srmalloy

Expecting professional, paid-developer-grade work from the unpaid HC staff working on their own dime on someone else's poorly-documented spaghetti code? They're doing it out of their love for the game, and doing a far better job, with far too little appreciation than they deserve, than we have any right to expect.

As an addendum to the manifestation of this bug, it occurs when you have any storage object open in a base when you are applying a catalyst to an IO; however, only in the case of a Salvage Rack will the bug put the catalyst in the storage object -- for other storage objects, it will not go into the object, and you will see an error message saying that you can't put Enhancement Catalyst into that storage object. So it appears to be a bug with the open storage object trying to take control of the catalyst when it is 'put in motion' by using it on an IO.

I made a figgy pudding for Yule a few years ago; I should do it again...

...where you're not limited by having to wait for the TTS to finish reading the text. How much of that 'time to play the game instead of reading text would you lose if the mission text stayed locked up on the screen while the TTS played out? Or being able to experience the joy of being attacked while the window with the mission text was locked on the screen because the TTS hasn't finished?

Along with the inevitable need for additional emotes...

I believe it was part of a series of upgrades they were looking at implementing, including zone revamps like the Atlas Park update and the two instanced outdoor missions in AP using the feature developed for Praetoria, although I believe the latter proved problematic and was shelved.

What galls me the most about the 'advance at the speed of narration' segments is that, even if you use the Section 508 tools to get a transcript of the narration (for example, for a deaf individual taking the training), it's still dragging along waiting for the narration to complete before you can advance to the next section, even if you're unable to hear it (not that I have a hearing problem; I was just looking for ways to get around the slow, deliberate drone of the narration).

From my experience with mandated training at work, waiting for the narration to complete before you're allowed to advance to the next section, and even worse, when there are several bullet points that aren't even displayed until the narration gets that far in reading the text, has severely poisoned me for unskippable (or undisableable) voice over; I'm able to read the text four or five times before the narration gets through the text once. Now consider that, with a thousand character slots per server, you're going to be listening to the same VO again and again and again, until it stops being a clever addition and becomes a drag on play, particularly with 'wall-o-text' interactions that you don't bother reading through any more.

"So you're okay with being able to dress up as Wolverine for the two weeks it takes Disney's lawyers to issue a C&D order to NCsoft as the IP owner, triggering them out of the state of benign neglect they've had toward the rogue CoH servers and issuing C&D orders of their own, forcing all the rogue servers to shut down (or at least go underground), cutting off the game from everyone and ruining things for thousands of people for a brief satisfaction on your part?" FTFY.

It sounds to me like it's 'use on an enemy, get this effect, use on an ally get this other effect'.

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The woman below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude." "You must be a programmer," said the balloonist. "I am" replied the woman, "How did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "Everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help so far." The woman below responded, "You must be a manager." "I am," replied the balloonist, "But how did you know?" "Well," said the woman, "You don't know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow it's my fault."

Since the object being thrown is just a visual, perhaps it could be set up as a weapon customization, so you can pick the big rock, a present, another box (like the one being used as a soapbox by the Lost and others), the larger objects from Propel (like the forklift), and a 'random' option that would pick the object when the power was activated.

And there you have it. Singularities collect and carry around random things they can toss around inside them to make them look prettier; they're clearly female. 😁

The ToT league(s) in PI fixate on the murder motel because it's a nice, tight cluster of doors, and members don't have to move around much between the doors. Because of the layout of PI, it's the only place in the zone for this; if you want to ToT in the other areas of the zone, you're moving around an extended area due to the paucity of doors — the brownstones have the closest array of doors, but you're still moving down a row with only a sprinkling of doors as you work back to the start. Kallisti Wharf has clusters of buildings to use, along with several buildings that have enough doors that you can just work your way around the building again and again. Elsewhere, except in Grandville, you have to worry about outleveling the zone, which cuts off XP and forces you to go to another zone. So the PI murder motel became what it is because it's the most efficient ToT location in PI.

Or like Alaska, except that there they've figured out how to capture the mosquitoes and use them like helicopters to airlift supplies to remote communities...

