srmalloy

It's not properly a bug, but it's possible for one character to prevent another from using objects like a crafting table without the second character knowing that they're there. I had a character in Pocket D that had flown up to the crafting tables and attempted to click on one to open the crafting window, but was getting no response, even when moving to another table. I finally turned my character 90° and saw that there was another character behind mine, who had been completely unseen because of being 'behind' the camera position, but who had 'grabbed' my mouse pointer focus. After turning my character, I was able to get the 'interaction hand' mouse pointer change and craft the IOs. I've noticed this happening on occasion in other situations, where attempting to click on something in front of you will instead target/act on something that is not only behind you, but behind the camera position so that it is completely outside your field of view. Is there some way to tweak the way the game decides what your mouse pointer is targeting so that objects that are not actually displayed in your client's game window cannot be targeted, so things behind you won't interfere with targeting the thing in front of you that you actually wanted to click on?

This would seem to be system-wide across all missions with full-body-replacement 'costumes' -- the 'Infiltrate the Hellion Safehouse' mission from Matthew Habashy in Atlas Park does the same thing -- you enter the mission, and if female become a 'Girlfriend from Hell', but you retain your character's tail if you had one.

I've found that when I'm sniping from ranges that require Boost Range to bring them within the power range, often the first snipe will just leave the rest of the spawn standing around (perhaps thinking "Frank fell down. What happened?"); it generally isn't until the second snipe that the spawn panics, and may or may not aggro on me, depending on the mob type. However, I have noted that, out past about 200 feet, defeating a mob won't increment the defeat count for that mob for badges. It seems to be a defect in the game -- you see the "You have defeated X" message when they go down, but the badge counter doesn't move. I noticed this while whacking War Walkers for the badge, hitting them from >240 feet, but after a full round of the Council base the badge count for the 'War Torn' badge hadn't changed.

Back on Live, I had an AR/EM Blaster that exploited Boost Range for that. I determined experimentally that she could hit Boost Range, Build Up, then fire off Full Auto and Flamethrower to pretty reliably take out a same-level spawn of Nemesis grunts, while losing about half her HP to return fire, then Rest to recover her HP, and by the time she'd found another suitable spawn, FA would have recharged. Dancing with the RNG, because too many lieutenants could frag her survivability, but it was a steady stream of XP.

I've noticed an oddity with the monitored stats window on a couple of my characters, where the first stat monitored appears on the second line of the window, leaving the first line blank: It's happened with two characters, and appears to be persistent across a logout/login; I need to test it against longer logged-out periods to be sure of how persistent it is.

I do that unless the character doesn't have the badge for that GM (Babbage, Kronos, Kraken, Eochai, etc.) and I don't think I can make up enough damage solo to earn the badge. Otherwise, there's no real benefit to joining a league or team, and putting a flashback on hold to LRT to another zone to help take down a GM wouldn't let me join their team/league anyway.

Full Auto would like to raise an objection to your characterization.

And I expect we'll continue to see them for at least another week, until people are convinced that the event is over.

I'm not sure if it properly qualifies as a typo, but if you look at the list of zones when you click on a teleporter in an SG base, you'll see that all of the zones that have 'different' names from their original neighborhood names -- Baumton to 'Boomtown', Venice to 'Crey's Folly', Woodvale to 'Eden', Eastgate to 'The Hollows' -- have the zone name enclosed in quotes, but Astoria, now called Dark Astoria, doesn't. While the base neighborhood name is still there, I think that prefacing it with 'Dark' is enough of a change to justify putting the zone name in quotes when it appears in destination lists.

I think that would require more coding than is viable for the game engine as it stands; I suspect it would be necessary to make the Vanguard base its own zone for this, as all of the 'indoors' maps where you click on a door and are transported into/out of the building without a loading screen (i.e., city hall, the Vanguard offices, hospitals, police stations, etc.) are, I believe, contained in the zone map, so the zone reference would be the same whether you were inside or outside the base.

If the waypoints on the zone map had annotations that indicated if they were in a different 'subzone' than the character (i.e., 'outside base' if you were in the base, and 'inside base' if you were outside), it would give clues to where to go that would benefit characters.

Rather than giving you a copy of the mission-arc contact, it should unlock a base item that's a display case with the souvenir from the arc in it that you can place in your base wherever you choose to show off what you've done.

