mechahamham

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.

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.