Mythological

So I'm standing on a beach with nobody around me, click on my flight power and launch myself into the air, only to fall back on the beach and try to figure out what's going on. Was I rooted? Did someone hit me with -fly? Nope, it's just that all clicks are not made equal, and I'm not sure why.

When this game started out, I could pretty reliably click on things and know that they were clicked on. Some time shortly after that, they "fixed" it so you have a limited amount of space to click on an enemy in order to target him. Ok, I can live with that, regardless of the reason. I can always use the tab key. Powers, however, used to be something that only failed under significant lag conditions. Not so any more.

I can understand if powers don't activate instantly when I click on them in combat. I'm used to having to click a power three or four times to get it to activate just because there's so much going on. Occasionally this kills me because my heal or un-root or whatever just plain refuses to fire, but those are the breaks. My wife is quite used to watching me (or a teammate if I'm playing support) die to the sound of "click click click click click...." waiting for something to happen. It's gotten to the point now that I have to click my ice storm and hold the cursor over the spot that I want it to hit for a few seconds to see if it's not showing up because of graphics delay, or if the power just failed to activate when I clicked it. If I've just run near an unalert spawn in the hopes of blizzarding them before they notice me, that makes me dead pretty fast.

I'm not sure why this exists. I don't know if it's just a programming limitation that they never noticed, or if it's something they introduced in order to discourage bots. From my end, all I can see is that it's really annoying and only getting worse.

Cheers,

-MB

One of the most annoying things about CoH has always been that you can't skip a cut scene even after you've watched it about fifty times. This has recently become a serious nuisance with the BAF trial. I'm sure your developers consider the conversation incredibly important, maybe even a cult classic, but for every player I know the long load time plus ludicrously long cut scene immediately after is nothing more than an excuse to go get a drink.

I realize that there will occasionally be someone who hasn't seen it enough times to memorize the dialog, but it would be nice if a group of experienced players had a way of skipping over it. At dead minimum, you really aught to limit their length to something considerably shorter.

I think that this is awesome, and it wouldn't be too terribly tough to implement. Essentially, it would be a completely immoble NPC clone of the player that it is about. You can put the plaque data on "info". The hard part would be the editor, but they already have that for AE.

I've spent a bit of time trying to figure out an easy way of indicating which teleporter goes to which zone. The pictures on the beacons aren't bad once you get used to them, but they're tough to identify from a distance, and you often really have to know the zone well before it makes sense what you're looking at.

I'd like to see a set of three dimensional objects that are small (six foot tall?) replicas of highly recognizable objects in each zone. I'd set these on either side of the teleporters that serviced the appropriate zones.

Fleshette, your intantaneously vicious attack suggests you've been doing too much PvP. You seem to think that smashing your opponent with energetic ad-hominem attacks makes your point without actually bothering to address any of my comments. Please don't bother responding without thinking because it's really a waste of both of our time.

MacSkull, you're right that I don't have hard data on my observations, but I have been playing this game for a bit and I'm familiar with the way the market works. What I've seen is a distinct trend that I wanted to mention. I have to admit that I don't care to spend a few weeks using the in-game market interface to do a rigorous plotting of price trends over time, and I don't have access to any hard historical data, so it wouldn't make much of a difference in presenting a solid logical argument.

It would also seem that a search for information on how drops are weighted would be pointless because you tell me that they aren't weighted at all. Paragon Wiki seems to disagree with you, but that's between you two.

You state that the Devs consider the Market to be a form of PvP, which is fine, but you seem to think that this exempts it from any form of balancing effort. Considering the huge lengths that the Devs have gone to balance PvP combat, I think that your suggestion is flawed.

And probably the idea that the market is purely a form of PvP is flawed. If the devs truly think that it is all it is, then why don't they open it up between Heroes and Villains? Who cares if one side has resources far in excess of the other, that's just life, isn't it? Anyone with enough drive should be able to get what they need, right?

The thing is that the market is supposed to be a way to improve player enjoyment. That means all players, not just the ones that get their jollies off of finding an opponent and smashing them. I'm certainly happy to make my oodles of money selling stuff at ludicrous prices to people who are desperate for a specific recipe, but it is far more important to me to maintain and possibly increase the membership base so I have people with which I can do the WANTED socialization (in contrast to the unwanted kind).

