InfamousBrad

The stalker version of Radiation Melee's tier 7 power, Radiation Siphon, is flagged as available at level 8 instead of what it should be, 18.

I have three broad categories of requests, and then a thought about base PvP: My first request feels to me like low-hanging fruit, like it ought to be easy. Go through the list of items that can be used as interact-able objectives in AE missions, all the boxes and safes and stuff. Make a list of the ones that don't have matching base items, and import them. It feels like this ought to be pretty easy because by definition they all have separate geometry files, right? My second request is one I make every time, but especially after the last round of improvements to Winter Forest: we need more seasonal holiday decor! Halloween is sort of covered, with multiple jack-o-lantern models, plenty of existing spooky trees, all the creepy decor pieces from the Talons of Vengeance sets. But every year it astonishes me that we don't have a single Christmas tree, a single wreath, a single strand of holiday lights -- the only winter holiday decor we have in the game is a couple of menorah models. There are multiple 3D models in the game for wrapped Christmas presents (from the open zone event), how hard would it be to import those as base decor? And oh, how much I wish, every year, that we could place ice-skating patches in our bases. There's a Valentine's Day event, but no Valentine's Day decor, either. My third request is that I'd like a whole re-think of all of the non-interact-able NPCs and their placement. Right now, each NPC in the base editor has one idle animation. You get a couple of NPCs holding torches, and only those NPCs can hold torches, and that's all those NPCs can do, and so on. What I'd like is to be able to place any combat or hostage NPC that can be used in AE (except for custom characters, for obvious reasons) and then, in the Object Info panel when that NPC is selected, have a pull-down menu of every possible stance or idle animation. - - - - - As for base PvP, it's worth talking about why it never worked before we put any development resources into it. For one thing, CoH is a hard game to design PvP for -- you have the unhelpful combination of 80 MPH travel powers and long-activation combat powers that root the attacker. But base PvP was also super-punishing for anybody with pet or pseudo-pet powers, because bases don't get a map optimization pass like mission maps and city maps do, so there are no pre-calculated NPC paths for them to follow. For another, they create an inherent scheduling crisis: if both the attackers and the defenders don't show up at the same time, and in roughly equal forces, it's no fun for either or both side. I don't see any way to fix any of those problems. I can only really think of one PvP add-on to bases that wouldn't create some intractable headache. You could, in theory, add another room type to the Add Room tab for PvP rooms of various sizes that would use, say, Warburg combat rules, where you can attack anybody who isn't on your team. But because the NPC pathing issues are never going to go away, you'd have to make it impossible to place objects in those rooms, they'd have to be just empty boxes -- skinnable with the usual textures, but empty. Otherwise, the engine just doesn't support it well enough.

Any chance of making time spent hanging out in Winter Forest count towards the Pocket D badge?

Can we PLEASE have those decorated conifers as base-decor items?

Thanks! I had a similar but different complaint about the villain arc. For a level 30ish arc, I feel like there are WAY too many elite bosses, way too many of the bosses and EBs in that arc spawn multiple ambushes. That's the kind of difficulty I expect (in that level range) to face in the last fight of the last mission of the arc -- not two and three times per instance in every instance.

I just finished The Graveyard Shift on a level 28 (was 29 by the end) tri-form PB, set to +0x1, and ... was this supposed to be this brutal? Over half of the spawn points had unusually large numbers of spawns -- two lieutenants and a minion being the norm. Some of them were (expletive deleted) nuts, like the whole Raverobber instance, where a single spawn point typically consisted of 3-4 lieutenants and 5-6 minions. This, for example, is one spawn point (note the extra 3 lieutenants hidden by the girder):

Have the devs decided when to start the Winter Holiday event this year?

I love most of these changes but really feel like the new ally buff component of EMP Arrow should be moved to Disruption Arrow instead, since it has the advantage of being ground targeted. Not to mention that I can't think of any even comic-book-ish explanation for why firing off an electromagnetic pulse should buff your teammates.

Why is Boomtown, already one of the most annoying zones to travel to, missing from Long Range Teleport? Also, I'd really like to ask you, please, not to kill the sg portal access to the Echo zones. Making Ouroboros accessible at level 1 but only if someone else opens a portal for you is going to mean non-stop spamming of requests for portals in all the starting zones, and we really don't need more chat spam.

Any chance of showing the current WST on the news page above the announcements? Just to remind people as they're logging in?

The resume_info.txt trick for saving userid and password stopped working for me. Intentional, or does the file need to be in a different directory now?

Checked Tequila options. Game is saving to C:\COH Checked C:\COH\InfamousBrad. There is a playerslot.txt. Deleted it. Logged in. Moved a character from one slot to another. Played that character for a few minutes. Logged out to character select screen. Character is still where I moved them to. Quit game. Restarted Tequila, logged in. Characters are back to random order. Checked C:\COH\InfamousBrad. There is no playerslot.txt file. I haven't been able to save the order of my characters for months. Nothing works. Edited to add: Disregard. Checking "Remember this account" worked for me, too. Dip me in peanut butter and call me a Reese's cup.

