GadgetDon

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I reported as a bug and petitioned the following as well:

Last night I stumbled across base to brainstorm conversions and brainstorm to invention conversions were not counting towards my crafting badges (Artisan, Master Artisan, etc.). No news there.

But what also happened was my villain who had done all that brainstorm work didn't get credit for 12 enhancements he crafted from his memorized list. I popped over to a hero on another server and crafted one enhancement from his memorized list which also didn't give him credit.

This afternoon the hero has his count increased by 1 but the villain's count remains where it was before I did my crafting last night. So while the hero may have been a lag issue, the villain remains a mystery.

Perhaps because he had done brainstorm conversions and the hero hadn't?

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Or they may have tweaked something, added bugs, and in the process, broke stuff, so it might all be a bug. Wish we could get an official answer on at least how it's supposed to now work.

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I just confirmed it as well. I'm going to hope that this is a bug. If they're going to claim that either it was a bug that converting got you progress, or it was an exploit (which is why no patch note), the days of flat out lying to the players is back. And that's not a good thing.

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Well, the badge text does say "Create X Inventions to earn this badge", so I suspect it was indeed an unintended way to earn the badge.... Also, crafting empowerment buffs no longer count either.

It doesn't really bug me that they changed it, but I hate when there are changes without patch notes.

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It bugs me, because if the option to get crafting badges from converting base salvage wasn't said by a red name, it was definitely said in threads they were active without a hint of "well, that's not supposed to be allowed" (and I have a memory of red names pointing it out as a silver lining...but I don't have proof of that).

And more...Base editors objected to the hassle involved in the removal of base salvage, by action and word the message from the devs was "We don't care what you want, suck it up, it's coming through." PVPers were VERY unhappy with the changes, and while it was later withdrawn, a redname did say "We know it's not what the players want but we don't care, suck it up, it's coming through." A lot of concerns about the way merits were handled, "We don't care what you want, suck it up, it's coming through." Then little things like the reformed badge (where the devs "don't choose to speak to us about it") and, if this is not a bug, this (which is a lot bigger than reformed because it makes the long boring slog to getting a field crafter longer and more boring, it has a real impact).

And yeah, I get the feel of Jack and Geko again. They were pretty big on the "Look, it doesn't matter what you want, we know what should be in the game and it's coming through." For the most part, the new team is making better decisions about what they're shoving through, but what we were told of the game now being about "giving the players what they want within reason" seems to be "inoperative".

I'd love to see things coming up to prove me wrong. But between the developers thinking that there was no need to explain a badge change that annoyed a lot of players, and now this...I'm not happy.

There's a real possibility that it's a bug, or that it was a side effect of fixing some crafting exploit that allows you to craft without using anything (I don't know of any, but it's possible one is there somewhere). So I will be awaiting an official statement tomorrow about whether this is intended or not.

I just confirmed it as well. I'm going to hope that this is a bug. If they're going to claim that either it was a bug that converting got you progress, or it was an exploit (which is why no patch note), the days of flat out lying to the players is back. And that's not a good thing.

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Missing Patch Note:

Converting Base Salvage to Brain Storms or Brain Storms to Invention Salvage no longer counts towards crafting badges (Master Artisan, etc)

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If true...that's freaking outrageous. It really is. It's particularly egregious because in the loss of base salvage, one of the key ways of getting master artisan was converting invention salvage to components.

This needs to be confirmed, or denied, and if confirmed, "the developers have decided not to comment on this" will not be even remotely acceptable.

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That's actually old news........

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Really? Because I remember being told that our created missions wouldn't become canon. I'm pretty sure the Dev's Choice thing isn't the same as our missions becoming canon.

I could be wrong, though.

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Dev's choice doesn't make it canon, and I'm sure if you come up with something that contradicts what they've got in their bible, the bible will stand. But if someone has an interesting take on something that they just never filled out either in game, in the bible, or in their mind...they'll adopt it.

If we discuss the removal of the "Reformed" badge here, will we get any more feedback than we got in the Training Room?

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Not to be dumb.

But how do you get 4 tiers of powers in a set with only three tiers?

1: Swift/Hurdle (No prereqs)
2: Health (One prereq)
3: Stamina (L20 and 2 prereqs)

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You lumped Swift and Hurdle into one tier, which is not the case.

1: Swift
2: Hurdle
3: Health
4: Stamina

My understanding is that the tier-4s will still require level 20 and 2 previous powers in the pool to unlock them. Your earlier example of taking team teleport without any pre-reqs is not (or should not) be possible.

