BlackSpectre

"X" is pretty classic though. Very funny. 🙂

Oh, I got you beat! Lately I've been getting BLANK tells from people who want invites. Yep, blank. What the hell does that mean???? LOL

When I lead iTrails, if someone asks me to save them a spot, I say "Sure!" I don't have any problem with it at all. When there is only one spot left, and the person still has not joined, I send a courtesy tell to that player asking if they still intend to join. If they respond in a timely manner, I'll still save their spot but I'll put a time limit on it since the rest of the league is ready to go. Usually about 1 min. If they don't respond in a timely manner, I fill their spot with another player, and assume that they're busy and can't join anyway. If I don't know who I'm saving the spot for, I save them a spot until the last spot is filled. If they send me a tell informing me that the tell from character X is them, I'll invite them if there's still a spot open. If they never inform me of who they are, I just fill the spot. Fundamentally, it's up to them to make sure the leader knows who they are, it's not the leader's responsibility to hunt them down. So I don't worry much about it. It's on them. As far as first come first served goes... in my LFG posts I ask players to Please Send me a Tell (PST). The first tell = the first served. Once the recruiting is in full swing and people start shouting out in broadcast for invites, I basically invite in the order I received a request for invite, I don't prioritize tells over broadcast or local messages. I look at my Global chat channel and whoever asked for invite first, whether tell or broadcast, gets it first; and thereafter I just go in order. I also should mention that I typically don't see messages from people asking for an invite in the LFG chat channel. I don't have any problem with them sending me tells while I'm in the middle of a mission because the tells are saved in my chat, are gold and stand out, and are easy to find. Players need to know that If I don't respond right away, I'm probably in battle and can't. If I don't respond in 10 min, then their tell got by me and I don't even know they sent me one, and should probably send me another. Now, I do prioritize messages from players within Ouroborus over LFG. I know many players really, really want to join a BAF. So much that they wait around in Ouroborus (or whatever zone I'm doing the trial in) until the league comes back from the mission. When the league finally does come back, I send a message to Broadcast so I can get any player waiting around in Ouroborus first. If a player is willing to wait around for 15 min to ensure they get a spot, I try to make sure they get that spot. They earned it with effort and time spent. Once I have all of them in Ouroborus, and there's usually not more than 3, I send a post to LFG. Oakey, all of this is really dependent on how many tells I get before the iTrial starts. For the last couple years, I haven't gotten more than 2-3 tells per run asking to save spots. It's easy to adjust to. But if I start getting swamped with requests to save spots, I might have to change what I do. As you know, recruiting and organizing a league is not easy and there is a lot to juggle. Sometimes it's downright frantic! If I ever start feeling completely overloaded, I'd probably go to First message AFTER I start recruiting = the first invited, with no saving spots. I'd also change my LFG message to say get to Ouro and shout in broadcast for invite, rather than sending a tell. This method is the easiest for the leader after all.

Oh! I’m sorry, I just figured everyone knew about the ability, pre-Page 4, to convert Astral and Emp merits Into Reward Merits. Page 4 took that away. Thus, we can no longer get as many reward merits from doing BAF after the first run. P.S., if you'd like to read a verbose post about this, and admittedly it is way too long, try this

Not to mention that BAF now gives 80% less Reward Merits than it used to, and yet in the Dev notes it states that an equivalent amount of reward merits will be earned after Page 4. What they didn't say is that the equivalent amount only applies to the first run, every one thereafter takes an 80% cut from what it was before Page 4. Not cool. I don't know about the other iTrials, but I suspect they're in the same boat. It really does seems like doing many of the same iTrial is being discouraged, while doing only one of many different iTrials is being encouraged. The problem is that not all iTrials are equal in enjoyment, efficiency, or in returns for time spent. BAF and the DA mission are the most popular iTrials by far... and both take 20 min to complete. Efficiency is key. But this new reward system is discouraging efficiency in favor of diversity, and frankly diversity will always lose. So the question you need to ask yourself is, if players do not buy in to the idea of spreading out their iTrial portfolio, what will they do instead? What will the new reward system encourage and discourage players to do? I think @Ukase has a good answer to these questions...

