mechahamham

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.

I haven't happened to have joined any of those, but I wasn't aware that they'd drop for pre-50s. Thanks for the info.

So... this can't be right, can it? I haven't emailed any astral merits to myself and certainly have claimed any out of my mail. Frankly, I don't run much, if any at all, incarnate content. Not sure if this needs to be petitioned as a bug or a possible corrupted character data. I haven't noticed anything else out of place.

What makes you think I haven't already? When I lead teams and event leagues, I tell people that I'm not a good leader, but I am a *verbose* leader. I make it clear what I'd like to happen and what I expect. It doesn't always fly, but it does seem to at least more than half the time.

The trick there is that if there are both options, players will self-select. "Yeesh, I don't wanna run into the AFK police," turns into "I pretty much only join AFKing's leagues because they don't police for AFKers," in short order. Likewise, "Ugh, these AFKers get to me," turns into "I join PoliceDrone939's Leagues because they ask people not to AFK." An example where this works is moderated versus unmoderated message boards, be they on Reddit or anywhere else. (Back in the heydey of Usenet, before spammers really did Tragedy-of-the-Commons the unmoderated bit to death, there were wide selections of both moderated and unmoderated communities.)

We've been running into a problem of event abuse and shared resource wastage for quite some time now. Going back to MSRs, the number of people who simply sit in one position in the bowl with a buff or heal on auto fire is kinda sad, really. They're not even chatting. They've genuinely left a character AFK to soak up passive rewards. (And then when the MSR raid ends, you can see them waiting quietly at Point Du Hoc for their parents to pick them up, perhaps an aoe left on auto.) They may or may not be soaking up a spot in the instance where the raid is happening that would otherwise go to an active player depending on the day and server traffic. The problem is the lie. The Big Lie. The lie that's has caused and is causing endless damage and suffering: "If I'm okay with this happening, everyone else should be okay with this happening too. I don't have to be considerate of the way others feel or change my behavior because *I'm* in the right." (Should we be thankful that the nature of the game limits its effects to places and people that aren't real?) The answer is *communication*. Be the change you want to see and show others. If there's a league that's chasing away AFKers, and you want to start a league that's okay with AFKing, pick a zone where there's not already one going and announce that. Just like farmers announce what they want in their farms, announce what you want and what you're willing to tolerate. Likewise, if you're leading a league and DON'T want to see AFKers, announce that too. It doesn't have to be any kind of statement or ethics or morality. Just, 'No AFKers, please,' will suffice. Importantly, don't make that mistake, "I'm personally okay with this happening, so everyone else should just grow a thicker skin and bear with it." That doesn't help anyone.

@Widower @Cipher, Thank you both so much for the information updates! I truly appreciate these.

I'm always interested in hardware incident post-mortems. HC Devs, if you can share what happened or what was done to bring the server back up, please do. -- Widower made an announcement in the linked post whilst I was laying down to nurse my head cold. tl;dr: the physical server containing the authentication server, Everlast, and Victory died. The auth server was migrated to one of the remaining boxen, but Everlasting and Victory are still MIA. Get well soon, my electronic sistren and brethren.

I was one of those MMs. Apologies. All my awesome leaked out at once. Or maybe that was mucous from the head cold.

Lou Baga: "Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Peregrine Island Number 5."

Hesitantly, I joined a Deadly Apocalypse/Banner event happening in Peregrine just now. I was expecting awfulness, lag, self-loathing, rubberbanding, and existential angst. Instead, I was on a 3-team league that simply did the event with no drama or trauma. That population cap is helping TREMENDOUSLY. Thank you for putting it in place, HC devs!

... GM_Bot can't find its Pinkie Pie Halloween costume. ... the housekeeping staff at Murder Motel has gone on strike. ... the Peregrine Island McDonalds is all out of Happy Meal toys. ... Blue Steel hit Eochai so hard that they're cleaning the Pumpkin Spice out of Azuria's hair. ... Blackwing Industries is monopolizing the Banner Deadly Apocalypse in Kallisti Wharf. ... Zombie Hero One has picked a fistfight with Riktified Hero One. ... Jack in Iron's decadely bath is taking longer than expected.

This kinda goes in with the idea that connecting from Europe results in slightly fewer packet drops, but backbone network routing is DARK Black Magic. My personal (conspiracy) theory is that there's an intensification in the number of DDOS and malware attacks happening that are targeting North American targets and that lots of services and individuals are getting caught in the crossfire. In the last couple months, the fairly popular Arch Linux User Repository removed some malware that had been uploaded. Almost instantly after the removal Both the AUR and Arch Linux's main servers came under DDOS attack. That *kind* of thing happens all the time, but it seems to me that I'm hearing about it more often. I doubt that CoH is actually in the crosshairs of a similar attack, but maybe someone else at OVH *is* and we're getting splash damage.

I've been watching my /netgraph since this behavior began, and this screenie is pretty typical of what I see: My graph goes from spiky in/out to simply flat green. Then, after the event, it pops up that flat yellow or red area in the graph after its already been drawn. In terms of gameplay, I'll be playing along fairly reasonably and then just stop being able to get packets out. My powers and ability to chat stop working. After the event passes, I rubberband back to where I was when it started if I moved. Importantly, this only seems to affect data *out* from my client. I get chat messages *in* just fine the entire time the issue is occurring, and enemies can still attack me. I've found that it's least problematic if I connect to Excelsior from a Euro VPN node, but it still happens pretty often. Just going by chat, people start complaining loudly in /help and /gen whenever it happens to me, so I can only assume that it's affecting a fairly sizeable fraction of the server's population in addition to me.

People AFKing in outdoor zones, mothership raids, and the like in order to soak up passive rewards is a thing that happens: After all, if it's allowed inside the AE building why wouldn't it be allowed everywhere else? Going into October, AFKers are lining up... okay not lining up, but rolling up in their RVs to Murder Motel so that they and their pets can begin camping out. As much as possible, I try to avoid the Peregrine and Kallisti Trick or Treat leagues for a few reasons, lag and rubberbanding being the largest. (I also like being able to contribute to events, and trying to compete with Judgement blasts set to auto is difficult.) But that's okay because I genuinely enjoy soloing My ToTing. However, having the zone population ballooned out makes trying to do even non-Halloween stuff in Peregrine painful. I'm not sure how having Kallisti populated with real content is going to affect that this year. As mentioned in that CoC I linked, the GMs reserve the right to boot people who go AFK in situations like that. Is anything different being done this year in order to keep the rubberbanding to a minimum?