Chris24601

So I’m looking at rolling up an archer concept and was wondering about the pros and cons of... 1) Archery/Tactical Arrow Blaster 2) Archery/Trick Arrow Corruptor 3) Trick Arrow/Archery Defender 4) Archery/??? Sentinel Not really looking at pet classes; but if there’s anything notable about Ninja/Trick Arrow Masterminds, that’d be on point (ba dum bum) too.

The wild is hardly ideal though. It’s hard to have much of a community if there’s a server being shut down every week because NCSoft changed it’s mind about going after “public” private servers at a later point. The benefit of licensing the IP is that you get yourself legal protections (it’s a contract), certainty for our devs that all their hard work isn’t going to have to be dumped due to changing legal winds because the whole thing is legally dubious, and, most importantly, the ability to really let people know that City of Heroes is back (right now it’s all word of mouth and articles that are now 7-8 months old and moving further down the search results all the time). It might sound cool to “stick it to the man” but the legal no man’s land that results isn’t all that great for long term health of the game and community. I’d much prefer to see a fair deal worked out that gives Homecoming the legal protection to make significant further development worthwhile.

Pinging off a comment I made in the general forums... back in live (I think it was around the time First Ward was added) the devs ran a one-time event involving a Devouring Earth invasion of Atlas Park that culminated in Hamidon showing up and needing to be beaten back. My suggestion is... dig through the spaghetti code to find it and maybe trigger it every so often (or write a trigger akin to the Rikti raids where completing X spawns it... say the Eden trial or a Hami raid) so it can be another option for zone events at (hopefully) less resource cost than having to code a brand new one from scratch.

I wouldn’t be opposed to it either. Heck, there could even be something like a community contest to swap out the signatures for trainers and TFs with player-created ones. That said, the characters as they existed up to shutdown would probably be able to remain as is... its more that if something like that were in place anything added by the HC crew wouldn’t be able to change the status quo of the current signature characters. The main effect this would likely have would be that they’d essentially have to drop the “Coming Storm” as planned and create a story of their own. I honestly wouldn’t mind a change of direction from the storm being a singular force of aliens to it instead being a period of great upheaval with a series of crises in close succession (one of which could be an alien invasion). In the dev AMAs post-shutdown they discussed how the story was ultimately going to ramp up to absolutely cosmic levels (from Battalion to the Dimensionless to whatever was past them) where it’d be nearly impossible to actually continue the game as a practical matter (in the, why are beings on par with Marvel’s Galactus or DCs Monitor/Specter still dealing with mundane human threats). A series of overlapping crises though... we’ve already had the Praetoria War with Mot in the middle of that. So add in a smaller scale Shivan/Battalion vs. Kheldian war (with the Nictus wanting both sides dead), a resurgent Primal Hamidon (I seem to recall the devs running a DE zone event that culminated with Primal Hami spawning in Atlas Park; so there might already be some code for that hidden in the spaghetti somewhere) and Malta using underhanded means to try and re-start the metahuman draft because of all these crises and, finally, a major Arachnos scheme going off. There’s your perfect storm of events that could throw the world into the chaos that the Dream Doctor and Mender Silos are trying to prevent (though if it were up to me I’d make the actual threat be all the instability resulting from those two’s temporal war against each other... because time travel to prevent something leading to that something actually happening is one of the best tropes ever). But before any of that comes to pass... we pretty much need the assurance of a deal with NCSoft to make devoting the sort of effort necessary to do more than the work we’re seeing now.

Tax write-offs don’t work that way. Profits and losses are assessed on a fiscal year basis. There’s no retroactive penalty if a product that lost value in year X then gains value in year X+Y. Instead the current year’s taxes will just be assessed based on the current value of the product. If the IP is sold or licensed from some quantity of money, taxes would be assessed for the current year (and future years if payment is ongoing) based on the revenue from that activity.

They are. And it’s important to note that a license to use the rights and owning the rights are not the same thing. NCSoft could license the rights for any price (including free if they wanted) and still retain ownership of them and pursue legal action against anyone other than the licensee who uses them. My hunch is that one of the reasons they’re willing to talk now is that, after seven years, all the NCSOFT personalities involved in the original shutdown have moved on (i.e. up or out) so there’s no longer any personal honor involved in keeping it shut down (and appearing magnanimous is honorable in Korean culture). Likewise, City of Heroes/costumed superheroes is such a decidedly American franchise that there’s little likelihood of the IP ever being used again outside of things like a character cameo in a MOBA. Licensing it out for any price though would help preserve its trademarks though (c. seven years of disuse is when US courts start treating a copyright as abandoned). Honestly, we have to remember that it’s not even been a year yet since the private server reveal and launch of Homecoming. Deals like this often take a long time to fully hammer out (not just things like license fees, but the rights to modify the original game going forward also need to be negotiated... and the client (HCs 64-bit vs. default 32), rebalancing existing elements, pre-shutdown beta content, new power sets/archetypes, new costume parts/assets, and new story content are all different factors to be negotiated since they can add or detract from the value of the brand. For example, given their use of Statesman recently, NCSOFT might put restrictions on using existing signature characters in any new content (which might be just as well... Homecoming is a new lease on life, starting new stories seems like where it’d be best to take it anyway).

