srmalloy

I have always gotten a countdown — typically nine seconds — when logging off in a university, and it hasn't made any difference for getting the Professor badge; I will either see progress towards the badge or receive the badge, depending on how long the character was logged out.

When you log out in the open, you have a countdown to actually logging out, put there to prevent people from logging out to get out of a fight gone bad. Logging out near an SG portal, or in places like a graveyard, are 'outside' as well, so you get the countdown. Log out someplace safe, like a store, the Vault Reserve, City Hall, Ouroboros, or a tram station, though, and the countdown is zero -- you log out immediately; in the case of the tram station, even if you're standing on top where you can easily be attacked, or possibly actually be in combat (the drones can't be everywhere). However, if you're inside a university, where you're safe and can't be attacked, and you get the same countdown you would if you were outside. It's not a big thing, but is it possible to mark universities as 'safe' for the logout timer?

This is something that drove me up the wall back on live with Trick Arrow -- Rain of Arrows, as described, was a more than decent power for a tier-9 ability... except that it was virtually useless in combat. After you designate the target location, by the time the animation and arrow flight ran out, the combat would almost always have moved completely out of the AoE, and you just waste the attack on empty ground.

From what I remember from the events on live, the snowmen spawn within the level range of the zone where the present is, and the spawn size and composition depends on the size of the team you're on when you get a 'Naughty' result.

Despite all the work that was put in to make Paragon Chat work, except for specific celebrations that were held there, I could never spend more than a short time using it; running, leaping, or flying around Paragon City, it always felt as if I was watching the zombie reanimation of the game -- it was there, it was moving, but everything that gave it life was gone. It let me go back and remember what we had, but it was also a reminder of what we'd lost. I had a bet with myself, though, that at least one of the developers at Paragon Studios had kept a copy of all the game source, executables, and tools, even if for no other reason than having an offsite backup in case of a major failure. I'm more than gratified to have been proven right.

That day, I went around parking characters in various places -- the Matrix room under the arena in PI, the roof garden in SE Atlas, etc., but for the shutdown itself I needed something more. I logged in with the first character I'd created -- three days after launch -- and joined a league running a MSR, all of us determined to not let NCsoft's actions affect how we played the game, and ran the raid just as if we expected the game to continue. We were all down in the bowl fighting the Rikti when the shutdown happened, heroes to the end.

When you're zipping around Paragon City or the Rogue Isles opening presents, you will randomly get temp powers like Build Snow Beast. But you don't want the icon for it in tray 1 where you might use it accidentally, so you drag it to tray 3. Later, you get the temp power again, and it puts an icon in tray 1. Both that icon and the one in tray 3 say '2 uses' when you mouse over them. Feeling lazy, you leave the icon there in tray 1. You get the temp power again, and the game, unable to put two icons for the same power in one tray, puts an icon for it in tray 2 -- all of which say '3 uses' when moused over. Each time you get the temp power, the game creates another icon in the lowest-number visible tray that doesn't already have the icon in it. Even sillier, if you already have the maximum stack (10) of such a temp power, you'll still get icons for it dropped in your trays each time the game 'gives' you the power, even though you don't actually get more uses of it. I don't expect this to be fixed for this go-round of the event, but in the future, could the temp powers be set up to not throw icons in the character's power trays if they already have the temp power?

It's a reskin; the 3D models are the same for the blue caves, the Council caves, and the rarer brown caves.

Are you sure you're connected to the Homecoming servers and not to Paragon Chat? Paragon Chat is essentially a chat server using the CoH client as a front end -- you can create your character, enter Paragon City, and can use Sprint, Super Speed, Super Jump, Fly, and Teleport (IIRC) to move around the zones, but your only interaction is with the other people logged into the chat. There are only a few fixed NPCs like the trainers in place, and no wandering NPCs or traffic.

