mechahamham

I dunno who Jeff is, but eff that guy.

I don't remember who said it, but someone mentioned the entire 'War on Drugs' theme, which was fairly true to comics of the 1980s and 90s, aged like whole milk. It's somewhat shy of being offensive or racially charged in CoH the way it is IRL, but still pretty jarring. The most egregious example I can think of off the top of my head is the 'Heroic' tip mission in which you're fighting against people who've lined up for Superadine, including the aging boxer hero, Stalwart: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Mission:Tip_-_Denmark_Wants_Muscles_This_Friday In 2024, if I were to come up against an older person who tells me, "You don't understand. I'm aging and in pain. I need these opiates to function.", my reaction would NOT be to 'Arrest' them and let the Popo deal with them. Instead, it'd be more like, 'You're right. I don't understand. Can you get Narcan for if you OD? You know a lot of folks die from bad Fentanyl these days, right?'

I don't really get the point behind the new 'Hide First Appearance' option. All it seems to do is hide character bios by default, which kinda stinks. Maybe I'm misunderstanding why it was put in or what its usecase looks like. If I were going to absolutely nuke a game feature from orbit, it'd be Architect Entertainment. Mission Architect had the potential to brew up amazing player-created content, but was handled in a way that incentivized agriculture over gameplay. AFK farming should not ever be a thing, and it's one of the default leveling methods in CoH now. The good: It creates a hungry market for enhancements I craft. The bad: New players get sucked in a 'the game sucks at low levels' mentality. Existing players level a character without ever LEARNING that character or learning how to effectively team with that character. A significant number of players treat content outside AE as 'necessary evils' and want to coast through it without thought or difficulty. This is especially true of Task Force Commander TFs and other accolade-related arcs and missions. How many characters go into those TFs without even slotting dropped enhancements? (As an aside, I recently did a Positron TF in which a Super Reflex character kept getting KO'd. They complained loudly that SR sucked. Without checking their level, I encouraged them to give it time because SR is a late-blooming set. I told them that once they got some enhancers and levels behind them, they'd feel like nothing could touch them. It turns out that they didn't have *any* enhancements slotted, despite being level 26.) It would be next to impossible to remove AE from CoH at this point. Even if you attempted to re-engineer it so AFK farming and door-sitting weren't possible, you'd get people complaining loudly and making threatening statements like "If you want me to leave the game, this is how you do it."

I usually don't have any problem signing in with a VPN enabled, but I did get zapped a while back while trying to create a new account with my VPN enabled. (At the time, I wanted to experiment with having different characters on different accounts, but I've since moved in another direction.) As a VPN user, my suggestion is to use public internet of some kind of some kind, like a fast food or coffee shop, to create the account.

