Cobalt Arachne

The reason was so that brand new players must learn how to move between city zones before they can be powerleveled to max level, nothing more. Everyone doing their PL'ing in those other zones is expected.

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If you're going to do Hamidon later that day and you see somebody advertising for one earlier in LFG, you have to decide to either join the earlier raid, or use a different character on one of the raids. You can't join both on the same character and get full rewards, it's no different here. It's about respecting time commitments; If you decide to do the same content multiple times in a single day on the same character, that's a decision you made, other content in this game has already has the exact same restrictions on their rewards. It also provides some benefits to having built alt characters, which this game is all about.

Good suggestion! I'll adjust the Advanced Difficulty modes so that you always get the max reward for the content you do even if you join a lower difficulty TF earlier in the day, akin to how the Incarnate Trials are set up. It'll still be capped per content, but after adjustment means if you complete 1-Star ASF you'll receive 2 Aether, and then after if you immediately complete 2-Star, you'd receive the difference, which would be 5, for the same total of 7 that is reward total for completing 2-Star outright. Expect this change next build. As for why add goals to the game for players work towards? That's what makes the game healthy and sees people playing regularly. If you're asking about why we don't give everything to everyone for free, that's because we already do, that's already available for literally everyone at all times on Brainstorm. Everyone is welcome to go play on Brainstorm where they can experience everything this game has to offer without any restrictions or effort. As has been mentioned this is purely for vanity costume powers, if you don't care about them, then you can ignore them and sell any Aether you get on the auction house, it changes nothing about your gameplay experience. They don't provide any buffs or make your character stronger. Why have them on a cooldown? The reward restrictions are to introduce some sanity, so people don't feel pressured to repeatedly do same content over and over and over for the rewards. The entire game has always done this, you can't get infinite Hamidon Enhancements doing the same content back to back in the same 18 hours, it's no different here really.

Hello to all UNDEFINED_ORGANIC_TARGETS waiting in here! We're hurdling towards- <TWITCH CLICK> All hail Lord Nemesis! ...Issue 27, Page 4's reveal! In the meantime, seems like this thread could use a- <CLICK WRRR> ...little pick-me-up, so enjoy this early preview of one of the new rewards from the upcoming ERROR:TEASE_DEFINITION_NOT_FOUND system being added with Page 4:

For kicks and giggles one time, I loaded the game up in VorpX on my Oculus Rift and played first person in VR. It was kind of neat, until I got into a mission, remembered I was playing a Scrapper, and phew... Playing melee in first person is not ideal. 😱

Development is still fully underway! The original plan was that we were going to release a small 'Page 3.1' update in January that would've included the almost done things that missed Page 3's release date. However due to circumstance and availability on our dev team changing unexpectedly, it had to be delayed and it was rolled into Page 4 instead. Page 4 is nearing completion and everyone on the team is very excited to pull back the curtain and show you guys what's coming. It's already looking to be a massive update with a plethora of long-time feature requests. This upcoming Page 4 update is a full blown page, and includes a huge amount of stuff beyond what would've been the Page 3.1 update if it had happened in January. The reason we can't commit to dates/reveal things until they're closer to release is because our timetables are not directly under our control. We're all unpaid volunteers who donate our time and expertise to work on the game for free, but how much time we can donate varies a huge amount on a day-to-day basis. We can't commit time that would cause our personal lives to suffer, as that's not long-term sustainable, so we work on the game as much as we possibly can as unpaid volunteers. Our love for this game/its community is the passion that continues to fuel us to work on it, and I can promise you there is no shortage of it on the dev team. Homecoming prides itself in the consistency of our updates, operations, and running the game in a very professional manner, comparable to the game's quality when it was a retail service backed by a publisher. That being said, oftentimes that gives players the impression that our content output should also be equal to a professional development studio, but unfortunately that's not possible since we're not able to work on the game full-time, 40 hours a week, like a paid team would. We thank everyone for their patience, it's not easy waiting sometimes, but we are doing our utmost to ensure it's worth that wait! 💙

It is haha, but it's also not a new animation; At least not on a certain body type...

