RikOz

And speaking of lines under the home, this all started after they did exactly that. I live in a very old apartment building, and the previous owner apparently did not like things attached to the building. I found that out when I initially wanted to get my internet via the fiber-optic system the local utility district installed. Alas, hooking up to that required a box be installed on the exterior of the building, so the owner wouldn't allow it. That left me with no option except Charter/Spectrum, and even then the connection was limited to a cable hanging loose outside the back of the individual subscriber's apartment. That guy finally sold the building, and the new owner came in and started remodeling everything. That included getting Charter to come in and completely redo everything with new cables, strung neatly in the basement across the length of the building, and new connections into every apartment. A couple months later, the problems started. I should look into whether the new owner would allow the fiber-optic box. Because those lines are a public utility, they're available to local providers at low cost, so I'd be able to get my high-speed internet cheaper than Spectrum (and without constantly being nagged to add TV and phone service). Though I do have suspicions that the rental agency (as opposed to the owner) might have some deal with Charter/Spectrum for exclusive access to the building. They might have been feeding me a line of BS about the previous owner not allowing it.

I first had the issue last spring (before HC, so I was still playing WoW). At that time, I was still using the same modem (provided) and router (my own) I'd had when I signed up with Charter/Spectrum, so both were about 7 years old. They pointed out that the modem was outdated, so I took it in and exchanged it for a brand new one. The issue continued, so I went out and bought a new router, different brand from the old one. The problem immediately went away, so I thought that settled it. But then the problem came back in the fall. This time I got them to actually send a tech, and he went through everything and couldn't find the problem. But he gave me one of their routers to try out to see if it helped. I went from very frequent disconnects down to 3 a day at most. I don't know specifically what's going on with the modem - it's downstairs, and my computer is upstairs, so I can't see what happens, and it fixes itself so quickly that it would already be over by the time I got down there to look at it.

I'm very curious about the audio volume aspect of this game, because it it really freaking loud in comparison with literally every other sound-producing thing I do on my computer. It's completely unbalanced. As it stands right now, I have all three volume sliders pulled down to around 10-15%, and I still have to turn my speakers way down from where I need them to hear, say, YouTube or Netflix video, or streaming music via Spotify. On top of that, the game has no "master" volume slider, and none of the three existing sliders appears to have any effect on certain "global" sounds, specifically the "level up" sound. So I'll be playing the game at a comfortable volume, and then I level up and the sound of that blows my head off and wakes the neighbors. Before CoH came back, I was playing WoW on this same machine, with all the same hardware. I also tried out a number of other games (SW:TOR, FFXIV, ESO) after switching from a Mac to this Windows machine, and all of them had audio that was appropriately balanced, volume-wise, with the rest of the system.

Out of curiosity, how many of you who are experiencing this are on Spectrum high-speed internet? With my Spectrum connection, I was getting constant disconnects, one after another, until I went ahead and started using a router Spectrum gave me instead of my own router. Now it still happens, but maybe only 2-3 times a day. The thing about these disconnects are that it's probably only online gamers who would notice, and possibly people watching streaming video like Netflix, because the disconnect is very brief. It goes down and then comes right back up, so I'm only offline for a matter of seconds. But it's enough to lose the connection to the mapserver and force relogging. Even people watching Netflix or whatever might not notice, because of video buffering carrying them through the "down and back up". I know it's my internet and not the HC servers, at least for me, because when it happens, it happens to everything in my apartment at the same time, regardless of whether I'm playing the game or not, and regardless of whether the device uses the WiFi or has a hard ethernet connection like my PC.

Speaking seeded salvage, I'm sometimes puzzled by how long it actually takes my purchases to go through when buying a piece of rare salvage. The AH shows that there are around 10 million of that thing "for sale", and maybe a few hundred bidding, so I place my bid and ... come back tomorrow to pick it up because apparently I need to wait for a lottery to determine who gets one of those 10 million Imperviums.

When talking to the redside contact, Diviner Maros, on Sharkhead Isle, I couldn't help noticing that Maros loses his head in his thumbnail in the mission dialog window: Perhaps a Shark ... bit his Head? I'm guessing that, for technical reasons, they had to detach his head from his body to keep his eyes above his unique collar, making his head a separate model, and so his head isn't being pulled into the thumbnail along with the rest of him. But that's just a wild guess on my part. I have noticed this same bug with a handful of other contacts, but I can't recall their names at the moment.

I've done a whole lot of fighting on blueside against the Freakshow, and all of the missions that mention their leader spell his name "Dreck". Now I'm doing the redside "The Cult of the Shaper" arc from Diviner Maros on Sharkhead Isle, and the text keeps spelling it "Drek".

This reminds me of a joke I heard back when I used to bicycle a lot: Q: What do men and bicycle helmets have in common? A: They're both handy in an emergency, but most of the time they just look stupid. (Yeah yeah, I'm a man. I still thought it was funny.)

