Greycat

Heh... ... first thing I'll answer this whole thing with is this: https://web.archive.org/web/20120907080230/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=263335 When MA was in beta still, I spent a bunch of time writing up the Mission Architect tutorial series. Think it's on the HCWiki, too. Nearly burned myself out on the system by the time it went live 😄 So.. yea, I've created a few. I also co-ran a SG where either I or a co-leader typically had something up nearly every week (if it wasn't an otherwise-played-out scene or we decided to break things up with "training," an SG meeting or TF.) *That* will burn you out... Onward: Have you created any custom missions in the AE? Yes. Many. If so do you prefer to build standalone singular missions or create essentially your own story driven taskforce? Depends what I'm going for. usually it's at least 3 missions. If it's a single mission, it's possibly from wanting *that* map for an RP scene, and it'll be empty with a glowie. It may not even get published. Do you create custom NPCs or enemies for your content? Almost always, and some of those have become actual characters I play. I have one or two that are just "hmm, what were these old enemies..." as well. Does that add to your narrative or just a creative outlet for you? .. yes. 🙂 What other elements of the Mission Architect do you use when designing your missions? Everything, from map selection to what can be interacted with. Are there RP elements to your story driven AE missions? Some encourages reading, the people I tend to play with will RP through things anyway, and sometimes the end of (or even the middle of) the arc will have a "Go to this base and/or this portal" for some interactions. How difficult are your AE missions? Eh. Depends. Some are more "just play through and read the clues." Some - especially with the SG I'd mentioned previously, who could just roll through things - I'd try for the "yes, I *am* trying to murder you all" difficulty. (People for some reason do not like facing all time manipulation users... with all the slows.) What drives you to design your own missions or stories in the AE? Some things can be just RP'd, some things you want people to have to beat things up or *see* a character they're facing, sometimes it's (reasonably) reliable repeatability when people wont' see things at the same time, but I want them to have this touchpoint experience of having done XYZ. OK, a couple arcs. I make no promise to anyone else thinking they're good. Seriously legacy arcs. These are essentially as old as AE is. Maybe minor tweaks while on live, but otherwise ancient: Hero Corpse - 25648 Tsoo Faced - 25649 Not *as* old, but something I'd started as an RP series - Ax: Dominae et Librum - 49532 Fabulas ut Nuntiarem (Libris arc 2) - 52390 (I don't recall if I finished the series, I'm pretty sure I had at least two others I haven't republished.) "For the heck of it" arcs - tossing old enemy groups into an arc with absolutely no story to remember what they *were* exactly: Mystery Groups - 54425 Time Vikings! - 54426 (Because vikings deserve to be on a ship, plus time vikings!)

All of this. And as mentioned, it also affects the AE editor, where you'll often be tying longer lengths of text for mission briefings, sendoffs, clues, etc. (And which, unlike the way it acts in the bio editor, you can also go back to edit and have line breaks completely removed, everything jumbled together with <br>and the like exposed.)

Depends entirely on: - the character - Their level - What they're facing - How much of a hassle I feel like dealing with. - If it's a mission I've outleveled slightly or not - Sometimes just the mission itself and the end goal. I'll take the same character at +somethingxsomething one day, get a new mission, drop the level, run like that for a bit, get another mission against a different group, up the level, run (say) Ramiel's arc where the point is the slot and all the ixp between start and end is wasted, drop it to -1x0 and rush the objectives, finish, up th elevel again, etc. Personally I tend to find +4x8 annoying more than fun. Unless maybe it's a farm, and even then a bit tedious.

The editor (and whatever's going on behind the scenes with it) needs to be fixed first, I think, both for the hidden characters and the sudden "no, you can't type any more, but I'll keep it buffered, so if you click somewhere else it'll show up there" nonsense. It affects not just bio space but creating anything in AE. See how that affects space usage with characters first, I'd think. Frankly, I wouldn't mind a linkable CIT-like ("official" site) that you could link directly from the character...

There's not necessarily a "child friendly" designated server or one that caters towards rugrats. 😉 If they're only playing with you? I'd say grab one of the lower pop servers and just arrange their chat to not have General and/or any other problematic channels showing. You can somewhat "lock down" what they see, both through hide options and removing chat channels (including, IIRC, tells.) Then save that config for any new character they make.

