RikOz

QoL inquiry: Can something be done to speed up the various superpowered NPCs that appear in some missions as helpers, so that they can actually keep up with me? The majority of "civilian" NPCs that I rescue and have to lead back to the exit seem to have no trouble at all sticking to my heels all the way back to the exit. Mr. Yin, in particular, is a remarkably speedy old guy. But in other missions, I rescue the likes of Miss Thystle, Frostfire, Silent Blade, etc., who are then supposed to "help" me, and I can't run 30 yards without them falling behind and complaining that I'm too quick and they can't keep up. These guys should be embarrassed that Mr. Yin can outrun them! I mean, yeah, I can complete these missions without their help, but I'm one of those story-focused players who enjoys the immersion of "randomly" encountering another hero and teaming up with them, and it seriously breaks immersion when I have to repeatedly stop and go back and find these guys. It doesn't help that some powersets include run-speed boosting effects (like SR's "Quickness") that can't be turned off, but I also run into this problem with characters who have no speed boosts at all. I did one redside mission where I literally had to drag "Walk" onto my bars to escort an NPC to the exit, because I couldn't run 15 steps without this NPC "losing" me. While following me in a straight line, across an open field with no obstacles (outdoor map). (Flying "helper' NPCs can keep up, but they have their own set of problems, like Overdrive flying clear to the other side of a large warehouse, far enough away from me to trigger her "I can't keep up" line.)

These days, I'm pretty much leveling as much as possible via Tip missions. Then I can go back later and do the arcs I want via Ouro.

Heh - when the live game shut down and I went back to WoW, my first several days back were spent being extremely frustrated every time my character (on a horse!) couldn't clear a waist-high picket fence!

What are some "game mechanics" that never (or rarely) work in video games, even though they work just fine in real life and in pencil & paper games like D&D? The main one I've noticed, between CoH and WoW is "character size". The problem is that, in a computer RPG, the size of your character is simply cosmetic. There are no mechanical advantages or disadvantages to playing a character that is larger or smaller than "normal". This usually seems to be for "balance" reasons. I first noticed this in WoW, when I tried fitting characters of different races through tight spots. That's when I discovered that, if a tauren (WoW's physically largest race) can't fit through that space, neither can a gnome (one of the smallest races). More than once, I tried to move a gnome through a space that, visually, was more than big enough for her to fit, but nope. For the purposes of fitting through spaces, all characters are treated as the same size. Today, in CoH, I was playing a character who is eight feet tall, and uses the "huge" model. Additionally, it (it's a robot) uses Titan Weapons. So he's eight feet tall, and he's swinging a 10-foot laser sword. Now, in D&D, his size alone would give him extra "reach", and his weapon would probably also qualify as a "reach weapon". He'd have a similar advantage in "real life". But in CoH, none of that matters. For the purpose of making melee attacks, he's exactly the same size as everybody else, and he still has to be practically bumping chests with his opponent to hit them. Have you noticed other examples?

I don't drink any more, except on rare occasions (When my wife is away. I stopped drinking because she's a recovering alcoholic.) I can't recall if I ever played CoH drunk, but there were a few occasions when I played WoW completely hammered. Mostly back in the Wrath of the Lich King era, so 2008-2010 or so. I discovered that being drunk didn't seem to have much effect on my muscle memory, so I'd queue up for random dungeons on my fire mage - I was intimately familiar with the dungeons, having run each of them many times, so I knew what was happening (not to mention how minutely scripted they were) and barely had to think about what I was doing. Autopilot! So I'd jump in with a random group and just blast away, and I never got any complaints about my performance. Nowadays, due to a combination of age and infrequency of drinking, I don't have nearly the alcohol tolerance I used to have, and I don't even attempt to game while drunk. I tried once or twice, and even just solo questing, I couldn't focus. So on those rare occasions I get to drink now, it's Netflix instead of games.

Yikes! Yeah, it's currently 109F where I am in eastern WA.

Overheard in Faultline tonight: Construction Worker: I'm hiding from my wife. Why are you up here?

