Ukase

How about training up at a different trainer each level? Friends in high places Scratch that, if there weren't a badge for it, that's NOT something I would do anyway.

I'm someone who has spoken with Casey over the phone, briefly - he's the CEO and President at Heroic Games, a videogame development company focused on a single title, Ship of Heroes. This one will be completed regardless of what happens with HC CoH. How will it do? That's anybody's guess. But, make no mistake - his operation is not a fly-by-night operation. He's legit. He's got experience in game development. Whereas, the same can't really be said of CoT. But, they did have a lot of volunteers who were/are quite knowledgeable about game development, and I'm pretty sure they're going to keep the customer in mind when they finally get going. As to them getting going...I'm also someone who contributed to City of Titans. They're making progress, but man, it has been a looooong time. I thought that it would be unrealistic to expect anything before 5 years. But, I also thought it would have beaten HC; in the sense it would be working before HC opened their servers. They have woefully missed that mark. And it may very well cost them. Suppose they had been going for 2 years before HC opened their servers? A lot of us would have signed up, and have time invested in a number of characters and may not have even given a look at HC or the other servers. I cannot speak for everyone, but I don't think I'll play City of Titans, even if it finishes tomorrow. Why? Because I'd have to learn an entirely new system. How to get the requisite gear to make the character "super", how to acquire, earn all the stuff that may be equivalent to accolades and badges & such. The novelty might be interesting in the beginning, but I hate change, and I know how things work in CoH. I can't say that about CoT. I can see myself loading the game, hopping in, checking things out, but unless I'm completely compelled due to content or other features, I can't see sticking around for long. They'll really have to make things compelling. But, that's just my opinion, and if there's one thing I've learned on these forums, my thinking is rarely like anyone else's.

Chatterbox is a badge already in game, for talking with several NPCs within one of Provost Marchand's (primal) story arcs. Maybe "I hate dead air" ? (Dead air refers to disk jockey fears of there being any silence over the air. Even today, any radio station will either have dialogue, music or an ad of some kind playing. There's very rarely any time with no sound. )

I opened a few - and I was surprised to get both Experienced and the %xp boosters. I'm sure I'll find a use for the % boosters, as I'm guessing they don't negate the inf earning like 2xp from p2w.

Thanks, Yomo. I didn't really want to open that many packs until after they got rid of that useless 25% and 50% xp boosters. I love my experienced temps!

I don't have the time to open any packs just yet - spent too much time grabbing and rebidding as I grabbed more inf from my email. I'll try to open a hundred during lunch and report back.

So...I'm no longer truly inf rich. Asset rich, perhaps. Over 20K winter packs have been bought, of which, I've gotten over 2k of those. I plan to get many, many more...but it's like I'm driving a true gas guzzler, a 69 Plymouth Fury, with cement in the doors for the demo derby. I'm just not comfortable unless I have a full tank or darn close to it. So, I'm gonna wait a week, see what shakes in the market. I expect the price of rare salvage to plummet to 375k again, and hover around 400k for "buy it now!" for the next 6 months.

I noticed just yesterday that the few hundred of player listed packs had finally sold, and the seeded ones had dropped to a couple hundred below the 10M available. (quantity, not price) Now, as the patch goes on, I am wondering if the packs will go on sale. I was thinking they'd be "hot-fixed" over the weekend, not actually getting patched in. But, we'll soon see. I have literally billions in bids in place already. On one account, I plan to sink all the available inf into these packs - just to keep them in inventory, unopened, as a store of value, as my email is full of 999.999.999 stacks. Of course, perhaps smarter money would have just stashed them in bids of 10M or 14M on the AH. Still, I think every 15M pack on average will be worth over 30M, easily, in the long run. A tedious run, but profitable.

Actually, in my anecdotal experience, DJ Zero, Father Time...their missions stay in my queue until completed. I know that before Winter event hit, I ran valentines for DJ Zero, and knocked out Snaptooth. I try to keep those missions in case a badge character of mine needs them and doesn't want to wait until the next year. But, I do keep them on a lesser played alt that might sit idle for months. It would probably annoy me to see the mission in my queue on a character I play routinely.

It's like 8 minutes, tops.

Just using the hospital instead of the base would be a true hardship. Well, for me, just very, very annoying. Who dies that many times anyway? Twice per level? With 2xp, most don't spend enough time at any level for this to occur naturally.

Actually...as Yomo states, this is something I would do anyway. But, I have to wonder why even 1 single conversion isn't added to the Invention Tutorial system. I realize the tutorial was on the server before conversions were a thing, but I have to think adding it to the tutorial wouldn't be terribly hard.

