srmalloy

Except for one thing. The XP boosts trade off inf received for increased XP; if you're not getting any inf from AE missions, then what are you trading off to get the extra XP? If AE missions didn't give inf rewards, then XP boosters would have to be disabled as WELL inside AE missions, otherwise you're just getting free XP.

It wouldn't be the current farming arrangement, though, because watching the same heroes or villains running through the same mission over and over and over and over again would rapidly become boring, and the cluster of doorsitters doing absolutely nothing would generate no interest at all. Competitions where there was a stock mission and participants would compete to get the best clear time, with inf or drops awarded to the top finishers could work, although again, the current farming arrangement where you run missions that give you no real challenge wouldn't be a draw to the public. There are a number of ways that you could make AE into a spectator sport, but none of them work with the farming that it's used for now. Having, say, a monthly rotation of AE missions where the best completion times were recorded on a leader board by team size, perhaps awarding a tiered badge like the "N time the victor" badge from the Katie Hannon TF for the top finisher, or just a series of badges for finishing first once, ten times, a hundred times, etc.

Keep the original side -- Corrutes.

Actually, you should be getting XP from AE missions, since they are supposed to be a simulation of reality, so that you're learning to use your powers the same way you would out in the 'real world'. Drops is something that AE itself would have to accommodate; since you're in a digital simulation, nothing you receive inside a mission has any existence outside, so AE itself would have to award them to you to match what you 'earned' in the mission. Influence (infamy, information), though, no. The game lore for the currency is that inf represents your reputation, and the willingness of others to do things to support you -- and I don't see how crawling into your electronic navel at level 1, then coming out at level 50, would give you any reputation whatsoever with the public -- "You're a 'Hero of the City'? What was your name again? I never heard of you." Now, I realize that this last is going to be hugely unpopular, and people are going to say that inf is just a currency, but then it comes back to how you earn a 'real world' currency inside a digital simulation. And this is just my opinion, and I have little to no influence (heh) on the HC staff in this regard.

Is it possible to tweak the way that Peacebringer Photon Seekers are summoned/move so that they don't appear stacked on top of each other and remain that way until they decide to kamiikaze whichever random enemy mob attracts their attention? It kind of defeats the purpose of being able to name them if all you see above the Photon Seeker glow is a multiply-overlaid garble. It's a fairlly minor thing, but other uncontrollable pets, like fire imps and seeker drones, spawn away from each other, so it should be possible for Photon Seekers as well.

...or to have something done about the way that, during invasion events, mobs spawning in are targetable even before they appear visually, but are not attackable for several seconds after appearing, often remaining in an unattackable state until they use their first attack, or despawning without ever becoming attackable.

This was identified in another thread as the female Crey Field Agents having a level range of 30-30, so they spawn below mission level in higher content.

I'm certain that this isn't properly a bug, but there is a corner case for the WST. If a character does the WST while they are sub-50, then ding 50, unlock their alpha slot, and then do the WST again, they will get the Assistant badge (if they don't have it), correctly receive only the base XP for the TF, and will not receive a Notice of the Well, and because they did not receive a Notice, will not receive the Prismatic Aether Particle(s) reward. With the (presumptive) way that the WST rewards work, it's doing the right thing in not awarding a Notice (and the PaPs), but I wanted to throw out for comment the question of whether the game not being able to identify when a player has not received a Notice for completing a WST that week and award one for a WST completion is a sufficiently severe problem to warrant attention by the HC staff, or whether the number of times this specific situation will occur is small enough to not be worth putting in a special case for.

This had me laughing, remembering that I'd looked at the Titan Icon character save file for one of my characters that I'd exported from Live before the shutdown, and I'd noticed that they still had a rock in their inventory from the very first Halloween event...

In the entire live run of CoH, I was the only one to complain to Positron about that. I still cringe inside every time I take a character into a port zone and see "safe water" buoys parked ten feet away from a dock. At the first NCsoft exhibit at the San Diego Comic-Con, I even gave him a printout of the IALA Maritime Buoyage Standard so that he could see what the correct buoys should look like. But when I approached him years after that and mentioned the buoys, he said that 'that made two people who had commented about it, so maybe they needed to take a look at it' -- implying that they'd just ignored it after I complained about it the first time.

I agree; direct conversion of emp merits to any currency that's tradeable outside your account is almost certainly going to be a hard pass after the removal of emps to reward merits.

