srmalloy

Which is a big 'if'. However, my point was that I believe that the brown cave maps are duplicates of the blue cave maps -- or, at least, duplicate the pieces they're made from -- and that it should be possible to replace the blue caves with the brown ones for the specific problem of people having issues with the color.

Just as a bit of perspective, Kotaku has an article about the custom quests players are creating in Assassin's Creed Odyssey to farm levels and stats with essentially no work. The article mentions that a cardinal rule of video games seems to be the immediate exploitation of whatever tools you give your players. People are going to push the edges of what they can get away with for their own benefit, and trying to stop it because you don't approve of their choice of playstyle just breeds division and antipathy. CoH is big enough to accommodate a wide variety of playstyles.

If I'm remembering correctly, there are two "small caves" map-tile sets, one in blue and the other in brown, with identical map structures. Remembering a discussion with Positron about the possibility of user-created maps, he confirmed that the maps were built using preconstructed blocks, but that the tools for joining them together were still primitive enough that it took a fair bit of time and skill to get everything to line up and join correctly, so it would need a lot of work to create a map builder that players could use. And I'm sure anyone who was around for the release of City of Villains remembers all of the maps where you'd find a corridor that had a black wall "blocking" the corridor, but if you went through it, you could see the corridor back the way you came... or drop through to the "floor" of the universe and have to get a GM to put you back... or have mobs jumping through gaps in the geometry to get away, then shoot at you from under the map where you couldn't shoot back. All of these are the result of mistakes the devs made when joining and aligning the map blocks, and the tools (and map blocks) would have to be cleaned up enough to make building a map a snap-click process before it could be made accessible to the playerbase. I don't know whether the maps are defined logically enough in the databases to be able to make a sweeping replacement of all of the blue cave blocks with the identical (except for color) brown cave blocks, but if that's possible -- without having to go through map-by-map and do realignment of all the block joins -- that would be a solution to the color problem.

I think it's a combination of "I want my character(s) back the way they were before the shutdown" with the people pulled in from other games where everything up to level cap is just grinding and the 'real' content is all endgame. Both of them are out to pump their characters to the top as fast as they can, with the distinction that the ones recreating their old characters are the ones organizing the Incarnate trials and MSRs, while we see the ones pulled in from other games in the LFG channel with messages like "Lvl 50 [archetype] lf AE farm" or "lvl 50 [archetype] lf anything" because they don't know how much content is there and how to get to it, or don't want to play their shiny new combat monster in content where they're not going to be at full power. How long did it take for the community of serious AE developers to form and build their content? All of us who played CoH have been scattered to the winds for seven years; it's going to take time to draw people back and rebuild the things that we had before. Clearly, from the level of... discomfort... with the number of people farming AE to the level cap, there's a desire for it to be used for more than just powerleveling, but we're going to need people building the content to have real, complex mission/arc stories in AE. I remember a similar flood of "AE babies" when it was originally released, and it eventually died back. There were always people who chose to use AE to powerlevel characters past all the content, because they were only interested in endgame, but I'd rather that we let them do what they want if it lets us rebuild the volume of good AE content that we used to have.

I'm still a bit twitchy about creating Science-origin characters, from the experience of being thrown up against Vahzilok for my first ten levels. And I still try to avoid taking early missions that would put me up against the Vahzilok, because I remember what it was like facing them with a shortage of attacks and an even bigger shortage of mitigation. If I'm correctly remembering some of the things that were revealed about the really early designs for CoH, the different origins were going to make a huge difference in not just which powers you could have, but how many of them you got and how powerful they were. This was kicked to the side fairly early when the balance issues became too complicated to move forward on.

The problem is that Patreon is an "always on" system. What they're doing now is to close the donations when they've covered their expenses. This is to create an additional layer of deniability for a charge that they're making money off of NCsoft's IP. With a Patreon, they can't control people throwing money at them.

I'm going to have to wave the red flag of ergonomics here, and suggest that you go off and look at the readability of different colors against the window background before you push for changes like this. Purple and grey, in particular, can be very hard to read, as will any other low-contrast color.

You don't need to remove AE to tamp down on the AE farms; just have AE missions automatically set the 'No XP' flag. If AE is such a horrible blight on the face of the game, the original devs would have removed it. And while I think that crawling up your electronic navel in the chase for the maximum-gain minimum-effort route to level cap because the experience from other MMOs is that the game doesn't start until you're at level cap with twinked-out raid gear is a stupid way to play the game, it's not my place to dictate how another player has fun. Well, there's the badge. And I've picked up the habit with low-level characters of going to AE, turning XP off, and running one of the low-level "XP farm" missions for tickets once, sometimes twice, depending on the number of tickets I come out with, and then spending the tickets on low-end Arcane and Tech salvage to build up a reserve of the salvage they'll need for IOs at 12.

I fail to see how "buy the enhancement attuned" is a solution for "I have this recipe and want to make it attuned when I craft it".

