srmalloy

The Crey PR flacks are set up the same way as the Council recruiters, except that their support personnel are yellow-con instead of red-con, so they won't attack you if you get close -- unless you have some offensive aura power active -- but run away just like the recruiters. (I keep hearing Dennis' voice from Monty Python and the Holy Grail if I attack their support people to make up the count for a 'Defeat X Crey in Brickstown' mission -- "Now we see the violence inherent in the system!")

Used to be classified; now you can get access to it easily via the arena in Peregrine Island.

With that in mind, what would be 'ideal' for the people with a "screw the rest of the game, I only want to do the content that gives me rewards, and it's a horribly unfair imposition for me to have to do content that doesn't give me rewards" is for the HC staff to construct something that works sort of like a popmenu that has all of the story arcs with enable/disable limiters based on character level (or perhaps not, exemping you down automatically to the level cap of the arc starting mission), so that people can just run the story arcs without having to be bothered with the rest of the game. Personally, I don't see the value in something like that, but with Ukase's post, they seem to be bored enough with the game that only missions with rewards have any value to them.

You can make the same statement about the Crey personnel conducting PR briefings in Brickstown, who always have a number of yellow-con (putatively neutral) combatant Crey personnel in attendance. CreyCorp is, though, not "officially" designated as a criminal organization subject to its operations being shut down en masse.

The problem is that Resistance is also Resistance Debuff Resistance -- so if you have a power that is a 10% Resistance debuff, and you use it on a target that's 90% resistant to the type of damage linked to that power, they resist 90% of your debuff, so their resistance drops to 89% -- yes, they're taking 10% more damage than they were, but the difference between a 200-point hit that gets resisted down to 20 and a 200-point hit that gets resisted down to 22 isn't going to be noticeable except over the long haul -- and a controller isn't durable enough to easily hang in a fight with a mob that can hit 90% resistance.

And when you're up against opponents who are resistant, the lack of Containment drives your damage down significantly.

There's the Hand Grenade craftable temporary power, but I don't know if the temp powers are configurable for opponents in AE design.

Just in terms of game lore, just how much increased connection to the Well are you going to get from crawling into your electronic navel, no matter how many virtual opponents you destroy? Going the other way, though, I can see Dr. Aeon coming up with a way to drain off bits of the unrealized connection to the Well from a character and pay them off in carnival trash (tickets), laughing maniacally all the way to whatever device he's working on to use them.

If you're going to add sorting options, you should also add "Days Offline" as a sort condition, so you could see what characters you haven't played recently. And the 'search by name' function doesn't just search from the start of the name; it searches for your input string anywhere in the name -- for example, I can put in 'shoi' to find my Rad/Rad Sentinel Hoshasenshoi.

And this, I think, is one of the reasons why there were so many "AE babies" back on Live, and why we still see so much "LF farm" traffic in the LFG channel -- people who come to the game from other MMOs who don't have experience with CoH are conditioned by their experience in other MMOs to treat leveling as something you do until you reach level cap and start the real content, and miss completely that, in CoH, the leveling is the content, and they're skipping it all. (The other part are the players who've made their sixtieth character and don't want to bother having to level it because they're tired of doing, say, the Wheel of Destruction arc for the twenty-third time)

Cranking up your notoriety doesn't affect the level of 'helper' characters in missions; they spawn according to the mission level. it's one of the aspects of 'increased difficulty' that you chose when you increased your notoriety.

Quite a few of the holocostumes skin you in appearances you flat-out can't do in the costume editor, either because they abuse the costume structure in different ways, are sized outside the limits for character models, or the like. Some, like my Plant/Nature Controller Izporchennaya Zemlya, use the 'Voice of the All-Mother' holocostume on occasion for background reasons; my Bots/Dark MM Brigadyr uses the BCU holocostume for the same reason. But most of them are -- for me -- just fluff, and the same for most of the Halloween costumes (although they do give you a preview of what the holocostumes would be like, and ar a sort of enabler in that regard), with their only real use being enabling the "Whispered Rumor" tip drop. I'd just as soon have an option you could set, say, at the START vendor, to turn off costume drops during the Halloween event -- leave them on long enough to get a costume you're okay with wearing to get the tips, then turn them off so you're not clogging up your temporary powers list with an endless array of costumes you won't use.

Back on Live when people started asking to be able to change the color(s) of their powers, Positron said that it couldn't be done, because the colors of the powers were baked into the animations, and persisted with this until the devs got the time to rework how all of the power animations worked to make them 'colorless', taking their color from fields in the character data for each power that specified what colors to use for that power, and a separate table of default colors for the powers (the 'original' setting). The way the costume change emotes are coded and animated are likely not amenable to simply having color values changed for them, which would require that the animation be dissected to determine what separate effects make up the cce visuals so they will know what has to be copied and changed; it's not a simple case of "change the 'white' in the animation to 'black' ".

