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Yep, Nope is right

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Posts posted by Yep, Nope is right

  1. That seems to pop up pretty regularly on big leagues. See it just about every time I spend any time ToTing. Being caused by certain powers or whatever would explain why it's so erratic. Once it starts happening, it does seem to go on for a while, so you guys are probably on the right track. This is nothing new, you've seen it occasionally for years. It does seem to have become more common this year, though.

     

    TBH, until I saw this I had just put it down to the Halloween monster's AI occasionally having an uncharacteristic burst of common sense, and saying "I don't wanna go out THERE, those heroes are dangerous!"

  2. 2 minutes ago, Snarky said:

    CoH is an old game.  It is easy to point at ANY change and say "look, this is causing population decline.  I can prove it.  They added it and the population declined...."

     

    That's a different though itself interesting point. We still have a healthy population for an ancient if beloved game like this (even if it IS superior to pretty much everything built since), but the prevalent STYLE of play has from what I can see moved a lot more toward the 'unofficial solo server' Protector style I always favored outside of the big announced 'raids' and holiday events. Now, entirely possible I am seeing what I want to see, though given what I've seen lots of other people say, I don't think so. Not gonna waste either of our time arguing the point, all you have to do is scan the thread titles in the forums to see lots of talk about these sorts of observations and concerns.

     

    Like a lot of topics I address, this is a bigger issue even than CoH. I know for a fact certain there are developers in other MMOs playing, volunteering, and even reading these forums. So a little constructive critique might perchance go a long way. Though I also know from long discussions with developers of my acquaintance just how often their hands are tied by the people above them. Among other things, I'm still in touch with a couple of people I played with in CoH and other games who now work in the MMO world. Big corporations have their own problems, far beyond the scope of any discussion worth pursuing on a gaming forum. <shrug> I worked for a series of them for 34 years, and got the scars and t-shirts to prove it.

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  3. 5 minutes ago, Snarky said:

    okay.  Nostalgia is great, ...but....

     

    On Redside we needed the location badge from each bank for the accolade power.  There were some clunky workarounds, a lot of begging, and luck involved.  (if you missed one or more)  They put in a workaround.  That we begged for, for many years.  I do not want them to take that away...so we can be "creative"

     

    At this point, no, of course not. The point is there were SEVERAL viable solutions to BOTH the problems cited. Ya know, SGmates, second accounts, dual boxing, all that, and I bet I'm glossing over a half dozen other ways. Then there's the opportunity cost. What did we NOT get because of the development effort which went into Ouroboros and Flashback? Impossible to know, of course.

     

    I contend we lost something else, too. Look around the forums, or on the discord, all those vets don't just talk about nostalgia, they talk about how CoH has been moving more and more toward a solo experience over the years. Part of that is because the development effort both on live and since the revival has made it more and more convenient to do EVERYTHING solo. Now, I'm an introvert, quite dubious of PUGs most of the time, and think this is absolutely GREAT for my insular curmudgeon playstyle. But I am pointing out that in an MMO which always prided itself on the strong, helpful community, continually making development choices which remove player agency in helping each other may not over the long run be a great design philosophy.

  4. On 10/1/2023 at 8:15 AM, drgantz said:

    In the early days, there was a mission that awarded a badge.  To get this mission, you had to do a specific mission chain.  Some people would miss this chain, and then offer 900K Infl for that mission.  I would make a new toon, do that mission chain, and then wait for someone to make a chat announcement that he was offering infl for that mission. 

    Then - Profit!

