GM Crumpet

I don't know if that film will be as popular outside the US. Everyone I know has zero interest in it. American biopics and revisionist history generally have a smaller appeal in the rest of the world. It might do well because of the hype, but from what I've read there doesn't seem to be much (if any) reference to the work done by the UK and Canada before the Manhattan Project was formed. Not to take away from Oppenheimer and his team, or the abominable way he was treated afterwards, but contrary to popular media America didn't single handedly save the world while the rest of us looked on in admiration 🙂

Discord can be useful for a more immediate reply. GM's hang about on there a lot more so if you ping @game master the chances of instant help increase. We don't always see tickets quickly. There are also discussion channels for different aspects of the game, plus voice channels so you can invite people to a team and chat to them in real time if you wish without any specific apps. The disadvantage to Discord is it scrolls up endlessly and posts get lost in the mist of time. Forums are more useful for debates or bugs or suggestions. As for other iterations of CoX. They have their own discord channels. We use one for Homecoming and it's exclusively ours. Players have their own discords too, and a lot of the big SG's and roleplaying groups have ones specifically for themselves so they can plan events, hang out and do whatever they do without any interference or oversight from the HC team.

See? The devs do read peoples posts 🙂

I know, I don't mind his posts and he does generally drip with sarcasm, but some people do actually believe the things he says in jest.

It's not that I'm against sarcasm, but it's a point of view that some people actually hold so putting the record straight doesn't hurt. I've genuinely had abusive DM's stating that we have ruined the game for the player and that one change has destroyed their life. It got particularly bad when the changes came through for fire powers and AFK farms suddenly became lethal overnight. You'd think our dev team had publicly sacrificed puppies to the great god Imhotep the way some people reacted.

Things change. That's the nature of things. Our team tries to look at what is underperforming or is bad and make them comparable to others. Constantly calling it power creep and demanding everything is set in stone and is never changed again is not helpful or productive, and frankly isn't going to ever happen. Even Rebirth, which prides itself on minimal changes from live, has updates and changes, though not as big or as many as other servers. We could of course walk away and just maintain a version frozen in amber like a lot of legacy games do, but the reason we are popular and the biggest server by a long way is the fact we have a dynamic team that works hard on stability and balance. If people don't like that they are free to go find another server to play on more to their liking. That's the beauty of it. There are so many flavours of the game that if you don't like one version there are others out there easily accessible that may be more to your liking. We don't generally discuss other servers or what they do for their players as it's not fair to them and they don't have a right to respond, but we don't have any bad feeling towards them and actually think their existence is a good thing. Players have options if they don't like the direction one is going in to try a different one.

We can, but screenshots and chat logs attached to tickets are very helpful and let us react quicker

See. I'm the kind of person who wouldn't really care and would pick that piece out of spite and eat it in front of her. A licked finger? Baby I've had much worse than that in my mouth in my time 😛 Plus I'm not bothered by other peoples germs. I've probably got more on my finger than she has!!

I have 49 alts. I have deleted far more than I've kept, and I've stripped the deleted alts of everything of value. 39 of the alts are incarnate tier 4 and retired. I have 2 farmers but I use them for levelling not inf as the inf I get from teaming is better. I also have a base full of useful enhancements and sets so it doesn't really cost me that much to slot new alts. Considering how many purple sets I have on all those retired alts I dread to think how much inf I'd have if I sold them 😛

You'd think that, but sadly we can't grant stuff to ourselves any more than we can to players

spoilers

I have Fairy Nuff, Hairy Fairy and Airy Fairy. Also Glossy Box, but never got any sexual inuendo tells so was slightly disappointed 🙂

I went through all my alts and collected the inf and merits. I now have 1.8 billion sitting in my global emails and an alt I use as a mule for the merits. I currently have 68 hero merits in his inventory

You find out all those answers as you go through the game. The clones were created by someone you later meet, From the dimension they came from, and you learn a lot more about the oncoming storm at higher levels

You missed selling everything not nailed down in the Auction House then emailing yourself the inf. I sell all the enhancements, converters, catalysts etc. I just save the rare enhancements like purples and PvP and procs, the rest are just clutter. Convert vanguard merits to merits, convert merits to enhancement converters, pop those on to the AH for 10 inf each, grab the cash, voila!!

Yeah, I don't get why people can't follow a simple instruction. I wouldn't mind so much but it's not the longest or hardest trial in the game

Some are easy like BAF, some are annoying like TPN and Keyes, some are fun but a bit complicated like DD, Underground and Magisterium, some are a nightmare and need putting out of our misery like MoM. Even worse if the leader is insisting on doing a Master of run on some of the more complicated ones. I don't think I've ever completed a MoM and the last couple of times the leader was insisting on a Master of even though we were barely able to survive Penny. It's not that obvious how to beat her and when the league leader is spending all their time complaining instead of allocating specific roles and making sure everyone knows what they should be doing it just gets frustrating. The thing is, apart from Tinpex that's really all there is after you hit level 50 and finish the incarnate arcs. Yes you can go back and do all the arcs through Ouroboros, but then you get the situation where all those powers you've got used to suddenly become unavailable. It's why I play an alt then retire them when they hit tier 4 on everything. For me the fun is the journey, plus the people I team with along the way. I mostly solo, but I do enjoy joining a pug now and then, and doing the trials and tinpex.

