Arctique

Here's a few base building annoyances I run into a lot: - Selecting an object to shift it and having your cursor perfectly on the item, only for something to lag the moment you go to move it and you end up selecting and moving a wall behind it across the map instead. Thank god we have a ctrl-z function now. - On a similar note, items with selection boxes that get in the way of other nearby items. I can't tell you how many times I've been trying to select one object only to keep ending up grabbing a nearby tree instead because my cursor was too close to its leaves or something. - Wall attachment points being so inconsistent on the various wall props, especially the brick and indoor wall pieces. Even on 1/4 grid I find objects hovering inches off of the wall instead of flush against it, and worse yet sometimes on the same wall piece one item might attach just fine in one spot on the wall, but hover or get sunk into it if I place it on a spot just a couple pixels over. It makes trying to line up windows and other wall details a major pain. - BASE DRIFT. - Trying to hide the entrance room in some way when building above the base plot. I'd love a way to have a base plot that's just one single room that can be filled in with walls for an above-base build, without having that random lone box of the entrance room tucked away in a corner to try and hide away under some scenery. - "Base object does not fit" error message even with room clipping enabled and the object is well within the base boundaries. I've had it do this to me with stuff I was just trying to attach normally to a wall, especially annoying if I've already attached other stuff to that bit of wall already without getting the error, sometimes even the exact same item, only to find just one random void of space along the wall where it thinks an item is too far outside the base boundaries, even if it's completely within them. - The flickering when two items overlap. I swear most of my time building is just spent trying to hide or fix flickering items. - Trying to select an NPC that's already been placed, their selection boxes are just so overly specific and downright impossible to grab if they're near any other objects. This makes trying to reposition an NPC after placing them a huge hassle at times. - So many of the various flat surface/floor pieces not having built in Floor attachment points. There's a couple that do like the white tile floor piece and wood panel floor piece, but most of the other items in that tab don't register as "floors" so you have to constantly set each individual item you place on them to attach to all surfaces, or overlap them with one of the other mentioned floor pieces. Similar thing with how most of the items in the Desks tab actually register as "floor" on their tops for putting items on top of them, but other stuff like the counter pieces under Cabinets or any of the tables don't have the same feature. - The Icon/Facemaker NPCs in bases aren't flagged as Surgeons. I constantly find myself forgetting this when trying to use a base to tailor costumes on characters where the height/model varies between costumes. - Did I already mention base drift? - Base drift.

I think one of the most important starting points is just to establish in your head first, just who your character is. What's their personality like? How does the backstory you've come up with for them inform the way they act and think? Do they have any unique quirks that might come out in conversation or while punching Council goons in the face? What kind of values and morals do they hold? In any given situation, how would they react and what choices would they make? A lot of roleplay is heavily driven by character interactions. So a massively important thing is keeping that character consistent. That's mostly just going from my own experience and how I grew as a roleplayer, at least. When I first started out, I was completely making up everything as I went along, having my character act in just whatever way I thought would just make them seem "cool" and that lead to a personality for them that was all over the place. One day I'd RP them as the wise-cracking goofball of the team, then the next without rhyme or reason they were the team's brooding antihero. The only consistent aspect of the character was their appearance and powersets. Because of that, the interactions they had with other characters and the stories told through them usually ended up just a nonsensical mess. Even if it's just a simple set of traits like "This character is a hero that always abides by justice and wants to help people", as long as you keep those traits in mind when RPing them, things should just start to flow naturally. Of course as you RP them, those traits can still end up changing due to the events that play out. That simple idealistic hero could get shellshocked by the death of a comrade and develop into a more brooding anti-hero and completely change how he approaches a situation. Their personality dictates their choices, their choices influences the story, and the story can cause shifts in their personality, which will influence the choices they make later, and so on. I probably rambled a bit and over-complicated my explanation, but basically: Establish who your character is and how they think/act, and everything else should start to grow naturally from there.

Tiktok for the Clockwork? And then Vine for the Devouring Earth!

I am a cryptid and I have no idea how to act at a bar either.

