MTS

Oh, sweet, I like it when it's Sister P! That one is easy enough to solo, or duo with a friend to get some alts their notices.

Does

cityofheroes.exe -demoplay filename

not work anymore?

I don't recall being able to play demos directly with the old launcher either, but the above has always worked fine for me.

Actually the limit is 1023 characters. I did quite a bit of experimenting with it a while back, because I was making a character counter for the edit box on my SG's website to make it easier to write our bios there (with a better editor) and copy/paste them, and wanted to make it as accurate as possible.

The "phantom" characters are usually unicode (technically UTF-8) characters, which take up more than one byte. Things like letters with accents over them, the curly quote marks that programs like MS Word like to insert, etc. Using something simple like notepad helps avoid them, but you can still end up with them if you're not careful.

The other thing that makes it difficult is that the character counter on the in-game edit box is often simply wrong. I haven't figured out exactly what confuses it, but it will tell you that you have less or more characters than you actually do, and sometimes even lets you keep typing when the count exceeds 1024. Editing an existing bio is almost guaranteed to show it incorrectly. Deleting line breaks within the editor also really screws it up.

In all cases the maximum length the game seems to store server-side is 1023, so I'm guessing it's a 1024 character buffer (including the terminating null). If you type more than that when the counter is confused it will truncate your text upon saving. Really I've given up on the in-game editor and always do a count externally, then copy/paste into a BLANK bio, saving it first as empty if necessary.

Unfortunately even that is a bit of a pain because it won't paste line breaks

Got another case of an incorrect error message.

If running as a non-administrative user, it's checking if the builtin Users group has Full Control over the install directory. If it doesn't, it pops up a warning and asks to "correct" it, which will fail if UAC is disabled.

However, it checks for that specific ACL entry, rather than testing if it has write access to the files. In my case, I have a Games group that has change permission to the CoH install directory. When running as a member of the Games group, the updater is able to successfully update the install (after canceling the warning message and confirming that I really want to cancel it). The only way to keep it from prompting every time you start it is to grant full control to Users. Even Modify access (which is all you really need) doesn't make it happy.

Instead of checking if it has that particular permissions bit, the updater should first attempt to update the files, and then pester the user to change permissions only if that fails.

Subjective feedback: The NCSoft launcher is bulkier and slightly less convenient than cohupdater.

Cohupdater consists of 2 files (an exe and a DLL) which can simply be copied to a new machine and run. It's been ages since I've "installed" city of heroes, I just copy the piggs and the updater to a new computer and let it fix up the rest.

The NCSoft launcher consists of 62 files spread out among 19 directories, and depends on the .NET framework being installed (less of an issue on Win7, but can be with XP machines). By default it wants to be "installed" rather than simply copied. Its default install directory lives outside of the CoH directory, so it won't be copied along with the game installation.

After playing around with it some, it doesn't appear to depend on any particular registry keys too much, and can probably be forklifted to a different computer, probably even to within the CoH install dir. That makes it a little more palatable, but it's still annoying -- see my bug report about it complaining about admin rights every time it's run.

I normally don't run the updater anyway (I have some scripts that synchronize my costumes / powercust / keybinds across computers, and they need to be able to reliably detect when the game exits), only running it when I need it to install an update. In that regard the NCSoft launcher really isn't any worse, as I'll just be bypassing it most of the time anyway.

When running the launcher under an account without administrative rights, either in XP, or under Windows 7 with UAC disabled, the following message appears every time the launcher starts:

"You are NOT running the NCLauncher as administrator. If UAC is enabled you'll need to accept NCAccess so your game registry can be updated."

After clicking OK, ncaccess.exe crashes:
EventType : clr20r3 P1 : ncaccess.exe P2 : 1.0.0.0 P3 : 4b686183
P4 : mscorlib P5 : 2.0.0.0 P6 : 4be90358 P7 : 2cf0 P8 : 46
P9 : system.unauthorizedaccess

After closing that, the launcher appears to work okay.

After playing with the options, I can find no way to get rid of the annoying (and incorrect) message.

