Jacke

OH NOES!?! @Bionic_Flea is caught in a time loop!!! Again!!! Yes please, all-black jet pack. And all-red. Because red ones go fasta! Tutorials are definitely something that needs to be worked on. At least the original Outbreak/Breakout tutorials taught the player about the game system core that's been there since the start. The new Galaxy City Destruction tutorial didn't quite do as good a job there, but did add in a bit about the alignment system. And the initial Atlas Park arcs were also an extended tutorial as well. Now there's the new Tip system under development so players can be led around a zone to find its Badges. Good, but more should be done. There needs to be a system that instructs a brand new player, who's never played or heard of City of Heroes, the basics about how to get along in the game. And if there are things that the devs are assuming players will know--like to convert their Reward Merits to Salvage and sell them on the Auction House to get more Inf to pay for everything including low level SOs (which was told in the Enhancement Focused Feedback topic)--then those things have to be taught in the extended tutorial. Any organization is always losing people, even if only from them passing away. Don't recruit, don't teach those recruits the ropes, in the long run the organization will fail.

I believe you are right. The Healing powers that need to hit, Kinetics Transfusion and Dark Miasma/Darkness Affinity's Twilight Grasp are stronger Heals. I'm not sure of the original motivation to make them stronger, but it may be because they had to slot for Accuracy as well as everything else auto-hit Heals had to slot for. Transfusion could also slot for Endurance Modification (to buff its -End effect) and Twilight Grasp could slot for ToHit Debuff enhancement.

Oh, do I remember that. Getting Perez Park missions where the mobs on the way were worse than in the mission. In Steel or Skyway at level 10 and getting a mission at the far end. And running down the exact centre of roads in the City zones as well as dodging the mobs on the street. There's a reason why I go for full stealth on all my toons. By level 20 at the latest.

That's a very good point. Though technically it doesn't go on cooldown until you zone after invoking the power (which is what the red ring around the power means). You can see which Accolade Badges are for Exploration by their sideways spikey look, with the centre gem Blue in Paragon City, Red in the Rogue Isles, Yellow in Praetoria, a special Hazard Gates icon for Hazard Zones. And every one of them when earned has a label that says which zone they are for. It could be improved though. Take a look here to see what I mean. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Hero_Accolade_Badges https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Villain_Accolade_Badges https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Praetorian_Accolade_Badges

Perhaps it should have been turned off for general use last year. But /enterbasefrompasscode hasn't been removed with i27p1. It's been restricted. Need to be within 45ft of a Base Portal, including the summoned portals. Or invoked the 5 powers (LRT, Base Transporter, Day Job temp Monitor Duty Teleporter, Supergroup Portal, Day Job Accolade temp Rapid Response Portal), don't select, but use a /ebfp command. Or be inside a base, where it can be used continually.

When I brought this up in another topic, a dev said it was expected that players would take their Reward Merits and make the best use of them to improve their toons. As I've known for a long time, the best use of Merits is buying the best Salvage to sell on the Auction House to get Influence to then buy everything the toon needs. Not anything else. (The next step after getting enough Inf is to buy the Super Packs to get the stuff you want out of them and sell the rest, but that's a ways off for now.) Getting the Atlas Exploration Accolade is the quickest way to unlock Long Range Teleporter. It also pays 5 Merits. That's about a million Inf from it alone. There's current development on making a sequence of Tips to guide you through the Badges in a zone, eventually for all of them. Every Zone, all 8 Badges is another 5 Merits which can become another million Inf. Merits come from Exploration Accolades, completed mission arcs, Task Forces, and Trials. The first Weekly Strike Target (WST, at least 2 Task Forces/Trial a week, not iTrial, at least one 1 Blueside, 1 Redside) completed pays out double Merits. Some of these numbers have changed, but look here: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Task_Force https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Strike_Force The second Task Force Blueside, Synapse, pays out 58 Merits. Plus another 3 for taking down Babbage near the end of the Task Force. Even at 70,000 Inf average per Converter (I've sold them for more and bought them for less), that's 12.8 million Inf from one Task Force. Plus whatever you get for Inf rewards from defeating mobs and mission rewards as well as selling loot drops. The best consistent source of Influence from just playing the game is a level 50 toon. They make millions of Inf directly on every play session. Plus everything else. Not a farmer. Any level 50 toon. Pick the toon you like the most and start having fun on the road to 50. When you start an arc, finish it to get the Merits. More of the WSTs will be accessible for their doubled payout. And my 32 million Inf purchase of starting Prestige Powers is pure luxury (I've got 16 toons so far and over 2000 million Inf). Even a few million or so will get most of them. 2 Powers alone are 10 million each (Team Transporter, Supergroup Portal). I'm testing this on toons that only bankroll themselves. And some of my bankrolled toons haven't used any of their earned Merits. I've got a level 20 toon with 59 Merits. That's over 12 million Inf worth for a toon I've barely played, likely 16 million if I wait for the price of the Salvage to shift up. He's got both Posi Task Forces (26 Merits) and 5 Exploration Accolades (25 Merits), so that's another 8 Merits from 2 or 3 mission arcs.

