RikOz

Oh, I like that fine! It just never occurred to me. Doesn't really matter to me what the SG symbol is, since I'm the only one seeing it anyway :) I will implement this suggestion, post haste!

Yeah, in WoW, it didn't take me long to figure out that I was too old for PvP. I mean, I was an "original gamer", going back to when PONG was the state of the art, but I never got into "twitch" games, or any of the fighting games. My first foray into PvP, I found myself getting slaughtered by somebody running circles around me, - II soon figured out that I was not up to competing against 14-year-olds who had much faster reflexes than me.

American Association of Retired Persons

You should be getting that letter from the AARP soon :D (I got mine within a month of turning 50)

Given the fact that most of us here played on live, I wondered, "How old is the Homecoming playerbase?" I'm 55. I was 42 when I joined my first MMO (WoW), and 45 when I first logged in to CoX.

In my case, I made an all-female "supergroup" of 10 alts, with the leader representing the sun, and the other nine each representing a planet. They all wear the appropriate planet symbol on their chests, except for Ms. Mars, who can't because the Mars symbol is male-only. Ridiculous.

I still just want the Mars and Venus planet symbols to stop be gender-restricted. That didn't even make sense in 2004.

Indeed. I'm one of those who likes to go through a mission and track down and defeat every single mob, whether doing so is required or not. Like, what kind of hero would I be if I just left half a cell of Arachnos or Council sitting there in Paragon City, just because I got their boss? I'm baffled by players who say they stealth past everything and just kill the boss at the end. To me, that's just leaving a bunch of XP on the table. So I won't group with players like that. Actually, I play pretty much entirely solo. I'm pretty anal about having a "system" for progressing through maps, so somebody else going the "wrong" way is just going to stress me out, and me complaining about it is just going to annoy the other guy, so it's best all around if I just play solo :D

This was actually on a mission for Crimson, where for some reason you have to go report to Indigo and she tells you a bunch of stuff, but doesn't give you a new mission - you have to talk to Crimson again to get the next one.

Cite: I had to go talk to Indigo after a mission. I clicked on her, and she had a six-paragraph info dump for me. Which I didn't get to read at all, because the mission arc also had Malta ambush me while I was talking to Indigo. The ambush included a Sapper, who of course attacks from range, forcing me to move far enough from Indigo that the dialog window closed, forever removing the possibility of reading what she had to say. Poor forethought there on the part of the mission designer. The "lets you feel you're in a big impressive world" thing is the reason the World of Warcraft devs disable flying at the beginning of each expansion. The main problem WoW players have with this is that they used to allow players to purchase "new expansion flying" once they reached max level, but now they make the players jump through a bunch of hoops (which aren't especially difficult), and then they still can't actually unlock flying until the first major patch, which is usually a few months after most players have reached max level. Now, of course, City of Heroes - Homecoming isn't likely to see any expansions, so at this point players have seen all the zones multiple times and know them inside and out, so we're not missing much by early travel powers. As for the instant zone teleport power, I personally tend to reserve it for specific situations. The primary one being when a mission sends me a mile away from the nearest tram station (particularly common in IP and Talos Island). I've already had to fly all the way to the mission entrance; there is nothing gained by having to fly all the way back to the tram station by the same route, so I'll call my contact as soon as I exit the mission, get the next mission, and then teleport to the next zone. Granted, I could accomplish more or less the same thing by teleporting to my SG base and then using a portal from there, but given that the long-range teleporter always drops you at the new zone's base portal, the only thing teleporting to my base first accomplishes is adding an extra loading screen - one teleporting in, and one teleporting out. So all I'm "losing" by using the long-range teleporter instead is "waiting through a second loading screen".

