srmalloy

I had a tip, opened in Talos Island ('Elegant Party Favor'), send me to Dark Astoria -- which is a co-op zone -- for the mission. After completing the mission, I got the same 'wait until you're back in Paragon City' message with another tip. Either tips should not send you to co-op zones, or the tips themselves should be openable in co-op zones. EIther way is a viable resolution, although given the nature of Kallisti Wharf, if it doesn't generate tips, would feel somewhat odd.

That's why I don't think it's possible to do within the limits of how the game engine works. We already see the limits of it in the "Cure Lost" mission ending Montague Castaneda's arc, where the Lost you target freezes, then vanishes, while a civilian spawns and runs to where the Lost was standing. But it's entertaining, and when I got that tip mission again, I was able to get Dr. Henzinger to take out two of his Crey buddies after I beat him up.

In the villain tip mission "Doctor's Orders", where you have to find two Paragon Protector NPCs and beat them down until they turn friendly, interrogate them, and then find Dr. Henziger and repeat the process, he also turns 'friendly' (reticle turns from orange to blue) when you get him down far enough. When this happens, he will turn on and attack any nearby Crey NPCs that are still standing. I don't know if this is intended behavior (i.e., 'no witnesses'), but it was entertaining to see him turning on what should have been his own men. Given the way friendly/neutral/hostile status works, though, I'm not sure there's a way to correct this if it's not the right behavior.

When I opened the "You Can't Keep Your Balance!" tip while my character was in Kallisti Wharf, I got the message "Now is not a good time to investigate this tip. Wait until you are within the streets of Paragon City before you attempt any investigation." If Kallisti Wharf is part of Paragon City, then it should be possible to activate regular tip missions there -- since they're always door missions, there shouldn't be a problem with just designating a door and spawning the mission instance normally; the tip itself already determines whether it's a hero/vig or villain/rogue tip, so that wouldn't be an issue with the zone being co-op.

And I seem to have verified this experimentally, as I was running a Brute solo around one of the buildings in KW to get the tips for the event. He was running at +0x1 until he got his tier-3 Alpha, when I bumped him to +1 — but the ToT spawn levels didn't change. When he ran the 'whispered rumor' tip missions, though, the mobs spawned at +1 as his notoriety setting indicated,

No, I think that's correct, as one of the other BP minion mobs is a 'Husk'.

I think it's an artifact of the game engine, and so won't be able to be fixed, but I encountered a situation, then repeated it, where ToT mobs block movement before they spawn. When you knock on a door and get 'TRICK', the door(s) will open and one or more mobs will exit and attack. What I found is that the spawning mobs create collision boxes before they actually spawn onto the map. I had knocked on a door, gotten 'trick', then realized I was standing too close to the door and attempted to back up, but was unable to. While I was stopped, two lieutenant-rank vampires exited the door, running through me, and stopped in positions that, had they been there a moment earlier when I tried to move back, would have explained why I was unable to move, because they were blocking the direction I tried to move in. I believe this is unfixable because it is a complicated combination of your client rendering, the server spawn generation determining the location of spawned mobs before they actually appear, and lag in your connection to the server. However, because it is a case of the game subjectively not doing the 'right' thing, I thought I would report it so that people were aware of it.

When you don't have any remaining Enhancement Convertors, the 'Convert' option disappears from the Enhancements tab on your UI (normally to the right of the 'Manage' option). However, this occurs even if you have the Convert window open at the time, making you find the little red-dot button at the top right of the window to close it, which can be, depending on your UI window arrangement, overlapping another window and hard to see. (I know, zeroth-world problem, but it's still annoying) It's a minor QoL change, but can the 'Convert' option in the Enhancements tab of the UI be modified so that it's always visible when the Convert window is open, even if you've run out of convertors, to make it a little easier to close the window when you're done with it? Once you close the window, the option should still disappear if you don't have any convertors.

This is my normal practice -- don't run a TF until you've hit a level that caps the powers you would have available at the max level of the TF -- so for example, Citadel being 25-30, I'd want to be at least 35 before I ran it.

