Chris24601

The short solution is; find a VPN service whose price and features fit your needs. Install and run it with your location set to a place that would change the route your internet to reach Toronto in Canada. What that route is will vary with your physical location (see below for where my testing and research suggests the problem points are). How you use the VPN will vary with the service you choose (and this really isn’t the place to be pitching paid third-party software), but the big names are usually designed to be extremely easy to use. Mine is literally just a drop down menu of locations (with a recommended closest location first) and a big button you click on to turn it on/off. The mechanics of the fix is that you’re diverting the route the internet’s general routing system thinks is best (shortest number of bounces typically) to a different route that avoids the trouble spots. This works because the internet first calculates the shortest route to the VPN location and THEN calculates the route from there to the Homecoming servers. The precise route that will work for you depends on where you’re located relative to the Homecoming servers. As best I can determine, the problem is somewhere in the Midwest, possibly where the Internet hops from the US to Canada (having now looked at some maps of national/international internet traffic a route through Chicago is likely; rather than Detroit as I was initially thinking... which explains why my bounce to New Jersey doesn’t noticeably affect my ping; both are about equally out of the way in terms of reaching the Homecoming servers). Because of these two things though, there’s not a “one-size-fits-all” fix to the problem. I use New Jersey as my VPN location and it works for Ft. Wayne, IN. But if the problem is Chicago and you’re in Wisconsin, the route to New Jersey probably goes through Chicago anyway and may not help, but VPN location of Seattle or Vancouver might cross back to Toronto using all Canadian lines. On the other hand. If the issue is on the Canada side of Chicago to Toronto route then New Jersey would work fine from Wisconsin, but Vancouver might hit the problem and not be a fix at all. The big problem is that the problem isn’t on your computer or Homecoming’s end; it’s someone else’s network in the middle. That means we can only really learn where the precise problem is by analyzing who is having the problems and their locations. Other than that the route is all guesswork.

Honestly, there are so many possible sets available here that I never got to on live that I honestly would prefer they devote their effort first and foremost to the back end stuff that will make the game easier to add content to down the line. By way of comparison, my substitute MMO before CoH returned was SWTOR. You know how many new classes and options for those classes they had in the seven year gap? ZERO. Same eight advanced classes with three talent trees faction mirrored (i.e. only the animations are different between a jedi and a sith). Sure, they’ve added about 20 levels since then, but 15 of those only added railroad story content that amounted to maybe 3-4 hours of fresh play per character. The rest was all grinding the same seven year old content. In terms of fresh play experience, those twenty levels added about 2 powers and 3 talents to each build... and homogenized everything so that a jedi tank plays almost exactly like a bounty hunter tank. They had two straight years without an expansion during which they added a grand total of four missions designed to be ground again and again. So the amount of progress both in getting i24/25 stuff, power set proliferation, new sets and even some new missions out, plus the backend work... as VOLUNTEERS... is amazing and praiseworthy; easily IMHO eclipsing the content produced by the professionals employed by EA/Bioware on their big MMO property.

I've said it before, but I will say it again. The development of a 64-bit client and Homecoming's other back-end changes are what is going to make Homecoming the only game in town for City of Heroes sooner rather than later. Spending your time developing crazy new power sets and such is useless if you can't actually play it. Apple's newer OS's no longer run 32-bit clients and I've no doubt that whenever Windows 11 drops it will also no longer run the dinosaur that is 32-bit clients. That limits all the alternatives spending their time on flashy bits to an older and ever dwindling number of machines that can actually play them while Homecoming's "boring" work on a 64-bit client ensures it will be viable for years to come. Throw in the work of actually going legit (the danger of shutdown is certainly limiting development work) and I feel safe in saying Homecoming is far more likely to be around in 3-5 years than many of the other rogue servers.

I think you could even argue the seeds for such unconventional additions would be some of the new blaster secondaries like Tac Arrow (i.e. all ranged control/debuffs and personal buffs to the point it almost feels like a hybrid controller/defense set). Sets like that really diversify the way you can play a blaster (away from the blapper melee secondary attack) while still leaving the primary role (ranged damage) intact. Which does mean it probably makes more sense to apply this approach to the original hero ATs since they were less hybrids like some of the villain ones. As an example; how necessary would the dominator AT be if damage sets had been created for Controllers in addition to their buff/debuff sets? We have a strong semi-control/debuff set for Blasters. Could you create a balanced ranged damage set for a tanker? How about a melee set for a defender? A pure damage secondary for Masterminds? Perhaps the solution isn’t to add more ATs, but to expand the concepts available for the AT secondary sets. You’d have to be careful how you approached it (there’s a reason I suggest such options only be secondary sets... no ranged/defense scrappers) particularly where it would step on other ATs. For example, adding a damage secondary to controllers steps all over dominators so is a non-starter for legacy reasons (if we were back in 2005 discussing how CoV should be built it’d be another matter). Similarly, adding a ranged damage secondary to tankers could step on sentinels... as would adding armor as a blaster secondary. But others like adding melee as a defender secondary (replacing one damage category with another) or a scapper’s defense secondary with a debuff set (i.e. defense through debuffing attackers’ acc/damage/recharge) are niches that aren’t already filled and seem like areas worth exploring.

Except if the Earth is making a full rotation every half hour and the Moon is rising every night in an orbit perpendicular to the planet’s rotation, then its actually making a full orbit every thirty minutes as well and at best should look like the Moon in Thundarr the Barbarian or, more likely, hurled itself into deep space. This would of course end all tidal activity on the planet if the orbital rotation of the Earth hadn’t already cast all our water and atmosphere into deep space.