I like Brutes so much more than Scrappers. The main thing I dislike about Scrappers is that their main "feature" is "critical hits". Crits would be great if they were more dependable, but in my experience the RNG makes it feels like my big crits wait to proc when I already have my opponent down to 1 hit point. I always think, "That 500-point hit would have been a lot more useful earlier in the fight!" Also, Brutes get Super Strength. I was boggled when I learned that, in the early days, only Tankers could have Super Strength. The most fundamental, iconic superpower, but you had to be a tank to use it? Bah! Spider-Man is super strong, and he's clearly a scrapper. OTOH, I haven't managed to wrap my brain around Corruptors and Dominators. I would absolutely love to see new tip missions! I'm a big fan of them. Ultimately, though, they're part of what led me to have a problem with Redside. The problem was the level 20-29 Villain morality mission, which had me straight up murdering somebody for no good reason. Lots of actual comic book supervillains are not deliberate murderers. Sure, their actions may result in deaths that would rightly be called "murder", but the murder(s) were not the goal. That morality mission is basically murdering somebody just for the laughs, and that's not the type of villain I want to play. Not all villains are The Joker. My "main" villain has made the move over to hero because of this. Fortunately, I could easily justify her change of heart with her backstory. I originally rolled her as a villain, both on Live and on HC, but in her backstory she is the younger sister of one of my hero characters. She started out as a hero, working alongside her sister, but her methods were considerably more brutal than her sister's. She was more interested in "punishment" than in "justice" (the sisters shared an origin story, and the divide in their methods was due to the different psychological effects that origin had on them), and that ultimately led to her secretly relocating to the Rogue Isles. She still saw herself as a "hero"; her relocation simply provided her with more criminals to "punish". So I just had her gradually come to terms with her methods, where she eventually realized that she had become the monster herself. And for me, I just don't enjoy them (nor do I partiularly enjoy Blueside Safeguard missions). So being forced to do them to unlock new contacts is a turnoff for me. Oh god, yes. It didn't take me long to notice that it would be incredibly painful to be a speedster in the Isles.

Some of the most amusing chatter happens when the game code randomly assigns dialogue to inappropriate NPCs. Here we have, perhaps, a philosophical robot who has been contemplating the nature of humanity: [NPC] Vortex Cor Leonis Force: I hear the new vampyri are even more impressive. [NPC] Zenith Mech Man: I hope someday I can join their ranks.

I found a handful of spots, mainly in the "office" maps, where the lighting glitches out in the corners of certain rooms, leaving a completely black background. This can result in some interesting effects: EDIT: Correction - I realized later that these shots were both taken in a specific "hi-tech lab" map room, not an "office" map.

Surprised I hadn't seen this exchange before (Kings Row): Skulls Girlfriend: Your excuse is like crap. Gravedigger Slugger: Whaaat?

You've reminded me of a Christmas at my grandparents' house in the 1970s, when I was a young lad. My cousins, Jeff and Brian, got Rock'em Sock'em Robots, and instantly began to loudly fight over who got to be "the red one" before they even got it out of the box :D Couple new ones for me: Alt #103, "Fletchetta" (Archery/Super Reflexes sentinel): #104: Rho-Man (Broad Sword/Energy Aura Brute):

I run into this all the time on that "Mysterious General Z" arc, in the mission where I have to rescue him from the Sky Raiders. He decides to attack a Porter, the Porter ports away, and General Z races off across the map to find him. Then I usually never see him again.

Could we get Overdrive to slot some KB->KD? She's so annoying when I'm playing a melee character.

I did observe, last night while doing some of Maria Jenkins arc in Peregrine, that the various Freedom Phalanx members I was paired with in the missions kept up with me just fine, so I know it can be done. I recall having the opposite problem in WoW. In that game, NPCs that accompany you tend to follow so closely that they obstruct your view of your own character. That was especially "fun" when one storyline had a friendly ogre accompanying me, and I happened to be playing a gnome. Could not see what I was doing at all.

Psy melee: Yah, any psionic power set is painful against robots and zombies. I learned that right quick when one of my psionic blasters ended up in a Banished Pantheon arc. I currently have two Psionic Melee characters, one scrapper and one brute, and I gotta say the brute is a lot more fun. Beam Rifle's mechanic is odd, and it's not what I think of when I think "ray gun". I suspect it would be more fun if it let me feel like a Star Wars stormtrooper or something. I've recently discovered that Kinetic Melee really gets fun around level 35. One of my "top 10" alts is a kin melee scrapper, and while he felt "tedious" for a while, once he got to 35 or so he seemed to turn into a powerhouse. The animations actually allowed me to get extra creative with another kin melee scrapper. That particular character is a speedster, and in my head canon, super speed is her only superpower. But she's learned how to creatively utilize her speed for combat. Those elaborate animations are her using her speed to actually compress air into semi-hard balls that she then hurls at her opponents.