The Mapserver event is... not for me. I don't begrudge the people who do enjoy it. However, it's problematic outside of its content. It needs to be reworked in a few different ways. Lag Sitting around waiting for your powers to recharge is no fun. Sitting around waiting for your powers to recharge when the entire zone has slowed to a crawl is pretty miserable. Your powers LOOK like they should have recharged, but haven't really. The real mapserver simply can't keep up with a full league, everything else happening in the zone, and people constantly trying to get into the possibly full zone and/or trying to float a second league on top of the first one. This isn't just a problem with the Mapserver event, but also plagues the Halloween event, especially in Peregrine Island and Kallisti Wharf. It's less noticeable for Mothership raids and Hamidon raids simply because those zones hard-cap with a fairly small populations. Even then, it's still VERY noticeable during those events. Regardless, it's effectively impossible to have more than one (full) league active for those events at a time. Worse, the lag for the Mapserver event seems to spill over to the entire rest of the server, even after the patch early in the week of the 1st. My taskforce teams noticeably bogged down and glitched often. Even if you're not participating in the event, heaven help you if you happen to have a mission in the same zone, especially if that zone hasn't managed to spawn a second instance. How can we make this less problematic? First and foremost, the single biggest problem here is the event causing lag and other issues for those not participating. This is going to require at least some profiling and debugging effort to rectify. Are the events causing resource usage to top out on the servers? How much information does the event send to clients when compared to other invasion events? If the event can be optimized, it should. If the perception is, 'well, we don't need to optimize it because it's a very limited event we only run once a year,' then that ties into the next point. To make it kinder to those not participating, I'd also suggest that the event always takes place in a second instance of the zones it affects. For example, if Talos Island gets an invasion, the invasion should spin up a Talos Island 2 instance, even if Talos 1 is nowhere near to full. Those interested in the invasion can zone-hop. If Talos 2 hasn't emptied and despawned by the next time the invasion happens, it should default to that instance rather than the first instance. "The Mapserver of Peregrine Island has gained sentience and gone rogue. (Peregrine Island 2)" Loading Screen Tip #587: "If you need to travel between instances of the same City Zone, you can do so at the Tram, Ferry, Portal, or other zone entrances." Honestly, I think Excelsior's population is at the point where we probably NEED two instances of our most populous zones up at all times. Blue-side, this would be Atlas, Steel, Talos, Peregrine, Pocket D, and RWZ. The Hive and The Abyss are weird cases since there's nothing that happens there BESIDES the Hamidon event (and fighting GMs to harvest EoEs and start the event). A more controversial approach to this is to have the event prefer zones on the less populated servers rather than Excelsior. Length Last night, at the time of this writing, I was participating in a Rikti Invasion event in Peregrine Island. I heard the following from one of the other players: "Man, I've been spoiled by the MS invasions. This experience feels like nothing." Ah, I thought to myself. The event lasted long enough that the experience gain from it started to feel 'normal'. It wasn't a special treat any more after more than a week. In fact, there are players all over the server in withdrawal. When players who've been on Homecoming for a while related that the event usually only runs once a year, there were complaints. My feeling is that, to maintain a sense of 'specialness' to the event, it should probably last, at most, a single weekend. And if it does become more common, rebalance and optimization becomes VASTLY more necessary. For those uninterested in the event, the length of it was still a problem. It very noticeably drew players away from any other content. Even other invasions were ignored entirely for the Mapserver events. Worst of all, the lag created by the event for the rest of the server was more and more obnoxious as the week wore on. Balance I say 'Balance' here, and I think most people would immediately leap to the conclusion that I'm complaining about the experience gain. Instead, I'd like to focus on other issues. Invasion events in general have some pretty serious mechanical flaws. When enemies appear in any invasion, they often have a brief period of time in which they're untargettable or invulnerable, except by pets for some reason. In fact, if you participate in any invasion event, you often hear 'target through a pet'. This needs to be fixed one way or another. Either enemies should be invulnerable to ANY attack until their 'spawn in' completes, or they should be vulnerable from the moment they're visible. Currently, this creates a bias in events for players who have a pet of some kind. (Additionally, in some situations, you often see 'desirable' enemies spawn in and then immediately disappear such as Rikti Heavy Assault Suits during this same period. That's annoying, but it's not as biasing.) Chaining onto the odd 'spawn in' period, players with damaging AOEs can often reduce most of the enemies into a fine paste. This creates a bias in events for players who have strong AOE attacks. After the 'spawn in' period, buffs and debuffs become much more important to keep those participating alive and doing damage to the enemies that remain. This creates a bias in events towards strong AOE buff, and to a somewhat lesser degree, debuff effects. For the most part, these biases cancel out, even if you exclude the whole 'target through a pet' thing. Most characters are capable of doing at least SOMETHING to aid everyone else participating in the event. Characters that focus on single-target damage, however, tend to become a bit more excluded. There is, however, a class of character that gets to 'triple dip'. Incarnate-level players have Lore pets, Judgement blasts, and Destiny buffs. Not being able to contribute is worse than being unfun. It's actively demoralizing. You don't even have the fallback of 'I'll learn the event this time and contribute next time.' There's not much TO learn. It's 'fire all your abilities off as soon as they're recharged' and maybe 'focus fire on the giant monster when it appears'. Nothing makes me want to avoid content more than not being able to contribute. This really needs to change for ALL invasion events, and not just the Mapserver event. The usual counter to arguments like this is something like 'why should higher-level players be punished for being higher-level?', and that's correct. Those players should not be punished. But just like those players should not be punished, neither should lower-level players be punished simply for being lower level. One of the guiding principles of CoH has historically been that both high- and low-level players should be able to contribute to the same content. One player's enjoyment of the game should never come at the expense of another's. The recent scaling changes we've seen for giant monsters should be an example of what we need to do going forward for invasion events. In general, scaling and level compression should be used whenever possible to ensure that as many players can contribute to the event's success as want to. In addition, new event mechanics that incentivize separation of duties should be considered. These could be enemies who are more vulnerable to different forms of attacks, just like Hamidon's organelles. Imagine having enemies appear in invasions that incentivize being controlled, or attacked with single target effects. These not only allow more opportunity for different players to contribute, but also add more to learn about the event structure. Imagine hearing a callout like "Lowbies, please focus on taking out the Rikti Portal Technicians! Dominators and controllers, please lock down the Monkey tamers!" That's the kind of thing that would excite me about an event.

