TheUnnamedOne

I think the point is that there's four "Login during the 200# Winter Event" badges that are tied to SPECIFIC years (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) that have since been changed so that they can now be purchased from the Elf for a handful of Candy Canes during any Winter Event.

And there's a third group to add to the equation...

Those rare few of us who WERE here on those anniversary dates and whose characters did receive but have since mysteriously "LOST" the badges from the early anniversaries.

And yes, I've petitioned it a few times over the last couple years and have basically been told "Sorry, you're screwed, we can't help you." each time. I'm guessing that they can't verify login times from that far back. They've never told me exactly what the issue was, just that they can't help me.

It's bad enough that I missed an Anniversary Badge due to my own forgetfulness in maintaining my badge characters but having other ones "stolen" because of an unprovable and unverifiable database error with no way to get them back? Rubbish.

Anniversary "Badges" are a really bad idea to me. Badge Hunting is a gameplay function and as a system is an enjoyable hobby and I think ALL badges should be available to any character who puts in the effort. They should find a new way to commemorate the anniversaries (like a optional 2nd displayable colored title under your character name maybe?) and then make ALL badges able to be purchased or earned in some way, even anniversary ones. I like the Hero/Villain Merit idea, but not 30, that's just ridiculous.

Give special recognition outside of the badge system to those who currently have the Anniversary Badges and then open up all badges for everyone. Make Badge Hunting a completely available gameplay system.

Since I have absolutely no experience with the NCSoft Launcher I can't really comment on it's (lack of?) capabilities, I don't ever recall seeing anywhere that Linux was a supported OS for "City of...".

Not that I'm against it working on Linux, if they haven't feel the need to support CoX on the Linux platform, THAT is the area I think you should focus your attentions on, NOT railing against the launcher, no matter how good or bad it is, that will probably make CoX not work on Linux.

In my experience with .NET software in the banking IT industry, I often found a "bloated and buggy piece of .NET crapware" would run just fine if all you did was give it more hardware horsepower. More than a couple hardware upgrades at work over the years were prompted by single instances of software upgrades that were required to be run on the hardware that wasn't quite up to par.

There was no attack there at all. The worst thing that PeerlessGirl said was that she is sad that you didn't like those story arcs. How awful of her!

She was simply expressing her opinion (notice the multiple instances of "I" in her post) of the story arcs in response to your opinions of them. You are the one attacking her for something you falsely claim she's doing. Smooth.

As a fellow long-time Casual EverQuester myself, I understand your position but I fail to see what the problem is. The Casual COH gamer has gotten "a turn" for the entirety of the game's existence and that shouldn't be changing very much at all.

There are THREE events in the game that are not doable by a single group. The Hamidon, The Rikti War Zone Mothership Raid and the Cathedral of Pain. That's it. And you know what? Two of those are still "Casual-friendly" in that you can get on a team for them and be done with them in about an hour - Hamidon and the Cathedral. Even the Mothership Raid can be done in less time than most Task Forces. The COP is even limited to 3 groups of 8 players. But you know what? Even for a mostly-solo player like me, having those large events to go to casually when one happens to be taking place is really awesome and some of the most fun you can have in COH. Many of the Trials and Task Forces are actually harder to finish successfully with one group than these "Epic Raid" events are with dozens of players.

And with this you're assuming that "End Game" means raids. From what I read in the Producer's Letter, and the Meet-and-Greet promos and elsewhere, while they are going to add another (maybe two?) Raid-style larger group events (the BAF, for 12-24 players and maybe something with Mother Mayhem's Hospital?) most of the things they talked about were still focused on single-group Task Forces/Trials.

