seebs

I guess the problem is -- my error-bars for how likely something is to be a problem are HUGE. If I were going to just not do anything I'm unsure about, I wouldn't talk to people. EVER.

I need clear rules or explanations of what the boundaries are and why. I have NO instinct for this stuff -- brain's busted. I hate advice of the form "if you have to ask, don't", because they lead to everything being bowdlerized into nonsense and tripe.

There's not much that's DIRECTLY explicit, but...

1. There's character bios that say things like "((ERP ok))", because obviously there would be.
2. There are some which hint at things without saying them.
3. Tentacle Girl gets her powers from her close relationship with tentacles. (She has Tenebrous Tentacles and the plants power that looks like it...)

There's a few things where someone who is LOOKING for dirty will almost certainly see it, but if you aren't looking for it, there's no explicit words to tell you that it's dirty. You'd have to be bringing the dirty to the table to spot that.

If the answer is "don't publish that", I can just send copies to a couple of friends who will enjoy it anyway.

The arc, BTW, focuses on purging Pocket D of bad roleplaying. The enemy factions are <Pocket D Dark Pasts>, <Pocket D ERPers>, and <Pocket D Godmoders>. But as an example, one of the characters has as his bio:

Extremely Cheerful is cheerful, happy, or possibly frolicksome. He is a real man's man, IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN AND I THINK YOU DO.

There is no sexual content there. Seriously. Not a single sexual word there. There might be a bit of suggestive material in the dialogue for "Mary Sueccubus", but... Nothing that comes within MILES of the stuff I see every day in bios in-game.

Story's specific to Pocket D. Right now, I have the bad people who took it over having "remodeled" which is why it's suddenly the dance/rave converted warehouse for a couple of missions.

Ahh, but I wanted to keep the separate group tags. If I wanted a mission with both Council and 5th Column, I might still want them to have their own existing group tags.

Anyway, I "solved" it by splitting the factions into separate missions on smaller maps.

Silly me, I naively assumed that there would be access to pretty much all the maps. I've seen so many maps used (such as Atlas Park City Hall) in missions that I just assumed all of them would be available.

Ah, well. More backstory.

Say I have three custom groups, <Custom Group A>, <Custom Group B>, and <Custom Group C>.

1. Can I have both A and B show up as random spawns in the same map, without having their group name changed to <All Custom Groups>, so the A and B groups still look like themselves?

2. Can I have ONLY A and B show up, but not C?

Right now, I haven't found something other than <All Custom Groups>, so my dream of a map with various mobs formed from each of three custom groups is beyond me.

For various reasons, it would suit my story excellently to use part or all of Pocket D as a setting.

And yes, there is a good in-story reason for there to be combat in Pocket D. That being, in fact, the entire point of the story.

But I can't find the map in the list; is it just not there, or am I not looking in the right places?

I'm probably missing something obvious, but I've been a bit surprised by some of the words which have gotten descriptions rejected for "profanity". (Including a common synonym for "cheerful". Even assuming someone meant the other meaning, is that really "profanity"? The people I know who use it as a self-descriptive term don't strike me as particularly profane.)

Long story short, as part of a humorous arc, I want to do a custom faction called <Pocket D ERPers>. I'm wondering how subtle/circumspect I have to be about the content; I was assuming that overt sexual language would be a problem, but after a couple of the things the MA interface tagged as "profanity", I'm wondering whether I simply overlooked the place where they said that any and all references to the notion that humans have some way of making more humans is completely banned.

Part of the problem, of course, is being true to the source material. Having seen someone roleplaying a pimp (and yes, there were other players filling in the implied other roles), I'm concerned that if I bowdlerize this too much I'll lose all verisimilitude.

I just ignore it.

Was selling something, don't remember what, last 5 sales were all 800k, I listed 'em at 750k and forgot about it. A while later, noticed in passing they were selling for 35k. Ignored it. Logged in a while later, got 800k each on all of them. Whatever.

Eyebeams: Hate 'em. Would love to have some way to specify something other than eyebeams for a few powers.

Martial Arts: Wouldn't mind a few punches or something in there with all the kicks. Ideally, you'd be able to pick some punches and some kicks.

General: It might make sense to move these to a pair of settings; instead of going to a single pop-up menu of "punch/original, punch/tintable, kick/original, kick/tintable", have a selection menu for choice of animation, and then a second menu for coloration of that (disabled if you can't colorize a given animation).