Explain what you want or need out of your team BEFORE THE MISSION STARTS. Don't call it in and get that mission before a quick, 'Let's fight to each of the first 3 heroes and then clear around the door. We'll rescue the fourth hero and trigger the ambush after that.' If you want to communicate in a hurry and aren't a quick typist, be sure to put that on a macro button or in a popmenu. Don't use jargon. For example, 'pull' has entirely different meanings depending on who you ask. Be specific. "Blaster, please use a ranged attack to try to break one shadow clone off the group." If a melee-type says, "I'm going to pull," be ready for them to Leeroy into the group like they would have anyway.

Whenever I communicated about costumes to the OG Cryptic/NCSoft/Paragon devs, I always made a point of saying something like 'The Costume Creator is your pony. You have to feed it, brush it, and exercise it every day or it will wither away.' It's what originally hooked me into the game, and maybe not now, but for a long time, I think it was what hooked others. Others have mentioned most of the strengths I care about, so I'm going to mention areas where I think it can be improved. This is going to sound harsh. It's not intended to be. I love the costume creator and I want it to be the best thing ever. - Textures are wildly inconsistent in their resolution and quality. Some faces have sharp and crisp lines while others are more blurry and have visible compression artifacts. <Insert 'NEEDS MOAR JPEG' meme here.> If HC is in possession of the original data for the faces (or if there someone out there who is), a lossless, higher resolution 're-master' of all the faces is well overdue. No changes to the art is necessary. This may not be possible. Those files may simply be lost forever. - Additionally, some of the pattern textures are wildly inconsistent as well, particularly those that apply over the face. For example, the makeup textures will often blur over into the white of the eyes. Some tweaks to the color adjustment method (using multiplicative colors rather than overlay colors) might also help fix some of this. - I would love to see parts of costumes and textures broken out into sub-groups. Imagine that when you were working on a face, you could lock in the lips and nose, but pick the eyes separately. (Imagine the children's paper 'sliding face' matching game, but with our characters' faces). This would require at least some heavy lifting in the code and texture editing, but would not require any new artwork. The obvious upshot to this is DRAMATICALLY more character variety with only a minor increase to the size of data structures. - The old glasses models are pretty sad when compared to the newer items like 'Sweetheart' and 'Sporty'. The textures are miserably opaque and have no specular reflection. The low-poly rims are unforgivingly thin. The round glasses are tiny, and the ovoid glasses (Sunglasses, et al...) are huge. Additionally, glasses suck up a detail slot. You cannot have a horned demon who wears glasses. Even if there are no new glasses models, break ALL glasses out into their own detail category, as done with ears, please. - Animal heads are WOEFULLY immune to customization. It's very difficult or completely impossible to change their size. They don't have any 'animation bones'. The faces are always snarling with bared teeth. They're never 'relaxed' as most animal faces would be, most the time. (This also applies to most of the animal models, tbh.) - If you use Bestial legs with anything, you are locked out of using skirts or kilts. Why? (And why would the NCSoft devs have done this to begin with when there would be minimal clipping issues?) - A lot of the hair meshes would look fine on all three bodies, yet are very firmly divided into 'male' and 'female'. In fact, players can and have experimented with this by doing demo editing. We live in a non-binary world now. If there aren't any clipping issues with the hair meshes, propagate them. - For a little bit when NCSoft was floating the experimental costume file format that became our saved costume files, I reported a bug that one could hand-edit values into it with a text editor to get custom colors outside the palette made available by the game's UI. When I reported the bug, I made a point of saying 'I'm going to hate myself for ever mentioning this'. I DEEPLY REGRET reporting it. I wish I'd never done so. I wish I'd kept it to my little greedy self so I could have the perfect colors on all my costume pieces. What I'm getting at is that it's BEEN far, far past time to have the option to use custom colors on all costume pieces for more than a decade, in game, or total. In fact, there are private servers who already do. This can be in the form of sliders, number entry, or even just remove the damned validation step that forbids custom colors in the save file. (NCSoft didn't validate any OTHER effing thing...) Comment that bastard out of the costume load code. <Palpatine> DO IT! </Palpatine> The most immediate benefit from this is matching colors on pieces that just don't match, even though they should. The most obvious example are the classic 'with skin' patterns and the bridal textures. There are many, many more. The ONLY downside to this is that players can fake 'nude' costumes. The people who want that can (and do) use modded textures anyway. We can /report anyone who makes a point of 'flashing' others or sexually harassing others in the game, because we do so already. Long and short, it's not 2004. NOBODY is playing CoH over a POTS modem connection. Maybe some of us are still stuck on the potatoes we were using to play CoH in 2004, but I highly doubt that. We can afford to use more memory. We can afford to use more network bandwidth. Let's add in some of the more popular modded textures, and accept at least some community submissions for textures and meshes. I, myself, submitted some textures to the devs in 2020 or 2021, I think, but was met with *crickets*. If I may be so bold, from looking at the volunteer thread, we have all the human power we need to do ALL of these things.

