srmalloy

The ToT league(s) in PI fixate on the murder motel because it's a nice, tight cluster of doors, and members don't have to move around much between the doors. Because of the layout of PI, it's the only place in the zone for this; if you want to ToT in the other areas of the zone, you're moving around an extended area due to the paucity of doors — the brownstones have the closest array of doors, but you're still moving down a row with only a sprinkling of doors as you work back to the start. Kallisti Wharf has clusters of buildings to use, along with several buildings that have enough doors that you can just work your way around the building again and again. Elsewhere, except in Grandville, you have to worry about outleveling the zone, which cuts off XP and forces you to go to another zone. So the PI murder motel became what it is because it's the most efficient ToT location in PI.

Or like Alaska, except that there they've figured out how to capture the mosquitoes and use them like helicopters to airlift supplies to remote communities...

There's always the nuclear option of razing the murder motel and replacing it with a parking lot, or a warehouse type building with one double or quad door. No murder motel, no league spawning mobs in a tight area from a dozen doors, so no target-rich environment for an AFK MM to park in and take advantage of other players' activities.

Except that they should be base objects to go along with the Kronos titans -- and it's easier to make a model as a static entity than it is to rig it for animation (even though they'd just be scaling up the rigging and animation for the Hercules titans) and work out where in the data files it would need to sit to spawn under various conditions, so it could be available as a base entity faster than it could be added to the game as a new Malta mob.

And on a similar note, since the Kronos titans are clearly scaled-up versions of the Zeus titans, which are formed by a merging of two Hercules titans, I think there should be an Ouranos titan, which would be a scaled up and recolored version of a Hercules titan, and possessing the same ability, when damaged badly enough, to merge two together to form a Kronos titan.

I think there is a ten-second timer for clicking on any door, and a two-minute timer for clicking on the same door, with the timers being character-specific, so you could theoretically have the entire league click on a door, then move to the next after clearing all the trick spawns.

You're missing the point; the objection is directly over none of these things, and only peripherally over XP leeching. The people parking AFK MMs in the middle of the murder motel are earning XP off the efforts of the other players in the courtyard without contributing. They're earning XP from attacking mobs that would not be there without other players knocking on the doors. Park an MM all by themselves in the middle of the courtyard and go AFK, and they get nothing; there are no spawns for their pets to attack, because no one is knocking on doors. To make an academic analogy, you're part of a team of researchers publishing papers, and your supervisor, who had nothing to do with the research that led to these papers, adds their name to all your papers before they're submitted for publication, and then gets a better job on the basis of all their published papers. Having their name on the papers doesn't diminish your work, but they're 'stealing' reputation that wouldn't be there for them to arrogate to themselves if you weren't doing the work they're getting credit for.

The beta ended, IIRC, with the Rikti invasion.

ABS can be food safe, but it's harder to find, and anything but natural color is virtually certain not to be — the dyes aren't. PLA, again with the dye caveat, can be food safe, but you're up against the limitations of PLA — it has a low deformation temperature, so cleaning it with hot water can damage it, and unless smoothed the surface irregularities can trap food particles. Nylon and PETG filament is available in food-compatible varieties, and there is a TPU filament — Copper3D's MD Flex — that was developed for food and medical use, with an anti-microbial nano-copper composite. Equally important is using a nozzle other than the standard brass composition, which can leak lead into the melted filament as it's extruded.

I was looking at the stats of my Poison/Dark Defender's abilities, and noticed an oddity -- in both the mouseover stats on the enhancement screen, and in the detailed power info, Venomous Gas, a PBAoE power, has a base 70-foot range. The power functions normally, so it looks as if it's solely a quirk in the internal labeling, but it was odd to see:

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.