Shenanigunner

If you're referring someone to the relatively small pool of entries that are up-to-date enough to be useful, it's not a problem. And yes, things like ED are fairly well explained and accurate and certainly easier to explain by reference than by whacking away in chat. And that's the whole point of a game wiki. But when a large and increasing number of entries are outdated or imcomplete — down to just a stub that barely lists, say, a power name and which set it belongs to — it's not very useful to anyone and can be pointlessly frustrating to someone who doesn't have ten years of game knowledge under their utility belt, so that even crummy, partial info is useful. Telling someone asking a very basic, noob question to go look it up is not helpful if the entries they find are wrong, or have those aggravating SOMEONE PUT INFO HERE SOME DAY tags. They asked, they got sent off to the South 40... and got no answers. (I won't even address the issue of bind and macros; I didn't go down the fork of writing a completely separate manual for those and related topics because the wiki, pinned Reddit posts and the like were such killer ways to manage the info. I think a lot of the reason players reject binds is because being tossed into a haphazard swamp of criss-crossing wiki entries that aren't always up to date is less than unhelpful.) I suppose the 1913 Brittanica one of my siblings still has on a shelf somewhere is useful for looking up some things... but, you know, when the entry for WOMAN says SEE: MAN and it's a bit short on the atomic physics stuff added in Issue 1945... well, flapping a hand and telling someone to "go look it up" isn't very helpful. The point here is: a wiki is a good, essential thing for a game and environment this complex. And it's flat-out rotted to the point where it's a 50-50 shot that the info you seek is there, up to date, and complete enough to be useful to anyone but a charter player. Maybe some community time to bring it up to the 2020's would be a worthwhile project.

It's not a big deal, and I think there's even a fairly easy way to fix it... as much as I anticipate each landing on a City street, the login process is really a tedious run of click... wait... hunt... click... wait... repeat... I use a keyboard macro to actually log in, but if there's any way to automate the steps between "Log In" and standing around scratching your spandex, I haven't found it. A really simple solution that might take a minimal amount of time to implement, and goes with the games keyboard focus and would make hard macro login-to-alt possible... Can keys be assigned to the login buttons? Even invisibly? Just as ENTER is bound to "Log In" once you've entered user name and PW? Say... ENTER to log in (as it is now) Ctrl-X for Exit, Ctrl-S for Settings (just to be complete) R, B and A for Reject / Back / Accept 1- 5 (n) for serer selection, or a mnemonic first letter (E R I T... oops, V? Or X for 'Celsior?) 1-0 for character slot select/auto-Next. Could be expanded for the other pages, to assuage the altitis-afflicted, but that might be too much; most of us can keep our current toys on the first page. Unless the entry screens are really haxxed code, it seems like this is achievable. So Name PW Enter A X 1 would pop me right into my main on Excelsior. That'd be so nice...

Unfortunately, as has been discussed in a couple of recent threads, the wiki is out of date and incomplete on a large scale. Updates since HC have been very selective and many are boilerplate copying from patch notes and the like (if not other outdated or irrelevant sources for other servers); it is not unusual to go through a list of elements and find (basically) slugs like [INSERT ACTUAL POWER NUMBERS HERE]. There are (far too) many entries that are completely misleading; you have to be a very knowledgeable player to be able to know what's right, what's outdated, what's useful and what's become gibberish. It's not, as I said in an other post, just a few rust spots. We need a concerted effort composed of many, many knowledgeable players to update at least the core entries. (And that's also why I get exasperated when someone seeking information is told, whether kindly or with some snark, to go look it up in the wiki.)

Thanks for the cross-link. And no, the problem has not been fixed in any subsequent patch or release. You have to work around this parsing bug for pet emotes.

Believe me, I know this and have made what contributions I can. (CoX is far from the only institution I contribute time and energy to.) But I can't rewrite the Encyclopedia Brittanica single-handed. It's not a matter of a few rust spots here and there, The wiki simply has not been updated enough since HC to be the resource it should be. More than just being outdated and incomplete, it can be frustratingly misleading to any player who doesn't already have enough experience and knowledge to know that something is no longer correct. Maybe we need to make a call for a renewed wiki team, working together to identify weak entries and where there isn't time to fully update or correct them, at least flag them as needing caution with their contents.

