Blackbird71

Actually, we're still in General Discussion... 😉

Yeah, yeah, yeah, patience; how long will that take? - Ed Gruberman

This is a colossally Bad Idea, for so many reasons. Incentivizing name campers by allowing them to get paid for it is not going to improve the situation for anyone on either side of the issue.

Wow. Yeah, what a necro. But since it's been brought up, the code of HC has changed enough with regards to ATs and powers that I doubt an import of Sentinel+ files would even be possible, at least not without some major work going into adapting data to fit the changes, and it's just not worth it. The good news is that if you have those old xml files, you can open them yourself and see exactly what you had (may take some deciphering). Then you can just recreate the characters in HC, and it won't be long before you're back up to incarnate levels. I guarantee doing that will be faster than waiting around for the possibility to import old characters!

In light of your other posts, the irony of that statement coming from you is astounding.

Things do ebb and flow, but lately I've consistently seen enhancements that used to go for 1M a piece sell for 3M+. Maybe demand has shifted from other enhancements, or something else is going on; I don't have access to the data to really look at it and can only go by what I see anecdotally.

When you're picking up contacts, pay attention to the Origins they support (most will list two in their "about" messages). In those levels, if the contact does Technology missions, you will most likely get Freaks.

I saw the early days of the SWGEMU project, then came back to it years later, so I suppose I missed the drama in those intervening years.

OK, but now get the numbers for how many people actually use 1000 character slots. I'm an incurable altaholic, and even I only have around a hundred characters on my primary server. I'm sure the average count of characters per server per account is much, much lower than 1000. Just do some back of the napkin calculations based on Live's peak subscription count, estimating total subscriptions over the life of the game, HC accounts (based on server loads, etc.) and average characters per server per account for both Live and HC, and I think you'll find that the number of used names per server is at least comparable, if not, Live is higher.

You would be surprised. I took breaks near that long on Live and still came back. CoH was always the MMO I'd come back to.

So, when the game implodes, it goes back to running as a secret for a handful of what we have now? "Three men can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."

I can't comment on the Sega MMO, but as for EnB and SWG, my understanding is that fans spent years reverse-engineering their own version of the server code, so nothing was stolen. CoH is in a unique position among revived MMOs in that it's in the most grey legal area of all of them.

A bit, perhaps. But when someone asks specifically for resources to read up on the basics of slotting and what Enhancement shorthand means, and people reply with links to Inf-making guides and specific IOs to use, I do begin to wonder if people read with the intent to understand.

These are the sorts of threads where I read the OP, then I read the responses, and I wonder how many of them actually read the OP and understood the question(s) being asked. 😜 Or even the thread title, for that matter...

The problem with your question is that it's a purely subjective thing. Just to illustrate, I've found Broadsword/Shield Scrappers so immensely fun that I've built and leveled two of them to 50 the "slow way." This is going to very much be a "to each their own" kind of thing, and everyone will have a different answer.

I completely get the confusion; when I first got into working out my builds, the shorthand was one of the biggest obstacles to understanding what was supposed to be in the builds. Unfortunately, most people posting builds are just exporting the info from Mid's Hero Designer, and that's the format that Mid's Hero Designer uses for the Enhancement names. The best thing that worked for me was to actually download the various builds and then load them into Mid's; then I could see for myself what the enhancements were by mousing over them and getting all the details of what they do. Understanding the use of the enhancement sets and how they work together then became a process of seeing what other enhancements could fill the same slot (again, using Mid's for this), observing how this affected the character's Totals in Mid's, and reading the explanations of those who posted more information than just a build in the forums. The learning process takes time, but after a bit of research and playing around with a few builds, you become familiar with a lot of the common IO sets, some of the shorthand, and the reasons for picking one set over another in a given type of power. Mid's Hero Designer: ❚❚ Mid's Reborn: Hero Designer - Forum - Homecoming (homecomingservers.com)

I'd also recommend trying the HC Discord; the Excelsior section has a recruiting channel where SGs advertise.

Mine only move when something happens to change the resolution of the game window, such as moving it to my secondary screen (which is a different size). If it goes to a smaller resolution, trays will get pushed to the new edge, relative to the upper left corner. Then when returning to the original resolution, they'll hang out in the middle of the screen, in the same pixel-count position as they were on the smaller resolution. I get why this happens, but it would be nice if there were a way to get them to snap back to the edge of the screen after resolution change.

I honestly can't say why it takes so long to load; my system can handle plenty of other more recent and (theoretically) more demanding games, but it does just the same. Sometimes it loads faster, sometimes it hangs and crashes. Usually it's somewhere in between. But I do think you're putting a rather harsh and arbitrary limit of 60 seconds on people for things that may be beyond their control. I realize time is precious, but seriously, we're talking about a couple of minutes here; have a little patience.

Setting aside for a moment your extreme impatience and a host of other factors you're ignoring in your estimates and calculations, I'll point out that you're not factoring in screen load times. If I have to transfer between 1-2 zones, I can easily lose a minute or so just in loading each zone.

No, it's not. It's how you interpreted what was said, but you're wrong. First off, the idea that you can dictate to me or anyone else what their thoughts and intent are is not only arrogant and rude, it's ludicrous. We may play in a superhero game, but mind-reading powers are not real. So I will ask you again not to put words in mine or anyone else's mouth but your own. Secondly, to help you understand my point, consider this: does enjoying or even not minding violent movies make everyone who does so automatically a violent person? Of course not. The same principle applies here. Just because someone enjoys, participates in, or even just tolerates the presence of "garbage" content does not automatically make one a "garbage" or bad person. As I said, it's a false equivalency, and perpetuating it does not help the discussion move along. I suggest you drop the matter before this descends further into pointless argument.

Concept. I always pick the pets I feel best suit the character in question.

It also lends itself well to more long-form storytelling. The RP scenes in game more often end up being supplemental pieces of larger arcs planned and told through Discord. Often we'll do major plots in Discord, with elements of those plots inspiring some in-game RP, and then the plot culminates in an AE mission as the climax.

That's pretty much it, yes.

Our SG makes heavy use of Discord for RP, but we don't use voice chat at all. It doesn't replace in-game RP; rather it's a space for additional and supplemental RP outside of the game. A lot of our players only have certain times of the day they can get in game, but they can jump into Discord by computer or phone almost any time, and it adds a lot of flexibility to the RP and provides more opportunities to build characters' stories with more depth than we could ever get with just in-game chat. Plus with Discord, there's a record of the RP, so it makes it easy for others to catch up on stories and know what's going on. We even keep spaces in Discord for updating brief tidbits of things that happen in-game so that those who weren't present can keep up to speed on events. This of course is all on top of the social and organizational applications of Discord. I really don't think an SG like ours could function without Discord or a similar platform. Maybe if we had our own forums, but forums can lack the immediacy and ease of use of Discord communications.