mechahamham

The the way my wife read it.

In the tip mission 'Rescue the 5th Column traitor' one of the opening lines of dialogue is: [NPC] Raserei Ubermenschen Fire: Why have they kept him alive for so long? [NPC] Nebel Rifle: No idea. If they'd put me in the same room with that traitorous dog I would have slit his throat in a heartbeat. The text bubble for this censored 'slit', presumably as a euphemism for 'vagina': "No idea. If they'd put me in the same room with that traitorous dog I would have **** his throat in a heartbeat." I was drinking Diet Coke at the time and nearly snorted it all over my desk when I read that as 'I would have shit down his throat...'. I did some testing in local, making the 5th column guys in my mission blush, and found that penis and vagina are both on the bad word list. I'm personally okay with 'seven dirty words' type of words on the filter, and we can, of course, always turn it off. However, I'm not sure it's very healthy for people of any age to think that their anatomy needs to be censored. Even PG-13 movies get an allotted one 'Fuck' per screening. (I personally play with the filters on JUST for moments like the one above.) Honestly, I'd rather the violent act of murder be censored rather than the genitalia. All that said, what REALLY bothers me about the filtering is that it's not consistent. If it's censored in the text bubble, it should be censored in the chat window as well.

Salted and peppered hash (encryption terms and not cooking terms) is best practice, really. I vaguely remember reading something about work being done on the auth database to bring it up to modern levels, though, which makes me worry that it's not. I'm the sort that doesn't really trust password authentication on its own. It's a good 'first layer', so long as you ALWAYS use a different password for every different resource. There are good free pw managers out there, but I use an encrypted disk container for those I don't memorize and try to change them often. (Why yes, I do talk to a doctor about my paranoia. Why do you ask?)

I prefer to use, when I can, passphrases. I logged in today after a few days only to see 'This account is already logged in'. After a quick check of my characters to make sure nothing obvious had been disturbed, I immediately changed my password. I doubt anything malicious has happened. Chances are I closed out while still on a flashback or TF. Still, I'd kinda like to have a longer password than 15 characters, at least until we get something like 0auth or some form of 2fa. I've not looked at the Ourodev authentication code (or any of the code, really). I don't know how that password field is saved. If it's a varchar in an SQL database, it seems like an 'alter table/modify column' wouldn't be terribly ornerus. I say that, and it's probably a set-width string or, worse, a null-terminated C string.

Allow players to wear: horns with glasses. There are other 'Detail 1' collisions that just don't make sense, but that's the big one. Countess Crey's dress and glasses. The dress'd be ideal for a 'Unique Tops' item. Ouroboros Mender's belt. Cimeroran priestess robes (the two-cape system that Sister Solaris wears). Very few of us are playing CoH on the same computers we were in 2012. I think letting players have access to more intricate combinations will have almost negligible performance impact today for the overwhelming majority of players. I get more fps drop zoning into the unoptimized, but empty Kallisti Wharf than I do into Atlas during a costume contest on a 5yo nvidia adapater. In lieu of a real RGB slider control addition to the color palette, loosen the validation on colors in .costume files. We know that the engine will support a very broad gamut of RGB colors. (I have screenshots of me demonstrating this when the costume save feature went in.) This would allow players to fix color mismatches that have existed since Issue 1. The few players who use this to make inappropriate costumes will be ignored or reported almost instantly.

A Taxibot Tour Guide Pamphlet You have come across a Pamphlet for the Taxibot Tour Guide service. You mark the location it references for navigation on your smart device. (Traveling to this location and searching for landmarks will likely award you a badge for exploration or progress towards a history badge.) About the Taxibots The Taxibots were originally a series of robotic heroes who worked to ferry heroes to, from, and across dangerous locations. Their forces were joined by many who were not robotic, including heroes who only had powers related to travel, showcasing the true spirit of heroism that lives in Paragon City. The Taxibots numbers have dwindled simply due to lack of need as teleportation and transport technology advances, but there are still many out there who don't hesitate to help other heroes get to where they need to be. In recent years, the Taxibots were rumored to have been working up a tour service, even cataloguing important locations in the Rogue Isles. While you haven't heard anything official, you can only assume that the pamphlet you found is a part of that effort. (When I read that the HC devs were considering tip missions to help players find exploration points, I immediately thought of the Taxibots and their invaluable service to the others players of CoH. I think that referencing them in 'official' content would be a good way to honor them.)

