srmalloy

Hell, Positron admitted, back in one of the meet&greet events at the San Diego Comic-Con, several issues before shutdown, that the code was spaghetti and baling wire, and each beta pushed to the PTS was accompanied with "please, don't have too much break this time" prayers. Unless you've got Torquemada enforcing the coding design standards, this is going to happen to any big programming project as it goes through revisions and has coding staff move on to be replaced by new coding staff. And sometimes even that doesn't help. Programmers want to write code and see it up and running; documentation takes a seat way in the back of the bus, and even documenting everything that you do isn't going to help when the only way you found to do something without rewriting huge chunks of code was to hook into some obscure function in a module that did something completely different. Which then got updated in a patch unconnected to either your addition or the module's original function.

If I'm remembering the discussion back on the original boards about this, there are several 'paired' enhancements like damage and resistance that are actually in the same 'box' in the database, just with opposite sign, and that this is one of the things that constrains what kinds of powers the game can have -- you can't have an attack power that boosts your Resistance on every hit, because the game wouldn't be able to distinguish between Damage and Resistance enhancements slotted in the power; it's a trait of the power that determines whether the enhancement is treated as Damage or Resistance.

It is a nice feature to have; however, it's grossly dependent on _how_ the list of enhancements in storage are a) stored, and b) retrieved. At the rock-bottom simplicity end, which is very unlikely to be the case, it's altering one SQL query to add 'ORDER BY' clauses. More likely, using the admission by the GMs that adding AH functionality while in your base would require loading the whole auction house database into the data structures for the base, the items in storage are loaded into memory when you enter the base, which means that the enhancements in storage are already in a data structure than may not be amenable to being sorted. I can think of at least four different ways that it could be done, and they all have annoying aspects to them, particularly as they would more readily be done client-side, since there could be several people in a base all looking at enhancements, and all sorting them differently. This adds complexity, as you would need to ensure that there are additional checking to ensure consistency. And the problem balloons when all of this has to tie back into the existing code. So, yes, it can be a relatively simple problem, but given that CoH is 8+ years of accreting spaghetti code, it's unlikely to be.

Take the figure with a truckload of salt, but IIRC one of the numbers being tossed around in the "buy CoH from NCsoft" threads on the Titan Forums was eighty million dollars for the IP, source, and binaries (I don't recall if that included the player data or not).

I don't remember where I ran across it (here or on Discord), but there was a reference that, if you had the SKU for one of the costume powers, you would be able to get it from the P2W vendor. So it appears that there are provisions already for acquiring them, just not a way that doesn't involve GM intervention yet.

If you go over to the forums at the Titan Network, you will find a number of threads connected with several different efforts to get NCsoft to sell or license the City of Heroes IP, going back to an account of the attempt by Paragon Studios to buy itself free of NCsoft and become an independent entity prior to the closure of Paragon Studios in September 2012. Aside from nebulous statements about 'progress', there has been little or no evidence that anything is moving forward on any of these attempts, mostly from a lack of response on the part of NCsoft.

Each month, at the start of the month, they put up an announcement here and in Discord that donations will be opened, with the link and the time the donations page goes live. At that time, you'll be able to load the donation page and use the link to be taken to the page where you can actually make your donation; when their needed costs are met, the link is closed. Typically, the flood of donations meets their goal in a short time -- the first window closed in about 20 minutes.

Not just that, but I never got a sense that my characters were becoming supervillains -- you started reside as a legbreaker for small-time thugs, and worked your way up to being a legbreaker for higher-ranked thugs, then to being a legbreaker for small-time villains, on up the chain until you became a legbreaker for Lord Recluse and his lieutenants. The operative aspect being that you were always a henchman, dancing to someone else's tune -- it was only in the newspaper missions that you had any sense of doing jobs for your own benefit.

Does the "_A" through "_F" labeling in the Sentinel+ files match the default order in the set description? None of my recreated characters are high enough to be worrying about set slotting yet, but I want to make sure that I'm going to be getting the correct ones where I had partial sets slotted.

