srmalloy

I remember the "All X ITF" runs on Guardian; those could be insane. The All-Kin ITF, where all of the members had to have the Kinetics powerset, was players and pets on tons of crack zooming around the maps. The All-MM ITF was equally insane, with more than 50 pets clogging up the tunnel missions.

However, you can also look at hover sniping as falling into the original claim Jack Emmert made that "range was a Blaster's defense", which was true only until the change that gave virtually every mob a ranged attack that seemed to almost always exceed the range of non-Snipe attacks; my AR/EM Blaster could drift around high in the sky with Boost Range running and snipe out most mobs without retaliation (a few exceptions, like Malta Gunslingers and Zeus Titans, come to mind), but it was annoyingly slow. I only ever used it in PvE, but Super Jump kiting was also possible. My use of it in PvE was mostly with my Ktn/Reg Scrapper with Super Jump, mostly against the Sky Raider Sky Skiffs in Terra Volta -- he could queue up an attack on the ground, leap up at the Sky Skiff, sail past it, land, and the attack animation would go off; he'd eat the return fire and repeat until the Sky Skiff was down. That character was also the only 50 I ever deleted, after the Regen rework went in based on combat results from a badly skewed internal test server; I wasn't interested in the complete rework I'd have to do on the character to put him back together after the changes. And Willpower showed up later taking over the 'fire and forget' defensive powerset that Regen had been.

My guess is the hard part is coming up with the UI and fitting into the costume designer somewhere. Once the game captures the hex code for the color you want, I'm sure it's just text in the database. And it may not work for picking 'any' color, but I remember from the thread on costume pieces that have two colors (typically an interior color) but only have one pickable color that you could save the costume file, edit the second color for that piece, and load the file to set the color for the missing choice. I wonder if the quantization of the colors is a UI artifact, and you could extend the range by editing a costume file to use colors not selectable in the color picker.

I believe this was thrashed out in the thread on Burn, where people were seeing this specific pattern -- instead of the power delivering the damage with Build Up or Aim boosting it, it would do one tick of damage at the boosted level, then drop back to 'normal'; the supposition that the pseudo-pet spawned by Burn inherits your buffs and their durations when created was confirmed there.

Back before the shutdown, I was on an ITF with a parent and their five-year-old kid (the kid was doing a creditable job of keeping up and contributing; if I didn't know their age, I wouldn't have suspected from their play). The parent made a comment during the run that CoH was the only online game that they would ever think of letting the kid play without supervision. That one statement stuck with me long after the shutdown as a standard for the quality of the playerbase that no other MMO I've played has even come close to matching.

While I really like the concept of giving the DFB spam its own channel and redirecting references to DFB into the channel, I think it would only work as long as people didn't come to the conclusion that they're not reaching the people that they know are just dying to run DFB but don't have the channel active, and come up with euphemisms to get around the filter to solicit players in LFG. And because of, I don't think the effort to do it is worthwhile given the other demands on the GM crew's time.

IIRC, the buff pets just follow you and, with a high recycle rate (or sloe resistance), repeatedly cast their (non-stacking) buff on you. And because they're buffing you, it increases their Threat each time the buff goes off, making them a bigger target than you are unless you've got something with a taunt effect. I believe that the Threat increase is coded into the buff powers, so dealing with it is likely to be complicated.

Maybe a stupid question, how is what you mention above done? Who you talk to depends on if you're a Hero or a Villain. But there's an NPC you talk to, that adjusts your Notoriety. Or... you can click on the speech bubble icon at the lower right corner of your chat window, select "Notoriety" from the menu that pops up, and make your changes there, without having to find one of the NPCs to do it.

And unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to put anything else in the tray that opens when you activate Mystic Flight that shows the Translocation icon; I'd like to put Translocation-dependent macros there so they're only visible when Translocation is usable: /macro Fwd "powexec_location forward:max Translocation" /macro Up "powexec_location up:max Translocation" /macro Cam "powexec_location camera:max Translocation" Just a few shortcuts, either for traveling or an "Oh shit" bugout. I'll have to see if "powexec_toggleon Mystic Flight$$powexec_location up:max Translocation" works as a bind; I suspect that the latter may try to fire off before Translocation becomes available, but it would make a better general escape command.

