Samuel_Tow

Where are new players even getting the idea that they should be farming in the Architect, anyway? Isn't that something jaded veterans do?

Actually, Tigger has a good point. Double Experience weekends suck. Everyone leaves their brains in behind when they log off to make more room for all the "XPs" and I get deluged with farm, pad, bridge and powerlevel requests, only to STILL end up on crappy teams even when I try to avoid them. It's a weekend when the game takes on a secondary importance to the almighty glint of the XPs.

I say bah humbug!

I'm not sure they'd touch Trial accounts lightly, as a lot of new players try a trial, spend some time away, remember about the game and THEN sign up. Having their old characters there sometimes helps, though in a lot of cases people just start over anyway. Plus, with all the restrictions put on them to prevent RMT spam, what's one more indignity? That, and Trials are a very easy magnet for names, as they're free and people can only use them for 15 days.

Come to think of it, it sounds like a smart plan. Trials are limited to 15 anyway, so I'd say put their names up for grabs at all levels after a sufficiently long time of not having been activated.

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The "name purge" isn't actually a constant, ongoing process, it's a one-time script that puts names up for grabs once that has to be run manually. It hasn't been run recently, to the best of my knowledge.

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Never heard of that one. Nice to know. I always just hit the "Esc" key, though.

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Escape takes you out of Combat Mode (which /em none actually doesn't), but it doesn't interrupt emotes you may be doing. Sitting, for instance, is immune to Escape, because it's not a mode, but merely an animation playing in idle mode. /em none just forces the default animation cycle. I've rarely had use for it, myself, but it's better than jumping up to interrupt emotes.

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Each name can have 3-20 characters. The first must be a number or letter, the remainder can b a number, letter, space, or one of the four special characters: - . ' or ?
That gives just over 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible name combinations.


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i just made a new hero named 2t9j6%$^hif;g5-4]62\
his friends call him Face Roll

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So, you mean to say that 9,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 out of the 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations are bad? Also, the name field doesn't allow %, $, ^, ;, ], or \.

True, but most of them range from expressionless, to expressionless but hiding barely-repressed malice. I actually used one to indicate just that.

I suppose my original point was that since faces are unchanging, it doesn't make sense to lock them in a single, non-natural expression because it looks goofy. I've always been a believer that people's idle faces betray their actual personalities, such as man who always frowns has a face that looks like it's ever so subtly frowning when it's relaxed. I've made characters who were intended to be happy, and for those I picked the faces that looked like they were ever so subtly perky while not actually showing any meaningful expression. I can't imagine EVER picking the ear-to-ear cheesy grin perma-chiselled on a character's face because I can't stand always seeing that horrible thing every time I log into my server. If a character is easy-going and smiles a lot, that would have an effect on his face, making it more joyful and pleasant, but it will NOT face-lock him into a horrible smile.

Not being able to stand the horribly goofy faces probably has something to do with it, too.

Actually, I'd like to see that happen. The old pieces are in need of updating, but we've seen pretty much that that's the very lowest of priority, coming well after the want for NEW items.

Personally, I'd like to see them implement a system for overlaying different textures, at the very least in the same way as emblems, so that we can have one texture of skin with tights over it. Say, you could be a lizard, a stone creature or a robot and STILL have an opaque belly tee over your "skin." That would be VERY cool and it would solve most shading issues. I think...

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I'm in favor of allowing people to choose how they want to do it. Some will use it, some won't. But I would put money on the torrent users downloading a lot faster. At least for the first few days.

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As far as giving players a choice goes, I'm always up for it. However, you have to realise that people need to seed for a bit torrent download to have any meaning, otherwise you still have people downloading directly from the Paragon Studios servers anyway. But how many do you think are going to sit around and seed instead of playing the game?

I suppose if the updater somehow remained active AFTER you started the actual game (normally, it shuts down), then I could kind of see people seeding, but then that would interfere with actual gameplay as it eats up free upload capacity. I'm assuming there's a reason the Issue pre-download starts AFTER you exit, not as soon as you launch.

