Chris24601

Yeah... low bandwidth is a plus in this case. Also, I have confirmed via CoH's netgraph function that I have no reduction in my ping from using the New Jersey VPN exit. I suspect whatever route it's taking now is overall cleaner than whatever the default route was so despite the apparent detour from Indiana to New Jersey to Canada, its not actually taking any longer than before to send/receive packets.

I have my sounds at 3% and music at 2%. It’s still able to drown out iTunes running at full volume.

True, but I presume a nickel/iron core for CoH Earth just like ours... anything more dense would be highly radioactive and probably prevented life (or liquid water) from spawning in the first place. Plus, with all the tunnels deep under the Earth everywhere I'd presume even LESS density from all the alternate Earth villains who've mined it out to add mass to their own world in order to prevent the Apocalypse there (either that or that's what the ancient Oranbegans did to other worlds to keep Primal Earth from being destroyed after they sped up its rotation. Again... all of the above is said in jest. It's a game mechanic so things that only come out at night or during the day can spawn in a reasonable time for players who might only have an hour to play a night.

When you say "crash" do you mean "lost connection to mapserver"... if so the problem isn't on your end or Homecoming's its a bad ISP along the route between. The only solution that's worked solidly is to use a VPN that changes the route your data takes through the internet around the bad patch. Using New Jersey as an exit point for the VPN has provided me with absolute stability (the closest route without a VPN probably took my data to Canada through Detroit... now its probably going through Buffalo).

Since I did find a solution to this and posted it in another thread, but it hasn't propagated here I'm going to repost the relevant bits; * * * The problem isn't on your end or Homecoming's... its the messy internet in the middle and is probably related to your physical location. Why where you're located is relevant is that the particular route taken by some data is the problem. For example, I'm in Fort Wayne, Indiana and the route my internet takes to the HC servers in Canada on its own is probably through Detroit. The solution is to use a VPN or proxy server to re-route your traffic around the problem. For a rough visual... You -- Your ISP -- Bad ISP -- HC's ISP -- HC Server ...................\___ VPN -- Good ISP __/ I used ExpressVPN and their closest server (New Jersey) for my connection and via the in game /netgraph I can confirm no loss of ping while doing so. This probably changed the course from "Ft. Wayne > Detroit (bad) > Canada" to "Ft. Wayne > New Jersey > Buffalo, NY > Canada" bypassing whatever badness was mucking up the connection. What WAS interesting in the /netgraph report once I was no longer getting mapservered was what happened with a lost packet. Prior to using a VPN there'd be zero lost packets then it'd just mapserve and eventually dump to the login screen. WITH the VPN running I got the occasional lost packet (denoted by a red or yellow line on the graph) but the game kept right on running past what I suspect would have been a mapserve for me otherwise. * * * TL;DR The problem is a bad ISP between you and the Homecoming servers. Use a VPN (better security) or proxy server to change the route your data takes to connect. New Jersey has worked great for me as the exit point from the VPN into the internet at large.

Unfortunately you WILL have to because the problem isn't actually on Homecoming's end (or on yours). Someone's internet along the fastest path between you and the servers isn't working right (Given that you're in Florida, I bet it heads up through the Midwest, where I am, and probably into Canada around the Detroit area... I'd bet the problem is in some Detroit server farm somewhere that your signal and mine just happens to pass through) and the only way around it is to re-route your connection using a VPN or proxy server (VPNs being far safer for your computer security). In my case, my connection bounces directly to New Jersey before going anywhere else so its probably then connecting to Canada (where the HC servers are) through Buffalo instead of Detroit and the connections through Buffalo aren't borked. As to using a VPN, they're stupid easy. If you can download Homecoming, you can get a VPN running. In the case of ExpressVPN (what I'm using after doing some research into different options as the best compromise on price, locations and ease of installation), you sign up, download and install the software. When you click on the icon it brings up a window with a big button and a list of places you can connect to. Select the location you want (I used the closest option in New Jersey), click on the button to turn it on and that's it. I then minimize it and just leave it run (you can also set it in the options to turn on at startup so you don't even have to turn it on again... you can literally just forget about it). It's using zero processing power and about 165 MB of my RAM as I type this through it.

