srmalloy

Also, as a similar 'nice to have' bit of information, a display of combat/security levels if the character is not fully trained -- i.e., "38/40" for a character who is level 40, but only trained to 38 -- so you can see who you need to train to bring up to full status.

Wasn't there a recent update that was supposed to make the visuals for Wild Fortress constant, instead of only showing on activation (zone Changes, etc.)? Sounds as if that change isn't working properly.

It would be a nice QoL upgrade if pet powers were made 'smart' using a derivative of the code that handles sidekick/exemplar status -- you rise in level, either by dinging or a change in leader, and your pets' level goes up in parallel. Go down in level, and your pets decrease with you -- although this is complicated by the need to desummon pets you no longer have the power for (i.e., below 21 for the tier-3 pet), and the number of tier-1 and tier-2 pets may need to be reduced. But I don't know if the code would support making a change like that without serious unwinding of the spaghetti code behind the façade.

In the same way that the Ouroboros portal power was altered so that you no longer have to be on the ground to summon the portal, can the P2W powers for the various buff pets be altered so that you can summon your pet while just off the ground?

With pets using groups that already exist in game, the problem becomes one of a) establishing visual differences for the base, first upgrade, and second upgrade versions of each tier of pet, and which abilities the pets get (and at what strength) foe each level of upgrade. This may or may not run out of existing art assets with the group, and may or may not require additional animations -- all of which would be more complicated than simply subbing in the models from the group for the base pets.

You could make the argument that, with the retention rate that City of Heroes had, its very existence challenged NCsoft management's preconceptions about what an MMORPG should be, so they nerfed it all the way into the dirt so that it would no longer exist as a counterexample to their fixation that high-churn team-centric cash-shop-based MMOs were the best way to go.

And while we're at it, can we go back to the old form of exemplaring for TFs, where someone who was too high level for a TF had to be paired with a character who was in the level range for the TF, so we can control the number of people bringing high-level characters to low-level TFs and being overpowered compared to the people who are "legitimately" doing the TF, diminishing their contribution and ruining their emjoyment? If you can't recognize it, yes, this is sarcasm. The changes I've seen made in the game over the years (barring certain nerfs I decline to address, and which are a matter of opinion, anyway) have been to expand the ways that you can play the game. Zones used to be level-locked, forcing groups to break up if someone had missions in them; now, if you want to, a high-enough-level character can take a bunch of low-level characters into any zone and run content there. Exemplar and sidekick used to be strict pairing, meaning that you had to have one high-level character to match to each low-level character to sidekick or exemplar, and you could be kicked from TFs if that broke, or have part of a team suddenly stop getting XP or get roflstomped by mobs now a dozen or more levels higher than they are; now, you just team up and it's all handled automatically. Wiping the zone MSR out of the game because you don't want to deal with the hassle and consider lower-level characters in an MSR to be useless is taking away options from the players. The existence of zone MSRs is not stopping you from forming instanced MSRs to your heart's content; go have fun your way, and let other people have fun their way. If you can't get enough people for your instanced MSRs because they're running zone MSRs, then that says something about what they prefer.

The "Council weapons rack" object that's used for mission glowies for weapons (the other being the 'Warriors weapons rack' with melee weapons) is either missing polygons or has several of them facing the wrong way, so the surfaces are not drawn correctly for the back part of the frame:

One mechanically simple way to address the issue is to create command IDs for each of the random power/emote effects -- for example, Propel would have separate messages for 'throw car', 'throw fan sculpture', 'throw pool table', 'throw dumpster', etc. -- and either have the server generate the random item and pass the correct command ID back to the originator and everyone who can see the power activation, or have the client where the user is activating the power generate the random item and pass the correct command ID to the server to be forwarded to everyone who can see the power activation. The latter relies on the client to generate a correct command ID, and goes against the "never trust the client" principle of online game design, while the former adds a trip to the server and back for the power animation, potentially adding lag. Since the message has to go to the server and back to the user originating the power use anyway to generate the correct 'hit/miss' animation, I think that putting the object determination on the server and passing it back to all the clients is going to be the best way to go in the long run, avoiding the possibility of the process being hacked.

Give pets the same speed as their summoner (whatever it is) when out of combat, dropping them to their current speed in combat.

When you use the emote, your client generates a random food item for you to eat. Anybody watching you has the server send "XXX performs the 'eat' emote", and their client generates a random food item that they see you eating. Passing the food item from your client to the server, then to the client of everyone who can see you adds delay, and adding more emote types makes things like the emote menu off the chat window bigger. Neither of which are necessarily reasons not to do it, just warning about the side effects.

You still don't get the Wedding Band if you're over 25 when you complete that arc.

It's a nice tool to pull with, since it doesn't aggro any mobs it misses (or nearby spawns, and deposits stunned mobs for cleanup. I do have to warn you about an odd quirk if you use Wormhole with "up:max" for the destination when you're outdoors -- sometimes mobs launched this way forget that they should fall back to the ground afterwards, and remain standing in midair where Wormhole dropped them. I have yet to explore the limits of using it with "cam:max" to fling mobs off of buildings, or "back:max" to yank mobs out of a spawn and deliver them back where the rest of your team is waiting to crush them, though.