     

    This highlights one of my subtle critiques of a LOT of what even the live CoH devs, the SCORE team, and even the HC devs here have changed. Often the players come up with quite viable work-arounds to even tough-to-solve problems like this. Rather than supporting or encouraging that innovation, they put in a 'fix' - thus removing agency from the players. Sure, flashbacks are perfect, and they even have a (bad) explanation in lore (time travel). Talk about both a story-telling crutch AND a way to make a complete pretzel out of what little continuity and canon there really is. <sigh>

     

    "But running that mission is not worth 900k INF! Drgantz was evil for exploiting those poor people that way," I am sure someone is at least thinking. A thing is worth what someone is willing to pay, the fundamental law of economics. Ask the people who gladly forked over that INF to get that badge back in the day, guarantee they were happy as heck to make the exchange. You want the price lower? Fine, channel the entrepreneurial spirit of the noted mission contact Drgantz, get the mission on your list, then start advertising you'll run it for what you consider a fair price. Hey, developers, you coulda saved a LOT of development effort by setting up a channel for that, and advertising it in the launcher or a logon message. Encourage teaming, encourage players to active friendly COMPETITION to help each other and provide a valuable service? Gosh, seems like a helluva return for creating a chat channel and adding a few prominent notices. If more players had been actively and publicly flogging this (and other) missions for cash, the competition would have inevitably driven the price downward. 

     

    Do please note, I am not, in fact, advocating against flashback. Using this as an illustrative example of a strong bias I've observed for years if not decades among development teams across the entire industry against giving the players the tools to solve issues like this as a community rather than spending untold gazillions of development hours and money adding bells and whistles to the MMO when supporting the ingenuity of the players can often yield not just a solution to the perceived issue, but lots of 'intangible' benefits. Even some aspects of MMOs I personally find quite odious COULD be made a lot more tolerable if to the greatest extent possible PLAYERS were given more tools to solve the inherent problems which arise in edge cases. Some of what I have in mind goes back to the very earliest days of online gaming, and worked at least as well as the Rube Goldberg arrangements we get now. But then the developers got it into their pointy little heads that a fancy system was better than the community working things out on their own and having the tools to do so, and here we are. <sigh>

  5. The joke of it is, all they did by making the shapeshift 'instant' was restore kheldians somewhat to the way they played for YEARS before the devs on live suddenly decided they had made a mistake in the way the shapeshift animation was working. There's a huge thread in the old live kheldian forums where they explained why this change HAD TO BE MADE, and the players begged them not to make that change after seeing it on the beta server, but they insisted. And overnight kheldians went from slightly subpar but 'good enough' that a lot of experienced players enjoyed them, to a VERY small population of diehards still playing and pretty much universally condemned as badly underperforming. PB went from one of my favorite ATs that I was spending most of my time on, to something I couldn't bear to play any more. I recreated my peacebringer on HC and finally took her to 50, but I would never pretend it is at all as much fun as it was originally on live. And I am not sure I played that hero at all for probably the last several years before the sunset. It went from being smooth, fun, and exciting to being too clunky to bother with.

     

    The REAL problem with that change, which I and several others tried to point out to them at the time, was that they waited WAY too long to make that drastic a change. All the people playing kheldians had more than enough time to train their attack chains and opening moves and stuff into motor memory. It's a HUGE problem to then change things around and force people to retrain.

     

    Developers (not just MMOs) in general just seem to have no understanding of how badly it affects users to make even subtle changes to the timing of how powers fire, or more generally sequences of physical movements to perform a task. It is FAR harder to retrain any motor skill than to train it into muscle memory in the first place. 'Only' hundreds of repetitions to get it down in the first place, but once it becomes an unconscious skill; if the sequence or timing is changed you'll need to practice the NEW version far more to first 'unlearn' the old one, then get that new sequence smoothly committed to motor memory. Ask any good piano teacher or sports coach or sensei about that, it's the basis of the famous Lombardi quote "Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.”

     

    Think how hard it was when you first learned to drive - now, you literally do it most of the time without thinking about what you're doing. Until you switch cars, and some of the controls have been rearranged - same problem. How many times have you found your fingers unconsciously doing a sequence of keystrokes you've repeated thousands of times for another character which don't work at all for the one you're actually logged into? That's exactly why - you've hammered that sequence so many times you do not have to think about it at all. By the time your conscious mind catches up, you've already run thru the whole string. That simple change of timing and some tweaking to do with the way the queue processed the shapeshifts was disastrous for the population of kheldians actually being played for years afterward. 

