srmalloy

They probably could, but I think the intention of doing it this way is to ensure that they're taking in only what they need to cover the operating costs, removing the "making money off of our IP without our permission" violation that would give NCsoft the excuse to sue for damages, rather than just issue cease&desist letters, if they decide they need to make an example of the people operating the rogue CoH servers.

For a Greco-Roman style, he'd be wanting a chiton, for which the toga approximates, but covers the upper body, too (it would also be considered an athletic chiton, as a regular chiton was much longer. The kilt, plus one of the wider 'wrapped and tied' belts to represent the kolpos tied off at the waist would be as close as you can get with the existing available male pieces.

It's got a trivial workaround, but when you complete a respecification, and return to the normal CoH screen with your power tray(s) that have all your power icons dumped into them willy-nilly, any power that is "unavailable" won't appear in the trays. This includes powers like Follow Through in Titan Weapons, which requires Momentum to be usable. It's still in your Powers window (and will appear in red, showing that it's unavailable), and can be dragged down to your power tray(s), but if you're not paying attention, you may not notice that you're missing one or more powers until some time later.

There's a clue, which unfortunately people don't normally see any more (and may not have looked at when they got it), in the description for the 'Experienced' power that new characters got for the first few weeks -- "When this power is used, you will gain half a level of Patrol XP, however, you can only ever have 1 level worth of Patrol XP at a time. NOTE: Any Patrol XP granted through this power beyond the one level limit will be lost."

Because enhancements scale down as you exemplar, the special effects of uniques will work down to the higher of the minimum level of the enhancement set or five levels below the level you picked the power it's slotted in. So putting a level 10 Karma: KB protection in the power you picked at 49 isn't going to do anything if you exemplar below 44. The game doesn't record when you added slots to a power, so if you took Combat Jumping at 4, then put a second slot in it at 50, you could put that same Karma IO into the second slot, and it will work down to 10, the minimum level of the set. Basically, the you get the effect if the enhancement exists at the level you're exemped to and the power it's in isn't disabled for being too high. And even if you lose the set bonus effects, the base values (i.e., Dam/Acc increase) are scaled as long as the power is available.

Both "Meet the Gang" and "Help defend the Shining Star's Base" missions from Twinshot have execrable pathing. In the former, after you talk to Dillo and head back to the entrance to help with the intruders, Flambeaux goes into spaz mode each time you go down an elevator, exiting one, then running back in, sometimes several times. In the latter after you deal with the intruders on the second floor and go into the room that leads to the elevators, Grim runs back and forth pressed up against the railing of the raised section apparently unable to figure out how to reach you, until he finally realizes that he can jump and jumps onto the railing, then down to you.

Just as a sanity check, did you play the character between logouts, or just log in, see that the bar hasn't progressed, move them to a different location, and then logged back out? The badge requires you to earn 30 bars of Patrol experience, and you can only have 10 bars at any point, so if they've been logged out long enough to have 10 bars, and you don't use any of it by doing things to earn XP on the character, you're going to stay at the cap and not earn any more. Ifyou're at 96%, log in on the character, run a mission or two, and that should use up enough of your accumulated Patrol XP that you can log out and have the badge next time you check.

... that duplicates the texture of each possible costume piece for each slot, and doesn't fall victim to the animation quirks that cause existing costume pieces to clip weirdly. So at a base, ignoring whatever clipping issues might arise, you're wanting to double the art resources for costumes just to create a single effect? And this is also ignoring the rendering load -- I recall when it was discovered that the lag and rendering issues in Grandville were the result of all the Arachnos buildings having complete original-issue Brutalist building architecture hidden under the Arachnos facades. I'm not saying that asymmetrical costume designs aren't something that's worth setting up as a goal, but trying to implement one effect by troweling more graphics on top of the existing models in a way that isn't going to set up an ongoing way to produce additional asymmetric effects is probably not a good place to allocate the limited developer resources at this time.

Now that you mention it, I have a vague recollection of Positron saying that this wasn't possible the way that the rendering was set up, because the left side of a character was a mirror of the right side, and except for things like skirts and capes, it would take a major change in how characters were rendered to do asymmetrical styles.

