Amish_Justice

It seems that since i17, virtually everytime I send a private message (which is often), I get this message tied to the response.

For example:
[Tell] -->Mental Monarch: Nice look
[Tell] Mental Monarch: (Thanx!
[Tell] -->Mental Monarch: [AUTO-REPLY -- Chat Hidden]

It's so bad, that when I once messaged another player asking for to join their team, I got caught in an auto-repeat bounce message, which ultimately repeated so many times, it had to ban me from speaking for 2 minutes for "over-talking"

What's causing this, and is there some way I can change something on my end to keep it from happening?

I think you guys are missing one of the primary aspects of Triage Beacon.

I prize it for it's strong visible focus. It's a distinctive call for any hero (or villain) for whom health is a concern, saying loudly "Come over here!". That allows you, to a large degree, to dictate the center of the battle. I roll with Heal Other as a compliment, but it helps that any injured heroes always run to my Triage beacon (and therefore to me) so that healing them isn't difficult.

Personally, as a defender, I like being on a team that is consistently challenged. On difficult mobs, I prefer to follow a tanker's leap into combat pretty closely, and Triage beacon is the first thing I drop. That, plus my FF Generator following me obediently, is enough to make sure that the tank won't fall. From there, Acid Mortar to weaken them, poison to give em pause, and caltrops to make sure they don't run away (I put a range enhancer in it, like someone else suggested, and place it behind enemies).

This would be great, but I'd rather it were limited to hunting only.
I'd love to have the ability to drop my level down on one of my 50's, and challenge myself against some enemy redcaps
More importantly, it'd mean more heroes on the streets, which leads to more character interactions, and that's good, right? Perhaps having some of those level 50's running around Dark Astoria will revitalize the zone a bit --- not that anyone could see them anyway

Am I to believe the answer is still "No"?

Back in the day I created a couple different characters that had distinctly different costumes and personalities, and I helped differentiate them with differently color chat bubbles.
At some point in the past, the ability to effect colors of bubbles using command tags disappeared, and these characters were relegated to a shelf.

I'm wondering if a work around has been developed since that time. Is there any way to effect the color of our speech bubbles beyond the default color sliders under options?

I think you guys are missing out on much of Traps ability to use these tools to defend a team.

For example, if a tanker is willing to just jump into a group of enemies, and use Taunt, a crafty trapster can follow that tanker in, bringing their FF generator with them.
A quick drop of Triage beacon gives the entire team a focal point for the battle. It allows you to assist your tanker, without forcing you to actively protect them at all.
An Acid Mortar, and then a carefully placed Caltrops to the rear of the enemy effectively box them in, and push them slowly toward the poison gas trap you've just put down.

Caltrops is amazingly useful --- I like to put a range SO in there actually, so I can push the caltrops to the rear of the enemy. Additionally, caltrops can act as damage mitigation, because enemies on top of caltrops spend most of their time trying in vain to get to the trapster. Wonderfully, Caltrops' indirect ability allows them to be safely used from behind corners, much the same way that Seeker Drones function.

Trapsters have tons of options

A lot of people seem to be talking about Voice Customizations, and though that seems like a difficult feature to implement, I was considering another interesting option to give our characters a voice.

Chat window modification!
The ability to color our text and text-background is wonderful, but we could have so much more ability to create a voice for our heroes if we had some ability to adjust the shape of our text boxes (anyone else miss the ability to change color of those borders?) and the font with which we speak.
I think that a limited selection, perhaps 5-10 different fonts, and 5-10 differently shaped text bubbles, selectable under character options or with a command line. It would great to be able to put a staggered edge on a cry for help, or to give a robot an angular font.

I was toying with some character concepts I had, and I was feeling the limited options origin-wise which the Traps Defense set (Defender, Corrupter, Mastermind) allows. It's pretty much limited to Tech, with some creative concepts allowing use within Natural or Science perhaps.

What about a Magic based set of Traps animations? I searched the forums and found nothing, so considered suggesting my own.Now, I am not suggesting that the effect of the power be changed in any way. Just some new animation concepts for Traps powers.

