Faultline

Okay, I just checked, and I was misremembering: it's two characters of the same AT. Different ATs are assigned to the same team until it's full, but two characters with the same AT will be assigned to different teams and allow the match to start. I just tested with two controllers and got Pentad Victor by defeating the other character, then have that character (the defeated one) leave the map, rather than wait for the timer. Edit: if both characters of the same AT end in the same team, just switch to Freeform Teams, then switch back to Pentad, that should redistribute them to separate teams.

Last I checked, Pentad and Septad can be obtained with just two people on different ATs, because they will fill different slots in the Pentad/Septad and allow it to begin if it's not rated. There are probably other badges that rely on validation that doesn't happen in unrated matches. Swiss Draw is completely broken and has always been, because the arena system doesn't transfer match data correctly between mapservers, so the "first" team on each round is the one that always advances. There is a plan to fix Swiss Draw by having all the matches happen on a single mapserver, with the players in different vision phases to each other; I did some code commits to test this a week ago before going on break.

There are four card rarities; prior to this patch, Experienced dropped on all four, and with this patch, you get Experienced on Common, 25% XP on Uncommon, 50% on Rare, 100% on Very Rare. That's the only change. Will be reverted on the next non-critical patch.

Antivirus software these days tends to quarantine/remove software that is not digitally signed (a way of tracking down who released it in case it's bad). Tequila wasn't signed and hasn't been updated in years, so triggering false positives is not surprising, especially if its used with manifests from multiple servers; that looks very sketchy to antiviruses. HC Launcher is signed to the Homecoming Servers LLC and only downloads and runs updates that have also been signed to verify they come from HC, so it is highly unlikely to run into the same problem; antivirus software sees the signature as the LLC saying "we vouch that this software is clean and we are responsible for anything it does".

Prestige costs are never coming back, period. It physically pained me to see base builders dismantle their detailed bases in order to do something new because they could only afford to have one supergroup with enough prestige for their cool ideas. It gave me the same feeling as seeing an art gallery burning down, with unique works of art destroyed and never to be seen again. If any other dev decides they want to limit creativity by reintroducing Prestige costs, I'll be loudly leading the mob with torches and pitchforks. Prestige earned just for bragging rights in the Top 100 table? Eh, sure, maybe at some point. Wouldn't use the same way to earn prestige as the original though, otherwise it's just a meter on how much your SG has historically farmed, and highly meaningless.

RMT is a thing, which Homecoming already has to deal with a fair bit. Paying real money to skip large portions of a game has become the norm in the microtransactions era, so a lot of players don't even see a problem with it, but we are not going to be adding anything that costs large amounts of influence that encourage people to head to the nearest RMT seller to acquire.

This is the most important advice on this thread. I keep seeing messages from players saying the ASF is too hard because of the exploding Brickernauts and instant-death patches -- which explicitly don't exist in the base difficulty. These are not your standard difficulty settings, they actually change how the fights work.

I would make a modificaton to the above to use time since the first obelisk is hit, rather than time elapsed in the mission. Otherwise you can zone in, watch an episode of something on TV, and come back to do the trial with vastly reduced ambushes.

The formula can be tweaked easily and without a patch, so feel free to drop feedback on that; there are 16 spawns on the map that are eligible to detach, so it's not difficult to come up with a table of ambush chances that covers all 64 possibilities (1-8 obelisks, 1-8 players). Doesn't need to be a simple additive formula either, feel free to go nuts.

Fastest run has now dropped to 18 minutes. Median on all difficulties (not just Malicious) currently sits at 98 minutes. Mission5 (the ripples one) has predictably the largest variance, going between 304 seconds for the fastest run, 33 minutes median, to over 9 hours for the slowest (though most likely someone just went to sleep and left their character AFK in the mission; this is why we take the median and not the average).

The secret battle reward never required no deaths, we're not that evil.

Next patch, and because the expectation was that killing the AVs for extra rewards would be the normal path, but nobody's doing that, so just killing the 12 AVs is enough extra effort for the badge, no need to add the no deaths condition.

Median, not average. Floating around 60 minutes at the moment. Will likely go down as people get used to it.

Well the ambush chance is dropping to 1/4 of current on the next patch, so if you want a crazy ambush fest, do it now. The current chance is 1% * obelisks * players, every 30 seconds, on 16 spawns -- that ended up being waaay too much. It's being dropped to 0.25% * obelisks * players.

The TF can be completed in as little as 27 minutes (actual datamined time) in the lowest difficulty, so the 40 merits aren't out of line; it'll go up some but those expecting 100+ merits at once on completion will probably be disappointed. On Relentless it can certainly take two hours, but then each AV drops 3 astral merits (5 astrals convert to 1 empyrean, 1 astral converts to 2 merits) so you're talking 6 extra merits per AV fight starting on the very first mission. Mission 5 alone has 12 AVs, that's 36 astrals / 7 empyreans / 72 merits right there. You can currenly start the ASF on Relentless, fight to mission 5, quit, and still walk away with the equivalent of 100 merits; if those were moved to mission completion instead, you would get nothing. Players will just need to get used to the idea of getting the reward over time during the course of the TF rather than a massive bulk payout in the end.

Those are the death puddles left on the ground after a Shimmering Essence spawns, is left alone 30 seconds, and is absrbed by Ripplesurge. They don't spawn at all on Villanous. The blue orbs from the King Midas fight should be just as bad, and also don't spawn on the default difficulty setting.

The letterboxing code ignores the window size and just renders the bars up to 3000 pixels horizontally for some reason. Fine for up to 1080p, not enough for 4K. Fixing next patch.

You're insane. Good job!

Confirmed, the "No Epics" challenges are trying to reward the badges NoEpicPowersSL8 and NoEpicPowersSL9 which don't exist. It should be rewarding NoEpicPowersatSL8 and NoEpicPowersatSL9.

The clue should still award after mission completion, just get her to the computer.

To my knowledge, nothing changed about them. But that arc is getting a minor revision in January, so I'll add a note to check the NPCs.

Not intentional, but not fixable either: the timer type used for those buffs was changed to one which doesn't tick while the powers are disabled, but apparently that means any time remaining on the original timer type is ignored.

That is because the Boss version of Minotaur/Cyclops (regular and incarnate alike) are currently ignoring rank reductions; they spawn as Bosses even when the difficulty settings dictate they should spawn as lieutenants. This is a bug and will be fixed, critters should not ignore rank reduction outside of Task Forces and explicit exceptions.

That is very strange, what is your character name and server? I need to pull it from the database to see if I can reproduce this behavior.

All the story arcs are getting their merit rewards revised when we're back from break, so this is only going to be annoying and painful during December. There's many arcs that reward no merits because they have an attached reward table (everything in Dark Astoria, the Incarnate arcs, the SSAs) and all those reward tables need to be found and modified. We just ran out of time.