mechahamham

Importantly, BNY is a 'hostage' type follow and not an 'ally' follow and without exception, hostages cannot see through stealth of any kind. Some allies can't either, but it's a 100% thing with hostages. If you have something like Shadow Fall, Steamy Mist or the like that does AOE stealth as some MMs (and many others) do, he loses sight of you after just a few steps and says his 'Typical mortal...' line. (This is a real pain in the tuckus for Stalkers.) I think it was Solace, but one of the GMs told me that their biggest source of tickets related to the Rescue BNY mission was from people who didn't realize they had to turn their stealth off to get the little gnome to follow you. As for the falling through and getting stuck on the geometry I wish I could offer more help to you. My personal strategy with ANY NPC follower is to take lines as straight as possible and avoid any obvious vertex on the terrain. Always go over a change in the terrain as perpendicular as possible: Make a ---|--> motion across ledges and the like.

After doing quite a bit of thinking about it since it's release, I'm of the opinion that the badge leaderboard functionality and the tracking and progress functionality need to be divorced. One need not even make a new kiosk, although there certainly could be one created. Just keep the red-screen computer for the progress functionality and have the leaderboard functionality accessed by clicking on the base of the hologram display. A hint could even be included on the display given by the computer to click the hologram base to view or submit one's character for the leaderboard. I think I remember reading that the kiosk was powered by a Lua script that ran SQL queries? Please correct me if I'm wrong. If they're split off into separate entities, then the tracker/progress script has the potential to use Lua's collectgarbage functionality to reduce its memory usage after players leave Pocket D. Likewise, I remember reading that the script polls every player who enters Pocket D. If the leaderboard ONLY polls players who actually click on the hologram or its base, then neither the tracker nor the leaderboard have to poll every last player who drops into Pocket D.

I've had reasonable luck with Lutris in the past and can recommend it. I don't currently use it because CoH doesn't *have* to have it, and it's really the only thing I'm using WINE for at the moment.

CoH on Linux at my house runs on Endeavour (which is basically a fancy Arch installer) and Mint, which is based on Ubuntu and by extension, Debian. WINE from the Arch repos with no extra configuration will very happily run both the HC Launcher and cityofheroes.exe. I *think* we had to install WINE from WineHQ's PPAs to get it to run correctly on Mint, but again required no configuration beyond that very trustworthy PPA addition.

Ideally I'd like a vendor in the lodge itself, or in the private areas below, one at the bottom of the slopes where I posted the OP image, one in the Tiki lounge, and then one in the RMFC area. I'd take one ANYWHERE on the slope and be happy, tbh. The vendors don't have to be standing behind the bars, but the bartender stations with cash registers are SCREAMING for vendors. It seems odd when there are no vendors in sight. It's doubly odd when there's a bartender NPCs talking to you, like the one in my chat box, but then you can't actually do anything with them. (I dislike visiting Pollux because walking past 20 Spines/Fire brutes that I KNOW are just there for the sake of agriculture kinda takes me out of the game.)

In particular, can one of these two NPCs at the bottom of the ski slope sell inspirations? It seems like Chilli is one of the vendors for the temp powers available during the Spring event, or sends you to the NPC that does that. Even if he can't be made to sell inspirations and buy dropped enhancements, his coworker right next to him should.

I updated my Wine to version 10.20 this evening. Both the HC Launcher and the game itself load and play correctly, but Wine is, for some reason, not displaying icons or other graphics related to the game correctly. This is a minor, entirely cosmetic issue, but one worth mentioning, IMO. To be clear, this doesn't seem to be a CoH problem, but a minor Wine problem. I'm looking for information about similar happenings, but haven't found any yet.

The Founders' Falls Safeguard is littered with misnamed NPCs, but I recently noticed this guy as particularly egregiously named: I can't imagine that Maestro OR Arakhn are amused. As for me, I'm just happy I can punch fascists in teh face without also being in Council Caves.

