Focused Feedback: Travel Updates: Base Teleportation, Long Range Teleporter Accolade, Special TP Powers

[CrudeVileTerror]

Seems the optics on this are still going to be quite a pain for the Team, even after all the improvements, hmm . . . 

Overall, from a sheer mathematic standpoint, this whole shee-bang is moving things in a positive and progressive direction for the majority of players, within the confines of removing the /enterbase command from general circulation.  (Although there might be more changes to come in that department when the exploit-related changes hit.  My nose-analogue-tentacles are twitching that there's something in the pipeline that the Devs aren't publicly addressing due to the reported exploits.)

 

So, perhaps some mollifying is in order?

Would the Devs be willing to throw some token bones to players who have a long history of having used the Pocket D VIP Teleporter?  Are there any records of how frequently specific players have made use of the Power, and a way to perhaps refund them 1,000,000 Inf (even if they had earnt it by spending the one hour in Pocket D).

I know the Homecoming Team don't like the idea of Inf floating around, so maybe some Merits instead?  Whatever.  Something to say:  "We are doing our best.  We need to move forward.  We've done our best to meet many different people's needs, but this issue is extremely far-reaching.  Here's something for your trouble."

[Mr. Vee]

16 minutes ago, RoboKnight said:

One big selling point of the base tp macro's is being able to go to your base from anywhere in the game. 45 feet away is pretty much just clicking distance & still makes them useless. You might as well just enter the code manually instead.

Clicking twice and typing some crap as opposed to just hitting one button? Yeah that doesn't fit my understanding of "might as well".

 

w/r/t the changes it's a definite improvement but I'd still like to see shorter cooldowns across the board. Sure 10 mins per mission seems right if you only run radios in PI but those of us who only speed TF are never in a mission that long. I'd also like the PD porter to stay. The only reason I don't use it now is the long interrupt time made it faster to just base macro and use the porter there. Something on a different cooldown that can get me to PD (when my 2xp or amplifiers run out mid-tf) and back without burning multiple charges of the general use teleports is worth a tray slot to me, especially as it already has one on all of my toons from when I bought it at level 1.

[Greycat]

Hmmmm.

 

I think I'm going to miss the Pocket D teleporter, but that's mostly nostalgia (and the tiki room arrival.)

Same for the Wentworth/black market one, though that's slightly more practical - I tended to plant lowbie characters in the auction house there so they could get to auction house locations quickly. It was a nice initial "limited zone travel" when they had no SG.

 

.... not really arguing for them being kept (though I wouldn't argue,) but I get the idea of consolidation.

[Lockpick]

Been doing some testing on the travel powers this morning:

 

• I copied a character over and logged in and was awarded LRT.  This is good as it recognized I already had some exploration badges and gave me the power.
• I went from DA to Talos and worked fine.  I noticed that I was missing some locations like FF and Bricks, so went to get those badges
• I got exploration badges for Bricks, FF, and KW.  I then decided to check the menu to see what was missing.  I activated LRT and took a picture.  I then selected Cancel, because I wasn't going anywhere and I wanted to test if it would cancel the power and allow it to be immediately used.  LRT was activated and was on a 10 minuted cooldown even though it wasn't used.  I'm not sure if this is working as intended or not.  It seems like if you cancel you should not be stuck waiting for the power to recharge.  Is there a way to tie the recharge start time from when you land at your new destination?
• I had used the LRT power in previous testing and when going to a zone and doing a mission the 10 minute cooldown felt okay if the mission took some time.  If not, the cooldown seems pretty long.  I would suggest that the cooldown be reduced, especially if canceling the power is going to start the cooldown.
• I like the LRT menu. It looks clean.  I only have 13 destinations available, so not sure how it will look when I get all.  Curious if it will be to big or cluttered.  If anyone can post a screenshot I would appreciate it.  I added a number of locations and the list stays the same size, but adds a scroll bar. 
• I like the Fast Travel power.  This will save a lot of room in the trays.  Very nice.
• Base Transporter - Has the same issue with LRT in that if you cancel you have activated the power and need to wait on cooldown.  I assume all these powers will have this issue.
• The reduced activation time is very nice. Thank you.
• Rapid Response Portal - I'm not sure how to earn this power.  Is it logging out at the base?  I tried the freebie menu and didn't see it, so might be nice to add it there so we can test it.
• I added additional locations and getting a zone exploration badge is relatively easy as there is generally a badge near the SG portal in a zone.  If you ave a SG base with the zone portals you will easily be able to use your base to get the zone exploration badges.

