RikOz

I occasionally find it fun, when I'm on a high-level toon in Atlas Park, to take out an entire crowd of Hellions with one AoE. Though I do tend to look around first to make sure I'm not about to kill-steal from a lowbie.

By 2004, most of my county had been wired up with fiber optic internet, courtesy of the local Public Utility District.

This is a bit of a puzzle. I've asked, in-game, when certain Bane Spiders gained the ability to Placate my characters, and some players are telling me they've always done that. Except, I've been playing on Homecoming for two years now, and this literally never happened to me until about a month ago, shortly after the i27 patch dropped. Granted, this is only happening to my level 50 characters, and I only got my 5th and 6th alts to 50 about a month ago. But since I play solo exclusively, I run a whole lot of alignment/morality missions to earn merits, so I've run the level 40-50 tip missions many, many, many times on level 50 characters. These include several missions against Arachnos, so I've run into those high-level Bane Spiders plenty of times, and as I said, my first Placate only happened about a month ago. The first time was on one of my fresh 50s, who hadn't unlocked her Alpha yet, but the most recent was on my main, a T3 incarnate running missions at +3.

This one was really only funny in context. I got a standalone mission I'd never seen before, to see if I could find Count Crey. I entered the mission, and a Crey Vigilant yelled at me: "This is a medical facility! You're not sterile!" It was funny because I was playing my SS/Rad brute. I looked at the Vigilant sadly, and said, "My whole body is irradiated. Of course I'm sterile." Then I punched him really hard.

@Techwright You've reminded me of the black costume I made for Flaminatrix, for those "stealth" situations :D

As far as the map indicating a spawn and then there being nothing there, I've noticed that a few times in relation to "patrolling" mobs, the ones that wander around the map. I think sometimes I'll completely clear a room, and then leave by one of multiple exits, and as I go out that way, a patrolling mob enters from another direction. And then, due to differences in the path I take and the path the patroller takes, I may never actually see him. So he ends up being the last spawn alive, but he's constantly moving. Sometimes I think the map marker marks his original spawn point, but by the time it appears, the mob has moved on. That's just a guess, though. I also sometimes see a marker that, when I mouseover it, it shows "???", and it doesn't end up seeming to have any in-mission effect. There's always an actual mob marker elsewhere, and tracking that one down finishes the mission. As far as ambushes, I can see why it would hide the marker. But there were no ambushes in the last office-map hostage rescue mission I ran, and still no markers.

Indeed. I follow a few female musical artists who typically wear dresses or skirts on stage, and you bet they're all wearing shorts under them. After all, they're elevated above their audience, and they don't want to be providing a peep show when they stand at the front of the stage.

It's also worth noting that comic book character design drew from a lot of different sources, including live action sources like movies, where it wasn't unusual for characters of different types to be portrayed with many of these same "mistakes" in their costuming. Many of these tropes started out as visual shorthand that let you know something about a character just by looking at them. Some of the tropes are simply the result of utilitarian practicality from the publishing standpoint. Something as simple as zany, bright colors for costumes served a definite purpose in the old days of 4-color process printing: They let the reader quickly identify the characters in a crowded scene. It's exactly the same reason anime characters have all different colors of hair, including colors "not found in nature" - it allows viewers to quickly distinguish one character from another, particularly when the art style renders them all looking more or less the same otherwise, down to the way they're dressed (often in matching school uniforms).

This probably isn't a "bug" per se, as it seems to have been the status quo for some time (going back to live, as far as I can recall). But I'm curious as to why the "last mobs" map markers don't seem to work on office maps. We've all been there, with one hostage left to rescue, and you think you've looked everywhere but just can't find them. And unlike other map types, if it's an office map, we're not getting any help. Is it due to the fact that most "office" missions cover multiple floors, and this somehow presents a problem for the marker feature? I'm trying to remember if the feature is also broken on Arachnos base maps, as those almost always include an elevator to another floor. Very very rarely, a warehouse mission will include an elevator, but that's so rare that again I can't recall if the feature was broken there as well. Then again, those particular mission maps tend to be more linear than your normal warehouse maps.

Found an appropriate article on Cracked.com! https://www.cracked.com/image-pictofact-6497-14-impractical-useless-or-downright-dangerous-superhero-costume-accessories/

In the "The Tsoo Coup" arc, in the mission, "Bust gang leaders, their crews" (this is in the second building identified in the blueprints), one of the Family mobs says: "I heard that they are going after Johnny No-Nose and Marko Slow-Eye as welll." There's an extra "l" (lowercase L) at the end of "well".

I've noticed that many of my costumes look much better in motion than they do in a static image. Like, static im ages of this Flaminatrix costume just don't do it justice:

Just came across this shot of White Orchid, taken back on live. I like the way it came out.

Typo in the description of the "Nature's Wrath" badge in Eden: It uses the word "plaque" when it should probably say "plague".

Goldbar's level 40 armor upgrade: Goldbar's costumes seem to do well with the cel shading - it makes them looks nice and shiny.

