RikOz

But doesn't explain why it keeps switching me to "Local" after I select something else.

I'm getting confused. I see constant chatter in "Looking For Group" and "Help", but I can't figure out what is considered "General" chat channel. Sometimes I want to say something that is neither LFG nor asking for/offering Help, and I'm having no luck. In the input box, I select something like "Broadcast" (which sounds like the closest thing to "General Chat"), and type whatever it is I want to say. Then when I press Enter, my words appear in a bubble over my head, and in the chat window my message has changed from "Broadcast" to "Local", so I can't tell if anybody who wasn't standing right next to me "heard" what I said. I see other peoples' messages labeled "Broadcast", so I'm not sure why mine keep getting changed to "Local". The same thing happens when I try "Global". What's going on here?

I'm starting to suspect that something is "off" with regard to The Lost spawning in Kings Row. I've gotten a mission to hunt Lost on a few different characters now, and I'm having a really difficult time finding any. I've repeatedly visited a location where I clearly remember being able to dependably find Lost when I played in 2011-12 - it's the area around a particular skyscraper up towards the northwest corner of KR, near the entrance to the next zone (I want to say Skyway, but I'm not looking at a map right now). I've looked there during both day and night cycles, and there is never anybody there but Skulls, Skulls, and more Skulls. In fact, the whole zone is practically nothing but Skulls, with an occasional Clockwork spawn, and Circle of Thorns on the rooftops. It's possible I'm actually visiting the wrong building - there are identical buildings elsewhere - but I'm just not seeing many Lost at all these days. Is it possible that i25 inadvertently nerfed Lost spawns?

It actually seemed to me that it wasn't a matter of the spawns not keeping up with so many people killing them. At one point I went to a spot where I know for a fact that three separate groups of five Hellions typically spawn for that mission. I just stood there in the one spot for a good 10 minutes, and not a single Hellion spawned. If I encountered this in WoW, I'd assume it was a "phasing issue". I don't know the mechanics behind whatever CoX's version of "phasing" is (I'm pretty sure that these particular mobs only appear to people who have the mission, and that the area remains Hellion-free after completing the missions), but this feels like something similar.

Posting here because this doesn't seem like a "bug" per se. Yesterday afternoon or evening, I ran into an issue where I couldn't find Hellions to defeat in Atlas Park. Specifically, I couldn't find them for the very first mission from Matthew Habashy. Considering that this is likely the very first mission a new player is going to receive upon entering AP for the first time, this could leave a bad taste. If I'm on a Magic-origin character, I'll usually grab the first mission from Azuria at MAGI as well, which is also to beat up 5 Hellions, as I can complete both missions simultaneously. However, while any Hellion in AP counts for Azuria's mission, only the Hellions in a very specific area count for Habashy's mission, and they just weren't spawning there at all. I saw a good number of other characters circling around and around the area, the same characters for quite a long time, so I'm guessing other people weren't finding Hellions either. It wasn't just the mission location, either - There were no Hellions standing around or mugging people in the parking lots and lawns around Atlas Plaza. The Hellion lieutenants assaulting people at the part in the next block for the second mission in the arc were also very scarce. Logging my character out and back in again eventually solved the problem, but I'm wondering if the problem was the result of the sheer number of player characters in AP yesterday overwhelming the server to the point that it was having trouble spawning mission mobs.

It might not be your computer. I think there was general weirdness going on over the weekend due to the US holiday allowing more people to play. I was dealing with frequent disconnects myself yesterday.

i feel you. After lvl 3 I just ignore levelling until contacts send me to KR and I can level up there (and oh the sweet sweet silence of the AE in KR, no goddam spines and hot feet driving me up the wall) MCM imagine being this afraid of other people existing Eh, I work in an environment where there are often too many people in too small a space, and the noise and chaos really gets to me after a while (I suspect undiagnosed social-anxiety or Asperger's, which just seems to get worse as I get older), and so I play almost entirely solo in MMO's because I get at least the illusion of wide-open space and peace & quiet and solitude, and only having to deal with crowds and noise on my own terms.

This is simple, but it's my first try at recreating a real-life person. This is my attempt at Tatiana Shmailyuk, the singer for Ukrainian metal band "Jinjer". Unfortunately, there are no skirts like the one she's been wearing on stage lately, so this was the closest I could get. Sonic/Darkness blaster.

I have a lowbie Ill/FF controller, and holy cow is she a challenge to play, at least at low levels, and solo. At level 7 she only has three "offensive" powers - Spectral Wounds, uh, the "flashbulb" thing, and Confuse. On her FF side, she only has the first power, (Force Bubble?), which is mostly useless solo because she can't attack while it's up. And the next FF power she'll have available cannot be used on herself. So she ended up doing the Shining Stars arc up through the "Save Manticore" mission, and wow, did I have to get creative. Largely because all those "Arachnos" lieutenants are largely immune to anything except direct damage. Well, not techinically immune, but good luck landing any kind of immobilization on mobs that con +1 or +2 levels higher than you.

The only problem I've had with escorts was while I was on my Stalker. I forgot that Hide also hides me from friendlies, so I'd take a few steps and the NPC would promptly lose track of me.

I just wish all the DFB/DiB LFG spammers would stand someplace else other than all clustered around Ms. Liberty. I've found myself running all the way to Back Alley Brawler to train levels a few times just to avoid having to fight my way through that crowd.

