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Do you mean Darth Helmet's post? Yeah, real scummy behaviour right there, discussing reward balance. Insidious puppetmaster at work, thinking a certain playstyle is under-rewarded. This stuff's all good to talk about, even if it does go in circles a lot. Everybody is well-meaning in their proposals and deserve to be heard. Some may not realise that they're suggesting something that alienates other players. All these threads move away from AE nerfs really quickly and identify that if there is a problem at all, then there may be other ways to go about resolving it. Some less well-considered than others, some a lot more work than is reasonable, but it's all good to discuss. So? I think it's ludicrous and misplaced to lump the 'community' into a particular mindset and then laugh at it. That just implies you're not really reading these threads and just wanna feel like your way of playing the game is being attacked. It really isn't, and I'd jump ship myself if the game started to ostracise certain playstyles - even if I didn't share it.

I think at some point someone important said that 'huge' was meant to be androgynous. Yeah, right. Last I heard, folks were still trying to backwards engineer CoH models into some usable or modifiable state. We're only seeing extra textures being added at this point, we might be a little ways from seeing new 3D models enter the game. A whole new character body would be a long way after that, since they would need their own variation of aaaaaaaaall the costume options.

A constantly running Perez reclamation event would be great fun! I also like the idea of prestige becoming a reward again, used for a new something-or-other, but I feel like this should be done in such a way that it doesn't oust or ostracise the solo SGs that people have been making. I love the idea of claiming spaces, but the event can't just include the most popular few SGs. Or rather, it could reward popular SGs in such a way, but have something for everybody as well. Since blueside is vastly larger than red, the easiest thing would be to open up these zones to both sides, as you say. If it's remotely possible in the coding, it'd be nice to have these zones interchangably co-op/PvPlite depending on how you're teamed. That way if streetsweeping in the zone does become valuable in some way, it's not necessarily bias towards heroes.

I think it’s a fair concern, to which the resolution is to look at how the rest of the game can reward players, rather than nerfing AE, which only alienates a playerbase. Bentley’s barking up the right tree, I think. Only the idea of merits-per-minute is too easily exploitable. I’d be keen to look at how street sweeping can become rewarding for all levels, especially in hazard zones. You could have entire leagues clearing out the place and all benefitting from it. Could a new kind of merit, a bit like vanguard merits, be awarded for them and for those to buy things unique to them, or be traded for reward merits?

Katamalta Damacy?

Reunion gets the same thing, and we're not even in the same country.

I suggest this is a suggestion for the suggestions forum. I hear you, OP. But without knowing how this works under the hood, it could be as easy as the backpack being selective to certain powers from the crab set or it might be that the entire game must be rebuilt from the ground up. Or anything in between.

This is a ToT thing, and it is a bit unfair. I guess there's a sort of pseudo-taunt period where the monsters zero in on whoever it was that clicked on the door. Even a tank can't take aggro for a few seconds.

I think there should be more crafting tables.

This kind of translates as “I don’t want farmers to farm in AE, I want farmers to farm everywhere”. It’s totally passable to make the argument that you feel that a powerlevelled character is less valid character than one who ‘earned’ 50 through arcs. I won’t try to convince you otherwise. But you can’t then argue that it should be easier than AE to earn 50 through content. Wouldn’t that mean that characters working to 50 in AE had a tougher time of it and therefore earned it more? World content is pretty well balanced for reward. Dxp pushes it maybe a smidge too far in the player’s favour, but it’s still quite well paced. As I said in an earlier post, let’s look at what makes the large gatherings of players attractive - MSR, Hami - and see what we can learn from that in terms of rewarding players for engaging with the world.

I guess there is just a lingering objection against powerlevelling and farming. The message of ‘grr, powerlevelling, cheating bad’ was ubiquitous in any online game and often it was fair enough. I once got kicked out of a supergroup - people I’d known for years from a previous game - for powerlevelling. I don’t think I even realised I was doing it. I suppose I can see why they were angry but now I think about it, they were just tied up in an old perspective and hadn’t seen how the game transformed and the opportunities there were. In the early game it did have the capacity to be a problem, since there wasn’t much endgame content and it was harder to exemplar into most content. I didn’t actually notice it being a problem (too busy falling into Grendel’s Gulch for like three years), but I can see how it could have been. Folks kinda have to take a few steps back, take stock of the game as a whole and the behaviours of the players, to realise that levelling doesn’t matter anymore. It matters a lot less than you might expect from other games. There’s not a significant difference in what’s available to everybody between levels 1-49, and what’s within that range far outweighs the endgame content in quantity. The game is easy enough to not even notice when you’re carrying some mid-teen character around in level 40 content. So I guess it’s just an old bias dying hard. I can understand it; you just gotta expose how the game is. Anyway, that was off topic.

