srmalloy

Sometimes pretty ruthlessly, as Unicode characters take up two bytes in the bio, so while they can make the bio more immersive, they force you to abridge it more.

They eventually despawn, but as described above, once the target of the ambush leaves, they can't track their target any more and 'go dumb', standing around until something aggros them. What I'm suggesting is that, instead of 'going dumb', they despawn at that point, having lost their target. It would still require a change to the AI code for ambushes.

Sometimes it can take a while. It was just a couple weeks ago that I learned that the pool room has a _fifth_ level to it: the one you enter from, the level up the stairs, the platforms above that, the level below the entry level -- and a fifth level at the bottom, where if you go to the far left (as viewed from the entrance) of the lower level, you can jump down away from the entrance and get access to a pair of intersecting passages under the walkways of the 'bottom' level. I had a mob spawn down there on a defeat all, and I was close to filing a petition for a stuck mob until I figured out how to get down there. I managed to make it through eight years of live without ever knowing that space was there.

Or -- and this would require programming effort, so it's a 'down the road' thing -- make the ambush 'aware' of the ambush target's location and despawn if they leave the zone (either by changing zones or entering an instance like another mission or a base). Because this would need to be added to the AI loop for the ambush, it's a more 'blue sky' suggestion, although it addresses having high-level ambushes dangling around in zones.

I discovered yesterday that it's possible to be too good at your job. My AR/EM Blaster had talked to Levantera to start the 'welcome to Vanguard' series, and Borea sent me out to defeat 10 Rikti. She flew out, parked herself up N of the warehouse due S of the base exit, popped Boost Range, and started sniping the minions standing around on the roof. She'd dropped three before they noticed where the attacks were coming from, and two more while the Headman Gunmen inaccurately shot back. It was at this point I noticed that the mission goal still read 'defeat 10 Rikti' -- apparently, with Positron's Blast slotted in Snipe, and Boost Range to crank its max range out even further, I was too far away to get credit for taking down my targets. I find it amusing that the game lets me reach out and whack them (firing high-velocity, copper-jacketed, armor-piercing arrest warrants, of course), but won't give me credit for doing so. Unfortunately, at that point, the character was 39 (I'd neglected to run that series when she'd hit 35 during the MSR a couple days previously), so I'm going to have to go out and find higher-level targets to hit at extreme range to determine whether it's just defeat credit that I'm losing out on, or whether I don't get XP for them, either.

I have several characters that I've gotten Mortician with logged out on Striga, and when I've logged back in on them prior to their getting the badge, I've always been able to see progress on it. What I've always done is to use a base porter to drop me in Striga next to Moonfire, and then head N off the rock into the graveyard right there, settling either on top of the mausoleum just to your NW or the pillar at the E end of the ruined wall N of you (that pillar often has Council wolves during the day, and you can pick up aggro settling there if you have an offensive aura or lack stealth). I got the badge on a character just yesterday, so I know it works there; I've never tried logging out in the graveyard where Tobias Hansen is standing.

In the dialog you get when receiving the mission, Serge specifically suggests Talos Island as someplace you can find Tsoo to defeat. It may be a level-range issue, since all of the Tsoo you'll find in those three zones are 29 or below.

"I have CDO. It's just like OCD, except the letters are in alphabetical order. AS THEY SHOULD BE." I have the habit of slotting a set the same way in each power containing that set, a habit I started back on live, and aided by the fact that I'm able to buy entire sets of attuned IOs at once and can slot them all at the same time, instead of whatever I can get on the AH at the level it happens to come up as. So when I slot, say, Thunderstrike Acc/Dam, it goes in the same slot for each power slotting Thunderstrike -- when I pull the IO out of my tray, I use which slot lights up in the slotted power(s) to direct where to put it in the unslotted power.