That's been there since Live, and you can find more NPCs walking through walls in the Portal Corps buildings.

Having the game decide what you want to see, however, can shaft some players, particularly melee. If there was an option to prioritize rendering for a) friendlies, b) hostiles, or c) default would be better, and having the rendering algorithm tweaked so that if you have a mob targeted and have attacked/shot at it within the last, say, five seconds, then it is automatically rendered regardless of the rendering althorithm's choice of mobs to render (so your Tank/Brute/Scrapper won't be pounding on a target that the game decides is "too far away" and vanishes, or when the target you're still shooting at vanishes -- most often during MSRs when more Rikti teleport into the bowl and force the game engine to reassign which mobs are 'visible'.

The problem of changing it is complicated by the render limit built into the game engine, which (as far as I know) prioritizes nearby targets, so you could move your character and see mobs appear and disappear as the 'closest' mobs change; I noticed this in a Nemesis invasion this afternoon, where my Brute jumped away from the scrum of PCs and Nemesis fighting jammed together and had eight more Nemesis render out of nowhere as the 'nearest mobs' list changed. Dealing with the limitations of the game engine is likely to be one of the biggest obstacles to making this work.

I've noticed that, during invasion events -- Rikti, Nemesis, mapserver, zombies -- there are endemic issues with attacking the mobs. A mob teleporting into the scrum is targetable, often even before the mob appears in the zone, for several seconds before it is attackable. This results in your character (particularly with melee-based characters) running up to an empty spot on the map with an attack queued up and just standing there until the mob that they've targeted appears, then waiting more until it becomes attackable and their queued attack goes off. Compounding this issue is the fact that some mobs that are targetable, and show the teleporting-in animation, despawn before ever becoming attackable, resulting in characters standing around looking like idiots, unable to contribute to the invasion defense until the server decides that a particular mob is attackable. This gets worse as the lag from the invasion climbs If it's possible to make the change simply, I suggest that targeting hostile mobs teleporting into a raid situation be changed so that you can't target a mob until it's attackable, even if it's visible in the zone. As it is, mobs can spawn into an invasion scrum, fire off one or two attacks, and then despawn before the PCs in the scrum can attack them.

Only if you can a) inactivate the SG portals and the portals directly back to FBZ, and b) make the 'jump off the rock and be teleported back to the start of the zone' target change to the entry to the next deeper zone in the Shard. The full experience of the Shard requires that you find and use the gravity geysers (or, for the masochistic, flight or teleportation) to traverse each zone, so you don't miss anything.

Little Bobby Tables...

It's a picayune grammar objection, and more properly a British usage, but the NPC random zone text: [NPC] Buddy: Freakshow annexes Mashu Bridge! Can the PPD stop them? Pick up your Paragon Times today! should more properly be "Freakshow annex Mashu Bridge", because 'Freakshow' is used as a collective plural noun, not that a specific individual Freakshow has annexed the bridge. Another example would be 'The staff disagree on the proposal', rather than 'The staff disagrees on the proposal'. But it is a niggling grammar point, and is widely ignored in common usage in the US.

I discovered that turning on Mystic Flight and pointing Translocation straight down breaks you free of the bird, taking you back to the ground.

When you use a catalyst in your base with the base storage window opens, the game will put a catalyst into the storage item first -- so if you only have one, the IO won't become attuned/superior -- and only then will apply the catalyst to the IO. This has been a known bug for some time.

Would that be 'City of Zeroes', archived at https://shenanigunner.com/coz/ ?

The Midnighter Archivist in Dark Astoria does not show all the recipes in your inventory: As you see, the vendor recipe list shows two recipes -- Reactive Defenses and Touch of Lady Grey -- while the character recipe list also shows Experienced Marksman. The latter is just a rare recipe, not one of the non-vendable ones, so there's no reason for it not to be shown in the vendor list.

And in a freak spawn where Sally was on the shore of the island where War Witch is located, but moved back into the water before I could grab a screenshot, neither does Sally; she's just a blob with a neck and head -- no fins or tail.

You earn 10 Vmerits for an MSR regardless of whether you have the Member of Vanguard badge or not, but if you don't have the badge, that's all you get.