mechahamham

As I've mentioned in other threads, I don't powerlevel or farm at all. I usually avoid the PI ToT league unless I'm on a character over 25 that simply can't solo the EBs, which isn't really a problem after last year's changes. I love door-to-door ToT and did it for most of the month entirely solo, with frequent breaks to run Dr. Kane's House of Horrors with the requisite team of 4. On the teams that I form, I make a point of fighting through the entire house rather than skipping ahead to only the boss fights. If my character can manage it, I stay behind on other teams that did skip to clear the mansion of monsters and zombies. I occasionally broke off to help fight Eochai and Jack in Atlas Park. If someone advertised for a Banner/Deadly Apocalypse event, I tried to join even if the character I was on already had those badges. I love the 'Whispered Rumors' tip mission. I love visiting player-created Haunted Houses. I love seeing characters in Halloween-themed costumes. I love changing my own costumes for the holiday. I had EXP turned OFF for my characters for most of the month. Now, a few days out of the event, I'm looking forward to next October. I love it that much. If you reduce or remove the event, you're stripping that much enjoyment away from *me* that has zero to do with powerlevelling characters. Don't take that away from me.

I love that we've got some more color to the various spawns in Brickstown. The Crey encounters where they're threatening or even killing civilians are chilling and will fill even the kindest hearts with rage. And then there are these hosers: When you attack the Council soldiers, these asshats get to run away to the nearest door like civilian NPCs. I want to arrest this guy, even if I don't get experience or influence for it. On my less patient characters, I want to arrest this guy into a greasy smear on the asphalt. Can we adjust these guys so that they have the same level and abilities as like a level 1 Hellion? Barring that, can we make them go into the 'hands behind head' pose after we've taken out their supersoldier friends rather than just getting to run away? (I'd also like to rough up the council trainees that tend to appear in the East part of the zone, but I suspect that would likely be more development effort.) Thank you for helping me to stamp out fascism.

The name alone gives me a cold chill. And sadly not the kind that gets you paid sick leave. There it is. There's the awful horror movie. Wow, I wish I could say I hadn't lived through that a few times.

I really feel like the auction listing needs a major reorganization and optimization. The way it's currently done smells like the Paragon devs used an unordered 'select * from items where category = 'something'' when what they needed was to add on a series of parameterized clauses onto the query. 'order by parameter1, parameter2, etc...' I'm not privy to the code, though. If it were me, I'd also 'flatten' the tree-view listing a bit. Rather than have a tree for 'Enhancements', just bump the different enhancement types to the top level of the tree. The most major change I'd make would be to acknowledge the fact that the consignment store buckets enhancements regardless of levels or attunement. Rather than a separate listing for each level of enhancement, have one listing per enhancer, and then have it select the player's level as the default to purchase, with an option to change the level or to purchase pre-attuned. This is is some pretty serious SQL plumbing and UI work, though, and as we know, UI work is a LOT harder than it seems like. Additionally, unoptimized, uncached SQL can be a huge drain on computer resources and we know for a fact that this is something that HC can struggle with since they're using a hosting facility rather than the far more expensive option of maintaining their own servers.

In the Rogue alignment tip mission 'Steal the stolen items!' from the 'Auction Notice' tip, Shock Treatment tells me that she's going to kill me, but then fails to change alignments: She accompanied me for the rest of the mission. Interestingly, she showed as 'Orange' alignment while hostage to the Wyvern agents in the mission, and actually got debuffed when I used Devour Psyche against them, although she didn't attack me then, either.

I kinda figured we'd get endless night, and the pumpkins-in-windows textures with this maintenance. Are we not doing that this year?

The Impounder badge is currently awarded for 100 vehicles destroyed during Mayhem Missions. This is actually DOWN from 200, pre-Issue 16. The problem with this is that exploding cars and trucks in Mayhem Missions is one of the most fun things you can do as a villain, but you can knock those 100 cars out in only 3 missions or so. I'd like to suggest adding higher tier badges for destroying progressively more and more vehicles: Wrecker Service -- for 200 vehicles "You've shown the utmost dedication in removing vehicles from the streets of Paragon City... not running or otherwise." Uninsured Motorist -- for 500 vehicles "Every major automotive insurance policy provider has officially included you by name in their 'Not Covered' clauses." Unsafe at Any Speed -- for 1000 vehicles "Cars and trucks are inanimate machines without consciousness or feeling. Why, then, do the people of Paragon claim they can hear their vehicles screaming in terror whenever you're nearby?" Difficulty: Easy - Medium We don't really need new badge art for these... just recolors of the existing Mayhem Mission badge. It's currently a silver steering wheel on the red inlay with a gold border. I recommend recoloring the steering wheel to be Copper/Silver/Gold/Black to match the badge tier.

