mechahamham

Wine is one huge collection of edge-cases. It's amazing it doesn't break more often than it does. I've watched my darling spouse STRUGGLE to get the exact right combination of Proton versions and/or Winetricks configs to make games like Fallout 4 work. Bethesda had a big update earlier in the year that broke several previous years' worth of fixes.

The hardest part of this is converting the artwork to the texture format used by CoH, and that's been fairly well documented. Changing the color without changing the artwork is as simple as opening the images for the icons in the editor of your choice, adding a flat color layer of your choice, and adjusting the blend options on the layer until you like the color. It's more work for set IOs that tend to have color artwork on top of the colored background. I've poked around the Ourodev git repository specifically looking for artwork and haven't been able to find much. Devs, please consider making original artwork files for powersets and IOs available if you have them to make this kind of mod easier to accomplish.

Currently, Endeavour, which installs Wine straight from the Arch repos by default.

I tried launching CoH this evening under both Wine 9.21 and 9.22, but cohgame.exe hung after the login screen. However, dropping back to 9.20 allowed login and play as usual. To be clear, this doesn't seem to be a problem with CoH, but seems to be a Wine problem. There are some other games impacted, like LOTRO. (I was up in the air on whether I should post to the bug reports forum. GMs, please feel free to move the topic if you think it's necessary.) If you're on a rolling-release-style distribution or are installing from WineHQ directly (like you're using their PPAs on Debian-based OSes), you may want to consider holding back on upgrading past 9.20.

Instancing Lord Winter using the same rules as MSR would be wonderful. Part of the problem then becomes explaining that, no, you don't need a 50 to lead because everyone gets levellocked at 50, which is still far and away better than people just bouncing because you're trying to recruit but not 50. I run into this fairly often when recruiting for Summer Blockbuster or Drowning in Blood: "Wait, don't we need a high level to lead?! Won't we die if we're not 50 for this?!" "No, this one locks everyone to level 29, regardless of their real level." Occasionally people STILL don't understand that, so I explain it in terms of the level-locking that they've already experienced in Death from Below. "Y'know how DFB always starts you at level 2? This is like that, except you're level 29 for both movies." Also, at what point did players start thinking they were instantly going to die if there wasn't a 50 leading the team? (Incarnates. It happened when Incarnates dropped.) I feel like the level scaling mechanic needs a big billboard in front of Atlas City Hall explaining what it does and doesn't do. Or maybe Mender Tesseract needs a 'Level Scaling Tutorial' under her name in Ouro.