QoL inquiry: Can something be done to speed up the various superpowered NPCs that appear in some missions as helpers, so that they can actually keep up with me? The majority of "civilian" NPCs that I rescue and have to lead back to the exit seem to have no trouble at all sticking to my heels all the way back to the exit. Mr. Yin, in particular, is a remarkably speedy old guy. But in other missions, I rescue the likes of Miss Thystle, Frostfire, Silent Blade, etc., who are then supposed to "help" me, and I can't run 30 yards without them falling behind and complaining that I'm too quick and they can't keep up. These guys should be embarrassed that Mr. Yin can outrun them! I mean, yeah, I can complete these missions without their help, but I'm one of those story-focused players who enjoys the immersion of "randomly" encountering another hero and teaming up with them, and it seriously breaks immersion when I have to repeatedly stop and go back and find these guys. It doesn't help that some powersets include run-speed boosting effects (like SR's "Quickness") that can't be turned off, but I also run into this problem with characters who have no speed boosts at all. I did one redside mission where I literally had to drag "Walk" onto my bars to escort an NPC to the exit, because I couldn't run 15 steps without this NPC "losing" me. While following me in a straight line, across an open field with no obstacles (outdoor map). (Flying "helper' NPCs can keep up, but they have their own set of problems, like Overdrive flying clear to the other side of a large warehouse, far enough away from me to trigger her "I can't keep up" line.)

These days, I'm pretty much leveling as much as possible via Tip missions. Then I can go back later and do the arcs I want via Ouro.

Heh - when the live game shut down and I went back to WoW, my first several days back were spent being extremely frustrated every time my character (on a horse!) couldn't clear a waist-high picket fence!

What are some "game mechanics" that never (or rarely) work in video games, even though they work just fine in real life and in pencil & paper games like D&D? The main one I've noticed, between CoH and WoW is "character size". The problem is that, in a computer RPG, the size of your character is simply cosmetic. There are no mechanical advantages or disadvantages to playing a character that is larger or smaller than "normal". This usually seems to be for "balance" reasons. I first noticed this in WoW, when I tried fitting characters of different races through tight spots. That's when I discovered that, if a tauren (WoW's physically largest race) can't fit through that space, neither can a gnome (one of the smallest races). More than once, I tried to move a gnome through a space that, visually, was more than big enough for her to fit, but nope. For the purposes of fitting through spaces, all characters are treated as the same size. Today, in CoH, I was playing a character who is eight feet tall, and uses the "huge" model. Additionally, it (it's a robot) uses Titan Weapons. So he's eight feet tall, and he's swinging a 10-foot laser sword. Now, in D&D, his size alone would give him extra "reach", and his weapon would probably also qualify as a "reach weapon". He'd have a similar advantage in "real life". But in CoH, none of that matters. For the purpose of making melee attacks, he's exactly the same size as everybody else, and he still has to be practically bumping chests with his opponent to hit them. Have you noticed other examples?

I don't drink any more, except on rare occasions (When my wife is away. I stopped drinking because she's a recovering alcoholic.) I can't recall if I ever played CoH drunk, but there were a few occasions when I played WoW completely hammered. Mostly back in the Wrath of the Lich King era, so 2008-2010 or so. I discovered that being drunk didn't seem to have much effect on my muscle memory, so I'd queue up for random dungeons on my fire mage - I was intimately familiar with the dungeons, having run each of them many times, so I knew what was happening (not to mention how minutely scripted they were) and barely had to think about what I was doing. Autopilot! So I'd jump in with a random group and just blast away, and I never got any complaints about my performance. Nowadays, due to a combination of age and infrequency of drinking, I don't have nearly the alcohol tolerance I used to have, and I don't even attempt to game while drunk. I tried once or twice, and even just solo questing, I couldn't focus. So on those rare occasions I get to drink now, it's Netflix instead of games.

Yikes! Yeah, it's currently 109F where I am in eastern WA.