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Nope, Swift and Hurdle are both Tier 1s. They are both opened for availability at level 6.
Level 14 opens Tier 2 - Health
Level 20 is the Tier 3 power - Stamina

There is no tier 4 Pool power.

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In your primary pool, you get to choose between two powers. That does not make the ninth power in your primary pool "tier 8".

At the very least, there is a legitimate question about whether the "tier" in a Power Pool is the position in the list, or the group it's in.

EOE is Essence of Earth, a special inspiration dropped by the DE monsters. You have to defeat a random number of DE monsters to make hami spawn (from 5 to 50), so you get a number of them. An EoE gives you capped resistance to hami damage (75% for most ATs, I think, more like 90% for tankers) for one minute. In a normal raid, tankers use a lot, scrappers may need some, because they are taking hami damage and yellow damage (which is significant). Everyone else only takes green and blue damage, which is a lot less, so a healing bubble is sufficient.

In this raid, though, everyone needs to be under EOEs full time. (The advantage being that the full time is a lot shorter.)

A note: Once Tankers move into position under the mitos, they are out of range for using nukes. So if someone else wants to try this, I'd have the tankers use their chem nukes first.

same could be said about every game which is Intel-only (which is a lot of them).

Parallels is a lot slower, boot camp requires rebooting.

It may run on Tiger or unsupported graphics cards...but it HAS to be on an Intel machine. G4 is a PPC processor, just won't work.

Still a little unclear about Patroller XP. I understand that, while I have blue bars, I won't be getting 1.5 x 2 XP. But as I earn experience, do the blue bars get eaten up as though I was burning through Patroller XP?

In other words, I log in when Double-XP starts with 4 bars of Patroller XP, stay logged in the whole time, and in the process go from 5th level to 45th level (and I never die so no debt taking off some Patroller XP). Do I still have the same amount of Patroller XP (which won't be worth four bars anymore)?

And second question--I log in before Double-XP is turned on, burn off any Patroller XP before it starts, but then get kicked off from lag and aren't able to get back on for a day. Do I have blue bars when I log in?

Want to make it clear, I'm loving these ads. They're great, they're well done, and they're funny. And I've been posting them on some Mac forums I participate in, with an explanation of what CoH is.

My comments are just that, as stand-alone ads for people who don't know what CoH is already, they don't work. So "Let's run these on TV" would be mostly wasted money, because most of the people who see it won't know about City of Heroes (and there won't be a description beside it explaining what CoH is).

But for those who know about it, and for locales where there's also some info, they're great and I'm looking forward to the next one.

Actually, thinking about all this...if NCSoft handed me a small pile of money to market CoH, I'd go for a mixed approach. Part would be viral videos, including these ads, and I'd see about getting permission for other videos that have been made in the past (though there might be soundtrack issues). Don't just trust them to become viral, create some web pages showing them off, and banner ads/rss ads/podcast ads to point to it.

I'd also have a "campaign" of news reports from Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Use it as a theme for web ads, video podcasts, etc. On the web, you can afford 60 seconds so long as it's entertaining as well as sell.

And yes, some 30 second ads for niche tv (say, scifi channel, spike tv, G4)

Another thing I'd explore...most of those "as seen on TV" ads aren't directly paid for, instead the channels get a percentage of sales (so you get different phone numbers or different web addresses based on the station airing the ad). Could that be used with software?

And last...QVC. Hear me out. QVC sells a LOT of stuff, including a fair amount of computers. Put together a video for them, let them include a CoH free with their computers.

How would I script a 30 second ad? I don't know, it would be tough. Frankly, as fun as these ads are, I'm not sure it's even directly adaptable to a general ad. (Microsoft thought they could do the same sort of thing will Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld, and it didn't work that well.)

If I was going to do an ad, I'd probably go less for the lightness, and maybe go with a fake news report. "Heroes are gathering in Perez Park to fight the Kraken" "Heroman is in Blyde Park fighting Nemesis forces". "The hellions are setting buildings on fire in Steel, and the heroes are busy. we need YOU!"

Announcer is live action, with greenscreen behind showing in game footage.

Yeah...that's how I'd do it, I think.

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Seriously Devs you guys gotta put these up on TV and Radio. We'd help pay if you needed it, IMO it would generate a lot of business. DOOO EEETTTT!!!!!

