srmalloy

The events that have particular changes to the zone — like the treat pavilions east and west of the Atlas platform, and the vendor south of the road — are handled by actually swapping out the zone map for another one with the event customization built in, but these event maps have different names than the standard maps. Older versions of Vidiotmaps had the labeled map replacements only for the standard maps, not the custom event maps, so when the map textures changed, there was no corresponding Vidiotmaps replacement. All it takes to fix is copying the stock Vidiotmap texture to the name of the event texture, but it wasn't done with the old version; you'll have to get the newest one. Example (not actual file names): if the standard zone definition file is 'AP_std.zone', and the Halloween event file is 'AP_fall.zone', the map textures would be 'AP_std_map.tex' and 'AP_fall_map.tex'; the original Vidiotmaps would have a replacement for 'AP_std_map.tex' but not for 'AP_fall_map.tex', so when the event was rolled out, the client would use the internal AP map image, not the Vidiotmaps one, because there was no file with the right name.

And it can vary hugely depending on AT, powersets, and build; I was running my Elec/Elec Sentinel Shoka Lecheniye (Шока Лечение, 'Shock Treatment') around one of the buildings in Kallisti Wharf when I realized how boring it was to ToT with her. I knock on a door, get 'Trick', the spawn comes out, and with no more than two attacks, the entire spawn is at zero End with floored recovery, and it's just grinding them down while they flail fruitlessly. The EBs are annoying only because of how much longer it takes to grind them down; otherwise, they're no more of a threat than the minions. While on other characters, the EBs require significant inspiration use. The same goes for other content; I have a Rad/Rad Brute that runs Heather Townsend's arc at +4/x6 as the best tradeoff of XP against time while others struggle at x1 and +1 net level (+4 once they get all three level boosts, for example). The different ATs and powersets play differently; that's the point. Perhaps the difficulty setting that downgrades Bosses to Lieutenants could be checked to downgrade the EBs one step to Bosses, at the cost of, say, them losing the 5x XP and badge count for them.

It's not 'on the spot', but if you've spent enough time logged out in your base to have the Rapid Response teleporter, or have bought the Base Portal or Base Teleport prestige powers, you can jump to your base, train at the trainer there, and return to where you were (albeit only outside of missions).

It's like most of Anton Sampson's missions, where "check out Nemesis base" always seem to have the unwritten addition "...and defeat every Nemesis trooper inside", even though it never actually shows as a mission goal; the mission just won't complete until the map is cleared.

For me, the problem was that it had been dropped about thirty feet in toward the courtyard center from a back corner, so when I was dumping cone attacks into the mobs spawning from the two doors in the corner, and whenever my actual cone-centering target went down, the game picked the MDC as my next target because it was closer — and I was hanging back to get a good spread on the cone.

And having to remember to log out and back in after teaming with a Kheldian, because having one on your team set a flag to enable Quantums and Cysts in your mission spawns, and the flag didn't clear when you left the team, so you'd keep getting them, even solo, until you logged out. And the flag was 'contagious' — once you had it set by teaming with a Kheldian, you could 'infect' other teams you joined with it, causing them to start getting Quantums and Cysts.

Setting up a MM with Aggressive/Stay pets and going AFK is inherently slower; MM pets do not have stellar tracking ranges, and left to themselves will fail to focus on targets, doing smaller amounts of damage to more targets, reducing the XP return. The point is that it doesn't matter to the MM; they can just leave their pets out soaking up XP for a longer time. This does, however, gimp the teammates of AFK MMs to a degree, since the MM pets are not contributing equally compared to non-AFK team members.

The murder motel in PI has a new troll annoyance to deal with — the yahoo who thinks it's funny to drop a Vanguard MDC target dummy into the courtyard to draw fire from people not paying close enough attention to where their target shifts when the mob they're targeting goes down. They've resummoned it at least once.

It dates me that my first thought in response to that name was "Mr. Ed's straight man"...

"Draw me like one of your French primates..."

The "rescue homeless people from the sewers" mission is one I've taken up a variation on that, at least for my ranged characters. I work my way in, whacking the hostage guards, but keeping away from the hostages themselves so they don't trigger their follow. Then, once I'm at the back of the mission, I'll hook the rearmost hostage and drag them with me toward the entrance, picking up the other two. If the map cooperates, I'll drag everyone off to the side in a big room so that the ambush runs past me to the back of the mission, giving me an easy run to the entrance.

Now if we could get 'door diversification' for the city zones — there are clickable doors all through each zone, but my characters keep getting sent to the same ones. For example, the fifth mission of the Synapse Task Force (after the first patrol mission) seems to be virtually certain to be at the west side of the skyscraper just west of the Siren's Call gate, and the Positron I mission right before the "jump into Oranbega" mission is always at the building just north of the Siren's Call gate. There are many other examples — Rick Davies' first mission, to retrieve the Clockwork sprocket, is always the same two doors in AP.

