srmalloy

And it's a sisyphean task to try to block them at the source, because of all the ways to spoof both IP address and MAC address; with the limited connection data you get, you can't extract anything immutable that uniquely identifies the originating computer.

There are other uses to which the pop-up tray could be put if it were possible. For example, if you have Mystic Flight, create a macro "/macro Zoom powexec_location up:max Translocation". This sits in your power trays taking up space, but is only usable if you have Mystic Flight on. If you could drag the macro into the pop-up tray, you could have a set of predefined Translocation jumps that would only be visible if the pop-up tray was open, and not take up space at other times.

And Regen works loosely similar to Defense, in that you take all the damage, relying on your healing to keep you alive while you grind down the incoming damage, your goal being to cut the incoming damage to less than your healing rate before you run out of hit points. Once you get ahead of the incoming damage, you'll heal back all the damage you took until, at the end of the fight, you've healed back all the damage you took, and are standing there uninjured, while your Resistance- and Defense-based companions will be damaged to one degree or another. Regen is inherently more brittle, because it is vulnerable to any damage spike, not just a lucky one as Defense is, but it will always end a fight either chewing pavement or looking fabulous.

When the Council wises up and starts making their Mek Men out of the same material they make that damn bell out of, and they won't work any more; those bells would survive being at ground zero for Tsar Bomba and keep ringing...

And even the 'minimal' alteration of changing it from an int to a uint -- fitting in the same 32-bit space -- raises a whole raft of unintended consequences. There has to be all sorts of code checking your inf total to prevent things like spending more than you have -- essentially, any transaction that would make your inf total negative. Changing the field to an unsigned int makes all of that useless -- unless you change all the code for every transaction, where spending more than you had would make your inf total negative (easy to check for), an unsigned int would roll over to maximum -- if you had 10 inf and spent 11, suddenly you'd have four billion inf, because the 'check for negative' code won't work any more.

KW has a few, albeit specialized uses. As a level-50 zone, it gives an alternative for individuals and teams for the Halloween event if they don't want to join the 'murder motel' league in PI and don't want to have to keep moving zones as they go up levels. Bloody Bay, Siren's Call, Warburg, and RV all have content that can be run in and around PvP activity, while KW as a PvP has nothing -- no reason for anyone to go there except for PvP fights, which need the other zones already fill -- and would have the effect of driving out the people who do use it for their own purposes as Rudra describes, as well as diluting the population of the other PvP zones. Or does anyone fantasize that making KW a PvP zone will somehow magically make more people want to engage in PvP when simply making it a PvP zone adds nothing but more room to fight in?

Changing it depends on where it's stored. If it's in the data structure that defines your character in the database on the server, changing it from a signed int to an unsigned int, or from a 32-bit signed int to a 64-bit signed int, may not be possible without a 'flag day' when that field, and every other field anywhere in the code that can hold an amount of inf, gets changed. If it becomes necessary to roll out the character and item databases, then roll them back in after a schema change, it would make for an extended downtime.

That's true as long as Instant Healing is just a "Heal a lot faster" power. One of the things that I have long believed about Regen is that Instant Healing isn't doing what it should. It should be returned to being a toggle, and instead of just cranking your regen rate to the sky, what it does is make every hit you take behave the same way Spectral Wounds does -- you take all the damage that gets past any Resistance you have, and then a second or so later, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals. This also partially addresses one of the reasons why Regen was perceived as overpowered back on Live -- a Regen scrapper would end a fight at full health, where a Resistance- or Defense-based character would end the fight significantly down on hit points; what wasn't noticed is that a Regen scrapper's HP would nosedive early in the fight, where they would be trying to reduce the incoming damage to below their regen rate before they ran out of HP. Once they got ahead of the curve, then barring surprise shots, they were guaranteed to win, because their healing would heal the same hit over and over and over again until it was gone. Making IH into a 'one and done' effect for each hit turns it into a mitigation power like Resistance or Defense -- it will stop its 'instant' percentage of each hit, but only once. So if you had IH slotted for a 'heal' of, say, 54%, if you got hit for 100 points of damage, you'd take all 100 points, then a second or so later, 54 points would 'instantly' heal -- leaving you having taken the same damage as if you had 54% Resistance; your other healing powers would have to take care of the other 46.

I was pointing out why the MM pets were being triggered to attack the entity. And I'm not sure that simply making it untargetable would solve the problem, because it would set up a conflict with the MM pet aggro logic to attack entities that attack the MM; I don't know enough about the logic tree in that case to be able to say that they would ignore it.

The entity is applying a debuff to the Mastermind, so the pets will attack it even if they're in Defensive mode; you have to set them to Passive or point them at another target to get them to stop.

