macskull

Any function that pings the character database will reset a character's "days offline" counter, such as supergroup rank promotions/demotions and using /altinvite to invite your own characters to your SG.

The live and test shards share an account server, so you cannot be logged into the same account in both places at the same time.

I know it's almost three weeks later, but you can't currently connect to the test server using Island Rum because the necessary manifest update was never pushed out (and won't be until the next major update gets pushed to the test server). This thread has instructions on how to get the new launcher running on MacOS. The instructions in this thread describe how to do it for legacy launchers (Tequila, Island Rum, CreamSoda, whatever else is out there) but as I said above you won't be able to get on until a manifest update is pushed.

For what it's worth, many of the post-shutdown QoL improvements came about in response to a much smaller population while the game was still in hiding. Specifically addressing veteran levels and incarnate rewards here, but based on past developer comments some of the "streamlining" that was considered necessary at the time is now the source of significant frustration from a balance standpoint. I would not be surprised to see the incarnate-related rewards from veteran levels significantly nerfed at some point in the future.

Procs are - and always have been - flagged "cancelonmiss" which means if the power they're slotted in misses, the proc won't do anything. In the case of autohit powers though you ended up with what is essentially autohit damage. The two biggest examples coming to mind are Caltrops and Corrosive Vial, which is precisely why the change we're talking about was made. Proc rolls are always performed after the hit roll but it happens so quickly it might as well be simultaneous. In the case of Infrigidate, if you miss your target none of your procs will fire, but if you hit your target then the procs will check against their % chance to fire. In the case of Corrosive Vial, the procs will do a hit check and then either do nothing (missed the hit roll) or something (check % chance to fire and either fire or not).

This was a relatively recent change and only affects damage procs slotted in autohit powers. IIRC the hit roll for those is affected by global acc and tohit buffs but I'm not entirely sure.

Also worth pointing out that while the power itself is autohit, the procs slotted in the power are not.

They're going to get that overhaul eventually and unfortunately that's likely the direction that'll be taken. The powers dev has said on multiple occasions that epic pool powers are supposed to have a "penalty" (usually implemented as a recharge time increase), but then the increased recharge time makes them good proc options. You may recall that during one of the beta cycles for a previous update Scrapper and Stalker snipe powers were tweaked to have an "internal recharge time" that was half their actual recharge time to specifically nerf their interaction with procs. While I agree that some of the epic and patron pools could stand to be looked at, I don't think everyone will walk away happy from it when it does happen.

Mids is correct, though I would expect the Dark Mastery version to get the nerfbat at some point when the powers that be get around to an epic/patron pool overhaul.

In the case of Corrosive Vial I'm pretty sure its base damage is low enough where you won't get much mileage out of straight damage enhancements and would be better off putting damage procs (i.e. "chance for x") in there instead.

While I appreciate the extra inf in my pocket, I'm now curious if/when this changed because it was not working for me when I last tried it right after the patch which got rid of the +/++ system for combined enhancements. I spent a lot of time trying to game the system and combine what I had in my base bins to take advantage of the price spikes of level 51-53 enhancements but ended up a bit frustrated.

While these special enhancements can be combined, they can only be combined with an identically-named enhancement (no combining Hamis with synthetic ones, or Titans with Hydras, etc. etc.).

Ehhh, not exactly. On an M1 Mac the game is being run through at least two layers of translation/emulation so there's a bit of overhead. It'll run though.

Rebirth just did a bunch more asymmetrical costume stuff, specifically how patterns interact with each other, and they don't have all costume pieces unlocked from the get-go like HC does. On the surface it doesn't look any different but it significantly increases the number of costume combinations you can use. Trying to use HC costumes on other servers is not usually going to end well because HC has rewritten a good chunk of the costume-related code and HC's version doesn't always play nice with OuroDev-based servers because those are using the legacy I24 costume code as their base. One of the stated goals of Rebirth's costume changes is to maintain maximum compatibility with other I24-based servers. This is a pretty bad take on it - those are both low-population servers because they didn't spin up until around a month after Homecoming by which point they were never going to pull a significant fraction of players away. You can argue otherwise 'til the end of time but the single biggest motivation for players to stay on Homecoming was players were already established and didn't want to start over again. In the case of Rebirth at least, they've done a pretty good job of making sure everything's relatively true to the way it was at shutdown and have no issues in the "stability, balance, things that actually make games work" department. Thunderspy definitely has more of a "throw things at the wall and see what sticks" vibe though,

Tequila is eventually going to be deprecated and no longer receive manifest updates from Homecoming, at which point you'll no longer be able to connect to the servers and play. At any rate, the current launcher version is a "release" version, though there are still "test" and "MacOS" branches.