I started this Christmas event like I started the one last year, in 2023. I took my newest character to rescue Baby New Year and defeat Lady Winter. And then I logged out. Like last year, I'm finding myself just not wanting to log back in for the event, and am left wondering why. This seems out of place for me since I enjoy the Halloween event so much I run all my characters through all the badges, many of them solo. I don't really care for the Murder Motel league in PI, but I adore solo Trick or Treating and will lead Dr. Kane's trial repeatedly. I've put together a few reasons why I think the Christmas Event is turning me away: Opening Christmas Presents isn't very challenging, and is hard to do at level due to limited spawns: One of the things that makes solo or small-team Trick or Treating fun for me is that it's constantly challenging. Even well-slotted, well-equipped characters can get TOUGH fights in the form of the Halloween EBs. (That difficulty completely dries up in full groups and might as well not exist in leagues full of incarnate players. Trying to contribute to ANY league event when you're not decked out with incarnate powers is like trying to extinguish a match with a water pistol when Superdude420 next to you is dousing the entire area with his fire-hose.) The solo-friendly event for Christmas is opening presents. Unlike Trick or Treating, presents have limited spawns and always spawn at zone level rather than player level. If you happen to be opening them in a zone where the snowmen that spawn aren't grey to you, they can be anywhere from purple to green, all in the same zone. Since our population is so top-heavy, higher-level zones tend to be saturated in terms of people opening the available presents. The unsaturated zones tend to be lower level meaning that it's quite possible for a single player to control a huge part of that zone's present spawns, even if he or she defeats all the snowmen they spawn. This was also a problem during this year's anniversary event, which uses the same spawn mechanics. My suggestions: Tweak the spawn rules for presents and Snow Men somewhat: Require players to open presents in a zone their level or have the Winter Horde snowmen always spawn at the opener's level. To avoid situations where a level 50 is littering Atlas Park with level 50 snowmen, have those snowmen only agro the present opener unless attacked. To avoid the situation where you have 50 level 50s crammed into Peregrine Island trying to open all the same present spawns, populate Cimerora and the Rikti Warzone with presents. Kalisti Wharf seems to have adequate present (and time capsule) spawns, but players tend to forget the zone exists because there's so very little content there. It's possible that Kalisti could use an increased number of spawns to make it more appealing. Baby New Year and Lady Winter missions are repetitive and grindy: While Old Man Time's missions for the Christmas event have fun difficulty spikes in the form of Snaptooth and Lady Winter, the rest of the missions are very samey-samey-same-old. You've already fought lots of snowmen while opening presents, and if you want to earn rather than simply buy the Candy-keeper's badges, it means grinding the ever-loving snot out of snowmen in those missions. The missions are great for single groups, but then you have to convince the group that you're there to 'Defeat All Winter Horde', which tends to be ignored by PUGers. Yes, we know you can solo Snaptooth, Bobby. That's wonderful. Now come help us KO all these snow hydra. My suggestions: Add a more linear, indoor mission to Old Man Time's lineup. Snowmen are *okay* to fight, but having some more interesting enemies would go a long way to making it less repetitive. Consider adding a 'Must Defeat All' challenge setting to the game. Check a box to convert any mission or taskforce into a 'Defeat All'. This would help prevent the situation where that one player 'Didn't hear' that you wanted to defeat all, or 'forgot' and stealthed all the mission's objectives, not just on the Winter event missions, but for a LOT of the game's content. Also consider re-weighting the cost of the Candy Keeper's badges or the Candy Cane drop rate so that each badge is about one mission's worth of effort. Leading Lord Winter's Realm below level 50 is punitive: I don't make any secret of the fact that I simply *do not enjoy* the Incarnate game, but that's another thread. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to lead teams and leagues if your character is not Incarnate or even if you're not 50. However, trying to keep a league together long enough to start Lord Winter's Realm when you're not level 50 is an exercise in frustration. A significant number of people who are interested in joining the league simply bounce when they see the league leader is not 50. From those who stay, there's a constant demand to "Give the star to a 50", even before the event starts. Perhaps the most frustrating experience I've had with this trial was with a player who I truly believe was trying to be helpful. However, they were also dismissive and demanding. After they joined the league I was building, they started demanding to lead the league since they were 'already 50 and lead everything anyways'. It seemed like one of those situations where a person is condescending without realizing it. Regardless of if they meant to treat me like small child or not, they still managed to. My suggestions: League leadership mechanics could use some rework. I've heard people say that they're perfect and should not be touched, but even the league window has some jankyness that could be ironed out... such as the difficulty arranging team leaders. Making the process of anchoring the league's level seems like an obvious pain point that could be addressed. What I'd really like for Christmas is a 4-person trial. I adore Dr. Kane's and Summer Blockbuster, and I believe I'd still adore them without their awards. I'd love a Christmas Double Feature to play in theaters 3 and 4. Help John McClain kick Hans Gruber off of Nakatomi Tower or assist Kevin McAlister in booby-trapping his house to defeat the burglars. The award doesn't need to be equivalent to an Overwhelming Force IO, but it'd be nice if it was about the same as the award for Lord Winter. All events are not for everyone, and that's... okay... if a bit sad. I think that with a very minor bit of tweaking, the Christmas Event could be a LOT better for most players.

So the Tuatha in the Lady Winter mission are still bugged this year: One of the groups of Tuatha standing near Nuada show up as enemies. They attack the allied groups of Tuatha, but they *won't* attack the players despite the player being able to attack them. I've never had them survive long enough to see if they'd convert to Allies if you get Nuada to try to send them out.

I can confirm this. I've personally experienced this bug.

Putting this here, but will gladly move it to the other forum: If you enable certain tracking protections in Firefox or, like I do, run Librewolf's privacy-focused fork of Firefox, you end up disabling features that Invision uses to upload images. You can disable these features, but then why bother with the privacy settings at all? My workround is to upload to imgur, which falls back to simple POST-style file uploads, and then include the imgur link rather than try to upload from my own PC. As a bonus, you can watch imgur people crap on your CoH-related post because it's not political rage-bait.

