mechahamham

Since CoH's built-in text editor is pretty awful, I always compose in a second application and then paste into CoH. This means that if you use one that does auto-saving, like, say, Sublime Text, you've always got something saved.

And Yipe! "Replacement of the equipment affected" can be anything from failing over to a hot mirror machine to some poor IT pleb digging around in a rack to fish out a dead router. I don't know enough about OVH to know which one is more likely. You'd think being a cloud provider, they'd be all about having like multiple blade-type machines they can spin up or down with a shell script as needed, but even then getting one up and configured can take a bit. Thank you #6 and Michiyo for the update!

Discord hates me for some reason. I simply cannot connect to ANY Discord server. I do always try to connect to the HC discord server, though. Regardless, thank you for the insight!

I heard a few people complaining about this in general chat. I experienced it myself when attempting to switch characters, and am now completely unable to log into the game.

'Sweetheart' glasses make 'Round' look pretty janky by comparison. I'm going to have a hard time NOT using them on my glasses-wearing characters. They look that good. Whoever modeled them should be proud. If they're supposed to reference a certain 1962 movie poster featuring actress Sue Lyon, the tops are a little narrow for that. The hearts would almost be horned rims if they were matching said movie poster, which I will not link here for reasons. Additionally, the legs are too wide to match that same poster. I'm not sure how easy any of this would be to change/add and keep the same polygon budget. Like all the other CoH glasses, this lacks hooks on the legs. That's not a big deal at all unless you try to wear them without hair or with a full mask. Is there any chance of getting that same glass texture applied to versions of 'Round' and 'Sun Glasses'?

I was actually one of your visitors this evening. Exploring 'Haunted' was a blast, and, as I said, I stand in awe of the time and effort. Kudos. Seriously, that base is a work of art and you should be proud of it. You should absolutely list it on your resume if you're looking for design or game work.

I truly enjoy haunted houses, both in RL and in games. When I played Everquest, my favorite hangouts were the undead-infested house in the Estate of Unrest and the vampire-infested Castle Mistmoore. Dr. Kane's House of Horrors is PERFECT. You fight through a Haunted House gone horribly wrong, only to discover that there is a real undead-raising mad scientist behind it. You fight his zombies, his monsters and his abominable final creation. (And the Black Whip demon!) Something that I'm seeing more and more of, since HC keeps making more goodies available to base builders is FANTASTIC haunted houses run by supergroups. These are SG bases made into mazes, and in one spectacular case a castle that puts a lot of EQ, WOW, and even OG CoH design to shame! I mean, wow, I wanted to adventure in that castle! I wanted there to be undead baddies to fight! One of the SG bases had drop-scares! (Witch Mansion on Everlast) How awesome is that?! I am just blown away with the creativity and effort players put into these bases. So, very seriously, HC devs, you need to be engaging these SG base designers and incorporating their works into the game as maps with enemies to fight. This is a good way to increase the 'vastness' and variety in CoH, and a good way to strengthen the loyalty between players and HC. The more haunted houses there are in CoH, the happier I'll be!

This is probably how I got the Hollow Reaper to run away. I was fighting against it with a KB-heavy blaster... water/sonic. Between water's KD and sonic's KB and holds, it quit being able to attack me and decided to GTFO. This would be FAR less issue in a team than with a single, inspiration- and empowerment- loaded blaster. These guys definitely need some work before the next time the event rolls past, but I'm still enjoying the variety. Clave Dark 5 mentioned that they weren't supposed to spawn for soloers, but that didn't make it in before the event started. I'm hoping that rather than completely disabling them for soloers, they'll let us turn them on and off with the noteriety settings for the next event.

I've noticed some further oddities. Sometimes the Crone Matriarch just doesn't agro, especially if you attack from range. She just sits by the door she ran out of and soaks up punishment. Also, the 'I'm being griefed' code seems a bit wonky, again, especially if you attack from range or manage to use knockback against the EBs. I had a Hollow Reaper run half-way across Founder's Falls from me and then despawn just before I could KO it. This has happened to Crones and Vampires I've fought as well.

For as often as I do my ToTing in RWZ, that'd actually kinda fit. That said, I would absolutely drone him every time he spawned! (The Horror Hotel League probably wouldn't even notice him. Or he'd try to spawn in this hospital due to door overload and get droned.)

That would be perfectly acceptable afaic.

Srsly, I've wanted to create a pixie-sized character since before CoH launched. Even if you can't let us go as small as 'mini-mode' characters, or let us use them in PVP, please, PLEASE, let us create shorter character with proportional-sized (i.e.: not gigantic for the body) heads.

