gameboy1234

Extra Plus Bonus Annoyance: Maps with jails. Die on this map and you'll go to jail! Be separated from your team! Wait for them to bust you out or try to solo what is probably far too many mobs for your character to handle! So just sit and wait instead! Yeah no...

Ashley McKnight again, Cap au Diable, her second mission at level thirty "Midnight's Hand" part 2, her mission intro text is: "We don't have the man power like Vanguard" Merriam Webster says this is usually "manpower."

Ashley McKnight, red side contact, called her by phone at level 30. "Howdy, PlayerName. What brings you by?" as her opening text.

I think it's supposed to follow Matthew Habashy's arc, which is mostly trying for lots of action and "rush around doing stuff!!" type of gameplay, while also showing off some of the new features of the engine like spawning a character other than your own so you can be "in disguise" during a mission. I think Twinshot is meant to pick up after that and reinforce things you maybe weren't sure about, even if you've experienced them before. But also to experience some gameplay first so that the tutorial wasn't just theoretical at that point. The locations thing is mostly about Day Jobs. You go to City Hall and the Hospital and the Police Department and Wentworth's to learn there are special locations to log out. The level up thing actually gets you over to Kings Row to talk to Blue Steel, so you can learn there's more than one trainer and also how to use the Tram. It's not terrible. The plot, I'll grant you, is a little weak. And the AI personally bugs the heck out of me. But it kinda is what it is. I'd like to see work done on it, but I can see how it's not a priority.

I like this. However I think the developer intent was to actually have the player *dislike* the actions they just took, even while being told the action was necessary. Allowing players an easy out (it's a game, choosing to disobey authority is easy here, but in the real world would you be able to make that choice?) would remove a lot of the pathos that I think developers had planned.

My 2nd best idea is to use the teleport idea, but have the camera fly towards its new location, rather than porting with the player. This would give a sense of distance and scale, while still using what might be an easier mechanic for the engine/server. I don't know if that's possible to have the camera do that, but it's a thought I had.

I like the jump pad idea. I think it's even been proposed. Just dispose of any idea of "jumping" or CoH mechanics and just put everyone on a "track" the follows a basic parabola from point to point and have everyone travel that exact path. I don't know how hard that would be to do with the current engine but trying to finesse the "physics" to get it just right sounds like a far more complicated idea.

The intro to Ouroboros has you actually help the Council win against the 5th Column. You literally are the person responsible for forcing the most important leadership in the 5th Column to join the Council. It's pretty good as lore, and I enjoyed it. I also played it as a villain, as a hero it might be pretty dark actually. Mender Lazarus's mission, level 30-39.

That's actually a point. Someone on the design team was really interested in adding vertical challenges to all maps. I'm not sure why. Maybe they thought there should be an advantage to Flight that other travel powers didn't have, or if it was just an aesthetic choice (or some sort of PVS in the graphics engine?), but it's kinda horrible. Flattening some maps and making things more accessible seem like at least worth considering. Some pet peeves: 1. League Code. Whether it's scrambling the league on mission load or the obtuse UI, this is a pretty horrible piece of tech. Frankly I think the whole thing needs an overhaul. At minimum fix the tech issues, but it would be useful to also look at the UI and make it easier to use. A feature to lock teams to 50 would be useful (auto-promote a team member to leader). Be able to reorganize the order of members of team members. Clearly indicate the actual level of each individual so decisions can be made who to promote and where to put them on a league. More better options for display. Etc. 2. Collision Detection. The CD seems too aggressive most of the time. This is especially true in tight maps like caves and around lots of small geometry objects. Large toons can have a lot of difficulty here. Flyers have the collision shapes displaced from the model so it's easy to misjudge the actual location of the character. Looking at game design articles, CD in modern games is used to help the player move around the map. The implementation in CoH seems to be a classic and basic implementation of CD, with the result of a CD being basically "full stop," which is pretty terrible for players. In my mind, I think the client should be in charge of finding the best way to move around the map based on player actions, and the server should just verify that the player doesn't CD and the movement is valid (and the result of an error here can be "full stop" since the client was supposed to generate this). 3. NPCs getting stuck. This is an old problem and really needs fixing. I'm talking about getting rag-dolled into geometry and then the animation doesn't CD in their new position and they're stuck when they stand up into geometry or something. 4. Gravity Geysers. These things always suck. You need a magical incantation and a dead chicken to get one to work right. Just replace them already. 5. Walk Speed. Needs to change based on the size of the model. It's "walk," you're moving slowly and all your powers are shut off, I don't think there's any need for "fairness" or any exploits to worry about here. Bonus gripe: Temp Power Icons: Always grey. I think it would be useful to start adding some color to these, I often have issues telling them apart on my tray. Might have been OK when there were few of these in game but now there's dozens. Start by adding a bit of color to the most popular powers (Envenomed Daggers?) and then see how players like it. Maybe decide on a common theme like a black outline or something.

