srmalloy

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.

When I logged in to a character that was logged out in Ouroboros, I noticed something odd -- the character's enhancement tray had one tab, labeled "all". I thought this was odd, and switched around between the management window and back, but nothing changed. Going to my base, however, returned the enhancement tray to normal, but when returning to Ouroboros, the single "all" tab returned. This time, after about fifteen seconds, it spontaneously flipped over to the normal set of tabs. Wondering if this would happen with other zones, I went to Pocket D, and I noticed that the enhancement tray as I spawned in showed a single "all" tab that immediately changed to the normal tab set. This leads me to the conclusion that the enhancement tray display isn't broken in Ouroboros, but that there is something delaying whatever change the Homecoming staff applied to give everyone seven tabs, so that you only see the one on zone entry.

Also, if you're in the casino area, there are sewer entrances at water level that can be mission entrances, as well. Those look like they're in the casino area but show as below you when you get there.

The tentacles never gave merits; you get six for defeating each of the eight tentacles and then the head. Each part is somewhat more challenging than taking down Babbage, but if you can get one tentacle down -- and I've been part of single teams (mixed level) that have done it -- you can take him completely, so the difference is in the time it takes to whack him nine times. I agree that he should be worth more merits, but only to a degree.

I was going to post a longer reply, but... No. Just no. This straitjackets the creation of story arcs to an unreasonable extent, and there are good story arcs already in existence that break the 'rules' you want to impose -- "The Clockwork Captive", for example.

And there is a ParagonWiki page for how that works.

I started tuning him out about the time when he made the post about how fun in a video game, for him, was throwing himself at the end boss again and again, wiping over and over and over and over until he found the one trick that let him defeat them, and that this was how he wanted AVs to work in CoH. As if the first person/group that found out how to defeat some end boss wasn't going to throw it up all over the Internet as soon as they figured it out. The fun isn't beating the boss; we know that it can be done and how to do it -- the fun is figuring out a way to do it better.

There are some decent artists in the CoH community; hold a series of contests for billboard replacement advertising -- pick one of the stock billboard spaces and hold a contest for art in the correct aspect ratio for that space (the aspect ratio for normal billboards, like the one across the street to the west of the KR tram, or the aspect ratio for the vertical drink ads in AP and Steel and elsewhere, etc.). The winner of a contest has their ad swapped in for the stock ad for billboards with that aspect ratio for some period of time, and then turned into an art file that people can download and stick in the appropriate subfolder of their data folder if they want to keep seeing it. Over time, this would build up a sizeable library of variant ads that could be rotated in and out to make it look more dynamic.

Obligatory musical reference.

I think you're right; having the spectral pedestrians would work better during the banner event, just thicken the fog a little.

If it's not something tied to the zone, and isn't difficult to copy, having additional NPCs walking around the zones with the same spectral effect you see with the NPCs in Echo: Dark Astoria would add a little bit of additional flavor to the event. Or maybe only when there is 'supernatural activity' in a zone, perhaps making all the non-interactive NPCs (i.e., everyone but enemies, contacts, detectives, and anyone else you would talk to in the course of a mission) spectral when the activity is going, to add more spookiness.

Ignoring for the moment the complexity of coding for the game effect of it, you could put "Disable Incarnate Level Shift" as a choice in the difficulty menu when you're adjusting notoriety.

A 5-minute Build Up type of effect with a 5-minute animation.

Try that in an office hallway. It is not a sinecure.

Everyone has seen the "You have X bought and Y sold items in the Consignment House" message that you get when you log in on a character. Would it be possible to create a new slash command, such as '/altauction', that takes the name of an alt on your account and displays the same message for the alt's auctions? Right now, you have to log out of the character you're on, then log in to the alt to check their auctions, but being able to see if the numbers for the alt has changed will tell you whether you need to switch and look. Adding any kind of detail would be much harder to do, and all I'm looking for is an "I had ten bids open, have any of them moved?" check. For example, if you're bidding on five pieces of a set to slot in a power, and you don't want to grab your purchase out of the AH until you have all five, this would tell you whether all five had been bought without having to switch characters. And because this doesn't interact with the game play, it limits how much of the spaghetti code that it touches.

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.