I mean, he is homeless, so it may be outdated because he doesn't know where to get free internet access. This is the fellow at [435.0 159.5 5645.7] in Talos, next to the Movie Theater in front of the Paragon Dance Party entrance. We now have both PDP and Pocket D, though, so surely he must have seen one or two people disappearing into the door behind him. However, as instruction to newer players, it also falls short (and did in the Live era as well) since there are more entrances.

*GASP* There are DOZENS of us! I used Win7 for a LONG time, despite working my dayjob in Linux. I had few different pieces of hardware and software that just wouldn't let me ditch Microsoft. I did most of my Live-era CoH career on it. My understanding is that CoH would play somewhat okay on Wine after about 2010 or so. I've never connected to HC's servers using anything but. Valve software has really done us a solid by pouring so much effort into the project over the last few years.

Back on live, pre-GR, I would very, very occasionally see 'Pulse Rifle Corruptor' petless MMs. Like maybe a total of 2 of them, ever. 'Whip Corruptors' were and are a tad bit more common, and they're the ONLY petless MMs I've run into since Beam Rifle became a thing. I've seen maybe half a dozen on HC. I wish I could count the number of times I've run into '+4x8 or nuthin' players. I've very seriously known more than one person who quit CoH entirely because they couldn't solo max difficulty, and I've heard at least two people this week make the statement that everyone should be able to solo +4x8. I'm honestly not sure if they meant that every player should slot to solo +4x8 or that every single player should be able to solo +4x8 regardless of slotting. Either way, wow, way to suck the fun out of the game.

How the heck does that even work?! I mean, I thought you had to have at least Win98 to install DirectX 7.

At one point there was a poor, but fairly complete, Korean localization of City of Heroes. I think it was just 'City of Hero' because Korean tends to omit plural nouns. I've heard it described as 'Laughably inaccurate'. The CoH client and server is set up to use string tables, but a Korean client would have a different checksum than an English client. You'd have to do some hackery to get the old localization to work. The default font used for chat and reticles in the game, Montreal, comes with fairly broad Unicode support, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters, so those folks who aren't multi-lingual can at least communicate with others who speak their language. We have a 'Korea' global chat channel with at least some community, I know. I've met at least one Chinese player as well, but don't know if we have much of a community there.