Right from the BEGINNING, Jack Emmert (a.k.a. "Statesman", the original boss of COH) used every trick and bit of influence he had to force COH into a Risk vs Reward ethic. He absolutely HATED the idea of Time vs. Reward. To Jack, the idea of a Blaster hovering safely outside of the range of enemies' Ranged attacks and using JUST slow-recharging Snipe powers to defeat things in three times the amount of time it would take to just go in with all guns blazing was the worst thing that could happen to COH. And that's not even the worst example. Just about every unpopular power and NPC change in the first couple years was done to appease his draconian RvR mentality and stranglehold on how the game was "supposed to be played." It's really only been since he left that things have been turned around into a more congenial reward system. The only bad thing is that so many of Jack's horrible ideas are still stuck so firmly entrenched in the bedrock of COH that I don't think they'll ever come out.

It doesn't seem like an attack, but I think you're really jumping the gun here. While it does look like there's a shift in focus to giving some more options on harder and larger things to do at the end of the game, I highly doubt NCSoft is going to change things THAT much in the next year. COH is going to be just as fun as it always was for Casual and Hardcore gamers and even moreso, that's all.

I remember those boards... *shiver* I don't miss them at all. Nasty things! I didn't try to stay on those boards for very long.

I spent less time in EverQuest than I have in COH so far. I probably would have stayed longer in EQ except they shut down the Guide program and that was the only thing I really had fun doing anymore there.

COH on the other hand is a much nicer place and the forums here, for the most part, are much more forgiving a place.

Ah, I should have thought of that too. I was more focused on thinking who it could be than "what" and the caption even refers to it in a non-person manner ("This" not "Who").

I doubt it. Noble Savage has a thread for requests for "Adapting NPC Costume Pieces" or something like that.

For them to use certain pieces, they might have to make sure the body size/type matches the geometry that the piece was designed for, or else adapt it to where it becomes a "new" object.

Also, for many NPCs, what looks like separate "pieces" are actually inseparable joined objects. Sometimes graphic bugs (viewing them through transparency effects for instance) can reveal this on certain NPCs, like the red-clothed Wyvern Sting agents.

For us to use it, they'd have to make sure it worked with scaling body sizes and multiple body types.

I'm actually more interested in who this is:



I'm going to guess they didn't put that in there without there being a VERY good reason. I'd bet that it's going to be someone anti-Cole. My guesses would be someone who is somehow related to Stephan Richter, or based on the white eyes and sci-fi costume, maybe a Praetorian Peacebringer?

The person who answered your petition actually told you it was changed to accept Defense sets? That sounds suspicious in the first place.

Anyway, any further news on this? I do have a character with Field Mastery Temp Invulnerability that I haven't gotten around to Freespec'ing yet and wonder if I should wait?

"Fluff" nothing, this is a GREAT idea! Even with the sliders in the interface, I never really changed anything. Now I can get the colors close to what I want and just tweak the sliders a bit.

Thanks to you, now most of my characters have GUIs that nicely match at least part of their main costume color scheme.

Of course, now my wife is bugging me to set hers up with "Just the right shade" of Neon Green to match her favorite character's costume...

What are you using to create your PopMenu files? Could it be something that has "SmartQuotes" or a similar function? If so, it may be changing the "apostrophe" character to a higher-ASCII character that is not displayable in the PopMenu. I've seen a few things that the PopMenu simply ignores.

Or maybe you've stumbled on the "Escape" character for PopMenu... what happens if you put two single-quote marks together in the menu like "I''m"?

PopMenu is actually an extensively used, inherent part of the GUI interface for providing all kinds of dynamic information to the user. Just about any right-click on the different GUI elements will bring up some kind of dynamic PopMenu.

Unfortunately, and this is my theory on why it's not supported, it's a fairly "dumb" menuing language. There's little visual customizability, only a couple rudimentary logic functions in the PopMenu code and it's also been mentioned a couple times that PopMenu may have the potential to crash the game based on the complexity and depth of the PopMenu code (though I have not experienced this myself) so it's not a great idea for the devs to actively support something that can run rampant crashing your game client if it is created in the wrong way.