If I'm remembering from the old forums correctly, this was explicitly stated by Positron at one point. Taunt gives you a measure of aggro on its own, then applies the taunt modifier to the aggro you have. If you already have aggro, that gets lumped in with the aggro from taunt before the modifier is applied, which is what makes dropping a high-damage AoE in a spawn and then taunting gets you a much better lock on the spawn than taunting, then attacking -- you do it the second way, and the Blasters and Scrappers will be able to pull aggro off you fairly easily.

That was one of the things I did after making a character here, just to see if I remembered how to do it -- and because all the Hellions were missing in the area Matthew Habashy sent me to, so I had to jump up onto the roofs in the area to get them. One of the "thank God that's gone" things I remember is from the early days, when you could be deep in a tunnel mission or five floors up in a door mission when you get 'Mission Complete', and having to make your way back to the entrance door to leave the mission, because there was no 'Exit' button.

It doesn't help now, but the Titan Network had the Sentinel+ utility back before shutdown that would have done that for you -- it would save out the information on your current character as an XML file, with the hope that it would, at some point in the future, allow you to load the data back into a revived server. I think that there are tools that will do this, but they are server-based, and I'm pretty certain that the public servers will never implement it. If you were to set up your own server, or found a private server that did this, you'd be able to reload the data and have your old characters back. But unless you had gone through and saved out the character data before the shutdown, there's no way to get it back now.

For all of the MMOs that have come out of Asia, that's because that's the way people became accustomed to playing there. Home computers in Asia typically didn't have the graphics capability to run the games the publishers were producing (being primarily business-oriented), so the publishers cut deals with the internet cafés to subsidize hardware in exchange for offering their games. So people would get together with their friends, go down to the internet café, and play together sitting right next to each other, then go home until the next session. In the US and Europe, where home computers were more entertainment oriented, people would go home, log into the game, and either play solo or group with people they'd meet up with after logging in.

I suppose it depends on what you're building for. My first character, back in 2004, was an AR/EM Blaster that I'd tricked out with an eye to Jack Emmert's comment "Range is a Blaster's defense". This became less true after virtually every mob got a ranged attack; I think she was the only character I had that got Zookeeper in its original 'defeat 10,000 Rikti monkeys' form. Still, as I had Snipe and LRM slotted, with Boost Range, I could hit targets so far away that I couldn't actually see them -- more than 250m for Snipe and 273m for LRM. With Build Up or Aim, I could one-shot a mob in a spawn and be too far away for the rest of the spawn to aggro.

It sounds a bit like Jack Emmert's mantra from the early days of CoH that "three minions = one hero" -- his vision that three bottom-tier enemies would be a significant challenge to a solo hero, the last vestige of which can be seen in the fact that the default minion spawn in solo missions at x1 is three minions. He also had the fixation on 'fun' being throwing yourself at the end boss again and again and again, being defeated over and over, until you figured out what the obscure specific actions you had to do to defeat it (as if the correct tactics wouldn't get splashed across the net within hours of that boss being beaten for the first time). Both of these aspects that made CoH more tedious to play got phased out as he was pushed upstairs, then the buyout by NCsoft freed the rest of the devs to make play feel more 'heroic'.

Okay, umm.. so it sounds as if you yourself do not know which one is which for certain. So perhaps label them more clearly? Loyalist Extreme, Loyalist Normal... etc.... They were Loyalist Responsibility (protecting the people while being loyal to Cole), Loyalist Power (support Cole while working to acquire more personal power), Resistance Warden (opposing Cole, but with as few human costs as possible) and Resistance Crusader (opposing Cole, whatever it takes, including human costs).

The KR base portal is just visually out of the way; if you go in the doors of the building it's on (behind Blue Steel), you're taken right up to the roof where the base portal and helicopter are.

I have done this with two characters, and both of them behaved the same way. I used a respec at level 10 to juggle powers, and replaced Fly with Mystic Flight on both of them, then went to the tailor to tweak the visuals for Mystic Flight and Translocation, making the changes I wanted, then saving the power customization to a file so I could just load the file when editing a different character slot. Because the tailor screen reverts back to the powers customization tab, not the pool powers tab, which I just clicked through (I'd loaded my changes, right? What did I need to look at them again for?), I didn't notice until I changed active costumes that the other character slots failed to pick up the changes I'd made to Mystic Flight. Going back into the tailor, I went back into the 'load power customization' screen, but this time looked at the actual colors in the table of customizations -- and the list that was displayed showed the Flight pool entries, but not the Sorcery pool entries. Oddly, the .powercust file itself does show the entries for the Sorcery pool, so it appears that this is a case of the 'load power customization' function not recognizing the Sorcery pool and dropping those entries on the floor when the file is loaded.