I had a fun UI glitch featuring this window a few days ago in Brickstown. The Deadly Apocalypse/Banner event was up at the same time as the Prison Break event. The Banners info that usually sits in the nav bar got sucked into the event window: (Screenie in that linked post)

What you're seeing here is LOVE. 'Professional' (hah!) game companies are often, but not always, in a contest of 'How much labor can we wring out of these schlubs because they think they're doing their dream job?'. Outside the development team, there is no love for anything other than green paper. There are exceptions to this rule, and you can always tell by how polished and well-crafted their titles are. CoH has been in the hands of its playerbase for many years now, and the changes that get made, the care that is taken to engage with the community, the level of polish and management that goes into addressing problems like those we've been experience... these are all done by players who don't have to be here if they don't want to. They're doing it for the love of the game, love of the craft, and love of the community, and WOW does it show. No development situation is perfect. I wish we could be paying folks full-time wages for the outstanding work they're doing. Right now, though, the love shows. Thank you for your hard work during a difficult few weeks, devs and GM staff!

I managed to get a video capture of a glitch I've been seeing with my Necro/Marine MM: https://files.catbox.moe/ii82xg.mkv Enemies spawned by Trick or Treat knocking can get stuck in an animation loop where they come out of the door, fade away, and then come out of the door again. My mastermind pets can target and attack them, as shown in the video, but they can't attack me. If I set my pets to aggressive and target through them, I can attack and debuff as well. It seems to be more likely to happen when I drop Tide Pool just right up against the door, but can happen without. It's less likely to affect enemies without feet like ghosts, but seems to affect witches, vampires, and werewolves better than 75% of the time. It affects the EBs as well as the other spawns.

This is basically how I do the vast majority of my ToTing. Bricks is my favorite zone for it, but Founders and RWZ are also good.

Welcome to our city! The others are giving you great info, so let me balance it with some examples of stuff that might be difficult or more challenging. 1. The game is extremely solo friendly. Almost everything except for those Taskforces/Strikeforces and Raids will scale down so that a solo player can complete it. That said, it's ENORMOUSLY easy to jump on a pick-up team (sometimes called a 'PUG' or 'pick-up group' for a half hour or so and gain a tremendous amount of experience should you want it. Don't force yourself. Just be aware that it's there should you ever want it. Now, a mistake I see people fall into quite often is that they boost their difficulty settings without realizing they have done so. If you talk to a Hero Corps Analyst or Fortunata Fateweaver, be aware that they'll very happily boost your difficulty settings to where you can't complete missions any more. There is also the 'Noteriety' settings in your chat command/emote menu. These will let you set those same team-size, level, boss, and arch-villain preferences. When in doubt, change these back to a level of +0 or -1, a team size of 1, solo bosses off and solo arch-villains also off. Don't be afraid to ask for help in /chat if you think you've accidentally changed these settings. When you get a bit more experienced in the game, you may find yourself wanting to increase the difficulty a bit. That's a good time to start experimenting. Be sure to take small steps, though, and find your own comfort level. 2. As others have mentioned, the melee oriented Archetypes, Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers, are the easiest classes to just 'pick up and play'. You're fairly durable, whack your enemies at close range, and have lots of armor-type powers to keep you alive. Sentinels run fairly close. You have ranged powers rather than melee powers, but the same kinds of armors. Some other MMOs tend to make out 'Priest'-type classes to be strong soloers because they can heal and buff themselves. That's not necessary to solo here... AT ALL. Those armor powers are the solo-oriented buffs. Healers, Buffers, and Debuffers can be significantly more challenging to play and are frankly much more group-oriented. These are Defenders, Controllers, Corrupters, and Masterminds. You end up needing to understand how and when to use their powers to get good use from them. That said, if you build skill with them, the right character with the right power choices can be surprisingly effective soloers. An Empathy/Psionic Defender is EXTREMELY team oriented and will likely struggle to solo in a lot of situations. A Dark Miasma/Darkness Controller brings a tremendous amount of power to a team, but if played intelligently. can solo ridiculously well. Again, other MMOs will have you believe that Healing is all-important. It is not the case here. This is a game of damage multipliers. If you stack enough positive damage multipliers on yourself or your team and enough negative multipliers on your enemies... they simply don't do anything to you that requires healing.

I happened to find a spot in the RWZ Hospital that can see z-fighting in pretty much any direction: [183.0 -73.0 -2271.9]: It's particularly difficult to get screenshots of the z-fighting behavior because half the time, they come out looking 'normal'. I did manage to get it looking towards Lady Grey and the Vanguard Drill Instructor, though. This is one of those spots that's fairly easy to find just coming off the hospital teleporter pad, and there's always at least one instance of z fighting no matter which way you look.

I just came across a UI glitch I haven't seen before that happens when the Prison Break and the Deadly Apocalypse events overlap in Brickstown: The Deadly Apocalypse stuff disappears from the navbar and gets partially yanked into the Event/Trial Objective window. It gets pulled over as text only, with no icons or the Red -> Blue progress bar. The 'Banner Up' icons and progress bar completely disappear from the Navbar when this happens. SpaGHETTI!

The consideration is very much appreciated. I wish we could treat *you* guys to something. Chasing hardware issues that you can't physically touch is no fun whatsoever, be it the 'customer'-facing staff that deals with problem tickets and the like or the server-facing folks trying to connect to a machine through RDP, a backplane administration interface, or the like, especially when that hardware refuses to talk to you. I've experienced both first-hand, and you have my sincerest sympathies. I haven't experienced any loss, but the idea that springs immediately to mind is in keeping with theme of the month's event. Make with a handful of prismatic aethers via email to those affected... enough to get one of the tier 1 permanent hologram costumes or so.