mechahamham

I started this Christmas event like I started the one last year, in 2023. I took my newest character to rescue Baby New Year and defeat Lady Winter. And then I logged out. Like last year, I'm finding myself just not wanting to log back in for the event, and am left wondering why. This seems out of place for me since I enjoy the Halloween event so much I run all my characters through all the badges, many of them solo. I don't really care for the Murder Motel league in PI, but I adore solo Trick or Treating and will lead Dr. Kane's trial repeatedly. I've put together a few reasons why I think the Christmas Event is turning me away: Opening Christmas Presents isn't very challenging, and is hard to do at level due to limited spawns: One of the things that makes solo or small-team Trick or Treating fun for me is that it's constantly challenging. Even well-slotted, well-equipped characters can get TOUGH fights in the form of the Halloween EBs. (That difficulty completely dries up in full groups and might as well not exist in leagues full of incarnate players. Trying to contribute to ANY league event when you're not decked out with incarnate powers is like trying to extinguish a match with a water pistol when Superdude420 next to you is dousing the entire area with his fire-hose.) The solo-friendly event for Christmas is opening presents. Unlike Trick or Treating, presents have limited spawns and always spawn at zone level rather than player level. If you happen to be opening them in a zone where the snowmen that spawn aren't grey to you, they can be anywhere from purple to green, all in the same zone. Since our population is so top-heavy, higher-level zones tend to be saturated in terms of people opening the available presents. The unsaturated zones tend to be lower level meaning that it's quite possible for a single player to control a huge part of that zone's present spawns, even if he or she defeats all the snowmen they spawn. This was also a problem during this year's anniversary event, which uses the same spawn mechanics. My suggestions: Tweak the spawn rules for presents and Snow Men somewhat: Require players to open presents in a zone their level or have the Winter Horde snowmen always spawn at the opener's level. To avoid situations where a level 50 is littering Atlas Park with level 50 snowmen, have those snowmen only agro the present opener unless attacked. To avoid the situation where you have 50 level 50s crammed into Peregrine Island trying to open all the same present spawns, populate Cimerora and the Rikti Warzone with presents. Kalisti Wharf seems to have adequate present (and time capsule) spawns, but players tend to forget the zone exists because there's so very little content there. It's possible that Kalisti could use an increased number of spawns to make it more appealing. Baby New Year and Lady Winter missions are repetitive and grindy: While Old Man Time's missions for the Christmas event have fun difficulty spikes in the form of Snaptooth and Lady Winter, the rest of the missions are very samey-samey-same-old. You've already fought lots of snowmen while opening presents, and if you want to earn rather than simply buy the Candy-keeper's badges, it means grinding the ever-loving snot out of snowmen in those missions. The missions are great for single groups, but then you have to convince the group that you're there to 'Defeat All Winter Horde', which tends to be ignored by PUGers. Yes, we know you can solo Snaptooth, Bobby. That's wonderful. Now come help us KO all these snow hydra. My suggestions: Add a more linear, indoor mission to Old Man Time's lineup. Snowmen are *okay* to fight, but having some more interesting enemies would go a long way to making it less repetitive. Consider adding a 'Must Defeat All' challenge setting to the game. Check a box to convert any mission or taskforce into a 'Defeat All'. This would help prevent the situation where that one player 'Didn't hear' that you wanted to defeat all, or 'forgot' and stealthed all the mission's objectives, not just on the Winter event missions, but for a LOT of the game's content. Also consider re-weighting the cost of the Candy Keeper's badges or the Candy Cane drop rate so that each badge is about one mission's worth of effort. Leading Lord Winter's Realm below level 50 is punitive: I don't make any secret of the fact that I simply *do not enjoy* the Incarnate game, but that's another thread. That doesn't mean that it's impossible to lead teams and leagues if your character is not Incarnate or even if you're not 50. However, trying to keep a league together long enough to start Lord Winter's Realm when you're not level 50 is an exercise in frustration. A significant number of people who are interested in joining the league simply bounce when they see the league leader is not 50. From those who stay, there's a constant demand to "Give the star to a 50", even before the event starts. Perhaps the most frustrating experience I've had with this trial was with a player who I truly believe was trying to be helpful. However, they were also dismissive and demanding. After they joined the league I was building, they started demanding to lead the league since they were 'already 50 and lead everything anyways'. It seemed like one of those situations where a person is condescending without realizing it. Regardless of if they meant to treat me like small child or not, they still managed to. My suggestions: League leadership mechanics could use some rework. I've heard people say that they're perfect and should not be touched, but even the league window has some jankyness that could be ironed out... such as the difficulty arranging team leaders. Making the process of anchoring the league's level seems like an obvious pain point that could be addressed. What I'd really like for Christmas is a 4-person trial. I adore Dr. Kane's and Summer Blockbuster, and I believe I'd still adore them without their awards. I'd love a Christmas Double Feature to play in theaters 3 and 4. Help John McClain kick Hans Gruber off of Nakatomi Tower or assist Kevin McAlister in booby-trapping his house to defeat the burglars. The award doesn't need to be equivalent to an Overwhelming Force IO, but it'd be nice if it was about the same as the award for Lord Winter. All events are not for everyone, and that's... okay... if a bit sad. I think that with a very minor bit of tweaking, the Christmas Event could be a LOT better for most players.

