Alissara

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I wonder how long CoX will last after MUO starts. Only time will tell...

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If I might play devil's advocate for a second, in the presence of EQ 2, how well is EQ doing?

And yes, that's a rhetorical question.

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Cesium Exposure - Which is a sleep duration SO... Cesium as in "cease moving" perhaps?

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Elemental metal. Atomic number 55. Never, ever, mix with water!

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Be very careful what you ask for. You might just get it.

Somewhat of an apology for another rather necro post, but it seems to me that this zombie is already alive and kicking, and living in Astoria, OR

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While I'm at it, I'm stunned that in a year and a half, nobody has mentioned the fast food chain City of Gyros.

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I have 3 taunts slotted and can stand in a group of grey mobs without them caring a whit.

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As a tanker: I can walk up to grey minions with invinc. They will give their text message that they've been engaged, use 1 attack, then stare at me with those yellow tohit decorations floating around them.

Them standing there, staring at me is the result of taunt working. Turning invinc off allows them to eventually run away (coinciding with the tohit decorations dissapearing).

It's not doing anything to grey lieuts or bosses, as mentioned by _Castle_.

If brute's invinc aura doesn't even affect minions... this is incredibly amusing.

I love bugs.

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Castle described it as insidious. I've seen enough of this one in action on a */inv scrapper to agree 100% with him.

In the past, my taunt from invincibility worked even when I had invisibility (power pool) active. Meaning if I were invisible, but had invincibility on, mobs would aggro on me.

As things stand now, NOTHING aggroes on me if I have both invincibility and invisibility turned on. Drop the invis, and minions aggro, while lt's (and presumably bosses) don't.

There's also a "conflicting desires" problem for the AI. If I maintain taunt in a group of way low NPCs, they stay in a huddle around me, but don't attack unless I attack them first, after which they hit once, and then return to not attacking mode. Drop invince, and eventually they run away, and start attacking with ranged.

It's as if they want to attack with ranged, but can't leave because of the taunt, and so their AI gets in a jam and they do nothing.

Speaking as a professional programmer with north of 20 years experience, this looks like a real nasty one.

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Now we just need the COH staff to record a live version of this song, to be used in the special Winter Event Zone....

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Uh....You really don't want that level of sonic torture.

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Two thoughts.

1. Do the recording, and then use it for a one day patch for the Sonic set on 4/1.

2. This is a seed of an idea, Devs. You need to take, it, plant it, nurture it, and finally cause it to blossom into something wonderful. Just think in terms of that song and a well known and generally hated sequence of missions in the middle of a certain task force. Like a well trained wide receiver, you have the ball. Run with it.

One change request, although I'll be the first to say that it may not be at all easy.

With regular contacts, the progress bar fills up blue, and at a certain point we get their phone number.

With detectives, it fills up red to show progress towards a safeguard. However, there is no corresponding blue "fill up", and no option to ever get their phone number.

Have you considfered adding a second bar that fills up blue as we complete Safeguards, and allows us to get their phone number, so that we don't have to keep heading over to talk to them.

Single entry: Storyline.

More accurate comment: 50% storyline, 25% costume, 25% badges.

It is perhaps worth noting that the update to Faultline rates as a major story event, IMHO. We have Paragon City doing a major cleanup in a zone that was, to put it delicately, a disaster area. I should point out that by "disaster area", I'm not referring to the playability, but the very essence of the zone itself. Faultline had undergone a tremendous upheaval to get it the way it was, what with those crevices, the damage to the buildings and so forth. And now we have it being restored to a workable zone. You know that progress is being made when they build a donut shop just to attract the police officers.

Here's another couple of examples.

There's a high level arc that covers (among other things) the history behind Countess Crey. Hell of a good story there, and quite the eye-opener as to why things are the way they are in Crey Corp.

Or a very short mini arc involving (IIRC) Mrs Boxer, her son Joe, and the Malta. After doing that little bagatelle, Malta are KoS as far as I'm concerned. Not arrest on sight, but KILL.

