srmalloy

And have donations to cover operating costs be pulled out separately for the PvP-only server so that when if it fails to get enough support to cover the cost of running it, we can shut it down and we'll have hard numbers to wave in people's faces the next time the idea comes up.

Back on live, I had a stack of emote bind files for my Bots/Dark MM, whose background was being a 'failed' Soviet experiment to create a robotic director of combat robots. What the bind files did was let me make a sequence of pet 'statements' in Russian like this: <em taunt> Твоя мать носит обувь солдата! Your mother wears the footgear of a soldier! Что? What? Это должно быть оскорблением? That's supposed to be an insult? Так написано в словаре. That's what the phrasebook says. Я никогда не пойму органику. I'll never understand organics. I need to recreate the bind set; maybe with a popmenu, so it doesn't take up much keyboard space.

The only problem you're going to find is that the slightly slower speed of Group Fly and the jerky response of your pets will cause them to fall out (literally) of the Group Fly volume if you try to make any decent speed across a zone. Unless and until this gets worked out, you either have to stop at intervals to make sure you haven't lost anyone, or use tricks like putting yourself on follow to one of your pets, then using the Goto order on that pet to send it where you want to go, which keeps you from outrunning your pets.

Something that I found to be useful if you're going to do this is to remember the base portal and base transporter. If you use your Ouroboros portal to go to Ouroboros to talk to Mender Ramiel, then exit to FF and enter the Vanguard office right across the street to go to RWZ to talk to Lady Grey, the portal won't be recharged after you talk to her. If you have the right teleporters, you can go to Echo:Galaxy City and take the tram to Ouroboros before the portal recharges, then you talk to Ramiel to complete the mission, go back via FF to talk to Lady Grey again, and then back to Ramiel to turn it in (the Ouro portal may not be recharged yet if you're quick, so you can either wait or take another loop through Echo:Galaxy). If you haven't learned from the "Talk to the Perez Park Security Chief" mission, which always sends you into Perez after Circle of Thorns you're not leveled enough for, don't just complete the mission to talk to Lady Grey -- this just completes the 'talk to Lady Grey' part and auto-accepts the 'rescue the Honoree' mission, and now you have to wait three days to auto-complete that. This, like the "Talk to [zone] security chief" missions, is a chained double mission -- the mission to talk to the temp contact, and the mission they give you -- you want to auto-complete the second, not the first.

They're incorporated in New York for the tax break.

Sondra Castel's arc also pops you out right next to Thiery, and about 80% of the time the XP award for finishing her arc pushes you across a level break, so having BAB right there is quite convenient. I'd like to see him put back into Echo:Galaxy City, though, along with the other fixed NPCs; if it's supposed to be an echo of the past, it should resemble it as it was more closely.

Something separate from the Controller ATOs, which are universal mez, then?

This is why both of my DP Blasters have been sidelined; they're at levels where Hail of Bullets is an important part of whacking a spawn, and I don't want to get used to having to work around its defects.

The AR/EM Blaster I had back on live was an experiment to see if Statesman's claim that "range was a Blaster's defense" could be made to work. One of the things I used to amuse myself with was standing on the platform near Imperious in Cimerora waiting for an ITF team to fill, sniping the mobs in the plaza on the other side of the valley with Snipe and LRM, then shooting the survivors as they made their way toward the platform after aggroing on me.

The only real issue I have with the Snipe in Archery is that the animation is a textbook example of "How Not to Shoot a Bow" -- you draw the bow and hold it, with the subsequent wavering of your aim that is the inevitable result of trying to hold a high-powered bow at full draw, and you're expected to believe that this is the highly accurate longest-range shot you can make. If the point of the arrow is waving around, you're either pulling too much draw weight, or you need to work on strength and stamina in your arms. And medieval military archers generally didn't hold full draw at all -- once they reached full draw, they loosed. I'd much prefer a Snipe animation that had you holding the draw smoothly, but that would raise complaints like "why does my character just stand there holding the shot?"; a slower, more careful draw that releases when it reached full draw would feel better. But there are already enough liberties taken with Archery to make it a viable powersetn what's one more?

Which is why I added the update; I haven't taken a dive into the data structures, so I can't say for certain that it's just a matter of changing a link to a sound file. I can only speculate based on what I would have done if I'd been responsible for defining the data structure. In any case, I'm just trying to see if there's enough support for the idea to actually present it to the devs for consideration.

That was the uniform they had at launch.

