srmalloy

The article I linked pointed out that there were a number of competing key sets for movement, but that it was all the people grabbing Thresh's config that made WASD the winner. Quake let you make your own choice for bindings, but people figured that the camp's config was the best.

And the Paragon Studios management having the presumption to think that they could buy themselves free of NCsoft to become independent may have been another nail in the coffin -- get rid of those waegukin who didn't have the proper attitude toward their superiors.

According to Positron, though, they were making more money from CoH after it went F2P. I suspect that one of the reasons why NCsoft decided to shutter CoH was that the way that the Paragon store was set up in the code, it couldn't be monetized the way they did with their other MMOs -- a microtransaction store where you paid with NCcoin, which you had to buy directly from NCsoft. But we're unlikely to ever know for sure.

It goes back 20 years to Dennis 'Thresh' Fong and his standard configuration for Quake, winning the first Quake tournament. When he converted to using the mouse for mouselook, he needed controls for his left hand, and settled on WASD. Read How WASD Became the Standard PC Control Scheme -- there were other patterns on the left side of the keyboard, but Thresh's celebrity had people asking for his configuration, spreading it around.

A single mob may provide enough inf to buy a Mako's bite recipe, but won't begin to cover the 490,000 inf crafting cost

By that time, I'd been playing CoH long enough that I understood that the to-hit roll was made at power activation, and only things like interruptibility and the post-animation LoS check for snipes would cause a miss if the initial roll succeeded (and had experienced both the other side of being chased by an attack's visual effect and the gyrations of a visible attack following a running mob). What made that one incident memorable was seeing how the "successful hit tracks the target" code interacted with the ballistic trajectory of the grenade so that it made a sharp turn in midair to follow the Ink Man -- normally it's the mob moving around making it curve to the side as it descends; this was the only time I ever saw the range-to-target change fast enough to force the game to alter the grenade trajectory like that. Given the game code, it's going to happen that way if that situation occurs again, but given that I only saw it so noticeably once in the entire live run of the game makes it something to remember, not something that needs fixing. The Ink Man was defeated by my grenade, so there was no glitch in the game; it was just entertaining visuals watching it take off like it had a rocket booster.

That reminds me of an odd incident back on Live showing how target tracking worked for range attacks. I was in IP with my AR/EM Blaster shooting up spawns of Tsoo; one of the Ink Men hit me with Siphon Speed as I lobbed M30 Grenade at him. Them grenade went over the top of its arc and had started down as the Ink Man decided to bug out. The grenade made a sharp turn in midair to head back up again, arcing off into the distance, where both it and the Ink Man disappeared from sight. Approximately 15 seconds later, I got a defeat notice; since it was for the normal amount of XP, it wasn't someone else whacking a partially-defeated mob, it was the Ink Man unsuccessfully trying to outrun the grenade.

If it's possible to tweak them out separately, can the Tsoo Spirit Ink Archers be given the same positioning logic that the Knives of Vengeance DP mobs have? It seems weird to have them run up into melee range, then shoot you with a bow -- they should stay at range and shoot.

I also discovered that that door spawns invisible trick-or-treat mobs during the Halloween event. Looks like it has several problems.

Coupled with the fact that, at level 49 (or any level down to 45, but 49 gave the best rewards), the farmers still had their incarnate abilities, pumping them up over straight 49 content.

All four beg the question of whether procs should be nerfed, which makes all of them invalid.

<patrolling NPCs walking past a fight> "Hey, look-- the boss is getting his ass handed to him by a couple of heroes. You think we should help him?" "Didn't he write you up last week for having a grease spot on your uniform after you'd pulled an eight-hour shift in the motor pool?" "You're right. Screw him. If he can't handle the heroes, he doesn't deserve his job. Let's just pretend we don't see it." "Say, don't they have lasagna in the cafeteria today?" "And it's time for our lunch break. We'll come back later and see what needs to be cleaned up."

You've got LBUTTON, MUTTON, RBUTTON, and then BUTTON4 through BUTTON8. Along with 25 joystick buttons and four positions for each of a joypad, three joysticks, and three POV hats; they're all in the standard 'key' names.

