Lunar Ronin

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Unfortunately, the horse left the barn years ago for that. There were quite a few people who made a hundred or more characters the week that the servers went online just to reserve character names.

There already is a Null the Gull option to disable Group Fly. The issue is that many people argue that that is "too cumbersome."

Only as much as Rikti costumes do at mothership raids.

You should be able to walk right up to Operative Kuzmin and speak with him.

From the Homecoming Team directly, here. It's been mentioned by other staff members on these forums before as well, and on the Homecoming Discord server over the years. Again, the live game was smaller than people remember.

The servers back on live had a hard cap of 1,500 players. Excelsior has had more than that the past couple of weeks.

Yes, that's what I meant. None of the live servers were as busy as Excelsior is, and the majority weren't as busy as Everlasting is.

Yeah, it started late on live, and greatly escalated with the dawn of Homecoming as people played other online games during "the snap" and acquired "bad habits" from those other games. Now it's all about speed and rewards, dang everything else. I've noticed that it's mostly younger (35 and younger, yes I'm old), players. It's just how many of them play. It's frustrating. I've led many TFs/SFs and specifically advertised them as kill most, only for people to join and try to force speed on the team. I've either kicked them, or they rage quit when I less than gently remind them that we're not speeding.

There weren't as many people nor as much activity back on the live servers. I've found that people seriously misremember how small the live servers were in comparison to Excelsior and even Everlasting, likely skewed by modern MMORPGs. I've seen a few people over the years say that Infinity was a small server back on live. It was the third most populated server back then, just behind Freedom and Virtue.

It's not shallow, it's smart. I do the same thing. I'll team with friends for regular story arcs, but as for PUGs? Nope. Ouroboros Flashback or bust.

FWIW, Victory has been back since April 2019 thanks to @Michiyo , and has been running Homecoming's code. It's just becoming fully integrated with Homecoming.

There is an issue when it locks out nine to twelve of the game's ATs, and the vast majority of power sets. Also, we're not talking about three to four hours with a team with diverse ATs. I was once told that bringing a "non-viable" AT to a hard mode would increase the time by 20 minutes. 20 minutes! The sheer, abject horror! Also, yeah, I've heard "we don't have time for that," but then they go on to do a half dozen other TFs/SFs, taking two hours or more. So... I guess you did have time for it, you just chose differently. I don't have issues with people playing how they choose, with who they choose. However, there is a severe problem with people telling others that hard modes simply cannot be done with "non-viable" ATs and power sets (and those non-viable ATs and power sets comprise about 90% or more of the game), when that is 100% objectively false. I've seen it plenty of times on these forums, on the Homecoming Discord server, on other Discord servers, and in-game. It leads to people believing that, and they won't even join hard modes if they don't have the "right" composition as a result. But I digress.

The only reason you "need" specific ATs for hard modes is if you care about getting the rewards as quickly as humanly possible. Hard modes can be done with any AT just fine. All you need is some balance. Been there, done that. But too many of the Homecoming player base have convinced themselves otherwise.

But then my Dominators would have to change alignment back to Villain.

The problem is that there is already exclusionary behavior. The only acceptable ATs on most hard mode teams are Blaster, Corruptor, and Scrapper. Defender, Brute, and maybe Tanker if they're being generous. This is a small step in trying to correct that.

I started playing City of Heroes before City of Villains launched, and I still ask myself to this day: "Why would anyone want to play blue side?" Like you said, tons of filler content, tons of delivery missions, too many zones, dull and boring. Everything from Issues 0 and 1 are terrible, which is the majority of blue side content to this day. And Atlas Park... I hate Atlas Park. Too shiny, too bright, too many people, too dull. Even when I did play blue side back on live, I avoided Atlas Park as much as humanly possible. This thread has been interesting, because most of the complaints in regards to red side are reasons why I love it. There's no hub zone, so there's no massive glut of PCs like Atlas Park to avoid. There's fewer, more compact zones to travel. The zones are more dingy, thus feel more real. St. Martial reminds me a lot of Atlantic City in real life. It has the glamorous casinos... and the rest isn't so glamorous. As for the lack of agency... I never saw much agency blue side either. You either perform heroics, or you don't. To each his or her own.

There can be only... ?

Dark Miasma, Electrical Affinity, Nature Affinity, Thermal Radiation, and Time Manipulation are all excellent Mastermind secondaries. Whichever secondary you go with, I do recommend taking one with a heal, so you can keep your henchmen healed. Otherwise, pick up Aid Other from the Medicine power pool. It can be a bit slow otherwise, slowly waiting for your henchmen to heal back up. As for primaries, they're all good. Pick whichever floats your boat.

Yes, you can transfer back. And no, not with the way Cryptic Studios designed the character database. They didn't believe in using SQL for MMORPGs. Thus, here we are.

Other ideas now that I'm thinking about it: Increase the drop of infamy red side to 1.2x or so. Not enough to woefully unbalance things, just a nice bonus and a small incentive to play red side. Hey, villains care a great deal more about material wealth than heroes. There really should be a level eight to fifteen strike force in Port Oakes, comparable to the Positron TFs blue side. Right now, if you're lucky you get to do a DFB red side... and then what? Missions are great, but for those who prefer to team, SFs are better.

In one of the City of Heroes AMA on Reddit after shutdown, one of the Paragon Studios developers (I forget which), said that prior to sunset, the City of Heroes population was roughly split 80% heroes, and 20% villains. On Homecoming, the split is roughly 90% heroes, and 10% villains. Why is there a greater disparity between hero players and villain players on Homecoming compared to live? The ability to play villain ATs hero side out of the gate only became available on live one year prior to sunset. As such, most red side characters on live started out red side. Homecoming on the other hand has had the ability for villain ATs to start hero side since launch. Null the Gull lets characters switch alignment at will. There's no gating, unlike live. Those two combined have effectively cut Homecoming's red side population in half compared to live. What to do about it? Well, again in the AMA on Reddit, the developer stated that villain characters would get permanent lackeys in Issue 25, to help level out the playing field. Every villain essentially would get a pet, so they don't have to rely as much on other players. The first permanent lackey was going to be Fiona Kal, the daughter of Mortimer Kal. Now I know that Homecoming is not beholden to anything that Paragon Studios had planned, but it's an intriguing idea. Just please, please don't change the zones to become more like hero side. I almost exclusively play red side, mostly because I much prefer the red side zones to blue side zones. They're more distinctive and have more character. YMMV.

Did you create a game account as well?

Corruptor, IMO. Especially if you want to debuff. Blaster will work though, just realize that the Dark Blaster secondary will want you in melee range, and it's all damage with minor debuffs.

Do you have the four auto accolades? Those would be a big help. Invader/Task Force Commander, High Pain Threshold/Freedom Phalanx Reserve, Born in Battle/Portal Jockey, and Marshal/Atlas Medallion?