RikOz

As I was flying past an AE building: Architect Patron [#1]: Architect Entertainment spans multiple dimensions. We could be playing a mission built by someone from another universe! Architect Patron [#2]: It's not even possible to describe how dumb you are.

I used to do something similar for my writing. The (USA) Social Security web site has a feature that lets you search for the most popular baby names for any given year. So I'd decide what year a character was born, pull up the top 100 male or female names for that year, and either peruse it until I found one I liked, or just roll a percentage die (or 2d10) to pick one randomly. https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (Scroll down to "Items of Interest")

One of my rare tankers (Stone Armor/Super Strength) The Real Ziggursky! I tend to gravitate toward that Alpha costume set a bit too often, and I typically use a high-contrast color pairing. But in this case, I really like how the low-contrast color scheme worked out. The two colors are from the extreme left and right swatches of the same row of the color picker (7th row from the bottom). I think this is also the first time I've used that "High Tech Helmet", which I normally find kind of goofy-looking, but it somehow fit this character to a T.

I'm not sure why it took me until now to notice that the Phoenix Wings would work great with this costume.

In Night Ward: [NPC] Disgruntled Spirit: Pfft... nice costume.

Erm, the Silent Blade mission was a hero alignment mission that I've done dozens of times (I have a lot of alts), and she always helps with combat after she's rescued. This last time, she didn't.

So I encountered the strangest thing in this mission. I'm not entirely certain that it's a bug, but the Wiki article for the mission mentions nothing about it. This is a "board transit" mission. I encountered multiple groups of level 1 civilians, all huddled together, cowering in fear. They were all labeled "Citizen", and showed the group membership, "<Paragon Citizens>". The odd part was that they were all hostile, i.e. I could have attacked them had I chosen to do so, despite this being a blueside mission. When I would approach to within a certain distance, they would all run away as a group. And when I followed them, I discovered they were all making their way to the mission exit: Like I said, I'm not certain that this is a bug, as I don't believe I've ever done this mission before now, and I'm sure I would remember it if I'd seen this before. Regardless, it was extremely strange.

Dang it, Praetor Duncan stole part of my costume!

I dunno, I've just run into virtually the same thing in the hero alignment mission, "A Cloud of Odorous Smoke". Rescued Silent Blade, and afterwards she never drew her sword. In fact, since I tabbed out of the game to add this fact, I didn't notice we got ambushed, and Silent Blade went down without defending herself.

Encountered another apparent bug in the very next mission of the arc. The Longbow lieutenant guarding the computer is simply named "Scrapper". The other lieutenants encountered had correct names.

In Bane Spider Ruben's arc, "Destiny Follows", the second mission, "Cripple the Arachnos Base", has the player teaming up with the villain Icecap. Icecap fights alongside the player ... right up until completing the mission's first objective. From that point until the end of the mission, Icecap just follows the player and does nothing except describe the next objective. I assume this is not the intended behavior. I think this is the second time I've played this arc, but I can't remember if the same thing happened the first time.

Montague Castanella breaks the fourth wall when I call him around level 35 to get the mission to travel to Cimerora and talk to Imperius: (He says, "Hello there, PlayerName")

My alleged fire farmer, a Spines/Fire brute has, nearly three years after rolling him, finally reached level 40. So here's Girra's new costume: The top hat and cigar are the only consistent bits from one costume to the next.

Heh. Yeah, the NPC pathing in that mission chain, at least the parts inside that base, have been seriously bugged since its debut. I noticed that it only seems to be a problem with the female NPCs, Twinshot and Flambeaux. I'm no programmer, but I suspect it's somehow related to the fact that both Twinshot and Flambeaux spawn offscreen when you hit a "trigger" in the script, and then come to you, while the male characters are pre-spawned in a specific spot, and you go to them. Then, in the scene you screenshotted, I have a suspicion that one of those Twinshots is supposed to be Proton. You start the mission on the first floor, Twinshot shows up, and then you take the elevator to the second floor to meet Proton and Flambeaux. From there you go to the third floor to meet Dillo, at which point you get the message from Proton about a disturbance back on the first floor. Since you, Twinshot, Flambeaux, and Dillo are on the third floor* and Proton is on the second floor, he ought to get down to the first floor before you do. *The four of you are technically on the third floor, but the bugged pathing for Twinshot and Flambeaux has them running back and forth between you and the elevators, and apparently going up and down the elevators for no good reason, and I think that, in the confusion of the coding, a Twinshot model gets substituted for the Proton model (you'll notice that, when you pass through the second floor again on your way down, Proton is not there where you left him, so it's safe to assume that he is supposed to be heading down to the front entrance encounter). Then Twinshot shows up after the fight is over asking, "Who's this?", and you have to specifically talk to that Twinshot, not the other one, to complete the mission. The whole thing is a mess. I think the Shining Stars arc was added at the same time the game went Free-to-Play (veterans, correct me if I'm wrong about that - I only found the live game shortly after it went FTP), and I suspect the devs' time was being taken up with the in-game store stuff and bugfixing got put off for later. And then the shutdown announcement came before they could get to fixing this stuff :(