 

I'll try to get a few more locations and see how the menu looks, but all in all I would say these are some nice changes.

Edited October 31, 2020 by Lockpick
Adjusted bullets due to testing

[Monos King]

•  Pocket D VIP Teleporter (P2W Power)
  • This power has been removed and can no longer be earned or purchased
  • If you previously owned this power, it will automatically unlock Long Range Teleporter with Pocket D as a destination

Don't really know why this was changed, I like the Pocket D teleporter and icon. Not a necessary change in my opinion, little things like this remind me of my time playing before shut-down. If it isn't harmful to keep, I wouldn't remove it.

[GadgetDon]

1 hour ago, Tad Cooper said:

I'm not thrilled that MoMLTF is about to get even more annoying, but I appreciate that saying, "Ha ha, I'm a time traveler. Screw you guys I'm out!" in mission 2 is probably against the spirit of the thing. Guess I'll have to figure out how you're actually supposed to leave that map... I don't think I've ever seen anyone do it.

Is the temporary base portal not working within that mission? Or any mission? If so, that will really suck. And I'm not sure the "but it's a time travel thing" is a justification - when I'm in Ouroborus or Cimerora, I can call a contact, get a mission, and Mission TP to them. I can also, from Peregrine Island, call Marcus, get a mission, and mission teleport to it. Attempting to unwind the "oh it's traveling through time not just distance" issues in the game is too late, IMO. (Same with calling a Praetorian contact from a Primal zone). If the various teleportation powers (and yes, I include base portal in this) are creating wormholes to get you from point A to point B, in theory that would work across time too.

[ivanhedgehog]

50 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

That is actually not a bad idea at all.  Again, they both do the same exact thing, so do we really need both?

they dont do exactly the same thing. one allows my whole team to follow me

[ShardWarrior]

8 minutes ago, ivanhedgehog said:

they dont do exactly the same thing. one allows my whole team to follow me

TT works for you solo.

[Lines]

19 minutes ago, Lockpick said:

• Rapid Response Portal - I'm not sure how to earn this power.  Is it logging out at the base?  I tried the freebie menu and didn't see it, so might be nice to add it there so we can test it.

You need both the patroller and the monitor duty day jobs to get the rapid response accolade. Once you have that you can start gaining charges for it.

 

Try /badgegrant DJ_On_Patrol$$badgegrant  DJ_Monitor_Duty

[Lockpick]

3 minutes ago, Lines said:

You need both the patroller and the monitor duty day jobs to get the rapid response accolade. Once you have that you can start gaining charges for it.

 

Try /badgegrant DJ_On_Patrol$$badgegrant  DJ_Monitor_Duty

I have the Rapid Response Member accolade on this character and used to have the Base Teleporter power with 30 charges on Live.  When I copied over I lost Base Teleporter, but now have Monitor Duty Teleporter with 30 charges.

 

The Rapid Response Portal is separate and I thought it would be issued automatically if you had the accolade.  I'll log off at my SG and check back in a while to see if it is awarded.

[QuiJon]

Ok so even with this idea of to many travels and we get a tray for them stuff, it still occurs to me that we are adding in a power to make it so that 2 powers give us mostly exactly what we have been asking for.

 

Base teleporter is 1m from p2w vendor and transports you to your base with a 10 minute recharge (down from 30)

SG Portal opens a portal to your base with the only real difference i can gather is it is usable by other people. 10 minute recharge but cost 10m

 

Ok first of all i think 10m to get a base portal is insane to begin with. However in the end both these powers are mostly granting the same thing ease of travel to your base to use transporters or whatever reason. So why not just combine them. Even if you leave it at a 1m (but i think cheaper is better) just make one power that opens the portal usable by anyone while open. With both on a 10 minute recharge means they could each be used 6 times an hour, add that divide into 60 minutes and you get a 5 minute recharge which is what people have been asking for anyway. 

 

So i can do 1m per toon if i need to, it combines two different powers and negates the need to play recharge bingo and really doesnt give us anything that the two powers were not already giving us acept a bit more convenience maybe for team members  to use our bases.

