srmalloy

This. Back when I started playing CoH on May 8, 2004, one of the things that attracted me to it was that it didn't have PvP. And I may be viewing it with jaundiced eye, but it seems as if every suggestion about 'improving' PvP boils down to "There aren't enough people doing PvP, so this change needs to be made to force more people into PvP so the ones that are already doing PvP have more victims opponents to play against". The mechanics of PvP are enough different from PvE that to be good in PvP requires different builds and different playstyles, and 'suggestions' that would make everyone else learn a different way to play because you're unhappy that they're not playing the way you want are never going to get my support.

IIRC, the original design of the origin pools would automatically grant slots in the 'auxiliary' power at certain levels -- when the Sorcery pool was rolled out, I would see 'an additional slot for Translocation' in the 'what you receive' dialog when training at certain levels. To my knowledge, that feature of the pools was never implemented, and the HC staff eventually found and removed the notification of the additional slot when training. I believe that it was removed because, as the single available origin pool, getting free slots would have made Sorcery a disproportionately advantaged power pool.

Aka "I'm not seeing enough PvP participation, so I want to change the game so that, instead of having the opportunity to actively choose to engage in PvP, players are randomly forced to actively choose not to engage in PvP". And the "they don't have to PvP, they can just find the transmitter and destroy it" claim ignores the fact that they will be subject to PvP while looking for and destroying it. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to go with Tyrannical on this one.

I suspect that it's something like "Waaahhh! I was in PvP and my (Scrapper/Tank/Brute) was able to stun my flying opponent with my one ranged attack, but they didn't immediately fall to the ground so I could defeat them. Fix this *now*; stuns should be an 'I win' button!" It's almost always some form of "Other people get away with this, and I think it's an exploit that needs to be fixed immediately", and never "making this change would increase the challenge for me by making it riskier to get stunned while flying".

I always do it that way, often going to my base to use the empowerment station to make a Grant Invisibility buff to sneak past her guards to finf the chest and clear back to her; the salvage is cheaper than the pain of having to rescue her from her idiotic 'aggro on everything' attitude.

I have seen exactly one reference to this type of concealed installation in game; there is a mid-to-upper 20s mission against the Council that sends you to a warehouse (for me, it's always been in south IP), but you appear in a Council base map on entry, with the entrance pop up telling you that you found a concealed door leading to a base under the warehouse. It's a nice touch to have it explicitly acknowledged, but I'd like to see more of it.

If you leave the launcher up so you can just click to start the client, you will not see that there has been an update until you are told that there is a client mismatch when you try to log in, and you won't see the 'unable to determine update status' message until you exit the client. Checking for updates manually only takes a moment, but it requires that you select the option from the drop-down menu. Would it be possible to either make the launcher automatically check for updates when you click to start the client, or make it an option to do so for the people who can't wait the extra couple of seconds for the check?

When even the thugs start noticing the population in the Hollows: [NPC] Outcast Initiate Chopper: What's with all the goody goody squads in here? Between the heroes, the PPD, Legacy Chain, and Freedom Corps, it's getting a mite too crowded for my tastes! And the ones who aren't happy with the change of scenery: [NPC] Outcast Initiate Slugger: I don't know how I feel about this Hollows business. Not enough citizens to harass. Slim pickins. And the Skulls are getting some snark: [NPC] Gravedigger Slammer: Nice costume! Did you fall asleep at the sewing machine or something?

ESO, though, very clearly shows its origins as a game designed for game consoles -- despite your character possessing a significant number of attacks and other combat abilities, you're limited to six and an 'ultimate' on mutually-exclusive 'front' and 'back' bars (you can put the same ability into both bars, but typically they're associated with your primary and secondary weapons), driven by the limited number of buttons on a game controller. And if you have a toggled ability on one bar, it turns off when you switch bars if it's not on the other bar.

For this one, it's likely because it's 'Capo di tutti capi' (Boss of all [the] bosses). More correctly as 'capo di tutti i capi', and also 'capo dei capi'.

When I use Striga for the Mortician day job, I always park my character on top of the mausoleum just NW of the base portal. I always make sure that, when I'm logging out a character for a day job, that the icon for the day job appears in the character's buff bar before logging out.

When the reorganization happened to destroy Galaxy City and make it a tutorial zone, and add Matthew Habashy and Twinshot as training guides to the game mechanics, the original origin-based contacts downstairs in City Hall (or Galaxy City) were removed from automatic assignment on first entry to the zone and had their origin-specific restrictions removed. Your origin contact used to start you on a string of contacts that would give you a storyline specific to your origin, so the Science contacts would send you on missions against the Vahzilok that culminated in your defeating Dr. Vahzilok in the sewers, the Technology contacts would send you against the Clockwork, etc. As you went up in level, you would start to be introduced to contacts belonging to other origins, until you could have contacts of any origin.