The problem is that any chaos we might be able to cause is only for a short while. I think, with 50B the first thing I'd go for would be first - Hamidon Enhancements. Understand that HOs, Titan-Os, Hydra'Os and now D-Syncs are all in the same bucket, if they share the same attributes and level. The reason is because these cannot be bought with merits. And, they are random as to what drops for the reward. So, it could be quite annoying for someone looking for a microfiliament. Then, I'd buy all the recipes and IOs for Celerity and Quickfoot - and leave standing bids to try to keep the supply as low as possible. If it weren't Winter event time, I'd get all the Winter's Gift and Blessing of the Zephyr's. So many folks I know put a KB protecting proc in a travel power, to remove the ability to get these, outside of paying merits for them..that might get annoying. (To be fully transparent, if this happened to me, I'd just craft any old enhancement into what I needed, I've plenty of converters. But, it is winter time, and folks can swap candy canes and some inf for Winter's Gift recipe and then convert if they wish and were willing to do the work - and they knew about it. Also, Overwhelming Force. Granted, SBB can be run to get these (random reward table) or they can fork over merits for them. But, I imagine a lot of folks, if they want to use one or even a set are going to find running 5-6 SBB's more than a bit annoying. There are probably too many farmers to really do much with purples for any meaningful amount of time, but it would be interesting to simply buy all of the enhancements and all of the recipes in the market at a given point in time. No idea what I'd do with them all, but if I got all the recipes and all the enhancements, even with all the farmers we have, it would certainly drive the price up, way up, before it settled back to it's normal price. I've joked with friends that my last act in game will be to liquidate all my billions by buying EVERYTHING that's for sale, and then just log off forever. The problem is the clicking alone would take over a week, if I went without sleep. The salvage alone would take about several hours for one category. Clearly, buying all the rare salvage, at least, all the salvage that's less than a million could be fun. It's just an awful lot of clicking, so I can't really be bothered. I might also buy all the ambrosia, even at it's inflated 2M price tag. Those are just the thoughts I have at the moment.

As has been mentioned, there is a confuse effect in the final room of the Underground Trial, when fighting the Avatar of Hamidon. The 10 dollar label for the source of this confuse effect in this room are Discordant Spores. It's a PBAoE confuse with a whopping 600 foot radius, mag 20. It spawns every 20 seconds, lasts for 10 seconds. Without Clarion, or enough stacked tactics, or a tier 3 break free, you will be literally confused half of the time. I have often thought about making a macro to target these things, to see if they are in fact, targetable, but it's typically quite chaotic during the final fight, and I'm often too distracted in that moment to do this. But I digress. Just figured I'd share a fun fact about the Underground confuse situation.

Blizzard. Nuff said.

True story here, bear with me. I once teamed with someone who was knowledgeable (about the game), a bit sarcastic, but quite funny, It was just a pug thing, I made a note, and left on my merry way. Fast Forward, another friend asked me to an Apex/Tin Mage combo. I get there, and I see this chap again, and I see a couple of other players I had teamed with before and had a good experience with. One of these other players starts just talking like crap to the others. I mean, if someone said that kind of thing to me, I'd have found some way to meet them in person and slap the taste out of their mouth. So, in an effort to try to keep the tfs drama free, I sent the offender a tell, espousing the virtues of the other player. Turns out, they are friends and have been gaming with each other a very long time, and are always talking smack to each other. Sometimes, I'll see disparaging remarks in help, and then...I wonder...maybe those two know each other and are just ribbing each other. For the most part, that's usually the case. The exceptions are when someone asks an off-topic question that should be in help channel, but they ask in LFG, or an lfg request in Help. There is one thing that tends to be met with abuse in either channel, and that's the requesting of PL in a repetitious fashion. Like, every 20-30 seconds for several minutes.

Hmm...I hadn't actually thought about it like that. Thanks. I sit corrected.

I've been busting my head, trying to figure out how to walk a player through the IO conversion process in an AE mission...but that seems impossible to me, as there's no way to show what the AH interface looks like. I mean, no point in crafting that trash IO and turning it into an LotG 7.5% if you've no idea how to sell it, the various pricing strategies, etc. With streaming now being allowed, I've thought about just hosting a demo for my sg. But then, I asked myself how I would measure it's effectiveness. Price of PvP IOs dropping to 3M, with all the competition? A bunch of angry sg folks because they wasted all that money on salvage and recipes & crafting only to discover they were being undercut by another SG mate? It didn't seem politic - in that context. I still think it's a good idea for everyone to know these things - even if they choose to never do them. Same with procs. While some may choose to never use the damage procs, the information can only help them. At least, it certainly can't hurt them, other than the math-induced headaches that may occur.