[GadgetDon]

36 minutes ago, GadgetDon said:

Is the temporary base portal not working within that mission? Or any mission? If so, that will really suck. And I'm not sure the "but it's a time travel thing" is a justification - when I'm in Ouroborus or Cimerora, I can call a contact, get a mission, and Mission TP to them. I can also, from Peregrine Island, call Marcus, get a mission, and mission teleport to it. Attempting to unwind the "oh it's traveling through time not just distance" issues in the game is too late, IMO. (Same with calling a Praetorian contact from a Primal zone). If the various teleportation powers (and yes, I include base portal in this) are creating wormholes to get you from point A to point B, in theory that would work across time too.

Some quick testing shows that the temporary base portal can work both from within missions (I tested it with a mission from Borea) and also from Cimerora. So the justification for "no base portal in Ouroborus" seems even weaker.

 

Thought just occurred to me - there used to be some people who would use Ouroborus portals to try to grief people, like someone putting an o-portal over the sub for the STF. That was fixed by moving the active point of the o-portal to the glowing gem floating above the portal, but can the temp base portal be used as such? Can it be put just before a door someone needs to get to? With our current community, probably not a concern. But if the negotiations work out and we go legit, trolls may be an issue again.

 

Can there be restriction so that it can't be within, say, three feet of a "door"? Or within six feet of another temp base portal? Even if you don't want to hold up this issue to make it happen, might be worth putting on the "to do" list. Oh, and not in the bowl of the mothership. (BTW, would be good to deny the use of the team teleport within the bowl - we've had a few low level trolls.

[Freakenstein]

The go to base or enter a base code options seems to be missing from Long Range Teleport on Beta, unless I'm just somehow overlooking it.

[GadgetDon]

Just now, Freakenstein said:

The go to base or enter a base code options seems to be missing from Long Range Teleport on Beta, unless I'm just somehow overlooking it.

LRT is to jump to a zone you "know" (by collecting the exploration badges)

[Freakenstein]

On 10/24/2020 at 7:44 AM, Jimmy said:

Long Range Teleporter can also take you to your base, and allows you to use /enterbasefrompasscode to enter any base

It goes to bases as well now, right?

(as per todays update)

 

Edited October 31, 2020 by Freakenstein

[Blackbird71]

The real frustrating thing in all of this is that it feels like things are so close to a simple workable solution, but then wildly miss the mark and instead we're left with a complicated mess of powers that have to be used in conjunction with each other to get back in the neighborhood of the old functionality.

 

Quote

 Monitor Duty Teleporter (Day Job Power)

• This power no longer requires the Rapid Response Member Accolade to earn, and has replaced the Monitor Duty (prestige boost) day job power
• This power has been renamed from Base Teleporter to Monitor Duty Teleporter (to match the badge it is connected to)
• Recharge time reduced from 600s to 30s
  • This would be 0s, but we wanted to prevent accidental double usage as this power has limited charges
• Activation time reduced from 17s to 2s in PvE (still longer in PvP)
  • This has been reduced further, down to 2s
  • This was previously listed erroneously as being reduced from 15s to 10s, it is in fact 17s on live (including the interrupt time and activation time), and was reduced to 12s in the last build, and has now been reduced to 2s

 

This right here?  This is so close to what we need as to be painful.  30s recharge?  Fantastic for RPers or anyone else who may need to change locations in a short period of time (or who messed up which location they went to and need to portal again to fix it; happens more often than you'd think!).  2s activation?  Very convenient, I hadn't even hoped for something this nice!

But where this falls down on its face is that it still uses charges, which can only be recharged at a rate slower than many players' daily use of base portals, and at the expense of being able to progress on any other day jobs.  If the need for charges was removed, this would be the perfect drop-in replacement for the enterbasefrompasscode functionality, and most players could take this and ignore the other mess of powers involved in this change unless they wanted some of the additional functionality (dropping a sustained portal on the ground, etc.).  Simple, clean, done.

 

[Freakenstein]

Also, does logging out at a base portal earn recharges on both the day job base teleporters? Rapid and Monitor? Or do you need to do something different for one.

[Starforge]

Seems to me we have way more options to use here compared to back on live. I have no issue with any of these changes.

[CrudeVileTerror]

Reminder:  It doesn't matter where you actually log off for Day Jobs.   It matters where you log back in.  Logging out in a Base will be meaningless if your last public zone location was in the middle of the ocean.