And what about the story of Sam Wincott that unfolds as you do the Hollows missions?

There are others. These stories are a lot of what make the game for me.

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I think most people would just like either
a: a personal storage locker in base
b: a personal storage locker in base

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No.

The point about a personal area is that it gives ME a place that I can decorate and design, because as things currently stand, much like an estimated 90% of the playerbase I can't alter the appearance of my SG base.

A personal room as proposed would give me this ability. That's why we need something more than just a personal storage bin.

@Statesman, you say that it's the tech that makes this a problem.

Talk to us. A problem shared is a problem halved. What's the technical problem that's causing so much trouble? Maybe if we know what it is we can help find a workaround.

Put that another way. What do you think we want that's causing the trouble? If we can negotiate on the requirements, maybe we can reduce the technical difficulty.

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"You can use this power to create a solidified hologram of a Redcap Rascal. It will follow you around wherever you go. Great for parties!"

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Then he needs an H on his forehead!

(sorry, nerd reference)

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Dammit - you owe me a new keyboard Just spat my soda on this one laughing at that.

@ _Castle_

If you want to sell us on the solid Holo concept, you MUST permit us to name them. Mine will need to be called "Smeg Head".

That said, give some thought to adding more of these over time, as rewards for doing semi-serious missions. A certain other MMO, arguably the most popular if subscriber count is used as a metric, did something of this sort, and it proved to be quite a success. Pet hunting over there was, in it's way, as popular as badge hunting is here.

For example:

Miniature Zeus titan, for doing something slightly nasty to the Malta.
Miniature "Supa Troll" - well I'll let your imaginations work on this one.
Miniature CoT behemoth ...
Miniature Nem Jaeger ...

The possibilities are endless

Just to address a couple of points ...

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Few people care about the aesthetics of bases. It's just not obviously an expression of one's self, especially if it's been designed by 20+ people, or by someone else. That's the crucial difference between costumes and bases.

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If no one cares about the aesthetics of bases, it all comes down to function ... and there's not a whole lot of function in there.

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What compounds this is that when I'm being social with SG members, more often than not we're not in the base, we're out on a mission. I'm somewhat overstating things now, bt it's as if you want to remove the acion from the game, and turn it into an AOL chatroom on steroids.

Make no mistake, the social aspect IS important. However for me at least, most of the time it doesn't take place in base.

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We(Cryptic) assumed a certain value to bases which clearly doesn’t match up with players’ perceptions. We assumed that customizability, some gameplay features, layout control, etc. would be considered worth X, but players think it’s X-Y. That means WE were wrong. No fickleness involved, just something we didn’t identify well.

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In some respects it IS worth X-Y - Y being the rent. This is an issue that keeps on coming up, but lets take a second to look at the "financial" differences between costumes and bases.

With a costume, it's a one time charge to change. Pretty tall as well, I'm looking at something in the area of 1.5 million to set up my 5th slot on my main. However, it's a one time cost.

You'd get infinitely less flak if you increased the cost of base items, but completely nuked the rent. If you want to limit the speed of growth, use the following system. Makeit so that you need to construct certain items from salvage to permit plot size increases. By carefully limiting the drop rate of this salvage, you can tune the rate at which SG's will grow. Same applies to items.

The point about this is that it turns it from a negtive into a positive. We need to work to upgrade the plot size. It takes 100 widgets to get that plot size increase. as the SG collects them, there's a sense of progress and moving forward, which is always a good thing.

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Yet a Super Group costume isn’t your creation, either. And yet people wear them. The counterpoint is, of course, that a Super Group costume is in addition to one’s normal costume, not instead of. There’s no such personal property in the base. We thought (on paper) that the “personal items” would do the trick, but it isn’t really the same thing, is it?

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See above. A SG costume is one slot out of five, and a one time cost. If people had to pay rent on SG costumes, they'd vanish overnight. Trust me.

I hate to keep harping back to it but rent is a "bad thing" (tm). It turns gameplay into a bit of a chore because now I have to work at something. There are better ways to get where you want to be. There really are.