But, no, I don't think that my suggestions are the most reasonable. I'm a software engineer, but I don't know what their code can do. I just don't think that it's fair to ***** and moan about something without presenting a possible solution. If you care to contribute positively to this conversation (as opposed to just whacking down my ideas with a curt "you should know better, but you don't, so here's a knuckle sandwich instead"), then I'd welcome your input. In the mean time, I'll go do a quick survey of recipe availability to show you what I mean.

Having recently done an informal study of the condition of the Consignment House/Black Market, I have a few suggestions to make.

First, it appears that enhancement drops are done based on how many people have powers that could slot those enhancements. While this may initially sound like a good idea, it means that the market is flooded with enhancements that very few people actually WANT to slot (for instance, Resistance sets with recharge reduction), while the ones that people do want to slot (melee damage, for instance) have become almost completely unobtainable.

This has resulted in a serious drop in people's ability to use the market to slot out their characters, which has decreased people's use of the market in general, whether to buy or sell their stuff. In conjunction with the (let's say) slight drop in membership, this has resulted in an overall drop in participation of the market.

The end result of this is that, for the popular IO sets, there are none of them on the market for large ranges of levels with hundreds of bids and spiraling costs. On the other end, there are also numerous enhancements that are unwanted and unsellable.

Similar to this is the issue with invention salvage. I don't know what algorithm they use, but the devs have never actually figured out how to balance Uncommon enhancement drops. The logical thing to do with these would be to drop them at a rate equivalent to use in recipes, although that doesn't account for those that people sell to the Quartermaster or stores. An adaptive algorithm is to have a drop pool. When someone uses one to build something, it contributes 1.1 to the pool. When someone sells one to the store or just deletes it, it puts .9 back into the drop pool. This may result in brief periods where the drop pool needs to be adjusted, but for the most part it would be self-adjusting as people use them.

I realize that a certain percentage of this is due to recent AE abuses, but feel that it is an ongoing problem that will likely never be completely fixed. The market problem can be fixed by applying an intelligent algorithm, assuming that the devs have the information resources available. Alternately, they could always implement a stop-gap where they periodically sell things from the "company stock" to the highest bidder on appropriate items, but that plan is also subject to abuse.

Best,

Mythological Beast

I've been having network issues for a while now. I have no problem with download speed, but the game itself has severe rubberbanding issues. I can't get any help from my ISP because they insist that nothing is wrong with anything.

Can any one suggest tools by which I can measure the gaming performance of my network connection?

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Pretty sure not. the difference between 3 and 0.5 is 2.5. you'd just get another couple Rikti. "ratio" is 1/6 but DW said "difference" which means subtraction.

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The actual statement was "greater than six times". 3 is six times .5, but it's not greater than six times, so no, you'd need at least one other dude to raise your threat level. With only an invader threat of .5, you'd get one heavy. In order to get two heavies you'd need an invader threat of three, which means you'd need nineteen players in the 30' area.

Sounds like an awesome use for Detention Bubble on a Rikti monkey, followed by Blizzard.

Another thumbs up for a great guide, and a little note about neutron stars.

Larry Niven actually made a "good enough for science fiction" description of how creatures might possibly evolve on a neutron star in his book Neutron Star. I think his creatures were the size of a thumbnail, as dense as the neutron star itself, and evolved from barbarism to interstellar travel in about a month's human time, but those are just details.

The real problem I have is with their description of one coming from a neutron star and the other coming from a pulsar. The only difference between a neutron star and a pulsar is where the earth is located. Yes, you read that right. Let me try to explain.

Neutron stars have a magnetic field hundreds of millions of times that of earth. This means that, instead of an Aurora Borealis, they shoot out a beam of energy from their magnetic poles that can be seen from earth, IF the earth is in it's path, and there's the crux.

Magnetic poles aren't generally in line with the axis of spin. For the earth, for instance, it's about 11 degrees off, but it can really be anywhere. This means that, as the neutron star spins, it spits out that beam of energy like a lighthouse. If, by some chance, the earth is in the rotational path of that beam, the light appears to blink on and off, and this is what we call a pulsar. If we aren't in the path of the beam, then it's just a neutron star (but it might be a pulsar from some other place).

So you can understand why I find that differentiation to fail to even meet the standards of "contrived". But, really, who cares. They're fun to play.