RikOz

I kind of unintentionally established a pattern for myself when I created a Super Group called "The Extracurriculars", which is just a group of ten of my own alts sharing a particular backstory. It's a group of former students of the Galaxy City International School for Superpowered Girls. Their school was destroyed in the Shivan meteor event, and they had to escape in a hurry, and so their initial "costumes" were more or less just whatever they happened to be wearing at the time, or threw on in a hurry. the backstory then has a number of these students officially forming a team, and once they had the resources (mechanics-wise, at level 10) they each designed a "proper" costume. These were simple out of necessity, so were just your basic spandex costumes. As they gained more experience and acquired more resources (level 20) they improved their costumes to make them more suitable/protective. That has ended up being the pattern I follow more or less closely with most of my alts, where those who weren't already part of some related organization start out in mostly improvised, homemade costumes, and then those costumes evolve and improve over time. Those who were part of some relevant organization (the military, a security firm, a government agency, etc.) often start out in a costume that is modeled after their former "official" uniform/clothing, and then evolve from there.

That would require having fingers first!

In the Battle Axe power set, the "Chop" power is consistently performing the "draw weapon" animation every time, even when the weapon is already drawn. Checking more closely, this is only happening when "No Redraw" is selected in the power customization.

I've lately been running my low-level alts through a particular AE XP farm to quickly get them to level 12. The "mission" itself exemplars you down to level 1, and you get a room full of level 1, "orange" bosses to beat down. Today I did this on another alt, and these bosses were all "yellow" to her. I discovered that I had apparently set her Notoriety to -1 at some point and had forgotten. In any case, she finished that farm with 372 tickets, and then I reset her notoriety back to the default +0. But then I wondered what would happen if I set her "Solo Bosses" to "Yes". I changed that setting and ran the mission again. Okay, it turned all those "orange" bosses into "red" elite bosses. Cool. Finished the mission, only to realize that the mission awarded me no tickets at all. Zip. Zilch. Nada. I got XP and Inf, but no tickets. Also no drops of any kind, so I'm pretty sure that I didn't inadvertently click "Standard Rewards" instead of "Architect Rewards" when starting the mission. Anyway, I'm not sure if what happened was a bug, or if that was actually what was supposed to happen, but I'm throwing it out there.

Say what? Does this only apply to TFs? Because when I go to my SG base after dying in a mission, I emerge in the zone beacon location. I was moaning about the distance from the Faultline hospital after dying in one of those missions at the south end of the zone behind the dam, but then somebody informed me that, in the old days, there was no hospital in Faultline and you had to travel from the one in Skyway.

LOL - You've reminded me of "Sprint" animations in WoW. As we all know, a person's posture/stride when jogging isn't the same as when sprinting. So since WoW's "rogue" class is the only class with a "sprint" power (in normal form anyway - I'm not counting druid animal forms), and some races cannot be rogues, Blizzard did not bother with creating separate sprint animations for those non-rogue races. The result is that, if those races somehow benefit from some kind of temporary speed buff, past a certain point it just looks stupid because the character just uses a speeded-up jog animation. I specifically noticed this during the Warlords of Draenor expansion. You had a mine in your base, and while in the mine you could get a speed boost by drinking "Miner's Coffee". Each cup granted a +10% boost, and you could stack this by drinking more coffee. I think +30% was the point where the models would switch from "run" animation to "sprint" animation, except for races that had no "sprint" animation.

Yeah, the war walls seem to do nothing to stop the Rikti's bombing runs, or stop them congregating in Founder's Falls, Crey's Folly, etc. To actually be effective against Rikti, there would need to be an energy dome, not walls. I mean, even in the real world, city walls were rendered mostly obsolete by gunpowder artillery, and airplanes just sealed the deal. The real explanation, of course, is a gameplay explanation: gotta have some way to physically separate the zones, but then there of course needs to be an in-world lore explanation, and here we are.

As I discovered after some experimentation across multiple alts, the initial Shining Stars missions are actually much easier if you start them at level 5, when you're introduced to Twinshot, than if you wait a couple levels. Due to the XP buffs, I had been hitting at least level 8 before talking to Twinshot (I like to play the Matthew Habashy stuff to completion, all the way up through the end of Aaron Thiery's missions, before talking to Twinshot). Somebody in another thread where I mentioned this pointed out that there are different "tiers" of enemies, so perhaps the "tier" incremented somewhere between levels 5 and 8. There's also the point of the "beginner's luck" buff, which is going to be lower at 8 than at 5.

In the New Praetorians arc that starts in Brickstown, ol' Wossname, the Praetorian rebellion leader, at one point hollers something about Paragon City clearly being some kind of fascist regime, just look at the war walls.

I'd be happy if there was simply a way to tone down the blazing blue light from the war walls. Like, replace that swirling blue light with, say, a mesh that is more or less invisible from a distance, so it stops being a major feature of every screenshot.

