Wild Claw

Quite a few, actually. 🙂 I'm always surprised to find out how many people still speak the various Insular Celtic languages (Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Welsh, Cornish, and Bretton). I can sorta get by in Scottish Gaelic, but I wouldn't call myself fluent by a long shot. Tuath... changes quite a bit depending on which version of Gaelic you're speaking. As I understand it, Irish Gaelic tuath basically means 'rural' or 'the country', which comes from an older meaning of 'tribe'. In Scottish Gaelic it just means 'north'. I dunno about the rest of them, but that should give you an idea of how much the meaning shifts around. I believe the writers of this game meant to reference the myths of the Tuatha De Danann, which supposedly translates into 'Tribe of the Goddess Danu'. Many people think they're Irish-only, but cognates of these deities/heroes/whatevs wander around all the various Celtic peoples. In any case, I'm not aware of any translations of Tuatha where it was supposed to represent just 'men', as in the male gender.

Oh neat. I was completely unaware of this. Never mind then. 🙂

Not that big of a deal, but I ran into this one today, so thought it might be wise to get it on a list somewhere. Sometimes you get more than one mission using the same door. If one of them is a timed mission, it's kinda aggravating to get shunted into the *other* one instead. It currently seems to run on whichever one was picked up first, though I've only ran into this one two or three times so that's not a good sample size. Is there some way to get it to give you the chance to choose which one to go in on? Or maybe prioritize timed missions over untimed ones?

Actually, there's a thematic way around it without switching to blue. Kill 25 signature heroes and you get the Hero Slayer Badge. That unlocks Lord Schweinzer, who can send you on any Mayhem Mission directly.

I'll be honest, I'm a bit puzzled at the moment about this. I've been slowly working my widow up (currently level 34, turning off XP on a regular basis to go through all the mission storyarcs redside). So far she's only really squishy against a couple of the Hero/Archvillains like Back Alley Brawler (Alan Desslock's Longbow List), and Sea Witch (Lorenz Ansaldo's Carpe Diem). Which I expected, and I've needed to load up with purple inspirations to take them down solo. And I completely failed at trying to solo Bat'Zul in Virgil Tarikoss' Strike Force, but again it was more me being curious if I could and I'm obviously not up to that skill-wise yet. Is there a problem at higher levels that I just haven't reached yet?

Thanks for the explanation on the fixes. I'm always curious as to *how* things went sideways. 🙂

Trickle down economics! 🙂

Ah. Never dived into the PvP zones myself, even for badges and the like, so I didn't realize the zone-wide auto-exemplaring feature already existed. Never mind me then. 😉

This brings something up that's been niggling at the back of my mind ever since I joined HC, but still hasn't fully formed. The sidekicking system allows you to exemplar down to a teammate, TaskForces exemplar you down to the maximum level of the TF, and Oroboros exemplars you down to the maximum level of the story mission. Are all of these the same code? If so, could it be extended? Meaning could auto-exemplaring be added to Hazard Zones so they are maintained as being appropriately 'Hazardous'? Just a weird thought that crossed my mind. Not fleshed out or anything, just a passing fancy.

However, I can see some new global Badges for account-wide accomplishments. Like the 'No Life' badge for maintaining 500 alts, or something. 😉

Hrmmm... Currency symbols are mostly the a letter from the name of the currency (often an italic version) with one or two lines through it, because money people are often singularly uninventive. Or is the symbol for the previous currency carried forward... for the same reason. 😉 For examples the dollar ($) and the pound sterling (£) are supposedly derived from the Spanish peso (which was legal currency in the US before they started striking their own coins), and the Roman libra (again the predecessor to the pound). Since Influence/Infamy/Information all start with I, if it was a true currency it's probably an I with two lines through it. Though it would be funny if Influence was (as in the designers were trying to say 'not a currency'), and Infamy was (as in 'ha, we've x'ed out your not-currency!')

Just adding another thing, while it occurs to me: Rectify the costume system. I know this isn't a little thing, I fully admit it's pretty big. But after years of additions and proliferation, of epics and npc pieces, of power customization and the like, the entire costume system is bit of a hash at this point, making it difficult to expand it any further. And given that it is one of the big attraction points of this game, it's fairly important. Attachment points, pet customization, gendered hugeness, glossy vs matte texture map selectors, expanded color palettes for main, secondary, and especially skin, are all things that are annoyingly difficult to change right now to one degree or another. So it might be worth taking a good, hard look at the whole appearance system, and rework it from base principles.