Trying to drag the subject line back to where it should be and all that ...

This has been a costume bug for I don't know how long, and should be a relatively minor bugfix. Jackets are being drawn one sided, so from certain angles where you see the "inside" of a jacket, it's invisible. This leads to some fairly odd looks.

To Jay (and more to the devs in charge of the 3d engine), All you need to do is use

glDisable(GL_CULL_FACE);

when rendering jackets, and it'll fix the problem. If you were able to subdivide the jacket into front and back portions, you really only need this for the front, the back can (and should) be left with CULL_FACE enabled. Yes, this does mean a slight performance hit, but I somehow don't think it's going to break the bank.

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You know what I was really hoping to find out in this article?

An explanation of why/how Consiglieres are gravity controllers.

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Since The Family seems to be coming a bit more to the forefront, would you guys consider correcting two minor mistakes.

There is only one Consigliere in a Family, and likewise only one Underboss. Since the roles of both of these two is administration, they would NEVER be seen out on the streets leading a group of men. It's about as incongruous as seeing the Vice President of the U.S. of A. doing the work of a beat cop.

They simply wouldn't be peppered all over Indy Port and Striga Isle the way we see them - the "bosses" of those groups would be capos and skippers.

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The real TOP ISSUE is still this:

Stop shafting your morning customers with your maintenance schedule.

You are averaging 2-4 days a week lately that your morning customers lose out on their entire playing time.

That is patently unfair.

Cycle it a bit.

Move it to a less populated time.

Seriously, it is long overdue that you re-examine your maintenance schedule and do something a little more equitable and less onerous to your paying customers.

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Let me spell this out real simple for you.

NCSoft (the publisher) set the maintenance schedule. Remember, they own the server hardware, they pay for the bandwidth, and you pay them to play.

They are not here for your benefit, nor are they here for mine. They are here for the benefit of their sockholders (if they're public) or their owners / investors (if they're private). Never ever forget this. Because of this, they make decisions based on one thing, and one thing only. That being what gets them the biggest profit.

They have chosen the current time to do maintenance because it has the least impact on their bottom line. The reason for this is very likely as follows. They have to balance between the cost of doing the maintenance (which goes way up if they do it any time outside normal working hours), and the lost revenue when people like you cancel.

They have determined that the lowest number of people online when maintenance time is cheap for them happens at the current maintenance timeframe.

Cambios, you are in the minority. There's hardly anyone else here that complains about the maintenance time. NCSoft have it dead right. They ARE htting the fewest customers they can, while still keeping it within "normal" business hours, and hence keeping the cost down.

It would hurt the game if they were to change the time. Make it earlier and the maintenance cost goes up. Make it later and they interrupt more people. It's not going to change, you cannot cause anything to happen with your absolutely pointless personal crusade.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one" -- Spock, from Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan.

How much more clear can I make it to you?

I may be jumping the gun here, but it looks like a major woot is called for.

Patterns may be back on skirts!

Props to whoever got this fixed.

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... The only real solution I see to balance stalkers is reducing reliance on AS'ing into oblivion to survive. E.g. reducing the AS damage while raising hit points, and then giving a bump to regular attacks to make up for the lost damage from the AS.

It'd make stalkers a lot more scrapperish, but would still maintain a lot of stealthy flavor.

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Part of me likes this idea, because it would be a "fix" for them. However it heads in the same direction as the morass that existed quite a while ago where the dividing line between Scrappers and Tankers got very thin. If you start whittling away at the very essence of what makes a stalker into a stalker, then why not just ditch the entire AT, and make them into Villain side scrappers?

And stand by for an incredible cacophony of howls when you do so.

Before you say "stealth", there's a rather funny point to make here. I respecced Alissara when I discovered that Tough and Weave were of questionable value, and took the concealment pool instead. (*) Believe it or not, this call was made before I even knew how stalkers worked. So I have a very "stalker'ish" scrapper already. She uses invis A LOT, and while I don't get the huge up front alpha that A.S. gives, dropping a focus or a shockwave right out of invisibility (or TP foe) allows for a good sized chunk of damage before the mob(s) has/have time to react.