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  6. On 9/26/2023 at 10:50 AM, Psi-bolt said:

     

    This used to drive me so nuts.  I also remember that even after they added real numbers, Statesman would occasionally make comments to the effect that people didn't really need them to play the game.   Absolutely insane.

     

    That dude was just weird, even by gamer standards.

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  7. Blackjoy commented "I am skeptical the devs designed the Fighting Pool expecting Scrappers to take it.  I could be wrong." We actually had several comments from the developers indicating that at least by that point, they DID expect scrappers (and tankers) to take both tough and weave IF they wanted to build layered mitigation. Whether that was the original concept, who knows?

     

    The two contexts I know it came up in was in discussions about the 'wasted' pick of boxing or tough, and several times in a couple of  huge long threads in the old tanker forum from a tank whose name I've forgotten who was always arguing for invulnerability to be buffed. I'm far too lazy to go dig those out, but I do remember direct statements from developers that they *expected* someone wanting a truly solid melee capable of eating an alpha to take the fighting pool. That sent the tanker advocating for invulnerability to be, ya know, invulnerable, into a quite eloquent if ultimately futile tirade. I've forgotten that side of the discussion, but I distinctly remember the comments from the developers about the fighting pool. 

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  8. 17 hours ago, Solarverse said:

     

    Regen needs a cushion of some type. IMHO it could use either a fast regenerating Absorb Shield, a much higher Resistance to Regeneration Debuffs and an adequate Resistance to Recovery/Endurance Debuff and that would put the set in a proper place. It wouldn't be the best by any stretch, but it would be in a position where it can sit within the ranks of others without being shamed.

     

    P.S. I appreciate you taking this to a serious discussion instead of insinuating a set is not for me. Trust me, it's for me, it was once my favorite set and thematically it still is...I just don't like the punishment it received and I believe the set needs to be adjusted to fit the times.

     

     

     

    You're not wrong. And yet... the hero pictured as my avatar has been my main since right AFTER the big regen nerf. People told me I was nuts for going with /regen. They were probably right. <grin> It was rough going at times learning the ropes, but I made it work, with a lot of advice gleaned from the old scrapper forum. I've stuck with katana/regen scrapper for all those years, and it's still my favorite. If it underperforms, I can't tell. <shrug> Well before I hit 50, BladeSnow was for most purposes unkillable if I did my part - which included knowing when to bounce to give the regen time to catch up or one of the 'oh shit' clickies that vital second or two to recharge if the inspiration tray was looking a bit thin. And that included going into +4/x8 missions; until Incarnate dropped and massacred us all I thought I had survivability all figured out.

     

    Part of the reason I was an early adopter of IO sets was getting more tools to work on my main. When my fellow blade the katana/SR had a defense cascade failure every few missions, I was the one left standing. Also a katana/invulnerability scrapper who often joined us., same deal - I had put a LOT more work into layered mitigation than either of them at first, though they were not dumb and quickly followed suit. We all had our strengths and weaknesses, but unless one of us was having an off night, we could all three get thru any content with the teams we could cobble together out of our SG - we were never big on PuGs. If one of us was getting hammered, the others would cover long enough to take the heat off - that's the point of a team, after all.

     

    Most nights nobody on the team died at all, and barring lag or just old fashion screwups of all the various sorts it wouldn't be the scrappers. My SG mates were always marveling that the 'weak' regen could keep up with the 'stronger' sets, but you just had to pay attention and use the tools you had to keep in the fight. Including 'wasting' power slots on fighting pool - the one I always hated was boxing, had zero use for that nor kick (on a scrapper, I mean, weapon redraw alone was a killer). Always had but never slotted boxing, but such was the price of getting more resistance and defense. Even before IOs, CJ, weave, maneuvers, and stealth layered on top of tough and regen worked pretty well. Best of all, that was one hero who never had to worry about his blue bar, which freed up a slot or two in the ol' inspiration tray and paid lots of OTHER dividends.