Hmm. Probably isn't actually "small" but adding level range and alignment filters to the character search.

OK. So the reason what seems logical to me wouldn't work and couldn't be looked at that way is because the system wasn't designed to do things in a way that would make sense that way. Yay Spaghetti! 😉 But thanks for the answer. Yeah, to me it would seem like you'd want - say "Account" (handling the initial login) able to know "this person logged in today, this person hasn't logged in for two years" (and that would likely also have been set with active/inactive flags or whatnot talking to a billing server on live that would be NC's domain, but that could also be manually set by customer service types to ban an account *now* if needed,) which could then talk to the individual shards and say "Hey, if you have '@ this guy' on your list, run this script," instead of the back and forth and other checks it sounds like we have. But it's something that'd have to be designed in from the start (or early on.) I still say it'd be better to do it by account first, but that's more a "In theory ... if that were actually feasable, which it sadly doesn't sound like" preference at this point rather than a request.

OK, but hold on. Confusion here. Because - again, granted, not being able to dive into the database and see what's happening.... (or, really, probably know what I'm looking at if we did) Why are we looking past that first step? Step 1 is the account itself being logged into. Before anyone picks a shard or rolls a character, they log in. Which is kind of the very basic, stripped down to everything level of "is the account active or inactive" that's been mentioned. Is *that* available at all, to have anything done with? If the account itself has not been logged into, period, then specific shard activity is kind of irrelevant - they won't have hopped on to Indom any more recently than they would have logged into that *very* first step, into the game itself. (And/or second step of "have they accepted the EULA" - don't know if that's registered anywhere either.) Or is that not tracked or discoverable at that level *at all?* I'm asking because going from there to "the shards would need to know" doesn't logically make sense to me at that point for what's being talked about. In my thinking it should be possible without doing a heck of a lot to look at that account server and say "OK, User3897 logged in today. User 3898 hasn't logged in since October 6, 2022. User 3899 hasn't logged in since 2021." Or "Account server, give me a list of all accounts who have not logged in (or accepted the EULA, or whatever) in 366 days or more," and then work with that as the basis, versus a shotgun "character based, active account or not" approach. And wondering why it would involve any shard having to know anything else other than what they already do. I'm reasonably sure the live devs ran their script manually (and seem to recall a comment along the lines of "and it took a while," yeah.) I'm just confused about the whole "and the shards would have to know..." bit, versus "We get this info from the authentication when someone logs in, these accounts haven't been logged into in over a year at all," taking that and just feeding it (and the globals) to the shards at maintenance and saying "Free these up." (Or, to put it another way, I'm asking about parking the car in the driveway, and *to me* it sounds like you're going on to the part of trying to corral the kids to help bring the groceries in and put them away afterward being difficult... I don't care about the groceries, how do we get the car parked in the driveway?) Just looking for clarification here.

Well, yes, it does. (Again, going to that "anyone can spin up a COH server" bit, there's a DB tool that shows "Character," "Account" etc. on it - not much more, and I don't know how to dig for other info in it at the moment.) What I was more aiming at is that the "Account being active" flag was probably more handled by the payment server, which was never part of the game and which determined if you were allowed to log on (or what your status was, later) or not. One less thing for the DBs *we* have to worry about. Basically, two "can you access this" steps: Payment server (NCSoft) => account paid or not => indicate this to game login server to grant or deny access. (THIS one would be interested in time, if the account had run out, etc.) COH server => did the payment server say they can log in? => login => ok, these are your characters, last logon, etc. It wouldn't need to know when the last time *you* logged in was, but it knew how long the character was logged in. What I'm *suspecting* is that whatever tool the live devs ran (only twice, because it wasn't worth it with the result) on live got a list of "last active >365 days" accounts from NC's payment servers, then used THAT to filter for characters using their other criteria (like the second run being purely "under level six, not active for x time") instead of running it solely on the database of accounts. But that's all *purely* a guess on my side. And yes, I'm sure our devs could come up with a reasonable filter or whatnot to tell "this account has not been logged on to for a year," because - yes - it has your characters to show you on your own account. It may not be *easy* - as mentioned, not a db developer.