So, having now tried it for a bit I feel fairly comfortable saying that a VPN (a proxy server might work too) seems to fix the problem. 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. What WAS interesting in the /netgraph report was what happened with a lost packet. Prior to this 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.

I like the idea of having a personal villain; however, I wouldn’t go automatic opposite by default. Plenty of heroes have signature villains who are more dark reflections than direct opposites. Arrow had the Dark Archer (aka Malcolm Merlin), Flash has a whole set including Reverse Flash, Professor Zoom, Savitar, etc. Superman has Zod, Doomsday, Darkseid, etc. as dark reflections. Spider-Man has Green Goblin (who in later versions uses a variation on the process that gives Peter his powers), Venom, etc. The point is... elemental opposites is far from the only way to go in having a signature villain. If it were up to me, I’d have them built more in line with the AE custom mobs so you can pick whichever powers and appearance best fit your concept of an arch-nemesis.

I don’t respec much at all so my IOs generally get slotted in A) the order I can buy them and B) if it’s already slotted with SOs they go into whichever slot least impacts performance (i.e. I don’t drop a dam/end IO on top of an acc SO unless I’ve already got enough Acc in the power).

I created a second account as part of trying to figure out the comtinual mapserver issues I was having (since it seemed to affect only some accounts and not others). Now that the solution seems to have been found (use a VPN or similar proxy server to route around whatever bad intermediate stage is causing the problem) about the only thing I can using the second account for would be for some RP where I want a main’s significant other or friend to also be present.

If VPN is actually a solution (and not a placebo like the "play a video in the background" above) then I'd be very curious about two things... First, which VPN service you used and where you set your location to while using it. Second, where you're physically located. Why where you're located is relevant (and everyone else experiencing the glitch is) is that the particular route taken by some data might be the problem. For example, I'm in Fort Wayne, Indiana. If everyone else experiencing the problem is located in, say, the American Midwest, that would explain some things (i.e. they're running into the same network that has an issue with the CoH data stream). The main reason the VPN might be the solution is that the issue is in the routing. Your computer to your local ISP, to one or more intermediate networks then finally to the HC server. The VPN channels your signal to the location you choose before the internet routes you to the HC servers. So if everyone experiencing the problem passes through one of the same intermediate networks where there's a glitch, THAT could be the problem and the route to the VPN exit point (the thing that makes it look like you're in some other part of the world) changes the route in a way that bypasses the glitchy intermediate network. For a rough visual... You -- Your ISP -- Bad ISP -- HC's ISP -- HC Server ...................\___ VPN -- Good ISP __/

I suspect your solution may be psychosomatic, because I tried the video and it made zero difference whatsoever. I mapserved less than 5 minutes after logging in. I think I'm going to have to try one of the other servers for awhile just because this is unplayable for me and anyone saying its not something broken by the Black Friday patch is kidding themselves. No one was reporting this problem before the patch turning on the Holiday Even went live. Immediately thereafter some computers started getting constant mapserve crashes. The absolute lack of Dev response on this is disheartening. Since I haven't been able to play for more than about 10 minutes at a time (and thus have barely logged in this month at all when I could have really used some fun stress relief) and can't even reliably finish a single instanced mission there's no reason for me to donate this month.

Still no change on the constant mapserves after the latest maintenance. I can’t even finish a short door mission without a mapserve kicking me to the login screen. It’s absolutely unplayable as is and there’s nothing more I can even think to do on my end. Would it be too much to ask for the pre-Thanksgiving build to be put up on a server for, say, four hours? Just long enough to confirm whether this error is related to whatever got changed in the Black Friday patch or if it’s an issue independent of that. Because if nothing changes, I may as well just uninstall and check back after the holiday patch is gone.