It would just spawn euphemisms like the "meow mission" solicitations for AE farms that appeared after the devs tried to crack down on exploitative farm missions, but the idea of creating a global channel "DFB", then scanning chat (except for tells or the Team channel) for the string "DFB" and moving such messages to the DFB channel has its appeal. And you'd also see people using "D F B" or "D.F.B" or some such to get around the filter, so it likely wouldn't work in the long run. Still, ghettoing all the DFB chat in its own channel that you can just not choose to in your chat tabs is a nice dream if it would work.

With the drawback that it attracts all the Freakshow within 500 yards to look for the rave?

One of the people I used to play D&D with (the original three-book set in the white box, which tells you what a grognard I am and how far back that was) had a phrase that pops to mind for situations like this: "A crisscross of multi-colored beams, at the center of which nothing living could exist."

One of the things that attracted me to CoH back in 2004 was that it didn't have PvP. Then the devs introduced the Arena, and later CoV. And from there came Movement Suppression, and all the other changes. I watched the devs go from "We won't make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to "We won't make PvE changes exclusively for PvP reasons" to "We'll try not to make PvE changes for PvP reasons" to a deep silence on whether any given PvE change was driven by some PvP problem.

Have some spot in the game where the organization of heavily-armed die-hard patriots are still stubbornly celebrating Independence Day as if the United States as a political entity still actually meant something, and you can run across people out with barbecues and bunting, shooting off fireworks, and if you start a firefight you'll find yourself in a massive crossfire from all the 'civilians'. Sounds surreal enough to work well in a cyberpunk game.

Like the high-velocity copper-jacketed arrest warrants my AR/EM Blaster uses... ;D

You can even get fancier than your example. Because you can stack 'powexec_toggleon' commands in a single bind, with the limitation that only one power activates with each keypress, you could put all of your toggles in a single bind: /bind alt+I "powexec_toggleon DefenseA$$powexec_toggleon DefenseB$$powexec_toggleon DefenseC$$powexec_toggleon DefenseD" And then set up your keyboard macro to emit "alt-I" four times with a half-second delay between them, giving you a one-key 'toggle everything on' function. You can't stack attacks like this though, but you can stack as many "powexec_toggleoff" commands as you like, and they all take effect with a single keypress, so you can set up another key to turn all your toggles off if you wanted to.

With the introduction of crafted Invention Origin enhancements, particularly the IO sets that have one enhancement that grants a global bonus (like the Luck of the Gambler set's 7.5% +Recharge IO, or the Karma set's Knockback Resistance IO), having 'mule' powers that you take for the single slot which will accept one of these globals is pretty common. Combat Jumping and Hover, for example, will both accept the LotG+Rech enhancement.

It's been years (heh.), but that's about what I remember the leveling rate being. For a long time, it was trivial to outlevel your contacts, particularly when you start running TFs. So far on Homecoming, I've run DFB once on one character to see what it was like (and may run it on a Defender I'm working on; I haven't decided), and have been using the notoriety adjustments to bump missions back up when I've outleveled them, or leave them at the lower level if I'm only interested in the badge they give (i.e., the Spelunker mission), with the standard 'complete this mission' toss for the inevitable "You're sending me to the Perez Park Security Chief at level 7, and he wants me to clean up the CoT?" mission. At least for the level-11 mission in Faultline I've gotten on seven characters now, I can expect to be able to skirt around all the purple mobs to get to the door.

Unless it was handled by actually taking the interior out of the map, the AE building in Echo: Galaxy City is evidence that it can be done; if you click on any of the doors, you get the stock "you cannot enter" popup for an inactive door. But without knowing what was done besides removing all of the interactive NPCs (BAB, vendors, contacts, etc.), I don't know if that's viable.

