mechahamham

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.

This is what kills the 'end game' in CoH for me. Over level 38 or so, there's no finesse, no timing, no management. It's simply a race to see who can click their powers the fastest.

So, what I'm reading here is that Hiscox is totally in on the Nemesis weather satellite plot. COINCIDENCE?! I think not!

Ibuprofen and Benadryl. Aside from being predisposed to allergies, my parents smoked like chimneys the whole time I was growing up. I'm rocking some truly EPIC allergies and sensitivities. Benadryl has quite literally saved my life on multiple occasions. I take it often as Epi pens are gawdauful expensive but good ol' diphenhydramine is cheap as dirt. Well, very nice potting soil might be more expensive. I try to always have some in me. I occasionally have blood running in my veins as well, but it's mostly benadryl if you poke me. I'd like to, before I die, take a trip to George Rieveschl's grave and pour out fourty pink capsules for my ILLUSTRIOUS dead homie. Since I'm allergic to so many natural foods, I subsist on mostly artificially-flavored snacks. They may be horrible for you, but tree nuts would kill me in MUCH shorter order. Diet Coke and other aspartame-sweetened drinks are my favorites. I don't care for the taste of sucralose, but aspartame and sugar-alcohol are okay in things like hard candies. One natural food I do like to have is oatmeal. I'll often munch on uncooked rolled oats. I am also blissfully NOT allergic to apples and stone fruits, ironically meaning I can have almonds in small amounts. I get sulky if I don't have a bag of apples, but a supply of fresh, dried, or even canned cherries, peaches, and apricots are super welcome by mah gaming desk.

This was a consequence, I think of the fact that the OG devs used Excel as their mission editor for years at a time. It was easier to simply copy and paste a line in a CSV spreadsheet than it is to hand-craft each mission objective. When you're pressed to 'get 90 missions out the door in time for release', you're going to opt for the former every time.

I love the Halloween ToT EBs, and I love fighting them. I love that each one has one or more 'tricks' you have to learn. They're not perfectly balanced, though. (Thanos: "As all things should be." *SNAP*) They're good, but there's still lots of room for improvement. Solo, the EBs are almost undoable for a lot of characters. They seem like they're balanced for groups and/or the multi-group ToT leagues that gravitate to Kallisti Wharf and Murder Motel in Peregrine. The 'sore spots' seems to be characters in their 20s and early 30s, and low DPS characters, even if they're otherwise powerhouses. For example, among my characters that struggle with them is a Psi/Sonic blaster optimized for 'Blapping'. She can easily wade through the entirety of the 'Whispered Rumors' mission at 33 without a break, but just doesn't have enough damage and fuel in her tank to burn down one of the EBs, even well slotted with IOs. Psi blast just has bad fuel efficiency in that regard for a lot of situations. Even inspiration loading doesn't solve the problem since Psi's relatively low base damage isn't enough to deal with the EBs. My personal solution to getting her the ToT badges while solo was to use Ouro to exemp to a level 24 mission so that the EBs didn't spawn, and then joining the team in Kallisti to work on giant monsters and EBs once she had the other badges. This is a reasonable compromise, IMO, but is a little convoluted. My understanding from last year was that there was a planned code change to make the EBs not spawn at all for solo players. Apparently that didn't happen in time for the event this year. (I think we're all coping with 'We all have less free time right now.') I'd personally like to see something along the lines of the EB spawns being affected by Notoriety settings. If you have 'Solo Bosses' activated, they do spawn, but if you don't, no EBs. In small groups, they seem almost perfect, with a few serious caveats. The first of those is the Arisen Mummy's 'Knockout Blow'. Knockout Blow can, as the name suggests, all but one-shot a lot of players. Ironically, it's a hair easier for a solo player to deal with this since they have more (perceived) mobility away from a group and can kite the Mummy around a little more effectively. (Players who are allergic to themselves or others moving around... seriously, cut that out.) The Mummy's long-lasting 'Diseased' debuff can derail a small group. While the debuff itself is just fine for the encounter, the duration could definitely use to be cut down a tad... maybe cut it by 50%? In large groups, the EBs just simply aren't a challenge. The Murder Motel and KW teams don't even blink when a horde of them show up. (They don't even notice when a horde of Nightmare EBs pop up in the Zombie Apocalypse invasions.) I personally don't think we should balance encounters where a raid-sized team is chewing through content originally targeted to solo players and small groups. However, what I would LIKE to see is to make the EBs just a tad more... chunky... for the large groups. How about this? If the EBs spawn at 50 for a player in a team, they spawn as AVs rather than EBs, using the Mission Architect scaling rules. Thoughts? How do you feel about the balance of the Halloween EBs?

