CountZero

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.

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?

I do have a tank who's almost turn every story arc in Ouroboros yellow, so it was a case of "OK so what's next?"

Don't know if this is something anyone else has tried, because frankly you'd have be nuts to try it, but I'm thinking about doing a character where they become besties with all 327 contacts (it would be 367 but the Praetorians kinda mess things up). So no Ouroboros, plenty of trips to Null to alignment shift and zero xp most of the time. Still musing over which AT to go with, but has anyone else tried to something so dumb?

Depends where in Canada the servers are but the results range from "not great" to "complete dog shit"

Before this weeks reboot, everything was fine. Post the reboot, the amount of lag and rubberbanding had just made the game unplayable. And before any idiot chimes in with "it's a problem on your end", speed tests are giving me ping rates of around 20ms when CoH starts acting up, all while music is being streamed completely uninterrupted.

Tiny wrinkle I stumbled on. The Unlucky Artifact mission has a fail condition (letting the boss escape and somehow he did) but failure still awards the badges, so maybe find failure missions that you can complete (finish) instead of ones you have to complete (win)