If NCsoft licenses the CoH IP and code to the Homecoming group for free, the negotiations for the license can specify an arbitrary value on it and write that value off as another tax loss and expenses for advertising and goodwill (letting us use the IP for free won't make us love NCsoft, but it will likely reduce the widespread animosity toward them, and they get HC and whoever else winds up allowed to use the code as free market research to see if it's worth developing a CoH 2 MMO). And I'm sure that the lawyers on one side or another have pointed this out as part of the negotiations.

If you do it before level 10, you can change everything about your character for free; after that, it costs an amount that increases as you level -- a base tailor fee, plus a fee for each change. If you're only changing your costume colors, the base tailor fee is all you pay; each costume part or customized power you change adds to the cost; using a tailor token (there's a button that appears in the lower right if you have one available) waives all the costs for changes, so it's worth saving them for when you want to make sweeping changes at a higher level. One thing I have noticed -- and I have not tested this extensively, because I'm mostly satisfied with the power customization I have by level 10 -- is that if you change your power customization, save it to a .powercust file, and complete the changes, you pay the full cost for your changes, but if you immediately pick another costume and load that .powercust file, the changes are free, so if you (say) want to change your Freezing Rain, you can save the modified power customization and load it into all of your other costumes without paying extra.

I have to concur with a radius increase for Ignite. Right now, it's useless except to block a doorway. I was in AP with my AR/EM Blaster, and I clicked on a package, getting 'You've Been Naughty' and the standard three Frostlings. I backed up and put an Ignite patch down right where the package was, intending to get all of the Frostlings in it. The Ignite patch went down right where I wanted it, smack in the middle of the Frostlings standing around where the package had been... and the radius was so small it didn't damage any of them. Now, if you've opened a package solo, you know how close the Frostlings spawn. For a tier 8 power to have an area so small that you can drop it in the middle of a spawn without hitting any of the spawn makes it a waste of a power pick.

You're conflating copyright and trademark. Trademarks expire if not defended; this is why Bayer GmbH no longer owns the term 'Aspirin', and why both Xerox and Kleenex fight the use of their trademarks as a generic term. Copyright is much harder to lose. The Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended the term of copyright to prevent "Steamboat Willie", the first depiction of Mickey Mouse, from falling into the public domain. The House of Mouse has trademarks on the likenesses of its characters, as well as copyright on their later incarnations, but unless Congress passes another extension to the term of copyright, on January 1, 2024, the specific depiction of Mickey Mouse in "Steamboat Willie" will fall into the public domain.

She, actually. Her bio: Appolinariya Zinovna was a young woman from Tver'; because of her mental powers, she had been invited to become новичок in Народная Армия, one of the state-sponsored hero groups. During a training exercise, a building collapsed on her, crushing her spine and leaving her paralyzed. Unwilling to accept life as a cripple, she volunteered for the experimental Полный Киборг program; her brain and the undamaged section of her spine were transplanted into a life support shell, which was installed in an android body. The first body was crude, with limited fine motor control, and difficult to operate, but subsequent designs were more sophisticated, increasingly human in appearance, although somewhat oversized to accommodate all the internal systems. The final body she was given incorporated plasma emitters that delivered short-range concussive blasts and longer-ranged electrical pulses; these would supplement her innate mental abilities. But none of these shells could truly replace her original body. She's essentially a brain and part of a spinal column in an otherwise completely robotic body. I don't have many characters that fall under the conventional 'square-jawed hero' image; it can be more fun to start with someone who's gotten jerked over by circumstance. I have a Fire/Rad Controller who has the full 'Chitin' set colored to look like chitin plates over exposed muscle; I created a macro for her to use when people comment on her costume -- "Это не костюм; это мое тело «Подарок» «славной советской техники»." ('This is not a costume; this is my body. A 'gift' of 'glorious Soviet technology'.). She has issues.