Fortunately when Frostfire got busted and turned stool-pigeon, there was still at least one Outcasts Brick crew safehouse that survived in Boomtown: the Brickyard. BRICK-11767 @InfamousBrad (both here and in-game): FINISHED.

Red-side? I am SO in! Is there a Discord I need to be on? When's next?

Resilient

Related bug: Hardcase, story arc "Breaking the Streak," mission 3 "Defeat Luckless" lead me to the same door as the "interior pawn shop" map from the St. Martial zone event, while the zone event was in progress, meaning that the mission couldn't be started without first clearing the zone event. I don't think this is the only mission with this problem, either. There's a list of random mission doors in St. Martial, that's used by lots of missions, and nobody thought to take the zone event mission door off of the list. (This bug has existed since the zone event was created, back during issue 23.)

With the circuit powers, where only one target gets the full effect, is there a way to determine which target that is? Or is it random?

I've been running my beasts mastermind pretty heavily the last few days, and I didn't notice any weirdness? What did I not notice?

I voted for the "glow up" to existing enemy groups because there's one particular across-the-board buff to most enemy groups that seems like a no-brainer to me, and like it wouldn't be all that hard: Within a faction, there should be a lot fewer enemy types "dropping out" as you level up. The Circle of Thorns would be more challenging, and more fun, if they continued to spawn Life Mages and Ruin Mages all the way to level 50. (Not to mention how much easier they get when Earth Thorn Casters drop out!) Paragon Police would be a lot more challenging if they continued to spawn SWAT Equalizers and SWAT Ghosts all the way to 50. It makes no sense at all that all level 41+ Crey mobs are power armor tanks.

There was a patch to the main Homecoming branch (not the test patch, the main one) today that seems to have been just to turn off the snowy ground in Atlas Park. Why would they do that any time before March? It was nice.

As someone who hasn't been on my Demons/Thermal lately, I should double-check, but I think you're wrong about Demons being primarily ranged. Demonlings have a very short attack chain and depend on their claw attacks for about a third of their already pitiful dps, if I remember right, and the Ember Demon's main damage comes not from his thrown fireball but from his breath weapon, and cones do better fired from medium to close range. Not only that, but the Ember Demon's +resist aura and relatively short radius AoE heal are calibrated around the assumption that all six demons will be moving more or less together. So I think they should continue to do what the Ninjas do: open from range, then move together to melee. Similarly, we all cry about the Arsonist rushing to melee range, but if he uses that breath-weapon cone attack at maximum range, it's going to hit only one target most of the time, which is a heck of a nerf. I'd rather see him even slightly up-armored (say, some smash/lethal resist) than see him set to prefer-ranged. But nitpicks aside, you've definitely got the right idea here.

Is the Winter Lord trial the most efficient way to farm Candy Canes? Does it have diminishing rewards on Candy Canes?

I find this question unpleasant to contemplate, but ... How few players? HC is down to just a bit over 4k players at peak concurrency and it's already starting to feel too small to support 4.5 servers. With full server consolidation, maybe I could stand it as low as 1,000 peak concurrency, but honestly, even that's a bit low to find teams during off-peak hours. How few sides? I would be perfectly fine with only having one side ... if it weren't the existing blue-side solo content, which uniformly sucks [expletive deleted]. I'm not inherently villainous or mercenary -- I just hate having every other mission be four zones away from where I just was, hunting for obscure spawns, or both. Also, right now, there are maps like Boomtown and Crey's Folly (and arguably Eden) that just plain no longer have any reason to exist, haven't had any reason to exist since somewhere around issue 5. (I can't shake the suspicion that, given enough time, all three of those zones would have gotten New Faultine style makeovers.) Fewer modes? As long as we're keeping the existing game mechanics, then as far as I'm concerned, open-world PvP could and should go away. It makes zero sense to fight someone in a zone a mile on a side when most combat moves root the attacker and the target moves at 60 mi/hr. And I haven't been inside a single AE mission since relaunch. On the other hand, I'm also starting to get a little low on content I'm not bored with again already, which is what AE was meant to fix, so maybe in the long run I would miss it. How few archetypes? I feel like I could make a pretty strong case for merging Scrappers and Brutes, and maybe even Tankers. I feel like I could make somewhat of a case for merging both Kheldian ATs into a single AT with multiple powersets and both Arachnos ATs the same way. It wouldn't break my heart if they got rid of Dominators, although I'm sure some would complain. I could imagine a more-balanced AT about halfway between a Defender and a Corrupter replacing both of them. On the other hand ... why would you? Supporting extra ATs is the least programmer-intensive part of the game.

And at least parts of Steel Canyon. I didn't check any other hero zones. I did check Mercy, PO, Cap, Shark, & St.M and none of them had so much as a single turning leaf. I get that this would be a labor-intensive change. (I'm assuming the windows weren't because there are global "lighted vs unlighted" window objects that respond to the sky setting?) Is there any way to outsource purely-cosmetic zone editing to a larger group of volunteers? With only a couple of map editors, I get why you'd concentrate your efforts in the areas that 80% of the players use. And Eris forfend that I complain about free stuff. I've just always wanted four seasonal variation maps for all of the outdoor maps ever since I first started, back around issue 4. Is the answer still "too labor-intensive to maintain"?

Do we know when the event is turning off?