srmalloy

It doesn't really make a bit of difference to gameplay, but there are some missions where the hostage selection needs to be better to fit the story. I just finished Long Jack's "Rescue unwilling recruits" mission, where you free four unwilling recruits from the clutches of the Council. Two of them were fat men in business suits; it seems to me that the Council would pick people in better shape when they run their press gangs -- you start with someone who's significantly overweight, and they may have some underlying medical condition that will lead them to croak before they get through conditioning training, wasting the time and effort put into them.

I'd be willing to bet that Positron's dialog is still buried in the game code/piggs; all that was done to the arc was change it so that you never got sent to Positron. There would have been no need to cut the conversation out of the piggs and force a big re-download for everyone's client, since the mission arcs are kept on the server.

Just before Christmas, Santa Claus gets a surprise visit from the Federal Aviation Administration. The examiner walks slowly around the sled, looking at each of the reindeer harnesses, the runners, and the sled's body. Then he weighs Santa and performs balance calculations to determine the sled's payload. OK, everything checks out," he says while stepping into the sleigh. "But you still have to pass the test flight." Santa jumps into the sleigh, then notices that the FAA examiner has a shotgun sitting across his lap. "What's that for?" he gulps. "Technically, I'm not supposed to tell you this" winks the examiner "but you're going to lose an engine on takeoff."

As part of this, I would recommend looking at a change to the ambush logic in general, so that the ambush spawn is targeted to go to the location where the player/team was when the ambush was triggered, particularly if the player/team is stealthed, rather than the way it seems to work now, where triggering an ambush almost always puts a homing beacon on the character triggering the ambush, and the ambush spawn follows the beacon, regardless of how far and fast the character moves. An example of the latter is the "Rescue the missing homeless people" mission in Kings Row that I recently completed, where the sewer map had one of those 'one path separates into three that all join up again' structures; I had gotten the hostages back -- with a Celerity:+Stealth IO active, moving in fits and starts to keep them following (hostages seem to be a little better about seeing through stealth, but I don't have hard numbers on it) -- to around the curve of one of the side paths in time to see two spawns of ambushers run in, turn right to run along the right path... then stop, turn around, and come straight for me, running through a spawn standing near the intersection that didn't react at all, even when I ran past them after defeating the two spawns that had turned around to come after me.

No; that would be the live cam of the Trojan Room coffee pot at the University of Cambridge. The camera was set up in 1991 and migrated from the internal lab network to the web in 1993.

Let's see... Designate a location in an existing goldside zone as the day job location for a new day job badge that awards a jet pack, or create an entirely new zone, with all of the attendant geometry, random neutral NPC activity, open-world hostile NPC spawns, contacts and their missions, trainers, vendors, exploration badges... designate the zone as awarding the badge and jet pack temp power... and all of the work creating the new zone is for the fraction of the playerbase who want to play past 40 while staying goldside out of the fraction of the playerbase who play goldside. And giving access to goldside characters to the Shadow Shard would be a slap in the face to all the redside characters, whose players have been asking for access to the Shadow Shard since back in Live. Goldside has gotten short shrift because it was developed and released in response to the clamor for more difficult content, and released with an 'end cap' at 20 because the devs didn't want to keep it stuck in development until they completed making a full 1-50 experience, along with ways for characters to rotate alignment between all three factions the way you could for red- and blue-side. Then the Great Purge happened, and whatever plans Paragon Studios had for extending goldside vanished into the mists... and Homecoming doesn't have enough development staff to advance goldside content at any significant speed. They may be working on it even now, keeping it close to their chests to keep people from clamoring to have their favorite content be given priority of place; we don't know. I'd like to think that there is at least some planning along those lines going on, but I'd rather let them work at their own pace than keep badgering them about it.