Yes I know. There are far more lucrative sources for Reward Merits. Every little bit helps, and believe it or not it adds up over time. I don’t have an issue with the 18 hr lockout if they removed that then we’d get double the amount of reward merits per run than we had before. I’m not asking for that. I’m merely asking to make the amount of Reward Merits the same that it used to be, no more. in the patch notes the Devs make it a point to let us know that we’ll be getting an equivalent amount of reward merits as before Page 4. That’s true for the first run only. After the first run it’s an 80% cut. Not equivalent at all.

The rewards, specifically the Merit Rewards, for completing a BAF are a bit low compared to what they were before the adjustments in Issue 27 Page 4. I know an attempt was made to balance the rewards so they would be more or less equivalent to what they were before the changes, but they could use a little tweaking... REWARDS PRIOR TO PAGE 4: Every 20 hours: 1 Empyrean Merit 1 Astral Merit per BAF after the first 1 Astral Merit for defeating Nightstar 1 Astral Merit if less than 20 prisoners escaped 1 Astral Merit for defeating Siege 1 Astral Merit for running as an open league (not locked) 1 Astral Merit if the requirements for a badge are fulfilled (up to 4) * Not On My Watch - prevent every prisoner from escaping * Alarm Raiser - no towers were deactivated * Gotta Keep ‘’em Separated - Siege and Nightstar defeated each time where they spawned *Strong and Pretty - defeating AVs while no minions are spawned/alive 1 piece of incarnate salvage per BAF completed Incarnate Threads Psychic Incarnate Experience to unlock incarnate slots REWARDS AFTER PAGE 4: Every 18 hours: 1 Prismatic Particle 18 Reward Merits 1 Empyrean Merit 1 Astral Merit per BAF after the first 1 Astral Merit for defeating Nightstar 1 Astral Merit if less than 20 prisoners escaped 1 Astral Merit for defeating Siege 1 Astral Merit for running as an open league (not locked) 1 Astral Merit if the requirements for a badge are fulfilled (up to 4) * Not On My Watch - prevent every prisoner from escaping * Alarm Raiser - no towers were deactivated * Gotta Keep ‘’em Separated - Siege and Nightstar defeated each time where they spawned *Strong and Pretty - defeating AVs while no minions are spawned/alive 2 Reward Merits per Astral Merit awarded from completing a badge achievement requirements 1 piece of incarnate salvage per BAF completed Incarnate Threads Psychic Incarnate Experience to unlock incarnate slots THE REQUESTED CHANGE: The part that needs to be adjusted is the amount of Reward Merits awarded for completing a BAF after the first completion. Prior to Page 4, players received 1 Astral Merit (AM) for completing the BAF, 1 AM for defeating Nightstar, 1 AM for defeating Siege, 1 AM for preventing 20 prisoners from escaping, 1 AM for not deactivating any towers... and sometimes 1 AM for preventing all prisoners from escaping. The total AM reward per BAF amounts to 5-6 AMs per run. Perviously, players were able to convert those AMs to Reward Merits. 5 AMs equaled 10 Reward Merits. This means players earned 10 Reward Merits per run (if they didn't want to convert them to Emp Merits for incarnate salvage). After Page 4, however, players can no longer convert AMs to Reward Merits. Page 4 added the ability to receive 2 reward merits per badge achievement. That means that players will receive only 2 Reward Merits per BAF run after the first, since Alarm Raiser is typically the only badge achievement consistently completed in a BAF run. That's a lot less than 10 Reward Merits per run.... well, 8 less to be exact. What I recommend is this: Reduce the number of Reward Merits earned for the first BAF run every 18 hours from 18 RMs to 10 RMs. 1 Emp Merit was equivalent to 10 Reward Merits, so that's right on the money. After the first BAF, just make sure the players are able to get 10 reward merits per run. If you want to keep the 2 extra reward merits for badges, then simply add 8 Reward Merits for the completion of each BAF. .. or you could just award 2 Reward Merits for every Astral Merit earned. Either way, it still amounts to 10 Reward Merits... and that's the mark you want to hit. Task Forces, Trials, and other missions that award Reward Merits in general give about 30 Reward Merits per hour. That's the typical exchange rate in City of Heroes for time spent (there are a few exceptions, but the vast majority follow this rule). BAF takes about 20 minutes to complete, which means if we follow this rule it should earn players 10 Reward Merits per run. BAF used to follow this rule, but after Page 4 it no longer does. After Page 4, doing 1 BAF per day will give a player approximately what they would get before Page 4... however, after the first BAF the rewards drop to only 20% of what players used to get. Losing 80% of your Reward Merit income from BAFs is a pretty big reduction. A bit too much. Frankly, 10 Reward Merits per run is only an average payout. It's not what I would call a good deal or even a good return for time spent. It's just average. Nothing special. I don't know if it's attempting to incentivize players to only run 1 BAF per day, and no more, but that is basically the end result. Maybe we want to encourage players to do other incarnate trials other than BAF, and it's not a bad goal, but don't we also want to encourage players to LEAD more than 1 BAF per day? Not having a BAF running severely hinders players' ability to gain their incarnate powers. We want a BAF running at all times if possible. I'd imagine the game would want to incentivize people to lead BAFs, not discourage them as Page 4 does. In my view, BAF has 4 big advantages over other incarnate trials... 1) no Alpha slot requirement, 2) allows a big league of 24 players, 3) is exciting and has tons of special effects gong on, and 4) takes only 20 minutes to complete. There are no other incarnate trials quite as good for casual players with a limited amount of game time. The Dark Astoria arc is only good for 8 players or less (and can be done solo), can be completed in about 15-20 min, but it lacks the camaraderie, special effects, and team spirit that BAF has. Good for some players but not most. The same can be said for LAM. And that's about the only incarnate trials that take less than 45 min-1 hour to complete. So... please restore the ability for players to earn 20 Reward Merits for the first run, and 10 Reward Merits for every run thereafter.

