I wonder if the developers of the game realized when they created Ouroboros that it would just be used as a shortcut to get around from point A to Z.

That's all I see Ouroboros used for.

I'm sure that was never the intention.

Ouroboros has the story arcs for the contacts for unlocking these TFs!

For Hess, A Madman's Council (contact: Lars Hansen).

For Katie, Crossing Over (contact: Buck Salinger).

So it looks like you can always go back and unlock! Is this new?

[ETA] I am told: No, not new, but there is no longer a bug that prevents the flashback mishes from unlocking the TFs. But I just went to PW to search the patch notes and see no mention of when this was fixed. So, when was it fixed, and where was the fix announced? [/ETA]

Lighthouse posted this note regarding some fixes that weren't initially included in the patch notes.

There are a couple of "exploit" fixes that didn't make it into the patch notes but are intended. These include:

* Removing XP from Rikti Portals
* Removing XP and Influence rewards from the Ouroboros Flashback mission "Welcome to Vanguard"

We're working to verify these changes and include them into the release notes. We don't include such changes in the Training Room patch notes because we don't want to draw attention to exploits that are currently on the live play environment. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

In addition, it's worth noting that XP rewards from the Rikti Communications Officer has been increased significantly.

Hell of a patch today, all. Gigantic list under the cut.

( 2.12.08 Version 16.200801222.5T2 )

The top reason is you get a relatively quickly (5 minute) recharging portal to AP, FF, IP, PI, Talos, and board-train mishes! I love being able to quickly go to PI and FF. And in Talos it dumps your near the train, the SG portal, and the trainer. So convenient! And I keep forgetting that you can get to board-trains that way, too. I hate traveling in this game, so this is so nice, I almost wouldn't care if the time travel stuff were to go away.

The second reason is it is a way to get the Spelunker Badge if you missed it. I spent all of Sunday trying to unlock Hess on my blaster on Champion. I was on a great team, and we decided in addition to helping each other hit 25 and unlock Hess, we'd also go for the Atlas Medallion accolade. About maybe half the team didn't know anything about Ouro. The rest of us were delighted to show it to them and get them the portal and get all of us the accolade. Yay!

(And I carefully got us to avoid returning to Outbreak, but now I realize that was a mistake. With a team that worked that well together, getting Isolater probably would have been less painful than usual. Oh well. Unlocking Hess and getting the Atlas Accolade and the Ouroboros Portal is a good day's work. :)

Part I: Ouroboros is Bugged! Don't use it.

Today I had the misfortune of going to Ouroboros for the first time. I was actually looking forward to it. I hadn't played COH at all since November (real life took over) so this was the first time myself and my gaming partner got a chance to check it out.

First mission was ok... but the second missions was TERRIBLE. It dropped us down to lvl 1 and you 1- have only your starting powers (had to use temp powers) 2- you get no XP 3- you have no travel power 4- you have to search a HUGE map looking to rescue someone.

We got off the main path and headed straight to the marker on the mission map because we wanted to get this over with as fast as possible. When the marker piece was done we had missed -1- person to rescue. Now let me repeat. No travel power - huge map - no XP == no fun.

We were talking over skype while trapped in this horrible mission about how this mission was more like a punishment. No travel power - huge map to search and no XP == no fun.

My gaming partner got so annoyed with this mission that he quit to go walk the dog and gave up on gaming for the day. The mission was really that terrible.

So then I alone finally found the final person to rescue and finished the mission.

Fine I thought - no more of these horrible Ouroboros missions - I'll go back to doing regular missions that I enjoy.

But I talk to my contact and they give me another Ouroboros mission. Crap - fine - I'll just drop it from the contact which marks it as complete and then I can be done with Ouroboros.

Well then it said return to contact, and as soon as I talked to the contact it gave me ANOTHER OUROBOROS mission.

There was nothing I could do to make it stop giving me Ouroboros missions. It's not a Task Force. With a Task Force you an just QUIT team to quit the Task Force. This was a story arc. And you can say other story arcs are like that - but that's not true. With normal story arc you have the option to say "No thanks", or if you get stuck in one like this, at least you have the option of out leveling it, and dropping it, and the contact will tell you you have out leveled it and its done. So in effect you can opt to not finish the story arc.

Here you don't have that option because you aren't going to even out level them since they are all exemplared missions. Once you start the first intro arc - you are stuck with it taking up a mission slot and no matter how much you want to get rid of them, you are stuck with it.

Bugged.

Part II: Rude and well ... not bright GM's

So I petitioned to ask how do I get rid of Ouroboros missions from my mission tab. I don't want any more Ouroboros missions. They are terrible.

-2 hours later-, I'm team captain of a team running a fun challenging story arc, and I finally get a message from a GM. I tell him what happened and that I currently am on a full team playing the healer and we were in the middle of combat and the GM immediately started being rude with me.

He said, "Why can't you understand what I'm telling you?" He kept trying to tell me that I was on a Task Force. And I kept telling him... no I was not on a Task Force, because Task Forces you have the option of quitting at any time.

Then he said to me, "You must be new to the game." and that I had "never done a Task Force before." That's when I knew he was a complete idiot. I was playing my PEACE BRINGER at the time. So I informed him that "Yes I am new to the game. I've only played since the BETA and I'm currently playing my Peace Bringer which I could only have if I had a lvl 50 character already so I must be new to the game."

What a dumbass.

That's generally been my interaction with GM's in the game. By the time they finally get back to you after petitioning them, it's been SO LONG since the problem that you've given up and moved on to something else. And if the problem still persist not only are they no help, but they seem to be highly clueless.

Just my experience.

