srmalloy

We have always been at war with EastAsia.

I think this was deliberate due to the surprise nature of the event, so that people who couldn't log in to the game during the event wouldn't get shut out of badges without knowing that it would occur — with there being no badge for defeating Bladehook as another example. Next year, when people know about it in advance, we'll likely see a badge for Bladehook as well as the chest spawns counting for the Pirate badge.

People with infinite belief that the salvage will be worth something in the future, or usable to purchase something... another "Line Goes Up" belief...

The vendor is Annah -- go to Croatoa via the tram, then exit and go down the ramp to your right, and she's just around the wall to your right on the grass to the south of the tram. There is another Halloween salvage vendor in Nerva for redside characters -- Granny Beldam, at {2692.5 11 6050.5).

You get two types of salvage from the chests -- Legacy drops and the 'piratical' Invention salvage -- Diamond, Sapphire, Gold, and Ruby. The legacy drops, if you have a full set, increases the chance of Bladehook spawning as a GM when you get an ambush opening a chest (and can even spawn when you're opening chests solo, so don't feel safe if your running around by yourself opening them) who will take your legacy salvage if he defeats you, or you can sell the Legacy salvage for 100 inf each at a vendor.

The vendor in an SG base (and presumably the regular vendors as well) will buy the legacy salvage for 100 inf per item, too, so you can divest yourself of them if you want to cut your chances of him spawning.

The timed mission from Janice Pennington and the guy inside the IP hospital (I forget his name off the top of my head) where you rescue Senator Farnsworth and his aides I've run enough that I just go around and check all the locations where hostages can spawn on the map; there are only twenty-eight, which doesn't take that long to check.

Despite showing as belonging to the 'Spectral Pirates' group, the ghost pirates spawned from the chests apparently don't count toward the badge for defeating spectral pirates -- I ran a chest route on a recently-new character who's never been to Port Oakes, and despite whacking at least a hundred of the ghost pirates, no badge progress shows up in the badge list.

I can see one case where you can make an argument for an account-wide badge, and that's an anniversary badge that you get from just logging in during the window for the anniversary; with 1000 character slots per server, just the time to log in and out on a stable of several hundred characters on a server would take up a considerable amount of time, so having the badge award across the account could be argued as preserving playing time for your alts, instead of just swapping logins for badge-chasing.

And this is the problem I have with the builds most people post on the forums. Yes, the build may be well-designed and effective, but they're absolutely useless for following the build with a new character as it's laid out in Mids, because they're clearly based on a "this is the result of my level 50 respec" build, with their bottom four powers six-slotted before putting slots into any other attacks or defenses, because the player just filled in slots left to right, top to bottom, and didn't care what level the slots were allocated, because only the level powers were chosen makes a difference in the game.

So, solo, you get either three level-free white spectral pirates to defeat, or a random message -- there are no actual rewards other than progress on the badge for defeating spectral pirates?

Move to Lake Woebegon, then, where all the powersets are above average.

You can make the same argument that, since you have already, say, recovered the Wheel of Destruction on an alt, there's no need for you to do it on another character, since it's already completed, and you should just get the arc reward and accomplishment badge. Or The problem is that, regardless of headcanon that says otherwise, or your playing them as mutually supporting in game, each of your characters independently merges into Paragon City's history; when you arrive in the tutorial, or at the foot of the steps in front of Ms. Liberty, nothing any of your alts has done has happened -- your character hasn't found any of the history plaques, nor the exploration badges, nor cured the Lost, or any other thing that your alts have done to earn badges and accolades; your character has to collect them all from scratch.

Both 'Antivenin' and 'Sthenic' are valid words. 'Antivenin' is another word for 'antivenom', and 'sthenic' is an adjective meaning robust or strong. Or was there a different word that was a typo?

I've lost track of the number of times I've run around a map looking for glowies when they're tucked into odd corners behind objects so they're not visible, and for whatever reason they're not emitting the 'glowie sound.' Would it be possible to add a prestige power to the S.T.A.R.T. vendor -- probably under the 'Utility' category -- that, when used, marks on the map all the remaining mission objects... but is only usable when there are no hostile mobs remaining on the map? Requiring that the map be cleared before the power will work keeps it from being used by stealthers to shortcut a mission and grab just the glowies for the mission goals, but it does serve a purpose when, for whatever reason, the server decides to be particularly clever in hiding the mission glowies.

