Mjolnerd

Clearing out some unused alts, there's some good stuff here I think: Arach-Kid Catsai Cybersecurity Jail Bird Juke-Box Hero Petal to the Metal Professor Primal Smooth Operetta Stoplight Vigilant World Champion Get 'em while they're hot!

Checking a few random names tonight, I discovered both Fistfight Sonata and Gunfight Sonata are available (get it? It's clever!). I kept Frostbite Sonata for myself.

I was floored when, checking on a whim a few days ago, I found both Cybersecurity and Cyber-Security available on Excelsior. It was really helpful because I've been searching forever for a more evocative name for my bionic time-cop with a laser shield. I'm currently sitting on both versions, but once I decide whether I like it better with or without the hyphen I'll re-release the other one (along with her old name!).

No idea what you two are talking about, I think the colors we have already look TOTALLY NATURAL.

Discord is fine as a chat program, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why the entire world has decided it's the best way -- or even a good way -- to disseminate information. Especially information someone might need to refer back to at a later date.

Both the hero and villain Death from Below trials are fundamentally the same. One has Longbow trainers at the beginning of each section and the other has Arachnos, but apart from that they're identical. And that's... fine, I guess? But the enemy groups in the redside version don't really make a lot of sense. Not as much as they could, anyway. And making them specific to the Rogue Isles, but more than that just making them different from the blueside version, might entice a few more people over to that side of the servers. I also can't imagine this would be too terribly difficult or intensive of a change to make? My suggestions: Replace Hellions with Infected Replace Vahzilok with Snakes Replace Lost with Coralax Replacing the Hydra Heads with something else is more of an undertaking, so I wouldn't worry about that. The other boss fights don't even need to change, really -- just scale up a normal unit from each of the new groups to AV status the same way the trial does now. Obviously rename the Cadaver Counter and The Cleanser badges (even more reason for people to cross over and participate!) but the way they're actually earned could be the same.

/getglobalname Tiger Man gives a global handle of @Leopard. /getglobalname Armsman shows it's owned by @Nostrum. Hit them up in-game and see if they respond.

Clearly some of y'all aren't familiar.

Sure, but you never know. Maybe I mis-counted the last hundred times I checked it. Maybe they changed the rules about name length and I just missed the announcement. Maybe I've unknowingly done something to please the electric pixies that live inside my computer and use their digital magic to make it all work right and they'll grant me this favor in return by letting it slide just this once. The fae are capricious, that's all I'm saying.

Ladies and gentlemen, I'm just a caveman. The idea of not fully committing to the gag frightens and confuses me!

I have the same issue with "Unfrozen Caveman Hero" -- it's one letter too long. I still check it every once in a while just in case.

Combat Teleport is something I want to be able to use quickly, during a fight, to reposition myself or get out of trouble. I don't want to have to toggle on "Teleport Mode" for it to work.

Equating a power --especially a single-target power-- having knockback to "things randomly flinging around" is a PEBCAK issue.

I went with a Traps/AR defender.

This is a bigger project, but it's probably the way to go eventually. Just the ability to sort by name/archetype/level/alignment at any given time (or, dare I dream it, a two- or three- or four-level version of that -- sort by Alignment, then AT, then level) would be a massive QOL improvement. It's one of those things that probably wasn't needed in the before-times, but with a thousand character slots, some additional organizational tools are needed. In fact, with the looming name release policy implementation, being able to sort by number of days since last login would save a lot of headaches too.

/getglobalname Frog shows it owned by @Vulture, this appears to be a list of offers. I just released more unused names: Sabaton Rocking Horse Miss Illusion Egomaniac Papa Loa

I'm not sure I understand the point of this post. Are you asking for some kind of change to be made? Because there's literally a whole separate "Suggestions & Feedback" forum for that -- suggest something! If not, are you looking for solutions or workarounds from players? Just complaining/venting? In what way specifically are sentinels' patron/ancillary powers "noob junk"?

And it's worth mentioning that while money/business is no longer the motivation to insert systems into the game which keep players feeling like they need to come back and try again tomorrow, there's still a reason for Homecoming to cultivate that "maintain your subscription" mentality, and for us as players to want them cultivating that mentality -- because it keeps the servers populated. If too many players ever feel like they're "finished," they'll play something else instead because there's nothing more for them to do here. And that means fewer teams for the rest of us to join, fewer Incarnate trials, fewer people selling things on the market, fewer people in the chat, less activity on the forums and Discord and social media, and generally just a drop in player investment across the board. Which only leads to more people leaving due to that lack of interaction, whether it's a deliberate decision ("this game is dying, I'm going to look for something else") or just a general, passive lack of interest ("there's nothing I need right now, I don't think I'll bother logging on today"). And that, in turn, leads to more people leaving, and so on, and so on, and eventually you end up with Ghost Town of Heroes. The idea is to provide players with goals. Games like this are a delicate balancing act between too much and too little -- an exercise in giving players enough that they always feel like they're accomplishing something, but never letting them feel like they've accomplished everything.

That's exactly how it's intended to work -- not every drop is supposed to be perfectly tailored to the person picking it up. If every enhancement you found automatically matched your origin, there would be no reason to even have enhancements of different origin types. This is, like, the one thing that origin does in the game. Besides that, it helps to make better enhancements that work for you specifically harder to find -- training/no-origin enhancements are weak, but anyone can slot them, so 100% of them are usable by any given character (assuming they have a power that takes enhancements of that type). Dual-origin enhancements are better but you're only going to be able to use about 40% of the ones you find because the rest will be for a different origin. Single-origin enhancements are even better than that, but only about 20% will work for any given character. "Better numbers = harder to get" is MMO Drops 101. And also, admittedly, it's all a holdover from earlier in the game's lifetime when the whole Invention system didn't exist, and you literally couldn't get SOs before level 22 or DOs before 12, and stores weren't even marked on the map because Jack Emmert wanted players to run across them by accident and their locations to spread via word of mouth. But it's still a deliberate design choice that made sense at the time.

