srmalloy

Wes Schnabel will give you missions as long as you're level 10 when you approach him. The moment you ding 11, though, he cuts you off.

If they do that, I want to see the default landing spot for Team Teleport to the 'Rescue Robert Alderman' mission of the Penelope Yin TF changed -- right now it drops you on top of the tail of the helicopter that's the entrance to the mission, right in the middle of the rotor blade circle.

This is a design feature of virtually every MMO; increasing travel time means that you spend more time in game not actively earning XP, which stretches out the time you spend getting a character to level cap. For subscription games, this means that you are paying more. This was something that drove me up the wall in SWTOR, where the world maps were designed so that you could be sent somewhere literally a hundred feet from where you were, but because there was an unclimbable barrier in your way, you had to go a mile or more around out of your way to get there. And the Jedi classes that had a Force Leap ability could leap across a hundred-foot gap or straight up... but only if there was an enemy at the other side to attack with the jump.

What makes it hard to understand is that you get the "You have defeated X" message, and you get the XP and inf for the defeat, all the way out to the maximum range you can attack from... but the badge credit cuts off at 212 feet. It should all be triggered by the defeat of your target, and if you're being told you defeated them, and getting XP and influence for the defeat, you should be getting badge credit, too.

I remember when the devs went through and tweaked the costume and skin color palettes, and it was indeed to prevent the creation of 'nude' characters. I also remember the flailing in the forums when it was demonstrated that, with the right chest colors and the correct lighting, you could tell that the body models had nipples.

Well, that would answer the question of whether a nearby teammate would suffice to get credit. Pity.

Or pick from a more extensive palette, rather than having to just rummage through a bunch of colors stacked on a pallet...

Feh. And pets don't count. I was tooling around Striga with a Demons/Plant MM, designating targets for my demons and flying on to the next target, and I don't get defeat credit unless I'm within 212 feet of the target at the time they go down.

On Striga, at [-3708.1 -0.4 -2037.0], there is a tree with its base floating in mid-air:

Just now, I found that a level 50 Exploit Weakness Damage/Range IO won't move into the AH. Reflecting on this, since all the Damage/Range IOs are binned into a single slot inside the AH regardless of level or attunement status, that's the expected behavior

I had taken my Seismic/Energy Blaster out to Boomtown to work on her defeat count for Council War Walkers, and was sailing around the base with Boost Range up sniping out the walkers. After two orbits and fourteen downed walkers, I checked her progress bar, and it hadn't moved. I wasn't getting defeat credit for the walkers. With Boost Range up, I could shoot from over 270 feet out. If I wasn't getting credit at that distance, where was the limit? 200 feet gave credit, 220 didn't. 210 did, 215 didn't. I finally narrowed down the limit to 212 feet -- at that distance, defeating a walker gave me credit toward the badge count; at 213 feet the defeat isn't counted. Given that I was able to make longer shots with my AR/EM Blaster back on Live, although I have no recollection of whether I was getting badge credit for defeats at that range, I have to wonder how long this limit has been in the game, and the various ways of getting around it that I'll have to experiment with as opportunity presents itself. For example, if I'm shooting from 250+ feet away, will having an invisible teammate near my target give the team, and therefore me, defeat credit? However, that doesn't change the fact that a single character defeating a mob with no assistance from any other source of damage will fail to get credit for the defeat if they're too far away from their target. Boost Range lets a Blaster snipe from well in excess of 200'; you should be able to get defeat credit as long as you're the one shooting.

On my Fire/Time/Dark Corruptor, when he uses Blazing Bolt, I get two separate visuals for the attack -- a fast speedline-marked zapline connecting the character and his target, and a slower flame trail that makes its way to the target after the zapline is established. The oddity is that these two visuals don't line up -- the flame trail is under the zapline, appearing to comee from around the character's waist:

As something that nags at me whenever I take a character into a zone with harbors or other navigable water, I want the game world updated to adhere to the IALA Maritime Buoyage Standard. As an indicator of how little this would affect things, in the entire live run of the game, I'm the only one who ever brought it up to the devs as an error, and it's a purely visual error. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, there is a worldwide standard for the shape, color, and placement of buoys as navigation markers; a vertically-striped red-and-white buoy means "clear water; deep-draft vessels may pass on any side"... and the game world has only that one type of buoy, often placing them right next to concrete piers or wharves. And fixing this would have zero effect on the way the game works; all it would do is stop the jarring feeling every time I see that buoy placed somewhere inappropriate.

Pfft. I started creating characters with foreign origins to make using names in other languages more justified after seeing someone say "для" in chat back on Live, and discovered that CoH supported Unicode. Each Unicode character is 16 bits wide, taking up two characters in the bio space, so putting "Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии им. И. М. Сеченова" (I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry) in a bio, for example, eats a fair chunk of space. And I've got one character whose origin is as a 'failed' Soviet research program to create a robotic director for combat robots whose bio stretched to six and a half pages, with chunks of it in Russian, that couldn't begin to fit into the space the game gives; what's there is a grossly-abbreviated version of the first couple of paragraphs.

