srmalloy

It's a rather tortured acronym, coming from "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Purpose System". The basic functionality had a medical information system written to use it as a database -- VA FileMan -- then the codebase was expanded further to become CHCS -- the 'Composite Health Care System' -- and used across the entire DoD healthcare system until it had a partially-separate GUI-based system -- AHLTA (Armed Forces Healthcare Longitudunal Technology Application) -- take over part of its functionality until both it and CHCS were replaced by a new medical-information system (MHS Genesis), with CHCS becoming a static archive until the legally-mandated live access period expired and the whole thing could be archived to Iron Mountain. MUMPS' claim to fame is that it handles sparse data better than any other language. For example, in C, if you have an array with three indexes, each of which can range from 1 to 100, you need to allocate a million cells for the array to define it, even if you're only populating it with ten values. In MUMPS, you define the cells at those indexes, and you've allocated ten cells of storage. So you can store A(1,3), A(1032,42), A(13,999), and A(3,"ALPHA"), and have an array variable with four values populated, instead of the million-cell or more array C would require even if it could handle a string as an array index.

I can see splitting the TF across both IP and Talos, but rather than it being a case of "Talos!" "IP!" "Talos!" "IP!" back and forth forever, have the first half of the TF be missions in IP up to the 'defeat 20 Council', and then move to Talos; aside from repointing where the missions are located, this would only require rewriting the briefing text. Another option is to have some of the "first half" missions, including the one right before you take the parts to Fareed Abdullah, be in Steel Canyon, with your being sent there because the data you acquired from the computers in the first couple of missions refers to bases concealed there, then the mission in Skyway, with the information you recover there allowing Citadel to identify several facilities around Talos setting up production lines for the Zenith Mech Men, and ultimately being sent after Vandal. So it would be a progression across zones, not back-and-forth again and again, and the Skyway mission could be moved into Talos with no loss of generality.

I think it's "Old Guard" or "Original Generation", a reference to the original TFs with the implication that they're outdated and no longer fit for purpose.

I think that they're referring to your putting, say, "Positron's Blast" into the search box and getting a disorganized return back. I think mechahamham has the right of it that the return from searches often feel like the only terms in the search are what you put in the search box and the level min/max choices -- which points up another quirk, in that attuned enhancements appear to have an internal level of 1, regardless of the level range of the set, so if you search for "Positron's Blast" with a level range of 35-40, you'll get the listings for level 35 through 40 crafted Positron's Blast enhancements and level 35 through 40 recipes for Positron's Blast enhancements, but not the attuned enhancements in the set, even though the level range you specified is within the set range, so the attuned IOs are valid for the query. And I agree with you that the amount of query design necessary to make the more general queries present returns in a more 'rational' order will be significant. Speaking from experience -- I spent thirty years doing datamining from a medical information system, both in MUMPS and SQL Server -- what needs to be done first is to sit down and decide how the search returns should be presented, including ordering, and what changes need to be made to either the database or the queries to support this (i.e., making attuned enhancements show up within the level range of the set, rather than making you set the minimum level to 1 in order to show attuned enhancements in the return), and then go through and make the query changes, using a test database like one of the testing or internal testing servers so you can't accidentally corrupt the live database (even though you should only be making 'select' queries, so that shouldn't be possible, I've seen stupider things happen).

In my case, Vanessa was alone, and it was a lone Seneschal that aggro'd on her, so it was just the two of them. Interestingly, the burn patch the Seneschal was putting down didn't affect my character (verified by her Mental Lance power not showing the 'in combat' yellow ring) as I was standing in the burn patch talking to Vanessa.

In the mission "Talk to the person in charge" mission from Tina McIntyre -- the follow-on to defeating the Clockwork and Carnival leaders in Waxahachie Park -- I had approached Vanessa de Vore, who had a blue reticle, indicating that she was 'friendly'. When I approached, a nearby Seneschal aggro'd on her, and has been spending the last five minutes futilely blowing fire at Vanessa and whacking Vanessa with her torch. There's no chance that the Seneschal will be able to do enough damage to defeat Vanessa, but it's amusing to see her own people turn on her like this.

