ZemX

It makes a great academic argument, doesn't it? Let's all fight about something that has zero chance of ever being done!

I know you asked about ice/ice but I've been having a lot of fun with an Ice/Shield Stalker. If you're willing to branch out a little, any of the melee types can do this. Thematically, with the elemental->ice shield costume choice, the character still seems to be all about ice and not mixing in any other superpower. Looks very good with ice sword drawn and matching ice shield out.

Sure, but most of the stuff you run across redside is like this... "Oh, what has science wrought? I sought only to turn a man into a metal-encased juggernaught [sic] of destruction powered by the unknown properties of a mysterious living crystal. How could this have all gone wrong?" and... "She who lives by the cybernetic monstrosity powered by living coral, all too often dies by the cybernetic monstrosity powered by living coral. Fortunately, you have helped me to avoid this fate." Did you just spend a few missions repossessing body parts from people who couldn't pay their bills so she could build said monstrosity? Sure. Did I lose any sleep over the moral implications of this? No. No I didn't.

I think it's more that the builds you typically see posted are trying to maximize things like Defense, Resistance, and Recharge. CJ, Hover, and Combat Teleport are all sort of competing for the same spot in your build: Combat Mobility. CJ and Hover give a little extra Def(all) and let you slot LotG:Def/+GlobalRecharge IOs. Combat TP can't and doesn't really let you slot anything else particularly exciting. Gaussian's BuildUp proc is maybe the most interesting, but Build Up is probably the best place to put that on a Stalker. Yeah, you can take both CJ/Hover and CTP but... extra power slot. Though if anyone has room for that it's Ninjitsu Stalkers. Smoke Flash is skippable (and always should be, IMO) but I'm one of those weirdos who always takes Caltrops and stuffs a Ragnarok:KD proc in it, then six-slots Blinding Powder with Coercive Persuasion. 🤪 Teleporting Ninja sounds great as a character concept, but people posting builds are mostly min/maxing, not doing cool character concepts. But if I'm missing anything great about Teleportation, let me know. I have a Staff/Nin stalker I am not sure what to do with build-wise as well. There are definitely one or two power picks I could change... I just don't have many (any) slots to give the replacements. I wouldn't drop CJ, but I already have Teleport Target, so that pool is available. Maybe I will just try it and become a convert myself.

No? Look, it's great you get into being a villain that much, and I do that too sometimes, but mostly I play this game to run around in teams and hit things. I can do that anywhere, but redside is content fewer people are running and who doesn't like a change of scenery from time to time? The entire point of Going Rogue and Freedom was to let all the dirty capes run all over your lawn, Snarky. Sorry. But it stopped short of making it really easy. It inexplicably allows a vigilante to join villainous contact missions... but not to run them. Why? What's the difference? Why not go that one more step? If they just let anybody run any content, how much skin off your back is that really? Meanwhile, bored heroes can go run papers in Grandville as easily as radios in PI and you can sneer at them while they do it. Everybody wins, right?

Who said anything about obligation? This thread is about suggestions. Nobody is making demands. Nobody is telling you what to like or taking anything from you. How on Earth does anything suggested in this entire thread "redo" anyone's choices? If you're trying to suggest that giving rewards for villain play is "redoing" their choices then why aren't you beating the war drums to have ALL rewards in the game removed? Isn't the point of any reward to incentivize that particular activity?

That game had the best bugs I've ever seen. I once watched a Great Lord (max reputation) give a coin to a beggar and be instantly executed by a teleporting guard because reputation was an 8-bit number and it had just rolled over with that last act of charity. Speaking of Great Lords (and Dread Lords) they all got a nifty shield for their accomplishment which would also punish them if their alignment ever fell from max (or rose from minimum) by exploding and killing them. Except there was a magic spell called Incognito that would make anyone temporarily neutral. Only it REALLY made them neutral so... boom! It wasn't even a crime because it was a non-combat spell. Exploding Great Lords Day. *sniff* I miss it. And then there was The Day the Earth Stood Still... a bug in stamina regeneration caused literally everyone to grind to a halt. Even the teleporting insta-kill guards couldn't move. So people starting committing crimes everywhere until their screens were full of absolutely immobile guards... and then the server crashed. And of course who can forget the time Lord British himself was assassinated during an in-game appearance because someone forgot to turn on his invulnerability flag? Ah... good times.

The problem, as stated, is that more people choose blueside than redside. It's not a solution to simply say, "Well then, more people should choose to play redside! That would fix it!" More people should choose to eat vegetables. More people should choose to safeguard the environment. More people should care for one another. More people should push for world peace and equality. They. Don't. Individuals do. Populations don't. Populations need the carrot or the stick (or both). And the stick is usually bad for business.

