mechahamham

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.

Usually, the way the event is jigged is that two weeks of the event have the Eternal Night setting and the other two weeks have the day/night cycle as normal. My understanding is that this is a compromise for the sake people who have difficulty with in-game darkness. I'd personally prefer the entire 4 weeks of the event, or longer, to be 'Eternal Night'.

As I've mentioned in other threads, I don't feel like we have the option of letting the game stagnate in any way. We must constantly be looking for ways to improve it. Happily, the Halloween event provides a huge surface area for improvement despite being the most-loved event of the year. Here are my suggestions for improving the event and easing pain points that have come up over the years: Spin up extra instances of Peregrine Island Alternately or additionally, consider setting a hard-cap of 50 players in the zone as already exists in some other zones. I prefer to solo my Trick-or-Treating or duo with a friend. I typically don't join the league unless I'm on a character that is absolutely 'team only'. I think I'm in the minority there. A lot of players want only the badges or Prismatic Aether awards for defeating the Halloween EBs. Or they want the powerlevelling that the inevitable Murder Motel Trick-or-Treating league attracts. Regardless, one full league of players hammering a mapserver instance to spawn as many enemies as possible seems to be the absolute limit before zone performance goes to the Hospital. When a second league starts in Peregrine or an invasion event of any kind starts, the zone drops down below 'Playable' and into unpleasant territory. For those with missions in Peregrine who don't want to participate in the Holiday event, it can be extra frustrating. Having a 'pressure relief' instance of the zone always available would alleviate some of this frustration. Difficulty: My guess is that spin-up population and zone caps are both one-item config changes, but I have nothing to substantiate that. So *probably* pretty easy. Additionally, consider some stronger AFK checking in Peregrine. While the league is not really for me, people who want to join it often can't due to people going AFK in the Motel parking lot to soak up passive exp. That would obviously be more work. Consider 'Night Only' zone instances rather than the off-on split. One of my favorite things to see in the game is sunset against the War Walls. That said, when it comes to the Halloween Event, I want it to be midnight through the entirety of September, October, and November. Obviously, I'm not going to get that wish. 14 days of total darkness is... lacking... lacking in the extreme for me. I want at least a whole month. That's problematic because there are people who'd be just as happy if the Eternal Night thing just didn't happen at all. Or the long night actually affects their mood negatively rather than positively. Rather than the two-week split compromise, let me suggest having multiple instances of each zone, one with Eternal Night activated for the entire duration of the event for weirdos like me, and then one with the normal Day/Night cycle. Zoning into 'Rikti War Zone (Eternal Night)' would suit me just fine. Difficulty: Easy to medium. I suspect that this is again, only configuration changes, but I could certainly be wrong. In the extreme, this might require different zone definitions. Haunt Kallisti Wharf like a Romero movie: Trick or Treating can only spawn so many Halloween-themed enemies. The Zombie Apocalypse and Deadly Apocalypse certainly add some more, but we have a large, tragically under-utilized zone that's just ASKING for 24/7 Monster Mashing. Have each of the present/time capsule spawn locations in Kallisti cause invasion zombies or banner enemies to spawn. For bonus points, have them rarely spawn the Trick-or-Treat EBs as well! Difficulty: Medium-to-hard. This doesn't require any new spawn definitions, but does require changes to the existing spawns. It'd probably be as much work again if not moreso as the addition of the Time Capsule event. Award Monstrous or Prismatic Aether for defeat-all-ing Dr. Kane's House of Horrors One of the things that makes me sad is when players speed through fun content. When I build Dr. Kane's teams, I encourage the team to fight through the trial rather than speeding to the objectives. This usually works, but has more than once given me a reason to use the /playernote feature. With the advent of Monstrous Aether drops, we discovered that it was an effective incentive to complete under-played content. Poor Scrapyard is STILL walking with a limp. Thus, I'd like to propose that defeating every monster in Dr. Kane's House of Horrors award some Monstrous Aether or even a Prismatic Aether to the team members. This increases the amount of time players spend on the trial, increases the number of players participating, and keeps them coming back for more. Difficulty: Medium-hard: My understanding of the way special drops work in missions is that they depend on hidden and/or temporary badge flags. This would require something along those lines, possibly requiring code changes. Make Halloween EBs (or Trick-or-Treating in general) respect notoriety settings This has been one of my long-lasting pain-points. Trick-or-Treat spawns can not difficult enough or, especially with the addition of the EBs, too difficult on some low-damage characters. The only way to adjust the difficulty of the spawns is to recruit for a team and, after a point, there's only downwards adjustment in difficulty. Once you get four or five players over level 20, the team synergy takes over and even the EBs simply turn into paste. Alternately, let Null disable Halloween EB spawns for those characters that simply can't handle them. Difficulty: Medium-hard. This seems like it'd actually require code changes. It'd be simple conditional logic, but I don't know what the compile/deploy process is like. Allow players to visit random Halloween-themed Bases I ADORE haunted houses! I am delighted to the point of delirium that our super-talented base-building community goes all out to create and hold contests for haunted house bases. Kudos to all of you who do so! I try to visit all of these that I can find, but it occurs that there are many I'm missing simply because I don't read the right threads here on the forums. (I only this last month found out about the Base Registry spreadsheet on Google Docs. How did I miss that for so long?!) If I'm missing them when I actively seek them out, it occurs that they could be made more accessible in general. Thus, I'd like to propose an in-game feature to send players to a random Haunted House base. When players click on the base portal, in addition to the usual list of bases and the option to enter a code, they could also be presented with an option to visit a random Haunted House submitted by its builder. Difficulty: Hard. This would require at least a new database table and two new subsystems, a registry and a randomizer for the base portal, all of which would require some pretty serious testing. The upshot of this is that the idea of an in-game base registry would be pretty useful in general and not just for Halloween. Alternately, this could be a temporary power that brings up a popmenu curated by the GM staff or even forum volunteers. This takes work off the the developers, but places it on to others for more limited functionality If you have suggestions to make the event less onerous or more fun, please don't hesitate to share them! I'd like to wish all of you a Happy Halloween!