The Winter's Gift recipes -- travel, travel/end, and 20% cold resistance Opening the presents scattered around the zones can give you temp powers, too -- Build Snow Beast (a pet summons), Instant Snowstorm (creates a visual snowstorm around allies -- no combat effect, though), Duplicating Gift (to chain passing around among allies), Snowball (make and throw snowballs -- snowballs don't cause aggro, so they're fun to throw at enemies), and Mystery Gift (open for a random reward). Note that the consumable temp powers you get from the presents (Mystery Gift, Duplicating Gift, Build Snow Beast, and Instant Snowstorm) stack (before burning one each on a Posi 1 and 2, I had five Snow Beast uses), but the ones you buy with canes from the vendor don't, and if you have any of the present-awarded versions, you can't buy more from the vendor. The Mystery Gift, when opened, randomly awards one of: Candy Cane, 250 Inf, Build Snow Beast, Snowball, or Jingle Jet. You can also get a Mystery Gift when someone gives you Holiday Cheer (purchased from the candy cane vendor).

Some years ago, at one of the 'meet and greet' events held at the San Diego Comic-Con (when NCsoft was pushing Aion and Tabula Rasa, and CoH got to come along for the ride), I asked Positron about the feasibility of an editor that would allow players to make maps using the existing resources. I'm sure that most people notice that the 'indoor' maps are just a set of standard blocks joined together, and it seemed to me that if the players were able to make new maps with them, it could immensely increase the variability of the office, lab, and cave maps. Unfortunately, from his answer, the map development was as roughly done as most of the other support software that they worked with, and while linking the map blocks themselves was simple, it took a fair amount of fiddling to make them line up properly. If you've ever been in an office map (this happened more with the new color maps that appeared in CoV) and found a black wall in the hallway, that's the result of a tiny misalignment between adjacent map blocks. So, until the devs made the time to upgrade their tools to make map building easier, it wouldn't be feasible to make them accessible to the players. And it appears that they never made the time before shutdown.

Not to downplay the league distribution problem, but it sounds as if the game isn't properly treating a league like a single unit for rewards, and you're getting bitten by the same minimum-contribution requirement that keeps solo players from jumping into the end of a fight with a GM, attacking once, and getting the defeat badge.

Or you can make it more generic: /macro fly "cce 1 CCMurderOfCrows$$powexectoggleon Fly$$powexectoggleon Mystic Flight" That way, it doesn't matter whether you have the Flight or Sorcery pool, it will toggle the correct movement power. I have a set of standard binds that I load for all of my characters that has commands like this, where a functionally-identical power exists in two different sets -- Fly and Mystic Flight, Super Jump and Mighty Leap, Teleport and Translocation -- so that I can have a common bind that functions for each pair regardless of which of a pair the character actually has. Another trick that I use for low-level characters is to make a bind that toggles on Sprint and Ninja Run: /bind ctrl+L "powexectoggleon Ninja Run$$powexectoggleon Sprint" Now you might think "this activates two powers, so it won't work". And that's true, it does activate two powers. But they're toggles -- you press ctrl-L once, it turns Sprint on; press it again, it turns Ninja Run on, as well. Once Sprint is on, the bind falls through to the next functional command. Now, you can turn off as many toggles as you want with one command: /bind shift+L "powexectoggleoff Ninja Run$$powexectoggleoff Sprint" Pressing ctrl-L once turns off both Ninja Run and Sprint.

Minor bit of trivia -- the Council maps are mostly the blue caverns recolored and with Council greeblies added in place of the rock formations. If you pay attention, you can draw congruences between the Council map segments and the blue cavern segments. The pool room is the layer cake room with the rock floors removed and replaced with the pool sections.

Very much this. The Sands of Mu, Ghost Slaying Axe, Blackwand, and Nemesis Staff (pick any three) all give you much-needed DPS for a low-level character, and in the case of low-DPS ATs like Controller, continue to be useful into higher levels. The Ninja Run and Beast Run powers give you semi-travel-power movement, and the short-charge (30 seconds before cooldown) jump and flight packs add very useful mobility for the early levels, even though you can pick travel powers at 4 now.

