srmalloy

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.

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.