Mister Rik

This is mostly for authors who:

• Create enemies with "custom power selections"

and

• Assign their stories a 1-54 level range

Note: I'm referring to story arcs, not farms.

Please, please test your arcs on characters with different ATs and at multiple level ranges. Have friends help you with testing if you don't have a suitable range of levels and archetypes amongst your own characters. Custom power selections do not scale well across the entire 1-54 range, and what can be fairly simple for a particular AT in a particular level range can be virtually impossible for a different AT in a different level range.

I first encountered this problem a while back when running one of these MAs on a low-level scrapper. The custom enemies had so many defensive abilities that, despite having all the appropriate enhancements for my character's level, I simply could not hit the enemies with any kind of consistency. Every encounter with a group of three enemies (even when those enemies were merely Minions and the same level as my character) took a ridiculously long time to overcome, purely because I was only able to land maybe one out of four attacks. And after each of these encounters I was left with my health so depleted that I was forced to spend an insane amount of time just standing around waiting for my health to regenerate (what with Rest still recharging). However, I had previously completed the same MA much more easily on a higher-level blaster.

I just ran into the opposite problem on a different MA. It was a very entertaining story and I had a great time playing through it on a level 18 brute. So the next day I decided to run the same MA on my level 36 fire/fire blaster ... and it was a miserable, frustrating experience. Why? Because blasters, at least at that level, have little in the way of defensive powers (this character has Combat Jumping and ... that's it). Blasters depend on being able to take down enemies quickly, from a distance. I.E. "The best defense is a good offense." And doing that becomes next to impossible when every enemy we encounter is loaded up with knockback/knockdown powers.

My best example of why this is a problem is the very first group of three enemies my blaster met when she walked in the door for the final mission of the arc. She attacked, and all three enemies immediately unloaded on her with knockdown/knockback powers, which promptly knocked her down and into the corner next to the door. By the time she could stand back up, the enemies had run right up to her and surrounded her in that corner. Being backed into the corner forced the camera into first-person perspective, so the only thing I could even see was the enemy directly in front of me. I couldn't even see the targeting reticle at that range to see which enemy I had targeted. The low ceiling prevented me from seeing the floor (couldn't angle the camera down enough) so that I couldn't even target an AOE attack that would have made them run away from me. Add in more knockdowns, preventing me from even blindly attacking whoever I had targeted.

Now repeat that same basic scene over and over for the duration of the mission, and you have a mission that takes entirely too long to finish.

Getting beat because an enemy outfought me or because I made mistakes (mistakes I can learn from) is acceptable and still fun. Getting beat because of enemies spamming one attack for which I have no defense, that results in my being able to do absolutely nothing to defend myself (i.e. I can't fight back because I'm spending all my time lying on the floor and trying to stand back up, only to get knocked right back down again) is simply frustrating and no fun.

Of course, I realize y'all aren't doing this deliberately. It just appears to be an unintended side effect of assigning custom power sets and then not testing to see how those powers work at different levels vs. different ATs.

I'll add my "vote" for this. I was running a well-done story arc the other day (can't remember the name) that had one glaring mechanical problem. I had collected some data in one of the missions, and in the following mission I needed to deliver it to a scientist. I got to the scientist, who was standing in the very large laboratory room at the very end of the map. He told me to "enter the data into my computer, right over there".

"Right over there" turned out to be an obscure corner on the previous level of the map.

On a related note, I've been noticing that on some of my characters, the Field Analyst/Fateweaver icons don't show up. Is that just based on whether or not a particular character has done the breadcrumb mission that introduces them to Hero Corps/Fateweavers?

Thanks

Is there any way to get the [Help] channel chat out of my Global chat window? Deleting the Help tab simply, well, deletes the Help tab, leaving Help chat scrolling through my Global window (which leaves me wondering why Help even has its own tab).

It's not that I have any real issue with Help chat, it's just that sometimes when the channel is busy it ends up really cluttering the Global window. And I like having the Global window active, since that's where missions dump all the info when I click on a glowie or get a drop. It would be nice to be able to scroll back to review something I might have missed without having to also scroll through a ton of Help chatter.

If I can't get Help out of the Global window, then is there a way to set up a special tab/window that will only show mission info, XP/Inf earned, and "loot" drops (basically, the green text stuff) and leave out the various blue text (Help chat and NPC chatter)?

Woble?

My only antivirus software is ClamXav, and that only runs when I launch it and click the "Start Scan" button.

In any case, I played CoH for several hours yesterday, running under my normal, main user account instead of the special new account I had set up, and everything seemed to be fine. So I guess I'm just going to have to blame "network issues" for the rotten performance the day after I installed the patch.

On a completely unrelated note, when I attempted to take screenshots while running the game under the special new user account, hitting my screenshot key instantly crashed the client. Taking a screenshot worked correctly, however, with the game running under the old "main" user account. Weirdness.