I think another big one to keep in mind, is if people can easily identify "this is where people meet up and RP". There's a reason bars/taverns tend to be the RP hot spots for casually meeting people in most settings. They're places that, even in the real world, are designed specifically for meeting new people. If I was a new player looking for places RPers gather, would my first instinct be to hang around the bank in Atlas Park, or the Midnighters Club, or that rooftop garden in Atlas? Probably not. Those places can make for nice areas to hang out and RP and do provide a reason to just be casually dropping in, but people aren't going to just naturally be drawn there to meet people unless they already know that's the designated "hub". Parks would offer a good alternative, like for the sake of new player accessibility I'd suggest the park directly across the road from the Atlas statue. It's literally right behind you when you first zone in on a new hero, so somebody new looking to join into the RP community would need only make a single 180 degree turn to see people RPing and figure out "ah this is where i go to meet people". But then the problem there is that only really works for blue side. What's an equally accessible and recognizable spot for villains? What about an easily recognizable social hub that's a co-op area for both sides to mingle? I can understand 100% just personally not clicking with the bar/nightclub setting for casual RP. Especially when it would just make no sense for a particular character to hang out there. It can be hard to get an alternative to gain traction in an already established RP community though, because the bar RP tends to become a bit of a default for a reason.

Personally I think the problem is more when people stick exclusively to the bar/club/tavern RP. Those types of settings can still be surprisingly vital though, an easily recognized social hub like that can really help build connections that feed into more impactful RP storytelling outside the club. Like a lot of the time when I'm trying to lay the foundations for some sort of RP story arc on one of my characters, I might just spend some time with that character hanging out at Pocket D with a couple of friends that are already involved in the upcoming plot, and occasionally discussing plot threads relating to what's to come, in between the usual casual banter and slice of life moments. Sometimes this can lead to others in earshot getting curious and contributing to the conversation, wanting to learn more about the story at hand and providing a way to form connections between characters, and potentially end up along for the ride if things click right. Like for example, Hero A and B are hanging out at the bar chatting as old friends. Their conversation turns to pondering possible ways to stop Villain X that's been giving them trouble lately. Hero C looks up from their texting and offers some ideas of their own after overhearing the conversation. A, B, and C continue talking and getting to know each other from there, and soon enough when it's time to fight Villain X, Hero C has joined the fight when it would have been just A and B otherwise. To me, that just feels more organic than joining a random RP mission team. That can be fun still in it's own right, but if I'm looking to get some new faces on board for a larger story, I'll head to somewhere like Pocket D to dangle some plot hooks around. tl;dr: Bar/Club RP can help enhance RP outside the bar/club. All about that networking!

It's not a baby, but that thing is definitely my sleep paralysis demon.

Putting aside the obvious problem of creeps RPing them for sexual stuff which is never okay, I think a lot of the other problems just come from it being pretty difficult to actually write children well. Even outside of RP, it's pretty difficult to find child characters in fiction that are written well. It's something most professional writers can't get right, let alone people just playing pretend in a superhero game for fun. So while I can't forgive somebody RPing a child character for sketchy reasons, I can at least understand somebody trying to RP one for entirely wholesome intentions and just not sticking the landing with it. That said, Pocket D is for sure not the place for any child character. Even one that's actually well written and not played with creepy intent, the place is still a night club. That's a setting that just by design kinda requires characters there to be adults.

I did say it's typically somewhere away from the actual busy RP areas. There are parts of Pocket D that aren't typically used for RP after all. Do we look at the people gathering near War Witch for instance (before or after they moved her downstairs) or the seemstress and assume they're all standing there silently gawking at her ICly? Or all the fire farmers hanging around Pocket D's AE? If it's people goofing around in an actual busy RP area like the bars everyone typically gathers at, that's another story entirely. Nobody likes the guy that spams powers and disruptive emotes in the middle of the bar full of people trying to RP. When it's just a small group of friends off at some unused corner of the dance floor just having a laugh amongst themselves, I wouldn't call that "making the effort to remind everyone we are playing at theater." That's the point of goofing around somewhere more out of the way, to not disturb people that are actively RPing.

It's fun to play it up when doing this, by actually RPing it with an emote and/or parting quip. Though it can also sometimes provide a character with more personality, playing into the different ways they may exit a scene. Some of my characters do just walk away normally, others would and do just launch over the railing with a comedic quip, some just vanish from sight with a stealth or TP power, etc.

SG idea: A super team where every member is some form of Superman expy and the leadership changes daily from all the petty internal squabbles over which one gets to be the Superman of the group.