Mithra has the following in common with the Jesus character: Mithra was born on December 25th of the virgin Anahita. The babe was wrapped in swaddling clothes, placed in a manger and attended by shepherds. He was considered a great traveling teacher and master. He had 12 companions or "disciples." He performed miracles. As the "great bull of the Sun," Mithra sacrificed himself for world peace. He ascended to heaven. Mithra was viewed as the Good Shepherd, the "Way, the Truth and the Light," the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah. Mithra is omniscient, as he "hears all, sees all, knows all: none can deceive him." He was identified with both the Lion and the Lamb. His sacred day was Sunday, "the Lord's Day," hundreds of years before the appearance of Christ. His religion had a eucharist or "Lord's Supper." Mithra "sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers." Mithraism emphasized baptism. Regarding the various similarities between Mithra and Christ, as well as the defenses of the Church fathers, the author of The Existence of Christ Disproved remarks: "Augustine, Firmicus, Justin, Tertullian, and others, having perceived the exact resemblance between the religion of Christ and the religion of Mithra, did, with an impertinence only to be equalled by its outrageous absurdity, insist that the devil, jealous and malignant, induced the Persians to establish a religion the exact image of Christianity that was to be—for these worthy saints and sinners of the church could not deny that the worship of Mithra preceded that of Christ—so that, to get out of the ditch, they summoned the devil to their aid, and with the most astonishing assurance, thus accounted for the striking similarity between the Persian and the Christian religion, the worship of Mithra and the worship of Christ; a mode of getting rid of a difficulty that is at once so stupid and absurd, that it would be almost equally stupid and absurd seriously to refute it. "

Merry Zagmuk! And remember, Mithra is the original reason for the season! (those Christians will steal anything, even other religions' holidays)

Once I started making characters with Russian-derived names, I went a little overboard working up bios for them, looking up actual Soviet/Russian research institutions, such as Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова (I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry) to reference, and made up a collection of background references -- the state-sponsored hero groups like Народная Армия ('People's Army'), villains like Красная Угроза ('Red Menace'), Генерал Зима ('General Winter'), and heroes like Красный Орел ('Red Eagle') and Зимняя Дева ('Winter Maiden'), which I referenced through different characters' bios. By re-using the same references to individuals and organizations back in Russia, I think it creates a more organic backstory than having each character's bio being completely isolated from each other's.

True; everyone is standing around Ms. Liberty with their powers active lagging the zone while they rework their costumes.

There wasn't one originally; the tailors were in NW Steel Canyon , E Independence Port, and S Founders' Falls, so the one people thought of if they needed to rework their outfit was Steel, because it was a lower zone. Unfortunately, it was in the high-level end of the zone, and the N and S trams were on separate loops, so you'd be running (pre-travel-power) from the SE corner of the zone to the NW corner. Kings Row was a lower-level zone, easier to cross, and when you took the tunnel to IP, it left you only a hundred yards or so from the tailor, with only a couple of spawns to avoid.

In Atlas Park at (1722.7, 580.1, - 1275.1), partway up the east side of the northernmost of the skyscrapers just east of the industrial park, is a balcony surrounding a glass-walled room with a door leading out onto the balcony. The room is empty, the floor pattern of the balcony continuing into the room. The door itself, like most of the doors in Paragon City, shows the blue hand when moused over, and "You cannot enter" when clicked. Would it be possible to stick some scenery inside -- a bar and bartender copied from Pocket D, and a couple of bar tables and chairs -- and make the room enterable like the roof garden in SE Atlas? It seems a waste to have this room empty and inaccessible, and even without anything interactive in there would make an odd little place to hang out, or for the RP players.