Fiiiiiiiiiine; Only one more though! 🤔 Me walking to go post a teaser: Also me when my walking IS the teaser... 👀

Sheesh, really twisting my arm, eh? Fine here, take it! 😔

Sounds like we're in need of an infusion of TEASE! 😏

As others have mentioned, we ignored many of the usual balance considerations when it came to what a mob can or can't do because this was a for-fun event and the expected size of the groups fighting this GM would be league-sized (sometimes even two leagues!). 😱 Rest easy, the various crazy things that the Dreaded Mapserver™ did would never go into normal, permanent content. The GM was a flavor wild card thrown into the event to liven it up with some bizarre-level nonsense. Given it's drop reward was a tiny fraction of the event's overall income and most times it was dead minutes into the zone's invasion, I don't believe it had any impact on the event's success.

Phew! Thanks to everyone's combined efforts to hold back the Dreaded Mapserver, our hard-working server engineers had the time needed to suppress and contain the dangerous sentient code! Invoking an ancient ritual known only as CTRL+X&CTRL+V, we have sealed the glitchy threat away on a very secure USB thumb drive that we hid in the janitor closet, where it will surely never be unleashed again! Definitely. 100%. Nobody ever goes in that closet anyway! We hope everyone had fun and walked away with a few extra levels under their belt!

Oh my! I've received reports that GM_Bot has once again begun accepting tells and distributing costume upgrades in-game. I'm sure everything will be fine...

Confirmed & found the source. Rikti Monkeys got a bump by mistake while creating the stronger versions that went into the event monkeys used in the Mapserver Madness invasions. Will be fixed next patch.

Mapserver Madness! (Four-One 2022 Invasion Event): After GM_Bot went rogue last year and was subsequently suppressed by our capable server admins, we thought all was well!...We thought wrong. 😱Small bits of the unknown and mysterious code that suddenly gave rise to GM_Bot's sentience have escaped and begun proliferating itself! We've now received reports that it has manifested within the various mapservers that run the zones of our fair City of Heroes!We do our best to keep our mapserver instances happy and healthy, but as you are all aware, the map server can be a fickle beast. Often disconnecting unexpecting victims at a moments notice, we thought it was likely just bugs in the code, but new information has arisen that shows there may be more...Something unnatural, more malevolent...The crisis we now face threatens the fabric of our world! The mapserver has gained sentience, and become the Dreaded Mapserver!™ It has had enough of our super-powered antics and has deemed all player life as requiring immediate extermination! Assembling the most terrifying, under baked, and volatile code it could conjure, the Dreaded Mapserver has assembled a violent army of glitches, bugs, broken scripts, and other abominations to attempt to wipe out all life as we know it!It is up to the brave players of our world to rise and combat the sentient Dreaded Mapserver, drive back its wicked and unstable minions, and to exterminate the fiend's sentience with a hard reboot! Those who muster the courage to face these aberrant distortions will find themselves as much as tenfold times more experienced than they were before, with an untold bounty of influence, infamy, and information that comes with such triumphs! We wish you noble souls the best of luck as you work to save our world! DISCLAIMER: This is a short, for-fun invasion event! Thus, there are no unique badges or rewards that can be missed, but we hope you will enjoy the x10 reward scale! Level some characters! This silly invasion event will run through the weekend until regular Tuesday maintenance time. ~FREEM! Author's note: The mapserver has stocked up on a lifetime supply of Blue Spider© brand Hero Repellant™ and Dr. Caretaker's© Signature Costume Bleach™; Beware!

Fragmentary Veritas - New Release: Chapter 2, Page 17 - 'Finally Seeing Eye To Eye': http://fragmentaryveritas.webcomic.ws/comics/32 Can't commit to any kind of release schedule, but still enjoy finding time to work on art when I can. 🙂

We're waiting to see how many badgers get desperate enough to defeat Romulus one hundred times. Naw, just kidding. 😉 It's still coming! January was, unfortunately, busier than we had hoped for many members of the dev team. The reality of being volunteer developers is that we have to ensure the responsibilities of our personal lives are met first and that comes with sometimes having less (but sometimes more!) time to work on the game than we expect. Good stuff is still in the works, rest assured! Stay tuned!