Also a more extended display of the power animations on the power customization screen; as it is, there are a number of powers where the display in the customization screen loops too quickly for you to get a good idea of the visuals, and it's only after paying for the change and taking the character out into the city to actually use the powers that you say "That doesn't look like what I thought it would from the tailor" and go back to do it over.

And just because it's hard doesn't mean it won't be taken for development. In the short run, is it more likely to be done as an animal-transformation travel power like Panther Run? Yes. As a 'character assumes an avian form, but can still use their powers' travel power? I think it would be too much work for just a special travel power. As a basis for an aviform body type? That has more potential, although the one example of a fully non-android body type — nova-form Kheldians — and they have an extremely limited number of power animations. Is there enough presence of aviform individuals (or the desire to have aviform characters) to make the development effort worthwhile compared to putting that effort elsewhere? I don't know; they seem to be a niche character type.

That would depend heavily on the details of the Avilan design — whether they were to have been humans with wings (from a hexapod ancestor, like centaurs) or like pterosaurs, where the hands are part of the wing structure. If the former, as we got winged characters in game, then any residual animations left in the data files aren't likely to be much use; if the latter, they still might not be usable, but would take some examination to make the determination.

No, we're giving you a list of reasons why it's hard to do as a regular travel power that still allows you to use all your attacks while the power is active. Your response is "well, we'll just make it so half the playerbase can't use attacks while it's active", and don't seem to see how suggesting a new ability that can't be used equally and fairly by all characters is inherently divisive and gets downgraded for consideration. As Rudra says, and as I noted in my original reply, there's nothing (except maybe having the bat, bird, and other meshes to use for it -- I'm not sure whether the existing meshes from various powers are detailed enough to be used easily, but that's a much smaller issue) preventing it from being another animal-transformation travel power, where it suppresses your ability to use attacks while active.

Yes, but what I'm seeing is that he's continuing to argue for the power while excluding entire powersets from being able to use it -- AR, Dual Pistols, Archery -- an Archery/Tactical Arrow Blaster might as well have all their powers suppressed by Bird Form Flight. When you have to presuppose gimping a significant fraction of the playerbase -- all melee powersets, all ranged powersets using a weapon -- to use the power, it's feeling more and more like an "I want this how I want it, and I don't care how many other players are inconvenienced when they use it" suggestion. As Coyotedancer says, it's much easier conceptually to make it work like Rocket Board or the other prestige flight powers.

So the existing 'one arm extended' snipe stance works how in bird form? Or the double-arm-forward animation from Fire Blast? You still have to animate the character mesh doing something to have a visible animation; it doesn't just magically transfer to the new mesh. And the flying animation for a bird form is going to be considerably different from the existing hover/flight animations, so attacks from those postures don't simply transfer across.

So you only have to create new animations for all the ranged attacks, then?

I already do this for all of my female characters, the standard 'NHTSA 5-mph safety bumper' size looking out of place (see "Most Common Superpower").

Two options. Make it a cosmetic variation for Fly and Mystic Flight... and then come up with new animations for every single power in the game that can be used while flying. Or make it a separate power like Rocket Board that suppresses all your powers while using it. I can see enough downsides to the latter than I expect it would get much less use than you might think, and the former involves enough work to make it prohibitive for the minor upside of the visual change.

I don't even have a hundred characters yet; and with up to ten costumes per character, I'm certain that I'm not even close to having the biggest closet of costumes/power customizations.

With 1000 character slots available, and ten costume slots per character, it's far too easy to build up a sizeable list of costumes and power customizations to pick from loading an existing set at a tailor. Would it be possible to get a small change to the list of costumes/customizations so that when the list is up, you could type a character and have the list scroll to the first entry starting with that character? For example, with the list below, if I typed 'S', the list would scroll to put 'Shallkinetiisch.powercust' at the top of the window:

While I agree that they are annoying to have to remember to convert to threads once you've got your T4 Alpha, remember that they don't exist in isolation; you would need to come up with a disposition for the Notice of the Well reward for a WTF as well. Simply upscaling the shard reward — it takes five times as many threads as shards to make a common component, so changing shard drops to threads, making them five times as likely (for a single thread), then merging that drop chance into the existing thread drop chance would give a single base drop. Notices, though, are more complex. For crafting an incarnate boost, they're the equivalent of a rare component, but just giving a choice of rare component for a WTF may be giving too much, since the rare can be used to craft boosts for the other slots, making the T3 boosts easier to get, but changing the Notice to the same random-tier component pick that the incarnate trials have could be biased the other way; there will be a need to examine the balance of rewards.

Incarnate Threads were originally a subscription-only drop. As shards were not usable for crafting Incarnate boosts for anything but the Alpha slot, this made an effective gatekeeper for incarnate abilities — the devs didn't have to block off earning incarnate XP after the Alpha slot was unlocked, as nonsubscribers wouldn't be able to craft anything to go in them. Shards existed to give the freeps a taste of the incarnate system to encourage them to subscribe.