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The thing that always gets me is how Infernal can draw his ax but still have it strapped to his back when he fights.

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Which is actually one of the reasons why sheaths for swords aren't trivial to make. It would be trivial to make a sheath with a sword in it hang on your back. Probably even trivial to make it a sheath with the RIGHT kind of sword. Making that sword DISAPPEAR from the sheath when you draw it, on the other hand, is where things get interesting. Yes, certain effects can be keyed off combat mode, like the Cyborg auras. They're keyed off ALL combat mode, however, and it wouldn't make sense for your sword to come out of its sheath if all you did was throw a punch.

As BABs has said numerous times recently, it may not be necessarily HARD to solve this problem, but it is pretty much necessarily time-consuming to work on. Anything not "trivial" usually is.

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I have been playing the game almost daily for 5 years. I think you are simply trying to figure out my adjenda, and it really pisses you off that i have been playing this game, and on these forums longer than most of you, and your knee-jerk response is to try and discount any validity of my criticism.

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As long as we're measuring the length of our members, I've been around as long as you have. Do you think it makes me envious that you've been around a few days more? Do you think that's reason enough to find you utterly ridiculous? Because you are. People are asking for things and getting them. People are making suggestions and seeing them implemented into the game. Just because what YOU wanted and what YOU suggested didn't make it in doesn't empower you to act as the sole man qualified to judge.

As well:

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evel cap,SG base content, Cathedral of pain, debt in PVP zones to name a few

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You don't need to post much, but maybe if you READ a little more you'd have seen all the debate that has gone into these subjects, both coming from players and coming from the developers. To claim all players want a level cap, for instance, is laughable. Whether you did or did not claim that in actual phrasing is irrelevant, you claim they "have fallen short" on delivering a level cap raise, which assumes it's a good idea, which assumes people feel it's a good idea. That couldn't be farther from the truth. At best the players are divided 50/50 on the subject. At worst, many, many of us came here to get AWAY from incessant level cap raises that invalidate lower level content. Raided Onyxa recently?

And that's just one easy example. Don't flatter yourself by leading yourself to believe that what you want is somehow objectively good for the game and that if the developers don't do that, they have objectively let "the players" down. If you'd read the boards, you'd have caught Castle's comment on why a level cap increase will NOT happen, and even if it did, powers and slots are NOT things new levels would give.

Next time you try to pass judgement, try to have a solid argument, backed up ACTUAL player popularity and better evidence than "I work in the industry, so there!" What you're doing right now isn't convincing. It's absurd.

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I'd like to see them fix it, but I'm sort of curious what it would entail.

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I can't see it taking much work at all. All that should need to be done is create a bump map for each pattern/mask. The Tanker chest option for Males has a bump map (No, I haven't pigg-dived, it's obvious if you've ever done any 3D modeling at all), and you can make it white with no problem. But the Tanker option for Females' Tops with Skin still has no bump map, so we're left with the wet t-shirt look, minus nipples.
There are some Tops with Skin options that have obvious bump maps (Metal, Leather, and the various Plus options come to mind), would it really be that hard to add a simple bump map to the rest of the Tops with Skin options and the Full Masks/Face options? I could probably do it for them if they send me the patterns/masks, then it's just a matter of changing the code to enable the bump map (which I'm guessing is a variable in each piece's code).

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Here's where the problem with that is this: Male Tanker, Female Metal and so on are full-fledged, separate textures that actually come with their own unique torso model, even though they look a LOT like the original torso. Things like Angelic or Savage, though, don't come with their own model or texture, they use the "base" texture for a naked, nipple-less torso or a naked, crotchless upper legs assembly, with a pattern applied over it. This pattern is applied over the "naked base" in just the same way it's applied over something like Armour Plate or Leather Straps.

As I'm sure you know better than me, these colour patterns are applied as mask textures overlaid over the original texture. However, they are not separate textures in themselves, they are just colour filters, making the underlying texture look monochrome. They can't add shaders, and in fact actual shaders have a LOT higher priority than patterns do. This is why shiny items always colour a LOT darker than dark matte colours, but a LOT brighter than bright matte colours. Pick any of the I6 CoV shiny items (say, metallic skull) and colour it black or dark brown. The shader almost disappears, because of the dark colour, and the item is almost not shiny. Try white, however, and the shader is extrodinarily effective.