Events The Spring Fling event is now active. NPCs Pocket D Ganymede, Scratch, Jessica Megan Duncan, and Arbiter Hawk now have the proper Contact NPC FX rings. Dram and Chilly now have the proper Vendor NPC FX rings. Tasks Spring Fling 2012 - Arbiter Hawk: 'The Widow in Red' Revamped Virgil Tarikoss's dialog tree to better fit his character, as the previous dialog tree was copy-pasted 1:1 from the hero contact. The obol contact now provides a few vials of mana-infused blood which are used in the ritual instead of the player character cutting themselves. DJ Zero's involvement in this story arc has been removed as it violated his 'absolute neutrality' rule. Mercedes Sheldon (in Pocket D) has inherited his role with a rewritten dialog tree. A few lore inconsistences, typos, and mistakes were corrected in the arc's text. Spring Fling 2012 - Jessica Megan Duncan: 'The Widow in Red' The obol contact now provides a few vials of mana-infused blood which are used in the ritual instead of the player character cutting themselves. DJ Zero's involvement in this story arc has been removed as it violated his 'absolute neutrality' rule. Mercedes Sheldon (in Pocket D) has inherited his role with a rewritten dialog tree. A few lore inconsistences, typos, and mistakes were corrected in the arc's text.

To quote the wisdom of Joe Young: "The monkey's villains ain't kilt! They's De-feat-ed!"

Oh geez, haha, probably 1000+ hours or more easily? I didn't keep track. 😅 I spent most of my free time last year working on it (as I was able to without compromising on any real life responsibilities). As a result, it's kind of surreal that we're already in 2022, time seems to have evaporated so quickly... When I started out I kept things simple and realistic, as I didn't want to expand the workload of anyone else on the dev team due to my own inexperience. As things progressed however, and I learned what was possible with the system, there were moments of "Ooh, I could totally add this" or "We gotta do that". This became a bit of a double-edged sword, since it did introduce a fair bit of feature creep, but fortunately we stuck the landing and everything came out and at a high quality standard. I'll expand more on these under Question #4. In terms of being able to script the missions and assembling the working parts, I could do that far quicker now than I did originally. If we were to tackle another piece of ambitious group content I think with the lessons learned from the ASF, we could do so in less time, but as you guessed the map creation is something that would be difficult to speed up without sacrificing quality. Map creation was the one area that I was actually somewhat familiar with before joining the developer team. The City of Heroes map editor conventions and functionality are not too dissimilar from other map editor standards of the same time period, so I was able to adjust quickly to the quirks/nuances. As mentioned, high-quality map creation takes a lot of time, even with experience, and it easily took up a hearty chunk of the ASF's development cycle. 😄 I'm happy when I see people mention that the maps are one of the highlights of the content for them, they were a labor of love! Surprisingly, no there actually weren't! The most ambitious things on the original outline were the final mission's map and use of geometry phasing (seeing a player's first reaction to that map has been one of my favorite things) and the smelting cauldron mechanics for the fight with King Midas. Those big ticket items were included fully as originally envisioned and we ended up expanding numerous elements far beyond the original scope more than a few times. 😲 All these were features that were added during development: -Becky's appearances on the first and last missions -The entirety of the Smelting Cauldron Arena encounter, map, and mission -The Crey map and mission -The Golden Brickernauts and their self-destruct -Everything included by Golden Roller's ripple dimensions -The Ripplesurge encounter -The upside-down sections of the King Midas' fight -The D-Sync Enhancements -The Advanced Difficulty Options While that list looks great and things did turn out well, we learned as a team that feature creep made it difficult to coordinate tasks and delegate work equally. This is something we'll be sure and keep in mind for the next project we undertake.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with those who prefer to play MMO's alone, in-fact, I was one such player myself in the past. 😄 There was a really great GDC panel about the 'lone wolf' type of online player in the MMO space that I often think back on, so I do always keep stuff like that in my mind. That being said, this is an MMO, and there is going to be some content that was designed for teams. If somebody wants to collect 100% of the badges, it will require going outside their comfort zone sometimes and looking for some help to get these badges. There's a really great group on Everlasting who run open-invite nightly Incarnate Trial badge runs and Master Of's from their [Everlasting TFs] global chat/Discord/LFG channel that I was able to join with minimal interaction and got most of the game's group-oriented badges with them. Given server transfers are free, there is always the option to move to where players are who can help. (I'm sure other communities of this type exist on other servers as well, but I'm only familiar with the server I play on myself.) Mostly, it's about finding the helpful folk in the community. They are certainly out there, and more than happy to lend a hand if you are friendly and ask. 🙂