I'll join the PI league on my characters that aren't good soloers, but in general, I prefer to solo the event. It's a lot of joy, IMO. Honestly, the badges and PAPs are... additional. If anything I'm wierded out by the fact that I get more mummies than werewolves rather than irritated that I don't get werewolves

I was not going to use the term 'sample size' in my post, but, yes, 18 encounters is absolutely not enough sample size to draw conclusions. I'm going to continue logging mine through the event (simply for my own edification). After my post, I managed to get a few more encounters, including 3 back-to-back Arisen Mummies! I seem to get more total EB encounters in Talos and IP than in Croatoa at level 27, so I wonder if the map population is playing into the spawns at all. (Sadly, I did not think to start logging 'eb vs. non-eb when I started. -- Edit: Or how many or what EB were in which zone, for that matter.) Crone Matriarch: 5 Spectral Werewolf: 2 Arisen Mummy: 9 Ancient Vampire: 3 Hollow Reaper: 3

So I noticed that I seemed to be getting dramatically fewer Spectral Werewolves than the other EBs, so I've been keeping a log of all my solo ToTing today. In the last 24 hours, I've encountered: 4 Crone Matriarchs 6 Arisen Mummies 4 Hollow Reapers 3 Ancient Vampires but only 1 Spectral Werewolf One day and 18 encounters is nothing LIKE enough to account for RNG streakiness. However, this seems to be roughly in line with what I've experienced in the previous 3 days: Very few Spectral Werewolves, and quite a few Arisen Mummies. This seems odd, given that 5 of each is required for each of the badges. Is this working as intended?

This seems like a great idea to me, Andreah. I've been thinking of a way to try incorporate star ratings into the invite process since it's almost always by tell, and simply having it inline in the chat evaded me for some reason. Great suggestion!

Arachne, this map makes the Mario 64 Penguin Slide Race music start playing in my head.

I was like, oh this is all going to be power measuring and... WAIT JUST A @#$@ing SECOND?! They actually got my problem? In 2012 era terms, CoH's polygon budget was conservative in order to deal with an engine that was not as optimized as it could be and MMO shenanigans, like 50 people crowded into one area for a giant monster/raid/etc... event. In 2023 era terms, CoH's polygon budget is ridiculous compared to what even very, very potato computers can do now-- with a few big exceptions. We *need* the ability to overlap more costume parts. This NEEDED to happen in 2012. Some of this, I'd like to see come in the form of new costume tech, like asymmetrical tops and applying textures to patterns and vice-versa. And I DO INDEED have a demon girl who cannot wear her horns and glasses at the same time because they're both stuck in Detail 1. Break horns out. Break glasses out. Break a few things out that were limited for reasons that don't really exist any more, let alone matter. Now, the huge exception... We've got some stuff that's CPU-bound that SHOULD be GPU bound, but that was created before GPUs were really capable of doing things. Capes are the number one example, but there are a few others. These, frankly, need to be reworked to allow GPU utilization. That's a huge ask for an entirely volunteer dev staff. At the very least, players need to be limited to 1, maybe 2 cape systems. That said, I'm perfectly willing to completely sacrifice capes and cape systems if it means my characters can have extra details. "Enabling this costume feature requires disabling Cape Systems for your character, making some costume parts unavailable, including Trenchcoats. This requirement is in place to reduce network lag and graphical slowdown for all players." ^^^ Make this happen! -- Edit -- Re-reading this this morning, I realize that it can possibly be taken as 'I want to take away others' ability to use capes'. That's not what I intended at all. My goal for this would be to limit my own polygon budget and CPU utilization in exchange for extra details on my character. I'm restricting how others see me, and not the other way around. Others could make the choice for their own characters, but wouldn't be limited or affected in any way by others' choice. Two cape systems per character is probably reasonable and not terribly taxing on most computers. It would allow for things like wearing the Sybils' /Sister Solaris' flowing gowns. It wouldn't allow for things like Mirror Spirits multiple cape systems to make up her robe and hair ornaments. I can certainly see the argument for allowing unlimited cape systems, but I don't think it's worth it.