But in all things moderation (even moderation sometimes 🙂 ). Going too far, drawing out the argument too long, that often hurts you position.

Decades ago, in a magazine about board wargames, there was an article that refuted that argument. Back then it was about mailing surveys. Which several companies did, one quite frequently, to help gauge how well some of their ideas would sell if developed into a product. The problem was the survey responses were in no way truly representative of the player base. They were at most a small non-random fraction of the player base, self-selected to those that really wanted to be heard. Even with written-in addenda to the multiple choice surveys, they were less helpful than first thought and could often hurt if followed too closely without further judgement on the choices. Some very bad games that didn't sell at all came from that. Now it's game forums. Still for every game, a small non-random fraction of the player base, self-selected to those that really want to be heard. Still not likely to be representative of the player base as a whole. The devs know this. They have the stats for how many accounts, how many toons, how many posts how often. Just depending on a volume of posts saying that's crap, politely or otherwise, isn't going to work with anyone who's been to a few of these rodeos. You have to support what you say with a proper argument. Understanding what and why the devs did what they did what they did. Making a respectful argument showing its issues. Proposing other workable solutions that fits within the constrains that can only be moved a little or sometimes not at all. Making your point and not repeating yourself excessively. That is the way. It's how several of i27p1 changes were improved over the open beta. It's how things will continue to improve. And maybe even reconsider some things.

It's not an obstacle, it's a cost. ("Held up, minefield. Wait, out." is an obstacle. Especially if buddy is now a smoking wreck.) The cost is there to make sure the use has a cost versus benefit balance, as @Glacier Peak points out. That the use isn't completely frictionless and doesn't have whole sections of the game devolve as what happened with unrestricted /ebfp. I have to get Inspirations, Salvage, craft Enhancements, use Converters, etc. So all that has a cost versus benefit balance, risk versus reward. Or I could demand that Null the Gull actually get a setting to make me more powerful. Without cost. Without limit. Without being frozen in gull form. Interesting idea to consider. Thanks for posting, @therealtitanman.

There's something under consideration that may help you out. It's buried in the first post of this topic, so it's easy to miss (and I don't know how I didn't miss it either). You may want to get involved so you can champion it in a way that helps it works the way you want it to. I don't think you'll get a recreation of the free general case /ebfp command, but you could come close. Think of Enhancement Converters. I can easily burn through hundreds in a single session of converting enhancements. Something similar on a lower scale for Base Teleportation shouldn't be that expensive.

That should already be possible. Outside of a base, the 5 powers allow use of the /enterbasefrompasscode to get into a base. What I forgot to mention is that inside a base, you can jump to another base with /enterbasefrompasscode directly. Just tested it with 2 macros in my Custom Window. Bounced back and forth between Bases until I was dizzy. 🙂 Ah, Custom Window. A feature in City that's been around for a while. Rediscovered it a few weeks ago. I made this post last week that covers it in some detail in the last half. The same file is automatically shared on all your toons. Reduced to the little grey box, it's very unobtrusive. The only issue is you should leave the Custom Window, whether expanded or the little grey box, in the upper left of your UI. The darn thing will jump around a bit, but at least it will roughly stay in the upper left. (Need to make a bug post about that.) I don't think it's suitable for combat use, but for a bunch of Base /ebfp macros, it's perfect.

Interesting thoughts, @Blackbird71. I wanted things both ways. both the repurposed LRT power as well as the classic Pocket D teleport. With its arrival point in the Pocket D Tiki Lounge moved so as not to disturb the floor show. What we have now is better than a low recharge Base teleport power. LRT takes you to a zone in one jump, near the base portal so you can go in for restock or carry on elsewhere in the zone. Teleport to a base, you have to go to the porters there to get to another zone. But that's still possible, with 4 other powers. And all 5 powers can be used to get access to the current /enterbasefrompasscode.

