Cobalt Arachne

Before it gets asked, the remaining Holstered Weapons sets (Beam Rifle, Pulse Rifle, Bows, Dual Pistols) are aimed for next update; I had to delay them due to some health issues leading to unproductive months earlier this year. I'm back now, but they weren't able to be ready for this Page's release cycle.

Probably, I'd need to go look at them and how they were written.

Disclaimer statement: None of my projects are in Issue 27, Page 6. Clarifying follow-up: Before anyone starts asking where the teased macguffins are. Distraction attempt: Have another teaser image!

Understandable, it's been annoying to implement.

We're never working on anything. EVER. Nothing. Not even stuff like this. ESPECIALLY not stuff like this. Now that we've cleared that up, thank you for everyone's understanding.

I'll look into this... potentially a typo in the power ID that the menu option looks for; Should be a quick fix. Thanks for the report!

Ah, the explanation of the issue and the picture specifically included having the SG portal threw off my understanding of what I thought was being referred to with the report. I wonder if it's some kind of monitor resolution related issue and what the game reads as valid coordinate points on-screen to generate the float? Hard to say. I've never noticed that issue on my own computer, despite having played a couple characters who were the absolute minimum size the costume creator can legally create, but I'll start keeping my eyes out to see if I notice it when on them.

@CluelessWonder Is it it exclusive to targeting through the SG portal? There's actually an invisible cylinder geometry inside those that serves the function for mouse-clicking detection, it used to be solid (thus SG portal objects had collision) but when Homecoming made the portals side-color specific, we removed the collision property of that internal cylinder geometry so players could walk through SG portals, however because it still exists inside it, the camera and target pathfinding still calculate for it, and if you're standing behind an SG portal targeting something on the other side, it won't think you have line-of-sight with your target because you're behind an invisible geometry. That's all a side-effect of that non-rendered geometry cylinder inside the portal FX, and not something I'm aware can be fixed with the way the map engine works, fortunately you're not super likely to encounter SG portals where you're fighting in most content. Also the reason player names vanish when they walk inside the portal FX, the game thinks they're behind a wall and not in view.

Appreciated and most welcome! Posts like these are the reason we're developers. In the end, our goal is ever to deliver a fun and quality experience to our players, and while there are no perfect decisions, we are always striving to create work that lives up to the legacy of the game we all hold very dear. Happy holidays to everyone in the City of Heroes as we move into 2023! 🎄

Happy Halloween! 🎃

Literally right after your last post, you missed the party. 🎉

Which is totally valid; I'll echo my earlier reply, we respect everyone's decisions on what they're comfortable doing with their computers/smart devices, but we use Discord heavily for our development process and have for years, that's unlikely to change, unfortunately.

That's valid. Honestly that same argument could probably be made against any number of communication applications. Personally, I've used Discord for many years, since its earliest days and have never had any issues with it, but I will always respect an individual's decision on what they do or don't do with their own computers. There are always non-install options like browser Discord as well. However, Discord is what we use on the development team here at Homecoming. It's what we prefer for our work, that's just the reality of it, if you opt out for your own security preferences, I understand and respect that, at least you're not opting out because we weren't open about inviting everyone to participate.

Won't disagree, honestly 'Focused Feedback' once on Brainstorm could probably be called something more fitting to ensure it conveys the right ideas. Everything is different depending on the context of the changes, for some features even though it's called 'Focused Feedback' it's really more just hoping people find bugs, since some features are not really possible to deeply change direction by the time they're on Brainstorm. Perhaps that naming convention has contributed to the schism of communication; I can bring up discussions on finding a better name for those. If I'm being honest, I think a lot of our dev practices we just inherited from how the retail devs handled things, but as a non-profit operation we don't have the same considerations and I think we could improve our work by challenging or redoing some of the conventions we've relied on that have honestly not served to help us at all, and have only made things more difficult as a result. Example: The practice of not being forthright with design purposes is standard in the game's industry because very frequently the answer would be "We did this to make more money and increase our game subscription numbers" which is a business motive that obviously players are going to scorn, so rather than be honest about it, you keep silent. Which as paid game studo employees working for a publisher is the only move they really can make, but as unpaid volunteers who's only motives are making the best game we can, this doesn't serve us as much good. Since we don't have any kind of profit motivations of that kind, I think us being better with our communication will only help make our job easier.

This more than anything else would be attributed to the fact that each of us on the development team have our own set of tempos that we operate by, our own methods and practices. Some of the team like to be on the forums and responding more directly, others like to sit back and read the feedback without ever letting the players know its been read. As I've said, I think we can do better on communication, but by the same token very different devs handle different parts of the game. Even I'm reading something in a powers feedback thread, there's almost zero chance I weigh in because I had absolutely nothing to do with those changes.

