srmalloy

Cursor color should just be a parameter (or two, if the fields are defined independently) that can be easily changed; altering where the input cursor starts depending on the state of another setting involves altering the client logic, and asking for a minimal change is more likely to be approved than asking for something that needs a more complicated code change.

IIRC, that's the 'pointer' cursor (replacing the stock arrow pointer), not the narrow vertical bar that is the text input indicator in the login screen.

On the login screen, the white cursor against the off-white input field background is hard to see, making it easy, if you have 'save my login' checked, to start typing your password into the username field. In the interest of reducing the number of mistakes like this, could the cursor be changed to a dark color for the two input fields?

English is not a static language, the way the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France tries to establish French versions of words and terms to keep French 'pure', like "émission à la demande" for 'podcast' (the object), with different terms for the action of making a podcast, the action of receiving a podcast, and the action of presenting podcasts for download. Common usage drives what becomes acceptable English.

This isn't true for the single counterexample of snipe attacks -- snipes make a LoS check when you trigger the power, and again when the animation ends, and if you lose LoS on the target before the snipe goes off, it doesn't fire. Now, there are few enough mobs that have a snipe attack in the first place to make 'duck and cover' a worthwhile practice (the Nemesis tirailleurs, for example), but it could work in some cases.

What had me confused about it was that the first 34 times I used Glue Arrow on the oil slick, it ignited; I didn't think the proc would be causing it, because it shouldn't be that reliable. It was only after I'd made my first post that it finally failed to trigger.

The OED, however, reports that decimate also has come "rhetorically or loosely" to mean, "To destroy or remove a large proportion of; to subject to severe loss, slaughter, or mortality."

"Your name's not Hulk? That's going to cause some confusion; mind if we call you Hulk just to keep things straight?"

Just open a few of the gift packages to collect some charges of the Instant Snowstorm temp power, and you can have snow everywhere, even inside your base.

No; there's no winter event. Ignore the snow, the packages scattered around the zones, the animated snowmen, and all the rest; they're just figments of your imagination. 😉

It was part of the overreaction on the part of the devs, reworking Regen after their internal testing showed that a Claws/Regen Scrapper could solo +8 spawns without difficulty, despite the playerbase calling bullshit. It was only after the rework was in place that the devs admitted that they'd discovered that their internal test server didn't have the 'purple patch' incorporated, which meant that the scrapper they were testing with was hitting about 10x as often for 10x as much damage as it should have been... but the changes remained. One of them was turning Instant Healing from a toggle into a click power with a recharge time so high that it could not possibly be made perma, because of all the Regen characters that had been built around getting enough end reduction to be able to afford the punishing end cost of IH, which the devs had originally thought would keep characters from running it continuously.

That wasn't clear in the OP, and part of debugging a problem is to ensure that all possible extraneous influences are eliminated.

The reasoning behind locking CC titles to a new costume slot is to let the winner keep the costume to show off without eating a regular costume slot, or deleting or altering it inadvertently. Other titles, not associated with costumes, would need to be examined to see whether they apply to the character or the player -- titles associated with the player, like, IIRC, Bug Hunter, should be account-wide.

Particularly with a character who won one of these titles might be using a more drab costume, leading people to wonder how they managed to win the title with that costume. Or edited the costume significantly after the contest. Either making the title account-wide, since the award is essentially going to the player that created the costume, or, in what I expect would be a nasty piece of coding, award them an extra costume slot with the winning costume in it and locked so it can't be changed, and tie the title to having that costume active.

Just as a check to make sure something isn't overlooked, do the damage numbers you see in the combat pane and floating over your target reflect gross damage or net damage (i.e., after the target's resistance is subtracted?

I'm disappointed with the change to ESD Arrow, with it taking away an AoE hold and replacing it with a stun, given the game's horrible handling of stunned mobs -- back on Live, I've watched a stunned Outcast stagger off at a dead run, leap up onto the roof of a building, and disappear. Stun is not a reliable mez until the game aborts any movement for a stunned character and replaces it with the slow stagger PCs are limited to. But I moved a slot from ESD Arrow to Ice Arrow so that was five-slotted, and replaced the Lockdown in ESD Arrow with two Absolute Amazement and a pair of procs, and it seems to be reasonable. Oil Slick Arrow works like the Defender Trick Arrow version, so if you've gotten used to lighting your slicks, it's not a pain. Adding a macro to target the oil slick and fire Explosive Arrow at it makes lighting it easy, and in big fights someone usually has it lit before I can. Once they fix the bug that causes a targeted Oil Slick Arrow to fail to spawn a functioning oil slick (you can hear it, but it doesn't show up, and it doesn't affect mobs) it will be a steady part of my rotation.

