Lothic

Maybe as part of your "decent into insanity" you could cosplay as various player characters and jump around as if you're a character running around in the game so that we can pretend the UStream screen is the game's screen. This might help some people cope with the withdrawal symptoms.

Hasten's great for autoing because you pretty much want its effect firing "whenever it can". But powers like Build Up are clearly intended to be "situational click" powers. Sure game lag can make using them frustrating sometimes. But setting them to auto for -any- reason is just about as tactically useful as setting a nova blast on auto.

Let's just say there are some powers I would not bother setting to auto even if I could. *shrugs*

If the Devs could snap their fingers and produce CoH tablet apps for zero cost and zero effort then I'm sure they would exist right now. It doesn't really matter if you or I would personally use them or not. I'm sure someone would if they existed.

But if you read my posts on this thread you would see that I'm generally "realistic" about the possibility of CoH tablet apps actually happening anytime soon. This means I wouldn't worry too much about it. I'm quite sure tablet based MMOs and support apps for those MMOs will happen more regularly in the future when the hardware can legitimately handle it. Until then I'm willing to wait for that. *shrugs*

Everybody has to "stop their attack chain" to activate those powers. That tactical delay is by design to balance the benefit you get from them, not just to stop AFK farmers. If the Devs wanted us to be able to have those power up permanently they would have made them toggles not click powers.

Thanks clearing this point up. Again I was just looking at the Blazing Tiger badge situation from the point of view of "how did she get 1229 badges VERIFIED on Badge-Hunter". Not knowing the exact nature of the how mutually exclusive the Agent badges were I simply theorized that she might have been able to verify these badges at different times to accomplish the net effect of making Badge-Hunter list them both as verified.

But now that you've shown that a character can actually have both Agent badges at the same time we now see that the "mutual exclusivity" of these badges is only by the Devs' intent, not by the actual game code. The Devs relied on the idea that in a perfect game (one without mapserves) no player would ever normally have the opportunity to earn both badges. It was simply a case of the Devs not "bulletproofing" their code because they didn't envision a scenario that would have allowed for that in the first place.

Either the Devs are going to have to figure out a way to purge the "extra" Agent badges from those who have more than one or they are going to have to rethink their intentions for these badges to be mutually exclusive in the first place.

Actually this situation is still unique because this is the first time that badges which, according to the Devs, are supposed to be mutually exclusive have been proven by events not to be. When someone can manage to stumble onto a way to have both Trusting and Arriviste at the same time then we'll be dealing with a more similar situation.

To put it another way Badge Hunter already had to take into account the mutual exclusivity of the Trusting/Arriviste pair because of the way characters can manually switch those badges. On the other hand there was no original consideration for the Agent badges in Badge Hunter because those were supposed fixed in stone by the game and there was (up until this mapserve bug) no way anyone could potentially have both at the same time.

Beef_Cake mentioned he has a good handle on this situation. Again I don't fault him for not checking for this up until now because no one (Devs or players) ever had any expectation it was a potential possibility in the first place. The game allowed a buggy situation to expose a shortcoming in the code. It's up to Beef_Cake to eventually handle his side of things in Badge Hunter regardless of what the Devs ever do to fix this in the game itself.

More than likely our Devs' level of "resources, technical limitations and time frame" dictated the need for using Transgaming's software instead of a native Mac client in the first place. You can't just wave these engineering realities away because they are inconvenient to your desires.

As Zwillinger implied there's probably no one out there who outright doesn't "want" this kind of thing to exist. But unless the give and take of software development allows for it it's not going to happen anytime soon, if ever. And frankly if any Devs are secretly toying around with something this significant during their "free-time" then I'd seriously question what their "busy-time" is being spent on. *shrugs*

Something like this may be possible (and might even be necessary) assuming there is no other more obvious way for the game to know that a given character is a "Praetorian native" versus a "Primal native". If there is no such simple flag in the character data then all I could say to that is that the Devs probably should of thought to include one for just such a contingency.

As far as the other "Praetorian only" badges go I would actually hesitate worrying about stripping them from lucky Primals just yet, at least until the Devs have made a decision on whether or not they will ever let Primals get those badges legitimately. I mean if say by Issue 21 or 22 the Devs are already going to be giving us a "Praetorian Ouroboros" to get those badges then I don't think they need to make a big deal out of a few Primals who may already have Avid Reader today. Case in point there were a few people who had (via a bug that was stumbled upon) opposite side respec badges for months before it was "legitimate" for that to be possible and it didn't ultimately harm anything.

So yes badges which are supposed to be mutually exclusive should be fixed regardless.
But everything else may just end up being "resolved" by retroactive additions to the game.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. Knowing the type of person I am I'd probably buy it too even though I probably wouldn't use it all that much.

All I'm saying is that the Devs are always going to weigh their effort to develop anything for this game against their expectations of how many players would benefit from it. Exactly how many Crazy 88 members are there in this game?

Actually the Devs have a long track record of creating unreasonable badge requirements.
They also have a pretty good record of FIXING those broken requirements once they agree they were shortsighted in the first place.

They could have motivated us to do their 3 hour login stress test with ANY type of reward imaginable. They poorly chose a reward that by their own event track record was proven to be an ill fit for the window of opportunity involved many years ago.

