srmalloy

It's a question of laziness; with the murder motel building, all the doors face into the courtyard, so ranged ATs can park in the middle and be able to reach out to spawns from virtually every door. Turn the building around (using the PI building as an example) so that the inside of the 'C' faces the AE building, move the upper level walkway to the outside of the 'C' along with all the doors except for one in the middle of the 'C' (for people parking behind the motel to get inside and to the front), and it's still a tight location with lots of doors, but you have to move around to get all of them — park in the courtyard, which is now facing the AE building, and you've only got the 'back door' to spawn ToT mobs from; it reduces the 'accessible' doors from 16 to 1 for someone parking an AFK MM in the courtyard. With their pets on Aggressive, assuming that there were enough people hitting that one door, they would see their XP drop by more than an order of magnitude, and parking on one of the outside faces would cut the accessible doors by more than half. But for the active players, the experience would change very little, as they're already moving to whichever door is spawning mobs.

Unfortunately, there are just too many options for us to get a proper range of cowboy hats. First, you've got the brim style — flat, western, bull rider, Reiner low sides, Reiner high sides, quarter horse, rancher, tracker, and rolled, among others — then you have the crown shape — cattleman crease, brick crease, Dakota, pinch front, Gus, gambler, boss of the plains, Montana mix/Tom crease, and more — and then there are all the variations of the hat band. I'm sure people would scream about their favorite hat style getting short shrift in comparison if that amount of detail was put into one single hat type.

There are game changes that affect the visuals of the zones — the Halloween windows, the tree foliage changing color, the frozen lake in AP, etc.; these are all managed by altering the properties of the zones, whether by replacing textures (i.e., the windows) or other characteristics. These are changes to the game data in your client, and require a patch to update the pigg files. Changing the game's response to, say, knocking on random doors, is managed by altering configuration data on the server — there's nothing that needs to change in your client to turn on the ToT door functionality, so just enabling the Halloween activities doesn't require a patch download, just a server restart to load the changed parameters.

Before looking to see if it's broken or bugged, check to see if the strikebreaker is enabled for pseudo-pets.

This. And I learned, painfully, back before Containment, the one hard rule for Controllers — if the AoE debuff anchor takes off running, cancel the debuff NOW. Otherwise you got two or three spawns aggro'd back onto you.

IIRC, the different window textures would have required a patch to the zone data, instead of just flipping the switch for the event to make doors active and the invasions trigger.

It has, I believe, a minor effect on mob behavior; mobs higher than you are slightly less likely to run, and lower-level mobs slightly more likely, but there are other factors (i.e., morale by faction — except for the Fakes, Nemesis mobs rarely ever run) that bury the difference in the noise.

The US needed something to keep the Arctic from crawling south into Minnesota.

The third of August and winter.

It all comes back to the 'nature vs. nurture' question...

I think that Mutation and Science have an overlap the others don't innately have; Mutation is supposed to be part of your genetic inheritance, while Science is things done to you after birth, but as you describe, being exposed to something that awakens innate abilities can go either way. But I agree that origin has become more important as the framework for the character background than something fundamental to the character, as the very first concept of the game had it, controlling the number and strength of the abilities your character got. And there's the other ways to blur the lines. I have a character, Machinator Magicus, who comes from an alternate universe loosely like Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos universe, where magic is technology. And it can carry over into costumes, too; I have several fire-based Science and Mutation characters who have rocket boots, dumping high-energy plasma into the thrust chambers on the boots to create the 'rocket' jets. That's what your imagination is for — to take the framework that the game gives you, with origin, powers, and costumes, and flesh it out into a character that's yours, different from all the others. And I think that's one of the things that draws people to CoH — that it gives you more freedom to make each character uniquely yours than other MMOs.

You left out politicians... 😁

So are midges in the Scottish highlands; it doesn't mean that I'm happy putting up with them.

And I forgot that I have a reference picture:

I haven't seen a tight pocket of doors in KW like the murder motels provide; all the KW ToTing I've seen in KW has the group orbiting one of the larger buildings working their way from door to door, or moving between a cluster of smaller buildings. In either case, AFK leeches who just park their pets on Aggressive will be left behind, and leeches set to Follow will a) be readily identifiable and b) have their pets following behind them where they don't aggro as much, reducing the leeches' XP gains, so they'd go off to a murder motel where it's easier to hide their leeching.

In KW you can also use a trick to identify the AFK members — Incan to a spot away from where you'll be ToTing, then run to the building to start; the ones that remain at the Incan point even after the rest of the league resumes ToTing are definitely AFK. The ones who have one of the other league members on follow, though, are less easy to identify.

Perhaps some sort of "Long-Standing Bugs — Check Here Before Reporting" post could be pinned at the top of the subforum listing the more commonly-reported bugs in an attempt to reduce the number of times someone finds a game-shattering bug that hasn't been reported... in any of the posts on the first screen of the subforum.

Not that it makes much difference, except to the people creating popmenus and then trying to figure out why they don't work, but in the Earth Control powerset, the tier 8 power "Volcanic Gasses", 'Gases' is the proper plural of 'Gas', not 'gasses'; one 's', not two.

Search for 'Free Range Fruitcake'; you'll find quite a number of hits, all to copies of the recipe by the same name from Alton Brown's "Good Eats" show on the Food Network. Unlike the standard 'brick eternal' fruitcake, it doesn't use any of that candied fruit crap (unless you count crystallized ginger - and for the recipe I recommend using small-piece crystallized ginger like Crystallized Ginger Chips from The Ginger People). When I make it, I use more dried fruit than the recipe calls for — entire eight-ounce bags from Trader Joe's — and the recipe fills a bundt pan. I expect to be baking one this weekend or the next; that will give me enough lead time to have it thoroughly spritzed with brandy before I give it to my stepmother at Christmas.

However, the decision of the devs back on Live was in accordance with the maxim "Making something difficult is no substitute for making it impossible", and preemptively blocked it off specifically to reduce the amount of policing that they'd have to do. The HC staff can decide differently; that's their prerogative.

But at least he's got a good head on his shoulders... Just be careful during the event that someone doesn't take him for a vampire and try to drive a steak through his heart.

The Dark Astoria zones are always dark — after all, that's part of their raison d'être. They're not properly zones, but IIRC the tutorial 'zones' are fixed in time — day for Outbreak and Galaxy City, night for Breakout. But I think that the OP's request is that the outdoor maps for AE either have normal day/night cycles or be selectable as day or night when a mission is created.

Given that there isn't really a specific counter for each type of mez, I'm not sure that having a color for each type adds much information, plus you'd be running up against vision-limitation issues with lots of colors. Red for defeated and, say, yellow for mezzed should be enough. Let that play for a while, and then decide if more colors are needed.

The minimal fix is to copy the standard AP map texture to the filenames the client associates with the event zone configuration. A more thorough fix is to add the event-specific changes, like adding the Halloween vendor south of Ms. Liberty and the nearby 'terrain' for the current event, along with the cosmetic candy cauldron pavilions, and similarly for the candy cane vendor in the winter event map, but both of those take artwork changes, and are more work, so the people putting in the time to update the maps for the rest of us will need to take the time to do it right.

You need to find Mender Macy and Mender Gimble. But even though they're standing next to each other, they haven't spoken to each other in decades.