I tried a Sentinel for a bit and the main changes I think it needs are A) buff/reduce the nerf on AoEs B) fix their AT mechanic so you can control its triggering without resorting to the t1-2 attacks (perhaps something closer to the Domination button that you can hold once charged up). Other than that I don’t think there’s that much of a problem with them. They don’t especially stand out on teams, but they’re another source of damage and another pool of relatively resistant hit points that makes the team stronger than they’d be if that slot weren’t filled. They’re kinda the Jack-of-All-Trades (i.e. second best at everything) which means they don’t shine individually in a group the way the best do (i.e. blasters nuking whole spawns, tanks soaking hits from entire spawns), but they’re adding a bit to everything (damage dealt, hits soaked) that adds up overall. Has anyone tested what the performance of an all Sentinel team looks like relative to say, one of all blasters, all tanks and a well mixed team? I’d be curious about, say, their clear times for some of the common TFs relative to each other.

Since it’s been discussed; if I were to do a Sentinel archetype I think I’d take a cue from the Dominator secondaries (i.e. a mix of melee and ranged attacks) and build their power sets as hybrids. In place of straight melee attacks, I’d make one set a mix of melee attacks and defense (some defense/resist and say mag 2-3 mez protection). Then I’d make their other set buff/debuff with the mix being at the set choice level; i.e. empathy is pure buff, trick arrow is pure debuff, dark is a mix. As an AT feature I’d do something where using your buffs/debuffs improves the range of your melee/armor set attacks for a short time (either stacking buffs to range akin to a Blaster’s defiance or something you build up to then activate like domination). Basically, the more you buff, the further your reach.

If we’re going for realism, I’m more concerned that the City of Heroes Earth is rotating so quickly that everything on the surface would be hurled into space by centripetal force. For the sake of avoiding global Armageddon, I would like the day/night cycle slowed down to 90 minutes per cycle (one rotation every 84 minutes being sufficient for a resting object to reach escape velocity at the equator). You’d still have near weightlessness at the equator, but at least it wouldn’t be throwing our atmosphere and oceans into the void. No wonder we have to have War Walls; they’re the only thing holding the atmosphere in and possibly providing artificial gravity... though still less than 1G as evidenced by how high even out of shape civilians can jump. Yes, the above is a joke (sort of... the bit about the orbital rotation required to cancel gravity via centripetal force is actually true and might make a good super-villain plot in some future arc), but it does point out the notion that some of the game mechanics are just unrealistic for the sake of playability. Personally, before even seasons, I’d like to see them add rain. We know the art assets for rain exist from the Who Will Die? story arc. We also know that weather effects like falling snow can be attached to players so it’s appearing to rain all around them. Throw in an overcast sky and you could have zone wide rain showers periodically (and we know the sky/lighting can be changed due to its use for zone events like the Rikti/Zombie invasions). Standard Code Rant applies, but I think something like rain would be far more possible to implement than expanding the snowy/frozen areas game wide.

Even better; it’s about 400k across the board then for rare salvage with seeded salvage listed at 1 million. Which means as long as the salvage prices we see remain below that 1 million mark then ALL the transactions are actually player-to-player. Thus, if the population stays stable or expands, it may be possible to stop seeding salvage entirely at some point (though a case can be made for continuing it, if only to prevent inflation... which is something I remember from live).

As long as each AT has something distinctive about it; I’ve got no problem with adding an AT. To me this means more than just mashing together power sets though. We ended up with ATs in the first place because of how just combining any two sets worked (or didn’t as the case might be). No, I mean a theme and a mechanic behind the AT. Blaster has All Damage All The Time and it’s defiance mechanic and sustain powers. Masterminds have a truly unique and AT defining primary. Right now I’d rather see more focus on our ATs that overlap a bit much (Corruptor/Defender and Tank/Brute/sorta-Scrapper) and making each of those feel distinctive before we even think about adding new ones. In terms of the Tsoo concepts mentioned up thread; I think something similar could be accomplished instead via a new power set (that thankfully has most of the FX we’d need already in the game); call it Kinetic Armor and have it run entirely on buffing your defenses and other traits by targeting enemies. It’d be a rather rollercoaster experience as you’d need a steady stream of enemies to peel energy from to keep your personal buffs going, but that’s kinda the point. I could see a drain damage to boost your resistance, drain speed to boost your defense, drain regen and recovery to boost yours, drain their to-hit to increase yours, maybe inflict a very low mag disorient on several targets for a short duration to give you mez protection for a few minutes. The tier-9 could be an big AoE multi-effect debuff that boosts everything for a couple minutes. There’s the frame for six of the nine powers right there. The key bits would be to scale the debuffs to the ATs scale AND make them personal rather than team buffs.