@CuppaManga - Both of those graphics options were already disabled, as suggested in another thread I read shortly after I started playing back in September. RAM tests show everything OK there. I did try your suggestion of creating a new user account an running only CoH in it, and that showed a big improvement. I still had a few hangs, but they resolved themselves much more quickly than before (2-3 seconds vs. 10-20 seconds), and not completely out of line with what I've dealt with since I first started playing the game. And they're not of the "Freeze, unfreeze, move forward 10 feet, freeze again" variety I was experiencing.

It was just "suspicious" experiencing this abrupt performance degradation after installing the latest patch, not to mention the problems simply downloading and applying the patch.

@RogerWilco - I've kept the "Put drives to sleep" option turned off as long as I've been playing games on Macs (16 years), for exactly this reason. Didn't take me long to get tired of having to wait for the drive to spin up all the time.

I fired up the game a couple days ago, after not playing for week or so (busy doing other things), and it told me there was a new patch. So I downloaded and installed it like I would normally do, using the launcher, of course.

The download hung up/stalled just shy of 50% downloaded. After a couple minutes I cancelled and tried it again. And again it got to about the same point and stalled. No biggie, probably network issues somewhere. After a couple more attempts I finally succeeded in downloading the patch.

Then the installation process started ... and hung up/stalled about 50% of the way through. I waited a few minutes before clicking the "Cancel" button and trying again. I repeated this several times. Notably, the launcher/installer would consistently freeze up each after I clicked "Cancel", and I would have to "Force Quit" the application and then relaunch and start all over again. It might also be worth noting that I have the game, all its files, and the launcher installed on an external Firewire drive, but throughout this entire process I did not see any activity (i.e. flashing blue light on the drive enclosure that normally indicates drive activity). I finally just decided to start the install process and go to bed, hoping that it would get past the hangup on its own and the game would be ready to play the next day. Better than sitting and staring at an unmoving progress bar. This "worked".

So now I can play the newly-patched game. I get into the game and load up a character, and she zones into Architect Entertainment, where I had logged her out. She exits through one of the upper doors and flies away, and the whole game freezes up for several seconds. Finally it unfreezes, and she flies forward a few more yards, and everything freezes up again. Then the freezing seems to go away, and she looks in her Contacts and accepts a Tip mission. She flies to the instance, zones in ... and everything freezes up with bare-minimum graphic quality for several seconds before finally returning to normal.

Repeat all this random hanging/freezing on every other character I try, on different servers, with each server showing "Low" or "Medium" population at the times I was trying to play. I'll note that this isn't the normal latency/lag you typically get in Atlas Park when it's crowded. I expect that, and don't worry about it. I'm seeing this in every zone, and even in instances where population isn't normally a problem. Everything will be performing smoothly, and then *BAM!* Hang! Freeze!

I would suspect an issue with my own Internet connection, except I don't have this problem when I'm playing World of Warcraft (though sometimes I think Blizzard has made some kind of deal with Internet Satan, because WoW will continue to plow through even when I can't get my Web browser to connect to any Web sites). And, honestly, I wasn't having this problem with CoH until I installed the latest patch.

Anybody else having performance issues since this latest patch?


Hardware Overview:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Running Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard)

Did a search and the only threads I could find on this were from about this time last year, so apparently this hasn't been fixed yet.

The bug being the hero or villain in the bank disappears. That is, the character model disappears, leaving only the visual effects of their active powers visible (or in the case of the villain in a safeguard, a sack of money floating in the air in the middle of the power effects), leaving the mob untargetable/unhittable.

Previous threads have connected it to the mob being near an elevator, i.e. just came out of it, and that was the case when I ran into this during a mayhem mission. I just finished a safeguard, and this time I was just inside the bank entrance where I'd been fighting the guard mobs in the lobby. The villain, Shock Treatment, appeared, and I got her down to about 5% health, and then she vanished, leaving only the bag of money and her electric armor showing.

So I made a beeline for the escape point (an Arachnos flyer in this case), and pretty soon she appeared ... still as just a floating bag of money and an electrical field.

This isn't happening every time; I've successfully completed several of these missions. It's just every now and then...

Sorry, I'm kind of new - what is "MA"?

My billing date was the 14th, and I haven't seen my points for November either. Or my Reward Token — I got one on Oct. 14, but not this month.

I guess this is more of an oversight than a bug, but thought I'd post it here anyway:

The AE Ticket Vendor is not selling "Enhances Damage Resistance" DO enhancements. He does sell the Training and SO versions, however.

I also noticed a labeling inconsistency - in the left-hand menu in the vendor window, in the SO submenus, this particular enhancement is labeled "Resist Buff", while in the Training submenu it's labeled "Resist Damage".

I'm VIP, but I didn't even start playing the game until after Issue 21. There are a number of items I've purchased from the store that still show up up with the "Buy" button enabled.

Same here. Got the error, quit the client, relaunched, and everything was fine.