Someone mentioned LLM scrapers already, which are typically HORRIBLE netizens, but there are a few other kinds of automated queries that are better behaved. Search Indexers typically respect robots.txt, which is a standard to tell search engines which pages you do and do not want indexed so people can find them with web searches. For example, static pages or older discussions are good to index while some generated pages or a brand new discussion that hasn't been edited yet are poor subjects for indexing. Cache Servers are another source of 'anonymous' web traffic. These LOOK LIKE they're sucking up all a website's valuable resources, but what they do is suck up those resources once and then repeat your as often as necessary for browsers who connect to the internet through them. This is another one of the reasons that it's REALLY IMPORTANT to properly configure your robots.txt, use CDN servers, or otherwise separate your generated content and static content when making websites. If you do so, cache servers can save you a ton of money, even if they belong to someone else. On sites that are database-driven forums like this one, they mostly scan for images and other static Binary Large OBjects, sometimes called 'blobs': files that aren't likely to change. (Big providers of BLOBs like Netflix and Amazon Video often deploy custom cache servers to ISPs' and telecoms' local offices in order to reduce costs and increase reliability for everyone involved.) An important resource for us, personally, the City of Heroes community, is the Internet Wayback Machine archive provided by Archive.org. https://web.archive.org/web/20120701000000*/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/ is an interface that Archive.org has into archived pages from the old City of Heroes forums. There are other archives, including an SQL dump of the whole damn forum, floating around. Without archivers, all that stuff would just be straight up lost to the sands of times. So while I wish hordes of angry Canadian geese into the homes, businesses, and bedrooms of for-profit LLM scrapers, some guest use of the site is not only good, but ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY!