One note: when you respec a Dominator, the icon for Domination does not get put in your powers trays at the end of the respec, and has to be pulled down manually. I presume that this is because the power is going to be inactive (red text in the powers window) and unusable; I don't know offhand of any other powers that would be inactive during a respec to test whether my assumption is good.

Back in the Before Time, whenever I did the Wheel of Destruction arc, I would always have my character say "I'd like to put these under 'Will Call' for the Banished Pantheon, Azuria" whenever I was turning the artifacts in, because they were going to vanish from her vault almost as soon as I left the room. It's almost as if there was a "Night Pick-Up" window poking out the back of the vault so that the BP didn't even have to try to break in.

Even with ignoring the 'Mini-Me' aspect of the Wisp pet for a Grav character... But I agree that most of the prestige pets just feel like they're taking up space and rendering capacity.

It's just quirky that a contact hands you a mission that's located in a zone that you would be unable to enter if you were actually the level of the mission (level 9 and Boomtown). It makes me wonder whether the missions that default to whatever zone you're in when you talk to the contact should be tweaked to not put the mission in hazard zones. This would only be for the specific case where the mission normally is located in the same zone (i.e., go physically to talk to Laurence Mansfield, the mission is in Atlas, call to him from Steel, the mission is in Steel), not the 'sending you to do X and the mission randomly happens to be in Boomtown/Perez/etc.' type.

Wow...just Wow...If Champions can still be online with that little support, it's still hard to believe that NCSoft ever pulled the plug on this... I still believe that NCsoft didn't understand the attraction of the game to its players, and the way that the game was structured, there was no way for them to turn the Paragon Store into the sort of microtransaction-driven cash machine that their own MMOs were -- most of the unlocks were account-wide, and the ones that weren't were not locked to individual characters, allowing them to be traded for in-game currency. And the play style doesn't fit well for the standard Asian MMO structure -- you could log into the game and play solo or with teams put together on the fly with almost any combination of characters, while Asian MMOs have, virtually from inception, been heavily group-centric, where you would go down to the bang (internet cafe) with your friends and all log in and play together sitting right next to each other. Look at how badly "City of Hero" flopped in Korea despite all of the regionalization and art intended to appeal to the Korean market. And then there were the attempts by Paragon Studios to buy themselves out from under NCsoft, instead of recognizing how much better off they were under NCsoft's enlightened management (and all of the 'defer to authority' baked into Korean management practices).

It appears that Skyway and Faultline are being treated as a single zone for purposes of handing out missions; just now my level-11 character received a door mission from Lorenzo DiCosta (contact in Skyway) located in Faultline. This is not the first time Lorenzo has handed out a mission in Faultline to one of my level-11 characters; both times it's been "Arrest [rank] Archon [name] and his guards" -- this time, 'Adjutant Archon Belaggi', previously 'Archon Archon Roget': Because I have flight on the two characters that have received this mission in Faultline, I was able and expect to be able to get to and from the mission without drawing aggro, but getting handed a mission where the entire zone is deep purple to me is annoying. In a similar vein, it also appears that low-level contacts, when giving you a door mission, default the mission zone to whatever zone you're in at the moment. After I had finished the "talk to the Boomtown Security Guard" mission and turned it in, I called Laurence Mansfield while hovering in Boomtown; he gave me a level-9 door mission in Boomtown ("Arrest the jewel thief and his crew"). I abandoned the mission, exited back to Steel, and called him again; he gave me the same mission, this time in Steel. I again abandoned the mission, went to Atlas, and when I called him I got the same mission, this time in Atlas. I don't know if this is intended behavior, but it feels odd.

There was always a tram in the north end of Steel Canyon. But originally the trams at each end -- and the trams at each end of Skyway -- were completely separate loops. The tram at the north end of Steel connected to south Skyway, Talos, IP, Brickstown, and FF. while the south end tram connected to Atlas, Galaxy, Kings Row, and north Skyway.