At the end of Sunstorm's "Winslowe and the Cosmotron" arc, Archon Swann appears to be capped at 24, rather than matching the level of the mission. This can make him a surprisingly-squishy walkover if you get the mission at a higher-enough level.

That's not entirely true; however, to do so requires a fairly ruthless hand with the 'Disable XP' toggle in the options.

In the AH listing for Attuned Enhancements, "Universal Damage Sets" appears, but this category is missing under the the Crafted Enhancements list, which goes from 'To Hit Debuff' to 'Universal Travel' with nothing between.

The Rikti need to pay more attention to where they're recruiting their personnel for missions; apparently the Traditionalists and Restructurists still can't work together. In Levantera's mission "Fight Rikti Raid", the first mission she hands out after you join the Vanguard, my Peacebringer found a number of Quantum Rikti mobs in the mission. These Quantum Rikti and the regular Rikti were, however, completely hostile to each other, and spawns containing a Quantum would fight it out until one side or the other was down. Equally entertaining, the raid leader spawned in the field of fire of one of the Vanguard turrets, and died to the artillery before I could get there. Not a shining demonstration of competence on the part of the Rikti.

Random NPC dialog in Night Ward: [NPC] Huntmaster: NIGHTWARD_NIGHTSTALKERS_FIGHT_APP_INACTIVE_TEXT Should be something a little more informative.

In Gordon Stacy's 'Revenant Hero Project' arc, he sends you to talk to Marc Freeman, who sends you to deliver a CD-R to Jake Montoya. With the advance of technology, the 'CD-R' could be updated to a DVD-R or a USB stick; it doesn't change the mission, it's just that sneaker-netting a 640Mb storage device when there are multi-gigabyte replacements available feels odd.

You want to run solo, or inside the AE building, you're fine with however you choose to build your character. But if you come out of the AE building, join a Citadel TF, and the only movement power you have is the inherent Sprint -- and don't even know that the P2W vendors sell jump and flight packs, then get bent out of shape because nobody is waiting for you to sprint to the NW corner of IP for a mission, then the "patently rude" demands are on the part of the AE baby. And yes, I've had exactly this experience with someone who was playing a level 50 character. They did know how to get around between zones, but they didn't think how much time it took them should matter to anyone else.

This. If someone wants to spend all their time in AP, or inside the AE, or in their base, that's their choice. If they come out and join a TF, and then have to be hand-held to micromanage every step of just getting to the zone the TF starts in, and then everyone else in the team has to wait every mission because they not only have to be hand-held to get to the mission, but don't have any movement power beyond Sprint, then they need to either go back to AE (or whatever they were doing) or start a new character and level it while learning what you need to do to be effective out in the wider world of Paragon City/the Rogue Isles. Expecting everyone else to reshape their play to fit them us, in my opinion, unreasonable.

In the "Recover the Cosmotron" mission from Sunstorm, the mission completed after I collected the glowie and defeated an Assault Raider who was shadow-boxing and running his mouth. The mission completion text said "You found some orders on the defeated Penumbra Elite Archon" -- but the Assault Raider was not fighting with anyone; he was solo in his spawn. So it appears that the mission was slightly broken because it didn't spawn the Archon that the Assault Raider should have been fighting, and still counted the Archon as defeated when the lone Assault Raider went down, with the text still assuming that the Archon was present.

Hmm. I suppose the PS devs might have decided that computing s spray of misses would have been computationally expensive enough to be impractical to animate, but it seems sloppy and lazy, given the special-effect-fest that is the bowl of an MSR or the final phase of a Hami raid.

I thought that I'd seen it happen while soloing, and paid more attention to it while running Synapse and Manticore -- the Nova-form power Scatter, if you miss your target, has the character animation but no visual effect of the power; other nova-form powers have a normal miss 'power effect goes off into empty space' effect.

I completed a Manticore yesterday (the blueside WTF) on my 38 (40 at the end) PB, and didn't see any Prismatics in my salvage afterwards, either. At the time, I just chalked it up to drop rates.