srmalloy

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.

I have to concur with a radius increase for Ignite. Right now, it's useless except to block a doorway. I was in AP with my AR/EM Blaster, and I clicked on a package, getting 'You've Been Naughty' and the standard three Frostlings. I backed up and put an Ignite patch down right where the package was, intending to get all of the Frostlings in it. The Ignite patch went down right where I wanted it, smack in the middle of the Frostlings standing around where the package had been... and the radius was so small it didn't damage any of them. Now, if you've opened a package solo, you know how close the Frostlings spawn. For a tier 8 power to have an area so small that you can drop it in the middle of a spawn without hitting any of the spawn makes it a waste of a power pick.

You're conflating copyright and trademark. Trademarks expire if not defended; this is why Bayer GmbH no longer owns the term 'Aspirin', and why both Xerox and Kleenex fight the use of their trademarks as a generic term. Copyright is much harder to lose. The Mickey Mouse Perpetual Protection Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act extended the term of copyright to prevent "Steamboat Willie", the first depiction of Mickey Mouse, from falling into the public domain. The House of Mouse has trademarks on the likenesses of its characters, as well as copyright on their later incarnations, but unless Congress passes another extension to the term of copyright, on January 1, 2024, the specific depiction of Mickey Mouse in "Steamboat Willie" will fall into the public domain.

She, actually. Her bio: Appolinariya Zinovna was a young woman from Tver'; because of her mental powers, she had been invited to become новичок in Народная Армия, one of the state-sponsored hero groups. During a training exercise, a building collapsed on her, crushing her spine and leaving her paralyzed. Unwilling to accept life as a cripple, she volunteered for the experimental Полный Киборг program; her brain and the undamaged section of her spine were transplanted into a life support shell, which was installed in an android body. The first body was crude, with limited fine motor control, and difficult to operate, but subsequent designs were more sophisticated, increasingly human in appearance, although somewhat oversized to accommodate all the internal systems. The final body she was given incorporated plasma emitters that delivered short-range concussive blasts and longer-ranged electrical pulses; these would supplement her innate mental abilities. But none of these shells could truly replace her original body. She's essentially a brain and part of a spinal column in an otherwise completely robotic body. I don't have many characters that fall under the conventional 'square-jawed hero' image; it can be more fun to start with someone who's gotten jerked over by circumstance. I have a Fire/Rad Controller who has the full 'Chitin' set colored to look like chitin plates over exposed muscle; I created a macro for her to use when people comment on her costume -- "Это не костюм; это мое тело «Подарок» «славной советской техники»." ('This is not a costume; this is my body. A 'gift' of 'glorious Soviet technology'.). She has issues.

Mithra has the following in common with the Jesus character: Mithra was born on December 25th of the virgin Anahita. The babe was wrapped in swaddling clothes, placed in a manger and attended by shepherds. He was considered a great traveling teacher and master. He had 12 companions or "disciples." He performed miracles. As the "great bull of the Sun," Mithra sacrificed himself for world peace. He ascended to heaven. Mithra was viewed as the Good Shepherd, the "Way, the Truth and the Light," the Redeemer, the Savior, the Messiah. Mithra is omniscient, as he "hears all, sees all, knows all: none can deceive him." He was identified with both the Lion and the Lamb. His sacred day was Sunday, "the Lord's Day," hundreds of years before the appearance of Christ. His religion had a eucharist or "Lord's Supper." Mithra "sets his marks on the foreheads of his soldiers." Mithraism emphasized baptism. Regarding the various similarities between Mithra and Christ, as well as the defenses of the Church fathers, the author of The Existence of Christ Disproved remarks: "Augustine, Firmicus, Justin, Tertullian, and others, having perceived the exact resemblance between the religion of Christ and the religion of Mithra, did, with an impertinence only to be equalled by its outrageous absurdity, insist that the devil, jealous and malignant, induced the Persians to establish a religion the exact image of Christianity that was to be—for these worthy saints and sinners of the church could not deny that the worship of Mithra preceded that of Christ—so that, to get out of the ditch, they summoned the devil to their aid, and with the most astonishing assurance, thus accounted for the striking similarity between the Persian and the Christian religion, the worship of Mithra and the worship of Christ; a mode of getting rid of a difficulty that is at once so stupid and absurd, that it would be almost equally stupid and absurd seriously to refute it. "

Merry Zagmuk! And remember, Mithra is the original reason for the season! (those Christians will steal anything, even other religions' holidays)

Once I started making characters with Russian-derived names, I went a little overboard working up bios for them, looking up actual Soviet/Russian research institutions, such as Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии имени И.М. Сеченова (I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry) to reference, and made up a collection of background references -- the state-sponsored hero groups like Народная Армия ('People's Army'), villains like Красная Угроза ('Red Menace'), Генерал Зима ('General Winter'), and heroes like Красный Орел ('Red Eagle') and Зимняя Дева ('Winter Maiden'), which I referenced through different characters' bios. By re-using the same references to individuals and organizations back in Russia, I think it creates a more organic backstory than having each character's bio being completely isolated from each other's.

True; everyone is standing around Ms. Liberty with their powers active lagging the zone while they rework their costumes.