The very fact that anyone would be OK with something in the game that pretty much everyone (even yourself and the Devs from years ago themselves) can agree is "unreasonable" is the very definition of stupidity. I don't know about you but I don't want anything in this game to be unreasonable, much less ON PURPOSE that way.

Variations of this idea have come up several times over the years. I think the chances of something like this ever happening is just about as close to zero as humanly imaginable. Still, I think any true badge collector would not really need a "choice" about which badges we'd want to get auto-magically under such a scheme. The priority for the rarest/hardest badges to get is pretty much already established:

The automatic first choice (assuming you didn't have it already) would be Bug Hunter.
The second choice (for a NA server character) would be Passport.
After that perhaps any anniversary badges you missed out on...

Wasting this "choice" on any other badges would be, well, a waste IMHO.

Yeah something like Mids might be cool as a tablet app. A standalone costume editor would be cool too, but I realize after the fallout with the Marvel lawsuit an "official" one of those will likely never happen. Beyond these things I simply don't believe CoH is "suited" to a tablet platform in its current form. *shrugs*

Yeah I'm pretty much in this same boat. I've always used badge /settitles more than the fixed ones. But after toying around with this new feature last night I might start using them.

I hear their tablet-based Pvp Operational Network Gaming system is coming along nicely as well.

It's usually unwise to claim absolutely everyone (or no one) would want this kind of thing so I'm not going to presume either one of those extreme cases. But I do feel very safe in assuming the number of people who would want the "super-limited" tablet interface you describe would have to be far less than would be necessary to justify this level of effort by the Devs.

I'm in roughly this bracket of marketeering and I can accomplish this with only 10-15 minutes of effort a day. I'm sure there are people out there who can earn more per minute of effort, but this level of safe, simple and consistent marketing works for my purposes.

The very first Halloween Event back in 2004 only lasted for roughly one week. After the event it became obvious to them that only allowing one week for such an event was TOO SHORT a time for the badges involved. Since then every Halloween Event has lasted longer than that. Let's just say that if the Devs learned a lesson about providing adequate windows of opportunity for event badges years ago then they totally forgot about that here. If one week was not enough time for one event then how can THREE HOURS (or even one weekend) possibly be adequate for another?

The Devs can decide on any badge window or threshold they want. But in reality even they need to keep a certain sense of "reasonableness" in mind when it comes to dreaming up new types of badges to offer us. This was clearly a case of someone tossing out a badge without considering the ramifications involved.

I agree that they are mutually exclusive at least by design. But if you read what I said a bit more closely you would see that I was trying to explain HOW Blazing Tiger could have had both versions of the badge verified at one time, not that the fact that she managed to have them both verified at once was a desirable or legitimate situation.

Basically the Badge Hunter code wasn't implemented to make sure no one would have them both verified because until now there was no reasonable way anyone could have managed it in the first place. I don't really consider it a "failure" of the Badge Hunter code. It's just a unique, very rare situation that Beef_Cake is going to have to handle as he's already described.

I have no problem with the idea that Primal characters may eventually get a legitimate way to get a badge like Avid Reader. But I would agree that a pair of badges that were DESIGNED to be mutually exclusive should be kept that way not only by the game but by a website like Badge Hunter.

Obviously what happened here was an accidental scenario that allowed Blazing Tiger to earn a couple of badges (or at least be able to verify a temporary Primal/Praetorian "flip" of one of those badges) that should otherwise not have been possible. I don't consider what she did an "exploit" at least from the point of view of her going out of her way to actively trick the system into giving her the badge. She was simply in the right place at the right time during a random mapserver crash and got the badges while she happened to be in a mission she would of otherwise had no possible access to. In the grand spectrum of badging I don't consider what she did as strictly wrong. On the other hand I really don't consider that she should legitimately keep those badges either, and if the game itself can't prevent her from keeping them then at the very least a website like Badge Hunter should do what it can to make sure that it remains consistent to the "rules" of the game.

So Blazing Tiger should not be "punished" for her luck. But in this case she shouldn't really benefit from it either.

You obviously weren't really thinking that hard about it. As a player who likes to collect badges your "notion" of having badges that lockout other badges would not bother me in the least. As long as such a system affects EVERYONE then EVERYONE would have to live with it and have a certain subset of badges unavailable to them.

I have little sympathy for people who think they are making fun of others who like to collect badges. *shrugs*

You guys remember back when I20 first went live there were a lot of mapserver problems with the new Incarnate trials. As it turned out many people were finding themselves accidentally reloaded back into OTHER PEOPLE'S MISSIONS when the game dropped the trial instances. I myself had a situation where one of my characters was reloaded back into a mission of someone else's ITF so I know it occurred to others as well.

Technically speaking of course Primal characters should not be able to have any of the following badges right now:

Moral High Ground
Resistance Member
Loyalist
Avid Reader

So if I had to guess Blazing Tiger had the incredible good luck of being thrown into someone else's Praetorian tutorial mission. This not only allowed her to get Avid Reader but I'm assuming while she was there her Agent of Order/Chaos badge (the primal version of that badge) was flipped to become the Agent of Praetoria (the Praetorian version of that badge). Since she had likely long ago verified Agent of Order/Chaos she was probably able to verify the Agent of Praetoria in that mission or afterwards.

Basically what happened to her is the same thing that happened to a few people back when they "accidentally" got PvP reputation badges or the Passport badge on NA servers automagically. This isn't the first time people have gotten badges they shouldn't have and sadly I doubt it'll be the last.