MTS

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she claims 4 times in an ITF solo under 60 seconds.

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Well, the exact words used were "Romulus from the ITF", not in the ITF. Whether that's just a linguistic slip, or is a subtle way of being misleading, I can't say.

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Forgive me for being incredulous, but I've never heard of this before. Dark's damage always seemed, well, sub-par. Can it achieve the sustained 95 dps necessary (or slightly lower if you keep the AV in tar?)

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Dark Miasma has regen debuffs in Twilight Grasp and Howling Twilight. So a dark built for survivability could probably do it, it would just take a while.

As for the later claim of Level 54 rommie, that sounds like an AE mish to me. He's a pushover without his Nictus allies anyway.

No, she's obviously a Thugs Mastermind who didn't take any of the pet summons. Just look at how survivable she is(n't).

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And alien nazis from the future.

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Hmmmmmmmmmmmm....... Sound familiar?

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This could be the form of a third, neutral market, some form of in-game mail that works by account,

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How is this any different from combining the markets? (which I'm against).

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Don't dwell too much on these, I just threw them out as examples of possible ways to get goods from one market to the other. The method used is immaterial to my argument.

I'm assuming that a hypothetical neutral market would (a) be in an inconvenient location, (b) charge a higher percentage cut of the profits, or (c) both. Otherwise yes, there would be no reason to not abandon the existing markets.


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It gives an incentive to exploit the side-switching mechanic. It helps exploiters and cheaters to prosper. I'm vehemently against this.

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Explain how this would be an exploit, please.


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Over time, the market that is over-supplied will begin to dry up, resulting in rising prices. The formerly supply-starved market will have more seller competition and undercutting, leading to falling prices.

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Using your thinking, Purple items will be moved to the villains and posted for blue side pricing. Obviously the villains have fewer of these.
The Purples (and to lesser extent all invention sets) are the primary reason that many want markets merged.

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No, you are misunderstanding my reasoning. Purples are probably the worst case for this, being so rare, and would take a long time to stabilize (if ever). I was thinking more of common salvage that tends to average higher on one side than the other. Maybe certain yellow or orange recipes. Here's the step by step.

1. I notice that Science Widgets tend to be much higher priced at the Black Market than at Wentworths. There are a ton for sale at WW and nobody bidding. There are very few for sale on the BM.

2. Being the enterprising person I am, I sense an opportunity. I buy up all the Science Widgets from Wentworths that I can get for cheap.

3. I use some magical method to get these Science Widgets to one of my villains. How exactly I do it really isn't important.

4. I dump the Widgets on the villain market. Do I use blue side pricing? No, of course not, that would be stupid. I want a quick return on my investment, though, so I list them just a little bit lower than the average villain side price. I'll still be making a ton of cash, and they'll sell quicker.

5. The first few I get lucky and people actually pay the higher villain side average since it's in the last 5. Eventually someone guesses my slightly lower listing price and gets them for cheaper. Since I have a ton listed this quickly catches on and becomes the new de-facto "buy it" price.

6. Villains who get Science Widgets as drops and take them to the BM will see the slightly lower price. They will either have to match the price, or list it higher and wait for all of mine to sell out.

7. Repeat. Especially effective if multiple marketeers are doing this, as they'll be competing with each other.

8. In the meantime, all the cheap Science Widgets are gone blue side. People start bidding ridiculous "BUY IT NAO!" prices and the average normal price in between them slowly rises.


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The transfer of Purples across the lines is the worst possible reason for market merger.

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Purples would probably be the least affected, because they're in short supply anyway and often have 0 for sale on either side. Their price is much more arbitrary and more a function of "what is someone willing to pay?" The likely result is that blue side prices for purples would rise to meet the red side prices, or possibly a value slightly lower the current red side prices. After all, people would be wanting to sell them on the market that will fetch them the most for it.


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Prices won't fall.

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The point isn't to make prices fall, but to make them reach equilibrium, wherever that happens to be. Some prices would undoubtably rise.


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It will prompt cheating players to buy more infa from RMT spammers. Leading to more RMT spams and gain for players that cheat.

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I don't really see a connection. The amount of recipes and salvage, and the number of people who want them would be the same, they would just be more evenly distributed.


