srmalloy

"Dear sir. I am seated in the smallest room in my house. Your request is before me. Shortly, it will be behind me."

It is less good than it was before, back on Live, when the devs handed out ranged attacks to essentially every mob in the game to address the issue of hoverblasting, where a flying/hovering Blaster could hang in the air above spawns, out of range of their melee attacks, and grind them down with impunity. I could make the argument that they went too far, with many mobs having ranged attacks that outrange a snipe attack with Boost Range active, but that's a separate issue. Before ranged attacks became 'universal' among NPCs, knockback was a ready source of mitigation -- knock a mob away from you, and you had until they got back into melee range to shoot at them. But as a general tool, it requires more skill to use effectively, but knockback is an effective herding tool if you exploit the geometry of a mission -- firing off a cone with knockback to push mobs into a corner, where they cluster up for other AoEs. But just knocking mobs away from the melee team members usually doesn't help the situation unless you're doing it to give them time to recover, as the ranged attacks are generally wimpier than the melee ones. However, "disrupting the team" is not a feature confined to knockback, as anyone with a tank or brute who has run into a room with mobs scattered around the room, hit them with a taunt... and then discovered that they're all stuck scattered around the room, because the controller on the team has fired off an AoE immobilize before anyone else can attack, and before the mobs can be grouped up to make it easier to defeat them... and has this happen over and over and over again during missions and TFs.

And there are too many of them for the number of Cimeroran Traitors we encounter. But when you make it a mob-rank designation, rather than a role title, you're going to get things like that -- one of the shortcuts that the original devs took with Cimerora, along with kicking Roman naming conventions to the curb, although I expect that the formality of referring to others by their proper names fell out of general use after Cimerora was drawn off into the sea of time and isolated -- "N. Fabius Q. F. M. N. Furia Gnatus Maximus" (Numerius Fabius Maximus, son of Quintus, grandson of Marcus, born of Furia) would be too unwieldy to wave around in conversation, even when formally introducing the player to a new individual. I just toss it into the same pile of things that gnaw at me about the game but aren't really important enough to fix, like the problem with the buoys in the harbors.

They would probably have hated to have me on and lose; my reaction to something like this is "I lost. Okay, I could have won this... and been taxed for winning it. But how am I worse off than if I hadn't played?"

If you go back and dredge old posts, you'll find a bug report about the vines going away, and a followup post from one of the HC staff that this wasn't intended, and would be fixed. Like you, I recolored the power for all of my Plant Manipulation characters, and just assumed that they hadn't found where to tweak the power to make the vines stay, or it got pushed back in priority behind other things. Since it was a purely cosmetic issue, I didn't pay attention to it.

...after which people will bitch, moan, and whine about knockback versus regular mobs, and there will be calls to reduce knockback effects on regular mobs. And after that, people will bitch, moan, and whine about knockback versus resistant mobs, and there will be calls to reduce knockback even more. Repeat until the only option is to remove knockback entirely, at which point all development staff time goes to rebalancing all of the powers that did knockback to account for the fact that knockback is being taken out of the game, and issuing a free respec to all characters so that anyone who's chosen powers with knockback and/or slotted powers with knockback enhancements can restructure their characters...

He can handle any type, as long as it's negative...

As Glacier Peak said, there are players on those servers who are invested in their characters and don't want a merge, with all of the name collisions that would entail. But since you're so gung-ho for it, we'll make sure that all your characters are tagged with 'vulnerable to losing name' in the event of name collisions in the event server merges do occur.

And some of the DP visuals showing the bullets being fired into the air and arcing down to strike their targets doesn't? There are quite a few aspects of the game that require, not merely suspending, but hanging, drawing, and quartering disbelief.

And it seems it was someone playing with Wormhole, as I ran across them actually doing it while I was on a Fake Nemesis loop through PI.

Particularly because it falls under the same truncated misquotation problem as "money is the root of all evil" ('The love of money is the root of all evil'). The original quote is "An it harm none, do what thou wild be the whole of the law."

To misquote Robin Williams, "If they're wet, they must be ready"...

Not to mention that there would have to be protections built into a copy function if you could transfer a base including all of its stored items to prevent it from being used to dupe the storage. I can hear the screaming now if you could set up a base on a 'mule' server, cram its storage full of huge inspirations, purple, PvP, ATO, and winter enhancements, and then copy it back to your primary server again and again, giving you an infinite supply of these enhancements. I could see a 'move storage contents' option, where anything in storage was transferred to the new server and deleted from the original one, but copy should die the real death.

I just checked several of my locally-saved .costume files, and all of them already show RGB data for the colors: "Color1 255, 169, 0" and "Color2 76, 137, 255", for example. The back end would have to become a bit smarter to be able to tell if the colors for a costume piece were in the standard grid selections, or if they required the full RGB selection, with the UI displaying whichever was appropriate for a given piece, and the option to switch back and forth between the two types. But the internals of the costume files shouldn't have to change at all.

This change would have one improvement, which would either be inconsequential or major, depending on how anal you are about your costumes. As it stands now, there are cases where you can't match colors between costume pieces on different parts of your body -- you pick the same color for your pants and boots, and you can see the hard dividing line where the color is just a little off (or more than that), and no other color choice gives you a match. Sometimes moving one spot to an adjacent color works, and sometimes nothing you do will get you the match you want; being able to fine-tune the RGB value would address that.