I can also confirm that the mapserver effect has ZERO to do with activity or graphic settings (since the restart didn't fix things I went back to my original testing regimen). I put the settings to minimum and just sat in a lifeless area (just inside a door mission) while working on something where I could keep on eye on the screen and just nudged the toon every couple minutes so an AFK wouldn't happen. After about 10 minutes (so a typical period of activity before a mapserve) and a minute or two after my last nudge (so literally no activity from my end) the "Lost Connection to Mapserver" message popped up and a minute later I dropped to the login screen again. So that leaves trying a VPN to force a different route... but at this point I really don't think its the route. I don't see how it can't be something related to the "Black Friday" patch. That's when the game turned basically unplayable.

Welp, you're right. Dammit. Played for over an hour yesterday afternoon before posting with zero issues. Logged in this afternoon and Mapserved within 5 minutes. Devs, please roll at least one server back to Pre-Thanksgiving because this is unplayable. I can't make plans to play with anyone. I can't even finish most door missions without having to start from scratch and HOPE this time it doesn't mapserve until I get the last objective. I don't really want to go looking for another CoH server to play on because most of the others don't sound that hot to me... but playing on one of those is better than not playing on yours which is what's happening right now.

Update on testing. I think might have something, but its so bloody stupidly obvious I'm going to sound like an idiot for not having tried it first thing... its also a potential difference between two otherwise identical laptops; particularly given that one where there's no issues is a secondary machine. When was the last time you completely shut down your laptop that's having the mapserver problems? Because I generally put my system to sleep instead of doing a full shutdown because I'll be back on it in basically 6-8 hours and it takes forever to start up from a full shutdown. I've never had an issue with any of my programs while doing so in years. But thinking about that old laptop I mentioned; one of my programs on it sometimes runs into problems communicating with the printer after awhile if I've only put it to sleep instead of fully shutting it down, but it starts working fine after a complete shutdown. So that's what I did with my desktop... just to rule it out mostly. So I completely shut down (not just a restart, but let everything spin down completely) and re-started the computer. After that I was able to run for an hour and twenty-minutes (nearly triple the time before I'd usually get mapserved) before logging off. Now, it could be a coincidence related to the time of day or some other factor and the next time I log in, the mapserver issue could return... but right this second that seems to have fixed things for me, and if your laptop has similarly been left 'on' (i.e. only put to sleep instead of turned completely off) while the other laptop does get turned off completely... THAT could be the common link between who is having problems and who isn't.

I’ve experienced the same thing while just flying around. There is no rhyme or reason to when the lost connection hits. If there were I could at least avoid those things. I’ve tried all three clients (64, 32, Safe) and they make no difference. I’ve also tried complete uninstall/reinstall and a different account on the same machine... no difference. It does make me want to see if my old laptop can run it (even at minimum settings) since if has no issues that’s another datapoint that the issue is NOT the internet connection, but something in how the Homecoming server is talking to certain computers. And it’d be one thing if it was just the type of lost connection where you’d freeze for a second or five then resume. This freezes you out for at least a minute before dumping you to the login screen and I already have the long load time for the character select screen that’s a known issue with Win7 (and we can already rule out OS as a cause since it’s happening with your Mac (but not another one on the same connection). I’ve also got two other things to try. First, I’m going to dump the settings to dead minimum and then stay in a single zone with minimal interaction with anything (hover at altitude and move just enough to avoid an afk) and see if that matters. If that does keep me from mapserving then we can say there’s some sort interaction that triggers it... even if it’s not something we perceive; a certain piece of geometry of GFX is loaded or something like that. If that doesn’t help... well, at least it’s another data point. The other thing I’m considering is maybe trying out a VPN service and setting my location elsewhere to see if that can’t change the route to the Homecoming servers. Maybe the issue is that my PC and your one Mac is using a different route than the Mac with no issues somehow. Basically, I want to get the devs a start point to help them look for this because it seems pretty clear it’s a rare enough issue that all their own machines might not even experience this. The obvious solution would be to revert to the pre-Thanksgiving patch since every last complaint of this issue started AFTER that patch... but the vast majority enjoying the holiday content might get annoyed at that.

Update: I created a new account and ran it from the same computer. Though it took longer to kick in (perhaps due to being Atlas Park with minimal zoning?) it the mapserver issue did pop up so we can rule out an account related issue. ScarletFe's two identical laptops with one having the error and one not is the best lead I can now think of in terms of WHAT is causing the issue. Isolate what's actually different (perhaps one is using a different route through the internet despite the same starting point?) and maybe there's a solution to be found. Does anyone perhaps know how to make a connection follow a different route through the internet? My ping is in the 100 range and I don't PVP so I can accept double the ping if I'm not being booted at random every 5-30 minutes.