So the Tuatha in the Lady Winter mission are still bugged this year: One of the groups of Tuatha standing near Nuada show up as enemies. They attack the allied groups of Tuatha, but they *won't* attack the players despite the player being able to attack them. I've never had them survive long enough to see if they'd convert to Allies if you get Nuada to try to send them out.

I can confirm this. I've personally experienced this bug.

Putting this here, but will gladly move it to the other forum: If you enable certain tracking protections in Firefox or, like I do, run Librewolf's privacy-focused fork of Firefox, you end up disabling features that Invision uses to upload images. You can disable these features, but then why bother with the privacy settings at all? My workround is to upload to imgur, which falls back to simple POST-style file uploads, and then include the imgur link rather than try to upload from my own PC. As a bonus, you can watch imgur people crap on your CoH-related post because it's not political rage-bait.

Albert made her presence known about the same time as Keith Nance and Jenni Adair in Talos. Strikingly, she has exactly the same costume as Jenni, suggesting that she was supposed to be part of the hero-side doppelganger arc the same way Colonel Taggard in Steel appears to be part of Laura Lockheart's story. A name does not a sexuality or gender make. However, there's rather a lot of anti-trans, anti-non-binary sentiment in the world just lately, so I kinda hope that HC fleshes her story arc out and leaves her name and model as-is.

I've been seeing quite a few anecdotal reports of disconnects, mapserver errors, and crashes (without the crash reporter coming up) on Excel, especially after changing maps. I experienced one myself just now upon exiting Stephane Peebles 'Defeat all villains in warehouse' mission vs. Family and Council.

"How... how many slots DO you have in [Brawl]?"

Tray 1 & 2 are my click powers. Tray 3 is my toggles. I may have to overflow into other trays if I'm on a toggle-heavy character. Tray 8 is my 'social/utility' bar. Tray 9 is where long-recharge stuff goes... once every 30m type stuff. Mystic Fortune usually goes there, as well as that 'W' button, which resets my UI per-character for when Penny Yin leaves it in a mess. Penny, girlfriend, why you gotta throw my inspirations everywhere?! Do I throw your gate next to the hospital in IP every.. okay, yes I do. I'm sorry. I'll try to stop that. My 'Global' chat window displays server/global chat channels as well as zone events. I keep 'No General' and 'No Chatter' options for when I'm trying to avoid current events, movie spoilers, or just feel like I need to focus on what I'm doing and answering /help chat is distracting. The green Fast Travel menu icon in tray 8 hosts my custom popmenu based on HC's default fast travel menu. Yellow icon immediately next to it is AboveTheChemist's BadgeSetList popmenu. It's a game changer. I no longer have to hunt through a non-alphabetical menu to see if I have a badge or not. Map (optional, toggled with the default M key) is in the upper right. Purple icon is my own 'Chatter' menu that contains some ascii/unicode emotes (these are all characters found in msgothic.ttf), macros for setting up some hotkeys and my per-character UI saves, as well as instructions for my favorite 4-person trial and web links to CoH-related materials like Dacy's YT Channel, City of Data, the (currently still broken I think?) calendar, and a few others.