Well, then. My sins seem to boil down to (1) forgetting that there's a sizable faction here for whom humor is a struggle, and (2) over a decade of experience with the things I expressed "venom" about. My thought is that a little humor makes what is basically the intersection of accounting and code review a little more digestible, and that I am hardly the only one who, having spent many years trying to be of more than average help to the community, gets a little tired of players who object to some facet of the game and then resist — in repeated and increasingly strident posts, to the point of being nasty or downright rude sometimes — every single suggestion that isn't the one that occurred to them. It is far too common and gets pretty wearing. Other than that, I didn't "venom" anyone but a few player/poster classes we all know exist... and hey, if your irritation is because that Vanguard boot is rubbing a sore spot, consider listening the next time someone with a lot of experience makes a polite, helpful suggestion that is not what you first asked. Because any "venom" — which I usually see as entirely justified exasperation — comes out long after a few posts from knowledgeable players (not just me) that are not just rejected but the poster, in attempting to adapt the answer to objections, is basically told to quit bothering them. Or we can all just stop trying to answer such posts, and leave players who don't understand the first thing about UI customization to confuse each other.

Maybe Ouroboros, in its wisdom, is telling you it's time to get back to work. 🙂 Concur that it might be a badge/auth issue, though.

(Adds TT to list of participants with whom to avoid all attempts at humor.) I'll just add to the last posts that anyone who is frustrated by the crappy text-entry fields of the game and hasn't learned to do all the actual writing over in a more capable tool (I again heartily recommend Notepad++, an asset any time you need to edit ASCII without the limitation of Notepad or the complications of WordPad) — perhaps especially if you are one of those who notes visual or language impairments — then you should adopt this practice posthaste. Even with good vision, patience and a wish to keep some things efficient, the text entry on CoX is up there with those little rubber-stamp letter toys some of us had back in the old days. If your objection to binds in any way lies with how hard it is to write, examine and edit them in-game... triple the above. You can bang out to a NotePad++ window, type like mad, and either save/load or cut and paste in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the error rate of typing in a string longer than "Good one, dude!"

Other than not agreeing it's a change worth dev time, I haven't been in any way judgey. Your visual issue is the same whether the field is 32 characters or 500, or whether you're entering it in a pre-cooked game field or a chat line. I do get a little tired of players who want their fix, their way, and soon, and absolutely every other solution is rejected for an encyclopedia of really stupid, selfish reasons, including the one where anyone who doesn't agree is some kind of control monster. What was whined demanded insisted asked for was a way to hit F10 and have a much longer battle cry without having to adapt any iota of gameplay or UI recollection. I answered with a process that not only does that, but is 99% congruent with the way the game itself does it. And that's not good enough, and to say it is becomes "judgey." Jesus H. on a pogo stick.

Ah, yes, the intermittent forum attention span. Love it. Twenty text exchanges with confusion and topic drift, or "shaddap, dude, no one wants to read your novel!" 😄 :D: 😄

And hey, I just thought of a great use for $battlecry. Put your fave "transport hub" passcode info in it, so you can instantly pass it along when someone asks!

I think you know exactly what I meant - that the list of changes, both needed and QoL/requested, is nearly endless, and even the most dedicated volunteer only has so much time. This is just not a request that "sticks to the wall" for me, not when there is a literally trivial alternative... not even a "workaround," but simply implementing the game feature from a slightly different angle. I am all for every suggestion anyone has to make. But the answer options are not binary; there is often a way to achieve what's asked, or even something mo' bettah, without using up Dev time.

Okay. Four different answers here. ONE The battlecry thing is an awkwardly implemented feature. It's not really an integral game feature, it's a game variable (the only one you can define) that can be called in a bind or macro. F10 is just the default bind for it. Nothing more, nothing less. I've always thought there was some better way to use that variable, but haven't come up with any killer ideas yet. TWO The $battlecry variable is short because battle cries are supposed to be short. I suspect it was arbitrarily set at 35 characters or whatever because that's about as long a "battle cry" any of the original devs wanted to hear. I don't disagree; I am glad on a very minor scale that noobs can't go full Grabthar's Hammer every eight seconds. I am thumbs-down on changing the length. However, I wouldn't mind seeing a few more user-defined variables added to the mix. Not sure of uses, but. THREE No, there's no in-game tutorial for binds and macros. Nor is there for fifty other gameplay elements. Those who use this as an excuse not to bother are just handicapping themselves. Those who use this as an argument that custom binds and macros aren't needed are just... well, expending pointless effort. THREE POINT FIVE The number of people who won't learn a little basic customization, especially those who insist it's somehow unnecessary or wonky or just foo-foo, make me think of people who buy a car, won't adjust the seat, steering wheel, mirrors, temperature, radio station or volume "because that's the way it came," complain about all these things, and then when it's suggested they move the seat forward, snarl, "Don't tell me how to drive my car!" *sigh* (ETA: I wonder how much this category overlaps with the one of players who spend four hours in the costume creator for each alt?) FOUR If you understand that the magical, sacred, perfect game UI is nothing more than the set of binds the devs decided to ship out as default, then it's a short leap to understanding you can rewrite the whole thing if you like, but you can also make little itty-bitty tiny itsy tweak to the aspects you don't find optimal. Like the battlecry. You want a huge, long battle cry? It's ten seconds of writing a different bind for F10, not something that needs to be rejiggered in the game code. You're not breaking the game. You're not "coding." You're not committing a religious offense. You're just adjusting the rear-view mirror. And as for how, you can either ask, and any of about ten regulars here will write the bind string for you, or you can grab a copy of the tech manual I've spent over ten years writing and updating, and if a raw noob can't figure out how to write a simple bind in about ten minutes, I've completely failed not just that effort but about 40 years of writing this stuff professionally (and winning awards for it). And if said noob does the deep dive and wants to completely remod the UI and gameplay, breaking all the sacred rules about How The Gods Handed It Down... well, complete instructions for heresy are included in its 140 pages. ZERO Or just plead to the overworked devs to change some pointless feature because you want it that way. That works, I guess. 😜