In the 'Confront Velez' mission from Eagle Eye, the cutscene has Velez telling Morana to lock down the rave, and to give orders to kill anyone who tries to leave before your character is defeated. However, the last spawn of civvie ravers, when you defeat the Skulls near them and get close, split up, with some of them running to the front of the mission (and the mission door), and some of them running to the back of the mission. If you're quick enough getting to the back room, you can see these running civvies run past the three Skulls guarding the door out of the back room and exit through the door behind them, without the Skulls doing anything. The 'running scared' logic for all the civvie ravers not in the back room should be adjusted so that they all run to the front of the mission, to preserve the illusion that the Skulls guarding the back door are doing their job. Or, alternatively, have a scripted bit where the Skulls gun down the running civvies when they try to reach the back door, just to prove that Velez's orders are being obeyed.

Госродин Заморозить (Gospodin Zamorozit') would agree with that assessment.

From 'Here We Come A-Wassailing': I have a little leather pouch, of ratching leather skin. Pray give us each a penny to line it well within. God bless the master of this house, likewise the mistress, too, And all the little children who round the table go. Or the 'Gloucestershire Wassail' (second and third lines of first and second verses, and fourth verse): Pray God send our master a good Christmas pie. And a good Christmas pie as may we all see, Pray God send our master a good piece of beef. And a good piece of beef as may we all see, Come, butler, come fill us a bowl of your best, Then we pray that your soul in Heaven may rest. But if you do bring us a bowl of the small, Then the devil take butler, bowl and all. A late seventeenth-century commentator wrote, "Wenches ...by their Wassels at New-years-tide ...present you with a Cup, and you must drink of the slabby stuff; but the meaning is, you must give them Moneys." At Christmastide, the poor expected privileges denied them at other times, including the right to enter the homes of the wealthy, who feasted them from the best of their provisions. In exchange, the lord of the manor had the goodwill of his people for another year. At these gatherings, the bands of roving wassailers often performed songs for the master while drinking his beer, toasting him, his family, his livestock, wishing continued health and wealth. Wassailing became associated with rowdy bands of young men who would invade the homes of wealthy neighbors demanding free food and drink under the threat of vandalizing their home -- "Oh, bring us a figgy pudding" and "We won't go until we get some" from 'We Wish you a Merry Christmas'. The Puritans attempted to control such rowdiness through a ban on Christmas celebrations, chafing under the early church's decision to capitalize on the preexistence of the pagan Saturnalia (with its traditions of rowdiness and misbehavior) when picking December 25 as the date for Christmas, and similar laws remained in effect in New England long after the restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660 restored the Christmas celebration there. So, yes, there is a long tradition, in England and thence to America, of going door-to-door during the holiday season and expecting to receive food, drink, or money. However, the rest of your comment is valid; we already have the presents strewn across the zones to serve as the 'wandering to collect rewards' activity for the season. And in particular, I don't think the HC staff wants to create a holiday-themed version of the Peregrine Island murder motel.

One of the things that is useful to think about when proposing new mechanics like this is to realize that giving it to player characters only is unbalancing, and think about it being done to you -- being part of, say, a +4x8 ITF, and having any of the NPCs being able to run up to your character, or any member of your team, once they were held or knocked down and one-shot them, disabling the use of any self-rez power or rez inspirations. I regularly see recruiting announcements for +4x8 ITFs where one of the restrictions is that team members aren't allowed to rez at the hospital; think about running a TF with that restriction, and the one team member with a rez power gets held and whacked, putting the entire rest of the team under threat of being taken out of the TF simply by having a hostile mob close enough to whack them if they get held.

The present at [-134.6 32.8 -883.6] in Atlas Park -- under the statue NE of City Hall -- is partially embedded into the plinth the statue is on:

Proof that the NPCs have just as many problems coordinating groups as teams do: [NPC] Scrounger Slugger: No, dimwit, kill the lights, then charge in. Element of surprise. Get it?

Back on Live, the arc got changed so that you only got sent to four of the five iconic origin characters. You always got sent to War Witch to start, and you always got sent to the character representing your origin, but the other two (or three for Magic-origin characters) were chosen randomly. I think this occurred somewhere around when Penny Yin replaced Sister Psyche. Some time after that, the arc was streamlined further and dropped Positron as one of the possible destinations, so you always got the other three after seeing War Witch. I don't know if there was a problem with the random selection of destinations (I remember how you could get the three in different orders for different characters after it was charged to not send you to all four), but it always felt as if you were missing something by not talking to Positron in the arc. It's not as if what amounted to five FedExes and one real mission took up much time.