I can't say for sure, because my memory is not that precise for a detail this small, but I believe this was happening back on Live as well, and I have seen it on occasion during all of the ToT events on Homecoming. Unfortunately, it was also in the context of a league at the murder motel, so ascribing contributory factors is impossible.

There are times when you have another power that you want to be autofiring more reliably than Hasten, as the movement-key bind won't fire if you're not moving forward, or if you use the LBUTTON+RBUTTON combo to move forward. For example, if I have a character with Conserve Power, I'll generally put that on auto, rather than Hasten, and let the movement bind trigger Hasten.

CoH Mod Installer, "Completely Muted Recharge Sound" -- it silences the "power not recharged yet" bleat.

Mine is similar to yours -- my keybinds.txt has W "+forward$$powexecname hasten" -- so that hasten tries to fire each time I move forward; for a simple bind it would be: /bind W "+forward$$powexecname hasten"

There is a partial solution, but it both involves coding changes and borders on harassment even if the code changes are made. The code change would be to disable the "teleport closer if too far from the summoner" code for AFK MMs, then take advantage of the fact that the game is set up so that all pets, except for the 'untouchable' T4 Radial Lore pet, will automatically accept teleports. This can be a serious inconvenience on teams and leagues if you don't have your 'prompt to accept teleport' option turned off -- if you're an MM with your henchmen clustered around you fighting a group of hostile mobs, and someone else on the team/league fires off Incandescence -- your henchmen will instantly 'accept' the teleport and disappear to wherever the Incandescence drops them, leaving your MM with their schwanzstucker in their hand facing the hostile mobs while you're trying to get your mouse to the 'accept' button on the teleport prompt window. (It's still better than having the prompt disabled and automatically accepting any teleport; I don't know how many times I've been tempted to take a character with Incandescence to the southeast corner of the instance during a MSR and Incan the league way the hell out of the way just to illustrate to everyone how much you can get jerked over by not setting the 'prompt to accept teleport' option)

It is a known quirk of the game that if a contact offers you the first mission in a story arc, it opens the arc for that contact, even if you don't accept the mission, taking up space in your 'open arcs' allotment until you break down and actually run their arc.

It's a stylistic thing, but when I'm running my Grav/Traps Controller through missions solo, I regard it as a bit of a personal failure if any of the mobs in the mission get an attack off before they go down. I respec'd out of a couple of procs in Wormhole that I'd seen in a build here on the forum because they didn't mesh with the playstyle -- Wormhole by itself doesn't cause aggro, but if you put a proc in it, the proc check aggros everything in the effect radius, even if the to-hit check on the teleport fails.

Pfft. The Italians had a wider range of elite and special forces units during WWII than any of the other combatants, including paratroopers, assault engineers, sea-landing and swimmer units, long-range recce and ski units, and even hand-picked Fascist 'Mussolini' units. The Decima Flottiglia Motoscafi Armati Siluranti (Xa MAS), created in 1938 as the 1a Flottiglia Mezzi D'Assalto, was the first unit of commando frogmen in the world, later copied by the Royal Navy and US Navy. Other commando and special forces units include the Folgore, the Arditi, the Bersagliere, and the ARDA (Arditi Distruttori Regia Aeronautica)

That would suggest that it's some sort of timing or network packet issue, where the direction from the server to the client to play the 'hit' sound gets lost.

