New efforts!

[pinballdave]

It's all speculation, when we get CoH back it's issue 23 and when we get CoH  Legacy it will be level 24. And, the early days working up an auction house to meaningful IO recipes and salvage will be an epic memory to the frontiersmen in the new dawn of CoH

[Taceus Jiwede]

You would be surprised what people could do in a couple weeks. By the end of the first month I'll already be farming and collecting recipes to put in super group base bins. Some people have more time and drive than others ;) The hardest thing will be getting my fire/fire brute up. Probably will take me about 2 weeks since they are squishy :-/ Some will get it done much sooner though.

I agree.  It wasn't that tough to find the mat's needed for IO's anyway.  And it was always vastly cheaper to craft your own anyway.  The set's would be tough, but like you said its pretty amazing what people can accomplish in a short amount of time in games.

[worldweary]

I won't be in any hurry to lvl up or rush any content if we get the game back.With no new powers or new
anything being added I'm hoping to play every contact and mission.I paid the buy it now price so I could
play as much as possible but this time around I won't have to be in a hurry.

[HEATSTROKE]

 Honesty Im not playing a game that locks me into SO's only and I think its unfair of the player base that wants to force their vision of the game onto other people. If you choose to play with SO's only.. then you have the right to make that choice..

[Pyromantic]

Personally I won't be in a huge hurry, although at least some of my early characters would be remakes, and I wouldn't feel the need to slow down their progress either.

I do suspect, however, that within a few days you will certainly see some 50s with reasonably solid IO builds.  Certainly it won't take too long for people to at least get decent frankenslotting.  I never had any interest in AE farming, though I do recall hearing people time their 1-50 runs at about 6 hours.  (Which is truly ridiculous if you ask me.)

As for costs of getting a well-enhanced build while levelling, I recall prior to IOs that it was tricky to get a full SO build with 25s, but quite doable with 30s using only inf you've earned on that character.  Later on I kept a collection of various mid-20s multi-aspect IOs handy so that I could frankenslot once I got up high enough, so I actually couldn't have said how easy it was to SO out at that point.  But I suspect that even just vendoring stuff you find would make kitting out a character with SOs at level 22 within reach.

Some of the early "perk" ideas are interesting from a "what if?" standpoint, though I don't know how many of them are actually practical.  It may be doable to place some once-per-account bonuses for free on the market that can help people get up and running.  Assuming the capability is there to turn on such switches, I think double XP for the first little while is quite likely.

As for which issue I'd prefer to play?  I think that discussion only has interest as a novelty, but I don't see any particular appeal to going too far back.  Quite happy to go to Issue 23 myself, especially as I couldn't play the game during the last 18 months or so due to an arm injury; there's a lot of content there I haven't seen.

[Aggelakis]

The first screenshot though was like issue 10+ anyways, more-so, once people learned how to use IO's.  I was stomping 4-5 groups at a time with my fortunata.

Judging by the look, the first screenshot is before any of the (three?) graphics tweaks, thus issue 5 at the latest (Issue 6/Villains brought the first graphics tweaks). Based on all the limbs I see, it looks like the critters are stacking, so that's super early in the game. I can't remember when enemy collision was updated/implemented. That screenshot is quite possibly an entire map of critters, way more than your paltry 4-5 groups.

[Brigadine]

I believe we will, but minus our old accounts and characters.
Which is fine as that can be more of an opportunity rather then a burden.
Of course IF the sentinel files can do at least a partial restore then that is fine too, but we shall see.

The sentinel files aren't fair to those who couldn't do it.

[Teikiatsu]

I look forward to starting fresh.  It will be interesting to see how popular redside vs blueside vs goldside will be, with the influence, infamy and information available at relatively equal levels.

I look forward to seeing how the market prices will shift when people don't have hundreds of millions to spare.

I'm not looking forward to the AE farms that will spring up.

It will be interesting to see if a happy medium of Hive Hami raids can be maintained.  From what I saw the people who knew how to organize raids moved away from Hami and focused on Incarnate content once their stable of 50s had their necessary shards to move forward.

[Twisted Toon]

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8293/7853492906_910f0d8456_b.jpg

This one reminds me of the bugged Atta mission I had done with a couple of Guidmates once. Every single Troll we engaged in combat with ended up disappearing, including Atta. We finally found each and every one of them crammed into a smallish side tunnel we had passed by near the cave entrance. Atta was in the middle of the huge mob of Trolls. The only one that managed to survive the assult to get to and defeat Atta was the scrapper. Mainly because the individual Trolls would ignore anything that didn't affect them personally. So, the scrapper could be beating one guy and the guy literally 1 foot away would stand there and watch. However, if the Rad Defender tried to help with a DeBuff, a dozen or so Trolls would swarm him, ignoring the Scrapper.

Fun times.

I'm glad they fixed that mission though.

[ivanhedgehog]

I look forward to starting fresh.  It will be interesting to see how popular redside vs blueside vs goldside will be, with the influence, infamy and information available at relatively equal levels.

I look forward to seeing how the market prices will shift when people don't have hundreds of millions to spare.

I'm not looking forward to the AE farms that will spring up.

It will be interesting to see if a happy medium of Hive Hami raids can be maintained.  From what I saw the people who knew how to organize raids moved away from Hami and focused on Incarnate content once their stable of 50s had their necessary shards to move forward.

the ae farms dont bother me one tiny bit. those that want to farm will farm. those that dont , wont. it really didnt make much of a difference either way.

[HEATSTROKE]

Ive never understood the whole AE farm resentment thing. Im far to busy having fun playing my game than to be concerned about how other people choose to play their game.

[chuckv3]

Ive never understood the whole AE farm resentment thing. Im far to busy having fun playing my game than to be concerned about how other people choose to play their game.