(*) BTW, I vow to quit the game if the devs ever remove or nerf this pool. At least the invis portion, I don't give a flying rats about the def section since that's not why I took it. Contact me at @Alissara if you want my stuff.

I agree, the stalker has the problem of being a one trick pony. It does that trick incredibly well indeed, but since it's not particularly useful in a PvE we have the situation we do.

As a side note to this, I have to wonder what would happen if the rate of attack of stalkers were twiddled, either the recharge time on their stealth, or using placate, so that in the long term, their DPS using AS repeatedly could be made to match that of a scrapper.

As it is right now, my DPS output exceeds that of a stalker if the stalker remains visible. I do not believe that is under debate here.

However, an AV fight lasts for quite a while. Just say that running my attack chain over and over gets (for example) 100 DPS average over a minute. That'd be 6,000 total damage per minute, including misses, focus boosts, critical hits, etc, etc. OK, so assume that a comparable stalker can do 600 points via A.S. If he can do that every 10 seconds in an AV fight, he's exactly as useful as a scrapper, in terms of raw damage output: 6,000 points per minute.

Does this even begin to make sense?

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A fix for Group Teleport will be coming in I8.

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Oh? So you're finally replacing Group Teleport with something useful?

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QFT.

I use TP self as my travel power. TP foe and Recall friend are both very useful powers.

Now, remind me again why it was that I was going to take group TP? I can't get it until I hit level 20, yet 99.999% of players I team with will have had a travel power for three plus levels by that time.

And for the other 0.001% I'll just TP self to the mission door (or wherever), and then Recall friend.

I was going to post this elsewhere, but then I had an epiphany and realised that it belongs in the costume bug thread.

Thinking out loud for a moment, IIRC it typically takes up to three textures to render a character fully. One is that pattern that selects between the two colors (e.g. boot_lightening.texture), while the other two are a "decal" (boot_leather_01.texture) and the associated bump map (boot_leather_01_bump.texture).

That being said, what I'm seeing in the SG costume editor is almost as if all three textures are not there. The decal and bump maps are simply gone, and the pattern is replaced by a single color, which is what you'd get if the texture was "incomplete" in Open GL terms, and thus providing the default 0,0,0,1 (i.e. select one of the two colors unilaterally).

And to make sure this gets seen, I have to issue the following edict:

Jay is TEH SEXXORZ

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the problem is, the Cities have acknowledged that the core of their base is players who DO NOT WANT that stuff in this game.

Making the game more like WoW is going to cause more cancellations than new subscriptions. The SWG effect, if you will.

[/ QUOTE ]Saying players have "acknowledged they DO NOT WANT that stuff in this game" ....Doesn't make it true.

You go ahead and try to speak for 100 thousand other players and type in CAPS, I'm just giving my opinion what I would like .

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I'm going to give my opinion then. I would just up and quit of loot and crafting went beyond the level it's currently at. Almost everyone I team with feels the same way.


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I'll add my voice to Angello's here.

While I do like a game with a well thought out crafting system, I don't want crafting to "take off" in CoX. The game we have works very well as it is now. The last thing I want to see it becoming is a grind for recipes (unlikely, since those appear to come free with tables) or more likely, a grind for materials.

If I were able to provide any input for any "crafting" system for this game, I'd want one thing above all else. It needs to be an "icing on the cake" kinda thing, rather than a major factor of the game.

Crafting is a "major" gameplay item in games like WoW, EvE, etc. etc. etc. For better or for worse, I don't think CoX needs or wants crafting of that sort. IMHO, the game is a breath of fresh air (sewers notwithstanding ) in the current MMO world, by virtue of its delightful simplicity.

I'd see it as simple as you go to some sort of "craft station" in your SG base, dial up what you want, and the game then proceeds to auto collect salvage from you as you're playing. Then one day, you get a note: "Item Built", in much the same way that we currently get "Mission Complete" or "Enhancement Found" messages.