We use Discord for development because it is the superior choice for quick & efficient discussions and throwing ideas around, it has nothing to do with trying to exclude anybody. Forums are slow, and responses often out of context because of the way they work, it makes our job harder. We also can't ping our testers for focus testing on the forums, as that's just not a feature the forums have. If the low bar of downloading a free app and joining a server that is open to everyone is too high a hurdle to participate in development discussions at the stage where direction can be influenced, than it feels more to me like the issue is that being involved isn't something that matters enough to the player to make that effort. The minor effort check is just to ensure people who join are actually are interested in helping discuss and test, and not because they want to tell their friends we're working on <experimental unconfirmed feature> that we never promised anyone anywhere, and then have to deal with people getting upset later when it never comes. I'm sorry if that reads bluntly, but I just finished explaining earlier in this thread how anybody who wants to have a seat at the table where things get discussed & decided can very easily have one with minimal effort. We've already seen a handful of forum regulars join the test server since I posted just last night, it's not an exclusive club in any capacity, it's a meet-in-the-middle collaboration. If you want to be involved and influence what we're doing, get involved. Most welcome! We're not bad guys, I promise. We're not trying to ruin your game, we aren't trying to force people into playing anything they don't want. We just want everyone to have a fair and fun experience in the game. There's a common misconception that nerfs are because we don't want players who like X or Y being too strong, but that's wrong, it's entirely because we don't want players who dislike X or Y to feel pressured into something they don't like because of major balance gaps. Balance is about ensuring all choices are relatively worthwhile choices so you can pick what you like without regrets. I'm a member of over 20+ different CoH Discord servers (some anonymously others less anonymously) that play on Homecoming. I have City of Heroes friends who have disabilities, are roleplayers, farmers, PvPers, base builders, LGBTQ+, raid runners, AE arc makers... There's no one 'player type' that we favor, because we're trying to ensure everyone who loves this game can play it and find enjoyment in doing the activities they prefer. Friends sometimes bring broken things to my attention, or mention suggestions that have resulted in very quick additions (Rogue Arachnos chest details on VEATs or the Hero Corps chest detail) but no matter how good a friend, they're never any kind of factor on deciding if I'm going to take on a major project that's going to be hundreds of hours of work; That would be an incredibly nonsensical way to prioritize feature development in a game that has thousands of players. Most of the dev team rarely finds time to play regularly because we normally put that free time towards working on new things/improvements. We approach development work objectively (and it is work, not fun, scripting missions or FX is not 'fun') and our decisions are motivated entirely by what we think is best for everyone who plays our game. We do this for free, as a service to the community. Our reward is the satisfaction/fulfillment that comes from doing high-quality work and seeing players enjoy things we add.

Sure, I can be straight up about what, just without specifics/spoilers. 😄 Next update I'm working on: - Remainder of the ranged weapon sets for Holstered Weapon support. - Wave 3 Aether rewards (I've got some cool new ideas cooking but I have to see if they'll even work first). - Kallisti Wharf's zone map (gosh, there's so dang much to fix in there), new KW enemy groups, Warrior revamp, KW mission arc scripting, KW mission arc maps, and helping the rest of the team with KW things as needed. ...- The rest of the zones that need Tour Guide missions written, I swear they'll happen someday. >_>

It's on our to-do list, we've got a big ol' spreadsheet compiled of all the various rewards and datamined average completion times (10,000+ runs worth for most stuff) for most content, with time/reward ratios and such; It's been on our radar to go through everything again and decide how we're calculating those payouts and ensure that the various contents are relatively as rewarding as they should be. It's something we'll continue work on, we want everything to be fair based on the relative time/effort involved in the activity.

I wrote the design draft for the Dr. Aeon Strike Force (ASF) in November 2020 during Page 2's testing while finishing work on the Tour Guide tip missions, when I officially joined the development team in I think... March? my first assigned task was to create the Dr. Aeon Strike Force I had drafted earlier. The ASF released in November of 2021, so round about 8-ish months? But it also doubled as my learning in the out's of all the various City of Heroes systems, if I were to do it again it now, it would probably take me less than half the time. Honestly, the biggest time sink in the ASF was doing entirely new maps for every single mission, worth the effort, but maps take a lot of time to make high quality. Luckily, I had a lot of experience with the Morrowind map editor, and the City of Heroes map editor is not too different. Well maps, and the feature creep was unreal, any cool idea that came up basically got thrown in... Mission 5's ripples could've been it's own TF honestly, Piecemeal did such great work on those. The final result was like x10 the size of the original design draft, but I did it with a lot of help from the rest of the development team on figuring out and implementing ideas. The Advanced Difficulty mode was created alongside the ASF from the get-go and was originally going to baked into running the content automatically at level 52+, but Number Six decided to make it better and made major improvements to the Challenge Settings system (basically ripped it out by the guts and rewrote the whole thing) that drastically improved controlling variables inside mission content, so we retooled the ASF to use them and fleshed out the system more. Which later on made making the Advanced Difficulty Imperious Task Force far easier, and it only took me about two months to finish, the majority of which was spent scripting the new Romulus fight and making the hostless Nictus mechanics. I'm sure we'll do more group content in the future, but all our current efforts are now focused on making Kallisti Wharf into a functioning zone with contacts, mobs, missions, arcs, and more. We've got some real spicy stuff cooking in the oven, though it may be a while, I don't think folks will be disappointed. 😉