As a fallback, you can always use a description of the character's powersets in a foreign language; I had/have a number of characters with names like this in Russian - Yaderniy Ogon (Nuclear Fire, a Fire/Rad Controller), Yadernaya Zima (Nuclear Winter, a Fire/Cold Blaster), Tenevoy Ogon (Shadow Fire, a Fire/Dark Corruptor), Luchevoy Mirazh (Radiation Illusion, an Ill/Rad Controller. Some less directly descriptive - Ledyanoy Kulak (Ice Fist, an Ice/Ice Tanker), Deva Molniya (Lightning Girl, an Elec/Elec Dominator), Obmorozheniye (Frostbite, an Ice/Ice Dominator), Stal'naya Deva (Steel Maiden, a DB/WP Scrapper, and Umstvenniy Ulan (Mental Lancer, a Psi/EM Blaster).

Which is why, if I make a character that draws from other source material, I'll research that material so that I can create a bio that justifies why the character is in Paragon City's universe and not their own. For example, when I decided to see if I could do a reasonable job creating a draenei in the character creator, I dug into WoW lore wb pages to see where a draenei could reasonably be extracted from that universe and dropped into CoH's, and wrote the bio accordingly. Another character I created, motivated by seeing how certain costume part combinations resembled anime mecha, was named 'Mobile Suit Gun Dame' and used various references to make her costumes look like different Gundam mecha.

No. The game knows what level you were when you picked the power, but it doesn't record when you added slots to the power, just how many slots you have in it. To my knowledge, this is deliberate, to prevent adding an unnecessary level of complexity when building a character that might be exemplared to a lower level. For example, a character taking a power at level 8, adding one slot to it at 9, then adding three more at 50. If the slots were tagged by level, exemplaring to 10 would make it important what order the enhancements were slotted, so that you'd have to consider what level you might exemplar to for each slot in each power. Instead, taking the example above, if they exemplared to 10, the power would have five slots. The enhancements would be scaled down, and likely the set bonuses would be gone, but all five slots will be active.

This morning, I ran the Terra Volta trial with a level 27 Blaster, and finished having dinged twice. I returned her to my base to level up, and trained for the two levels she'd gained. Making IOs for the new slots, I was short a component, so I exited to KR (having a convenient vendor where I can compare prices on the AH and vendor for the set IO recipes, and dispose of them appropriately), and noticed that the character was showing as level 32 in the level display. Thinking that this must be something held over from the trial team, I logged the character back out, then logged back in. Still showing 32. I took her back to my base and took a screenshot (below) at the trainer, showing the displayed level as 32, with the trainer telling me how much XP I need to reach level 30. I then exited the client completely and restarted, and the level display is still showing the character as level 32. Opening an infoself window, it displays the character's actual level -- 29 -- as does the character selection screen; it's just the level display in the center of the XP wheel that's krank. Aaand I found the reason. Everyone was quitting the team after we were done, and apparently I got my departure a little slow, winding up as the team leader without the final mission having been turned in. So I was still technically in the trial, and raised to the trial max. Once I called the contact and turned it in, everything went back to normal. Need to pay more attention to the other parts of the UI.

No, I did it because the project I was part of -- to computerize the development of the Navy's instructor and trainee guides from the core material, making updates vastly easier and allowing them to be used in a computer-based training environment -- needed to be able to package up a course and ship it to another training facility. One of the things that I've learned to do as a programmer over the years is to look at other ways to solve problems. Duplicating the powersets with the first two powers inverted would work. It's not the best solution, nor is it the most elegant solution, and would need a second fix if they decide later to implement it in code to fold the duplicates back into the original in characters that used them. However, it has the single advantage of being doable by playing with the database, with no programming involved, unless there are limits in the number of powersets that can appear in a list that I don't know about, which would make this approach nonviable. However, any decision whether to do this at all is up to the Homecoming staff. As Haijinx points out, characters are, in the long run, slot-limited rather than power-limited, so switching the order of the first two powers for your secondary really doesn't get you much.

Then you're not thinking tactically. Sub-14, the best way is to hit Kings Row, go over to the west side, take the tunnel to Independence Port, and then it's a short run to the IP tailor. Sure, the mobs are higher, but when you're that low, they're going to stomp you anyway, and there aren't as many to avoid.