By “accessory”, I meant some item I could hold, purportedly as a focus for my powers. With as much customization as there is, I sort of thought there would be something like that available, but I guess not.
You’ll have to wait for City of Titans for that kind of customization.
Some powers give you an object you can hold, like a weapon or shield, and you can customize that in the costume editor. Other than that, no. It’s much like Champions Online in that sense.
Another costume option that I’m sure must be there, and that I just didn’t see, is a utility belt.
There are belt styles you can pick from, and a lot of them have pouches and other gadgets on them. Is that what you mean?
Yeah, I looked through the belt styles, and didn’t see one with pouches and gadgets, but I’m sure that was just me being selectively blind. Hey, it was late at night, I was tired.
I am enjoying some of the new (i25) Blaster secondaries, but I wish there was a source of info outside the game to look at them and compare. They’re explicitly not in Paragonwiki, which apparently has deliberately decided not to host any post-Sunset content.
I don’t know either; that’s why I asked.
I saw instructions on how to add friends so I added @dangerosa, @thermocline and @balanced. The Chat window is tiny tho and I don’t know how to check if people are online. Or how to send tells, for that matter. People keep asking me to do stuff and I can’t figure out how to reply to them so I just say it in Broadcast.
Thanks for that tip on the game difficulty, by the way. I was thinking “ddamn, this is way easier than I remember”; now I can make it a little more challenging.
There are a bunch of them, about midway thru the list, IIRC. I used to wear the big utility belt with a huge radio on it as a Mastermind. If you do, when they call their minions they pull the big walkie-talkie off their belt, there’s a squelch of static and the thugs appear. Pretty cool little detail just for using a certain belt eh.
I believe that replying to someone involves typing the backspace key when you aren’t in a text field of any kind. I think I found that one out by accident. :o
You’ll find some utility-belt styles around the 30th down in the list. Tactical 1-3 have various arrangements of small pouches and ampules. Imperial Defense has larger, more obvious pouches. Official is a straight-up cop belt, with large pouches, radio, and a tonfa. Stealth is the last that I see, with small two-toned pouches.
If you click on Friends in the menu, it will expand a box with your friend list. You can see there which friends are online. The dropdown at the top of that box lets you switch to Global Friends, so you can see if those people are online, regardless of which character they’re playing. For people who aren’t on your list, you can select Team and click “Find Member”. This brings up a search interface that lets you look for people by name, archetype, which map they’re on, and so forth.
Quick chat guide:
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The tiny little buttons just above where you type switch channels directly. If they’re too small to read or click, clicking on the channel name brings up a dropdown list where you can choose the channel.
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Send a message to someone directly with /t [name], [message]. /r [message] will send your message to whoever last sent you a tell. Hitting backspace while not in the chat pane will automatically fill in /r. Clicking on someone’s name in chat brings up a menu that lets you send them a message (and various other things, like sending their team leader a message–useful if you want an invite to their team).
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The little speech-bubble button at the right of the text box brings up the emote menu. Homecoming has also added a Notoriety selector to it, so you can adjust your difficulty level anywhere (although if you do it in a mission, you’ll have to reload the mission for it to take effect).
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It’s widely considered good etiquette to send a tell before sending a team invite. This is sometimes waived if everyone is quickly assembling for an event, but it’s generally nice to ask someone if they’re interested before making a popup appear on their screen. Some people just reflexively dismiss blind invites.
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Using Broadcast for everything tends to be considered noobish; that channel is best used for actual zone-specific events and questions, because it can get very spammy if everyone tries to have individual conversations there. General conversations do happen in Broadcast, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you’re trying to talk to a specific person, it’s usually better to do so in tells or Team chat. It’s like making a phone call as opposed to shouting over the noise in a crowded bar.
First thing I do in a new toon is enlarge the chat box; click & hold on the bar under the tabs then drag.
Second thing I do is move Help and LFG into their own tabs so they don’t clutter up the main tab.
I should have mentioned customizing tabs, but my “quick” guide was already getting long-winded. 
Thank you both. Balanced, that wasn’t too long at all; I thought it was an excellent succinct explanation.
I tried to enlarge the chat box once (I remember having it larger back in the day) but moved on when it didn’t work as expected.
I tried the little tiny buttons but didn’t see one that said Tell or Reply so I just let it go. I did figure out that Space Bar would let me type and without anyone to really talk to that was fine; didn’t realize the “slash letter” thing was part of this game too.
Thanks again.
Last night I played for about 80 minutes. Took me that long to do 2 missions and the last one (“Save Dr. Perry’s work” I think) I failed at. 
But I got about a level-and-a-half out of it, so hey, not a waste of time, right?
ETA: Are character GUI layouts/settings stored somewhere? I usually just find that file and copy/paste it into all my toons for these kinds of games.
You can save them to a file.
Menu->Options, “Save Options to File” button saves options.
/wdw_save saves your window config to a file. It should automatically be loaded on new characters. You may have to use /wdw_load to load it on other existing characters the first time you log back into them.
Maybe try a corrupter? I strongly suggest sticking to Blue side…it is very difficult to find teams on the Red side…
Blue side and red side? Blue = heroes, red = villains?
If I team up, it’ll probably be with other Dopers.
Speaking of which, how do I add you guys as friends, and join C.E.C.I.L.?
Oh, and also, those things you get that can permanently boost your powers (at least until you level up enough to outgrow them)-- How do you use them? The tutorial was very clear on why I would want to use them, and on the fact that I can combine them to increase their effective level so they’re usable longer, but never actually said how. I tried dragging the “Damage training” one onto my primary damage power, and that didn’t work, nor did any of my mucking about with right-clicks.
EDIT: “Enhancements”, that’s what they were called.
Click the word Enhancements in the Power window and then click Manage. That’s where you load them into your powers.
The friend thing was on page two: I’ll save you the clicking and scrolling: it’s /gfriend @name.
I’m @bomage (of course). The ones I wrote down are @dangerosa, @balanced and @thermocline.