srmalloy

The filled-in icon and accolade name vs. the empty icon outline and 'earn this badge' text isn't enough indication already?

I also suspect that a factor in their deciding to shut the game down was that the way Paragon Studios had set up the cash store, where anything you bought unlocked permanently for the entire account, couldn't be turned into the sort of one-time individual purchase microtransaction-based cash shop that sits behind virtually every Asian MMO, where you'd pay to unlock a single costume piece for a single character that could be used in a single costume slot, and if you changed the costume in that slot to not use the piece, you'd need to buy it again to use it again. Asian MMOs are also stylistically different in gameplay. The average home computer there didn't have the graphical power to run the MMOs, so the Asian MMO publishers made deals to supply the internet cafes with systems that could if they'd make their games available. So while with a Western MMO you would go home, fire up your computer, sign into the game, and meet up with your friends or run solo, with an Asian MMO you got together with your friends, went down to the internet cafe, and all sat together playing as a group -- so once you got out of the tutorial area, it was expected that you'd be playing in a group, and all the content was balanced around your being part of a group to face it.

Let me help you see the other side. We all know Group Fly is a thing, we all know before we pick it that it affects others against their will, and we take it anyway, knowing in advance that it forces people to go out of their way to have their character configuration tweaked to become unaffected by your decision to impose an unwanted movement condition on them, potentially disabling one or more of their powers, because it's more convenient for you not to care about negative effects on others, simply because there is a workaround in place that means you don't have to care about it.

Does it market your personal information and activity to advertisers to allow them to present tailored advertising? If so, "best of a bad lot" is like arguing over the species of the mold growing in your shower.

It is when it's not their birthday...

A thought occurred to me while playing my Arsenal/Trick Arrow Controller -- Assault Rifle throws spent shells in its animations, but neither Gun Drone nor Tri-Cannon do. Would it be possible to get the shell-ejection part of the Full Auto animation from Assault Rifle added to both of these, so it looks as if the shells are falling out of the bottom of the gun platform?

I don't remember which of the Stone Armor powers does this, but in the animation for Snowball, you crouch, mime scooping up some snow, then briefly tossing the snowball in your hand before throwing it, with one of the Stone powers active, the armor effect copies to the snowball, so it looks as if you have a rock inside the snowball.

Something I've been noticing with my Arsenal/Trick Arrow Controller is that Cryo Freeze Ray appears to have an intermittent animation-timing problem. I haven't been able to establish a way to reliably make it happen -- sometimes I'll get strings of four or five in succession, sometimes only every three or four shots -- but what happens is that I activate the power, the animation runs through the muzzle lift at the end of the animation, and there's a perceptible lag before the visual effect of the shot fires from the character's weapon to the target.

The strawman fallacy is on your part. I never said that the "must have Tier 4 Barrier" route is the only way to beat the SF, only that, because it is a known, readily accessble, and reduced-skill way to do it, it has become the default that immediately excludes characters who a) don't have a T4 Destiny yet, b) only have a single T4 Destiny crafted, and chose something other than Barrier for their play style, or c) don't have a T4 Destiny Barrier in their available crafted Destiny abilities. How much of this is due to the people who want a higher degree of challenge from not rolling with the meta being less willing to solicit for PuGs for the TF and choosing to assemble a team of known players without going through the LFG channel, and how much is due to the people who are soliciting for PuGs using the restriction to reduce worries about the skill of the people who join to be able to run the SF more often, I don't know. What I am saying is that we see the solicitations including this requirement, and people are okay with it, providing a case where that sort of exclusionary filter is an accepted practice.

You can put any of the Unicode characters supported by the CoH font into character bios. Well, you can actually put any Unicode character into a character bio (or chat), regardless of whether or not it's supported by the font, but all you'll get is, at best, a hollow box. I have a fair number of characters with Cyrillic in their character bios. The only thing you need to remember is that Unicode has 16-bit-wide characters, so each one you use in a bio takes up two characters of the already-limited space.

This reminds me of the people I've encountered who didn't get the joke about the name of the sock-puppet news announcer on the "Dinosaurs" TV comedy series, 'Howard Handupme'...

This reminded me of the mission you get from Steven Sheridan to appear at a science-fiction convention, which prompted me back on Live to suggest that there be 'update on entry' mission goals. The dialog with Sheridan is about appearing at the con, but as soon as you accept the mission, the mission goal in your nav window is "defeat all villains in building". Now, you know that, when you accept the mission, it's not going to go down as neatly as your contact describes, but it would at least increase the immersion to have the mission goal match what your contact describes it as until you enter the mission, at which point the goal changes to the actual mission goal. At least that mission got updated so that Sheridan no longer always sends you Crey's Folly, a hazard zone, to attend a 'science fiction convention' -- no, that wasn't suspicious at all...

Check the other threads for discussion of Adamastor's "BEGONE!" power.

