mechahamham

Someone with a Lex Luthor avatar knows the location of a video containing 'Kryptonite'. Coincidence? I THINK NOT!!

They've buffed the ever-loving snot out of the WL for this year's event. I like the increased difficulty, but wow, good luck getting a team together for it, especially in sub-50 zones.

This largely falls into personal preference and not 'My way is the right way, period', but here goes: When you're on those big leagues, a few different things happen. The first of those things is that it becomes far less important, and even impossible in some cases, for players to understand what's happening around them. You don't know if the debuffer is debuffing or if the buffer is buffing. Is the tank taunting or does the brute have agro? You don't get the opportunity to lean into a team synergy. Big events like zone invasions see everyone blasting like mad and stacking ridiculous numbers of effects on both the players and enemies. There is ZERO finesse in such a situation. It's about who can click all their buttons the fastest. Because of that, you end up in the second issue I have with big leagues: It doesn't really matter if you're there or not. Take the Rikti mothership raid as an example. You have the Raid leader, who's maybe communicating with team leads. Then you have everyone else who plays follow the leader during the pylon phase and then just goes into scrapperlock mode or sit in center of the bowl and blindly blast/buff/debuff. Once everyone's in the bowl, the event kinda just goes into maintenance mode, even before U'kon Grai is down. People can and do go AFK, and you really only notice when they're sitting at Point Du Hoc after the event with a power still on auto. "We need a 50 to start a league," is my next big issue and the one that causes me the most pain. If a level 35 player tries to organize during an event, a lot of players will just outright not join that league or team because a 50 is not leading it. Who cares that the player knows how to anchor the team's level by setting an active mission? They're not going one second without their Ageless and Judgement blast. I've run into this problem again and again and again, to the point I can type out 'Please take a level 50 tip mission so I can anchor the team's level,' in under 5 seconds. The most recent time I ran into this was a couple days ago. Someone advertised a Winter Lord in Talos. My character needed the Frozen Fury badge, so I hopped over. Nobody else was organizing, so I stepped up to lead. Many of the people I invited either rejected the invitation to my team or joined and then bounced when they saw their level dip for a second. I eventually got around seven people to join my team, which DID anchor at 50 as soon as I got a player who had an open mission, but then six or seven more who were just hanging out solo despite asking for league invites. Happily, my team had enough damage to qualify for the badge. A couple years ago, I was trying to organizing a Lord Winter trial at level 30 or so. I started building the league, dealt with players who asked to join and then VOOPed as soon as they saw my level, and then had a player demand the league star while I was still recruiting. I'm certain they didn't mean to treat me like a child, but they managed. It takes rather a lot of need or frustration to get me to try to organize anything now, regardless of my characters' levels. After that mess in Talos, I've given up even trying for the year. I'm here for fun and not frustration. That's the long and short of it. Fun and Frustration. Big leagues have far more of the latter for me and very little of the former. Again, this is my personal preference and experience. Maybe you enjoy the chaos. Maybe you enjoy any of the things I listed above that bother me. Maybe you try to lead everything and get your enjoyment of the game that way. If so... just please be considerate of people who try to step up to lead.

"It's our policy to not comment on ongoing litigation or negotiation." If you spend any time in corporate business, you'll hear that phrase or a variation of it over and over again. The larger the company, the more likely it is they have lawyers working on legal cases, arbitration, or business negotiation continuously. Having details of any of that leaking out for public exposure can be pretty disastrous, depending on what those details are. Accordingly, if you want to be taken seriously by a large company, you kinda have to toe that same line in any kind of legal dealing. HC managed all that. I'm certain that it was less than pretty behind closed doors.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree. Not only do I like the smaller teams, but I feel that the 16 player cap is VERY well balanced for the difficulty of the event. 1 team attacks Lord Winter and the other is responsible for clearing the crystal spawns. If either team makes egregious mistakes, the extra 'Icebreaker' badge is lost. However, I don't make any secret of the fact that I dislike 'full league' events, so YMMV.

They did do that, and got a few bites from advertisers, but the way it was handled was... weird. And I don't mean that the products being advertised were weird, but more that the placement was bizarre. For example, I think it was a shoe ad with an endorsement from a basketball player. I couldn't tell you who or which shoe, but I do remember clearly all the damaged billboards in Boomtown changing to show the ad. It was so bizarre as to be offputting. The end result of the whole ordeal was that some time later, Paragon ran a contest for player-designed ads. That's how we got billboards for 'The Clanket' and 'ZombCare'. I think it'd be cool to do something like that again. Maybe more movie posters or the like, but I'd take a hand at submitting art for a billboard as well. My designs wouldn't win, but I'd still submit! -- Edit: I did a joke ad/box art for cookies a while back:

Khelds can be used to power terrestrial computer hardware?! My gaming PC will be able to run at FULL POWAH now! Thank you for the heads up, @Laucianna!