And exploits like the early farming in Perez Park, when mobs could clip into themselves, there was no aggro cap, and Tankers dragged a good chunk of all the mobs in the whole zone to the trash cans so Blasters waiting there could defeat the whole lot. That was fixed, with aggro caps and making mobs have a collision surface to prevent them from packing too close together. Funny thing, that collision surface of mobs, restricting them from clumping too close, could be a long standing cause of melee AoE powers underperforming, even now. Fixes can have unintended consequences. And all those quotes that everyone are giving are basically the devs talking about the same issue: giving a GM command to all players all the time without restriction, without limit, without cooldown, is open to exploitation in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places, in all of the game. Drawing attention to specifics like PvP and trying to blame PvP for a necessary fix for something impacting all the game is unfair. I think a lot of the devs and GMs were just tired too, a big set of changes that they've been working on for near half a year or more. Some feedback topics still helped make some of the changes much better. Especially the Travel changes; just go back and look at the beta original mid-October change notes to see how far they improved. About as often as @Bionic_Flea says "But @Jimmy....". 😄 I've actually made a Katana/Regen Scrapper just to see how bad it can be. Katana 'cause at least getting good defense should be "easy". 🙂 Though now I'm thinking Dark Melee/Regen...damnit @Troo, you've got me altitis acting up. Anyhoo, someday Regen will have a pass through the revision process and will shine a bit brighter again.

From what I can recall of the discussion in the beta topics, that bug was only discovered--or perhaps discovered to extend to that degree--about 6 or so weeks ago, just before the Open Beta started, when the changes were coming to the form that the Open Beta was started with. A bug being discussed in 2019 could be another bug, or it could be the same bug, but at that time in 2019 was not known to be that serious. EDIT: To remove harsh words from a misunderstanding. Yes. But argue fairly. Else this is on the road to madness.

An excellent idea. Which is why I've been explaining how to travel as well now as before Issue 27 Page 1. EDIT: To remove harsh words from a misunderstanding. The macros being an exploit is that it's the use of a GM tool in a way that was never intended and that trivializes so much of the game. No idea what the bug was, because there is no context.

I don't like that Tactical Arrow had its ranges nerfed when it was a powerset that was buff and ranged powers only and was an obvious case that should be added as an exception. Many others who commented in the Blaster Secondaries Revamp Feedback topic made very good and very passionate arguments and suggestions for not nerfing the ranges. To the point where the topic was dominated by Tactical Arrow posts. The ranges still got nerfed. I understand why this happened and why the devs put the changes in and why they stuck to them. I want that to change in the future. I'll have to work at it to see that through. Connect with the devs. Perhaps as an overall reasssessment of power ranges, which have been buffed in the past. That is the way.

I'm glad that you brought more people to Homecoming. But an unrestricted /enterbasefrompasscode was never go to be kept. And what we have is just as good and as fast. You just have to learn it. It's not that hard to learn. There's more Base Portals in more Zones. There's 2 commands to summon a Base Portal. Within 45ft of a Base Portal, permanent or summoned, you can use /enterbasefrompasscode. Invoke but do not complete the Prestige Base Transporter power, the temp Base Teleport power, the LRT power itself, and you can then use /enterbasefrompasscode. In games as in life, there are going to be changes. To get things better overall, changes are needed. We have to adapt to the changes. This is damn simple adaption. Without adaption, we'd still be playing City of Heroes as it was Issue 0 in 2004. That was a great game. For 2004. It got better. It's still getting better. But we have to adapt to that change. Help direct it when we can. But adapt we must.

That's not quite what they said. The devs knew the /enterbasefrompasscode command was excessive. They should have just removed it from general player use. But they left it in until they could roll out an equivalent and better system for players. Issue 27 Page 1 has been under development for a long while with beta testing since the summer. Open beta testing from middle of October. Including the /enterbasefrompasscode and the teleport changes. The exploit was found about early October. It was partly patched out. For the rest, the devs decided to continue with Issue 27 Page 1. Because it's not said there. The devs and GMs are human, frail, volunteers, and they're getting tired of having to say the same things, refute the same mistaken impressions and incorrect histories. So sometimes they don't say all the details. As @Ironblade said, it was mentioned in one of the Focus Feedback posts during the beta. The problematic aspects of the command were all players being able to use a GM command all the time, everywhere, without cooldown. It trivializes much of the game. It is wrong. What we have now is better.

