srmalloy

About a month ago, I was running a character over to the contact on the east side of KR between the buildings (I forget his name off the top of my head), flying over a (to me) purple Hellion in the interminable tug-of-war with a woman over her purse. When I left the contact, I flew back out, and the woman was gone, with a Hellion standing where they'd been, rifling through a purse. So it seems as if there's at least circumstantial evidence that they do on occasion get the purse.

There's always the brute-force method of putting a Repel on trainers, Ouro portals, mission doors, and tram gates that only affects pets, so they get pushed clear, and you only have players standing around idle to aim past when clicking. 🙂

There are a few places where it hurts gameplay as well. Zone in or out of a mission, activate a power that's interruptible, and the MM minions push you out of their way and interrupt you. Or being unable to click on the door because they're standing in the way. Making the, say, 20 feet inside or outside of a mission door or tram entrance a collision-free area would address that. Also, just as a QoL thing -- and it would be complicated to do, so I'm just tossing it out for comment -- if there were some way to 'quarantine' all pets (MM, Controller, Dominator, Lore incarnate pets) in locations where there cannot be combat for them to be used, it would clean up chokepoints. For example, I had a case yesterday passing through Ouroboros where I could not click on the portal to leave because of three sets of Lore pets and a MM pet collection standing right on top of the portal; I gave up after a couple of tries and waited three minutes for their players to leave. I'm not asking to have them despawned, just leave them active and not draw them in the area. There are all too often enough people standing around something you need to click on, adding pets just makes it worse.

I was pointing out that a similar 'exploit' is currently in use to get players out of PvE combat with no objections, noting that the NPCs are unable to raise the same complaints that PvP players have. Would we have seen any discussion about this if someone had raised the issue back on live? Without being able to hit up the devs about their thoughts on the issue, there's no real way to know, but I doubt it, because even though it's objectively not 'fair' to be able to instantly pop away from combat whether it's against NPCs or other players, they're just NPCs, and they don't really matter, do they? As for what I am advocating, I described it before -- Take the existing command and add a check of the status flag that indicates whether someone is in combat to disable it when in combat, à la movement suppression. The core problem is that it is being used to escape combat to avoid defeat. Suppressing it in combat removes the problem, while retaining the rest of its functionality in other circumstances. Does it supersede the Base Teleport prestige power? Yes, but that is not in and of itself a bad thing. It has functionality the base teleporter lacks which make it more useful. And I realized while cooking dinner just now that the original statement -- that heroes wouldn't use slash commands -- ignores that it's not just heroes playing the game, but villains as well, and a villain is likely to use whatever advantages they can get, as exemplified by the uninterruptible teleport escape of Nocturne in the last mission of Jim Temblor's arc, hearkening back to every cheesy unstoppable escape by villains in superhero comics, many when actively in combat. But the core complaint here is using it to skip out to avoid defeats, which giving it the same lockout that movement suppression has would solve.

Well, let's bring up another example, a case where a game action does exactly what one of the core complaint about /enterbasefrompasscode is -- allow a player to skip immediately out of combat, no interrupt, no animation. How many times have people been on a TF, and they're deeply embroiled in combat, mobs three deep all around them, and the mission goal completes; the blue 'Exit' button pops up, and they click on it... and are instantly removed from combat and dropped outside the mission door. That hits squarely into the way the character interacts with the game environment. The button was put in many issues ago to address a QoL issue where characters used to have to run back through the length of the map -- sometimes down four elevators in multi-floor missions -- to get back to the mission entrance to leave the mission. But it also lets them jump out of the middle of combat, even if immobilized, stunned, held, confused, or affected by any other effect that would normally render them incapable of getting out of combat. But it's got a long history of being part of the game, and the benefit of not having to slog back out of missions is undeniable -- and the NPCs aren't going to complain about the players exploiting the Exit button to escape from combat -- so no one objects to it.

Not to mention the problem of having to redo many of the art assets. There are lots of costume pieces -- typically Chest Detail, but also Belt -- where at certain angles you should be able to see the 'back' of part of the costume piece... and there's nothing there. The costume part has a texture for the 'outside', and there's nothing on the 'inside'. Which is reasonable, because for the vast majority of situations that's not an angle that you're looking at the character from, and it just doubles the amount of work the renderer has to deal with (cf. Grandville, whose framerate issues back on live were reportedly due to having ordinary building textures under the Arachnos structure textures, doubling the visibility checking overhead). If the character model itself were transparent, you'd be seeing the 'back' of most of the costume pieces when you look through the character, and if they're all transparent from the back, it destroys the visual you're trying to create.