My KM/WP scrapper is my number two favorite toon after my current archery/tac arrow blaster. I themed them as a close combat spellcaster (and not-so close once the ranged attacks opened up) so their movements are them gathering mana and casting their spells. For your epic either go fire or mu mastery as both have some fairly quick recharging ranged attacks; enough to almost have a decent ranged attack chain if you include KM's two ranged attacks... this makes you a solid damage dealer who can pop trash mob runners and still have solid melee damage. Leveraging the large amounts of knockback/down is also handy for damage mitigation and a little regarded element of their build-up power is that it also includes a damage debuff with each of your hits... using their AoEs with the build-up when swarmed not only knocks a lot down (reducing the attacks taken), but also reduces the damage dealt (meanwhile WP scales up its regen when surrounded so the two in concert can make you quite survivable; particularly in late-game with its large amounts of elemental damage that you have defense against and slot IO-sets to further improve). As damage types go its not all that horrible. Smashing is broadly, but not heavily, resisted; meaning lots of enemies will reduce that component by 20% or so, but few will have the 50% reduction that say, lethal, gets in some situations). Conversely, many enemies that are resistant to smashing are vulnerable to the energy component of KM's damage (ghosts and undead for example reduce the kinetic damage, but take more from the energy part so it ends up either a wash or even slightly favoring kinetic melee). It's big downside is long animation times. I ended up not keeping the tier-9 simply because the three second animation time caused my build-up cycle to do less damage over time than just pounding on the target with your t1-3 attacks to build and maintain stacks of extra damage. Which I think is the important point to take when it comes to Kinetic Melee. It's forte is not burst damage like a lot of melee sets, but damage over time. It's build up is more akin to a blaster's defiance mechanic that ramps up after activation, sustains for a short time then ramps down after the effect ends (a stack added a fraction of a second before the effect ends lasts its full duration so often you're halfway to your next click of build up before they've all worn off). Its actually better at bigger spawns or tougher targets where you can get the full effect of the build-up, sustain and ramp down of a full cycle on targets instead of small weak spawns that are dead before the effect has even ended.

I think its worth pointing out that "non-profit" doesn't mean people can't be paid for their work. My brother-in-law works at a non-profit religious school and is paid just like any employee at a for profit company would be. Non-profit just means that its profits can't exceed its expenses; any overage needs to be re-invested in infrastructure (ex. new computers for the classrooms) or donated (ex. giving the older computers to another religious school that needs them). Once a deal is signed (before which you might be hiring people just to lay them off if something goes sideways), a non-profit could still hire a small staff to perform basic operations. Having paid positions to provide 24/7 trouble ticket support would be a perfectly justified expense for a non-profit offering a service. Having a few paid employees to program new mission content/power sets would similarly not be out of line with a non-profit related to a computer service. A lot depends on the provisions of any deal made. One thing I feel fairly confident of is that it won't involve a rollback of what Homecoming has already added. There's just no point to forcing a rollback to i23 when the work's already been done. While it might freeze any additional new content beyond that, I also think that outcome is unlikely (other than possible provisions like not being able to use the existing signature characters in new content).

Well, as long as there’s no issues from you to New Jersey, there seems to be a clear internet route from there. I suspect any VPN location on the East Coast from say Virginia to Maine would also avoid the problem. Also, this has been a known problem covered on two other separate threads with essentially identical behavior in all cases and a lot of testing done to isolate the cause. It does not appear widespread enough to have affected more than a handful of players, indicating whatever the problem being encountered is fairly localized and therefore relatively easy to route around.

If you don’t mind my asking... whereabouts are you located? I ask because in two of the people with the mapserver issue who’s location I know of are likely passing through Detroit as part of the shortest connection to where Homecoming’s servers are (if I recall correctly they’re physically in Toronto). I also know my issues started right at the time they did the winter event patch (which is why I thought it was a coding problem with the update for the longest time). However, when I detoured from Indiana to New Jersey before heading to Canada by using a VPN the mapservers issue ended entirely. I can also confirm via CoH’s /netgraph command that using the New Jersey location with the VPN service I got didn’t change my ping rate at all. What DID change was how the connection dealt with lost data packets. Without the VPN the crash happened the first time in a session that it lost a packet and it would not even try to resend a lost packet. With the VPN I would get a lost packet every few minutes (indicated by a yellow or red line on the netgraph) but the lost packet would be resent and the connection would continue without issue. This suggests to me that whatever section of the net along the direct Indiana to Toronto connection is dropping connections at the slightest hiccup instead of retrying the connection. Unfortunately the only viable alternative is to bounce your signal around the problem part of the internet using a proxy server or VPN. For the sake of your own internet security I definitely recommend a paid VPN service. Free proxy servers and VPNs are likely to log everything going through it and sell that in order to pay for itself (malicious ones might even hack your computer using the connection you established). Remember, if it’s free, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Fortunately for us too, City of Heroes doesn’t actually need all that much bandwidth to play. It’s original minimum connection requirements were a 56k MODEM (as in dial-up... still used by 60% of the US in 2003 and by 36% in 2006).

No... it should be Anti-Halloween... a month of solid high noon daylight. It's dark here at 5pm and the sun isn't fully up until 10am. Another month of eternal night in game would be atrocious. I was already seeking out arcs with outdoor missions just so the day-night cycle in them would give me a little daylight.

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).