srmalloy

Well... unless the runner is your AoE debuff anchor, and you're tied up in the fight and don't notice your anchor's run off until the four spawns he ran through show up and want to argue. Some of those were epic in the sudden addition of aggro.

Just out of curiosity, you have picked up all the plaques in Echo: Galaxy City, not just the plaques in the 'live' zones?

What? The game doesn't record what level you assign slots at -- had that data been available, it would have been reflected in the Sentinel+ extractor that archived characters out of Live before the shutdown. From looking at combat attribute data on live, if you had a power you picked at level 4 that you assigned slots to at level 50, it had those slots even if you exemped down to 4.

I've generally found Council only on the street just north of the university in Steel, with about an 90/10 bias toward the 5th Column in the spawns north of there, except for the "five 5th Column beating up one Council" spawns. Since all of this was 5th Column before the addition of the Council, as were the missions we got handed, would it be possible to make these missions "defeat N Council or 5th Column" rather than just defeat Council?

This is why the Homecoming Group shuts down the donation page when they reach their monthly cost goal. Whether there are two hundred or two hundred thousand players, what's the cost/benefit tradeoff for them to sue a group that has no more resources than what's needed to keep the servers running for another month?

The only issue I have with Pine's running at the same time as CoH is that I have a display issue with the respec helper window, and have to drag it a bit to get it to display the window content, rather than just a black expanse. Minor enough and easy to deal with.

One of the reasons why I used to pick Energy Manipulation as a secondary for Blasters is that the automatic tier 1 power was a "get away from me" ability that was useful for reestablishing range when a mob ran up into melee distance,as well as being soft CC that rendered the mob 'inactive' while it got back up. This proposal would kick half of the benefit into the ashcan. It would also make the strategic choice of whether or not to slot a KB->KD IO into powers pointless, with probably thousands of characters needing to alter their builds to reallocate the slots devoted to no-longer-needed IOs. And it changes the dynamics of several powersets -- look at Storm, for example, when Hurricane just flings mobs into the air. Making it selectable through Null the Gull is going to be problematic, as people will want different powers to have different settings -- keeping Power Thrust or Gale as a knockback, while changing Hurricane to knock-up; this would make implementation significantly more complicated.

The run in Kings Row is about as safe -- you head due west from the tram, crossing the road; there's an empty lot with a rock formation toward the back in front of you. If there are Clockwork in the lot, jump over the fence to its north and use it to mask you from them. At the end of the lot, there's a trench; if you jumped over the fence, jump diagonally to it, because there are often Clockwork on the north side of the fence from it. Run west and cross the next road; there's another empty lot, which may have a spawn of Skulls near the building to the north; they're easy to go around. On the west side of the lot is a chain-link fence you jump over, and right there is a truck with its lights on. Go around to its back, and you'll see Pocket D flyers on the ground. Click on the back of the truck, and you'll be taken to Pocket D. Barring any detours to skate Clockwork, it's a dead straight line west from the tram.

It’s not the "DFB group lfm, pst" messages that seem to be the most obtrusive in the LFG channel, it's when I see four or five "lf DFB team" messages after the message about the DFB team looking for more people. The player trying to fill their team is making an active effort, but the 'lf team' messages popping up afterwards feel like "I can't be bothered to read the channel and make an effort to find a group or start one; find me and invite me". That said, I don't say anything in game about it; raising a stink over it is just going to make the game less enjoyable for everyone. Everyone probably has something other players do that they're unhappy with, but it's not worth trying to shoehorn them into your preferences.

Elecom EX-G M-XT3UR trackball. I've used trackballs with my computers since before I started playing CoH. Originally Logitech Trackman, then Trackman Marble, and then Logitech went wireless or to different ergonomics that didn't feel right, so I investigated a couple of different varieties, and that's what I wound up with.

Don't diss the Shoulders of Doom... ;D

Having seen the dedication that the Paragon Studios staff brought to the game, I was certain that there would have been at least one of the developers who had a full copy of the server and client code, as a high-paranoia off-site backup if nothing more, and that the reappearance of CoH as rogue servers was just a matter of time. And it turns out that my expectations were too low, and sub rosa servers had been running for years. None of which could dampen my mood when the Homecoming people brought servers out in public... and it's been sucking up as much or more time than it did back in 2012.

The 'stay' command doesn't always 'take', particularly when you get a runner. I've has battle droids in 'stay' mode happily take off after a runner and keep chasing it until explicitly called back or defeating the runner.

The 10-20 IO set Energy Manipulator set has a recipe "Energy Manipulator: Chance to Disorient". This cannot be found anywhere under the crafted enhancements; instead, there is an "Energy Manipulator: Chance to Stun" enhancement. The name should be the same for the recipe and the IO it creates.

I don't remember seeing one in Outbreak, but there's one in the Galaxy City tutorial for heroes about ten feet away from the Longbow Heavy you train at before you jump past them to the second part.

Related to this, when you are in the costume editor, and you are editing your weapons for either Dual Blades or Dual Pistols, and you zoom in, your character assumes a pose with their arms crossed upward at an angle holding their weapons. Is there an emote that assumes this pose? The 'villain 2' isn't right for that. The only match I remember from in game was the vampyri in the regen chambers that would get released in some of the later missions redside on live.