Praetorian Hamidon is the same entity as Paragon Hamidon. Paragon Hamidon despaired of ever achieving anything like his original goals in our dimension after becoming agriculture. Having Arachnos and the FP start making synthetic versions of his organelles because they were useful to super beings was the last straw. He used his powers to travel across time and dimensions in order to invade Praetorian Earth in the 1950s... only for Paragon supers to invade and subjugate him in that dimension as well. It's only a matter of time until we turn the abandoned plains of Praetorian North America into vast farms serving up the freshest Hami-Os. Wu Yin's super power in any dimension is the ability to seduce people he wouldn't otherwise be able to. Tielekku believes that the Dream Doctor is the reincarnation of Ermeeth. She's incorrect. Ermeeth's reincarnation is Montague Castanella. General Aarons is suicidal because of his failure to stop Virgil Duray from creating the Sky Raiders. He leaps into melee combat armed only with a handgun in hope that death will end his crushing feelings of guilt. Russel Brandt, the Clockwork King, is suffering from acute lead poisoning. He was never as knowledgeable as he thought he was about robotics or engineering. After his extremely unfortunate run-in with Blue Steel, he rehomed his brain into a brass and glass container and interacts with the world entirely via telepathy and telekinesis. That's a problem because if he were a bit more knowledgeable, he might have realized that a significant amount of brass contains lead (and even arsenic in rare cases!), especially in alloys for industrial use. The lead has been leeching out of the brass container, though the fluid inside, and directly into Russ's grey matter for years, plunging him ever further into psychosis and dementia.

Correct. This is the same scaling used by giant monsters and a few other events, like Paladin Construction.

This truly delights me. Thank you for this change, devs!

I feel like Council and 5th Column are some of the most dire enemies in game that it's *important* to defeat and arrest. Citadel and Council Cave maps drive me away from facing them as often as I should.

Discord hates me. About 4/5ths of the time, I struggle to log in, or am not able to log in at all. I avoid it in all but the most dire circumstances, where no other kind of communication is possible. Why does this happen? I know exactly why it happens. I use privacy tools. I use noscript, an ad blocker, a privacy-focused fork of Firefox and other tools. Why? I've had some pretty nasty issues with online stalking and was subject to some of the worse fallout from the 2014 Home Depot data breach. Both were nightmares to live through. Like a lot of big websites, Discord collects a ton of information about their users that they really shouldn't. Data mining is absolutely a thing, and a very profitable thing at that. Because they're trying to be THE end-all-be-all of online chat, they're also subject to the ills of people trying to take advantage of their position. Phishing, scams, and online stalking are very much ALSO things, and they absolutely happen on Discord. Collecting information on the people trying to use their service gives them a little leverage against those ills. Because I try to protect myself, that means I am persona-non-grata with Discord. Because I don't let them monitor my every mouse movement, I MUST be a data-scraping robot, or at least that's the nominal excuse given. Stuff presented solely on Discord might as well be lost to me, because I will likely never see it, even if I want to.

Because it had the potential to spark useful discussion. We HAVE to remember the past, bad things included, to successfully move forward. "Those who forget..." etc... Being upset at a word or concept is no reason to start handing out accusations, and its no excuse for attacking someone. In my OP I listed 3 kinds of microtransactions that bothered me. You had no reason to attack me, but did so anyway. I doubt you're a child, so stop acting like it.

Despite spending quite a bit of time learning about Asian cultures, Japanese and Korean cultures in particular, I've never really understood the idea of 'Losing Face'. It's a concept that just doesn't make sense to me, no matter how much I read about it, possibly due to my fairly abusive upbringing. If you're wrong, you admit you're wrong and then attempt to control any damage a poor decision has caused. I get that it's related to dignity in some way, but that's another concept that I have trouble with, simply by the way of never being allowed to have any while growing up. I thought about using the phrase in my OP, but instead I went with 'admitting wrong' because that's closest I can come to making an emotional or intellectual statement about the idea. I know (and am related to) plenty of people who refuse to admit that they're were or are wrong in any circumstance.