Oklahoman

I like the direction you are thinking in, but I think I would rather it not be an automatic increase. Instead, I think maybe having access to different inspirations and temps via Luna. This could create a way to spend those extra threads, emps, or even Transcendents on things. As an example (thought up on the spot here, so not necessarily advocating for these specifically): At vet level 100 you can buy an inspiration that reduces the recharge time of your incarnate powers by 25% for X number of seconds At vet level 200 you gain access to purchase PBAoE rez inspirations, which you can use even when not dead At vet level 300 you gain access to purchase a rechargeable temp power that... I don't know, does something that's cool but not overpowering. Maybe turns on your Destiny power for 5 minutes if you are playing sub-50 content? Again, don't hold me to those specific examples, but that's the sort of thing I think I'd like to see.

By that, I mean that an MSR is great for XP, but for 40-45 minutes worth of playtime you could almost certainly get more in terms of reward merits, etc. doing other things. A quick example I've mentioned before - we tend to do 4 (or more) Hami raids at a time these days, which could net you 200 reward merits if you just selected that from the table, and a set of Hami runs will take about 30 minutes. You'll get a little XP and other drops from the GMs as you are gathering EoEs, but not a ton. A single MSR will probably net you in the neighborhood of, let's say, 50 reward merits if you choose that conversion, and will require a little more of your time. You do get influence, salvage, and recipe drops during an MSR, but it's not going to make up the value of the 150 additional reward merits you would have got in a Hami. Others can point out even quicker ways to earn reward merits, influence, etc. than in an MSR, I am sure. Outside of AE, though, I don't think you can beat an MSR in terms of XP. In my mind, the non-reward incentives to participating in an MSR versus, say, a Hami is the interactions that happen especially in the bowl. This is an example of where our community gets to hang out and just have fun while playing the game. Hamis have that, but in my experience it is much different than just hanging out and blasting away at bad guys leisurely.

Specific to COH, I don't think your experience is wildly different from the norm. I've had a few stalk me in COH, but I've put them on ignore and move on with life. I really have no social media presence outside of the tiny one in I have in Discord. There's one other social media platform I use regularly, and I never post there "Hey, find me in City of Heroes @Oklahoman!" so there's no link between that account and my COH account. There are 3-4 people who play the game and have known me in real life, so it's a bit jarring when they call me by my real name in game, but I've seen them all in tights so there's the threat of mutually assured destruction there that keeps us in line. Other than that there's a small handful of people in game who know what I do for a living, and specifically what town I live in, otherwise I enjoy keeping those parts of my life separate. Makes it a little harder to stalk me outside the game, I think. Though, I think most people know what state I live in.

That's been what I've seen, too. It's been a good long while since I've had an MSR fail in any way, shape, or form. It probably has some small effect on rewards, but if you are doing an MSR for rewards you probably aren't getting the biggest return on your time, anyway.

True, and especially when that happens with trials where you have carefully constructed the makeup of each team before going in it can be extremely chaotic. With an instanced MSR it doesn't have to be that way - you just have a delay before you get the star back and add any new people into the league. Last time we sorted this out while we were working on pylons.

That sounds like a lot of work, especially when there is a non-zero chance you won't be able to get enough people to form a successful raid at all. It's rarely happened to me, but I have had to call off a couple raids in the past due to lack of interest.

One thing about the second run is that I still had people in the league from the first run. It may not have happened if I had completely dumped and reformed the league between runs. Next time I do a back-to-back run I will try that and see what happens.

I just finished running back to back instanced MSRs. For the most part, it went smoothly. On the first run, for some strange reason, after we got into the instance I could no longer invite to LEAGUE, even though I had a lot of open spots. I emptied Team 1 to the other teams and then invited to TEAM and everything went well. Some told me they couldn't join via LFG, though. The second run was worse. After we zoned in, I was suddenly the Team 4 leader and we had a heck of a time getting the star back to me. Once I had it, same sort of issues as before. Then, even though I had 1 spot open (and it was on Team 1) there was no way I could invite anyone, and they couldn't join with LFG. In both cases, invites would go out normally and with no error messages, but when they accepted they said they were immediately kicked. We know LFG is still messed up, but it seemed moreso with this. Still, it was a smoother run overall and I'll probably change to doing instanced, even with the bugs I ran into.

