RikOz

A couple Nemesis soldiers are betting fifty bucks on whether I will show up "here" or not. The winner of the bet: "Woo, looks like it's my lucky day... err... wait... no probably not."

Psimonator and Polar Shift make a good team :) I decided to get a closer look at the controls on a piece of equipment in the sewers: Um, I'm pretty sure that's a control for moving a ship.

The only other MMO I've enjoyed was WoW, and one of my gripes with it was that there were a lot of ways to play the game, but Blizzard has this unfortunate habit of putting most of their focus into only one or two of those ways. And that focus changes from one expansion to the next. They'll come up with something that is fun for more casual players (i.e. non-hardcore raiders) that allows those of us who don't have hours to play every day chip away at rewards at our own pace, and just when you find something you like, they take it away, and suddenly everything is "RAID OR DIE".

Sometimes I have an idea for a bio right off the bat. Sometimes I need to play a character for a while before its bio forms. I never wrote a bio for my main on live, and after recreating her on HC, it was still a year before an idea popped into my head. Then I have some characters whose bio I have in my head, but it would be too difficult to pare it down enough to fit in the limited space.

This cracked me up:

This is one I took on live, and it is literally "live". I had to make two free accounts in addition to my main account, and create each character on a separate account. Then I launched two instances of the game on my Windows laptop, each logged into a different account, and launched another instance of the game on my Mac and logged it into the third account. Loaded all three characters, got them positioned just so, and managed to get the screenshot before the clients on the laptop crashed. I wanted the group shot because these three characters are triplet sisters.

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.