As I understand it, the auction house program sells the item that is listed for the lowest price to the highest bidder (that is also higher than that price) and then in the order put up for bidding. So say three people put things up in this order; 100(a), 150, 100(b). If three people then bid 200, the first bidder gets 100(a), the second gets 100(b) and the third gets 150. As stated, the seeded salvage is listed at well above the typical going rate for them (ex. the going rate on Everlasting is currently about 400k) so as long as you list the salvage for around the going rate or less, it’ll cycle through pretty quickly (if you absolutely want to sell it now, list it for 1 inf and it’ll sell immediately for the highest current bid... risky for low volume things without many bids, but for rare salvage you’re pretty safe).

Well, there’s literally hundreds of weather controllers running around Paragon City so I figure the only reason there’s ever winter at all is because the Winter Lord has awakened and is just that powerful.

And to put the devs seeding choices into perspective... if you have salvage, super-packs and reward merits you CAN basically get any enhancement you'd ever want eventually for some price (a recipe drop in the same category + seeded salvage + converters and attunement bought for merits = any attuned set IO you'd want; seeded superpacks equal eventually getting an ATO you need; sell the rest). In other words, as long as there's enough salvage and super-packs everything else can be gotten by yourself if you want it enough... or if the playerbase is large enough, others will do the work and you just pay them the Inf for doing it for you.

To be fair, in the CoH lore both were cursed by the Red Caps into their present forms. The funny thing to me is that I came in here expecting a discussion on etymology because the word Tuatha actually means “men/people”... literally “The Men/People of the gods of Danu (Danu probably derives from the PIE “flowing waters” denoting gods who came from overseas... i.e. foreign gods brought by settlers arriving in Ireland). Likewise, Fir Bolg translates to “Men of Bags” and describes a group of migrants/settlers who came to Ireland and ruled it before the Tuatha de Danann arrived and displaced them (Irish myth is essentially telling the story of waves of immigrants displacing the former occupants of the Isles).

The only thing that makes sense regarding the old accounts is like the person hinted at above with the “I had a toon with all the badges” toon; i.e. they accomplished something they feel is notable on live and want the ability to show it off here. It’s basically bragging rights because every mechanical part that was account locked (vet awards, benefits purchased with Paragon Points, etc.) is now available for either free or for a token amount of in-game currency. I mean, you get all costume, power sets (including the sorcery pool) and EATs that were account restricted immediately. If you stop by the P2W you get most of the vet/prestige powers free. If you take the 15 minutes or so to run the three Atlas Park arcs you’ll get 9 merits you can turn into 27 converters that you can sell for about 2 million and change to buy several of the other vet powers (ex. Reveal, a self-rez and say, magic carpet/rocket board). If it’s not your first toon you can just mail yourself the inf and skip that step entirely. Even the Vet Award badge titles got placed as exploration badges so getting them is just a matter of downloading Vidiot maps and going there. There is nothing other than elitist bragging rights one could get from the old accounts... and for that, just brag already. We’ve no reason to doubt you. If you got every last badge on live, allow me to say “congratulations.” But I don’t actually care; no one cares that much about other people’s toons or in-game accomplishments unless they’re an actual friend. The only thing they cared about on live if they weren’t in the group who got the Vet awards first was how long they’d have to wait to get those awards for themselves. And waiting for them is no longer a thing, so now I care not at all. I’m glad the old database is gone. I hope it wasn’t just deleted; I hope they bleach-bitted it and then shattered the drive with a hammer. That version of the game designed to extract profit via catering to the vanity of offering exclusive goodies to hold over other players is dead (and one thing that’s massively obvious looking at a lot of the later arcs now after seven years is how they showcased NPCs employing those power sets and options you could pay to acquire... basically their new content was made into product placement ads). The non-profit version where everyone can accomplish anything with just time and effort is the City of Heroes we have now.