The entire reason the other servers exist is fundamental differences in how they think the game should be experienced (veteran levels, incarnate XP/drops everywhere, P2W vendor, XP boosters, etc.). That's not something that can be resolved by something like "hey, come work for us now" unless you want a bunch of different codebases and at that point... why not just keep doing your own thing?

It runs through Wine, which is running through (AFAIK) Rosetta. There are several people on these boards running the game on M1 machines and haven't reported any performance issues.

If there's any influence on any of the current servers from members of the former dev team that wouldn't be public because that sort of thing would probably be pretty bad juju. I don't quite get what you mean by "the most organized" either. I'm also not holding my breath on any of these servers ever being made "official" and honestly I'm hoping that it never happens, because if it did it's more likely than not going to mean any server that isn't Homecoming is going to have to go into hiding, so to speak. Except it does matter. People wanted to play CoH again after seven years - badly - and when the first server was spun up most people stayed there even after other groups started their own simply because they'd already been established for a few weeks. Unfortunately none of the servers (including Homecoming) publish population data but it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's been paying attention the last two and a half years that there aren't nearly as many people on Homecoming as there were in 2019. Is that a problem? No, not really, the population is still plenty large enough. From what I've been able to tell the non-Homecoming server populations have remained relatively steady but they were never that large to begin with. One of these is a game being built from the ground up by a group of people who had never made an MMO before, and the other is 1) built by an established team and 2) reskinned from an existing in-progress game in the aftermath of the CoH shutdown. It's no surprise the latter has a working alpha while the former continues to be vaporware (and I put a good chunk of change into that Kickstarter back in the day). To your first point: yes, this is true. Rebirth does good work. Their updates are well-intentioned and well-tested and their goal is to continue development in the spirit of what they think Paragon Studios would have done. If the roles were reversed and Rebirth had been the first server spun up, Homecoming would be in the situation of having a small population. It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy: players tend to gravitate toward HC not necessarily because of what a given server is doing but rather simply because HC has a larger population. For what it's worth, Rebirth's population tends to fluctuate from the mid 20s to the 70s and occasionally higher during weekends and special events. TL;DR: Other servers do things differently than Homecoming and offer players a choice. Having this choice is good. I'm going to continue to play on Homecoming for various reasons but I do spend some time on the other servers because the stuff they're doing is cool. Pretending the other servers (who, by the way, are also actively developing the game) don't matter because of their small population is counterproductive.

The game's been running on M1 Macs for a while now.

Sorry, I'll clarify. I'm defining "competition" as "if a player has more than a basic knowledge that CoH is playable these days they know the server exists." By my count that's another three or four servers on top of the Homecoming ones. I play almost exclusively on Homecoming and dabble a bit on Rebirth because they do have some pretty cool stuff over there which I hope one day makes its way here, but if you think Homecoming has the lion's share of the population for any reason other than "it was set up by the same people running the 'secret' server and was the first public server out of the gate" you should re-evaluate.

I wasn't aware that player count was the only metric that mattered for whether a server was operating, my bad.

Defenders are fine, Vigilance is fine, Corruptors are fine, Scourge is fine. TL;DR: /jranger

I don't agree - competition is a good thing and it keeps the HC development team from making hare-brained decisions that might drive population elsewhere.

There are a small handful of players who stream but no one with more than a few subs/viewers. Positive Gamer was the only streamer with decent view numbers and streamed on HC until the initial streaming ban but then migrated to other servers and hasn't returned.

Out of curiosity, why pair the Emp with the Brute?