srmalloy

Not to mention that there would have to be protections built into a copy function if you could transfer a base including all of its stored items to prevent it from being used to dupe the storage. I can hear the screaming now if you could set up a base on a 'mule' server, cram its storage full of huge inspirations, purple, PvP, ATO, and winter enhancements, and then copy it back to your primary server again and again, giving you an infinite supply of these enhancements. I could see a 'move storage contents' option, where anything in storage was transferred to the new server and deleted from the original one, but copy should die the real death.

I just checked several of my locally-saved .costume files, and all of them already show RGB data for the colors: "Color1 255, 169, 0" and "Color2 76, 137, 255", for example. The back end would have to become a bit smarter to be able to tell if the colors for a costume piece were in the standard grid selections, or if they required the full RGB selection, with the UI displaying whichever was appropriate for a given piece, and the option to switch back and forth between the two types. But the internals of the costume files shouldn't have to change at all.

This change would have one improvement, which would either be inconsequential or major, depending on how anal you are about your costumes. As it stands now, there are cases where you can't match colors between costume pieces on different parts of your body -- you pick the same color for your pants and boots, and you can see the hard dividing line where the color is just a little off (or more than that), and no other color choice gives you a match. Sometimes moving one spot to an adjacent color works, and sometimes nothing you do will get you the match you want; being able to fine-tune the RGB value would address that.

In most cases, you're right, and someone will open up The Abyss 2 so the league can move there and start over with a 'fresh Hamidon' while the triple-bloom ages and eventually despawns, but I've also been part of leagues that decided to just collect stacks of EoEs and Rages so they can power past the blooms, since it isn't going to get any worse now that it's happened.

What's the point of throwing an AoE into a spawn, then backing around a corner to get them all to follow you and bunch up so that your teammates can lock them all down with an immobilize so they can be burned down with AoEs? It's all tactics; it's merely that some of the tactics are dictated by what your opponent(s) do. If they can trigger a barrage that drops high-damage AoE splashes around them, then your tactics will incorporate either being able to stand in the splashes and ignore the damage, or move so that you're not in the areas when they land ('Presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better'). Ideally, though, tactics evolve as people discover better ways to fight an opponent. Look at the Hamidon raids. I remember when you set out a tank/healer pair to keep Hami's attention, then everyone else clustered under a healing umbrella to take out the mitos, then stacked holds on the nucleus to defeat him. Hami evolved in response, and the tactics changed, with separate groups for each type of mito, clearing them, beating on the nucleus until the mitos respawned, then repeat until there were no more respawns and you could defeat the nucleus; these tactics evolved to only taking down one or two sets of mitos before piling on the nucleus, and a further tactic evolved, now called the 'hamikaze' tactic, where you just go in to pound the nucleus down before the mito spawns can overcome the damage it's taking. The final fight in the MLTF, likewise, has several different approaches people have used to defeat Lord Recluse. In other content, though, one 'winning' tactic was found, and is adhered to with what seems to be no attempt to discover other, perhaps better, ways to win -- because it's perceived as difficult enough that the fixation on success obviates any thought of trying to find other ways to complete the content, resulting in teams being built with gear checks to ensure that the single winning tactic can be followed.

All of the interior maps -- caves, offices, etc. are built up from tiles with pre-defined layouts that are plugged together to make floors (or entire maps, in the case of the cave maps) Back during Live, at one of the exhibits NCsoft had during the San Diego Comic-Con, I asked Positron about the possibility of enabling players to design maps for AE missions using these tiles; he said that the tools for assembling them into a map were too fiddly to be turned over to the general playerbase for use. One example of this in the 'professionally done' maps is the 'black wall in corridor' bug -- this was most often seen after the release of CoV in the yellow office maps, where you'd see a corridor 'dead-end' in a black wall you couldn't see through, but could walk through, and from the reverse view everything looked normal; this was caused by a tiny misalignment of two adjacent tiles, so that the game engine thought the corridor ended, and just drew a black wall where its algorithm thought it stopped. Apparently the map-creation tools weren't sufficiently advanced to do automatic joining of two tiles, and they had to be aligned manually, resulting in the 'black wall' when they didn't get it right -- the overhead in doing this for an entire map was one of the reasons why we saw so few new maps being released. (I can think of several ways that the data structures for the map tiles could be set up to define the 'join points' where adjacent tiles could be plugged in, and have the map editor automatically line up the tiles to link them at those points, but it was Paragon Studios' decision not to pursue making better development tools like that)

And it hearkens back to Jack Emmert's declaration that, for him, 'fun' was throwing his character at the end boss again and again, being defeated over and over, until he finds the one tactic that will allow him to defeat the boss. Ignoring the fact that it's fun for him, and may not be for anyone else, he seems to have been completely blind to the fact that, in the age of the internet, as soon as one individual/group figures out how to defeat a given boss, the process will be spread across the Net for everyone to see, so that the people who come after just follow the process, instead of beating their head(s) against a wall for hours trying to figure it out for themselves.

I had a similar incident back on Live, when I was running my Bots/Dark MM on a Manticore, and we'd finished the defeat-all missions when the rest of the team -- apparently a group of friends -- had to quit, leaving me solo. I figured 'WTH', and continued the TF, and was surprised as hell that I was able to complete the mission (this being the earlier version of the TF, that just had Hopkins, not Hopkins, his rez, and Countess Crey).

