srmalloy

The physics I took in high school and college makes me point out that a kilogram of helium will rise only so long as it is at a pressure that makes it less dense than the air surrounding it; the reference to a helium balloon establishes that for common usage, while 'a kilo of helium' does not. Two identical containers, one with a kilo of lead, the other with a kilo of helium, will fall at the same rate in a vacuum, after all.

Cain Royce (and presumably the other 20-24 contacts that send you up against the Banished Pantheon, like Andrea Mitchell) are apparently unaware of the events occurring in Paragon City. One of the early missions he gives you is to go off and defeat 20 Banished Pantheon, advising you that Dark Astoria is positively overrun with them. Even though the closure of the hazard gate into DA should have been a big red flag that things have changed, he doesn't seem to realize that he shouldn't be pointing level-20 characters at DA any more.

Making something difficult is no substitute for making it impossible. If it's possible to enable a function for all users, then you can easily make the argument that the long-term goal in creating the function was for all users to be able to use it. Having been a software developer for the government for more than 35 years and been through Security+ certification, I think I can say from experience that if you want to prevent the general users from being able to use certain functions of a piece of software, you design those functions so that they require the account of the person attempting to use those functions to have identifiers that it is not possible for a general user account to possess.

Do the exploration badge run for AP and KR, then make yourself an SG base with a teleporter linked to Echo: Galaxy City, run Galaxy's exploration badges, then go to the tram in Echo: Galaxy City and go to Echo: Atlas Park, and run the exploration badges there. That will double your merit accumulation to 20, and you go back to the Echo: AP tram, take the Ouroboros portal to Ouroboros, run up the spire to get the exploration badge, which gives you an Ouro portal you can drop (but not use until 14), then go back to AP.

That's subject to the 'fade time' for the language. You can write a BASIC program, leave it alone for a few years, then pick it up and still be able to figure out what it's doing without too much trouble. Well-written C code, you leave it for 6-9 months and you'll have to spend some time working through the code to puzzle it back out, but it's doable. FORTH, you go off to get a cup of coffee, and when you get back, you have no idea what the code is doing.

Back when the other nukes killed your End, having Full Auto be a narrower cone made sense. My AR/EM Blaster back on live could rush up to a spawn of Nemesis minions in PI while stealthed, pop Boost Range and one of either Aim/Build Up and unleash Full Auto with the expectation that she would survive the return fire while taking out the entire spawn, and then rush off to find another spawn, being healed up by then and Full Auto recharged for the next spray. The other Blaster nukes would leave the user exhausted, forcing them to wait while they recovered their End, and their nuke was typically on a base (IIRC) three-minute recharge, making them wait still longer to be able to do it again. Now, with the T9 nukes no longer crashing the user's End, there is no reason not to give Full Auto a wider cone; it no longer has the advantage of not crashing the user's End to justify restricting its cone width.

And applying a minor adjustment to disable it when the user is in combat -- and there's at least one check for that built into the code, because there are a number of things that don't work in combat -- addresses that complaint. The contention that this was intended to be a GM-only command is valid, but it invites the question "if it was only intended for use by GMs, why didn't it have a check to make it usable only by GMs?" Having the command usable by anyone, but just not telling anyone that the command existed, is a classic example of why "security through obscurity" is doomed to fail; all it takes is one person discovering a hidden function that's useful, and the entire playerbase will know about it in short order. I will point out here, though, that there have been an ongoing series of changes to the game that have, individually and collectively, served to make it easier and faster for players to move around and between the zones; this is just one more. It's got a flaw that it is usable in combat as a 'get out of death free' card, but other than the objection that this is was supposed to be a GM-only function, that flaw is the only problem with it; make it unusable when the game thinks you're in combat, and the flaw disappears.

We're all aware that the load on the servers from having to load the AH database with each instance of an SG base is the obstacle for being able to access the AH from bases. But what about giving access to specific tabs? The 'Sold' and 'Bought' tabs shouldn't require more than a small fraction of the AH data, particularly if all you get is the ability to collect either the purchased items or the inf from sold items. Just the item, the bought/sold price, and a 'get inf/claim purchase' button

Actually, because it occurs server side, the trick of queueing up an attack and zipping past your target doesn't help you in PvE -- mobs aggro on you instantly when you come in range and the attack triggers, and because of the mechanics where the success of the attack is determined when the animation starts, you can be well away and still eat the return fire from the aggro you got. Where you benefit is by being out of range for their next attack, so they have to chase you to get in range. Before all mobs were given a ranged attack, this meant that there were mobs where, with the right spawn makeup, you could kite a spawn of a dozen mobs and only have three or four be in melee range to hit you as you zoomed by,cutting down on your return fire. With every mob having a ranged attack now, you can no longer kite with impunity, so the original PvE justification is gone. Kiting another player in PvP, though, worked just fine; if they didn't know you were there and queued up an attack (which would go off automatically when you came in range), you could kite them and be out of range before they could react.

