srmalloy

Rikti monkeys and similar mobs can spawn with an icon color of -2 because they're 'underling' rank, which is one down from minion grade; they're still level N, but they con as if they were level N-1 -- so a spawn of a Headman Gunman and two monkeys that spawns at -1 will show the monkeys as green icons.

By the mission spawn algorithm, you'll see level 53-55 critters. It's always been ±1 to the difficulty-adjusted mission level.

So you're Weebles, then...

In missions, the mobs that are spawned can be ±1 to the mission level adjusted for difficulty, so a level 10 mission at +0 can spawn mobs of level 9-11 (at +1, they would be 10-12, etc.). Having mobs spawn +1 to the adjusted mission level has never been a bug; it has been this way all the way back to the initial rollout in 2004.

Not always. Skyway City always had north and south on the same line, as I recall, and Independence Port only had the one station at the north end of the zone, so that it was often faster to get to the south end by taking the tram to Brickstown and taking the road exit west to south IP. North Steel, Talos, and Founders were all on the 'high level' tram. The south IP tram station was added after the two tram loops were merged as a convenience for characters with missions and contacts in the south end of the zone.

I remember many years ago, there were a series of cartoons drawn by an artist after they'd visited the Soviet Union, and one of the cartoons illustrated his observation that all the signs looked like "KAOPECTATE" -- which actually is valid Cyrillic, although it's gibberish. Back then, there was a law that restaurants could only have a generic sign, so regardless of the name of the restaurant, all their signs just said "PECTOPAH" ('Restaurant').

Minor correction -- "...isn't anything like any of the American accents..." -- New England, Boston, Maine, New York, Philadelphia, Southern, Midwestern, Californian, Hawaiian, Pacific Northwest, High Tider, Cajun, or Florida -- and even Midwestern has differences depending on where in the Midwest someone's from. Not as many as there are dialects/accents in Great Britain, but the US is not a monolithic accent, despite the general adoption of the 'Neutral Midwest' accent by newscasters.

I thought I'd remembered it working that way, but I've seen other stupid mistakes on the part of the original devs that stuck around for years. That particular goof would have caused a storm of complaints, though, so I'm glad it's working properly.

I may be mistaken about the way the game handles it, but it may be that you get the 'you need unslotters to perform this action' only if you drag the enhancement to your tray; it may just assume you're deleting it if you pull it out of the slot but don't try to drop it in your enhancement tray. Which seems poorly designed; for maximum backstopping against doing something stupid, if you drag an enhancement out of its slot, but not to either the tray or the trash icon, it should just drop back into the slot you dragged it out of.

I'd expect it, were it to be implemented, to drop you into Statesman Plaza in front of his statue. Equally inconvenient for both blue- and red-side travel.

As an amplification, if you're running her arc through the Pillar of Ice and Fire (as opposed to doing her arc the first time with her as a regular contact), you're treated as if you're on a TF, because that's the way the Paragon Studios devs were able to make Ouro flashbacks work; you're not actually running a TF, so the patch notes relevant to actual TFs don't apply.

If the controller is defined in a game, they will sometimes try to read the data from its interface, and can 'read' phantom data. It's more common with USB devices, which usually have other devices sharing an uplink to the computer through the same physical port, and the controller driver is misinterpreting the data coming in through the USB port.

I haven't had it happen on Homecoming, but back on Live I remember one mission at +0 where every single spawn on the map was +1... except for the boss spawn, which was -1. I guess that was why he surrounded himself with tough guards.

The Citadel Task Force is the best argument I've seen for adding a Slaver digging tool to the game -- use Reveal, point the tool at the end room, press the trigger button and hold it, then just wait until it's finished coring a tunnel straight to the end room. If there happen to be any Council in the way of the beam, well, that's just collateral damage.

Spawns in missions should be ±1 to the modified level of the mission, so if it's a level 50 mission, and you have your missions set to -1 level, you should be getting spawns of level 48-50. If you're getting spawns above your level with missions set to -1, then that needs to be reported, with the contact, mission name, and so forth in the report. That said, there are some missions where, due to mission constraints or design bugs, some mobs spawn above or below that range -- a particular named boss whose level range bottoms out above the mission level, for example, or the quirk where you'll get random level-14 spawns in level 20+ missions because there's a bad mob type in a spawn definition.