This is almost entirely during the monster phase of a Hami raid, where the league is dogpiling on the monsters that have been herded up, both to get Hamidon to spawn and to collect EoEs and red inspirations. For a Hamikaze-style raid, as the Abyss raids normally are, you only need two EoEs, so you can drag excess into the AH to vend later. The small and medium non-red inspirations you use immediately so they don't take up space, and the large non-red inspirations you also drag into the AH to vend after the raid. You only want to keep two EoEs and as many red inspirations as you can get, but the large inspirations can get you 8k-40k each on the AH, so they're worth dumping in there.

The existing costume change emote visuals may not be configured for customization, so that would mean someone going in and reworking the graphics for the animations; the DA armor visuals are already set up for customization, so they'd likely be less work to port to a cce function.

One of the things I have noticed is that the various windows in the UI grab keyboard focus and are reluctant to release it -- for example, if you've clicked in the map window to set or clear a thumbtack, the map window has focus, and all of your keyboard input will go to the map window (which ignores most keystrokes); moving your mouse cursor out of the map window is insufficient to restore focus to the main game loop -- you have to move the mouse pointer out of the UI window, then mouse click in the main game window, for the input focus to be returned to the main game loop, so your keyboard commands that you would expect to fire off powers in your tray will be processed. One of the more obnoxious ways this can bite you is with the auction-house window -- if you drag something into the AH window, the AH gets focus, so if you happen to be in combat (i.e., during a Hami raid, when you may be dragging big inspirations and/or excess EoEs into the AH for later), if the focus stays in the AH window, it's possible to accidentally enter a minimum bid in the hundreds of millions (generally something like '123763442' or the like) for something, then get the 'high listing fee' popup in the middle of your screen (or, if you've turned it off, just pay the absurd listing fee). If it's not too difficult to change, can the focus determination be changed to make the mouse position the sole determinant of which part of the game/UI has focus, rather than requiring an additional mouse click -- or, to allow more flexibility, make this an option so if you're happy with the way it is now, you can keep it?

One of the more character-obscuring visuals from the Dark Armor set should be usable for this without requiring the HC staff to develop any new animations.

'Ninja' isn't Chinese; it's just the on'yomi (early-middle Chinese influenced) reading of the two kanji "忍者", the native kun'yomi reading of the kanji being 'shinobi'. Historically, though, 'ninja' was not in common use, with 'shinobi' and other colloquialisms being more common.

Слава Карачуну, зиме, повелителю мороза и метелей, приносящему жестокую смерть.

You're proving to the contact that you're responsible enough to handle being given a story arc. There are contacts that will always give you an introductory mission like this before they will give you their story arc(s) -- Gordon Stacey, for example, will give you only the mission that gives the badge "The Doctor's Ally" before he gives you any other missions. However, if you're being given a choice of missions, it can be tedious, but you already have an option: Take one of the missions the contact offers you. Abandon the mission from the mission list window. Click on the contact (not the open contact window) to get a new list of missions they offer. Repeat these steps until you get the mission you want -- I routinely use this with Trevor Seaborn/Haley Phillips/Hugo Redding to get the "Rescue the Mystic from the Circle of Thorns" mission as soon as I get the introduction to the contact, so it's in my mission list and I don't accidentally outlevel the contact. For other contacts, keep doing this until you get a mission offering that has an arc name prefacing it, then pick that.

The game does weird things when it disables powers -- one of the amusing ones is when you are doing Heather Townsend's personal story in Dark Astoria, and enter the mission while Hasten is activating; the game gets confused about what it should be telling your client to do, and you get caught in a perpetual loop of the visual effect of Hasten (the energy cloud running down your arms to your hands) while you're in the mission. Exiting the mission clears it, though.

This is correct. From Wikipedia: "Red Circle is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Harold Lohner and based upon the ca. 1930 lettering used in packaging and advertising for the range of A&P's Eight O'Clock, Red Circle, and Bokar brands of whole bean arabica coffees. It is an all uppercase typeface." So you won't see any size difference between the first and subsequent letters in a name where the font is used unless there is a specific use of point size changes to fake upper and lower case.

I opened up a tailor window for my DB/WP Scrapper to make some changes to the coloration of her Pyronic Judgement powers, and was surprised to have a 100,000 inf power fee. Poking around, I found that I was being charged for changing the colors of my Dual Blades powers: There should be no possible charge for changing the colors of the Dual Blades powers, because the Dual Blades powers don't have any color customization available -- all the customization is in the weapons customization. The tailor is trying to rip me off by charging for changes that can't be made.

I don't have OCD. I have CDO. It's just like OCD, except the letters are in alphabetical order. AS THEY SHOULD BE.

I particularly like the haiku: Stone grinds upon stone. The Circle lair lies open. Damp, cold air greets you.