mechahamham

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

There's the ideological difference. I believe very strongly that we all have the onus upon us to make our surroundings better both for ourselves and for each other. Especially now that City of Heroes is firmly in the hands of its community, that means we don't have the luxury of ever treating the game or our interaction with the rest of the game's community as 'good enough'. There should NEVER be a point at which we stop trying to improve upon things. I want to offer my suggestions and hear others offer theirs as well. I want the HC team to continue being awesome caretakers of CoH, but I also want players to continue to make mods and tools for the game. We can't afford to let any part of it start to stagnate I do believe that we're far enough into the game's life that there's no point to try to keep people from playing it the way they want to. But I also believe that it's important to say 'this one aspect is harmful'. Not 'don't do that thing you enjoy doing', but instead, 'maybe do that thing in a way that doesn't cause something bad to happen for someone else'. tl;dr: Don't feel attacked or confronted. Do feel like you should share what you think are pain points that can be polished by both us as players and the HC staff as developers.

So because I don't have a high post count, I'm a troll? I'm expressing a genuine concerns and offering what I feel is a great solution, and am asking others for their concerns and solutions. What are your concerns about the new player experience and what ideas do you have to make it better?

Over the recent long day weekend, I noticed a large uptick in new players. I answered as many questions as I could in /help and was as welcoming as I could be. However, I noticed some oddities that made me think we, as a community, are failing our newest members. We're doing things that harm them and NOT doing things that would help them. I noticed one person advertising in help chat, "I've gotten level 50. So now what do I need to do to equip my character and start enjoying the game?" We've failed that person. They're level 50 and want to START enjoying the game. They've missed most of the game on their first character. If they're lucky, they'll be introduced to taskforces and the flashback system. If not, they'll discover that a lot of level 50 players do nothing but the same two trials over and over, get bored and leave the game because it seems like there's nothing to do compared to other MMOs. We can hope they make more characters to experience more of the game. A significant number of players take pride in powerlevelling anyone they can. They feel they're helping others by doing so, or even giving them a gift. In games where all the content is biased towards the end of the game, that might be true. For CoH players who've experienced the game's content many times over, that might be true. For new players who haven't really had much experience with the game, powerlevelling them means we're robbing their character of the missions that are not in Ouroboros flashback system. It means we're taking away a relatively gentle learning curve and expecting them to learn their character at level 50. The answer to keep this situation from happening is pretty straightforward. Don't advertise free powerlevelling. The players who WANT powerlevelling will still ask for it, and are not shy about doing so. People who want to powerlevel as a 'gift' will still have every opportunity to do so, even if they don't advertise. More recently, I saw a farmer encouraging a new player to play a character 'the long way' rather than powerlevelling. They explained that they wanted the newbie to enjoy the game and to stay for the long haul, and that they felt the best way to do that was to learn the game organically. That's the best solution, in my opinion. We ALL need to communicate to new players that the game's content and major story does NOT begin at max level the way some others do. What ways do you see that we fail new players and what are your suggestions for fixing those problems?

That was overheard in Brickstown near the hospital. Should be 'relies'.

I dunno who Jeff is, but eff that guy.

I don't remember who said it, but someone mentioned the entire 'War on Drugs' theme, which was fairly true to comics of the 1980s and 90s, aged like whole milk. It's somewhat shy of being offensive or racially charged in CoH the way it is IRL, but still pretty jarring. The most egregious example I can think of off the top of my head is the 'Heroic' tip mission in which you're fighting against people who've lined up for Superadine, including the aging boxer hero, Stalwart: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Mission:Tip_-_Denmark_Wants_Muscles_This_Friday In 2024, if I were to come up against an older person who tells me, "You don't understand. I'm aging and in pain. I need these opiates to function.", my reaction would NOT be to 'Arrest' them and let the Popo deal with them. Instead, it'd be more like, 'You're right. I don't understand. Can you get Narcan for if you OD? You know a lot of folks die from bad Fentanyl these days, right?'

I don't really get the point behind the new 'Hide First Appearance' option. All it seems to do is hide character bios by default, which kinda stinks. Maybe I'm misunderstanding why it was put in or what its usecase looks like. If I were going to absolutely nuke a game feature from orbit, it'd be Architect Entertainment. Mission Architect had the potential to brew up amazing player-created content, but was handled in a way that incentivized agriculture over gameplay. AFK farming should not ever be a thing, and it's one of the default leveling methods in CoH now. The good: It creates a hungry market for enhancements I craft. The bad: New players get sucked in a 'the game sucks at low levels' mentality. Existing players level a character without ever LEARNING that character or learning how to effectively team with that character. A significant number of players treat content outside AE as 'necessary evils' and want to coast through it without thought or difficulty. This is especially true of Task Force Commander TFs and other accolade-related arcs and missions. How many characters go into those TFs without even slotting dropped enhancements? (As an aside, I recently did a Positron TF in which a Super Reflex character kept getting KO'd. They complained loudly that SR sucked. Without checking their level, I encouraged them to give it time because SR is a late-blooming set. I told them that once they got some enhancers and levels behind them, they'd feel like nothing could touch them. It turns out that they didn't have *any* enhancements slotted, despite being level 26.) It would be next to impossible to remove AE from CoH at this point. Even if you attempted to re-engineer it so AFK farming and door-sitting weren't possible, you'd get people complaining loudly and making threatening statements like "If you want me to leave the game, this is how you do it."