There's always the nuclear option of razing the murder motel and replacing it with a parking lot, or a warehouse type building with one double or quad door. No murder motel, no league spawning mobs in a tight area from a dozen doors, so no target-rich environment for an AFK MM to park in and take advantage of other players' activities.

Except that they should be base objects to go along with the Kronos titans -- and it's easier to make a model as a static entity than it is to rig it for animation (even though they'd just be scaling up the rigging and animation for the Hercules titans) and work out where in the data files it would need to sit to spawn under various conditions, so it could be available as a base entity faster than it could be added to the game as a new Malta mob.

And on a similar note, since the Kronos titans are clearly scaled-up versions of the Zeus titans, which are formed by a merging of two Hercules titans, I think there should be an Ouranos titan, which would be a scaled up and recolored version of a Hercules titan, and possessing the same ability, when damaged badly enough, to merge two together to form a Kronos titan.

I think there is a ten-second timer for clicking on any door, and a two-minute timer for clicking on the same door, with the timers being character-specific, so you could theoretically have the entire league click on a door, then move to the next after clearing all the trick spawns.

You're missing the point; the objection is directly over none of these things, and only peripherally over XP leeching. The people parking AFK MMs in the middle of the murder motel are earning XP off the efforts of the other players in the courtyard without contributing. They're earning XP from attacking mobs that would not be there without other players knocking on the doors. Park an MM all by themselves in the middle of the courtyard and go AFK, and they get nothing; there are no spawns for their pets to attack, because no one is knocking on doors. To make an academic analogy, you're part of a team of researchers publishing papers, and your supervisor, who had nothing to do with the research that led to these papers, adds their name to all your papers before they're submitted for publication, and then gets a better job on the basis of all their published papers. Having their name on the papers doesn't diminish your work, but they're 'stealing' reputation that wouldn't be there for them to arrogate to themselves if you weren't doing the work they're getting credit for.

The beta ended, IIRC, with the Rikti invasion.

ABS can be food safe, but it's harder to find, and anything but natural color is virtually certain not to be — the dyes aren't. PLA, again with the dye caveat, can be food safe, but you're up against the limitations of PLA — it has a low deformation temperature, so cleaning it with hot water can damage it, and unless smoothed the surface irregularities can trap food particles. Nylon and PETG filament is available in food-compatible varieties, and there is a TPU filament — Copper3D's MD Flex — that was developed for food and medical use, with an anti-microbial nano-copper composite. Equally important is using a nozzle other than the standard brass composition, which can leak lead into the melted filament as it's extruded.

I was looking at the stats of my Poison/Dark Defender's abilities, and noticed an oddity -- in both the mouseover stats on the enhancement screen, and in the detailed power info, Venomous Gas, a PBAoE power, has a base 70-foot range. The power functions normally, so it looks as if it's solely a quirk in the internal labeling, but it was odd to see:

It's a question of laziness; with the murder motel building, all the doors face into the courtyard, so ranged ATs can park in the middle and be able to reach out to spawns from virtually every door. Turn the building around (using the PI building as an example) so that the inside of the 'C' faces the AE building, move the upper level walkway to the outside of the 'C' along with all the doors except for one in the middle of the 'C' (for people parking behind the motel to get inside and to the front), and it's still a tight location with lots of doors, but you have to move around to get all of them — park in the courtyard, which is now facing the AE building, and you've only got the 'back door' to spawn ToT mobs from; it reduces the 'accessible' doors from 16 to 1 for someone parking an AFK MM in the courtyard. With their pets on Aggressive, assuming that there were enough people hitting that one door, they would see their XP drop by more than an order of magnitude, and parking on one of the outside faces would cut the accessible doors by more than half. But for the active players, the experience would change very little, as they're already moving to whichever door is spawning mobs.

Unfortunately, there are just too many options for us to get a proper range of cowboy hats. First, you've got the brim style — flat, western, bull rider, Reiner low sides, Reiner high sides, quarter horse, rancher, tracker, and rolled, among others — then you have the crown shape — cattleman crease, brick crease, Dakota, pinch front, Gus, gambler, boss of the plains, Montana mix/Tom crease, and more — and then there are all the variations of the hat band. I'm sure people would scream about their favorite hat style getting short shrift in comparison if that amount of detail was put into one single hat type.