You can believe it all you want to, but having six powers out of all the powers in the game work differently to all the rest, and then only in the specific case of the game's behavior when you receive the power -- the UI restrictions apply to your placing or moving the icons, so the only way to get multiple copies of the icons in a tray is to randomly receive a new use of the power from your opening a present or delivering a valentine, is a particularly shoddy implementation, a judgment based on forty years of experience as a computer programmer. If it was intended that you could have multiple copies of one of these powers in a tray, why does the game prevent you from dragging its icon into a tray if the same icon is already in that tray? Why is the only way to get multiple copies of the power icon in a tray not under your control? And if it was intended to work this way, why wasn't it announced when the event powers were rolled out? Surely, having powers that functioned in a way that broke the UI controls would be important enough to tell the players about...

The game prevents you from dragging the icon for any individual power into a tray if the icon for that power is already in that tray. You cannot, by your own action, put multiple copies of, say, Instant Snowstorm into tray 2, while receiving multiple awards of the power causes multiple copies of the power icon to appear in the tray. It is not functioning according to the restrictions established on placing power icons in your trays -- restrictions that were in place before the creation of the event-specific temporary powers that fail to conform to this restriction -- therefore it is a bug. The only other alternative is that the prohibition on your putting more than one copy of any power's icon in a single tray is the bug, and the way the event temp power icons will appear multiple times in a single tray proves that the devs intended for you to be able to have entire trays full of nothing but Brawl icons, and the restriction should be removed.

Don't forget that the original version of Rain of Arrows also had an absurd delay between completion of the animation and when the power effect occurred, with the determination of whether any given mob took damage being made at the time the arrows landed -- which meant that it was entirely possible, even likely, that if you used Rain of Arrows in the middle of combat, unless a spawn was locked down by a tanker's taunt or a CC, the entire spawn would move out of the area of effect and the attack would be completely wasted.

You're making the assumption that spamming your power tray with redundant icons is what the devs intended, and not a bug that was simply too low on their to-do list for them to get around to fixing, because it's an annoyance, rather than a game-breaking bug.

Automatically filling your power trays with redundant copies of a power icon is "working as intended"? I verified experimentally that the game will cheerfully drop more than ten copies of the 'Instant Storm' icon into your power trays, even though you can't have more than ten uses accumulated at a time.

And by the fact that, even when you're standing out at max range, invisible, the moment you begin your draw for Rain of Arrows, the mobs you're targeting aggro on you.

I have to agree with this; back on Live, I would have to squeeze to buy a single 3M-inf IO for a character, and on Homecoming, I regularly spend 8-10M inf on five or six IOs in a set at once. And that's without playing "auction house arbitrage" to make inf; I'll use convertors to swap an IO that's only going for just over crafting cost for one that makes a profit, but I don't keep plugging at it until I get a maxed-out return.

That is an ingenious way to address the problem of outleveling a zone for ToT, and if it weren't for the issue of not being able to modify your team once started, would be ideal. Still, if you just want to solo, it's a very clever idea.

So because similar things are broken the same way, we should just live with it, instead of asking that it be looked at for consideration to be fixed.

A more complicated solution would be to give pets the same travel power the character has (so if your MM had Fly, all their pets would be able to fly, too) if they don't already have a travel power of their own (so Singularity, which already flies, wouldn't need Fly), and the same movement speed as the character. This is likely to be a labor-intensive piece of coding in order to have the power effects carry over properly.

Since you only get each temporary costume once, having their icons pile up in your trays is them acting like regular temporary powers. But the winter event temp powers -- and the arrows from the Valentine's event -- still drop a new icon into the first available open slot in your tray each time you get a new charge, while incrementing the charges available for the power. And dropping new copies of the icon into your trays violates one of the hidden rules about powers in your trays -- drag a power from your powers window into a tray, and if the icon for that power is already in the tray, it won't work, but the game will happily fill an entire tray with Instant Snowstorm icons.

If you have no open slots in your trays, then you don't get multiples of the same temp power; locking the powers in the tray has no effect on getting extra icons each time you get another temp power.