About the only way for Tights with Skin to work with shaders and have their own surface shading that isn't the same as the bare torso shading is to make a unique texture for all of them, which isn't the case for most of them and would require a fair bit of work from Jay.

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Well even if the issue is aggressive shading... white should not have a pink/brown tint.

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The thing is, the shading remains the same colour regardless of what colour skin you put underneath it. Black, white, green, it's still the same colour shading. Ironically, the SAME colour shading as pure white skin. It's inherent in the texture itself, and the texture is made to look good on cream to dark cream skin, so the shading is made to look good with that. White skin, like white tights (which are mechanically the same thing O_o), simply shows this the most because it allows enough of the base texture's original colouring to remain, where darker colours "mask" the original texture better. I wouldn't be surprised if there WERE some kind of colour blending going on, but it's not based off skin colour, but off the base texture which may actually BE pure white, itself.

And as mentioned, black is the bane of auras, because the "darkness" of the colour also defines opacity, and black is invisible, or close enough to it. Except for Tendrils, which seem to have either a black sprite to begin with, or a much kinder opacity interval.

You know, here's something interesting:

A lot of people have been asking for the ability to define left gloves and boots separately from right gloves and boots. Suppose we reduce the two single-arm robotic arms to just one option that allows you to pick one robotic upper arm, add an option that allows you to pick one robotic upper leg, then allow an option for straight-up mirroring the entire model? Same animations, same use of powers, only the "skin" is mirrored over the skeleton.

I'd assume this may not be as trivial as it sounds, from what little I know about skeletal animation, but it would give us control over asymmetrical options that have to be worked on for one side only, rather than duplicated for the other side, as well.

If I were home right now, I'd save that pic. No use for saving it at work, though, bloody multiple computers!

I don't like specific-expression faces because they become DEFINED by their expressions, and a character stuck with a permanent green or a permanently raised eyebrow is pretty silly. Our faces are carved in stone as soon as we slap them on, so the most neutral expression works best. The hideously goof grin, fro instance, doesn't make the character look like he smiles a lot, it makes him look like he's a braindead idiot.

As long as our expressions don't change, expressionless is the most appropriate choice because that's actually the neutral state of face for just about everyone.

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I should slap you.

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I'm not sure what you're trying to achieve by saying that, but I'm pretty confident you didn't succeed in achieving it.

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But the problem isn't that they're taken, it's that they're taken by players who don't play the game any more. I think we can all agree that active players should be catered to over players who haven't played for multiple years. The question would be where to draw that line.

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You are wrong. A few years ago they ran a script that stripped every character below level 36 on accounts inactive for more than 90 days and left it up for grabs. Almost none of those names were taken above level 6, which is why the script was reworked to target names of characters below level 6 on accounts inactive for more than 90 days. No matter how strongly people want to believe that they are unjustly being denied their names by inactive accounts, the truth is that the names they want belong to ACTIVE accounts who aren't name-purged, and that the names on high-level characters in inactive accounts aren't all that desirable after all.

Just because a CHARACTER of a particular name never logs on doesn't mean the PLAYER who owns this character isn't playing full days every day.

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There are somewhere between 450K and 1 MILLION single words in the English language.
So even just using an already existing ONE WORD name, there are that many possible names.
If you add a second word, that makes it 1-2 MILLION possible names.

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Actually if one-word options are between 450 thousand and a million, then two-word options would be between 202 billion and a trillion combinations. What's even more funny is that with a 20-symbol limit and with limiting yourself to just letters and numbers, you can get 36^20 combinations, which is around 13 367 494 538 843 734 067 838 845 976 576, which spoken is something like 13 million billion billion options, which is two and a half million billion times more than all people on earth, so even if EVERYONE played, they'd still need five million billion accounts each to exhaust all available options.

