Shenanigunner

This came up in-game... I'd appreciate any and all feedback about which transporters allow access to 'Board Transit' mission destinations. Apparently some do, some don't and some are selective. If you get a BT mission, burning some TP uses to see which ones list it would be a huge help!

...and in other hilarity, I went from this to a BP mission... with a nekkid shaman on the other side of a glass door. Maybe it's a new cult-within-a-cult? Maybe we can hope the Carnival lassies pick up the belief? 😄

It's also common for the "ID photo" of contacts and the like to be missing hair, helmets, goggles etc. Not sure what amusing technical flaw causes that.

😜

Removing tailor function from trainers would be a theme/game/consistency thing; I do like seeing the world "make sense." Giving all tailors full powers is the 'duh' here — and I assume it's a fairly simple change on the dev side. Multiplying the number of Icon/tailors... not sure it's worth the effort. Costume changes are far from an every-session thing, or (I think for most of us) even an every-week thing. Between tailors already all over the zones and the simplicity of adding an Icon NPC to a base... I'd put this way down the list from the first two, with some other bigger "zone update' effort. I've become almost entirely base-centric anyway, and pop into the base for travel, vendors, training and what little costume work I need. I suspect a large portion of the player base is the same, whether it's their own base, an SG or just guest access.

That was it. as I found this afternoon while carefully checking my badge list. I don't think I've ever had an alt fail to get Patroller by about 12-15. However, I haven't let this alt "patrol" offline much, so I'm only at 25% at 25. Sigh. Thanks for the confirmation.

Unnecessary to the gamers who just want the game bent their way. I completely get that. And I have made it clear that it could use exactly the same code base, exactly the same implementation, update after update, just as five shards already do, despite some player differences among them... with one additional switch enabled that already exists on beta/test. No other difference unless the mass pleas of the gamers there want further anti-nerfs. I haven't heard one single cogent argument against the idea itself, except misunderstandings about this and that I somehow advocate "banning" some subset of users. I've said and mean nothing of the kind... but if all the crazed powergamers migrate there, we're all better off, including them.

Devote one (1) shard to one (1) option that bypasses leveling to end-game content. At the risk of speaking for the devs or seeming to dismiss their efforts, I think "completely unrealistic" is a bit much. Especially against the effort needed to "rebalance the game for the min-max players who are the only ones who seem to count any more anyway."

I've played since launch and only slotted the odd IO I found on the sidewalk. And the spread of material I've contributed to the community should indicate I am not a casual, kill-some-time player. Absolutely NOTHING stands in the way of this power-gaming style. The HC devs have brought down the bars on faster leveling and faster power building — bordering on too much so, IMVHO. So why can't the power-gamer, min-max builders just accept that they are welcome, even admired, and allowed (in all ways) to play this style... and quit trying to drag the game to that model, with only "poor people no one cares about" left out of the gameplay and "balance"? I didn't make the suggestion for a separate shard for these folks lightly, but MAN was it unpopular. At least among power gamers. I can't for the life of me figure out why... is it only fun to play this style if you have all the other players as an audience?

As I have been saying in a number of threads. I have no problem with the extreme players; I do get a bit exasperated at the continual movement towards lowering every bar to enable this play mode, make it all about racing to end-game content and builds, etc. If I read the OP correctly, the game should be "balanced:" for this extreme play mode, leaving all others (those of us who don't scrabble for IO sets at every earliest opportunity, for example) to... what? "Learn better?" No. Or, as Heinlein suggested, "Hell, no!"

Okay, I'm back in the Confused column. New alt, just hit 24. Has been parked near a base portal almost every single logoff. Got the Monitor Duty power. Got the Monitor badge (duh) and then Passport. It's been quite a few days/logoffs/hours... and still no RRM power. (And no, I don't mean have the power, haven't earned any uses — I get that distinction.) Does anyone have a specific idea on when RRM drops, AFTER you have the badges and WHILE you're spending every idle minute standing next to a big blue glowie tower?

Nice suggestion, but probably beyond the platform/engine's abilities. I can't think of anything else in the game that scales dynamically. Toon height is about it. (And that and other 'scaling' is just mesh warping.) There is the pseudo-sorta-kinda scaling of positioning things through others or through walls. I make nice glowy walk-through partitions by sinking Rikti Computers in the floor and walls, for example.

The passing civilians can tell you. They are coded by the first letter of their name: E: Edna and Ernest will tell you the official (real-world) server time, which is likely off by several time zones for you. F: Frank and Francesca will tell you the official in-game time. (See below for details.) G: Gordon and Greta will tell you how many players - "masks" - are in the zone currently. M: Max, Mongo and Mary will tell you the number of hours your current alt has been in the game. N: Nick, Nora and Nanoo will tell you the number of times your current alt has logged in. O: Oscar and Olivia will tell you how long your current alt has been on this server-day. Note the last three. You can find a suitable civ using the master targeting bind: /bind ADD "target_custom_next base" Need to know? Find a stream of civs and whack NumPad-plus until the right one lights up. Hit (F)follow and tap them. Yes, I suppose a slash command could be used to please the impatient. But asking is so much more... fun. (In game time, by the way, is a 24-hour decimal clock (100 'minutes' per hour) on a 30-minute cycle.) Further thought on implementation: add the numbers to the Combat Numbers list. Easy to look up, even easier to add to a display panel.

