srmalloy

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?

Yes; that's Yadernaya Zima, an Ice/Rad Corruptor.

It's an issue that's been around since launch, and I'm not sure where to point a finger at the problem; I think that it's associated with the drawing priority and LoD settings, but I can't be certain without looking at both the data and the code. Because this has no affect on actual game play -- it's just a visual glitch in the scenery -- I don't want to see any coding effort expended on it; if it's just a case of changing a field in the database entry for the object, yes, but not for anything more complicated. The larger sailboats have a standing problem where the mainsail -- which is made up of two separate polygons -- is drawn with only the polygon for a narrow strip of sail nearest the mast until you get quite close to the sailboat; you can see from the image how close I was to the boat, and it was still mis-drawing the sail:

The bar is elevated, but not impossibly high -- the Sentinel+ files have a checksum/hash code built into them -- the line like <!-- VKEY F0B0E92E --> just under the <character> tag at the top of the file, which can be used to verify whether the file has been tampered with. As I say, it's an elevated bar, not a panacea, because if you have access to the source to Sentinel+, you can reverse-engineer how it creates the value for that comment, then make whatever changes you like to your file and process it through such a 're-code' utility to generate a 'legitimate' tamper check.

It was particularly oppressive during the pre-Containment days, when a Controller became virtually unsoloable about level 12 because they had such abysmal damage. It was perennially annoying to be fighting a spawn of three Outcasts in Steel Canyon, slap down a Stun, and have one of the spawn take off at a high-speed stagger to the building thirty feet away, leap up onto the roof of the building, and disappear from view -- because you had to stand there waiting for them to decide to come back or miss out on the XP/inf for taking out the whole spawn. And it's still annoying that you get hit with a stun, and the best you can do is stagger around like a sailor on a five-day blind bender, while the NPCs act like Jesse Owens and dash off halfway across the map.

I don't expect that this would get done any time soon, since it has been an issue in game from launch to shutdown (which implies that the original devs either failed to work on it or never found a solution), but I'm throwing it out to get visibility. Fix the Stun mechanics so that NPCs are affected the same way that PCs are. By this I mean the way that an NPC who gets stunned can still close with you at full speed, or in the behavior that makes it most annoying, run off, jump up onto the roof of a building, and disappear from view, all while doing the 'body waving back and forth' stunned animation. If you get stunned -- either a PC or NPC -- your movement speed should immediately change to the speed stunned PCs move at. Ideally, it would also set your jump height/distance to zero, but just not having them continue to dash around at a dead run after being stunned would be a big improvement. It occurs to me that it might be possible to handle this as one tick of immobilize, which would interrupt an NPC's movement and allow the stun movement change to take effect, but I don't know how (or if) that could be implemented without looking at at the code. I suppose that I'm going to have to download a set of the sources so I can look for myself.

And I would be willing to bet that someone has written code to take a Sentinel+ character export file and load it into a server database (would likely need to be done server-side), so if you set up a private server and have Sentinel+ archives for your characters, you should be able to get them back as they were.

If I had to guess the way it's written, the 'skin' areas are handled just like all of the 'pattern' options, with a single flag that tells the client "use skin color rather than secondary color", so that it's not actually doing anything different than it does with a normal costume piece. This would make it nasty to replace it with a texture, since you'd need the texture map for the whole part of the body, then have the costume piece act like a mask on the skin texture. And some of the 'skin textures' would be model-altering -- IIRC, some of the Zombie options have limb segments that are just defleshed bones, and that won't play well with some of the 'X with Skin' costume pieces.

Fusionette doesn't really get airheaded until you run into her again in the Rikti War Zone; in the two missions you have with her from Jim Temblor, she behaves a lot more sane and responsibly than Flambeau ever does.

If you put "=5+4x3-7" into a spreadsheet cell and get '10', when you expected to get '20', that is an unexpected result, even though its result is correct according to the precedence of math operators. The program is doing what it is supposed to do, even if you're mistaken about what you think it should be doing. This is not a bug, no matter how unexpected it may be to you. From the Hacker's Jargon Dictionary, a source I consider to be considerably more authorative than whoever decided to edit a particular Wikipedia entry last: "An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature. " That the Mid's Reborn build export still shows a header suggesting that it can be imported into Pine's is a bug, an oversight by Crytilis, who's been laboring to improve the functionality of the code. Fixing the header text string of the export block is much less important to the functioning of the program than the other work he's been doing.

There's an event in Praetoria -- 'The Great Escape' -- that has 'Ghoul Flex' and 'Tantrum' in the pick list for your reward for completion.

Or do it the easy way -- be lazy about doing Jim Temblor's missions, and make sure you are 21 by the time you turn in his last mission, and he'll send you directly to Doc Delilah instead of Penny, skipping her completely while continuing the storyline in the zone.