All the things like FFG, robot summons: Would like to be able to pick which arm I type on to summon. That's because there's options to create a character with a robotic right arm, but not to create a character with a robotic left arm. It would look awesome to be able to have the human hand typing on the side of the mechanical arm, but that's not currently possible. (And I'd think this would be an exceptionally easy animation set to allow, because you'd just be flipping the default animation?)

Blazing Arrow for archery: Please make it more like "set up arrow, then fire quickly" and less like "draw arrow, admire it lovingly for a few minutes, then as an afterthought let it go". I'd rather see, say, pulling an arrow out, manipulating it to cause it to light, then firing it quickly. That'd look a lot less like my archer is a totally self-important jerk. ... hang on, leave it alone, it fits his RP.

I just realized, I shouldn't be using macros for this, I should be using popmenu.

As to "waste of development time": If they were going to do this, they would do it by budgeting out how much money they could make selling the app or the service, then funding the development from that, and hiring new developers to do it, so it would not in any way cost development time from the main game (or at least, it would pay in more than it took out).

I actually think this would be a lot more viable in CoH than it would be in a game like WoW, for the simple reason that WW/BM slots are finite in CoH. In a game where you can easily have 645 auctions up personally, an iphone app is going to be pretty useless, frankly. In a game where you have 10-15 per character, it's actually pretty practical.

That said, I doubt I'd pay money for it, so I don't know that there's enough demand.

Ooh, okay. Hadn't thought of quotes, should have. Thanks.

So I could make a file that bound a bunch of macro definitions to keys, load it, hit the keys, then load over it again with bindings I like better. I mention this because it's pretty hard to do some of the things I want.

On a vaguely related note: Right-click and edit of macros can't seem to handle <> (as in <emote foo>), because it turns them into &lt; so they turn into literal < that are spoken instead of leaving them as < to have their magic effect. Is that a known "feature"?

Specifically:

Is there a way in-game to create a macro which itself uses $$, or do I have to do that by editing files?

The issue is that, if I do:

/macro foo petsay_name Bob Hello $$ petsay_name Jim Hey there.

this actually creates a macro "foo" with the first command, then trying to execute the second command.

Is there an obvious way to "escape" the $$? For that matter, is there an easy way to just put these in a file and load it, so I can use an editor?

For thematic reasons, I'm doing elec/storm. I'm not sure how to make good use of it, though. So far, I have lightning bolt, gale, ball lightning, and snow storm. I'm not sure whether I want/need Charged Bolts -- right now my attack chain feels a bit anemic, but I'm going to have plenty of buttons to press soon enough.

Is O2 Boost a must-have power, or pretty optional, or what? I'm not quite clear on the priorities for corruptors. I looked some at storm/elec defender guides, but they didn't seem to quite fit the feel of the corruptor archetype.

Since everything I play flies (for some combination of RP reasons and I LOVE FLYING), I'm looking at that, and so far it looks like I probably want stamina for endurance reasons, so I'm looking at:

6 Hover
8 Swift
10 Steamy Mist
12 Zapp
14 Fly
16 Freezing Rain
18 Health
20 Stamina
22 Tesla Cage
24 Hurricane
26 Volatic Sentinel
28 Thunder Clap
30 Short Circuit (?)

I omitted Aim because I personally suck at powers like that -- I never remember to use them, so even if it's a good power on paper, the practical reality is that I'll never remember it. I omitted Thunderous Blast because the "and then you're useless" powers don't appeal to me.

What obvious improvements have I missed?

Also, if you have an Intel graphics driver, it's quite possible that you have onboard/integrated video that won't be able to handle the game very well. (If this is a desktop, this is a time to think about buying a video card for it.)

Sorry, my bad, I had a crafting binge last night.

I don't think it's a bug. It's not random, either.

When all ranged attacks are on cooldown, pets run into melee so they can make more attacks.

I have gotten around this by issuing a "follow" when they make their second ranged attack (for the little guys), then waiting a couple of seconds, then issuing an attack order again.

Bots:

SHOVER-01, SHOVER-02, SHOVER-03.
PUSHER-01, PUSHER-02.
CLIPPY-01.

The lowbies were named by Beloved Spouse, we were running stuff together and SOMEONE felt that being randomly pushed while trying to use ranged attacks wasn't totally fun. I explained that pushing will protect you from the terrible secret of space, and the bots were named.

CLIPPY-01...

/macro Clip /petsay_name CLIPPY It looks like you're trying to subjugate your enemies! Would you like help?

... What? I'm a VILLAIN.