srmalloy

I can confirm this with the extra loud sound I installed through the modder (not sure which one, as I'm not at my home computer to check).

Or the periodic emails purporting to be from banks I've never done business with advising me of urgent problems with my account, and to click here to log in and correct them. Ignoring the red flag that they rarely have my actual email address in the To: header (how anyone can believe that an email with 'undisclosed-recipients' in the address field is addressed to them specifically is beyond me), they typically rely on overlookable spelling changes, like the sender's address of "[email protected]" in the phishing attempt I received yesterday, to make the email appear legitimate.

Just call the Not At All Suspicious Airline Booking Company, and we'll not only get you the cheapest air fare, but relieve you of the crippling state of possessing surplus funds in your bank account!

Endlessly amusing, in missions against the Sky Raiders, to confuse the Engineers before they start summoning their FFGs.

Or the summoned Behemoths in the 'portal room' in Oranbega maps. You had to be a bit careful doing it, though -- once you triggered a portal, you needed to back away so that your Burn patches didn't frag the portal.

I've lost count of the missions where the briefing text -- and the mission goals in the navy window -- give you only a narrow concrete goal, but the mission doesn't complete until you clear the map. Just yesterday, for example, Colleen Nelson sent me to rescue the bodybuilder Leon Natale, but after freeing him, the mission didn't end until I'd defeated every Council mob in the base -- a requirement not stated anywhere.

Exactly. Power corrupts, and absolute power is kind of neat...

And if that's what you want to play, that's how you should go. You can get some odd results with a good sniping build; I remember back on Live, I was running my AR/EM in a full team doing a Vahzilok mission, and we'd run across two closely-spaced spawns. With my bright, shiny Snipe power, I offered to do a long-range pull, and sniped an Abomination; it went down. No response from the rest of the spawn. Try again; another Abomination goes down, the rest of the spawn remaining oblivious. Two of the other team members were laughing at this point, then the higher-level Scrapper says something like "to hell with this" and charges the spawn. My blaster and the other one, in the back of the group, who were unloading on the mobs the scrappers were attacking, ran when the scrappers faceplanted in the first exchange, and were the only two members of the team to make it down the elevator, then waited for the rest to come back from the hospital.

I was curious after seeing the latest pile of airline spam, and it appears that (850)970-1200 is a major spam bot, judging from the number of completely unrelated sites that return hits on the phone -- sites in the US, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Poland, etc. Doing a few reverse phone searches identifies the number as a rewards scam.

Which I sometimes refer to as the "See that dot?" combination, as my AR/EM Blaster can actually snipe targets that are a bit outside visual range. Back on Live, before MSRs got popular enough that you could trivially get a full league and hit the render limit with just the mobs in the middle of the bowl, she would pull mobs off the rim with Full Auto while standing in the middle of the bowl.

There are a couple of contacts where the "drag out play time" decision by the devs whacks you hard upside the head -- finishing your first mission from a contact, and immediately on mission exit you get a second mission where, if you actually read the mission briefing, says something like "you call your contact, and they tell you..." -- but they (at least back on Live) don't give you their phone number for three more missions, so you couldn't have called them to get the automatic follow-on mission.

One of the things that I have noticed, particularly as your character advances into the higher levels, is that missions -- particularly the first mission from any contact, where you have to physically go to that contact, and then physically return to them to turn it in -- are almost always in a zone distant from the contact. While this made sense when the game was live, in that increasing travel time increased the engagement time of a player, extending the time required to gain the same measure of experience. With Homecoming, though, this isn't a particular concern (especially with the ready availability of powers like Mission Teleporter and Team Teleporter), so I would like to ask that this be removed. Now, I'm not asking that the first mission from contacts always be in the same zone; what I'm asking is that, when looking at how contacts assign missions, if there is some code that excludes the current zone from the possible locations of a mission, that this code be removed. So if you, say, went to Anton Sampson for his first mission, you could still be sent to any 30s-and-lower zone for the mission, but Founder's Falls would also be in the choice list for the mission door, rather than automatically being sent to any zone other than Founder's Falls for the mission.

So you bind your teleport/translocation to CTRL+LBUTTON, then bind your Rain of Fire to CTRL+LBUTTON, and then bind your [X] to CTRL+LBUTTON, then discover you can't teleport with a mouse click... I suppose if you had a space-cadet keyboard you could have control-LBUTTON, meta-LBUTTON, hyper-LBUTTON, and super-LBUTTON as different binds, but trying to remember all of the combinations would drive you up the wall with different characters having different binds tailored to their powersets. SInce the space-cadet keyboard also had Shift, Top, and Front as modifier keys, you could wind up with a lot of confusing keybinds.

It's just anecdotal, but I remember watching an episode of an anime many years ago where the mooks employed by the Big Bad were some kind of ninja, and would sweep after the hero in masses when he wasn't looking, freezing in place when he looked back -- in whatever odd pose they were in at the time -- with some supposed ninja ability to be unseen if they were immobile preventing them from being noticed. They suffered from Conservation of Ninjutsu, though, so they weren't much of a threat.

No, that's just the bean burritos they got from Taco Bell.

