srmalloy

I gave up on the live devs fixing world background issues a long time ago. The first cringe was getting to Talos Island and seeing the red-and-white-striped buoys parked next to docks (and in the entire live run of CoH, I was the only one to complain about that). And it's usually little things -- Roman name structure and conventions, for example -- and it's always things that small amount of research would have turned up correct information to use.

If I remember from live, there were a couple of missions where you would start in one map type and switch to another by going through a door (unlike, say, the missions in Montague Castaneda's arc, where there is a hole in the floor leading to tunnels and the Rikti base tiles); if the HC staff had access to the map designer software, it would be possible to make more mission maps of this type

That's annoying. I noticed the issue in a mission where you have to get a number of the metal crates, with some of them being click-and-wait, and some having to be attacked and destroyed, and noticed that some of the crates weren't emitting the modified glowie sound. Thank you for the list; I'll have to see what I can do with them.

So you have the skill and knowledge hurdles, then you need to grind farmer(s) to 50, then accumulate the inf reserves to provision a PvP character. But, tell me... Which vendor sells the slots that let a character with three-slotted powers compete on an equal footing with characters that are five- and six-slotted with purple and Superior sets? Or lets the character skip around the requirement of reaching 50 before they, too, can slot purple and Superior IOs? It sounds as if there's yet another requirement -- that you have to get a prospective PvP character to 50 before you able to effectively start learning how to play them competitively... at half that level. A character exemp'ed down from the level cap to any given level is going to be inherently superior to a character naturally that level both from the additional slots and the additional powers past the reference level the exemp'ed character gets to use.

I found a sound file that replaces the default objective sound with a louder and more obnoxious sound, but I've found that it only changed the sound for the 'click' objectives; destructible objectives still have the default (and mostly inaudible) sound. Does anyone have the name of the sound file for destructible objectives?

And there will be lots of opportunity for your first impression being something that just gets reinforced again and again. My experience with open-world PvP is that the vast majority of it is driven by the people whose only way to measure their "leet skillz" seems to be how fast their level-capped combat monster with BiS gear can gank characters fresh out of the starting area, and who run at the slightest chance of an even fight. But PvP is inherently biased toward the people who do it. There is no 'learning curve' that will teach you how to overcome the fact that your character who just reached minimum level to enter a particular PvP zone is inescapably significantly inferior to the tricked-out max-level character exemp'ed down to the zone level who is crammed full of purple, ATO, and winter sets, who has spent several orders of magnitude more inf on their character than you could have even with a bottomless pocketbook, and has spent the time to learn the differences from PvE and where all the tricks and corner cases are. You can learn to minimize your inferiority, but skill will only get you so far -- Mario Andretti is never going to win a NASCAR race driving a Smart ForTwo.

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?