Bit of a lighter pet peeve here that's honestly 90% of the time just more amusing than actually annoying when it happens, but: People giving IC reactions to what is clearly just some OOC goofing off. What I mean by this is typically something like, when just bumming around somewhere like Pocket D with some friends but not actively RPing, just exchanging dumb OOC banter and/or goofing around with emotes (for example, one friend flopped on the floor with /e collapse or /e swoon, and others doing the jackhammer or shovel emotes on top of them), usually a bit out of the way from the actual busy RP areas. Typically stuff that's pretty easy to tell at a glance isn't remotely in character for anyone. Then somebody just wandering past it stops, takes one look at the clearly OOC buffoonery, and reacts to it completely IC. Typically ends up being their character reacting with confusion at what they're seeing, or dropping some snarky comment about it in passing. Again, it usually ends up being amusing and harmless rather than legitimately irritating in any way. Usually a simple response of "Don't mind us, we're just goofing around not in character" is enough for anyone making those passing IC reactions to understand and laugh along with the goofing. It just tends to also leave you just wondering "in what possible context would this interaction make sense from an in character perspective" and that can end up painting some funny pictures.

Definitely nothing wrong with that either, personally I usually don't like characters ripped from other settings either most of the time, but I try not to treat them like it's objectively wrong for those characters to exist at all. Though it's still usually best to avoid playing characters from other established universes for other reasons. IIRC it's technically not actually allowed, right? I could be wrong and remembering the rules regarding copyrighted characters/content incorrectly though.

Honestly the easy way somebody could handwave it if they really wanted to play a character from another universe than CoH's, would be to just say they're literally from another universe via Portal Corp. CoH does have its own lore, but that lore also provides an easy excuse to make theoretically any sort of character possible to exist. That's kinda the beauty of CoH as a setting for RP, honestly. It establishes a world where there's really just no limits on the kind of characters you can play, but it still has enough of its own lore and history to not just be some boring blank canvas. A player that bases their character in existing lore, a player that writes their own fully original lore, and a player that borrows lore from another setting can all occupy the same space without any really being out of place. If handled well of course. Being lazy with writing your character will make any concept feel really out of place, lore friendly or not. It just ends up being especially common for people to be lazy with characters based on other settings.

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Would a better solution maybe be if a new channel was created specifically for GMs to make announcements for the GM-hosted events, that players can opt out of just the same as other channels like General, Help, etc rather than making those announcements in the Admin channel that you can't opt out of? The GMs do need a way to effectively spread word about the events they hold in-game, as not everyone pays attention to the forums, but the Admin channel should probably be reserved for more critical announcements like server downtimes and the like. A GM_Events channel that's maybe enabled by default but can be removed like any other channel might help keep these things visible to the majority of players, while making it easy for those that aren't interested to just ignore.

Personally the swiss army knife style is what I like about AR as it is. There's something fun and fittingly comic-book-y about firing off a sniper rifle shot, a fully automatic burst, a grenade launcher, and flamethrower all from the same weapon as part of the same attack chain. If I want to play a character that uses a more conventional rifle, rolling an SoA and sticking to a Wolf Spider build can actually be a decent substitute for that. Though I also wouldn't be opposed to an alternate AR set focused mainly on feeling like an actual automatic weapon, either. Maybe just call it Burst Rifle instead? Build it around a combo mechanic of some kind, or maybe something similar to Titan Weapons' momentum mechanic? A playstyle meant to emulate just holding down the trigger and firing non-stop.

On a technical level I'm sure this is way easier said than done, but... God damn do I want this as an option so badly. Not only would it open so many doors for using objects in interesting new ways, but so often there's an object that would look perfect for what I want to do, only to place it and find it's way too huge or way too small. Or even just ever so slightly the wrong sort of scale. In particular, the letters/numbers in the Alphabet tab having only one singular size throughout them all. I'd love to be able to make smaller signs in certain places, but the current selection of letters are all so huge... It would also help in tidying up some item categories where there's lots of the same objects in different sizes already, like the various statues and rock shapes. You'd only need the one version for those instead of 3-5, if we have more free control over how scaled up or down they are. It's probably not something we'll have any time soon if ever, but a girl can dream.

Thinking about it, this could potentially be an alternative to having it as a / command. Same functionality of loading a saved costume onto a pet, but instead via a new NPC added to Icon/Facemaker where from a dialogue window you select which pet you want to change, and it then lets you select from your saved costume files and/or some presets what look you want to replace the pet's default with? Ideally with being able to load different costumes for the different upgraded tiers if possible in any way. I think the main reason why the / command would need to be removed after it's made redundant, would be tailor costs. Assuming the eventual replacement for it does include tailoring costs like other power customization at least. I can't imagine it'd be feasible to include an inf cost in the / command itself in some form, so even if it's only usable in an Icon/Facemaker building like how /enterbasefrompasscode is still usable near base portals... Well, why waste the inf on using the more integrated method when the still remaining /petcostume command is free? (personally i would prefer if tailor costs as a whole were just gone, but that's a whole other can of worms) Though keeping the theoretical /petcostume command would open some fun options for roleplay on a mastermind, being able to change a pet's costume instantly on the fly. So I'd definitely be in the camp of not complaining if it stuck around after it wasn't needed, but also would understand if it needed to go bye bye later down the road.