This one, I'll argue we may not actually have - not in the same way, at least, as we don't have a subscription / payment server (NCSoft has that, and it's not something the live COH devs would ever have touched, because it's not part of the game.) While I'm not a database developer or anything, that is something that could have been handed off sort of like - Payment server: "NCSoft account ThisGuy has accounts on COH, Game1, Game2, Game3. He has paid time on COH and Game2. Game1 and Game3 - deny access, COH and Game2, grant access." *Access* being granted would be different from actual account activity (since it would, I'd imagine, also involve things like if an account is temporarily/permanently banned or not,) and the "paid account" server couldn't care less if you were actually logging in to anything, just if you'd given them money. I don't know what it flagged right offhand, but yeah. "Live-era-did-they-pay" - the only way we know accounts went "inactive" and/or had access to things once we had VIP, paid costumes/ATs/etc - wouldn't care if you were actually playing or not and probably triggered something else in the game's database. ... if that made any sense. In short, they probably had a way of saying an account was "active" (or let's say "live" or "log-in-able") versus "Inactive" (unpaid,) "Free" (limited,) "Banned" etc.

Or leave active players alone and just deal with the ones who actually haven't been in game for a year or more and aren't likely to come back. ... for that matter, you can spin up a copy of COH on your own, including a character database, and see just how little space a character or account takes up.

You say "especially," meaning you're not ruling out *active* accounts also having characters deleted if they don't meet some metric. I can see that helping the database, sure, because someone finding a character they had holding their INF, IOs, etc. that they hadn't used up to the time limit - even though they were otherwise active - would likely leave the game with absolutely zero positive feelings about Homecoming. If I want to hear HC get slammed, I'll just go to Reddit, no need to delete anyone's characters for that. And I doubt the database is having any issues with stability. It dealt with far more accounts for far longer than HC's been running when the game was live, after all, and I don't think characters take all that much space.

Since you obviously have zero interest in doing anything but being "right" and telling me I'm "wrong," I'm done with you.

OK, let me get very detailed and specific in my answer. I have a character who was my first 50 in COH. I've brought her into other games, as well. She's here, too. She's the global on my main account. She's 50. I don't dust her off much to play because of all the history and such that just *can't* follow her - the player that played her (eventual) husband isn't here and isn't interested, most of the SG she co-led isn't here, all the stories are in the past, pretty much. She's very much a "legacy" character, even if she's got slightly different powersets in the game now. This character means a *lot* to me - yet I don't play her very much for all the reasons listed. My RP tends to focus on characters that still have stories to tell and be a part of, so those other characters get logged in more. I might not get around to logging her in - I get an itch to play her again for one reason or another, but... yes, that *could very well be* more than a year apart, or I could get the urge to run her in every MSR and Hami raid I can for a month. Neither means I care about that character more or less. Now, mind you, I don't think her name would be taken at all if 50s were opened up to the name policy. It's not an obvious name, it doesn't really reflect her powersets, etc. But if she lost it because I didn't get around to logging her in because of a silly metric applied to an otherwise *obviously active player's account,* I would be *PISSED OFF.* It is an integral *part* of that character, and honestly if someone else did take the name I'd assume malicious intent first (again, because it's not an obvious name for anyone to grab.) Now, as I've said, I've taken her to other games. If someone took her name (or the variant of her name) in STO, Aion, SWTOR? I haven't been on those in years. I wouldn't care. I probably wouldn't even know, because I'm not in the slightest bit involved in those games any longer. But here? Damn right I'd be angry about it. Edit 2: Or to put it another way, you're coming up to me and saying "Why are you keeping those photo albums you haven't looked at in a year? Everything like that should be thrown away or taken to Goodwill." Never mind those are pictures of relatives that have died, pictures from school, pictures of places I've visited that I may like going back to looking at *every once in a while* or showing nephews and nieces on occasional visits. Nope, they're over a year old, throw them away - and while you're throwing them away, you're telling me I *don't* actually care about them because I haven't looked at them in a while. Yes, I *do* care. These pixels and database entries that make up our characters *do* have personal and emotional attachments to us *active* players that are completely unrelated to if we've logged them in in some arbitrary time unit.

