Zhym

It's just part of the Halloween event and PI having room for all those leagues, monsters, pets, etc. Learn to love it (or, y'know, go hunt somewhere else).

With the new Ancient Vampires all over the place, I keep thinking Peregrine Island is being overrun by Snarkies.

Gotta work on your priorities... FWIW, the new badges are quick to get. Hop to Spookygon Island, join the mob at the Motel of Horror, and you'll have defeated five of each Halloween EB in no time. I was able to top off my badges in a standard 15 minute break period. Win!

How much does it cost to run an individual shard? The October donations thread shows a payment of about $4000 to OVH last month. Would shutting down one of the five shards actually save 20% of that cost? I'm not saying we should shut down any shards. But since saving money seems to be the only reason to shut down a shard, I'm wondering how much that would actually save.

Yeah, I do this a lot. Thus, I have ended up with: Captain Kangaroo: MA/SR scrapper. Lots of fun to play. Was my "main" on Live and one of the first characters I recreated when I joined Homecoming. 70s Man: DP/MC blaster. He was an AR blaster on Live, but DP is so much better. This toon redefined what "lots of fun" could be and quickly became my main on Homecoming. Splendidman: SS/Inv tanker. 'Nuff said about this one. Crystal Cannon: Ice/Ice blaster. The name is a play on "glass cannon." Tomcat: Claws/SR stalker. Teal Ninja: Ninja/Ninjitsu stalker. A great powerset combo for soloing. Canned Heat: Fire/Fire Blaster robot cop (okay, technically it's "Canned.Heat" because I joined Homecoming too late to get the name, but I had it on one of the Live servers, so I'm going to pretend I have the real name) Pippi LePew: BR/Devices blaster. This is also a fun combo. Siouxsie Tsoo: Kin/Sonic defender dressed up like a Tsoo. Kin/Sonic is a great combo, of course, and this is a fun toon to play in groups. Gort Mk. VII: Time/Rad Defender. I had a couple of versions of Gort on Live, since I'm not sure what the canonical power set would be for the movie version of the robot. This combo works pretty well, though. I also have Gort Mark XII, a Rad/Atomic blaster, but that combo hasn't quite grabbed me. Mediocre Fred: Claws/Regen scrapper. Based on a Smothers Brothers song, he's a normal looking guy (or bicyclist) who turns into a werewolf. I like the character concept a lot, but he's not at the top of my list of fun characters to play. The Bureaucrat: AR/Invuln sentinel. This was totally a concept build, and it didn't quite work. Worked well enough to get him to 50, and even play some after that, but it's not my favorite. Which is a shame, because I love the concept. Dr. Pierce: Emp/Arrow defender. Modeled after a certain TV army doctor. As a playable character, he's...fine. Subordinate Claus: Ice/Time controller. Santa in bondage gear. Pretty fun to play, but I only bring him out in the holiday season. There are a whole bunch of other names that I rolled up characters for but haven't leveled much for various reasons: Statsman (Kin/Regen brute—don't do this), Human Trampoline (SS/Shield brute, with the idea that I'd pick lots of knock-up powers as he leveled, but I never leveled him), Andromeda Brain (BR/Mental blaster), Seismogram (Seismic/Earth blaster), Ninja Pirate Robot (DP/Ninja blaster), Sound Blaster Pro (Sonic/Sonic blaster), Laddie Liberty (Broad Sword/Shield scrapper), Celery Stalker (Savage/Bio stalker), Major Weakness (Mercs/Poison MM), and OVH Tech Support (Robots/Time MM). I also have one or two characters with power sets I like, but who I don't play much because I can't figure out a good name to go with them. I must have changed the name on my SJ/WP stalker three or four times now.

I’ve done both. Usually, I come up with a character concept and then try to fit an AT and power set combo to it. But sometimes I want to try a power set combo, so I try to come up with a concept that fits. I’d say I’m about 50/50 on how that works out. I’ve had concepts I loved where the powers just sucked to play. And I’ve had power sets that worked reasonably well but the character concept didn’t grab me. It’s the characters where the concept is fun and the power set works that I really enjoy playing.

Like that woman Madeleine. How does she know the exact number of hours my character has been online? Is she a stalker? Is there some deep level of surveillance going on in Paragon City, and Madeleine is our only tiny window into this hidden world? It doesn't bear too much thinking about, really.

I'd try it out myself, but I'm on a Mac, so I'd have to rewrite the whole thing in Automator or something anyway (I almost said "AppleScript"; that's how old I am).

I find it interesting, given your post about wanting people to ask for invites in broadcast rather than tells (hey, it's right there in your signature!), that this script sends a tell by default. Maybe you could add another keyword check to see if the message includes the words "tell," "PST," "broadcast," or "shout" to determine whether the text to paste is formatted as a tell or a broadcast?

Awesome tool. Just be careful, anyone, if you're playing CoX while working from home. It might be awkward to accidentally paste, "I'd like to join DFB!" into work Slack.

From the Lore AMA Archive:

This is fantastic. A deep drive down memory lane! I assume that making quote tags work is somewhere in the to-do list. It'd also be cool if we could link directly to posts. (I just stumbled across Positron's "All that crap is grey to me, no XP" post, for example. I can link to the thread, but not the post.) And it'd be really great if the archive had the same look and feel as the old forums, for extra strong nostalgia sake, but I'm just getting greedy now. :)

He's Vet Level 215 and my badger (and my profile image on the forums), so I guess that means he's my "main": I ran him through almost all the blueside and redside as he leveled, pausing XP along the way and using tip missions to do the alignment changes. I've played this toon a lot (Madeleine in Atlas Park tells me I've played him for a total of 1,047 hours, though some of that was AFK farming for a damage taken badge). As for why I've played this toon so much, I think it's because the toon hits the magic combo of theme and being fun to play. "70s Man" is a concept I can run with in RP when I feel like it, and DP/MC is an absolute hoot to play.