This is known from the start of the game. The game actually makes the to-hit roll when the attack is activated, so it knows to play a 'miss' animation if you miss. If the attack hit, then the power visuals will hit the target, no matter how long it takes to catch up. The power fires in the correct direction to fly straight to the target based on the target's position when the attack animation finishes, then travels to the target. If the target moves while the attack visual is chasing it, the path of the attack visual will change to follow the target. Snipes, in particular, are often good examples of this; it's fairly common to see a mob take off as or just before your Snipe fires, and you watch the power visual tracking the target like a heat-seeking missile. In fact, seeing your attack curve tells you that you hit, letting you make decisions about your next attack before the shot actually lands.

Well, barring the inconvenience of having to take the whole amount from an email then put the amount you don't want to take back in a new email, or set up 'pre-measured' inf emails and then have to pick up multiples. A single depository has convenience going for it, although you're correct that a workaround exists.

Which is a big 'if'. However, my point was that I believe that the brown cave maps are duplicates of the blue cave maps -- or, at least, duplicate the pieces they're made from -- and that it should be possible to replace the blue caves with the brown ones for the specific problem of people having issues with the color.

Just as a bit of perspective, Kotaku has an article about the custom quests players are creating in Assassin's Creed Odyssey to farm levels and stats with essentially no work. The article mentions that a cardinal rule of video games seems to be the immediate exploitation of whatever tools you give your players. People are going to push the edges of what they can get away with for their own benefit, and trying to stop it because you don't approve of their choice of playstyle just breeds division and antipathy. CoH is big enough to accommodate a wide variety of playstyles.

If I'm remembering correctly, there are two "small caves" map-tile sets, one in blue and the other in brown, with identical map structures. Remembering a discussion with Positron about the possibility of user-created maps, he confirmed that the maps were built using preconstructed blocks, but that the tools for joining them together were still primitive enough that it took a fair bit of time and skill to get everything to line up and join correctly, so it would need a lot of work to create a map builder that players could use. And I'm sure anyone who was around for the release of City of Villains remembers all of the maps where you'd find a corridor that had a black wall "blocking" the corridor, but if you went through it, you could see the corridor back the way you came... or drop through to the "floor" of the universe and have to get a GM to put you back... or have mobs jumping through gaps in the geometry to get away, then shoot at you from under the map where you couldn't shoot back. All of these are the result of mistakes the devs made when joining and aligning the map blocks, and the tools (and map blocks) would have to be cleaned up enough to make building a map a snap-click process before it could be made accessible to the playerbase. I don't know whether the maps are defined logically enough in the databases to be able to make a sweeping replacement of all of the blue cave blocks with the identical (except for color) brown cave blocks, but if that's possible -- without having to go through map-by-map and do realignment of all the block joins -- that would be a solution to the color problem.

I think it's a combination of "I want my character(s) back the way they were before the shutdown" with the people pulled in from other games where everything up to level cap is just grinding and the 'real' content is all endgame. Both of them are out to pump their characters to the top as fast as they can, with the distinction that the ones recreating their old characters are the ones organizing the Incarnate trials and MSRs, while we see the ones pulled in from other games in the LFG channel with messages like "Lvl 50 [archetype] lf AE farm" or "lvl 50 [archetype] lf anything" because they don't know how much content is there and how to get to it, or don't want to play their shiny new combat monster in content where they're not going to be at full power. How long did it take for the community of serious AE developers to form and build their content? All of us who played CoH have been scattered to the winds for seven years; it's going to take time to draw people back and rebuild the things that we had before. Clearly, from the level of... discomfort... with the number of people farming AE to the level cap, there's a desire for it to be used for more than just powerleveling, but we're going to need people building the content to have real, complex mission/arc stories in AE. I remember a similar flood of "AE babies" when it was originally released, and it eventually died back. There were always people who chose to use AE to powerlevel characters past all the content, because they were only interested in endgame, but I'd rather that we let them do what they want if it lets us rebuild the volume of good AE content that we used to have.