I'm not going to pretend to know enough about markets in general or CoH's market in particular to say how this would affect it in any great detail, but I'm pretty sure it would. Specifically, by making people less likely to use it. For crafting purposes, at least. Having all salvage of a given rarity be fungible on the market only, the way it is now, is nice because it means you're always able to buy what you need or sell what you don't, but this change would bypass that need altogether -- for good and ill. If all that's required to craft the enhancement I'm trying to make is "any old orange salvage" instead of an Alien Blood Sample specifically, then I'm not going to go to the market to buy one, and that means you're not going to sell one (of whatever type you have for sale). You know how right now you can count on any given orange drop translating into a half million inf or so? That probably goes away. The prices of invention salvage in general are probably going to bottom out pretty substantially. Would that be the end of the world? No. But it's an effect that a significant portion of the player base would absolutely feel to some degree or another. I do wonder, though, if there's a less extreme version of the idea that could be implemented to provide some of the benefit but with the drawbacks being less: Make salvage fungible for crafting purposes, but only for things that match in both rarity and type (arcane/tech)? So if the recipe calls for a Synthetic Intelligence Unit, you could also use a Positronic Matrix or a Rikti Alloy instead, but not an Empowered Sigil or a Mu Vestment. Leave salvage requirements for set enhancements as they are, but retool common/generic enhancements to require generic components? So a common enhancement that currently wants 1 Regenerating Flesh, 1 Spirit Thorn and 1 Hydraulic Piston would ask for 3 common salvage (or 2 common arcane salvage and 1 common tech salvage, if we combine it with my previous idea). Allow substitution of high-rarity salvage of any kind for specific salvage of a lower rarity? So if I had an uncommon, say a Titanium Shard, I could use it in place of any common salvage I didn't have (again, possibly limited to only tech salvage, with similar substitutions working on an arcane-for-arcane basis). These last two are probably more complex to implement than they sound, since they would require the Invention system to be able to make decisions about when to substitute these things, and which ones, and for what, and/or they'd need additional UI to get input from the player -- if I have two pieces of salvage that could act as substitutes for one that I don't have, the decision of which one to use has to be made somehow.

I don't disagree, I can't imagine more than a handful of these contests are being rigged like that, because, yeah -- why bother? But I'm not sure that I'd call it malice or stupidity in most cases. More than anything, I think there's a performative aspect to it: people want to be the star of the server for a few minutes: hey everybody, look at me, I'm giving away all this money, aren't I nice? It's not necessarily a bad thing, performing in front of a crowd can be fun. And having someone perform for you can also be fun.

Looks great -- much better than any of my attempts to do something with it. Glad it found a good home!

A combination of two factors: Old habits die hard -- The same reason people are still staging Incarnate trials RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE PORTAL THAT OTHER PEOPLE MIGHT WANT TO USE FOR SOMETHING ELSE in Ouroboros instead of the big courtyard in the special Incarnates-only zone that was put there by the original devs, in part, specifically for that purpose. And why nobody uses the LFG tab to flag themselves as looking for teams/TFs/iTrials/whatever so that other people can find them with a quick search instead of just yelling that you've got a spot open in chat. Learning a new way to do things is hard, especially when you're already used to the old way. I didn't know that was a thing -- People try to use Echo Plaza for events every once in a while, and the chat immediately floods with people asking "where? What's that? How do I get there? What's a 'tunnel network'? I'm under Atlas for the CC, where is everybody, did I miss it?" I mean, in CoH communities on social media like Facebook and Reddit, I see posts almost daily with current, active players being directed to these very forums for some reason or another (password resets, help with builds), and most of them respond with shock that the forums exist at all EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD TO HAVE COME HERE AT LEAST ONCE JUST TO SET UP THEIR ACCOUNT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Basically, change is scary, and we're all somehow old farts set in our ways and tiny little crybabies refusing to let Mom and Dad change our diapers, both at the same time. Or at least the ability to change graphics settings from inside the editor without losing your work. "This looks great on Ultra settings with cel shading turned on -- I wonder if it's anywhere near as awesome using Recommended OH GOD MY EYES"

"Bland" in the general sense of the word, or the MMO sense? Because having bigger shoulders and more pointy bits doesn't always make something look better. Frankly, a lot of designs people come up with are really, really busy these days. There's nothing wrong with clean lines and readability. That said, I've won a few costume contests, I've lost a few costume contests where I totally agreed with the decision about who won instead of me, and I've lost a ton of costume contests where I went "really?" Of all the designs here you think THAT's the best one?" The thing that irritates me isn't people having different tastes than I do, it's how ungodly long it takes most of them to announce their damn decision. You've got fifty people standing around and not playing the game for like a half hour, sometimes longer -- and let's face it, probably four of them are actually in the running to win... maybe hurry things up a bit?

I don't think it matters which armchair copyright lawyer is technically right as much as whether Homecoming's legal team (do they have a legal team?) wants to mess with Disney's and/or Warner Bros' legal teams about it. I'm guessing they don't. Use names similar to those of existing characters at your own risk; the cemeteries are full of people who had the right of way. Anyway, I released the following today: Chessboard Devkit Four Elements Giant Saguaro Glacierface Inkarnate Miss Fire One-Hit Wonder Pharaoh's Curse Pop Culture Ripperologist Rotten Egg Silent Sentinel Vacant Championship