The Homecoming Wiki is broken. Even using the link at the top of this forum it's leaving little 404 pooters all over the place. I guess the database might be down, the page returned looks like it's actually from the wiki software and isn't a default page from Apache or something. Sorry if this isn't the right forum, I just wanted to let someone know.

Hit boxes in this game are in general roughly the size of Texas and all outdoors put together. I've posted before about my Dark Wolf (? the Dark Control pet) having a hit box large enough to be a game play problem on cave maps. And recently I noticed my giant ice/ tanker has a wonky hit box too. They need to be looked at imo. Not trying to invalidate your request here, just piggyback on it and amplify it. A quick fix like START or maybe adding a reduced hit box to Walk or something would be great. Probably have to add a mechanic to not engage the smaller hit box if you have aggro or been in battle within the last 30 seconds or something. It's hard to imagine someone abusing "I'll move slowly and shut-off all my powers" but I suppose it could happen. Anyway, yes please, look at hit boxes, including special cases for RP.

I'm pretty sure newspapers were part of CoV at its launch. They're too heavily integrated into the missions not to be. Radio mishes I honestly don't remember when they got added. I can't actually recall if it was late beta, early afterwards or later.

Yes, more or less this was my whole point. The gating system that Newspapers provides just isn't needed, or fun. Random missions are fun enough if you've completely run out of contacts, or just are in the mood for mindless fun. But they shouldn't be required to get to the story arcs. With higher XP rates it's actually tough to pick up more than an arc or two before you out level everything. Yup, this would be the best solution. Just open up all except the specially gated ones right away. It's fine for a contact to introduce another contact, but we shouldn't be required to do the newspapers to start off with a new contact. I think you can just walk up to a lot of the contacts, but you have to know where they are, and new players (and sometimes old players) don't know that. Discoverability is pretty poor in this game, so having a marker and a broker to tell you "go here" would actually be useful. Blue side new contacts often just pop up, brokers serve the same idea red side. I'm still also focusing on actual play experience, rather than theory crafting. Superior Invisibility = red side fun. I think that observation ought to lead to changes.

I started a new Dom w/ Illusion Control on red side to play though arcs. It's shocking how much superior invisibility improves newspaper missions. Just ghost them and skip them, it's so much better to not have to actually "play" through what is obviously padding and filler. It's what really convinced me that forcing newspapers are a bad idea.

We were talking in chat and someone mentioned something I agree with a lot. So here we go. The newspaper missions that you must do red side to get a contact are really annoying and padding out content. It's an old design that really isn't relevant, or needed, or fun. Instead make the newspapers optional, like blue side. When you talk to a broker, you should get the newspaper spiel, and also offered a contact to work with. Talk to the broker again and get another contact. Yes I'd like two options right off the bat. Of course we should still be able to do newspaper missions and mayhem missions if we want to. But right now they're forced on you and that feels bad. Find Contact can help by-pass that but still isn't ideal.

So I did this mish through flashback, the mish says "complete" but I'm still on the TF and I can't talk to Archmage Tarixus to complete the mission. (That means even when I'm standing in front of him I don't have the blue hand cursor and I can't interact with him at all.) Might be operator error by me but I think this one's a little buggy. It's only two missions and I completed them both, not sure what is up. I did get all the flashback badges at the end for buffed enemies and such.