Homecoming itself is probably never going to be able to do advertising for the reasons listed by others in the thread. However, I think the best advertising for ANY game these days is gameplay videos and streams on YT and other streaming sites. So the best kind of advertising HC could have is for an interested player to create a YT channel, learn the OBS interface, and upload videos of their gameplay experience. Just... be careful that teammates know they're on camera. Using myself as an example, I've had some nasty cyberstalking and harassment issues in the past. I DO NOT want to appear in others' streams for that reason. For example, when @Oklahoman streams his events, he announces in his recruitment messages that he's doing so. That's a good way to go about it, IMO.

CuppaJo was a great part of our community. I hope she feels like CoH was a great part of her career. It'd be neat if she were still secretly part of our community, but I would absolutely understand if she never wanted to be related back to her time working with CoH or NCSoft.

I am one of those people who have difficulty with certain kinds of flashing lights. I have light-sensitive migraines and often have to wear dark glasses outside, even on days that are not so bright. The first version of sonic resonance buffs before the rework that turned them into the gold-colored waveforms that are now their default appearance caused me pretty severe nausea. I've only been on a few teams with 'changelings', but the flashes from it cause exactly the same kind of nausea and triggered a migraine in one case. I VERY promptly started to use /++noparticles every time I encounter them now. So, yeah, completely aside from gameplay issues, this is a real problem that real people have.

I continue to be astounded by how truly GOOD the new badge UI is. As we moved into the Winter Event, I found myself embracing the new UI more and more, first just to add customization to my Player Info box, but then keeping closer track of which badges I was working on during a give play session. I've also been trying to embrace the changes in the Winter Event, but that's another post entirely. I've been learning the present locations in Imperial, simply for a change of space and to work on Toy Collector in an uncrowded area. Since I was in Imperial anyway, I decided to add the various Praetorian factions that I hadn't gotten the defeat badge for yet to my tracker. Why not kill multiple birds with one stone? My main goal is Toy Collector, but fighting others in the area wouldn't hurt. And then I realized I'd added Toy Collector to the monitor list before Resistance. 'Well that's going to annoy me,' I thought. 'I could just leave it as is, or remove it and then readd it'. It's a minor thing, but I prefer to not have pebbles in my shoes, so I went to do exactly that. And when I moused over the badges... what do I see but: Organizer Buttons. Little, up and down arrow Organizer Buttons so I can move the badges I'm monitoring around to better suit myself. The entire badge UI, from the new buttons to the profile customization, to the monitor window itself show a great deal of love and care. The organization buttons show attention to detail and understanding of the way the UI subsystem truly works... and even more love and care. Bravo. Thank you for this little, almost insignificant Quality of Life addition. It means a lot to me that the hardworking Homecoming developers are willing to put this level of polish onto their work. Good job!

I think there's a good chance Bill is still correct. Unplugged connectors tend to leave their ends 'Floating' between the lower voltage values that signify 0s and the higher values that signify 1s. This could cause ALL KINDS of memory corruption issues. Plugging in that Wacom tablet may have pulled those values to reasonable levels. I hope this all works out for you and wish you the best of luck getting it sorted.

I am DELIGHTED! Thank you, @Faultline. Thank you, hard-working Homecoming devs! Knocked it out of the freakin' park here.

One of the lessons CoH teaches us is how very much the game's writers and artists achieved with the EXTREMELY limited technology available in 2004. If you look at almost any gun barrel in the game... they're not round at all. They're not even octagonal. They're square. The gun barrels are rectangular prisms with a gun barrel texture. That same high quality art over low-poly models is ALL OVER the game. The technology improved somewhat as the game aged, but the Cryptic and Paragon staffers did the gaming equivalent of taking the four cylinder motor and transaxel out of a 1982 Ford Escort and using it to move a 1993 AWD Lamborghini Diablo.

It's always like that, EXCEPT on boot-up, where it shows the usual ASUS logo That kinda points at a RAM issue, but it's possibly RAM on the video card. Hear me out. That logo is stored in the on-board ROM chip, either from your motherboard or on the graphics card, and is more or less read straight out of that ROM and plopped onto the screen. If the video processing were broken, that wouldn't display correctly. Once your computer begins execution of code, then it copies the result of that execution into RAM. It sends the data to be displayed on screen to your graphics card's RAM. If your main system RAM were broken enough to cause the screenshot you saw, it could make it difficult to boot windows. So are you able to tell if there's frequent crashing or lock-ups? If so, that points at your motherboard RAM. If not, that points at the RAM on your video card.

