srmalloy

They're not affected by Fear powers?

This was an ongoing issue with the Positron TF; it seemed like every time I ran it, the team was made up of four exemplar/anchor pairs, and the client was still unstable enough that it was a crapshoot whether we'd make it past the middle of the TF without having someone crash or disconnect, with a 50% chance that it would be an anchor, causing their paired exemplar to be ejected from the TF. If it happened in the first two missions, we'd generally restart, but later in the TF we'd just bull through.

Recently, I have been experiencing occasional -- sometimes almost back-to-back -- crash issues. Not just the client falling on its face, but the whole computer -- black screen and reboot. The crashes occur when finishing a transition; I've had it happen when entering a mission, leaving a mission, zoning into my base, zoning from my base to another zone, zoning with the tram, zoning with TUNNEL, and once when accepting an Assemble the Team during a Manticore TF. What makes it odd is that I have only been able to make it occur with my Demon Summoning Masterminds; when trying to replicate it with a Robotics Mastermind, or a character of any other AT, I can't get a crash. With further experimentation, simply summoning all my pets and running around zoning repeatedly failed to cause a crash; when I used Enchant Demon to buff my pets, I was able to get a crash four zone changes later. Testing using only Abyssal Empowerment did not cause a crash; the problem appears to be related to the use of Enchant Demon. I have not yet done tests summoning only one grade of pet (i.e., demonlings, demons, demon prince), applying Enchant Demon, and zoning repeatedly. Curiously, when a crash occurs, the Homecoming launcher shows the regular Homecoming client as 'not installed' when first started after the reboot, but clicking on the 'download' arrow appears to refresh something, because it shows 'Ready' within a second after clicking. Thinking that the issue might be something on my end, I upgraded my video drivers, and also wiped and completely reinstalled the game, although I did retain the mods I have installed: Vidiotmaps, the 'MoreMaps4U' i24 map update, and BernardTheBeast's sound mod to make the Demons less annoying. I will have to test removing each one in turn to see if one of them is the issue, but the problem does not occur anywhere else in the game except for loading into a new zone, and only with my Demons MMs. If I dismiss my pets before zoning, the problem does not occur, but taking the time to resummon and buff them all for every door mission in a TF gets tedious.

As long as you don't care about the inevitable shitstorm from people who see their pet feature not getting the priority they feel that it deserves, regardless of how much work it entails or how many other things break in the process, etc.

Which immediately reminds me of:

This is probably not going to be an issue for non-pet characters, but is it possible to change the way mouse targeting works -- the change to a red pointer to indicate that your pointer is over a targetable mob -- to exclude mobs that are between your character and the camera, but not displayed on screen? With my Masterminds, it's become tedious to have to perform camera gymnastics at mission doors and glowies to get the blue hand allowing you to click on the door/glowies, because my pets always run up behind me, and their target boxes for clicking on them extend up into my field of view even if they're hidden off the bottom of the screen.

IIRC, it's a condition imposed by NCsoft as part of the negotiations the Homecoming group is engaged in. With video hosting sites monetizing the uploaded video, this is making money off of NCsoft's IP, with Homecoming being complicit in enabling it by operating the rogue servers -- grounds for NCsoft to drop a C&D order on the negotiating table and go home. So Homecoming is aggressive in shutting it down when they find it, the same way they're careful to only accept donations to cover their operating costs.

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.