OH NO YOU DIDN'T Well, the art doesn't seem as if it would be that difficult, assuming that the color maps were done reasonably (but you're right; this is Paragon Studios; it's going to be done pessimally). Getting it added as an option to the costume pieces, though; that's going to be the problem, given what we've been told about the arrays for options.

While Null the Gull has the ability to let you toggle the pop-up power bars (i.e., Translocation when using Mystic Flight) off so they don't appear, I'd like to be able to put things in the slots on the bar. For example, with Mystic Flight active, have macros for 'Up', 'Back', 'Fwd', 'Cam', etc. (using powexec_location with 'up:max', 'back:max', 'forward:max', and 'camera:max', respectively) to have predefined jumps to use as "oh sh*t" responses. I don't need them in my regular power bars, because they're not useful when Mystic Flight isn't active, so having them pop up when Translocation does is a win. Right now, if I try to drag macros into the Translocation pop-up bar, it doesn't work. Or is there a command to do it already that I'm missing?

That makes the other comments about salvage changing order as you pull things out make more sense now; it suggests that a salvage rack is a base item with the array of stored salvage as attributes of the rack. I'd have to look at the code to be sure, but that would make it much easier to increase the rack storage than do anything about changing the display order of items in the rack.

Yet another one confused about the "This is my rifle, this is my gun..." mnemonic...

Let's see if the copy-and-paste doesn't destroy the Unicode. Brigadyr, a Bots/Dark Mastermind. … Калибрование… Один… Два… Три… Базовые системы онлайн. Чек памяти… Переданный. Кодовые модули… Нагруженный. Просмотр окружающей среды… Угрозы: Ноль. Эксплуатационный БРИГАДИР. A crate buried in the depths of a dusty, forgotten warehouse is a lonely thing to wake up in. Even when you're a robot. БРИГАДИР ('Taskmaster') was the prototype for a robotic officer, the director for a squad — or a platoon or company — of robotic infantrymen. But the Soviet researchers had built better than they knew. The Ministry of Defense wanted a soulless combat manager that would direct equally-soulless shock troops into frontal assaults with no consideration for casualties; what they got was a cybernetic Napoleon critiquing the tactical failings of the officers who tried to order him into action. When he decided the orders he'd gotten were practical, he could carry them out flawlessly. When given orders he decided were ill-conceived, he would as often as not completely disregard those orders and undertake a different objective, or at best disregard the battle plan he was given and implement his own. Finally, it was decided the problem was fundamental to БРИГАДИР's design, and he was deactivated, crated up, stuck in a warehouse, and forgotten... where he was lost for more than a decade, until, during an earthquake, an automatic threat sensor restarted his systems. There is another six and a half pages of background that I added over time, hung up on completion mostly because I can't write a fight scene for crap, but the remainder of the original bio (before being cropped to the space available, and before I started expanding on it) I'd written for the character in its villain incarnation (morality shifts being a thing of the future when City of Villains was released) went as follows: Breaking into the facility of a major shipping company, БРИГАДИР crated up his subordinate robots, then himself, with shipping tags sending them to a holding dock in the United States. But the increased tensions in the post-9/11 world threw him a curve; his shipping container was opened and searched. Activated by the opening of the shipping container, his subordinate drones gave him sufficient covering fire for him to escape... until run to ground by a pair of heroes and incapacitated. After a flurry of buckpassing (and intervention by the ACLU), Homeland Security decided БРИГАДИР wasn't an object, and couldn’t be destroyed out of hand. Failing any better solution, he was shipped off to the facility best suited for holding individuals with the types of abilities he exhibited -- Zigursky Prison in Paragon City -- until Arachnos blew the facility open, taking thousands of incarcerated villains out of the prison. The other inmates had never properly understood his designation, so he gave up and accepted that people would call him 'Brigadyr' -- at least, until they were brought under proper direction. Reclaiming his communications module and his surviving drone, he completed the tasks set by the Arachnos operatives to prove that he met their qualifications for extraction. The other inmates had never properly understood his designation; he had finally given up and accepted that people would call him 'Brigadyr' -- at least, until this sample of the dregs of society feared to address him at all. «Этот 'Арахнос' - - мощный. Но это имеет те же самые внутренние конфликты, которые подрывают человеческое общество. Я должен быть терпеливым.» A tactical subroutine intruded. «Нет -- по-английский.» His ruminations shifted smoothly to English. «Arachnos will provide support -- as long as we continue to prove ourselves worth supporting. Hah. Sound tactics. "Скройте ваших друзей, но ваших врагов ближе." With them tied to his logistics train, this Lord Recluse can observe all those he has brought out of this 'Ziggurat'. He will be able to determine which ones are worthless, which ones he can use, and which ones will become a threat to him; the Rogue Isles are the crucible where the dross will be burned away. Well, then... 'beware of a quiet dog and still water'... I will take your aid, and your direction, so long as I can do so safely. But you will find that TASKMASTER is not your muzhik.»

