Ironblade

Based on a brief count, it looks like there are 54 zones which have the full EIGHT exploration badges to grant an accolade: 28 'hero' zones (this includes Echoes of Atlas Park, Galaxy City and Faultline, plus the Sewer Network and Abandoned Sewer Network) 8 'villain' zones (this includes Monster Island) 8 Praetorian zones (3 city zones, 3 underground, plus First Ward and Night Ward) 6 co-op zones (includes Dark Astoria and Rikti War Zone plus the 'echoes' of those two zones and also The Abyss) 4 PvP zones Getting all 8 exploration badges in a zone will give an accolade badge and FIVE reward merits. (I know it's five because I track all merits received on my main character in a spreadsheet - unless it got changed since November, which is when my main finished his exploration badges.) The zones that only have a single exploration badge (like Kallisti Wharf) don't award an accolade. On a final note, whenever I make a new character, one of the first things I do is collect all the exploration badges in Atlas Park to unlock the Long Range Teleporter. Getting a jump pack or temp fly power makes it easy to reach all the badges. Edit: Just confirmed by getting the badges in First Ward; it's five merits awarded with the accolade badge.

And the 18th anniversary badge is live. I just got it when I logged in to check something unrelated. Badge name is Unquenchable.

He's entertaining live, too. I'm in an SG with him. 🙂

"likely contributed". So, you actually have no idea why he left and decided to regale us with this diatribe. Since you clearly actually care about the game population, did it occur to you to *ASK* him why he quit so you could use that information?

What? You're 55 and you care what other people think?!?!? 😛 Seriously, though, I'm going to answer this two ways: from general and personal viewpoints. General Viewpoint Video games are big business nowadays. Many many adults make their living playing, streaming and/or writing about video games. These professionals are supported by massive numbers of fans. Pro football and pro baseball generate around $10 billion a year each. The video game industry brings in over $150 billion. Personal Viewpoint I tell anyone who will listen that I play video games in my free time. Hell, I met my girlfriend in City of Heroes back in 2009 and our family and friends have all heard about it. On Saturday, we were at the PAX East gaming convention, followed by a meet-up at a bar with people we know from another game. I started gaming with Dungeons and Dragons - FORTY-THREE YEARS AGO. I've been a gamer all of my adult life.

First, let me suggest what not to play - any set with a gun. If he's used to relatively realistic gunplay from Call of Duty, adjusting to comic book guns could be annoying. If he really wants to go with a gun, beam rifle is probably the best choice. I would suggest he make two characters so he can get a feel for two extremes - a blaster and a tank. That would give him good context for discussions of damage vs survivability. For a blaster, my recommendation would depend on whether you expect to mostly duo or play on larger teams. For larger teams, fire blaster. Throwing non-stop AoE is a ton of fun. For a duo . . . maybe ice (or beam rifle if he wants a gun). Having said that, I think the first step would be a five minute monologue from you highlighting the characteristics of each AT. Since he lives on this planet, I assume he's familiar with superheroes and he might have a particular concept he's dying to play. Maybe after all that running and gunning he'd want to play some kind of defender. Who knows?

No. Your butt does that. 😛

Sadly, I have not sold any of these lately. I've only been a buyer. 😞

Back on live, one of my friends regularly ran all-defender Statesman task forces. They were a walk in the park. Conversely, I did an all-melee Kahn TF on Homecoming and it was absolute torture.

That would be my first thought.

The numbers fluctuate a lot.

Yeah, I hardly ever farm. And I don't ever PL any character that I actually intend to play. But then why would I PL at all? Oh, look. Dr Q is coming up in the rotation. (Or was. I thought of this a couple months ago.) I should PL an extra character to doorsit while I solo the TF on my main. That's an extra 244 merits at the end. Or more - I log in my main, my 2nd account, my 3rd account and my girlfriend logs in hers. Then I solo to the final mission on my main and everyone logs back in. Took me several hours (team size is set to 4 even if everyone is logged out) but that was 732 merits for me and 244 for my girlfriend for playing one mission. 🙂

Unless I'm mistaken, the current server architecture is entirely virtual so it doesn't need X hardware per shard. So there's no reason to merge shards. People who like busy shards play on the busy ones and people who like quiet shards play on the quiet ones. Please who like busy some of the time and quiet some of the time can play on both. Personally, I have at least one character on every shard. I do task forces on all shards and only do 'big content' (iTrials, Hami raids, MSR's, etc) on the busy shards.

