srmalloy

It ranks right up there with Emmert's other precepts about how he felt CoH should work, along with "three minions should be a tough fight for a hero" and his conviction that 'fun' was throwing yourself at an end boss again and again, dying over and over, until you found the one trick to defeat him... and being completely oblivious to the fact that, in the age of the internet, as soon as one person found the right technique, it would be spread far and wide, so everyone would know.

Like Dark Armor used to be, until players complained about having to continually switch their active armor powers around, sometimes in the middle of a fight?

Like the old PnP Champions method of implementing the way speedsters like the Flash could run up the sides of buildings by defining it as Flight with the limitation "only on a surface", letting you run up walls, across water, etc.

From P.D.Q. Bach's grand oratorio "The Seasonings" (S. 1/2tsp): "Bide thy thyme, for thyme is running short. Bide thy thyme so fair. Bide thy thyme, the seasoning season's o'er, Bide thy thyme, take care. February's fine for taking thyme, But in March of thyme beware. Bide thy thyme, for thyme is money too, Bide thy thyme so fair. Bide thy thyme, now thy subscription's through, Bide thy thyme, take care. February's fine for taking thyme, But in March of thyme beware. So bide thy thyme!" Then she produced a silken purse full of many spices, whereupon she said to him... "If you've got the money, honey, I've got the thyme, if you've got the money, honey, I've got the thyme; bide thy thyme somehow. "I've got the thyme if you've got the inclination, I've got the thyme if you've got the inclination; Bide thy thyme for now."

Try flying through Echo:DA with any of the Ice armors active, or the Fire armors. Rocket Boots are such a piddling part of the "blocks your vision while flying" collection of power visuals. With many of them, I've found that the way to address the issue is to point your line of flight down and hold down the "up" key (i.e., spacebar) so the net effect is your flying horizontally with the power effects trailing below your line of sight.

There were and are a lot of MMOs where grinding to level cap was just that, the grind, and the game didn't "start" until you got to raiding, which was the primary focus for a majority of MMOs -- and when CoH got people coming from other MMOs, they had it fixated in their minds that everything before level cap was basically a waste of time, so diving into the AE building and not coming out before they're 50 was, from their point of view, the most effective way to play their character. Unfortunately, CoH had always been set up so that the vast majority of the story occurred while you were leveling, with a relative paucity of "end game content" as seen in other MMOs. But we're still going to get people who want to recreate another character they had on Live, and we'll continue to get people from other games that see the 1-50 period as something to be rushed past to get to the "good stuff" that doesn't really exist here... and then quit because "there's so little content".

Back on Live, before the Great Regen Nerf and the institution of movement suppression, I got the badge for the Sky Raider Sky Skiffs on my Katana/Regen Scrapper by going to Terra Volta, targeting a skiff, queueing up a big attack, and super leaping past the skiff. The attack wouldn't go off until he was almost on the ground again, and at the apex of his jump, he'd be zooming past the spawn too fast for the other mobs to react. Rinse, repeat.

The HC staff addressed a bit of the 'AE baby' syndrome by eliminating the AE buildings in Atlas Park and Mercy Island, ensuring that new 50s whose entire experience of the game is doorsitting in farms in Pocket D at least have the concept of changing zones, even if they still have no idea how to get to different city zones (the classic "How do I get to Steel Canyon?" question from a 50 invited to a Positron TF). I can understand wanting to recreate characters they had on Live, but there's no effective way to to do that without making it possible for people coming from other MMOs where everything up to level cap is just grinding from using it to sweep to level cap without learning to play their characters.

Isn't that already baked in to the default 'walk' animation for female characters?

No. Current tooltips (e.g. "5 of 8 complete") is not enough information. I would like to know which other three badges I need to go earn without having to go cross reference all eight to see which ones I am missing. That's not what you asked for. What you asked for is to have a visible indicator of completed vs. incomplete accolades, not for a detailed breakdown of progress on each component of the accolade requirements. Phrasing is important; to cite an example from, IIRC, Robert Heinlein, note the difference between "this document was dictated by God!" and "this document was dictated, by God!" — or the possible confusion from the presence or absence of the Oxford comma.

If your knowledge of the internals of the CoH game engine is so comprehensive, you should be on the Homecoming development team.

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)