I was playing with temporary powers to see if any of them were particularly effective... The mummy can one-shot a summoned snow beast at level 29! Shivan Decimators seem to do a bit better, but can still be killed in a fight with the Mummy or Werewolf, even if you're blasting from range.

Greater difficulty and planning in Trick or Treating! This is fantastic. I'm truly glad that you've added new content to this event, HC devs! That said, I feel like the bosses need at least a little balance pass. Yeah, a lot of people use the Peregrine Horror Hotel to get all their ToTing done and depend on the league to keep them alive while fighting multiple purple EBs at once. However, at least some of us Trick of Treat for the sake of Trick or Treating. Solo or in small groups. It's in these situations, especially between 25-35 that the imbalance of these elite bosses becomes apparent. All five of the bosses have a 'trick' required to fight solo. The Crone Matriarch requires extra accuracy or to-hit to get through her hurricane. The Mummy is best defeated from range since he uses ridiculously powerful super strength attacks, and if you can't deal with with his Unstoppable phase, you have to kite him. The Spectre requires that you have extra status protection... breakfrees. The Vampire requires the ability to deal with his lifetaps. The Spectral Werewolf requires a balance of all the above. At 25, however, these enemies can all use their most powerful attacks... including things like the Mummy's uppercut attack that can two-shot a LOT of characters-- even scrappers. The best method for dealing with EBs, inspiration loading, is only partially effective. A tray of 25 inspirations may or may not last in a fight against the bosses. Additionally, the bosses spawn so often that it's not really possible to 'work up' your inspiration tray by collecting and combining inspirations like you would in a mission with an EB as the end boss. This means 'door-to-door' ToTing over a large area is often interrupted by frequent trips to an inspiration vendor. The EBs seem to use the Mission Architect versions of the powers... meaning that they don't have any 'tells'. There's nothing to let you know you need to GTFO before Mr. Mummy uses his uppercut. The second-best method for dealing with EBs, using temp powers like Shivan Shards or Envenomed Daggers has the downside of requiring a bit of fore-planning and effort. The long and short of it is you can't just wade into ToTing at 25 without fairly frequent KOs, and, so far as I know, there's no way to turn those particular elite bosses off if you're over 25. (I'll test this just to be sure. Edit -- Tested this and no, there doesn't seem to be any way to turn these EBs off in Noteriety settings.) Things that can be done to balance this: First, allow players to turn off the EBs via the usual difficulty settings. This has the benefit of allowing a player to 'build' an inspiration tray and then turn on the EBs when they're prepared to face them. Second, add emotes into the EBs' attack patterns to act as 'tells' so players can learn to proactively deal with those 'instant' defeat attacks. Finally, and I feel that this is the most important, scale those attack availability with level. The Mummy at 25 shouldn't have all its most powerful attacks, but at 35, it's a lot more reasonable for him to have them all. All that said, I TRULY enjoy the new content! Kudos, hardworking devs! I hope you continue to add and improve content like this! Thank you for your hard, unpaid work!

A few different practical purposes, (and I do indeed mash that button like a youtuber fangirl), but the big one is: It's not easy to keep an eye on the exp bar all the time. As Rudra said, they turn off the exp until they're done and then turn it back on and rely on repeatables to level them. That's more or less what I have to do. Even then, I'm a bit absent-minded and clumsy. I've missed it a few times when I just didn't expect to level so quickly and missed a window of opportunity or realized that I missed something I planned on after having turned it back on. Having even one of these temp powers available would give me a bit more leeway in that regard. It's that stress, the feeling of constantly double-checking myself, that degrades my enjoyment. You might as well ask what the practical utility is of leveling at all, if everyone farms their way to 50 and then does flashback content, or of having the existing increased XP temps at p2w when we could all be leveling at the 2xp rate. We all enjoy the game in our own, sometimes subtly different ways. This would make *my* way more enjoyable.

And it's a reasonable suggestion, but has some important caveats: a) You are *much* more powerful exemplared down to do content than you are if you do it 'at level'. Ideally, you can use the difficulty options to tailor it to your preferred difficulty level, but you only get one chance to do it as your character is levelling normally, with a limited number of slots and power selections. b) As wonderful as Ouroboros truly is, you tend to be stuck soloing flashback content. If you want a team, you have to recruit teams ahead of time, as you do with taskforces, but without the benefit of badges, accolade progress, or WST bonuses to help entice players. There's no option to 'recruit as you go', which seems essential for longer arcs when many players consider the revamped Positron TFs to be 'long and boring'. (Devs, I'd LOVE to see this limitation removed from Ouro!) Frankly, it's so much easier to hit that noxp button and recruit for arcs you want to do or to jump on someone else's team than it is to recruit for Ouro arcs.

