srmalloy

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.

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.