srmalloy

It's not really a zone geometry error, but in south Steel Canyon at [-3814.8 -0.0 2039.1], the pier supporting the E/W tram track right before it jogs north often has a spawn that appears in the concrete pier base; the spawn location needs to be shifted a bit so that there aren't mobs inside the pier:

When I saw that the HC total was 799, I had to load up the page and make the 800th vote...

That's a game engine artifact. If a mob has movement queued, and it gets stunned, the stun doesn't interrupt the movement, so they'll stagger off in the 'stunned' pose at whatever movement rate they normally use -- which, for the Crey tanks, is significant. I think that getting stunned should interrupt any queued action including movement, replacing it with the slow 'stagger' movement, but I suspect that changing the movement code for that would be an ugly dive into what is likely to be a pile of spaghetti code.

With the accidental change to the soapbox texture that various mobs stand on, and the winter event changing all thrown objects to presents (making some fights look like Santa's sleigh exploded overhead), it occurs to me that there's an opportunity to add some amusement to the event -- change the soapboxes out for presents. Since so many hero fights will leave discarded present boxes lying around, it's reasonable for NPCs to snag one if they need a box to stand on when orating.

'Venom Trap' for the one in the Poison set, perhaps, to avoid the redundancy of 'poison' in the name of a power in the Poison set, and to reflect that it's the one with a damage component.

Citadel even more so because of its "Independence Port! Talos Island! Independence Port! Talos Island!" mission location alternation, which made it a particularly nasty slog on Live back before the availability of Team Transporter, especially when the IP missions were in the southwest corner of IP. Reworking it so that the first couple of missions were in IP, then the next few in Talos, and the final missions are on Striga where the Council have a big presence, would be more coherent.

Actually, I find that by the time I'm ready to make my T3 Alpha, I'll have run a WST and have the eight shards (or four and a G'rai Matter, depending on the type) to be able to use them to make the T3, saving the Empyrean merits for the higher slots or the T4.

I had taken my Rad/Atomic Blaster to Eden to defeat enough Paragon Protectors to finish out her Infiltrator badge, and ran into a clear demonstration of a fundamental problem with Countess Crey's Revenant Hero Project. I was flying above a spawn, and sniped down the Paragon Protector in the spawn. The Medic in the spawn rezzed him, and he flew up after me. I blasted him down, and he fell back into the spawn... where a Geneticist rezzed him. He came up again, and was sent back down... and another Geneticist rezzed him. This went on and on, with the three rezzers always having one of them with their rez up. Eventually, the entire spawn disappeared, but not before I had gotten 62 defeats toward the Infiltrator badge from the one Paragon Protector. You have to admire their determination, if not their brains. I kept expecting the rezzers to do something like "Okay, Frank; you've had enough tries, you're done. Take the medi-port and go back to the lab." and stop rezzing him, but it took the entire spawn going away to stop it.

Doing the same thing with my Psi/EM Blaster, the ones that she doesn't one-shot seem to be all Rad or Psy, although most of them don't survive long enough to show which flavor they are. There is another bug that I've noticed with this character, and it appears to be a consequence of being too effective. Her Psionic Lance has a base range of 210 feet, and Boost Range adds about another 100 feet to that, but when she's attacking from just inside her max range when Boost Range is active, defeats don't count -- almost as if she's too far away to get credit, even though I see "You have defeated Paragon Protector" in the global window and "You hit Paragon Protector with your Psionic Lance for 1426.06 points of Psionic damage." in the Combat window.

Ummm... Lusca is a hexopus, with six tentacles, not eight; that would make the total 11, not 13. Also, the length of the fight is dependent on the team/league you have fighting; I was in a league of nine total heroes taking Lusca down this evening, and we almost spent more time waiting for it to resurface than on killing each tentacle. It would require special mechanics -- which is in itself an argument against it -- but if you're going to increase the merits you get for defeating Lusca, I'd prefer to have the game 'bank' two merits for each tentacle you help kill, with the merits you bank for the tentacles awarded if you help defeat the head. So if you got in at the start, and fought all six tentacles, you'd get 12 merits when you help defeat the head. You leave without helping defeat the head, and you get nothing. Join after two tentacles have been defeated, you only get 8 at final defeat. Wait until all six tentacles are down, then jump in and hit the head once (and I've seen people do just that), and you get nothing, just the XP fraction for the damage you did.

Seen in Pocket D=: [NPC] Dancer: I just love to dance. My body can't help but just move, you know? I like...do it for the endolphins. What a rush! That should be "endorphins", unless the point is to make the dancer out as being somewhat airheaded.

There is another reason why Babbage won't spawn, but it's not a regular enough occurrence to be coded around. If there is a zone-wide event like a zombie invasion or a Rikti assault, Babbage won't spawn.

Heard while standing around in Talos Island: [NPC] Van: Nice to hear about a task force on working in Steel Canyon. Makes me feel safer. The 'on working' feels as if it's either missing something or badly worded.

There's also the blueside mission in the blue tunnels where you encounter two Rikti, Stern and Krantz.

