srmalloy

That's why I posted this in General; it didn't seem as if there was anything actually broken. I was just curious as to whether anyone else had had this happen, and if they did, how common it was.

I discovered this morning that it's possible to fly up to a base portal and, while drifting to a stop, slide past the portal, but still able to click on the portal, and select your base right before the game decides you're too far from the portal and hides the pop-up window. If you can hit this absurdly narrow window, the client and/or server get horribly confused -- you get the hourglass indicating that it's waiting for something, but you don't get the 'map loading' floating text, and after about a minute, a concensus will be reached that you did not, in fact, choose to enter your base, and your client will reluctantly decide that, yes, you're allowed to interact with the client again. I can't call this a bug, because I have been unable to repeat it, so it likely depends on a ridiculously finicky collection of user timing and network packet transmission delays to make it happen. But if someone wants to see if they can produce the same result in a reliable manner, feel free.

An ongoing issue with a mission against the Lost, given by Sanjay Chandra and others, where he describes a warehouse controlled by "Unlucky Pete" where homeless people go in and come out looking stronger; he asks you to defeat Unlucky Pete and his crew. The mission text in your nav bar will usually describe the mission as "Defeat X and his crew", where 'X' is a different name, although it can show 'Unlucky Pete' as the boss to defeat -- the mission I just completed was "Defeat Faizon and his crew". The actual boss in the mission may or may not be Unlucky Pete -- if the mission text in the nav bar says 'Unlucky Pete', it will be him or another named boss; if it gives a different name, it will be Unlucky Pete or the boss named in the mission text. Now, with the progression of Lost through the 'system', I can understand there being turnover and a new boss being in charge of the warehouse, so the information the contacts have may be out of date, but I'd hope they have reasonably current information -- or at least consistent information, even if out of date.

Now I'm contemplating the horror of Photoshopping the Lollipop Guild into a screenshot of an Arachnos base with the evil laugh threatening to come out...

Or that they have to throw their character concept out the window and play with a specific restricted group of powersets to be comparable to other ATs that don't have the same sort of restrictions on their powerset choices.

Leveling up a new Necro/Marine MM, I exited a mission with a Specter active (summoned by the use of Gloom), and the dark cloak/invisibility visual effect on the Specter was stripped away, leaving it looking like an ordinary CoT ghost: It didn't affect the mob's actions, and the Specter despawned at the end of its 'life', so as it doesn't affect gameplay, unless someone happens across an easy cause and fix for the issue, it should get put behind more gamebreaking bugs in the fix queue.

For Necromancy, this bind doesn't work; I just downloaded the whole bind set because I couldn't find where I'd saved it, and the summons for the tier-1 pets failed. The power is named "Zombie Horde", so 'zombie' or 'zombie horde' would work, but not 'zombies'.

Not eldritch enough? Go watch the "Astartes" video made by Syama Pedersen (who, along with the video, was co-opted by Games Workshop and the homebrew Space Marine chapter he used in the video was made canon) Despite being a single person's work, it's incredible to watch, and includes enough eldritch content to satisfy...

It is for the three people unable to join the MSR because the league is full... How much of an issue it is depends on the raid leader.

MMs are the only AT that inherently gets jerked over for more difficult content; at any point in the game where an MM has more than one of any tier of henchmen, bumping the difficulty automatically gimps the MM for that content to a degree depending on the difficulty increase. I don't know how it could be made to work dynamically with changing content (i.e., being on a team where one team member has missions at +0, another at +2, etc., so the difficulty varies with whose mission is being run), but some of the issues could be resolved by tweaking MM henchmen so that, at +2 or higher difficulty, it erases one level of disparity (so three tier-1 henchmen would be -1 instead of -2, and two would be even-level instead of -1), and at +4 difficulty, it erases two levels of disparity (making all your henchmen even-level to you). Or make the 'erasure' happen at +1 and +3 if you wanted to buff the MMs a little more, but I think shifts at +2 and +4 will work adequately.