Just out of curiosity, what factors determine whether Detective Becktrees or Detective Frietag becomes our hero's police contact in Kings Row? As far as I've been able to determine, there is no functional/gameplay difference between these two NPC - both hand out the police radio, and whichever one gave you the radio, that's the guy you talk to when you get a Safeguard mission. I can't recall any specific contact sending me to talk to either of them - their yellow markers just show up when I first travel to Kings Row.

Thanks! My coworkers got a kick out of it when I showed them ;D

I'm going through this with my fire/fire blaster right now. She's a recreation of my "main" that I had before the shutdown in 2012, and she was the only character I got to level 50. Very, very fragile at low levels. I'm still only to level 13, so I die frequently. But I remember that, at higher levels, once I have more abilities and more power, most enemies are going to melt under my attacks long before they can harm me. I just need to be patient. Also, I'm playing entirely solo, not doing group content.

This is my newest character, "Savior Machine". I wanted to call him "Iron Savior", as I am a fan of that band and the science fiction story that is told over the course of their albums. Alas, it seems there was already another Iron Savior. So I went with "Iron Saviour" before deciding that was cheesy and went with Savior Machine. One of the band's songs is sung from the point of view of the inventor of the Iron Savior, and he calls it, "savior machine, creation of mine". And as that song is called, "Titans of Our Time", so my character uses the "Titan Weapons" powerset. I'm a professional cook IRL, so I created an "evil chef" supervillain. He cooks everything in the microwave (Radiation Blast PS) and fails to observe proper food safety practices (Poison PS). His name is "Recipe for Disaster":

Oddly enough, I'm pretty sure I ran into this exact issue myself, except it was on a followup mission - the one where you go after Chernobog's brother, Veles. I'm afraid I can't remember the name of the mission, but it's the final one in the arc. Veles set the place on fire, I couldn't find him anywhere, and the other mobs were unresponsive/non-hostile. I was doing the mission solo, not on a team. I ended up leaving the building and then came back and tried again the next day. Veles appeared on this second attempt. However, the way he appeared made me wonder if he was actually there the first time: he attacked me from behind after I was already deep inside the burning room. It almost looked as though he follows a fixed path toward the exit once you enter the room, and if you (the player) just charge off in an unexpected direction, you and Veles simply miss each other and he has to circle back to come after you.

Aye, thanks! I guess I must have had shadows turned way down back in 2011/12 so that I wasn't even seeing this. It's something I definitely would have noticed back then.

Yup, for several alts now I've just skipped Habashy/Twinshot and gone right to City Hall to see what I get.

Has the day/night cycle in-game been speeded way up? I know it was always faster than a normal 24-hour cycle, but now I'm seeing shadows visibly moving at a walking pace. I don't remember seeing that before. Then again, the older computer I used to play on was much inferior to the one I have now, so I may have simply had shadows disabled or turned way down previously.

Thanks :) In my origin story for this group, she was going to call herself "Plutonium", but just before the team went public the announcement came out that Pluto was no longer classified as a planet. So she decided to be snarky. Mother Sun is a scientist who developed a method of "awaking" superpowers in suitable individuals, so the whole team is the product of that method and they all have the "science" origin. Well, except Ms. Mars, who is an actual Martian. She's of "natural" origin.

Yeah, I knew that Habashy et al were added with Galaxy City. I actually never got to see the Outbreak/Breakout tutorials until this time around, as they'd been replaced by GC when I was playing previously, so I always got sent straight to Habashy. I think that, by the time I discovered the folks in City Hall, I had always already done Habashy/Twinshot, so I'd outleveled the origin people and they weren't offering anything. But this time around, I decided to try Outbreak since it was being offered again, and I got sent to Ms. Liberty and then into City Hall. So I'm sure the arcs I mentioned are actually "old", but they're new to me.

I keep finding relatively long mission arcs, mostly in Kings Row so far, that I somehow don't remember ever encountering before. Given the huge number of alts I created back in the day, I spent an inordinate amount of time in Kings Row, so I'm surprised to be coming across these missions. In particular, I've now completed the arc about shutting down the Skulls' superadine trafficking in KR, and another related arc that got into Skulls assassinating city council members and The Family getting involved. The only reason I can think of for missing them in the past is that maybe I fell into a rut with regard to the missions I ran in Atlas Park. For pretty much every character, I ran Matthew Habashy's stuff, and the stuff from Twinshot, and all the stuff that directly branched off from those arcs. So I always got the same Kings Row contacts from those arcs. This time around, it occurred to me to go talk to the origin-related NPCs in the basement of City Hall (M.A.G.I., S.E.R.A.P.H., etc.), and clearly they're introducing me to different contacts. Anyway, it's cool finding new stuff!

For the curious, here is the super team in question as they appeared in 2012, when I created them:

Yeah, I decided that one of my new characters in a blue & red costume, after playing him for a couple levels, could too easily look like Superman, or be accused of such. So I got rid of his red cape, and selected Super Jumping for his travel power rather than Flight when the time came.

Is there any way you can hack the "Planet" chest symbols to allow the Venus and Mars symbols to be used by either gender? For some baffling reason, the original designers disallowed "Venus" for male characters and "Mars" for female characters. I have a "team" of characters that are all based on planets. They all wear their respective planet symbols on their chests, except for my character "Ms. Mars". Can't use the symbol because she's "she".