srmalloy

You're wrong. I mean, it's not "your wrong", it's "you're wrong", so, you're wrong. ... ... Captain Pedant awaaayyyyyyyyyyyy Also +1 Inf for grammar check And just remember, there really are grammar Nazis.

My first was CoH, joining about May 6 of 2004 on the recommendation of a coworker who'd been in the beta. I played CoH straight through until shutdown, playing on the first character I'd made after signing up in the bowl during a Rikti mothership raid when the shutdown hit, just as if the game was going to keep running. During that time, I tried and dumped both Tabula Rasa and Aion, the former for a number of balance problems that didn't get addressed until shortly before NCsoft screwed Richard Garriot over, and the latter when I discovered how emphatically Aion adhered to the fundamental premise of Asian MMOs -- that once you were out of the starting area, the game pretty much required you to be in a group to have a chance of surviving the quests you got handed (and outleveling them wasn't an option because running around solo 'street sweeping' got you killed because of the size of the spawns, which almost always required groups to handle). When CoH shut down, I picked up SWTOR, and played that solidly until it became intermittent when I picked up ESO right around the release of Summerset, and played both until I found out about the Homecoming servers, at which point both of them have been mostly kicked to the curb as I came back to CoH.

I posted a reply in the thread My Old Account Revived that describes how to use Titan SentIcon to extract the costumes from a Sentinel+ file, and how to view it in Internet Explorer and decode the power picks and slotting (unfortunately, because CoH doesn't save when you applied extra slots to powers, you'll have to guess at those), turning them back into a tabulation that you can use to make a build in Mid's/Pine's or just to throw together on Justin for testing.

There's an online tool in the Titan Network forums --Titan SentIcon -- that will read a saved Sentinel+ file and export a zipfile containing .costume files for each of the costumes in the Sentinel+ file. For builds, it's nowhere near as clean, but if you're running Windows, you can just double-click on the Sentinel+ .xml file, it will open in Internet Explorer. This will use IE's XML viewer, so what you're going to see is a wall of text that looks like this: [pre]<power> <id>Scrapper_Melee.Kinetic_Attack.Smashing_Blow</id> <level>8</level> <slots count="6"> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_A.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_A</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_E.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_E</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_D.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_D</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_B.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_B</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_F.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_F</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Makos_Bite_D.Crafted_Makos_Bite_D</slot> </slots> </power>[/pre] The <power></power> tags delineate a single power in the character's build. In the tag pair, the <id></id> tags bracket the name of the power, identifying the powerset (or pool) that it came from and the name of the power. The "level" tag is the level at which the power was chosen, in this case level 8; because CoH does not record when you picked the slots for a power, it just lists the slots. In the "slot" tag, the "boost" attribute should be the boost value applied to the enhancement (i.e., +1, +2, etc., if you've used enhancement boosters), the "level" attribute is the level of the slotted enhancement, and the contents of the tag (i.e., between the <slot> and </slot> begin and end tags is the name of the slotted enhancement. On the cityofheroes.fandom.com wiki, the enhancement sets have the associated letters listed on the set page -- in this case, the power has the Crushing Impact Acc/Dam, Acc/Dam/End, Acc/Dam/Rech, Dam/End, and Dam/End/Rech slotted (in that order), and the Mako's Bite Acc/End/Rech. Common IOs will be easier to figure out; they'll have names like "Boosts.Crafted_Accuracy.Crafted_Accuracy".

Having news crews appearing for some of the zone events, like the building fires in Steel, appearances of the Ghost Ship or Lusca, and the Troll events in Skyway would add to the immersion. Someone would need to do up the scripting for all the NPCs, though, even if you stole existing NPC designs for the news crew, and the news van would need to be created. Other than the scripting for it, I don't think it would involve a large amount of work, but I can't say for sure.

I decided to run one of my characters around Echo:Atlas Park today, picking up the accolade "Walking Down Memory Lane" for getting all of the exploration badges, and I noticed that there was a fundamental difference between Echo:Atlas Park and Echo:Galaxy City. In Echo:Atlas Park, Ms. Liberty, the four origin contacts, the city manager, the supergroup registrar, and the Freedom Corps vendors near Ms. Liberty were all in their original positions, and I could interact with them -- Ms. Liberty told me how many XP I needed for my next level, I sold off unwanted TOs to the vendor, and Azuria even forwarded me to a new contact. In Echo:Galaxy City, on the other hand, the plaza and city building are devoid of life; BAB isn't standing out on the dais, and all of the interactible NPCs are missing from the building. It seems to me that putting BAB back on his dais as a trainer, and restoring the NPCs to the city building would make the zone a better 'echo' of what Galaxy City was. For the contacts in the city building, letting them an alternate interface to the contact in the regular zones shouldn't break anything, and putting BAB and the Freedom Corps vendors back out in the plaza likewise. I don't know what the difficulty of doing this would be, but as it is now, having the core of the zone empty while Echo:Atlas Park isn't feels a bit like the conversion into an 'echo' zone was done a bit half-heartedly.