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The RMT's would have a hayday moving stuff back and forth across the sides in order to manipulate the markets - and they do it as a full time job. Could players compete with that? Who do you think drives up the prices of Purples so high?

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No, they'll still farm for inf. It's efficient for them, a consistent source of income not subject to market spikes. Also, the same reason they don't play the market much if at all now -- it's not something minimum wage workers can repeatedly do without putting some thought into it. Do it too much and the price differential reverses.

As for setting the price of purples, the people bidding on them do that. Some likely have more inf than they should due to RMTers -- what they do is cause inflation by generating more inf.


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I certainly hope that your goal is not to promote cheating or to help cheaters, but that is in fact what will occur if an open third market or cross alignment trades are allowed.

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No, and I resent the implication. I don't know why people subsidize RMTers anyway. It's so stupidly easy to make absurd amounts of inf in this game with only a basic understanding of economics. Even getting decent amounts from playing normally is child's play. I guess some are just really lazy.


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Well, you are either talking about two markets or three markets. I thought your point was about a third market, but you are back to how it would influence the two.

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My point is about two markets. The third is a red herring -- a possible way to get things from one side to the other. Obviously if the third market is viable on its own then there's no reason to arbitrate between the 2 existing ones.


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The reason I bring this up is because I have quite a bit of experience in this area. I marketeered in WoW, which has a much more cutthroat market. I'd estimate that any given server economy is about half the volume of the total shared CoH/V economy.

One way I made tons of gold there was by doing exactly this -- moving things from the Horde to Alliance auction house and vice versa, by means of the neutral AH (which is both inconveniently located AND charges ridiculous commissions). The effects of doing this on a large scale were imminently visible; I could track the average prices and see them gradually converging as I moved more and more, until the difference was small enough that it wasn't profitable to do it anymore, and I could move on to the next niche.

Don't mistake this as me being greedy and wanting to cash in. It just struck me that it acted as a release valve for the two markets and kept them from getting too far out of whack. While it's not a very common thing, I know I wasn't the only person doing it.

There are a lot of differences between the wow market and the coh market systems. List prices are visible there (though actual sale prices are NOT). The CoH double blind system is much more prone to random and extreme fluctuations. CoH also allows long-term speculative bidding and indefinite auctions without penalty (other than use of your slot). They have in-game addons that track average prices and search for bargains. Even with all the differences, I think that allowing cross-market arbitrage can help stabilize the prices a little, in the event the devs are unwilling to consider a full merge.

One thing that comes up in this forum fairly often is the disparity between red and blue side markets, and the idea of merging them into a single market to "fix" the villain supply problem. While this is a worthy goal, it's often shot down on the grounds that such a merge would be a more or less cataclysmic event, and people who have a lot of expensive things listed stand to lose, big time.

Thus, I would like to propose a free market solution to the problem, one that is both simple and elegant. All we really need is some method for moving items (recipes, salvage, possibly inf but not strictly necessary) across faction lines. This could be the form of a third, neutral market, some form of in-game mail that works by account, or even side switching with Going Rogue if it's not too painful to go back and forth.

The reason this would work is that opening an channel between factions creates a lot of opportunities for market arbitrage. If recipe A is cheap blue side and expensive red side, it becomes profitable to move them from the hero to villain markets. So-called Ebil marketeers are sure to take advantage of this. Over time, the market that is over-supplied will begin to dry up, resulting in rising prices. The formerly supply-starved market will have more seller competition and undercutting, leading to falling prices.

While there would still be some disparity between the two markets, the most egregious cases would eventually balance out. It would be a slow process, meaning that people wouldn't instantly get burned by a merge -- they have time to adjust and adapt. A neutral third party handling the exchanges is also a lot less lore-breaking than the idea of WW and the BM cooperating.

Thoughts?

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It was documented, and relates to Chimora. The citizens there used to reference things happening in Paragon, some odd centuries into the future. So the two are some how tied together in code, and fixing must be either a big pain, or low on the priority list. I'm thinking both.

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Not too much out of character for them to know about it, considering the contacts there have cell phones. That you can call from the future.

Oh, and the trainer there knows how to instruct me in using my tech armor that hasn't been invented yet.