In Skyway City, Pavel Garnier's name has an underscore in it: Pavel_Garnier

Jimmy, I have a technical question about the new teleport menus. In particular, would you kindly share the icon name of the green 'Fast Travel' icon so that it can be used for a custom popmenu that doesn't replace the one you've created?

This is great for existing players, but we do still get new players from time to time. (And they promptly get sucked into AE farms. Srsly, farmers, quit doing that. I had a player in their 20s ask if they had to stand by the door on a regular mission team this week.) For the truly new players, and those who are returning from a hiatus since before i9, a little more guidance should be provided. Not only is our Consignment system a little more complex that most MMO auction houses, but it's not immediately obvious what can and does sell, especially with the 'last sell price' feature bugged out. I stand what I said before, that the price on DOs (not SOs) should be lowered so that they can be reasonably bought from vendors. I'd like to see a (?) symbol or some other kind of help or tooltip next to the 'Upgrade' button that explains WHAT it's going to do before the player clicks it out of curiosity. Finally, I'd like to see a Shady-looking 'Auction Informant' NPC in a conspicuous place in Atlas and Mercy (I'm thinking not too far from Ms. Liberty) that says something like the following: Psst. Hey, Pal. Wanna learn a little bit about making money? > Sure! > No, I'm good, really. > Is this a scam? It ain't a scam. You think I could get away with scamming folks in *this* city?! Nah, I work for the Chamber of Commerce, which is probably worse. We're trying to get super-powered individuals such as yourself spending more money in town, but the economy has changed a lot over time. I'm supposed to tell you how to *make* more money so you can *spend* more money. As you do missions for folks around here, you'll tend to pick up 'merit rewards', especially after you do something really amazing like fight a giant monster or finish a campaign against enemy forces. Stuff like that. Heck, you can even earn them simply for exploring. You can trade those merit rewards in at that ATM-lookin' terminal over there, yeah, past the statue. Sometimes there'll be folks standing around in red and gold uniforms to take 'em as well. If need some quick cash to further your endeavors, you can trade your merits for things like enhancement converters or boosters. Those tend to sell reasonably well right now at the local consignment house, and should get you, and some of the local merchants around here, more liquidity. > Where do I sell them? Where's the consignment house? East of here. Round building with a transparent ceiling. Kinda hard to miss, actually. > Can't I just trade my merits directly for enhancements or other goodies? You can, and many choose to do that. I recommend talking to the folks at Paragon City University in Steel Canyon. They'll tell you a lot about how to invent your own equipment. I'm just telling you about a good way to get started. Like I said, the economy has changed a lot around here and'll probably change in the future. I'll try to keep up-to-date information on hand so you don't get shafted too badly.

The 'Upgrade' button on the Enhancement screen doesn't show the amount of inf a player currently has. And if the player doesn't have enough influence to cover the upgrade, it fails without any kind of error like 'You don't have enough inf for that'.

I went into the Beta with a new, level 1 scrapper and played through Matthew Hashaby's arc. Before, a new player could reasonably buy a couple of enhancers off the vendors with those first few missions. Now I can afford only one or two DOs, with a generous amount of street-sweeping and selling all my drops. There's discussion about this, but it seems wrong and counter-intuitive to me. I think the price on those low-level DOs should be the same prices you'd find on TOs of the same level.

