mechahamham

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.

Before you IMMEDIATELY scroll down and hit that Sad Face button, hear me out. Obviously, a massive, across the board nerf is not the answer to the problems I want to address. Nor is a return to the 'cottage rule'. However, I really feel these problems do need addressing. One of the problems CoH ran into early on was that characters could become so powerful that they could break the game's behavior in a variety of ways, say herding an entire zone-full of enemies into a dumpster in Crey's Folly or tanking Hamidon in the face with a Spines/Regen scrapper. To a lot of players, that's where they want to be. It's been said by many. 'I play this game to feel super.' 'Feeling Super' often means soloing the most difficult enemies the game has to offer. They're not 'super' unless they're wading through enemies with the difficulty slider turned all the way up. I actually had a friend quit playing CoH entirely, quoting this reason, after the issue 3/4 era changes to defenses and agro. Here we are more than 15 years later. IOs offer the ability to enhance a character's defense until they're at the floor of the to-hit calculation in certain circumstances. For a character who carefully picks and chooses what enhancements they slot and/or follows someone else's guide and throws a lot of money at their character, they become as agile as it's possible to be in CoH. I have no problem with players slotting IOs or emulating pre-fab builds. The gameplay doesn't seem to 'break' the way it did in the issue 2 era. The expanded difficulty slider means that players can find their preferred level of risk vs. reward. Or at least it should. What I do have a problem with is the BORING SAMENESS this seems to cast on every character over level 40. "Everyone's a brute once they're softcapped," is something I've heard more than once. It only gets worse, post 50, when everyone has level shifts, pets, judgement blasts, etc... We've crossed the line from 'just overpowered' to 'zero risk'. Something I've heard more than once is 'Don't enter the mission first unless you're set to +4x8'. Another is 'If you ain't blasting, you ain't helping.' Even at maximum difficulty, characters mow down the content too fast for there to be any point to debuffs or control, except against maybe elite bosses, and Arch Villains or Giant Monsters. The secondary effects on most powersets become meaningless. Even Giant Monsters like Adamastor go down in seconds when he's up against Incarnates. I've advocated before for making GMs and Events more difficult for Incarnates and only Incarnates. The immediate response to suggestions like this is 'Why should we be punished for being Incarnates?' and not-so-veiled threats like 'If you want Homecoming to die, this is how you do it. Nerf incarnates and you'll drive away players.' I even had one player tell me, 'Without incarnates, lower level players would never survive the events.' He didn't have any kind of response when I told him that we completed the events just fine before incarnates were introduced. Ultimately, this goes back to that 'feeling super' problem. *Any* change to player durability versus the highest level the difficulty slider has to offer will be perceived as an attack against 'feeling super' and some players will be violently vocal about it. However, if we don't make a change to it, if we don't reintroduce risk, the upper-level game will continue to stagnate. My first suggestion for this is the one mentioned in the title. Remove the ability to softcap a player's defense via IOs. We already have a model for this, if not code. Defense gained from IOs should be subject to a diminishing returns model. This would make those dark purple +4 enemies a lot more dangerous, and a lot more in need of control and debuffs. If necessary, and I don't think it is since so many players farm, rescale the reward numbers so that players are granted the same rewards for facing the same 'difficulty' of enemies. Another way to go would be to buff enemies as the level difference between them and the player grows. White-cons, Yellows, and Oranges should see very little change. Red cons should see a little more difficulty. +3 Purple cons should not be approached without either buffs or debuffs. +4 purples should *require* buffs and debuffs to fight against. If necessary, add a +5 and a +6 difficulty level, and make 5 almost impossible for non-incarnate characters and +6 almost impossible for incarnates. Like 'The Really Hard Way' almost impossible. Make it impossible for players to 'live' at the end of the difficulty slider. Players have made it clear that they're not happy unless they're fighting purple con enemies, so I don't think changing the con system is really going to help in this case. This would be, in effect, a new 'Purple Patch' to compensate for IOs. Maybe my suggestions here are not the way forward and maybe they WOULD drive off players. I think that our players will slowly bleed away from boredom with a lack of challenging content, though. If you've got a better idea for reintroducing risk into the game or eliminating the sameness and monotony that is damaging our high-end game, please let me hear about it.

In the mission, "Defeat Officer Alvarez and his unit" given by John Strobel, the objective text reads: That '6 bombs' does not decrease as you disarm the bombs. Also, Officer Alvarez 'activates' and runs to the nearest elevator to escape, even if it's the elevator up, before the player can even reach him, let alone engage him in combat, resulting in a mission failure.

From "Defeat Archon Morena and his guards" (as given by John Strobel): Apparently Morena has gone above and beyond the call of duty to fascism to earn not one, but TWO Archon titles. Meanwhile, Max doesn't even have one. Just after, John gave me the mission "Defeat Archon Ippolita & his guards" and started making demands on how I finish the mission. What really worries me is that HE'S double promoting Archons as well. Really, John?! Either John has an inside track to the Council's promotion regime, or he's the ONE HANDING OUT PROMOTIONS. ISN'T THAT RIGHT, ARCHON ARCHON STROBEL!?

As the post title states, Blaster Martial Combat/Reaction Time doesn't display the absorb component in its detailed info. The absorb is mentioned in the short description. The power data also appears to be correct on City of Data. Here's how it reads in-game: I've also verified that the absorb component is working properly. (I've got a little silver bar and slotting health into the power makes it larger.) However, while the absorb bar gives its HP amount in the tooltip, this value is NOT displayed in Combat Attributes.

Since the recent forum changes, I've been unable to upload images. The image appears to upload, but what is displayed on the forum appears to be a corrupted image file. The image attached below is meant to be a screenshot of the power selection screen for reporting a bug to the i27p2 beta forums. As you can see, it doesn't display anything but bands of color.

Upon training to level 4, Afterburner still shows as a power you can select in the list of options when you choose the flight pool

Bloodyminded "The world threw sticks and stones, lightning and thunder. Through disaster and grief and every sling, arrow, and outrageous fortune, you've carried on, surviving, overcoming, Bloodyminded in your determination to celebrate." This may be a bit much for some players, but I like it.

As of this morning's patch, I'm still seeing Afterburner in the power selection menu when training flight pool for the first time. I've got a screenshot, but the forum seems to be bugging out on attachments this morning for me.

I noticed that when I was speed-of-sounding around Skyway playing with an exploration tip, my character was rubberbanding occasionally. I put it down to my bad internet, but thought I'd mention it in case it's cohabitant with this bug