srmalloy

If you're going to add new defeat badges, add one for Snipers; there's as much justification for them as there is for the Nemesis Jaegers and Warhulks, they're multi-faction (Nemesis Comets and Tirailleurs, Crey Sharpshooters), they're annoying (tooling across the zone, and *zap* some sniper shoots you), and they're common enough to make getting the badge viable with a little work.

2,147,483,647 is the biggest value that can be stored as a 32-bit signed integer, but you can double that by making it an unsigned integer (since you're not allowed to have negative inf); this still requires that every field in the server and client code, and the server databases, that manipulate or store inf values be changed. Changing the fields to 64-bit integers still requires the same global change, but puts the maximum value out beyond what is practical to ever acquire. And the people who can't count to at least 30 on one hand don't understand binary, and are stuck scratching tally marks on the wall.

So it's "absolutely fine" as it is... but it needs a change. A curious definition of "absolutely fine". 😄

I could see an argument for, if you have pets of a particular rank already upgraded when you summon more (i.e., replacing a single Battle Drone) the pets already summoned 'spread' their upgrades to the new pet(s). So you could summon two tier-1 pets, or one tier-2 pet, and have them inherit their upgrades from existing pets, but the tier-3 pet, or resummoning all three tier-1 or both tier-2 pets would need to be upgraded manually.

Ummm... There is nothing inherent about the 32-bit client preventing the internal use of 64-bit integers in the code; I've written code for 16-bit computers that used 64-bit integers -- the operations on the extended integers were just much slower. What the problem is with changing inf to be a 64-bit is that 32-bit inf values are embedded all over the code and data structures, and changing it would essentially require a complete rebuild of the database -- the entirety of the AH, all the vendors, the character data structure, email, and more. Think of it as having a shelf tightly packed with books of various widths, and you want to pull out a one-inch-wide book and replace it with a two-inch-wide book -- you need to reorganize the entire shelf to accommodate it.

There is nothing quite so terrifying as someone convinced that they're entitled to impose their morality on you "for your own good".

At random intervals, it appears that the draw animation for the Nemesis Staff power gets confused; instead of the normal 'pull it out of hammerspace' animation, you get the same animation that you see with NPCs pulling a tailpipe and muffler out of the ground -- you reach down, the shaft of the Nemesis Staff appears pointed at the ground, and you visibly strain while pulling on the shaft as the head of the staff gets pulled out of the ground. From casual observation, I don't think the animation time changes, it's just an odd-looking animation, particularly if you're flying.

Unfortunately, this appears to be endemic to the human condition -- you see exactly the same thing with people trying to get laws passed banning something because they don't think other people should be allowed to do it, not because it's something that they're unreasonably tempted to do and they want the law to help them stop doing it.

Upscaling all the mobs (i.e., minion->lieutenant, lieutenant->boss, boss->elite boss, elite boss->archvillain) would seem more doable, although it might be necessary to create the AV-grade version as a separate entity if the game doesn't have scaling mechanisms in place (I know AVs will downgrade to EBs, but I don't know if there's an algorithm in the code to go the other way). Doing that would be simpler than trying to scale villain groups out beyond their level range.

I don't know off the top of my head if CoH works this way or not, but one thing I have seen reported about wide-screen monitors and games is that the game will show the same field of view whether you have a normal or wide-screen monitor, so if you have a monitor that is twice as wide as a normal monitor, it effectively cuts off parts of the top and bottom of your normal vertical field of view (to keep proportions the same), making you look up and down a lot more. If the game lets you adjust the FoV setting, you can tweak that to show you more sideways and get the vertical back, but you need to fiddle with the value until you get something that looks decent.

That was done deliberately, to have someplace people could go to work on AE content where they didn't have to deal with the sounds and visual effects from other people's pets, aura powers, toggles, and the like, working without distractions. Get a couple of people with Technicolor® Shadow Fall, one or two with Dark Armor humming away, and another with Invulnerability glowing across your field of view, and then try to get anything done. There's nothing preventing you from doing your AE development out at the consoles in the main room, where all your powers will remain active -- or is your objection to the power suppression not that it stops other people from bothering you with their powers while you work, but that you object horribly to the sub-minute time it takes you to fire off your toggles again when you exit the room? Remember that not only do you not have to work through the visuals and sounds of their powers, they don't have to work through the visuals and sounds of your powers.