I suspect that the AI for the Traps powerset doesn't exist for NPCs, so the server is substituting one that it does have. You see a similar lack of sophistication with Arbiter Sands in Jim Temblor's story arc, where he doesn't really control the Arachnos drones of his; he just keeps resummoning them.

I have one character that I've left below level 10, for a purely mechanical reason -- the elf in the ski chalet sells the Winter's Gift recipes for candy canes, but the recipes are set at the level of the character buying the recipe. Shuffling my canes to a level 8 character ensures that the 20% Slow resistance proc recipes are at the set minimum of 10, maximizing the level range over which the enhancement can be slotted.

On a per-shard basis, that's a date field added to the character record, and when you log in to a shard and the server retrieves your character list, that field gets updated with the current timestamp for each of your characters. Or make it happen whenever you go back to the character selection screen, so there isn't anything special-casing initial sign-ons. Updating across all shards when an account logs in would be complicated, and frankly if you're not logging into a particular shard for more than a year, then I don't see that you have much investment in the characters on that shard.

I see them from time to time. Usually on a Synapse, where the spawns are big enough that you can grab aggro on multiple spawns at once and start running out of End, with tanks and brutes forgetting that they don't have their full set of defensive powers.

Oh, is that what that smell is? I thought it was just marginally-toxic levels of Axe body spray...

I don't think removing them is the answer; there are still people who set themselves additional challenge by using TOs and DOs like the original game. However, I would like to see a settings drop-down on the vendor window like the one on the map window with options to show/hide TOs, DOs, and SOs at the player's choice.

And this is what I expect to happen when the full name reclamation system goes live. All the people whose sense of personal value in the game is locked up behind getting that one perfect name that they absolutely have to have or the game is ruined for them hanging on the imagined promise that as soon as it goes live, that one name that is necessary for their happiness will immediately become available, and they'll be able to grab it before anyone else does. And when it goes live, and the name they feel belongs to them either doesn't unlock, or is grabbed by someone else before they can grab it, they'll feel horribly betrayed and whine about how it's not working right because it didn't let them get their name that they should have by some imagined 'right' to it. And while I don't see any need for such a thing myself, I'm certain that it's possible to write code that inserts itself into the input stream and drives mouse clicks to iterate through the character select screen to pick each character in turn, log them in, and immediately log them out, since the locations where you need to click on the select screen don't move. So someone sufficiently determined to hang onto their character names would be able to get around the idle check.

"Look -- the boss is getting his ass handed to him by a hero. Shouldn't we help him?" "Didn't he write you up last week and give you two week's extra duty for having a spot on your uniform." "You're right; screw him. He keeps bragging about the hero he defeated a couple of years ago; let him fight his own fight. Hey, I heard the galley has roast beef today. You hungry?" "Yeah, let's get something to eat; that'll get us away from the hero, too. They never seem to find the mess hall."

Characters are already associated with accounts in the database; nothing would have to change there. This change is entirely in the code, altering most -- but not all -- places where character names are displayed (for example, your character selection screen does not benefit from showing your characters are "YourCharacterName@YourGlobalHandle", but the zone search window needs it) or looked up. And this doesn't even address the effect on the UI. Look at characters with max-length names and how their name shrinks in the league window. Now double the length of the character name to accommodate adding their global -- and you can't just drop the global in the team or league window because of confusion from having two or more characters with the same name (and there were a number of SGs back on Live that deliberately exploited the similarity of 'I', '1', and 'l' in the game font to create characters whose names were difficult if not impossible to distinguish with several on a team/league, so the 'experience' of name confusion is already known).

In the map OUTDOOR_GRAVEYARD_01A slightly west of [1454.7 42.0 1664.0], there is a small rise with several mausoleums on it that is floating slightly above the ground:

Misattribution. Mjolnerd said that he doubted that it was feasible; there's nothing to suggest that it's not possible, or that he believed it to not be possible. What does going into the code to change how names are handled internally -- remember that it's not just changing how they're displayed; you have to change how lookups work, causing a flag day for everyone with a character name that currently has whatever character is picked for the name/account separator, etc. -- do to improve gameplay more than devoting time fixing actual bugs in the game or adding new powers, costume pieces, classes, and the like? From what I've seen of the dialogue over this, the primary motivation for wanting the change is the wangst of players whose enjoyment of the game is critically damaged by discovering that someone else has taken an obvious character name before they could, especially when they had a particular character name back on Live and found Homecoming only after someone else had already taken 'their' name.