It's not a crafting material, but I remember when I first joined Homecoming, you could reliably sell Essence of the Earth inspirations for 10,000 inf, and now I see sale histories running around 10-100, with the track record of selling the extras I get during a Hami raid showing the occasional 500, or even more rarely 1000, but not more than that, with occasional sale history runs as low as 1.

Well, to start with, the fact that you have completely different rigging -- Thugs/Mercs/Ninja/Undead all follow the basic humanoid rigging for costuming, but Demons, Beasts, and Robots all have unique rigging that doesn't line up with the existing costume piece location points, so just giving all MM henchmen their own costume slot tied to the existing costume creator completely shafts Demon Summoning, Beast Summoning, and Robotics, because it wouldn't work with them. So you'd need to have four separate customization interfaces, with separate sets of customization options -- Necromancy pets should still be visibly undead, regardless of their customization, for example. And you would potentially need three versions of the customizations for each henchman type so that the upgrade status of a henchman is visible. Then all of the art for the customization would have to be completed, and tested against all of the animations to ensure that they remain consistent -- the fully-upgraded Assault Bot has a missile launcher that extends up from its back to fire; if you customize it to no longer have this rocket pack, what new animation is required to replace it, and will it be different for different customization choices?

I already reported this in the Typo thread.

Western society are "guilt" cultures; Korean society, as well as Japanese and Chinese society, are "shame" cultures. In a guilt culture, morality is internal, so that if you do something wrong, as you describe, you are expected to admit it, and where possible make amends for it. In a shame culture, morality is external, and to a great extent, it's not that you are moral, but that you are perceived as moral. That is the principle behind 'face' -- you are expected to feel shame if people believe that you have broken the societal rules, or sometimes even made choices that make it easy for you to break the societal rules. For example, it's shameful for a woman to live alone in Iran, because then she could be a prostitute. It doesn't matter whether she is or not; that she didn't actively work to not look like a prostitute is sufficient reason to shame her. So in shame cultures you can have a lot of public virtue signaling and concealed duplicity. And the shame doesn't just fall on the individual -- it also falls on the individual's superiors, who should have noticed their subordinate's failings and corrected them. In business, it manifests itself as impairing the reputation of a manager who promoted a subordinate, who then became lax and failed to perform their new job properly; the manager should have corrected the subordinate or picked a more appropriate subordinate to promote. As a result, shame cultures tend to be more collectivist, where collective action (like social rejection or imprisonment) is taken when shaming is not effective. And it's not regarded as virtuous to defend your innocence is you can't easily prove it; you're expected to accept your punishment and try to avoid the appearance of guilt in the future. And it is an oversimplification to label Western society as a monolithic 'guilt' culture -- for example, Catholicism is more shame-oriented, while Protestantism is more guilt-oriented. And it can go deeper than that -- conservative protestants are much more shame oriented than progressive protestants.

Primal, a level 50 MM; I don't have any Praetorian characters low enough level to have not made the hero/villain choice moving to Primal Earth.

I logged onto a character I hadn't played in some time, and they had three Valentine tips lingering from the last event. I delivered one to Nightstar, then picked another one that was to be misdelivered to Archon Burkholder, with the directions "Board Transit". Apparently, the CTA transit is not considered 'transit' for this purpose, which sort of jerks over the Praetorian characters who have not yet left Praetoria when they get this type of delivery from the Valentine event; I'm not sure what making the CTA stations 'transit' for these purposes would entail, but it seems only fair to give Praetorians a way to deliver/misdeliver valentines to recipients they would otherwise be unable to reach.

I my opinion, it's more the perceived damage to their 'face' from their having made the decision to shutter the game, and then having the game's player community prove that their decision was a bad one, instead of just accepting that NCsoft management had made their decision and that was the end of it, as proper subordinates would in Korean culture. As long as we're just going off to our corner and playing with their cast-off game, we're no threat to their face, and they can ignore us.

When you're at the holocostume vendor and open the window to buy or convert aether, the menu still shows "Monstrous Aether Conversion", instead of "Unstable Aether Conversion". The actual conversion selection does show 'Unstable Aether', however.

I'm not sure whether it's a bug or WAI, but "Mark and Recall" is unusable when your character is flagged as "Only Affecting Self", even though it's a power that only affects your character. Is this because it spawns a pseudo-pet at the mark location or something similar, so that the game identifies it as affecting something other than just you, and if so, should this be changed?

And that's how we get venereal diseases resistant to many drugs... 😁