Most of the people who end up on my ignore list are spammers, abusive in some way, or bigoted. I try to give each of them a note so I know not to take them off. However, I moderated a public channel on the live servers for many years. In that time, I began to view the ignore list for what it was: A luxury to make the game environment nicer for one's self. I felt like I couldn't ignore problematic individuals because I couldn't moderate effectively. Now, I don't deny myself that luxury. If someone's annoying me and I don't want to turn off chat entirely, I'll ignore them. Again, I try to leave myself notes, but don't always manage. I've asked before for a temporary or 1 day ignore feature, but I suspect that's a LOT more coding effort than this.

The CoT trial was originally designed so that you HAD to have a team of eight, and all eight of those players had to simulclick the obelisk. Then all eight players had to brave ALL the ambushes at once. Thank you HC devs for removing the plague that was simulclicks. Timing was difficult to say the least, and surviving the ambushes as you tried to regroup was kinda secondary to the timing issues. The most successful CoT I participated in on Live had coordination down to a science and then had Assemble the Team ready to aid the regroup effort. A lot of them just ignored the ambush entirely, focusing on burning down the AV and rescuing Sam Wincott. It's worth defeating all the ambush waves for the Volcanic defeat badge, IMO.

Possibly. It looks like your gamma is turned ALL the way up. It's not affecting all your UI elements, but most of them. Could also be a memory issue. I'd a) Reinstall your video card driver after deleting all your settings and the like. It's possible for those settings to get corrupted and b) Run Memtestx86+ to test your computer's RAM. https://memtest.org/

I was cleaning out my ignore list a few days ago. I try to do so every so often because... people have bad days and say things they don't mean. Or they've come from another game and are used to the nasty culture there and have yet to grow into CoH's more positive, welcoming culture. Or any of a legion of reasons they don't need to be permanently ignored. As usual, I find that it's a real pain in the hind end to type /playernote "Character Name" for every last one of them to see if I've left a note for myself on their behavior. It'd be REALLY helpful if there was a button next to their name I could click to bring up their playernote. (It'd be equally helpful to see star ratings next to their name, or even in chat). This would probably be even more useful in the context of friends as well to bring up notes like, 'Only plays before 10PM EST' and the like. I made a mockup to demonstrate what I mean: I doubt the talented HC devs will want to use my artwork if they decide to spend effort and time on this, but in the case they do: https://files.catbox.moe/womegw.xcf There's a GIMP file containing said artwork. Difficulty: Easy -> Medium. UI work is harder than it looks, but we have all the UI elements for this already, with the exception of the button itself. I imagine that the majority of the difficulty here would be adding code to activate the playernote UI. Also, 'Righteous' is kinda a cool font to use for chat and UI, etc... It's really growing on me after using Lexend for quite a while.

I got this same error just now whilst trying to enter my favorite transport hub base on Excel, STATION-18074. I assume that this was the usual, 'You were trying to enter a base as it was being unloaded, so got booted,' error that you sometimes see. Usually though, that has an error message like 'Mapserver disconnected' or something like. Sadly, I was not able to get a screenshot. I was in the process of hitting the space bar as soon as I saw the message, which dismissed it. Bad cookie for good villains and evil heroes!

I have to admit that I would have said that they did at some point. The fact that the unusual bartenders for the Spring event exist may play into this. 'These guys don't sell the temp powers for the special event,' morphs over time into, 'These guys only sell inspirations. Wait, what happened to the inspirations?' This is wonderfully welcome news! Thank you so much!

Defeat Lady Winter Mission. There are a couple dozen spawn spots for Winter Horde snowmen on the map. If you can fight them at +0/x3 or better, you can earn 20-30 candy canes per map clear, and then another 5 if you can solo Lady Winter. She's a toughy, though, especially for melee folks. My debuffer types usually have zero problems with her, but I've been trying to build a strategy that works reliably for my katana/psi scrapper that also doesn't depend on temp powers.

3DSMax. I dunno if there's a specific version needed or if new versions will work. The problems with this is are many, though: 3DSMax tends to be the kind of thing you get a quote for rather than Autodesk just selling it to you. It also tends to be the kind of thing that you can't really BUY, but can only effectively *rent*, paying for a year or a few years worth of use at a time. The version you get HAS to be able to work with the existing CoH backend tooling. (Possible version considerations) People who work in modern tools, even the newest version of 3DSMax, may not be proficient in the Pre-War versions of 3DSMax. If you or someone you know is well versed in 3DSMax and/or has a legal license to use it, PLEASE DO head over to the volunteer thread or contact the devs in some other way: If you or someone you know is able to write software that converts between the model and animation formats 3DSMax uses and the formats modern tools use, again, PLEASE DO head over to THAT volunteer thread:

I find that you only need four things to get all six ski badges at around level 10 or so. Sprint. Athletic Run. Increase Jump Speed (from an Empowerment Buff station), and Increase Run Speed (Likewise). That's it. Maybe it's because I spend too much time in Mario Kart, but these four are enough for gold on the advanced slope.