I'd love for the devs to step up and take charge up improving and supporting the PopMenu code since it has become an integral and necessary part of my COH game experience. Documenting and improving the capabilities of the menus would be incredible, especially since there's code that I know has to exist for the PopMenu command (in order for it to perform the dynamic things it does in the GUI) that no one has found yet.

Thanks for the exact quote and here's my rebuttal:

If you don't include it since it adds nothing to gameplay, then why do you have a complete 3d city in the game that we run around in in the first place? The devs have gone out of their way to make the outdoor city environment itself inconsequential and almost effectively useless over the years. The only thing I can see the outdoor zones contributing to the game itself in any manner is the illusion of Paragon, the Rogue Isles and Praetoria being real locations. Sure, you can run around and fight enemies in the city zones but why? No one wants to "street sweep" anymore. It used to be fun to do that in the early days and it was often very common for teams to be seen keeping the streets of Paragon City safe. Now, almost every outdoor enemy is ignored unless the player needs Tips or a Defeat Badge.

The only gameplay reasons for having city zones now are 1. "Defeat ## <Enemy Type>" missions and collecting Defeat badges. For every other aspect of the game that I can think of, the city zones can be effectively and completely replaced by a simple background image and a menu, that's how inconsequential they are. If weather doesn't add anything to the gameplay, then why have the day/night cycle? That's not contributing much gameplay value except for a few locations (only one that I can think of) that have time-sensitive NPC spawns whose only contribution to gameplay is the previously mentioned Defeat badge hunting.

With the gameplay contributions of the outdoor City Zones being almost entirely based on eye-candy and the illusionary aspects of us running around an actual city, then it a logical conclusion that adding weather effects would only IMPROVE their main gameplay functions in the game.

I, for one, have loved the winter effects added in the past and would love to see more of that kind of thing. Always running around in a world with 78 degree, early-summer weather that never has rain or any other weather is just weird. Overcast skies, cloudy skies, rain, snow, trees that change color and lose their leaves, etc. would make the outdoor zones more interesting.

I've come to enjoy playing around in Praetoria more than any other zones and I've figured out why. It looks more realistic than the Paragon City/Rogue Isles zones. It would be hard to modify the geography of the older zones to look more real but adding weather would go a long way to doing the same thing.

I agree, there HAS to be a design problem or bug somewhere. I ran the events on my Demon/Thermal MM with the same tactics: "Pets on Aggressive, destroy everything in sight, sit back and watch".

I did the Neutropolis even twice with no problems. Got the badge the first time, got the emote the second time.

I ran the Imperial City event three times. Got the badge the first time, time ran out the second time due to the timer not resetting properly after getting to the roof and defeating the first wave of guards. Got the Temp Power the third time.

I ran the Nova Praetoria event six times now, both solo and teamed, both sitting back with pets doing everything and participating by buffing and healing. All six times resulted in the small reward choices and no badge or temp power.

Something has to be broken in the NP event for MMs. If the other events can work fine with me soloing and just directing my pets for the most part then I can't figure out what could be wrong.

Do I have to take damage from the enemies? That's the only thing I can think of that happens differently in the NP event than the other two. The NP event enemies are so squishy, they hardly last any time at all and it's easily possible that I did not get hit at all during any of the attempts.

I'll try again today if I can fit it in but this time I'll wait until one of them actually gets to hit me a few times before I sic the pets on them.

I haven't seen any troubles like this on either of my MMs (Robot and Demon) that wasn't caused by them being Feared or Confused. Fear usually makes them behave that way and if they happen to run into another group while running scared when in Defensive mode, they'll start attacking when they get attacked.

And the melee thing... not seeing that either. Sure, sometimes they do close into melee because they have melee attacks. I tell them to heel and they come back to me, I tell them to attack again and they unload with flying death again.

It's the boxed product and they ship it to you or you pick it up at a store. There was no option for Direct Download or to purchase just an activation code.

And of course it's listed as being on backorder with a 1-2 week estimated ship date.