Frankly, I don't know WHY you'd want the old database back anyway. I've already re-rolled every toon I care to have back and between the P2W store and all the options you had to buy using the VIP/subscription coins (power sets, costumes, emotes, signature story arcs, etc.) are now given to you for free. Other than some sort of elitist hope of proving you were actually a member since live beta or something there's nothing in the account database of any value and plenty that spells massive legal jeopardy for anyone who has it. You want your old 50 back? Find a server where the name is free, roll it up, go into a fire-farm, wait an hour or two... BOOM! They're back with all the credits and Incarnate stuff you'll need to be re-equipped in a few more. Better yet... PLAY it again. It's been seven years, there's been some tweaks in the code since live, and a refresher course in what it can do and experiencing old content as if it was practically new because of sever years away is its own reward. Speaking of, my actual job for the day where I'm stuck on a machine that can surf the web, but not handle CoH is done... so why am I am still here? See you all online.

There’s an old, but fitting, maxim when it comes to interpreting the actions of a large group like a business; “never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” If you really want to know what’s going on inside NCSoft (or any large corporation) just read a week or two of the Dilbert comic strip. The humor/despair for the human race is more when you realize it’s NOT actually all that exaggerated (mostly the exaggeration is that all the incompetence and flawed logic of an entire corporation is displayed using just the same recurring cast of five to six characters instead of the bad management and employee decisions throughout the actual thousands of employees). Odds are the original decision to shut down got started by an accountant who’s never played a video game since the 90s (and wouldn’t even know that killing support would actually take the game away from players... because Legend of Zelda still plays just fine on an NES and they haven’t made it in decades) looking at profit margins on a big list and selecting one to be cut. This renewal is probably the same sort of automatic process they have for all their properties. If one comes up, file the paperwork and move on to the next file. I wouldn’t be surprised if the application was a “form letter” they print out with the IP name inserted in a blank and the person who filed it doesn’t even remember doing so.

If they were to do snowy landscapes in more areas let me suggest though that it be more like Atlas currently rather than pre-New Years, because the falling snow is actually a temp aura that even shows up in the costume designer screen and persists in areas it really shouldn’t and is overall just not all that enjoyable after the first five minutes (kinda like the solid MONTH of night during Halloween was about two weeks too much... to the point I sought out story arcs that had outdoor missions because those still had the day-night cycle). Grant the falling snow temp power as a toggle for those who want it if you must, but please, don’t make me have to spend the holidays in the shadow shard because you want falling snow everywhere in Paragon City. Also worth noting in terms of winter in the Rogue Isles is that while instant zoning makes it feel next door to Paragon City in Rhode Island, the Rogue Isles are much further south (more in line with Virginia) and in an Oceanic climate to boot... meaning they pretty much don’t ever have snow. Any sort of holiday spruce up for the Isles should be looking at how Florida, Bermuda and the Bahamas decorate for the season.

To be fair, one advantage in terms of the negotiations now is that, because an unused IP and code is worth $0, then ANY license that brings in even a dollar would technically count as “increasing profits” relative to its value a year ago. The short version is that ultimately there’s virtually no upside to any endgame that isn’t a licensed server. First, CoH is not in competition with NCSoft’s other properties (the audiences are practically mutually exclusive) so allowing it to continue does not impact their profits, but shutting it back down brings negative PR and doesn’t actually shut it down; it just drives it to smaller, better hidden or even personal use only servers where any potential customers will be even less likely to listen. Second, because all the work NCSoft was ever going to do has already been done years ago and another business entity is offering to bear all the costs of operation/future development, there is zero cost from NCSoft’s end and free positive PR gained from a license deal. Third, a valid licensed server maintains their trademarks at no cost. The situation now with the game shut down for years and the code now in the wild is vastly different than the situation at shutdown. In the cold calculations of maximizing profit, a third party offering to do your work for you and increase the value if your IP at no cost to yourself is something you can’t pass up.

Which is why the ideal for me would be a completed license agreement with one or more servers to operate legally and a push by community leaders to support those legalized servers over the alternatives.