I've discovered an odd quirk when using Wormhole from the Gravity Control powerset. Playing with macros, I set up a macro "Zoom" that is "powexeclocation max:up Wormhole". On a recent mission -- one of Harvey Maylor's 'On the Psychic Plane' arc, where you get sent to an outdoor mission on the long, narrow city map with skyscrapers to defeat all of the (Praetorian) demons, I used this macro on a spawn of three Demons. They were flung into the air... and two came down. Figuring that, with the tall building next to me, that one had landed on a ledge, I defeated the two that hit the ground, and flew up... to find the third standing quietly in midair: Testing this through the remainder of the mission, I could fairly reliably expect to have about a 50% chance of one or more of the mobs flung in the air by Wormhole to have a Wile E. Coyote moment and forget to notice that they should be falling to the ground -- in one case, having all three of the Demons remain up in the sky where I'd flung them.

Is Nemesis Staff firing early all the time, or only against held/immobilized targets? Because I've seen it firing off before the animation ends against CC'd targets for some time.

"Oh, give me a home / Where the buffalo roam / And I'll show you a real problem floor..."

The second time I approached Positron about it, he said that it was the second time that someone had mentioned it, which meant that they should take a look at it. If I hadn't admitted that I had been the 'other person' they might have decided to fix it, since a minimal fix would just be duplicating the existing buoy object to create three new ones, colored uniform green, red, and yellow, and then change the object ID for the buoys in the various zones (the ones in the IP ship channel being red or green depending on which side of the channel they're on, and virtually all the rest being yellow, with only a few staying mid-channel marks).

The "The Security Chief for Perez Park has asked for you by name" mission that you seem to get around level 6-7, where you talk to him and he sends you into Perez Park to defeat Circle of Thorns, who all seem to be at least one if not three levels higher than you are, is the most egregious of these, in my opinion. It's also my automatic first use of autocomplete -- talk to the Security Chief, get the mission to defeat the Circle, and autocomplete to get it done with (don't autocomplete the 'Talk to the Security Chief' mission itself, because that just auto-accepts the defeat Circle mission).

It's not a bug per se, but it seems to be something built into the game that, any time you buy a particular item of salvage off the AH to be able to craft an IO, the first mob you defeat after crafting the IO will drop that salvage.

The ships at the dock in Cimerora are moored in opposite directions, but the sails are filled with wind blowing in the direction the ship is pointed, as if the wind completely reverses direction if you move sideways twenty feet. And a particularly petty one, that from Positron's own statement I'm the only person to complain about in the entire live run of the game: Virtually all of the buoys in the game are wrong. The IALA International Maritime Buoyage Standard defines the vertically red-and-white-striped buoy as a center-channel marker, indicating that there is deep water on all sides of the buoy, and it can be safely passed on any side. Instead, we see them moored ten feet away from docks, or (in Independence Port) used in place of the red and green lateral buoys marking the sides of the deep-water channel.

I had one incident back on Live that I've never been able able to reproduce. My AR/EM Blaster was in IP fighting Tsoo and she was attacking a Red Ink Man. She'd fired M30 Grenade, and it had reached the top of its arc and was headed down when the Red Ink Man hit her with his Siphon Speed and took off running. The grenade made a sharp turn in mid-air, going back up again as it followed the fleeing Tsoo, and about five seconds later, I saw the defeat message.

You do realize the zombies the Death Shamans summon don't give any XP, right?

Doing the "Cure the Lost" mission and targeting the boss in the middle of a big group of minions, then having all the minions whip out shotguns in unison and blast the now-immune NPC simultaneously, creating a sound spike that is physically painful. Looking through an invisible character and seeing the invisibility wipe away visual effects on other mobs.

What? You don't like the poot boots? 😄

The image of Reichsman during Mender Ramiel's monologue in the last mission of his 'unlock Alpha slot' arc makes him look like a gorilla trying to cosplay as M. Bison; that's good enough reason for me.

They're in the game:

You didn't get the huge chunks of XP that DFB gives, and it was inherently self-limiting due to the necessity of keeping a low-level character as team leader so that the rest of the team continues to get XP. That it was still run regularly before the devs rolled out DFB says more about the stultifying nature of the original origin-based contacts than anything else -- if you had a Tech origin, you faced Clockwork; if you had a Magic origin, you were sent against Hellions; Science, it was Vahzilok (which had me avoiding Science origin characters for years on Live). Restoring the origin contacts, but having their missions spread out across the low-level villain groups after an initial origin-themed mission, and then offering a wider choice of introductions, would give players a better introduction to the NPCs and prevent characters from being locked into missions against groups they don't want to have to fight. The addition of Matthew Habashy and his arc, with the follow-on contacts Sandra Costel and Officer Fields, at least changed things around a bit and made your initial opponents more uniform across origins. I have to agree, though, that Twinshot's arcs, being what amounts to an extended (and at times disjointed) tutorial, both starts too far into the game and is not well written.