Must be something like that. I have started quite a few of my new alts on goldside and it always seems like I hit 20 faster than running contacts blueside or even redside. It's not by much though. I am going by the fact I buy 8 hours of 2xp in the tutorial and it lasts me until I get to Primal Earth with some to spare usually. But yeah, it's got nothing on the DFB and Posi 1 and 2, I am sure. And I even see people running low level mish/radio teams blueside sometimes (which means starting one would probably get at least a few joiners and be faster leveling than solo by a mile).

Seriously, what did I write that you think is condescending? I'm disagreeing with you that anecdotes are evidence. That's pretty straight-forward. And I have absolutely no idea what you know about statistics, so I am being completely sincere when I say if you don't know what "self-selection bias" is then do read up on it. It's good to know whenever you're looking at the results of an online poll, particularly if it's for something more important than a video game. But it also applies here. A really great example, btw, is a poll I heard about a few years back for "World's most evil company". It was asked online and the answer that came back was not an oil company or hedge fund. It was Electronic Arts. Outside of the crowd of gamers who obviously bombed that poll, does anyone in the world really think a game company is the most evil corporation out there? But okay, aside from that, you accused me of having a "slant" about SWTOR, which applies equally to you then, and I said as much. If that's condescending then we both did it. I am attacking arguments here, not people. Okay? But this is another anecdote. Why you can't play villains or why I can has no bearing on whether or not that is the reason MOST people do or don't play villains. All that tells us is what our reasons are. So instead of telling you what my reasons are for being able to play redside, I am looking around and trying to see what evidence does seem to exist supporting the idea that content matters to people more than an avatar's morality. I mean, how often do you even run into people who are in-character? Assuming you team at all in CoH? I am on Everlasting and I would still put it at less than 50/50 for pick-up teams. The idea that any great number of people is getting into their characters to the extent they CAN be disgusted by the text of a mission brief is really questionable to me.

The word anecdotal literally means "not necessarily true or reliable". But if you don't like having a dictionary thrown at you, just take a step back and consider we're talking about (at the time I am writing this) some 18 likes of the first post. That isn't even a representative sample of the 1,366 people who are logged on and playing RIGHT now, let alone the whole active base of players on Homecoming. It's also what statisticians refer to as a "self-selected" poll. If you're not sure why that isn't considered reliable, I suggest looking it up. It has far more serious real implications for politics than to does for gaming, to be sure, but it's the same principle. There's also my last post which you might not have seen yet which asks how this "people don't like bad guys" explains the differences in villain populations even among the various servers of Homecoming. So if you don't like the SWTOR example, try that one instead because that's comparing this game to itself on different servers. Still though... Back at ya. Your villain thinking of themselves as a good person is a great way to roleplay. It's one of my favorite quotes from an actor, in fact. During an interview, Willem Dafoe was asked if he liked playing bad guys or good guys and he answered something like "Good guys, bad guys, makes no difference. Everyone thinks they're righteous." But... it's a bit of self-delusion too. He wasn't saying the villains really were good guys. Just that they thought of themselves that way and that made it just as enjoyable to get into them as an actor as with the real good guys. In SWTOR, your lightside Sith, for most of your career at least (as I recall) isn't really good or charitable or interested in making the Sith Empire NOT evil. More like just being less cruel or more interested in the good of the empire than of personal glory and power. That's certainly less evil than a power mad Sith who likes choking people that disagree with him but.... you're still part of an evil empire... c'mon. The only really good choice is to join the other side. And if that's a thing, it's new since I left.

And yet people run ten times more Positrons and CItadels as any redside SF I've seen and that's on Everlasting where you'll also find the highest (or maybe better to say least lowest?) ratio of villains to heroes among the HC servers. Speaking of which, maybe someone here who still believes the population imbalance is due predominantly to people not liking to play bad guys can explain WHY the ratio of villains to heroes is double on Everlasting, the unofficial RP server (where people should theoretically care about in-character issues like this more than anybody), what it is on Excelsior. I just want to see if "Excelsior players are twice as emotionally sensitive to being the bad guys as Everlasting players" is the hill anyone wants to die on. 🤪 And just to be totally clear, this can be YOUR reason for not playing redside and that's perfectly valid for you. The only thing I dispute is the notion that anything approaching a majority of players overall cares one whit about the pretend morality of their pretend characters in this MMO.