I've heard this same person recruiting and got pretty much the same response when I asked them about this seemingly bizarre requirement. They were also excluding masterminds when I saw them. First and foremost, the person who builds the team calls the shots. You can't get around that. However, the behavior they show is pretty awful. They 're: assuming that everyone who plays the 'prohibited' ATs is a bad player assuming that everyone who plays 'acceptable' ATs is a good player recruiting in a public space, yet discriminating against a good number of those in that space. I assume they're doing this when they can't get enough people in their private channel to join. doing the recruiting in a way that seemingly purposefully goes out of its way to make people feel excluded Unless you're 4 for 4 in agreement with that, you DON'T want to be on that team, even if you're one of the 'acceptable' ATs. If they discriminate against people like that in a public space, they're probably going to blame the public invitees for problems before taking the blame themselves. (And if you are in agreement... *Yikes*.) It would be so easy to say something like, 'Hey, we're doing challenge runs. Melee only ITFs. If you're a melee and would like to do this challenge run with us, send us a tell.' (In fact, I know of a group that does just that on Excel, often with far more challenging restrictions.) But they're not. They're not wanting challenge and they're being discriminatory on purpose. My advice is to /ignore this brand of person when you see them. You *don't* want to be on their leagues or teams, even if it seems like they want you to join. Happily, they're in the vanishing minority. Everyone else who does 'Challenge' TF runs makes the point of saying if they're going to have a closed run, limited to their private channel, or if they're going to accept new folks and teach them the ropes. The aforementioned group I know of does just that.

I had one I didn't care about, and TOLD people in /gen chat on excel that I didn't care about. I even encouraged another player who was interested to take it, if for no other reason than to see what it would look like when it got 'liberated'. Later in the evening, I decided to log in to see if it had been taken yet... and clicked on the damn thing before I realized what I'd done. So, someone who's had a name freed up, please post a screenie of what it looks like.

I considered just posting this in the typo thread, but figured that it was more than just a misspelling or grammatical error. However, GMs and moderators please feel free to have me move it or to move it yourself if need be. In the Atlas Safeguard mission, if you happen to get the Weapons Deal side mission, the text and NPCs present in the mission are inconsistent. When you find the key-holder group, it's a group of Vhazilok: Once you defeat the group and get the key, however, you're told that it was from a group of Skulls: Once inside the side mission, the first group you come across for the transaction is happening between the Hellions and the Vhaz: Note the typical out-of-order NPC text there that plagues a huge number of encounters in the game. I *think* this is set up as a 'hostage' encounter where both the hostage and the enemy are set as hostile to the player, but of course I can't be sure of that. However, and this is the kicker, once you go past just the first few groups of Vhaz, you DO see groups of Skulls in the 'back' of the side mission. They don't have any text associated with them. My guess is that at some point in the development of the mission, the enemy group was originally set to be Skulls rather than Vhaz, and not all the spawns or text references were changed. To fully fix this, you'd need to change the '... what the Skulls were talking about.' to something like '... what the Vhazilok were talking about', and then replace those last few Skull spawns in the side mission with either Vhaz or Hellions.

I think this stems from two different sources. First, people have gotten used to the fact that there are no end of companies that ARE constantly trying to screw them over, from search providers that sell their search history to advertisers to banks and financiers that attempt to extract every quantum of cash they can. Second, there's a trend in the media that the various talking heads can claim anything they want to justify their wants, even on 'news'... *hah* as if... broadcasts that are sensationalized to the point of fine puree. People get in the habit of thinking in terms of baseless accusations because it seems like everyone's out to get the better of them.