Same way they do cutscenes, I imagine.

Surely, most of us have heard the clever marketing regarding a "Masters Class", often hosted by someone of reknown. Gordon Ramsay for culinary skills. Steve Martin for a masters class in comedy, and I think it's Gary Kasparov that has a master's class for chess. I was reading in the forums about how most of us players learn what we learn about what's behind the figurative curtain of CoH from other players. Like Procs. Bopper, MacSkull and others have done a good bit of research into procs, how they work and shared this information freely. Yomo has made numerous guides that have taught other players how to go from rags to riches as they level up. The descriptions for various incarnate powers are often a bit vague as to how they work, what they do, what they do for your pets and your teammates. The poor newer Mastermind players are almost always asking these types of questions. In the Twinshot arc, a solid effort is made to introduce various things to a newer player. Same for the invention tutorial. But, what about a Master's Class? We get the costume files for @yomo and have his avatar behind a room, and players can enter this room and literally watch a video of how to craft and convert an IO, how to boost an enhancement, how to attune a crafted IO. How to make an ATO or Winter-O "Superior". Bopper's avatar can be in another room and players can learn what a proc is, how it works, and the painglorious math behind it. I'm not smart enough to generate dialogue or a suggested syllabus beyond what I've mentioned already, but I think it would be useful for newer players to not be told "Go to the forums" all the time. It could be a really good thing for newer players (which we seem to have a lot of lately) to learn these things from the game, rather than from us players. And while I am quite grateful we have folks like Yomo, Bopper, UberGuy, AbovetheChemist (and many others), it would be fantastic for newer players to get these key points from the game itself. A brand new player isn't likely ready for Yomo's meandering guide to a billion inf. Nor are they ready for procs. But when they are, it would be great to refer them to a contact in the university. By doing it in this fashion, instead of letting the players continue to be helpful, we can avoid the controversy of "Shards vs threads" for the Alpha slot. Instead of the newer player getting confused about what's the optimal way, they can learn that it all depends on the content they run and what drops for them. And, it certainly would be preferable to someone trying to be helpful but missing the mark and giving the wrong answer. There'd always be a place for the help channel, but I think a master class would be a good thing to add.

CoH is the only online game I've ever played...outside of Chess. So, I don't have a frame of reference to expect such things from the game. There's a ton of things that most players will never learn about this game if they don't come to the forums. I was literally told by an SG member "Most people don't have time to go to the forums!" In context, they were a bit frustrated, as from the forums - I learned about vidiot maps, and the subsequent updates, the popmenu BadgeSetList, and Mids. The tutorial certainly doesn't cover any of those things. There are a few badges my characters get organically - not by hunting them. The HC devs have recently introduced the Exploration "tips" that reveal the locations of these. Unfortunately, you'd have to do an awful lot of street sweeping to catch all the tips. Makes me wonder if someone is actually doing just that to get all the explores in a zone. Still, it's certainly a step in the right direction, a fun way of introducing things to the player base that may not re-visit the forums after they make an account. But you raise an interesting thought - why not incorporate some "tribal knowledge" about the game into the game, along the lines of the invention tutorial?

In Bricks:

That has never, ever happened to me, and I craft hundreds of IOs a day, easily. Are you sure it wasn't some other recipe you crafted and misread? (have to ask)

First, thanks for updating the popmenu list so quickly, and making it available, and EASY to use! My method for tracking tends to involve a combination of using Badger https://n15g.github.io/badger/homecoming in conjunction with the pop menu. When I see in the pop menu a badge I'm missing, I'll type the name of that badge in Badger and see what details are there to determine the best method I can to get the badge. Unfortunately, I've made a mistake with at least one of my characters. In game, I have 1245 badges. And when I checked off the new Cim badges, I saw that I had 1289! Apparently, at some point in time, I've gotten confused and selected badges as collected that were collected on a different character - I think. Brainless, I opted to just delete the character and figured I'd re-enter it. Explorations, History, PVP, and a few other categories were pretty simple. Then someone mentioned the import/export function. I could be reading it wrong - but given how Pop Menu determines (with accuracy) what badges my character has, is there a way to export that to Badger?

What bugs me the most is I need to relearn reading comprehension. Words on screen: One plus one equals two. Brain interprets: Null pointer exception. The stress from real life has always been real, but when it impacts sleep, it's impacts my ability to process information properly. The information was there, I just processed it incorrectly. Kind of like being color blind, only instead of color it's words, lol.