The same problem with the Oil Slick from Oil Slick Arrow not appearing happens when I use the "powexeclocation target Oil Slick Arrow" macro on targets that are on raised catwalks -- when I used it targeting a Warhulk on one of the elevated walkways on the big warehouse building in Crey's Folly SW of the entrance from Brickstown, the sound effects of the oil slick were audible, but the oil slick itself was not present. Using the power as a location power -- click the power, place the targeting circle on the catwalk -- worked normally.

The crane in Peregrine Island on the pier at (647.4, 93.0, -114.0) sometimes has two cables and hooks pendant from the crane arm, one of which is perpetually bouncing out at an angle, rather than hanging straight down.

My only characters with Latin-derived names are a Dark/Dark corruptor named 'Tenebrica', and a Fire/Time corruptor named 'Machinator Magicus', the latter name deriving from Kirk Mitchell's Procurator series, where 'machinator' was the term for what we would call an engineer, with the character being a dimension traveler from a world like Poul Andersen's Operation Chaos universe, where magic was the technology.

In an extreme quirk of coincidence, some years ago, when I had gone down to the local blood bank to donate, I was asked if I'd ever used another SSN. I said 'no', and they said that there was another person with my name working at the hospital where I did. The next day, when I went in to work I checked the patient file, and not only was there someone else with the same first and last name as mine (different middle initial, though), but we shared a birthdate -- month, day, and year.

Well, let's sift through my characters and pick some: "Теневой Огонь" (Tenevoy Ogon', 'Shadow Fire', fire/dark corruptor), "Лучник" (Luchnik, 'Archer', arch/ta blaster), "Обморожение" (Obmorozheniye, 'Frostbite', ice/ice dominator), "Ядерный Огонь" (Yaderniy Ogon', 'Nuclear Fire', fire/rad controller), "Термоядерный" (Termoyaderniy, 'Thermonuclear', fire/rad sentinel), "Пожарная Сорняк" (Pozharnaya Sornyak, 'Fire Weed', fire/plant blaster), "Голубая Молния" (Golubaya Molniya, 'Blue Lightning', elec/elec defender), "Ядерная Зима" (Yadernaya Zima, 'Nuclear Winter', ice/rad corruptor). All with names that are essentially just descriptions of their powers, yet, having been filtered through a foreign language, acquire more weight.

To corrupt them effectively, you need to start them young. Good work.

Certainly not as a traditional pizza, but cut into rings and grilled on the fire along with a pork butt, which is then shredded, the pineapple chopped, and both scattered across a circle of pizza dough with barbecue sauce and baked, and it's wonderful. But it just doesn't go well as a topping with a plain tomato sauce and mozzarella.

No Way in [suitably amplified] Hell.

Observer bias, yes. You don't notice all the times when things happen the way you expect them to, but the weird outliers jump out in your face. Something that might be worthwhile to do is to go into the source code, extract the function for the RNG, and set it up as a standalone program and run a few million numbers to look at the distribution to see if the RNG itself has an issue. Some RNG functions have odd biases built into them because the developers don't think about the data they're working with. RNGs produce a binary number (32- or 64-bit, typically), and one of common way of getting a random number in a range is to mod the random number by the range (i.e., X mod 10 + 1 to get 1-10). But this introduces bias; mod 10 means the bottom four bits of the random number are all that determine the result, so you have 0-15, producing 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 when you apply the mod function -- 0-5 appear twice as often as 6-9. This effect gets smaller as the range goes up -- a 1-1000 range (10 bits, 0-1023) only doubles up on 2.4% of the range, compared to 60% for 1-10. I would hope, though, that the original CoH developers accounted for things like this; RNGs in games have been around for a long time, and solutions to this problem should be routine.