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While they could be the start of real ads...they don't explain what the game is at all. Don't get me wrong, they're funny, they're well done. But it's mostly in-jokes...we recognize the emotes, the costumes, things like day jobs and sidekicking. It works for people who already know the game, might be useful for resparking some interest for those who left the game.

Could they be the core of ads? Definitely. Say, cut them to 20 seconds, then 10 seconds of real ads. And have them describe the real features...Sidekicking lets you team with people who haven't been a hero as long as you, my DayJob gives me bonuses when I'm fighting crime. (A shoe salesman is definitely well-heeled, after all.)

Again, I love these videos. I'm enjoying them very much. But if I showed them to someone who knows nothing about City of Heroes, he's going to go "what"?

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Don't shoot me if this has been asked before, but will the Mac version work in Linux? Just curious, because Mac's are now based on the Linux Kernel.

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Nope. First, Mac's are based on BSD Unix, which is not the Linux Kernel, they're just both Unix based. Second, the wrapper draws upon the OS X code that isn't just the kernel.

However, if you buy Transgaming's Cedega, you get the same wrapper that they use for the Mac ports, so you'll get the same experience.

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Okay, Stone Falcon, you get to present on making videos at HeroCon 2009.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

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Even if you don't want to give the presentation...how about a post explaning how you do the cool mouth and eye animation? Did you do a demo record and record it then add the animation, or did you create these guys as models in another tool? (I was going to say "just create these guys"...and realized there would be nothing "just" about it.)

while fun...this was a great missed example of having fun AND explaining a key feature. Explain that he doesn't have the experience being a hero that I do, but as my sidekick, we can fight crime together!

The people at dotfour.net have cobbled together an RSS feed for the developer and community digests, subscribe to it here:
http://www.dotfour.net/coh/rss

We're going to be changing forums soon, I hope the devs manage to put in some official rss feeds for those digests.

I have to agree with UnSub. These are great ads for those who know about CoH. But for those who haven't heard of City of Heroes, it's amusing, but gives no reason to go play the game.

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They either need to convert half of the av's to Ebs or add a 2 min delay between mary's. The only reason it is so fast is that they force feed you av's. The speed of the tf is dictated by the design. A 2 min delay would add 18 min base to the tf. all of a sudden your 40 min tf becomes 1 hour. I happen to like the fast paced respawn, tedium does not make for fun. Welcome to city of timeclock

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Yeah. That's the worst part of the merit system as it's currently done...it rewards tedium and grind. The Shard TFs and most of the original 7 TFs have desperately need revamping since I3 when Hess showed what a fun TF could be--and it involve "OK, we can stretch this out by making the players do the same [censored] thing three, four, or five times in a row, with long travel times and huge defeat-all maps". But now, fixing them would be a nerf to player rewards.

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I agree with Miladys. As a more casual player, merits have all but stalled my IO progression. I have to play 10-12 TFs to get ONE IO that I need without having to spend 10-12 Mil influence at WW. For a casual player who only gets to play 2-3 times a week and may get in a TF or two it does make things a lot harder than it was before.

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I see a lot of comments like this but I don't see how you draw these conclusions. Previously, you would get random recipe drops. Now, you can buy random drops. Unless you were speed-running Katie or Eden, there hasn't been some massive nerf to the rate of obtaining random recipes.

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The problem is that most drops people get, aren't something they need. In part because most of the drops are worth almost nothing, but even the prized drops aren't useful to everyone. (If my willpower scrapper got a recipe to protect from knockback, I have no interest in it.) These unneeded drops were fed to the market.

Because there is so much unmitigated garbage in the C pool (and some in the D pool as well), most people I speak to are saving their merits for specific recipes they need (personally or for an alt). So while TF running is probably up, recipes going into the market are down.

So how to fix it?

(1) Give up on the market. Players who want a Pool C or Pool D recipe will have to get it with merits (the pain of which can be ameliorated by boosting the rate people earn merits and/or reducing costs)

(2) Feed the market automatically. In one way or another, programatically add recipes to the markets (question is how and how many how fast to add them).

(3) Make the Random Rolls a better chance. Remove some of the garbage so our odds are reasonable of, if not getting a recipe we can use, at least one that someone will want and we can sell on the market.

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I only have 2 Gb. Buying memory from Mac is sooo expensive. It's so much cheaper to buy elsewhere. I just need to get some more.

Thank you sooo much for the help everyone!!!!

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Actually, with the most recent releases, that's less true. You still can buy cheaper, but you're no longer foolish to buy a computer with more RAM if you're buying online.