When you are resting, you have the flag 'Only Affecting Self' and it puts this in big red letters on your screen. So, no.

No, but there's a way to simulate that (although it's probably not helpful to your situation). You can raise the floor and lower the ceiling to make that square completely solid. This would let you make odd shaped rooms or a corridor with alcoves, etc. Yep. Unless it's been changed, the limit is 18 storage items.

It would be easy enough to determine. Just monitor your PvE stealth radius in the combat monitor and test it as you described.

1) My computer that was able to run three accounts back on live was absolutely NOT a "pretty great computer". I did not play any high-end games and therefore did not have a powerful 'gaming system'. 2) I never said that all computers could handle multiple accounts. But is it definitely 'most'. Evidence? Okay, according to the Steam Hardware and Software Survey, here's what people with Steam accounts are using: 92% have Windows 10 or 11 93% have 8GB or more of RAM 95% have a CPU running at 2GHz or faster 89% have discrete video cards (i.e. not using graphics on the CPU) Obviously this isn't all gamers and I excluded Mac hardware but it's definitely representative of computer hardware currently in use by gamers.

Just updated the Homecoming Wiki. It now has the correct coordinates for anyone else who is looking for her. 🙂

Another good reason to have multiple accounts. In equipping a character on another shard, I needed to move about 25 enhancements that I crafted on my main. Emailing that many single items is way too tedious, so I have a character who was made purely to ferry items across shards.

Disagree strongly. Not sure why you're making an issue of this but most computers can absolutely run multiple accounts "with no problems". As I pointed out, the computer I used to play CoH fifteen years ago could run THREE accounts with *NO* problems.

At the top of the forum screen is a button called 'Server Status' which gives the exact current population on each shard (and also breaks it down between red and blue).

That's an understatement. The computer I was using to play CoH FIFTEEN YEARS AGO could run three accounts. The key sections are as follows: - If there are less than 1500 people logged in to a shard you may play with up to three accounts at once. - If there are more than 1500 people logged into a shard you may only play with a single account. Also, the Hamidon raid zones (The Hive and The Abyss) NEVER allow multi-boxing.

No, that looks right. I just logged in and checked. It looks like 54 accolades related to getting all exploration badges in a single zone, plus 1 for completing Atlas and Echo:Atlas and then 1 more for completing all of Praetoria.

Well, since a well-known marketeer is asking, I guess the context is clear and the answer is something like: Hordes of people start hitting the market wanting to equip their characters NAO!!!! I had noticed something was up but hadn't made the connection to the Mapserver Event. I have Ironblade on every shard and the one on Reunion is self-funding his build by buying garbage IO's, converting to something valuable and selling them.

It's a pretty big gap between having to plan how you spend your inf and having more than you can ever spend. And while it may not be a difficult transition to make in terms of funds if you apply yourself, it can be a huge step in terms of mindset. Back in the day, on Infinity, I was duoing with a friend because they wanted to hit 50 that night. It was going to be their first 50 on Infinity and the first 50 in their SG. We played, they dinged 50, then started talking about their inf situation. They explained that most of their characters (and money) were on Virtue so they planned to move about half their available funds to this character for their final build. I asked them how much that was going to be and they said they had about 100 million on Virtue so they would move about 50 million over for this character. I opened a trade window and offered them 100 million inf. They hesitated and asked, "Are you sure?" I explained that 100 million was 5% of what I had just on that character. From my viewpoint, that was an excellent use of that inf. The recipient was excited to be able to do a better build then they had expected and would have some left over for their next character. If I had kept it, it would just have been gathering dust in the Scrooge McDuck vault.