@BEGIN(Sarcasm) I see... so we should petition the HC staff to update the game so that any character that has taken Group Fly as a power choice automatically has "I HAVE GROUP FLY" floating in bright yellow letters over their head to warn everyone that they team with, because it's obviously your fault that you don't microscopically examine the power choices of every person you team with, and were surprised when they turned on Group Fly. @END(Sarcasm)

The Warriors got a rework that expanded their abilities and character types, but when we see mixed spawns of Freakshow and Warriors, it seems to always be one Warrior kneeling and getting whaled on by the Freakshow. It doesn't really make a difference as far as XP goes (barring the Freakshow rez), but it would be refreshing to have some of these spawns inverted, to have two Warriors whaling on a kneeling Freakshow, to help illustrate that the Warriors have had their capabilities enhanced and are no longer the whipping boys of Talos Island.

You're three missions into a TF, in the middle of a mission, and then the MM pulls out Group Fly and drags their teammates into the air. Seems as if they're pretty tied down to me.

At the end of the day, 99% of the population doesn't understand why they should be forced to accommodate the playstyle of the 1% of the population who uses Group Fly to pull their henchmen up into the air with them, and what they're saying about Group Fly makes perfect sense only to them. Whipping out the 10'-wide brush and tarring everyone who doesn't create a character and immediately run off to Null the Gull in Pocket D to disable Group Fly on themselves as "lazy" or "forgetful" is unlikely to improve their opinion of you. If people forming teams for TFs announced 'No Group Fly', and kicked MMs using it anyway, denigrating the MMs as "lazy", "forgetful", or "rude", then by your arguments you would not be in a position to complain -- you can't have it both ways. The HC staff has worked out a mechanism to hand out Athletic Run and a Flight Pack to new characters at character creation; it is certainly possible to hand out the token that disables Group Fly at the same time. That, however, doesn't affect the thousands of characters already created; a more comprehensive solution is to change powers so that MMs no longer need to take Group Fly in order to drag their henchmen with them,.

I think the restriction for character names was more to keep the names able to be easily typed by other players -- if you could name a character "Outré Girl", how many people are going to know that, to get the 'é' character, you have to hold down the 'alt' key and type '0233' on the numeric pad? Or how to type the Unicode for a character named "Черный Шпион", or using less-readily-recognizable character sets like "赤 医 忍び"? Or even be able to read the character name, to be able to type a reasonable transliteration into chat? For the Korean localization when the attempt was made to bring 'City of Hero' to Korea, I don't know (having never tried) whether there was a Korean-language-specific version of the client that would have let players create characters with names in Hangul, but that was the only foreign-language localization for the game that I know of that would have used a non-ASCII characterset if fully implemented.

Unfortunately, the way the mission system works redside is that you start as a legbreaker for street-level thugs, and as you gain experience you become a legbreaker for more important and more powerful characters, working your way up the power tree until you become a legbreaker for Arachnos -- but you're still just a legbreaker; nothing redside gives you the opportunity to have your character implement their own plans or (except for MMs, and that's a limited case) accumulate your own collection of underlings to do your bidding.

And a fish, because someone will want to create a character like Dr. Ghoti:

Other people have said why this can't be done -- and in quite a few forum threads since Null the Gull was added to Pocket D -- but you have to drag everyone back to the brownish spot on the ground where the dead horse used to be before it was pounded into mulch indistinguishable from the dirt it was lying on. What you should be arguing for instead are changes that would allow you to keep your henchmen with you without imposing your power choices on everyone around you. Group Fly existed before City of Villains was released, and it had its role as a tool to allow your teammates to fly in situations where their chosen travel power would have made moving through some missions difficult, and it was well understood that if you took Group Fly as a power choice, it would affect the characters around you. A change that would restore Group Fly to the oddball power pick it originally was (before the ready availability of temporary flight powers made it unnecessary as a power choice) would be to make Fly and Mystic Flight automatically spread to your pets -- and only your pets -- to allow you to keep them with you without forcing everyone around you to work around your build choices. But of course it's not your problem, it's theirs for not wanting your 'gift' of flight, so the 'obvious' fix is to change the way everyone else's character works to accommodate your playstyle.

Length of time since last person entered the base would be better; this would account for people who've built public bases as RP locations or transportation hubs, where there are non-SG characters using the base regularly for whatever purpose but the SG member(s) haven't logged in.

You would have cringed at the all-MM ITF that Kay organized on Guardian back on Live. Not only did we have 48+ henchmen thrown into the caves maps, but this was before MM henchmen lost their collision box, so they would block up the tunnels to boot. It was a pain making sure that the melee-set MMs were at the front as we moved so the ranged-set MMs didn't block them from getting to the Cimerorans.

Particularly if Power Thrust got KB enhancements made immune to ED -- I fondly remember six-slotting Power Thrust for knockback and playing Hellion Golf in Atlas Park; a high-level character could get a Hellion almost all the way across the zone diagonally, especially with Power Boost (which boosted KB at the time).

One place I see this regularly -- and accepted -- is in the "there is a known way to beat this content, so this is the One True Way™ way to beat this content, and there is no other way" solicitations. A prime example is the "Critical: Must have Tier 4 Barrier" in solicitations for increased-difficulty Aeon TFs; I'm reminded of the joke about the mathematician, engineer, and physicist each putting out a fire -- everyone seems to fall into the mathematician role. Breaking out of the mold is how we got the two different styles of Hami raid -- the one in the Hive, where you clear one or more waves of mitos before finishing Hamidon, and the Hamikaze style in the Abyss, where you go directly in and spank Hamidon hard and fast. A bunch of people had to be willing to fail to find out if the other method would work, and they did.