400 alts????!!!! Holy doppelgängers, Batman!!!!

Is there a way to determine a character's "db_id" for use in slash commands, or is the information just not available to players?

Is there a trick to easily move a NPC? Cuz I have a VERY hard time doing it. if this was a thread asking for something to be fixed, that would be at the very top of my list.

Also internal teleporters that look like something— like a lever or elevator buttons, passcode key box, hand or retina scanner, etc.

I'm glad to see that doors made the list... but what I think would be fantastic is a variety of doors that WORK. Click on them and they open, and/or approach them and they open.

I use this macro to send myself inspirations: /macro "emailsendattachment @GlobalName "Awaken" 0 2 00 Insp$$emailsendattachment @GlobalName "Awaken" 0 2 10 Insp$$emailsendattachment @GlobalName "Awaken" 0 2 20 Insp$$emailsendattachment @GlobalName "Awaken" 0 2 30 Insp$$emailsendattachment @GlobalName "Awaken" 0 2 40 Insp" What I do is fill up my entire inspiration tray with awakens, then click this macro only 4 times, and all 20 inspirations are transferred to my global email very quickly. Basically, what this macro does is transfer all of the inspirations in the bottom row of the tray. Since inspirations move down when you use or delete them, you end up getting the whole tray in just 4 clicks. 🙂

Unintended attachments is mainly due to lack of understanding on how the indexing system works, but corrupting your email/character may be a real risk. It's never happened to me or any of the people I know, but I can see how things might get messed up in the back-end. Thanks for the warning. It's definitely worth keeping in mind. Use at your own risk.

On my warshade, the damage resistance effects from the click power Eclipse are suppressed when mezzed (stunned). Not sure if this is supposed to do this or not, especially since this is my first experience with a warshade. Is this normal?

Hi, we recently saw the addition of /powexec_togglealloff which serves a long standing need to turn off all our toggles, especially useful when changing costumes to a "normal". However, an ability that has been requested for almost as long as they game has existed is to be able to have some sort of toggle_all_on command to take away the burden of constantly toggling on toggles. I was thinking... a command that toggles on all the powers in a specified power tray might do it! Thus, /powexec_toggleon_tray. By designating an entire tray to power on, it side-steps the need for players to choose which power to turn on (which I imagine has always been the stumbling block for a command like this). I imagine most players group their defense and resistance toggles next to each other, I know I do, so this would work great! I know the upcoming change to de-toggling will address some of this issue, especially during combat, but it still doesn't address the need for something like this for costume changes and certain gameplay. For example, whenever a Warshade or Peacebringer changes forms, all toggles turn off. So it's still needed.