I usually don't have any problem signing in with a VPN enabled, but I did get zapped a while back while trying to create a new account with my VPN enabled. (At the time, I wanted to experiment with having different characters on different accounts, but I've since moved in another direction.) As a VPN user, my suggestion is to use public internet of some kind of some kind, like a fast food or coffee shop, to create the account.

The Mapserver event is... not for me. I don't begrudge the people who do enjoy it. However, it's problematic outside of its content. It needs to be reworked in a few different ways. Lag Sitting around waiting for your powers to recharge is no fun. Sitting around waiting for your powers to recharge when the entire zone has slowed to a crawl is pretty miserable. Your powers LOOK like they should have recharged, but haven't really. The real mapserver simply can't keep up with a full league, everything else happening in the zone, and people constantly trying to get into the possibly full zone and/or trying to float a second league on top of the first one. This isn't just a problem with the Mapserver event, but also plagues the Halloween event, especially in Peregrine Island and Kallisti Wharf. It's less noticeable for Mothership raids and Hamidon raids simply because those zones hard-cap with a fairly small populations. Even then, it's still VERY noticeable during those events. Regardless, it's effectively impossible to have more than one (full) league active for those events at a time. Worse, the lag for the Mapserver event seems to spill over to the entire rest of the server, even after the patch early in the week of the 1st. My taskforce teams noticeably bogged down and glitched often. Even if you're not participating in the event, heaven help you if you happen to have a mission in the same zone, especially if that zone hasn't managed to spawn a second instance. How can we make this less problematic? First and foremost, the single biggest problem here is the event causing lag and other issues for those not participating. This is going to require at least some profiling and debugging effort to rectify. Are the events causing resource usage to top out on the servers? How much information does the event send to clients when compared to other invasion events? If the event can be optimized, it should. If the perception is, 'well, we don't need to optimize it because it's a very limited event we only run once a year,' then that ties into the next point. To make it kinder to those not participating, I'd also suggest that the event always takes place in a second instance of the zones it affects. For example, if Talos Island gets an invasion, the invasion should spin up a Talos Island 2 instance, even if Talos 1 is nowhere near to full. Those interested in the invasion can zone-hop. If Talos 2 hasn't emptied and despawned by the next time the invasion happens, it should default to that instance rather than the first instance. "The Mapserver of Peregrine Island has gained sentience and gone rogue. (Peregrine Island 2)" Loading Screen Tip #587: "If you need to travel between instances of the same City Zone, you can do so at the Tram, Ferry, Portal, or other zone entrances." Honestly, I think Excelsior's population is at the point where we probably NEED two instances of our most populous zones up at all times. Blue-side, this would be Atlas, Steel, Talos, Peregrine, Pocket D, and RWZ. The Hive and The Abyss are weird cases since there's nothing that happens there BESIDES the Hamidon event (and fighting GMs to harvest EoEs and start the event). A more controversial approach to this is to have the event prefer zones on the less populated servers rather than Excelsior. Length Last night, at the time of this writing, I was participating in a Rikti Invasion event in Peregrine Island. I heard the following from one of the other players: "Man, I've been spoiled by the MS invasions. This experience feels like nothing." Ah, I thought to myself. The event lasted long enough that the experience gain from it started to feel 'normal'. It wasn't a special treat any more after more than a week. In fact, there are players all over the server in withdrawal. When players who've been on Homecoming for a while related that the event usually only runs once a year, there were complaints. My feeling is that, to maintain a sense