This is easily verifiable. Lots of us log chat and take screenshots. Be sure to post an excerpt of a chat log with a timestamp that shows less than 100 days on a character when you've also verified that they're showing 200+ days. You may be able to find someone you group with regularly who logs this if you haven't. Seriously, don't accuse people without proof. It says a lot more about you than it does about them.

The Hellions are pathetic. They literally summon succubi because they can't get girlfriends. Mostly they serve to demonstrated that certain enemies and enemy groups have weaknesses, but they don't do that very well. Their only AV, Tinder, doesn't last long enough in fights to make jokes about. The Skulls used to be in the same camp, before their revamp. They got a much more interesting story and some ethos. I really want to know what happens to Veles and Morana and they just don't show up any more after you finish Eagle Eye's arc. Occasionally we hear Skulls in KR as well as Chernobog speaking broken English. Is this because they're starting to lose grey matter to all the Superadyne or because English is a recent second language? We know the Petrovics are from Eastern Europe. It'd be interesting to have more substance to this backstory, but there just ain't any in the game. Clockworks are a lot more interesting once you realize just how deluded poor Russel is. A lot of folks miss that because they don't read the clues or mission dialogue: The bit at the end of Synapse where he's trying to assure his 'minions' that everything will be okay is... pretty damn tragic. IIRC, Positron wrote that. Good job there, Matt. The bit about Rusty being Penny Yin's creepy stalker gets played just a little TOO much, IMO. Unlike a lot of people I really enjoy Synapse's TF, mostly because of the map variety and the long sessions of figuring out the team's groove and then leaning into said groove for an hour or so. Council and 5th Column. Hah. I'm okay with purple/brown caves. They 're not my favorite, but I can cope with them. I respect the layer cake room for what it is, a trap to split teams. I could comfortably go the rest of my heroing career without *ever* seeing another Council Cave map. I have a strict policy of 1 Citadel TF per character for that reason. And then when I do vs. Council arcs, the fact that I'll have to go into those caves is always at the back of my mind. Lars' Hansen's arc is always a slog even when I cruise through the rest of the Striga arcs. The Council Water Room can bite my ass. I freakin HAET that room! Laura's arc in Steel is BRILLIANT. I find myself avoiding it just to avoid the few missions that are in Council Caves. Another problem is that you get a lot of 'Defeat 10 Council in Steel/Boomtown' missions if you do the issue 1 contacts. The fights with the 5th Column make it much more difficult to actually find them to beat up. I hate getting my 10 by defeating 10 of those that are lying unconscious on the ground. Between 1 and 15, the Lost exist as basically clues to the big Nemesis Plot that caused a certain war. Before Issue 9, they got very, very little mileage otherwise, despite being pretty interesting to fight. You've got the standard 'Guys with guns and found weapons' punctuated with Lieutenants and Bosses that have Psi attacks and control effects. Then with the Faultline arcs, they get much more limelight. Aside from the comedy of Penny's arc, you start to get a peek into their motivations. You see a little more of their relationship with the Rikti in Montague's arc, which you can do before 20, but it's minor compared to Penny's arc. I'd like to see a lot more about how the Lost virus works and how the Lost recruit the other homeless into their ranks. Circle of Thorns is pretty meh between 1 and 20. Unlike a lot of people in the thread, I actually rather like Orangebagel. It's twisty and mazelike without the terrain and geometry you get caught on for no damn good reason from Council Caves, but you don't see much of it until after 20. You end up with some good exposition and dialogue in Positron Pt. 1, but the Circle doesn't really get very interesting until you're in your early 20s, and you start to get hints about what they've been dealing with. Fighting the Circle is a mixed bag. It's one of the first groups you run into that consistently controls and debuffs you so you have to find counters. (And then Melee folks forget all about that as soon as they get their status protection.) But then between 18 and 38 or so, the difficulty tapers WAY DOWN. You very, very occasionally see 20ish Ruin Mages in Talos. You don't start to feel threatened by them again like you do with Madness and Ruin Mages until you start running into Behemoths and Earth Thorn Casters. I like the 'Master of Ruin' treatment you see on high level Circle mages. I kinda feel like that same treatment should be applied to the Circle at all levels. So it's not 'You fight Fire Thorn Casters at 37 and Earth Thorn Casters at 38, period' cutoffs, but instead you run into interesting lieutenants and bosses. Vhaz are all about debuffs. Lots of people who come into CoH from other MMOs go up against them and think 'these guys are vicious' without really understanding that what makes Vhaz so difficult is the debuffs. They're interesting to fight. Being able to survive fights with Vhaz is one of the 'milestones' for my solo characters. It's how I know I'm building them well. The problems with their story and their appearances are pretty serious, though. We get little bits of Dr. V's insane rationale for what he's doing, but for the most part it's just the human Vhaz and the Eidolons acting very over-the-top ghouls. There's an Issue 1 one-off where you see an Eidolon who's horrified that her beautiful face is long gone, but because she's an Eidolon, you don't actually SEE that face. They need more of that. Piecemeal's arcs are GREAT, but you don't really see them until your'e in your 20s. Now, the number one reason I avoid Vhaz: Bugs. I don't handle them well IRL. I jump when I see them in game. When you've got a debuff that's got the 'Flies' aura, that's just too much for me. I avoid that arc pretty religiously. Snakes, Coralax, and many other CoV groups: It feels like we got the beginning of these stories and then no middle or end. It's hard to feel invested in Act 1s when you never get Act 2s or 3s. Snakes and Coralax are both interesting to fight because of the unique models and power choices, but there's very little substance to the groups. You get a little bit more meat later in a villain's career, but it's nothing like what they deserve. What is the Shaper Cult? How has it survived so long? WHY has it survived so long? This was right about the time that Cryptic started pulling people off of CoX for Cryptic's other projects, and it sure does show. HC has done a wealth of improvement to the Goldbrickers. I'd love to see the Snakes and Coralax get similar treatments. Praetorians: Good LORD am I sick to death of Praetorian factions. It doesn't help that there's so little room for evolution for them. Tyrant nukes the Magesterium, Hamidon wins. The End. Again, you get what feels like the beginning of stories and are then promptly booted out of Praetoria. There's no more 'City of Spies' after that. The double/triple agent shtick is the most compelling thing about Praetoria, and its absolutely gone by the time you get back to First Ward. Here, NCSoft screwed us out of compelling resolutions. Additionally, We never got the Clockwork EATs or attached story arcs. Praetoria could use a top-to-bottom overhaul, but I find myself not caring in the slightest if it will ever happen or not.

