srmalloy

No; it's 30 minutes, with midnight coming at the half-hour points (1200, 1230, 1300, 1330, etc.).

Do you have ctrl+lbutton bound to Teleport? That may be screwing things up. I've got a character with a set of macros like this, and "powexeclocation back:max Translocation" does in fact pop him back 100 yards relative to where he was; unfortunately, as you have observed (and "powexeclocation 180:max Translocation" does the same thing) it spins you around before activating the power. He's got four -- 'back:max' and 'up:max' as "oh, shit" buttons, and "fwd:max" and "cam:max" for traveling.

Ahh, another physics geek. While you were there, did you think about the Moon's orbit having been shifted 90°, so that it rises in the south and sets in the north, and does so every day, and take the time to calculate whether this would put the Moon inside the Roche Limit and cause it to break up (it's not; it would need to come in to about three orbits every two days before it would begin to noticeably distort).

At my previous place of work, the big trash containers were these enormous metal containers with hatches on the side for dumping in your trash, with trunnions for the collection truck to lift them overhead, then open the bottom to empty them into the truck. I always used to snicker when I went by them, because they had the logo of the waste management company on them (Browning-Ferris Industries), and as a programmer, when I see "BFI", my first interpretation is 'Brute Force and Ignorance'. It just seemed so appropriate for a waste-management company.

I'm working from a many-years-old memory, so I may be misremembering, but from what I remember on the original boards from people who played using multiple monitors, the problem was the field-of-view limit; you could get a multi-monitor game display that spanned across three monitors, but the field of view you got wasn't increased from what you had on a single monitor, which meant that you lost visual angle up and down. So while you could play with a display that was 5760x1080 across three monitors, what you saw was like setting a single monitor to 1920x1080, then putting covers over the top and bottom third of your screen, so all you saw was the middle third.

This won't work for all the MM primaries, only the ones that have pets that can be represented in the costume creator. And it raises the immediate issue that made the devs decide they didn't want to go there -- the immediate arrival of large numbers of "pimp" MMs, with their stables of provocatively clad pets that all have the boob and hip sliders maxed out.

There are a few -- a very few; I don't think I've gotten more than two on any given character back on live -- missions against the Council where you're sent tot a warehouse door, and when you zone in, you're in a standard Council tunnel map, with the entry popup talking about how you found the concealed entrance to the Council base. Having the warehouse you searched be explicitly part of the map, with your defeat of the pseudo-boss in the warehouse giving you the clue to where the secret entrance is. Doing this for all the various types of concealed bases would increase immersion. Another thing that you could do is to have non-uniform floors -- you enter a door and it's a standard office map, but when you take the elevators up from the second or third floor, you come out on a lab floor. With multi-floor maps, you could do this with almost any 'special' floor type -- an abandoned office map with a concealed Arachnos base, or a villain's hidden laboratory.

This would, to be properly implemented, require an additional statistic for opponents, "Coordination". Particularly in melee, it is difficult for more than two or three people to attack one target without getting in each other's way. This value would be determined for the mob group as a whole; more-disciplined groups, like Malta or Longbow, are trained to work in groups, and would not suffer a decrease in individual effectiveness until the number of attackers on a single target was higher, compared to a more 'individualistic' group like the Trolls. Cryptic chose a route that makes small amounts of Defense proportionately more effective than other defenses in the interest of simplification of combat. Unfortunately, one of the easiest ways to address this requires a sweeping change over a lot of powers in the game, as well as combat -- make Defense a separate check. Your attacker has their chance to hit; if their attack misses, it's done. If they roll a hit, then their target makes a roll against their Defense; if the target's Defense roll is successful, they dodged/blocked the attack, and it stops there. The rest of combat resolution remains as it is. Obviously, this would mean rebalancing every single power that increases Defense of any type, the value of Defense enhancements, all Defense Debuff powers, and altering the "did I hit" section of the combat mechanics to include the additional RNG check. Would this add enough to the game to justify the coding effort? I don't know.

You're not going to get a 'proper' scythe; at best you'll get some sort of toon or fantasy scythe, because a 'proper' scythe has a handle that is designed to be held and swung horizontally right to left; the grip points don't work for any other swing. And, yes, I'm being a bit of a pedant here, but if you're going to insist on 'proper', you get everything that comes with it. Which isn't to say that there aren't hundreds if not thousands of examples of gripless, straight-shafted scythes out there, but they're not 'proper' scythes.

I'd have to go digging for the website, but there is/was a site that had comments from employees about the working conditions at their company. The stock complaints about working at NCsoft NA were that they installed managers from Korea who ran the office as if it were in Korea, decision making centralized to a few people and their relatives (whether or not they were in management) when the decisions weren't made for them from the Korean offices with no input from the local office, you were expected to dump your personal life at a moment's notice when management decided they wanted you in the office (for example, if you were out to dinner with your family, or on vacation, you dropped everything and came in to the office). Now, I'll admit sites like this suffer from confirmation bias, in that the people who have no particular axe to grind with a company are unlikely to post reviews, but the fact that the reviews largely cite issues with management style and treatment of employees suggests that NCsoft treats the NA branch as if it were in Korea, much like jubakumbi's observation about American companies in the international market. Given the way that NCsoft has pushed Asian-style games on the Western market without understanding the differences in the gaming culture, I would not be surprised if they expected us to react like Koreans would.

