mechahamham

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.

If you can get the hang of teleporting around a battle or even a map, it makes being debuff, control, or dps massively more effective and useful. The new(er) powexeclocation command enables this in a way that is even better. For example, if I have only an area heal, I can target a wounded ally, TP close to them with a hotkey, fire off the heal, and then TP right back on top of the main agro. Getting little routines set up like Nostromo's where you just instinctively hit your 'TTFO' button as part of an attack/debuff chain is a path that not many think about pursuing. It is SO worth it.

This is the way. If you're non-armored and you're a) not moving around the battle as needed, or b) not staying in the thick of the melee to affect what goes on there, you're just not gonna be as effective as someone who does either of those things.

... Blue Steel hit the Clockwork King so hard, it knocked Excelsior off the internet. ... Homecoming neglected to consider the effects of salty sea spray on delicate server electronics. ... The Minotaur spawned in Delaware and killed the server hardware. ... That hypercube turned inside out, diving the Midnighter Club, Homecoming, and the State of Rhode Island by zero.

It's no secret that some of the tip missions are based around ridiculous choices and feature writing that is... faulty, if not downright BIZARRE. A good example of the bizarre from "Dragon Embossed Journal": This feels odd to read, let alone repeat out loud. A lot of missions are based around false dichotomy-type choices like this one from "Radio Distress Call": MOST of the game's content is concentrated on the fact it's an MMO. The players are strongly encouraged to form social and working relationships with others and to shore up each other's weaknesses in teams, leagues, and supergroups. Yet, for these missions, you're suddenly supposed to act like you're the only character in the story. You can't pick up your cellphone and call a friend to cover the angles you're unable to. Piecemeal's writing in "The Graveyard Shift" centered around the alignment point you earn in the "Viral Transmissions" mission is particularly good at avoiding this problem. You're awarded the point based on how you react to a bad situation, being trapped in the warehouse waiting for decontamination, and the choice you make regarding that situation. I'm a very firm believer in that content should NOT be removed from the game, even if it's awkward. However, going forward, I think it's a good idea to model any future alignment missions around 'heat of the moment' choices and not false dichotomy choices. In a lot of cases, it would be as simple as adding a line like "You can't take the risk that the Big Bad will go free. You call a friend who's better suited to save the bus full of orphans while you set about hunting down the villain."

Imagine superpowered or highly-trained types that would be described as chaotic good or chaotic neutral. They're going to be fighting in King's Row because that's where the fighting needs to happen, regardless of any police presence there.

Attitudes towards Police and Law Enforcement have changed a lot since 2004. Blue Shield's backstory seems to actively play into this, with some extremely questionable decisions on his part ultimately leading to the rise of the Clockwork King. from https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Blue_Steel This CAN BE a very charged topic, so let me preface this by saying that this is a fantasy city in a fantasy world. No flesh-and-blood human beings live in Paragon City. However, lots of vigilantes and rogues DO live in Paragon City these days, or at least maintain residences there. I can see people wanting to stay in character and avoid dealing with Police officers, even as a trainer. The quick answer to this is to simply zone over to, say, Talos, to train where Luminary is right in front of the tram station. I think there's an opportunity here to add some character and color to King's Row by adding a second trainer in an out-of-the-way location. For bonus points, explicitly flesh out the trainer to cater to Rogues, Vigilantes, and those who otherwise refuse to talk to police officers. For example, Stalwart is an example of a truly heroic character who relies on illegal drugs due to his age and weakening abilities. If the talented HC devs didn't want to create a new character to serve as trainer, there are others in the game that are more or less heroic that would be good matches for this position.

This affects me so often that I have a popmenu option to make a UI save file and then another to make a macro to reload it: /wdwsavefile namegoeshere /macro W wdwloadfile namegoeshere Every character gets their own UI file so that I can, say, have my team and league windows set up as I like them and extra trays open on a mastermind. The section in my custom popmenu looks like: Divider Title "Binds" Option "F7" "beginchat /bind f7 say <scale 1.50><color #FFFFFF><bordercolor #000000><bgcolor #00A000>F7!!" Option "wdwsavefile" "beginchat /wdwsavefile namegoeshere" Option "wdwloadfile" "beginchat /macro W wdwloadfile namegoeshere" I hit this many, many times a day. You can be absolutely sure of this happening on a Penny Yin TF on any character.

Summary: Female Pants/Baggy/Shredded has an odd behavior, including the ability to select a 'Tattered' pants category that doesn't exist elsewhere, and the ability to select a torn-edge pants texture that doesn't exist elsewhere. Steps to reproduce: Take a female character into the costume editor. Select 'Pants' for lower body. Select 'Baggy' for Pants type Select 'Shredded' for the subtype. This causes 'Baggy' to be replaced with 'Tattered'. Then you can further explore this by: Clicking 'Tattered' but NOT selecting any of the options. Just click in the dead space next to the menu, allowing 'Tattered' to remain. Click 'Shredded'. You can select 'Long' and 'Short' to see different options. 'Long' brings up that torn-edge texture. Short doesn't do anything. 'Motorcycle leathers' and 'Baggy Cargo' do what you'd expect. Do I have visual proof? I captured a video in OBS and attached it, showing how I reproduce this. Hopefully it makes more sense visually Suggested Fix: This screams 'improperly initialized object', like most of the costume bugs. I'd suggest looking at the data that gets initialized into the costume when selecting 'Pants', but I'm no C++ expert, so take that with a 10meq sodium chloride tablet. Obviously, the torn-edge texture should be available across all the pants types. (Frankly, I'd like to see something similar available on the bottom hems of everything that has a bottom hem!) 2024-07-09 00-25-58.mp4

@Phoosy has posted some great screenies of positioning bugs with huge and female eye auras:

I'm delighted to see all the various bug fixes and geometry fixes. The big part of this for me are the new accolades. Mark and Recall looks AMAZINGLY awesome! (I'm still amazingly burned out on incarnate content.)

Dunno how likely this is to change in an Echo zone, but: [964.6 -46.2 327.4] Server: Excelsior Zone/Mission: Echo: Faultline Position: [964.6 -46.2 327.4] When approached from below, from inside the crevasse, this allows a player to fly up into the geometry of the building above.

From Blaster's 'Plant Manipulation' Skewer text: "You lunge forward with this melee attack and Skewer your foe with the large Thorn on your arm. Deals high damage and poisons your foe. Poison from the Thorns deals additional Toxic damage and can reduce your foes defense." There's some weird capitalization going on here, but the error here is "foes defense.". It should be "foe's defense.".

From 'Retrieve one of the Spirit Thorns' from Peter Stemitz: Should be "... hope that if they can get their hands on one,..."

Why not both? Can you not love the Art Museum, but still hope that they get more amazing works to put on display? Can you not love the Statue of Liberty, but want the monument to be well-maintained and easier to visit? My feeling is that we, the game, the community, everything, really, is subject to slow decay. The game in and of itself doesn't get objectively worse over time the way copper oxidizes, but if the population dwindles it'll become less enjoyable. The way to avoid that is to constantly improve. Preserving the now is wonderful, but the preservation is still work