mechahamham

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.

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.