srmalloy

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.

More to the point, why not the Performance Shifter proc and a Performance Shifter End Mod? The latter works exactly like a common End Mod enhancement, except that it can be attuned, so you don't need to upgrade it as you level, and you get the two-piece set bonus (7.5% movement, iirc).

As opposed to, say, people posting complaints about their Lore pets charging off in some random direction immediately upon summoning and get killed because they are set to Aggressive by default when summoned? According to the wiki, a pet in Defensive stance will "defend its master or any other henchman that comes under attack." So your 'emasculation' consists of 'waiting to attack until it or its summoner is attacked' Now, if they were defaulting to Passive when summoned, you'd have a point, because then they wouldn't respond to provocation.

Have you checked to determine whether the truncation is solely in the display in the combat attributes window, or if the game truncates the value internally for its own calculations?

There is a remnant of this still visible in the game. Open your contacts window and look at the progress bar for each contact. There are two vertical lines across each progress bar; you didn't get the contact's phone number until you filled the bar to the first line, and they wouldn't offer you their full set of enhancements until you filled the bar to the second line.

My first was an AR/EM, too. I built her as an experiment to see if Jack Emmert's claim that "range was a Blaster's defense" was true, and until every mob got handed a ranged attack it was mostly true. Unfortunately with that change, instituted to deprecate hover-blasting with impunity, too many mobs got attacks that outranged a Snipe with Boost Range active. Still, it was fun to stand on the platform near Imperious in Cimerora and snipe mobs in the courtyard across the valley to the north.

The Banished Pantheon spawn at night; during the day, the area is a ghost town -- even the Warriors and Freakshow don't extend their spawns into the area during the day.

I made a popmenu for my Arch/TA Blaster for this: Menu "SlickBurn" { Title Oil Slick Ignite Option "Oil Slick Arrow &1" "powexecname Oil Slick Arrow" Option "Here &2" "powexeclocation down:max Oil Slick Arrow" Option "Target &3" "powexeclocation target Oil Slick Arrow" Option "Light &4" "targetcustomnear Oil Slick$$powexec_name Blazing Arrow" Option "Fire &8" "powexecname Blazing Arrow" } This would go into a 'Location Powers.mnu' file in the game folders, and then I'd create a macro for it: /macro Oil popmenu SlickBurn So then, to use it, I click the macro, select 1 to do the normal target-location pick, 2 to drop it at my feet, or 3 to drop it under my current target. Once the slick is down, click the macro again, and 4 targets it and fires Blazing Arrow, with 5 as a backup if I get distracted.

The full form of this required a flying /Devices blaster. While the tank was running around aggro'ing the map, the blaster was in the dumpster setting trip mines. When the tank called out that they were headed to the dumpster, the blaster would fly high up into the air. Trip mines have a hidden weakness -- if the blaster who set them is too far away, they won't trigger. So now the tank jumps into the dumpster, and the aggro'd mobs follow them, while the trip mines just sit there. CoH has a collision-model quirk -- NPC collision is checked only horizontally, so if a mob jumps right on top of another mob, it just lands overlapping the first mob; this allows all of the aggro'd mobs to fit into the dumpster with the tank. When the tank decides that they've got all they're going to get into the dumpster, they call for the blaster, who dives back toward the dumpster; when the blaster gets within the activation range of the trip mines, they all go off, killing defeating everything in the dumpster but the tank. This would result in everyone's enhancement tray instantly filling, several hundred thousand points of XP, and one of the funnier demonstrations of the limits of the game: if you were too close to the dumpster when the trip mines went off, you would get a Windows pop-up from the game engine with the error message "Too many effects to render".

It's been that way back to Live. Most of the time when you get a delivery or misdelivery to a different faction, you get sent to an instance where the recipient is, but a few still want you to go to the other side.

Don't forget that it was also the time of limited-lifespan pets, and pets that died when you passed through a door or used an elevator, so perma-haste was as much a tool to let you resummon your pets at each new floor as it was to getting multiple sets out.

This was why you learned the skill of jumping up the side of a building using the window ledges.

Ahh, that brings up memories. A line from Spider and Jeanne Robinson's novel Stardance: "Tact? I've always understood that to be a mutual agreement to be full of shit."

But wouldn't creating a 'cleric archetype make CoH more accessible to people coming from other MMOs, for whom the Holy Trinity™ of tank, DPS, and heals has been so aggressively beaten into their brains that they can't conceive of an MMO where the character roles aren't so narrowly defined? On the other hand, creating an archetype that is intended to be Heal/Melee regardless of powersets pigeonholes that archetype much more narrowly than any other archetype in the game. The gripping hand is, do we really need such a specialized archetype when several of the existing archetypes can be built to specialize in healing if the player wants to?