     

    I've tried just about every variant of scrapper, and played *all* the blueside ATs from the very beginning. Finally got serious about the redside ATs when Going Rogue hit, though still not as familiar with anything but MM and Stalker as I'd like, only so many hours in the day. Yet despite all that, katana/regen/body was always my main and go-to for the toughest content. My first 50, my first incarnate, and the first character I recreated when the new servers came up. Only character I make a point of recreating on EVERY server. Regen has gotten SOME rework since the big nerf. MoG was tweaked at least 3 times that I can remember, and emerged better every time. There are some other scrappers better known in the community who played big katana/regen, too, and did just fine. It may be in theory weak, in practice it's more than strong *enough*. I tried a katana/willpower variant, and just didn't perform as well for me.

     

    Castle at one point told us that willpower was what regen should have been had the team understood things better at the beginning, or something to that effect. You can likely find his exact comment in the old forum archives. I like willpower a lot, and have played it all the way to 50 on a hero or two. But at least in my hands, it just can't quite hit the sort of peak I can on regen, when I'm firing on all cylinders, probably due to long experience.

     

    There is more or less universal agreement regen needs a fix, but you keep coming back to the simple problem - the most logical way to fix it in the current paradigm would leave it looking a LOT like willpower. So much so that there is arguably not a lot of point in having both. No idea what the solution is, and from my experience at least, not sure it's enough of a problem to tie up scarce development resources solving. <helpless shrug> Some powersets match people's personal play and build style better than others, is all I can really say.  "Regen has been bery, bery gooda to me."

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  9. You DO know that all this was possible on live, right? I had the exact same build on live that I have on Homecoming. Literally the same build, I had MIDS saves to allow me to recreate it exactly. Only difference was on live it cost me a fair bit over 2 billion INF instead of just under 200 million. I do tend to agree that HC goes a bit too far into 'easy mode' territory, but it's not the fault of the IO system. 

     

    The power escalation was well under way at sunset, but it also appeared that the live devs were in the progress of committing an equivalent escalation of opponents. If anything, some of the content they put out toward the end was moving us back into the 'bad old days' territory of extreme risk for not much better rewards.

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  10. 7 hours ago, arcane said:

    Believe it or not, things with a 5% chance to happen… happen all the time…

     

    Damn right they do. Four or five attacks in a row, on characters with incredible amounts of accuracy and to hit bonus (and build up, and a build up proc). This is why it has been called the *evil* RNG for over 40 years. (Well, ok, in the early days we usually abbreviated it to +RNG, but you young whippersnappers would likely have no idea what that means... kids these days.) Had Arcanaville not put a helluva lot of work into verifying the randlib CoH uses actually produces halfway decent random numbers, I'd wonder.

     

    In the end, RNGesus giveth and taketh away, to (mis)quote another common gamer saying.  Just leave us to our mumbling about uphill both ways and shaking our fists at the skies. One reason I overbuild for mitigation and don't worry as much about the damage cap, all yer gonna do is miss anyway. :classic_dry:

  11. The easiest way to find anything in-game is to have vidiotmaps loaded in your client. There's a whole thread showing where to get and install that in the third party tools section.

     

    But vidiotmaps is not JUST an overlay, it started out as maps on a webpage, and that functionality is still available for handy reference. To find most anything WITHOUT installing vidiotmaps, you can look up the maps on the homecoming wiki starting here: 

     

    Homecoming Wiki Vidiotsmaps

     

    Scroll down, and there's links to bring up the map for all the zones in your browser.

  12. Err... I guess I have to turn in my min/max card, cuz I just never worried about the lower bonuses at low levels. I usually try to slot attuned sets as I figure out where I want the build to go, and just have done with. If not that, I'm slotting SOs and shooting for +3, or just stuffing common IOs in there so I don't have to think about it and trying to remember to update them every few levels but not too worried if I forget. I've seen a lot of people say they don't bother filling slots AT ALL until they hit the mid 20s or so, and I can understand the reasoning.

     

    Lower bonuses or not, if you slot your powers at all decently at low levels you'll curb-stomp pretty much everything you run into if you have any clue at all how to handle your powersets & AT. To me, at least, this suggestion seems like a solution in search of a problem. I wouldn't argue against it if the devs pick up the idea, but I do kinda wonder if it's really worth their time.

