Faultline

I know people are frustrated with the subreddit situation, but I'll echo Cipher's position in that it's best to not engage and focus on the positive. Press attention is certain to cause a new influx of players, and we want them to see a welcoming community, rather than one that is fractured and bitter. Be excellent to each other and game on, dudes.

The chance to fail is based on the relative level between enhancements. It's there to prevent you from buying low-level HO-equivalents (I think they start at 30 with Eden/Hydra?) and combining to get a 53 HO on the cheap. Yes, even back on Retail you could combine a Hydra/Titan with a HO.

Players ask for options all the time for pretty much anything as if it was a no-brainer to just make everything into an option. While this is more-or-less true for client settings (graphics, controls, sound) it is very much not the case for server settings, especially those that affect gameplay. Not only for the obvious reason of gameplay consistency (if everyone changes too many things about how the game works, it becomes harder for people to help each other since they will not have the same frame of reference) but because not everything can be made into an option. There's a concept in programming called "scope": while yes, at the end of the day everything in the game is in memory somewhere, parts of the game don't know every other part of the game, and making it so some parts of the game are accessible from a part of the game where they currently aren't can introduce issues. And that is assuming that the thing you want to change affects only the client or only the server; if the setting would require the client and server to both be aware of it and keep it synced between them, it becomes even more of a hassle. In some cases, no amount of moving things around will get past that problem. There's a reason Null the Gull exists and hasn't been deprecated in all these years; the various gameplay changes it enables are only possible via directly giving something to the player character itself that can be detected via the powers system, or by polling the character inventory directly in order to see what badges they have available, or what alignment they are. Those things cannot be read from the settings code, and cannot be altered by settings -- not without some major surgery to change how settings are managed and stored, which is very much not worth the dev time. In conclusion: pretty much every time a change is made, players ask for an option to avoid the change, and more often than not, they won't get that option. It doesn't matter what the result of the poll is, because if the setting is something we can add without much fuss, we'll just do it (see the various settings to control the power recharge animation -- a client setting) and if it's something that we determine isn't feasible to make into a setting, we won't.

No, badges can have pretty complex requirements that are hard to reset, and even in the case of simple ones, resetting them is not desirable. For a very obvious example, take the Veteran badges -- while they are awarded by a single stat that could be reset to zero, that means player would be able to repeatedly get the badges for infinite Empyrean merits. Even Rookie has a reward attached, it gave you Patrol XP, so allowing you to revoke an Exploration badge would mean infinite Patrol XP.

Regarding the new way to obtain the Passport accolade, be aware that the change means any exploration badge counts for Passport, not just the badges tied to an accolade. Jail Bird (Breakout), Thrill Seeker (any AE location), Rail Rider (CTA stations) and a bunch of other badges now count. So going to Pocket D and grabbing Big Time, Trucker and Thrill Seeker counts as three badges, if you want to avoid enemies entirely outside of your starter zone.

Those powers can be switched out, so making them slottable is a no-go; you would lose the slots and any enhancements slotted on them when swapping.

UI scaling is also pretty huge. If you have a 1080p monitor you won't think about it, but 4K monitors are a significant part of the market now, and the game is borderline unplayable at that high resolution with default UI scaling.

A while ago I bought the game "It Takes Two" to play with my SO while I'm in Europe, which is strictly a two player co-op game. I got it on Steam, but it still installed the EA launcher and forced to launch the game through it. The darn "friends list" refused to work, so I could never play the game. We appeared as offline in each other's friends list no matter what we did, and EA support just said blamed the developers of "It Takes Two" and said it was their problem. I contacted the developers, telling them basically "hey, you know that EA is saying your game's broken when it's clearly their launcher, did they ask you to fix anything?" and they responded that EA had not made them aware of any issues with their launcher whatsoever, and to contact their support. The game has fantastic reviews, but to this day, we haven't been able to play it. At this point we'll just do couch co-op once we're back in the same continent.

Not really an spoiler since it was obvious it was going to happen eventually.

