I made a Praetorian toon too and left as soon as I reached 20. Ghost town.
That, and it only lasts 20ish levels, and there’s very little reason for characters who started in Praetoria to ever return there. A level 50 might return to Steel Canyon or Skyway City for the Positron/Synapse task forces, or just because that’s where the front business is they’re investigating for a Malta mission or whatever. But there are no task forces in Praetoria, and no mission that originates outside of Praetoria will ever send you there.
It’s a pity-all of the missions are pretty cool so far, and I like the look of the whole place so far. I’ll tough it out I guess :).
Also, there was a fellow on last night named Alexander Hamidon who spent the entire time quoting the musical. I have to salute the name.
While driving to my brother’s yesterday, I heard Beck’s “Loser” on the radio and decided I was going to make a Stalker toon named “Drive-by Body Piercer.”
It got crickets when I said that during the Hami raid.
I would have got it, that name is awesome.
“Yo bring it on down.”
To any C.E.C.I.L. SG members who might still be playing CoX (all two of us?), I’ve made, in my role of “Perfect Master”, some changes to the base storage - some housekeeping and reorganization.
Salvage storage has been completely reorganized. All rarities are mixed together now, organized completely alphabetically. I retained all yellow/orange salvage, but cut all common salvage down to no more than 10 of a specific item. There were dozens of some specific common items, taking up a whole lot of storage space. This culling has left three completely empty storage racks, as well as letting me delete two other empty racks.
I deleted the two racks to allow me to add two more Inspiration Collectors. Inspirations are now sorted by type: DAM, ACC, END, HLTH, RES, DEF, and MISC. One type per collector, except for MISC, which has the Awakens, Break Frees, and any other misc insps. This should allow everybody to find what they need more easily. All collectors are now labeled, though I do wish there was more than one typeface available for that, as the one available font looks a bit out of place.
I also did a bit of redecorating 
I still play! My main character is Axe Patriot.
ETA: I basically retired my old character who was Martial Arts/Invulnerability. I was constantly running out of stamina and frankly it was boring. He was replaced with a Titan Weapons/Bio Armor character that is awesome.
I’m up to 119 alts at this point. Nine of them have made it to level 50, with a tenth sitting at 45, almost 46. 54 of my alts are level 30 or higher.
My youngest sister inspired my most recent alt. She teaches kindergarten at some private school in California, and she designed a T-shirt that says, “Teaching Kindergarten is my Superpower!” and has a cartoon image of a female superhero in black tights and a red cape. I decided to recreate that character in CoH. I had to decide which powersets would best suit a kindergarten teacher, and ended up making her only my second defender, with Empathy/Sonic Blast. I was surprised to discover that the name, “Kindergarten Teacher”, was unavailable, so I ended up calling her “Schullehrer” (German for “school teacher”).
I’ve got 40-50 alts. I made the entire cast of What We Do In the Shadows into toons, including a few extras. I also made wrestlers Orange Cassidy and Luchasaurus, Human Resources characters Addiction Angel and The Shame Wizard, and a couple inspired by lines from Beck’s “Loser”: Drive-by Body Piercer, and Trailer Park Arsonist. I’m currently working on a SJ/WP tank named Matt Foley, who lives in A VAN DOWN BY THE RIVER! I got to be MT for a Hami raid yesterday.
A SG on my server sponsored a race across newbie zones with level 2 defenders. They followed it up with a Costume Contest (theme: fire) in their base. Whoever designed their base made it look like the effing Palace of Versailles. My SG base looks like a truck stop men’s room. I struggled in the race, but I won 2nd place for my toon Dumpster Fired. I dressed like a garbageman with burn patterns on his uniform and won 250 million inf.
I’m disappointed you didn’t make Beefcake Pantyhose.
(Though honestly, that just sounds like a nickname for superheroes in general.)
Just for you, I will make that toon. A Dominator of some kind.
Ah, I was wondering who did the reorganizing! Sorting by rarity vs. pure alphabetical is debatable, but you did make one newbie librarian mistake: You filled the shelves. With the way you did it, if someone wants to add a new Ancient Artifact to the shelves, they’d need to move something from every other shelf to make room. When I get a chance, I intend to spread them out a bit. I think I might favor keeping one shelf for all of the rares, but alphabetizing the whites and yellows: I will admit to sometimes searching in vain for an item until I realized I was looking in the wrong rarity.
I think I’m at… 34 alts now? Though that number includes several who are basically unplayed: A few who I intended to play, but never got around to, five who are placeholders because I want to eventually make an AE story using those characters, and wanted to make sure I wasn’t using anyone else’s name, one who stays perpetually low-level because that’s part of the joke of the character (and he’d probably get genericked if I ever played him now), and one that looks like my current D&D character that I made just to get a few screenshots. Then I have… four, I think? that I lost interest in or otherwise retired short of 50, two that I’m currently leveling up, and the rest are about fifteen 50s.