Just more fuel for the "Nemesis Disneyland" theory

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They could put the actual room further underground. That should get rid of all sounds since they would be too far away.

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IIRC that room has windows out into the zone, so I don't think it can really be moved. At least not without duplicating half the zone geometry.

Hopefully in before somebody beats me to it. The master list is here:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...Number=6220088

Numbers below 1 mean strong against that type of damage. Numbers above 1 mean weak against that type of damage.

BP zombies are very resistant to cold, negative energy, psionics, and toxic. They are slightly weak against lethal, fire, and energy, but only by 5%.

EDIT: If you're planning on hitting Croatoa, it looks like Red Caps are substantially weaker against fire than other types of damage. They're also weak against negative (dark), but not by as much as fire.

It's great for those "Find Mission Exit" ones where you get ambushed and are supposed to fight your way out. I usually fight the ambushes for XP, but say on a quick STF run...

When I was working on the Vanguard / Caregiver day job badges would use the Ouro teleport to contact trick for a quick jump to Levantara, since she's only a few steps away from the hospital in there.

Now I'm doing Dimensional Explorer and have a Kora Fruit mission to use the mission teleporter on

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I also find the Wentworths day job teleporter extremely useful at low levels, due to 3 of the destinations being commonly visited low level zones (Atlas, KR, Steel). Especially since it holds charges now instead of expiring.

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Man.... that's kinda silly... CoX should encourage Third Party Add-Ons like Blizzard does for their games... Get some standard policy and such as to what can and can't be changed, etc...

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Right now the "add ons" like Hero Stats work by poking around in the game's process memory, which is not only potentially a EULA problem as one could theoretically cheat this way, but can cause stability issues if they're not careful about it.

The map / icon packs just dump some extra texture files in the game's directory, which the game loads and uses instead of its own. Whether this mechanism was intended to enable end-user overrides, or is just an internal debugging feature I don't know. I use a similar method to remove the "power still recharging" sound since I like to queue things up and it was driving my friend crazy

If they were to encourage add-ons, they'd have to come up with an official API for doing it, which would be a large amount of development work as it would mean not only creating a new API from scratch, but testing it as well as making sure that it can't do anything that enables exploits, cheats / unfair advantages, unattended botting, etc.

It was a bit easier for Blizzard to do it since their in-game UI was written in a scripting language to begin with, but since in CoH it's all native code they'd basically be starting from scratch. As much as I'd like to see it happen I just don't think it's feasible this late into it.

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I think its worse when they are Circle of Thorn ghosty types in the caves .. they not only run away but go intangible and have an annoyuing habit of poofing into walls.

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Not quite intangible. They do go invis, but you can still hit them with aoe attacks (have finished a few off this way). I'm not sure what their stealth radius is, but in theory popping some yellows should enable you to see them. Croatoa ghosts do the same thing.

Yes, I'm talking about dev-created missions, not MA missions

Before I14 they would actually use your character's name.

Interestingly, the NPC villain chatter still uses your name ("Oh no! It's xxSuperPicklesxx!")

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Art: Pocket D Super Group beacon is missing

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Since this is on here anyway, could we please get the Grandville beacon on the to-fix list? It shows the broken beacon like the Pocket D one.

Usually this happens if your active client is hogging the CPU too much and the ones in the background can't run often enough to maintain a connection.

If you have a dual-core CPU, I've found "-renderthread 0 -maxinactivefps 5" to be a good set of options for keeping everything running (for *all* of them including the foreground one).

Since I14, hostages that I rescue in missions have forgotten my name.

Hostage: "Thank you for saving me from the evil fiends, Rescuer!"
Me: "Uh, glad I could help, Generic Citizen..."

I'm thinking that "Rescuer" used to be a substitution variable and got changed to $name for MA, but the existing missions weren't updated...

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I don't know if this is at all relevant to MA, but Frostfire uses controller pets below level 32, so it is possible somewhere in the game.

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Actually, it's not just frostfire. I've noticed other Outcast bosses using controller pets as well. I know for certain I've seen lead scorchers summon fire imps, and I kind of think I've seen jack frost out as well.

I don't recall ever seeing that before I14, so I don't know if it's new or just rare enough that I never noticed it before.

