GraspingVileTerror

(( Blame @Luminara. Apologies to @Piecemeal )) As Newt fled the PPD forces, a thought continued to percolate in that demented Vahzilok-taught mind: "What if I grafted MORE MEAT to myself?" The fugitive ran tirelessly, satisfied that even with their hardsuits, the PPD would eventually be unable to keep up. "With everything that's been going on with those new-fangled 'Freaklok' upstarts, I clearly need to improve upon my methods . . . " The arraignment didn't go well. At least not from the PPD's perspective. The power-suppressors were in full effect in the courtroom, and the defendant was restrained with the appropriate grade of handcuffs. Yet, somehow, the self-styled 'Newt' had managed to get free from the cuffs, excrete some kind of vile fluid that became aerosolized on contact with the floor, and stunned the police escorts. Even more disturbing was the realization that the fugitive managed to squeeze between bars that were less than five centimetres apart. Finally, the would-be convict wasn't showing up on thermal scans any longer, making the prospect of a successful pursuit very, very grim. "Yes, yes . . . more bio-matter. That's the solution!" Newt began to babble vocally while prying open the sewer cover and slipping down in to the murky, stinky depths. "That's been the problem all along! I see now! We never should have relied so heavily on cybernetics from the get-go! Vahzilok, you were a genius, but your vision was limited by your assumption that integrated technology held the answer." "This is Officer Albrecht. We've . . . lost the fugitive. Recommending we get some Ascended in here to do airborne reco- wait. Please hold, Dispatch. What've you got there, Henderson?" A momentary pause as Albrecht listened to her partner. "Crap. We have reason to believe that the fugitive has fled in to the sewers. Requesting FBSA-approved heroes be brought in. .... Confirmed, Dispatch. I am not equipt to go down there." "Frankly, it's offensive," Newt was now in a full-blown conversation with no one else to hear the angry rambling. "Biological augmentation is such a sure-fire solution. How could NO ONE deign to explore it? Crey? PHA! They hardly count! Their clones are rudimentary, at best. Arachnos? Puz-leaze! They're more obsessed than the Freakshow when it comes to cybernetics. But the Rikti? The Rikti are the key! I must find a way to capture some . . . to learn their secrets . . . hmm, but they are so powerful." The bio-augmented scientist-turned-lunatic stopped running and pondered carefully. " . . . I am going to need bodies. Lots and lots of bodies."

Join forces with the folks over at https://forums.homecomingservers.com/clubs/2-unofficial-homecoming-wiki/

I think it should be mentioned that there's a difference between fan fiction and head-canon. Head-canon is when we read what's already in the game, and put a personal spin on the context of that existing lore. Fan faction is when we write something that self-services us as fans. Another way to look at it: Has it happened in the lore already, and you think "X is why it happened?" Head-canon. Has it not happened (yet)? Fan fiction.

There's no such thing as spoilers. We're having a frank conversation about lore here. Just lay it out, please.

Except for my head-canon being a reading of everyone being lied to and manipulated by a millennia-old deity who is ALLLLLL about them lying schemes, and said spell isn't operating as advertised.

So, looks like the wiki has been updated. Lots to chew through. Although, Tielleku is definitely not permanently consumed, from what I can see in the Dream Doctor's arc. But also: It seems to me that David Hazen believes he is referring to a Judeo-Christian-Islamic "God" as having arranged the ley lines and such, but my head-canon still places Lughebu (I keep getting the spelling all wrong, whoops!) as the orchestrator of all of this. Sounds like exactly the kind of gambit that THE trickster god of malice would do. All roads lead to Mot being fuel to the fire for the Banished's liberation.