OK, it worked out that there were exactly 600 salvage items with 900 spaces available, so I used all of the shelves and put approximately 67 items in each (as close as I could get without splitting one item over multiple shelves). It’ll probably drift away from that as people take things out and add them in, but an occasional move of a few items should maintain it.
There are also some commons and maybe uncommons that I know we’re missing… I’m debating whether I ought to buy some from the AH just to have well-stocked shelves. Probably the best way is to just, when anyone notices you’re missing a white or yellow for a recipe, buy a batch of them from the AH (for yourself and some extra for storage).
Oh, and completely aside from the sorting, great job on the decor! Are any of these new NPCs or other things functional?
For my D&D, Pathfinder and Starfinder games I’ve used Heroforge to mockup my character for my picture on Roll20 and just for creative juice purposes. We’re talking about starting a Mutants & Masterminds game and I went to Heroforge and found that it’s terrible for superheroes. Then I remembered CoH and fired it up to make several potential costume choices!
I’d argue that it hasn’t aged super well visually (really looks like a 2004 game) but the sheer amount of options still can’t be beat.
Indeed, I recognized that doing it the way I did would eventually lead to the issues you mentioned. The difficulty was that all of the racks started out completely, or almost completely full, so I was having to transfer stuff in and out of my own inventory while making a circuit of all the racks, “pushing” stuff to the front in order to make space further down. I totally expected stuff to spread out again eventually.
One of my main considerations was based upon the fact that “common” salvage is dirt cheap and in ample supply on the AH, while the prices for “uncommon” and “rare” salvage seems to fluctuate quite a bit. So I figured that keeping large numbers of each common salvage was unnecessary. There’s also the fact that so few of us are still actively playing - the racks filled up quickly early on, but there aren’t enough of us now balance it out with withdrawals.
I sorted the Inspiration Collectors based upon what I’ve done with three of my other SG bases. On each of my alts, I purchase the “Inner Inspiration” prestige power from the P2W vendor as soon as they can afford it, which gives you three Medium or Large inspirations, on a 30-minute cooldown. So every time they’re in the base, I clear three insp slots (by depositing them in the relevant collector), and use the Inner Inspiration to get three new ones. The new ones that I don’t want get deposited in the relevant collector (if there is room), and then I retrieve the ones I deposited first to refill any remaining slots in my tray. That has built up a very good supply of each type. When I went through the CECIL insp collectors, there was a metric buttload of reds, yellows, and greens, and I think a grand total of four blues. Purples and oranges were pretty scarce as well, but not nearly as scarce as the blues. For the reds, yellows, and greens, I kept all of the larges and bigger versions, filled the remaining spaces in the relevant racks with mediums, and then just deleted the excess.
So for the insps, everybody just drop any extras you have into the relevant rack, if there’s space, and take what you need. I like having one type per collector - it saves a lot of hunting.
Nah, just decorative. The new room I added was going to be a gym, but I found the available equipment options lacking. Then I found that big Talons statue and just thought it looked cool
I do want to add a space to hold some “tech” items that don’t fit in with the “arcane” them, but that don’t have “arcane” equivalents, such as the Merit Vendor machine and the Mission Computer.
Large numbers, certainly. The only reason we had so many of some of the pieces was because they were scattered so much that nobody could notice that we had large numbers. I have no objection at all to selling off surplus common salvage.
I’m just saying that it’d be best to have at least a few of everything, so when you’re crafting, you don’t have to keep hopping in and out of the base to /ah.
The mission computer is unique, but isn’t there a human merit vendor available (like the human trainer, tailor, and shopkeeper) to replace the vending machine?
Ah, didn’t occur to me to check that. I’ll take another look!
And so I checked, and there does not appear to be a human merit vendor available. Or if there is one, I can’t find it.
Also, I have discovered that, when I was reorganizing the salvage racks, I forgot to put back the Halloween salvage (Backalley Brawler Halloween Gloves, etc.) since they got automatically shuffled off into the “Event” salvage tab, separate from the “Invention” salvage tab and I forgot about them when I was moving everything around. There are 28 items total, and I’m not sure where to put them. I think I originally meant to keep them all together in one rack, rather than sorting them alphabetically.
I changed my base decorations a bit. Got rid of that arch in the doorway into the storeroom, because I didn’t like all that empty space above it and couldn’t find anything suitable to fill it in. Instead, there are now a pair of stone pillars flanking the passage on either side, and they reach the ceiling.
Added a base entry code (or changed it, if there was already one in place) in the event somebody wants to invite guests:
SDMB-2742
I’ve also been doing some remodeling in some of my other bases. Here are the entry codes if anybody is interested in seeing my "work in progress:
Random Assortment of Heroes: RAND-6258
Solar Angels: SOLAR-3651
The Charnel House (VG): PLOT-11529
I have one more, but haven’t yet done anything special with it.