It's aesthetically annoying but I don't know that there's an actual delay between activation and damage application or if it's just an animation goof. Haven't timed it. If I think about it, I usually try to draw the staff by hitting AS early, before I reach the enemy, if I plan to AS from Hide. I did notice yesterday my rad melee stalker was sometimes not properly animating AS either and there's not even a weapon involved in that case. Not sure what's up. When it happened, I'd just stand there with glowing green fists until the hit landed. Can't say I noticed that before, but it's been awhile since I've played that one.

I mean, I did try to google it and I found the game show reference which sounded like a joke about people who make up nonsense with numbers so... it didn't SOUND like a compliment. 🤪

The numbers tell you there are fewer villains. They don't tell you why. I am not disputing there are fewer villains. I am disputing the notion that it's because people don't like playing the bad guy. i.e. It's the villainy. The aesthetic of playing the role of a villain. If this is what you believe then it's you refusing to accept that this is nothing more than a correlation. Villains are bad. There are fewer villains. People must not like playing bad guys.

I don't even know what that means but it sounds bad, so I'll just assume you disagreed with me. It's not...er... numberwang. Nor is the lack of villain population an illusion. Anyone can check server stats and see there are around 3-8x more people at any given moment playing heroes as playing villains. So having checked population, most people will say to themselves, "My goodness! If I want an easy time getting a team, I should start blueside, definitely!" So yes, it's self-perpetuating. The larger population attracts more population in a game where people want to team up (which I usually figure most people want to do in an MMO). Are they? I usually join teams advertised on LFG (yeah, I'm a follower... sue me) not shouted out in a zone like Atlas or Ouro. I don't farm, so if this is how farmers coordinate, it's not something I know about. It's not that there aren't more people hanging around those places, but it's hardly what I'd call a big crowd. I'm on Everlasting, so I know the RPers tend to hang in Pocket D, but that's about it. As for what "WoW figured out" really, I don't know why everyone wants to ignore the amount of content available but I keep being told "nobody" cares about it. And yet, MMOs with largely balanced content for their factions tend to have *gasp* reasonably balanced factions! At least better balanced then we have here. What an odd coincidence eh?

You guys are fast. I was going to say Dark Miasma Corruptor or Defender too but... interesting reading. I've never given Darkness Affinity much thought but suddenly I want to try a Mind/Dark controller myself.

This is not what anyone would call a representative sample of a population. So yes, you would need more than that. I would too so I am not saying I am proven correct either. But I am putting down arguments to support my case. All you and anyone else agreeing with you have been doing is saying "Blue is good, Red is bad. Blue has more people. It's because people like playing Good." I can provide precisely the same line of reasoning substituting "has more content" for good and "has less content" for bad. Both are correlations only. Dismissing without reasoning doesn't make your case. These are both sci-fantasy MMOs with factions, swords, sorcery, guns, and superpowers. Attempting to claim there is a fundamentally different kind of MMO player between the two is stretching it. You'd basically have to claim that somehow the type of gamer who plays SWTOR doesn't care about the morality of their avatars' chosen faction but CoH players do. Meanwhile all I am saying is... they have balanced content and balanced (mostly) factions. We have unbalanced content and unbalanced population. Which one of us is really stretching farther to make their case?

You have offered no evidence for the claim that "many" people don't like playing the bad guy. Meanwhile, I can look over at SWTOR and see nobody having any problem whatsoever playing Imperials. WoW players have no problem rolling up undead, orcs, and dark elves. Now, I'm sure having said this people will come running to inform me that their Imperials or Horde are actually not evil, but c'mon. These are both classically "bad guy" factions and no, the vast majority have no problems playing them. Lightside Sith in SWTOR are not "good guys". Still no trouble playing them. Why? Because those games have balanced content. Meanwhile the content disparity in this game is fact, not opinion. You think that people care about the good vs evil but you can't show that's the case. There are hardly zero restrictions. It is simply easier to team blueside if you are natively a blueside alignment. If you prefer to hop into the far more abundant blueside DFBs or low level TFs to level, it's just plain simpler to start blueside than it is to go villain and then rogue. So why would you?

Yeah. I've started most of my characters in Praetoria and most of them have been Stalkers. The number of ambushes is off the scale. Whoever designed these arcs LOVED the idea of ambushes and figured if one ambush was good then nine must be nine times as good! No easy sneaking in and out in a lot of these missions. They also didn't do the best job giving hostages an ability to navigate stair cases. Especially the super long winding ones that lead up or down from the underground levels. Especially fun when a timer is ticking down to another ambush and you're like... "Really? You're stuck on the railing going up the stairs again? We're like thirty feet from the exit door here and you've got ten seconds to figure that out before I leave you right there for the goon squad to find!!!"

