Piledriver

As far as I know, there's nothing illegal about hiring a programmer or putting a bounty out for a piece of desired software, no matter what the desired software does. I mean, even if it's something nefarious like the Stuxnet virus, the only illegalities involved would be in development and deployment, and we're not talking about anything like that. At the very very most there's an implication that the developer would need to look at the leaked CoX source code, but even that isn't necessarily so, given the amount of work already done by reverse engineers on the Titan forums. I'd have personally employed someone to make convertors or plugins for the formats myself if ol' Piledriver Pete wasn't just a barefoot hillbilly. If someone out there has money available for CoX-related projects but doesn't want to get mixed up in any of the illegal things with it, this would be a good option.

I thought Sonic with the alternate animations looked more the part. Either way, yeah... It also makes possible a proper Human Torch with fire blasts and fire armor. It's not the most team-friendly class, but I imagine it was concocted to allow more soloable blasting when populations were low.

Maybe try /vis_scale 4.0 That extends your range of vision across the map to the max. If it's too much you can adjust it down, the range is from 0.5 to 4.0. In addition, there are detail sliders for world and characters respectively in the Options menu under Graphics and Audio.

I don't get that but I keep my visuals set low. I know the laser show in Pocket D does a number on my framerate when I face it, though, even from another room. Always has, but at least it used to be turned off most of the time. I also use the following macro to occasionally clear out the cache, sync the connection, and set the client so that if I al+tab out it will use minimal resources until I bring it back in focus. Mainly it's clearing the cache after zoning helps performance. /macro rgfx "sync$$reloadgfx$$maxinactivefps 2"

Well, you'll get shards for killing bosses occasionally. You can convert those up.

Yeesh! I hope that the numbers associated with deleted passcodes go back into the system or we'll soon be having some very long numbers to remember.

No. They did not across-the-board nerf/reduce AE rewards. They did not nerf rewards at all outside removing doubled rewards from respawning/resurrecting enemies. They did, however, break AE functionality repeatedly in an effort to herd farmers away from certain mission designs, thereby punishing anyone who ever used those features in a non-farm mission and making the AE system less capable for anything other than farms. A global XP nerf, as a permanent response with no plan of ever solving it through hardware or optimization, is just hostile to anyone using the system in any way. Farmers never lost and never will. Take AE out of the game entirely, farmers will have even more of a corner on the market for their services using standard game content, just as they did before.

/bind lshift+lbutton "powexec_name translocation"

Even the Mystic Flight visuals can be turned off. You don't get Hover in that pool, though, so you can't switch to that for the defense buff while fighting.

Yeeeeah, that's not how it works. To clarify: the file formats are not defined in the source code for either client or server. All that's there are routines to read them. It's not something that nobody ever looked at in fifteen years, of course. All the way back in 2004 people were able to figure out that CoH's *.pigg files are just *.zip archives and *.texture is mostly just a straight *.dxt with additional header data. We even know that the *.geo format used for models is a variant of VRML98 (which is itself very obsolete). A lot of other files are just text, some of which make all the references to objects and textures to add them into the engine and its UI (the character creator menus, fi). However, these were mostly machine-generated, making them a morass of disordered entries rather than neatly-organized lists. This gets to be more complicated when you realize that putting all the elements of a component together may rely on entries from several different text files, and information in the file headers (which, again, haven't been entirely figured out)! Child's play it ain't. However, from what is known, and what could be reversed from the engine code's reading instructions, this could all be figured out and new tools made. Finding programmers capable of this, and willing to do so....? Perhaps it's something we can throw money at? We could create a fund and see what it's worth to the community. Even if we raised funds to pay someone, though, we can't know if they're capable until they prove it. It would need to be set up as a bounty. Basically, X amount of money is in an account waiting to pay out to whomever can provide a tool capable of A, B, and C. That Icon NPC mode seems to be using an established developer flag associated with a bunch of parts, so it's still well incomplete. Lots of other old files are still in the piggs but not referenced there -- the mantle and Unknown Soldier face I think are still in there -- but never referenced by the game. People have pulled them out using costume hacks for Paragon Chat, though. Someone made a collection of *.costume files showing a bunch of the available NPC parts that are not in Icon and posted it on the Titan forum; I don't have the link to that handy at the moment but will look for it and come back to edit this post later. Meantime, you can go over there and poke around if interested. I think this was it. Some of these other new costume elements are unique to i25/SCORE and reside in the piggs in its special subdirectory. Among other things...

A bunch of AE functionality got broken in the last couple of years on live (mostly as a by-product of trying to nerf farms). Unless Leandro/SCoRE fixed or rolled-back all that, it will be difficult to get older missions working properly.

Nostalgia makes everything better. I get a lot of mileage out of tales of the belt, for instance. Why, you must be a coddled millennial with a shelf full of participation trophies or somethin' if you don't have tales of pleading for mercy at the top of your lungs while permanent stripes were being laid across your backside.

There is endgame content. There is also Ouroboros, which allows you to go back and play all the low-level content after you've reached level 50 and completely slotted your build, thereby avoiding the constant failure of your enhancements and need to run to a trainer (or accidentally out-leveling the contacts because you were running with a steamrolling team at boosted difficulty settings).

