mechahamham

@Widower @Cipher, Thank you both so much for the information updates! I truly appreciate these.

I'm always interested in hardware incident post-mortems. HC Devs, if you can share what happened or what was done to bring the server back up, please do. -- Widower made an announcement in the linked post whilst I was laying down to nurse my head cold. tl;dr: the physical server containing the authentication server, Everlast, and Victory died. The auth server was migrated to one of the remaining boxen, but Everlasting and Victory are still MIA. Get well soon, my electronic sistren and brethren.

I was one of those MMs. Apologies. All my awesome leaked out at once. Or maybe that was mucous from the head cold.

Lou Baga: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Peregrine Island Number 5."

Hesitantly, I joined a Deadly Apocalypse/Banner event happening in Peregrine just now. I was expecting awfulness, lag, self-loathing, rubberbanding, and existential angst. Instead, I was on a 3-team league that simply did the event with no drama or trauma. That population cap is helping TREMENDOUSLY. Thank you for putting it in place, HC devs!

... GM_Bot can't find its Pinkie Pie Halloween costume. ... the housekeeping staff at Murder Motel has gone on strike. ... the Peregrine Island McDonalds is all out of Happy Meal toys. ... Blue Steel hit Eochai so hard that they're cleaning the Pumpkin Spice out of Azuria's hair. ... Blackwing Industries is monopolizing the Banner Deadly Apocalypse in Kallisti Wharf. ... Zombie Hero One has picked a fistfight with Riktified Hero One. ... Jack in Iron's decadely bath is taking longer than expected.

This kinda goes in with the idea that connecting from Europe results in slightly fewer packet drops, but backbone network routing is DARK Black Magic. My personal (conspiracy) theory is that there's an intensification in the number of DDOS and malware attacks happening that are targeting North American targets and that lots of services and individuals are getting caught in the crossfire. In the last couple months, the fairly popular Arch Linux User Repository removed some malware that had been uploaded. Almost instantly after the removal Both the AUR and Arch Linux's main servers came under DDOS attack. That *kind* of thing happens all the time, but it seems to me that I'm hearing about it more often. I doubt that CoH is actually in the crosshairs of a similar attack, but maybe someone else at OVH *is* and we're getting splash damage.

I've been watching my /netgraph since this behavior began, and this screenie is pretty typical of what I see: My graph goes from spiky in/out to simply flat green. Then, after the event, it pops up that flat yellow or red area in the graph after its already been drawn. In terms of gameplay, I'll be playing along fairly reasonably and then just stop being able to get packets out. My powers and ability to chat stop working. After the event passes, I rubberband back to where I was when it started if I moved. Importantly, this only seems to affect data *out* from my client. I get chat messages *in* just fine the entire time the issue is occurring, and enemies can still attack me. I've found that it's least problematic if I connect to Excelsior from a Euro VPN node, but it still happens pretty often. Just going by chat, people start complaining loudly in /help and /gen whenever it happens to me, so I can only assume that it's affecting a fairly sizeable fraction of the server's population in addition to me.

People AFKing in outdoor zones, mothership raids, and the like in order to soak up passive rewards is a thing that happens: After all, if it's allowed inside the AE building why wouldn't it be allowed everywhere else? Going into October, AFKers are lining up... okay not lining up, but rolling up in their RVs to Murder Motel so that they and their pets can begin camping out. As much as possible, I try to avoid the Peregrine and Kallisti Trick or Treat leagues for a few reasons, lag and rubberbanding being the largest. (I also like being able to contribute to events, and trying to compete with Judgement blasts set to auto is difficult.) But that's okay because I genuinely enjoy soloing My ToTing. However, having the zone population ballooned out makes trying to do even non-Halloween stuff in Peregrine painful. I'm not sure how having Kallisti populated with real content is going to affect that this year. As mentioned in that CoC I linked, the GMs reserve the right to boot people who go AFK in situations like that. Is anything different being done this year in order to keep the rubberbanding to a minimum?

In the mission, 'Rescue Trapped Citizens' from Gordon Bower in Croatoa, there's a spot with some really bad z fighting and flickering at Server: Excelsior Zone/Mission: Office_60_Layout_04_01 Position: [874.2 36.0 2230.9] At that same spot, you can pretty reliably back the camera out of the geometry, giving a black-screen w/ enemies display.

My world detail is at 130%, but that doesn't affect NPC draw distance, and character detail, which does, is at 180%. I'm standing on the war-wall side of the boat house, and have positioned myself so he's just on the border of popping out of LOD culling, and Kraken himself is just on the other side. Note that the other hydra-men have a much higher draw distance.

