mechahamham

Self moderation features... that is, features that allow a person to tailor what they read or 'hear' in chat will simply by definition be more effective than GM moderation: Once /ignored, you never hear from the ignoree again unless you want to. There are some downsides. One risks isolating themselves on purpose or accidentally. However, in game chat, that's not a huge concern, especially if you include some kind of 'undo' button. I'd like to suggest the following features to enable more control over one's experience: A 'match string' filter for chat channels. Example: A user does not ever want to do Citadel's TF again. They filter /lfg or private chat channels for 'Citadel'. Any line mentioning 'Citadel' is not displayed. Ease of implementation: Easy/Medium Difficulty. This can be entirely client-side, giving zero server overhead to the feature. Additionally, there are several very good public domain and BSD-licensed matching libraries available. The hardest part of this is the UI. You'd need to add a 'filters' window for chat channels. For extra credit, allow those with the know-how to use regular expressions in their matches for super-fine-grained control. Re-implement character-level ignore: Right now /ignoring a character defaults to the /gignore behavior: Ignoring the player at the account level. Generally, that's a positive thing. If a troll is going to troll on one character, you generally don't want to hear from any of their characters. However, that knocks out some use-cases for character level functionality. The obvious example here is to ignore farmers who recruit in /lfg without ignoring their non-farm characters. Ease of implementation: Easy. This is almost certainly still in the code base and needs simply to have the old default behavior rehooked or renamed. Expiring ignore: People have bad days. People are upset by news, current events, or events in their life. Sometimes, people have a few too many drinks or tokes before playing. Occasionally, a player comes into the game with negative expectations, but then lightens up when they learn more about the community. However, once you've /ignored a player, that's it... unless you personally try to take people off your ignore list. I'd like to have an 'ignore for 1 day', 'ignore for 1 week' and 'ignore for 1 month' options to better allow for 'bad days'. Ease of implementation: Medium/Hard difficulty. This would almost certainly have to be server-side and require new data to be stored, complicating what are probably already scary database/data file joins. It would also require new UI elements. Client-side Ban/Generic: Sometimes /ignoring a troll or abusive player is not enough. Sometimes the mods aren't quick enough to keep your day from being ruined. Sometimes there are costumes that upset, offend, or otherwise cause you grief, even if the player behind them isn't doing anything wrong. You don't want to SEE that player or character, ever again. (People with serious Coulrophobia might know about this.) In that case, allow players to either permanently hide another character that is problematic for them or cause their costume to be 'genericed', say reduced to monotone tights, but only on the client side. Difficulty of Implementation: Hard. This would need to be, effectively, a client-side mod that watches and intercepts the zone data to remove or alter character data. Certainly any development effort is not without cost. Even for volunteer developers, time spent on features like this is still time. The upshot of this kind of work is that it might ultimately cause a reduced workload for volunteer GMs. Let me know what you think.

So I'm noticing on an Ice Armor stalker made after the recent placate changes that Placate does not work well, or at all, when using Chilling Embrace. The combat logs from such a situation look about like so: There are no DOT numbers ticking over the enemy's heads, but the chilling embrace graphic (with no damage procs, it's only got one endurance reduction generic IO) is still playing. They immediately attack, even if the placate animation finishes playing. My thought is that Chilling Embrace is not properly suppressed when placated. Looking at CoD, I see the following tag on the power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=stalker_defense.ice_armor.chilling_embrace&at=stalker That looks like other non-damage vs. Enemy PBAOE stalker auras. If you look at Cloak of Fear or Oppressive Gloom on Stalker's Dark Armor, they're set up the same way. (The difference between the DA auras and Chilling Embrace is that Chilling Embrace doesn't apply any kind of control other than slow.) Perhaps the fix for this is removing the enemy notification or changing the enemy notification so that it stops as soon as the enemy is placated. Thoughts?

After doing Ganymede's missions as a Resistance praetorian, he gave me a couple of Paragon City contacts to talk to. I picked Jill Pastor. She went into my 'inactive' list. After doing DJ Zero's first snaptooth mission, he gave me a completely blank reply box, and offered to introduce me to Alphonse Ruebel or Mercedes Sheldon. Mercedes' 'bio' text was completely empty, and she was wearing her club-wear in the photo. When I went to talk to her, she told me, awesomely, "I don't talk to people from an alternate reality." It seems like there are usually a few posts about the wonky contact introductions, but I couldn't immediately find any. I was surprised to that Mercedes was an option, but she appears more severely bugged than most.