As we near the date and time, I'm starting to hear more and more complaints about the impending Release. These pretty universally fall into only two categories: "It takes so much time to log into my 4 pages of level 1 name reservation alts and I have to do that every month?! Why are they attacking me like this?!" "I can't take the risk of losing this name. I have to log in every week. Yes, I know it says one year, but I CAN'T TAKE THAT RISK!" For the first case, it only takes 20 minutes or so to get level 6 to get that year of lag time, Brenda. Also, have you considered that you just *might* be part of the problem they're trying to fix? If you have x pages of 12 level 1name reservations each, maybe it's time to let some of those go. You evidently haven't played them until now. Why sit on that name unless you're really attached to it? In the second... my dude... You're assuming that a database script is going to try to catch you snoozing in order to cheat you out of 11 months. Either you're really bad at math, have no idea how computers work, or need to talk to someone about these feelings that everyone's out to get you. Possibly all of the above. Start by reading about 'SQL Rollbacks'. Even if the developers make a mistake and expire all the names early, that can be reverted or even restored from backup in the worst case scenario. I've altered some of the details of the statements above, but they are both things I've actually heard. (It was more than 4 pages, I'm afraid.) I'm a bit surprised that there's being so much pushback, alarm and unrealistic anxiety about the name release policy. I figured everyone would be much happier about inactive names being freed up.

What's always killed me about the system of arrows is that it's missing for even/+0 con, -4 con, and +4 con. If it's there to give colorblind people an easier time, you'd think they'd've made grey, white, and purple enemies have different patterns. Those breaks in the system tend to make people dismiss it out of hand as meaningless.