With both Blackwand and Nemesis Staff, the attacks work the same way -- you draw the weapon, assume a stance with the weapon held vertically at arm's length behind you, you sweep it forward, ending with the weapon held horizontally out in front of you pointing at the target, and then the blast flies from the tip of the weapon to the target at which point they take damage (and KB, for the Nemesis Staff). Yes, the hit/miss for the attack is determined when you activate the power (with the animation picking a 'high and right' direction for firing the attack), but the blast always comes at the end of the swing. The bug is that, when used against objects, the blast fires when you pull the weapon back behind you, and you complete the animation while the blast is flying. It doesn't affect the operation of the powers, except that the attack goes off earlier (leaving the animation to complete, so it doesn't affect any rotation you have). Aside from the minor benefit of potentially downing or interrupting your target before it can attack back there's no real game effect of the bug. Animations can be weird, too. I've never been able to duplicate it, and wish I had a demorecord of it, but fairly early in the original run of the game, my AR/EM Blaster had shot M80 Grenade at a Tsoo Red Ink Man. The grenade had reached the top of its arc and was descending when the Tsoo hit me with Siphon Speed and took off at full speed. I watched my grenade make a sharp turn in mid-air, heading back up and arcing off out of view range as it chased the escaping Tsoo. Only by the defeat notice and XP/inf award about 15 seconds later did I know that my grenade had reached its target.

So far, I've only found this in the "Get Proton to help you!" mission from Twinshot, but when I use the Nemesis Staff or Blackwand against the String Relay Transmitters, the blast from the power goes off about 1/4 of the way through the animation, leaving you waving your stick around after it's already fired. This happens only when attacking these objects; when used against any of the mobs in the mission, both powers animate and fire normally.

This. My personal opinion about how they choose to play, so long as what they're doing doesn't throw obstacles in front of me, isn't important to anyone but me. That said, I have to feel a little sad when I see "Level 50 [archetype] lf anything" or "Level 50 [archetype] lf AE farm" in the LFG channel, because i know that there's enough content to keep people busy for a long, long time, and I have to wonder how much of it is people wanting their old characters back as fast as possible, and how much is from other MMOs teaching people that everything you do prior to level cap and getting twinked out for endgame raids is just makework, and the game doesn't really start until level cap, so they come here and treat it the same way, even though CoH is (at least to me) more about the journey than the destination. But, hey, if they want to bumrush the level cap, twink themselves out to the limit, and then spam chat looking for something to do that won't exemp them down off their carefully-crafted peak of power, my only objection is with the latter. I think they're missing out on what made CoH what it was, but if the devs had genuinely wanted to stop people doing things like that, they could have easily made it impossible shortly after the first level-50 "AE babies" that didn't know how to get to Kings Row appeared.

Something I started doing back in the original run of the game was to pick names related to the character's powers; this was complicated by the fact that lots of other people appear to do the same thing. Early on in the game, I happened to see "для" pop up in chat, and on experimenting verified that CoH supported Unicode, albeit not for character names. The next character I made after this discovery was Yaderniy Ogon ('Ядерный Огонь', "Nuclear Fire"), a Fire/Rad Controller, who I set up with custom versions of the stock exclamations in Russian. Other characters were given similar foreign-language power-related names, generally with backgrounds that made the language of their name appropriate -- Dunkelkalte, Sovnya (a sovnya was a historical Russian weapon that was a blade on a staff), Tenevoy Ogon, Stal'naya Deva, etc. Going out to foreign languages for names has made it much simpler to get a name I'm satisfied with and appropriate to the character.

Hmm. Makes me wonder how ParagonWiki has managed to retain incorrect power information. You would have expected that someone would have fixed it in the time since the pool was released.

Giving the squires a mace and a bow would possibly allow them to use the same combat logic as the Battle Drones, and mirrors the typical backup weapon that archers would carry..

No. Each tier summons brings in one car, out of which however many pets you get for that tier pile out, except for the Strongman, who zooms in seated in an Al Bahr-like miniature car, then dives out, rolling to his feet while the car zooms on and fades out (comparable to the arrival of the tier 3 Thugs pet). The Tier 1 and 2 cars, however, must be obviously too small to hold even one pet of that tier, much less 3.

aka "Re-establish range". This takes a mob that has gotten to melee distance and puts it back at range, where their attacks typically do less damage. As such, it's useful for all the /MM Blasters that don't want to be blappers. If you don't want them getting pitched away from you, don't take it. A powerset is not required to have a complete roster of powers well-suited for a particular playstyle. This feels to me like "I want to play a Fortunata with Blaster-level damage". Having damage in the power and not being a PBAoE autohit Confuse make it something that's going to draw aggro to the Blaster and be somewhat risky to use. Changing it so that the Blaster can run in with Invisibility, fire it off to Confuse everything in the spawn but the bosses, and be perfectly safe while the spawn whittles itself down, allowing the Blaster's nuke to more reliably drop the whole spawn feels as if you're tipping things too far the other way.