Still it's 10 bucks, can't beat that.

That's because the /beginchat command requires user input (hit the enter key) before it executes whatever is put on the chat line. Only the first bit before the $$ is there because that's the command separator so the first command ends there but doesn't accept anything else yet since the /beginchat command still has control of the chat line and is still waiting for that user-inputed enter key before anything else can happen.

At least that's what I think is going on.

I have my Warshade's form quick-switching popmenus set up using 2 different menus and when I play him, I use 2 popmenus in a row, the second one called from the previous menu and I have never seen this issue happen. I've played him for hours straight through missions and TFs and must have used popmenus triggered by popmenus at least 100 times in one gaming session and never once have I lost control.

My first menu is triggered by a bind which prompts for a power that he will drop of of his Nova/Dwarf Form and activate, then the menu loads another menu which prompts him for which form he wants to go back to.

It's been working ever since I started doing PopMenus months ago. I have never, EVER seen any of the control problems you're quoting. I don't think the problem is as simple as "Calling a PopMenu from within another PopMenu causes your controls to stop working". If I had to make a guess, I would say it might only come up when using chained menus with multiple submenus as my Warshade quick-switch menus are all only top-level, no submenus.

Even then, in my early iterations of my BadgeReporter menu which were up to three levels deep, the different categories (Accolades, Exploration, Gladiators, etc.) were all separate menu files and were all called from a completely separate simple top-level PopMenu and I never noticed the problem there either... Maybe if the PopMenu originating the call to a second PopMenu is multi-leveled and the command is in a submenu?

Not so simple.

The default QUICKCHAT menu file contains multiple separate menus.

You can see this by using these commands:

/popmenu QuickChat
/popmenu Example

The "Example" menu is above the QuickChat menu in the text of the default QuickChat.mnu file.

If this project had anything at all to do with my ego, I might agree but it really doesn't. I started it or the sole purpose of making badge hunting easier in the game for me and anyone else who wanted to use it. I also hoped that someone with more time and/or ability could come by and assist on adding details. Snow Globe was about the only one that did so there didn't seem to be much more likelihood of evolution of the project beyond me simply adding the new stuff each new Issue. I don't consider this a threadjack at all, simply another developer adding his skills to the project.

andsoitallbegins took the basic framework and really ran with it! He added all the things I had previously posted that I would like to add. Things that I just made a spin-off menu for because I didn't have the time to do the whole menu like that.

I'm going to give his menu a good trial run and see how it goes. It also looks a little on the large size so people running COH in 1280 or less resolution may have troubles with it as Snow Globe mentioned he had already with my more basic menu.

I'm more than willing to maintain the basic, "low-rez" version that I started if andsoitallbegins wants to keep maintaining his version. I have no problems with sharing the credit. Heck, he even gave me credit right inside his menu so it's not like he's ignoring the origins.

Thanks andsoitallbegins! I'll be sure to let you know how it goes. It looks great from the screenshots!

How so? Any ideas to make it better? Is it just that are there just so many of them? Does it take too much to get down to the badges you need to find?

I generally don't use the BadgeReporter for finding the Exploration Badges, just for a quick peek at which ones I don't have which is why I hadn't bothered to put in LOCs for them in the first place. Vidiot Maps work much better for me to find the badges, except for the rare few troublesome ones.

I had a bit of time to waste so I got them all added into my copy of the next version. I'll test them out this weekend and see how everything's doing.

From a LockedOption count, we're up to 1198 badges displayed by the BadgeReporter! There's a badge for 1250 Badges. I'm not sure that if we get the rest of the I19 badges in we'll be at that number. We'll see.

Latest BadgeReporter PopMenu Tool stats:

• File Size: 149,319 bytes
• 133,149 Characters
• 8086 total lines
• 5356 Lines containing non-bracket PopMenu Code
• 169 Submenus
• 1198 total Badges displayed, hopefully without any repetition
• Lots and lots of my time spent on this thing!