srmalloy

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.

It is technically feasible to do, in that it's possible to make the code changes to the character model database structure and the rendering engine to allow it to work. It would impose a performance hit on the game engine, although I can't say offhand to what degree. However, given the limited development resources, I believe that the effort that would be needed would be better expended in other directions.

IIRC, salvage storage predated the Invention system, because you needed both Prestige -- obtained by playing in SG mode -- and base salvage, which was drops of components that were needed to craft base items. Virtually everything you did with your base needed some combination of base salvage and paying the Prestige cost for it. Base salvage was eventually eliminated, but the Prestige cost for base items remained.

It's also an incomplete answer that doesn't explain why the current costume model can't have asymmetrical patterns on the chest and legs.

They're not left and right halves; they're one half, which is mirrored on the other side. That's why asymmetrical chest and leg pieces don't work -- the costume models only have data for one side of the chest/legs; there's no place in the database to store the information for the other side of the body. It would take a character database redesign to add the 'other half' fields to do this -- and then all of the UI changes to handle it.

Go to Echo:Galaxy City, get all the badges and plaques, go to the tram, go to Echo:Atlas Park, get all the badges, then go to Ouroboros. And just as a bit of trivia, there are two separate plaques that are in Paragon City twice. One is the plaque under the statue of Atlas in both Atlas Park and Echo:Atlas Park; the other is plaque 5 for the Just Said No to Superadine badge, on the wall of a building north of Yin's Market in Faultline and on a marker stone adjacent to a building in the same location in Echo:Faultline.

I picked up the habit, whenever I did the Wheel of Destruction arc, to tell Azuria in local chat "I'd like to put this under 'Will Call' for the Banished Pantheon, please" whenever I delivered a piece to be put in MAGI's 'secure' vault. I kept wondering why there wasn't a pick-up window on the outside of City Hall back where the MAGI room was, so the villains don't have to actually go inside City Hall to collect the artifact(s) they want.

I'd be willing to bet that you could program either a Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS or Saitek X-65F HOTAS (joystick/throttle combinations) to do it, but it would be a pain in the ass learning the switch configurations, since you wouldn't have the association between the keys and the trays. Besides, joystick and throttle for movement doesn't work well for an MMO.

They do work the same as the tailors elsewhere; the NPC is a tailor, not a plastic surgeon. Tailors allow you to change your costume and powers; plastic surgeons will allow you to change your body type and sliders, as well. The plastic surgeon at an Icon or Facemaker is generally in the right rear of the location. Having plastic surgeons as one of the NPCs you can put in your base is something that has been requested a number of times.

"Radiation Illusion", "Steel Maiden", "Archer" (that one was basic, an Archery/TA Blaster), and "Overgrowth", actually. Others I have would be, in Cyrillic, Теневой Огонь ('Shadow Fire'), Обморожение ('Frostbite'), Умственный Улан ('Mental Lancer'), Дева Молния ('Lightning Girl'), Влияние Кинетика ('Kinetic Impact'), Удар Молний ('Lightning Strike'), Ядерная Тень ('Nuclear Shadow'), Черная Молния ('Black Lightning'), Темный Знатокъ ('Dark Adept'), Лезвия Разума ('Mindblade'), Термоядерный ('Thermonuclear'), Буревестник ('Storm Petrel'), Ядерная Зима ('Nuclear Winter'), and Голубая Молния ('Blue Lightning'). As much entertainment as I'd get by watching people try to refer to them in chat, the transliterations 'Tenevoy Ogon', 'Obmorozheniye', 'Umstvenniy Ulan', 'Deva Molniya', etc. make communication much easier, even if the meaning of the name is opaque to them. Allowing special characters in names might have made sense when the game was being regionalized for the "City of Hero" release in Korea (and despite the Unicode support in chat, it was never enabled for names), but I don't see that making things more difficult for other players to enter names is worth the increase in name variety.

Background chatter in the Vanguard base in the RWZ: [NPC] Vanguard Wizard: I don't care WHAT your opinions. If they do not help this operation, they do not leave your lips. Got me? I think there should be 'are' after 'opinions'.

