srmalloy

It's botanically a fruit, but legally a vegetable, so ruled by SCOTUS in Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893), which concerned the tomato's classification under US customs regulation.

Fly's Acc debuff got removed somewhere around when City of Villains was released, IIRC. Maybe earlier.

Have the mission owner go to base before mission completion, then take the porter to Eden, then go to the Hive and position themselves for a good Kronos spawn. Then port back to base. After all that setup, complete the mission. The mission owner exits the base via the base portal, and is returned to the Hive, because that was the last zone he was in. And the Kronos spawns in the Hive.

The "Circle of Thorns 3" shoulder piece has a flappy, cape-like part hanging in the back. It appears to use the cape code for coloring, as the outside takes the colors you select, but the inside remains in black and white, and is uncolorable. You can work around the issue by making costume colors linked, which spreads the shoulder colors to the inside of the capelet, but if you're making that change after working on the rest of your costume, it can screw things up.

Back on live, the devs adjusted the mission reset function so that you could only reset a mission, IIRC, six times before the reset did nothing, leaving the mission as you exited it last. This was done to address the perpetual resets of the wolf farm missions before the addition of AE to the game, at which point some of the focus turned toward trying to police the AE missions to catch 'no risk' XP farms, and never changed after the aggro and target limits were put in that prevented the 'herd the whole map' process that the wolf farms relied on.

The waypoint being reset to the your assigned detective in the zone happens only when you enter a zone for the first time; on subsequent entries it doesn't happen. Still, I agree that it's annoying, and unnecessary if you already have your police radio.

All of the Outcasts' summoned fire imps, whether Frostfire or the Lead Scorchers, properly 'die' when the summoner is defeated. I think the reasoning behind why some pets do and some pets don't is that for the various controller/dominator pets, they're summoned and empowered by the will of the summoner; when the summoner goes down, the force holding the pet(s) together dissipates. For the critters summoned by the CoT or Rikti portals, they're self-contained entities; once they appear, they're there until defeated. For the husks summoned by the BP Death Shamans, you can make an argument both ways -- they could be fully empowered when summoned, and independent from that point, or maintained by the shaman, and should go down when he does.

For mobs that get stuck in the geometry, I don't think that there's anything that can be done. For mobs that fall through the geometry, there's a 'floor' beneath the map geometry that these mobs fall down to; if there were some way for this floor to be designated as a continual-damage area, so that any mob that fell through to the floor would take enough damage to kill it immediately or over a few seconds, that could address most of the problem. It would still leave flying mobs, who could be knocked through the geometry but not land on the 'floor', though.

Actually, I've seen two examples that suggest that it happens, although offscreen. One was a conversation among a group of Hellions where one says "No, I'm telling you -- he got the purse!", and the other one was a 'pass by and come back later' situation in Kings Row over on the east side; I was over there to talk to the contact there, and there was a Skull playing tug-of-war with a civilian. When I'd finished with the contact and headed back out, the civilian was gone and the Skull was rifling a handbag. So there is at least the suggestion that purse snatchings can be successful.

Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur. Unless you're trying for "sounds snooty".

I sometimes wish the ragdoll code was a little more sophisticated, with limits on the movement of body parts; it can be disturbing to defeat, say, a Council Marksman and have the body lying there on the ground doing an imitation of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, except that they're spinning at the waist and making five or six turns.

Turn down your graphics settings. I was having continual CTD problems with MSRs, where I would get down in the bowl and have my client blow up within two minutes. Reducing my graphics settings to 'Recommended' solved the problem, and I haven't had it recur since.

Vah! Denuone Latine loquebar? Me ineptum. Interdum modo elabitur.

When the team clicks, it can be awesome. And sometimes the setup makes all the difference; I remember being part of an all-Kinetics ITF that Kay ran on Guardian; it was a steamroll mostly because everyone was hopped up on boosts, with pets zipping around like hummingbirds on crack.

That's been in the game since fairly early on live, and there's never been a fix for it. I suspect that it's actually a communications problem between the server and your client -- you one-shot a mob, and the server sends a packet to tell the client to make the mob fall down, but the packet doesn't go through, and the client leaves the mob standing; the server 'knows' the mob is dead, so it never sends any more directions for it, and it will just stand there until there's a wider scene update and the server tells your client, "Oh, by the way, these mobs are dead", and your client updates by despawning the corpse.