I'm afraid I don't understand the geologic processes that are responsible for 'veiny' metals other than 'a bunch of gold got dissolved in really hot water a long time ago'. As for natural diamonds, I can't imagine that they're terribly rare if you've got SOME kind of coal/carboniferous deposit, but that digging around in coal is a real good way to tear up your lungs.

Metallurgy's a heck of a thing, ain't it? Add a little bit of aluminum to your alloy mix and, blam, purple. More copper, pink.

And here's the rub. I DO actively work to build event teams and still have all the problems I mentioned. If I have a team of three 20ish people on the Talos hill or in Blyde Square, they see a 50 join and then immediately leave, it becomes much harder to keep them on the team as well.

Non-sprint run is already 15mph. I think that's before Swift, even.

I have a level 18 Archery/Mental Manip blaster that I copied over from Excel. She took Telekinetic Thrust as soon as it was available and slotted it. On Brainstorm, it shows that she still has it unlocked. It's just in the t9 position. If I respec, it becomes unavailable. Moving Telekinetic Thrust to the t9 bothers me deeply. It's basically the same utility as Energy manipulation's 'Power Thrust' with more damage. I use it as a 'get away from me!' power the same way I do with Power Thrust. I'm not at all concerned with the damage it has. it becomes less useful with Drain Psyche, but only by a small amount. Honestly, if I were going to choose an order for Mental Manipulation, it would be like so: Telekinetic Thrust Subdual Mind Probe Concentration Psychic Scream Drain Psyche World of Confusion Scare Psychic Shockwave Psychic Shockwave *seems* like the obvious t9 in this group to me. It's a powerful PBAOE that recharges often enough to use as part of a rotation.

I ran this on my existing Lutris install by selecting 'run EXE inside wine prefix', selecting the installer exe from my downloads folder. It installed and ran with zero hiccups. The copy-over from Tequila was flawless. I updated my Lutris runner for CoH to run the new launcher executable in the bin folder. The new launcher is done well and 'correctly' from a programming POV, as far as I'm concerned. It's blazing fast. Kudos.

Reading through the comments in this thread, I see most of the conversation is about tweaks to powersets and concerns about nerfs. There was an important factor that was only glancingly mentioned in the OP, but one that's fairly important to me, and doesn't seem to be getting a lot of attention: How endgame affects the rest of the game. One poster tried to make an explicit warning about 'not turning off incarnates'. I'm probably in the other camp. I had my fill of the incarnate system during the Paragon Live era. If I never see another incarnate while I play CoH, I wouldn't be very upset at all. That said, I accept that there are players who want to play to 'be powerful', and I respect that they and I have to live together. Here are my concerns: Many players become so attached to their incarnate abilities that they refuse to play below level 50. This is not a serious problem for taskforce teams and leveling teams. Where it becomes a problem is world content, especially for events like we have currently with the Halloween event. The only zone event team that manages to keep any kind of traction is the 'Murder Motel' league in Peregrine Island, frequently run with multiple players who have Incandescent league teleports to zip masses of players around to monsters and banners. With multiple incarnates spamming their powers constantly, the amount a player in their 20s contributes starts to get close to meaningless. It's not just at 'Murder Motel', but also against any other zone event that garners the attention of Incarnates. I was with a team in Crey's Folly fighting the zombie invasion event earlier in the year. I was on a 35ish blaster, but there were seven or eight incarnates in the assembled league. I couldn't even target the non-boss enemies before the Judgement spam obliterated them. The bosses and EBs lasted for maybe one or two hits before they too were annihilated. Not only did I have no impact on the event, there was also no challenge. If I stopped attacking for a while, there wasn't enough enemy spawn to make me regret it. I could just sit there and earn passive exp. It was pretty disheartening. This is where the 'things don't live long enough to make x worthwhile' complaint comes into my take on the equation. Likewise, if a lower-level player tries to organize an event team, such as for the Zombie apocalypse team or a Deadly Apocalypse 'banner' team in another zone, assuming they can get any kind of buy-in for the event, they're constantly barraged with complaints that they need to 'promote a 50'. I've had maybe half a dozen or so instances this year where players simply leave an event team as soon as they see it's being run by an under-50. I haven't had much luck at all organizing teams in Talos or Steel Canyon at all during this particular event. The 'close to meaningless' problem is also very apparent against zone GMs like the Council Goliath or Adamastor. These guys are pretty much farmed for reward merits as soon as they're able to spawn. People make jokes about how quickly Adamastor dies. In the event of a less common world GM spawns, the difficulty curve of the encounter goes upside down as soon as the team facing it is dominated by incarnates. A good example is the Malta Zeus Titan that shows up as an ambush during the 'World Wide Red' arc. If a single team of below-40 players with a moderate amount of IOs slotted try to tackle it, it's a pretty rough fight, but completely winnable. A Single team of below 25s would have serious problems with it. If there are a handful of incarnates whapping away at it, it's trivial. The Zeus Titan goes down in seconds as opposed to minutes and things like debuffs or team buffs cease to matter in the face of the sheer amount of damage Judgement is able to pump. The basic problem here is that the 'Giant Monster' level compression code that's used for all these zone events does not (or cannot?) take Incarnate abilities into account. This is the unfinished problem that the Paragon Devs had to leave behind. Certainly applying a nerf to Incarnates now would be so massively unpopular that it'd be hard to justify. My suggestion is to somehow add the following to the 'Giant Monster' code: If the player is not an incarnate, no change should happen. If the player is an incarnate, the event should make the GM-scaled enemies significantly more resilient to their damage and able to hit them for somewhat more. In effect, the GM-scaled enemies should get an 'incarnate shift' for calculations against the incarnate players, but not against non-incarnate players. I know I'm likely in the minority of players with this kind of concern, but this is a major detriment to my enjoyment of events. I'm pretty much soloing Halloween this year.