I got out my old level 25 Peacebringer and played around with it last weekend. It was a fun time! But some of his kit is rather odd and old school. Especially after playing around with teleport powers like Jaunt, the White Dwarf Step seems slow to cast and hard to use for actually moving around. A much faster cast time would make it more useful. Maybe with a "use three times in a row and it has a longer cool down" like Jaunt has. I think I would be happier if White Dwarf Step actually worked exactly like Jaunt tbh. I'm just kind of idly musing here, I'm not really sure what impact it would have for the AT overall. But it would make my White Dwarf happier, I think. Peacebringers have inherent travel powers so it's not like White Dwarf Step is needed for long range travel. Any thoughts? There's probably some consequences I haven't considered...

I've had the idea for a while that some pool powers should duplicate primary powers, for those who want to add a little extra to an existing character. Like Kantana/SR for a "Jedi" but then add a smaller pool of TK for the extra powers. I don't know how hard it would be to proliferate existing power sets into pool powers, but that might add some flexibility and fun to many builds. Oh and someone new this weekend was asking how to get more "gadget" type powers into his build, seems he wanted to be normal with all gadgets. One or two gadget type pool powers would be great too.

I don't want to get into one of those fights but it does matter, a lot. "It doesn't matter" is a mathematically provably false statement. I suspect it's something like at least 50% of the entire player base. Capped defense are really easy to get. Fortunately I think the devs understand all of this and there's no chance of this being implemented. I just wanted to point out a serious math error here and ask that you check your math work. I know it sounds like "only 5%" but it isn't, Arcanaville's work back on live showed that it isn't, going from 5% chance to be hit to 10% chance to be hit doubles the damage taken.

Yeah this. Toss ideas onto the pile, it's up to HC to sort out what they want to work on. I'd like to see this, there's quite a lot of colors that can't be represented with the simple choices we have. Otoh it's not a huge priority either for me personally. I'd like it if it shows up, if not other stuff is cool too.

Demons and Necromancy is always good. Pair with just about anything you like, Pain is a great support set, but any of them will work (Thermal is great aesthetically).

You mean for us to hit them? Or them to hit us? My defense based tankers would hate it if the defense max was dropped from 95% to 90%, you'd double my incoming damage.

Sometimes during the Synapse TF Babbage appears to not spawn. It doesn't really happen a lot, but it seems to happen often enough where players basically expect it. It might help to add spawn and despawn messages for Babs on the Zone Events channel. That way at least if Babs doesn't spawn or gets zapped by a security drone folks will know and not have to wait around. It would be better to move Babbage's spawn points so he doesn't get zapped, if this is possible. If you do, don't forget that the AE building also has security drones. (I suspect the AE is responsible for at least some Babs no-shows.) One spawn location that works for all mission locations would be fine I think.

I like the idea of adding mechanics in theory, but it has to be done carefully or you risk something that is worse than a boring fight. Either an even more boring gimmick, or something that is totally out of left field and incongruous with the rest of the game. Basic game design is play testing. You have to put ideas in front of players and test what actually works. If you don't have the resources to do this it's basically impossible to add stuff. Players need tutorials to teach them what to do. You can't just drop arbitrary mechanics on people and expect them to figure it out. First I'd like to see gimmicks already in the game catalogued and figure out which ones work the best. Build on those where possible. A mission arc is a great way to add a gimmick tutorial to an end-boss fight. Explain it to them, expect them to do it with just simple mechanics in the first mission, add more context to the gimmick so it's a little harder in the next two missions, then you have the boss fight where they are expected to actually use the gimmick. I think this could work. But you still need the resources (people) to implement this, and I think that could be hard. Personally early bosses like Frosty are fine and don't need any gimmick. Early levels are almost vigilante street level in power level, and that's fine. The 30's and up are where the game starts to drag. Adding more interesting gimmicks in those levels could add new real content to the game.

I've wanted a "Leg Detail" option for a while now. Extra bits to add on like the "chest detail" option. Holsters, straps, straps with pouches, knee pads, strapped on armor, etc. Just small things that can be added each update to add a bit of pizazz to characters.