srmalloy

Character names are constrained to be unique because that's necessary to uniquely identify them in the database of heroes/villains registered with Paragon City/Arachnos. But while Ajax is registered as a hero, there's nothing preventing some street thug from calling himself Ajax as well. Or we could do it the other way, and because there's been a camelid called a vicuna for hundreds of thousands of years, they have priority, so your forum account is going to be changed to "genericwanker34592", since there can only be one use of the name in the entire world.

And in counterpoint, Zect, I'm disappointed to see that, between the changes that have been made with new TF contact and the people who are fixated on running it at max difficulty who grab onto one way to succeed as if it's the only way to succeed, it's resurrecting the "r u healzorz?" by organizers demanding specific mixes of ATs, powersets, and even individual powers, locking out people who don't min-max their characters to fit the holy meta. One of the things that made CoH so much fun, even back when it had just released, was that you could make team with virtually anything and have it work, and I'm seeing that get ground down to turn CoH into an MMO distinguished from the others only by having an awesome costume editor that doesn't depend on the gear you have. It's not WoW, and getting bigger and bigger sledgehammers to try to pound it into the same hole is a disservice to the game.

And a regular guitar, for all the people wanting to create El Kabong homage characters...

That would, if I remember Positron's description of the way "add on" costume parts like the chest detail, head detail 1 and 2, and back worked, require creating a new anchor point on the character model, then change all the logos to use this new anchor, and then recode the costume editor UI in a manner similar to what they did for asymmetrical gloves and boots, so that the logos had their own category.

I remember when I had a dialup connection, and the ballpark figure I used was ten minutes per megabyte for download times... and now it's "20Mb file? I've got a minute; sure, I'll take a look"...

They've already got rooster tails, but only for the Rumpless breed of chicken...

And I'm getting some giggles thinking about a 'combat aura' peacock tail, with teammates complaining about your blocking vision...

I generally assume that it's a piece of sloppy code in the rendering engine.

There are a few examples -- one is in the grassy area east of the wall separating the rest of AP from the Argosy Industrial section -- where the 'instanced outdoor mission' functionality causes issues. In that location, you see a spawn of Clockwork under a tree that will disappear if you move closer, and reappear if you back away. I don't think this is the cause of the issue Rudra is describing, though, because the instanced outdoor functionality isn't widely used;the Paragon devs, IIRC, reported that they had problems with making it work right, so it was pretty much limited to Matthew Habashy's and Aaron Thierry's arcs in AP, outside of Praetoria where it was first used.

I've had occasions -- always out in a zone -- where I will find mobs that are invisible, with only their shadows rendered (which implies that it's a bug, because characters with a stealth power active don't have shadows), but are nonetheless targetable, and if I move around, I can get them to render.

All of the Paragon devs will have found other work, and I'm pretty sure that, until the HC staff can work out some sort of legal accommodation with NCsoft to legitimize HC's status, none of them would be able to work on Homecoming in any sort of recognized capacity. HC is trying to work out a legitimate status for itself with NCsoft, and I think that they would tapdance around doing anything overt to interfere with the (perceivedly glacial) negotiations to that end.

As I said, it's theoretically possible; I've spent enough years working with databases to know how I'd do it. But that's predicated on being able to work with organized and structured code, not with the rat's nest that makes up most of the CoH server code. I shudder to think of how much code would need to be rewritten to clean things up to where a sweeping change could be made, and that doesn't even consider the other things that would need to be updated -- a final solution to name collisions, cross server chat, and a host of other things.

No, it couldn't, because even in a totally instanced environment, the players on a team have their character information stored in their server's database; an instanced mission has to be run on a single server, and that server won't be able to read the character data from another server's database. It's theoretically possible to fiddle with the database engine to share databases across multiple instances, but I wouldn't want to have to write the code that utilizes that functionality to manage character data from each individual server; I can see where it could introduce some nasty lag.

They're going to have a big uphill PR road ahead of them -- the Disciple history badge is for collecting the plaques marking the history of Hero Corps in Paragon City, with the plaque in Boomtown partially buried in rubble loosely in the middle of the zone (-686, 272, 3123) stating "After the destruction of Hero Corp's first Paragon City office, the company planned to rebuild their headquarters here. But public sentiment could not have been more firmly set against them. Despite the patronage of Countess Crey, this site remained vacant, and in October 1999 Hero Corps was forced to move on to another city."

Yes, well, try creating a bio that makes extensive use of non-ASCII characters. CoH supports Unicode, but at a cost -- for example, including the name "Институт Эволюционной Физиологии и Биохимии им. И.М. Сеченова" ('I.M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry') takes up 114 characters in a bio, even though it's only 62 letters, because each Unicode character is 16 bits wide, taking up two 'characters' of the bio space.