There's not a lot of benefit, since in the situations where the notification of rewards would get spammed off chat window too quickly to notice (i.e., MSRs, ToTing, etc.) you'd also have the level notice get spammed out of view the same way, but it's a minor advantage once you get past VL 12, where you can see how many vet levels you need for the next emp merit reward.

When you ding a new level, you get a message in chat saying something like "You have reached Combat Level XX! See a trainer to upgrade your abilities." However, once you hit 50, it just says the same thing again and again, with no useful information. Would it be possible to have the message modified so that, after 50, it appends your new veteran level to the announcement -- i.e., something like "You have reached Combat level 50/14" instead of just 'Combat level 50', so you can see immediately what your veteran level is, instead of having to check /infoself?

It wasn't so much that he wanted boss fights in CoH to be repetitive team wipes as the players figured out what worked and what didn't, but that he clung to this premise as part of his vision for the One True Way™ to play CoH without recognizing that, in a game where the players are expected to cooperate to complete content, the ways to win the 'Big boss' fights would get shared aggressively, making the whole premise worthless.

I don't know if it would be archived anywhere, but I remember seeing a statement from him that 'fun' was throwing yourself at the end boss again and again, being defeated over and over until you found the one trick that let you defeat them. And wanted it to be that way in CoH, with each player learning how to defeat the various big bosses as they leveled. Which showed that he didn't really understand how the Internet worked, because as soon as someone found a way to defeat a big boss, that process would be splashed all over the Net for other players to find, shortcutting his desire that each player learn for themselves.

This was one of the things that led to the "slight tweak" to Regen back on Live, when the devs responded to claims that Regen scrappers could take on insane spawns routinely (despite protestations from the playerbase), where the testing on their internal test server seemed to support the claims, and only after the changes had been coded and scheduled for rollout did the devs admit that their internal test server lacked the "purple patch", meaning that their test scrapper was hitting much too often, doing way too much damage, and taking way too little damage compared to the same fights on the live servers... and deployed the changes anyway. What people were seeing was that the Regen scrappers were finishing fights essentially unhurt, while the other ATs would be significantly injured if they weren't popping greens or receiving heals through the fight. But they didn't see that a Regen scrapper would typically drop to 25% HP or less about a quarter of the way into the fight, and then heal back from there as they defeated opponents. The issue was that, once you got your incoming damage down below your healing rate, a regen scrapper was unkillable, healing the same damage over and over and over again until it was gone -- but it was learning to judge where that point was -- you either went down quickly if you got overwhelmed, or came out looking fresh and clean. But people didn't see that part; all they saw was the end of the fight, and it made Regen scrappers look better than they were; the people who learned to judge that dividing line the best got the most out of the powerset. Pre-IOs (where the 'rework' occurred), it was hard for Regen scrappers to get significant amounts of Resistance and Defense, so they remained vulnerable to the big alpha strikes; after IOs, good slotting could significantly boost your Res and Def -- and those two stats made a disproportionate contribution to survival for them.

Or set them to 'passive follow', so they stop attacking and follow you, then switch them back to their regular configuration when you get away from them.

Mystic Blast makes a decent single-slot power if you have a power pick you don't have a good choice for (i.e., nothing you can pick to use for a LotG mule), drop an Acc/Dam IO or HO into it and boost it to +5, then use it only when its powerup triggers. The only drawback is that it has a relatively slow animation, but with the augmented damage it's worth keeping as a fallback.

There are other cases where the draw distance priority for objects in the game are screwed up. One that's easy to see is the way the large sailboats are rendered. You can approach them fairly closely, and only a thin wedge of the luff from the foot to the head is visible: But if you keep getting closer, you hit a point where the server decides that it should render the whole sail, and suddenly the rest of the sail pops into existence: Some time ago here, and also back on Live, I submitted requests for the draw-distance settings for the sailboats to be looked at so you didn't have boats floating around with partial sails up, but it seems to be a sufficiently minor issue to not be addressed, like Paragon City's continuing violation of the IALA Maritime Buoyage Standard (but that's a different and particularly geeky failure on the original devs' part).