One of the things that has always bothered me about the DE is how the Granite mobs 'rip off' the Council wolves, particularly the howling; it just feels wrong for an animated rock formation to be sounding like a wolf. Fortunately, there's already a good replacement in game -- in The Hive, the monster-rank Quarries have a deep, almost subsonic cry that feels much more appropriate for animated rock. So I'm throwing out the suggestion of asking to have the Granite 'wolf howl' be replaced by the Quarry low-frequency call. Comments? Update: In theory, this should only require replacing the 'play this sound file' value for the animation a Granite does that currently plays the Council wolf howl with the one a Quarry uses, but I've learned not to trust that how I'd set up data structures would be the way another programmer would do it.

I use this trick with the Bertha and Long Tom missions in the Synapse TF. Since the next mission after Bertha (defeat Long Tom) is always in Steel Canyon, and the mission after Long Tom is always in Skyway, hitting the base teleport when each mission ends speeds up getting to the next mission. You could also do it after the first mission of Posi 2, since only one person needs to talk to the Hero Corps field analyst, and the following mission is always in Faultline.

I'm reminded of an exchange between two characters in the novel The Long Run, by Daniel Keys Moran: "What are these... Whores-doovers?" "Or-dervs. It's a Frog word that means munchies." "Oh. They could have said."

If you read the page, there is a quote from Castle explaining that the Law of Fives applies to named bonuses, not their magnitude. So if you could find some way to slot them, you could get ten 7.5% bonuses to recharge -- five as "Luck of the Gambler Recharge Bonus" from the LotG global, and five "Huge Recharge Bonus" from IO sets. Unfortunately, the paragonwiki pages don't list the names of the set bonuses -- a 3% bonus in one set might be "large X bonus", while in another it could be "Huge X bonus". "Castle further elaborated on the rule of five in I13 Closed Beta saying that the exclusion of more than five of the same bonuses is based on the name of the bonus and not its value. For example, a character can benefit from up to five global benefits of Luck of the Gambler: Defense/Increased Recharge Speed, which gives a global +7.5% bonus to Recharge Rate, as well as up to five set bonuses of +7.5% Recharge. That's because the first bonus is named "Luck of the Gambler: Recharge Speed" while the second is "Huge Recharge Bonus". One can find the names of the bonuses listed in the Combat Attributes window. "

I'm not sure it can properly be called 'geometry', but in Kallisti Wharf, at the 'T' intersection just east of the base portal, there is a car in an endless loop between the zebra crossings on the N/S part of the intersection -- a one-car version of the pileup that used to be over on the west side of the map.

In Faultline: [NPC] Construction Worker: I'm hiding from my wife. Why are you up here? In Brickstown: [NPC] Mad Freak Chopper: Chillin' like the villain I am!

To contribute to the necro-ing of the thread, I still think that the easiest long-term solution to the enterbasefrompasscode issue is to hook it into the same check that drives movement suppression -- when the game decides that you're in combat, the enterbasefrompasscode function is suppressed. This would allow its use everywhere in the game until the character attacks or is attacked; once combat starts, you're stuck, thereby preventing them from using it to skip out on an imminent defeat. If you can zip far enough away for the in-combat check to expire, then you can use it again, but you have to get away first.

The name change, moving 'Homecoming' to the front of the name, does imply a degree of progress; with 'City of Heroes' at the front, the implication is that it's still being run by NCsoft; moving the qualifier could set up a legal status of being 'Homecoming', a licensed derivative of 'City of Heroes'. I don't know how the legal aspects work, but it seems to me that this is a move to separate Homecoming, a legitimated derivative, from the original. It's not proof of progress in any way except to show that NCsoft is actually negotiating, but it is a promising sign

Don't Brawl and Boxing alternate between left and right punches, too?

And all of the hedges in Perez Park are neatly trimmed, despite it being a hazard zone that civilians and low-level characters should avoid (and that's not even considering the functioning businesses in Perez Park and Boomtown -- at least the ones in Perez have functional buildings; the ones in Boomtown are in buildings damaged in first Rikti invasion). And Penelope Yin when you first meet her in Faultline.

You can already go to any of the origin contacts downstairs in City Hall when you create a character and do their mission arcs and follow their introduction chain as you fill out their relationship bar.

Altering your costume (or your body) at any tailor or tailor-enabled trainer before level 10 is free. You can head over to the Icon across the street from the hospital on the north side of Atlas Park and avoid the crowds and lag.

In Max's mission "Rescue Gyrfalcon from the Council", in the first chamber there are a pair of one-sided polygons sticking out from the structure. In the first screenshot, there is a triangle polygon intersecting the near rockpile, and nothing beyond it, while in the second screenshot, from a reverse angle, there is another triangle polygon between the two rockpiles, and nothing at the far rockpile. From the pattern in the wall, you can tell that the two polygons are in different positions, and neither is visible from the position of the other.