We actually created a system in-place to accommodate that idea, but then ran into issues (like half the things we try). Primarily, once converted from an AE arc format to a contact arc format, there would be no easy way to make edits to the arc, meaning if there were bugs or typos found later, it'd be very difficult to fix them. The other concern was logistics. The raw manpower needed to vet arcs and pick ones worth keeping would take a lot of time, since it involves actively and extensively playing/checking arcs, it's the hurdle that has caused Dev's Choice AE arcs to be an on-and-off affair (even though GMs do those). We're all busy adults and the amount of required extra hours to run the massive number of AE arcs that get submitted for consideration is not a small ask. On-top of it all, if the AE arcs were being considered as official content additions we'd have to scrutinize them twice as hard, since players can hide things in AE arcs very easily. Worse, it would likely involve them surrendering the rights and source files for their story arcs, and that's not something we're particularly comfortable demanding from folks, but would be needed since we wouldn't want somebody to suddenly demand we remove their content after it was made a permanent contact story arc. At least with Dev's Choice all we have to do is find their arc in the AE system and add a tag, and the player can remove the content themselves if they don't want it on Homecoming anymore, much less involved.

This is a great question, since it's the one that's often the most difficult for us to explain to players during feedback. Decisions are often based around a couple factors: How much is a feature is demanded by the players? This one we try and balance around the areas of the game we feel need help, that don't have as many options, or feel marginalized even though they're perfectly fine in terms of fun and quality. It's a little vague, but things that help the game be more well-rounded are often things we consider more often. For instance the Advanced Difficulty content was in response to a demand for content that actually challenged players, and then the Aether Rewards were added to meet a demand for more goals to chase after since for veterans, completing a functional maxed character could be done in hours if you had a reserve of resources, as well give us a new way to control incentives as we'd been encountering problems where all content was competing with itself since there was a distinct lack of unique rewards due to accessibility changes. Basically if it's something we know can be done reasonably, and a huge amount of players have wanted it, like Sheathed/Holstered Custom Weapons, it's a lot more likely to get on our radar. How much a feature is likely to demand in new tech/code? This one is harder to explain to players since they're not going to know what on earth we're talking about when we explain the specifics, since often it requires understanding the context of how certain subsystems in this game can or can't talk to each other in specific ways, and often that makes requests that seem 'super easy' to do actually far, FAR more involved than anyone (even us frequently) can imagine. Depending, this can be a more reasonable barrier, other times it's basically an insurmountable barrier. Things dealing with the oldest systems in the game (like sequencers) are often hard walls because they control so much of the game and rewriting them is akin to remaking the game engine. If the demand is going to require rewriting half the game it's obviously not going to happen. How much time is a feature going to take to create? This one is a bit nebulous too, so it often is tough to give answers to it, there are lots of things that are distinctly 'possible' but committing to them could end up as hundred-thousand hour affairs for what seemed like a 'simple' ask. The common one people bring up is giving NPC costume pieces to players, without realizing that without source files (everything in City of Heroes is converted from a sane industry standard format to a dumb Cryptic proprietary format that the game can read) for these models and how they don't attach to player geometry without major gaps as is, as well as often they only exist on single body types, meaning our 3D artist (we only have one on the team) might have to completely remake some models from scratch just so we can player-ize them. If something is cool but is going to take us huge amounts of time for very little relative impact, it becomes harder to justify. There's other considerations, but those are often the big ones that jump to my head when I'm in the design process... Unfortunately, even when people participate in design discussions, half the time the answers are usually "Won't, Can't, Shouldn't" for the reasons above. This game is old and as a result there are tech limitations we just have to work within, making straight requests from players difficult because the answer is usually "It might work, but I'd have to see if it has any issues." or "It definitely won't work with the game's limits.", then when things are "Oh, that'd definitely work." it's usually the third issue that makes the call on it tricky. If something was in high demand, required no new code, and was very quick to do, I imagine we'd have already done it without anyone having to ask. 😅

Incorrect, and we already provided information on that during Page 4's discussions. Because AE farming is generally done with the three allowed accounts all rewards a farmer gains must be calculated by triple and because of that triple modifier it absolutely eclipses all other content types by a huge margin on a 'how profitable for me is this?'. +4/x8 speed ITFs came close if we were limiting things to a single account, but because you're only getting x1 reward, AE still wins by a landslide with its x3 with multi-boxing. If you want to dig through the Page 4 AE feedback thread, the graphs were posted there showing datamined influence income totals. We're basing our decisions off of data, not speculation. We don't think the AE is making way more money than everything else, we have hard evidence that it does.

That isn't a valid response as the Auction House doesn't generate any rewards itself except for the seeded items that can't be profited from above a certain margin. The AH is simply a way to manipulate items exchanging hands and taking a cut of the profit for yourself to reinvest. Since the AH does not generate anything by itself, AE is still undisputed king for generating wealth, even if a large portion of it then ends up on the AH for others to profit from. Players have to actually play and put things on the AH for it to function at all.