srmalloy

Virtually all of my characters get customized. The most necessary being any character with a Radiation powerset -- radiation is not toxic green; that's a misperception from radium illumination, which is actually the color given off by the phosphor in the paint, not the radium. Any glow from radiation comes from Cherenkov radiation, which is a different color entirely. For Fire Blast, one of the things I do is scale the color of the blasts up as their damage rises -- the tier-1 is red, scaling up through orange, yellow, pale blue, and white to show more energy in the blast. The floating runes in Mystic Flight go unless there's a thematic reason for the character to have them, though. For most characters, though, it's tying the powers together with my concept for the character.

Every time one of my characters gets that mission, I get so conflicted. Which should you be rescuing -- the lawyers or the Devouring Earth?

That was something I hadn't considered; compensating for that would be a pain, unless as part of the change there was a revision to how pets work so that they sidekick and exemplar along with their summoner -- which I have to admit would be a very nice QoL improvement for any powerset with pets, but which I expect would be a stone cold bitch to change in the code.

Alternatively, how about a hybrid approach? Retain the sidekick as -1 level, and add back the range limit from the original version of sidekicking, except that instead of 'falling out' of the sidekick if you got too far away, change it so that as long as you were within some moderately generous radius of someone at the leader's level, you got a +1 boost to your combat level? This would give a nod back to the original concept of the sidekick fighting alongside their mentor, not running off to do their own thing, and address the increased divide at higher difficulty settings.

I'm pretty sure we don't have the art assets that would be needed to do it, but Cruella de Vil's costume change (seen in the latest trailer for Cruella, and the top image in the linked article) would be awesome to see implemented in game.

Praetoria Police can't dance, because they have two left feet?

Actually, many RNGs take a simple approach that introduces bias, but the bias is at the low end of the range. The RNG algorithm computes a number, generally 32, 64, or 128 bits, and that number is distributed uniformly, but when converted to a result range, it introduces bias. Say you want to generate a 1-10 result; this is commonly done by generating a random number modulo 10 (getting 0-9) and adding 1. For this, only the low four bits of the number is relevant, but there are sixteen values -- 0:0, 1:1, 2:2, 3:3, 4:4, 5:5, 6:6, 7:7, 8:8, 9:9, 10:0, 11:1, 12:2, 13:3, 14:4, and 15:5. So the returned values have 1-6 appearing twice as often as 7-10. The bigger the range, and the closer that range is to a power of 2, the less effect this has -- a 1-1000 range is very close to 1024, for example. From the graph above, though, that isn't what is being seen here, so the original devs were careful to avoid the easy pitfalls of random number generation.

Ahh, but it lets you joke about the stage ninjas who sweep in behind you as you leave and change the entry chamber so it points to the other Council base that was built there.

What makes Citadel such an annoying slog is the endless "Clear out this base in IP. Now clear out this base in Talos Island. Now clear out this base in IP." back and forth over and over again. If you were clearing Council bases in IP, then moved to Talos to clear more, it would be less oppressive.

It's not a game-shattering issue, but the ship docked on the N side of Mercy Island at (-3488.3 12.3 -3786.5) has sails set that disappear when you get close.

There are contacts that you talk to -- Agent Watkins in NW Steel Canyon is one example -- who lock you into their story arc the moment you first talk to them, without ever getting a mission from them. There needs to be a way to drop an arc if you have no missions or progress in that arc; otherwise, you can get part of your story arc space tied up with arcs you have/had no intention of doing.

It would be annoying to code the trigger, but if a single Nemesis invasion was triggered by someone getting the Unveiler badge when no one has received it in the preceding [define minimum interval], then it would be random enough not to be overbearing. You would want a minimum interval long enough that a group grinding one of the farmable Fake missions wouldn't trigger a bunch of invasions as each member of the team got the badge -- two to four hours would be a good place to start, and tweak as needed.

I suspect that this is the same thing that allows a mob you have stunned to stagger at a dead run, leap to the roof of a building, and disappear -- if you apply a status effect to a mob after it has movement queued in the server, that movement will complete before the status effect is applied to the mob. So you're seeing the mob continue to run away, finishing its queued movement before any -speed or immobilize gets applied... at which point it's too late to notice any effect.

I've got characters with two binds/macros for rain-type powers, one that works for targeting yourself or the ground below you when flying over the monster mash in the summoning phase of a Hamidon raid -- 'powexec_location down:max' -- that usually has 'Rain' for the label, and one labeled 'Parade' for dropping it on my target -- 'powexec_location target'. I picked the labels mostly for the amusement of 'rain on their parade' as a mnemonic for remembering which is which; I've got another character that uses 'Toe' for toe-bombing Ice Slick.

You would also want to have a toggle associated with the Huge body type that controlled the character gender for purposes of selecting pronouns in game dialogs, which makes things more complicated. Although the value of such a toggle could control whether you got the male or female head options like face and hair style.

Not to mention that 'huge female' was requested for a number of years when the game was live, and nothing ever came of it; if the original devs didn't think it was important enough to devote time to, it's probably not going to be high up on the HC priority tree.

Overheard while flying across the Hollows: [NPC] Gravedigger Slugger: Fine. I don't care that you're wining. Later we'll play cards and I will squash you. That should be 'winning'.

Oh, and just as a niggling little detail, the physicist whose name you reference in the description of 'Instance' is Max Planck.

...which provides limited entertainment when your level-thirty character has been sent to Atlas Park to investigate a Nemesis hideout. That solution is useful, but can be heavily situational.

Cross hairs, just like you get if you pop a yellow inspiration.

That targets the nearest mob with 'Mito' in the name, so it could target any type. What you want is targetcustomnext alive electro For the second half, when you assist the green team, you'd also want targetcustomnext alive mend

Loooong entrance tunnel.

Or other things, exemplified by Dr. Ghoti.

It would take making each individual costume piece 'aware' of all the potential adjacent costume pieces, with individual adjustments for each combination to make them interact 'properly', and when you add an animated piece like capes, it just gets worse. I believe that it's theoretically possible to do this with the existing game engine, at the cost of a significant change to the costume database and the character data structure, and a massive amount of art changes to accommodate the number of variations for the interactions. I don't believe that the HC team has the resources to do this, and frankly, I don't think it's a severe enough problem to warrant diverting their time to address.

And as the horrible mental image runs through my mind, I hope no one ever creates this as an alternate effect for Call Ravens in the Beast Mastery powerset...