Most of my characters have names that derive (generally in other languages, because it's easier to get a name you're after that way than in English) from the character's powersets, like a Fire/Dark Corruptor named Tenevoy Ogon (Теневой Огонь -- 'Shadow Fire'), or a Fire/Rad Sentinel named Termoyaderniy (Термоядерный -- 'Thermonuclear').

It would be nice to have a "move all remaining enhancements to enhancement tray" button, though, for when you're making a big slotting change and don't want to move twenty or thirty enhancements one at a time. It would take enhancements left-to-right, top-to-bottom from the enhancement display, so if you had any at the end you wanted to save and didn't have room, you'd want to move them first.

And this was one of the things that attracted me to CoH in the first place -- when I started playing, a few days after launch, the game didn't have any form of PvP whatsoever. And even when Arena dropped, I just declined to participate. About the douchiest thing I ever did in PvP was hanging out with several of my friends -- all of us were playing villains in the 25-30 range -- in Bloody Bay, where we managed to occupy the roof of the hero base (at the time, it didn't have turrets on it) and rain attacks down on the people trying to dislodge us. Occasionally one of us went down and would have to fly back, and eventually the heroes pushed us out, defeating enough of us at once that we couldn't sustain our occupation, but it was a hilarious couple of hours.

You're wrong. I mean, it's not "your wrong", it's "you're wrong", so, you're wrong. ... ... Captain Pedant awaaayyyyyyyyyyyy Also +1 Inf for grammar check And just remember, there really are grammar Nazis.

My first was CoH, joining about May 6 of 2004 on the recommendation of a coworker who'd been in the beta. I played CoH straight through until shutdown, playing on the first character I'd made after signing up in the bowl during a Rikti mothership raid when the shutdown hit, just as if the game was going to keep running. During that time, I tried and dumped both Tabula Rasa and Aion, the former for a number of balance problems that didn't get addressed until shortly before NCsoft screwed Richard Garriot over, and the latter when I discovered how emphatically Aion adhered to the fundamental premise of Asian MMOs -- that once you were out of the starting area, the game pretty much required you to be in a group to have a chance of surviving the quests you got handed (and outleveling them wasn't an option because running around solo 'street sweeping' got you killed because of the size of the spawns, which almost always required groups to handle). When CoH shut down, I picked up SWTOR, and played that solidly until it became intermittent when I picked up ESO right around the release of Summerset, and played both until I found out about the Homecoming servers, at which point both of them have been mostly kicked to the curb as I came back to CoH.

I posted a reply in the thread My Old Account Revived that describes how to use Titan SentIcon to extract the costumes from a Sentinel+ file, and how to view it in Internet Explorer and decode the power picks and slotting (unfortunately, because CoH doesn't save when you applied extra slots to powers, you'll have to guess at those), turning them back into a tabulation that you can use to make a build in Mid's/Pine's or just to throw together on Justin for testing.