I sometimes, but not always, have luck when explaining what combos are useful for by using the 'Holy Trinity' vs. 'Damage Multipliers' illustration. My explanation usually goes something like, "Most other MMOs are tightly anchored to 'Holy Trinity' mechanics: Tank, Heals, DPS. City of Heroes is not. CoH is all about stacking damage multipliers, positive on you and your team, and negative on your enemies. Accordingly, healing just doesn't go as far in CoH as those other games. Empathy is one of the best buffing sets in the game, and if you play it as a buffer, it's very, very welcome. If you play it as an MMO cleric healer, you're going to be frustrated."

You're an absolute Chad for following up via machine translation, Okie. Bravo! On the multi-lingual front, the players I seem to run into the most often that have trouble with English are Korean folks. They're usually on in the VERY late night US time or early morning. When my insomnia lets me sleep at all, I'm usually on the same schedule they are. Maybe we should look at translating some common instructions or help to Korean. I know for a fact that the Montreal font that comes with CoH still has those Hangul characters. Perhaps some of Excel's bi-lingual folks could help proof a machine translation.

FFS. gee crimanitely. We've got a few players on Excel who want to control exactly who or what goes into their teams and leagues. However, the ones I know of are always very good at broadcasting ahead of time what their intentions and requirements are. As soon as you get a few playernotes you can say, "Oh, that's one of their alts. That looked like one of their recruitment messages. I'll just steer clear of that team since it's not for me." It's not that I don't care for them as a person. Just, I don't like how strict they are with their teams. Additionally, a demand for the Team Transporter is an instant 'nope' from me, even when the team is doing Dr. Quarterfield's TF. I've only had that happen once or twice since I started playing on Excel. "Wait, you're demanding that the entire team have TT? For *Citadel*? I'm sorry. I think this isn't the team for me," which I think were my exact words despite the fact that character did indeed have all the prestige teleports. That was.... early last year I want to say. At the time, I think I immediately floated another Citadel and had like half the team I was just on join me. Again, usually the team leader is very upfront about what they expect when recruiting, like "Looking for 4 more for a speed Dr. Q. TT required for this run," which I *do* see every so often when Dr. Q is the weekly. When they start demanding things after the team starts, then it's time to politely nope out.

I do not like voice chat for gaming and avoid it whenever I can. Nothing takes me out of the game quicker than hearing people's voices. The text chat functionality of Discord is also pretty miserable for me. First, Discord does NOT like privacy measures like VPNs or custom browsers. If I can log in at all, it's because I'm not using any of the online privacy tools I prefer to. Second, Discord also does not like 3rd party clients for the same reason, so you're stuck using either the web interface or the Electron interface (which is still just the web interface). Both come with all the usual headaches of webapps, including a tremendous memory footprint Third and most importantly, Discord just doesn't seem to like me. Even if I'm jumping through all the hoops, I can log in maybe one of three or four times.