We have descriptions of the various illicit activities of the Tsoo, and the Triads before them, but it still lacks the 'civilian' population required to make up the sort of enclave you want to see. That the Tsoo, and the Triads before them, control the docks doesn't mean that those areas are predominantly Asian, and it's the 'support' activities -- stores, restaurants, temples, homes, etc. -- that are necessary to make up the visible aspects of a Chinatown. Consider also the upheaval from the Rikti invasion, with the city being "divided into a patchwork of human and alien controlled neighborhoods", with the static barriers put up to curb the fighting at the boundaries evolving into the current War Walls. We don't know what is in the areas of the original Paragon City that now fall outside the current zones; it's entirely possible that these ethnic enclaves were deemed unprotectable and what population that could (or would) be moved was brought within the War Walls and set up in whatever space was available -- in the reconstruction after the Rikti War, the city wasn't going to tear down perfectly good buildings just so the Asian community could build a Chinatown. For all its activity, Paragon City is a lot less than it was prior to the Rikti War, and what's left isn't likely to mirror what it was, and the various activities the Tsoo conduct "in abandoned warehouses or empty lots in bad neighborhoods" are hardly conducive to supporting a recognizable enclave; it sounds more like they're having to fall back on unused spaces because they don't have a definable area that's recognizably Asian. I think the devs at one point mentioned there being ideas about a zone for the Paragon City airport, but that it was kicked to the side for the lack of development resources, so it's possible or likely that there are human-controlled zones that we don't see that would include a Chinatown, Little Italy, or Little Havana, simply because the devs weren't given the time or the staff to create them. If the reconstruction of Baumton proceeded with wholesale demolition of badly-damaged buildings, clearing space for new construction, it would be viable to have Tub Ci, as the head of one of the major (if illicit) power groups, to demand that part of it be set aside for 'his people' and begin to develop into a Chinatown, but having to accept a more formal role in the process, the Tsoo in that area acquiring the same 'neutral' status that Crey personnel have in Brickstown, with story content built around, say, the Tsoo running up hard against Crey and the Family for control of the development around the nascent Asian enclave.

I feel as a side note to this that it should be pointed out that Rhode Island, where Paragon City is located, is an extremely whitebread state. From the 2010 census, a breakdown by ethnicity for the whole state: 81.4% White alone 5.7% Black/African-American alone 0.6% Amerind & Alaska native alone 2.9% Asian alone 0.1% Native Hawaiian & Other Pacific Islander alone 6.0% Some other race alone 3.3% Two or more races If you ballpark where Paragon City is by loosely matching up the waterfront to a real map of the state, that puts it in Kent County, which is even more whitebread: 93.4% White alone 1.4% Black/African-American alone 0.3% Amerind & Alaska native alone 2.0% Asian alone 0.0% Native Hawaiian & Other Pacific Islander alone 1.0% Some other race alone 1.8% Two or more races The early immigrants to Rhode Island were mostly from Europe and Canada, largely Irish and French Canadians. In the early 20th Century, there was an influx of Italians and Portuguese immigrants. Hispanics began to immigrate around 1970, and Asians around 1980. While the Italian immigrant community has been in existence long enough to have ethnically-recognizable enclaves (although tending to accumulate in entire communities, rather than just neighborhoods), the Asian immigrants did not arrive until long after the social pressures that formed the sort of enclaves you're describing had decayed. At best, there would be areas that had a higher than normal percentage of recognizably ethnic businesses, but not neighborhoods that were ethnically homogeneous. I suspect one of the considerations that led the devs to place Paragon City in Rhode Island was to be able to sidestep ethnic neighborhoods as being a complication the art department didn't have the resources to address.

I'm pretty sure that what the original poster means is that an attuned Kinetic Combat Acc/Dam IO, which should cap at 35 with enhancement values of +22.9%/+22.9% for a level 35 two-aspect IO, is showing, on a level 50 character, enhancement values of +26.5%/+26.5%, which you would expect from a set that ran all the way up to 50.

Not to mention that the authority-deference that is tied deeply into Korean culture makes things more opaque; once a decision is made by your superiors, you are expected to suck it up and quietly accept it, regardless of your opinion or feelings. I suspect that this complicated things after the announcement of the shutdown and the closing of Paragon Studios -- we were 'barbarians'; we didn't just accept NCsoft's decision and move on, we came back in their collective faces and argued with them about it.

