CraterLabs

Yeah, this is basically what I was suggesting. I think the thing that even sparked the idea for me was the recently-implemented "Skulls Vs. Family?" tip. In *practice*, this might not be quite what I want since each of those tips gives you a short mission to run through before you actually get introduced to the contact in question, and that would probably be a bit much for Doctor Graves or David Wincott. But theoretically something similar to the Valentine's Tips which are pretty much just a tip to have you go up to a contact and click on them (except when they're not doing that) could work? I dunno how twisted that particular knot of code is, admittedly. -EDIT- In fact, a Valentine's Tip might be perfect for David Wincott. His first dialogue serves as an introduction to him, but if you're following a tip there could just be an extra dialogue page that describes him busily coordinating with other police and holding up a finger to ask you to wait for a second while he handles things to serve as the Mission Complete moment a la the Valentine's Tip missions, and then have that segue into his normal introduction. The other thing about Wincott and Gordon Bower is that they both have separate dialogue coded for an initial meeting depending on if you get referred to them from a mission, or if you just walk up to them out of the blue. It's not hard to imagine that extra dialogue code being handy for this kind of thing, though again I've never seen the code myself.

I believe that Essence of the Earth has a cooldown preventing you from taking it too often. You can only use it once every sixty-ish seconds (so that you're not accidentally wasting it too early before the effects of the first one wear off, I think)

With the understanding that Tanker really isn't the best archetype for PvP play, and that Street Justice/Super Reflexes might not be super intuitive powersets for it, how would you start setting up this build for PvP situations? Would the general practices for a Tanker using a defensive set instead of a resistance set still work, or would there need to be some wheel reinventing going on?

I've been looking over the Prisoner bosses in Brickstown; they can give you the Mob Specialist Badge and they add some fun color to a zone that doesn't get a lot of foot traffic. But once you figure out the seven-ish places that they spawn and start hunting them specifically, they're a smidge repetitive. Would it be possible to add the Shotgun and Submachine Gun bosses to the Arch Spawn pool at a low spawn rate? Both to tick up their visibility, and to add just a smidge more variety to hunting down these super criminals. I don't think that it's *impossible* to spawn normal Prisoner bosses anymore; my vague understanding of the spawn rules is that they might still pop up if enough heroes start showing up in an area. But without that eventuality, players are deprived from such lovable personas as Andy Smash-Hands, Fingers, Banjo, Chains, Chris the Fist, Lefty, Mad Mike, Jack, Needles, Tommy Fontana, Phil, Danny-24, Big Al, Beastly Keetsoth, and of course, Dee Nutz. If there was, say, a five percent chance to spawn one of these guys instead of one of the normal Arches, it might add some fun spice to patrolling Brickstown on those days when you're a hero with a lonely vigil. No pressure, of course. Those wily crooks who grab the guns from prison guards are still out there in the code. It's just hard to find them since there's not exactly a whole lot of missions or story arcs that make them show up. (Also, I'd be willing to write a mission for Ouroboros about dealing with the Prisoners if that'd help)

I'm pretty sure Exploration tips also get limited to 3, but I've not really tested it. But either way, this kinda thing wouldn't count against that limit.

Would it be possible to use the Tip system as a way to introduce certain contacts? I think it might help the players to learn more about things organically, and also address a couple of personal annoyances i have, heh. Namely, three things I don't like: Some contacts that used to have regular missions to go meet them in Live (like David Wincott or Gordon Bower) no longer have those missions available. That clears up mission bloat, but it also means that the bread crumbs to go to the stories and areas that these characters facilitate are often ignored. You either need to remember to do them when you're at the right level, or go back and do them later in Ouroboros (which isn't always great for players who prefer to do stuff while leveling up instead of backtracking through Ouroboros to get them.) Some contacts you're supposed to meet by having a pop-up appear when you get to the right level or get the right badge or whatever (like Bane Spider Ruben), but for whatever reason, the game doesn't always make those pop-ups appear. I'm not sure why they sometimes appear and sometimes don't, but I think I've had Ruben's introduction trigger maaaaybe twice since Homecoming opened up? I don't like Dr. Graves and Twinshot automatically becoming contacts. It's easy enough to ignore them, sure, but if I do that it always bugs me that they wind up hanging around in my contacts menu forever with an incomplete (and incompletable) relationship bar. This is a super niche problem, I fully admit that, but I always like completely filling up the progress bars on my contacts, so my choice is either to get bugged by Graves not getting a full progress bar in my menu, or to force myself to march through his mission with my XP progression turned off on every villain I make. (Twinshot doesn't bug me as much, probably because I like her story more.) And I think a lot of these little issues might be resolved if the Tip system replaced the current methods of meeting them. Consider: Instead of having a contact give you a mission to introduce yourself to David Wincott and his Trolls Task Force, you could get a tip, hearing from the FBSA that a PPD officer named David Wincott is starting some new task force specifically to deal with the Trolls problem! But unlike most other task forces... it's personal! He may have issues, but he's addressing a real crisis for the city in a region that's been destroyed, and a superpowered hero could turn the tide. And if a player doesn't want to do that? They can just drop the tip! Instead of gambling on if Bane Spider Ruben's introductory pop-up makes its way to you... what if your villainous character just hears about it naturally through a tip at level 15 or so? The word gets out, and Port Oakes can have a decidedly dastardly villain show up if they choose to investigate, and the mission won't be missed because no introduction popped up. I CAN JUST IGNORE DR. GRAVES. ...I'd like to pretend this isn't personal, but it totally is. I'm the only player who hates that he's automatically a contact. But if his introduction is a tip? If you hear a rumor about a whispered gathering of new villains who are holding a contest for a mysterious benefactor? Well then, that sounds *delightful*. I admit that this one is a little trickier, because his mandatory-ness is meant to help new players be introduced to certain game mechanics. I am willing to sacrifice those players' tutorial experience to make it possible to never interact with him again, however, mwahahaha. ...okay, so, I think it's a good idea, but even if Dr. Graves doesn't get this treatment I think we should do it. Let's get the Hollows Task Force back in the spotlight. 🙂

