mechahamham

And that's the wonderful thing about having the code 'in the wild'. I can play on those servers if I want to. I've heard that some servers cater to the pre-i3 experience, reinstating such things as no aggro caps. I know people who'd love to play that way. I'm not one of them, but the choice exists. I should have clarified my OP with the statement that I thought that a 'Classic' experience would be a good feature if and when Homecoming got an actual agreement or license from NCSoft. It would probably be relatively low-hanging development fruit... database work and fairly simple conditional coding. Right now, I'd *rather* have work on new costume options if possible (More asymmetric goodies, please!) A "classic" option would be something to help expand the playerbase.

One of the things I love about Homecoming is the ability to tailor your own game experience. For example, I don't much care for accelerated exp of any kind. I disliked 'Double Experience Weekends' on the Paragon-era live servers. I can, if I want to, use the NoXP option to completely turn off my experience as I'm going forward to avoid outlevelling content. However, as I explained to my wife, showing her the contents of the P2W vendor's inventory, if you want a 2xp weekend, this is where you get the stuff to make that happen. 'Slow' experience is not the only part of the 'Live Server Experience'. There are other limitations that were designed to make the game more engaging that we have cast away for the sake of time and longevity... like having to actually go to the Consignment Shop or Black Market to use it. I can see a demand for an game option or temp power that would reinstate the 'Live Server' conventions and limitations. At least I have that demand on some of my characters. You could even tie it to membership in a Supergroup, so you could have 'Classic' Supergroups. Why not having a 'Classic Server'? While Everquest has proved that these work and work well, our limited population causes a problem: Homecoming players seem to gravitate to where they can group. At the time being, this means that Excelsior has a large population. If you were to tie 'Classic' settings to a server, so few players would use that server that it'd almost be pointless to have it. With a setting or a temp power, you don't *have* to provision out a new shard. I'd like to see the 'Live Experience' setting or power come in two varieties: The 'Going Rogue Experience' setting would have restrictions that were in place right before the shutdown: You had to use the auction house physically, couldn't use base passcodes, etc... The 'CoX Experience' setting would have restrictions that were in place before the release of 'Going Rogue'. Hero and Villain ATs are enforced. There were no heroic brutes or villainous scrappers. Alignment changing is not allowed. Certain powersets are 'villainous' or 'heroic'. There are no heroic pain domination defenders and no villainous empathy corruptors. WSTs don't award extra benefits. There are no incarnate abilities, etc... Allowing these settings to be placed on a supergroup would encourage large teams of players to group together under the same limitations. Yes, you absolutely can challenge yourself and adhere to these restrictions if you want to already, but having a unified framework for doing so encourages a larger number of players to use it and group with others who are using it. It also opens the door to gearing new content towards this framework. Imagine awarding an account-wide badge to a player who leveled a character to 50 with no experience modifiers at any time, perhaps at issue 3-era speeds. Do you like this idea? Do you hate it? What changes would you make to it? What restriction sets would you like to see made available?

Today, I answered the trouble call to help Admiral Sutter defend Independence Port from Sky Raiders and Praetorians. By the time my group had finished, we'd followed the trail of Praetorians to Talos Island, into the sewers beneath the island, and up into Skyway City, where two (or more) Colonel Durays were coordinating an attack on the city's transportation infrastructure. We engaged the multiple Durays, dodging strafing fire from sky-skiffs and attack aircraft and... And there was Derek, calmly walking along the center median of a still-intact stretch of freeway. While we were fighting, and Derek didn't even look up. For my group, it was a do-or-die fight against invaders from another dimension. For Derek, it was Monday.

This. A thousand times this. CoH is in the hands of the players now. Solicit and promote AE arcs for this kind of content. Freed Seer: "Some of my sisters have banded together for protection, but they don't know how to tell the difference between people who are merely hostile to them and people who are actively attacking them. We need to restrain them before they go to far. Please save this group of protesters, hateful though they may be, from my sisters." Things like that. Give some general direction on the kinds of story arcs needed for the zone and then cherry pick. The best part? The runners up stay in AE and broaden the amount of content available for players!