I'm slowly building up a library of popmenus for various purposes -- for my characters that have foreign backgrounds, I've got popmenus for common statements in their native language (thanks, congratulations, yes, no, and a variety of insults and vulgarities to use in combat), and for location AoEs, I have popmenus with three options -- the normal targeting, at my target, and down:max (which toebombs the effect if the character is on the ground, or among the mobs they're hovering over if flying, as in the monster phase of a Hami raid). Wormhole has a special popmenu, because of all the fun things you can do to reposition mobs (and since it doesn't generate aggro, it's useful for clearing paths).

And it's a sisyphean task to try to block them at the source, because of all the ways to spoof both IP address and MAC address; with the limited connection data you get, you can't extract anything immutable that uniquely identifies the originating computer.

There are other uses to which the pop-up tray could be put if it were possible. For example, if you have Mystic Flight, create a macro "/macro Zoom powexec_location up:max Translocation". This sits in your power trays taking up space, but is only usable if you have Mystic Flight on. If you could drag the macro into the pop-up tray, you could have a set of predefined Translocation jumps that would only be visible if the pop-up tray was open, and not take up space at other times.

And Regen works loosely similar to Defense, in that you take all the damage, relying on your healing to keep you alive while you grind down the incoming damage, your goal being to cut the incoming damage to less than your healing rate before you run out of hit points. Once you get ahead of the incoming damage, you'll heal back all the damage you took until, at the end of the fight, you've healed back all the damage you took, and are standing there uninjured, while your Resistance- and Defense-based companions will be damaged to one degree or another. Regen is inherently more brittle, because it is vulnerable to any damage spike, not just a lucky one as Defense is, but it will always end a fight either chewing pavement or looking fabulous.

When the Council wises up and starts making their Mek Men out of the same material they make that damn bell out of, and they won't work any more; those bells would survive being at ground zero for Tsar Bomba and keep ringing...

And even the 'minimal' alteration of changing it from an int to a uint -- fitting in the same 32-bit space -- raises a whole raft of unintended consequences. There has to be all sorts of code checking your inf total to prevent things like spending more than you have -- essentially, any transaction that would make your inf total negative. Changing the field to an unsigned int makes all of that useless -- unless you change all the code for every transaction, where spending more than you had would make your inf total negative (easy to check for), an unsigned int would roll over to maximum -- if you had 10 inf and spent 11, suddenly you'd have four billion inf, because the 'check for negative' code won't work any more.

KW has a few, albeit specialized uses. As a level-50 zone, it gives an alternative for individuals and teams for the Halloween event if they don't want to join the 'murder motel' league in PI and don't want to have to keep moving zones as they go up levels. Bloody Bay, Siren's Call, Warburg, and RV all have content that can be run in and around PvP activity, while KW as a PvP has nothing -- no reason for anyone to go there except for PvP fights, which need the other zones already fill -- and would have the effect of driving out the people who do use it for their own purposes as Rudra describes, as well as diluting the population of the other PvP zones. Or does anyone fantasize that making KW a PvP zone will somehow magically make more people want to engage in PvP when simply making it a PvP zone adds nothing but more room to fight in?

Changing it depends on where it's stored. If it's in the data structure that defines your character in the database on the server, changing it from a signed int to an unsigned int, or from a 32-bit signed int to a 64-bit signed int, may not be possible without a 'flag day' when that field, and every other field anywhere in the code that can hold an amount of inf, gets changed. If it becomes necessary to roll out the character and item databases, then roll them back in after a schema change, it would make for an extended downtime.

That's true as long as Instant Healing is just a "Heal a lot faster" power. One of the things that I have long believed about Regen is that Instant Healing isn't doing what it should. It should be returned to being a toggle, and instead of just cranking your regen rate to the sky, what it does is make every hit you take behave the same way Spectral Wounds does -- you take all the damage that gets past any Resistance you have, and then a second or so later, an enhanceable fraction of that damage 'instantly' heals. This also partially addresses one of the reasons why Regen was perceived as overpowered back on Live -- a Regen scrapper would end a fight at full health, where a Resistance- or Defense-based character would end the fight significantly down on hit points; what wasn't noticed is that a Regen scrapper's HP would nosedive early in the fight, where they would be trying to reduce the incoming damage to below their regen rate before they ran out of HP. Once they got ahead of the curve, then barring surprise shots, they were guaranteed to win, because their healing would heal the same hit over and over and over again until it was gone. Making IH into a 'one and done' effect for each hit turns it into a mitigation power like Resistance or Defense -- it will stop its 'instant' percentage of each hit, but only once. So if you had IH slotted for a 'heal' of, say, 54%, if you got hit for 100 points of damage, you'd take all 100 points, then a second or so later, 54 points would 'instantly' heal -- leaving you having taken the same damage as if you had 54% Resistance; your other healing powers would have to take care of the other 46.

I was pointing out why the MM pets were being triggered to attack the entity. And I'm not sure that simply making it untargetable would solve the problem, because it would set up a conflict with the MM pet aggro logic to attack entities that attack the MM; I don't know enough about the logic tree in that case to be able to say that they would ignore it.