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Doubling is highly unlikely, given that you can theoretically represent a power pick with a single bit and no MA critter can have more than 21 assigned powers (counting flight). That's without even getting into fancy stuff like using hex values. If the bloat would me much more significant than that, I'd argue investigating optimization techniques should be a high priority.

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So can costume data, and indeed already is somewhat (in demorecord files), but they chose a bloated format for MA instead...

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You know the only reason the ranged attacks were added was an attempt to curb some of the farming missions (whether good or bad) being created in AE. No longer will you be able to hover over melee attack units and kill them with AOEs. They will now have a ranged attack so you can't keep out of their range and take them down.

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Because Throwing Knives is really going to be a major threat to those farmers hovering overhead...

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So will you be crediting our accounts for the extra loss of game time?

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Seriously? Who does this, really? Could you even type this with a straight face? Does Blizzard refund WoW players for time spent in server queues or during downtimes? But hey, if you want to take them to court over your 5 cents per hour missed, I'm sure any Small Claims Court in the country will be sympathetic.

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Occasionally, but only in extreme cases. The only one that comes to mind recently is when they had some major issues after a pre-expansion patch that caused most of the servers to be unplayable for nearly 2 days (servers did come back up from maintenance late the first day, but had to be taken down again due to unexpected problems). Even then it wasn't a refund, but a credit of additional game time.

Seriously, a couple extra hours past the maintenance window for a major content patch due to slow updating on the most populated server really shouldn't be surprising. Especially when they said "it might take longer". Honestly if it were up to me I'd use the Scotty method and just schedule a 20 hour maintenance, so it's sure to be done early.

This thread seems relatively civil so far, but on the other one I thought I had wandered into the WoW forums by mistake for a minute. People frothing at the mouth "OMG THEY'RE STILL DOWN I CAN'T COPE RAGE!" or "I do teh computerz at work and it dons'nt take this long to reboot teh servurz I'D FIRE TEH ADMIN!!1!".

Jeez, if people are so addicted that they can't handle a few hours without it, maybe a little time off will do them some good.

That's funny. I am usually on Triumph and have seen it there often enough. I've also seen it used on Paragon Wiki quite a bit (memorization badges, for instance).

Never played anarchy online, which is probably why I haven't seen it elsewhere. The prevalent term in wow (at least on the servers I've played on) seems to be CC for crowd control, if I said mez there I'd probably just confuse people

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Thanks, I'll edit it now. (I've only ever seen "mob" used to describe a group of enemies, never a singular enemy...odd...)

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If we're referencing other games, in wow the term "mob" always refers to a single npc, to the extent of being pluralized when they're in a group ("trash mobs" before the boss).

I've seen it used interchangeably in CoX, sometimes referring to a single npc, sometimes referring to the group itself, as in the classic definition of a mob of critters.

Also,

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Mez: Noun. Not typically used in CoX.

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It may be different across servers, but I see the term Mez used in CoX quite frequently. Usually in context like, "Watch out! There are mezzers in that group" or "I typically don't put CM on tankers and scrappers because they have mez protect powers."

Come to think of it, CoX is the only MMO offhand where I've seen that term used.

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- Teleport dampening field added to Cimerora. (Related to the Mac pac mission teleporter issue, most likely.)

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I assume you mean the Midnight Club.

I just checked and am (fortunately) able to still TP around in Cim. I can breathe now. I'd have a very... strong reaction if they ever disabled TP in a large zone like that.

Only worse patch note would be "Teleport dampening field added to all Shadow Shard zones"

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No I did not say that. There are NO costume peices that say "YOU ARE AN ALIEN FROM THE MOON!" Costume pieces are whatever the players wish to make of them up to and including that this is simply an alien mask bought at Walmart for a costume contest and it is being worn by a normal human.

Your analogy FAILS.

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I stand by my statement.

The point wasn't to make a perfect analogy, but simply to make one as equally absurd as what you are claiming.

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Most of those other badges were acquired with exactly the same amount of metagaming so they are just as "unintended" to get.

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Quite a bit less actually, since the RWZ arc means that heroes can fight longbow without going out of their way to do it. Conceivably, a team of 8 running the arc through Ouroboros for merits and/or drops a few times might have gotten the badge without even intending to.