So this next character is one that makes me wish they'd find a way to increase the allowed length for in-game bios. My main villain, both on live and HC, was Bruised Violet (dark/dark brute): At some point on live, I got the idea to make BV the younger sister of White Orchid (seen a few posts back), and I came up with a backstory for them. They were born and raised in the Dominican Republic. As teenagers, they were abducted by a magic-wielding supervillain named "El Demonio", who kept them captive for months while he performed evil, magical experiments on them. Unbeknownst to El Demonio, however, his experiments had the side effect of instilling magical powers in the sisters, and one day, they unleashed those powers, overcoming their captor and escaping. The sisters eventually made their way to Paragon City, where they became a crimefighting duo known as White Orchid and Blue Violet. Alas, time revealed that their time suffering at the hands of El Demonio had slightly different psychological effects on the sisters. Joselin (White Orchid) became resolved to grow strong enough to ensure that nobody else would have to suffer at the hands of evil like she and her sister had. Carmen (Blue Violet), on the other hand, resolved to grow strong enough that nobody could ever hurt her again. The practical result of that difference was that, while fighting criminals, Carmen tended to go quite overboard with the violence. Where Joselin was satisfied with subduing and arresting criminals to see they faced justice, Carmen preferred to administer severe beatdowns, instilling fear in criminals and feeling it was her duty to punish them. That led to increasing disagreements between the sisters, with Joselin insisting that Carmen moderate her approach, and Carmen refusing. This caused a rift between the sisters, and by the time of the Shivan meteor attack on Galaxy City, that rift had grown. They went to Galaxy City together to fight the Shivans, but became separated in the fighting. When it was over, Carmen was approached by agents of Arachnos, and it didn't take much convincing for her to decide to relocate to the Rogue Isles. She had no intention of working for Arachnos, though. In her mind, operating in the Isles would give her the chance to fully unleash her powers. She would be surrounded by criminals everywhere she went, and nobody would bat an eye at her taking them out. In her mind, this was true heroism, but of course it eventually gave her the reputation of being a villain herself. She changed her "hero" name to "Bruised Violet", changed her color scheme from blue to purple, and she soon built a reputation as someone to fear. Meanwhile, Joselin mourned privately, believing her sister killed in the Shivan attack. Eventually, though, Carmen began to regret her violent ways, and also to miss her sister. And so her journey back to the light began. In-game, around level 47, I started her on the transition from Villain to Rogue, via alignment and morality missions. I maintained her as a rogue until level 49, at which point she returned to Paragon City. To avoid being identified as the villainous Bruised Violet, she changed back to a blue costume, including a mask for the first time since she wasn't ready to reveal her true identity yet. Along with the costume change, she again renamed herself as "Blue Celestina" (celestina is a blue flower that grows in the Dominican Republic). I started her doing Rogue -> Hero alignment missions, and she reached level 50 on the final alignment mission. She then completed the hero morality mission, "The Unusual Suspect" (seemed appropriate), and made the final transition back to Hero. After another costume change, this time without a mask, she plans to soon reunite with her sister.

White Orchid (Energy/Energy brute) has reached level 50, and has transformed into a being of pure energy!

I just have my TAB key set to "Target Nearest", and that seems to serve me well in "general" combat scenarios. The main place this is less than ideal is when I specifically want to attack a Lieutenant first, because, apparently by design, Lieutenants almost always seem to be positioned behind their attached Minions. But for many enemy groups, I have priority targets that are usually higher than Lieutenants. You know the ones - Sky Raider Engineers, Malta Sappers, Carnival Master Illusionists. On Circle of Thorns maps, I'll prioritize the various ghosts/daemons to eliminate their -ToHit debuffs as quickly as possible. So I'll click to target those priority targets. I originally made the switch to "Target Nearest" because the default setting had that bad habit of picking targets on the other side of the room, which doesn't work very well when I'm playing a melee AT.

I wonder if it started as a play on "Kings Row is the best row."

The sun never sets, it just rises in the opposite direction.

I don't know if this is possible, but ... I would love to be able to remove selected contacts from my "Active" contacts tab. In particular, there are certain contacts that get added to the list when characters reach a certain level, and for whatever reason you never outlevel them, so they stick around. I'm talking about First Ward contacts that get added at level 29. I'm simply not going to do First Ward/Night Ward on every single character, and I get a little tired of the contacts cluttering up my list. It would be nice to be able to remove them / shuffle them off the the "Inactive" tab. Aside from those "automatic" contacts, there are also some RWZ contacts I'd like to delete. And frankly, any contact in the higher-level zones, particularly PI, simply never go away unless you take the time run them out of missions, because there aren't any higher-level contacts for them to introduce. There are many of them that, once I've completed whatever arc they offer, I don't intend to do any more missions for them. For example, after completing Harvey Maylor's Carnival of Shadows arc, he continues to offer a bunch of street-sweeping missions (all of which are "defeat 50 X") that I just don't want to do, but he won't leave my contacts list until I do.

I just came across this skyscraper in Moscow, Russia, the Mercury City Tower: and it reminded me of a couple of the towers in Paragon City: At first I thought the Mercury City Tower's design might have inspired the CoH buildings, but after further research I learned that the MCT was completed in 2013.

Taking time out from villainy to appreciate some fine art.

I really need to start exploring the bottom half of the color palette one of these days. I think my comic book roots being in the old "four-color process" days has prejudiced me toward preferring bold primary and secondary colors. I'm a traditionalist, I guess, but it wouldn't hurt me to start exploring some different shades.

I liked the way this shot of Darkray turned out: And this shot of Deepfire's current costume turned out nice. (She's not really pink, it's that Atlas Park lighting.)