I believe it does, I've not checked it. I want to use them in a new story, though, and they don't exist anymore to use.

I've got a story where I'd like to use the Dockworkers faction. And specifically I *would* like the Dockworkers rather than the Scrapyarders since it's focusing on the Family and St. Martial rather than miners or Sharkhead Isle or the Cage Consortium's crimes. And while I'm on the topic, could we get the low-level Warriors from The Hollows added back? I don't know when they were taken away exactly. I used them in a story called "River Of Fire!" a while back and liked that they were available at the time, but I'd kind of like to have them have the option to be used again. I dunno if the Warriors revamp did something to the code that made them get cleared outta AE or what, but it'd be nice if they came back.

At the risk of throwing a monkey wrench into the carefully balanced Gladiator Combat scene, I wanna get a Natterling gladiator when I get the Flying Nuisance badge. 🙂

After I finished the "Investigate The 'Dyne Lab" mission from Robert Kogan (the first one he offers), I started walking back to the entrance instead of just clicking the exit button, and got this dialogue flub from one of the Skulls where you can see the Say command, or whatever it is.

Aye. I'm not a huge fan of downloading mods for stuff like that, but I hear it's great! Admittedly, though, the ability to search badges is more of a side-benefit to what I'm proposing than the primary goal. I mainly just think that it'd make the purpose of the badges a little clearer if we split them into two sets since... well, they kind of already *are* split into two sets.

So we kinda have two different sorts of badges in the Achievements category. We have the "classical" achievements which are "make the number go up" badges (get to level 20, deal XXXX amount of damage, heal XXXXXXX amount of damage, gain XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX amount of Influence, etc.), but we also have a sort of more "Modern" version of Achievements, which are usually just special challenges (defeat two enemies at the same time, choose not to use the temporary power that was put in to make the fight easier, beat the challenge without anyone getting irradiated, etc.) I like both of these as achievement types, but it's kind of weird searching for certain achievements, especially when some of the "modern" achievements kind of veer more toward Accomplishments (which would be the kinds of things that heroes would get headlines about, like "Stopped the 3rd Street Scorpions from Robbing the Jewelry Store" or "Rescued a Mystic who'd been Kidnapped by the Circle of Thorns.") As such, while I dunno what kind of coding would be required for it, I think it might help to make the different badge types a little more easily to quickly scan through if we turned achievements into two different things. I wasn't sure what to call this kind of thing, but Infernalectric on Everlasting suggested "Challenges" which... honestly, it fits pretty well. It's all the badges related to going the extra mile and "winning more". Anyway, just wanted to float it out there.

Running through Underground Neutropolis to do some badge hunting, and this particular Praetorian Police officer calls me HeroName instead of Short-Cut. I was pretty close to [246.7 -1088.0 -3006.1], roughly midway between the City Access C door and the Sector C marker on the map, if it helps.

Incredibly low-stakes issue, but I've noticed this for ages and never seen it talked about so... If you have multiple windows open (such as the badge tab, the recipe inventory screen, and the auction house window), then hovering your mouse over some things that usually give you pop-up text (such as the text telling you the specific numbers for how far along a badge's progress bar you are) won't make the text pop up. My guess is that it's because the pop-up text probably counts as its own window somehow, and having three other windows open interferes with having the text show up, but I've never looked at the code so my idle musing is effectively useless. For example: here's a screenshot of the text usually popping up, and one where it, uh, doesn't Two windows open in one, three in the other. Again, this isn't really an "issue", though it is sometimes an annoyance if I go to Wentworth's with a portable crafting table, heh.

In the Belts category, the Tech Knight belt has a secondary "Tech Knight Belt Cloth" option which creates a kind of secondary hip-cape, but there doesn't seem to be a direct way to modify the colors on the interior of it. You *can* change the color by either selecting "Costume Colors Linked", or you can change it to black and white if you scroll all the way up the list of belts and get the "sets the color to black and white" bug, but there's no way to directly modify the colors itself like you could with the interior of a cape.