The whole 'Fog of War' thing annoys me, at least for the city zones. Doesn't anyone in the entirety of Paragon City have maps of the city? Now, for zones that have been... redecorated... I would like to see a different form of 'Fog of War' -- when you first enter a city zone, you get a fully 'explored' map showing the zone as it was, for example, Baumton as it existed before getting ruined. As you explore the zone, the 'old' map is replaced by the 'real' map -- Boomtown as it is. For the city zones that weren't significantly damaged, the 'gas station map' will be accurate, while zones that were severely affected by events will have varying degrees of change as they are explored. Now, I don't expect this to happen, because it makes a significant change to the way that the zone maps work, and requires new art for the 'pre-destruction' zones -- Baumton, Eastlake, Woodvale, Overbrook, Perez Park, etc.

As I originally envisioned it, it would have only been for zones that had two tram stations, but I realized that most zones had multiple regular entrances. Whether base teleport drop locations are included would have to be decided if this was implemented.

The "rank rank name" Council bosses seem to be a stock problem; I've encountered them enough times that it doesn't even raise an eyebrow any more.

Of the ones I've leveled enough, /Nature seems to be positioned very nicely; your heal is an aimed cone, so you can stay behind your pets and keep them healed, and both Wild Bastion and Wild Growth buff your pets significantly; Lifegiving Spores creates a healing area you can drop under a fight, and Overgrowth can buff your pets' damage and ToHit. You've only got the one debuff you get automatically at creation, but the range of buffs you get really helps keep your pets alive. It doesn't really have good thematic synergy with any particular primary but it's still a good secondary.

Or, when encountering one of the swinging gates (like just S of Penny Yin) or one of the red phone booths, pushing up against the door to vandalize it, breaking it off.

I don't know a good way to implement it, and it's not a really serious suggestion anyway, but I think having a badge series for making the wrong choice would be funny. The badges would be something like 'Confused', 'Misguided', 'Clueless', 'Lost', and 'No Sense of Direction' for increasing numbers of times you entered a zone for a mission, where the zone has multiple transport locations, and you pick one that isn't the closest to the the mission. It would need to have protections against gaming the count -- only the first time you enter the zone after receiving the mission, etc. -- but it would be a silly goal for people to go after.

Acc/Dam, Dam/End, Dam/Rech, Acc/Dam/End, Acc/Dam/Rech (Dam/End/Rech generally only gets slotted - last - if there isn't anything needed more for a sixth slot). And I use the 'will go in this slot' highlight on other powers slotted with the same set to make sure I put them in the same order.

It would be interesting to see people dealing with names like 'Лучевой Мираж', 'Стальная Дева', 'Лучник', or 'Разрастание' -- all characters in my roster...

Do both -- have a TF/SF or trial that revolves around an even more ambitious plan. For example, the Oranbegans work out a ritual to go back into trackless prehistory and set up a failsafe that would be under the location where the Mu set up their tap into the portal in the Tower and short-circuit their attempt to hijack it (it being camouflaged as a confluence of ley lines to make its location attractive for siting the Mu's attempts). The heros/villains have to follow the Oranbegans into the past and stop the creation of this failsafe or pervert it to become a power tap for Arachnos. The TF/SF succeeds, sort of, and the failsafe detonates, creating a wave in time that swaps a section of the modern world with a part of the world from millions of years in the past, resulting in the appearance of new land from the distant past. Now, with fragmented Oranbegan artifacts scattered across the land, there are expeditions from both heros and villains to recover the artifacts, find out more about what they are supposed to do, investigate the wild life, etc., with the trail of exploration for Oranbegan artifacts leading up to another TF/SF to find and recover the damaged but still powered relic the Oranbegans intended to use to sabotage the Mu. The zone could then have dinosaurs, Oranbegan structures in the open air and underground, with both Oranbega and Mu fighting to take/retake artifacts, and with careful enough design, the final TF/SF could be built to allow for siding with the Oranbegans, the Mu, or denying them both their goal.

It's not a reversed knee; it's the equivalent of the ankle joint in humans, between the tibiotarsus and tarsometatarsus bones. Birds and other digitigrade animals have knees like plantigrade animals, but many have disproportionately shortened femurs relative to the tibiotarsus, so that the thigh remains close to the body and is not immediately recognizable. But you're correct that the rigging for the digitigrade legs pays no attention to an actual digitigrade gait, being plantigrade walking for all leg types.