You can also use /copychat to copy all of the entries in one of your chat channels/tabs. In your case it would be /copychat combat Then just paste it into a document. And as far as defense goes... the difference in survivability from 40% defense to 45% defense is HUGE.

I need to read the patch notes, but until then... in your opinion, how many Empyrean merits do you think is good to keep? I have 500 Emp merits right now, and am thinking of converting a few, but not sure. I typically send 50 Emp merits to every Alt that makes it to lvl 50 to help speed along the crafting of Incarnate powers. However, more than half of my alts end up sending the 50 Emps back after they've got all their incarnates. So I'm not expecting to lose a lot of Emps over time. 500 Emps gives me enough to send to 10 alts. But with many alts giving the 50 Emps back... not sure. Should I keep the 500 or sell some of them down? And if sell, how much should I keep? ************************************************* Re: Inability to convert Emp merits to Reward merits... The ability to convert to reward merits put the incarnate trials on par with the reward merits earned by task forces and other trials. I hope the Devs consider adding Reward merits as additional rewards to many of the incarnate trials that don't have them. The BAF incarnate trial, for example, typically earns about 1 Empyrean merit per run. That converts to 10 Reward merits right now, which is about the average ratio of time spent per reward merit (30 Reward merits per hour). BAF takes about 20 minutes to complete so that's right on the nose.

You can't. The command never worked with names that had spaces and it's been this way for 20 years. This is also true for the /emailsendattachment command. The best you can do is rename your global name and take out any spaces. Kinda like what I did... Black Specter --> BlackSpectre. Otherwise, you're just out of luck. 😞

Did a bunch of aggro testing today... The aggro changes are an improvement, and a little worse. It's a little less ridiculous now that Enemies that are beyond the cap won't just stand there and ignore the threat. But they still *will not* pursue players that move out of range. The range is small, and you can be just around the corner, 15 feet away, and they won't pursue or attack. Still a bit ridiculous, but better. The code that prevents the enemies beyond the cap from moving ends up reducing the amount of enemies that could be grouped than before this aggro change. Before, minions and lieutenants would ignore the tank, but if their boss/lieutenant ran off to attack, they would follow. Now they don't follow. I was able to group a max of about 32 enemies within a mission, and that was with a LOT of work and under optimal circumstances (the enemy groups were very close to each other). This is a little more than 3 groups, more or less (and I was only able to do it once). But the amount of extra work that it took to group this many together will have the result of players not even bothering to try to make big enemy groups. In the amount of time it would take a tank to group this many, the team could have already mowed through about 9 groups. What I would like to see is enemies pursuing the threat without a restriction to move. Let the AI handle it. Being out of range is a good criteria for enemies to stop pursuit, as is amount of travel time from starting point. Definitely keep the "holding aggro" cap. I might even recommend reducing the cap to something like 9. The point of allowing larger groups is: 1) increases the difficulty, 2) increases the risk to the team, 3) and allows "battle royals" to occur where one lone team is pit against an ARMY of enemies. Personally, I love the huge battles and all the special effects. And yes, teammates die and struggle, but that's the whole point. It makes it fun! Battles with smaller groups just don't have the same grandeur. Anyway, my two cents. I do like the change, allowing enemies who are over the cap to attack from range. It makes the situation a little less ridiculous, and that's something that's always bugged me about the way the aggro cap was implemented. Keep up the good work! 🙂 P.S. I know I've mentioned this before, but I really do like the idea of enemies growing in strength as they grow in numbers. There's a zillion justifications that would allow this, morale support, psychology of a horde, safety in numbers, berserker fury, esprit de corps, combat tactics, etc. It would probably require a bit of balancing in the game, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Group sizes are fairly consistent in the game, and that could be the benchmark to use, where the buff = 0. It would be an area buff, as more enemies arrive in the same area, the stronger the buff gets. This would also have the effect of reducing the number of enemies that a team would attempt to pull. Pull too many and the whole team dies for certain, including the tank. This would in effect be an aggro cap without a cap... it's be a soft cap more or less based on whatever the team could handle. It would also bring a lot of danger and risk into the game that currently does not exist. Food for thought...