In most cases, you're right, and someone will open up The Abyss 2 so the league can move there and start over with a 'fresh Hamidon' while the triple-bloom ages and eventually despawns, but I've also been part of leagues that decided to just collect stacks of EoEs and Rages so they can power past the blooms, since it isn't going to get any worse now that it's happened.

What's the point of throwing an AoE into a spawn, then backing around a corner to get them all to follow you and bunch up so that your teammates can lock them all down with an immobilize so they can be burned down with AoEs? It's all tactics; it's merely that some of the tactics are dictated by what your opponent(s) do. If they can trigger a barrage that drops high-damage AoE splashes around them, then your tactics will incorporate either being able to stand in the splashes and ignore the damage, or move so that you're not in the areas when they land ('Presence of mind is good, but absence of body is better'). Ideally, though, tactics evolve as people discover better ways to fight an opponent. Look at the Hamidon raids. I remember when you set out a tank/healer pair to keep Hami's attention, then everyone else clustered under a healing umbrella to take out the mitos, then stacked holds on the nucleus to defeat him. Hami evolved in response, and the tactics changed, with separate groups for each type of mito, clearing them, beating on the nucleus until the mitos respawned, then repeat until there were no more respawns and you could defeat the nucleus; these tactics evolved to only taking down one or two sets of mitos before piling on the nucleus, and a further tactic evolved, now called the 'hamikaze' tactic, where you just go in to pound the nucleus down before the mito spawns can overcome the damage it's taking. The final fight in the MLTF, likewise, has several different approaches people have used to defeat Lord Recluse. In other content, though, one 'winning' tactic was found, and is adhered to with what seems to be no attempt to discover other, perhaps better, ways to win -- because it's perceived as difficult enough that the fixation on success obviates any thought of trying to find other ways to complete the content, resulting in teams being built with gear checks to ensure that the single winning tactic can be followed.

All of the interior maps -- caves, offices, etc. are built up from tiles with pre-defined layouts that are plugged together to make floors (or entire maps, in the case of the cave maps) Back during Live, at one of the exhibits NCsoft had during the San Diego Comic-Con, I asked Positron about the possibility of enabling players to design maps for AE missions using these tiles; he said that the tools for assembling them into a map were too fiddly to be turned over to the general playerbase for use. One example of this in the 'professionally done' maps is the 'black wall in corridor' bug -- this was most often seen after the release of CoV in the yellow office maps, where you'd see a corridor 'dead-end' in a black wall you couldn't see through, but could walk through, and from the reverse view everything looked normal; this was caused by a tiny misalignment of two adjacent tiles, so that the game engine thought the corridor ended, and just drew a black wall where its algorithm thought it stopped. Apparently the map-creation tools weren't sufficiently advanced to do automatic joining of two tiles, and they had to be aligned manually, resulting in the 'black wall' when they didn't get it right -- the overhead in doing this for an entire map was one of the reasons why we saw so few new maps being released. (I can think of several ways that the data structures for the map tiles could be set up to define the 'join points' where adjacent tiles could be plugged in, and have the map editor automatically line up the tiles to link them at those points, but it was Paragon Studios' decision not to pursue making better development tools like that)

And it hearkens back to Jack Emmert's declaration that, for him, 'fun' was throwing his character at the end boss again and again, being defeated over and over, until he finds the one tactic that will allow him to defeat the boss. Ignoring the fact that it's fun for him, and may not be for anyone else, he seems to have been completely blind to the fact that, in the age of the internet, as soon as one individual/group figures out how to defeat a given boss, the process will be spread across the Net for everyone to see, so that the people who come after just follow the process, instead of beating their head(s) against a wall for hours trying to figure it out for themselves.

I had a similar incident back on Live, when I was running my Bots/Dark MM on a Manticore, and we'd finished the defeat-all missions when the rest of the team -- apparently a group of friends -- had to quit, leaving me solo. I figured 'WTH', and continued the TF, and was surprised as hell that I was able to complete the mission (this being the earlier version of the TF, that just had Hopkins, not Hopkins, his rez, and Countess Crey).

It's an annoyance, rather than an actual bug, but can the interval at which rescuees check for pathing updates be decreased? If you have a character that's flying, and you defeat the mobs threatening an NPC -- like the possessed scientists in the plaza of Portal Corps -- the rescued hostage will usually go running off in some random direction where they can find a way to increase their elevation (i.e., the hills around Portal Corps, a fire escape, etc.) to get close to you to reward you with inf, and even if you fly right up next to them, they'll usually keep running toward whatever point the server has picked for them, completely ignoring the fact that you're right there next to them. If the interval at which these NPCs are checked to update their pathing to your current location was decreased, this would reduce some of the 'runaway rescuee' cases.

Watching a TF completely fall apart because connection problems caused two of the low-level exemplar anchors to disconnect for longer than the 'grace window', kicking their exemplars from the TF... Or having to run the OG Positron TF in a single sitting, because while everyone could log out and back in the next day to finish, if the low-level exemplar anchors didn't log in before the exemplars did, the exemplars would be autokicked...

Of course not -- "You're healed -- now, get out of my face; there are other people waiting."

BINGO! That was the last cell I needed on my card of "features that have been requested so many times they've become tropes".