In fact, getting attuned purples jerks you over, because you can boost regular purples; boosting a set of purples to +5 won't get you much on the primary effect, which usually hits the ED barrier pretty hard, but generally at least two of the secondary increases will benefit significantly.

What is stopping players from building an armor-based character, taking a self heal from an existing powerset or pool, and defining it as a repair function? I've got a Bots/Dark MM whose backstory is having been a Soviet military research project to develop a director for a team of combat robots which accidentally became sentient; I think of Howling Twilight as the ejection of a cloud of nanites that extract energy from its target to power them to reconstruct the entities around him.

That depends on which mechanism behind time travel is the one that's actually working. If I'm remembering the arc correctly, in the Pilgrim's arc, your final mission is from Twilight's Son, who sends you back to engineer a change in history, to no net effect, and he mentions in your debrief that this type of mission has not generally produced the desired outcomes. This increases the likelihood that, when you undertake an arc through the Pillar of Ice and Flame, you are actually going back to a close but parallel time stream, not your actual past, so the increase in familiarity with the arc's contact exists only in that time stream -- and after completing the arc, if you use the Pillar to do the same arc again, you get sent back to yet another time stream where you hadn't done it. So no matter how many times you do an arc through the Pillar, it doesn't affect your relationship with that arc's contact in your native time stream.

It all came from the same bloom produced from the iron sand; because the iron sand was not smelted at a high enough temperature to fully melt the iron, the bloom created has different grades of steel in different parts of the bloom. The smith had to separate the pieces the tamahagane was broken into according to the quality of the steel, making final determination of where each piece would go according to its behavior when first hammered into thin plates before being forge welded together. Some swordsmiths would separate the tamahagane pieces into more grades -- Masamune Goro allegedly created swords from seven different grades of tamahagane, for example. The actual construction of the base sword billet depends on the smith; the crudest method just used one homogeneous block, while many used the trough-and-core method, while others would use a more composite construction, with a more ductile core, a very hard edge, and side/back panels of a steel less rigid (and brittle) than the edge, as well as other geometries for layering the different grades of metal.

It was already established (I'm not in a good position to search the forums for the post) that pool-power copies of powerset abilities have, IIRC, a doubled recharge time. Replacing the single-target attack with a snipe that, instead of having a doubled recharge time, doesn't get the in-combat 'fast snipe', continues the policy of making the pool power a weakened version of the powerset ability while keeping it distinct as a power.

Making the pool power a snipe that does not have the fast snipe option, so that it's always the interruptible long animation, would be a decent way to help balance the power by making it less generally useful while still giving it situational advantages.

Depending on the skill of the smith, folded-steel edges can be kept sharper than regular forged billets, but the actual purpose of the folding is to address the crap quality of the raw material they had to work with. Satetsu (iron sand) produces a low-quality bloom of steel (tamahagane) that does not have a uniform character; the Smith will break it into pieces and sort them into harder and softer steel by eye. The pieces chosen for the blade are wrapped together and heated to be hammer welded into one mass, then folded repeatedly to drive out impurities and voids in the billet. This process is necessary to turn the low-quality steel into something that can equal -- not outclass -- the steel in other swords. This material is then forged into a trough shape, and an inner layer of more ductile steel is welded as the core to give the blade strength, then the blade is shaped, a tapered layer of clay for the final quenching giving the edge its temper and creates the curvature of the blade. It's possible to make an excellent blade this way, but it takes considerably more skill, which is why the best swordsmiths are revered; the average katana was of much lower quality -- from simply mediocre to having defects that compromised the blade (too hard and brittle, too soft, voids in the steel reducing its strength, etc.).

That one I fell back on an obvious solution a while ago. Exit your base portal to Striga, then park your character on top of the mausoleum just NW of the base portal; problem solved.

You're right; I must have missed the fine print on all of the 'use on defeated opponent' powers that says that they can't be used on any BP except bosses... Oh, wait... And while we're at it, we can have the HC staff go after all of the other inconveniences in the game. CoT ghosts are resistant to Dark damage; this handicaps characters with Dark-based powers, so they need to be changed to remove that. And mobs that attack with powers that go against AoE defense, and all you have is Ranged defense? Can't have that, either. In fact, let's just grind the game down to where nothing is different except visual effects between powers, and the only difference between NPC mobs is the model.

Heaven forfend that you might have to display some vague acquaintance with tactical decision making, the same way that characters with anchored debuffs need to pick an anchor that leaves a body on defeat if they don't want the debuff to turn off instantly when the anchor is defeated.