It's not going to stop all the possible abuses of teleports -- early in Live, there were people who got their jollies by going up to the edge of the roof of a tall building, invite a low-level character to team, and then teleport them to a spot about five feet out in the air from their position, just to watch them fall to the ground (remember, this was when you had to be level 6 before you could get even Hover, and 14 to get Fly, Super Jump, or Teleport) -- but one of the things I've been seeing with increasing frequency is the use of Incandescence in Rikti mothership raids to teleport the league to a pylon -- but there's no way to tell where the teleport is going; it could just as easily be bringing you to an extreme corner of the zone as it is to be taking you somewhere useful. I would like to suggest three modifications to the way that Teleport Target, Team Teleport, and Incandescence work to make them a little friendlier to the victim recipient: If you have 'Prompt for teleport' turned on, your pets should not be teleported unless you click 'accept'; this keeps you from being denuded of your pets in the middle of combat. Allow the teleport prompt window to be moved on the screen and remember its position. Currently you can drag it around, but the next time you get a prompt, the window pops up dead center in your screen where it can obscure the maximum amount of what's going on around you, and won't go away until it either expires or you click on one of the buttons (requiring a mouse click, even if you're using the keyboard) Put a flashing marker on the map showing where the target of the teleport is. It's not going to help if you have the map closed, or zoomed and panned so that the teleport target is outside of the zone window, but it at least gives you the opportunity to know where you're going before you click 'accept'.

It's been too long since I had my DB scrappers back on Live, and I've gotten out of the muscle memory of the rotation that looped its way through the three combos -- I need to practice more so I don't just fall back on the 'what power is recharged?' crutch.

The Incandescence Destiny incarnate powers already do this -- with two caveats: First, if you have a tier-4 Radial active, the untouchable Lore pet is unaffected by the power. I've watched the Lore pets get teleported back and forth in the Hami raids in the Abyss with, generally, two to four Incandescence usages before the Hamikaze charge (with its own Incandescence to pull everyone into the fight). Second, the teleport from Incandescence is automatic for your pets -- it doesn't matter what your personal teleport settings are, your pets will be teleported. I personally have had quite a few instances when my Mastermind has been left standing, all alone, in the middle of a group of hostile mobs because some yahoo on the team decided that it was appropriate to fire off Incandescence unannounced, and in the time it took me to find my mouse pointer in the special effects on the screen and move it to click 'accept' on the teleport prompt (and don't get me started on the 'accept all teleports, without having any idea of where it's going to take you' issue -- I played on Live when people thought it was funny to teleport lowbies just away from a tall roof just to watch them fall) my MM would faceplant from being the focus of all the damage. A minor correction -- when you get two of a henchman (whether tier 1 or tier 2), they summon a level below you; when you get three of a henchman (for the tier-1), they summon at -2. So if you're running at 50+4, your tier-1 henchmen are -6 to the hostiles, effectively rendering them useless except as Bodyguard fodder to soak up damage if you can keep them healed and standing.

The new contacts that have been added to the game with the new content, that aren't in the existing "refer to next contact" tree. Or at least put them into the same sort of "you are contacted by X" popup you get at certain levels or when you get certain achievements, like automatically getting introduced to Mender Ramiel when you train to 50.

And without access to the other server's code base, there's no way to tell how it was implemented on that server. I've watched features, updates, and bugfixes being made to Homecoming since I joined, and I appreciate the way that the HC staff takes the time to try and establish that changes they make are going to be stable and not cause problems with the existing characters and gameplay before they get rolled out; I would rather wait for them to take the time to do it right in the context of Homecoming, rather than just have it riveted onto the side without a proper integration with the rest of the game code.