The main idea of making it a / command to load a costume file onto a pet was to let players have much more control over how they customize their pets without it requiring any potentially clunky changes to the tailor UI. Even implementing a small selection of alternate preset looks to choose between would likely take a lot more work on the developers' part for what would be a lesser level of customization. It could, at the very least, serve as a temporary solution like the old /enterbasefrompasscode command did, with the / command only existing until a more elegant solution can be fully implemented like what happened with the various recent travel changes. The /petcostume command is introduced, and later down the road when a way of adding that functionality to the tailor menu itself is possible, away goes the now redundant command.

That's a fair point, there'd definitely be some fussing with messy code to get that to work, especially considering how frequently I find that a costume that should be valid is for whatever reason telling me it can't be loaded (most often due to weapon models). It's definitely not something I expect to be simple but, at the very least might be easier than some other options.

I'd probably have it so that if a costume is invalid to be used by a player, it just wouldn't load for a Pet either. Maybe just give some error message saying "Costume file not valid" if you try to load one that's not compatible for one reason or another. Likewise if you try using the command to load a human costume file onto a non-human pet, it could simply give the same error text.

So, I've had this idea in my head for awhile now on a potential way to make customization for Mastermind pets more of a possibility. No idea how feasible it is in terms of actual coding, but I feel like it would at least be a much simpler solution than fitting it into the costume creator. My idea is to make a / command for it. Simply put, lets say it's something like "/petcostume [name.costume]" when you have a Mastermind pet targeted, the / command would check your costumes folder for a saved costume with that name, and apply that costume to the targeted pet. At least, in the case of the pets that use the same sort of human body/skeleton as players, which I think would be Thugs, Mercs, Ninjas, and maybe Zombies? For the non-human pets like Bots, Demons, and Beasts perhaps there could be a list of other alternate compatible models that the / command can check for instead of saved costume files. Like say instead of the lion pets on your Beasts MM, you want the shadow leopard model, it could look something like "/petcostume shadowleopard" or whatever the name of the appropriate file would be. In the case of upgrades that change the pet's model, maybe the command only replaces its current upgrade tier when used. So if for instance you change a Thug pet's costume right after summoning it, then use your upgrade power on it, it would revert to its default "upgraded" model. But then using the /petcostume command again would allow you to replace that upgraded model with a costume of your choice as well, which would in a way allow some control over your custom pet's visual progression as well if you load slightly different costumes for each stage of pet upgrades. Like maybe for a Mercs MM you've given them costumes that have some high tech power armour, and for their upgraded tiers you replace those costumes with more bulked up versions of their armour. Assuming of course that it'd be possible to have the command memorize what costumes you applied to which of its models, which might be more of a nightmare to code. There's probably plenty of issues with this that are escaping me at the moment, but at the very least I think it would require much less untangling of spaghetti code than trying to fit in pet customization into the character creation menus anywhere.

I feel like at the very least, the Icon/Facemaker NPCs that are available for bases should have been set as "surgeons" so they can change body and height sliders. I sure wouldn't complain if trainers had the option as well, but to me the ability to edit a costume at any trainer is always just a nice bonus function anyway. The tailor NPCs for bases really should be capable of any and all costume changes though.

This, too. What about people who indulge both these styles of play? I might want to rush to 50 on one alt, but take it easy leveling through regular content with another. Do I have to play on both servers then? What about people who are focused on PvP? Do they have to migrate over to this other server and try to establish a new PvP community within a now split community too? What about roleplayers? I know people on both sides of the coin that I RP with, so then that splits up a sub-community that's completely unrelated to the issue of fast levelers vs. slow levelers. What about large SGs that support multiple playstyles? Do they now need to try and establish a presence on both servers in order to keep their membership, or just up and lose potentially a large chunk of their roster? What about the endgame content itself? If all the people that just rush 50 to play the endgame move off to another server, that's likely to cut into a large portion of people running and joining endgame raids and trials. It'd suck having to go to a whole other shard just to find consistent hami raids to join.