Zhym

I agree that the snakes are underwhelming. But at least those missions are short. I'm running through the Port Oakes missions now, and after clearing gangsters out of ship after ship, I'm starting to have fond thoughts of snakes. I misread this as a contact chain: Vendetti, who would introduce Bocor, who introduced The Radio. Bocor does introduce The Radio (so would Mikey the Ear, at the right level), but Vendetti, Bocor, and Billie Heck are all introduced independently by the Broker. I've only done Vendetti and part of Billie Heck so far, but you made a good choice omitting Heck. His story arc is pretty tedious so far: a defeat-all in a large office map and a ship's-hold kidnap mission. It looks like it might get better after this, though. Still, with each of the three contacts (Vendetti, Bocor, and Heck) requiring three newspaper missions and a mayhem mission to unlock, I'd argue that it's probably only worth doing one. Otherwise, that's nine newspaper missions, three Atlas Park mayhem missions, and a long damned time pausing XP at level 9. So I might suggest phrasing the quoted line as something like: Angelo Vendetti (5-9) and/or Billie Heck (5-9) and/or Mr. Bocor (5-9) > The Radio (10-14) Or just omit Vendetti and Heck entirely, or relegate them to short descriptions as "Other Contacts" under Port Oakes. ETA: The Billie Heck arc kind of grew on me. It still doesn't make much sense, but after those first two slogs of missions, it was kind of fun. Doing both Vendetti and Bocor might be a bit much, though, since they both have a lot of "defeat all the Hellions in the office" missions, which gets old. But they also both have badge missions, so some players might want to do both anyway.

Fort Darwin was a great, memorable starting location. No, it wasn't Atlas Park, but you weren't a hero—you were a virtual nobody. Sure, Arachnos busted you out of the Zig, but just so you could prove yourself against a whole bunch of other virtual nobodies. The Issue 21 changes broke the flow of Mercy Island, IMO. Starting at little Fort Darwin meant fighting your way through the broken slums with the massive walls of Mercy looming ahead of you. Just getting through Darwin's Landing to get to Mercy was something. When Issue 21 put starting villains right there in Mercy, there was almost no reason to go to Darwin's Landing anymore let alone Fort Darwin, which was virtually forgotten. You can still see some vestiges of Mercy Island being designed for a Fort Darwin to Rogue Isles Ferry progression. For example, the Darwin's Landing side of the giant wall has big "MERCY" signs telling you where the elevator doors go. Up topside, there's nothing—the game assumes you know what those are and where they go, because most of the players would have started on the other side of those doors. I often wish there had been an Echo: Mercy Island that preserved the original design.

Thanks for this! I recently created a villain to run through CoV somewhat old-school style (but with a few of the P2W powers and enhancements, because I'm not a masochist). This guide will really help. I do have a couple of comments about this from the early going: It's not entirely obvious, but the Breakout tutorial will give you either Kalinda or Matthew Burke as a contact. You can do both, but I don't think it's worth pausing your XP to do so. You end up with a lot of missions that look a lot alike: jump into a snake hole and kill all the snakes. Their missions aren't exactly the same, but they can seem like it (the only difference between some Kalinda missions and Burke missions is the name of the boss snake you're supposed to kill). After you're done killing snakes for Kalinda, she sends you to Mongoose to...kill more snakes. When youre done killing snakes for Burke, Doctor Creed gives you missions against Infected and Arachnos, so there's more variety. Although Kalinda sets up the "Destined One" arc, in terms of the actual gameplay I'd take Burke. It might also be worth noting that whether you take Kalinda or Burke as your initial contact makes no difference once you're out of Mercy Island (as far as I can tell). Either way, you'll get sent to the same brokers in Port Oakes. Re: Lt. Harris, I agree about his arc being distasteful and a little dark for this game. OTOH, if you do his arc you get a chance to clear the Longbow out of Fort Darwin. As someone with lasting memories of sending weak newbie villains out of Fort Darwin only to scamper back to safety after a few kills—port Darwin really is well named—I appreciated the opportunity to kick all those smug candy canes the hell out of "my" fort.

Revert to the old version? If you've been using Time Machine, you can open Time Machine, scroll back to a time before the update installed, and restore the old version of the launcher. If you haven't been using Time Machine, you'd have to install an old version of the launcher manually, I assume. BTW, you can bypass the launcher entirely by executing "islandrum.sh" from the command line. Of course, that only works while the CoH client version hasn't been updated. But at least it lets me feed my addiction tonight while Manga works furiously on patching the launcher.

Thanks. I can revert to the previous version (hooray, Time Machine), but is there any way to prevent Island Rum from automatically updating itself? Or should I just chill for a day or so and hope for a new update soon?

I don't even get an "Install" option. It's just stuck at "Scanning":

This all sounds pretty exciting. One request from a security paranoid Mac user. Could you test the new launcher to make sure it works on an account that doesn't have admin rights? It took me a while to get Island Rum working that way, and I have a sneaking supicion that any upgrade process for the new launcher is likely to freak out, run into a corner, and cry if it doesn't have full admin access to everything. Thanks!

If you’re fixing grammar issues, I’d be inappropriately happy if someone could replace all instances of “alright” with “all right.” I don’t have a list of all the places “alright” Is used, but it shows up a lot. One place I do know it appears, just because I’ve done the mission so often, is in the Heather Townshend arc. In the first mission, there’s something like, “Alright, I’ll take from here,” as a response in the opening exchange in the cave. Then there’s “Alright, I’ll check out the Tsoo,” in a later mission. There are many more throughout the game. 🙂

It looks like the trigger for this option is Master Midnight's story arc, "Revenge: Serve Chilled." I ran one of my toons through it in Orouboros, and the next time he ran the Heather Townshend arc he suddenly knew a lot more about the Talons. Mystery solved!

After that it's the same Part Two dialogue that you get after "I'm all ears if you have an idea" in the other branch.

Isn't that what the "Chipped Talon" badge is? Or is there a different one? I'm thinking maybe it's based on completing the First Ward (or Night Ward) story arcs.

In Heather Townshend's arc (you know the one—it's the one we've done over and over and over to get incanrate components quickly), one of my toons has a response option that the others don't have. After the first mission, when she asks, "Do you have any idea what caused these women to transform?", the only option for two of my toons is, "No, not in the slightest." But my other toon can also respond, "I have a feeling it's a group called the Talons of Vengeance": Paragon Wiki doesn't list that as a reponse option, either. So I'm wondering what triggers that other option. The toon who gets that option did all the First Ward and Night Ward arcs, so maybe it's something in there? I thought it might have been the "Chipped Talon" badge, for defeating a certain number of Talons of Vengeance, but that didn't make any difference. Thanks!

Is it actually possible to drop a mayhem mission? I can't find any way to do it.