One of the things that I believe either Manticore or Positron said while working on some of the later issues is that there's a real problem in tying things too close to the original design intent. "We're asking new, creative people to work on something decided by people who don't even work here any more if we do that." In our case, we're asking volunteers to complete work by people who were quite unfairly fired years ago. I think that we either need to let the Battalion go, or put development of Battalion-related content in the hands of someone who is particularly devoted to the idea and really wants to carry that torch. I personally think that, at least until we know one way or the other how Homecoming's status as a 'legal' hoster and/or developer will go, we need to say that the Battalion is on indefinite hold. IMO, We don't need more itrials. We need more 1-50 content for all the players making new characters. There are lots of good ideas in this thread. I particularly like the ideas about Praetorian Wu Yin and Syndicate attempting to move in to the area. We don't know what the Sky Raiders are planning after the big reveal in Market Crash. I do think that Nemesis and the Rikti have been done ad nauseum. I also think that there are lots of good NEW villain groups lurking within creative minds. Mission Architect is full to bursting with them, if you can just dig down below the compressed crust of Fire farms. Even if we want to stick to ideas that have been partially fleshed out in game, the Coralax and Black Blood of the Earth haven't been well explored at all.

That would be the ideal solution if it were to work consistently. I've had players drop team as soon as they got the star or refuse (or not know) to invite others. Some are intimidated by the league interface for big gatherings. In the situation I mentioned above, I didn't have time to so much as ask if the 50 wanted the star. The other happens too. I've been on a team that filled, and the fifties on the team asked the 20ish team leader pass the star. He was either not reading chat for focusing on the event, or refusing to pass the star. Pretty much everyone on the team dropped and reformed without him. I feel that's punishing someone for trying to take the initiative when nobody else would. When in zones with invasions where I'm not high level, I often say something like, "I'm willing to help organize, but don't want to exemp anyone down to my level". It *usually* works out eventually. I just feel that there is a code solution with relatively little effort for this problem.

The recent Nemesis invasion event and the current Rikti invasion event are highlighting a problem that's existed since the Paragon-server era: Invasion zones are full of folks requesting teams or leagues, but have very few people willing to lead. Usually there are a few, but unless they are 50, people invited to their teams are exemped down to the leaders' level. While bomb hunting in Talos as a 24ish blaster, I had a teammate tell me 'Sorry, too low', quit the team, and immediately go back to asking for a team in broadcast before I could try the usual work-around of seeing if he had a mission I could set as active. It kinda ruined the vibe of the event for me-- it killed my imaginary sense of urgency. Here are some suggestions for addressing this issue: - Extending the 'select a mission as active' work-around, if a mission is not set as active when a player joins a team, the highest-level mission available is set as active. This is not terribly ideal since it could set a 30 mission as active if a level 30 joins a team and then a level 50 joins the same team later. - Allow team and league leaders to use a command like /setactivelevel 50, or implement a UI that does the same thing. This has the benefit of allowing knowledgeable leaders to deal with the situation, but might cause problems for those who haven't read the patch notes or command listings. It'd also have to be very carefully tested to a) make sure it works with GM scaling and b) ensuring that players could not use it to horribly cheese their way through content. I can see it going awry if players were to use it to speed through badge farming or 'defeat x enemies in zone' missions. - My personal favorite: During and only during an invasion event, characters in the zone all have their levels hidden and are given GM scaling so that they are effectively 'level-less'. Again, this would require a fair bit of testing. I'd love to see a message like 'This zone is under attack. You can safely ignore your security level to defend yourself and others from invaders.' A less-complex variation on this one is to temporarily disable team-based exemping if your team leader is in a zone with an invasion. This has the benefit of needing less testing and probably less coding, but runs awry of breaking 'player expectation' for the sake of providing a convenience.