The vast majority of folks I team with are reasonable people who just want to have fun. They group, do a few taskforces or missions, and, for the most part, have that fun. That said, I do see a few problematic cases: As others have already said, communication is key, and that goes both ways. It's not just you communicating with your team, but others communicating with you. There's a lot to be said for letting your team do their jobs without going into too much instruction, but when no one says *anything*, there's going to be problems down the line. Be clear about what you want out of the team and what they can expect from you, and that's true of both leaders and regular team members. When a team member or team leader refuses to communicate or, worse, acts like they're communicating, but is simply ignoring everything said to them, once things go sour they stay sour. A good example of this: I was on a lower level character, an 18ish mastermind. The team leader was 22ish, iirc. The mission difficulty was at +4. Members of the team indicated that they thought, with the current team build, that +4 was going to be too much. The team wiped two or three times on the first couple groups. The leader kinda gave away that they were ignoring or discarding the team's concerns by saying, "I don't know why we're not able to do this. You gotta keep the tank healed!" The entire team bailed at that point. Another issue is that, as we gain new players, they come from other MMOs where it's possible or even common to take lots of grief for not building perfectly on the 'Meta', or get derided because they don't understand the game's mechanics yet. They don't ask questions because they don't want to be called out. I personally try to err on the side of verbosity just to help these individuals enjoy themselves. This means actually answering questions. Often it means phrasing things so that it doesn't seem like you're trying to catch problems, but offering help. For example, on Summer Blockbuster, I used to ask if everyone was familiar with the trial, but kept running into *crickets*, and then one or more of the team drops when they realize that they're responsible for objectives they don't understand. Instead, I now say, "If you're not familiar with the roles or the badges, don't be afraid to say something. I can call out a walkthrough of all the objectives." It was a night and day difference! Whereas I'd get crickets before, now people will say that they haven't done it before. I've got a not-too-brief explanation of the different movie roles and the badge requirements saved to a custom popmenu, but often just mention selecting a role and the parts that role is responsible for. That leads in to the next issue I see popping up: ADHD, and to a lesser extent, dyslexia making communication issues more difficult than they might otherwise have been. I married into a family where both are common, so I get to see both sides of the frustration it causes them. ADHD can make it very frustrating to try to keep up with the things going on in the game *and* chat, *and* anything that may be happening IRL. My father-in-law was dyslexic. He loved to game, but was mortified of feeling like people were waiting on him to read the game's text and chat boxes, so he missed a LOT that happened even in just our family groups. He didn't stick with CoH or any other MMOs for that reason alone. This is one of the few areas where I feel like HC development staff and modding community could actively help. There exist fonts and font features that aid dyslexic folks in their reading ability: https://www.weareteachers.com/best-fonts-for-dyslexia/ There was a thread a while back about using fonts other than the standard RedCircle/Montreal combo: I personally chimed in in that thread to share my experiences with switching fonts, and offered some font suggestions. Perhaps we should see if we can't put together a 'dyslexic friendly' font mod for CoH? Another problem stemming from our newer players is the fact that, as our community grows, so do the number of people who want to gatekeep or otherwise behave in an elitist way. GIFT/Online Disinhibition is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect, but every niche community, online or off, seems to gather its gatekeepers. "Well, I liked them BEFORE they were cool!" In CoH, this sometimes takes the form of people trying to impose 'Search first' rules on /help chat. This morning, I watched a player on Excel angrily tell others in /help that they were wrong and then offer 'corrected' advice that could have just been a rephrasing. Since the official license announcement, I've heard a few players who've come from other private servers try to impose those servers' rules or lack thereof onto Homecoming players. Largely due to our increasingly polarized media, doubling-down behavior has become more and more problematic EVERYWHERE, but these players almost universally do the 'I can do whatever the hell I want!' spiel or some variation on it when you ask them nicely to stop problematic behavior or advise them that they're contradicting HC's rules. Our long-suffering GM staff is ALREADY working against these kinds of players, but I think it's important for all of us to know that they're out there and that we should not go down that same path. When these players are on your team, though, and they start with abusive, elitist behavior, it's important to a) ask them nicely to stop, b) politely remove them from the team when they don't, and c) ATTEMPT to ensure those being attacked that the elitists are a very vocal minority here on HC.

I logged in to Excel this evening to see this message in /lfg: So, yeah. This is definitely an issue. Poor Scrappy. He was getting ALL the love since the patch, and will go back to being forever alone. In general, it's neat to see giant monsters getting so much attention from players, but when I watched a hunting team vote to go farm Scrapyard, it was pretty disappointing.

The attuned versions of 3 of the Dark Watcher's Despair IOs is set to have a minimum level 7 while the other 3 are set to minimum 17: Dark Watcher's Despair: To Hit Debuff/Recharge/Endurance Reduction Dark Watcher's Despair: To Hit Debuff/Recharge Dark Watcher's Despair: To Hit Debuff "I want to slot as I go with this new controller. What level does Dark Watcher's start at? 7? Really" And slotted one at level 12 before I realized the others started at 17. The recipes and non-attuned IOs all start at level 21 and quote a minimum level of 18.