I'm willing to admit this may just be a Mac issue, but thought I'd mention it anyway.

The shivans in the tutorial seem to be horrendous graphics-lag generators. I'm not sure what it is about them — maybe the fact that they don't seem to have "solid" models, i.e. they're sort of "see-through", much like the walls and floors in Arachnos bases where I often experience similar lag — and it may simply be that my Mac's video card just has trouble with things like that. I'm "blaming" the shivan models because the lag goes away once all of them are killed in the second part of the tutorial, right before the giant shivan appears. And I don't get the lag with the giant shivan. Once I'm past the tutorial and into Atlas Park or Mercy Island, everything is fine.

I mention this mainly to point out that the amount of lag in the tutorial gives a really bad "first impression" to a new player. If this is the first thing they see after character creation, graphics lag so bad that it's hard to even move their character, some may think their computer just can't handle the game, and not proceed past it and discover the lag goes away after the tutorial.

[strike]Hey Bubbawheat! I did your "Apprenticeship in the Fine Art of Revenge" on one of my level 5 villains last night. Really enjoyed it [/strike]

EDIT: D'OH! And upon visiting AE again, I realized that wasn't your arc (and I got the title wrong).

I've only been playing the game for about a month, so I don't know whether my issue is a technical issue or an author issue, but I thought I'd toss it out there.

I've been enjoying playing through a variety of AE missions (while trying to figure out the best way to avoid the farms and find the actual stories), and I always check the "My Level" box when searching. I've run into a "problem" on my low-level characters with some of these stories: while the mission description itself says, for example, "1-54" and all of the enemies therein are indeed scaled to my character's level (let's say level 9 or 10), it's clear that the particular enemies chosen and their associated power sets were originally designed for higher-level encounters.

The result is that the enemies have powers, even at their scaled-down level, that my low-level character has no defense against. So my characters repeatedly get their butt handed to them by mere Minions of the same level. The two most common examples of this, that I've seen, are Knockdown/Knockback attacks, and defensive abilities that grant deflection. This has resulted in my being forced to abandon otherwise good, interesting stories purely because my character either spends almost the entire time lying on the floor and standing back up only to get knocked right back down again (because enemies are typically in groups of 3 and they take turns knocking me down), or I watch in frustration as I attack, only to see "Deflected!" over and over again, with the result, again, of my dying repeatedly — not because the enemies are doing big damage, but because they're surviving long enough to hit me so many more times. If I am able to beat each group of enemies anyway, my hit points are still so depleted afterwards that I have to wait around while they recover, and since the Rest ability is probably still on cooldown from an earlier fight, that means just standing around doing nothing for several minutes while I wait for my health bar to fill back up. And that's just boring. I know the trick of stacking Luck inspirations to improve survivability, but I can only carry so many of those.

The obvious (to me) solution is to avoid using enemies with these kinds of abilities in low-level stories, but that's where my uncertainty about "technical" vs. "author" issues comes in, particularly in cases where the story is supposed to be appropriate for all levels. I seem to remember seeing something — either in the original AE tutorial mission you get at level 5, or in a loading screen tip — cautioning authors about this very thing, i.e. "Scaled-down enemies will still have their higher-level powers, so use with caution in low-level missions" or some such wording. But I can also see that being a problem when trying to create a story that is suitable for all levels - an author doesn't want to be stuck using just Skulls/Trolls/Hellions/etc. So perhaps the best solution is to write stories with narrower level ranges, using enemies appropriate to that range, instead of "1-54" and trying to make the same enemies fit every level range.

I dunno the solution; I'm just tossing my thoughts out there.

Of course, all this leads to another question. As I mentioned, some of the stories I've had to abandon for these reasons were genuinely well-written and interesting. I simply couldn't do them at my current level, but would like to go back to them once my character(s) have suitable powers to deal with the enemies. In these cases I prefer not to rate the stories, since I haven't completed them, so I just dismiss that window when it comes up. Does "no rating" = "zero stars"? I hope not, because I'd hate to be damaging the rating by not voting.

Besides, I think the idea of a "superhero" is that you defeat your opponents, not kill them. Though how that concept applies to gun or blade characters, or villians ...

I don't have much trouble with Atlas Park, unless it's crowded, but the tutorial with all the Shivans can give me all sorts of graphics lag. Likewise, Arachnos bases with all the perforated steel (i.e. all those holes making the walls and floors see-through).

The odd thing is that this graphics lag is very inconsistent. I'll do the tutorial or a mission inside an Arachnos base and the lag just kills me, and then I'll do the tutorial on a different character or do another mission in a virtually identical Arachnos base and everything will be smooth like butter.

I starting to wonder how many of the graphical elements in the game are stored on my hard drive (4.06GB seems awfully small for a game this size), and how much is being streamed at me "on demand". Streaming would be one explanation for why the same scenario is laggy one time and perfectly smooth the next time.