Both the October 24th deadline for Page 5 and the April 26th deadline for Page 6 were mentioned by me several times on the Discord, which is the place where people are more aware of the state of polish of the patch and more willing to not freak out if the date is missed by a week in either direction. Players who are not engaged in the beta tend to just treat any given dates as an unbreakable promise, which puts us in a bad spot if the patch is deemed to be ready a week earlier, or if a last-minute bug if found that forces a delay for a week. A rule of thumb for the future is that the Brainstorm release happens a month before the Live release.

As Shade indicated, the deadline was set by me because starting today I have a series of appointments for a ton of immigration-related paperwork that are very time intensive and I'm unlikely to be able to give COH the required attention for the next few weeks; small patches is fine to fix issues, but the big page publish definitely needed to be yesterday.

I was pointed to this thread so I guess I'll provide an explanation; it is already widely known by the people in Golden Testers anyway. I'm the one in charge of patch merging and publishing and making sure that all the changes from other various devs (powers, storyarcs, base stuff) don't conflict with each other, and work in conflict resolution when it happens. So while work can continue while I'm not around, publishing an actual patch requires me to be around and with plenty of time to spare in order to deal with it. While other people have access and could do it if I were to suddenly dissapear, they don't generally work on the master branch without my involvement unless it's an emergency, because I've been doing it long enough that I can tell at a glance whether a seemingly innocent change will break everything. Last year I was offered a good job in a different country, so I had to pack up my life and leave by late October. That's why Page 5 was relatively light in content and it didn't have a long public testing time; unlike other pages, that one had an actual deadline, where it needed to be out by October 17th or not at all. The intention was that I'd be settled by the beginning of the year and be able to start putting together Page 6 for a release in February or March. Some keen eyes noticed that I "lost" my "Developer" title after Page 5 release, which was done to signal that I was not around for development, so sending me messages about it would not be useful. Well, the move was a disaster; I was robbed upon arrival at the new country and lost the bag with pretty much everything valuable including the laptop, all my IT gear such as harddrives, all the cash on me and more importantly, all my documentation besides the passport. So for the first couple of months I just had to deal with getting my paperwork back in order, and try to get settled with minimal resources. I am still not done with that, and my next appointment to sort out paperwork is on April 26th; bureaucracy is slow. The job is fortunately still waiting for me, but until I sort all my paperwork I can't get started. I have only had enough stability to sit down and look at COH patches since last month; my new desktop arrived on February 10th. So testing was pretty much frozen from late October to early February. There's a lot of content built that needs testing, but we can't rush the process by just dumping everything in at once; branches are merged one at a time, checked that they work, and then new changes are brought in, make sure they work and don't break other changes, and so on. It will be a while until we're ready to announce Page 6, and the blame can be placed completely on me. It was worked on, and it is being tested, but the testing phase started way, way later than we would have liked.

The passcode is mangled before being stored in the database, so it cannot be retrieved. This was done because some people reuse the same password (or something very similar) for trivial and important things, so we didn't want to have a chance of someone accidentally giving out an important password by making it retrievable. Some people may still do it, but at least they have to consciously give the passcode out, witch may give them a chance to think that it may not be a great idea.

I did notice that the on screen keyboard only appeared on Gaming mode for me, I got the standard Steam overlay on Desktop mode when pressing Steam+X. So if someone else is tryingto do this without a keyboard, make sure you add the game to Steam by right-clicking the desktop icon, then switch to Gaming mode and launch it from there.

It should have created an icon in the desktop called HC Launcher. If it didn't, you should run the script again to create it; it will not create the icon if you don't select which version of the Homecoming launcher to use. Let me post screenshots of the process: After launching the script, select the Proton runtime. It should show both the ones installed by Steam itself, and the ones installed by tools like ProtonUp-Qt. As soon as you select the Proton runtime, this window will pop up. Note how I disabled the Desktop shortcut for this demonstration; it doesn't actually matter, and neither does the path shown in the window. You just need to hit Install here... And notice THIS window that pops up, asking you to select the Homecoming launcher. That window is what creates the icon on your desktop. Select the (probably only) path that is in there and click OK... And note the new icon on your desktop. The icon is created when you answer to that window, it doesn't actually care if you finished the game install or not.