As I've stated in the past, I use the 'noxp' option frequently. I have it in my main popmenu of useful commands. I don't need a reward or a bonus for using it. The bonus I get is that I don't outlevel content that I want to experience 'at level' and I can spend as long as I want in 'comfy' exp ranges(like 24-29... endless Tsoo sorcerers in Talos!) I feel quite confident in saying that I shed FAR more experience than I actually gain. I don't farm. I don't powerlevel at all. I pay for all my enhancements by crafting and marketing. I recently made a new staff scrapper. Since I already have a staff scrapper at 50, I decided to try to spend as much time as I could with experience enabled, just to see if I could endure the free-fall. I can't. I still find myself turning noxp on ALL THE FREAKIN' TIME! ("23? I haven't even trained 22 yet! The actual @#$#!") The sensation of using it is rather like riding in a car with someone who likes to slam on the breaks. I feels very 'jerky' and 'stop and go' to do it that way. Please let me suggest the following custom experience rates. These can be duplicates of the existing temp powers, simply with a fractional multiplier: "Steady on, Pardner..." -- .75 * normal experience. This would be nice to use on taskforces you *want* to level on, or with characters that tend to level somewhat slower... like my controllers. Duration: 1 day unless deleted. Flavor Text: "Whoa there, Pardner! Enjoy the scenery a little, why don't ya?" "Spirit of the Tortoise" -- .50 * normal experience. I would use this mostly on the 40-50 level range, when exp has slowed a bit, but those long missions tend to level me anyway. Duration: 7 days unless deleted. Flavor Text: "Slow and sure wins the race." "Fury of the Rampaging, Super-intelligent Snail Encased in Tungsten" -- .25 * normal experience. This would probably be my default experience rate on scrappers. Duration: 30 days unless deleted. Flavor Text: "I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." "Unsafe at Any Speed" -- .10 * normal experience. Duration: 30 days unless deleted. This is how I would play blasters. Duration: 30 days unless deleted. Flavor Text: "Speed Kills, but then so do you." "Welcome to the Department of Motor Vehicles" -- .05 * normal experience. Duration: 30 days unless deleted. This is the rate I'd use when working on 'defeat x' badges. Flavor Text: "You.... got.... some....thing.... against.... .... Sloths.... ?.... Well.... do.... ..... ya.... ?!" Having these available would significantly increase the quality and enjoyment of my gameplay. So, please consider adding these temps to our favorite p2w vendors... but at your own speed. ^_^

The event invasion and the vectored knockback brawl (BOOM! SURPRISE! FREEEEM!) are delightful. Thank you for the wonderful present!

I've been playing my water/ice blaster for the last few days and was thinking that the 'gravity' effect described might be a good fit for dehydrate. All the water in an enemy's body is getting forcibly drained. It's going to drag them towards you, just a little, or even knock them forward.

Self moderation features... that is, features that allow a person to tailor what they read or 'hear' in chat will simply by definition be more effective than GM moderation: Once /ignored, you never hear from the ignoree again unless you want to. There are some downsides. One risks isolating themselves on purpose or accidentally. However, in game chat, that's not a huge concern, especially if you include some kind of 'undo' button. I'd like to suggest the following features to enable more control over one's experience: A 'match string' filter for chat channels. Example: A user does not ever want to do Citadel's TF again. They filter /lfg or private chat channels for 'Citadel'. Any line mentioning 'Citadel' is not displayed. Ease of implementation: Easy/Medium Difficulty. This can be entirely client-side, giving zero server overhead to the feature. Additionally, there are several very good public domain and BSD-licensed matching libraries available. The hardest part of this is the UI. You'd need to add a 'filters' window for chat channels. For extra credit, allow those with the know-how to use regular expressions in their matches for super-fine-grained control. Re-implement character-level ignore: Right now /ignoring a character defaults to the /gignore behavior: Ignoring the player at the account level. Generally, that's a positive thing. If a troll is going to troll on one character, you generally don't want to hear from any of their characters. However, that knocks out some use-cases for character level functionality. The obvious example here is to ignore farmers who recruit in /lfg without ignoring their non-farm characters. Ease of implementation: Easy. This is almost certainly still in the code base and needs simply to have the old default behavior rehooked or renamed. Expiring ignore: People have bad days. People are upset by news, current events, or events in their life. Sometimes, people have a few too many drinks or tokes before playing. Occasionally, a player comes into the game with negative expectations, but then lightens up when they learn more about the community. However, once you've /ignored a player, that's it... unless you personally try to take people off your ignore list. I'd like to have an 'ignore for 1 day', 'ignore for 1 week' and 'ignore for 1 month' options to better allow for 'bad days'. Ease of implementation: Medium/Hard difficulty. This would almost certainly have to be server-side and require new data to be stored, complicating what are probably already scary database/data file joins. It would also require new UI elements. Client-side Ban/Generic: Sometimes /ignoring a troll or abusive player is not enough. Sometimes the mods aren't quick enough to keep your day from being ruined. Sometimes there are costumes that upset, offend, or otherwise cause you grief, even if the player behind them isn't doing anything wrong. You don't want to SEE that player or character, ever again. (People with serious Coulrophobia might know about this.) In that case, allow players to either permanently hide another character that is problematic for them or cause their costume to be 'genericed', say reduced to monotone tights, but only on the client side. Difficulty of Implementation: Hard. This would need to be, effectively, a client-side mod that watches and intercepts the zone data to remove or alter character data. Certainly any development effort is not without cost. Even for volunteer developers, time spent on features like this is still time. The upshot of this kind of work is that it might ultimately cause a reduced workload for volunteer GMs. Let me know what you think.

