quixoteprog

I think you are missing the point. I feel really safe in saying all the live data is gone. Unrecoverable. But even if it were still hanging around somewhere, you would have a hard time finding anyone with the skill to port it over who was willing to dedicate the time to do it, and face the legal challenges of handling the data and keeping it safe. Porting over the data would not be so hard in the TECHNICAL sense. It would be difficult in the LEGAL and liability sense. And even then it would not be so difficult as to be insurmountable by the people involved because I am sure they are all quite clever and accomplished people. It is more of a cost to benefit analysis. It would be an ENORMOUS effort (again, mostly from a legal and liability standpoint dealing with laws in several different countries and facing lawsuits and maybe even criminal prosecution in some EU countries) all to appease a few people who want to recapture something of what they had on the live servers. Stuff that they can pretty easily reacquire by playing a game they supposedly love playing. And all that assumes that NCSoft even kept the data (highly unlikely since it would mostly have been a liability to them if some bad actor somehow got their hands on it).

Oh, I understand it. You seem to be missing my point, probably because I am not making it clearly enough. I will try to be more clear. If you take away limited liability then the only people working at any business would BE THE OWNERS. No one will hire other people to work for them. Who would hire people who were not liable and take on all the liability for anything that other person did? Knowing that their entire personal fortune depended on the actions of the weakest link in the company? Not anyone smart or competent enough to run a business I assure you. I am not saying that companies should not be held more to account than they are. I am saying there is a reason why we have limited liability. It HAS value. That is why it is a thing in almost every country on the face of the Earth and has been for hundreds of years.

I think you are missing my point. The idea is we NEED limited liability BECAUSE of your example of the pizza driver. If I owned a pizza shop and I knew I would be liable for anything any of my employees did? I would not hire employees. I would either do everything myself, or at the VERY least, I would hire only grade A number one certified super drivers. That may sound like it is a good thing until you realize how few people fit that bill. No one would get hired. Every business would need to be a sole proprietorships, or large partnerships. And none of them would be THAT large. Because how many people can you think of in your personal life that you would trust with everything you own? Those would be the only people you would start a business with or hire. Because you would be held liable for everything done by everybody who worked at the company. It would VASTLY limit the size of companies. Meaning that any country that kept limited liability would be able to grow large companies. And it would not even stop the unethical. If the owners of Wal-mart were liable for everything done by anyone who shopped at of worked at their stores? They would not own Wal-mart. They would have it incorporated under the name of some sucker to "own" it that they had some kind of leverage over and then throw them to the wolves if something happened. I bet under such a system you would have LESS accountability rather than more. Similar to the way that prohibition resulted in MORE crime.

While it may sound good to say, "limited liability should be stricken from the books", and was probably just a bit of over heated rhetoric, it would be HORRIBLE idea in practice. If everyone working at a company were personally liable for every action of his coworkers or any damage done by the product they were working on then no company bigger than a few people would ever be created. While that may sound good if it were true City of Heroes would never have existed AT ALL. It no doubt took the combined effort of hundreds of people, developers, IT, testers and middle managers. Now, I am NOT saying the law is perfect, and doesn't allow people with money to stomp on the little guy. It should be tightened, and people should be held responsible. I'm just saying that there is a very good reason why some amount of protection from liability exists.

The thing is NCSoft is a publicly traded company. The leadership of the company is legally bound to try and make the most money they can to return as much value to their share holders as they possibly can. When you pass up the chance to make more money, by developing a new game, in order to keep an old game running, you are derelict in that duty. It may sound callous, but it is just the way corporations are. We create them and invest our money in them in order to make money. There was, I am sure, nothing personal in their decision to shut down the game in the first place. As much as it may have hurt the people emotionally invested in the community that they had built it was a decision made out of a legal obligation. If they do sign a deal with Homecoming to run the game as a non-profit it will still only be done because by their own calculations the good will generated will make them money in some way.

This could be a good thing. Years ago NCSoft may have let the copyright lapse because they just did not care what happened with it. Until they entered negotiations with Homecoming to run the official "City of Heroes" server. That would require them to license or give the rights to use the trademark and copyright to them. They certainly aren't going to let the Homecoming people file for that copyright. Because it has a value, especially if they ever want to do a sequel. And for that reason, among others, they don't want to let it become public domain so that some porn or scammer group gets it and registers a web site to screw with people. Then all the value/good will associated with it would be shot.

While I would not mind doing this in a group, it would probably be sub-optimal as far as components per time. With the Freebird flight stealth IO and set at -1/1 (no bosses) I can routinely stealth to the final fight and complete this in under 15 min. Even on a mind/emp controller. I usually choose to save both. Mass Confusion helps a LOT. Even with that I died a couple times on the first try but still completed (since I have rise of the phoenix) but on subsequent runs with a level shift and Judgement Ion combined with mass confusion I could kill everything in time. With a group, unless EVERYONE had stealth, it would mean fighting a lot more spawns.

There is an enhancement that provides stealth when fly is active. It does not provide any fly speed bonus but if I am not mistaken you don't need that since flight will reach the flight speed cap by 50, or very near. SS is better, or can be, since you can slot the running version of the stealth enhancement in SS to boost your stealth rating, but with flight you can just fly over stuff. The flying stealth enhancement won't let you run up on a Sniper but it will let you stealth missions.

I have not done the math, but since you need so many components of every rarity to get your slots all up to T4 I am guessing you are better off always taking the random roll. I have taken the merit once because I had 7 and needed one more to make a rare comp. But when you consider the components necessary to make each (I think this is right, but not certain, please correct me if I'm wrong) T1 is 3 common T2 requires 1T1 and 2 common and one uncommon T3 requires 1T2 and 2 common and 1 rare. T4 you need 2T3s and 2 common and 1 very rare That is 16 common, 2 uncommon, 2 rare and 1 very rare to make 1 T4. Since (IIRC) it possible to break down rare stuff into more common things (mostly threads I think, that can be made into common and uncommon) taking the component is almost always the right thing. Not sure what the stats are on how often each rarity drops, but since rare and VR ones seem to come up more than 1/16 so probably take the component.