Something that new pen-and-paper GMs get told, and some older GMs forget is 'Your NPCs are not the main characters of the story. Your players are the main characters.' Lots of MMOs fail MISERABLY at achieving this. Your characters are just along for the ride with the signature/mascot/box characters' quests. CoH does reasonably well with this up to a point. In most cases that point is 'We have to make the allies and antagonists interesting enough that people want to play in that world, but not quite so central that they outshine the player.' Dr. Graves' arc is GREAT for this. Twinshot fails pretty bad, but not entirely. The interesting characters are newbie antagonists. However, Cryptic and Paragon threw 'the player is the main character' concept out the window, found where it fell, and then crapped on it for the sake of having raid content. Suddenly the main character is not the player, nor even the raid leader. It's the central NPC character, enemy or ally. It's the person who's in the middle of the cutscene. In Lambda Sector, it's Marauder and whoever gets the position right to teabag Marauder while he's drinking his potion. In BAF, it's Mother Mayhem's (Actually Aurora's) huge pair of... Anyway. In UGT, it's Desdemona, and so on. In Dilemma Diabolique, the raid leader is standing *behind* the Dream Doctor when he pulls out the Dagger of Jocas. Way to effin' go making the rest of the raid tagalongs there, Paragon. *sigh* In the later content in general, there's this trend towards having the various signature NPCs be the main character, the Praetorians especially so. It kinds flops in to even otherwise excellent low-level content. Why do we need to find out that Back Alley Brawler got humiliated while piloting his attacker/bully? When that arc dropped, we already had all the technology to make that story happen within the context of the arc itself, but instead the player is not only not the main character, but doesn't even APPEAR. In early CoH, it was pretty obvious that the reason that they trotted out so much Greek Mythology was that Greek Mythology is GENERIC as Great Value Brand Kitty Litter. It's been done to death since the Bronze Age. Because it's so generic, that means there's this huge open space for players to create their own stories, be they some other mythology, aliens, super scientists, or wannabe world dictators. Unlike others in the thread, I don't think that the power progression or the balance around incarnates is good at all. I think it's horrid in its pacing and repetitiveness and detrimental to the entire rest of the game in terms of balance. If you get more than a team of Incarnate-level players in a zone invasion event, it's hard to contribute to the fight at all if you're not one of them. It encourages players to build their characters around Incarnate abilities and scream bloody murder if they have to play at lower levels without those abilities. I think the one thing Paragon did right when introducing the Incarnate system was to make the Well of the Furies story so vague and self-conflicting that they once again opened up that huge space for players to create their own stories, be it holding a special artifact, evolving into a being greater than humanity, or simply being a literal deity.

My personal head-canon is that Praetorian Hamidon is the same being as Primal/Paragon Hamidon. He tries to escape becoming agriculture in The Hive by traveling through time and dimensions. He sets about becoming more powerful in Praetoria's past... only to have his incarnate avatar beaten down in UGT. He wants to become the god of nature or something like that, and is thwarted again, and again, and again.

People don't lead task/strike forces for many reasons, but one of the reasons I see pop up most often is that people don't want to be punished for playing, and team MEMBERS are typically VERY quick to punish the shit out of others if things don't go their way. The team leader inevitably soaks some or all of this up, even if it's just something like, 'Who invited this piece of trash?' "Who the hell went near the stairs?!" "Who activated all the computers before we cleared the ambushes?" "Don't you dare use knockback on outdoor maps!" "Who the hell pulled that extra mob?!" "Why are we even tolerating this kind of behavior?!" You've heard these. I know you have. Recruiting for a team and then hearing stuff like this makes one never want to recruit again. Hearing this stuff as a team member, even if you never dish it out, makes you never want to lead. My own personal pain point is team members asking to join zone event teams and then immediately dropping that team when the leader isn't 50. Heaven forfend you don't get to use your incarnates for sixty seconds while the team leader tries to arrange things to make you level 50! It really makes leaders feel like complete and utter turds when people start demanding "Pass the star to a 50! Are you listening?! Pass the star!" You weren't recruiting five minutes ago, Karen. You're going to start recruiting now? I'm trying to lead an event that no one else was willing to step up for, and now you're giving me hell for it? 👏 Stop. Punishing. Your. Teams. 👏 👏 Stop. Punishing. Your. Team. Leaders. 👏

