RikOz

I only even discovered the game about a year before the shutdown was announced. Even though it had just gone F2P, I went with the VIP subscription so that I'd have access to most everything (I'd already been paying for my WoW sub, so no biggie). And then I bought piles of costume pieces/packs (however it was done, I can't remember). I probably sank $200-$300 into the game, only to have it yanked out from under me after a year.

Re: Lady Spectrum - LOL! A character I shared earlier has a related backstory. His friends all told him that consuming so many energy drinks wasn't smart. But he didn't listen, and now he has superpowers. Super Strength/Radiation Armor brute, with Super Leap for his travel power.

Odd. I was having this exact issue after the original install. Then it went away after the last big patch/maintenance, so I assumed they must have fixed whatever was causing it. Have you downloaded/installed the latest patches? (Quit and relaunch Tequila, or open Options and click the Re-validate button.)

Just a note - Bobcat is the name of a canon character (she's the Praetorian counterpart to Mynx), so you might need to change her name. (Cool costume, though) I have now seen two separate player characters named "Lord Recluse". I mean, c'mon. The first one I saw was blueside. My immediate thought was that the player probably also plays WoW, and has a death knight named some variation of "Arthas" and a demon hunter named some variation on "Illidan".

I noticed this too; it's pretty bad, leaving little for the 5-10 range except the Hollows; shades of being sent to Perez as soon as it's in-level to kill 10 Circle of Thorns. I think something that breaks the progression through early levels for new players wants looked at pretty urgently. And, as near as I can tell, you only get sent to The Hollows if you know to click the "Find Contact" button to get Officer Wincott. It took me a while to remember that one, because as near as I can tell after running a crapton of new alts through Atlas Park, and doing all of the stuff from the origin contacts downstairs on top of the Matt Habashy and Twinshot stuff, nobody in AP sends you in that direction.

I'll look at it again the next time I do that mission. I did try fighting Skulls elsewhere in the zone on a couple characters, and it seemed to me that they weren't counting for that mission. But I'll try again. But saying there are level 15s all over the zone - that doesn't seem accurate to me and I've been running new characters through that zone since the Homecoming relaunch. That's why I said "nearly" the entire zone. Indeed, the Skulls behind the police station and in that general vicinity are lower. And they need to be, for the mission where Ms. Liberty sends you to talk to Blue Steel, because a player not using XP boosts is likely to be level 5-6 when they get that mission. But it's still inconsistent. On several occasions now I've found that area full of mobs conning orange and red (though no purples). I'll grant that this was all more of a problem on my first few characters, because I was electing to not use stuff from the P2W vendor. For more recent alts, though, I've said, "screw it" and I've been using the Prestige Enhancements for a damage boost and the 2x XP boosters to make sure my alts are now level 10 by the time they finish Atlas Park. That still leaves the problem, though, where once you're level 10, the contacts in KR just want to shuffle you on Steel/Skyway instead of offering missions, the only exception being the contacts for the new Skulls/superadine story arc. So I end up missing out on the old KR stories.

If it helps, install Vidiotmaps. It's still valid ... except for Kings Row. Boy is it off. It clearly illustrates how out of whack KR is now. In the "red" neighborhood in the north, it shows nothing higher than level 9. Go to the area yourself, and good luck finding anything lower than level 11.

It's also worth noting that tells are not text messages. Specifically, a text message doesn't get lost in a constantly-scrolling box that is being continually updated by multiple people. For me, personally, I've missed a few tells simply because I have my chat window collapsed. I collapse it quite often because I want to focus on the task at hand and the constantly-scrolling text becomes a distraction because my brain wants to process the words. I also play on a 32-inch screen (repurposed TV) and I think my eyes constantly flicking down to the chat window was contributing to the eyestrain I mentioned in another thread. Another reason for not responding to tells could be that the recipient might be in the middle of a costume designing session. I know I'm not going to back completely out of the costume designer in the middle of the process just to read a tell.

Right, my point is that KR is supposed to be a level 5-10 zone, and all of the older content is still designed around that concept. Technically speaking, a character is supposed to get the heck out of Atlas Park no later than level 7 or so and move on to Kings Row. Then Steel Canyon and Skyway City are supposed to be the next step up at level 10. The Shining Stars mission I mentioned in the OP is supposed to serve the exact purpose of moving the character to the next zone. Dillo tells you to defeat those Skulls and then go talk to Grym at the University in Steel Canyon. But as it stands now, Steel and Skyway are "easier" than Kings Row, when they're meant to be the next level of difficulty/challenge. All this is why I suspect that the new material that was still unreleased at Sundown was simply not finished. I think the original devs still had adjustments to implement but just hadn't gotten that far yet, and then they never got the chance. Keep in mind that I'm also trying to look at this from the point of view of a brand new player, of which we do have some. A new player who has leveled via missions, not repeated DFB runs, who hasn't yet figured out how to ideally slot their powers, and who might still have some stuff unslotted simply because they don't have the Inf and haven't gotten ideal drops.

