MistressOhm

@Neiska I don't think you're off base at all. It IS a disparate group (not desperate, yet!) and as such we all have differing ways we prefer to play. And that's what this comes down to, play. This isn't a job. No one is requiring us to log in 8 hours a day, other than perhaps ourselves. If it's not fun, however we each define 'fun', then there's not much reason to engage. As for Dev motivations... I have no idea, we'd need a Dev to weigh in, specifically on that question. We did get a note that said "Hey we figured out the math was wrong on the XP Boosts and fixed it" along with a rather simple explanation as to how it was wrong. The fact that it went unnoticed for such a long time? That probably makes the change sting a bit more, because we'd all gotten used to it being wrong and accepted that as normal. I -try- not to compare myself to others, because let's face it, I'm weird, I know there's not many others that I could even remotely draw comparisons to. (That might be true for a lot of us, but only self-reflection will expose that, it can't be declared from without.) There are times that I get -jealous- of someone multiboxing and running farms to get a 50 in a few hours, whereas it takes me months to get there slogging solo thru the game content. But then I remember, multiboxing requires planning and resources that either I don't have, or don't know how to leverage, so there's more to it than what the results tell you. I admit to getting a large spike of satisfaction when I've automated a job to where what used to take weeks now only takes an hour. The results validate the weeks of time I may have spent working out the process, dodging criticism from others how "it'll never work" or "we don't have time for this, we have things that need doing." So I get it. But, that was to make a job easier and to free up time for more ... productive use. My 'play' isn't in the automation sphere, much. Will these changes chase off the farmers? I doubt it. Yeah, the process isn't -as- efficient as it once was. But it's not completely kiboshed, either. So, there's that. If the Devs decided "in order to save up memory requirements per character, we're shortening the Bio panel to a URL" I'd probably go 'whaa?' because while I understand that server resources management is a thing, there's no plausible explanation why that would be NEEDED with as small of a playerbase as HC has (nevermind how many people are running around with blank bios). It would be ... arbitrary. And maybe that's why the farming people are upset, it feels arbitrary to them. @battlewraith Fair point! I'm still thinking of this as a structured game, with a set of rules. There's something about 'coasting' that bugs me personally, not because it affects me all that directly other than perhaps the economics of the system (a whole new rhubarb to get into!) but because it seems to break or at least bend those rules. I like structure. And structure that gets bypassed is... annoying? I don't know. Maybe I'm borderline OCD that way. But your point stands - it SHOULDN'T be that big of an issue.

So here's my take on the "feelings" posed by a couple of farmers: "I used to be able to make billions just doing the AFK thing, now I can't, and it's not fun anymore". This was never designed to be an AFK game, but there are AFK games out there that you might enjoy, if that's what you like to do. I'm glad this was never a grindfest, and actually catered to casuals since I am one, but at the same time, I don't believe that INF and resources should ever be bestowed in bulk as a participation trophy for showing up. And essentially, that's what AFK farming IS, at the core of things. You log in, enter an instance, set a power to automatic, and do your RL thing while the game throws mobs at your idle character. While that might be a legit strategy, I don't see that it should ever be the predominant way to gain resources - if you're not interactively playing, you shouldn't reap more rewards than those who are interactively playing. Day Jobs are the reward for showing up and simply hanging out in one spot, as specific buffs and minor abilities that are associated with a location. They help with the gameplay but don't break the game. "I farm very little because I accumulated so many resources long ago that, because I don't play much anymore, I don't have tons of toons to outfit and I've got nothing to spend it all on." This is what happens when you farm excessively, exclusively for farming's sake. You got SO much stuff so quickly that you honestly can't use it all, and aside from more farming, you don't really play the rest of the game that much. Face it, you're BORED with the system you yourself set up, and now that the system doesn't flood you with stuff like it did before, the only reason you did something boring is now diminished. It's not the dev's fault you're in this spot, but your method of play was (and is) rather narrowly defined, and that's what got you. While you may feel this was a personal attempt to 'gimp' you, it's simply balance. The same will be said of those folks messing around with wallstreetbets - they're 'gaming' the system, and when the system gets changed to curtail their activity, they'll whine, but then they'll figure something else out. So, figure something else out. "This tastes different and I don't like it anymore." So someone gorged on the buffet in the past, and now the portions are smaller and the cost (sunk Time) higher. If my experience with casino buffets pre and post Covid are any comparison, maybe that buffet line isn't the best choice anymore? The comparison is apt - buffets used to be cheap (and comped to nearly everyone who played) so the quality of the food wasn't always that big a deal. But now they're expensive, and you have to gamble a lot more to earn a comp... so given the choice, I'd rather spend my $20 comp on a pizza made to my specifications, than spending twice that on a few plates of watery wilted salad, crappy orange chicken and bland steamed rice, and a small plate of tiramisu that tastes like it came out of a freezer box with the words "Sara Lee" on it. Likewise, if farming doesn't give a player the endorphin rush that it did, because it's harder, takes longer, or doesn't reward as much, then that player needs to decide if it's worth it to them to continue. As @Doc_Scorpion pointed out above, these quoted feelings are on the table because (and ONLY because) they were brought up as points to the discussion. That makes them fair game. I'm not going to say they aren't valid... but I'm also not going to prop them up if I think they're unreasonable or entitled.