These would be invasions that are triggered by Task Force completions like the Rikti Invasion triggered by LGTF completion or the Nemesis invasion triggered by Heldenjaeger's arc being completed. Despite Katie's TF being on tap this week, I haven't managed to catch any zombie apocalypse invasions, so I cannot comment on the spawn rates in those.

Overheard this evening during a Rikti Invasion in Talos: Names redacted to protect those who don't want to be singled out. This was a league on Excelsior with 27 people in Talos on top of the hill as usual. We had a total of 9 ebs spawn and no bosses that I could see. It was mostly Green-suit Headmen, drones, and rikti monkeys. Something is VERY wrong here, but I'm not sure what has happened at all. This has been going on since i28 dropped. Invasions just seem broken when it comes to spawns. The clipping radius has decreased DRAMATICALLY, with pets and enemies alike drifting in and out of view only a few yards in front of you. A few nights ago, I was on a very full league in Peregrine fighting a Nemesis invasion. After the GM Nemesis went down, there were maybe less than 10 Warhulks spawn, but no Fake Nemesis of any variety after that. Likewise, the clipping on the enemies and pets was very broken. Please chime in if you've seen this or if you understand what's causing this.

This happens more often than not now. /get_global_name fails once and then succeeds if you retry. This happens both when right-clicking and using the 'Get Global Name' menu option or using the slash command directly.

I didn't think too much about it when it happened last night while I was playing through Shauna's arc, but just now, Eagle Eye missed giving me send off text for the 'Run Security for Councilwoman Simmons' mission, the bit that's supposed to go: Instead, it just gave me an empty field with no text in it. This is identical to the behavior Shauna showed on a few missions in her arc last night. Sadly, I didn't think to write down which ones they were. If you call Eagle Eye back for the 'Unnecessary Solicitation' text, he does tell you the Mina Horne backstory like he's supposed to.

Holy cats do I love the Escher-esque stuff!

This is immediately after defeating Chernobog, but the first time I've done Shauna's arc since I28 dropped. About 1/3rd of the skulls, those closest to the entrance, became un-attackable and fled as usual. The rest did not change, are stuck ,and can't attack or agro me, even though I can beat on them all I like. Obviously, there isn't a LOT to exploit right here, but still better to report so that it can be nailed down.

That. I'd consider myself a career blaster and that my skills as a scrapper are inferior. A group of purple freaks in a hazard zone, think Crey's Folly, is just not that challenging, at least IMO. This is a source of frustration for me. I want teams to stay together and wipe out every last enemy on the map, but there are so many people who want to 'Gogogogogo!' When I build my own teams, I try to advertise 'Defeat Most' for this reason. More than once, I've seen teams plow through the first mission of Penny's TF, only to get stuck at the door to the police station because they just straight up ran ahead past the hostage groups and didn't bother to check that they'd actually completed the mission's objectives.

The 'When' may be the important part of what I'm experiencing. After 35 or so, when you encounter Freaks, it's always as part of another group's arc or DreckWorld like you mentioned, so they are very much falling off the table of threats at that level. They're much rougher to fight in your 20s when you don't really have all the pieces of your kit together yet. I do like that that Bricks now has, outdoors, Noise Tanks, which I feel are very much missing from Penny's TF. Sister Psyche had just the right balance of mission and NPC variety, but it's hard to get people to do because of the length and lack of WST rewards. I kinda feel like I want to fight the other 'Advanced' Freak types that you mostly see red-side as a hero.