The initial statement from the devs was "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons"; this became "We won't make PvE changes for purely PvP reasons", then became "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons", and then they stopped explaining whether a given change was being made for PvE or PvP reasons. However, /Regen Scrappers were not "literally unkillable if they survived an alpha strike"; a Regen Scrapper was unkillable if they could reduce the incoming damage to below their regeneration rate before they ran out of hit points. Jump into too big a spawn, or with mobs too many levels higher, or with abilities that slowed or stopped you from thinning the herd, and you ate pavement like any other character. But because Regen applied its huge healing rate to each attack over and over and over again, once you got ahead of the curve, you'd be fully healed at the end of the fight, where both Resistance- and Defense-based sets would be needing to heal up before the next spawn. The trick you had to learn was to judge where that line was -- and because more people on your team meant that you weren't catching all the incoming damage, that pushed the bar over until the biggest spawns couldn't focus enough on you to take you down, and alphas became your biggest worry.

The actual statement made by the devs as the reason for reworking Regen was that their evaluation on their internal test server showed that a Claws/Regen Scrapper (this was back when all you had were SOs) could solo missions easily at +4/x8 -- a declaration that the players called bullshit on. Some time after the changes had been made, it was leaked that the internal test server did not have the 'purple patch' applied to it, so this 'godlike' Claws/Regen Scrapper was hitting (without inspirations) about ten times as often and for ten times the damage (and being much hit less often for much less damage) as it would have been on the live servers. Nevertheless, the changes stayed.

Got in this time, right on the end (98.6‰), but I made it.

It seems to me that the problem in this case isn't the concept of picking defensive or offensive opportunity, but that it's tied to the first two attacks, when giving the Sentinel a pair of powers with icons, the way that Dominators get a power and icon for Domination, addresses most of the problems. You're not stuck avoiding a significant part of your attacks if you want to hold off on triggering Opportunity, and don't have to avoid the attack that would trigger the 'wrong' one, or have your Opportunity triggered on a mob that's going to go down with one hit from anyone, but your Opportunity gets triggered on it and it goes down before you get any benefit from it.

The two-aspect set IOs have a roughly 62% effect in each aspect compared to a single-aspect IO. Making dual-aspect non-set IOs Uncommon and setting their merit and worktable costs to be, say, 75% of the cost of buying a recipe for each aspect (making them cost 150% of a common IO recipe) puts them at a small premium over the regular IOs (135% effect, 150% cost) while not being prohibitively expensive.

Combined with the fact that the trainers will, at certain levels, announce that you're getting an automatic slot in Translocation, but since it doesn't appear in your powers, while the power may actually be receiving the slots, they're inaccessible, and that the temporary power bar that pops up and would be a good place to put 'powexec_location' macros for Translocation but can't have anything slotted in it, it makes it somewhat underwhelming

I've just come up with a new problem. This morning, I launched City of Heroes without a problem, but later closed out of both the game client and Tequila, then when I came back later and opened Tequila, it crashed out on me. The window opens, displays "Fetching Manifest", then "Validating", then crashes out with a Windows popup "Tequila.exe has stopped working". The Tequila activity log stops at going out to the patchserver: [9/22/2019 7:16:04 PM] Loading application. [9/22/2019 7:16:04 PM] Load application complete. [9/22/2019 7:16:06 PM] Started patching [9/22/2019 7:16:06 PM] Attempting to download Manifest file "http://patch.savecoh.com/manifest.xml" [9/22/2019 7:16:06 PM] Manifest downloaded successfully, starting to process it. [9/22/2019 7:16:06 PM] Starting self-patch process. [9/22/2019 7:16:06 PM] Self patching process complete. [9/22/2019 7:16:07 PM] Loading Web Browser URL to: "https://patch.savecoh.com/homecoming.html" Downloading a fresh copy of Tequila.exe does not solve the problem. I have verified that my firewall is configured to allow Tequila.exe to connect to the Net, and the manifest download from the log shows that it's not failing because it can't connect. My antivirus is not triggering on Tequila.exe, and if I use the launch information from the Tequila.xml file to launch the client directly, I can connect to the game. Update: Taking the brute-force solution of renaming my install directory to keep it as a backup (more for the costumes, power customizations, and the mods than anything else) and running Tequila to download a fresh set of files appears to have addressed the problem.