And when you get a 'black wall' across a hallway -- you see it more often in the yellow office maps that were added for CoV -- it's a sign that the segments didn't get lined up right, and the rendering engine thinks the hall ends at the joint. The collision mesh is more robust, which is why you can just walk through, but it can be a surprise if there's a spawn on the other side.

Because of Lord Recluse's light sensitivity, the bases have to be kept so dark that the construction crews can't see what they're doing.

It looks as if this is another remnant of an old bug. Damage and Resist Damage are the same stat, just applied with opposite signs. There used to be a bug where you could slot HOs as long as one of the boosts in the HO was appropriate to the power -- but the other bonuses from the HO could affect the power. So a Ribosome Exposure HO (Res/End) could be slotted into an attack, and the Resist Damage effect would boost the damage of the attack. Because Summon Dire Wolf shows as taking both Damage and Resist Damage enhancements, I'm betting that it was missed when the problem was originally cleaned up, and the Damage enhancement is being applied to the resistance.

This is why both of my Seismic Blasters have Meteor six-slotted, with a Boosted KB enhancement in the sixth slot. With careful positioning, it's good for herding (*bam* all the mobs are in that corner), and watching mobs disappear at Mach 1 is entertaining.

This has been rebutted over and over again; the AH is accessible in open zones because the entire zone accesses a single copy of the AH data that is loaded when the zone is spun up. To make the AH accessible in bases (or any other instance), each base would have to have a copy of the AH data, which would be loaded each time someone enters a previously unoccupied base. Think "City of Slideshows". The limitation is, unfortunately, baked deeply into the code, and would require a major rewrite, with all of the unfortunate bugs that such a rewrite would introduce, to be pounded out over time.

May she go forth in the sunrise boat May she come to port in the sunset boat May she go among the imperishable stars May she journey in the Boat of a Million Years

Detail 1 and Detail 2 for the head are additional submodels added to the base body, so they can be asymmetric. It's the torso and legs that are stored as a single side, forcing all their patterns to be symmetrical.

It's not a sealed gate; you can go in and out through it, crossing between Talos Island and the Dark Astoria incarnate zone. I was cruising the area twice during the X:15 and X:45 'noon' periods, and that whole area was dead, with just a few civilians wandering, and two Freakshow on the next island to the west. I made sure to cover the area around the two buildings as well as down on the lower level along the east War Wall. Nothing for more than ten minutes each time.

Something I noticed this evening is that the southeast portion of Talos Island -- the area where the Banished Pantheon spawns at night -- has nothing spawning there during the day. It is a little disturbing to zoom through this part of Talos and not see any of the gangs that spawn over the rest of the zone. If this area could be set up with one or more other groups that spawn on the opposite timer to the BP spawns, so that as the BP disappear they're replaced by Tsoo, Warriors, or Freakshow (and vice versa), it would improve the feel of the area.

Julius Fucik's "Entry of the Gladiators". 😉

What's funny about all of this is that I remember the really old days of D&D, when it was three saddle-stapled books in the white cardboard box, and when TSR released the first AD&D books, Gary Gygax tried to claim that if you didn't adhere strictly to the rules in the books, that what you were playing wasn't D&D, and you couldn't call it that. And it seems that WotC didn't learn from that failed attempt to grab it all to keep control over it...

From the OGL 1.0: "in consideration for agreeing to use this License, the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive license with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content". In 2004, WotC clarified what would occur if the license was changed; it "already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway". The recent release of the 'draft' of the new OGC license specifically stated that it 'de-authorized' the original OGL -- an action not permitted under the terms of the original OGL -- and would immediately subject anyone continuing to publish OGC content to the terms of the new license, including material already published under the original OGL.

"We lose 10,000 inf on every sale, but we make it up in quantity!" Putting common IOs on the AH is done for one of two reasons: a) you've got the crafting badges and get a discount on crafting costs and don't pay for recipes, or b) you're working toward the crafting badges and need to get rid of the resulting IOs. Only the former is likely to leave you with a profit.

It's not 'nothing'. The new license explicitly gave WotC full rights to use any content created under it for any purpose, which would have allowed them to take anything 3rd party publishers created and sell it as their own, and it imposed a 25% fee for companies making over $750,000 on OGC content, with the fee based on revenue, not profits -- the profit margin for game companies is typically less than 10%, so the terms would wipe out their profit, and make them lose more money the more sales they had.

It's all pets, actually; it has its limits, but you can target through a pet during an invasion and be able to attack mobs you would be unable to attack on your own. I have my suspicion that this is due to the pet logic being entirely on the server, letting them get targets the moment the server enables them, while a character attacking involves several handshakes with the server, delaying response.