Not just radio and paper missions - the number of doors in any zone that are used for missions is a small fraction of the doors in the zone. Sometimes it gets ridiculous -- back on live, I was part of a Citadel TF where the first three missions were to the exact same cave entrance; by the third mission, we were all joking about the Fifth Column ninja redecorating team that was running in behind us to set up a whole new base the moment our backs were turned. Starting a new character, I generally pick up missions from the old Magic, Tech, and Mutation contacts in City Hall;half the time, the 'defeat all gang members' mission is the same door as the 'defeat all Clockwork' mission -- the office building just north of the west side of Prometheus Park. When it's not, it's the east-side door of the brownstone just north of where Matthew Habashy's 'Defeat Five Hellions' mission is -- and the other starting mission, defeating the Council in the warehouse, is the door on the south side of that same brownstone. The follow-on mission from the first Clockwork mission is usually the east door of that brownstone, and the follow-on for the Council mission is virtually always the back door of the brick building just east of the south end of Argosy Industrial. The 'defeat gang members at party' mission you get if sent to Jose Brogan right off will be either thessouth door of the business just northeast of the AE building or the front door of the building north of that one past the park and down the concrete slope. The problem doesn't go away as you level; you keep getting sent back to the same doors over and over again. Given the hyperdimensional nature of Paragon City (come on; how many office or warehouse maps have you seen that would fit inside the walls of the building they're in without being folded through higher dimensions?), there's no real reason not to pick a door completely randomly from all the doors that don't have a dedicated interior (stores, universities, police stations, tailors, etc.).

I think Cutting Beam in the Beam Rifle set is a 120° cone (and you get such a nice visual demonstration of the arc when you fire); it's certainly the widest cone I've seen in the game.

The combat attributes window shows correct numbers, so it appears to be something broken in how the numbers are being calculated for display, but if you right-click the 'Frequent Commuter' day job icon in your buff list, it shows running and jumping speed as +2.15 mph, but flight speed as -5.01 mph. Since this appears to be an error only in the tooltip, not in how it modifies your actual movement, stick this way down on the list of bugs to fix.

And the thing is, he's right. Adding a second autofire power -- or any number of autofire powers -- is a fairly simple thing. IF the code to manage autopowers was implemented rationally, with the intention of having more than one autopower sometime in the future. I can think of easily four different ways that it could be done. And I'm absolutely certain that none of these was used in the CoH server code, and if we were to go digging, we'd find it buried somewhere in the loop that updates countdowns for status effects or something, because that was where the devs could find a code loop that executed with the right frequency to catch the autopowers becoming fireable and set them off. And there's no way to shoehorn a second autopower in, because they used a random integer field they had lying around in the character data structure to record which power was tagged for autofire, and there isn't any space there to put a second field, so you'd have to arbitrarily pick an unused field somewhere else in the data structure, which means you now have two arbitrarily-chosen data fields that have to be maintained whenever something with autofire powers changes, with no explanation why. (with close to forty years of work experience as a programmer, I have some insight into how spaghetti code gets that way. And we don't want to make it worse just to add a feature that will increase the bottability of the game.)

Heh. "Didn't want to have people zerg-die-zerg through content." Sounds kind of funny in the face of Jack Emmert's direct statement that 'fun', for him, was throwing yourself at the big boss again and again, getting defeated over and over and over again, until you figured out what the one tactic that would let you defeat them was. Which is a little ironic in the age of the internet, where when a solution is found, it's all over the net in days at most, and the challenge switches to how effectively you can follow the go-by -- and how well you can recover when something goes Tango Uniform in the process.

They're also different periods -- Echo: Galaxy has an (inaccessible) AE building and arena, while Echo: Atlas has the original buildings that were torn down when the AE building and Wentworth's were put in, and is missing any connection to Eastgate/The Hollows. This would make Echo: Galaxy City's timeframe sometime after Issue 14, when AE was released, and Echo: Atlas Park's timeframe no later than Issue 1, since Issue 2 added The Hollows. It feels a little incongruous simply to be stopped in the tunnels out of the echo zones, and for the hazard gate from Echo: Galaxy to Perez Park to be blanked off. I think it would feel better thematically for the zones as 'pockets in time' to have players automatically zoned to the first open Ouroboros zone when they reach the transition point (or click on a guard in the Perez gate). I don't know how possible that would be to do, though.

I don't remember the specific comic that the panel was in, but years and years ago, there was a Spider-Man comic where he'd wound up riding vehicles in a chase well out of the city, and he'd resolved everything, waved a farewell to the victim he'd rescued, and fired a webline to take him away... and the panel had him standing there in a suburban tract full of one-story buildings as his webline arches over and descends, with no tall buildings to attach to; you could almost hear the 'Wah-wah-wah-wah' sad trombone slide. Pointed up how location-dependent that type of mobility was. Found it. Spider-Man #267, page 10, panel 3. And the kid's comment is just rubbing salt into the wound:

That's loosely similar to what I did with my Bots/Dark MM; he was a late Soviet-era project to develop a robotic director for combat robots that accidentally became self-aware and began ignoring his orders, replacing them with his own plans. Despite the fact that he was actually more efficient this way, the generals backing the project wanted robotic cannon fodder, and not being able to rely on the robots being there to draw fire made it unacceptable, and he and his subordinate robots were deactivated, crated up, and stuck in a warehouse for decades, until he was awakened by an earthquake that triggered automatic threat sensors.

Shooting runners in the back is probably one of the things I love most about playing ranged characters. ;D It's not just shooting runners in the back; it's seeing the runner, taking the shot at them as they scurry off, and watching the trail of your shot curve to follow them as they duck around a corner, which tells you that, no matter how fast and how far they run, they're going to get it. And sometimes you get the weird effects, too; back on live, I had one where I was on the docks on the W side of IP with my AR/EM Blaster attacking a spawn of Tsoo. I'd fired an M30 round at a Red Ink Man, enough damage to finish him off, and I watched it arc over and begin to descend... then the Ink Man hit me with Siphon Speed and took off running -- and I watched the grenade turn in mid-flight and begin ascending again as it disappeared into the distance chasing my runner. And about 20 seconds later I got the XP and inf for his defeat, without ever seeing him again. You can't buy satisfaction like that.