Since NCSoft never needed the Trademarks to shut the servers running CoH down, I'm going to treat this as neutral-to-good news. Neutral would be that trademarks in the US are use-or-lose with a seven year window (i.e. after seven years of disuse someone else can claim the trademark... for an actual comic example, see Captain Marvel/Shazam). On November 30, 2019 we reached the seven year anniversary of CoH's shutdown when the clock for disuse would have begun so an application to keep the trademark filed just a few days after it would have lapsed could just be a default IP-protection practice from their legal department that happens to occur while negotiations regarding a license for private servers are ongoing. Bolstering this possibility is that the renewal was filed in the US, while Homecoming is based out of Quebec, Further, Canadian trademark law's use-or-lose period is actually 15 years so, presuming NCSoft's trademark was registered in Canada while CoH was live, then the one from 2012 would already still be in force with no need to re-apply for it to use Trademark infringement against Homecoming. If its good news then it means NCSoft is actively securing their IP trademarks in advance of issuing a license to the Homecoming team to make these servers official and legal (just making Homecoming an officially licensed service would also reset the Canadian trademark use clock).

Honestly, I think people need to get over this "NCSoft is forever the enemy" attitude because its NOT helpful to the negotiations at all. The fact they've taken zero action against any of the CoH servers when they could legally have them all shut down tomorrow is not the actions of an enemy. It is also worth noting that the decision to shut CoH down was made seven years ago. Do you know if the people who made that call are even still working at NCSoft today? For example, shortly before the shutdown, the Nexon corporation acquired 15% ownership of NCSoft. They sold their share in 2015. Did they have a say in CoH being shutdown? Also in 2015 several of their officers were spun off into a subsidiary (Iron Tiger Studios). Did the person in charge of that decision end up there instead of in the position to determine the outcome of negotiations with Homecoming? A more recent turnover was their chief development officer being replaced in mid-2018, It'd be counterproductive to label people who didn't even work for the company at the time as "evil" for their non-existent role in ending City of Heroes... particularly if those people are willing to negotiate now.

The trick though is that Homecoming rests a bit on the shoulders of giants in the sense that the vast stores of content here were developed by a fairly good sized staff of paid employees and the game had a previously established fanbase. It’s one thing to get by on monthly goodwill donations and devs working on small additions in their free time when the total works out to a dollar or so per player because you’ve got a large group of players with plenty to keep them occupied. It’s another entirely when that costs jumps to tens of thousands per month split between an initial playerbase of a few hundred because it’s just launched and the only way to churn out sufficient initial content is to pay several people to work on the game full time (we’re talking expenses in the range of $5k per month for each full time programmer/graphic artist/animator on staff on the low end). In other words, Homecoming is a great model to sustain/slowly improve an existing game, but probably not all that great for developing one from scratch. But there’s two interrelated aspects that makes CoH much more of a perfect storm that would be difficult to copy for other games. First, CoH isn’t really in competition for market share with anything else in NCSoft’s wheelhouse. It’s a relatively non-grindy MMO themed around the distinctly American concept of superheroes. There is basically no overlap in the audience for CoH and NCSoft’s other games... which means it’s existence isn’t costing NCSoft any revenue. In short, it’s not in competition with it’s parent company the way the WoW emulators were before the release of WoW Classic. The second factor is that CoH’s IP isn’t owned by a third party and, in fact, isn’t being used in anything more than a token capacity by NCSoft. This is why you’ll never see an official server for Star Wars Galaxies or Marvel Heroes (in addition to ticking off The Mouse, the former is also semi-competition for current license holder EA/Bioware’s SWTOR). As much as I’d like a more community focused approach, the amount of work to launch and grow a community coupled with typically being competition to the owner’s business and the prospect of third-party IP rights makes CoH very much the exception that proves the rule rather than revealing some previously unrecognized path.

Yeah, I don’t even play WoW (never even tried it), but I have to agree that the 800 lb. gorilla of MMOs committing sepuku is probably the bigger story of the year (that said, I still voted for CoH just out of loyalty). Frankly, one of the biggest problems a LOT of MMOs have had for the past decade is that they set out to be WoW-killers and, for some reason that also means aping 90% of WoWs mechanics (ex. SWToR with its massive gear grind and cookie cutter classes and focus on “progression raiding” guilds). The related problem is the perception that a game with tens to hundreds of thousands of active players is a failure (because it’s not millions like WoW) and leads to pulling all the development resources out of the title and putting it towards the next WoW-killer. The point being; if WoW weren’t such an 800 lb. gorilla, then the AAA game producers wouldn’t have felt the need to spend the last decade grinding out and then dropping support for the slew of WoW-clones we got. While this really made games like CoH shine as a contrast, I think the MMO field as a whole would have been better off if WoW hadn’t exploded like it did. Maybe if it ends up killing itself there will be enough room for fresher ideas to flourish.