OEM61

If I was picking two? Level and last played. Those two seem to be the most all-around useful. Creation date and time played seem mostly useless to me. I mean, it tells you who is oldest or youngest or wherever in-between in those terms, but for what reason would someone be seeking out the character with the least time logged on to play? Isn't any level 2 the same as any other in that regard, even if one of them might have a few more minutes in-game? Who cares if this level 50 was created on May 3rd and that one on May 6th? What affect does that have on which one you would like to play?

It's not me saying that they are denying access to a whole zone, but I think that snipers shouldn't be taking potshots at people in the hospital area. The first thing to happen to you after you respawn shouldn't be "get shot by the sniper". Crey is fine. Snipers are fine, and they need an aggro range to match their attack range to really work as snipers at all. Zero problem with any of that. But I am not a fan of snipers spawning to where they can, and do, shoot into the hospitals in the hazard zones. I don't know how much work is involved here, but either creating a "no sniper spawn bubble" just larger then sniper range around the entry area or stacking the sandbags higher so they can't draw a line of fire or something to prevent this would be nice.

Not players. No, players are understandable. But I just hit 30 and had a mission to go into Crey's Folly and, well, the enemies near the "safe zone" are tough to deal with. Most are orange+, and what yellows I have found come in large groups, often containing orange+ enemies as well, so I have been doing a lot of hitting-and-running. But there is a Crey Special Agent Sharpshooter north of the "safe zone" perched on top of a building sniping away. He's got 6 levels on me. I am not really in a position to charge up there and fight him. In the meantime, anyone that goes running back to the safe zone ends up getting shot, and as soon as you respawn in the "hospital"? Yep. You get shot again and have to find some cover. So I don't expect a GM to de-spawn him or anything, I don't expect any other players to run in and take him out while I am there. I would, however, like to see some safeguards put in place to keep NPC snipers from spawning in spots that overlook these supposed "safe areas" in PvE zones, hazard zone or not.

They already do in everything but the cut scenes. If you stopped to read mission briefings and clues on TFs teh rest of the group would have cleared the objective by the time you finished. Cut scenes aree different because they're forced on everyone over and over again. Anything gets old after you watch it 1000 times. IF you want to slow down and experience the content and read every clue and mission briefing, then make a TF for that purpose and let people know ahead of time. Because that should be the standard? "Oh, you wanted to watch cutscenes? You'll have to form your own TF. It's far too much of a sacrifice for us to slow down how quickly we obtain our XP and our phat lewtz". If the majority wants to race through everything and disregard the story then the story should be abandoned? "It will take us another month to get the new content in. We mostly have the missions coded, but we need to fine-tune the contact dialogue and..." "SCREW THE CONTACT DIALOGUE!!! GIVE US THE MISSION NOWWWW!!!! JUST TELL US WHERE TO GO TO GET OUR REWARDS AND GET OUT OF THE WAY!!!" Sounds fun. ::)

When I was in the military we played some Champions PnP and the GM had a villain called the Maestro that used song and band-themed villains as his henchmen, so to fit into that I made a character named Solar Angel, after this song:

I wouldn't want a player that has not seen the cutscenes, or even if they haven't seen them in a while and want to be reminded, to feel any pressure to skip or get kicked. This is what the SW: TOR system felt like so many times. Other players in the group repeating "space bar space bar" and people asking "Okay, who isn't skipping the cutscenes?". So maybe leaving it as it is is the safest thing. People that want to see them can see them and everyone else knows that they are going to get played. If you create an option then we get back to "space bar space bar" and people trying to find out who isn't "cooperating". If you make it an up-front thing then I can see TFs with an early cutscene disbanding and reforming to try and figure out which person didn't skip choose to skip cutscenes and to keep them out of the group, and groups demanding that everyone has to pick "skip cutscenes" going in. They aren't that bad, and if one particular cutscene is making one think that icepicks to the eyeballs would be preferable then I suggest that they find some different TFs/SFs to run.

I can't say that I really listen to any particular songs when I play. I might turn on the radio, put on some CDs, or most often I probably find some internet station to listen to (whatever genre strikes me at the time). But some songs that carry a general vibe for me? Let's start with this...

But it has affected which side they are playing on to get those benefits. I do not have to like playing redside, I just have to play redside.

I just want to throw this out there before I drop out of this. The Scroll of Tielekku mission has your character "change" an altar and portals to change the Banished Pantheon's trap into a warning for the goddess. So yeah, I thought that I remembered something of this sort in the game though someone said it didn't exist. Doesn't matter what your character's background is, you are sent into a mission to change the nature of a complex magic ritual. Also? If you are bothered by the idea that your contact might send your science character on a mission that would result in them going into a lab and mixing up some chemicals to achieve some end, even though they are not a scientist? Then you are immersed in your character. However slight that immersion may be, you think that the game should respect what you have determined the background of your character to be. If the game tells your character that they have to do something that you do not think that your character should be doing, then you are upset about them breaking your immersion in your character. If you were not immersed in the idea that your character was not a scientist then it wouldn't matter. Not that it really matters too much. I demonstrated that a story could be constructed around a an origin without shoehorning the hero or villain into a particular type of character that might have that origin.