It's an annoyance, rather than an actual bug, but can the interval at which rescuees check for pathing updates be decreased? If you have a character that's flying, and you defeat the mobs threatening an NPC -- like the possessed scientists in the plaza of Portal Corps -- the rescued hostage will usually go running off in some random direction where they can find a way to increase their elevation (i.e., the hills around Portal Corps, a fire escape, etc.) to get close to you to reward you with inf, and even if you fly right up next to them, they'll usually keep running toward whatever point the server has picked for them, completely ignoring the fact that you're right there next to them. If the interval at which these NPCs are checked to update their pathing to your current location was decreased, this would reduce some of the 'runaway rescuee' cases.

Watching a TF completely fall apart because connection problems caused two of the low-level exemplar anchors to disconnect for longer than the 'grace window', kicking their exemplars from the TF... Or having to run the OG Positron TF in a single sitting, because while everyone could log out and back in the next day to finish, if the low-level exemplar anchors didn't log in before the exemplars did, the exemplars would be autokicked...

Of course not -- "You're healed -- now, get out of my face; there are other people waiting."

BINGO! That was the last cell I needed on my card of "features that have been requested so many times they've become tropes".

"...made worse due to lack of access to many powers" ...if you wait until you've leveled to 50 and only then go back and do his TF. Run it at level or close to level, and you don't even have those powers whose inaccessibility you bemoan. Whining about not being able to use powers you wouldn't have had at that level is bootless.

We know that it can be done, because Kheldians were tweaked so that, when changing forms, unavailable toggle abilities were suppressed rather than detoggled. There are quite a few missions, like Heather Townsend's personal story, where you enter the mission, take Heather's form, and all your regular powers are disabled, toggling off. This requires you to restart all of your toggles when you exit the mission, which can take a bit of time for toggle-heavy builds, and while the game code does appear to try to despawn mobs right outside a mission door before you/your team exits, that doesn't always work; having your toggles suppress during the mission and reactivate immediately on exit would close a (possibly) unintended window of vulnerability.

Which does more damage depends on the bow and crossbow. But, yes, there are differences -- reflex bows are faster to shoot, while crossbows take longer to 'reload', but can be kept cocked and loaded so you can shoot your loaded shot faster, and you don't require constant practice to maintain the muscle tone (this last a handwave for a superhero game). You could game it by having an automatically granted power, "Load Crossbow", that grants the 'Loaded' status to a character, with all of the crossbow attacks requiring and consuming Loaded, but going off much quicker than equivalent Archery attacks. So you'd use Load Crossbow, then you could carry it around loaded to whip out and shoot quickly, but then you'd have to use Load Crossbow again before you could use another attack.

Assuming that you can move and attack in the horrendous lag... 😁

I just noticed that the Cold Domination power "Heat Loss" has a disjointed power description: The high-level description, and the power icon, indicate that it's an AoE power, but the 'Effect Area' in the detailed description says 'Single Target'.

Oh, that takes me back to the early days, when we'd pull gags like carefully opening up a floppy disk, removing the media, gluing the cover closed again, then putting on a label identifying it as "InvisiCalc -- the first totally transparent spreadsheet program", then making jokes about being able to get it running on anything, like an actual toaster...

A couple of days ago, I had a character in Peregrine Island who ran across a bizarre collection of mobs -- Frostlings, CoT, Nemesis, and Rikti all jammed together in a watchtower: I don't know if this was just the spawn generator breaking, or someone having fun with Wormhole (most likely fun with Wormhole, given that it's not a present location to spawn the Frostlings), but it was entertaining to see.

I was searching through one of my base's enhancement storage units, and it occurred to me that the stock alphabetical sort order still left a lot to be desired for picking out the enhancement(s) you wanted, and thought about a small filter dropdown, à la the Auction House listing, to allow you to select a category of enhancement (i.e., Resist Damage or Ranged AoE damage) and show only the enhancements that matched the selected category, with only a single category selectable at a time, a 'clear selection' option to return to showing all enhancements in the storage, and the selection resetting when the window was closed. Would it be possible to add this sort of filter without breaking something else?

Dread Pirate Roberts #153946 (ask me about franchise opportunities in your area)

I was doing the "Investigate the DPS readings" mission from Tina McIntyre, and ran across this interesting NPC: I'm not sure whether this is a case of 'working as intended', with a fuller range of NPCs changed into 'Crazed' for the mission, or the mission populating with an improper selection of NPC models, and picking a police officer model instead of a random citizen model. Update: From the clue received after rescuing Dr. Calvin, it appears that it was a wide-area "affect whoever's there" thing, so it's not an improper model selection, just a cop in the wrong location at the wrong time.

And this is one aspect that I still snicker about, one of the few things that SWTOR did better than CoH -- I've had rescue missions where I had to bring the rescued NPC back to a specific location, and I would be able to just hop on my speeder bike and zoom off; the game would always pump the NPC full of whatever the universe's equivalent of hypermeth was, because they'd be running along behind me, fully keeping up with me on my speeder bike. It was pretty humorous at times to see them running frantically to keep up.

"Two weeks" -- the universal programmer's jargon for "When it's ready; go away and let us work."

Even with the ready availability of flight temporary powers, there is a corner case where being able to spread flight to your team could be useful, which is why I suggested breaking Group Fly up into 'Pet Fly' -- Group Fly as you describe, only affecting your pets -- and 'Team Fly' (or, better, 'Grant Flight' to parallel the Stealth Pool's 'Grant Invisibility'), which affects teammates and is a cancelable power.