I just participated in a Nemesis invasion in King's Row. It attracted quite a few players, so Nemesis made his pledge to attack personally in the Event channel, and then never actually appeared. The event ended without his 'Fools, you only defeated one of my Robotic Replicas!' quip. Of course, the player force was gathered on the street in front of the Police Headquarters, and the Nemesis enemies were appearing just off to the North East of the players... just like all invasions. I haven't looked at the source code, but I assume that this is either a simple case of invasion enemies calculating their entrance point by adding a few negative feet in both axes to player locations or a slight rounding bias where the enemies appear *at* the player locations, but rounded down to a whole integer coordinate. Regardless, that's not a major issue. I've seen it in other games. What is an issue is that apparently the event enemies tend to despawn if there's a significant gap between their location and the ground. This happens in Talos when zombies or rikti try to start spawning on the police station or other buildings NE of the 'Last Line' hill, and it happens at this location as well, looking down into the 'Wentworth's History Buff' area. This time, our Nemesis Giant Monster was subject to this bug, and nobody in the league got the badge for him. Happily, there will be other opportunities to fight him thanks to the new event trigger. It seems like the 'right' behavior for NPCs who spawn in mid air would be to drop down without damage, and then leap back up to attack the players, or be given a few seconds worth of hover, like teleporting players, so that they can agro the players. At the same time, you might wanna look at that invasion spawn-in code and look for a floor() or round() or the like, since the NE creep in invasions is a big general annoyance. It's SOO easy to push an Peregrine invasion right into Castle's police drones.

They may well try to release tonight or tomorrow morning. I personally don't know that I'd release the day before a major U.S. holiday, but I'd love to get my hands on the new goodies. I'm ITCHING to put taunt sets into placate!

As a fan of KB... I may weep tears of joy, Number Six. >I have a copy of Assault Rifle with an M30 grenade that makes big groups hilariously get flung right on top of you. So, your grenade brings all the boys to the yard?

My experience is that Teleport Target and Team Teleport are both properly suppressed by the 'Movement Supression' effect that you get while in the theater and the Casino Heist map.

tl;dr: Using Summon Teammates allows you to pull teammates out of their 'Roles' in Casino Heist How to reproduce: 1. Have 'Summon Teammates' from the Steel Canyon Safeguard/Mayhem mission. 2. Start a 'Summer Blockbuster' trial with 3 other players 3. Start 'Casino heist' 4. While 'Assemble the Team' is inhibited 'Summon Teammates' is not. It can be used to move teammates out of their otherwise sealed rooms, preventing them from completing their objectives.

Both Seismic Blast and Earth Manip come with some hefty screenshake, Earth Manip moreso, which is not in and of itself a bad thing. However, there is at least a small percentage of the playerbase, myself included, who have to turn screenshake off because it causes nausea or headaches. The problem here is that all the camera options are under 'Mouse' for some reason. I have to lead people to find it on the /help channel fairly regularly, and I suspect that will increase with i27p3's release. Can we break the camera options, including Disable/Enable Screen Shake out into a 'Camera' section in the options?

The motel has been receiving vampires and witches by the bus-load, apparently just after stopping at WcDolands. So, expect some Happy-meal toys to be mixed in with the loot is what I'm saying.

>Costume manipulation wont be considered legitimate in costume contests. Any costume manipulation will be disqualified. So, out of curiosity, what kind of costume manipulation are we talking about? I've always wanted to be able to hand-edit .costume files to get the exact colors I wanted.

There is a great deal of venting in my post. I do make few suggestions for changes that I wouldn't mind being discussed, such as dropping the minimum level on 45+ TFs to 40, but I'd also like to see if other people have issues apart from the ones I listed or if they have differing feelings about the problems I see. I'd also love to hear about suggestions for dealing with the problems I mentioned in the OP.

- Everything being run at level 50+4. I got bored of Incarnate content a long time ago. I really like the Dark Astoria arcs, but I could comfortably go the rest of my life without ever doing another Lamba, BAF, Keyes, or TPN trial. The level 45+ Taskforces are better, but they get really dull really quickly when no one specializes, everyone blasts through the content as rapidly as possible and no one plays as if they're part of a team. My attempts at running 'non-incarnate' TFs at 45 have been met with very little success. Saying you're planning a 'no incarnates run' is met quite a bit of disdain, with players who DO join the team actively 'forgetting' your requests. You can forcibly disable Incarnates by also disabling Ancillary/Patron powers or limiting to only AT powers, but this is a bit over the line where players simply avoid the team. Devs, you might consider dropping the min level on those 45+ TFs to 40. I don't know if that would be over or below that 'Absolutely not' line, but it'd be worth trying, IMO. I think I'd really enjoy a 'Level 40 club' type play group or SG, but that currently limits your TF selection by quite a bit. - Players actively spreading knockback hatred. By this, I don't mean the players who ask their teams to use knockback in a team-friendly way. I mean people who spend time in general and help chat ranting about how awful players who choose energy or other KB-heavy sets are. I keep hearing this phrase: "Don't use knockback so your teams won't hate you," as a warning to newer players. That's REALLY painful to hear, since I've heard (and been subject to) that same phrasing 'Don't be x so people don't hate you' over and over again in my hateful part of the U.S.. south as anti-LGBT bigotry. I've heard this one more than once: 'Knockback on teams shouldn't be tolerated.' There are others. This kind of speech is crossing the line from saying 'I don't like this mechanic' to 'You're a bad person if you use or enjoy this game mechanic.' It's becoming more and more common, and knockback is not the only target any more. It's also starting to apply to players who use AOE immobilize powers. I apparently missed when that started, but it's something I've heard several times in the last month. - Players who can't leave real life out of the game. I'm personally guilty of this. I try not to do it, but I slip up from time to time. When I realize what I'm doing, I silence myself. There are lots of folks who don't. Once they get triggered on their personal hot button, they cannot silence themselves. I've got a 'No general/help' tab that covers my 'global chat' tab that helps to filter this out when it starts polluting the shard-wide broadcast. Global chat channels can likewise be hidden, even if they're invite-only. It's a little bit more difficult to deal with when it happens in team-chat, which is happening more and more often. There's a cultural push that encourages people to be outraged all the time, and it splashes out into the game more and more often. I often find myself thinking, "If I try to start a fun conversation in this group, what am I going to do when it turns into the usual hatred or outrage?" Most recently, I was on a TF team for my favorite taskforce in the game when one of the people leading the team started spewing. Knockback hatred came up, as well as various RL subjects. I finished the TF and bowed out of the team, even though I'd planned to follow them to the next TF they were doing. As certain real-life issues heat up, I find myself soloing, with almost all of my chat options filtered away. That gets old real quick.