So I'm noticing on an Ice Armor stalker made after the recent placate changes that Placate does not work well, or at all, when using Chilling Embrace. The combat logs from such a situation look about like so: There are no DOT numbers ticking over the enemy's heads, but the chilling embrace graphic (with no damage procs, it's only got one endurance reduction generic IO) is still playing. They immediately attack, even if the placate animation finishes playing. My thought is that Chilling Embrace is not properly suppressed when placated. Looking at CoD, I see the following tag on the power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=stalker_defense.ice_armor.chilling_embrace&at=stalker That looks like other non-damage vs. Enemy PBAOE stalker auras. If you look at Cloak of Fear or Oppressive Gloom on Stalker's Dark Armor, they're set up the same way. (The difference between the DA auras and Chilling Embrace is that Chilling Embrace doesn't apply any kind of control other than slow.) Perhaps the fix for this is removing the enemy notification or changing the enemy notification so that it stops as soon as the enemy is placated. Thoughts?

After doing Ganymede's missions as a Resistance praetorian, he gave me a couple of Paragon City contacts to talk to. I picked Jill Pastor. She went into my 'inactive' list. After doing DJ Zero's first snaptooth mission, he gave me a completely blank reply box, and offered to introduce me to Alphonse Ruebel or Mercedes Sheldon. Mercedes' 'bio' text was completely empty, and she was wearing her club-wear in the photo. When I went to talk to her, she told me, awesomely, "I don't talk to people from an alternate reality." It seems like there are usually a few posts about the wonky contact introductions, but I couldn't immediately find any. I was surprised to that Mercedes was an option, but she appears more severely bugged than most.

I just participated in a Nemesis invasion in King's Row. It attracted quite a few players, so Nemesis made his pledge to attack personally in the Event channel, and then never actually appeared. The event ended without his 'Fools, you only defeated one of my Robotic Replicas!' quip. Of course, the player force was gathered on the street in front of the Police Headquarters, and the Nemesis enemies were appearing just off to the North East of the players... just like all invasions. I haven't looked at the source code, but I assume that this is either a simple case of invasion enemies calculating their entrance point by adding a few negative feet in both axes to player locations or a slight rounding bias where the enemies appear *at* the player locations, but rounded down to a whole integer coordinate. Regardless, that's not a major issue. I've seen it in other games. What is an issue is that apparently the event enemies tend to despawn if there's a significant gap between their location and the ground. This happens in Talos when zombies or rikti try to start spawning on the police station or other buildings NE of the 'Last Line' hill, and it happens at this location as well, looking down into the 'Wentworth's History Buff' area. This time, our Nemesis Giant Monster was subject to this bug, and nobody in the league got the badge for him. Happily, there will be other opportunities to fight him thanks to the new event trigger. It seems like the 'right' behavior for NPCs who spawn in mid air would be to drop down without damage, and then leap back up to attack the players, or be given a few seconds worth of hover, like teleporting players, so that they can agro the players. At the same time, you might wanna look at that invasion spawn-in code and look for a floor() or round() or the like, since the NE creep in invasions is a big general annoyance. It's SOO easy to push an Peregrine invasion right into Castle's police drones.