Codewalker

The Self Destruct power from the Cyborg pack goes off even if the user gets knocked out before the countdown finishes.

Besides, the plot writers have never been concerned with in-game power mechanics before; I don't think that can be used as a justification for what can and can't happen.

Actually it'll go up to 23. On beta the existing one turns into a beacon for Echo: Dark Astoria, and there's a new SG Badge and corresponding beacon for new Dark Astoria.

Your huge 'females' might also get offended at all the NPCs referring to them as "he". Though I guess you could play that off a variety of ways...

Eh, [Psychic Bomb] could be a granted autopower that persists through defeat, like Mystic Fortune (you still have the icon while faceplanted, even when Fitness disappears). Some clicks work while defeated, too. So there's precedent.

Whether or not powers like that would continue to work when someone's fully dead, we have no basis of comparison for, since our characters can't actually DIE.

Heh, so you can get your HO enhancements from doing the HOTF (Hero One Task Force)? Very punny.

Penelope Yin Task Force is the obvious choice, sub in one psychic for the other, even if the level range creates continuity problems with Faultline. Still leaves the question of who takes over Statesman's though.

Also, if anyone is considering upgrading it, DO NOT DO SO UNTIL ISSUE 22 IS LIVE!

Please mention to people in-game who are considering it as well:

Superior Scrapper's Strike: Recharge/Critical Hit Bonus is BROKEN and does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
(except for the recharge enhancement to the power your slot it in)

This is a known issue, and is already fixed on beta, but the fix probably won't hit live servers until Issue 22.

It's a naming problem. The proc doesn't give you stealth of any kind of all. Without stealth, all "Hidden" status really means is "guaranteed crit for your next attack."

The GMs will ban you if you don't!

It's true, somebody on the Internet said so.

I see what you did there...

Fixed the thread title for you.

What server? I've found some of the people I know from Triumph on there, with varying degrees of activeness.

Yeah, he's the Tom of CoH Faces.

Maverick X was involved in creating the site years and years ago, and has since moved on from CoH to other things. New accounts no longer automatically add him as a friend.

We've debated whether to remove him from everyone's friends list, but didn't want to do that across the board in case there really is someone on there who keeps in touch and wants him on their list, since he does pop in from time to time.

My favorite solution is to just move him to "pending" status so it shows up as you got a friend request, but even that might be too overreaching.

Heh. Really I think people ought to be bugging the UI designers rather than the FX artists on that one anyway.

Just my hunch based on how many new character and environment FX we've seen lately versus, well, anything on the UI side.

Maybe at the time. Now? Not by a long shot.

I believe the last known bug with that was fixed recently. Fulcrum Shift for one uses multiple psuedo-pets that summon each other, as do the chain powers in Electric Control.

According to City of Data, the Oil Slick pseudo-pet doesn't have any sort of afraid status in it.

This was changed when a certain power designer (who may have been an intern at the time, I don't remember the full story Castle told us) figured out a way to fix it. Now, the top-level pseudo-pet has an autopower that can only be used on a dead "creation" -- i.e. a pet that itself has spawned. As soon as the target dies, this auto power is able to find a target and activates, summoning the Fire pseudopet and revoking itself.

It was probably done to avoid the unreliability of a dead entity summoning something, which ironically I think was just fixed for Beam Rifle's Disintegration spread to work right (and which many Kinetics users are immensely grateful for).

The Fire pseudopet only has the fire damage and the Avoid. The original stays and the fire one overlaps it.

Well, that actually shouldn't be possible. According to CoD, which is usually accurate about these types of things, the Avoid effect is targeted at foes only. If friendly targets are being affected by it, they should also be taking damage from the fire, which uses the same target specification.

So if there's a bug, I don't think it's on the power design side, which looks solid. Possibly an engine bug with the Avoid effect itself? Note that this is not the Afraid status that powers like Hot Feet or Arctic Air use, it's a different one called Avoid. Perhaps changing it to Afraid would work around the issue in an acceptable way.

There's only a handful of other powers that use Avoid: Blizzard, Ice Storm, Rain of Fire, and Sleet. I'm curious, do these also cause friendly NPCs to run out of them?

Thanks for that, but don't sell yourself short! When I decided to take a swing at it, I compared the current state it was in with a baseline copy made right after the old server was shut down, to see what had been done so far. I knew you'd been working on it in your limited spare time but was surprised at the volume of the changes. It definitely saved me a lot of time!

Most of the work so far has been on revamping the back end into a more modern architecture. It's clear that it's one of those sites that got quickly thrown together as a "hey, this would be cool!" thing and then just got more and more pieces added on to it. Which is absolutely fine, that happens a lot, there just comes a point where you have to go back to square one and re-think a few things. I can definitely sympathize with the folks at Paragon who have to reverse-engineer old systems to be able to maintain them.

There have been a few minor tweaks to the interface that long-time users may be able to spot, but nothing huge. It should be quite a bit faster now, too, though that might be hard to tell after months of it being down.

Going forward I do have a few ideas for improvements to the site that you'll hopefully be seeing Soon(TM). I've never really used Faces in the past, but just navigating it and testing things I already see a few obvious enhancements. Looking at the forums, I see some of those have been requested before, like paginated comments, and I'll try to tackle them as time allows. It's clear that the site still needs some love.

That said, I don't have unlimited free time, so I think applications for a dedicated Faces developer are still open.

That's not too surprising, since they kind of shot themselves in the foot by offering lifetime subscriptions at launch.

So launch revenue was high, and then dropped like a rock as most of the people who would have stuck with it long-term were already playing for free. I don't know if they counted those in the number of "subs", but they certainly didn't add to the revenue!

Guess it depends which other games said that and how bad of shape they were in when they went F2P. If they were struggling, I'd expect a much bigger percent increase than a game like CoH which has a relatively stable (even if not overly huge) core subscriber base.