While doing a Deadly Apocalypse event in Kallisti, I saw that there was an GM-less spawn of Unseelie waiting in this location. I even incorrectly reported it to the zone as a GM spawn. My only assumption is that the drone caught the GM, but not the Unseelie ghosts.

I've seen quite a few people refer to the Riktified Honoree as 'Zombie Hero 1' or 'Undead Hero 1'. I've also heard, "If he's alive, then why do we see his ghost?" Obviously, lack of literacy is becoming a serious issue in the English-speaking world.

At least some players construe the characters with their real life pilots and the decisions those pilots made. You brought up Jack Emmert as Statesman. Without going into it, Jack Emmert, the real person, made statements and decisions that were unpopular. Matt Miller, the real person behind Positron (https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Positron_(Developer)), was much less controversial, but as lead developer for City of Heroes for quite some time did become the focus of some pain points. In particular, Mr. Miller championed the idea of inserting multiple new currencies into a given game to try to create depth. This created some friction with players who didn't want to keep track of 'yet another brand of skeeball tickets'.

My personal, anecdotal evidence, is that having any kind of stealth on dramatically cuts the number of zombies (or Rikti or Nemesis for that matter) that spawn for you during invasions. So if you're using something like Hide, Steamy Mist or any other, it's going to reduce what you see. A way to get around this while not removing the power is to attack other regular zone enemies. It suppresses your stealth a bit and event enemies will start spawning in while you're fighting.

This is the way to go about it. Communicate, communicate, communicate. I try to avoid speed-anything simply because it doesn't feel like I've earned anything on those TFs and this is usually when teams split up to not be blasting dead enemies. However, if you're a) not griefing the team by not being there to soak up agro and b) not skipping objectives (lookin' at you here, Yin TF-speeders), it really doesn't make a big difference. A lot of folks who do 'skip ahead' do so by doing things like pretending that Freaks don't self-rez or Clockwork Princes don't summon Gears. Usually this is not a huge problem, but it can become one in short order if things start going wrong, say a Super Stunner manages to detoggle someone. The latter can escalate into a team wipe if it's, say, a controller, defender, or corrupter that gets detoggled and they were quietly carrying the rest of the team. (As a career Blaster, thank you for your buffs and service!) It's worth mentioning that there are a lot of maps and individual rooms that are *designed* to split the group. Council Caves are their own special level of hell, but regular purple/brown caves do this as well, especially with the over/under room and the layer cake room. If you see your team can't hack being split up on those hazards, maybe don't run off?

This smells like one of those early 2000s 'Storage on our high-redundancy SAN is at a premium' decisions. It occurs that this would be fairly easy and free of consequence to change. Of course, there's always a spaghetti noodle touching things it shouldn't in CoH.

The following changes are now on the beta server: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/54189-open-beta-patch-notes-for-october-5th-2024/ This very reasonably addresses my concerns and is a nice middle ground between removing them for solo spawns and leaving them unaltered. Thank you for your hard work, developers!

What you're describing here is a level of advanced play that it's unfair to *require* for the event. I know how to inspiration load and kite. I know how long the different powers last. I know how to use empowerment stations to boost myself and cover holes in my defenses. I will also happily tell others about these and more. I take a bit of pride in trying to be as helpful as I can. Making all these things *required* for enjoying the event is pretty malicious. This is sticking with me as just not true a significant amount of the time. Ancient Vampire, for example, holds and then melees players down often in a Hold/Hit/Hit cadence frequently mixing in Life Drain. Hallow Reaper will terrorize and likewise destroy players, albeit not as quickly. Arisen Mummy often leads with poison debuffs, then uses Uppercut and Knockout Blow, effectively two-shotting many characters, even if they're able to start running from him. I think players are most likely to be able to survive running from Spectral Werewolf and Crone Matriarch, but the three I mentioned can prevent even running to the police drones. This is exacerbated since the EBs tend to get a free hit in due to the invulnerability period at the beginning of spawns.

Ideally the way to accomplish that would be to have the ToT spawn respect notoriety. That may be more work than restricting them to spawn only for teams, however, but I by no means know the code in question.