Not only that, but because of "supply and demand", farmers meant having 100 of something on the market, and cheaper than it would have been having only 2 or 3 on the market from random drops. So even if you hated farming, I bet you got some shiny new IO a lot cheaper because of farming.

Plus, sometimes when one is low on cash, and wants to enhance something before continuing, farming (or any other general fund-raising) can be a nice change of pace. Even WAY before AE, people used to run their 50s around street hunting to raise funds for their alts. My first 50 was an energy/energy blaster (hit 50 just before ED), and I used to hunt those Circle-of-Thorns groups of 3 or 4 out in the parking lot in front of Portal Corps in PI. Rinse and repeat for a while, and I'd have funds for an entire compliment of 25 SOs for whatever alt just made it to 22. AE farming is just a more efficient version of that.

There are those who think AE is "the right way" to play the entire game (either PLing everything or just making INF), yet they haven't played ANY of the real content. I don't resent those types, even when they get preachy or braggy, I just feel sorry for them.

[Vee]

It will be interesting to see if a happy medium of Hive Hami raids can be maintained.  From what I saw the people who knew how to organize raids moved away from Hami and focused on Incarnate content once their stable of 50s had their necessary shards to move forward.

Hami raids had died out apart from people wanting to do it for badges or nostalgia long before incarnate stuff came around. Probably because if you wanted an HO you could run 3 lrsfs or 2 stfs on different toons in about the same amount of time it took to populate and organize a hami raid, not even counting the actual fight. And I'm probably being generous to the hami in those time estimates.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Not only that, but because of "supply and demand", farmers meant having 100 of something on the market, and cheaper than it would have been having only 2 or 3 on the market from random drops. So even if you hated farming, I bet you got some shiny new IO a lot cheaper because of farming.

Plus, sometimes when one is low on cash, and wants to enhance something before continuing, farming (or any other general fund-raising) can be a nice change of pace. Even WAY before AE, people used to run their 50s around street hunting to raise funds for their alts. My first 50 was an energy/energy blaster (hit 50 just before ED), and I used to hunt those Circle-of-Thorns groups of 3 or 4 out in the parking lot in front of Portal Corps in PI. Rinse and repeat for a while, and I'd have funds for an entire compliment of 25 SOs for whatever alt just made it to 22. AE farming is just a more efficient version of that.

There are those who think AE is "the right way" to play the entire game (either PLing everything or just making INF), yet they haven't played ANY of the real content. I don't resent those types, even when they get preachy or braggy, I just feel sorry for them.

All of this. i'd occasionally run AE missions specifically to get certain salvage pieces i needed. Usually by running arcs that sounded interesting or farms that were built for different ATs. (i usually ran Fire farms on my Widow if i was just doing some quick Salvage acquiring runs.) i certainly didn't mind farmers, AE and otherwise, keeping prices lower on stuff. If that's what they enjoyed it helped me as well.

[Brigadine]

Hami raids had died out apart from people wanting to do it for badges or nostalgia long before incarnate stuff came around. Probably because if you wanted an HO you could run 3 lrsfs or 2 stfs on different toons in about the same amount of time it took to populate and organize a hami raid, not even counting the actual fight. And I'm probably being generous to the hami in those time estimates.

It just required too many people.

[Nyx Nought Nothing]

Hami raids had died out apart from people wanting to do it for badges or nostalgia long before incarnate stuff came around. Probably because if you wanted an HO you could run 3 lrsfs or 2 stfs on different toons in about the same amount of time it took to populate and organize a hami raid, not even counting the actual fight. And I'm probably being generous to the hami in those time estimates.

i was joining Hami raids semi-regularly on Virtue until a month or two before shutdown and also joining the occasional raid on Champion. The Virtue raids generally went fairly quickly, with some completed less than 20 minutes after heading into the bowl (occasionally using pets and nukes to power straight through all the blooms was fast but a bit risky), while Champion raids were usually considerably slower, but more interesting and varied in terms of what the players did. There were a few times i did two or three raids in a row by hopping instances, but not in the last year or so.

[Vee]

Oh the into the bowl part was nothing time-wise. it was all the cat herding prior to that that made it not worth the effort.

[LadyVamp]

Oh the into the bowl part was nothing time-wise. it was all the cat herding prior to that that made it not worth the effort.

I never found it that hard though herding cats is my job.  Those would be Indian cats building on bunch of java powered airplanes while flying in a vmware cloud.   ;)

Excuse me while I ball up my strings.

[Zombie Hustler]

Hami raids had died out apart from people wanting to do it for badges or nostalgia long before incarnate stuff came around. Probably because if you wanted an HO you could run 3 lrsfs or 2 stfs on different toons in about the same amount of time it took to populate and organize a hami raid, not even counting the actual fight. And I'm probably being generous to the hami in those time estimates.

I still remember one Hami raid I tried to do. Took forever to get things started, and then it finally did, and about midway- nearly the end, my system froze because of all the vfx that it just couldn't process. (This was before you could turn off a lot of the extras that increasingly came into the game via power customization and all the costume extras). Was so disappointed, I never tried to join another.

[darkgob]

Hami raids had died out apart from people wanting to do it for badges or nostalgia long before incarnate stuff came around. Probably because if you wanted an HO you could run 3 lrsfs or 2 stfs on different toons in about the same amount of time it took to populate and organize a hami raid, not even counting the actual fight. And I'm probably being generous to the hami in those time estimates.

Hami raids had no badges associated with them.  And "died out" is a relative term.  Infrequent, sure, but if you watched the proper global channels they did still get run (maybe not the case for all servers but definitely some of them, my home Pinnacle included).