Somewhere a former Paragon coder is sweating. "We had DEADLINES, Okay?!" I haven't had any crashes on Linux/Wine with an Nvidia adapter if that helps narrow it down in ANY way at all (which I highly doubt), Number 6.

I have adored magical girls and magical girl anime for a very long time. (Hurl your derision upon me!) One of the things that's really missing from the costume editor that 'finishes' a magical girl costume are bows and ribbons. Just before Paragon got evicted, they did add a few bows to the game, particularly as part of the gunslinger set. They're attached to other pieces. I'd like to be able to use them independently of the veils and half-skirts they're attached to. I'd also like to be able to use one as a chest detail as depicted in this gorgeous fanart of everyone's favorite sailor-themed Pretty Guardians (Art by Sayaka Inumori). This one will actually require new model work since I don't think they exist anywhere in game. However, there are many free 3d meshes of something that I'd like to see used as weapons and back details, especially with the new sonic set coming out. Guitars have been sadly unrepresented in CoH, which is a shame because they quite literally rock. (Also, everyone knows who Haruko is from a certain 4-letter anime, right?) Doll joints, desu. This one would be texture work rather than mesh work. I actually had a hard time coming up with an image for this one since they either go really creepy or borderline NSFW territory. Think Chachamaru from 'Magical Sensei Negima', Lime from 'Saber Marionette', or any of the dolls from 'Rozen Maiden'. This kind of texture would work well for both magical characters and tech characters... think not just animated dolls, but humanoid androids with visible joints. Another good example of the latter would be Gally from 'Gunm' aka 'Battle Angel Alita' I have no illusions about how much our current volunteer team is already doing, going above and beyond, and I understand the amount of work I'm requesting here. I don't expect such things to just 'materialize', even at the rate new costume pieces were created by Paragon's staff. (I still love you, Jay!) That's just not possible right now, when the devs are fighting to manage what was once done by a team of many dozens. However, I want to plant seeds for the day when art and modelling work like this can once again be added to our wonderful costume creator. Thank you, HC devs, and please let these images simmer in your mind for the days when costume pieces can be added again.