There's an online tool in the Titan Network forums --Titan SentIcon -- that will read a saved Sentinel+ file and export a zipfile containing .costume files for each of the costumes in the Sentinel+ file. For builds, it's nowhere near as clean, but if you're running Windows, you can just double-click on the Sentinel+ .xml file, it will open in Internet Explorer. This will use IE's XML viewer, so what you're going to see is a wall of text that looks like this: [pre]<power> <id>Scrapper_Melee.Kinetic_Attack.Smashing_Blow</id> <level>8</level> <slots count="6"> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_A.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_A</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_E.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_E</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_D.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_D</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_B.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_B</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_F.Crafted_Crushing_Impact_F</slot> <slot boost="0" level="50">Boosts.Crafted_Makos_Bite_D.Crafted_Makos_Bite_D</slot> </slots> </power>[/pre] The <power></power> tags delineate a single power in the character's build. In the tag pair, the <id></id> tags bracket the name of the power, identifying the powerset (or pool) that it came from and the name of the power. The "level" tag is the level at which the power was chosen, in this case level 8; because CoH does not record when you picked the slots for a power, it just lists the slots. In the "slot" tag, the "boost" attribute should be the boost value applied to the enhancement (i.e., +1, +2, etc., if you've used enhancement boosters), the "level" attribute is the level of the slotted enhancement, and the contents of the tag (i.e., between the <slot> and </slot> begin and end tags is the name of the slotted enhancement. On the cityofheroes.fandom.com wiki, the enhancement sets have the associated letters listed on the set page -- in this case, the power has the Crushing Impact Acc/Dam, Acc/Dam/End, Acc/Dam/Rech, Dam/End, and Dam/End/Rech slotted (in that order), and the Mako's Bite Acc/End/Rech. Common IOs will be easier to figure out; they'll have names like "Boosts.Crafted_Accuracy.Crafted_Accuracy".

Having news crews appearing for some of the zone events, like the building fires in Steel, appearances of the Ghost Ship or Lusca, and the Troll events in Skyway would add to the immersion. Someone would need to do up the scripting for all the NPCs, though, even if you stole existing NPC designs for the news crew, and the news van would need to be created. Other than the scripting for it, I don't think it would involve a large amount of work, but I can't say for sure.

I decided to run one of my characters around Echo:Atlas Park today, picking up the accolade "Walking Down Memory Lane" for getting all of the exploration badges, and I noticed that there was a fundamental difference between Echo:Atlas Park and Echo:Galaxy City. In Echo:Atlas Park, Ms. Liberty, the four origin contacts, the city manager, the supergroup registrar, and the Freedom Corps vendors near Ms. Liberty were all in their original positions, and I could interact with them -- Ms. Liberty told me how many XP I needed for my next level, I sold off unwanted TOs to the vendor, and Azuria even forwarded me to a new contact. In Echo:Galaxy City, on the other hand, the plaza and city building are devoid of life; BAB isn't standing out on the dais, and all of the interactible NPCs are missing from the building. It seems to me that putting BAB back on his dais as a trainer, and restoring the NPCs to the city building would make the zone a better 'echo' of what Galaxy City was. For the contacts in the city building, letting them an alternate interface to the contact in the regular zones shouldn't break anything, and putting BAB and the Freedom Corps vendors back out in the plaza likewise. I don't know what the difficulty of doing this would be, but as it is now, having the core of the zone empty while Echo:Atlas Park isn't feels a bit like the conversion into an 'echo' zone was done a bit half-heartedly.

Given the complaint that someone else made about how the salvage in a salvage rack changed order when they were pulling salvage out of the rack, it suggests that the actual database storage of a salvage rack is an array of records with the ID of the rack and the ID of the salvage item in the order in which they were put into the rack, and they get rolled up under the first record of each item of salvage when displayed, with the first matching item in the array being removed when you take an item, then the list being reloaded. So if you put in a Simple Chemical, then a Luck Charm, and did it again four more times, alternating, you'd see 5 Simple Chemical then 5 Luck Charm, and if you took out a Simple Chemical, the rack would display 5 Luck Charm then 4 Simple Chemical, because the first Luck Charm you put in is now at the 'top' of the list. Given all the ways it could have been done, it's likely not the way it's actually implemented, but it's one possible way, and illustrates how seemingly unrelated design choices can affect what you see in the game.

It makes me wonder whether TA was originally balanced as a Defender-only powerset, with the assumption that a Defender would regularly have Vigilance active reducing the End costs of all the powers -- which, from what I saw pre-shutdown, became less and less useful as characters became more powerful. It seemed as if, when things fell in the pot badly enough for Vigilance to come into play to any significant extent, things were bad enough off that just reducing the End cost of the Defender's abilities wasn't going to be much help pulling things out of the pot. Maybe reducing End cost and recharge time, with the numbers being looked at based on combat data? I don't know.