@darkgob, I always read through all feedback (even if I can't respond to everyone individually), while considering the context, but I feel like what I'm reading is based a few misconceptions... Badges in this game are always optional, existing primarily as little stickers of merit for doing specific things (with the exception of accolade powers that increase your character's strength, which are all set to be very reasonably accessible by everyone). If a player wants to get every single badge in the game, they should expect to have to do everything the game has to offer. This may include things they do not normally enjoy doing like PvP, challenge modes, or content that requires team coordination. 100% badge completion is a challenge involving an extremely diverse and time consuming list of things that have to be done to reach it, it is not something anybody should see as the 'baseline floor of accessibility'. That being said, we do always keep these things in mind. For instance, we very intentionally did not attach **any** badges to the highest difficulty modes in the Dr. Aeon Strike Force. Malicious adds the minimum mechanics needed to get the badges in the first place (one of the Master of badges does not even require Malicious and can be earned on all difficulties), but does not add any of the grueling difficulty bumps seen in the higher difficulties beyond it. We very intentionally held back the ASF's badges from being as hard as they could've been, that they require the team to be coordinated and approach the challenges with awareness is not really any sort of exclusion, unless you mean to suggest that all badges requiring a team to work together are inherently exclusive? Our group content data shows this is absolutely not the case. The Dr. Aeon Strike Force has been fairly popular since it launched and I'm told the GM ticket count on issues regarding it has been low relative to other content. Players who want to see it have been. Most players should be able to play the ASF and complete it without any problems. I've joined a lot of ASFs anonymously on my player account since it launched and merely hung along for the ride without adding any input to the team and have finished every one I joined. Granted, it is anecdotal and none of these were on anything above Malicious, but there should not be any hard stop obstacles as long as a team doesn't overshoot their capabilities on the advanced difficulty modes. That being said, I'm not sure where your statement is coming from, but feel free to elaborate on what teams seem to be finding impossible to complete. The only places I could see this happening is if players ignore the summons that Ripplesurge creates to heal himself or if they don't drag King Midas into a cauldron to make him vulnerable to damage. Both were made to be as intuitive as possible and neither are mechanics that kill/punish players. As mentioned, severely under prepared teams having problems on Relentless difficulty is not unexpected, as the difficulty was tuned/balanced around tier 4 Incarnates using full set IOs. However, that difficulty mode is entirely optional and again, has no badges tied to it, it's there for players who enjoy that kind of gameplay experience. There will be a bit of a learning curve regarding the advanced difficulty modes and team leaders abilities to gauge the capabilities of their group to decide what mode they should choose to play the content on. Majority of the existing content that featured advanced mechanics did not explain themselves transparently, and current player familiarity with them is only due to their existing for so long and people having learned/documented them over time. Apex/Tin Mage/Incarnate Trial mechanics were much the same way as the ASF on launch. What they did and how they were dealt with was not immediately apparent when the very first group entered them for the first time ever. That being said, for those who wanted to know, the AU-Rifters Dimensional Distortion produces a purple effect near them in addition to the beam, anyone close enough when their power fires is pulled closer to them and then hit with a mag 50 Immobilize. Similar to the War Walker's Orbital Lance, they fire this independent of player interaction so a warning pop-up was warranted vs. the Brickernauts who blow up only when players drop their health to 25% and are thus triggered by player interaction. To the contrary, all the decision making with the ASF was done to be as inclusive as possible, not exclusive. That these new options exist in content that some players would rather opt out of does not exclude anybody unless it's a self-made decision to be entirely excluded. I've seen ASFs recruiting in LFG for all styles of play... Some running badges, some running on higher difficulties, some running sub-50 for experience gain. There are more ways to play and enjoy the ASF than any other existing content in terms of variety of options and modes. Inclusive works in both directions, some players like the game easy, some like it hard. If there are no hard options, then those players are excluded just as much as the reverse scenario. The badge requirements were set at the lowest they could be, where the mechanics to earn them are present but the higher difficulty challenges are not. If any of the badges were locked to Relentless, I feel like this statement would have more weight, but this is not the case (by design).

Totally okay! 🙂 There's no single piece of content that can hit all the notes, so always about options and variety. There are more shorter/simpler TFs currently and fewer longer/elaborate ones, so we opted for what would help diversify the available content offerings.

Becky was originally found in Vernon von Grun's Von Grun's Redemption arc in Grandville, specifically the 'Investigate Devouring Earth attack on Arachnos base' mission. She was a very memorable character and I thought she was a fun choice for inclusion in the ASF.