Samuel_Tow

Seems to me like a retread of the Team Seek interface. You see people begging, pleading and even crying for a team. Then you search for their name and they have no search comment and are set to "Not looking for any."

I'm actually not entirely against boss fights that restart if you lose (read: wipe), but bosses that can reset the fight with what I feel is a "cheap" mechanic? No, thank you.

Generally, I kind of don't like the approach where you can just keep flinging warm bodies at a boos and no matter how many times you die, all that matters is you keep dealing damage. But unless we can define a losing condition - which I don't think Keyes Island has - then resetting the fight is just a dick move.

The problem with animated or moving hair is that it requires tech that City of Heroes simply doesn't have right now. What this means is we'll need an entirely new system to be developed to handle that, and with the development team being "frugal," I suspect they won't give a very high priority to that.

Animated hair using the Capes system is a mistake. It's both very limited in what it can look like and, quite frankly, it looks like crap. No offence to Ghost Widow, but her hair looks like a mop. It has no sense of volume to it, no sense of density. It looks more like a balding man's thinning-out mullet.

Animated hair would need to account for long hair, short hair, pigtails, ponytails, braids, Johnny Bravo bangs, afros and more. Pretty much each hair's "movement" would need to be rigged for that hairstyle specifically, barring extremely short or extremely greaser hair.

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When it comes to hats with hair, that's kind of the same situation - hair options would need to be unique to each hat, unless the developers somehow enforced a standardised hatline like we have a standard waistline, but given the variety of hats we have now, this is unlikely. You can't just combine an existing hair with an existing hat, simply because when people put on hats, they compress the hair, something which doesn't work quite as well with 3D meshes.

What would be necessary for hair with hats is for hair "cutouts" to be appended to the hat, and those would need to be matched to the hatline dimensions of each separate hat. What this means is we'll likely only ever see a few styles per hat, basically bald/short/long/tail.

I actually don't believe this is impossible to do, or even "too much work," though, to be honest. It might increase the workload involved with adding more hats in the future, and it may be quite a bit of an art dump to do all at the same time, but it has the potential to be a mini revolution in costume design.

On Time Stamps for chat:
I'd like an option to have that available, yes, and for the same reasons mentioned. I usually put a "Mark." line in my chat tab just so I can tell at a glance if anything about it has changed when the "Mark." scrolls up, but even then I just end up missing people's tells and ending up not knowing how relevant their offers are.

What time the stamp displays shouldn't be a problem. The /localtime command already prints the time of your system clock in chat, so there's no reason they couldn't be able to use that. In fact, we can kind of ape that already with binding our chat button to append chat messages with "say [$$localtime$$say ]"

If all else fails, there's always /servertime that's the same for everbody, and is the time on the system clock of the server, though this doesn't seem to be aligned to American time zones, I don't think.

When it comes to inspirations:
All the crap of who DOESN'T sell what is just legacy nonsense. All of this became meaningless the day they allowed us to convert inspirations. It doesn't matter if a contact only ever sells Insights. You can still have a tray full of everything. And while converting this way does cost you three times the Inspiration cost, but when that cost is 50 Inf, who cares? I can go into the Tailor and change NOTHING and I'll still get taxed, like, 16 000. How many inspirations can I buy for that?

All contacts need to sell all inspirations at all relationship levels. Furthermore, the Architect inspirations vendor needs to sell Awakens. Why she doesn't, I do not know, but fix it, please.

Also, on selling enhancements:
Can we PLEASE get rid of the ripoff, lower-than-normal sell prices of enhancements to the "wrong" stores? Example: If you sell a Tech SO to the Tech store, you'll get about twice as much INF as if you sell it to the Mutation store. If you sell any enhancement to one of those "buy only" vendors in Croatoa or the Shadow Shard, you'll get only ONE TENTH of the price.

Why? Why is this necessary? What was this EVER necessary? In ANY game? All it does is add one more hoop to what is already an annoying process of selling your vendor trash, and you're not told who buys what at a good price, or that a price difference even exists. If I sell a piece of salvage or a recipe, it scores the same place everywhere. Can we do the same with enhancements, please?

There are already stores which buy all types of enhancements at top price, usually in co-op zones. The Vanguard Quartermaster in the Rikti War Zone, for instance, buys SOs and DOs of all origins for the best price you can get... Yet the DO Clockwork Quartermasters in Praetoria buy ALL enhancements of the WORST price you're likely to get because they're the "wrong" store for all types. All that does is piss off new players, and the community gains nothing at all for this ripoff.

Non-Inventions enhancements aren't high-value items or a large-traffic commodity. They are not a good place for an Inf sink, so they end up just irritating to sell.

All that does is give people even more reason to powerlevel to 50, skip all the content and irritate everyone along the way.

Once upon a time, BABs said he was doing just that. He was working to ensure that we would only ever play the weapon draw animation if we couldn't use a power at the moment, and if we tried to use a weapon-based power without the weapon drawn, we'd jump straight to the power's animation with the weapon magically appearing in our hands. He made some headway, but had problems with Shield Defence and then said he'd finish it after Going Rogue.

And then he left.

I'm not sure if that's a bug, but Nuclear Toast reported that his Steampunk Jacket colours swapped when he went to the tailor, primary acting as secondary and secondary acting as primary, "breaking" his costume. Also, it seems that people who had the original Steampunk jacket on a Male character are getting defaulted to a Steampunk jacket without the ascot, even though the original Steampunk jacket still exists.

As for apparently missing options, that may be a bug with the category arrows. For some reason, those could sometimes skip options in the list for no reason. I had that happen to me with gloves yesterday. I'd go from Monster to Zombie 1 to Zombie 2 STRAIGHT to Spiked gloves, skipping Smooth, Flared and Finned. Hitting the back arrow took me back to Zombie and hitting the forward arrow took me forward to Spiked. I had to open the dropdown list, select Smooth manually, and only THEN the arrows worked correctly.

I went about four pages back in time and found the old "Bugs with the Steampack" thread, but figured that a lot of those should have been fixed and so resurrecting that wasn't useful. So I thought I'd make a new one.

So far, I have only one bug to report. Though the Victorian chest piece for women appears to indeed have been fixed so it doesn't clip with jackets, it now clips with the character's breasts, and in a rather ugly manner. I don't think I've nudged the chest slider too high on this character (in fact, I think it's below middle - she's supposed to be a kid), but even so the chest piece clips with her chest just below her clavicles.

I haven't had time to play around with the rest of the options quite yet, so I couldn't tell you if anything else is wrong, but I figure if it is, we should collect those in the same thread like before.

I want to jump in with Claws here, for one specific reason - the justification for the mere existence of a VIP server. We don't need a new server. We have too many as it is. We're not getting a VIP server so that we'd have one more. The only reason the VIP server is even being considered is for the notion that some players would specifically want to NOT team with Free players. That's literally the only reason it exists.

Now, obviously, this isn't the only thing people can use it for. It's a new server, so some names may (probably won't, but may) be available there when they're taken everywhere else, it's 12 more free slots and 36 more slots total, and it will have VIPs that people may want to play with if they're friends from before. There are plenty of perfectly benign reasons people can use to justify making characters on the VIP server. I can't think of any "benign" reasons why we needed a VIP server in the first place and more than anything else, why people say they're going to move there and never play on any of the others. And I've seen a few say that already, so I'm not making things up.

To a large extent, the sense of "elitism" is inherent in the very existence of a VIP-only server. Considering it's a server that's functionally identical to all the others except Free players can't play on it, I trust that should be easy to see. Clearly, people playing on the VIP server aren't automatically horrible snobs. But the server's basic design IS snobbish.