  13. Hmmn. Based on a reasonable number of experiences on Live, I'd be opposed to entirely removing collisions between players. It's far less of a problem now, but back in the days when massive lag was a fairly regular occurrence, or slow connections or high latency links like satellite not quite bad enough to disconnect someone but so bad they had little control over their character, our SG several times saved someone from dying by repeatedly bumping them to get them out of a bad spot. I've not seen such a situation since we came back, and, of course, some of the situations which can happen wouldn't incur debt anyway. Still, it is the sort of thing that you get thanked for profusely, and really makes someone's day when they finally are able to recover out of the massive lag or relog and realize their friends expended that extra little effort to protect their teammate and they won't be making a run back from the hospital after all.

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  14. 9 hours ago, Shenanigunner said:

     

    I know it's been eleventy-seven years, but we really need to change one of these acronyms.

     

    <shrug> Not sure that's really necessary. Players don't seem to get confused about what they're fighting. It would be bad if we COULD fight the other sorta GM, I mean, the servers wouldn't last long without them. Probably some legal issues involved, too.

     

    Besides, not like you ever hear the giant monsters complain about being lumped in with them. Most of them are not great conversationalists, granted. But I'd like to think the GMs are grateful to the people who brought them back from limbo and let them rampage again. Monsters got feelings, too, y'know.

  15. Could be something to do with AlienFX, but the laptop which does not have this problem also has AlienFX installed and enabled. I keep hoping some bright lad will figure out how to convert that RGB lighting functionality to something more general. I've got Corsair smart RGB keyboards on both machines, and there's plenty of other RGB keyboards out there. A lot less of a niche feature than it was back on live, and at least SOME of the hooks are already in there. There's a thread floating around here somewhere in the forum where we talked about that a bit. I had an Alienware back on live, too, and the low hit point warning flash especially I found very useful.

  16. I'll be watching this thread with interest. I've still come up with no resolution for the problem other than starting with "reset graphics" every time. I just never shut down further than the login screen unless forced to by a patch. Minimize the window and leave it running in background until I am playing again. Oddly enough, my Alienware laptop of the same vintage but running the same NVidia GTX 1080s does not exhibit this behavior. I am not quite sure WHAT to make of that. As I said in the other thread, I've seen the exact same behavior on the Ouroboros-based Rebirth code, too. I keep hoping whatever the heck is going on will get magically fixed by a driver or windoze update, but so far no luck.

  17. My main problem with spanning using Nvidia was updates got weird. It works OK day to day, you just have to do a lot of fiddling every time Windows Update changes something. About half the time I'd come in and find the system only using one screen and claiming the others weren't working, and have to manually reinstall. I finally gave up and don't span the desktop, just leave it as three separate monitors. You're right that it seems to be three monitors that gives it fits. Never had any of those problems with the laptop that only has two external monitors attached through the Alienware 'external graphics adaptor'. But, yes, you're right about GeForce Experience. It is on my list of software to be avoided on a real gaming rig, which is really rather ironic. I've avoided GeForce Experience for years now, so I doubt that's the problem. Though it can be bad enough I'll check.

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  18. I could believe it. I've avoided GeForce experience for quite a while because of similar problems in other games. It has some nice ideas, but too often gets in the way. Besides, Alienware has their own more comprehensive system update utility. Only problem with that one is that it takes considerably longer for them to certify drivers, so if you rely on them you're often several revs behind. I suppose I could try another round of driver updates in hopes that somebody finally found the problem and fixed it.

     

    Another system I've found somewhat problematic for just day-to-day gaming is the Windows "Xbox Gamebar". It definitely has some uses for streamers and whatnot, but for me it's just another thing to go wrong. (Windows is kinda like Westworld, really... in SO many ways.) I wonder a bit if the streaming component of GeForce Experience might be the real problem child. Not even sure they're still chasing that rainbow any more, it's been so long since I looked at GeForce Experience. Besides, they don't have a profile for City of Heroes anyway most likely.

