Necrotron

I reckon the whole Enhancement system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. The entire UI has to be scrapped and replaced with one that takes IOs into account. The current system feels very... disjointed.

I can only hold 10 IOs in my tray, which is hard on any respec, and impossible if you've spent dosh on set IOs. If I want to slot an IO, I have to buy the stuff for it, get them in two separate inventories, craft it into a third (limited) inventory, open up a fullscreen menu, then slot the IO in the chosen power.

While this isn't intuitive by any regards, we deal with it because we as regular players have learned all of the ins and outs of it over time, gradually.

The Enhancement screen needs to be re-thought entirely, maybe even made as a regular transparent in-game window. It should tell you about the effects of ED, not just in a percentage change on a popup, but graphically, and with a warning telling you that you're pushing ED. It should be built with IO sets in mind, to let you keep track of sets better, grouping them together and showing you what benefits you get. I should be able to hold more than ten Enhancements, with IOs of similar sets being grouped together, like a deck of cards, for example.

The information is all there, but it is NOT presented in an intuitive way.

If I double-click a power, I don't get to see the real numbers, or see how the IOs are interacting with each other. I get the SO combining screen. Who the heck does that anymore? Anyone who cares about such small percentages will have moved over to IOs long ago.

I know that they don't want to balance everything around IOs, because they want to keep it simple. Well, IOs don't have to be complicated. If you wrap the right user interface around everything, it will become intuitive.

The Mission Architect is a perfect example of this. Here we have a system so hideously complicated that no tutorial would ever explain it. Instead, it has been designed to be intuitive, with everything nicely named and grouped, and with extremely helpful tooltips peppering every screen. As a result, everyone can use it.

Oh and as Donna said, making slots mutable would be nice too. Maybe for a minor inf cost, you could shuffle slots around.

Well that was a sneaky feature. Same goes for Mastermind pets, it seems. It must have been some groundwork for I16 or something.

Exactly what the title says. Have we always been able to recolour Vanguard HVAS bots? I had never noticed that before...

They sure are. Using the Tags system I've played half a dozen arcs these past few days, all of them were gems. Well written, well balanced gems.

Welcome home. :3

Sorry to hear about your black dog. 3: I'm sure everyone here will help you any way they can!

Confirmed on Windows 7 RC1 x64. This issue spans operating systems.

It sounds like the details on file aren't valid, even though it was accepted.

We forumites can't help you. Raise a support ticket.

Bandwidth isn't a factor in how a game handles. 2Mbit is plenty. Latency is more important, but even that isn't essential for CoH.

You want 2GB of RAM to run CoH well. This will pretty much get rid of every pause that you're probably getting in the game, where it has to consult your hard drive. More RAM means less swapping. This doesn't give better framerates, but it does keep the framerate consistent.

For future reference, MB/sec and Mb/sec aren't the same. The small b means bits, the capital B means bytes, and there are 8 bits in one byte. Hard drives, RAM, and USB keys are measured in bytes, while broadband is advertised in bits. ...Don't ask, it's a marketing thing.

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I hope there will be a new npc to do the power customisation and not the tailor/facemaker. I'd like to do it with a character who won't visit Icon ever again so she won't loose the awesome bolero/wings combo ...

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And you were saying power customsation was impossible with the engine :P Lies.

They could have just cloned each animation and made it so that when you select a colour for your power, it changes x)

I don't know. But i think the devs are hiding the full capabilities of the game engine so that we don't start requesting crazy game features xD
Wish the Devs would take the fact that players want that and implement it again.
Seeing as, y'know, the 'impossible' has happened

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It's not that simple.

Power customisation was always possible, it just took a LOT of work to retrofit every single power in the game. That truckload of work is simply tedious, and would tie up the 15-man team for a whole issue.

I reckon they've been working on this, and much more, ever since NCSoft expanded the dev team. Yet it still took this long to do.

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I hope we can have a personal option to turn off the colourisation effects. I'm used to the colours as they are, and having seem a lot of REALLY VERY UGLY COSTUMES I'd rather like to avoid REALLY UGLY GARISH GLOWING EFFECTS EVERYWHERE. My eyes won't be able to take it.

Seriously, people can make the ugliest choices, and I really, really hate the idea of the game turning into a combination of Hello Kitty and dried blood.

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People can already make dog ugly glowing characters. Full body pink spandex, bright purple glow aura, on a Peacebringer. Changing the colours of powers only gives these people more choice, it doesn't let them make even more garish powers.

...Although pink fire imps scare the hell out of me.

Now it works, let's remove the UAC prompt. This is optional but it's worth doing.

Make a shortcut to CityOfHeroes.exe. Not the updater. Add -project EUCoH to the end of the Target. You want it looking like this:

"C:\...whatever...\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -project EUCoH

Character for character, word for word, with the " where you see them. Start CoH with this shortcut to bypass the updater and play it directly.

You will still need to run the updater manually should a patch come out. I should point out that this shortcut isn't officially supported.

This also lets you use more advanced keyboard and mouse software, like the kind found with Logitech peripherals. If CoH is running with admin privileges, I personally can't use game-specific keybinds.

It's pretty simple to get CoH to run without an administrator prompt, but let's get the thing to work first.

Follow FFM's advice, the man is wise. Install the game to C:\Games so that it can fully write to itself.