The Brandenburgers, and their predecessor unit, the Freikorps Ebbinghaus, was formed by and operated as part of the Abwehr until it was broken up in the late war, some personnel being transferred to an SS-Jagdverband under Otto Skorzeny, with the remainder redesignated as an infantry division, then given a panzer regiment and redesignated again as a panzergrenadier division -- a sign of the Reich's declining fortunes at the end of the war, with commando operations no longer being viable as an adjunct to normal operations. The standard WWII German infantry squad had one machine gun, one submachine gun, two pistols, and seven rifles. Initially the squad leader would carry a Kar98k, but this was replaced with an MP40. The machine gunner had a pistol as a secondary weapon, the assistant gunner had a pistol as his primary weapon, and the remainder of the squad, including the Munitionsträger (the ammo carrier for the machine gun), would carry the Kar98k. Squad members would also have some number of grenades, either the Stielhandgranate 24 'stick grenade' or the Eierhandgranate 39 'egg grenade'. (Sources: Buchner, Alex: Handbuch der Infanterie 1939-1945, S. 15-16; German Squad in Combat: p.1-3 ; Töpfer: p. 5-7; Bull: p.23-24)

I haven't been able to determine a consistent way of replicating the problem, but as I've been running my Fire/Dark Brute around one of the buildings in Kallisti Wharf knocking on doors and beating up whoever answers, I've noticed that sometimes I'll see the floating damage numbers from Greater Fire Sword float up over my target, but the 'hit' sound for the power doesn't play. It can be hard to visually verify this sometimes, as the floating DoT numbers from Incinerate can partially obscure the Greater Fire Sword damage number, but it's happened enough that I think it's worth reporting.

Oh, I certainly agree, but like a number of things with the CoH UI, the defaults aren't set up that way. I'd like to see an option added so that you could set your default to having your pet window controls to advanced mode, so you wouldn't have to adjust it for every character, but that's an "is this really worth programmer time to fix?" issue, since you don't have to worry about it until your character has pets to control, which for many of the ATs/powersets isn't until they make their first Lore boost.

Then you should be proposing that it, like many other of the powers that were originally "only on the ground", be altered to function when you're close to the ground, and can be used when you're in minimal-altitude hover or flight.

Or, as I describe it when someone asks me why I dislike open-world PvP, it's because it's a magnet for the sort of loser gamer whose sole measure of their "leet skillz" as a gamer is how fast their level-capped combat monster in BiS gear can gank newbies fresh out of the tutorial zone, and who run like scared chickens from anything that even might be close to an even fight.

Depends on circumstances. Playing solo, my Grav/Traps Controller uses Poison Trap regularly, putting down 3-5 Trip Mines, a Poison Trap (occasionally two) and sometimes an Acid Mortar, then Wormholing a spawn onto the mines. The Poison Trap helps ensure that any survivors of the blast don't react as they get a random piece of sculpture bounced off them. On teams, though, the team is generally fixated on speed, moving so fast that in the time it takes to put down Poison Trap and one Trip Mine, the team has already bumrushed the next spawn, so she normally uses Poison Trap and Trip Mine for preemptively mining the known approaches of ambushes (like in the Yin TF, when she plants several PTs in the antechamber of the reactor room, knowing that a Freakshow ambush will be coming through there). Since Traps doesn't have VG, though, I can't speak to it for that character.

Set the pet window controls to Advanced Mode, so you get both the Aggressive/Defensive/Passive and Attack/Follow/Goto icons.

Weirdly, when I took one of my characters to Annah just now, the "Supergroup Details" category was visible, with 'Candy Cauldron' as a non-available choice -- but because the character already had all the badges from earlier Halloween events and had been dumping the salvage into a storage rack for new characters to grab a set for the extra slot. Update: Checking with another character that did have the requisite salvage, both the category and the Cauldron were visible, with the Candy Cauldron a creatable choice, even though all of my characters belong to the same vanity SG, which already has a Candy Cauldron installed. Is the Candy Cauldron a 'buy once for each placement' item, or a 'buy once, place many' item?

They're resistant to psionics in general, making not just Confusion but Psi Melee and Psi Blast annoying to use against them.

Which way you're facing when you exit the portal appears to depend on your position relative to the portal when you click on it; I've been able to go through the portal and come out facing the stairs (both ways), but so far have not been able to do it consistently.