Cobalt Arachne

Hah, it's a fun idea! 😄 Being truthful though, that badge with Becky has been a constant headache since we added it, due to the less-than-reliable nature of NPC pathfinding (I've been trying XYZ to get it working better for years, with ASF fixes as recent as i28p1!) If we ever did another badge like it, I would probably try to find a better way to implement it that doesn't cause so many support tickets about the NPC getting stuck. 😱

Will look into this, most likely a model definition mismatch in the FX. All fixed! Expect it to go live with Page 2. Thanks!

Yes, the fix for that bug should be in the next patch as well.

👀

I underestimated the foot traffic the event was going to see. 😵 We'll be moving Sigil, Kadabra Kill, and the Ouro crystal down to the main floor in Pocket D on *Friday with a fix patch, which should alleviate things.

Bug identified and fixed. Specific to the hero version of the mission due to the way encounters are handled when spawning alignment defined critters.

💟 Hello, Homecoming do-gooders, evil-doers, and other dimensional entities! 💕 Hey everyone, it's Cobalt Arachne! I'm one of the designers here on the Homecoming Team! Hope everyone is having a fabulous February! It’s that time of year again! Spring is a flingin' and to celebrate we’ve added a brand-new event mission! But beyond that, we’ve added a missing piece of City of Heroes history back to the game for the first time, allowing our players to experience what was a pivotal narrative moment in the series’ timeline! Tis the season and romance is the reason! Back during the Spring Fling event of 2008 (Wow… 17 years ago, crazy!), the development team running the game at that time organized a special live in-game event for players to experience a momentous occasion. The developers logged in as their signature characters for a special performance where two of the game’s NPC heroes, Manticore and Sister Psyche, were to be married, and they were going to let the players be a part of it. This was during the heyday of heroes vs. villains, so of course, the wedding would see the Arachnos bad guys interfere, and in the end the whole event devolved into an insane PvP free-for-all, with players having the opportunity to fight alongside and against the developers in a chaotic scrap. It was a unique experience, but one many remembered fondly but also one that many didn’t have the chance to experience, given the limited seating available and the short run of the event. Ah, good old 2008 screen resolution! @Arcanum brought forward a suggestion that we could re-create the wedding event in mission form, with the content added to the game in a way that could be experienced by those who weren’t players back then or didn’t have the opportunity to join the event when it was running. It was a fascinating and unique part of City of Heroes’ history, and we wanted to find a way to bring it back due to how limited the experience was originally. Since I myself also missed this event, the idea of recreating it and bringing it to life for everyone else who missed it to experience was particularly exciting, and I got to work right away on bringing the idea to life. Step aside Sela Vermont, Cobalt's organizing this timeline's wedding! With the idea in hand, I took the lead in designing a new mission experience that would emulate the happenings of the original wedding event, and in a fun way we could add to the game as part of this year’s Spring Fling event. For me, it was about ensuring two things: Faithful to the original event. Channeling the same fun/chaotic vibes. To ensure the first, we found an archived video on YouTube of the original event; From here I transcribed the wedding ceremony text and vows, this ensuring they had 100% historical accuracy. Everything Positron, Manticore, and Sister Psyche say during that ceremony is faithful to the original event. We even fished up the original special map version of Ouroboros that was used in the original and restored it for this occasion! Timelines? Time is not made of lines, it's made of circles! That's why Ouroboros is round! Next, to secure the second goal, after the ceremony we needed to recapture that element of instant chaos, with Lord Recluse appearing without warning and the whole event descending into a mad brawl! I wanted this mission to have something a little more unique, so I gave players a pair of AV helpers, which allowed for the mission design to lean a little more into the chaotic element by letting us have larger groups of enemies, since the AV helpers would ensure players didn’t run into completion issues. This helped in ensuring the vibe felt appropriate to the content! Wow! What a turn out! Seems like everyone was invited! Lastly, the Freedom Phalanx all received special wedding outfits for the original event, and not wanting the villains to feel left out, we gave the Arachnos elite their own brand new fancy outfits! After all, if you're going to crash your nemesis' super group's special occasion, a true super villain knows to do it in style! Evil never looked so fashionable! For those looking for something a little bit spicier at Level 50, might I recommend the team leader talking to Positron when they have both the Best Man / Maid of Honor + Wedding Crasher badges? There might be a dangerous surprise waiting in store! 💫 That's all for this Valentine's dev diary! It's our hope that everyone has fun with this year's Spring Fling event! Additionally, look forward to Issue 28, Page 2 and beyond, coming later this year! Everyone is working hard to create some really impressive stuff for our loyal heroes, villains, and Praetorians! 💌 Thanks for being awesome players, Homecoming! Here's to another year of City of Heroes in 2025! 💞

This is likely due to the method by which many mob support powers work, using a whitelist of allowed targets. Specifically, Heal Other is only allowed to be cast on a curated list of Cimeroran Traitor enemies, if they try to target anybody else (like a player) it will return invalid. In this specific case, it's to prevent them from healing Nictus Romulus in the finale mission on standard difficulty, as their heal hits for a base 50% of the target's max HP which would be really strong if used on an arch-villain.

