srmalloy

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...

Depending on your build, you may not want to speedrun it. I was running my Brute through it to get him to T4 across the board, and running it at +4/x5 (level shift 3) was getting him about a vet level per run, taking a little less than an hour; between the arc's rewards and the vet level rewards, it sped up the process. For my non-brute/tank characters, I'll probably speedrun them, bumping difficulty as their level shift rises, with my Scrappers and Sentinels likely getting a bump just because. But regardless of where you put the difficulty, underfyre's right that this is the best for working on your incarnate solo. For grouping, if you've got a regularly scheduled Hami raid on your server, you can get four emp merits for the first run each day on a character, then 80 reward merits for the next, and 40 for any additional runs. If there's more than one, you can switch characters to keep getting emp merits and mail them between your alts, or take the reward merits and work them for inf if you're still working on slotting out your character.

It also, as a separate entity, continues to damage the mobs around you even if you get confused. Equally useful, it appears -- I haven't looked at it really closely -- that a mob damaged by it becomes hostile to you, and therefore attackable, even if you're still confused.

For a while, until the temp power Sands of Mu expired, my DM tank could make a rotation out of Shadow Maul, the temp Sands of Mu, and the prestige Sands of Mu. It made for amusing fights, where she'd jump into a spawn, taunt, and then hand out cone beatings until the number of targets reduced to where that was inefficient.

For the first one, it would be 4 if the mentor applied magic to the character to give them the ability to learn magic; if it was learning magic as a transfer of knowledge, without any actual magical imbuement on the part of the mentor, it would be 1. Strip Dr. Strange of his various magical items, and he's clearly a 1; before he was accepted into Kamar-Taj, he was just a normal human. I can't think of a character I could point to who'd be a 4 by imbuement, but the D20 PnP gaming system has a spell, "Imbue with Spell Ability", that allows the caster to give someone the ability to cast a limited number of spells. For the second one, it would depend on whether the character needed to retain possession of the book in order to be able to cast the spells contained in it. The stock D&D magic user, for example, had to memorize their spells from their spell books, and once they cast a memorized spell, it was 'forgotten', and they had to spend time re-memorizing the spell to be able to cast it again; that would clearly make them 2.

Mad Science means you never have to ask, "What's the worst thing that can happen?"