srmalloy

This is the primary problem I have with the way that playing redside feels -- you start off as a legbreaker for people not much better than street thugs, then you advance to being a legbreaker for a small-time boss, then a legbreaker for a mid-range boss, then a legbreaker for a big-time boss, and finally become a legbreaker for Lord Recluse. FDR's Think Tank is correct that what we need is some way for redside characters to get some independent agency, with control over the activities of an increasing number and quality of your own 'boys', sending them out on their own missions to pull jobs for you. I also think that this would involve a huge amount of programming and writing, since you would want to have a fairly wide variety of long-term goals for a villain to pick from, which would affect the types of missions that you'd need to send your thugs out to perform. Some of them would be shared -- after all, knocking over a bank to acquire funds doesn't care about the end purpose you're going to put the funds to -- while some would be specific to a particular goal. You'd have advancement toward your goal by meeting certain requirements in terms of the resources you gain from the missions your thugs run.

I am certain that it is technically feasible -- you already see a marker for a Location AoE, for example. Whether it is practical depends on how it gets implemented into the UI and around the existing code. Pressing and holding the key for the command already uses keyboard autorepeat to queue up that power to fire when it recharges. Pressing and holding the mouse button over the icon in the tray already 'picks up' the icon to drag it to another slot. Modifier keys like control, shift, and alt are already in use to activate powers in other trays. So using any of those means that you have a cascade of UI changes that have to be made, making everything more complex. Since there's already a marker for Location AoEs, though, the changes to make it show the AoE area should be much less than it would be for cones or targeted AoEs. But that last assumes that there is some rationality in the code that displays the location marker.

As a programmer with some 35 years of experience, I find that I have three judgements about modifying code -- the first, based on how I would do it assuming standard database practices, the second a more jaundiced view based on pessimal assumptions about the programming practices of the original developers, and sometimes a third based on actually working through the code, usually accompanied by phrases like "Good God, why?" when I encounter things that are worse than my lowest assumptions. In thirty-five years working as a programmer, I can count the number of times I've been pleasantly surprised when examining the code on one hand; it's as if programmers, as a rule, take the adage "If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read" to heart when coding.

There are also some other quirks along that line -- in the mission from Matthew Habashy where you go into the Hellion hideout after information, characters with tails retain them in their disguise, and if you're a Mastermind, your tier-1 pet will accompany you into the mission ("Yes, I'm a Hellion, just like all the rest of you; ignore the combat robot following me around"), and in that mission and the other low-level mission where you link into an office's security cameras while an NPC talks to a Hellion boss, if you have one of the buff pets you can still activate the power after entering the mission.

If it had been easy to do, I suspect that Paragon Studios would have worked some way to work out a deal like Blizzard has with Figureprints, where you can select a character and their pose and have a statuette color 3D printed (example gallery here) or that Perfect World did with Gameprints for ordering 3D prints of your ships in Star Trek Online.

Immediate downside: You have a pet go down, so you resummon them, and they jump back into action... and then either have run outside the range of your PBAoE auto-upgrade, or get yanked out of combat while the upgrade animation plays out... during which time they get taken out again.

And it's useful to have it this way in some missions. For example, the low-level "Rescue the Missing Homeless People" mission, where you go down into the sewers and fight Lost to rescue three civilian NPCs, almost always has an ambush or two associated with it when you're leading the hostages out. After playing with the circumstances, it appears that the 'front' hostage (the one closest to the mission entrance) is the trigger for the ambush(es). If you are careful and stay away from the hostages, pulling their captors away from them to defeat them without getting within "rescue range" of the hostage, you can defeat the captors and clear the room, then proceed deeper into the mission and do the same for the other hostages. Then, once you've cleared out the Lost, you sweep past each hostage in turn, 'freeing' them to follow you, and can either make it to the entrance before the ambush(es) appear, or duck to the side in a room and watch each ambush thunder past you on its way to the back of the mission, then head for the entrance unopposed.

Actually, that's not necessary; the conversion functionality doesn't have to care about how you can slot the enhancements; all it has to know is what the type of conversion is. You convert within the set, and it does an RNG to pick one of the other IOs in the set. Do it by category, and it does two RNGs -- one to pick the set within the category, and a second to pick the IO in the set. It's complicated somewhat by making sure that the available list is level-appropriate -- no returning a 10-20 set when converting a level-45 IO, for example -- but power- or build-exclusivity isn't a factor. The existing conversions are by set, by rarity, or by category; to make it work at all without having to completely rebuild the conversion code, you'd need to do something like define Hami-Os as their own set or category internally, and then special-case them in the convertor so you could only convert them within that grouping. Without looking at the structure of the database, I don't know how much work it would take to fold HOs into the set IO tagging enough to make that work, and once that was done, there would need to be changes to the conversion code, which could be relatively minor or grindingly difficult, depending on how cobbled-together the conversion code is.