Apparently, the newer story content in Kings Row has caused some sweeping, zone-wide changes. One change seems to be that the whole zone is completely overrun by Skulls, and groups like The Lost are no longer appearing where they used to appear (now there are more Skulls in those places). But I'm here to discuss the level range of the zone. The zone menu at the tram station still indicates that KR is a level 5-10 zone. However, street mobs over nearly the entire zone are now in the level 10-15 range, on par with Steel Canyon South and Skyway City North. This becomes a problem because the various contacts in Atlas Park continue to introduce Kings Row contacts when the player character is around levels 5-7, and the Atlas Park contact, Aaron Thiery, becomes unavailable as soon as the player reaches level 8, making the second half of Matthew Habashy's story suddenly unavailable if the player hasn't already started it. [EDIT: These mechanics are clearly intended to push the player along to Kings Row and out of Atlas Park.] And then the "older" contacts in KR are still handing out missions based on the character and KR mobs being in the 5-10 range. This results in an issue where the first missions most of these contacts offer are "street-sweeping" missions. Missions to defeat mobs in KR that are now too high-level for the mission level. In other words, as soon as the player character is high-level enough to tackle the street mobs in KR, the KR contacts stop offering missions and instead start introducing contacts in Steel Canyon and Skyway City. This includes the second tier of Shining Stars missions, which start in Kings Row when the player reaches level 10. One of the earliest missions here sends the player all the way to the north end of KR, to talk to Dillo, who tells the player to beat up 10 Skulls in that neighborhood (Skulls elsewhere in the zone don't count for this mission). Except that all of those Skulls are now level 14-15 and conning red or purple to the player. In short, it seems that the new, previously-unreleased content for Kings Row was not finished at the time of Sundown. The new Superadine storyline is fine, but otherwise the rest of the zone has been rendered more or less obsolete by the combination of the overscaled mobs + regular contacts whose level range has not been adjusted to reflect the changes.

Roscoe Buteo played professional football in Seattle until a freak mutation rendered him ineligible. Now he utilizes his newfound abilities as the superhero, "Seahawk"! Water Blast/Willpower Sentinel.

I've come to the conclusion over the years that, in this, computer programmers deal with almost exactly the same situations that we professional cooks have to deal with. Namely, people who don't do what we do, don't know how we do it, and don't comprehend the resources we need to do it promising things to customers and expecting us to "just do it".

Thanks for the comments. I'll try replacing some DMG enhancements with Endurance Reduction and see what happens. I already have ERs in the defensive skills. At these characters' current level (16) I don't have more than 3 slots unlocked per power. I do tend to lean more toward the Brute playstyle, but at the moment I don't have any brutes with the same power sets as these scrappers, so I can't directly compare how they work out.

Or just certain power sets? I have a Dual Blades/Super Reflexes scrapper and a Martial Arts/Ninjitsu scrapper who both just drain endurance in no time. The DB/SR character went into the fight against Veles in the Kings Row storyline, and I made sure to bring along a couple blue insps just to be safe. She had to use both of them, and still ended up out of endurance before the fight was over. She still managed to pull it out, but the last bit of the fight was a whole lot of Hit ... waaaiiiit ... Hit ... waaaiiiit ...

Pro Tip for Windows 10 users: The "Photos" app makes it very simple to crop your screenshots down so that you don't have to upload the entire screen.

It's also an issue because with so many contacts you pretty much have to do these street-sweeping missions before they'll offer anything else. I'm usually hoping to find an actual storyline in there, but I go talk to a contact and they give me an initial choice between "Go defeat 10 of such-and-such specific group for vague reason" or "Go talk to the Perez Park security chief", who is just going to give me a different street-sweeping mission. And from what I've seen, the Security Chiefs don't start storylines, they just hand out one-shot street sweeps. So I manage to find enough mobs to fulfill the street-sweeping mission, return to the contact, and they just give me another street-sweep for the same number of the same mobs for a slightly different vague reason.

I don't know if there's really any easy way to fix this, but there is one frustration I have that goes back to when I was playing before the shutdown: Council street-sweeping missions. Nearly every time I get sent to defeat Council in the streets, I look around and think, "Why? It looks to me like the 5th Column has the situation well in hand!" What I mean is that more often than not, the only Council I can find are involved in firefights with the 5th Column, and the 5th Column are invariably getting the better of those fights. If I'm on a melee character, it's hopeless trying to join in these fights because the 5th Column soldiers end up doing more damage, more quickly than I can (mainly because they've already shot up the Council guys a bit before I can even get in there), particularly if my character in question doesn't have much in the way of AoE and I have no choice but to fight one enemy at a time, and I end up not getting mission credit for the Council guys I do manage to defeat before the 5th Column kills them. Other times, I find one, lonesome Council soldier lying on the ground, unconscious, at the feet of a group of four 5th Columnists, so I beat up the 5th Column guys and then ... it just doesn't feel very heroic clobbering the unconscious guy on the pavement just for mission credit. Every once in a while I'll find a single Council guy standing on a soapbox in Steel Canyon, apparently trying to do some recruiting, and I can smack him up, but I can fly around forever trying to find those guys. We need some Council spawns that aren't being harassed by the 5th Column. Or some skirmishes where the Council has the advantage, so that I can attack them without the 5th Column stealing my "kills".