Given the complaint that someone else made about how the salvage in a salvage rack changed order when they were pulling salvage out of the rack, it suggests that the actual database storage of a salvage rack is an array of records with the ID of the rack and the ID of the salvage item in the order in which they were put into the rack, and they get rolled up under the first record of each item of salvage when displayed, with the first matching item in the array being removed when you take an item, then the list being reloaded. So if you put in a Simple Chemical, then a Luck Charm, and did it again four more times, alternating, you'd see 5 Simple Chemical then 5 Luck Charm, and if you took out a Simple Chemical, the rack would display 5 Luck Charm then 4 Simple Chemical, because the first Luck Charm you put in is now at the 'top' of the list. Given all the ways it could have been done, it's likely not the way it's actually implemented, but it's one possible way, and illustrates how seemingly unrelated design choices can affect what you see in the game.

It makes me wonder whether TA was originally balanced as a Defender-only powerset, with the assumption that a Defender would regularly have Vigilance active reducing the End costs of all the powers -- which, from what I saw pre-shutdown, became less and less useful as characters became more powerful. It seemed as if, when things fell in the pot badly enough for Vigilance to come into play to any significant extent, things were bad enough off that just reducing the End cost of the Defender's abilities wasn't going to be much help pulling things out of the pot. Maybe reducing End cost and recharge time, with the numbers being looked at based on combat data? I don't know.

Hell, Positron admitted, back in one of the meet&greet events at the San Diego Comic-Con, several issues before shutdown, that the code was spaghetti and baling wire, and each beta pushed to the PTS was accompanied with "please, don't have too much break this time" prayers. Unless you've got Torquemada enforcing the coding design standards, this is going to happen to any big programming project as it goes through revisions and has coding staff move on to be replaced by new coding staff. And sometimes even that doesn't help. Programmers want to write code and see it up and running; documentation takes a seat way in the back of the bus, and even documenting everything that you do isn't going to help when the only way you found to do something without rewriting huge chunks of code was to hook into some obscure function in a module that did something completely different. Which then got updated in a patch unconnected to either your addition or the module's original function.

If I'm remembering the discussion back on the original boards about this, there are several 'paired' enhancements like damage and resistance that are actually in the same 'box' in the database, just with opposite sign, and that this is one of the things that constrains what kinds of powers the game can have -- you can't have an attack power that boosts your Resistance on every hit, because the game wouldn't be able to distinguish between Damage and Resistance enhancements slotted in the power; it's a trait of the power that determines whether the enhancement is treated as Damage or Resistance.

It is a nice feature to have; however, it's grossly dependent on _how_ the list of enhancements in storage are a) stored, and b) retrieved. At the rock-bottom simplicity end, which is very unlikely to be the case, it's altering one SQL query to add 'ORDER BY' clauses. More likely, using the admission by the GMs that adding AH functionality while in your base would require loading the whole auction house database into the data structures for the base, the items in storage are loaded into memory when you enter the base, which means that the enhancements in storage are already in a data structure than may not be amenable to being sorted. I can think of at least four different ways that it could be done, and they all have annoying aspects to them, particularly as they would more readily be done client-side, since there could be several people in a base all looking at enhancements, and all sorting them differently. This adds complexity, as you would need to ensure that there are additional checking to ensure consistency. And the problem balloons when all of this has to tie back into the existing code. So, yes, it can be a relatively simple problem, but given that CoH is 8+ years of accreting spaghetti code, it's unlikely to be.

Take the figure with a truckload of salt, but IIRC one of the numbers being tossed around in the "buy CoH from NCsoft" threads on the Titan Forums was eighty million dollars for the IP, source, and binaries (I don't recall if that included the player data or not).

I don't remember where I ran across it (here or on Discord), but there was a reference that, if you had the SKU for one of the costume powers, you would be able to get it from the P2W vendor. So it appears that there are provisions already for acquiring them, just not a way that doesn't involve GM intervention yet.

If you go over to the forums at the Titan Network, you will find a number of threads connected with several different efforts to get NCsoft to sell or license the City of Heroes IP, going back to an account of the attempt by Paragon Studios to buy itself free of NCsoft and become an independent entity prior to the closure of Paragon Studios in September 2012. Aside from nebulous statements about 'progress', there has been little or no evidence that anything is moving forward on any of these attempts, mostly from a lack of response on the part of NCsoft.

