Cobalt Arachne

It's been a busy year for many on our team, but despite that we're still very hard at work on new content! For that wait, I can say the next update has grown a lot for the time it's had. 🍜 That being said, if we had any specific ideas on when to expect things to drop we'd be more forthcoming with details, but it's very much 'as time allows' for some of us and it makes it difficult for estimating the exact timetables of collaborative volunteer projects. Updates as soon as we're ready! This is what I've been working on recently myself... As always, work not final, subject to change, not a Nemesis Plot(?), may not even see release, etc, etc.

😱 Good catch, I think I already know exactly why this would happen, likely a holdover gurney left in when they copied the Talos map. I'll check on that, thanks for the report!

Vendors Luna Fixed an issue that was causing Luna in Ouroboros to not properly offer the Mini Tyrant vanity pet for the Going Rogue anniversary month of August.

Apparently the sticky note got missed and the patch that was ready to go out didn't go out this morning, I've mentioned it to the server admins.

An issue was just found and players will notice Luna is not offering the Mini Tyrant pet currently. This will be fixed next Tuesday with a patch. Apologies and thank you for your patience!

Out of curiosity I checked to see if this might have been caused by mode bit order mismatches, but everything looks tip-top there for Titan Weapon's PFX files... At this point I am thinking that @Number Six or @Captain Powerhouse will need to take a look, since unable to see anything immediate on the data side of things.

I'm not a powers dev, so any sets that don't use weapons aren't going to involve me. My comments were only in regards to weapons FX, which I am the main dev for. Specifically Assault Rifle, Beam Rifle, Archery, Dual Pistols, and the Ninja Mastery epic pool; All of which would be entirely incompatible with Shield Defense.

Naomi told me it took them about roughly ~24 hours of work to create each single(1) second of new animation across all three models for the inner tube emotes using the one extremely old animation application we have that is compatible with City of Heroes. Until we have modern 3D tool compatibility that allows our limited time investments to pay-off in a realistic way, this is a 0% chance. Time is our most restrictive and valuable resource as volunteer developers, anything with an extremely poor/disproportionate amount of work-to-results ratio is basically not going to happen.

My current plan is to go back and see how feasible this is once I have finished all the weapons, but given how cthulian the shield sequencers are, I can't commit to it being possible until I've familiarized myself further with it's setup and nuances.

Everyone who's saying this won't happen because of animations is spot on. The Shield animation sequencers are one of the hackiest in the entire game, a game which is already notoriously clunky... Adding new animations to it is extremely unlikely given how difficult it is for us to make new animations currently, on-top of we would be adding them to arguably one of the most volatile animation control systems in the game. The majority of complex animation-related enhancements or features fall under "technically possible, but is too difficult/time consuming with the tools available to our team for us to be able to realistically commit to." Plugins and scripts need to be written to add full compatibility to modern 3D/animation tools that allow them to output to City of Heroes' unique data formats if any major ground-breaking animation work is to occur.

I did that fix, what do you want to know? Only the height changed, as volumes check your feet to see if you're in them or not, and some volumes were set on the surface of the water, but in water your character's feet are lower than normal, so the volume didn't actually count unless you jumped while in it.

Fixed this internally; Was a missed flag in the weapon's FX. It'll be good next patch. 👍

That looks painful; 😱 I'll look into this, thanks for the report!

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!