I almost never have more than one mission active at a time. The only exception is when I have one of the costume slot missions, but those are hunt missions with no clues. So everything in my Clues list should be from the one arc I'm currently doing. I think part of the problem is that, in missions that have several Clues (like, there are some missions where every glowie gives a clue, and possibly multiple NPCs that give clues), there's a programming expectation that the player will find the clues in a certain order, which doesn't always work out. Sometimes the objectives will spawn out of order, sometimes the player just misses them on the first pass. So the clues appear in the list in that expected order, rather than the order they were actually found.

Who knew? Everybody! :D

It might be similar to another mission-completion oddity I've encountered several times. There are some missions that have the objective of clicking on all of the glowies that will complete without clicking the last one if you happen to defeat all of the enemies on the map first. I wondered if this was a deliberate time-saving thing: with all the enemies defeated, there is nobody to stop you from clicking that glowie, so we'll just consider it clicked and complete the mission. I actually complained about this, because of the Intern day job. Intern rewards you with a Large(?) inspiration upon mission completion, but of course it can't give it to you if your insp tray is full. So I'd go into one of these missions and save the last glowie until after I defeated the last enemy. That way, I could clear a space in my insp tray and then click the glowie to complete the mission. Except I'd defeat the last enemy and *boom* "Mission Complete", and no insp reward.

It was recent: You probably didn't find it because I didn't put "Crey" in the title. I didn't realize it was Crey-specific until I encountered it again in a different mission.

Alt #124: New Claws/Fiery Aura brute, "Canis Rufus" (Red Wolf) I may reconsider the name. It occurred to me after the fact that, not being a black man myself, it might appear that I picked "Rufus" as a stereotypical name.

Relevant - I just came across this photo on another site:

Gotcha - I didn't realize they were in a separate thread :)

The main thing I'd like to see is the ability to lock an item in place. I get frustrated when I try to move an object, and instead end up sliding my floor tiles around. (Also, where is this poll? I see no poll.)

I would love it if clues would appear in the Clues list in something resembling the order in which they were found. Preferably, with the most recently-acquired clue at the top, similar to the "Most Recent" badges list. It's quite annoying--particularly late in a story arc after many clues have been found--to find a clue and it gets dumped into an apparently random place in the Clues list. At this point, I've largely given up on reading clues because, when I open the list, I have no ... clue ... which is the one I just found. (On a similar note, it's really irritating in alignment missions when the "Clue Found!" message pops up after clicking the object or defeating the specific enemy that completes the mission. Because alignment missions are one-offs with no follow-up, this clue is immediately cleared from the list. I have never been able to read a single one of these mission-completion clues.)

See, now, I loved daily quests! Especially once they started putting them on a random rotation, so that it wasn't exactly the same thing every day.

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. But I was addressing the concerns others have about brand new CoX players--those who are discovering it for the first time--immediately getting PL'd and then not knowing how to do anything else in the game. I just think that some of these new players have been conditioned by other games, like WoW, to think that "endgame" is the only thing that matters, so they want to jump straight into that. I don't begrudge anybody else their playstyle/content preference. I mean, I'm the guy who prefers to be left alone to solo in a multiplayer game with my (currently) 122 alts, and I'm well aware that some people think that's ridiculous. The penultimate thing on my road to quitting WoW was the devs discontinuing things I enjoyed with the explanation being, basically, "the raiders complained about it". That just made it obvious, to me, that "endgame" was the be-all, end-all in WoW*, and all that meant in the end was that WoW was no longer the game for me. But more power to those who want to focus on endgame. I was just offering a potential explanation for why new players would want to PL past all of the leveling content. *If you spend enough time on the WoW forums, you'll discover an alarming number of people who use the word "content" as a synonym for "raid". Constantly criticizing the game's "lack of content", when literally everything in the game is "content". They just don't want to do it, so they don't consider it "content".