I've read your other posts on red vs. blue. You also said you think most people play blueside because they like facerolling easy content. So it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense that you also think they care about the quality of writing. If most people soloed as much as you do and cared as much as you do about the writing, they'd all start either gold or redside and then move redside. But they don't. That's pretty compelling evidence that most people don't share these priorities. This is also a feedback loop. More people choose blueside because there are more people blueside. If they primarily soloed the game, they wouldn't care where the most people are. So most people team up for content, which also supports the idea they aren't reading the stories anymore. Changing that would require some counter-balancing incentive LIKE more content or higher rewards or something. If better writing were that counter-balance, it would have worked a long time ago.

That might be your reason, but we're talking the whole playerbase here and it's ridiculous to ignore the elephant that has always been in the room: CoH has more content. Always has had more content. Always will have more content. And yes, that is absolutely because it came first. Where was their entire customer base when CoV released? Blueside. How much content did CoV release with? Less than blueside. Were they going to spend each subsequent issue release adding MORE content to redside than blueside to bring them to parity on content all the while pissing off their existing customer base that was blueside? Of course not. This got talked to death on the original forums. This is just how it was. Redside wasn't doomed by people wanting to play heroes. They still play heroes. They were playing villains and anti-heroes blueside before CoV was even a thing. Not going to down-vote you because I disagree, but c'mon. You're going to ignore how much more content is Blueside and chalk up the population disparity to... heroism? For most who play, and this goes for pretty much any MMO... content is king.

Seems like nobody actually answered this one yet. The answer is that the cel shading option affects what you see, not what anyone else sees. If I have the option off, I see the same thing you see when you have the option off and vice versa. If you're curious about whether a CC judge is using cel shading ask them. I would suspect most of the time the answer is "no". Some people like it. I don't care for it aesthetically, myself. Which is good, because it doesn't seem to perform all that well for me either. It's just one data point, but all the screenshots I saw of the Anniversary CC were without cel shading. I think it's probably a pretty uncommon option for most. Beyond that, there are certainly other graphics options like character detail level that might affect how someone else sees your costume. But as everyone else has pointed out, it's subjective anyway. Whatever options they are using, they are seeing all the costumes with the same options at least, so there's that.

I said alignment, not side. They are different. A vigilante and a hero are both blue-siders but they are different alignments. What I am curious to know is what percentage plays Vigilantes/Rogues vs. Heroes/Villains. It matters because I think most of the "players don't like being villains" is nonsense. Players just don't care that much about the story, for the most part. They play where the content is and it's simply more convenient to base yourself blueside than redside, even with the alignments that allow crossing over. You still run into annoying cross-teaming issues. Not insurmountable. Just annoying. It might help a little if those last barriers were dropped and you could just make a team of any eight people no matter where they are. If they can gather in one zone they can work together. If not, some have to drop. You work it out. But there's no need to prevent people joining or kick people for the zone they are in. The content the team runs will sort all that out eventually. It won't ever bring the two sides to parity in population though and that's just the way it is. Only the same level of content on both sides would do that... and that ship sailed long ago.

I don't know why people think this is a major factor. Or even the somewhat greater difficulty I sometimes hear. Redside has always been less populated. It started with less content and it's always had less content. The devs weren't going to spend more time bringing redside up to parity when most of their established players were blueside. Going Rogue was them finally admitting, officially, that would always be the case so they just opened the gates to both playgrounds. Blueside has more people because it has more people. It's self-perpetuating. Without some reason to move towards equilibrium, why would it happen? So it makes sense to think of incentives, but I think it also runs afoul of the same reason the original devs didn't try to add exclusive perks or favor redside with more content updates. It's going to upset a lot of people who already play the game and are fine playing blueside. I don't think this is the way. I think the only thing you can do is continue what Going Rogue started by lowering barriers to cross-teaming where possible. If there is a way not to be booted from a team just because you're from different factions, that would be nice. It should all be sorted out anyway when the team tries to gather in one zone. The game doesn't need to prevent the invites from working or boot people from the team because they went to the wrong zone. I don't know about anyone else, but that alone would make it easier for be to home more of my characters redside without having to deal with the inconvenience of joining blue teams and then getting randomly booted for going to Ouro or my SG base. Maybe just fixing those last two, if possible, would be enough. It's not going to magically make redside as big as blueside. Not saying that. But it might help a little more.