Each month, at the start of the month, they put up an announcement here and in Discord that donations will be opened, with the link and the time the donations page goes live. At that time, you'll be able to load the donation page and use the link to be taken to the page where you can actually make your donation; when their needed costs are met, the link is closed. Typically, the flood of donations meets their goal in a short time -- the first window closed in about 20 minutes.

Not just that, but I never got a sense that my characters were becoming supervillains -- you started reside as a legbreaker for small-time thugs, and worked your way up to being a legbreaker for higher-ranked thugs, then to being a legbreaker for small-time villains, on up the chain until you became a legbreaker for Lord Recluse and his lieutenants. The operative aspect being that you were always a henchman, dancing to someone else's tune -- it was only in the newspaper missions that you had any sense of doing jobs for your own benefit.

Does the "_A" through "_F" labeling in the Sentinel+ files match the default order in the set description? None of my recreated characters are high enough to be worrying about set slotting yet, but I want to make sure that I'm going to be getting the correct ones where I had partial sets slotted.

If I'm remembering from the old forums correctly, this was explicitly stated by Positron at one point. Taunt gives you a measure of aggro on its own, then applies the taunt modifier to the aggro you have. If you already have aggro, that gets lumped in with the aggro from taunt before the modifier is applied, which is what makes dropping a high-damage AoE in a spawn and then taunting gets you a much better lock on the spawn than taunting, then attacking -- you do it the second way, and the Blasters and Scrappers will be able to pull aggro off you fairly easily.

That was one of the things I did after making a character here, just to see if I remembered how to do it -- and because all the Hellions were missing in the area Matthew Habashy sent me to, so I had to jump up onto the roofs in the area to get them. One of the "thank God that's gone" things I remember is from the early days, when you could be deep in a tunnel mission or five floors up in a door mission when you get 'Mission Complete', and having to make your way back to the entrance door to leave the mission, because there was no 'Exit' button.

It doesn't help now, but the Titan Network had the Sentinel+ utility back before shutdown that would have done that for you -- it would save out the information on your current character as an XML file, with the hope that it would, at some point in the future, allow you to load the data back into a revived server. I think that there are tools that will do this, but they are server-based, and I'm pretty certain that the public servers will never implement it. If you were to set up your own server, or found a private server that did this, you'd be able to reload the data and have your old characters back. But unless you had gone through and saved out the character data before the shutdown, there's no way to get it back now.

For all of the MMOs that have come out of Asia, that's because that's the way people became accustomed to playing there. Home computers in Asia typically didn't have the graphics capability to run the games the publishers were producing (being primarily business-oriented), so the publishers cut deals with the internet cafés to subsidize hardware in exchange for offering their games. So people would get together with their friends, go down to the internet café, and play together sitting right next to each other, then go home until the next session. In the US and Europe, where home computers were more entertainment oriented, people would go home, log into the game, and either play solo or group with people they'd meet up with after logging in.

I suppose it depends on what you're building for. My first character, back in 2004, was an AR/EM Blaster that I'd tricked out with an eye to Jack Emmert's comment "Range is a Blaster's defense". This became less true after virtually every mob got a ranged attack; I think she was the only character I had that got Zookeeper in its original 'defeat 10,000 Rikti monkeys' form. Still, as I had Snipe and LRM slotted, with Boost Range, I could hit targets so far away that I couldn't actually see them -- more than 250m for Snipe and 273m for LRM. With Build Up or Aim, I could one-shot a mob in a spawn and be too far away for the rest of the spawn to aggro.

It sounds a bit like Jack Emmert's mantra from the early days of CoH that "three minions = one hero" -- his vision that three bottom-tier enemies would be a significant challenge to a solo hero, the last vestige of which can be seen in the fact that the default minion spawn in solo missions at x1 is three minions. He also had the fixation on 'fun' being throwing yourself at the end boss again and again and again, being defeated over and over, until you figured out what the obscure specific actions you had to do to defeat it (as if the correct tactics wouldn't get splashed across the net within hours of that boss being beaten for the first time). Both of these aspects that made CoH more tedious to play got phased out as he was pushed upstairs, then the buyout by NCsoft freed the rest of the devs to make play feel more 'heroic'.

Okay, umm.. so it sounds as if you yourself do not know which one is which for certain. So perhaps label them more clearly? Loyalist Extreme, Loyalist Normal... etc.... They were Loyalist Responsibility (protecting the people while being loyal to Cole), Loyalist Power (support Cole while working to acquire more personal power), Resistance Warden (opposing Cole, but with as few human costs as possible) and Resistance Crusader (opposing Cole, whatever it takes, including human costs).

The KR base portal is just visually out of the way; if you go in the doors of the building it's on (behind Blue Steel), you're taken right up to the roof where the base portal and helicopter are.