Yeah... I can't even finish an instanced mission without being mapserved to the login page. That's absolutely unplayable in my opinion. The issue started precisely with the post-Thanksgiving patch for me and nothing else is registering the slightest connection/streaming problems. ScarletFe, since you have two identical systems available, could you try logging into your account from the other laptop? If your account runs fine when logged in on the other machine that could isolate if its an issue of connecting with specific computers. If it still mapserves you on the other machine, it could mean the probably is associated with the accounts experiencing problems (i.e. something in the spaghetti code is interacting with something in the account database in a screwy way).

Is there a reason why you think it wouldn't it be? Scrapper's AT mechanic is dead simple... 5% (more with ATOs) of your hits deal double damage. That includes the bonus damage from Power Siphon. It honestly synergizes better with Scrappers than it does Brutes since Power Siphon's activation would bleed off some Fury, but the Crit rate is steady state.

I'm using Verizon FiOS (by way of Frontier Communications) and everything from streaming to other MMOs runs absolutely smooth. It could be an issue with where the signal being routed through having connectivity issues (i.e. one of the hops has issues that that hop is not one that occurs when connecting to Netflix, YouTube or SWTOR), but I have no idea how you'd actually change that.

I'm still having the problem of periodic mapserves dropping me to the login screen after the latest patch and there's nothing ISP related my scans have been able to detect. Typical mapserves are just a moment or two and then you rubberband or what have you and your health/endurance alter to reflect what's happened while you weren't synced up. These always last until it dumps not just to character select, but to the login page, all action stops immediately (flight doesn't even decelerate, you just stop and start standing in place) upon the mapserver hitting and just hangs for a minute or so as the packets sent and received slowly cycle down to 0. As an additional experiment, I streamed a movie on Netflix in the background on the same computer and it didn't skip a moment. The fact that this ONLY started with the post-Thanksgiving patch is just very suspicious in terms of trying to narrow down a cause because there's nothing I've been able to find on my end and the fact that its either running absolutely smooth or hard-mapserving (vs. rubberbanding or brief mapserves indicating a spotty connection) makes me think something is broken in the spaghetti code.

I wasn’t there for the end-end, but I spent the day moving each of my toons from wherever they’d been last to the place I considered their home. For one it was a specific apartment in Faultline, for another it was the far south-east island off Peregrine Island. For my sg leader it was in the main room of the base. Once they were safely home (with a pic or five of each), and I’d said goodbye to my online friends (about an hour before shutdown) I logged out for the last time as content with the end of their stories as I could be in the situation. I still need to update my old Virtueverse page with an update I never thought I’d be able to make... that my old toons emerged from the multiverse after being lost for seven years and now continue their adventures.

I get endless fun out of a grav/storm controller... wormhole + singularity + lightning storm + tornado + hurricane + ragdoll physics... AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

For me it’s Claws/Willpower. Willpower works for me because it’s such a fire-and-forget set... put your 4 toggles on and pop your t9 early because it’s best at mitigating damage over time vs. mitigating spikes and it’s “crash” is negligible. Willpower also shines for me in late game where many enemies exploit the common psychic hole and suck endurance to make them more dangerous. Willpower is one of the best for mitigating Psi damage with both resistance and defense against it and most end-drain attacks are tagged as energy which Willpower mitigates with defense (no hit means no End drain) and the extra helping of recovery means even draining hits are less potent. It also has a hefty dose of Regen so even the Pratorian plasma attacks with their -regen aren’t as effective. I find it pairs particularly well with claws’ quick, low endurance cost attacks as it makes -recharge less of a hassle and further mitigates the -end/-recovery effects. Most of claws’ powers recharge fast enough with just normal slotting that you don’t need to go after +recharge set bonuses quite so hard either (and WPs t9 isn’t affected by recharge); which saves a bundle on IOs. Claws benefits from two early attack powers that make it easier to hit your targets... in the levels before SOs these are godsends. Claws also gets it’s 40’ and PBAOE early enough that you’ve got your main anti-runner and large spawn tools even at very low levels (i.e. even exemped down to the teens). My preferred ancillary is definitely blaze... slot the immobilize for damage, then add fire blast and fireball to claws’ ranged and ranged cone attacks and you’ve got a reasonable ranged attack chain for those situations when you need one (like keeping up the attack while avoiding red circles of doom). IO set-wise I lean towards Mako’s Bite and Thunderstrike because of the great synergy with Willpower since they add considerably to WP’s the already meaningful energy/negative energy defense and the ranged defense cuts down on damage from targets outside the effect of your Rise to the Challenge (who’s hit debuff is effectively +defense vs. attacks made at melee range... in addition to boosting your regen). The combo of simple quick attacks with several good AoEs and that make opponents easier to hit coupled layered defenses that scale with the number of mobs in melee range and don’t have to manage is pretty much my platonic ideal of Scapperdom.