I love the Croatoa groups and the story, but it just kinda peters out rather than coming to any kind of satisfying conclusion. There is a TON that can be done with the Seelie fae vs. Unseelie fae vs. Cabal/Coven angle that's just... not. Once you're out of Croatoa, the Redcaps and Tuatha only show up in the throwaways for Holiday events. Cabal and Fir Bolg just straight up disappear. I'd like to see the consequences of Katie Hannon getting married, or more details on how the Witches' magic works. Katie is mentioned a couple times as being the Cabal's 'last hope'. WHY is she the last hope? Is she the only witch who can still bear children? What's stopping the younger witches in the Cabal from having families? Additionally there are a few DE trees in Croatoa. Are those there on purpose or were they just misplaced by... was it Archon Voss who populated that zone? It seems like I remember War Witch saying he did. It'd be neat to see an arc that was fae vs. Hamidon themed. This is a personal thing, but I am SICK TO DEATH of Praetorian content. Please don't tie the Croatoa stuff to Praetoria in any way. I kinda hate that the Midnighters got tied to Night Ward. That said, the Drudges are seriously cool. I'd like to see non-Praetorian-centric Drudges show up in other arcs.

So, how much work are we talking here for rotating ? Just replacing images one time, like many folks do for vidiotmaps or texture replacements seems nominal, but wouldn't we have to have an updater or something similar for rotating images? Can CoH modder handle regular rotations like this? I can think of a couple ways to do this with shell scripting, but they all involve intervening in the CoH launch process. I dunno how extendable CoH modder would be for something like this. The actual creation of regularly changing images wouldn't be that difficult and updating them would require only very minimal supervision. A typical process is that an artist creates one PSD or XCF file that contains layers of background art and text and can then export it in whatever format is needed, like BMP or PNG. In the example of the ads for regular costume contests, you'd have the same art for a few weeks and then a changing date in the text. This can even be automated fairly easily, so long as the artist or event organizer checks the output before uploading the new version. "4:00 PM EST on 08-09-20X3 - This week's theme is 'Starving Creator'!

If you are within 5 meters of that thing when it tries to launch.... what are those, grenades?... you are at risk of life and limb. But give it to a Freak and he will absolutely weld his torso to it and call himself a 'Freak Vespa-taur!'.

You make a compelling argument, Snark.

Over the past several days, I've noticed a distinct uptick in the amount of racism and bigotry I've seen in various chats. The usual pattern I've witnessed is that one person will say something slightly or very blatantly bigoted, including obvious slurs, and if they're called out on it, a couple others will leap to the defense and attack the person who speaks up. The language is straight off of 4chan in a lot of cases. I've been wearing out the /petition button reporting these incidents. It's no secret that other private CoH servers have pretty serious racism problems. Those people are coming here, infecting our servers with hatred and intolerance. Don't stand for it. Don't ignore it. Don't make excuses for it. Call it out when you see it, and /petition the people who do it. Devs and GMs, please take the reports seriously when you get them. We're better than this. Don't let hatred and bigotry ruin Homecoming.