Because it is part of a *CHARACTER* the ACTIVE PLAYER cares about. Even without your housekeeping metrics. Yes, some people see characters as just a bunch of stats and don't care what their name is as long as they can melt a pylon in 5 seconds. Others don't. Why is this so difficult for you to grasp? Why do you keep wanting to insist that the characters *active players* care about, they actually "don't," *despite being told to the contrary?* If the *player* is active, they shouldn't have to deal with this, period. If the concern is "people who don't care about the characters are sitting on ALL THESE NAMES," then deal with the players that obviously *don't* care by any metric - as shown by *not even logging into their accounts* for over a year.

Played time - even that recorded in game - can be wildly inaccurate. I don't know of anyone who's had *less* time than they played showing - especially with leveling pacts no longer being a thing - but more is definitely a thing. The example I've given in the past is running a "shield squad" with three friends of mine. We only were on at the same time, to run these as a group. Average time played to 50 on the other three (we checked when we hit 50) for them? 80-ish hours. Mine showed over 300, and I certainly wasn't on that character nearly four times longer than them. And *characters* are tied to *player* - or account. So instead of guessing about why I may not have played a specific character on my *obviously active* account and risking annoying a player who's invested into Homecoming (no, I don't mean monetarily, just to cut that argument off,) deal with the accounts of people who haven't been here in years and who most *certainly* aren't interested in keeping the names they grabbed years ago. Don't *assume* a character I'm not on every day, week, or month isn't important to me. Or that I'm just "sitting on the name." I am an active player. Deal with the ones that most *certainly* aren't interested because they haven't been in the game in *any* way, shape or form for over a year. There's *zero* reason for those to be reserved, regardless of level.

If the question is "inactivity means release the name," and you don't think 50s should make a difference, you should absolutely be saying "yes, by account." An active *player,* regardless of how active an individual character on their account is, should have precedence over someone who went "ooh, it's back, shiny" and played for two months several years ago, never to return, no matter *how* many 50s are on that obviously inactive account or how they got there.

Snipped various points I agree with and others I feel are rather poor assumptions. However, this is why I tend to lean more towards "Pay attention to ACCOUNT activity, not character." I'm an active player, but some of my characters don't get played a lot (they're pulled out for certain things, for instance,) so I've got to go through multiple accounts (RPer, there are reasons) and make sure everything's out of the 'danger zone.' I'm told (I believe in the beta thread that this was announced in) that for some reason HC can't *track* account activity. Granted, we're not paying, there's no separate payment server that says active/inactive/renew and controls access to the game... but I find it hard to believe something *can't* see "This account hasn't been logged into in a month/a year/three years." If the issue is that people rushed on to HC and reserved a bunch of names at launch and then never came back, surely the *account* would be the place to look for that and the *account* would be where you'd want the names - level 1, level 50, whatever - freed up, since those would be obviously inactive characters and accounts. And would avoid "Hey, my RP character I pull out for an event, that doesn't need to be level 50, got renamed" for an active character while freeing up names that are - after a year or more on an inactive account - likely never being touched again, regardless of level.

The Eternals is a movie that should've been a series instead. I'm not sure how they thought it would work as a movie. Big cast of characters nobody had seen before in the DCEU rushed through so nobody had time to get to know or care about who or what they were, rushing to fight off another threat nobody really had time to get any sense of build up or threat about, and done... If someone asked me to write a movie with an eye towards having it fail? It'd be The Eternals.

There's a lot that'd be nice to have on the character select screen. This is just one of the things that's been asked for a good bit... and would still be nice to have.