Maybe because like email signatures, there's a reasonable length to something you're going to shout out five times a mission. If you can't say it in four or five words, it's not a battle cry, it's a monologue. 😄

Writing a chat bind is hardly "coding." If you can find the ID panel to type in a string, you can add /bind B "s to the beginning of it. /bind B "s Make way for LAZYMAN!" /bind F10 "l And his mighty sidekick KANT-B-ARSED!" 😄

Well, it would be a lot more useful if half of it wasn't out of date and much of the rest... sketchy and incomplete. I've tried to use the wiki (both of them) to validate and update stuff I work on, and I have all but given up after finding so many entries stuck in the Live era, or composed of little more than unfinished, cryptic text clipped from the game. (One more SOMEONE PUT ACTUAL NUMBERS HERE SOMEDAY flag, or the like, and I think I'll scream.) Some entries are useful. Many are useful as long as you understand their limitations. But overall... an encyclopedia in which only one in ten articles can be trusted isn't much use at all.

UI scaling became sort of a two-factor thing sometime in the HC era. I don't have the game up at the moment, but there are two sliders that are kinda-sorta interactive, and one is locked to the Status window (the one with the bars, pips and main menu). If you scale the UI using that slider, everything changes; if you scale Status using /windowscale, it changes the slider. It's all a bit buggy and weird, especially if you try to use both sliders. My overall solution is to set the initial scale of Status to where you like it, then use /windowscale to size every other window just right, then use the UI save and load functions to keep it that way. Never touch the sliders again, and never settle for one generic scaling so that nothing is really the optimal size.

Save/load isn't meant to prevent the problem, any more than for the dumb-bunny move of accidentally rescaling your whole UI. It's just a fast fix when it happens.

Gotta agree with the generality of this. I don't find any of the monster parts appealing in any way, for any build. They come off as dork-ass and childish looking as, say, King Shark.

No objection to an update — it would seem to need little more than an expansion of the database usage — but after all, a random costume is either for hurry-builds on Beta or as a starting idea... emphasis on starting. It only takes a moment to add a tail or cape or backpack. I never used the randomizer on Live — maybe once — but I've actually run through a few dozen clicks to find a starting point for my last couple of alts. If I don't have a firm look/theme idea in mind, it's a nice way to shake things up. But I never consider the result more than a starting sketch...

I find Notepad++ the absolutely essential ASCII-editing tool. In this case, it can display characters, with and without line-returns that sometimes matter to text windows and sometimes don't. It makes Notepad look like a toy and doesn't have Wordpad's faults of using non-ASCII encoding. And it's free and well-maintained.

A thought: does the effect change with cel shading or no?

The in-game email system makes me long for the sophistication of Prodigy, ca. 1986. 😛

Thanks for the observation. Those are all travel powers, which I think are treated as a group by Gull. I suspect other temporary powers behave differently; waiting on reports if anyone has the chance to test the idea.

I haven't had UI elements just randomly reposition in a while; I know there were some buggy doors and missions that did it. I do, however, occasionally have my Nav window (positioned top center) decide to sllllloooooowwwwlllllly slide over to the right border. Won't stop until I log and return. I have no idea why. The general fix for this is to save your UI and reload it, I have a fairly elaborate UI management scheme, but recognizing that's Just Too Much for players who dislike binds and such, I suggest everyone do the following: Tweak your UI until it's perfect, using /windowscale as needed. Type /wdw_save. Now, whenever anything messes up your UI, including you, type /wdw_load. Many oddball problems... minimized if not fixed, exactly. This can be used to transfer a perfect UI to all your alts, too. Save on one, load on all. And if you use different setups on different ATs/alts... well, you can save and load individually, too, but it involves b*nds. 🙂