srmalloy

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.

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.