For any issues like this the best thing to do is to pop a ticket in as mentioned above. For obvious reasons we never discuss actions taken/not taken against reported players except with the player involved, but to clarify. Unless it's specifically requested by a player (which happens occasionally) we lock/ban accounts for only the most serious of violations. If a player does something against the rules and keeps doing it (such as creating IP violations then renaming them back repeatedly) the chances are they get a small three day holiday. To get a permanent ban it has to be something serious. We aren't monsters though and we try to work with the player before that happens. If your account is banned then you can appeal and put your case. You may have a point. You may not. But the lead GM's and admins will investigate thoroughly. We don't ban because you have decided to make W0IVER1N3 or Chucky Cheese Man. We just generic it. It's not even a strike against you as such, though if we have pages of violations on your account we might need to have words. There are occasions where accounts get locked by accident and if that does happen please let us know as soon as possible. This is an old game with a creaky database. Sometimes mistakes happen and we will do everything we can to put it right.

I think it's a combination of many things. I have a 17 year old living in my house (not my kid) and she has the attention span of a goldfish. YouTube is too boring, everything has to be a 30 second TikTok. You talk to her and it's like the lights are on and nobody is home. Yet she's not stupid, just really low attention span. And I've noticed the same thing with my nephews. It's like the journey isn't important, just getting there as quickly as possible. I'm at the age now where I've turned into my dad and don't understand the youngsters or their interests. I'm as guilty as anyone else of focussing on the screen and not paying attention to chat. Someone will ask me something (such as pass the star) and it can take a couple of tells before I notice. I am so busy trying to be a contributing member of the team I kind of zone out of anything that isn't fight related. As for new players, 99% of the time I see so many people on chat patiently answering questions and pointing new players to the wiki, or mids, or vidiotmaps. There are always going to be unpleasant people with no patience, but the majority are always really helpful. It's not the new players fault they don't know something, and it's not their fault they made questionable choices when they started playing. It's up to us as a community to get them on the right track. Someone the other day was standing next to the P2W vendor in Atlas and giving out free inf to help new players buy boosts and temp powers. That's the kind of community we have. Some games are really toxic, this game isn't. Most players are actually really great people and it's part of the reason I've stuck with it for as long as I have

As you say, there are a lot of people who are under the impression CoX is like some other MMO's where the game starts at level cap and everything to get there is a painful grind, so they do AE farming until they hit 50 then have no real clue how to play. Not their fault, it's a symptom of a lot of games, but it does mean they don't have much to do at that level and they don't understand the basics. I think we need to have patience with those people and help point them in the right direction, but I can see why someone would be annoyed with lots of people all messaging them 🙂

Please keep on topic and avoid personal attacks and debates about personal attacks. Or perceived personal attacks, as I know from my own experience that what I think I'm saying can read very differently to the way I intended it to come out.

I spoke to Number Six about seeding a while ago and the only thing the admins are willing to seed is salvage. Everything else is a free market and the prices do tend to stabilise. Some enhancements are meant to be ultra rare and expensive. Some recipes the same. You can make a really good build without ever going near D-Syncs or Hami-O's and while I understand the desire to squeeze as much out of a character as possible sometimes things are an inf sink. If you want to maximise your slots with multi purpose enhancements you can, it's just going to cost a lot of inf. I still think it's better than live where some of these were priced above the inf cap and people had to transfer 3-4 billion inf manually to a player to buy it. If we got to that point I think the admins would have to step in to cool the market down, but we are not in that position and hopefully never will be. As someone said above, you can always pop a bid in for much lower than the recent sale price. The chances are you'll probably get it, you just might have to wait a while.

I loved Incredibles and was excited for a sequel as I watched the end credits for the first one. I thought, OK it'll take 3 or 4 years, but it'll come. How could it not? The first one was wildly successful, but we had to wait so long a lot of people had lost interest. As you say, it just seemed to be "Everyone liked Jack-Jack, make sure he's in it doing wacky stuff". "Edna Mole was a hit, make sure she's in it". And the Jack and Edna stuff was indeed great. Unfortunately the story was just "meh". The first one was exciting, complicated, had fun characters, a great villain with superb motivation, exotic locations, and the sequel lacked any of that. I think they just went too simple. They had the set pieces they knew everyone would love then tried to make a narrative to link them all together. It wasn't a bad film, it just wasn't in the same league as the first one.

There was the animated series and a couple of spin off movies, but yes that does sound fun. The problem is they rarely pull off a good sequel. I watched Frozen and thought it was wonderful. I watched Frozen 2 and thought it was terribly dull. They didn't really move the story along, they just tried to take what they thought people liked in the first film and make a film with those bullet points. Even the songs didn't pop like the first film. I didn't find any of them particularly memorable. At least some of the direct to video films tried something different. Aladdin, Return of Jafar and King of thieves at least tried to make a coherent story, but (I'm probably in a minority) they overdid the genie in my opinion. Robin Williams was very talented, a genius even, but he could go too far in his wild tangents and like Jim Carey I always felt he worked better with a bit of discipline from the director. I think it's just a problem with having a writers room. The films that work well are generally made by a person or small group who are all on the same page. Writers rooms smooth any edges over and act as an echo chamber throwing ideas out and going for a consensus. They always end up with the blandest and safest options instead of just telling a new story. They analyse why they think the first film was a success and then hope that giving the audience more of the same will make it successful. Then blame the fans when it's not.

Oh police academy. I remember watching the first couple on video back in the 80s