I read somewhere, back during live, that the members of Shining Stars were supposed to represent different player types: Grym: The player who basically just recreates his character from a different game. In the case of Grym, WoW's "Cataclysm" expansion had just introduced the worgen (basically werewolves) as a playable race not long before the Shining Stars arc was added to CoH. (I totally get this - my first CoH character, Flaminatrix, is a fire/fire blaster who physically resembles my WoW main - who is a paladin - while having the powerset of my then-#2 WoW character, a fire mage.) Dillo: The hardcore roleplayer who never, ever breaks character, right down to constantly speaking in an incomprehensible dialect. Flambeaux: The female player (or male player playing a female character) who always tries to be the center of attention, and uses being a female to score benefits from other, male, players: I don't recall what player archetypes Proton and Twinshot were meant to represent.

The problem is that, when the missions were first implemented, they were meant to introduce new players to the game's mechanics and features, and a new player did not have access to all of those extra attacks. You can get them all now from the P2W vendor, but that was not the case on live.

This level capping on IO sets, combined with a lack of obvious in-game information, led to me mistakenly downgrading one of my characters yesterday. I can't remember the "yellow" set name offhand, but my character was level 45, and I wanted to start replacing that "yellow" set with an "orange" set. I had found a recipe for one part of what appeared to be a suitable "orange" replacement: the Damage/Recharge piece of Decimation. I crafted the IO as a level 40, and slotted it in place of the Damage/Recharge piece of the the "yellow" set already slotted. That yellow IO was level 41. I then applied a catalyst to the new piece to attune it, expecting that now it would scale to level 45. Oh, no it didn't. Only now did I find out, in the Attunement text that only appeared after applying the catalyst, "This IO scales to level 40". Well that's just great. I spent 500k on the rare salvage I needed, then spent 20 Merit Rewards to buy the catalyst, to downgrade an IO.

The other big problem with those missions is the fact that those orange Arachnos lieutenants immediately hit you with Web Grenade every single time. The problem with this is that WG doesn't just immobilize you - it also slows your recharge. And slowed recharge is bad for a character that has, if starting these missions at the "expected" level (i.e. Twinshot is introduced at level 5), at most, three attacks. So you can't run away because you're immobilized, your attacks are slowed to the point that you can barely fight back, and you're being shot at and pummeled by a mob that is +2 to you, who your own debuffs, if you have any, won't stick. Also, and this has nothing to do with difficulty/challenge, but Twinshot keeps committing the RPG faux pas of making RP assumptions on behalf of your character. Some of my characters are middle-aged, and really don't like being called "Kiddo". Outside of the Shining Stars arcs, I've actually started setting my lower-level blasters Notoriety to -1 enemies simply to deal with the weird way so many maps spawn front-loaded with +1 enemies. It's always bizarre to me that the first room or two of almost every map is full of mobs that are harder to beat than the named "boss" at the end of the mission - I've noted that the named mob at the end of the map virtually always matches your notoriety setting, so with the default +0 setting, if you're level 13, the named guy at the end will be level 13. But he's hiding behind a bunch of level 14 guys at the front door, for some reason, which means your character immediately walks into a crowd of yellow and orange mobs.

Earlier today I was on my level 45 fire/fire/fire blaster, doing some Tip missions in Steel Canyon. Everything was fine until I entered my fourth mission (the one where that depressed Polar Shift character was going to destroy Paragon and Jameson and his Freedom Corps crew were after her again - can't recall the mission name). Anyway, once I was in the mission, I suddenly couldn't use my attacks. I targeted the first mob, pressed my "4" key, and nothing happened. Pressed some other attack keys, and nothing happened. At first I thought I'd been mapserved and my client just hadn't gotten the message yet, but I figured out that hadn't happened when I wandered close enough to the mobs for them to aggro. They chased me back out of the cave, since I still couldn't fight back. Once outside, I logged out and back in, then I tested things on the outdoor Steel Canyon mobs, since they weren't likely to kill me. My attacks still wouldn't work by pressing the number keys. I discovered they worked just fine if I clicked the buttons, though. I also discovered that I could trigger the powers on trays 2 and 3 by combining the number keys with the appropriate modifier keys - alt+1, alt+2, etc. But the powers on Tray 1 still wouldn't work when I pressed the unmodified number keys. Further experimentation showed me that, strangely enough, this issue was confined to keys 1 through 8. Pressing 9 or 0 activated those powers just fine. Tried 1-8 again, and they still didn't work. Until, suddenly, they did. Just like that, with no apparent change to anything I was doing, or anything going on around me, they just started working again. Re-entered my mission, and everything proceeded as usual, and continued normally until I logged out for dinner a bit later. It was very strange. Has anybody else had something like this happen?