I hear you on the Wards thing, @Piecemeal. I was making good progress on my main villain doing all of the content at each level, freezing Experience gain to track down Contacts and earn Badges and Temp Powers. Then I hit a particular arc in First Ward that deals with robbing the player-character of their free will. It hits a particularly raw nerve of mine, which comes in to conflict with my OCD. I've been stuck on that arc since . . . February 2020? It's stalled me out and really sucks any enjoyment out of the content for me. Before jumping back on to the original topic of this thread, though, I'd also like to share some suggestions for games which I think could be of value in the future development of content in City. Please consider checking out: FTL: Faster Than Light Darkest Dungeon World of Horror Disco Elysium Hades (and then search "procedural ludonarrative" in Google or Youtube, and just bounce around filling your brain with all the juicy research, opinion pieces, and analyses out there. I think that it will potentially spark some interesting ideas) Anyway. Another head-canon of mine which is supported by a couple secondary sources (the official comics and the old lore bible) is the Grand Scheme of Lughebu! The Banished Pantheon consumed the corpses of their fellow gods and fed off the misery, sorrow, terror, dread, and anguish of mortals. This is what got them banished. Trapped in a spirit world with only micro-fissures to reach out and affect the mortal world with whispers to drive humans to madness (Banished Pantheon Cultists), these banished gods (Ullutay, Tomdala, Rambetu, M'Teru, and Leghebu) sustain themselves on what little negative emotional energy they can siphon through the fissures. This is canon. Mot is a different god; a Sumerian embodiment of death which . . . somehow . . . came to rest in the area which became Moth Cemetery. I haven't finished the NuDark Astoria content yet, and last I checked the wikis were still incomplete for those pages, so I don't know if any major revelations on this were discussed, but the short of it: Mot isn't Banished Pantheon. Mot was "The Sleeper" which Lughebu was compelling the Banished Pantheon's mortals Cultists to try to awaken, so that the level of misery, grief, terror, dread, et cetera would be sufficient enough for the Banished to finally break free of their astral bonds and return to the mortal world. Mot was ridiculously powerful. But I don't remember seeing anything about Mot having consumed other gods for their power. Which suggests to me . . . when the player-characters defeat Mot, then it was all a part of Lughebu's contingency plan, and the now-defeated Mot has also be consumed; siphoned through those micro-fissures . . . feeding the Banished five . . . Mot was merely a means to an end . . . and that end will be the Banished Pantheon's return to the mortal world.

You can't self-delete any more, but you can self-Hide a post. It's as good as deletion for the likes of us. Only the Homecoming Team can see Hidden posts, to the best of my knowledge.

I'm just gonna take this moment to shamelessly promote my idea for saving Sally from constant beatings: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/11623-can-we-stop-punching-sally-yet/

The good news is that if you eat up your Patrol Experience by getting defeated, I'm fairly sure it still counts toward your Debt Badge progress. And vice-versa; if you have Debt and log off, the Patrol Experience you gain will first eat up your Debt, and that counts toward the Badges. I accumulated the Debt I needed on my main Badger by teaming with a low level Taxi Bot in the Monkey Island Zone. Invisible Taxi would stand near a pile of Rikti Monkeys, and I'd just keep hitting the Hospital button while the Taxi kept Teleporting me back in to the pile of Monkeys. Worked a treat.

In Mercy Island: [NPC] Eric: I had some Arachnos guys shoving me around. What do you mean you can't make a case? You're a lawyer!

Well . . . if Domination could be Slotted with Recharge but was unaffected by Global Recharge, what would that look like? But that's a question for an entirely different thread! Some other ideas for this thread: Slot Knockback Enhancements to give Henchies increased Knockback Resistance (like how Acrobatics slotting works). Confuse Enhancements to give Confusion Protection. [Control-type] Enhancement for [Control-type] Protection. Making this work would take a little magic, obviously. Supremacy already does some interesting contortionist gymnastics in terms of code, as I understand it. Tacking more "stuff" on to it might run some risks of breakage. But like @TheZag says: It's something to discuss, if for no other reason than to give the Devs some ideas about which directions to explore.

Binds are absolutely incredibly handy, and at the moment I make extensive use of them myself. However, there are only so many keys on a keyboard, even when you take in to account "(R/L)SHIFT/*CTRL/*ALT+**+" options. Besides, not every player necessarily has the muscle memory or physical coordination to make use of this many Binds, and would benefit from having the visual indicators available. And then for people like me who have a small nation of alts, having to create custom Binds for each individual character gets cumbersome and tedious. Timers on Macros (and inside poptrays) would just open even more doors to all of us for ways to personalize our play. I already provided a (kludge) example of an Accolade poptray in one of the linked threads above. If I could have a poptray for each category of Temp Powers which included countdown timers, I would then be able to copy that poptray to every alt I have with a single command, saving an inordinate amount of work. This might even be the impetus for some players to make more alts themselves. New alts help to keep other parts of the social gameplay experience flowing, and should be considered a net positive to the sustainability of the whole game.