So I don't go out of my way to do vs. Freakshow missions because there are already SO DAMN MANY of them, but I do happen to be doing a few this evening at 35-36ish. I'm playing a 34 Claws/Bio scrapper and bio is, frankly, a bit OP at the moment. Despite that, I feel like I'm still having too easy a time against them. I tried looking for some higher level Freaks and found some purple groups that were around level 38 near the back wall of Brickstown. It seems like the hardest part of purple encounters is waiting around until it's obvious that the Freaks won't self-rez. By comparison, it feels like purple Nemesis, Crey, and Council are 'about right' in terms of difficulty. A 38 Paragon Protector or a Council Warwolf feel like they're going to get through my armor, whereas a Freak Tank just doesn't. This is something I've been noticing on other characters, but I've always put it down to 'Blasters tear through enemies quickly' or the like. Now I'm a bit conflicted. Do you feel like Freakshow are too easy, too difficult, or just right, especially into the 30s and 40s?

That looks like your gamma is set WAY too high. Consider tweaking it down. Your graphics driver settings may have an option for it, but you can tweak CoH's gamma setting in Menu -> Options -> Graphics and Audio -> Graphics

I don't farm at all, ever. I keep a /noxp macro on so much that my level rate is maybe 1/5th to 1/10th what many others experience. I routinely jack up the difficulty as much as I, personally, can manage. When I play on teams, I prefer that the teams also raise difficulty, but I don't push it. I do slot sets. I marketeer like anything and buy attuned IOs. I don't build my characters for incarnate content. I build them to be fun against the 1-50 game. Brain, there are ways to make the game more challenging for yourself (and there almost always has been in the form of notoriety settings). The way I play is pretty challenging, IMO. Don't make the game less fun for others. If you can't enjoy the game by changing the difficulty for yourself, maybe it means that you're just not enjoying the game, period. Maybe you should take a break from it for a while to see if the spark comes back?

Thank you for the clarification, Crumpet! This is EXACTLY what I wanted to know! I know of several Hispanic people in my part of the country who are named Jesus. A lot of them go by 'Jessie' when speaking English.

The newer Dr. Who series just don't do it for me, but I read that there was an episode in the newest season in which a young Paul McCartney and John Lennon were minor characters. John Lennon falls into that 'cultural icon' category, and, due to his untimely death in 1980, predates a significant portion of the CoH playerbase. However, people closely related to Mr. Lennon are still alive and occasionally make still make headlines and youtube videos. John's widow, Yoko Ono, is 91. His songwriting partner, Paul McCartney, is 82. Presumably, the BBC got permission from Sir Paul and from Ms. Ono to use those likeness in that Dr. Who episode. This is the unusual case where someone is both a historical figure, but also still weighs on the present. I could see a GM having trouble deciding how to handle a time travel involving him.

When people ask about what the name/likeness rules mean in chat, I usually respond with something like 'No real people. No religion. No politics.' But then there are a handful of fictionalized and nonfictional historical references throughout the game... like https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Will_to_Win I've seen the GMs generic characters that were closely or even loosely based on real people who are no longer among the living. For example, somewhat recently, I heard a player complaining that their villainous character based off of Charles Manson had been generic'd. The infamous Mister Manson died in 2017 (and the world became a better place), less than a decade ago, but the people in chat, myself included, concluded that the character ran afoul of the 'Real People' rule. This raises the question, how would HC GMs react to more historical characters, especially in the context of Mission Architect? We know that Nemesis attempted to interfere in the American Civil War. If one traveled back in time to prevent his interference, and met William Sherman or Ulysses Grant in the process, would that run afoul of the rules? We know that the Fifth Column/Council have attempted to time travel to the WW2 era. If one followed a certain Mr. Ubellmann back in time, would meeting Douglas MacArthur or Dwight Eisenhower break the rules? There are other examples along this same kind of tangent. I'd be interested in hearing from the GM staff on if they have guidelines for this kind of thing, and where they'd rule on such situations. -- Edit - GM_Crumpet has provided an EXCELLENT clarification on the rules for historical figures in a post near the bottom of the page! A good general rule is nothing "Post World War 2".