Here's an update... Talked to the guys over at the WayBackMachine and apparently what I read misled me to believe they had a search engine up and running. Turns out it's only for a very few archives, and those do not include the old COH forums. So there's no way to search the WayBackMachine. At least we can still browse the old forums. This stokes an even greater admiration for many of my fellow COH players. I've asked questions, and people have answered with links to the original COH forums. They actually had to go browsing for the link. That's a lot of effort, and a lot of kindness. I know I've said it before, but thanks guys. Looks like the only way to search the old COH forums is to take @The Philotic Knight up on his generous offer and grab a copy of the old COH forums from him. Be warned, that tiny 90 GB compressed file turns into 800 GBs of data! Make sure you have enough room on your hard drive. And thanks gain, TPK, I appreciate all the hard work you and your team did to grab these files. Using your own file search app along with the old COH forum files is a great research tool. You might not be able to browse the files, click from web page to web page, but you can still find the pages you need and even follow a thread if you need to. Pretty cool. 🙂 P.S. Here's a link to the old COH forums at the WayBackMachine that I use... there are other links for other dates, FYI. https://web.archive.org/web/20121108232155/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/

Currently, when disabled the /Fullscreen command sets the windowed mode in options, but does not apply the setting so that windowed mode takes effect. For that to happen the game needs to be restarted. However, using the Options window, selecting "Windowed" and clicking "Apply" actually puts the game into windowed mode without restarting! I'd like the slash command to do the same thing. Either that or create a new slash command called "/windowed" that puts the screen in windowed mode. I tend to switch between screen views frequently. Sometimes full screen, sometimes a much smaller windowed screen. So the slash commands /fullscreen, /screen, and /wdw_load come in VERY handy for me. Anyway, just a suggestion. It would make things a little easier though. 🙂

Why players do what they do should be completely irrelevant. Why you do what you do is, however, paramount. There’s an old psychology rule that is always in play… 90% of attributions for others’ motivations are in error. Us humans are generally not bright enough to figure out why other people do things. People are very complex, and our reasoning ability is not.

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/List_of_Slash_Commands Over 200 new commands were added to the Wiki. The "Working Commands" list has been vetted and hundreds of pages created/updated and standardized, except for the technical/graphics commands. I know very little about computer graphics, and I couldn't even tell if the command worked or not when I started testing them. So I'm leaving them for someone else to look over. If you feel you can do it, please do. I know players would appreciate it. I ended up creating new wiki pages when I ran across the need for them to exist. In many cases pages needed to be updated in order to explain the slash commands. In these cases, I tried to retain the original author's verbiage as much as possible, while updating the information and layout to make things easier to understand. I created many images for these pages too. The list is far too long and frankly I couldn't remember all of them if I tried, but the ones I like most are... Pages I created: Default Folder Context Menus League Window SG_music Pages I updated: Tray Window Powexec_location Through all of this I did discover something new and cool. While attempting to make the various power tray commands easier to understand, I realized that there were trays, and then there were trays, and more trays! Different pieces of the Tray Window were all called the same thing and it got really confusing very fast. While looking through the game's configuration files I stumbled across the missing part of the puzzle.... what the Devs called the primary, secondary (Alt), and tertiary (Alt2) trays... they called them "Tray Slots"! I explain in more detail on the Tray Window page at the wiki, but in short the components of the tray window, in official verbiage, from large to small, are: -Tray Window- Tray Slots Power Trays Power Slots Power Icons I know it's a small thing, but it's kinda cool anyway. 🙂 My 2-month long project with the Wiki is now over. I am done with the slash commands. I have to say I enjoyed the detective work that many of the commands required to figure out how to use them. I felt very Sherlock Holmes-ian. I hope this helps people feel more confident in the Homecoming Wiki. Although many pages throughout the wiki still need slight updating, this one huge and useful section no longer does! For slash commands at least, I can say with utmost confidence that the Wiki is now the best place to go looking for slash commands, has the most complete list of slash commands, and the clearest instructions on how to use them than anywhere else. Cheers, everyone!

The primary Menu (Status Window--> Menu) has a radial dialog button missing in front of the "Enhacnements" menu item. There are also no radial dialog buttons in front of Arena, ID, Persona Info, Chat Handle, Options, Support, and Quit.