Well, okay. And being on record that I think this is a change worth making — that all tailors should have all functions, with the reasons for the division being long obsolete — I gotta devil's-advocate just on dev-time basis. Anyone who's worked with a software team knows the one programmer who will expend a dozen man-hours optimizing some bit of code that runs once, for 3 milliseconds, only at program startup. (Good practice is to optimize the modules that occupy the most CPU/system time throughout program execution and work downward.) So on that basis... dev time to make this change, should it be more than perhaps a man-hour in all, is not worth the tiny bit of collective player-time to scoot over to a full tailor one (1) time with every fourth or fifth alt. The features/functions are readily available, after all... just not with maximized convenience. So if the actual change requires more than trivial expenditure of dev time budget... it's not worth it while more important fixes wait.

Got it. And agree. A copy is a copy, no matter how blurry or if it has red shoulder pads instead of the canonical gold ones.

Can't argue that. Seems —seems — like a simple change and a worthwhile one.

On the one hand, I agree that there should be more... consistency in these sorts of things, and implementing it should not be a dev-crusher or game-breaker. OTOH... just how brutally hard and time-wasting is it to go alllllll the way to another zone's shop when you want to play Stretch Armstrong with your alt? 😛

I get your point, but this is a fairly weak example. Walmart et al. aren't somehow stealing Advil's market, they are selling a USP OTC drug on which patents expired quite some time ago. How much they choose to make the packaging look like Advil is moot; I see a wide variety of designs for budget/generic makers, and it's the shelf pricing below that makes the real difference... for consumers who are well enough informed, at least. Because the real crime is that Brand! Name! Advil! is priced as much as 5X the store brand... and being a USP formulation, it's exactly the same stuff. To the point of the thread, though, respecting all valid IP is a good practice, even on thuh net and no matter how many sites and users think it's some kind of capitalist conspiracy. In our delicate position of "borrowing" IP to exist, it behooves all of us — devs, sysops and players — to be a little more scrupulous about outright violation of other properties that in no way are necessary to enjoy the game/world. As I find myself repeating here, "But I wanna" is not a valid argument.

I was just genned for a toon built after a... well known character for which I actually have some rights etc. After discussing it with the GMs, I elected to recast the alt. Not worth setting a bad example. Yes, we're online. No, that doesn't mean we can be as casual about IP as the rest of the net. C'est le guerre.

So I took Experimentation as my first pool power on my Staff Brute. I've had good luck smoothly integrating the TP powers (Jaunt and Translocation) from the other pool powers, but Takeoff is frustrating me. It appears to be a reskin of Foot Stomp, which is great (I love it on my SS tank)... but as a completely separated power there doesn't appear to be any good way to integrate it with the actual jump power. I've exhausted the bind possibilities and come up with only a two-button, three-click version that is erratic. (The long recharge of Takeoff doesn't help here.) Would it be possible to integrate Takeoff into Mighty Leap a little more/smoothly/better, as Jaunt is with Mystic Flight and Speed of Sound? So that it can be used to smoothly Takeoff, then, well take off? I am not sure what approach is best, especially as it's nice as a separate AoE attack, but... I dunno, somethin'?

Glowies don't always seem to have an 'instance name' that can be targeted, but the most useful addition you can make to your targeting options is the Master Targeting Bind: /bind ADD target_custom_next base That makes the numpad-plus key a tap that will search through every discrete object in view — foes, friends, doors(!), hostages, and most objective/glowies. Easy key to tap with your mouse hand. When you can't find the last hostage, go to a high place and slowly turn while whacking +. Move to other places with a good view of some part of the map and repeat. That stupid civ will show up even if you can't see them with normal vision. Pet-runners will probably want to add notmypet to the string, so that you aren't endlessly targeting your zombie doggie bots. Not really recommended because it limits the search, but an "objects/hostages/junk"-only search would be: /bind ADD target_custom_next base notteammate notmypet ...which will pretty much only search for objects and foes. (Oddly, adding notalive will cause the search to skip many objects.) A good time to add the targeted targeting binds, too: /bind CTRL+SUBTRACT "beginchat /bind SUBTRACT target_custom_next enemy alive " /bind SUBTRACT "target_custom_next enemy alive Sorc" Whack Ctrl-Numpad Minus and type in part of the foe name you're looking for. Hit Return. Ctrl-minus now searches for that badge foe, boss, sapper, whatever. Fast to update as needed. (The starting bind uses Sorc for Tsoo Sorcerers, can be changed.) This ONLY works on actual names, not supergroup/villain group/foe associations like "Family" or "Warriors." You have to specify part of an actual name.

Well, mine either, as the emoji should have indicated. As my sometimes-controversial posts should indicate, I think there's a line between polishing off rough edges/adding welcome convenience and... lowering every bar to the floor so that no one ever has to do anything but grind straight to 50. There's more to this world than XP; I'd rather not see the game/world bent to make the power-gaming set happy. But nobody listen to Zathras.

Or the devs could simply add /store to the list, so that no one ever has to go anywhere to slot up. 😜

A base with a trainer and vendor (and Icon tailor, and nurse/insp machine) is an aw'fly nice convenience. Just sayin'.

And that's about it. Man, it sticks ass. 😄