C++ can get very... tangled, especially when written by inexperienced coders. I personally try to stay away from it if at all possible. I'm just not that effective if I'm handling reference pointers. From a 'front end' POV, @Global+Character is fairly straightforward, as are unique ids. The places I can think of where it would need to be touched: SG memberships and permissions, if they don't already use unique ids. Since we have /altinvite Charactername, that hints that this is already the case. Chat windows would have to make it available to the left click team/league invite mechanics. This could be hidden as a text attribute the same way timestamps and chat colors are. If there are two Mechahamhams active at the same time, you want to be able to invite the one you're talking to and not the other. '/i Charactername' and '/li charactername' would need to be able to tell you that there are multiple Characternames active, and possibly give you a list like "There are 2 characters using the name 'Charactername', @Global1/Charactername and @Global2/Charactername," that you could then click on to clarify your invitation. Not many people use the /sea or 'Looking for Team' board, but it would likely need to be updated as well. The team window would likely need to have some sanity checks and possibly some visual indicators included for the rare situation when you have two or more Characternames on the same team. If you drag an inspiration onto your team window, you want it to go to the right person and so on. This could be as simple as assigning each Global/Charactername a color based on the same hash used in chat windows and could be as complex as adding AT icons to the team window. (Imagine a SG full of Startrek Borg- or Dr. Who Cybermen-types who roleplay a collective consciousness!) Currently our ignore/friend systems work on @globals rather than character names or @global/characternames. This is personally kind of annoying to me since I want to ignore certain characters, but not necessarily the person behind them. I'd like to see this retouched to give you the option, even if if defaults to @globals. There may be more, but I think this is a very doable list, even if you had to do something like a few carefully crafted SQL JOINs for each case. Parameterized SQL *usually*, but not always just works once you get it correct. Unparameterized SQL is inviting Little Bobby Tables problems, and we know that the SG Base entry codes have been subject to this same kind of madness.

I'm of the opinion that we should have moved away from unique names during the Live era. I haven't looked at the source code, nor the database structures, but even if we make the very probably incorrect assumption that characters do not have unique numerical IDs on the backend, the fact that we have an @global/charactername scheme on the front end STILL gives us unique identifiers for characters even if we do away with unique character names. (Knowing that SGs all get unique numerical IDs in their base codes hints that characters almost certainly do too.) I think it was somewhat before GR launched that the devs indicated that hey had a basic plan put together for a shardless system with non-unique character names, but the CoH community at the time wasn't very receptive. Now that we have 1000 character slots to fill, it seems foolish to me not to pursue this. (My ideal setup would be to have a minimum of one 'crowded' instance and one 'slow day' instance of every permanent zone, with some indicator of which was which like the 3 dots from the server select screen.) As for me, personally, I never have trouble coming up with unique, original character names, often only one word long without resorting to spelling silliness of inserting random punctuation. I see others struggle though, including close family. It always bites away at my willing suspension of disbelief when I see names that DO include such oddities. Regardless, I just don't think it's fair that we should hold each other to the standard of 'every character name must be absolutely unique'.

At first I thought that this was defined by the split between Montreal and MS Gothic. Montreal, which is the default chat font, is a pretty standard Latin font in terms of the number of characters it contains. It's got all the umlauts. ÖÖÖÖ. All the CJK characters like Kanji as well as the special symbols like hearts and musical notes are in MS Gothic. However, if you try to use a character in Montreal that's not 'standard' for English, it won't even allow you to type or paste it in the character name field. So somewhere in the character creation code is a list of 'valid' characters that's English Latin glyphs, Arabic digits, and a few punctuation symbols.