That happens occasionally; the instanced outdoor mission code still has some bugs in it. Leaving the zone and coming back can fix it, but leaving the area, logging out, then back in, works more reliably.

The article I linked pointed out that there were a number of competing key sets for movement, but that it was all the people grabbing Thresh's config that made WASD the winner. Quake let you make your own choice for bindings, but people figured that the camp's config was the best.

And the Paragon Studios management having the presumption to think that they could buy themselves free of NCsoft to become independent may have been another nail in the coffin -- get rid of those waegukin who didn't have the proper attitude toward their superiors.

According to Positron, though, they were making more money from CoH after it went F2P. I suspect that one of the reasons why NCsoft decided to shutter CoH was that the way that the Paragon store was set up in the code, it couldn't be monetized the way they did with their other MMOs -- a microtransaction store where you paid with NCcoin, which you had to buy directly from NCsoft. But we're unlikely to ever know for sure.

It goes back 20 years to Dennis 'Thresh' Fong and his standard configuration for Quake, winning the first Quake tournament. When he converted to using the mouse for mouselook, he needed controls for his left hand, and settled on WASD. Read How WASD Became the Standard PC Control Scheme -- there were other patterns on the left side of the keyboard, but Thresh's celebrity had people asking for his configuration, spreading it around.

A single mob may provide enough inf to buy a Mako's bite recipe, but won't begin to cover the 490,000 inf crafting cost

By that time, I'd been playing CoH long enough that I understood that the to-hit roll was made at power activation, and only things like interruptibility and the post-animation LoS check for snipes would cause a miss if the initial roll succeeded (and had experienced both the other side of being chased by an attack's visual effect and the gyrations of a visible attack following a running mob). What made that one incident memorable was seeing how the "successful hit tracks the target" code interacted with the ballistic trajectory of the grenade so that it made a sharp turn in midair to follow the Ink Man -- normally it's the mob moving around making it curve to the side as it descends; this was the only time I ever saw the range-to-target change fast enough to force the game to alter the grenade trajectory like that. Given the game code, it's going to happen that way if that situation occurs again, but given that I only saw it so noticeably once in the entire live run of the game makes it something to remember, not something that needs fixing. The Ink Man was defeated by my grenade, so there was no glitch in the game; it was just entertaining visuals watching it take off like it had a rocket booster.

That reminds me of an odd incident back on Live showing how target tracking worked for range attacks. I was in IP with my AR/EM Blaster shooting up spawns of Tsoo; one of the Ink Men hit me with Siphon Speed as I lobbed M30 Grenade at him. Them grenade went over the top of its arc and had started down as the Ink Man decided to bug out. The grenade made a sharp turn in midair to head back up again, arcing off into the distance, where both it and the Ink Man disappeared from sight. Approximately 15 seconds later, I got a defeat notice; since it was for the normal amount of XP, it wasn't someone else whacking a partially-defeated mob, it was the Ink Man unsuccessfully trying to outrun the grenade.

If it's possible to tweak them out separately, can the Tsoo Spirit Ink Archers be given the same positioning logic that the Knives of Vengeance DP mobs have? It seems weird to have them run up into melee range, then shoot you with a bow -- they should stay at range and shoot.

I also discovered that that door spawns invisible trick-or-treat mobs during the Halloween event. Looks like it has several problems.

Coupled with the fact that, at level 49 (or any level down to 45, but 49 gave the best rewards), the farmers still had their incarnate abilities, pumping them up over straight 49 content.

All four beg the question of whether procs should be nerfed, which makes all of them invalid.

<patrolling NPCs walking past a fight> "Hey, look-- the boss is getting his ass handed to him by a couple of heroes. You think we should help him?" "Didn't he write you up last week for having a grease spot on your uniform after you'd pulled an eight-hour shift in the motor pool?" "You're right. Screw him. If he can't handle the heroes, he doesn't deserve his job. Let's just pretend we don't see it." "Say, don't they have lasagna in the cafeteria today?" "And it's time for our lunch break. We'll come back later and see what needs to be cleaned up."

You've got LBUTTON, MUTTON, RBUTTON, and then BUTTON4 through BUTTON8. Along with 25 joystick buttons and four positions for each of a joypad, three joysticks, and three POV hats; they're all in the standard 'key' names.