If you right-click on the icon for 'Toxins' from the Plant Manipulation powerset and select 'Info', you will get a window stating "You use your power over plants to coat all your attacks with powerful toxins for a few seconds, all your attacks will now do extra toxic damage and be more accurate." If you click on the 'Detailed Info' tab, the only power effect listed is " +20.00%% to hit for 10.00s on self" -- no suggestion that you're getting any additional damage at all, toxic or otherwise. Since this is the 'Build Up' power of the Plant Manipulation set, it should be giving a damage bonus similar to its analogues in other powersets.

Also, as a sort of micro-event, tweaking the servers to spawn and keep spawned Atlas Park 33 during all or part of November might be a good social remembrance of the game's survival of NCsoft's shutdown.

You've got 1000 character slots per server; the limit on transfers is to manage people making wholesale moves of characters between servers — you just have to take longer and wait for the transfer pool to refresh so you can do another group.

It's not a trial or a Hami raid, but you can do the same thing with the reward window from Heather Townsend's "Burden of the Past" arc, as well as the repeatable missions from Ephram Sha in DA.

In the enhancement management window, when you mouse over a power, you get a floating window that gives details about the power -- name, power type, allowed enhancements and enhancement sets, the buffs affecting the power, giving the aspect (i.e., Damage), the base value, enhanced value, and percentage of enhancement (i.e., with one even-level SO, an attack that did 60 points of damage base would show 60 as the base, 80 as the enhanced value, and a modifier of 33%). However, you only see aspects of the power where your slotting enhances a base effect of the power -- if you had a Hold power that did damage, and had only a Damage enhancement slotted, you'd see the modified damage value, but not the hold duration, accuracy, recharge, or endurance cost values for the power. When you're making decisions about where to put slots, or where to put enhancements, knowing what the base values for a power are can be extremely useful -- for example, if you have a slot to place you will use for an EndRdx enhancement, knowing that power A has an End cost of 8, while power B has an End cost of 10 can affect your decision where to put the slot. Would it be possible for the popup detailed information on the enhancement management screen to include all the basic aspects of a power, whether they're enhanced or not

If we were going to go that way, I'd rather see 'two-factor' sets like Def/Heal, Res/Heal, and Def/Res than a single set that tried to be the Swiss Army knife of defensive slotting. Or, if you have to have a three-factor enhancement that boosts all of them or it utterly ruins your enjoyment of the game, have it be an HO or D-sync, so that you have to weigh the tradeoff of getting all three defensive aspects in a single enhancement against not getting any set bonuses. But even with the two-factor sets, it would be necessary to look at the available powers to see how many powers would be able to benefit from such sets, or whether it's just a case of "I don't want to have to make the decisions about balancing my slotting between two aspects of a power; do it for me and give me 1337 set bonuses, too".

In the 'Stop Sky Raider attack' mission from Justine Kelly (save 3 people, protect equipment), there is a one-sided wall in the lab map: Zone/Mission: Tech_60_Layout_07_03 Position: [-500.5 28.6 -378.8] As you can see, you can look between the large pillars through to the walkway beyond. If I move around to the other side of these pillars and look back, though: Zone/Mission: Tech_60_Layout_07_03 Position: [-495.6 27.9 -332.2] There is now no visible gap, and the wall appears solid (and it is not possible to teleport through from the gap side -- the teleport target rings appear against the distant map geometry, but they appear in the red color that indicates that it is not a valid teleport target.

It's probably a lost cause, but can the AI for rescued hostages in instanced missions be made just a tiny bit smarter, so that after you rescue them, they run toward the exit of the mission (i.e., mission door or elevator to the earlier floor), rather than to the closest exit from the current floor, which is often taking them deeper into the mission where the mobs you haven't cleared yet are?

Back on Live, I was working on a story arc in AE, and had gone out of the Quiet Room to the main floor to test the mission I'd just finished, when someone sent me a tell out of the blue asking me to invite them to my farm, and when I tried to explain that I was testing a storyline mission, not a farm, they responded that if I wasn't running farms, I shouldn't be in the AE, and I had to have a full team for the best rewards, so I should be inviting them. I responded with something like 'go find someone who believes that bullshit', put them on ignore, and logged out.

...drag the invite window off to the side where it's only marginally getting in the way of your playing the game as yet another window that will capture your keyboard input and stop you from using your powers until you notice and click outside the window...