srmalloy

The Experienced Marksman recipes are showing as Rare (orange), and the set shows as Rare (orange) enhancements under the 'Crafted Enhancements' category, but as Very Rare (purple) under the 'Attuned Enhancements' category. Since this is a 10-50 set, having the attuned enhancements show as purple misrepresents their ability to be slotted at lower levels.

Or, if you want a more lore-based reason, the Echo zones don't have any mission content because they're a mirror of how those zones existed in the past, and your characters weren't in their databases back then, so the contacts have no idea who you are, and won't talk to you to offer missions because you're not registered.

The PvP in CoH at least has some attempts at leveling the participants, avoiding the worst of PvP that I've experienced in other MMOs, where it seems to be populated by jerks whose sole measure of their "leet skillz" as a gamer is how fast their level-capped combat monster with BiS gear can gank lowbies fresh out of the training zone, and who run like scared bunnies if they're ever put in a situation that even vaguely resembles a fair fight.

So, instead of inconveniencing the people who farm Empyrean merits to turn them into Reward merits, you're going to more significantly inconvenience everyone? Just what do you think these people were doing with their converted reward merits? I expect in virtually every case, the answer winds up at the Auction House, whether it's buying convertors and selling them directly or buying convertors and using them on cheap IOs to turn them into expensive ones to sell. At what point does what you get lose the 'taint' of having purchased it with reward merits? If I buy a recipe with merits and craft it, can I then sell it on the AH, or does the fact that the recipe was bought with merits make it account-bound, too? If I craft an IO and use convertors I bought with merits on it to turn it into a different IO, does that make the new IO account-bound, because I wouldn't have it if it weren't for the merit-purchased convertors? If an IO remains account-bound after being crafted from a merit-purchased recipe, does it remain so after being converted into a different IO, even if the convertor was obtained from a drop? If I use a merit-purchased catalyst on an IO, does that make the attuned/superior IO account bound? And now you've doubled inventory issues, because you're going to have to track the things bough with merits separately from drops or things bought on the AH -- four Recharge recipes, but two of them are merit purchases and two of them are drops, so they're two separate entries in your inventory. The same for convertors, boosters, unslotters, and any other thing you can both buy with merits and get as drops that stacks. For everything else, you're going to have to add a field to the item database to record whether that item is account-bound or not. And once the decisions about inheritance of account binding are thrashed out, the code to handle that will need to be written.

Black Scorpion on the dais in Atlas Park as the trainer for a real "wait, what?" moment...

I just wish the damn Photon Seekers weren't so desperately suicidal, and would spread out more; after watching them go from summon to suicide in about a second, I named them just so I could steal a line from Rock and Rule: "This is Toad, Sleazy, and Zip. Mes assistantes stupide."

Every time I've taken Terra Volta, I go to the factory building SE of the base portal; on the north side near the NW corner is a spawn of eleven standing there, then over the central E/W ridge of the building and turn left for the next spawn to finish the hunt. Done in under a minute, then out to help finish IP before heading to Talos and/or FF.

On the extremely rare occasions that I've done something like this, I ask the person building the team to hold a spot, and that I'm switching to [character name], and after I switch, send them a tell saying that I switched from [original character name] to join, so that they get confirmation at both ends of the switchover that I'm the right person. But for the most part, particularly with a team that's close to full, I'll assume that the leader can fill the team and start in the time it takes me to switch, so I'll just let it go by.

Or if it's only going to have kicks, rename it something like 'Savate'...

And I misread the caption in that image as "No One Comes Home Without Bagpipes", which would give it a completely different kind of horror...

The text from the patch notes is "Completing the Weekly Strike Target for the first time each week on a max level character that receives a Notice of the Well salvage, will also earn 1-2 Prismatic Aether Particle salvage depending on the length of the content completed." (emphasis mine) So if you're not running the WST on a 50, or you're running it again after having already received a Notice, you don't get the automatic PAP reward.

In what was almost certainly a lag-induced condition, and not inherent to the issue I described, I had an incident yesterday where, when switching from Bright Nova to Human form, my Peacebringer character fell far enough before her toggles turned on that she hit the ground and actually took damage. Admittedly, the one point of damage is hardly going to be consequential, but it does illustrate that there is a disconnect between switching out of Bright Nova with its inherent Flight and removing the suppression on Energy Flight and Combat Flight.

I know that this has come up before, and the upshot appears to be that conversion to other sets is determined by what other sets are available at the lowest end of the set range, and Air Burst is a 10-50 set, and is the only Ranged AoE Damage set at level 10, so there's no 'in type' conversion available for it, and the 'by rarity' conversion will be limited to whatever sets are also available at level 10.