Albert made her presence known about the same time as Keith Nance and Jenni Adair in Talos. Strikingly, she has exactly the same costume as Jenni, suggesting that she was supposed to be part of the hero-side doppelganger arc the same way Colonel Taggard in Steel appears to be part of Laura Lockheart's story. A name does not a sexuality or gender make. However, there's rather a lot of anti-trans, anti-non-binary sentiment in the world just lately, so I kinda hope that HC fleshes her story arc out and leaves her name and model as-is.

I've been seeing quite a few anecdotal reports of disconnects, mapserver errors, and crashes (without the crash reporter coming up) on Excel, especially after changing maps. I experienced one myself just now upon exiting Stephane Peebles 'Defeat all villains in warehouse' mission vs. Family and Council.

"How... how many slots DO you have in [Brawl]?"

Tray 1 & 2 are my click powers. Tray 3 is my toggles. I may have to overflow into other trays if I'm on a toggle-heavy character. Tray 8 is my 'social/utility' bar. Tray 9 is where long-recharge stuff goes... once every 30m type stuff. Mystic Fortune usually goes there, as well as that 'W' button, which resets my UI per-character for when Penny Yin leaves it in a mess. Penny, girlfriend, why you gotta throw my inspirations everywhere?! Do I throw your gate next to the hospital in IP every.. okay, yes I do. I'm sorry. I'll try to stop that. My 'Global' chat window displays server/global chat channels as well as zone events. I keep 'No General' and 'No Chatter' options for when I'm trying to avoid current events, movie spoilers, or just feel like I need to focus on what I'm doing and answering /help chat is distracting. The green Fast Travel menu icon in tray 8 hosts my custom popmenu based on HC's default fast travel menu. Yellow icon immediately next to it is AboveTheChemist's BadgeSetList popmenu. It's a game changer. I no longer have to hunt through a non-alphabetical menu to see if I have a badge or not. Map (optional, toggled with the default M key) is in the upper right. Purple icon is my own 'Chatter' menu that contains some ascii/unicode emotes (these are all characters found in msgothic.ttf), macros for setting up some hotkeys and my per-character UI saves, as well as instructions for my favorite 4-person trial and web links to CoH-related materials like Dacy's YT Channel, City of Data, the (currently still broken I think?) calendar, and a few others.

I've heard this same person recruiting and got pretty much the same response when I asked them about this seemingly bizarre requirement. They were also excluding masterminds when I saw them. First and foremost, the person who builds the team calls the shots. You can't get around that. However, the behavior they show is pretty awful. They 're: assuming that everyone who plays the 'prohibited' ATs is a bad player assuming that everyone who plays 'acceptable' ATs is a good player recruiting in a public space, yet discriminating against a good number of those in that space. I assume they're doing this when they can't get enough people in their private channel to join. doing the recruiting in a way that seemingly purposefully goes out of its way to make people feel excluded Unless you're 4 for 4 in agreement with that, you DON'T want to be on that team, even if you're one of the 'acceptable' ATs. If they discriminate against people like that in a public space, they're probably going to blame the public invitees for problems before taking the blame themselves. (And if you are in agreement... *Yikes*.) It would be so easy to say something like, 'Hey, we're doing challenge runs. Melee only ITFs. If you're a melee and would like to do this challenge run with us, send us a tell.' (In fact, I know of a group that does just that on Excel, often with far more challenging restrictions.) But they're not. They're not wanting challenge and they're being discriminatory on purpose. My advice is to /ignore this brand of person when you see them. You *don't* want to be on their leagues or teams, even if it seems like they want you to join. Happily, they're in the vanishing minority. Everyone else who does 'Challenge' TF runs makes the point of saying if they're going to have a closed run, limited to their private channel, or if they're going to accept new folks and teach them the ropes. The aforementioned group I know of does just that.

I had one I didn't care about, and TOLD people in /gen chat on excel that I didn't care about. I even encouraged another player who was interested to take it, if for no other reason than to see what it would look like when it got 'liberated'. Later in the evening, I decided to log in to see if it had been taken yet... and clicked on the damn thing before I realized what I'd done. So, someone who's had a name freed up, please post a screenie of what it looks like.