Architect Entertainment was added to the game in Issue 14. Much like the holodeck for Star Trek Online, also created by Cryptic, it is a system for user-created missions. From the very beginning, some people used it to create efficient farms. There are two basic types of farm. The XP farm, which would be a large outdoor or cave map full of spawned groups and patrols that would take thirty minutes to an hour to clear, used for power-leveling. And the Ticket farm, which was usually a small map with a lot of ambush triggers near the entrance, allowing AOE farming builds to bypass the aggro cap for one big burst, capping out the ticket rewards for the map in under five minutes. It has changed since i14, including various content and functionality nerfs that broke some of the storytelling functionality in order to appease complaints about the farms, and changes specific to Issue 25, such as making all AE missions function like previous "Dev Choice" content, optionally paying out normal game rewards instead of tickets. *edit* The Ticket farm design is probably the hardest on the server because it bypasses the aggro cap. With those, you've got hundreds of enemies being aggroed at the same time. Probably even more than a team of eight could aggro otherwise, even if there's only one player in the farm. Ironically, the XP nerf "solution" would not much impact the original purpose of that farm design (so go do it for tickets, passive-aggressively! j/k (seriously, don't do that)), but a lot of players never understood that Ticket farms were not intended for power-leveling and are less efficient for XP gains due to the constant starting and stopping, so they ignorantly use them for that anyway.

Reasons the LFG newbie trials might have been intentionally turned off are that the XP rate is high, pushing characters to level 20 or higher in less than eight runs (the amount of repetitions needed to collect all the rewards from both DFB and DIB, amounting to about two hours of play altogether), they reward power boosts that remain in effect to level 20, and drop SOs on low-level players.

Inside the minds of controlling people This is what it is, basically. It is about different personality types more than an argument we can resolve.

People are behaving like it's broken. Maybe it's just turned off. People who left the game around i18 or earlier (i14) sometimes seem averse to later features, sometimes very strongly. If the server operators here are of like mind that could be a problem.

Those were removed very early on. I'm thinking 2006 or so.

So, I've now seen all the crowing going on over at Massively. If that's the perception of the move, either the server ops need to clarify that this really was their intent or absolutely was not. I have no doubt that killing AE XP outright (for nerfherding reasons) will send many players packing for other servers at the first opportunity. While farmers would find or return to other means, the decision would be a sign of authoritarian leanings that will inevitably spread to other aspects of the game.

AE was never designed or meant for farming, or the devs at cryptic wouldn't have hit it several times with a nerf bat. Anyone can do whatever they want with it, more power to you, but to say this is pure delusion. Yeah, I think the Paragon Studios guys also intentionally created monkey-shaped XP sacks for AE in order to ensure most players had a few well-outfitted 50s on hand when endgame content was in the offing. They did cave to the nerfherders a few times, though. And every single time they wound up breaking something legitimate creative AE users were using (rezzing enemies, for instance, were a great gimmick for vampires and zombies, but nobody would play something if the enemies pop back up worth no XP or anything, storyline or no), if not basic functionality (proximity triggers were altered to all go off across the map, presumably because someone was using them to sequentially trigger ambushes or something related to farms, thus breaking a fundamental storytelling device). So, no, whether they were trying to manipulate player activity or just to appease the complainers, it was a mistake. No nerfing short of completely disabling the entire system will ever prevent farmers from adapting and finding a way; farming only requires the most rudimentary game functionality, after all. AE should have been given attention in the other direction, expanding its storytelling capabilities and giving players more ways of using it, instead of nerf batting it until it could hardly avail much beyond a simple farm.

Maybe. Hopefully not. What I do know is that farms can be a big demand on the system because of all the active AI going at once. That may have also been why the aggro cap was reduced. Games have always struggled to fake massive numbers of active enemies by grouping them into instances and/or dividing up processing cycles between smaller groups. I believe City of Heroes just makes them super stupid and brute forces through, but I could be wrong and even with optimization it's just too much when enough instances are packed with wall-to-wall mobs. That said, I'm totally using this definition of nerfherders (gamers who want to dictate how others play) from here on. I like that.

I take it they mean in the sense of how you might "fix" your pet. ;) Quite a few people hate AE with a passion. These are not the people who should have a say in how the feature is managed, because they do not and will not use it. Unless they're running their own server for like-minded people only, of course. :)

Go here: The Black Spectre's City of Heroes Site I think what you're looking for is under "Black Spectre's Binds." Lots of goodies. Specific stuff, too.

My guess would be that all they did was clone the existing site and point it at their server instead of the original Cryptic/Paragon Studios servers. That could be done here. To be honest, though, these servers may not be a permanent thing. Since there are some thirty thousand or more accounts with who knows how many characters each (tons of name squatters using hundreds of those thousand free slots, probably), it might be better to wait and see if it's going to be around for very long before going to that much trouble.

Answering way more than was asked: You can set up a keybind with /bind <key> "powexecauto <power name>" This can also be used in combination with another power, so you fire one and set the other to auto so it will follow: /bind <key> "powexecauto <power name>$$powexecname <power name>" Or, you could make a series of bind files and put them in your c:\binds directory, naming them bind00.txt, bind01.txt, and bind02.txt In each file you successively enter: <key> "powexecauto <power name>$$powexecname <power name>$$bindloadfile C:\binds\bind01.txt" <same key> "powexecauto <power name>$$powexecname <power name>$$bindloadfile C:\binds\bind02.txt" <same key> "powexecauto <power name>$$powexecname <power name>$$bindloadfile C:\binds\bind00.txt" With each file referencing different powers, so you can run through a whole attack sequence with one key or button. You could just do the powexec auto in the bind files and it'd work well, too, turning them on successively. Add a macro to your tray to set it all back to the beginning on demand: /macro load "bindloadfile c:\binds\bind00.txt" Bind files could also turn on all your toggles with one key using powexectoggleon <power name>.