mechahamham

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.

How is a inv/ss tank with strong poison debuffs in any way appropriate for solo players? Other than the Ouro-based workaround, how? Trick or Treat doesn't respect notoriety settings and never has. Inspiration loading is the way I deal with them, and I keep breakfrees on me. However, the one-two punch of being held or terrorized and then getting KOd happens too quickly for a lot of players to react to. Restricted to teams is what I *want* to happen, but I'd also love if the ToT spawns respected noteriety settings. Right now, the onus of the workaround is on players who are trying to avoid them. They have to reduce their own level to 24 or lower. That burden should be on players like me instead, who do want to face them while solo. I should have a non-participating team member with me or something like. -- Edit -- Another point is that we're all experienced players here. The EBs are challenging for us, even at max level. We can't expect every player to be that experienced or at max level. Those who join us here on Homecoming for the sake of event will likely be 25 or by the end of it and be running into what will be for them, brick walls.

That's not really an option, though. Right now, they're not appropriate for solo players, yet solo players do not have a way to avoid them. Just because I like being trounced in combat doesn't mean that I can expect every other player to enjoy the same thing. I can't ethically deny players the fun of the event just because I like it being too hard. The mechanic was put in the game in an incomplete state and was never finished, probably for the same 'We don't have as much free time after the Pandemic' reason that a lot of projects have run into. However, it's still incomplete. It either needs to be completed, given that 'only for teams' treatment, rebalanced, or, and I sincerely hope this isn't the answer, removed until it can be fixed or rebalanced. It's causing people grief and punishing them rather than giving them a fun time.

This is the 3rd Halloween these guys have been active. I love 'em dearly, but they are a source of frustration for a lot of players. Apparently they were supposed to originally spawn only for groups, but so far as I can tell we've never heard if that was still the plan or if that's been scuttled. If they're supposed to be out for all 25+ players regardless of AT or team size, they are simply too far out of balance to be appropriate. Their power combinations have too much 'insta-kill' potential. Of course they can't one-shot a character, but they can reliably two-shot a LOT of characters. Right now, I'm telling players who cannot solo them that getting an Ouro mission that bumps them down to 24 is a workaround, but that's not ideal for many reasons. This is being unfun for many, and the special event should be a source of fun rather than frustration. As much as I love the EBs, something has to be done here.

As someone who *does* inevitably have lots of new characters for the event every year, I think I can get behind this.

I use AboveTheChemist's popmenu on every character I have. It's pretty damn good. Thank you, ATC, for making it available and for yours and any others' work. It's a real godsend for me.

For the sake of clarification, will RWZ be considered a raid zone? A lot of the regular MSRs are now forming exclusively for the sake of instanced raids, but I still find myself occasionally getting in the way of those that form up in the permanent RWZ 1 instance. (Also, Laucianna, Maya and others forming raids in SG bases, thank you for doing so!) This usually happens if I'm using the Vanguard base as a crafting hub on a new, unfunded character due to its convenient placing of crafting tables and vendors. I hate to think I'm crosswise of people trying to enjoy a raid, but would be even more upset if I found I'd been causing policy problems. If RWZ will be considered a raid zone, might I suggest keeping a RWZ 2 instance spun up by default? Another good solution would be to put vendors inside the Kallisti Wharf University to make it as convenient as the RWZ location.

I've got family members who are dyslexic. Online ANYTHING that's not strictly voice-only is a nightmare for them, so much so that they avoid things that require anything like reading comprehension. The anxiety it gives them to be expected to read something and understand makes any positives about the rest of the experience just not worth it. However, I think that there's a lot more of what I call 'functional literacy' coming to the forefront, exposed by the modern shift to do everything online. That is, someone is literate enough to read labels on store shelves, or fill out a job application, but actually reading something to understand it is not something they've ever developed a habit for. A while back, I saw some online drama around a certain streamer. One of the videos showed this fellow attempting to read a wikipedia page because someone, iirc, called him a fascist, and he had to look up what it meant. The page was its own special labyrinth for him. He tried to predict multi-syllable words based on the first couple letters and had to back up and restart reading them repeatedly. He had to sound out single- and double-syllable words to understand them. A lot of words and sentences he just gave up on entirely. This guy SOMEHOW has a career making videos for the internet, but struggles to read a Wikipedia page. I think that same general level of literacy is a lot more common than anyone would like to believe. Something that's not uncommon at all seems to be blurring attention over the chat window, except for 'keywords'. Something that's happened to me *many* times is that I'll be explaining what something means in /help chat and happen to type a few letters that are or adjacent to some content name. The most common version of this is that I'll say something like "DFB is 'Death From Below', a low level trial that's great for new players." I immediately get several one word tells, "invite", despite not chatting in /lfg. I don't get those tells if I don't actually use 'DFB' in my explanation, even if I do spell out 'Death from Below'.

Sadly, this is the post-40 game in general. There's very little skill involved. It's more about racing to see who can use their powers the fastest than it is even about learning the encounters. Having multiple teams means there's just that many MORE people to race against. Nobody waits to teach players new to the content how to excel. The starred taskforces are a bit better about this, but even there it comes down more heavily on the side of 'Did you build your team correctly?' rather than 'Did you follow the boss's telegraphed attacks?' or 'Did you not stand in the fire?' We've got a handful of really great leaders that *do* try to teach people how to do their best on the content, but they're not omnipotent.

It kills me because the text editor and html parser have been batshit since day 1, despite there being GOOD public domain and BSD-licensed text editors and parsers available... like: https://www.scintilla.org/ The only reason I can imagine that we're STILL stuck with it is that it's the base of a house of cards at this point. I remember very clearly when clickable links first went in. In the beta, players figured out toute suite that they could link to things not meant to be linked to and were able to do things like link NPC portraits and power icons in chat. An example of current editor braindeadness: I've got a popmenu item that starts chat with the text to rebind F7 to actually say 'F7!!' instead of 'Ready!!', but doesn't finish it in case I want to edit it further: Option "F7" "beginchat /bind f7 say <scale 1.50><color #FFFFFF><bordercolor #000000><bgcolor #00A000>F7!!" When I actually use that, does it paste that exact line into the textbar so I can edit it further? Abso-freakin-lutely not! And this is somehow despite the fact that we don't really have any good font-size handling. Does it at least keep the color so that it's at least CONSISTENTLY applying the styling? Again, no. But does the bind itself actually work despite not actually displaying all the text going into the bind? It sure does!

Way ahead of you there. I'd already saved that off and was going to supply it if a dev needed it in addition to the map image and 'Stop Amanda Gates!'.

Back to Amanda. She does her 'I've been captured' text and converts to a following NPC: Then *she* teleports as well, to about the same location the Dirge did, and does her 'Ambushes are coming' text: It didn't break my targeting when she teleported like it did with the Dirge. I'm going to see if I can line up another character to do this mission on Brainstorm to see if I can recreate this behavior.

This has happened to me a couple times. I'll be fighting in a mission, come across a group, agro the enemies, only for the enemies to lose agro and rubberband across the map, usually through a wall. This time I managed to get it screenshotted as it happened: This is the 'Stop Amanda Gates' mission, obvs. Here, I've agroed the Dirge of Chaos and Amanda's Freak buddies. They've teleported through the wall and deagroed. Here's the fight with the Dirge of Chaos, showing its location on the map. I agroed it again after a couple minutes of waiting for it to walk back to Amanda. It was out into this hallway a ways, and walked back up to the base of the stairs after I blasted it. Continued in the next post so I don't break the file-size limit.