     

     

  19. only 60ish, cuz I have all the dials turned up to 11. But it pretty much never drops even in the ugliest mixups. I could probably tweak things to get it up a lot, but there's not much point. (lol)

     

    (edit) I should clarify, the max I see is 60s, the lowest around 35 or so. I get better framerate on the laptop even though it's in theory a slightly less capable machine. I did a little work on optimizing  CoH on that box, since it launches more reliably there. I use Mouse without Borders to be able to control either machine from either mouse and keyboard, so I've got a semi-circle of 5 4k monitors plus the laptop screen way off to the right. It's kinda scary.

     

    I experimented briefly with using Surround to span all three displays on the desktop into one 11,520 x 2160 display. City of Heroes will actually run at insane resolutions like that, but I didn't play with it long enough to get it stable. Besides, the surround sound no longer works like it did on live, so you don't get the audible clues that something is coming at you from the side. BaBs I think it was is sorta responsible for my interest in a multi-screen setup for gaming, he mentioned in the old forums running dual monitors and how cool it was other than the line down the middle. 3 monitors gets rid of the 'line', or really moves it somewhere you don't care as much. But I quickly decided the better use for all that extra screen real estate is references like wikis, forums, and MIDS

  20. Almost hate to ask, since I have a viable work-around. Figure someone might know an easy answer, though, so here goes. Has to be something I'm overlooking.

     

    When I launch CoH on my Alienware Area-51 R5 desktop, it opens a window that is simply black. No matter how long I wait, nothing happens, and I get a standard "City of Heroes (Not Responding" error on the title bar. I am using Win 10 Pro &  Homecoming Launcher, though the behavior is the same with Tequila and Sunrise. More system details below.

     

    However, if I add -gfxreset to the launcher, it works fine. I just reset the graphics to something useful for a box driving 3 x 3840x2160 monitors and get on with life. To avoid having to do this every launch, I simply minimize CoH rather than closing to desktop. But that's inelegant and wasteful of bits or something.

     

    I've spent an afternoon going through *every* setting on the Nvidia "Manage 3D settings" tab. Tried various SLI configurations. Updated every driver I thought might be conceivably involved. Gone through multiple Windoze updates. Changed lots of windows settings trying to move the problem. Updated the BIOS. Nothing I've tried has changed this behavior.

     

    Only clue I can add to this is that if I run the debug console, the last three results on the console are:

     

    loading system font.. done

    loading other fonts.. done

    initializing fonts.. done

     

    On a successful launch using -gfxreset, the next step after that is "networking startup", but I never see that on a "black screen" launch. That made me mildly suspicious of firewalls and antivirus, but I made sure to whitelist the executable, and tried launching with both disabled. Also tried running on the WiFi rather than my usual hardwire to the DSL router. 

     

    I even got desperate and rebooted the system. <grin> And turned it off and then on again, though I had to go online to find out where the power button is. (Technical note for the humor impaired - that was a joke.)

     

    System information

     

    Launcher - Homecoming (though I've seen equivalent behavior on Sunrise & Tequila, and in fact this box does the same thing with the Rebirth client)

     

    Alienware Area-51 R5

    OS - Windows 10 Pro version 10.0.19043 build 19043

    cpu - Intel i9-7920X

    memory - 32 Gb

    graphics - dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080

    graphics driver - 472.12 (I've tried 5 or 6 different versions over the past few months)

    SLI mode - maximize 3D performance (Have tried disabling, and every other possibility)

     

    To further add to the mystery, I also have an Alienware 17 R4 laptop sitting right beside the desktop, using as close as possible to the same hardware and software, and it runs City of Heroes without having to play with -gfxreset. I'm really hoping someone here can point me toward what I'm overlooking in getting this working right. Even though I have a viable workaround, it bothers me to not be able to solve this.

  21. Don't thank me, thank the people over at Ourodev who got it working. I just noticed what they had done. Rebirth apparently has some talented people working with them, their version of the Halloween event has some fairly nice additions. I especially like the IO set that has a proc to summon Croatoa ghosts. Not amazingly combat effective from what I can see, but definitely fulfills the 'rule of cool'. 

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