Back Alley Brawler is in the southwest part of Atlas Park, in the center of the traffic circle at the south end of Argosy Industrial (just N of the big warehouse at the south end). Every time I've gone by -- always when finishing Marie Castel's arc, and whenever the dogpile around Ms. Liberty gets too insane -- there's rarely been more than one other hero in the area.

Back before ED, "Hellion golf" involved a level 50 six-slotting Power Push for KB, then going to Atlas Park, popping Power Boost if you had it, then hitting a Hellion, preferably doing this from the east side of the zone, with spotters to see where the body landed. I don't think you could make it all the way across AP, particularly with buildings in the way, but it was possible to hit Argosy Industrial. IIRC, this was one of the reasons the devs modified Power Boost to not affect knockback; it was far too easy to get insane amounts of knockback with it.

IIRC, the power description specifically states "sniper" in its effects, the same as Sniper Rifle, so even if the power's damage is Targeted AoE rather than single target, it should inherit all the Snipe characteristics and changes.

The Rule of Five is that you can't have more than five of the exact same set bonus. The KB-to-KD effect is the direct effect of the enhancement, not a set bonus, so theoretically it's not affected by the Rule of Five. At least as I understand it.

It didn't make ENOUGH money. In their eyes, yeah, because when you're a greedy company like NCSoft, you never make enough money, regardless of what IP they publish.. In point of fact, Paragon Studios was losing money, although that was due to them working on an undisclosed project that NCsoft had dumped in their laps; CoH wasn't making enough money to cover its own expenses and the development costs for this undisclosed project, so the studio was technically a losing proposition. Why NCsoft didn't just shut down the development project and keep CoH and Paragon Studios, I don't know. You could argue that killing the development project would be admitting that it was a bad decision to start it in the first place, an action damaging to the face of the manager who made the decision to go forward with it. You could also argue that NCsoft wanted to shut down Paragon Studios, and handed them the project so that it would run a net loss, giving them a reason to shut down the company. Another possible reason is Paragon Studios' attempt to buy themselves away from NCsoft, with NCsoft shutting them down for failing to display the proper respectful subordination to NCsoft. Or it could be that CoH had no way to be turned into the sort of microtransaction-driven cash-shop-based MMO that was their staple business model. But we can't know for sure. All we have is NCsoft's statement that CoH and Paragon Studios didn't fit with their ongoing plans for the future of the company.

I ran Posi 1 on a Beam/Marty Blaster yesterday, and there was disintegrate spread all over against the Vahzilok,mostly because of the way everything bunched up -- I would hit an Eidolon with Disintegrate to maximize the likelihood that I'd be able to hit them again for spread before they dropped, and when I hit them again, I'd usually get four or more "disintegrate spread" popups, then Cutting Beam to catch everyone that it spread to, and "disintegrate" would go fountaining up with the damage numbers. Running solo, it's harder to get the spread to work, because the spread range seems to be fairly short, and the mob you hit with Disintegrate usually takes off running towards you, pulling too far away from the rest of their spawn before you can hit them with a second attack to spread it. If you can hover above the group to use Disintegrate, so that the mob just runs back and forth under you and doesn't separate from their spawn, then it's much easier to spread disintegration.

IIRC, this was discussed early on in the original run, and the capability wasn't there -- if you've ever knocked back a Tsoo Sorcerer or one of the CoT mages, you'll know that there's nothing under their robe; it's a solid cone with feet sticking out of the bottom. I don't know if the advances that have allowed things like the long "Circle of Thorns" skirts would allow this to work, but I believe that if it had, the 'trenchcoat' costume piece would have been extended to have its proper length all the way around the body, rather than being just a buttcape.

Unfortunately, using the example of M80 Grenade from the Assault Rifle powerset, knockback is broken for that. You're shooting an explosive device at a target, and it and it explodes; logically, the other mobs around the target should be knocked away from the target by the blast, but as you see in game, all of the targets in the affected area get knocked back away from the shooter. This means that doing this (and fixing how M80 Grenade does knockback) would involve coding the effect as doing ordinary KB to the target and spawning a pseudo-pet that immediately applies a repel effect. The mechanisms for doing all of this is already in the game; the problem would be coding out the ability so that it works that way. Realistically, it would be more practical to develop the code to do knockback out from the center of an explosion first, and then see what other applications there are for it. One of the bits of fallout from making explosion knockback be 'out from the center' rather than 'away from the caster' is that it would be possible to make some powers like M80 Grenade into location AoE powers, rather than targeted AoE powers, allowing you to use them strategically to knock targets back in a desired direction (i.e.,the tank has mobs herded into a corner, and you could drop the grenade a bit away from the corner to push the mobs more tightly into the corner rather than just scattering them).