srmalloy

I was parking a character in the Talos Island police station for the day job, and it suddenly occurred to me that there was a significant flaw with the offices. There's nothing urgent going on, yet there is a continuous loop of sirens blaring. How are the officers in the building going to know when something happens that genuinely requires their attention if there are alarms blaring 24/7? There should be a more subdued audio environment for the police stations -- perhaps the same loop that plays when you're near the police drones -- so that the police stations don't sound like they're in permanent crisis mode with no visible indication that there's anything wrong.

If the 'fix' consists of reworking the entire powerset to have different powers that work differently from the existing powers and reordered, I would rather see that as a completely new powerset -- "Gunnery" or some such. If you're going to 'fix' Assault Rifle, do it in a way that preserves the existing powers so that every AR character doesn't have to burn respecs to get their character back to even a semblance of what it was before the changes.

It's not the character of the missions; it's the fact that, playing redside, you start out as a legbreaker for street-level thugs, and work your way up to being a legbreaker for more important and more powerful thugs, and then to being a legbreaker for minor villains, and eventually become a legbreaker for Arachnos... but no matter how powerful you become, you're still someone else's flunky -- you never get to a point where it's you sending out flunkies to serve your ends. Admittedly, that would make for a much different game redside, with your acquiring increasing numbers of henchmen who can be sent out to carry out different types of missions, and how you assemble the teams you send out affects their chances of success, and the missions you complete give you access to gear to equip your henchmen to make them better at doing missions for you.

After noting, back on Live, that the plane of the Moon's orbit was shifted almost 90° (watch it -- it rises a little east of due south and sets a little west of due north, instead of rising and setting in the east and west like the sun), as well as the double-moon effect near rising and setting, I stopped being surprised by the handwaves the devs put into the sky.

Why should tanks be the only AT that can be instantly killed by an NPC doing this?

The problem is in more than your standing there after you loose; a more serious problem is in the' hold it' part, where you're standing there with your point of aim waving around like you're trying to hold too heavy a draw weight.

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." — Robert A. Heinlein

Ohhh. Let's create a mechanic that's exploitable right out of the box. Scenario 1: Use /holdback to lower your level until a contact talks to you. Get mission from contact. Enter mission. Use /letloose to revert to your normal level. Wipe out grey mobs. So we clearly can't allow /letloose to be used inside missions, only out in the world. Scenario 2: Use /holdback to lower your level until a contact talks to you. Get first mission of story arc from contact. Use /letloose to revert to your normal level. Steamroll the now-grey story arc, because once you have the first mission, the contact will keep giving you the arc missions, no matter how badly you outlevel them. Since the second scenario can be used even with my idea to have a contact in Ouroboros to scale you, the idea is unworkable due to exploitability. The only way to address that would be to have scaling hide your current missions, and be unable to 'unscale' while you have any missions open at your scaled level. Which is almost identical to the 'TF mode' that Ouro puts you in now, except that you can join teams or invite people to team.

It was the surprise of seeing the checkerboard pattern carried over to the light fixtures; I'd seen that the 'stock' warehouse lights were a generic metal texture, but had never noticed that it was different in this one mission. Kind of like back on Live when the devs' attention to detail poked me -- noticing that all the footgear options had different sole patterns.

Necroing the thread... I was running the Clockwork Captive arc the other day, and in the final mission, where the shop has these decorative checkerboard bands on the walls, I happened to be up near the ceiling, and the tops of the light shades have a checkered pattern, too; something I'd never noticed until this week, despite having run the arc on dozens of characters.

Every time when you have a mission that involves your clicking on the NPC standing by the open rear hatch of a helicopter, then running into the cargo bay of the helicopter to enter the mission, you exit the mission still running into the helicopter, and have to turn around and run out, sometimes blocked by people exiting the mission after you. Is it possible to turn the mission exit around 180°, so that when you leave the mission, you're running back out of the helicopter, not further into it?

Ahh, but the original description of the power: "The LRM Rocket is a powerful piece of hardware. It is very accurate and has a very long range. The impressive round can knock down its target. Like most sniper attacks, you must take your time to aim, so this attack can be interrupted. You must be level 47 and have two other Munitions Mastery Powers before selecting this power. " describes it as a "sniper attack"; I believe that it was only with the introduction of the Invention system that it was reclassified as Targeted AoE so that it wouldn't take Sniper sets.

As another illustration of this, I just completed the "Defeat the Kerner and his crew" mission in the Freaklympics arc, and the room with the Kerner had a Freakshow minion, a Council minion, and a Council lieutenant. I defeated the Kerner and the Freakshow minion, but the mission would not complete until I'd defeated the two Council mobs, even though they were definitely not part of the Kerner's 'crew'.

I'd be happy, as an intermediate update to the Citadel TF, to have him use some of his processing power to make a more efficient set of mission assignments, so you start by hitting Council bases in IP, then move to Talos Island for the remainder of the TF, instead of the constant back-and-forth that was clearly put in, back before the availability of Team Transporter and Mission Teleporter, to pad out the amount of time required for the TF.