The character DB uses a UID now? Fantastic! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making that little step in the direction of data integrity

You sound like you're having a great deal of fun with this.

I really like how Flambeaux is fleshed out:

"People will tell you that Incarnates are the end-game. They're lying. Altitis is the real end-game and well all know its true, even if some of us don't want to admit it." The character select screen was great when it was designed to hold 8 characters. Then it was reshuffled to hold 12. And then pages were hacked into it so it could hold 36. Then others had to cram in features to it as gracefully as they could manage so that it could hold a theoretically unlimited number of characters. It's likely HIGHLY due for some refactoring and re-engineering.

While they're a staple in anime and serialized manga, we don't see many 'timeskips' in western Superhero comics. Rather than 'let's have lots of filler while the characters age to this point', manga fans often get a 'Five years have passed since the climactic battle and our characters are more adult than children now...' line. Western comics typically have a more Soap-opera-like sense of time. Some characters may age rapidly in the story while others don't budge. Some skip ahead or even backwards, with or without time-travel. That WAS the case until a certain climactic comic-book movie dropped a stunning 'FIVE... YEARS.... LATER...' on us just before the curtain rose on its second act. And we, City of Heroes players, have experienced our own timeskip. Eight years ago, NCSoft pulled the plug. Now we're all back in Paragon City. So while Kallisti Wharf may have been intended as a battleground for players to fight against the mysterious aliens known only as 'The Battalion', I suggest re-purposing the zone for 'The Timeskip'. "I was just a little kid when the Battalion invaded here. It was pretty epic watching all the heroes and villains come together to save the planet!" The people of Khalisti Wharf have somehow been shunted forward in time 8 years. They remember a fight against the Batallion that no one else in the city recalls. The only person in Paragon City who can make sense of the temporal mess is Montague Castanella, who senses that his own history has been significantly disturbed. He's our first story-arc contact, who helps the player uncover a plot designed to either skip the Battalion invasion entirely, or to make the people of earth *think* they've skipped it. Both Praetorian and Primal Penny Yin, helping each-other to navigate the chronal madness, act together as our second story-arc contact with wonderfully chaotic dialogue. In this arc, the true history of Giovanna Scaldi's mask, the same mask worn by both Praetorian and Primal versions of Vanessa DeVore and later by Desdemona, is revealed, along with its importance in restoring the fractured timeline. Our third contact is Mender Tesseract. Her tragic journey across time into our pasts and futures is explored, as is the founding and eventual demise of Ouroboros. Tesseract's secret identity as the daughter of [REDACTED] is revealed, even as we and she use the knowledge gained to try to keep time itself from unraveling. "I was only getting Pizza," is the excuse given by our fourth story-arc contact, Mender Derek. Yes, he's an idiot, but an idiot-savant when it comes to navigating the twists and turns of temporal paradox. He'll act as a temporary temporal guide for the Heroes and Villains who set about repairing time and replacing what has been lost. The last story-arc contact is none other than the Dark Watcher, who has been tracing different timelines, different parallel Earths, for far longer than anyone should have to. He'll help us to understand what ramifications 'repairing' our 'damaged' timeline will have, and why it must be done anyway. Scarred, older, but wiser for his sojourn in an almost-alien world, Hero One has returned from where very few others have-- complete Riktification. Few understand the Rikti and their history better than he. Most importantly, he knows of their conflict with the Battalion and how it changed them. He'll charge the bravest of earthlings, hero and villain alike, to undertake a grave responsibility: The newly repaired timeline puts Earth back in the sights of the Battalion. Many of Earth's most powerful leaders, hero and villain alike, desperately want to avoid this conflict. Both we and Hero One know that the conflict HAS to take place, or our future will simply fragment again. Defend the repaired timeline from the greatest super-powered individuals Earth has ever known and hope that they can forgive you for doing what must be done.