I believe that, before we can help, we have to understand many things: - The HC team has indicated at several different times that they are uninterested and/or unable to participate in an open-source CoH project of any kind. For a volunteer project, this is severely limiting in almost all regards. We need to understand why they have chosen this path and what we can do to work around this limitation. - The HC team is notoriously secretive as has been already mentioned in the thread. Basically everyone who contributes has to sign an NDA. We need to understand WHY this is required and if there's any way to realistically contribute without signing that NDA. One of the problems with NDAs is that they often forbid people from discussing the terms of the NDA itself. - We need to know what the HC team's quality requirements are for contributions. I've personally privately volunteered textures to the project. My attempt at contribution was met with silence, I assume because I didn't go through that NDA process. HC Staff, you can help yourself a LOT if you talk to the legal representation you've got and see how much you can disclose to us and how much you can accept from us. We genuinely want to help.

I spent an afternoon experimenting with subbing in different font files and have made the following observations: Paragon City Italic... I can't see that this is actually used for anything? Maybe just a clone of redcircl? redcircl - Account Name and Password labels, Settings button, Select a Server label, character names on select screen, combat text floaters including damage and heal numbers, level number on HP bar gothicb - account name and password fields, Exit and Login buttons, Back to Login button, server names, character AT/Powerset/LastPlayed on select screen mont_bold - zone name on loading screen mont_demibold - license text, button toolips, most UI elements including buttons, menus, neighborhood names, and chat text mont_hvbold - status text (Hidden, Held, Taunted, etc...), character placards above heads including titles, names, badge titles, SG verdana - chat balloons Font Considerations: When picking fonts, you want to consider what's important to you: Readability, aesthetics, etc. Red Circle is not terribly readable and is used almost solely for aesthetic reasons. Montreal is better, but has really crummy character differentiation between look-alikes such as 1, i, l, 0, o, or O. If you invite team members by typing their names, this can cause problems. If you invite them solely by clicking their names in chat, it's less so. A significant number of players use 'look-alike' characters to make trick chat names. This ranges from idiocy like copyrighted characters ala 'WoIverine' to more creative examples, like using 1s, is, and ls to make barcodes. If you change the font you see character names in, you're going to see some of these break. The CoH client has pretty awful font configuration. You can only indirectly work with font sizes via UI scaling and the 'chat font size' slider, which has huge jumps. In many cases, you're stuck with the sizes the client chooses for you and the metrics built into fonts. This means one font might appear significantly smaller (and therefore less readable) than another in CoH, even though their sizes are more similar in any other application. Some of the most 'impactful' aesthetic fonts are fixed-width, meaning each glyph is exactly the same width, even comparing characters like W and I. Be prepared for text to slide off the right of your screen if you use these. I, personally, do NOT like serif fonts (fonts with tags on the ends of character strokes). YMMV. TTF (True-type Font) and OTF (OpenType Font) are very similar, but not identical formats. So far I've found that CoH handles all .otf fonts I've thrown at it if I rename them to .ttf Fonts I've found that work well or are noteworthy: Raleway - https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Raleway This is a particularly good chat font, with great differentiation. Rowdies - https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Rowdies This is an nice, impactful bold font that's a good choice for your floaters (i.e: redcircl.ttf) It looks like a million bucks when you see 'Critical' or 'Assassin Strike' floaters. The Magnificent Girl - https://www.fontspace.com/the-magnificent-girl-font-f79686 Another aesthetic font. The metrics don't play quite as nicely as the others, but it looks awesome on the character select screen. Gamegirl Classic - https://www.fontspace.com/gamegirl-classic-font-f3331 This is one of those fixed-width aesthetic fonts. It looks great in floaters, but not so hot on, say, the consignment screen. Dosis - https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Dosis This is wonderful for differentiation, and scales very well if you use the chat font size slider or use /uiscale. At its default size, it's a bit hard for my worsening vision, though.

Satellite is the big bad Television came to warn us about.

I'm left wondering if this wasn't the cause of the same issue that was placing players into a login queue over the last week. Regardless, thank you kindly for keeping us up-to-date on the situation!