The Marcone already have a tenuous line into Paragon; if you pay attention when you tool around the Striga dock area (the built-up part at the W end), some of the Family mobs are Marcone. Having them appear in spawns fighting the Sky Raiders, Tsoo, or regular Family in IP, or the Warriors, Tsoo, and Freakshow in Talos, would fit thematically. A possible enhancement to the game would be the addition of a contact who talks about Marcone wanting to establish a foothold in Paragon City, with random missions to disrupt the Marcone trying to set up associations with the other groups in Paragon City, and a story arc about the fighting between Paragon's Family and the Marcone. That could readily be prototyped in AE, and then presented to the Homecoming devs as a unit.

Working from memory, the monuments, lost people, and Kora fruit missions are all just time sinks once you're capped out. The Kora fruit missions originally gave out big inspirations for each fruit cluster, but the devs decided that was too disruptive and downgraded the reward to medium inspirations.

While they're about it, they need to make the mergeable GM for the Malta Group. Look at the Kronos Titan, and compare it to a Zeus Titan. You can see that they're both the merged form of a smaller Titan -- the Hercules Titan for the Zeus, and something like an Ouranos Titan for the Kronos. It would make things interesting to be fighting a pair of Ouranos Titans and have them merge into a Kronos when you damage one too far.

No; it's apparently something that I, and I alone, complained to Positron about during the entire life of CoH -- the second time I asked him about it, not too long before the announcement of the shutdown, he mentioned that someone else had commented on the same thing, and that made it something they might have to look into (since I knew I'd been the 'other one', that makes me the only one to complain). The International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities maintains the Maritime Buoyage System, an international standard for the navigation marks used in ports. This specifies things like the colors and shapes used for the buoys that mark ship channels, hazards, etc.; if you travel to Independence Port and go up to the big doors in the War Wall at the NE of the zone, then turn and look west, you'll see two lines of buoys, one along the left side of the channel, and one on the right. These are called 'lateral marks', and indicate the left and right sides of a deep-water channel. In Region B, where the US is, as you're sailing into a port, the buoys on the right side of the channel are red and the buoys on the left side of the channel are green (the origin of the mnemonic 'Red Right Returning'). The red-and-white vertically-striped buoy, which is the only type of buoy seen in and around Paragon City, means "clear water, deep-draft vessels may pass on any side", and generally are used to indicate the middle of a channel when the channel is very wide. If you look at the docks around the N end of Founder's Falls, you'll see several of these buoys parked ten feet away from docks. Southeast of the ferry in Talos Island, there's another buoy parked about ten feet from the corner of a concrete pier. All told, there are only four or five buoys that are appropriately positioned to be center-channel markers.

East? I always remembered flying south from PI until you zoned back into Talos; going east, you hit the force wall.

And if you look at the Kronos Titan, it's got the same design as the Zeus Titan, just bigger and recolored; I always wondered if there were Ouranos Titans that merged to make Kronos Titans; it would make for more flavor in Malta missions if players could run into Ouranos titans, and then get faced with a pair of them merging into a Kronos...

The devs never took the PDP out of the game; it was still there if you went through any of the old doors.

If you're going to add moving ships, then you need to fix the damn buoys.

Yes; There are, IIRC, two marked roof-access doors on the building, one on the N side, one on the S. I think they're the NW and SE corners. I parked a character under the dome prior to the shutdown of the live servers.

Also, just as a niggling detail, if Metal Beads are scattered "around you", it's a PBAoE, not a Targeted AoE.

One thing that I think is part of the 'who will run' determination is that the person doing the active crime -- the mob pulling on the handbag, or directly threatening another mob -- is more likely to be the one that bugs out first, and if you attack them first, it stops them from running. It doesn't always work that way, but it's more common than one of the others in the spawn.

I'm certain that someone developed a tool to take a Sentinel+ character archive and load it into a server's database. I also expect that this is something the Homecoming management will likely not implement. Because it requires connecting into the server database, I would expect that such a tool would be limited to vanity or personal server setups. Importing from the character databases on the live servers, assuming that those databases even exist, is theoretically possible, although it would require both access to the old character databases and the intention of the server management to do the import, either or both of which I expect we'll find lacking for the 'regular' servers, although again it might be something done for a private or vanity server.

The problem that I've found with my Rad/Rad Brute is that while the attacks are powerful, they're also slower than other powersets, which means that you're more heavily dependent on keeping yourself surrounded with attackers in order to efficiently raise/maintain your Fury. On TFs, it's great -- run into the pileup around the tank and go to town -- but I've found that Fury fades quicker with Rad Melee as you do yourself out of attackers than it does with other powersets. It makes Scrappers, with their fixed-rate Critical chance, come up a little more to the good in comparison

Power Boost doesn't affect knockback any more. Back on live, before ED and that change, one of the pasttimes for the easily amused was to take a level-50 /EM blaster, six-slot Power Push for knockback, then go to Atlas and find a Hellion, line up so that the Hellion was between you and the long axis of the zone, hit Power Boost, then Power Push the Hellion. Because you were 50 and the Hellion was under 5, you'd get a huge boost to your knockback effect, and with a good shot (i.e., missing the buildings), you could punt the Hellion diagonally across most of the zone. Even with a more rational slotting of Power Push, you could easily get a couple of hundred yards.

Well, хуй. And I just noticed the announcement, too.

She's been alone for years; she's got needs.

Or wonder why the exit from Echo: Galaxy City to Perez Park is blocked off.