I'm not sure how you would make it work internally, but I can see having the 'visible' part of the process be a contact in Ouro you can go to who applies a specialized form of temporal scaling to your character, locking them into an earlier stage of their life when they were a lower level, and you'd have to go back to the contact to have it removed. It would be necessary to adjust the code for determining if a contact thinks you're in their level range to recognize when a character is scaled and use their scaled level. As an afterthought, an amusing side effect of doing this would be to have any of your contacts that you've been scaled to below their level range give you the "you're not high enough level" spiel if you go to them, and "Who are you? How did you get this number?" if you try to call them, and not be able to use their 'store'.

Even if it was removed, the full text of Positron's dialog for technology and non-technology characters is on the old Paragonwiki page for Percy Winkler -- Talk to Positron. So it could be recovered and reinstated.

It's not just what hand you hold the weapon in; the animations for the attacks and idling tie into how the character moves, so it would be necessary to create a second version of all the animations in a powerset and all the possible secondaries where they interact with the primaries to allow you have your weapon in your other hand.

I can't see how removing 1k-2k of text would make enough difference in the game's size on disk to be worth removing. It may have been discussed, but I don't see how you could make CoH work within the limits of a console game controller; it would require a keyboard. For example, it's clear that ESO was designed around consoles, with its limit of six abilities plus an ultimate, with two sets (front bar/back bar) of abilities swappable (and any toggle not in both bars turns off when you swap) -- while in CoH I normally have three bars of ten powers, plus two overflow bars for less commonly used powers (three for my MMs), all immediately available. There's no way you could cram all that into the button limits of a game controller.

I haven't looked at the code to be certain, but I think that the Winter Lord is on a low-probability 'chance to spawn' randomizer for any 'naughty' result from clicking a present if the resultant spawn includes a boss. I can say with certainty, though, that the 'team size' difficulty setting is ignored when generating 'naughty' spawns -- I was unable to get more than the 'stock solo spawn' of three frostlings when solo, regardless of my team size setting, so you can't use that to try to increase the chances of getting a WL to spawn.

There's a separate mission in a different arc (Rise of the Vampyri, IIRC) where you assault a Council base where they have vampyri candidates wandering around, who are existing Council members who have been through some sort of selection process, which means that the fatties would need to make it through the intake conditioning and training, then prove themselves as Council agents to be selected for the vampyre conversion process. The wolf conversion, though, has less information available about it, so there aren't any good conclusions to be made.

It doesn't really make a bit of difference to gameplay, but there are some missions where the hostage selection needs to be better to fit the story. I just finished Long Jack's "Rescue unwilling recruits" mission, where you free four unwilling recruits from the clutches of the Council. Two of them were fat men in business suits; it seems to me that the Council would pick people in better shape when they run their press gangs -- you start with someone who's significantly overweight, and they may have some underlying medical condition that will lead them to croak before they get through conditioning training, wasting the time and effort put into them.

I'd be willing to bet that Positron's dialog is still buried in the game code/piggs; all that was done to the arc was change it so that you never got sent to Positron. There would have been no need to cut the conversation out of the piggs and force a big re-download for everyone's client, since the mission arcs are kept on the server.

Just before Christmas, Santa Claus gets a surprise visit from the Federal Aviation Administration. The examiner walks slowly around the sled, looking at each of the reindeer harnesses, the runners, and the sled's body. Then he weighs Santa and performs balance calculations to determine the sled's payload. OK, everything checks out," he says while stepping into the sleigh. "But you still have to pass the test flight." Santa jumps into the sleigh, then notices that the FAA examiner has a shotgun sitting across his lap. "What's that for?" he gulps. "Technically, I'm not supposed to tell you this" winks the examiner "but you're going to lose an engine on takeoff."

As part of this, I would recommend looking at a change to the ambush logic in general, so that the ambush spawn is targeted to go to the location where the player/team was when the ambush was triggered, particularly if the player/team is stealthed, rather than the way it seems to work now, where triggering an ambush almost always puts a homing beacon on the character triggering the ambush, and the ambush spawn follows the beacon, regardless of how far and fast the character moves. An example of the latter is the "Rescue the missing homeless people" mission in Kings Row that I recently completed, where the sewer map had one of those 'one path separates into three that all join up again' structures; I had gotten the hostages back -- with a Celerity:+Stealth IO active, moving in fits and starts to keep them following (hostages seem to be a little better about seeing through stealth, but I don't have hard numbers on it) -- to around the curve of one of the side paths in time to see two spawns of ambushers run in, turn right to run along the right path... then stop, turn around, and come straight for me, running through a spawn standing near the intersection that didn't react at all, even when I ran past them after defeating the two spawns that had turned around to come after me.

No; that would be the live cam of the Trojan Room coffee pot at the University of Cambridge. The camera was set up in 1991 and migrated from the internal lab network to the web in 1993.