Can also confirm the "no," buuuuuuut . . . it DOES give me an idea . . . *scribbles something down in the Suggestions board* https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/30035-mastermind-inherent-supremacy-slotting-idea/

Masterminds are on the minds and lips of folks around here again (or, more to the point, as ever), and one of @Thrythlind's posts in General got me thinking . . . What if Supremacy could be Slotted with Enhancements to supplement Henchpets? Slot a Healing Enhancement in Supremacy to increase the maximum HP of the Henchpets. Slot a Run Speed or Jump Height to improve their mobility. Slot a Resistance to improve the various Auto +Resist Powers many of the Henchies have. Slot a Recharge to improve Damage dealt, Healing given, and Control Duration (since Henchpets are unaffected by Recharge, translate such in to raw improvements to the areas which Recharge would have affected). Accuracy and Damage shouldn't be slottable, since they're already covered by the Henchpet Powers themselves. Thoughts?

Ah! Yes. I see your replies in at least one of those other threads. But . . . yeah. This remains one of those topics which, as far as I can tell, there has been no official Dev word on yet. Not to be a bother, @Naomi, but from your perspective in the art department, was there anything either official or personal you would like to add?

The first time I solo'd Dr. Meinst in Death From Below was as a Dual Pistol / Super Reflexes Sentinel. Opportunity definitely contributed to that.

It's a popular suggestion. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/18930-custom-pet-costumes/ I've been very vocal about it for a long, long time. There are some technical hurdles in the way, but competing servers out there have demonstrated that it's possible, if a bit kludgey to pull off. There has also been heated debates about the social impact of offers that level of customization, but whether that debate has been resolved internally with the Devs or not (or even if any of them ever debated it to begin with) is unknown to the best of my research. My personal solution to that particular issue is to offer greater options to players so they may choose whether or not they want to ignore other players' custom Henchpet appearances. I know it's theoretically possible, but it's unclear if it would be too complicated to code.

Not fair, @Piecemeal! Whenever I post messages like that I at least make sure that I'm only filtering my messages through four or five standard ciphers, and always try to leave a hint as to the last cipher on the pile. I don't have the computational brute force to break the encryption on yours, and I see no hints as to which key or - oh. "Warriors||Circle of Thorns//Legacy Chain??Outcasts!!Hellions}}Longbow``Arachnos**Council@@Fifth Column&&Devouring Earth" Looks like I found a browser-based decrypter that was mostly accurate while searching for a website to remind me of the word "mode." *coughs nervously* So . . . The (True) Banished Pantheon is up for grabs, then? *revs up the chorus of Lugbehu-chanting cultists*

That's really the biggest stone in my craw: This overwhelming attitude of oversimplifying and disregarding nuance and depth in the lore, tone, and themes. The Circle are a faction ripe for Machiavellian plots and contorted cultural touchstones . . . but they often come across in the official writing (particularly on Blueside) as self parodies*. The Orenbegans are an entire civilization with tens of thousands of years of culture! I mean, I know the lore loves to say "the dead can never change," but it also goes out of its way to give us plenty of examples of that not really being true either. I know @Piecemeal has said that they don't want to write every faction as undergoing a civil war, but there's a wealth of interesting depths to plumb with a lot of these factions if they were to be explored as being less unified than the hammier writing implies. Circle especially. And I know that my Commandant Nongratis (and a few other) character(s) have a particular antipathy toward the Circle, but as a player I really like the potential the Orenbegans have. @Coyotedancer deserves kudos for making some really interesting Orenbegan characters. *And then there's how some content tries too hard to be "ha ha, lol, funny," and just ends up undermining the more interesting parts of the narrative, rather than enhancing it. I think comedy needs to be skilfully applied and have a good contrast with seriousness to really deliver something meaningful. Even when that comedy is pure silliness. I'd much rather a Monty Python's Holy Grail or an Airplane, over a Dumb and Dumber or a Meet the Fockers. (While you're here, Piecemeal; I hope this thread is inspiring and enlightening!)