You mean something like the drop down at the top, above the selections for the individual pieces, where you can select an overall costume theme and it sets all the pieces for you? Now, an upgrade for that would be having a 'lock' icon next to each costume slot, allowing you to lock the piece selection and color(s), so you could (for example) select 'Celestial', lock the chest and legs, then pick 'Vanguard' and have all the other pieces change to Vanguard.

With a kusarigama, the weight at the end of the chain was thrown to wrap around a limb of the target, allowing them to be pulled to the kusarigama wielder, who would then use the kama blade on them. We don't have any existing animation that could be stolen for this, and I don't think the HC staff have the tools to produce completely new animations, particularly one that stumped the PS staff.

the Rain of Arrows animation doesn't really work for thrown weapons, though.

If it were a PBAoE, you could call it something like 'Whirlwind Throw', where you hurl your blades/shaken/whatever in all directions around you, using the DP animation for Hail of Bullets.

An entirely different feeling than what I got from Paragon Chat, which used the CoH client as the front end to a chatserver; you had all the character design, and could run/jump/fly around, and speak and use emotes, but it always felt to me like the reanimated corpse of CoH -- all of the framework, but nothing of what made it live. I couldn't spend more than ten or fifteen minutes logged in before it just made me more morose about its fate than I'd been. Fortunately, I won the bet I'd made with myself (that at least one of the devs had kept a copy of the game code), and found Homecoming shortly after it became public.

If the Council built their robots out of the same material they use to make the damned bell that keeps on ringing even after you defeat the robot, they'd be a lot harder to take down.

Yesterday, while a team was building to take out Jurassik, one of the team members commented that they wished they could earn Jurassik's tree-and-car weapon for a Titan Weapons character. Since the model already exists, would it be possible to create a shrunken character-sized version for TW characters?

There's another bug with defeat credit, but it's range-based. I haven't done the grunt work to find where the limit is, but if you have a Blaster with a primary that includes a snipe, and Energy Manipulation for the secondary, sniping at or close to your range limit with Boost Range active will show the defeat in the chat window, but you won't get defeat credit for the defeat badges. I discovered this by accident while hunting DE emanators in FF with an AR/EM Blaster; she would sit in mid-air at extreme range and pop a minion in a spawn with one or more lieutenants, wait for them to drop the emanators, then snipe just the emanators, leaving the other mobs in the spawn so she could come back and farm the spawn again. After taking out some thirty emanators, I checked her badge progress, and it hadn't moved. I verified that it was a range-dependent problem; if she shot from within basic snipe range, the defeat would get counted. I've been bitten by this on occasion any number of times since then when I didn't pay attention to how far out I was shooting from

It was back when Cryptic was still developing the game; Jack Emmert had posted on the forums "small concern=small tweaks, don't worry regeners"; then the changes were announced. I believe that Geko, who was the Powers guy at the time, posted a video from the test server showing a Claws/Regen Scrapper one-shotting +12 mobs as justification for the nerfs; after the community rallied together to show that the numbers the video presented were possible only without the purple patch, his response was "Oooops, you guys are correct"... and then the Regen nerfs rolled out a couple of weeks later, as if we hadn't proved anything. To get the specific posts, it would be necessary to scrape the Wayback archive.

Despite all the saltiness over the Regen changes, though, there was a general admission that Regen did in fact need to be reeled back some. The hate and discontent that it got was due to it being applied on the basis of bad assumptions and that it felt as if it had been given a 'small tweak' by a blindfolded spastic with a fire Axe.

I've forgotten how many times I received the "Talk to the Perez Park Security Chief" mission at level 6 or 7 and autocompleted it before remembering that it just accepts the "defeat 10 Circle of Thorns in Perez Park" mission, where the spawns are all 5-9 mobs at least two levels higher than I am.

There are already enough powersets that have multiple "usable only on allies" powers for them to rail against; I don't see any particular problem with giving them more to whine about.

It should also be pointed out that the nerf, and its magnitude, was an overreaction based on bad data -- the devs, testing on their internal test server, found that a Claws/Regen scrapper could solo +6 spawns for an eight-hero team, a declaration that the players claimed was grossly inflated. The changes to Regen were made and deployed to Live before the devs discovered that their internal test server did not have the 'purple patch' applied, which meant that, in their testing, the Claws/Regen scrapper was hitting about 10x as often for 10x the damage that it should have been, a difference that would have seen the scrapper falling quickly to the first spawn. Despite this admission, the changes to Regen were neither rolled back nor adjusted in light of the bad data used to justify the changes.