Thanks, but I wouldn't know what to do with it (other than buy Aether to get mini mode, of course). And I mean that literally: where do people with that kind of scratch even keep it? Mail? Alts that are nothing but inf mules? Market bids for items that no longer exist?

I have a Nature MM I really like, and a Sonic Defender who debuffs really well, so I recently figured hey, why not roll up a Nature/Sonic Defender? I will be heavily copying this build, so thanks! One question about Entangling Aura, which I really enjoy on my Nature MM. I take it this build doesn't have it because it doesn't really fit the support role, but if you had to give up a power for EA, what would you drop?

Whirlwind would make them scurry...but it doesn't scan.

I'm trying to work up some lyrics, but so far I'll I've got is: Trolls and Skulls and Lost gonna scurry When I take them out with my Flurry When I take them out with my Flurry with the Rage on top That's it. And, really, "Flurry" isn't the power to strike fear in the hearts of bad guys.

Okay. First “The Farmer and the Cowman,” and now this? Are people just trolling for @Oklahoman likes now? ’scuse me, all. I’m going to go see if there’s a post where I can reply with “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top” and be on-topic.

Yeah, that's the part I was hoping to avoid.

Does that mean making sure that slot 6 in tray 2 has whatever the current incarnate slotted power is? If so, I'm not quite getting how that's better than what I'm doing now, which is moving my active incarnate power to the tray slot once I've made the power active. Or am I missing something?

Is there any way (e.g., a fancy macro) to have a power tray slot activate whatever power happens to be slotted, as opposed to being tied to a specific power? For example, one of my toons has Ageless, both Barriers, a Clarion, and an Incan for the Destiny ability. If I try to put each of those powers in a power tray, that's five power tray spots, only one of which can be active at a time. It'd be great if I could just have a power tray slot for whatever Destiny power happens to be active. Is that something that's currently possible? Or should I be posting this as a suggestion?

I don't think so—but you can also start the SSAs through the LFG tab (under "Story Arcs").

Fair point. I'm probably thinking more in terms of badge runs, which do seem to have a more limited set of people who run them—probably because badge runs must be a PITA to run given how susceptible many of them are to griefers. Speaking of which, I know you don't do Keyes and Underground trials. Am I right that it's also been ages since you ran a TPN, or have I just not been on at the right time?

Did you miss the part where I said "after you've built all the Alpha slot powers you need?"

I'd quibble a bit both with the premise that Homecoming losing so many players is a huge problem and with the conclusion that the way to get them back is to add more things to grind for. Yes, Homecoming doesn't have as many players as it had in March 2020. No surprise there: it was "new" again, and most of us were home all day because of the pandemic. Homecoming will never have that many players again. Is that a problem? Well, I play almost exclusively on Excelsior, where it still doesn't take long for TFs and iTrials to fill. Hami raids and MSRs are also routinely full. And of course there's all that content that can be played solo. If Homecoming's population drops to that of a ghost town, I'll still be incredibly grateful that I could log into that ghost town and play all that solo content that I missed so much after NC Soft took it away. But the loss of players is felt a bit around the edges. Less popular activities, like Hami Bud "raids" in First ward and Recluse's Victory runs, don't seem to happen as often than they used to. And we're increasingly reliant on a handful of players who run iTrials on a regular basis. If @Oklahoman, @STiTcH, and @Confusion got bored with the game and left, parts of the game would practically collapse. Excelsior would be...well, like most of the other shards. Fortunately, they don't seem bored with it yet. And there's plenty of stuff to do even when there isn't a raid or an iTrial going. By another metric, Homecoming's population is just fine: they're still getting enough donations each month to pay the bills, and getting them fairly quickly. Homecoming is never going to be the next big thing, even if talks to have legitimate use of the IP eventually resolve. Maybe it's okay that it's a niche game that a few hundred people love and no one else cares about. But suppose we grant the premise that population loss is bad. I really don't think it's a lack of locked content or enough things to grind for that's keeping people away. And adding NPC costumes that are locked behind a new currency isn't going to bring anyone back. Personally, I think Homecoming's biggest barrier to population growth is that it's gotten kind of unfriendly to new players. I don't mean "unfriendly" in that we're intentionally hostile and mean when a new player shows up, but the way the game is structured now isn't really newbie friendly. For example: just yesterday, someone who joined a Hess TF asked how to get to Striga, and it took me a moment to remember the smuggler's submarine and where it is, because what I usually do is use the macro to hop to the Excelsior Transportation Zone base and use a teleporter there. Until recently, using LFG to get to Cimerora quickly was another piece of arcane knowledge kept from the uninitiated. And don't get me started again on Homecoming's weird economy, which new players can't possibly be expected to understand unless someone explains it to them. Someone who wants to try this game they've heard about, where you can be a superhero and fight bad guys, is quickly going to become lost in what Homecoming is now. NPC costumes locked behind a new currency doesn't solve any of that. In fact, it makes it worse by complicating the game even further. What would bring more players in? Beats me, and this post is too long already. New content is always good, but new content has just turned into the next thing to farm (see: Aeon, which is just full of wonderfulness and challenge but is usually just sped through for the rewards. The only reason people do the AWESOME Hero 1 fight now is because it rewards Aether...so I guess I'm glad Aether exists, if just for that). And because I think it's mostly casual players we're losing, adding more hard modes isn't the solution either. Maybe there isn't a solution. Maybe that's even okay.