Maybe. I didn't consider this while writing, but did think of it later. +1 influence for you. Maybe this would be a way to at least get some people that may have never tried redside to give it a shot, and maybe some of those people might stay, or at least find it interesting enough to revisit from time to time, and some quantity of those people might be amenable to teaming up with others. So it may just be a fraction of a fraction, but it would be something. Worth a try, I suppose. If it results in nothing, if the worst-case scenario plays out and people just use it as a chance to level up faster and everyone ends up back on blueside when it's done, there was no real harm done and life goes on. But I think that the best solution is probably for the villain toons to concentrate on a couple of servers. I know, I know... If you are on a different server then you risk losing your name, but if everyone that really wanted to team up would move to Indomitable (unofficial PvP server) and Everlasting (unofficial RP server) then this "problem" goes away. At least as completely as it can. If they want to keep their heroes and villains together because they want to monitor the chat for both sides then they can move their heroes, too.

No offense, but I don't join your SG, or quit it if you tell me "It's Tuesday. You have to play a villain today". Even if you do not, I may end up running my hero while the rest of the SG is running their villain but hey, at least I am on blueside, right? If I need help I can probably find someone. If I decide to run my villain on some day other than Tuesday? Maybe not so much. Let's face it, this is probably a blip; Nothing more. On one day a week some villains might find grouping slightly easier. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe you have a massive SG and the redside population is noticeably affected on Tuesdays. But that still doesn't help redside Wednesday through Monday. That is a temporary fix at best. Players jump on redside, level up faster if that it the goal, and then jump to blueside. This isn't only for toons rolled on redside from the start, but some people will just flip their heroes, get to cap, and then flip back. Players that did not want double XP, and I would count myself among that group, wouldn't not only not care, but may actively avoid the faction(s) in question because they just want to play and enjoy the story as they go without having to figure out when they need to turn off XP gain so as not to out-level some content. I won't claim to have any answers here, but whatever the change it has to be something that will not only get people to play redside, but keep people playing redside. Creating a situation where redside gets a boost for a month and then things return to normal is not a "fix". Trying to achieve perfect parity is folly, but I think that the ideal would be that every player would have toons on both sides and that at any given time at least 25% (but no more than 75% because it goes both ways) of the currently logged-in players are playing redside. But that may be folly, too.

This. One of my mains was (is? Will be?) an energy/energy blaster, and while I do not normally slot for knockback*, I absolutely understand why it can get on some people's nerves. I enjoy knockback as a solo tool for that blaster, but as a group tool it is not exactly optimal. * I may slot a knockback IO set for other benefits, but even that remains to be seen. I will not, however, slot any generic knockback enhancements of any sort. I may also make a point of slotting overwhelming force, though, for the kockback to knockdown conversion if nothing else.

It's a double-edged sword, right? I mean, AE can be used by players to build content that they want to see. It can be used by RPers to build massive story arcs for themselves to enjoy with the side-effect that others can play the same missions. Imagine you and a few friends starting a SG and then each of you making massive 1-50 arcs for specific teams to run through; You could make a magic-themed group and play a single 1-50 story where you are dealing with some supernatural threat, or a high-tech team and play a 1-50 story against some technological menace, or a group of mutants and play a 1-50 story where you face off against a group of evil mutants, and not to mention just having a band of random heroes brought together to fight the classic villain types. AE allows that. It can truly offer some amazing things in-game. The quality may not always be there, but for people that are sincerely trying to craft adventures, AE is a wonderful tool. But it also allows for missions that are nothing but XP farms. It's easy to see the former as "artistic" and the latter as "trash", but they share one thing in common: People that are playing those missions are not playing the missions that the devs put into the game. So when people get frustrated about not being able to find people to group with to run non-AE content, AE itself becomes an easy target. But a lot of people that take aim at AE seem to be suffering from tunnel vision. Get rid of AE and DFB and old-fashioned PLing would grow. The people that are racing to 50 through AE would just look for another way to race to 50, and that probably doesn't include running missions with randoms just looking for some people to play with.

Thanks, but I have one. But an hour of flight time goes by fast for me relative to the XP I may gain in that time. I am just not in a hurry. Never have been. I just spent an hour and change doing a mission arc that was well below my level but that one of my contacts offered me never the less. No idea why they offered it to me, but I figured "what the heck?". Got me a souvenir and 0 XP. Besides, I don't have any friends in the game.