A studio name is often just that: A name. The people and talent who make up a studio change over time. At most you'll see a director or producer or team lead carrying the torch, but that's no guarantee that the actual chemistry which made up the winning team for past titles will be present during any other. And in this case, by the sounds of it, the team in question was operating on this specific project, and not any of the other titles currently in production at Cryptic. Not sure whose bright idea it was to start charging for micro-transactions while still officially declaring it a "Beta." If you're collecting money for an active product, it's Release, frankly. No matter how unpolished or unfinished it is from the intended end state. But like just about every project I've been involved in, you can't blame the people who inevitably get fired. They're not the ones who have the power or authority to make the decisions which lead to their mass layoffs, after all.

I imagine that there's also no shortage of world leaders who are either on the take, or actively support Arachnos' "good work" in the field of scientific inquest. Remember; the rest of the whole world doesn't have to be populated by good, moral leaders. Quite likely the opposite, frankly . . .

I mean, a more reasonable downside might be that your Defense is lowered by 5 in every category, and your Resistance by 10 likewise. A trade-off like that is at least a little thematic too. You mock someone and open yourself up as a target to try and get them to stop attacking your ally. "Come at me, bro," as they say.

I dunno. The Centre always struck me as a desperate ageing man struggling to remain relevant in the face of a world that is mostly trying to leave relics like him behind. But due to the continued efforts of larger shitheels (notably Nemesis), there's still a sizeable population of potential victims to brainwash in to cruel jackboots. Meanwhile, the Column recruits the truly hateful dregs while simultaneously growing more and more outlandish in their desperation. A prime example being their haphazard screwing of the space-time, which I contend is one of the leading causes of all the screwy timeline crap which permeates the entirety of the game narrative. The Column's time-fuckery is, in my head canon, one of the leading causes of how we can have people saying, simultaneously, that it's 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2021 while standing in the same room at the same time, and all still being accurate from their personal points of view. Both the Council and Column are threats, but more in the way a cornered animal is a threat. They'll lash out and struggle to the bitter end, but they're both far too narrow in vision to pull through while other factions remain powerful, let alone all the heroes who take the fight to them daily. People love to hate nazis (and fascists), and for good reason. And frankly, I would like them to both stay on the back foot for tonal reasons as well. Let players have their fun beating them up, but don't let those groups actually start gaining any grounds. What they stand for is too ugly to reward them in that way. Like many other players, I like the idea of Lord Recluse taking some time for a little soul-searching. Reprioritize. While, unlike @Darmian, I don't think Recluse should retire and lurk in the shadows, I do think it's high time that Arachnos bares its teeth and actually demonstrates the cohesion that clearly exists. I mean, an organization with such a vocal and public acceptance of Recluse's form of "Darwinism" (and I do emphasize that it's Recluse's vision), there HAS to be something which allows them to keep a densely-populated archipelago nation like the Etoiles fed and functional. Despite the constant threat of random violence, people choose to live and work in the Etoiles. There's something to that worth exploring. And the things like Project Destiny and the Arachnos bank heist excursions should be revealed to be mere confidence schemes and distractions. Or at the very least, more heavily implied to be (since there are Police Radio missions which hint that Arachnos isn't actually robbing banks for the money, but instead to lure out specific heroes). If played straight, then both the heists and Destiny are totally irrational and run contrary to the established functional operation of the Etoiles as sovereign territory. (Though, like I said in that other thread recently, that nonsense may have been the intent of the Legacy writers. Doesn't mean it's worthwhile, though.)

Not enough Trays, then. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/14927-save-and-load-command-for-power-tray-configuration/ I mean, if I could go up to 15 or 20 Trays, that might do the trick. Would feel kind of wasteful to have so many instance of Macros AND the Powers they're there to try and cut down on at the same time.