So, for those of us who like playing with poisons, we only have ... poison. There's nothing that directly matches, thematically. Sure, you can argue for plant control, somewhat, and spines if you *really* like bananas, but... More toxic sets might be fun. Generally I'd see these having an effect of gradually (or quickly) wearing down an enemy's defense/reisst, and having it keep stacking (if it's mechanically possible, possibly starting to add DOT after some point. I'd suspect it is possible, due to things like disintigration and scourge.) Stunning and otherwise disabling the enemy would also be fully fitting as they react to noxious gasses and the like. While these aren't full set descriptors with powers and such, a few rough thumbnails follow. Toxin Blast - Does both Toxic and Smashing (from the projectiles hitting you) damage. It's interested in both weakening the enemy and keeping them at range, so things like (say) a toxic pool as part of an AOE that slows the enemy and/or stuns (from the smell) or holds (maybe on stacking) would fit. To deal with resistances, *maybe* we could have something like Swap Ammo which lets you go more towards smashing or more towards toxic damage (or balanced) as options would be useful. (And yes, animation wise I could see regular blasts, "lobbing" some of the attacks, or - yes - even the poison pool's spitting options for animations.) Toxic armor - OK, so other than "let's make more sets" I've got a different personal interest in this. Before COH came along, I had a character - inspired by Dennis Cuzinski in the New Universe D.P.7 series - who basically had this. Due to a mutation, he just started oozing toxins. He could make "spitballs" (which, thanks to the rules of the system being a bit silly at times, I managed to destroy a bunker with once...) and could walk into a room full of enemies and, in his words, just "smell bad." The noxious cloud he could create could blind or incapacitate enemies, as well as eat through armor and weapons (and his clothes, and bulkheads...) When I came to COH in i3, my first character - Memphis Bill - was an attempt to come close to him, but the only sets I had at that time turned him into a fire/SS tank. Dark armor has otherwise been the closest to the "ideal" him... but I'd love to make this come to life. So that bit of preamble should give some idea of what the set would be like. Mostly resists - incoming fire literally melts, after all - as well as PBAOE damage and control, probably working with other powers in the set to give "more." Player regeneration and health would continue improving as you picked more powers up (probably as a mix of a dedicated power and synergy with others) since you get more resistant to your own body trying to eat itself with those same toxins. A somewhat control-leaning tank. Toxic Control - My main thing here is "just how do we *animate* this to show control?" Some things - stuns, choking, and a similar "toxic pool" as mentioned before are easy, but this might be a graphically boring set, honestly. Possibly having "fumes" rising from the enemy (singular or in groups) to show where the area of effect is, and/or "bubbling" around their feet. Also possible in here is a slow/small DOT/-tohit "cloud" (with chance of confuse) using a non-stealth-inducing version of Steamy Mist's graphics to show the area of control. Other than that, it'd be a fairly standard control set with the debuffs we've been going with with the other toxic sets. Pet? ... *shrug* I don't know, something ooze-y? Toxic Melee The one that's really "how do we make this look like... toxic melee? What would a toxic melee look like?" AOEs and cones would be "sprayed" or "splattered," of course, and likely build on each other for damage (and work in synergy with any other toxic powers to build damage even on top of their powers that have -res side effects) but other than that... yeah, hadn't really developed this much. 😉 It and the blast, of course, would contribute to the assault version on doms. Just rough thumbnails of an idea for another thematic branch of powers to go along with Poison.

Should talk to the guy complaining about having too many threads to do anything with. >.> 🙂

Yeah. that's not spoilery. Honestly, what I'm going to say is probably more spoilery than what Hyperstrike did: Yeah. Movie is supposed to be a big setup for future stuff. We know this. But ... ok, some is interesting, the rest *feels* like "We're setting things up." Mind you, I enjoyed the 2 1/2 hours of diversion. It wasn't mindblowing. It didn't *really* leave me feeling "Oh, that was awesome!" or whatnot. It gave me an excuse to kick back and eat popcorn (well, pretzel bites in my case.) One character is both "Hey, look, it's him! Kinda cool!" and one step away from being the humor equivalent of a fart joke. That character should've either been treated better (with more of a backstory,) or held off on and put in somewhere else. They ended up being utterly disposable as far as movie plot, or even subplot. They kind of fell seriously flat. Honestly, so did the post-big-fight bit. Watching it will make which "post fight bit" obvious. Verdict - not bad. not my favourite. Certainly better than the ... what was it, eternals was it? but that's *not* a high bar.

Well, considering on live they only ran the script twice - and the second time *radically* dropped the level that was affected because it didn't really make a lot of difference... Also... *looking up a few posts* I didn't think i'd have to specify that no, I was not saying or even implying anything about two million accounts. That should be obvious.

I've played an earth/ff controller. It was fine when I did it, with a team, and pre... various updates, plus sunset. Now, it's just .. slow. Bots/FF - at least on live - nearly bored me off the entire AT since - especially after the "all buffs are AOE" was done to the set, it left absolutely nothing to do other than press two buttons every once in a while.