Head back to the SG base, pick up your new shiny, and that's it.

The point being that this does not introduce the horrors of explicitly grinding for craft materials that seems to be so prevalent in games where crafting plays a larger role.

We currently have an excellent mechaninc in place for gettng craft materials: Salvage drops. All we're mssing is a way to turn them into personal items rather than SG items, especially since many SG members do not have the necessary privs and/or resources to build stuff from salvage.

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... AV/Hero>GM ...

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I really have to question this relationship.

When I consider that in a recent TF, six of us laid waste to the Clockwork King (AV) in very short order, while the same gang of six could not even scratch the paintwork on Babbage (GM), I'd have to say that the current standings are GM>AV.

Likewise, a (different) team of six dispatched Nemesis (also an AV, I believe) a damn sight faster than a team of 8 (with a Shivan) took out Adamastor (GM).

And then there's everyone's favorite: Lusca .....

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The difference being that GMs are supposed to be taken on by several teams, whereas AVs have to be restricted to what a maximum of 8 players can handle. You can gather 48 people to fight in a zone, but not an instanced mission.

Well, not legitimately in an instanced mission. >.>

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Taken at face value, your explanation tends to confirm that GM > AV.

If GM == 48 (or 16 for the last attack on lusca), while AV == 8, then most definitely GM > AV.

Or am I missing something simple here?

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... AV/Hero>GM ...

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I really have to question this relationship.

When I consider that in a recent TF, six of us laid waste to the Clockwork King (AV) in very short order, while the same gang of six could not even scratch the paintwork on Babbage (GM), I'd have to say that the current standings are GM>AV.

Likewise, a (different) team of six dispatched Nemesis (also an AV, I believe) a damn sight faster than a team of 8 (with a Shivan) took out Adamastor (GM).

And then there's everyone's favorite: Lusca .....

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and since i am in an asking mode... how about a hosp in hollows. god knows that that is the ONE place that needs it the most. travel is dangerous enough for lowbies...do we really have to make them run from atlas on every death?

there has to be a way to make hollows less annoying than it already is... unless there are more mish in atlas from levels 1-14 and up hollows entry to 14 at travel (or travel at 10)

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NO hospital in the hollows. Unless its REALLY close to the AP exit. Like...right next to it.

Whenever I ding in the hollows (before level 10) I almost always take the AP hospital express to see Ms. Liberty.

Of course, knowing posi's sense of humor...the hospital would be in a back corner of the hollows....

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My gut feel is that the Hollows won't get a hospital. Ever. Based on the current state of affairs, there isn't a hazard zone in the game that I'm aware of that has a hospital, and a "non-hazard" zone that doesn't have one. Admittedly, I've never had a toon make it way up to the end game, so that might break north of level 40.

However for all sub level 40 zones I think you'll find that to be the case. And since the Hollows is a hazard zone .....

Arrgghh!

Two years later, and yet another bug that we asked about still hasn't been fixed.

SG settings are common across all costumes, which in 99.999% of cases doesn't work. Is there any way in creation, please, pretty please, pretty please with a cherry on top, we an get one set of SG settings for each costume.

Jay will be "TEH UBER SEXY" if he gets this fixed.

Please?

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I ought to get a screen cap of this, but if you put a belt on a female char, and then increase her hip size, the belt doesn't grow, and with the slider all the way to the right, you can get some "inverse pokethrough" artifacts as the body expands and starts covering the belt.

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What belt and what top?

Earlier when I was checking belts this is exactally what I did on most belts in the editor, so if you've found one with the recent changes that is not scaling correctly please post which it is

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V belt, smooth top. My bad however, it's not the hips that do it, but the waist. Leave the hips default, widen the waist (I don't want her to look like an hourglass), and it'll stretch out over the sides of the belt.

I'll post a screenie if this gets to be a major issue.

I ought to get a screen cap of this, but if you put a belt on a female char, and then increase her hip size, the belt doesn't grow, and with the slider all the way to the right, you can get some "inverse pokethrough" artifacts as the body expands and starts covering the belt.