+1

Hail Ants!

Those Vahzilok Eidolons always look ready to merge.

Hey You watch the game last night? huh? well did ya? It was good right? right?

I always go around wentworths trying to start conversations.

The world wasn't exactly well distributed before AE came along. There were still dense concentrations of players in certain areas. Often non-AE farms. It's not a whole lot different now. A bigger effect was the sidekick system overhaul, which allowed everyone to zoom up and down the level range instead of playing sidekick tetris and getting carried. It made those concentrations accessible to everybody. The effect that AE had on the economy on live was very destructive [edit: I'm kinda rethinking this statement. Inflation is a terrible problem across any MMO economy that hasn't thought about managing it]. Many IOs became the sole territory of powergamers. HC have addressed this in more way than one, we're seeing a more stable economy for now and I'm sure more methods would be introduced if it does start getting out of hand. If it does remain stable, then farmers only give the entire community a surplus - which is great. I agree that the rewards of the world content are worth thinking about, but I think this needn't be limited to XP or Inf.

There's literally like two people in this thread saying anything like this. And the OP isn't even one of them, though their suggestion would have that effect. edit: and both got instantly shot down.

Mate, again? You voice the same opinion as most of the community and then laugh at the community. It's weird.

It could be. There's a delay before the badge was awarded. And yeah, we heard about the same thing from the SCORE notes. Absolutely didn't happen; maybe slipped past HC somehow? Or maybe trying to fix a bug by bugging it is just a bad idea.

Nah, we figured this out over a lot of testing. Basically, Swiss Draw is not about the winning or losing. It’s about the taking part. Taking part before everyone else. In a group of 8 (and don’t do this with more than 8!) the organiser will never make it past round 1, regardless of if they win. On the invitations list, only the people in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th slots will make it to the semi finals. 6, 7 and 8 are eliminated. Then, again winners being irrelevant, invitee 2 and 3 will go head to head in the final. The winner (actual, bonafide winner) will get the badge, but they need to stay on the map until its awarded. So make sure the person you’re giving the badge to is the first person you invite to the event. Once they’ve won the finals, make sure they stay in the map when the score screen appears. Once we figured out the logic (insofar as CoH PvP can be logical) we got the badge for all 8 members with only one anomaly where the finalists got the countdown but the match never started. W̘͈̟̫͈̰̫͖͘͠o̵̸̢̞̭͇̙͉͓̜̻r̶̘̪̱͓̘ķ̫͎͎͢i̜̜͇̳̮͡n̸͔̬͚̼̗͎͎̲͠͠g͞͏̵̰̻̦̗̳̱ͅ ̡̠̭̳̥͚̪̩͈͝A̲͈̬̥s͏̪ͅ ҉̸͎̮̺̦͖̝͟I̱͔͚̗̫̻͇̕n̮̤̖̠ț̨̠͖̀e̡̮̬͙̮͖̯n̝͔̣̮̜̮͈̲͎͜d͎̫͉̙̺͘͘͢e͕͓̫̹͉̕ͅd̶҉͈̮̣̯̠͟

I’m in favour of the OP’s suggestions here, but that’s because I’m coming from the school of protestant work ethic and I like the sensation of unlocking stuff. For me, it’s an immersion thing. An RPG should at its core use the character as the liaison between the player and the game world, with the player’s interactions done through the character. Little things like the /ah command do break that contract, where the chat box takes the role of the character. But that’s a niggling thing; I use the /ah command all the bloody time so I can hardly fight this corner. As for hazard zones, I absolutely agree they need to be reevaluated. I think we’re beyond the days that levelling up is either a grind or a reward, so I don’t think they should be viewed in that scope. A new approach would be to look at what makes the MSR and Hami Raid popular, in the way that they reward players. Could hazard zones become co-op, each have a unique unlevelled raid, rewarding a type of currency (let’s call them City Merits or something) that matches Vanguard Merits in income-per-raid and exchange value? The events needn’t be more complex than the MSR, with similarly ludicrous amounts of murd— arrests. This would be something that is rewarding for everyone up and down the level ranges, attract people to the zones and give them back a sense of danger. edit: gimme

While AE may be a contributing factor to the empty zones, I think this issue is the result of a lot of changes. I think that radio missions and the newer sidekick system had a much larger impact on zone use than AE does, as does the ease of travelling around the city now. Rather than eliminating the dense concentrations of the players in the game, the fix here is to make those zones attractive somehow. I'd love hazard zones to be given a overhaul.

More prisons.

Sister Romanghostwidow’s arc uses the first half of the Cimerora map from the last mission of ITF, and I think it’s a defeat all. I never knew about it. I really, really enjoyed exploring it by myself and seeing the detail of the map. It’s a fun one, I think because there is so much verticality to it.