Cobalt Arachne

The other design purpose of the Aethers was, of course, to provide worthy incentives for people to play the new challenging content. It's the hardest content in the game currently, so it stands to reason those who conquer it should be handsomely rewarded for their struggles, but almost nothing rewarded there is exclusive to the advanced difficulty modes. People with access to more characters, resources, and knowledge are going to have an advantage in earning anything we add compared to new players, regardless of the context, so I'm unsure how that matters regarding the first design goal, which is still accomplished (Aether is consumed by its use and there is no cap on how much it can be consumed, which helps it retain value) while also ensuring the hardest content in the game is lucrative enough to those who are willing to commit to running it. Farming the influence to buy the Aether is of course, the easiest, low-input way to accumulate the currency, that's by design since it is where the influence comes from that trickles down to the new players selling it. It's a balance made using effort vs. time as the factors that drive players to acquire it. You can either play the harder content to get Aether more quickly, slower by playing the easily accessible content like the Weekly Strike Target or Incarnate Trials, or you can buy it from the herd income that sells it on the Auction House. We'll also be adding new gamemodes and content that will reward it and continue to make Aether more available; There's a lot of ambitious things planned in the future, stay tuned!

I am not sure on this, but I will check and can make them ignore levels as well.

Because the Alpha slot salvage is no longer exclusively the way to craft Alpha slots there is no longer any worthwhile incentive for 50's to join and participate in Weekly Strike Targets now, which hurts its role in the game at max level. The Aether addition was aimed at giving 50's reason to join WSTs again.

You're misquoting us a bit here.... That was never a design goal for the Aether system; Rather particle limitations as a whole are something we have to keep in mind constantly with every single new thing we add to this game because particles are a hard-coded engine limit that will very easily cause problems for us if we are careless. I've mentioned multiple times that the Aether system serves a very specific purpose, and that purpose is not to just give players new customization options, since if that were the goal we would've just placed them in the costume editor like we did with the mushroom aura. The design goal of the Aether currency is to serve as an economic balancing tool by allowing new players who don't have vast reserves of wealth to have a way to coax veteran players into parting with their dragon's horde of wealth they've accrued over the years, which creates a healthier and more accessible game overall. The main strength of the currency is giving newer players something they can sell to the veteran players on the Auction House. Last I looked it was sitting at 4,000,000 each and for a player who's currently leveling up, that much influence is a godsend and will cover almost all their enhancement needs up until they start investing in Invention Origin Enhancements. It's very likely a leveling player who's doing missions will end up earning at least one Prismatic Aether Particle and it will majorly benefit their leveling experience. Otherwise, the *trillions* of influence some veterans are sitting on does nothing to help new players, the game, nor the economy. A major part of this was design was that Aether does not drop from any Architect Entertainment farming activities and is not infinitely seeded on the Auction House, which means the price and value is controlled ONLY by players themselves per supply and demand, and is given resilience from being completely devalued primarily by ensuring the Tier 1 rewards were trivial to get and the higher tier rewards were major investments (anything less and veteran players would buy them all out immediately and then the currency's design goal would cease to function completely). It's not an option unfortunately for us to do account-bound rewards in this game due to the way the account system works. Before it gets mentioned, while there are account-wide AE badges that exist, but those were done in an awful, horrific way by having every single map instance server check every single player every single time they zone and reward the badges. If we added anything else to that method of account-bound it would significantly hurt the server's performance, so thus is not a viable option. Which means account-bound stuff cannot be done currently. That being said I am considering making the Weekly Strike Target reward 1 Aether to all non-50's and 2 Aether to 50's for all WSTs which should help.

Beam Rifle and Pulse Rifle will get the same model proliferation pass that Assault Rifle did when I do their holstered versions. 💙 So they will be getting the Crey rifles!

Woops! I'll check on that, must've missed an inclusion somewhere... Min FX Original is also likely doable; Will look into that today. 🍄

Aether Rewards - Wave 3 Tier 3 Reward Additions New cosmetic effects added to the Tier 3 Aether reward vendor offerings: Effect: Flames Effect: Chill Effect: Earthen Effect: Shocking Effect: Psionic Effect: Photosynthesis The Tier 3 cosmetic effects category as a whole can no longer be used in PvP. Tier 4 Reward Expansion Undefined Mode and Undefined Mini Mode now have two additional customization options available: Undefined Silver Undefined Evil Aether Reward Fixes Fixed missing halo aura on Legacy Ruin Mage costume. Fixed a few broken pointers in the meta costume accolade menu.

This is very useful, helped me hone in on where the break is; Thanks!

Ultra icky! 😱 I'll get it fixed

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.