Tier 1 - Web Grenade

A single person ranged immobilize with a more native, magic appearance is simple enough. It can even retain it's web animation, just modify the projectile --- perhaps a glowing skull? A Crystal of some sort, akin to those used by Circle of Thorns? A less mechanical arachnos spider shaped web bomb?

Tier 2 - Caltrops
Caltrops already have variations in the form of Thorntrops.

Tier 3 - Triage Beacon
Why not offer a plant akin to the Devouring Earth's "Tree of Life" or a less grand, but equally beautiful, version of the Spirit tree from the Plant set. Or if you wanted to keep the plants separate, you could have it be more in the appearance of the healing crystals from those Circle of Thorns caves. I like the idea of a tribal shrine of some sort.

Tier 4 - Acid Mortar

This one's tricky. It's essentially a placed object that fires projectiles at nearby enemies, lowering their ability to resist attacks. What if this was a plant, which attacked enemies with an approach more like the animations for Carrion Creepers? Rather than lobbing at enemies, the attacks comes at the same rate from below.
Would love to hear other ideas.

Tier 5 - Force Field Generator

Two of the defining aspects of Force-Field Generator is its distinction as a following, but separate entity, and its ability to offer a visible sphere of protection.
The obvious change is to just create a floating crystal which offers a field of protection with a less shimmery, and more glowing look. The less obvious (and more fun) option would be to attempt to make a field of flies, not unlike the available aura on all Vhazilok. On a wise spread scale, that might make a very appealing and interesting way to protect the team. Of course, it might also be impossible to see through, and could cause epileptic fits, but I think it's still worth a shot.

Tier 6 - Poison Trap
Plant. Crystal. Exploding Corpse!

Tier 7 - Seeker Drones
Oooh, a great new use for those Buff pets Veterans get. The Fairy would do nicely in a pinch.

Tier 8 - Trip Mine

Here's where my trouble really begins. This is a distinctive looking device. Obvious when seen, which offers both knockback and strong damage. The limiting factor is that the effect follows its trigger immediately. There's no time for an animation any longer than an explosion. I think that the last part of the animation from Stone Spears, or Stalagmites might offer an out. Perhaps crystaline?

Tier 9 - Time Bomb

This is much simpler, because the bomb explodes based on time. Personally, I think that you could have a really great animation involving a short magic ritual, and the eventual landing of a meteor
But I'm sure there are other animations which would work instead.

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So, there's just a couple ideas.
Would love to hear feedback or possible suggestions?

Thanks guys. I knew you'd come through.

I've never used the Super Science booster ability to change character models (between male, female, and huge) and tried to do it today only to find that the options we not available at ICON.
I've got the science booster. Is there something else I need to do to unlock this ability, or is this ability no longer available for some reason?

I am part of a regular group of 5 players, meeting weekly for a little CoH action.
We've run a number of fun teams, but we thought we'd try something different.

That's why our newest team is going to consist of a pair of Mind Controllers, and then a trio of damage dealers to back them up (or maybe it's better to think of that the other way round).

My first instinct is scrappers, of course, but I'm more inclined towards high single person damage, in order to get the most out of the mind controllers sleeps. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

So, I'm opening the floor for suggestions. Who do you think teams best with Mind Controllers? What defensive secondaries pair well with all that highly active Mind control? What Primary and secondary sets would you recommend for the scrappers? Should we include a blaster? Tactics? Anecdotes about your own experience? Likely snags? Problems? What do you think?

I am part of a regular group of 5 players, meeting weekly for a little CoH action.
We've run a number of fun teams, but we thought we'd try something different.

That's why our newest team is going to consist of a pair of Mind Controllers, and then a trio of damage dealers to back them up (or maybe it's better to think of that the other way round).

My first instinct is scrappers, of course, but I'm more inclined towards high single person damage, in order to get the most out of the mind controllers sleeps. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

So, I'm opening the floor for suggestions. Primary and secondary sets? Should we include a blaster? Tactics? Anecdotes about your own experience? Likely snags? Problems? What do you think?