These are due to an extents issue in Atlas Park, and a mini map scale issue in Founder's Falls; Fixes to both are coming in the future.

Sorry to punch a hole in the hyperbolic list that you made to make a point... But I'm the only dev who could've possibly said anything about the Labyrinth, and I can promise you that I never said this, because I actually like the suggestion and am considering adding it now that I've seen it. But the context that I'm seeing it makes me disappointed. It benefits nobody to pessimistically assume and spread misinformation.

Sounds like another Devouring Earth misdeed... We'll deploy our strongest nature-relocating super gardeners to see if they can't convince the shrub to 'leaf' the area.

It's not. Trackers can't be retroactive, as there's nothing recorded before the trackers are added.

I have a fix for this in the works that should go out with the next Page update.

I have a suspicion the reason she doesn't like that mission is because NPCs like to have doors to exit out of on both sides, and for the first couple of dimensional doors it's just one door, one way. I'll look into adding non-functional doors at the arrival points for her to emerge from and we'll see if she behaves better after that.

Fixed up Summer Blockbuster (15-29), Kane's House of Horrors (15-29), and SSA 1.1 (10-20) incorrect level ranges.

While I'm fixing this one, are there any other known LFG descriptions that have issues?

This was probably just overlooked; I'll check on it. Update: Was overlooked; Fixed in a future patch.

Happy Halloween! Here's to another fun-filled year of City of Heroes!

This seems incorrect from what I'm seeing in the game's data; Red Cap transformations don't have any awareness for difficulty I can see, unless there's something hard coded that I'm unaware of. How they work: 1 in 7 chance per spawn group that a single Rascal minion will have RedCaps.Minion_Transform.Transformation which always spawns RedCaps_RedCap_Transformed_Lt 1 in 7 chance per spawn group that a single Hooligan LT will have RedCaps.Lt_Transform.Transformation which always spawns RedCaps_RedCap_Transformed_Boss The transformed Red Cap cannot transform a second time, something exclusive to Snaptooth.

Bug that's already been fixed internally, hopefully we can deploy a hotfix to the Labyrinth zone soon.

Our intention is to run the new Anniversary event each May and continue adding to it, so those badges will be available again next year. 🙂

Some misunderstanding there on what's doing what... Atlas Park changes automatically when the server's calendar date rolls over into to October, it has nothing to do with the Halloween event running or not. We use a script to start the Halloween event after the first October maintenance, it doesn't activate at 00:00 of October 1st like Atlas does. This year things just happened to fall on the same day, but they are usually triggered independently. The special Halloween version of Atlas was designed to be Halloween themed, so it has spooky window swaps always on by default, because that version of Atlas Park only ever appears in October, no need for seasonal setups. However, for the rest of the game unfortunately, it does require manually patching. Specifically, a patch that uncomments this line from every single zone's scene file: #include scenes/includes/halloween.txt Edit: I'll ask our admins about it... But a longer-term solution is probably warranted, it's a very minor change that doesn't warrant two version builds, but was a charming part of the original event, and I agree, it is a bummer to see it missing.

The core reason for that is because we don't patch at all to start the Halloween event anymore, and those window texture swaps require manually patching them in and manually patching them out after. A few years back, the game's event scripts and specifics were enhanced by the administrators to run automatically without needing to patch the game. Things such as Atlas Park changing to autumn in October or the events starting are handled by automated scripts that don't require building and deploying any patches. Due to that, some elements that only worked with patching were missed because they aren't possible to implement without a patch, and thus aren't compatible with the new current Halloween event setup. I can mention it to the admins who run things, but essentially, it's at odds with some of the automation measures implemented for how we run the events today.

Additionally, note that the Hollow Reaper Elite Bosses that spawn from Trick-or-Treating do count for the Unseelie defeat badge as well, though it could potentially be a more difficult way to do the badge, it doesn't require locating any limited spawns.