The game uses a 'lower is better' hit mechanism, so that if you have a 57% chance to hit, you need to roll a 57 or less on the virtual D100. The game actually drops a step in the normal "dX" random-number generation, and just converts the internal random number to a 1-100 range, leaving all the decimal places (although you only ever see the first two digits after the decimal place), instead of truncating it to an integer; this allows for more subtle modifiers to be applied to random chances, instead of rounding to whole numbers (adding, say, three 5.4% modifiers to make a 16.12% modifier, instead of having three 5.4% modifiers each rounded to 5%, adding up to 15%). This isn't entirely altruistic on the original devs' part, though; skipping the integer truncation speeds up the RNG for combat resolution a small amount and lets the server make more combat rolls without slowing down.

No... Peepshi:

In the patch notes, the description of Shifting Tides has the text "...and provide you and your allies a stacking Rising Tide buff that increases ToHit, Damage, and Recharge time." Unless this power slows the recharge of you and your allies, this description should be "Recharge speed", not "Recharge time" -- increasing recharge time is not a buff.

I was too startled to get a screenshot when it happened, and I didn't get any zone name text on subsequent attempts to enter the zone, but I had used the SG teleporter to exit to Eden, and had gone to the entrance to the Hive to verify that I'd gotten the exploration badges for the zone, but when I zoned to the Hive, the screen announced "The Cascades" in the initial zoning text before it was replaced with the correct zone loading screen. This was at approximately 0930 Pacific today.

'Collateral Damage Man' was taken?

You mean besides open-world nonconsensual PvP attracting the sort of players whose sole measure of their "leet skillz" as a gamer is how fast their level-capped combat monster in BiS gear can gank newbies fresh out of the tutorial zone? Because that's what I've seen happen in other games with that 'feature', and it's soured me badly on PvP as a whole.

You can occasionally get some funny results with Wormhole. I have a popmenu for quickly selecting various ways to move around a spawn or fractional spawn, and "Powexeclocation up:max Wormhole" will teleport the group, or as much of it as you grab, straight up over you, where they drop to the ground (and take no damage doing it, which feels wrong, but okay). Occasionally, though, they will have a Wile E. Coyote moment, and fail to realize that they should fall to the ground, and simply remain floating up in the air. It does remove them from the aggro radius, though, so except for 'defeat all' missions, it sidelines the group pretty well when it happens.

If you're going to be going with a name derived from the character's powers, then look at translations of 'Stone Thorns' or 'Stone Spikes' into other languages -- 'Steindornen' and 'Steinspitze' in German, 'Epines Pierre' and 'Pointes Pierre' in French, 'Klipdorings' and 'Klipspikes' in Afrikaans, 'Steinthyrmir' and 'Steindoppar' in Icelandic, and many others -- virtually none of which have any significant chance of already being taken, and which give you the opportunity to come up with an interesting backstory to explain why they're in Paragon City with that name.

And some are inherently less valuable than others. Take the Hamidon Bud pet recipe; that averages a cost of around 10,000,000 inf to craft, because its recipe requires 20 Hamidon Goo salvage. It might be amusing to have a Hamidon Bud trailing around behind you through Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, but it's not 10M inf amusing.

Exactly -- you can have a macro that tries to fire off a half-dozen or more things -- toggle on Fly, toggle on Hover, toggle on Stealth, fire an attack if those three are already active -- so that you can just slap the one macro several times to turn on the toggles, ending with the attack. The game can't know which of those you want to show cooldown on, and if you've got emotes scattered into the macro, it gets even more complicated. I've always handled this by having a toolbar for the icons of the location powers that I've built into targeting popmenus: // Rain of Arrows Menu "ArrowRain" { Title Rain of Arrows Option "Rain of Arrows &1" "powexecname Rain of Arrows" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation down:max Rain of Arrows" Option "Target &3" "powexeclocation target Rain of Arrows" } With the icon for Rain of Arrows sitting in the 'drop powers' tray, I can see the icon for the location AoE power with its recharge countdown and keep track of whether it's ready to fire again.