By comparison, there is a fairly limited amount of Something Man and Fire Something names to go around, and 150 000 people, each with 132 slots, who could potentially use them.

Not disappointed in the slightest. The grimacing faces always bothered me, personally, because while it's nice to have an expression every now and then, having an expression that IS your face is not my cup of tea. I prefer expressionless faces because they fit everyone.

Specifically, I made me a new villain with the emptiest face I could find, which simply MADE the character. One of the new male faces, I don't remember which one, which is both completely empty of any emotion, yet still sinister and scary in its almost-blank eyes.

Bad, I like your story

Some people are new, some people are veterans, but I guess some people are simply jerks and idiots. I say let 'em die. It's the only way they'll learn.

That, and I stay away from the Architect. It's become the drain for the entire community's stupidity, both in terms of bad teams and horrible missions. It's a shame, because there's some brilliant content over there, but the crowd it attracts is just... Ugh! At least it sucks that horror out of the regular content so I'm less likely to run into it. Which is good in its own way.

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I don't remember if this was in the patch notes, but I did notice that toggles seem to stay on after you log off. I just logged in and all of my toggles were still on.

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There's a certain amount of time that the server keeps a log of what powers you have running, so it reapplies them when you log back on. It's not very long, though - give or take 10-15 minutes or something like that. Past this time you log in with no powers active and have to retoggle.

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I also noticed that there's a listed limit when writing a profile now. Hopefully that's new and I'm not just really dense.

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The limit was always there and always 1024 symbols, but the current/max symbols readout IS new and very, very welcome. I was SERIOUSLY tired of having to guess how much I had left and typing out lines of periods just to see if I'm within 10-20 symbols of the end. Very, very welcome, indeed, especially with line breaks coming back.

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This may not be new, and it may not be intentional, but I seem to be getting full credit for allied mob kills in missions. If I remember right we're only supposed to get partial to no XP depending on how much damage we do versus the ally mob. But in both a Mayhem and a mission in Faultline I was getting full Xp even if I didn't touch the defeated mob.

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In regular missions where the developers control the NPCs, that was always the case. Any NPC "allied" to you will act like a pet, granting you full experience for any damage it does. This is not true only in the Architect.

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This probably seems like a silly thing to be frustrated by, but I used /em flip to force characters into the idle cycle for screenshot and demo purposes.

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Use /em none, instead.

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I kinda like the new version. Maybe what we need is /em idle so you don't need to use a workaround to get you into the animation loop you want?

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Just to address the other occurrence of this - /em none does just this. Breaks an emote or stance and returns you to the idle animation cycle.

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personally i find the idea of hammerspace a more elegant solution than scabbards and that sort of stuff. It's not as realistic but then again when you're playing as a superhero able to defy the laws of everyday physics with the ease of slicing bread...you can't have an everyday sheath on your hip.

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"Can't" is a huge exaggeration. It's like saying that because every hero is so hideously strong as to punch out vault doors, we "can't" have weapons. Point is, holsters, sheaths, scabbards and so forth just LOOK good, and oftentimes carrying your oversized sword on your back looks better than... Not carrying your oversized sword on your back. It's a point of aesthetic, and when it comes to aesthetic, there is no "can't," only "won't."

Point is, they're petty thugs, so a lot of what they do is petty vandalism. The Freakshow spend all of their time saying things like "Man, I can stop smashing stuff!" "We should set things on fire next!" and the Trolls spend the majority of their days jackhammering into rubble, remarking "This fun!" Is it so out of the ordinary that a Hellion will take a crowbar to a bus stop or a chisel to one of the support beams of the light rail line? There's a gang of Outcasts that are always chiselling at the poles West of the Steel Canyon Yellow Line.

Since footsteps on sand already sound like snow, I'd assume it would sound the same. From what I've seen, sounds are now based on terrain texture. Where before all surfaces defaulted to "asphalt" unless, apparently, specifically altered (which is why some metal crates sounded like metal while others didn't), now the surface textures have a sound attached to them.

Either that, or someone went over the entire game with a fine-tooth comb and tweaked every rock and pebble, with I seriously doubt.