I don't know if it's my biggest mistake, but my most recent was respecing my character at level 26 and not double-checking everything before I finalized it. I would have sworn that I had selected flight, but when I got back into the game there was no travel power to be found. Now I am going to have to get by with sprint and a jump pack until I hit 28, two more levels, and Heaven forbid I get exemplared for a TF.

Not arguing the point, and it's really going to be subjective, but to be fair here the villain ATs were designed with the inherent ability in mind, while it was added to the hero ATs. The villain inherents should have felt smoother and more a part of the AT because they were designed that way. The hero inherents were going to feel tacked on because they literally were. But again, whatever advantage that may have given the villains in terms of drawing people to play redside disappeared when all of the ATs became available to play as either a hero or a villain. I would be interested in seeing how many/what percentage of primarily redside players are playing one of the old hero ATs compared to how many/what percentage of primarily blueside players are playing one of the old villain ATs.

Not necessarily. There could still be general content added. I don't know that anyone has suggested that all new content would have to be for one origin and one origin only. There is a big difference between "add an arc for each origin type" and "make it so each origin type will run content exclusive to them with no crossover outside of TFs". Nailing down those other ideas is more of an issue. In any event, this is all strictly dream content in my opinion, which is why the hostility puzzles me. This will not happen. Not enough hours in the day. Too much other stuff to do. Because while this could encourage alting, this doesn't have the same potential payoff here as it would if the game were live and trying to generate profit. See, this is mostly where I am. I think that suggestions fall into a few categories. Those that are "serious" that I might throw my voice into support or opposition for, and those that I think have no chance, but they might be fun to talk about. This is the latter for me. Will it happen? No, I do not think so. Doesn't mean that the discussion with some people that enjoy the game as I do can't be fun.

They have something similar in SW:TOR. If memory serves, in that game the characters are just holograms, but you can decorate your stronghold with NPCs that just stand around in their place. I would approach this the same way. The characters do not move around, they just hang out wherever you place them, just like a chair or a desk. So in the base decorator a new category of "Group Members", and then whoever is decorating would have the team roster to choose from in their 0 costume. Captain Amazing can stand over there by the workbench, Dr. Awesome is at the salvage rack, and Miss Mayhem and Robo-Riot are in the teleporter room. That sort of thing. If they could further add an emote action to the decoration even better. Captain Amazing can look like he is actually working on something, Dr. Awesome might look like he is taking inventory or looking for something in particular, and Miss Mayhem and Robo-Riot could be talking or dancing with each other or whatever. The big trick would be to have the decorations disappear if the character is logged in, or certainly if they enter the base. Because while it might be okay for Robo-Riot to be talking to Miss Mayhem in the base while the two of them are actually online and running missions out in the world, it would not be okay at all for them to be in the base while their doppelgangers remain in the teleporter room.

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,2771.msg41559.html#msg41559 A general thread about adding more APPs to all ATs. In short: I support them making more APPs for all ATs based on available powers. I don't think that they should go out of their way to make a bunch of new things, but if the stuff is already in-game or mostly in-game then yes, put it together in an APP for the various ATs, starting with whatever they think is most overdue and then moving on from there.

I honestly can't see how you would draw this conclusion from what I wrote. What was assumed? That a magic-based character in Paragon City might try to contact another magic-based character if they think that they could help them with a problem? That some spellcaster used his abilities and the spell led them to your character? That some seer might have seen your character as the one that must undertake the mission? That some other magic-based contact might have told their magic-using friend that you were a good hand? This is where you go off the rails and start making ridiculous complaints. All I have done is suggested that they could make origin-specific arcs that only characters of that origin could play. Something that would do it's little part to set aside the different characters of different origins. Something that might encourage people to not just re-roll new toons with different ATs, but to re-roll new toons with different origins. A natural hero would have at least one thing in the game that would play to that origin. Their own story arc that only natural heroes could do, and that it wouldn't matter if that natural character was Batman or Superman or Captain America. Spoiler alert: The Clockwork aren't really based in technology. The character's earliest opportunity to face the Council in the game comes from the natural contact. I picked the Council for my placeholder. You know what a placeholder is, right? If the devs think that the Vazhilok would be the best enemies to use for natural heroes then so what? They use Vazhilok and it doesn't matter that the enemies are science. Again, if every character has even one exclusive story arc based on origin then origin matters more. Other people have.