But, yes, @Freakenstein:   You -should- get charges for both a Day Job Power and Day Job Accolade Power if they require the same location for charging.  If you aren't, then that's a bug worth reporting.

[JAMMan0000]

On 10/27/2020 at 5:01 PM, JAMMan0000 said:

For consideration: Bellow is an example of a single key (F12) rotating bind that will;

1. Use the enterbasefrompasscode command to use a local portal if available, and if not available

2. Cycle through the various Base teleport powers, using the first one available to create a portal and then use the enterbasefrompasscode command

 

So basically, you press F12 and if you are near an existing portal you immediately go your base. If you are not near a portal, pressing F12 creates one, and pressing F12 again takes you to your base. Also, if you are teaming and one person creates a portal, you can just press F12 to use that persons portal rather than using your power/charges to create another one. 

 

Not as quite as nice as the prior unlimited enterbasefrompasscode, but it helps reduce tray icon clutter and conserve Day Job portal charges by using/sharing any existing 'free' portals and P2W portals if available.

 

Note: You will need to change the example below  for bind key (F12), sg passcode (HEAVEN-95), and CoH bind folder path to match your setup.

 

Example:

BaseTP Bind:
/bind F12 "powexecname Base Transporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent "c:\games\City of Heroes\binds\BaseTP2.txt""

 

BaseTP Bind Files:

BaseTP1.txt:
F12 "powexecname Base Transporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent "c:\games\City of Heroes\binds\BaseTP2.txt""
BaseTP2.txt:
F12 "powexeclocation me Supergroup Portal$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent "c:\games\City of Heroes\binds\BaseTP3.txt""
BaseTP3.txt:
F12 "powexecname Base Teleporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent "c:\games\City of Heroes\binds\BaseTP4.txt""
BaseTP4.txt:
F12 "powexeclocation me Rapid Response Portal$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent "c:\games\City of Heroes\binds\BaseTP1.txt""
 

FYI - I updated the bind files to use new Monitor Duty Teleporter and add a 5th option to get to your base via Long Range Teleporter.

-Beta BaseTP Binds
/bind F12 "powexecname Base Transporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent ".\binds\BaseTP2.txt""
BaseTP1.txt:
F12 "powexecname Base Transporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent ".\binds\BaseTP2.txt""
BaseTP2.txt:
F12 "powexeclocation me Supergroup Portal$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent ".\binds\BaseTP3.txt""
BaseTP3.txt:
F12 "powexecname Monitor Duty Teleporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent ".\binds\BaseTP4.txt""
BaseTP4.txt:
F12 "powexeclocation me Rapid Response Portal$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent ".\binds\BaseTP5.txt""
BaseTP5.txt:
F12 "powexecname Long Range Teleporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent ".\binds\BaseTP1.txt""

[Vanden]

1 minute ago, JAMMan0000 said:

F12 "powexecname Monitor Duty Teleporter$$enterbasefrompasscode HEAVEN-95$$bindloadfilesilent ".\binds\BaseTP4.txt""

Isn't putting the /powexec command before the /enterbasefrompasscode command going to waste a charge of the day job powers if the enterbase command actually works?

[Monos King]

I want to elaborate a little further on the Pocket D change; Pocket D is already a teleport hub, and doesn't need to be added to the Long Range Teleportation menu. It makes about as much sense as adding Ouroboros. If I want to teleport to Pocket D, I don't want my teleporting to other places to be put on cooldown.

[Coyotedancer]

1 hour ago, Freakenstein said:

It goes to bases as well now, right?

(as per todays update)

 

 

Not as far as I know... Where are you seeing that in the patch notes?

[Blackbird71]

9 minutes ago, Vanden said:

Isn't putting the /powexec command before the /enterbasefrompasscode command going to waste a charge of the day job powers if the enterbase command actually works?

As I understand it, the enterbasefrompasscode command will only work after you execute the Base Teleporter/Monitor Duty power (unless you're already in range of a portal).

[Lines]

1 hour ago, Freakenstein said:

It goes to bases as well now, right?

(as per todays update)

 

Correct. If you fire off LRT and use /enterbasefrompasscode straight after, you can enter bases.

 

(just tested. But also thought of some ways I can try and break this.)