I love the general idea, but balance issues will almost certainly creep in. You'd open cans of worms like people picking the best melee for farming, and discovering that effect x mows down enemies with armor y faster than any other combination available. Fire Farming + Winter Os demonstrate just how extreme this scenario could be. I can see lots of people doing things like picking an Energy Blast clone and dropping its knockback in favor of another effect. (And I would be sad because I love knockback.) I can also see lots of people hopping on whatever 'The Meta' is for a given FOTM.

After completing The Pilgrim's introductory arc in Ouroboros, I often head over to Bloody Bay to finish defeating 200 Shivans to complete my 'Man/Woman in Black' badge. There are several other PVE badges available there, and 5 merits for getting all the explores. I've been playing a Pyro/Cold controller this evening, and was struck by how very different her powers felt under the PVP ruleset. Of course that's just something you accept going into a PVP zone for any reason. It occurred that, so far as I know, there's no in-game text explaining that ruleset or the reasons behind it. You do get a pop-up upon zoning in stating: If you happen to click on the 'i', in a blue bubble next to 'Shiva Strike' in your Nav bar, you get some lovely color text explaining the story behind the zone: That's brilliant. I love it. I want more in-game novels to read. I would literally re-read this guy... ... if it's 394 pages were somehow converted to in-game text. (Getting the rights do to that would probably be nigh-impossible unless it just happened to somehow get lumped in with the rights HC obtained to run a server. My guess is that the publisher still has at least a partial claim.) I love the text of the history items in the Midnighter's club. I love history plaques. I love tutorial texts when they're available. I love the villain dossiers that were being published by Paragon devs before the shutdown. I want those all to be readable in-game. I also love it when the authors or developers communicate with you in-game. Explaining the rules or the ideas behind the rules is always welcome, at least as far as I'm concerned. A good example of this are the Reconnaissance Officers in hazard zones that give you a rundown of what to expect in the zone, and level ranges of enemies. So, in addition to the contacts that already exist in PVP zones, let's add contacts or history items that further explain the zone. A Combat Officer in each of the entry fortresses could give you a rundown on the PVP rulesets for powers. Include text like, "Many of your powers will function slightly differently in this zone. Some powers require line of sight to activate against an enemy player or NPC." Also include something like a Historical Informant who will provide OOC commentary on the zone, based on things we've learned from the story bible or conversations with the HC or Paragon developers. "Bloody Bay was originally planned to be a free-for-all PVP zone by Cryptic developers. The strange radiation emitted by the meteors would cause the player to lose trust in others, including players from their own faction, allowing infighting. Based on player feedback and playtesting, the zone ruleset was changed to allow only faction vs. faction combat. Warburg instead was developed as a free-for-all PVP zone." Break the Kayfabe. We've been playing this game since 2004. It's fun to be in character, but it's also fun to peek behind the curtains from time to time Difficulty: Easy. We've already got history plaques and the various informant NPCs. We know that relatively large amounts of text can be displayed from the Midnighter's history items. (Displaying 394 pages of an E-book might pose some problems.) The most difficult part of this would be sourcing the text. A lot of it would come from homecoming.wiki or the story bible. Players could provide the rest, if a certain HC dev didn't want to write it their self. I'll even personally volunteer to do writing for it. (I think I've already volunteered to do writing in the volunteer thread. I may be misremembering, however.) The Exploration tip missions were brilliant and added a LOT to the game. I feel like adding more information like this could only make the game better. Put the explanatory NPCs in the PVP zones. Put those dossiers I mentioned in Fort Trident. Yoink that novel and quietly put it in the Steel Canyon University library for players to read. (It's a REALLY good superhero story. Do read it if you haven't already.)

I respect the Layer Cake Room for what it is: a trap to split teams. It's very effective at its task. Telling your team 'work down and then up to the top' is really all you need to keep it manageable. The Council Caves water room can die in a fire. If I never encountered that room again, it'd still be too soon.

Luminara has the long and short of it. If you move your cursor at exactly a 90 degree angle, you might be a robot and are then asked to find which squares contain traffic lights, except for that one square that's got just a sliver of the top of one traffic light fixture that's just black metal and not actually got any light to it at all. If you use privacy features at all, these checks tend to fail more often. I use a fork of Firefox called Librewolf that's basically just got all the 'easy fingerprinting' stuff turned off by default and some adblock stuff preinstalled. Since Cloudflare and the other captcha providers sometimes use those features to try to figure out if you're a scraper bot or not, I get lumped into the robot category more often that I'd like. Discord, for example, simply won't let me log in unless I'm using Firefox with no adblock. Something I do on those checks to make them work more often is to wiggle my mouse like I'm playing with a cat for a second or two before clicking the checkbox. More often than not now, it works. Good Lord up above, save us from web scrapers and AI-bros.