So I want tokens that I can drop on others' characters that will turn into goodies when 'opened'. The general idea is that I can give non-cash goodies to others that can be immediately used, such as access to the portable workbench table, team transporter, or the like. The first and most obvious answer to such a request is 'Why don't you just give them the inf to buy said goodie?' And the only response I should give is 'But I want to give wrapped presents, not a card with a check in it.' There are other reasons I can supply, though: I want to give things to people who are squeamish about money. I want to increase the number of people who have the crafting table, but not necessarily the number of people who have huge amounts of influence. Unless I do, in which case I can give both as a starter set. I want to roleplay a Mesoamerican war god who transforms his worshipers into Jaguars. Yes, that last one is suspiciously specific. It's part of one of my character's backstory, if that was not evident. I think these could be implemented as recipes or as special salvage. Either would give the recipient the option of trading it to another character should they already have that goodie, or, yes, selling it on the /ah. The difficult part would seem to be the data definition, since the icons and goodies themselves already exist. Special care would need to be taken to make sure that items that increase in cost as you level, such as costume changes, are not abusable. Thoughts?

The only people I've heard complaining about Adamastor are those upset that they can't soak up endless merits every hour on the hour.

So tip drops are pretty hilariously bugged. Steps to reproduce: Be level 20 Have a full compliment of tips. (This works with either Valentines or regular tips) Note which tips you have Fight enemies that are eligible to drop tips. Note that you continue to get tip drops Compare your tips after the drop to before. The tips you have will be replaced with new ones. -- Edit -- So apparently this is WAI. Can we please have an option to disable drop notification crawls? This pushes them over the limit into 'Distracting', especially on longer missions.

Widower and other GMs, I was doing a bunch of crafting and /ah sales yesterday morning across multiple characters. Those items now seem to be missing. I just straight up don't remember WHAT I put up or on which characters. Getting the recipes or enhancers back just isn't important to me, but I thought I'd mention it in case looking at my sales history helps your team diagnose the issues. I feel the pain of a bad SQL server install on a very personal, private level. (Jee criminey, I've spent a lot of late nights backing out bad installs...)

P2W - T4V -> START This seems like a good change, since it helps points new players to utilities that most of us take for granted. Additionally, the popup text you get explaining the jetpack and where to get more is also a good pointer. There's one area where I think it could be improved. Something that I see returning players ask in /help fairly often is 'Where are my veteran's rewards?' Most people who answer these questions immediately jump to the 'Veteran's Levels' after 50, and how they interact with the Incarnate system. I think what most people are asking, though, is 'Where are the loyalty and purchase rewards like Sands of Mu?' I think that popup text, which currently reads: Would be a good spot to placed an addendum like Note for Returning Players: Prestige Powers and Enhancements formerly available via the Veterans Rewards system are now available from START vendors. Another good place to show something like this would be among the map loading screen tips. Incidentally, there's an opportunity here for some real comedy in the game writing if you have the START reps be a bit sheepish about heroes and villains not being terribly okay with 'Paying 2 Win'.

Let's chat about the Origin dialogue. I think everyone, players and devs alike, going back to the Cryptic era have always wanted Origin to be more important. This is still reflected in the character creator not allowing you to progress to archetype, etc... until you pick one. However, a question that comes up in /help fairly often is 'What does Origin actually DO?' And, of course, the answer is always, 'Not much. Aside from the newbie attack power, which you can switch out, it's basically what stores you can buy DOs and SOs from. It's mostly there for roleplay value.' So, while in the future this may change, I think it's important NOW to inform new players of that. If you have not clicked on any of the origins that session, you can see the text: This text disappears and is not reviewable once you've clicked on ANY origin. You don't see it again unless you completely restart the CoH client. It needs to be visible the entire time a player is viewing that screen. Once you've picked, say, Science origin, it should look something like: Ideally, I think that the explanation of the choice should be OUTSIDE the text box so that newer players can more easily see that it applies to all origins. So something like the following might even be MORE helpful to new players: Choose the Origin of your Powers - Origin explains how your character got their powers and abilities. - This determines what types of Enhancements your character can to use as they level up. - In general this choice will not have significant impact on your overall game experience. - You must first select an Origin for your character before continuing. And then the 'You must first' text is replaced with the flavor text for the origin once you've clicked one, but the explanation of what Origin actually does never disappears so long as you're on that screen. And, of course, /help is generally a great place, and the people who listen to it are usually great about answering questions like this. I, personally, will continue to help new players understand the ramifications, importance, or lack thereof due to their choices.