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I think it gives you a warning in chat, but that's easy to miss. I kinda like the event. It's practically harmless and signals that you're punching above your weight at level 20. < also a redsider. Misunderstood and proud!

I'm also in team runny scrambled egg. Not sure I'd want my pork runny, though. That sounds inhumane.

This is awesome!

Here's my little bit of blue sky thinking on the matter. Yes, it's work for devs and will probably code-spaghettify the moon out of Earth's orbit. More a CoH 2 kinda idea. Currently street mobs are more or less useless. You can knock out some early levels with the hellions, but you pretty quickly outlevel most zones until much later on. Street mobs could be useful within a very narrow range, but they're unreliable and weird. To me, the city zones are so much more interesting and varied than the interior maps so I think it's dang right criminal that they're underutilised. I'd quite like to see a feature such that fighting street mobs was a viable and sustainable way to level up and get rewards. I also agree that there's not much sense in having Skulls nipping at your level 50+3 incarnate heels. So something like this: zone mobs don't just have a level, but they're not exactly invasion-unlevelled either. Instead they're unlevelled within a broad level range of around 10-20 levels. mobs in somewhere like Atlas Park, Mercy Island and the Hollows might have a range of 1-15, King's Row and Port Oakes might be 5-20... If you're in that level range, mobs will reliably con white (player+0) in the safest neighbourhoods and red (player+3) in the toughest. It stays that way while you level up in the zone and mob rewards scale according to your level, like unlevelled mobs. Once you exceed that range, or are sidekicked above it, say you hit level 16 in Atlas Park, the mobs levels will start to phase out. A safe neighbourhood will con blue mobs now and the toughest shift down to Orange. By level 21 (I think. math hard.) the whole zone would be grey and your Hellion Astronaut Recruitment Drive can commence. Similarly, you gradually phase into zones. The goal would be for street sweeping to be as valuable as running radio missions. A group might be needed to sweep in Hazard Zones, but a solo player could take on City Zones.

I don't think there is a villain group that hasn't dabbled around the origins. Even the Romans vicariously have a bit of science going on because of the Nictus. But if your goal is to face gritty, real-world-facsimile, Gotham City style enemies rather than extradimensional or significantly metahuman threats, you're more in luck. Early on it'll be a matter of avoiding certain arcs rather than finding the right ones. It'll get tough after level 35-40 when the game's story begins to revolve around the dimensions.

I dunno about this. I think there just happens to be a correlation between people who like to get under the hood of the game and people who want to chat about the game.

I'm in favour, especially if the narratives of the arcs at least nominally tied the stories to the location, so that an arc in Brickstown actually implied that they have a local impact. It's not the act of travelling that bothers me; I like hopping around the city. It's the vagueness of the plot contexts in old arcs that isn't great. Though I'll say I don't see this impacting the ratio of arcs vs radio missions.

I don't know how you can make these two statements in the same post and feel OK about it, you utter barbarian.

Always has been.

I imagine this was meant to be said by some of the carnie ladies, but this is such a wholesome bromance. ❤️

Guilty, but I literally just forget.

You're right, that does make sense.

Since you asked, this is what I'm seeing at the moment from a couple of them: The others are similar with ~5mil and some lowballs thrown in. The proc is at 1.5-2mil, but I've seen it lower recently. It's a little bit wild. I'm sure a lowball bid would pick one up in a reasonable amount of time, but I tried selling one for 2mil and got 4mil. As I said, though, I really don't think the price will hang that high. It's an odd set to be so exceptional, unless I'm missing something.

Scorpion shield is one of the most meta-appealing powers out there, which is why it's in so many builds. It makes sense that build guides often include it. CoH isn't a particularly well balanced game, and probably doesn't need to be, but people still enjoy the variety more often than just sticking with the known meta builds.

Procs seem higher than they were and there are a few sets that have gone up, like Basilisk's Gaze. (I guess the 4-set recharge bonus is desiriable, but I don't see the current price point sticking). But mostly things have dropped. It's no surprise to me that the purples are evening out against each other. I think that's an effect of converters. Perhaps if there were significantly more purple sets (and I'm not saying there should be) the prices would vary more. I imagine they'll stick at 20mil until the playerbase really dies out.