of 'specialness' to the event, it should probably last, at most, a single weekend. And if it does become more common, rebalance and optimization becomes VASTLY more necessary. For those uninterested in the event, the length of it was still a problem. It very noticeably drew players away from any other content. Even other invasions were ignored entirely for the Mapserver events. Worst of all, the lag created by the event for the rest of the server was more and more obnoxious as the week wore on. Balance I say 'Balance' here, and I think most people would immediately leap to the conclusion that I'm complaining about the experience gain. Instead, I'd like to focus on other issues. Invasion events in general have some pretty serious mechanical flaws. When enemies appear in any invasion, they often have a brief period of time in which they're untargettable or invulnerable, except by pets for some reason. In fact, if you participate in any invasion event, you often hear 'target through a pet'. This needs to be fixed one way or another. Either enemies should be invulnerable to ANY attack until their 'spawn in' completes, or they should be vulnerable from the moment they're visible. Currently, this creates a bias in events for players who have a pet of some kind. (Additionally, in some situations, you often see 'desirable' enemies spawn in and then immediately disappear such as Rikti Heavy Assault Suits during this same period. That's annoying, but it's not as biasing.) Chaining onto the odd 'spawn in' period, players with damaging AOEs can often reduce most of the enemies into a fine paste. This creates a bias in events for players who have strong AOE attacks. After the 'spawn in' period, buffs and debuffs become much more important to keep those participating alive and doing damage to the enemies that remain. This creates a bias in events towards strong AOE buff, and to a somewhat lesser degree, debuff effects. For the most part, these biases cancel out, even if you exclude the whole 'target through a pet' thing. Most characters are capable of doing at least SOMETHING to aid everyone else participating in the event. Characters that focus on single-target damage, however, tend to become a bit more excluded. There is, however, a class of character that gets to 'triple dip'. Incarnate-level players have Lore pets, Judgement blasts, and Destiny buffs. Not being able to contribute is worse than being unfun. It's actively demoralizing. You don't even have the fallback of 'I'll learn the event this time and contribute next time.' There's not much TO learn. It's 'fire all your abilities off as soon as they're recharged' and maybe 'focus fire on the giant monster when it appears'. Nothing makes me want to avoid content more than not being able to contribute. This really needs to change for ALL invasion events, and not just the Mapserver event. The usual counter to arguments like this is something like 'why should higher-level players be punished for being higher-level?', and that's correct. Those players should not be punished. But just like those players should not be punished, neither should lower-level players be punished simply for being lower level. One of the guiding principles of CoH has historically been that both high- and low-level players should be able to contribute to the same content. One player's enjoyment of the game should never come at the expense of another's. The recent scaling changes we've seen for giant monsters should be an example of what we need to do going forward for invasion events. In general, scaling and level compression should be used whenever possible to ensure that as many players can contribute to the event's success as want to. In addition, new event mechanics that incentivize separation of duties should be considered. These could be enemies who are more vulnerable to different forms of attacks, just like Hamidon's organelles. Imagine having enemies appear in invasions that incentivize being controlled, or attacked with single target effects. These not only allow more opportunity for different players to contribute, but also add more to learn about the event structure. Imagine hearing a callout like "Lowbies, please focus on taking out the Rikti Portal Technicians! Dominators and controllers, please lock down the Monkey tamers!" That's the kind of thing that would excite me about an event.