This has been literally the only game to make me quit WoW. Twice. The first time was in September 2011. I'd been playing WoW since 2008, starting during Wrath of the Lich King (I had wanted to play in 2004, as I had played and enjoyed all of the WarCraft RTS games previously, but I didn't get a computer capable of running it until '08, my shiny new iMac). Then the Cataclysm expansion came out, and it turned out they'd listened to all of the elitists and the "raid or die" mentality set into the game. Leveling through the expansion was great, but then I got to max level and, since I wasn't a raider, there was really nothing for me to do. So I leveled six more characters to max level, and then they had nothing to do either. I was left with running the exact same round of daily quests on seven alts, every day, and was bored out of my mind. I complained on a forum somewhere about my boredom, and mentioned that I'd love to try other MMOs, but they were all Windows-only. And somebody casually replied, "City of Heroes runs on Macs." Whoa, really? Why haven't I heard of this before? Downloaded the game, made an account, saw it had gone F2P, but I opted for the paid VIP subscription. Then after six months of paying subs for both games, I realized I was hardly ever logging into WoW, and cancelled that sub. Nothing but City of Heroes for me from now on! *sigh* And then, six months later, NCSoft pulled the rug out from under us. I reluctantly had no choice, still playing on a Mac, but to go back to WoW for my MMO fix. As luck would have it, this coincided with the release of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, which I absolutely loved. I was very happy with it, and it felt like Blizzard had learned something from their mistakes with Cataclysm. Then I played through Warlords of Draenor, where they made a whole new bunch of mistakes. Followed by Legion which was mostly awesome. And finally the current expansion, Battle for Azeroth, which is a weird combination of great and terrible, and of course the thing I liked a lot about it turned out to be something the elitists hated, so they decided to not take that thing any further. And so I was back to doing the same pointless grind every day. Ultimately, the best thing about BfA was that it forced me to upgrade to a new computer. I still had that same 2008 iMac, which still used OpenGL as its graphics API. It wasn't able to upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS X, and so couldn't use Apple's new "Metal" API. Blizzard had basically been holding their OpenGL support together with duct tape, and it showed. They warned us that BfA wouldn't support OpenGL, in fact wouldn't even launch with it. So I finally switched to Windows and bought a new gaming PC well before BfA launched. And then I played BfA. Of course, now that I was running Windows I decided to check out a bunch of those other MMOs I'd been missing out on. There wasn't a single one that could make me quit WoW. And then, Homecoming happened. This time it only took me three days to cancel my WoW sub. And it only took three days because I happened to get Homecoming installed three days before my WoW sub expired anyway. It was effectively instant WoW quit.

So, wow, thanks for pointing me at Endless Sky! Installed Steam, got the game up and running, and holy crap it felt just like the originals, but with better graphics. Played for a bit, and it was oh so familiar 🙂

Oooooooooooo!

FSAA is the only setting I can't max. If I go any higher than 8x I start seeing a performance hit. I have a GTX 1050 GPU.

Dang, if instances take a whole 20 minutes to despawn, I wish that would translate into letting me pick up where I left off, instead of having to start all over every time I get DC'd.

There was a single-player shareware game I used to love, called Escape Velocity (+ 2 sequels). Not too long ago I re-downloaded it to see if it was still as much fun as I remembered. Unfortunately, it wouldn't go above 1024x768, sat there in a little box in the middle of my 1920x1080 screen, and all of the non-scaling text was so tiny that my aging eyes could not read a word of it, even with my reading glasses. As it was a game where reading the text was pretty essential to gameplay, I had to sadly retire it to the "Fond Memories" folder 😞

Not to mention that "level up" sound is apparently unaffected by any volume setting I can find. Like, there's "Sound Effect Volume", "Music Volume" and "Voiceover Volume", but no "Master Volume". So I'll be cruising through a mission and sound levels are just where I like them, and then I'll level up and the noise blows my head off.

Speaking of multiboxing, back on live I got this idea to roll up a set of triplet sisters with superpowers. They had identical costumes except for the colors. To get a group photo, I rolled the first sister on my main account, then created two free accounts, one for each of the other sisters. I logged in the first one on my main account, on my Mac. Then I launched two instances of the game on my Windows laptop. Once I had all three sisters logged in, I got them positioned together and managed to snap a couple screenshots before the laptop locked up because it really couldn't handle running two instances of the game.

Hey, I have 1,000 slots, I'mma do my best to fill them up! Even made spreadsheets of the ATs I like to play - Primary PSs down the left, Secondaries across the top - so that I can keep track of which combinations I've already done so that I can get as far as possible without duplication 🙂

True enough. I generally only use the Turn L/R keys when I take my hand off the mouse to drink from my bottle of water and I don't want to stop moving. Keyboard turning otherwise doesn't have much use in this game, but in WoW there were places - like the overabundance of spiral staircases/ramps that force you to effectively run in a circle - were a lot easier if I used a combination of keys and mouse. Strafe keys ... I've never used them. Strafing looks to me like a holdover from FPS games. Back in WoW I'd see people who weren't even in combat, they were just running around in a city, and they're strafing instead of turning, and it just looked bizarre to me.