I really hate doing ANY "kill X" mission after level 30 or so. It is just too many. I understand the desire of the game designers to create content that involves street sweeping. But wandering the streets looking for a particular kind of mob is just tedious. Especially when it involves finding 30+ of them, sometimes in a very specific area. There has GOT to be a better type of mission than this.

Such statements from the OP essentially makes this thread a wasteland for me. No need to come back here. Nothing but mutant bandits gnawing on old bones.

You can kind of fake this by going to the costume guy, "face changer" or whatever he is called and using a costume slot to make a costume that is smaller size. Then, any time you want to "shrink" you /cc 1 and your giant guy is now a small one. I usually fill one costume slot with a "tiny toon" costume that I can change into on the small cave maps. Just seems easier to navigate around the tight spaces.

OK, so for those Winter Packs "Get 'em while they're HOT!" Or, whatever?

The question to the OP is, are you looking to get to 50 to experience the lvl 50 content? Or, are you looking to lvl to 50 doing content? Because the quickest way to get a character to 50 is to make a farmer that run AE farm mission. You get that guy to 50 and then it is a breeze to get other guys up. Not saying this is the BEST way to do this, just that it will get you to where you want to go the fastest. There are tons of tutorials on these forums and online in other places. It can be a kind of mini-game all unto itself. But definitely not for everybody.

When is the Winter Event set to end? Jan 1st?

Pretty close to what @oxmox said. This game is pretty easy, for the most part. And it can be very hard to judge the power level of your team just by sight. Unlike many fantasy MMOs where you can often recognize the high powered gear a player has in this game it can be a challenge to tell the difference between a team full of exemplared incarnates loaded up with a bunch of set bonuses and a group of newbie players still using training enhancements in half their slots. I was in one team where the guy who was acting as our tank, that I was just barely managing to keep alive with my empathy conytoler, complained that half his enhancements had "expired". And he was not the only newbie in the group. Which went a long way toward explaining why we had such a hard time at first. While I was baffled as to why he would let that happen I didn't complain. It was a pretty fun team, even though we wiped, or nearly so, a couple times; because it forced the group to actually do some communicating in order to come up with a strategy to complete the missions.

I guess that explains it then. Now, if only I can remember to dismiss Phantasm the next time I am on a mission with snipers. Are Cray and Nemesis the only ones that have them? I suppose I can look it up.

I DO usually have Phanty out when running around. But he usually lags well behind me, and I could swear that I have come around a corner and had them aggro to me. It may well be it that when this happens he is the one drawing attention. I will need to get a Nemesis radio mission and do some testing without him out and see how close I can get.

I would suggest an alteration where in place of the current limitation you make it something similar to a brute rage bar. Where as soon as you toggle on the power you get a small to modest buff to your resistances but the longer you stand in one spot and don't move the higher your resistance gets. You can move or jump any time you want but it immediately resets this buff to base level as soon as you do. You could rationalize it thematically as "gathering power from the earth" or something.

Looking at the Paragon Wiki I see that a sniper has a perception radius of 149 while Superior Invisibility has a stealth radius of 200. And yet (almost only on mission maps, but I may be miss-remembering) I regularly experience a sniper "seeing" me from quite a long way off. According to these numbers it would seem that having SI active means you should be able to walk up to melee range even on a sniper. Am I misunderstanding something? Or, is there something in the Paragon Wiki article on stealth that is inaccurate? https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Stealth_and_Perception

I believe the only power better than a Stalker's hide is Superior Invisibility from Illusion set. Everything else looks to be significantly lower. Although, I usually take stealth at some point on most characters since it is so handy and it works pretty well for most purposes. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Stealth_and_Perception

That is fine. If you seek to balance the game around TFs or other official/regular game content I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if TFs have any larger a number of mobs or more difficult content, other than the AV fights, than architect or radio mission set at +4/x8; but even if they did it is regular game content. Considering them and the role of brute ATs in them is fine. My only point is that if you start balancing the game around concerns for an exploitative activity like farming you risk toppling it over. Farming is about optimizing your build for max output. What you want as a farmer is to make the game as easy as possible, You want to optimize your output with minimal effort. That can be a game in and of itself. And one I enjoy. But if you asked me what changes I wanted from the perspective of a farmer it would be for the mobs to have less health and provide more influence and XP when defeated. Because farming is about optimization. I will say again, it is an activity that I participate in and actually enjoy doing, but it is taking advantage of missions designed an optimized to make the game's version of money at an accelerated rate. While the regular game content should be designed primarily to challenge and entertain. Balancing the game around content is an attempt to make it as close to equally challenging and entertaining for everyone as possible. That should be the goal of any change.

So much for my bright idea. New item for the developer wish list though...

You can give permission to people outside your SG to enter it, can't you let them access storage there too? If so you only need one toon to be the "owner" of the base and an actual member of the SG. The rest could just access it and its storage. Then join whatever SG they like.

While I could be wrong I don't think this will be a major hit for fire farmers. (Or any other kind, S/L or Rad I think?) It may even be a zero sum change since their survival is a combination of resistance and defense. And as someone who does it I don't think the game should be balanced around it AT ALL. I get a certain entertainment out of doing it as a sort of exercise in optimization, otherwise I would not do it even though it is "profitable". And while I would not consider it an exploit by any means, it is taking advantage of a sort of loophole in the game "rules" and so, when weighed against the balance of the rest of the game content, I do not think it should be counted for purposes of game balance.