Aargh. The link I tried to put in my comment didn't go through. Let's try this again: Paragonwiki on Influence. Admittedly, it's a high-level abstraction, and the devs seem to have assumed that the players would be more heavily into roleplaying and the world behind the game than the "fsck the lore, I don't want to take the time to play the game; PL me to 50 as fast as possible" fixation that has kept AE filled with sitters (for good or ill; they're at least participating in the game, and AE has a number of limitations that means that they'll come out of it at some point, to varying degrees of 'how do I do this?' that you get by level 10 or so running missions from contacts). I suppose it's a remnant of their having come to developing the game from PnP gaming, where the players would be invested much more heavily in the game world, instead of treating their characters like whatever hand cannon they've pulled out of their gun safe for this round of play.

Piker. That has nothing on the sub-contrabass recorder.

Except for one thing. The XP boosts trade off inf received for increased XP; if you're not getting any inf from AE missions, then what are you trading off to get the extra XP? If AE missions didn't give inf rewards, then XP boosters would have to be disabled as WELL inside AE missions, otherwise you're just getting free XP.

It wouldn't be the current farming arrangement, though, because watching the same heroes or villains running through the same mission over and over and over and over again would rapidly become boring, and the cluster of doorsitters doing absolutely nothing would generate no interest at all. Competitions where there was a stock mission and participants would compete to get the best clear time, with inf or drops awarded to the top finishers could work, although again, the current farming arrangement where you run missions that give you no real challenge wouldn't be a draw to the public. There are a number of ways that you could make AE into a spectator sport, but none of them work with the farming that it's used for now. Having, say, a monthly rotation of AE missions where the best completion times were recorded on a leader board by team size, perhaps awarding a tiered badge like the "N time the victor" badge from the Katie Hannon TF for the top finisher, or just a series of badges for finishing first once, ten times, a hundred times, etc.

Keep the original side -- Corrutes.

Actually, you should be getting XP from AE missions, since they are supposed to be a simulation of reality, so that you're learning to use your powers the same way you would out in the 'real world'. Drops is something that AE itself would have to accommodate; since you're in a digital simulation, nothing you receive inside a mission has any existence outside, so AE itself would have to award them to you to match what you 'earned' in the mission. Influence (infamy, information), though, no. The game lore for the currency is that inf represents your reputation, and the willingness of others to do things to support you -- and I don't see how crawling into your electronic navel at level 1, then coming out at level 50, would give you any reputation whatsoever with the public -- "You're a 'Hero of the City'? What was your name again? I never heard of you." Now, I realize that this last is going to be hugely unpopular, and people are going to say that inf is just a currency, but then it comes back to how you earn a 'real world' currency inside a digital simulation. And this is just my opinion, and I have little to no influence (heh) on the HC staff in this regard.

Is it possible to tweak the way that Peacebringer Photon Seekers are summoned/move so that they don't appear stacked on top of each other and remain that way until they decide to kamiikaze whichever random enemy mob attracts their attention? It kind of defeats the purpose of being able to name them if all you see above the Photon Seeker glow is a multiply-overlaid garble. It's a fairlly minor thing, but other uncontrollable pets, like fire imps and seeker drones, spawn away from each other, so it should be possible for Photon Seekers as well.

...or to have something done about the way that, during invasion events, mobs spawning in are targetable even before they appear visually, but are not attackable for several seconds after appearing, often remaining in an unattackable state until they use their first attack, or despawning without ever becoming attackable.

This was identified in another thread as the female Crey Field Agents having a level range of 30-30, so they spawn below mission level in higher content.

I'm certain that this isn't properly a bug, but there is a corner case for the WST. If a character does the WST while they are sub-50, then ding 50, unlock their alpha slot, and then do the WST again, they will get the Assistant badge (if they don't have it), correctly receive only the base XP for the TF, and will not receive a Notice of the Well, and because they did not receive a Notice, will not receive the Prismatic Aether Particle(s) reward. With the (presumptive) way that the WST rewards work, it's doing the right thing in not awarding a Notice (and the PaPs), but I wanted to throw out for comment the question of whether the game not being able to identify when a player has not received a Notice for completing a WST that week and award one for a WST completion is a sufficiently severe problem to warrant attention by the HC staff, or whether the number of times this specific situation will occur is small enough to not be worth putting in a special case for.

This had me laughing, remembering that I'd looked at the Titan Icon character save file for one of my characters that I'd exported from Live before the shutdown, and I'd noticed that they still had a rock in their inventory from the very first Halloween event...

In the entire live run of CoH, I was the only one to complain to Positron about that. I still cringe inside every time I take a character into a port zone and see "safe water" buoys parked ten feet away from a dock. At the first NCsoft exhibit at the San Diego Comic-Con, I even gave him a printout of the IALA Maritime Buoyage Standard so that he could see what the correct buoys should look like. But when I approached him years after that and mentioned the buoys, he said that 'that made two people who had commented about it, so maybe they needed to take a look at it' -- implying that they'd just ignored it after I complained about it the first time.