The star destroyers and TIE fighters were firing green blasts, the Rebel ships red blasts. The hand weapons are a different category; I think that it's "Legends" now, but there was a lore explanation that there were different grades of tibanna gas for blasters, and you got different bolt colors from different grades of gas, and the Empire didn't want to pay for all of its troops to fire the more expensive ammo when they were all expendable anyway.

The problem I see with having a shield automatically moving to your back when not in combat is that this would likely be a customization for the powers, not for the characters, since you are changing how the powers animate, which means that you'd have to have a 'stowed out of combat' customization option for each power in the set that normally puts your shield on your arm when active. And biostem's observation about how a click power would interact with this is another consideration.

And it's likely way too late to do anything about it this year even if it's considered a sufficiently big problem to warrant addressing, but putting down a block Group Fly suppression field at the murder motels could kill off the 'flying AFK Bots MM' crowd in the middle of the courtyard that I've seen so many complaints about, as the bots would all remain on the ground where they're continually vulnerable to attacks from the ToT mobs, and the AFK MM player could come back to find that their pets have been dead for an hour or more, and they haven't been getting any XP.

After repeatedly getting door missions across the street from it, I posted a suggestion to turn on ToTing in Dark Astoria so the murder motel there could be used to spread out the mobs at the Peregrine Island site. It wouldn't be as popular, since a) low-level characters would have to be able to make their way across an Incarnate-level zone to get there, and b) it's a fair distance away from the hospital, unlike the 'out the door and across the street' return from the PI hospital, so it would presumably be less heavily-swamped. But I don't know whether the HC staff will be doing it; I'll have to wait and see.

But he's late to the game...

And even within one choice of powersets, you can get radically different playstyles -- my Grav/Traps Controller plays completely different on teams than she does solo, because when solo she can take the time to lay down a minefield before Wormholing a spawn into it, with her Singularity grabbing any survivors, but on teams the "gotta go fast" fixation virtually eliminates any ability to take the time to set up 'thin the herd' minefields before the Scrappers and Brutes are wedged into the middle of a spawn.

I know; there are lots of people that just accept the default configuration for power customization. For myself, I always go in and tweak the colors for Ice and Cold to look more frigid (and somewhat more transparent in the process), just like I customize the powers for any character with a Radiation powerset to remove the utterly-wrong green color (which became the popularly-believed color of radiation because of its association with the color of the phosphor in radium-paint illuminated dials), replacing it with the proper blue color of Cherenkov glow. Similarly, I'll often adjust the colors for fire effects, using the black-body color distribution to shift the effects toward the blue end of the spectrum to represent hotter flames (I also joke about how, in Star Wars, you can see that the Imperial laser blasts are more powerful than the Rebellion laser blasts, because the Imperial blasts are green, while the Rebel ones are red).

And movement suppression in PvE seems to be an artifact of the original devs saying "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons", then changing it to "We won't make PvE changes purely for PvP reasons", then to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons", then stopped talking about it entirely as more PvP-centric changes spread back into PvE. The initial justification for movement suppression was to counter jousting, where you could queue up an attack, then boom past your target close enough for the attack to trigger, which because of network delay wouldn't happen until you were well past your target, and if your target only had melee attacks (or only short-ranged attacks, you would be out of range and they would be unable to attack back. And in the initial implementation for PvE, I can sort of understand it, even though it does run up hard against how superspeed is used in the genre. And movement suppression only changed how jousting was done in PvE, not eliminated it; I had a Katana/Regen Scrapper with Super Jump, and I got pretty good at attacking the Sky Raider Sky Skiffs by queueing up an attack, then jumping past them; Movement Suppression didn't abruptly halt his momentum, so he'd carry on the jump and land a fair distance away, wait for the suppression to fade, and repeat the process until the Sky Skiff went down. And with the sweeping "give every mob in the game a ranged attack" change, the original PvE justification is no longer there -- no matter what mob you're making a jousting run against, they've got a ranged attack that, with their response being entirely server-side, will be queued up for them to shoot back the moment you aggro them, so unless you one-shot them, you'll be taking return fire from them, and likely from their entire spawn. I don't see that there is any real remaining justification for movement suppression in PvE (I try to avoid PvP wherever possible, so I can't judge there); it's an artificial mechanic that I feel has outlived its original purpose.