NCsoft might -- and that's an extremely sketchy and vague 'might' -- have retained the NCsoft master account information, particularly if that master account was linked to other games. I'd tried and given up on both Aion and Tabula Rasa myself, so I had both of those games linked to my master account. However, NCsoft has gone through at least one realignment of its core account information -- I remember seeing a number of emails about having to log in and convert my account over to the new format that I ignored because there was nothing NCsoft was doing that I was interested in -- that I'd be surprised if even the master account information was retained after this long. Redlynne's right; unless someone actively saved all of the game account information from the live servers prior to shutdown -- and, if there is some movement to restore it, can prove that it's untouched, to avoid the inevitable claims of the databases being hacked to give certain people unfair advantages (IOs, levels, etc.) -- then I would expect that the entirety of the player information from the game survived no farther than the end of December 2012, a month after shutdown.

Working from memory, according to Positron when I asked him at an event held at the SDCC many years ago, they're edge artifacts from the semitransparent textures used to create the lighting cones, because the game engine didn't have the power to do proper dynamic lighting.

The costutme auras have an option for "combat only"; this is a status check that activates the aura when you attack or are attack, and your aura remains on for a period of time after the last incoming or outgoing attack -- I'm not sure what the timer is on it; ten or so seconds feels about right. If you took the same status value -- done efficiently, it would be a field in the character record on the server that was set when the character was 'in combat' -- and used it to disable the ability, so that you couldn't use it in combat (thereby rendering it useless for escaping from PvP or to skate defeats in Master runs), and give it a delay after leaving combat before it could be used, it would prevent the two primary uses that are being cited as its presence allowing you to skip around risk in certain content. Add a second check that skips past the first check if the character using the command is flagged as a GM. Just as an observation, there are a lot of activities your characters can take that, while there are ways to do them using the existing user interface, using a slash command makes them much easier -- and in at least one widely-used case, possible without major inconvenience. You can right-click on a character and select 'Add friend' or 'Add global friend' from the menu, but if they've dashed off, there's nothing to click on; "/friend" and "/gfriend" allow you to add friends if they're not physically present. You can drag inspirations onto your pets to apply the inspiration to your pet, but doing this in the middle of combat when your pets are moving around is a crapshoot; the "/inspexec_pet_xxxx" commands allow you to toss inspirations to your pets without twitch skills. You can activate abilities by clicking on them from your trays, but it's "/bind" that attaches them to keys to make them more accessible, and the "/powexec_xxxx" slash commands give you additional functionality when setting up binds and macros. Or the "/ah" command to conveniently bring up the Auction House interface. And the less that is said about the backflips that you had to go through to get your alts added to a personal SG without the "/altinvite" slash command the better. And while a lot of these aren't things that a superhero would be doing while beating up miscreants, arresting miscreants is not the be-all and end-all of a superhero's existence -- and the 'powexec' and 'bind' slash commands are examples where our methods do include using slash commands.

I was leveling a new alt, running missions in Kings Row, and I noticed that I had the popup window for taking down the Clockwork Paladin. This was unexpected, because when it popped up, I was flying above the road that heads due North from Blue Shield, and was due West of the KR tram station -- well South of the area where the Clockwork Paladin spawns up in High Park. Flying up to High Park, I roamed around, finding the Shining Stars standing around looking bored, but no sign of the Paladin. Flying back to Blue Shield, the popup disappeared where I would have expected it to (leaving the spawn area), and did not reappear. Since before getting the popup, I had not been further North in KR than a line through the AE building, I'm not sure why I would have gotten the popup.

Something like having a checkbox that appears next to the Skirt selection and Jacket selection labeled 'Hide' that suppresses drawing of the costume piece in that slot?

And in mission instances, if there's a way to distinguish a mission instance from an SG base instance. Doing that kills virtually all of the ability to use it in missions as an 'escape button' for Master runs. Or even add it to the list of things that fall under Movement Suppression, so that you can't use it if you're in combat.