Now I've got the mental image of a grenade-based version of the SNL "land shark" sketch running through my head...

If I had to guess what it would entail, I expect that it would require saving all of the current costume piece indexes and the associated piece names, rolling all the costume pieces out to individual files, rebuilding the master file from the individual files and generating a new list of indexes with their associated piece names, produce a crosswalk table from the two index lists that maps the old indexes to the new ones, then go through every character and costume slot updating the old indexes to the new ones (and doing it for any NPCs that use the costume pieces, like AE missions), then having an update so everyone gets the new costume piece file(s)... and writing and releasing a tool to do the same thing for saved costume files on your local computer if they didn't want to just make them useless.

And none of the arguing over knockdown 'converting' to knockback would be necessary if the implementation of the KB->KD enhancement were implemented as a final check after everything else had been calculated for knockback to clamp the maximum value to a fractional value. That way, it wouldn't matter how weak your target was to knockback, or how many levels higher you were; as long as you did some net amount of knockback, it would be reduced to less than 1, turning it into knockdown.

No. MM pets shouldn't die if the MM levels in the specific case of their sidekick status dropping because they've become too high level for the sidekick functionality to affect them. If you don't kill MM pets when the sidekick drops for other reasons, this creates an exploit where a level 1 MM can team with a level 50, sidekicking them to 49, then summon their tier 1 pet -- which summons three, all level 47 -- then quit the team, reverting them to level 1, but leaving them with three level 47 pets to run missions with. This will steamroller any content they face until they log out -- and since being in your base or another instance protects you against being logged out for inactivity, you'll only need to find another 50 to momentarily join to re-up your pets if there's a server reset.

Just as an etymological correction, that's "Hear, hear!"; it's a stripped-down form of the exclamation "hear him, hear him", which was a well-established usage in Parliament in the 17th century to draw attention to something someone was saying (there was no 'hear her, hear her' variant, because the phrase had been contracted to "hear, hear" in the 18th century, and the first female MP was not elected until the 20th).

I've long felt that Instant Healing should be a toggle that makes every hit act like how illusory damage works -- you take all the damage, then a short time later, an enhanceable portion of that damage 'instantly' heals. One of the problems with Instant Healing was that, like the rest of the set, it just made you heal more -- if you take a hit for 90% of your hit points, you heal that damage over and over again until it's gone. Once you reduce the incoming damage to less than your healing rate, you're unkillable. Making IH a toggle that works once against each incoming hit makes it balanceable against the other defenses.

Normally, going up a level has no effect on your pets, but i know of one specific corner case that may be the cause of this. Were you in a higher level team sidekicked to 31? If you lose your sidekick, your pets die (a measure to prevent exploits like having a 50 invite your level 1 to team, let you summon your (three) tier 1 pets as level 49, and then kick you, leaving you with three level 49 pets doing starting content). Where this breaks is when you are two levels below the team lead, sidekicking you to -1 to them, and ding. Because you are now legitimately -1 to the team leader, sidekicking doesn't help you any more, so the sidekick drops automatically -- which triggers the pet-reaping code, and all your pets die.

Not as much as your character being transformed into a Girlfriend from Hell... with a battle drone following along behind her. Or your character has a tail inconsistent with the Girlfriend from Hell disguise. Or the mission from Sondra Costel where you watch over Deborah Rosenfield as she goes to talk to the Skull recruiter... with your buff pet floating along behind her.

If you're going to make them award temporary gold titles, then let repeating the qualification re-earn the title, as a more serious inf sink.

15+, IIRC. Typically acquired through either the PychoChronoMetron arc in Faultline or begging in AP for someone to drop a portal.

However, there is one good reason to hit Ouroboros for a 'board transit' mission -- the hospital. Look at the position of hospitals relative to the tram stations/ferries. In the last mission of Posi 1, if you took the tram in south Steel Canyon to enter the mission, and get defeated, you'll have to schlep the width of Steel to get back to the mission. From Ouro, you rez at the stations in the back, and the portal's right there.

The problem is that the game client prioritizes closer mobs when there are too many mobs to draw, so you can be standing in the middle of the bowl shooting at a target on the raised wall around the bottom, and a bunch of Rikti teleport in -- and your target doesn't make the cut to be drawn, fading away and making you lose target. If you have the range, you can hit targets up on the rim of the bowl, but the moment there are too many closer mobs, your target disappears. Back on Live, I used to routinely pull mobs off the rim of the bowl with my AR/EM Blaster, but the raids on HC are enough better at pulling mobs from the upper decks into the bowl that her recreation here can't keep sight on a mob on the rim long enough for an attack to animate. Pets, because all of their targeting happens server-side, aren't affected by the render limits, so they can 'see' and attack mobs not visible in your client. In another thread, I proposed another way to address the problem, which was to automatically include the mob you're targeting in the 'drawn mobs' list, so you don't lose sight of your target just because other mobs moved in. Because it's only one mob, and only drawn in your client, it's not a load on everyone, since each player would have their own 'special' target. If you changed targets, or your target was defeated, you'd have to pick a new target from among the visible mobs before that one became your designated target.