Well, since I couldn't play CoH, I spent last night playing Microsoft Mahjong.

Not to mention that the idea that a non-superpower set like AR doing less damage depending on who's pulling the trigger is absurd.

Alt #102: Coldcore (Ice Blast/Sonic Manipulation blaster)

Ah, I was wondering this myself. Except it was with the Sonic Manipulation blaster secondary.

My main, the first character I rolled on both live and HC, is my fire/fire blaster. Love it. Close behind is my energy/energy brute. Alas, my energy/energy brute's younger sister is a dark/dark brute, and she is such and Endurance hog..

Oh god, this. As to revamping Goldside, my issue with Praetoria is probably due to my altoholism (102 as of last night). Boiled down, my problem is the complexity of the story, with all the double-agent stuff between factions and sub-factions. I've only rolled one Praetorian on HC, and I gave up in the middle and rerolled the character as Blueside. Likewise, when resurrecting my old Goldside-turned-Blueside character from live, I just rolled her Blueside to begin with and added a bit to her backstory, saying that she has a vague memory of once living in a different world, but she can't otherwise remember anything about it. The problem is that, as an altoholic, I rarely play the same character two days in a row. This meant that I rolled my Praetorian and got a few levels on him the same day. Then I didn't get back to him again for two or three weeks, because I was rotating through my other alts. When I logged him in for the second time, I realized that I had no idea where he stood. He started out Resistance, but had done at least one "undercover" mission before I logged him out the first time. I realized that, if I had already forgotten "the story so far", it was going to get even worse as I progressed when days or weeks might pass before I returned to the character. So that's when I decided to just delete and reroll Blueside. Essentially, I think the only way I could play a Praetorian all the way through the storyline would be to completely ignore all of my other alts for however long it took to get my Praetorian to the end. I suspect that "fixing" this would require a bunch of programming to build in some sort of flowchart that would track the character's progress.

I noticed something in Atlas Park yesterday that I had never noticed before. Several times, I was helping a mugging victim, and other passers-by stopped to watch the fight. Then, when the last baddie was down, they turned and continued on their way. Was wondering if this is something new, of if it's always happened and I somehow never noticed.

Posting for the curiosity: The curiosity is that I got inf for that defeat, because I have the +100% XP buff, which cancels all inf gain from defeating mobs. I actually "died" on that fight, and I'm guessing that what happened was Overdrive got the killing blow, and it happened in that moment between my dying and clicking "Go to Hospital". So since I was "dead", the XP buff/inf debuff didn't apply to that one kill.

The mission, "Stop the next Rikti assault", from Steven Sheridan. takes place on the "Wylie Park" open-world map (a "Board Transit" mission). For whatever reason, the red-enclosed "exit" area is not working. I tried to enter the area both in the air and on foot, and ran around inside the red-enclosed area, but could not trigger it to exit the mission. To exit without completing the mission, I had to log out.

Alas, I wish I could actually remember where I first heard/read the joke of somebody being described as half- & half- & half-. In the case of this character, I did it simply to justify his ridiculous name :D

I like the way this one turned out. He's Khan O'Copenhagen, my half-Chinese, half-Irish, half-Danish dual-pistols/ninjitsu sentinel:

Don't see too many of us using the various head options like that. My villain, Moldav, uses the same one:

The description for the Sentinel's Ward: Recharge/Chance for Absorb ATO incorrectly states that it requires the user to be level 50: This is for the regular, not the "Superior" version of the enhancement. I currently have this slotted on a level 36 Sentinel, and it's working fine. I'll note that none of the other enhancements in the set, nor in the other Sentinel set, have this "restriction" in their descriptions, so this looks like a copy/paste error.