Even with them downgraded, the kora fruit repeatables are reasonably worth doing. Originally, when you harvested a kora bush in the mission, you got a large inspiration of the color of the fruit; this was determined by the devs to be a little too much benefit, even though you had to fight your way through Rularuu to get them, and they were downgraded to give you medium inspirations instead.

He wants you to think that, so his real plots disappear in all the noise.

That's why I hedged my statement; I don't know if it had changed when I did it. I got hit up about doing Hess, and the leader was hawking it as a WST, so I assumed they knew what they were talking about.

It’s not significant enough to put on any accelerated fix schedule, but if you have a mission like "Interrogate Freakshow on Talos Island" (basically any 'defeat [number] of [group] in [zone]" mission), you don't see the 'you have a mission in this zone' marker when you take the tram and get the zone selection window. I believe that this is because regular door missions have a defined location for the mission location that the game checks to display the markers, while the defeat mobs in zone missions have a check when mobs are defeated, and there's nothing in the internal mission record itself that ties it to a zone, so the check doesn't 'see' it as being in a particular zone for displaying a marker. As such, that would require a change to the way defeat missions are handled internally, and I don't think it's a big enough issue to warrant that degree of effort.

Depending on when the actual changeover occurs, I may have been affected by this as well. I completed the Hess TF on Monday afternoon, when the GMotD said Hess was one of the weekly TFs (checked before and after), and I only received the standard 19 merits. I know I hadn't already done the TF on that character, because I got the Burkholder's Bane badge on completion.

For the Kronos Titan, if you look at the model closely, you'll see that it looks like a scaled-up Zeus Titan... which can be formed by a pair of Hercules Titans merging into one. This suggests that there is an Ouranos Titan (or some related name, to keep the theme), which can merge with another Ouranos Titan to make a Kronos Titan. This suggests a number of possible ways to use such a new asset -- either as a sub-AV boss in a particularly difficult mission or in the middle of a TF, or an encounter one step up from the existing Kronos ambush where two of the Ouranos Titans spawn, and if you don't take one down fast enough, or keep them far enough apart, they merge to make a Kronos Titan. With the Hercules Titan model already in game, it should (barring inconvenient art/coding/animation) be possible (if not easy) to scale it up, stealing the Hercules merge animation for its merging.

Some contact strings will let you just walk up and talk to them to start their missions, but a lot of the blueside contacts won't talk to you unless you've been fed to them by another contact. You don't follow the 'crumb trail' of contacts if you badly outlevel one, though. For example, my Sentinel badly outleveled Guy Denson (Steel, 15-19), and when I went over to him, he introduced me to Collin Larson (IP, 25—29) — skipping the 20—24 range, which I'd outleveled, too. Basically, it would let a character who's never talked to a contact, and who has leveled past that contact's missions, call the contact to get handed off to a level-appropriate contact rather than having to cross one or more zones to talk to them in person for the same thing.

Some of the most fun I've had playing back on live has been the 'themed' ITF runs that Kay organized; the All-Kinetic run was hilarious from start to finish, with pets zipping around like hummingbirds on crack from all the speed boosts, or the All-Mastermind run, where you could hardly move in the press of henchmen, but the withering hail of blasts carved swathes through the mobs. With all of the TFs that I've joined both here and back on live where the AT distribution was all wonky, but we sailed through the opposition, it makes me a little sad to see the LFG chat where someone is soliciting for a generic TF run and asking for AT and powersets in the tell, so they can build a perfectly-tuned team... as if that's going to stop people from doing stupid things in missions.

What -- you don't care for the HallowThanksgivingmas decorations going up at the start of August? 🙂

One of the 'facts of life' here on Homecoming is that characters outlevel contacts pretty quickly -- in some cases, before they get any work from them. But when you do, they'll still forward you to a new contact that's in your current level range. However, because you never talked to them before that, you've got to make the slog to where they are in order to get handed off to a new contact. Would it be possible, in the specific case where a contact has been outleveled and you've never done any missions for that contact, to have the 'handed out cell number' flag get turned on, so that you can call them to get forwarded to a new contact, instead of traipsing over several zones to reach them?