Security like this prevents any old bit of code from getting full access to your PC. Consider this 'administrator access' like you would your car keys. With Windows XP, it would happily give the keys to your system to any and every program that it saw. This allows viruses and trojans to help themselves to everything in your car, then drive off in it. Like a bunch of chavs.

With Vista, it will ask you before giving away these 'keys'. If a program was written well, it doesn't need them, or ask for them. You only need administrator access to change sensitive folders on your PC, install things, and muck about with Windows; things that you don't need to do very often. If a program was written badly, it will ask for access even though it doesn't need it.

Vista has been out long enough that every program you'd want supports this new security system, and so won't ask for the keys to your computer. However, installing stuff will always need to.

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Necro, I had the same problem finding teams, and then I started using the Mission Architect chat channel as well as the Defiant Architects one (MA channel also available on Union, I think). The MA channel seems to be relatively light on spam and the best place to find content-running MA teams, from my limited experience.

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I'm in that channel. It's full of awesome people. But I don't want to have to run MA stuff all the time. Also, I haven't really found content-running teams on there.

I weep.

I haven't met a single decent player on CoH in the past week. Every single person has no badges, apart from lots of Architect ones, and don't have a grasp of English, let alone how the game works. I've seen epic archetypes say "he he i a alien", people at level 45 not understanding why my level 19 Controller can't get at the Imperious task force, Stone tanks with granite armour that don't understand the difference between defence and resistance.

Farming is no longer an issue for the market or something that you can pretend to ignore. For anyone who isn't in a good supergroup, who rely on pickup teams, CoH has become a desolate wasteland. On both servers, on many level ranges, at all times of day, I simply can't find a team that doesn't farm.

I'm not whining. I feel genuinely... hurt. Like I've been punched in the stomach. Every time I see a player who has powerlevelled to the top levels in days, I die a little inside. This game is in my blood, and it's been poisoned. Can any of you really blame the veterans of this game for wanting to flee to greener pastures?

EDIT: I just got asked to farm while typing this. Twice. ;-;

You'll be back. You'll see. I'll be waiting, and I shall be condescending.

I15 was a bit of a sucker-punch, but I ain't down yet.

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Usually when special events occur and give a time at 10/11 am it's because they follow a maintenance donwtime...

So I'm guessing that there may be a maintenance downtime tomorrow... on a Wednesday...

Maybe just to turn off the CHAOS, but then again, that should stop at midnight BST tonight...

So...

Any chance that Posi may be announcing something tonight that goes live tomorrow morning??

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Surprised I've not had any comment on this - not even a "JD you're being a fool"...

But wondering further on this...

I've been wondering why Posi is doing the address when he is.

I'd guess that making an announcement at noon PST would have made more sense to me... that'd be noon in California, 5pm in NY, 8pm in UK, 9pm in central Europe.... much more hospitable...

So I'm wondering if it's either:
* CoH was originally 'switched on' at 8pm EST (the address time);
* Posi wants to announce something at the evening that goes live the next morning.

I don't know exactly when CoH went live, but 8pm EST seems very odd so I'm discounting that. But the latter interests me...

Ok - foolish optimism maybe. But I can still optimistically wonder...

Until then: anyone think of any reason why Posi is doing it at the time he is? Or is it just to let the West coast get home from work and logon?

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I daren't answer for two reasons.

One: I find no flaws in what you say.

Two: I'm scared to agree with you. I may jinx it.

As much as I think the event is underwhelming, seeing all of Atlas pile on to Ghost Widow is incredibly funny. Health zooming from empty to full while everyone gets Held.

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On the 5th. I really don't get why people like them so much. They're rebadged Council (or visa versa) and The Council are pretty average in most respects.

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They're god damn Nazis, man. Like the god damn Batman. Death metal skulls, awesome names. Who doesn't like beating up Nazis?

Defiant is having Croatoa GMs on it, Union has (no wait, was) under Rikti invasion. No devs or mods seen yet.

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The festivities will be more fun than you can shake a stick at


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Surely there has got to be more. I've had great fun shaking my stick - far more fun than a simple rehash of reheated past-event leftovers.

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do not want

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Yeah but I17's gonna be sweet

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<twitch> Don't...

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I'm guessing either:

* Lots more not yet announced (hey - Posi needs something to announce at 02:00)
or
* Lots bumped to I16 in order to:
--- launch I15 close to the CoH anniversary date;
--- come out closer to the competition's stated launch date.

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All my hopes have been summed up in those two bullet points. But... still. Can't shake the feeling that neither will be fulfilled.

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Have faith in the Devs for a change guys.

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I had faith once. The Devs rained on it.

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Call me an optimist, but I'm not there yet.




Yet.

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I am optimistic that there'll be more added.

Simply because no sane individual would continuely Big Up i15 as a huge content issue and then just add that lot.

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You're absolutely right. But that's what they're doing.

If there's some Deus Ex Machina in I15 that they aren't showing us, why are they hiding it? I wonder what the fallout in the US boards is like.

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Have faith in the Devs for a change guys.

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I had faith once. The Devs rained on it.

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Call me an optimist, but I'm not there yet.




Yet.

If this is all a ham handed in-plot explanation of why the war walls get destroyed so that we can get a swish graphical update, it makes sense.

But we all know this is just going to be some guy turning on all existing events without anything new.