Oh god, this. One of my alts got a mission requiring that he rescue 21 (TWENTY-ONE!) hostages* on an Oranbega map. I rescued 20 of them, and then spent the next 30-40 minutes running around and around in a huge, empty map looking for that last hostage, and failing to find them anywhere. Unrelated, but making this even worse: The mission was waaaaay up north of Talos Island, and I had to Super Jump all the way there, as this alt didn't have a flight power. I exited the mission through the door and made my way back to Atlas Park to purchase the Reveal power, then had to return to Talos, SJ all the way back up to the mission entrance again, use Reveal to see if I had somehow missed a side passage/room somewhere (I hadn't), and then spent another 20 minutes again retracing my steps through all of the passages and rooms I'd already searched three times, before I finally said, "Eff this" and autocompleted the mission. Making this even worse is the fact that the "last mobs" markers usually work on CoT maps, but they weren't showing up this time, which meant that there were TWO groups of mobs that I was somehow not finding. * IIRC, it was a mission arc where the CoT was going after people who had Mu blood. I somehow have never been offered that arc since. That gorram factory map. GAH! It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't often include "wandering" mobs. who are constantly moving and can appear anywhere on the multiple levels of that central building. That map, and one of the big city maps, are on my list of automatic autocompletes.

Dang, I'd be hosed if that were the case. First thing I do with most of my female characters is drag the chest slider to the left! Only CC I can recall entering back on live was won by a blatant Captain America clone. I've been a finalist in one CC on HC - heard the theme announced, decided that one of my alts had a costume that vaguely fit that theme, and logged her in. Was a finalist, but didn't win a prize. I typically only enter CCs if I happen to be in AP when one is announced, and then I'll just enter with whichever character I happen to be playing at the moment. I do wish I'd see more announcements for CCs in the new Echo Plaza, if only for the consistent, neutral lighting. AP's default lighting tends to add a pink cast to everything. Re: Cel shading - I tend to not like it, as I haven't figured out how to get rid of that "shiny" effect. A couple of my characters, though, have costumes that actually look better with cel shading on.

Resurrected another alt from live! On live, she was an electric/electric scrapper named "Shocking Pink". Alas, I waited too long to bring her back, and found somebody else had taken the name. I also had already made another elec/elec scrapper, and I'm avoiding duplicating PS combinations, so I brought her back as an electric/radiation scrapper, and changed her name to "Shokatomika". To reflect the change, I just replaced the slightly-darker pink in her costume with a bright blue. She's alt #101.

Question for those more familiar with mechanical keyboards than I am. I bought my first mechanical, "gaming" keyboard about a year ago. It has the red switches, and that is what my question is about. My keyboard is the Redragon brand, a pretty inexpensive maker. Included with the keyboard were four spare switches. I have since used up all of the spares replacing switches that went bad. The very first one I had to replace was the "W" key, obviously a less-than-ideal key to have go bad on a gaming keyboard. I've since had to also replace the 2, 3, and 4 key switches. So first, I have to ask: Is it "normal" for mechanical key switches to fail so quickly? Second, I was under the impression that mechanical key switches were sort of a standardized, "commodity" part, and should be interchangeable. So I bought a box of replacement switches to have ready for future repairs, and discovered that they are too big by just a hair, and won't fit into the sockets on my keyboard. Was I mistaken about them being standardized? Am I going to have to try to track down replacements switches the same brand as my keyboard? Aside from these switch failures, I like the keyboard.

There's definitely something glitchy with the calculation. I checked it on one of my many alts - one that was still under level 30 - and it said she had something like 8217 hours, which works out to 342 days of play time. Not possible. On a related note, a few years ago I added up the total play time of all of my WoW characters, and at that time it added up to my spending around 25% of my time playing WoW, from the time I first subscribed until the day I made the calculation - it was something like 2 years of total playtime over a span of 8 years. And that span of time included the six months in 2012 I did not play at all because I was playing CoH (those six months ended with the sunset of CoH, and I went back to WoW). My only excuse for spending that much time is that many of those hours were due to the fact that my job, during the whole of my WoW career, was very seasonal, and during the slow periods I pretty much played WoW from the time I woke up until I got tired and went to bed. So I was racking up 15-16 hours a day during those times. Hey, with work being slow, it was a lot of entertainment for $15/month.