I found this SNL skit on YouTube, and thought it was perfect for those of us who spend so much of our time in the costume creator 😄

I've got one better: Rescuing a whopping 21 hostages on the biggest, most complicated freaking Oranbega map I have ever encountered. I was probably in there for a good 40 minutes, trying and failing to locate the last three. I ended up having to exit the mission, travel from Talos to Atlas, purchase the Reveal power, travel back to to the mission, and Reveal the map to see if there was simply a room somewhere I had failed to discover. Indeed, there was, and I rescued two of the three remaining hostages in there. Unfortunately, I could not locate the last hostage, and this final room was filled with those portals that constantly barf out more demons so they're impossible to completely clear out, and thus the markers for the last spawn/objective on the map could never kick in. I wasted nearly another hour in there before I finally gave up and autocompleted it. Took me a minute to get "Bo Derek run" 😄 Yeah, those Green Ink Men are a pain.

Alternat thanks you for the mention, and is proud to have coined "The Awning Storm"! (which occurred to me after your mention of Ouroboros as a base of operations) And yes, it was Alternat, together with her comrades, Stabby Steffi and Mandy Manslapper, who first called out the threat of The Basketball Courts. They are currently considering a 3-pointer plan to deal with the situation.

Also, some of them are just simply outdated due to later content changes. For example, there's at least one Council street-sweep mission still present in Steel Canyon, which I assume is a leftover from the days before the 5th Column was reintroduced. Now it's next to pointless to attempt because most of the Council you can find are in a pitched battle with the 5th Column, and at level, you just can't defeat the Council faster than the 5th Column wipes them out. When they're not actively fighting, it's just one unconscious Council guy on the ground, surrounded by 4-5 5th Columnists that you also have to fight.

I'm more or less the same with most of my characters. I write short bios that more or less just explain how they got their powers and decided to become an adventurer. Then their costumes follow a progression, where their initial costume is just something simple they improvised at home, but becomes more refined and improved as they acquire resources and experience. There are exceptions, of course. Some had financial backing or large resources of their own right from the beginning, or were part of specific projects to create superpowered people.

Heh, I decided it would be fun to make sort of a Japanese girl version of Captain Underpants. Here's Captain Buruma!

I would like to see the Gold Bricker flight pack added as a backpack option. I see it's available as a temp power, so... (One of my hero alts is a reformed, rehabilitated former Gold Bricker, and I wish he could still use his old flight pack. I currently use that Sky Raiders porter backpack because it's the closest approximation.)

On the labeling of stats: "Stun" or "Disorient" - pick one. That caused me plenty of confusion early on, when I would hover over a power to see what enhancements it could take, and then could not find an enhancement that did that thing, until I finally figured out the labeling inconsistency. Likewise, "Slow" or "Snare".

I just voted, and we're in 2nd, 15 votes ahead of WoW Classic. EDIT: I'm also impressed that I did not have to create an account on that site to vote!

Don't sap me bro!

Heer Oranje: Daan Visser, while not a direct descendant of the legendary William of Orange, is related to the famous Dutch house through a chain of marriages. Erm, that is, his great-great-aunt married into the house a century ago. Daan himself is unmarried. When his biophysics research resulted in his gaining superpowers, however, he came to the attention of the house's more prominent members, and they elected to name him the house's Champion. The House of Orange provided him with the resources he needed to become a full-fledged superhero, including obtaining for him suitable training and equipment and sending him to Paragon City to gain experience and develop contacts within the superpowered community. While he does not hold an actual noble title, the house chose to grant him the honorary title "Heer Oranje" (in English, "Lord Orange").

But just for the record, the cyborg "auras" are combat-only - they don't show if you're not in a "combat stance".

Tell me about it. I soloed the entire arc on a mid-30s fire/fire blaster. Extremely painful, but I'm glad I stuck with it.

Heh. My character, "Cybernetic Queen" is based on a sexbot from a song. She started out looking a lot like a Praetorian clockwork, and as she levels up she's gradually replacing parts of her body with more human-looking parts.

Interesting article on Cracked.com on exactly this topic: https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-we-train-teenage-girls-to-love-psychopaths/

Ooh! I have an elec/elec brute named Elektricheskiy Shok! I originally called him "Old Soviet Hero", as he's a middle-aged Russian man who grew up in the Soviet era and was a member of a government superhero team, and emigrated to the USA/Paragon City in the early 2000s. I haven't fully written his bio yet, though. Right now his bio just says, "I am capitalist now!" (Though I will admit I don't know how good the name is, as I just relied on Google to translate "electric shock" into Russian for me.)

I have a character named "Epic Gear" whose costumes are purple and incorporate those big gear-shaped shoulder pieces. He's a direct spoof of "elitist" WoW players (I've played WoW since 2008, except for when I'm playing CoH): Epic Gear began his adventuring career on another world, in another dimension, where he was a mighty warrior known to all as Pwnmastr. In his long and storied career, he defeated elemental lords, lich kings, murderous dragons, demons, and even a few ancient, evil gods. In short, he was one of the most elite, hardcore heroes of his world. Alas, a teleportation spell gone wrong, probably cast by some noob casual adventurer, sent Pwnmastr hurtling through dimensions until he landed on this ... "Primal Earth". Although this new world was vastly different from the one from whence he came, he saw that there were evils to conquer and villains to pwn, and he set forth to become a hero here as well. Despite being still early in his career as a ... "superhero", he is clearly already one of the elite. See how he is clad head to toe in epic purple gear! On the other hand, another of my "tribute" characters is named "Mendacious D" (mendacious: adj. Lying; untruthful) made to resemble Jack Black's wrestling costume from Nacho Libre. His bio reads, "This is the greatest hero in the world. This is not a tribute." 😄