srmalloy

From what I recall, the second hit is based off the attack's base damage without AT modifiers, so ATs with a damage modifier of 1 or less will do better with doublehit (i.e., Radial), while ATs with a damage modifier over 1 will do better with the damage boost (i.e., Core).

SQL at least is readable. I worked IT at a naval hospital and wrote code for CHCS, the MUMPS-based medical information system the DoD was using at the time, and I could tell that the core code was written by at least four different groups of programmers who didn't talk to each other, because of the style differences in the different modules. I remember an old joke about the 'readability' of various languages, measured in how long you can be away from the code and still understand it. BASIC you can come back to after a year and be fairly well able to read the code. With C, three or four months away, and you'll have to work a bit to puzzle it out. FORTH, you can go get a cup of coffee and face an almost unreadable wall of code when you get back.

Or, worse, pointless comments. I spent a summer during college working for a company that, at the time, made the POS systems for McDonald's, and I remember a section of code that was a three-and-a-half page loop in assembler with the single comment "chunka chunka".

A relevant example being the current wedding mission, where when you earn the 'Villain Disruptor' or 'Hero Slayer' badge, you get a pop-up message from Agent Hassel or Lord Schweinzer throwing up their 'contact unlocked' window in the middle of your screen -- which, by definition, is virtually guaranteed to be while you are in the middle of combat, with the pop-up window obscuring vital information about the targets you're facing.

It's the same visual 'splash' effect you see from characters and NPCs stepping into the water; I think there's just the one effect, so it plays the same for everyone.

For the same reason you get the occasional mission from regular contacts that has you hand-carrying a message to another contact that is literally twenty feet away from them — they're lazy-ass bastards who get their jollies from watching you run around at their beck and call.

While you're at it, you could also look at why flying pets like the shield and power drones make foot splashes in the puddles in cave maps.

Making it impossible to buff someone not on your team (instead of, as suggested above, having a 'reject outside buffs' flag from Null or elsewhere) would prevent one of the community-positive acts you see (albeit a specialized case) — standing at the top of the toboggan run in the ski chalet area hitting people with Speed Boost and Inertial Reduction to help them get the gold badge for the run. I'm sure that there are other examples — and since things like XP and Vmerits in leagues are team-specific, I wonder if making it impossible to buff someone not on your team would affect buffing/healing members of other teams in, say, a BAF, Lambda, or other incarnate trial. That would significantly jerk over league-based activities — entering the mission randomizes the teams, so if you wound up on a team with no heals, you could be significantly hampered compared to other teams.

If you could drag the windows to a new location and have that location be remembered (like you can for the 'enter mission' popup for incarnate trials and the instanced MSR) it would help — I'm repeatedly annoyed by the 'confirm teleport' popup being fixed dead center on the screen where it covers what I'm doing and resets to that position if you drag it to the side.

You can also consider them to be really ablative armor, because they will completely absorb a single non-AoE attack when they die, which makes them useful for the first exchange when you're entering combat.

And it's even more fiddly than that -- it's a single flag on your character, and the rewards are a single package controlled by that flag. If you have a level 49 or lower character who runs the WST and gets the double merits, then afterward dings 50 and unlocks their alpha, then runs the same WST again, they don't get the Notice of the Well even if they haven't received it that week, because the character is already flagged as having done the WST.

I didn't have screenshotui turned on, so I didn't get a picture of it. but when you do the Nemesis version of the wedding mission, the pop-up that presumably reflects the attitude of Ouroboros itself to what you're doing talks about "what you have sewn" -- this should be 'sown'.

Creating a new pool of server-specific popular names is not, in my opinion, sufficient justification for standing up a new server. Will standing up a new server bring in more players to bring its population up to that of the other servers, or will it simply dilute the population of the existing servers as the people whose gaming experience is irreparably harmed by not being able to get a character name someone else who with malice aforethought has preemptively seized for their character and hoarded specifically to deny its availability to everyone else, move to the new server so they can get the name they are immovably fixated on to the absolute exclusion of any other possible name?

Generally I'll slot the Perf Shifter proc, the Perf Shifter End Mod (to get the 7.5% run speed bonus) and a generic End Mod IO, which I can boost to +5 sometime after hitting 50 when I have the spare merits for the boosters. That gets me a bigger payoff for End recovery than using a third Performance Shifter IO, which will give me a maximum 26.5% End Mod increase.

Looking at the two images, my first question is "Are you accounting for a difference in the size at which the enhancement icons are drawn in your enhancement screen/tray and in the AH listings?" Because this looks like a scaling artifact to me, where the size of the enhancement image in the AH listing is reduced slightly from its "native" resolution, and the effect is to shift the enhancement center slightly.

That's quite true, but I think the "I can't find other hardcore players to team with on the regular servers" complaints will be perceived as different from the "There's no one on the hardcore server to team with" complaints, because they'll have the undertone of "we wanted our own server, and you wouldn't give us one" carried along with them. Of course, this is just my sitting back with a bowl of popcorn watching a niche community of a niche community talking about how popular they believe themselves to be.

If implemented this way, I predict that we'll see a subsequent whine of "I can't find anyone to team with" from the people playing characters with that box checked when the pool of hardcore characters doesn't match their available play times. I also see quite a number of good observations above about all of the (relatively) minor changes that would need to be made to support a hardcore mode, from making characters immune to rez effects (it may not be necessary to actually disable drops of rez inspirations, since they incorporate a rez effect, and since they're more valuable than other insps of the same tier, just turning them off deprives a character of an admittedly minor source of inf from selling them) to rebalancing powersets that have rez-other or rez-self powers. Ultimately, though, what becomes of this is up to the Homecoming staff.

Right up there in the thread title: "It is time for a HARDCORE SERVER" (emphasis mine). A checkbox won't cut it; that leaves him facing the possibility of teaming with players who aren't gunning for a 'one life to live' experience, and who aren't as concerned about not being defeated, allowing him to be victimized by "zergers".

Well, if you stopped buying at Starbucks, you could get more coffee cheaper...

If you join someone else's Nemesis mission, you can get all the badges in one run.

It's not just adding a checkbox to character creation to force 'Ironman' mode; you can already do that yourself, just by deleting the character at the first defeat. What the OP is asking for is a dedicated server, with all of the associated costs, maintenance overhead, and code base changes, to enforce Ironman mode on everyone playing on that server, predicated on the belief that, since hardcore servers have been established for other games, it would be good, desirable, and popular on Homecoming, and the people arguing against it are just naysaying outliers that don't represent the actual playerbase.

MIght be the "Voiceover Volume" slider under the Graphics and Audio tab.

I dislike citing him as a counterexample, but this goes directly against what Jack Emmert described as 'fun' -- throwing yourself at the Big Boss again and again and again, being defeated over and over, until you discover the one trick to defeating them. I'm pretty sure that he would regard "you get one try, and if you guess wrong, too bad; it's over. Start again from scratch." with distaste.

On neither my heroes nor my vigilantes does Arbiter Hawke show a mission available icon over his head.