It depends on how the RNG works and how a program uses it to produce random numbers. For example, many system-level RNGs produce a pseudo-random 32-bit integer. One of the more common shortcuts used by coders unfamiliar with how RNGs work to get a limited random number range is to take the generated integer and MOD it to the range they want. This can inherently create bias. For example, if you have a RNG that creates a four-bit random integer from 0-15, and you use it to get a 0-9 number using MOD, you get the following results: RNG Result RNG Result 0 0 8 8 1 1 9 9 2 2 10 0 3 3 11 1 4 4 12 2 5 5 13 3 6 6 14 4 7 7 15 5 Note that 0-5 appears twice each in the result, while 6-9 only appear once each. Now, this is a very simplistic example, and one that would be guarded against by any decent RNG library, but it shows how not paying attention to the generation and subsequent calculation can distort the return.

And there's nothing you can really do by getting out of Pocket D into the space beyond the structure. You can visit the two motherships, the gas station, the TARDIS, and the other rocks floating out there, but you can't affect anything inside the structure except for hovering outside waving at the people inside. I've tried using ATT and Recall Friend (now Teleport Other) to try to help people get outside, and it doesn't work. I admit that I haven't tried pulling them up through the gap in the rock in the tiki lounge, but that's a real corner case and relies on their cooperation, so you can't use it for griefing. All of which makes it a really low-priority issue to be 'fixed'.

While the real answer is likely only known to NCsoft, there are a few things that I think contributed. First, because of the way that MMOs evolved in Asia, they are very group-centric; in many of them it's functionally impossible to do any significant advancement solo. CoH wasn't; its playstyle was foreign to what the people who played Asian MMOs expected, and as a result, the Korean regionalization fell on its face. This greatly lowered the perception of the game to NCsoft management. Second, most Asian MMOs don't rely subscriptions for their income, but rather on a cash shop for better and flashier gear; the design of CoH made it difficult to monetize that way -- think about the costume packs that were released, and imagine having to buy each costume part separately for each character that used it, or enhancements that were better than what you could get in game, but which you'd outlevel and have to replace. This also pushed the perception of CoH down, making it unimportant, since it couldn't be turned into a steady stream of microtransactions. Then, while CoH itself was turning a profit, NCsoft had saddled Paragon Studios with an undisclosed development project, whose expenses made Paragon Studios as a whole lose money. Finally, Paragon Studios was trying to buy itself out from under NCsoft, instead of being a properly subordinate subsidiary (not behaving like a proper Korean business); Paragon Studios losing money justified shutting it down and removing this group of upstart employees who didn't understand their proper place in a Korean corporation. As an aside to this, reading some of the posts on job boards about NCsoft's US component, the primary complaint was that the management was shipped in from Korea expecting to run the division like a Korean company with no understanding of American corporate culture or the business operations they were managing (after all, if you've got an MBA, you can manage any business, right? You don't need to have any understanding of what it does, management is the same). For example, people were expected to put in unpaid overtime, simply because that was how you show that you're dedicated to your job, and were marked down in performance appraisals if they didn't.

I automatically recolor Radiation powers from the incorrect green default (the stereotype of radiation being green comes from the color emitted by the phosphor used in radium paint for illuminated indicators) to the cyan blue of Cherenkov radiation, and this is the way it's always been -- no matter what the color you use for your powers, secondary effects remain the default green.

Once you activate your teleport -- and you have to be careful not to jog the target when you click, or you won't get through -- you wind up on top of the rocks making up the walls of the Tiki Lounge. From there you work down to the edge of the building and drop onto the rock under that corner as you get out. From there, if you don't have Fly, you can't get on top of the building to get to the TARDIS (or over to the gas station or either of the Rikti motherships).

Back before shutdown, there was no Icon in Atlas Park, nor an entrance to Pocket D, so you had to run a gauntlet of one form or another to reach a tailor.

Actually, the trek is less dangerous if you go to Kings Row, schlep over to the west side and the passage into Independence Port, then make the relatively short run from the gate there to the Icon due west of you. Although the trek in Steel got less gulpy after they linked all the tram lines so you could go to the North tram in Steel Canyon rather than having to make your way from the diagonally opposite corner.

In the mission from Debra Costel where you meet Debra Rosenfield, then watch her from the security cameras as she goes into an office map to meet a Skulls recruiter, my character had a path aura... which Debra acquired during her time in the office map. This looks to be a continuation of the relatively minor issue where costume parts that the character whose identity you're assuming doesn't have carry through into the mission (the mission from Matthew Habashy where a female character assumes the form of a Girlfriend from Hell will pick up the character's tail if they have one), as well as other innocuous quirks -- if you summon a buff pet before entering the mission, the buff pet will remain following the character you're portraying in the mission, and a MM with pet(s) out will still have them in the mission. It doesn't really do anything to affect the mission, but it's one more of the things that the game doesn't check for when swapping your character out for a new model.

Bzzzt. There are two versions of long integer -- signed and unsigned. Signed long integers have a range of 2,147,483,647 to -2,147,483,648. An unsigned long integer has a range of 0 to 4,294,967,295. Since you can never have a negative amount of influence, there's no point in keeping the influence total as a signed integer, which allows you to double the maximum influence without doing anything more than changing the definition of the fields for influence from signed to unsigned -- the bit length remains the same. On the other hand, I wouldn't put it past the original devs to have taken a shortcut and hardcoded the database to use signed integers for everything, which would keep this change from working without significant amounts of programming.

I picked Vredefort for that reason with a Seismic/Earth blaster