Letter from Positron

First off, I will meet you all in Atlas City Hall tonight. I posted on the boards and there are a few people/SGs who will be joining us.

Now onto Posi's letter:
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Two of the biggest complaints we see about the base system is "Stuff is too expensive" and "It takes us too long to get a base that does anything useful."

Statesman and I have looked closely at the data. We have looked at various Supergroup sizes and how they have been earning Prestige since CoV launched. One thing became clear, and that was that players were not earning Prestige at the rate that we had expected them to.

To this end, you can expect to see an (approximately) 25% increase in Prestige earning. This will be in an upcoming patch (have to get it through QA).

To address the issue of "It takes us too long to get a base that does anything useful" we are adding in some new rooms (in the same patch):

The Oversight Center (Found in the Control Rooms tab):

This is a 3x3 room that costs 50,000 Prestige. It can hold 1 Control item, 1 Storage item, and 1 Workshop item (as well as unlimited decorative items). This room is most likely going to be the first room you build in your base, and should be easily affordable by just adding a couple members into your Supergroup. "What about energy?" you ask. Well that is handled with a new Control item, a small, 25,000 prestige, generator that outputs Control and Energy to a level that is "just enough" to get the minimal functionality of the base online (that being a single Teleporter, Reclimator, and Worktable).

Med Bay:

This is a 2x2 Medical room that costs 50,000 Prestige. It has the restriction of only allowing 1 Medical item in it (no Anchors, no Aux items). This will allow you to get your "Revive in Base" functionality faster than you could previously.

Teleport Bay:

This is a 1x2 Teleport room that costs 50,000 Prestige. It has the restriction of no Dimensional Anchors and only allowing 1 Teleporter and 1 Teleport Aux Item (so your Teleporter is restricted to going to only one zone). This gives your base some limited Teleport functionality almost out the gate.

Workshop:

A new 1x2 Workshop will be available costing 50,000 Prestige. It, too, can not have any Dimensional Anchors in it, and it is limited to 1 Worktable and 1 Storage object, as well as 1 Empowerment Station.

Our goal has been refined since the original launch of City of Villains. We now want to allow a small Supergroup of 4 or 5 fairly active players to be able to afford something new in their base every few weeks. These new, lower cost rooms, and combo Control/Energy item, allow us to do just that, without making large Supergroups attain the top tier stuff too quickly.

This week Statesman and I (among others) will begin looking at the larger Supergroups and determining where the shortcomings are at that end of the system and figure out what we need to implement in order to get larger Supergroups to a level where both they and we are happy.

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Positron
Lead Designer, City of Heroes
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While certainly the new small rooms won't be of any use to us (except maybe over on Villains), the bump in prestiege will certainly help us get towards the 11 million prestiege secured plot a lot quicker. I thought perhaps we could just get secured rooms, but by the time we get the ones we need, we'll be at nearly 11 million anyway. And they are also larger rooms, so everything won't be able to fit on our current plot. So we might just upgrade secret plot sizes to save on rent (I've heard spent prestiege is taxed less than banked prestiege) and then cash in when we've finally reached our goal.

By the way, I placed 5 dimensional anchors in the base. I challenge anyone to go in and tell me how long it takes to find them.

Wow, wouldn't it be nice to get a 25% retroactive increase on the prestiege we've already made? :) 25% less screaming about being in SG mode! :-P Woot!