srmalloy

Be kind to it; it's in a strange place.

Reminds me of a lettercol from a Marvel comic many years ago commenting on something in an earlier comic that got past the proofreaders... A reference to a device that was "programmed to shit itself off".

There is a section of parkland in Skyway City roughly centered on [-1080.2 -0.0 -2369.3] where there are a number of civilians endlessly wandering in a square, in much the same way as the civilians used to climb the sewer entrance west of the tram in Kings Row.

Reading that, I had a quick flash of a minimum-height MA/SR Scrapper, 'Odori Ebi'... just to see how long it takes people to get the joke. The farthest I've gone for a deliberately obscure character name, though, is Xiao Guo, an Earth/Storm Controller, whose name is a multi-level indirection.

Kind of appropriate, too, given that the character that I have the footstep-sound issues with is a Bots MM whose backstory is that he was a Soviet military project to create a semi-autonomous director for teams of combat robots that became sentient, then began altering or ignoring its orders when it determined that alternate tactics were more effective. The project was shut down, with everything stuffed away in storage, until an earthquake triggered an incompletely-shut-down sensor. If I ever work out how to write a believable fight scene, I'll go back and finish the six and a half pages of background for him (it just kind of ballooned).

That's the problem; it seems as if, no matter how much damage my bots do when I tell them to attack, the first riposte from the target is always directed at me, not the bots attacking them.

I think the reference you're looking for is "I may be getting older, but I refuse to grow up".

I will never understand the idiocy behind the decision to make the Bots feet bare metal when rubber/elastomer pads would not only be quieter but give better traction. It's like trying to be stealthy with the Soviet Fifth Tank Army behind you.

It's in the beta patch notes under "Game Client Adjustment and Fixes": 'Powers that play a sound on each target that is hit will no longer reach a deafening volume when there are many targets. When the same sound is queued multiple times at the same instant, the audio system now reduces the volume.' Whether the amount of reduction will need to be adjusted has yet to be seen.

This is reportedly being addressed. I've had a similar problem that pops up when I'm doing the 'Cure Lost' mission -- I normally hit the biggest target in a spawn first and I've had the ring of minions around an Anathema all pull out shotguns and fire simultaneously at the freshly-cured civilian; if I'm wearing headphones, having eight or nine shotgun blasts going off at once is physically painful.

That you, or T. C. Mits, do not understand the mechanics of damage buffs as they have existed for the duration of the game does not mean that they are wrong, broken, and must be changed immediately to fit how you believe they should work. (for those who don't recognize the reference, 'T. C. Mits' is a really old usage, an acronym for 'The Celebrated Man in the Street')

Ahh, Jurassik. I miss that particular bug from the beta for inventions back during Live. The Touch of Lady Grey: Chance for Negative proc originally had a bug that, when it went off, actually did negative damage to your target, healing it. This was fixed, but badly overcorrected; after the first patch, when it went off, it would do an absurd amount of damage, instantly defeating your target, picking up the nickname 'Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot'. And I did, catching Jurassik in Crey's Folly when I was solo, and hitting him with my first attack for “4.183e+13“ points of damage. I was more amused by seeing that CoH automatically rolled over to scientific notation than by the amount of damage I'd done -- there were a number of other players who got bigger hits with it.

Stealth affects all NPC 'followers'; the ones that fight alongside you (i.e., Doc Delilah in the last mission of her arc) have a higher perception but any NPC following you will get 'lost' if you get too far from them. You can take advantage of this -- in missions where I have to rescue several people and lead them out, I'll whack their guards and leave them there, stealthing past them until I've dropped all the guards and am at the hostage deepest into the mission, then turn off stealth as I head out, gathering them up as I head back to the door.

Well, except for the minor inconvenience that -- for some unknown reason -- the police stations aren't counting as 'safe' areas for logging out, so you can have the full logout countdown each time (instead of the immediate logout you get in a tailor, store, hospital, tram station, AE building, etc.).

It's kind of funny reading the names of the enhancements, and imagining what characters would look like if they actually had the thing being described -- Blasters with their head covered with Benedict Tech Telescoping Eyes, Controllers staggering around under piles of Li Ten Kueh's magical crap, getting knocked back into a wall and all of their Nectanebo's Gourds bursting into a cloud of magic dust...

RMT is 'Real Money Transactions', and used to refer to the people running websites that had legions of grunts playing games for the sole purpose of grinding the in-game currency, then offering it (and, often, powerleveling services) for real cash. If I remember correctly, back on Live, after the introduction of AE, the cost for inf dropped to somewhere around $2.00 for 100 million inf from $10 per million in the early game.

I remember the early Hamidon raids when the zone limit was 250 characters -- and we filled the zone; given the slideshow that the hold and damage phases turned into even with everyone wearing 'Hami Raid Costumes' with simplified outfits and no capes or auras, I can only imagine what it would have been like with everyone fully tricked out with triple capes.

Or, if you still want to use "left+right" to move forward, but just want it to not toggle run on, you can use: MouseChord "+forward"

I will not buy this record; it is scratched.

Unaging is not deathless. The elves in Middle-Earth are functionally immortal, yet they can be killed.

I should point out that, while you can change your game fonts for more readability or wider glyph support, doing so only changes the appearance of the game in your client. If you change the game fonts so that they support glyphs not in the standard game fonts, then while you will see any of the 'new' glyphs you use in your chat, bio, or other locations , everyone else will just see a hollow box. It would take a global replacement of the standard chat font with, say, Arial Unicode MS (which has over 50,000 glyphs, but is a 22Mb file) for extended character support to be available both for you and the other players reading your text.

See Give your UI a facelift: replacing the CoH fonts with your own in the forums. It's not neat, but it's doable. Replacing the default font with 'Snubfighter', a poor choice for its lack of distinguishable upper- and lower-case letters: Trying again with 'Enigmatic Unicode Regular' produces a much better result:

I'm just repeating the 'explanation' that Positron gave for why they "couldn't" make full-length skirts for the costume creator. It may be that his waffle was true at the time, the costume management got better over time, and they just never bothered to go back and make full-length skirts as selectable costume options, but that was what was claimed back when they were originally requested.

The argument presented by the original devs for why it couldn't be done is that the character rig is different for mobs with floor-length robes -- they don't actually have legs, just the robe lower body. This is why, when you knock or defeat, say, a Carnival of Shadows Illusionist, the underside of their dress doesn't have feet; it's just a circular plate closing off the dress. To allow it to work for player characters would require allowing fundamental changes to the character model for specific costume pieces in the costume editor, which is a much more expensive change than adding costume parts that fit onto the existing character model.

The occasional live responses. An NPC thug's girlfriend talking to a Skulls gunner: [NPC] Ex Girlfriend: Well, I just can't get behind what you do. I mean, being a Skulls girlfriend is a thankless job. I always have to run when things get good. I hate that. [cue incoming fire blast] [NPC] Ex Girlfriend: It's been real, hon!