I'm not sure whether there are still a lot of occasional players who don't roll with a consistent Super Group, but I was thinking about how I like to team, and I call it guest starring.

My favorite in game experiences are when I'm the odd man out on a team of smart, cordinated heroes. I like seeing how they work as a team, and then applying myself where I can be most efficient (depending on my AT of course).

As a result, I'm often looking for existing teams.

I thought, what if I could have a search flag which says "Looking to guest star". It would imply that I wasn't seeking SuperGroup membership, but that I would like to join an existing team.

You know...now that I'm re-reading this, I think it would be underused. No one pays attention to those flags.

Addition of some more varied and inventive Bow Weapon options would be VERY useful. Can't we get some people who think beyond the basic bow? How bout something techie (but not Talsorian), with the sort of the sort energy string effect that the guy for the D&D cartoon had. Heck, why not a magical fantasy bow? How bout we transport some of the Shield effects over to the bow -- or to other Weapons. Mmm, smoking blades -- but I digress.

I'd even love to see something more outside the box
How bout a bow that's made from a curved snake? A bow that's unrealistically square. I realize that you can't change the pose of the character enough to make the character fire a crossbow, but surely you could come up with something more outlandish and fun?
A stone bow?
A bow made from bone? How bout from two enormous elephant tusks (similar to the Tribal Shield option).

Give us something other than Normal, Mongolian, or with a dumb laser scope.

At least then my Undead Dark/TA Mastermind would have something which matches his character. Right now, he looks like he found a bow in a grave or something.

There are all sorts of skills associated with CoX, but they are all considerably more subtle than the ability to the skills needed to throw a perfect spiral.

There are skills associated with power choice and use, skills relating to teamwork, and skills associated with targeting, but none of them are as glamorous as a Fireball Motion.

I think there's also something to be said about efficiency. I can tell if a player is skilled and experienced by their use of inspirations, for example. Timing for Build Up, Aim, and other similar powers is also a skill.

But more universally, there's a skill associated with knowing where to direct your attacks while on teams. How many times have you attacked an enemy with a big attack, and realized that it was dead before your attack even hit. How often have you used Transfusion on an enemy as it died, and it's effect didn't go off. How many times have you healed one of your Mastermind's minions, only to have another one in more end up dying.
The game if full of these sorts of things and avoiding those common pitfalls is definitely a skill.

I wonder how that Server default is expressed, and if we could somehow use that coding to fix the currently trashed bind system.

Weirdly, some of my old characters with binds seem to be ok. I have another character that speaks in two voices, and her colors worked just fine -- except for an antiquated border tag. Of course, when I tried to edit it out of my keybinds file, and reload it, it screwed the whole thing up.
So, it's only new binds which seem to be causing the error.

Perhaps if there were some way to skip the act of creating a keybind text file. I'm at a loss though.

Is it just me, or does it seem like the easy fix is just to convert it back to how it was --- was there some issue with chat bubbles before?

So, I thought I'd heard somewhere that we had lost our ability to change our text bubble's colors using Binds.

Well, I recently logged in with a tanker I made a while ago. He's a zombie, and only speaks like a zombie, while I occasionally speak through him as the Necromancer who's ressurected him, which show up in a distinctly different transparent bubble.

So I made a series of binds which allow this to work.
The simplest of them looks like this.

F1 "say <bgcolor #E222222><color #FFFFFF>Hello everyone!$$say ....grrrhhhrg...$$em wounded"

If I hit F1 in game, as per the recent changes it looks like this.

Zombie Text failure

However, if I take that very same code, cut and pasted, and then altered to read
/say <bgcolor #E222222><color #FFFFFF>Hello everyone!$$say ....grrrhhhrg...$$em wounded

I get this result.

Zombie Text Success

I'm wonderiing if anyone can help me understand why typing something might yield one result, while having it bound to a key ends up getting something else altogether.