Explain what you want or need out of your team BEFORE THE MISSION STARTS. Don't call it in and get that mission before a quick, 'Let's fight to each of the first 3 heroes and then clear around the door. We'll rescue the fourth hero and trigger the ambush after that.' If you want to communicate in a hurry and aren't a quick typist, be sure to put that on a macro button or in a popmenu. Don't use jargon. For example, 'pull' has entirely different meanings depending on who you ask. Be specific. "Blaster, please use a ranged attack to try to break one shadow clone off the group." If a melee-type says, "I'm going to pull," be ready for them to Leeroy into the group like they would have anyway.

Whenever I communicated about costumes to the OG Cryptic/NCSoft/Paragon devs, I always made a point of saying something like 'The Costume Creator is your pony. You have to feed it, brush it, and exercise it every day or it will wither away.' It's what originally hooked me into the game, and maybe not now, but for a long time, I think it was what hooked others. Others have mentioned most of the strengths I care about, so I'm going to mention areas where I think it can be improved. This is going to sound harsh. It's not intended to be. I love the costume creator and I want it to be the best thing ever. - Textures are wildly inconsistent in their resolution and quality. Some faces have sharp and crisp lines while others are more blurry and have visible compression artifacts. <Insert 'NEEDS MOAR JPEG' meme here.> If HC is in possession of the original data for the faces (or if there someone out there who is), a lossless, higher resolution 're-master' of all the faces is well overdue. No changes to the art is necessary. This may not be possible. Those files may simply be lost forever. - Additionally, some of the pattern textures are wildly inconsistent as well, particularly those that apply over the face. For example, the makeup textures will often blur over into the white of the eyes. Some tweaks to the color adjustment method (using multiplicative colors rather than overlay colors) might also help fix some of this. - I would love to see parts of costumes and textures broken out into sub-groups. Imagine that when you were working on a face, you could lock in the lips and nose, but pick the eyes separately. (Imagine the children's paper 'sliding face' matching game, but with our characters' faces). This would require at least some heavy lifting in the code and texture editing, but would not require any new artwork. The obvious upshot to this is DRAMATICALLY more character variety with only a minor increase to the size of data structures. - The old glasses models are pretty sad when compared to the newer items like 'Sweetheart' and 'Sporty'. The textures are miserably opaque and have no specular reflection. The low-poly rims are unforgivingly thin. The round glasses are tiny, and the ovoid glasses (Sunglasses, et al...) are huge. Additionally, glasses suck up a detail slot. You cannot have a horned demon who wears glasses. Even if there are no new glasses models, break ALL glasses out into their own detail category, as done with ears, please. - Animal heads are WOEFULLY immune to customization. It's very difficult or completely impossible to change their size. They don't have any 'animation bones'. The faces are always snarling with bared teeth. They're never 'relaxed' as most animal faces would be, most the time. (This also applies to most of the animal models, tbh.) - If you use Bestial legs with anything, you are locked out of using skirts or kilts. Why? (And why would the NCSoft devs have done this to begin with when there would be minimal clipping issues?) - A lot of the hair meshes would look fine on all three bodies, yet are very firmly divided into 'male' and 'female'. In fact, players can and have experimented with this by doing demo editing. We live in a non-binary world now. If there aren't any clipping issues with the hair meshes, propagate them. - For a little bit when NCSoft was floating the experimental costume file format that became our saved costume files, I reported a bug that one could hand-edit values into it with a text editor to get custom colors outside the palette made available by the game's UI. When I reported the bug, I made a point of saying 'I'm going to hate myself for ever mentioning this'. I DEEPLY REGRET reporting it. I wish I'd never done so. I wish I'd kept it to my little greedy self so I could have the perfect colors on all my costume pieces. What I'm getting at is that it's BEEN far, far past time to have the option to use custom colors on all costume pieces for more than a decade, in game, or total. In fact, there are private servers who already do. This can be in the form of sliders, number entry, or even just remove the damned validation step that forbids custom colors in the save file. (NCSoft didn't validate any OTHER effing thing...) Comment that bastard out of the costume load code. <Palpatine> DO IT! </Palpatine> The most immediate benefit from this is matching colors on pieces that just don't match, even though they should. The most obvious example are the classic 'with skin' patterns and the bridal textures. There are many, many more. The ONLY downside to this is that players can fake 'nude' costumes. The people who want that can (and do) use modded textures anyway. We can /report anyone who makes a point of 'flashing' others or sexually harassing others in the game, because we do so already. Long and short, it's not 2004. NOBODY is playing CoH over a POTS modem connection. Maybe some of us are still stuck on the potatoes we were using to play CoH in 2004, but I highly doubt that. We can afford to use more memory. We can afford to use more network bandwidth. Let's add in some of the more popular modded textures, and accept at least some community submissions for textures and meshes. I, myself, submitted some textures to the devs in 2020 or 2021, I think, but was met with *crickets*. If I may be so bold, from looking at the volunteer thread, we have all the human power we need to do ALL of these things.

I mean, he is homeless, so it may be outdated because he doesn't know where to get free internet access. This is the fellow at [435.0 159.5 5645.7] in Talos, next to the Movie Theater in front of the Paragon Dance Party entrance. We now have both PDP and Pocket D, though, so surely he must have seen one or two people disappearing into the door behind him. However, as instruction to newer players, it also falls short (and did in the Live era as well) since there are more entrances.

*GASP* There are DOZENS of us! I used Win7 for a LONG time, despite working my dayjob in Linux. I had few different pieces of hardware and software that just wouldn't let me ditch Microsoft. I did most of my Live-era CoH career on it. My understanding is that CoH would play somewhat okay on Wine after about 2010 or so. I've never connected to HC's servers using anything but. Valve software has really done us a solid by pouring so much effort into the project over the last few years.

Back on live, pre-GR, I would very, very occasionally see 'Pulse Rifle Corruptor' petless MMs. Like maybe a total of 2 of them, ever. 'Whip Corruptors' were and are a tad bit more common, and they're the ONLY petless MMs I've run into since Beam Rifle became a thing. I've seen maybe half a dozen on HC. I wish I could count the number of times I've run into '+4x8 or nuthin' players. I've very seriously known more than one person who quit CoH entirely because they couldn't solo max difficulty, and I've heard at least two people this week make the statement that everyone should be able to solo +4x8. I'm honestly not sure if they meant that every player should slot to solo +4x8 or that every single player should be able to solo +4x8 regardless of slotting. Either way, wow, way to suck the fun out of the game.

How the heck does that even work?! I mean, I thought you had to have at least Win98 to install DirectX 7.