Just the few missions I spent testing after I slotted a Sudden Acceleration: KB to KD in Hurricane had me grinning with the herding possibilities. Always assuming that the tank in the group knows how to pull into a location I can pin mobs into.

Look up 'frankenslot' in the wiki, and on the forums; depending on the sets you pick, it can benefit you more to slot powers 3/3 or 4/2 from two different sets, and sometimes 2/2/2 from three sets (or 3/2 for a five-slotted power). It's more complicated to do, because you have to look at what the partial set bonuses are to see where the set bonuses you want are. If you're going after the recharge bonus in a set, those are usually the 5-slot bonus, so frankenslotting for set bonus won't get you anything, but if you're five-slotting a set in a power, and you're close to the ED limits in an enhancement type, you may do better slotting, a dual or triple IO from another set -- say, if you're at 80% Acc from a set with one slot empty, then slotting an Acc/Rech IO from another set instead of a straight Acc common IO reduces the overall bonus to Acc, but doesn't waste as much of the Acc bonus to ED, while giving you a boost to Rech.

Karma, in the 10-30 range.

And it's an ongoing thing in the craziness of a fight during TFs to activate an attack, and by the time your power finishes activating and fires, the target is already dead -- but dead too slowly for it to abort your attack, so you spend the attack for no results. It's a fact of life.

The way to fix this is to special-case the XP that the Kraken used to give as a mission-completion bonus, so you can farm the trial to get boss-level XP for them, or complete the mission and turn it in to get the full XP. I'm pretty sure that there are missions that award XP and/or drops when you talk to the contact after completing the mission, so the mechanism should already be in the game.

Everything just feels so much smoother with the 64-bit client, and I can't help but wonder, given how much bigger the Paragon Studios development team was compared to the Homecoming team, why did Paragon keep on with their "we can't release a 64-bit client, and have no plans to do so" denials? Have the development tools improved that much over the years?

I have been setting my characters up with 15 IOs at 12, then burning the level-20 respec at 22 to pull them all out and drop them into storage before replacing them with 25 IOs. I can then mine the storage as I get alts to 12, rolling enhancements down through the line. Back in live, I'd save out Accuracy enhancements, then others in order of salvage cost to craft as I had room, accepting the sale of the rest that I couldn't keep. Rather than returning to selling back unslotted enhancements, I'd like to see a 'move all to tray' button that would take all of the 'up in the air' enhancements and move them into your enhancement trays, after which, if you had more than 70 enhancements you were dealing with, you could do the much smaller task of swapping any remaining enhancements you wanted to keep with ones that you could drop.

Or using Focused Accuracy for the same purpose with characters without TD.

The 'three minions should be a challenging fight for a single hero' concept being one of the major ones. How can you feel heroic if, regardless of level, you struggle to defeat three mooks?

Unfortunately, barring the few specifically-coded examples like the robotic arm, peg leg, and jacket chest detail options, the costume definition actually only stores data for one side of the character -- the data for one side of the character is mirrored for the other. There is actually no separate 'left glove' and 'right glove' costume data, just 'gloves', and it would require significant coding to enable the feature.

There are some reasons to use it. Positron TF Part 1 last mission is a good example; it's a 'board transit' instance, and if you're defeated, going to the hospital respawns you in the hospital in the zone you entered the instance from. In the case of Posi 1, that's often Steel Canyon, which puts you the width of the zone from the tram. If you enter the instance from Ouroboros, you respawn in the back, with a portal a few yards away, making it much quicker to return to the mission

I posted this same suggestion in Make Atomic Manipulation fully colorable about a month ago. Unfortunately, radiation effects have all been given a default color derived from the popular misperception of radiation as being green, which derives from the green color emitted by the phosphor in radium-powered glow-in-the-dark paint used in displays like watch faces.

As a really minor and side aspect of this, I would suggest that -- as long as we can establish a redside analogue -- that there should be a floor for the influence you get from an NPC when you defeat the mobs assaulting them. The minimum shouldn't be high enough that it competes with ordinary defeat rewards, but given the premise that influence represents your positive reputation, rescuing citizens from hostile mobs should contribute to that reputation even if you're too high level to get XP from the mobs themselves. Something like 10% of the influence that an even-level hero would get, rounded down, with a minimum of 1, perhaps.