Just as a followup. Just logged in again, and it's all gone back to normal. So either logging out/logging in cleared the issue, or someone's gone and fixed whatever was causing my account to do this and hasn't sent me a note saying they did it yet. As much as I appreciate the staff here, I'm betting on logging out and in again. 😉

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I was starting a new Widow character last night and had just completed the first couple of missions when the markers on the compass and the UI (not the maps, but the actual UI) suddenly started reporting the locations of the contacts and mission doors as being in weird locations. For example, on the Matthew Burke mission to bring back a snake skin, when I click on the mission or the mission marker on the map, the compass and main UI direct me back to Burke rather than the snake hole. When I do the same for Kalinda's clear out a snake pit mission, or Kalinda herself, they both direct me to the Arachnos Headquarters building door for some random reason. Again, new character, and I did the first couple of missions fine, and then suddenly everything got scrambled. Finding those stupid snake holes without the compass/UI markers is somewhat annoying. 🙂

So out of curiousity, what do you do with the alternate costume slots for your characters, normally? Personally, I usually have one alter-ego/civilian casual wear, one civilian formal wear, and a supergroup version of the regular costume (because the colors never work right from costume item to costume item). Depending on the character I might have also have a clubbing costume, and a formal costume version. If the character tends to side-switch a lot: an alternate good/evil costume. And that's about when I start to run out of ideas for an individual character unless they're that one shapeshifter faerie I keep rerolling. So what kind of alternate costumes do you run?

I was hovering at -2599.0 99.1 -1621.8, in Mercy Island, looking at two RIP officers pushing a Skull around. However the Skull wasn't labeled, and when he had dialog it went "(null): This wasn't in the brochure!" I'm guessing there's a missing reference ID in the db to let the engine know it was a Skull something or other, as I assume (null) is the result of a messed up string call. An incredibly minor glitch, but what the heck, it might be a quick fix in the db. 🙂

Something I'd like to see, but is unlikely to happen is: Tool Integration. In it's most basic form, the need for Tequila (and it's variants) goes away as the launcher can work without it. Plus offline tools like Mid's and Icon, and online tools like Paragon Wiki and Virtueverse, can call API-equivalents to update their systems straight out of the database. No more forcing the developers of Mid's to guess what the power settings are for anything, and having a way for your characters 'web-page' auto-update with badges and the like. One thought that amuses me, is reversing the integration as well. All those Information Terminals? Have them be in-game access to the various tools. 😉

I guess I see a difference in the sense that some women are very particular about how the are addressed. Would there be a difference for you if one was Miss Liberty and Mrs. Liberty? I’m not arguing just curious about your viewpoint I may be kinda old, so not in touch with current trands and modes of correct speech, but when I was growing up ( 70s/80s) Mrs is pronounced Missus, Miss is pronounced as it is spelled, and Ms is pronounced Mizz to differentiate it from Miss. Yes, it originated with the late 60 and 70s "Women's Lib" movement and intended as the feminine equivalent of Mr, which doesn't denote mariage status. Many women found it sexist that women were judged base on marital status while men weren't. To my knowledge, there used to be two male titles, but the exact meaning has shifted around over time to make things confusing. As Mister (Mr.) is to Missus (Mrs.), Master (Ms.) was to Mistress (Miss.). But the fact that Miss is actually an abbreviation of Mistress got lost about the same time Master being used for under-aged boys fell out of popular use. So when the 60's rolled round, nobody remembered that Ms. was technically the male form of Miss. and got co-opted as it's own term. Languages change over time, and English changes especially fast. :) I'm old enough to have been around in the 60's/70's when Ms. got co-opted, and I remember being confused as to what was going on.

+1

To follow up on the 'model it and send it to the developers' suggestion... Did the tools/instructions for generating .pigg-compatible meshes get included in the code leak? I wouldn't mind taking a shot at modelling more beast heads and the like in Blender if I knew how to get that model into a format the devs can use. All the stuff I can find online are about extracting stuff *into* .obj formats, not for shoving it back in to CoX. :)

I may have found the powerset icons... Doing some searching, it looks like the fixed versions were called 'Vanden's Power Icon Fix' and it was hosted on VidiotMaps long ago. Supposedly someone saved them here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/games/cox/vm_vip_i18.exe but I'm at work right now so I can't download them to check if these are the ones I remember. I have vague memories of one set being 'fixed' because the coded outlines that indicate whether the power is a cone, targetable, etc. were messed up on a few powers. But I also remember there being a 'shiny' set that were supposed to look metallic. I don't know which one this is, or if they're the same one. :)

I remember there was one that modified the power icons so that they were consistent (there's apparently some errors in the default ones), and shiny. But I can't find them anymore.

Guild Wars 2 came out not long after CoX got shut down, so there was a bit of 'ArenaNet stealing the air from Paragon' going around at the time. I had an interview with ArenaNet a little over a year ago (I had forgotten they were owned by NCSoft) and the people there were more than a little nervous about the possibility of NCSoft noticing they hadn't been shut down yet.

My only problem with farming is a lack of overalls and pitchfork costume pieces. :)

Sorry about that. I didn't see yours. :(