The answer is "because more people want to be the good guy than the bad guy". Works for me. I enjoy being a hero. Not to get into self-psychoanalysis or anything, but maybe that's why I joined the military. Maybe that's why I enjoyed work as a security guard, even if the pay wasn't good enough to keep me there. Playing as a villain just doesn't do it for me. And I tried back when the game was live. Maybe, one day, if this sticks around long enough, I will try again. But my mains will always be heroes. As an aside, I can not recall seeing anyone trying to assemble a Caverns of Transcendence on the team channel except maybe one time. I guess that I am as guilty as the next guy, in that I have unlocked it on a couple of toons but haven't tried to get a team together myself, but if I saw someone advertising (and wasn't in the middle of something else) I would certainly be willing to join. The XP bonus seems popular, but would it really help? I think maybe you end up with people playing redside to get to 50 faster, doing the same old things that they are doing now to level up as quickly as possible, and then talking to Null and going blue because "that's where everybody is". If people choose their sides based upon how many people are on that side, and if there is an in-game way to change sides, then you either alter perception or one side will tend to run at a deficit forever. The horse is out of the barn, but I think faction-specific ATs were maybe the best weapon the villains had to try and fight the imbalance.

I realize that it's an unfair characterization, but I also think that the context here is clear. I said in an earlier post that some people use them to build their own stories for their friends to play through, taking the missions they make completely out of the realm of "programmed superhero entertainment" and into "it's real to us" territory for those players, and that is a good way to do such things. But you also know that there is a reason why many people see it as "that place to level up fast at". And for every solid story you might find there, or even attempt at a real story instead of just an XP farm, I suspect that I would find one or more of those XP farms to go with it.

Pretty sure they do that now, don't they? I seem to recall some mission somewhere where our character, no matter their origin, had to perform some kind of ritual or use some magic item that they were given to activate some magic spell(s) or ritual or counteract some spell(s) or ritual or something of that sort. And while an ignorance of the inner-workings of magic is easy since it's not real, there are plenty of fantasy-styled characters that I have seen (or could create), magic origin or not, that may well have an ignorance of the workings of technology. Are you out there protesting that Migli the Dwarf, with his natural axe/shield self, transported from some fantasy realm, should not be asked to download data from a computer because he has no idea how computers work? But they are asked. They will be asked. And you can either uninstall the game because "muh immersion" or you can roll with it. And the writers, whoever they may be, can do their level best to try and make sure that the stories they write do not lean too heavily into some specific concept of what a character of a certain origin should be. That the magic story isn't about casting spells and discussions of the inner workings of magic with the foremost scholars in the game world any more than it's about the character trying to protect that magical talisman that gives them powers or trying to understand why the magical being chose them to be the new guardian of reality or whatever. The Circle of Thorns use magic. They are, arguably, the definitive magical villain group in the game, existing as enemies from level 5-ish to 50. So the Circle has been up to something. Your contact is sure of it. You go question some Circle. They give you a clue that your contact thinks points towards an ancient summoning ritual. That matches up with something they have learned from another hero. Better go check out location X, and there you encounter a Circle boss. That boss leads you to two other bosses. Now your contact is afraid; The Circle may think that they are going to conquer the city, but they believe that destruction of the city is the more likely outcome. You must stop the Ritual! (or the ritual happens and you must defeat the monster/demon/thingy that they summon!). In any event, there you have a 5-part arc that a magic origin character could play through that doesn't, in my estimation, lean too heavily towards any particular type of magic character. Shazam could fit as easily as Dr. Strange. Zatanna and Juggernaut should both feel at home there. It's a mission where you are fighting the CoT. Because the magic origin contact that gives out the mission contacted you because they are magic and you are magic... It works out. Just like both Superman and Batman are trying to stop the Council from mass-producing their latest "Perfect Man" and dealing with whatever they have to deal with to stop that from happening. No gritty noir detective story. A contact calls you, tells you that they Council has been making some moves and they just got word that they are hitting a pharmaceutical company as we speak! Part 1 leads to part 2 (find out what these drugs are for) leads to part 3 (a Council snitch wants a meeting, but, of course, the Council are on site so you need to extract him) leads to part 4 (hit the site! Hah, they fooled you. That was the old site, but it had info on the new site) to part 5 (Okay, now hit the site and fight their "perfect man"). Just like both Iron Man (who is a super-genius that makes all his own tech) and War Machine (who just wears the suit) will be dealing with whatever technology enemy they have to deal with. None of these have to try and tell the players what sort of character they are supposed to be playing because they have some certain origin, they are just a special arc for characters of that origin type. Afraid that somehow this all leads to you missing a badge? Then give everyone that does it the same badge. "Original" or something as a play on "origin".

I go there during the Shining Stars arc, because the mission tells me to, and then I stayed and got the badge for one of my toons. The rest will have to go back, I guess. Otherwise it's like I said; Too many other things to do than play some janky missions intended only to provide XP as quickly as possible. I try to enjoy the entire trip, not just the destination. 50 will come soon enough.