I first discovered this game in 2011, at 45 years old, having played video games since Asteroids. CoX was the game I had been waiting for my whole life. It convinced me to cancel my WoW subscription after about six months of paying for both games. And then the whole thing got yanked out from under me after I'd only gotten to play for a bit more than a year. I was heartbroken, and went sadly back to WoW. When it came back this time, it only took me three days to cancel my WoW sub. I'm where I belong again, and I couldn't be happier.

I've finally remembered how to tweak everything to minimize that enormous, nearly bow-legged thigh gap female characters have when they run. Legs shortened to minimum Hips shrunk to minimum Waist increased to reduce the "A" shape from waist to feet Physique slider increased to thicken the thighs a bit and bring the butt back up to where I like it This works for me. I also tend to drag the bust slider all the way down.

A-ha, it appears that the comma after the name is what I have been missing. Every time I've tried using /t or /tell followed by a name, it has failed, and the error message that appears in yellow is rather unhelpful because it just keeps saying to use /t or /tell (or one of a couple other variations), and does not make it at all clear that I should have been putting a comma after the name. Thanks! In hindsight, I can see why it's needed, given that we are allowed to use multiple words for character names. In WoW, when you sent a whisper (/w <playername>) the chat system just automatically assumed that the first word was the name and the second word was the beginning of the message, because in WoW your character name has to be one word. So there was no possibility of confusion over where the name ended.

I forgot this one too... at the bottom of the chat box, there are a bunch of little bubbles that signify which channel you want to talk in. Clicking on one of them (I think it's "A" for auto) will make you always talk in the channel that is the default for the text box you're in. That's what's getting frustrating - that is not working for me. Aside from the fact that those bubbles/buttons are completely indistinguishable/illegible to me because they're so tiny, despite playing on a 32-inch screen with the UI bumped up to 120% size, so I have to just click them in sequence until I get the channel I want, my words still go to "Local" instead of whatever I selected. I'll keep fooling with it to see if I can get it to work. I can type in Help, but I have to precede everything with "/hc".

That kind of thing drove me absolutely bonkers in WoW. Some players in that game, particularly tank specs and DPS specs that have great AoE, are always in a big ol' hurry, so when they have a quest to kill X mobs, they run into the area, purposely aggro everything in sight, and AoE them down as a group. I, on the other hand, am an old guy who prefers a more leisurely approach to "kill X mobs" quests, tracking them down and killing them one at a time. I enjoy that. So I would just hate it when I was busy fighting the very last mob I needed to finish the quest, and here comes somebody who thinks they're "helping" me by dragging their whole crowd of mobs over to where I am. Whether I wanted to be or not, I am now officially "in combat" with all these other mobs (even if they're all focusing on the other guy, if I somehow did even a single point of damage to them, they're mine now too), so I'm pretty much stuck having to fight the rest of them even after I've gotten that last kill I needed, because the game will not allow me to mount up and ride away until I am "out of combat". Of course, I can simply run away on foot. Unfortunately, I still remain "in combat" until those mobs die. And if those mobs instead manage to kill the guy who rounded them all up, they are now all going to come after me. So it ends up being faster and easier to simply help kill ten more mobs that I didn't ask for, just to get out of combat sooner. If I found myself in the same situation in CoX, I could at least simply activate my Flight and just fly away.

This happened to me today. I finished chatting with another player, and when the conversation was over I logged out. Just before it took me back to Character Select, I glanced at the chat window and saw that I had somehow ignored the person I was just talking to.

Is there some place, IN GAME that clearly shows the proper syntax and/or keystrokes for having a private conversation with another player? I've discovered, completely accidentally, by missing the M key to pull up my Map and hitting the comma key next to it that the comma key will format my chat line to send a tell to the other person I have targeted (whether I have another player targeted or not). When somebody sends me a tell, the only way I can find to reply to them is to click on their name in the chat window and select the "Send [character] Message" option from the popup menu. And I have to do that each and every time I reply to them, which is extremely awkward and inconvenient. I can't figure out how to send a tell to a character who is not in range for me to actually target them, because the syntax is not readily apparent. I had a conversation with another player today, and was only able to send a tell using the "Target them and hit comma" method to start the conversation, and then using the "Click on their name and select from the popup" method to continue conversing with them. And then, once the conversation was over and I logged out, just before the actual logout I looked at the chat window and saw it informing me that I had somehow inadvertently ignored this other player. Once I was back to the character select screen I logged my character back in, found my ignore list, and removed them from it. Then I tried to send a new tell to them, and typed, /t Charactername Oops, I accidentally blah blah blah ... Which didn't go through, and returned the error message, "There is no Charactername Oops currently online ..." I also apparently cannot send a message to somebody's Global handle without first adding them as a Global Friend? All of this is on top of the continuing problem of everything I type in the chat line gets dumped into "Local" instead of whatever it says at the beginning of the chat line (except for Super Group, that works properly). GAH!

Awesome! I'll fiddle with these. I only wish there was an easy way to change text size without changing the window size.