I was doing the "Cure the Lost" mission from Montague Castaneda, and I found a Headman Blaster with a bunch of random Scroungers gathered around him. When I cured the Headman, each of the scroungers, in unison like some Lost precision drill team, whipped out a shotgun and shot the (cured) civilian. I was wearing earphones to reduce spillover noise, but even with the volume turned down, having eight shotgun blast sound effects playing simultaneously made an absurdly-loud blast that actually hurt. I've had loosely-similar things happen before, where two or three minions will all pull out the same weapon and shoot simultaneously, and the sound effect is louder, but when you stack eight sufficiently-sharp sounds, it gets loud enough to be painful. Can we get a limit on the number of simultaneous identical sound effects that contribute to the volume the sound effect is played at?

Group Fly fails with your bots following for the reason Steampunkette stated -- they don't follow you close enough unless you keep stopping, and as a result fall out of the Group Fly radius when you move away before they start to follow you. That's why the 'send your bots where you want to go and follow them' workaround was developed.

CoH was not an Asian style MMO; that was pretty well proved when the Korean localization flopped. The way it was built meant that it couldn't be made into a microtransaction-driven cash cow like their other MMOs. Between those two things, it was the red-headed stepchild in NCsoft's lineup. If you look at Positron's account of the situation, CoH was turning a profit, but with the other 'secret' project Paragon Studios was developing sucking money, the studio as a whole was losing money. Since NCsoft management had ordered Paragon to do the development of this project, a sufficiently suspicious mind might draw the conclusion that this project was thrust onto the studio to make it run at a loss, justifying closing the studio, and in the process shutter a game that, while profitable, couldn't be monetized to feed income directly to NCsoft (their other MMOs require you to buy 'NCcoin' directly from NCsoft, which you then use in the individual MMO’s cash shop, so the microtransaction income goes to NCsoft, not the company running the MMO).

The AR and Beam Rifle animations are all oriented around a shoulder arm. In particular, Beam Rifle's 'ready' pose makes you look like a SWAT or SpecForce team member, weapon up and sighting down the barrel. Allowing a weapon wielded like a TF2 Heavy would require all of the animations to be changed for one weapon model.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a post about the KB->KD enhancements that stated that their effect was to divide the magnitude of the KB value by 1000?

Okay, so it's not just me. This keeps me from starting a duplicate topic. Also using the 64-bit client, Windows 7.

The solution that worked back on live with Group Fly was to set yourself to follow one of your pets, then use the Goto command to send your pets in the direction you want them to go. Because you're following them, they stay within the Group Fly radius. It's not a smooth 'just fly around' solution, being more like teleport, but it works.

The animations and power activation time slapped me across the face recently when I was watching a YouTube video about archery in the Middle Ages, and it was pointed out that, except for crossbows, if you have a heavy-draw-weight war bow you don't stand there with the bow at full draw while you take aim carefully, then release, because you can't hold it steady, and your aim turns to slime because you're waving the bow around trying to hold it steady -- and then seeing the animations in CoH where you're doing exactly this, and the high-damage, high-accuracy attacks are animated as you shooting your bow completely wrong,in a way that would be destroying your accuracy.

Actually, they learned this very early in the game. The mission "Find who's supplying the Freakshow with the new weapons" mission that gives you the Nemesis Staff temporary power originally gave the temp power to whichever character opened the right crate. At the time, missions were infinitely resettsble, and the zone limit in the Hive was 240. A group of people assembly-lined running people through the mission to get a Nemesis Staff, then they took enough people to fill the Hive and performed a sub-two-minute Hami Raid, simply by rushing in and shredding him with NemStaff blasts. The mission was quickly changed to give the Nemesis Staff temporary power to the mission holder, regardless of who opened the crate, and the temporary power was nerfed to make it single-target, rather than AoE. So, yes, the original dev team was perfectly aware that the Players would zerg Hamidon if they found a way to make it work. And I remember some of the early Hami raids, where the lag when we finally massed on the nucleus was so bad that -- with Hasten active and AM stacked twelve or more times, powers could take several minutes to recharge for your tier 1 and 2 attacks.