The message is incorrect because neither City of Heroes nor its updater in any way needs administrative access to the system to function correctly. CoH can be easily installed into a directory that has change permissions for an unprivileged user, and it stores all its settings under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Even without the crash, I'd consider it a security bug that the launcher is pestering users to give it more access to the system than it actually requires. Don't perpetuate the run-everything-as-admin fallacy that so many Windows programs fall victim to.

The old cohupdater functions perfectly in this configuration on both Windows XP and Windows 7 (after tweaking UAC on Windows 7 to not stupidly assume cohupdater.exe needs admin rights because of the file name).

Every once in a while I'll hit a dry spell. Ghost of Scrapyard works well villainside as mentioned above. Blueside I usually head over to Dark Astoria and aoe-bomb the big groups of BP. Usually have a tip after the first group or two.

The only one I skip is "You're a Cruel One, Mr. Phipps," just because it makes me go to IP instead of whatever zone I'm doing tips in.

I'll generally avoid "Malta Gunslinger Action Figure", but will take it if I don't have any other tips. The Carnie one doesn't bother me as I usually clear the map anyway, so the lead-outs don't take much longer.

I don't get why people hate Knives so much. They're kind of a joke really. They never get close enough to me to use their popcorn, er, caltrops, and if I get ambushed most of my toons have teleport or superspeed. The only ones that pose a threat at all are the bosses with stun grenades. Of course I rarely play melee-oriented characters so that may be why.

I've had this happen to me on a Mender Lazarus Task Force, on an Elec/FF controller. Note, this is on a static team that I play with, so it's always the same people week after week, and it was only on that one TF that it was a problem, never before or since. Bizarre I know.

I was not leading the TF. For some reason, every ambush (and you get a lot during the AV fights at the end) spawned with me at the top of their threat list. No matter how quickly the tank taunted them, they usually got a shot or two off at me, usually killing me because they large ambushes of +2 or +3 fifth column.

By the end of it, I had stopped using my control powers altogether, and was doing nothing but buffing people and running Dispersion Bubble. They still had it out for me. Conductive Aura was OFF.

For the last AV, I took to flying up to the ceiling before he hit each of the ambush points (every 25% health). They STILL came after me, running around on the ground unable to reach me, taking shots at me if I dared to fly low enough to be in range before they had all been defeated by the rest of the team.

Weirdest (and most frustrating) thing that's happened to me in the years I've been playing. I have no idea what caused it -- if it's an Electric Control thing (chain entity getting stuck somehow and generating threat?), or just a mission fluke.

I do think ambushes are more realistic and when used properly can make for interesting mission design, but they are definitely overused. The whole doppelganger thing is also very overused in current content as well (just because you CAN use it, doesn't mean you SHOULD).

That said, there are a few things that should be changed / fixed:

1. Unless the plot specifically says "they inject you with a tracking device", ALL ambushes should be last-known-location ambushes, and respect stealth. Sure, that means solo stalkers almost never get ambushed, but that's kind of the thing that the AT is balanced around.
2. Multiple wave ambushes on low-level characters (i.e. Praetoria) should either have longer timers in between waves, or have the spawn size reduced per wave. Scale it up on teams and high difficulty settings, but tone it down for 1-2. In most cases it should be limited to 3-5 waves, tops, not 10+ unless it's supposed to be a "run away" type ambush.
3. Spawn points need to be checked in many missions. There's nothing more frustrating and immersion-breaking than a huge group of enemies spawning right on top of you, or even on the other side of the room in plain sight. Ambushes should come running in from a place that's logically plausible. Take a cue from first-person shooters and add rooms to maps behind locked doors that NPCs spawn inside and can open the door briefly to get out.
   
   If the plot dictates a right-on-top-of-you surprise (and this should only happen rarely, one in a hundred missions maybe), add a visual effect for them teleporting in, like when Seers call in PPD reinforcements.

Also note that Patroller doesn't work like other day job badges. It's based off of patrol XP acculumation. So a level 2 staying logged off for 21 days will never earn it because of the patrol XP cap. You have to log in and actually use up the patrol XP to get more.

It's also not exclusive with other day jobs -- you can earn it at the same time as another. It's best to not even really consider it a day job badge because it's so different.

There's no day job under the atlas statue, IIRC. If you want a badge after 21 days, I'd recommend logging off in Wentworth's so that you get the teleporter temp power, though City Hall is another nearby option.