I'd say banks or governance isn't a requisite for economics. Economics is just the behaviours of trade - it's more observational rather than trying to manage anything. It's very different from context to context, but a lot of the same trends apply whether we were trading in dollars, influence or oxen.

On the basis that the streets are practically a useless gameplay feature, I'd like to see any step towards making them feel like they offer some value. So I'd be behind the OP's idea. But I think an overhaul is in order. Especially one that makes hunt missions interesting.

Chumbawumba starts playing. Please don't do this.

I agree. The later faces had a very odd glossiness going on. Like polished marble. Steampunk too has this.

Perhaps 'healing' in support could be 'damage mitigation', so that +defence and +resistance sets can be compared. Buffs, then, would be the support toon's ability to make their teammates wreak more havoc. This is cool, though, and I like the criteria. I'll have a think as I play some sets.

I think this is a really fair comparison, kudos for the critical reflection. It's worth noting that microtransactions were a thing as CoH approached the end of its original life. Not nearly to the extent that CO has gotten to, but CO has had longer to let its market seep into the game. It could have gone deeper into that quagmire, but we'll never really know. In Homecoming, many of the items you'll find in the P2W vendor, as well as many of the costume parts and power picks had to be purchased via the ingame CoH shop. There isn't much I can say that I really liked about CO, but it's mostly stylistic and down to taste. In broad strokes, CO's art style felt a little bit forced and the writing in the game felt like a parody of nothing rather than a lore. I played it relatively recently, trying to level a few characters, and found that I was outlevelling the world really really quickly - like the game didn't really want me to play it, it just wanted to ferry me on to the endgame. There were some awesome parts of the world - Snake Gulch, like you mentioned, was absolutely fabulous - that I found I was outlevelling before I even got there. That made the game feel a bit bored of itself. That's a huge win for CoH over CO - I can enjoy the 1-50 journey at my own pace and be challenged at an appropriate level along the way. But the big turn off for me was the world design, compared with CoH. Most of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles are well designed and full of character. Exploring it still gives me the warm fuzzies, even when I have fewer choices for travel powers. Millennium City felt to me to be a bit lazy and dead behind the eyes. It had landmarks randomly thrown in with no consideration to its context. The biggest offender is that god awful hub: It feels like it exists without any kind of explanation. The buildings are nonsensical in themselves and each fight against each other for style while dwarfing the landmarks around it, which includes the crashed alien ship and the signature supergroup headquarter. You couldn't ignore its existence because the game seemed to want you to hang out there at the exclusion of the rest of the world. It was very hard to want to be part of a world that didn't care about itself. If it wasn't for how terrible that hub is, I probably could have put up with the game for longer. I will say that I liked CO's freeform characters and the range of characters you could come up with. By the same token, it made it quite unclear what would balance well in the game, but I got bored before I made it to any point that it mattered. It also felt like there was an enormous range of currencies. I don't know how it got to that, but it was impenetrable for a new player. But maybe CoH feels the same way to someone not used to it (with influence, merits, vanguard merits, threads, shards, incarnate merits...).

I was also surprised by the taunt opinion you encountered. Taunt and gauntlet work well together, one doesn't make the other obsolete. I could probably live without taunt, but it's really handy to be able to control aggro at a range.

If they have the mod as well, they would. Whatever is in the local file is what the client loads when someone pulls out the sword. So if you have a lightsaber katana texture and I have a, I dunno, smiley face katana texture overriding the same file, then when I pull out my katana, you'll see a lightsaber and I'll see a smiley face. ... Solarverse, smiley face katana sfx when?

I don't think anyone's mentioned this, but I'm under the impression that the team is fundamentally reworking how knockback works. I could be wrong and a quick search for evidence was fruitless. I believe that the april fools Freem brawl tested this: mobs flew in a random direction whereas usually knockback just propels mobs away from the caster. If that is the case, peripheral ideas like this sort of ride on the back of those changes. The fundamental knockback mechanics could change so much that the KB>KD IOs become undesirable, for instance. Otherwise, I'm torn. I'm all for options, but I also feel like mitigating a powerset's shortcomings is a fun part of the game that could be made too easy.

I might be odd for a forum frequenter, but above average for a player. I get my alts to fairly affordable builds of about 150mil inf and consider them done once they feel comfortable. But all of those have some ways they could go to increase their power. That doesn't interest me. Ones who are done to the best of my ability, with expensive builds? Three.