CountZero

Anyone got a list of all of Flashfreeze's animations? So far, I've seen dancing, drinking hot chocolate and crafting. Any more?

If you're going after the "open 200 presents" badge, then you should pick up plenty of canes from either the nice presents or defeating the winter horde in the naughty boxes. Alternatively wait until March when the prices will drop on AH, buy them ready for next year.

I will get to the Praetorians at some point but not a high priority. When you do contacts through Ouro they don't improve the friendship rating with the toon, so doing it that way doesn't up the confident count. By the time it comes to doing missions via the flame, I'm hoping that all that's left not completed are the Praetorians, the original Positron TF and Old School Lord Recluse, possibly a couple of others.

So it's been a while, between ToT burnout and life CoH had taken a back seat for a while. But back to the grindstone, have to say the lvl 25+ contacts on the blue side were not great. The First\Night wards had a few infuriating fetch missions, where it's go find X on the map btw there's no waypoint and no map 🤯 then to Croatoa which has possibly one of the most irritating missions in the game where you have to stop Fir Bolg escaping, so you can either wait by the portal and wait form them to come to you a few at a time which will give you enough time to read War & Peace or go hunting and cross your fingers that there aren't too many escapees. And yes I know there's another mission like this waiting with Buck Salinger. As ever the red side missions and contacts are easier to deal with, although there's a slight wrinkle as Bobby Curtain is one of the few Rogue contacts, so going purple instead of red. And another slight obstacle, partly caused by ghosting through missions where possible, Kristof Jaeger needs you have the Villain badge unlocked. So now it's off to beat up another 400 Longbow personnel to get to Kristof. But like with all elephants, you eat them one fork full at a time. Edit: Knew I forgot something. The current BFF count is 132

I understand all that. But if you compare red side and blue side, the red side has a better story\contact structure to it. That's fine because the devs will have learned from CoH when CoV was released. However if you take a step back and look at the game, a toons origin makes absolutely no difference to the game play experience (with a couple of minor exceptions). So why include an origin at all? Now if you look at the lvl 1 missions for heroes they differ depending on the toons origin, which got me thinking. Was the original plan to limit enemy types by origin? So tech heroes would face clockwork and freakshow for most of their missions but magic heroes would get CoT and Tsoo. So different play through's would give a different experience and give players a reason to keep paying the subscription. And if that was the plan, then was it cut back because of time and cost pressures? Or alternatively were the different origins and contacts just smoke and mirrors to make it look like there was more content than there actually was? Honestly I'm leaning a little more towards the "smoke and mirrors". The way I'd been doing the contacts was to have as many on the go at once as possible but I switched to just focusing on a single contact at a time and noticed something. With red side contacts the missions are mostly limited to a single zone, so there's not much travel but with blue side the mission starts were always in "any zone but the one you are currently in", so lots of travel almost as if the devs were trying to create the illusion of the game being bigger than it was.

So there was a pause while lots of ToTing was done on various alts. Including a little experiment of getting a toon from 1 to 50 by visiting the "murder motel" and only doing one huge level up session, won't doing that again as I've now got a toon I don't know how to play instead of learning about how to get the best out of them as they level. Anyway back to the quest to get everyone on speed dial, there was a little bit of switching between blue and red to get through difficult hunting but generally from 20-25 the villain contacts\stories have a much better flow to them (the advantage of learning from the original CoH release). Also I'm wondering if the devs for CoH originally planned to have separate contacts\stories based on origin type which got cut down because of costs and time or was it just a cheap way to make it feel like there was more content than actually existed? Finally unlocked the sniper shot power, which I always enjoy on blasters because why make it a fair fight when you can one shot a red shirt? One of the fun advantages of this idiocy is doing "Who WIll Die?" hero and villain mission close to each so you get to play the other half of the story at roughly the same time. If I've got this right then I'm getting close to half way through. As the BFF count is now at 109, with 10 active contacts and 158 possible contacts And the 100th BFF Leonard - Unofficial Homecoming Wiki

Not really. If the entire league (minus the anchor) tp to a GM, then the 3 people left a the murder motel who aren't moving....

There is a simple way to sort the leechers at the murder motel. Do a little GM hunting but on the return taxi-port pull back to near the motel but not in it. Active players will walk the 100 yards or so, the leechers will stay at the landing point.

One of the Halloween costumes has a tiny typo, I'm guessing "Banished Pantheon Hull" should really be "Banished Pantheon Hulk"

I have a special technique for dealing with EB's

With a toon that wasn't around last year, I was doing a "little" door knocking to try and get the Halloween tip mission. But to get all the badges you need to run it 6 times. So far this toon has picked up 51 classic\holo costumes plus 64 event salvage costume items. With a rough estimate of 1 in 4 doors giving a treat, that would be someone in the region of 450-500 doors knocked on. Number of mission tips - ONE! A 1 in 500 chance of getting a tip mission? That can't possibly be working as intended (or if it is, then someone needs to give their head a wobble)

A little trip into the First Ward, gives a nice chain of contacts to make friends with and all in close proximity making them easy to befriend. However things get a little more complicated with a return to the blue side and contacts scatter across IP, Talos and Faultline. The various Special Agents in Talos are easy to progress but having 8 contacts on the go at the same time makes it feel like there's a lot of effort for not much progress. Currently down to 3 active contacts, and I get the feel that many of the remaining potential blue side are just repeats of other contacts so won't be introduced. Anyway the bestie count is now up to 84, and the question becomes who will be the 100th bestie? Strictly speaking there are TWENTY EIGHT contacts in Atlas but as the Galaxy ones don't offer missions and don't have a friendship, they don't count for the purposes of this lunacy.

So after a little break dealing with other toons dramas, it's back to Ash Lee's adventures. At lvl 15 there was a huge block of potential hero contact but with far fewer villain ones, the upshot being that all villain contacts were maxed out but only about half the hero ones were contactable at all. There was a long time staying at level 15 that eventually brought the bestie count up to 62. Now a little burst of levelling needed to get to 20 and unlock the next batch of contacts.

The large block of hero contacts hasn't worked out exactly as expected. right now I've only been able to get in touch with half of them. So a switch to the red side to get those lvl 10-ish contacts went pretty well, although something slightly odd happened as after going up a couple of levels all the blue side contacts were showing up giving missions, which feels off I was playing for the other team. Also Celerity: Stealth is absolute game changer for sneaking round, so everyone gets to be a stalker at lvl 12. So the bestie count is now up to 42, and just a few more missions before it's time to switch back to the blue side.