I'm pretty sure that it was done as a TF so that doing Ouroboros missions/arcs could take advantage of the way a TF can auto-exemp people down to the max level of the TF. Regular missions don't do that, and I'm pretty sure that beating on either the Ouroboros mission code (to allow invites mid-mission) or the regular mission code (to autoexemp you to the mission level) would involve some ugly work in the spaghetti-code bowl. On the other hand, being able to set two new flavors of difficulty -- 1) you exemp to the level of the mission when you enter, no matter how much you outleveled it, or 2) the mission increases in level to match yours, no matter how much you outleveled it, would increase the options available to players. The latter would bend the limits some, as some mob groups flat-out don't scale, so the best you'd be able to do is crank their damage and HP. And either would be a big programming project, as it would add a big chunk of code that would need to be written, so it's a blue-sky thing, not likely to happen.

It's the Council map room where it's a sort of oval on the map with a square structure at one end; depending on which way you enter, it immediately opens into a wide cave with tall pillars and, toward the back, a back and left wall that guide you down and angled left out of the room. If there is no more appropriate 'terminal' room (like the pool room or the one that opens into a long cavern that hooks right, going up in two stages to a wide area), the end boss for the map is often up on that balcony. If you're coming in from the end with the pillars, you can immediately fly up to the balcony and hit the mobs there from the back. I had the pool room on one mission of a Citadel TF today; it was a 'defeat Archon Fred and his men' mission, and we'd cleared the floors, but the mission didn't end; I immediately ducked under the bottom walkways and found a random mob tucked up close to the 'entry' side under the lower walkway, ending the mission when I defeated him.

It would make the power more situationally annoying to use, but I would love to see AR's M30 Grenade start blasting people away from where the grenade lands, instead of shooting it into the middle of a group and have the grenade blast knock people between you and the grenade blast away from you, as if the grenade blast is sucking them in.

Back on live, you used to have two or three missions between catching the plague and being sent after Patient Zero (and getting cured), so you'd be wheezing along for a while. Ghu, but that was painful. One of the reasons I stopped making Science-origin characters.

IIRC, this would also happen on live.

Back on live, the version of the character I had then could stand on the landing near Imperious in Cimerora and hit the mobs in the courtyard over on the other side of the valley with LRM with Boost Range; I'd have to move a little closer for Snipe. LRM would aggro them right off; with Snipe, I could generally drop the first one without them figuring out that they were being shot at; I'd be able to drop a second before they'd aggro. But I wasn't doing it for defeat credit, so I don't know if the same 'problem' existed back then.

I don't regard it as being 'horribly designed'; I look at things like that as a case of 'well, it just grew' -- under the bottom-level walkways isn't someplace you'd expect to find someone wandering around, but it's reasonable to have an "Oh, shit, I dropped X" moment and go down to retrieve it.

The controller tier-9 pets used to be on a timer, and died on its expiry, or when you zoned, entered a door, or went up/down an elevator. I don't remember the details clearly, but with SOs and a recharge-heavy slotting (IIRC, the standard was 3 Rech, 1 Acc, 2 Dam) with Fire Imps, with Hasten up you could get between 30 seconds and a minute of having 3 sets of imps at once. MM pets had the same restrictions; every time you entered a mission as a MM, you had to summon all of your bets, then apply each of the two buffs to each pet individually, waiting for the buffs to recharge between. Because this was post-ED, you could only get the recharge (with Hasten) down to about 40% of base, so you'd be standing around at the mission door for 3-5 minutes waiting for the MM in your team to set up -- and do it again when you hit the elevator and went up a floor. Needless to say, this made MMs the red-headed stepchild of villain ATs, because of how much they slowed down play. People would kick MMs after inviting them to team and they saw what AT they were. IIRC, along with the release of MMs in City of Villains, the tier-9 pets were made perma -- they didn't have a timer running to kill them off -- and in exchange, you could only have one at a time (Fire Imps being standardized at 3 for this purpose, being much weaker than the other pets). The problem, as I recall from the dev posts, wasn't getting the pets to transfer to the new map (whether zone, instance, or floor), but that the pets became uncontrolled when they did so, and would attack everything in sight uncontrollably. This was fixed and broken several times for elevators, but took longer for doors and zoning to be solved.

Boost Range isn't that good; back on live, even with Boost Range and three Dmg/Rng HOs in LRM, II'm not sure whether I could have reached that roof from at or north of the Vanguard gun towers at the height I was. Remembering my position at the time, there's a Vanguard squad in the 'parking lot' across the street from the gun towers edging the Vanguard base, and I was south of the squad, shooting at the rooftop SE of me, with considerable altitude to put me out of range of everything but the Headman Gunmen shooting back at me. Grabbing part of the map and marking myself as green and my targets as red:

Depends. If you're the level 12 coming around a corner in Steel and hitting the level 50 ambush spawn, you might think differently. But I agree that it's a subjective valuation, and because it's buried down in the mob AI code, I expect that it would get pushed onto the back burner even if it was decided it was worth doing.

And I have yet to finish a Moonfire without getting at least one pool room map. Two being most common, with one and three being outliers.