srmalloy

No, you're remembering correctly. The original version of the Hami raid spawned the buds that dropped an HO to the person who got defeat credit -- there is a post in a thread on Ars Technica referring to it, citing the poster's player group as figuring out how to work it, with one character getting seven HOs from a single raid (and blanking six others doing it) shortly before it was charged so that anyone who hit Hamidon during the hold phase got their own HO (making the rewards fair), with the Hamidon Buds dropping SOs when defeated. IIRC, the buds were removed entirely around issue 9.

Actually, I find that taking the base teleporter to Kings Row is faster, because it drops you much closer to the tram station; if you're looking at a tram ride regardless, minimizing the dash to the tram is better.

Must have been issue 3, because I remember the original version of the Hami raid ending with the spawning of a Hamidon Bud for every character in the zone, and the character that got the defeat on a bud would get an HO. This obviously skewed things badly to the Blasters and some Scrappers (particularly Fire Blasters), who could get two, three, or even four HOs, leaving the ATs with low DPS out in the cold -- my Fire/Rad Controller didn't get a single HO from a Hami raid until the devs changed the reward mechanism to dropping an HO directly to each character in the zone when Hamidon was defeated.

My first, created on May 8, 2004, was an AR/EM Blaster that I named 'Pakfront'; I picked /EM over /Dev for a couple of reasons -- the auto-pick secondary power was a useful 'reestablish range' power to put an attacker back away from me (this being before all mobs got ranged attacks, so you could get a ranged shot on them while they closed again, then repeat as necessary), and Boost Range promised to let her stay even further out of melee. She wound up being the character I was playing, down in the bowl in the middle of a mothership raid, when the servers were shut down, defying the idea that the game was going away. And she was the first character I recreated when I found out about Homecoming.

In some ways, it was easier in the early game, because the CoT pretty much only showed up at night, and the glow from their rituals would tip you off to where they were. With the revamp, they appear during the day and are less visible, but it's easy to see them on the roof of the building across the street to the south of the police station when you go to pick up your police radio, which tips you off about their spawn locations.

Having the old Sentinel+ tool updated to allow it to be pointed at different servers would be useful, so we could archive the data from our characters in the worst-case event of the talks with NCsoft going south badly and they start flinging C&D letters. The code's already out, so we'd be able to take the archived character data into a private server; it wouldn't be the full world that Homecoming has given us, but we'd at least have more than the hollow shell Paragon Chat always felt like. But I'd still rather that Homecoming and NCsoft work out an agreement to give us a secure Paragon City to play in.

Translocation, if you watch the messages from the trainers, is supposed to get slots automatically at intervals; whether this is a bug -- it's also been reported that you get messages about Flying Disc getting slots as you level -- and Translocation was meant to be unenhanceable, only an examination of the code can tell for certain. As a tweak to Translocation, I would like to see the pop-out bar with it able to take macros that activate Translocation, so you could have macros for, say, 'Fwd', 'Back', 'Up', 'Down', etc. that use the powexec_location command to have pre-defined jumps. Since they're only usable when Translocation is available, being able to put them on the Translocation bar would seem to be a worthwhile thing.

I've always parked my characters on top of the mausoleum a bit NW of Moonfire, near where the base teleporters drop you, and have never had an issue getting the badge.

The trigger for the bug appears to be having outleveled Stephanie Peebles (or Striga as a whole; I'm not sure which) before completing her arc. When I've done it on characters that burned straight through her arc, they got the ring temp power. When the character outleveled her (and generally all the contacts on Striga) before finishing the arc, they didn't get the ring. I think that you don't get the ring if Heracles is fully grey to you and doesn't give you any XP, and so doesn't drop anything -- which includes the Ring of Peebles.

I noticed something with the demon summoning binds that show that powexec_location does not work for the intended purpose. The demonlings summon has "300:5“ for its position, demons summon “60:5", and demon prince summon "0:5". Looking at these, it appears that the intent is to summon the demon prince in front of you, demons to its right, and demonlings to its left. However, it appears that the angle is relative to your current facing. Before I got the demon prince on the character, I didn't really notice the problem, but summoning them in tier order (1, 2, 3), you turn left 60°, summon demonlings, turn right 60°, summon demons, then keep your facing and summon the demon prince right on top of the demons. The problem with baking the angle into the summons bind is that it makes a difference what order you use them. If you summon by tier order, “300:5", "60:5“, and "60:5" has you summoning them left to right, but if you summon tiers top down, those numbers will put the demonlings on top of the prince. So if you want to use the angle values to spread the summoning out, you will need to decide what order you want to do it, and set the values accordingly.

The different origin contacts have different content they hand out, but the first mission you get is fairly similar. The focus is the big difference, though. If you were a Science origin, you got thrown up against Vahzilok right off, and then handed off to Henry Peter Wong for more Vahzilok... It put me off on Science characters all the way up until the rework that separated you from the forced first contact.

To be fair, all of the contacts down in the lower floor of City Hall in Atlas are old level-1 contacts from before the addition of Matthew Habashy and Twinshot to the game, and were specific to your origin, so whichever one you got sent to by your origin when you arrived in AP was the one who gave you your first 'real' mission -- and all of the door missions you get as your first are pretty lame by that standard.

A good example of this type of ambush is in the "Rescue the homeless people" mission you get around level 4-8 in either Atlas Park or Kings Row. When you rescue the first homeless person, it triggers an ambush of Lost that run toward you from the entrance that runs to the back of the mission. What I've found works as a ploy to avoid this is to aggro the pair of Lost guarding each of the captives from far enough away that, when I defeat them, I don't immediately trigger the 'rescue' of the captive, and then work my way back to the rear of the mission to defeat the other guards and the end boss. Then I run past each of the captives, triggering their 'rescue' so they follow me, running back to the entrance. Generally the first real room in the map has a section wide enough that, even without stealth, I can pull everyone to one side and watch while the ambushes thunder past on their way to the back of the mission, after which I can run out without incident, and if I decide to, I can go back and whack the ambushes as they stand around wondering where I am.

Rather than blocking it in instances and PvP zones, use the existing 'in combat' flag that activates movement suppression. If you're fighting anything, and for a short time afterward, base transport is suppressed. This keeps people from, as you describe, using it to bail on a bad situation, whether you're in an instance, on the street, or in PvP, but lets you use it freely when there's nothing attacking you. Particularly since the hazard gate from Talos to DA got reopened, so you don't have to use a teleporter to get to DA. Just in through the gate, and you're in the plaza in front of the hospital where the iTrials used to form up back on live (at least on Guardian).

Some of the MM pets have defined vocalizations when responding to commands. One of the things I've noticed with the Demons responses is that they always refer to the MM as 'Master'. The badges, where there is a difference, are gendered -- Master/Mistress of Olympus, for example. Not having looked into the code, I don't know where/how the badge label is generated, and where the 'standard' pet responses are coded, so I can't say how much work this would entail. but it would be nice to see responses like "I will destroy Gravedigger Brawler for the Mistress" when the MM is female. Is this possible to do easily?

It may have another cause, because I have no problem seeing level-50 recipes (screenshot taken just now):

And the wolf farms that took advantage of this, particularly Unai Kemen's "Close the dimensional rifts" mission on a map that was essentially the NE corner of Boomtown full of wolves. You needed a /Dev Blaster, who would jump into a particular open-top shipping crate and start putting down Trip Mine as fast as possible while a Tanker aggro'd up the whole map, then the Blaster would fly up into the air and the Tanker would jump into the shipping crate, followed by all of the wolves. Because there was a bug that prevented a Trip Mine from going off if the Blaster that set it was too far away, nothing would happen until the Tanker was sure they'd gotten as many wolves as possible into the shipping container, then the Blaster would dive down until the Trip Mines went off, killing all the wolves in the shipping container. One of the entertaining things about doing this was that, if you were too close to the shipping container when the Trip Mines went off, you'd get a pop-up error window from the game engine saying "Too many effects to render". My own experience with an egregious bug was actually two-fold. In the beta test of inventions, my Kat/Reg Scrapper got a recipe for the Touch of Lady Grey proc (chance for negative energy damage), which he crafted and slotted. The enhancement abbreviated itself as "chance for negative", which was prophetic -- when the proc went off, it did a negative amount of damage to the target, healing it. The devs fixed this, and introduced a new bug, which I referred to as "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot" -- when the proc went off, it did an absurd amount of damage to the target. Testing this, I took my Scrapper to Crey's Folly and found Jurassik. As if wanting to show off, the proc activated on his first attack, doing "6.1344e+13" points of damage to Jurassik, blowing him to fragments. I was amused by the fact that CoH spilled over into scientific notation without missing a beat; as it turned out, I wasn't even close to the biggest hit with this bug.

Not to mention the fact that, for game-balance reasons, the non-Force classes got crammed into little tiny boxes that distorts their performance. In one of the conversations the Trooper has with Eric Jorgan, their first companion, Jorgan comments on how, during his time with the Deadeyes, he made a 900-meter shot as a sniper. The non-Force ranged classes have a maximum range of 30 meters, except for the two subclasses that are supposed to be focused on ranged attacks (one of which is named Sniper), who get an extra five meters of range. Admittedly, it was a deliberate attempt to see if I could make Jack Emmert's claim "range is a Blaster's defense" (which became much less true after all mobs were given a ranged attack, with some mobs having ranged attacks that outrange a snipe slotted for range with Range Boost active), but back on live I had a blaster who I would amuse myself while waiting for ITFs to assemble and start by standing on the platform where Imperious is and sniping out mobs in the courtyard across the valley. A 'sniper' with a 35m range feels ridiculous in comparison.

IIRC, this was in effect on live, as well, and represents the fact that the prisoners are unarmed, and pose less of a threat than regular mobs to.

In the context of what I see Homecoming as doing, I think what could be done is for the Homecoming team to periodically look at the better AE arcs and their creators, and see who is consistently creating high-quality stories... and see if they can be recruited as content developers. Not taking AE arcs and moving them to the main game, but look at it as a portfolio to find the people who might do equally good work with an improved toolset. If they're not doing it already.

The only requirement to get the portal is to be exposed to time travel. One way is through specific missions, like the PsychoChronoMetron arc from Agent G in Faultline, but the simplest way is to get the exploration badge at the top of the spire in Ouroboros. Using a base teleporter, you can go to Echo: Galaxy City, then to the tram station; one of the destinations there is Ouroboros. Once there, you can collect the badge and get your portal. You can drop the portal whenever it's recharged, although you won't be able to enter it until you are level 14.

It was a weird conjunction of dismissing my pets and entering a door, but I dismissed my pets as I was entering the Steel Canyon university, and the client got confused -- after entering the university, the client pet window showed no active pets, but they were all there and under my control and I was able to dismiss them. I would not be surprised if there were other ways to get the server and client out of sync with each other.

You might also want to do what I do, which is unbind the default 'mousechord' (lbutton+rbutton) as autorun (++forward); I leave that as '+forward', just take off the extra '+' that makes it continue when you release the buttons. I made up a basic bind file that I apply to every new character: MouseChord "+forward" Y "powexecname Fly$$powexecname Mystic Flight" lctrl+lbutton "powexecname Translocation$$powexecname Teleport" O "powexec_toggleon Ninja Run$$powexec_toggleon Sprint" shift+O "powexec_toggleoff Sprint$$powexec_toggleoff Ninja Run" J powexecname Super Jump alt+B enterbasefrompasscode XXXXX-XXXXX The binds for 'Y' and ctrl-leftclick have two powers in them, so they work regardless of whether you have Fly/Mystic Flight or Teleport/Translocation. 'O' turns on Sprint when first tapped, Ninja Run when tapped again (with Sprint running -- notice that toggles activate right-to-left in a bind if you have several in the bind), and shift-O turns them both off. 'J' is pretty self-explanatory, and alt-B takes the character to my vanity SG base.

Not in the sense of having zombies pile up around Babbage and drag him down (since the zombies, and the Rikti in their invasions don't seem to bother the zone NPCs), but in that the zombie invasion interrupts and usurps the arrival of Babbage, yes. Although that would be fun to watch.

a couple days ago, I was in a Synapse where we came out of the "Defeat Clockwork Lord, his minions" right as the sky changed color for a zombie invasion. We roamed around looking, but it appeared that the invasion canceled the appearance of Babbage, so we just advanced to the final mission.