I'm not sure about the aura mission, but I distinctly remember getting a notification, when I got a character to 20, that I'd reached the level where I could earn the right to wear a cape, and was directed appropriately to the contact.

A reference from the past:

Just to play devil's advocate here, since turning on SG mode to earn prestige reduced your Inf accrual -- at first across all levels, then changed so your Inf accrual only started to reduce in your 20's, dropping to 50% at 30 -- with so many characters running around with the double XP buff earning no Inf at all, what would that do to your prestige earnings? You're advocating a return to having to pay for everything in your SG base, which leaves all the SGs who already tricked out their bases sitting pretty while penalizing new SGs (which won't be able to create similar bases for quite a long time), and further penalizing them by making them forgo the XP boosters if they don't want to gimp their prestige gain. And all for the purpose of getting back a dick-measuring contest (SG prestige ranking) that has absolutely nothing to do with actual game play, and is driven more by how many different players -- not characters -- you can get to join your SG. So I'm going to have to vote a hard 'no' on this; it adds nothing useful to the game, and just adds another form of elitism.

You're missing the relevant point -- the camera always points at your character. With 'normal' mouse movement, moving the mouse up raises the camera, which, because the camera is pointed at your character, aims the camera down, and moving the mouse down lowers the camera, aiming the camera up. Inverting the mouse movement means moving the mouse up lowers the camera, aiming it upward, and vice versa.

Back long before XP modifiers, patrol XP, and Ouroboros -- but after accolades -- there was a thriving business in selling access to the "Rescue the mystic from the Circle of Thorns" mission that awarded the Spelunker badge; low-level characters would charge for signing up high-level characters that had either blown past the 10-14 level range of the contacts that offered the mission, or were already past it when the accolade powers were implemented. So, yes, outleveling content has been a thing since launch. As SurfD describes, it was easy to do with any AT.

That's why I said it was a silly proposal; it's something that you essentially have no control over, so it's a gauge of your luck. Going in blind, did you pick the right entry?

If this was going to be the result of having an "outleveled but incomplete" category for contacts between Active and Inactive, I would like to see it made a game option to select either being exemp'ed to the max level of the contact/arc or retaining your actual level; sometimes you want the feeling of total superiority that being able to casually blow through a mission gives you (without having to wait for the first mission of Mender Ramiel's arc).

IIRC, the only things that are applied to the character as decals are some of the chest detail entries -- all of the symbols, Greek letters, etc. -- basically, all of the 'flat' decorations. Anything that's 3D is additional geometry on top of the base character model.

Everything is rendered by the game engine. The world, the characters, the NPCs, the power visuals, etc. Back during live, there was interest in exporting character models from CoH, either to use in other rendering tools or for something like the arrangement Blizzard has with FigurePrints to 3D print color figurines of players' characters. Unfortunately, CoH's character models are just the shell of the body, with (if I'm remembering the accounts of people who were trying to make it work) some annoying glitches in the saved polygon data that had to be cleaned up by hand, with the textures of the patterns overlaid on the model. Now that the code's available to look at, though, I suspect that it would be possible to get all of the model data and the surface patterns without requiring manual cleanup (if someone hasn't done it already). But it doesn't change that the surface textures and patterns are overlaid on a relatively low-polygon character model.

Aargh. "Add a 'half layer' to the other side of the torso/legs" as if it were a SMOP (Small Matter Of Programming). Change the costume pieces database to allow for torso and leg patterns that have both left and right halves. Change the character costume database to allow for these as well. Change the character rendering code to recognize a two-sided chest/leg pattern so that it knows to render it differently from the one-sided patterns. Change associated code affected by the changes, like the demorecord code, which immediately breaks all existing demorecord files, making them unable to be played back, or the costume save/load functions, which either breaks every single saved costume file or requires more changes to be able to recognize and appropriately handle both old and new costume files. Then comes all the art work, where the tools for developing patterns for costume pieces have to be changed to allow creation of patterns that have left and right sides, before any work can be done on actually creating the art for these new patterns, and because these will be separate left and right halves in the database, not single whole-body patterns, every single one will need to be tested against the range of body scaling to ensure that they render properly, feeding back to the game client code for changes there if pattern changes can't fix the problem.