This is one area where SWTOR has a definite edge over CoH, or even WoW. The "Class Story Arcs" that put your character at the beginning of the journey, with three 'chapters' to progress through, and then when you get to the last planet, all of the loose ends get sewn up and you're a Somebody in the Galaxy. Granted, aside from a few flashpoints (what they call Task Forces), you could treat it as a single-player game with 8 branching storylines, in a shared world with other players in. CoH having something like that centered around one's Origin... that'd be awesome. Especially if you could fill in a template early on, kind of like an AE mission builder, that would define an Ally group, a Nemesis group, and perhaps one, two, or three EB's to face along the way. The 'story arc' would plug in these parameters, such that if you were aligned with Group A, and pitted against Group B, A would supply your mission contacts, the Origin would supply the actual text and the maps used, and B would populate the enemies.

Rolled up an Energy Melee/Regen scrapper in a Leprechaun theme. Her name? Beginners Luck

I've yet to have a problem with that mission - it has ONE fight with ONE mob, and unless you stand there and soak what he's dishing out, it's pretty hard to actually lose.

Remember that there's some Oranbega maps that have a prison section. THAT'S where the defeateds end up. And while they're beating on the cell 'doors', the NPC's are talking about how best to go about commandeering their bodies. (for an added bonus, if someone logs out in the Oranbega jail, their "Day Job" buff on return is a confuse debuff, that makes all of the CoT read as friendlies/untargetable, but any heroes/villains that show up are now fair game. Yes... it's a coop PvP zone.)

Always funny when you run across cops in Faultline, hauling Lost out of a sedan. I had a villain on Live, more of a Rogue even before morality switching was a thing, whose use of Kinetic speed boost along with the Prestige powerslide was RP'd as her astride a turbocharged Hayabusa. 200+ mph in the real world... but CoV never let her go more than 80mph. >.>

Generic one-off missions are fine, but it's always fun to discover there's more to the tale, that there's a reason for whatever was going down that you've now put a stop to. Or, maybe you didn't stop it entirely, and the scope of the problem just got a little bigger. The one that always grabs me is the Petrovic Brothers stuff going on in Kings Row. You kick over a few drug dealer dens, standard "mission" fare, and find there's a Lot More Going On.

Sybil dresses.

Once I got to a level where I could take on the FF snipers (Nemmie Comets and Crey Vigilant Snipers), I'd put up Steamy Mist and hover around looking for them. Then I'd pop Lightning Storm right on top of them and watch them get slammed off the roof. Comedy Gold. 🙂 One thing about the WoW Rogue class was that it was also a CC class, so those 'summoned' monsters didn't bug me as much. Any kind of stun or blindness or what have you, would be enough to get behind them and land a critical. But, I went with the Poisons subclass more often than not, and there was a Paralytic poison you could use, ANY attack had a high chance of stunlocking even if your main method of stun was on cooldown. I always liked games that recognize you using a power or in a specific state, like the Campus Security at the Paragon University. If you're using SJ he tells you not to super-jump off the roofs cos of the noise, no superspeeding in the halls, et cetera. Now I'll need to bring a stalker in to see if he reacts to stealth powers. 🙂

No, I'm confused as well, why would changing up the respec process require a -sequel-? I mean, is the entire game so hardcoded around the respec that it'd require an entirely new iteration to change it? Yes, thread title is misleading.

Pretty sure the GM's actually do get killed or driven off, rather than imprisoned. Else there's a REALLY BIG section of Zig to house all of them...

It's been done. 🙂

The same system was also retrofitted to 'transport' defeated villains originally to the Zig, but now they're routed to the closest police station. There's usually 3-5 pads in the back of each station, behind the duty desk, close to the elevator to the jail cells.

I spot a Samedi... 🙂

See now we're all going to spend our lives just wishing.

"Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball". Tankers, take note.

At the time the sunset was announced, I was just getting into GW2, as an alternative to World of Warcraft. And I'd already started to sink "extra cash" into the cash shop within GW2, which was a LOT more than the shop within CoH. At that point, I wrote a ticket to the GW2 moderation team, explaining that no, I didn't need help with a bug, or a quest, or a troublesome player. I just wanted to let them know that the decision to shutter CoH (after the decidedly wise decisions to close down Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa, neither of which really did well out of the gate) had told me that NCSoft didn't bank on longterm players, they banked on wealthy casuals who needed to be fleeced before they (or their parents) caught on. And I was out, no more money sunk into NCSoft games ever again. I sent the ticket, gave away what bits in my inventory could be traded, and closed the account. I'm glad to see that SCoRE and Homecoming were able to bring my favorite MMO back... but NCSoft can still DIAF as far as I'm concerned.

"Oh, Smeg...."

We tried that, got tired of "LOL wat?" as the response.

It was mentioned that they have exactly ONE 3D artist on the HC staff, and most of their workflow is getting whatever they've designed in Blender or Maya to 'port over' to the Cryptic 3D engine without going completely bonkers. I've experienced "exploding mesh" from 3rd party mods in other games, and it is NOT fun. The BEST outcome is a game crash, cos otherwise you're staring at a jumbled screen of chaos triangles (and your framerate goes to nil as it is all semi-rendered) while something tries to beat the stuffing out of you. So if there's only one person available, I'd rather they take their time to make sure things work right and don't make the client freak out, rather than insist on "new costume bits NOW".

So then your tests are revealing there's much more going on than the code provided to me that's defining the ToT mob spawn behavior. I'm not a dev, so ... you'd probably want to take that to a dev, if it's a concern. if you feel it's normal, that's great.

Did you read the thread I posted? The code used for ALL ToT spawns including the EB's was quoted in the linked reply.

I filed the despawn behavior as a bug, and this is the reply I received: Based on the code string posted, and the explanation, if they are getting taunted off, or trained onto others, that's an issue.

Keep in mind it's not a costume edit, but a costume power. So if you reproportion your head to match, then you'll look like this guy when not in mini-mode: