srmalloy

The mechanism appears to be working as designed -- if you put an anchored toggle on a target, and you move further away from your target than a maximum range that's not clearly defined, the toggle will drop. However, there are a number of instances where your character and the anchor are both transported, but not at the same time, and the effect is to separate your character and the anchor by enough distance to drop the toggle, even though you may start adjacent to each other and end adjacent to each other. The 'offenders' are group teleports like Incandescence Destiny, Team Teleport, Assemble the Team, and the more prosaic action of taking an elevator in an instanced map. In all of these cases, because you and your anchor do not get transported at exactly the same time, there occurs a point where you and your anchor are far enough apart to drop the toggle, putting it on cooldown when you arrive, forcing you to wait for recharge to reapply it. Teleport Other, while it will drop the toggle, does it appropriately, because it's a single-target teleport, pulling you away from your anchor. I'm not sure how this would be addressed internally; turning off the anchor toggle range check for the duration of the transport would solve the problem, but making it work only for those types of transport would be problematic.

It has been an ongoing issue all the way back to Live; is there some way to prevent a targetable object that is behind your character and outside the view of your camera from being made the default interaction object? What is happening is that, for example, with a character that has a pet of some kind comes up to one of the sliding doors in a mission and brings their mouse pointer up to click on the door with their pet behind them and not drawn in the camera view because it's outside of the field of view, the mouse pointer will turn red so that clicking the mouse targets the pet; you have to play camera angle games to get a view that doesn't have the pet's targeting box occlude the object you're trying to click on. And it doesn't have to be a pet; I've had occasions where I've tried to click on a hostile mob in front of me, but the mob that clicking targets is one standing behind me that I can't even see. The 'targeting box' for objects appears to be larger than the drawing size for the objects, so that even if they aren't big enough to be visible behind you, their targeting box is still in the camera field of view, and preempt more distant objects.

I would be strongly in favor of the holiday 'Present' inspirations, and all other event inspirations that have a concealed effect, be rewritten internally in this manner, so that the effect is determined at the time of use, rather than just all having the same visual appearance, but sort themselves out into groups in an inspiration storage base item, where they can be categorized.

You haven't run the "Revenant Hero Project" arc from Gordon Stacey in Brickstown much, have you? The second-to-last mission of the arc is, with the exception of a single spawn on the first floor (at least in my experience) entirely populated with Paragon Protectors, minion to boss, all of whom have Moment of Glory or an equivalent power. I say 'equivalent power' because they're not all the same; the Energy Blast types have the 'classic' unhittable MoG, while the others just become mildly annoying and are not much more difficult to take down than they are before they pop MoG. The mission, though, is the best one to use to get the badge for 200 Paragon Protectors, lest you be stuck trying to street-sweep them.

In the catalog of weird history, "Hawaiian pizza" was invented in the 1960s by a Greek restaurant owner, Sam Panopoulos, in Chatham, Ontario, and it was given its name because that was the brand name of the canned pineapple he used. It was an attempt to get his customers to diversify their choice of toppings, which consisted almost entirely of mushrooms, bacon, and pepperoni; pizza was still a novelty -- an ethnic food that Canadians would eat when they went across the border into the US. While pineapple can be decent on pizza if grilled first, rather than just being dumped on the pie, those nasty little fishies are anathema.

IIRC, it was the ongoing "turn off your AoE stealth powers" complaints/demands by the people who, lacking an accurate understanding of how aggro worked, believed that running into an AoE stealth area while having already-established aggro would cause tanks to lose aggro, reducing their ability to pull mobs down into the bowl during MSRs.

And, in fact, Dr. Boyd's repeatable missions ('harvest Kora fruit in a small/medium/large cave') were farmed so hard that the devs back on Live decided that it was necessary to downgrade the inspiration drop from harvesting Kora Fruit to a medium inspiration, rather than the large inspiration it was when the Shadow Shard was rolled out.

I wonder whether this is the same issue that the HC staff fixed with the invasion events, where the spawns used to migrate to the northeast as the event continued. I've noticed the same thing with my Grav/Traps controller, where I'll put down a spread of mines, then Wormhole a nearby spawn onto the mine field, only to have the Wormholed spawn trail off in a line to the northeast with the mobs at the end out of the blast radius of the mine field.

Except for the badges for 10, 25, and 50 costume drops from trick-or-treating. I've gotten more costumes after getting the 50-costume badge, but there's no badge progress for a higher badge, like there was after passing 10 and 25, so I'm guessing that 50 is the highest. I was curious, and when going to Annah for a costume slot counted the halloween costumes she had available, and there were 144 of the regular 'door drop' costumes, not counting the Fir Bolg, Ancient Vampire, and Arisen Mummy costumes.

I was participating in the PI murder motel this morning, and had a thought about a potential power for a future powerset -- an anchored AoE DoT power. We already have anchored AoE debuffs, like you see in Radiation Emission -- Radiation Infection, Enervating Field, and Lingering Radiation -- where the debuff is tied to its target and stays with them if they run off (potentially aggroing lots of other mobs), but when you drop an AoE DoT, it stays at the ground position that you designate. My suggestion for consideration for a future powerset is an anchored DoT AoE power like, say, Ice Storm or Blizzard, except that like the Radiation Emission anchored debuffs, they stay centered on your target regardless of its movement until the power expires. It would require some balancing -- the advantage of your target not being able to run out of the area of effect, contrasted against the disadvantage of them being able to run off and aggro other mobs (depending on whether they can reach another spawn before the DoT runs out). So I'm throwing this out as a hypothetical idea for a new type of AoE attack, so that other people can comment on it.

For a while, my DP/EM Blaster, Mobile Suit Gun Dame (created when I noticed how you could get Gundam-like costumes with the right costume pieces) had a bind for LRM that had her yelling "Gun Dame BEAM!" when she fired it.

The best commentary about the community was something I remember from an ITF back on live, when we had a woman and her five-year-old son on the team. She said that CoH was the only online game she felt comfortable about letting her son play without supervision, because of the quality of the community. And when I tried playing other MMOs -- Aion, Tabula Rasa (both before NCsoft killed CoH), and SWTOR -- I was severely depressed by how rude, vindictive, and foul-mouthed the chat channels were. Yes, there were still courteous and helpful players, but they were far and away the minority. And I have to wonder if it's the setting itself that brings out the good behavior of the community. Well, that and the complete absence of adversarial loot, which inherently fosters jerk behavior.

It's far too late to do anything about it this year, and it only seems to be an issue when ToTing in a league and knocking on a door when another part of the league is already fighting, but is it possible to tighten up where "trick" mobs spawn? When your're solo, or in a group small enough that you're only knocking at one door at a time, any "trick" mobs will come out that door, or a door immediately adjacent to it (i.e., double, or occasional quad doors). If you have a league that's hitting several doors at once, and already fighting a spawn at another door, that's no longer the case. If you get a "trick" response from knocking, the spawn will almost always come out a door where there are already "trick" mobs present, and that door can be several doors over, or even on a different floor of the building where you're ToTing. For example, if you're at the 'murder motel', and you knock at the door on the ground floor closest to the bottom of the stairs to the upper level, get a "Trick" result, and there are other characters already fighting a spawn in the adjacent corner of the upper level, the mobs spawning from the 'trick' will spawn on the upper floor where the fight is going on, even though it's more than fifty feet away and up one floor. Once you have mobs spawning out a given door, other characters clicking on the door they came out of will get mobs spawning out that door as you would expect, but knocking on a door and getting the resulting mobs spawning somewhere else significantly dilutes the perception and effect of a "trick" result.

You are door-knocking in a level-appropriate zone, aren't you?

And it depends a lot on the character. I have an Elec/Elec/Elec Sentinel that I just took out on a round of the doors on an office building in NW Kallisti Wharf, and got three EB Vampires to verify what I remembered from last year; the only thing that makes the EBs different from the other mobs is that they're a sack of HP that takes longer to drop. They come out the door, and as soon as I see Lightning Field doing damage, they get their End taken away from them, and then it's just spanking them while I watch to see if any of them try to run. The Ancient Vampires spent virtually all of their time shaking from the shocks, and at 0 End the rest of their abilities are neutered.

This is a problem not limited to the Halloween EBs. You also see it in the Rikti zone raids and Nemesis invasions, where mobs teleporting in can attack you while being completely immune to being attacked — in the case of the Rikti and Nemesis, you get "Invalid Target" floaters and the attack fails to go off, while with the Halloween spawns your attack goes off, but you get the "Unaffected" floater over your target(s). In all of these cases, the salient point is that, while you can target them, you are unable to attack/damage them, while the converse is not true; they are able to attack and damage you the moment they appear, while you have to wait to be able to damage them.

Given the existing 'rate of exchange' for inspirations, where you can take three identical inspirations and convert them to a different inspiration of the same tier, I think that allowing two of the same inspiration to merge and bump up a tier is too good. I would like to see an option in the 'combine inspirations' menu for you to be able to, instead of converting to a different inspiration of the same tier, to convert them to the same inspiration type of the next tier up.

Except for the stupid 'throw your pistol into the air, catch it, and fire' animation for Piercing Rounds; that one needs to die the real death.

That would be double-plus ungood.

Which is elitism in the other direction. The Group Fly proponents say "Well, you can just go to Null and turn off Group Fly on yourself", while the people complaining about it say "Why should I have to go out of my way to stop other people from imposing their power choices on me?" And while I can see both sides' arguments as having merit, with the simplest solution to make the 'make me unaffected by Group Fly' setting the default for new characters, my personal view is that Group Fly was originally intended as a way for a team member to extend a movement ability to their teammates who lacked it (à la Grant Invisibility), and that its use by Masterminds was a "meh, it works well enough, we don't need to clean it up" decision by the Paragon Studios devs when City of Villains was being developed; no one thought about it being used 'selfishly' by Masterminds without considering their teammates, so no effort was put into working out some way for a Mastermind to spread their travel power to their henchmen without affecting anyone else.

While the proviso 'when not in combat' appeals to me because of specialized situations like the AFK Robotics MMs at the 'murder motel' in PI turning on Group Fly and leaving their henchmen on Aggressive hovering in the courtyard generating lag and attacking anything that comes within their detection range, I don't think that it solves the problem, because there are 'legitimate' (putting it in quotes because I know that there will be Robotics MMs who will yell about how leaving their bots hovering to attack autonomously while they go AFK is a legitimate tactic) situations where you would want to have your henchmen flying with you. It's an interesting idea, but I think it needs more work. Automatically giving an MM's henchmen the same movement speed as the MM, and the same travel power as the MM, addresses the problem differently -- pathing is still going to leave the henchmen lagging behind in complex environments, but it gives them the capability to keep up and cluster around the MM without involving an additional power that also reaches out and affects other people around them. Is it a good solution? No. Is it workable? I think so, but I don't know enough about the internals of the henchmen's movement code to know how automatically giving them a full travel power will affect everything else.

Peregrine Island is the 'go to' location for the 'murder motel league' because it's impossible to level out of it; in any other zone, once you ding past the zone level range, you become unable to get a response when knocking on doors. Kallisti Wharf has the same lack of a level cap that PI does, but its architecture, while objectively better than the other blueside zones, does not have a tight door cluster like the 'murder motel' buildings do. There is a 'murder motel' building in Dark Astoria as well, but I don't think the Halloween event extends there; if trick-or-treating were enabled in Dark Astoria, it would create a second focus point for ToT leagues that would also be free of the risk of outleveling; unfortunately, the building is considerably further away from the hospital than the one in PI is, so it would probably attract many fewer people (particularly the people who bring out low-level characters solely to take advantage of the firehose of XP for leveling, who would otherwise encounter problems getting back from the hospital to the 'murder motel' after defeat), which would make adding DA to the ToT event much less attractive as a strategy to pull people away from the PI .

That there are people posting music declared to be "royalty free video game music" does not absolve the HC staff from performing due diligence to protect against inadvertent copyright infringement.

Back before Containment, reaching 32 and getting your pet power was the point at which a Controller was able to viably solo again; from about level 12 to level 31, the damage output of a Controller lagged waaaaay behind that of other ATs; depending on the powerset, they could more or less run base-difficulty content solo, albeit at a very slow pace due to their limited damage output or long recharge on their more effective powers. With Containment and IO sets, that's less true, although there is still a significant jump in damage output when they get their T9 power, Uun is correct in that the squishier pets require more buff-and-heal support from the character's secondary powerset in order to keep the pet(s) alive to take advantage of that increased damage.

Both new tunes and player submitted tunes run up hard against the need for the HC staff to ensure that a new tune does not have a copyright that Homecoming would be violating by adding it to the game. If you don't have the artist and name of the piece, but just a recording, it becomes considerably more complex. As a baroque and obscure example of how complicated this can be, Peter Schickele, in his album "P.D.Q. Bach on the Air", has a section "What's My Melodic Line", where the (purported) listeners to the radio station send in the score to any work written between 1600 and 1750, challenging the "virtuosi di Hoople" to play the piece after being given its name. Three works are named, all by the baroque composer Archangelo Spumoni, and four are played (one is a misidentification); each one has a completely different score, and they're all the same piece of music, just scored differently. I don't think the resources of the HC staff are up to doing copyright searches on random music to ensure that they're not setting Homecoming up for a violation of copyright claim. The last two suggestions, though, just depend on the animation resources available to the HC staff, along with a determination that they're worthwhile enough additions to devote the work to.