I don't disagree with this. Not long ago there was a guy really wanting to get the REALLY HARD WAY badge, and he had absolutely no clue what he was doing. I, and several other regular league leaders, joined him on 2 or 3 runs. We gave him a try, and I think others should, too - it's possible he could have tried a novel solution the rest of would have liked to have learned. The end of that story is I got him to join me over on Everlasting for a run, where they have it down solid, and he got his badge. But, if that same guy decided to try again under an alt, I'd rather skip it. REALLY HARD WAY can be an expensive attempt. And if I could see his global in the chat, I would.

I asked in the Market subreddit about something like this - like, is there a secret slash command I'm missing? Someone mentioned that the pain is part of why this works for us. In other words, if it was easy more people would do it and prices on some things may plummet. I get that, but I also like what you are suggesting.

I've had a lot of people join my TPN badge runs lately who said they've never done one before, and are only doing it because they've enjoyed running with me on other things. It can be a way for players to try something new. Conversely, I may be quite interested in joining a POSI but because I enabled the setting to show their global name in chat I can tell it's being organized by someone I had a negative experience with recently (while they were on an alt), I might choose not to. I am all for an option to show globals in chat that is defaulted to off, like timestamps and character name colors. I am against an option that let's you define how my chat looks - whether it's a setting you can turn on that forces timestamps for your chat to not show up on my end, defining your preferred color for a chat name, disabling my ability to log any of your chats, or hiding your global in my chat.

Not just here but in this entire forum, we have got to stop assuming what the devs are capable of. We can't simultaneously sing the devs praises with each new update, then assume they are absolutely incapable of making a suggestion mentioned here work.

I run on a laptop, but I plug a second monitor in above via HDMI sometimes. On that second monitor I run OBS for streaming. But, I've always wondered if I could have the game spill over both monitors and move some of the lesser used windows up - thinking specifically of the map, target, nav, and maybe the level/health/end window. I don't reference those much but still want quick access to them.

On Excelsior, I've seen some new globals leading iTrials recently. One global I wasn't familiar with at all led multiple Triple Threat attempts (sans Discord, no less) last night, which was great to see. (In fact, I think I've seen fewer ads saying Discord is required, which warms my heart, having a deep hatred of it myself.)

It just occurred to me that you denied the "social" part, but not the "butterfly" part. 🤔

TBH I'm surprised 15 is the limit - seems low. But then again, I've never even come close to running into that. When I saw that error message I figured the limit was triple digits, easily. 🙂

Not sure, but we're gonna start measuring it in units of "Snarky"

I sit corrected.

I only ran a few instanced MSRs and prefer to run the one in zone. Mainly because: I don't get bent out of shape about some level 1s joining in and gaining a few levels. I'd rather they do it in an MSR and maybe be part of the community than in AE. I had too many times I queued an iMSR and you get the error that someone doesn't have the Member of Vanguard badge. Kick so they can fix it and rejoin later, re-queue, and have the same error with someone else. You don't get ALL the error messages like that at once, so it's a rinse and repeat thing. It's the same sort of problem we run into with Magisterium runs sometimes. There's a lot about LFG I would love to see fixed, and have made peace with the fact that I never will, but if we had some way to define a set of "requirements" before forming a team/league and the game would give error messages if we tried to invite someone lacking those requirements, that would help. I know that's a really big ask, though. Also, in general, I could always fill a zoned MSR but always ran iMSRs with less than a full league. I just found they weren't as popular, maybe because of the badge restriction reducing the number of possible participants available online at that moment. You don't need a full league to be successful, of course. The pros you mentioned are all valid and true, though, and I love that our player base has options.

I've always felt like Empathy Rez should the best Targeted AoE.

I'd like a slash command that will force a reload of the custom popmenus I have in C:\Games\Homecoming\data\texts\English Then, I could edit them while in game and reload them without having to completely exit out of the game. Now, I know this is a highly controversial topic, but perhaps we can all keep cool heads and debate the matter in a civil manner.

I just tried this - took a character with all 3 level shifts, started an Ouro flashback arc, went to DA, then LRT to Atlas while still in the flashback. Checked with another account to see how they look in Atlas and it says 50+1.

And yet, everyone is anonymous here. I'm actually a lifelong resident of Idaho. And I'm green. When I want to be "even slightly anonymous" I play on one of my alt accounts. Kinda sus that people are afraid of making it easier to see a global, imo.

It's an ideal layout for joining my badge runs, apparently.