Sadly, this only works for global chat channels and none of the 'default' channels, like team or broadcast. I should have been more specific in my post.

Echo Plaza was the one I was thinking about, but there are also new mission maps and some alterations to KR and Abandoned Sewers

As a techie, I'd be interested in hearing a 'state of the game' that included details about how Homecoming is handling the backend code and render code of the game, and challenges the devs are having working with that code. In particular, I'd be interested in hearing about: changes that would allow CoH to more efficiently use modern video cards changes that would allow CoH to use more cores on multi-core CPUs changes that make the UI more robust and/or more modular-- things like can the in-game text editors be a little less 'jumpy'? can we assign custom colors to chat channels? support for larger textures (I shy away from mentioning 'high resolution' textures) changes that allow for more flexibility on the mapserver-- did we see any code changes that allowed for higher travel speeds in the recent update, or was that purely hardware? it's become apparent that HC is doing more with the game geometry, going so far as to build new zones and maps. Is this a matter of becoming better with existing tools, or are there new tools in place? changes that would allow for greater flexibility in the costume creator-- any progress made on retrofitting Soldier and Widow hands to non-VEAT characters? Thank you for all the work you've put into our game so far. I'd love to hear more technical details about it!

I ran into this after updating to the latest stable Manjaro today. wine may want you to use the wine64 executable to launch 64 bit applications like the launcher. This is especially true if you see something like: "wine: failed to load start.exe: 40000003" Mods, please feel free to move this around if needed.

In the mission 'Rescue Tracy Templeton' as part of the 'Corporate Culture' arc, one of the NPCs says: This should be something like 'Dr. Giacomo thinks he can indoctrinate the wife, too.' or 'Dr. Giacomo believes he can indoctrinate the wife, too.

When using the panther and coyote travel powers, all your powers are greyed out (or pinked out? in the powers menu). The long and short of this is that you can't attack because quadruped animations for all the powers would have to be created. You can't click on your abilities at all. When using Magic Carpet, etc, your powers are still lit up. You can only use Flight and Afterburner or other movement-buff powers. When you try to use them, you get the message that you can only use powers that affect yourself. Rest works, and actually drops you off your carpet, while keeping it hovering next to you. The discontinuity and inconsistency between these two feels bad and wrong. Either Coyote and Jaguar should allow self-only, run, and jumping, powers to work, applying only the movement boosts of those powers and suppressing the animations, or Magic Carpet, etc, should not. If this is a 'we're doing part now, part later' thing, that should be reflected in the patch notes so that at least it can be explained to those complaining about it. The unavailable powers not being greyed/pinked out are confusing as well. This could REALLY be used to be fixed before going live to avoid complaints. Walk is a third leg of uncertainty here. It shows MOST of your powers unavailable, but a few, like brawl and prestige starter attacks like mutagen, etc... are not greyed/pinked. If you try to use them you get the same 'You can only use powers that affect yourself.' message that you get when using the prestige flight powers.

As of this build, upon training to level 4, Afterburner still shows in the list of flight powers that can be selected. It's greyed out, and doesn't appear the next time you train the flight pool.

From 'The Freakshow War' arc given by Neal Kendrick to/too confusion: 'to close to something' should be 'too close to something'.

In the mission 'Stop both groups of mystic madmen' (aka 'Spirit Warrior' badge mission), the objective text in the nav display says 'Destroy the last spirit trap!' even after you've destroyed all three.

As of this build, upon training up to level 4 and selecting the flight pool, Afterburner still shows up in the list of powers that can be selected, although it's grey.