CountZero

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.

I did a bit of prep work using the wiki, I put together a spreadsheet with all the contacts names and levels. Although the wiki isn't 100% accurate it's pretty close. Hadn't though about the "find contact" button, thanks for that. Just hit level 10 and there's a block of 25 contacts to befriend, I can see how the "find contact" would be a good safety net.

That's 30 besties, with another 9 contacts that are unreachable for various reason (mostly two or more contacts running the same story arc). The hunting mobs in the wild. combine with try to keep the level down as much as possible has been an interesting challenge. Taking on Hellions in Perez Park who are all showing up as at least orange and hunt in packs has meant been a lesson in sniping, aggro management and patience. Might have been easier with a blaster who's snipe power kicks in way earlier than a fire blasters but thems the breaks. Only another 290 possible besties out there.

Matthew Habashy wasn't on my list, so that's 3 more BFF's to collect

Well that's just not true. There are 5 starting contacts in Atlas, you can talk to all of them and max out all of their friendship ratings. Mercy gives you 3 starting contacts and again you can max all of those out. Kuzmin gives you a choice of one other contact but you never get a chance to meet the other unlike most other contacts. And the whole point of this exercise in lunacy is to get as many maxed out contacts on the inactive contacts tab. Something that Ouro doesn't help with.

Couple of minor hiccups. First off, while it's easy to control the level of mobs you face in missions, hunting mobs in the wild can be more interesting. I now have a whole new appreciation for hover mode and inspirations. Also Operative Kuzmin will only introduce you to one of his two contacts, which means Ash and Doctor Weber will never be friends 😞 Anyway that's 12 Besties with another potential 311 friends out there.

So far, so good. Admittedly that's not very far. I've gone with a fire\time blaster called Ash Lee. She's managed to become besties with the 5 starting hero contacts. The "plan" of staying one level below the next set of contacts until necessary is making life interesting as a couple of Villain contacts open up at level 3. Which means Ash probably holds the record for number of completed missions to get to level 3, also the lack of of travel powers means she's run a marathon criss-crossing Atlas Park. Hero-ing 101 - get your daily steps in. 5 Besties made, 319 left to find

That's short of what I was leaning towards, partly because my 1st ever was fire\ice blaster and it'd fun to recreate them in some form. MM's don't feel like an option because of the lack of stealth; tank is in consideration because while the damage output might be low (especially to start off with) it gets to the point where they can "stealth" missions by just ignoring the hits and running to the end. And running at -1 was always the plan, because most of the time I'll be trying to avoid gaining xp anyway so why make life difficult?