Interesting idea. Though it might overload the LRT power, both its listing and its use. I think you can have multiple "Board Transit" missions open. There is the open mission limit, which I think is somewhere around 7 or so now, with extras allowed for some arcs (the contact has the book icon with the green bookmark). So that could work, if there's no other reasons that make it difficult or inadvisable to do such a change. Please make a counter argument to refute my argument.

Repeating my post from the previous page:

I tried it on the P2W Vendor in Pocket D earlier tonight and it didn't work there either. Some adjustment may be needed. I remember reading a post where a dev explains what happens when /interact is invoked: a search is done forward from the toon and forward and up to see what those projections hit. If they hit something that can be interacted with, that's then triggered. Tuned to work in most cases. But not all. Perhaps a feedback topic for /interact is needed, just to get info on what people are having problems with. Perhaps including screenshots.

Get 10 Reward Merits from all badges in 2 zones. Or completing mission arcs. Or from a single Task Force. With 10 Merits, buy 30 Enhancement Converters from a Reward Merit Vendor/Machine. Sell the 30 Converters for about 70,000 Inf each. That's 2.1 million Inf. Takes a few minutes to a few hours, depending on what is done. A single Task Force, like the first half of the Positron Task Force, playable from level 8, pays out 11 Merits. Part 2 is 15 Merits. (Those are the numbers on the Wiki, they may be a bit different in the game right now.) Finish a mission arc at all levels and they pay out from 2 to 5 Merits each, some of the longer ones more. And stop with all the negative waves about PvP and blaming it for all the ills in the game. PvP players are people too. Beautiful people. In no way was PvP responsible for putting through the /enterbasefrompasscode restrictions. Stop telling all those porkie pies!

31 (or 32, I changed it as I added another power 🙂 ) million is not a lot of Inf. I can earn millions of Inf just from enemy defeats and mission rewards on a level 50 toon in a single play session. I can get 32 million in under 2 weeks easily just from play. And there are other ways to earn Inf as well. Like completing content, getting Reward Merits, and using those Merits to buy Salvage to sell on the Auction House for Inf. Merits are for players to use to improve their toons in the best way possible. Look at what the Merits buy at the Vendors/Machines. See what the prices are at the Auction House. The best use of Merits for the longest time (and likely on into the future) is: To buy Salvage, usually Enhancement Converters, from Merit Vendors/Machines. Sell that Salvage on the Auction House for Inf. Use that Inf to get what they need from the Auction House, including everything up to Purple and PvP recipes and Winter Origin and other special Enhancements. Though some special Enhancements can be made in other ways (which is why Converters always sell). And eventually use the Inf to buy Super Packs, get the stuff from the Packs, use what they want, sell everything else. Using the Merits at a Vendor/Machine to get the expensive recipes is not as good as converting them via Enhancement Converters to Inf and then buying those on the AH.

To outfit the entirety of Prestige Powers I like to have on a toon now costs 32 million Inf, leaving about 0.8 million change as a good starting float. But a few million is enough to start a toon. Get that toon to 50 and every play session earns millions of Inf. Before 50, Zone Badge Accolades (for all 8 Badges in a Zone), completed mission arcs, completed Task Forces, earn the toon Reward Merits. The devs expect players to use their Reward Merits to get what they need, including Inf. In fact, using Merits to get Inf is almost always the best use of Merits. TL;dr solution: convert enough Merits to Enhancement Converters at a Merit Vendor or Merit Machine. Converters will always sell on the Auction House. You don't always need to get the absolute best price. Just get a good enough price to finance your toons. Longer solution analysis:

Which is the way to disagree. Fast Travel in games, MMOs included, have gone from one extreme to another and back again. Sometimes travel is too slow, too hard. I remember early days in City of Heroes, when Sprint had half the effect and you didn't get travel powers until level 14 at the earliest. And people like @Luminara used Hurdle as a jumping travel power because builds were even tighter prior to Inherent Fitness. But it's important to see when travel is too fast, too easy, too trivial. And to see that a better way, a better balance, has to found. If you were using /enterbasefrompasscode, you already have access to bases with telepads. Get the dosh for the Prestige powers (get a level 50, all of them can earn millions per play session). Use the Prestige or the Day Job Base Portal summon powers, or invoke but don't use LRT, Base Transporter, and the temp Day Job Base teleport power; all then allow use of /enterbasefrompasscode. There's more zone Base Portals, they're in better locations, and when you use a Base Teleporter, you end up at that zones Base Portal to boot.