Please read this unfinished guide I am working on and post your thought's and corrections. When it is finished, I plan on posting the finished version on the boards.

Sexy Jay is not quite as sexy as one of our own!

Hey you guys, our very own LJer got his costume pattern choice selected! I was foolin around with the Jester and Enforcer stuff decided to look at the new patterns.

Remember maxered's outfits?


Well Check out the new Dagger pattern!!


P.S. Pay no attention to the colors. lol. I was playing with some odd color combos :^D

P.P.S. The cape is there too, I just checked!

Congratulations maxered!!! Awesome work and I'm so thrilled to have this as an addition!!

Current Mood: ecstatic

I recently did the initial Ouroboros missions with Reboundancy, my one and only 50. I then did a random flashback (a level 14 clockwork arc). It was kind of nifty to be back in the old days again, for a little while. I even put on my first costume, which I haven't used for a long time. But after a while, I asked myself what the point was. Nostalgia is fine for a mission or two; unfortunately, it seems you have to finish the whole arc before you can do something else again. (BTW, is there a way to quit a solo flashback without completing it if you get bored/stuck?)

It is all about the badges, then? Not that there is anything wrong about being a badgehound, I just wondered if I had missed some less obvious gameplay treasure.

Oh, and the exemplaring without needing an anchor could be useful for someone wanting to rack up influence instead of XP, but that is probably pointless for a lvl 50. I seem to get the same influence whether I am exemplared or not.

Anything else? (Talking about the flashback only here, not the Ouroborous missions.)

Current Mood: curious

These just hit the Training Room today. There is NO ETA on when they will go live.

Copied straight from the forum patch notes
( Now Testing in the Training Room - Dec. 4th, Version: 16.20071113.3T )

So, I have been thinking of rolling a new toon a SS/WP tank most likely. However not wanting to go through the same disappointment with invul when it was umm "adjusted" years ago. I am tempted to wait for the inevitable patch for it.

For those of you that are playing willpower now, what do you think will change, and will it be that drastic?

Instead of starting a new flood of padder posts, please everyone use the comments in THIS POST to request/offer pads. I don't want to see again what I caused last time. :x

Does anyone know if SG members using trial accounts will count for the prestige drop?

If anyone has SGs/VGs looking for prestige padders, I offer up free of charge my 12 slots on each of the following servers:

Protector
Victory
Pinnacle
Champion
Justice
Infinity

(Though ACTION UNLIMITED is always looking for a few good toons on Liberty...)

well, I've officially started my badge wh0ring with Ouro and have reached 453 Badges on my FF/Rad Def (still have ~100 more badges to get to complete my OCD, I hope =P). just some hints for you all:

( Read more... )

Current Mood: tired

Hey, now that i11 has dropped, I thought I'd advertize my SGs here for any filling that anyone has space for still on Virtue.  In trade, I've got space to offer on all other servers.

Comment here or send me a global at "@Master Programmer" if you'd be willing to do a swap or something.

1. When we're using the Orouborous to flashback to old missions, do we have to do the entire story arc until we're able to go back to our normal contacts? I'm currently running a Clockwork mission from the teens, and it appears to be stupid long. I'd like to give it a break and go play my stuff for XP, but it appears as if this isn't possible. I thought we could do invididual missions, not just full arcs.

2. I made a keybind for the LJ chat about a month ago, and it worked great. However, I've forgotten what my keybind was ( ;-p ). Since I didn't save it as a keybind file on my computer, is there somewhere I can go get a list of every bind/macro I have made? There are a couple of artefacts from before a respec that I'd like to see.

3. Maybe it's due to using Linux (or the beta nvidia driver), but the textures under the surface of water now show as diagonal lines, as do many of the skyscraper surfaces and curbs on the road. Also, I can't seem to see masks in the character creator, and some of the colour designs on things like helmets and costumes are showing up as blocks of dots, rather than the designs. Does this seem familiar to anyone?

Anyway, I11 is pretty much awesome regardless. I really enjoyed the first arc for the time-travel, seeing the Outbreak, the Fifth Council the Fifth Column [drat, I keep getting the name mixed up - I DO know the difference ;-P ] again, too. Good times, I must say.

Has anyone else noticed that flying with weapons drawn has gone wonky in Issue 11?  I logged in my claws/SR scrapper last night and was flying around PI hunting Carnies, trying to clear a mission slot so The Pilgrim would talk to me.  With her claws out, she stayed in the "hover" pose even while moving.  With claws withdrawn, she used the normal flight poses.  All was fine with flight the last time I had her logged in before the update.  Is this happening with any other weapons besides claws?  I don't have any other heroes who have flight and a weapon to test it out with.

I was just rewatching the official I11 Mender Silos video, and at around 2min 25-30sec in the timestamp, I came across this.

Am I mistaken, or is that BubbleYumm?

So, am I the only one who thinks I11 seems to have smoothed things out? I didn't have lag problems before but for some reason everything just seems to run more smoothly now. I haven't done any drastic hardware changes since the last time I played, although I think I did install new Nvidia drivers; however, I wonder how much of it is the drivers, how much of it is my imagination, and how much is real optimization by the programmers and graphics techs.

I'm expecting to see improvements in especially-laggy areas like the war zone and other outdoor maps when I go from 2GB to 3GB of RAM (don't bother installing 4 with a 32-bit OS; you can't use it all), but that won't be til next week. I'm mostly doing it to solve bad lag problems I'm having with a Battlefield 2: Allied Intent Xtended map (it's got a lot of polygons in it; refinery-like place) but CoX does lag a little bit in some complex Villains maps or if a map is full of people or if it's a large outdoor space. Not much, but enough to drive me crazy. And I like my eye candy and run every game I've got at full detail.