srmalloy

I definitely have to agree here; dropping VG and watching the electric spheres pop up again and again as the Lockdown proc fires off is such a delight.

Start->Run, 'charmap', select the Unicode characterset, click near the bottom of the scrollbar once to make 'ū' visible, double-click it to put it in the 'Characters to copy' textbox, then highlight it, ctrl-C to copy, then paste it into the captcha textbox. Not really convenient, but it works.

Given that the code for creating an email from the data a user puts in a form already exists, and good coding practice would have separated the form fill-out from the email creation, the ability to create an email with arbitrary content would have existed with a minor code enhancement. Similarly, a mechanism already existed for a class of objects (badges) to be 'claimed' and award an unlockable in-game effect; creating a pseudo-object with the same function to use as an email attachment allows the devs to create an entirely new type of reward -- one that can be 'bought' by one character and given to another.

One thing along those lines would be to unlock the incarnate logo when you unlock the matching slot -- get the Incarnate Alpha Chest Symbol unlocked when you unlock your alpha slot, etc.

Also remember that, with few exceptions, the world background is tissue-paper thin outside of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles, so if you have an idea for a character background that doesn't really fit into Paragon City's backstory, give them a background and name from another country and foot out a reason for them to have come to Paragon City.

For example, when I discovered that CoX supported Unicode, allowing me to create chat binds in foreign scripts like Cyrillic and hiragana, I created a number of hero and villain characters whose background was from the Soviet Union, creating state-sponsored hero groups like 'Народная Армия' (People's Army), villains like 'Генерал Зима' (General Winter) and 'Красная Угроза' (Red Menace), and doing some digging online to find actual Russian research institutions like Институт эволюционной физиологии и биохимии им. И.М. Сеченова (I.M. Sechenov Institute for Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry) to use in character backgrounds, and picked character names like 'Deva Molniya' (Lightning Girl, an Elec/Elec Dominator), 'Brigadyr' (Taskmaster, a Bots/Dark Mastermind), 'Yadernii Ogon' (Nuclear Fire, a Fire/Rad Controller), and 'Umsvenniy Ulan' (Mental Lancer, a Psi/EM Blaster).

Could be the 'Devastation Beam' referred to in the banter on the Admin channel...

It won't work for the rigid katana scabbard; however, there are historical records of an over-the-shoulder scabbard for rapiers, which were a flexible tube of leather to protect the blade. Because the scabbard could bend during the draw, you didn't have to get the blade completely out of the scabbard in a striaght line. Resheathing it was more problematic, and couldn't be done quickly, but the presumption was that you didn't put it away unless you didn't expect to have to use it again while trying to resheath it.

You miss out on his missions, which is a pity -- you should do his missions at least once -- but if you choose Kalinda rather than Burke for your first contact redside and do her missions, when you reach levels 20 and 30 you will be able to call her to get your cape and aura missions. Blueside, you have to physically go to the City Representative in AP to get those missions.

And consider that if his father hadn't moved shortly before he was born, we would now know Shakespeare as the "Bard of Snitterfield"...

AR/EM, Psi/EM, and DP/EM -- they all do pretty much exactly that at the pavilion. Particularly with the Psi/EM and laughing when the Minotaurs and Cyclopes kick off Unstoppable, and my damage stays in three digits while everyone else's tanks, pumping Psychic Tornado the width of the pavilion.

Oh, yes. And taking the Munitions pool and slotting LRM with three Dmg/Rng HOs, two Accs, and a Rech, Boost Range cranks it up to 'See that dot?' potential.

The Holy Fathers of the Perpetual Railgun would agree with you...

I should have expected this; I remember noticing with one of my characters doing Mender Ramiel's first mission (where I would cack the AVs just to watch them go down) that the fast-tick rains were ugly, due to the damage bonus going off with every tick of damage -- you could almost see the targets melt in the rain.

After all, "The enemy of my enemy is my fall-guy."

From being on several BAFs and Rikti mothership raids where the lag has gotten ugly, the problem appears to be the use of powers from the Destiny slot -- the first Destiny power doesn't add much lag, the second shows a noticeable slowdown in server response, and the third turns things into slo-mo puppet work.

Making the Destiny auras on others "extra" effects to be hidden with the graphics option toggle to hide extra effects might help, but it would have to be tracked at the server level, so the server didn't try to manage sending dozens of 'Character X has this type of bubble" notifications, but the server would still have to manage who has what bubble and send updates to everyone that doesn't have the options flag set. Making the bubble something that only you see around yourself would work better; that would cut down the recordkeeping of who sees what, although the purists would likely creeb about it...

Now, if they could just get Phil and Kaja Foglio and Cheyenne Wright to do concept art for new costume pieces for it...

Hats! Having a nize hat is important. Remember, any plan vhere you loze your hat is a bad plan.

Oh, Ghu, yes; watching Volcanic Gases with the proc in it is utterly giggleworthy. Watching six mobs locked down with it, four with the electric ball around them indicating the proc hit them... Joining a Rikti Mothership raid with my Earth/Fire Dom, toe-bombing Volcanic Gases, and watching it lock down mobs left and right, including hitting the proc to let me get a Rikti Magus held and keep him there while my pet and the other participants wasted him. Best single investment of reward merits I've ever made.

No -- first, have it teleport you to the mission that's displayed in your Navigation bar whether or not it's set; if you have no mission set, <i>then</i> prompt you.

Add to that fixing targeting so that anything that is behind you and "invisible" because it's outside the cutoff of your view frustrum is <b>also</b> untargetable. I'm getting very, very tired of running up to a door, sliding the mouse up to click on the door, and have the pointer turn red because I'm now targeting my pet, who is nowhere visible on the screen, but because it's right up behind me it's intercepting my mouse clicks, so I have to play 'how do I twist my mouse view to <i>not</i> target my pet?' games to be able to enter a mission.

It doesn't defeat the purpose; what it does is highlight an aspect of the game that shows that it was rushed out the door before all the tools to manage it were in place.

I did a Lambda today where one of the league members had run out to the gate into the Lambda facility and was doing the Robot Dance in the background of Marauder's cutscene. It was hilarious...

There is no 'overkill'. There is only "Open fire" and "I need to reload".

There was a 3rd-person racing game from Akklaim, 'Re-Volt', that had you driving RC cars around 'full-size' courses -- the interior of a museum, the streets of a suburb, a supermarket, etc. As an add-in, it had a 'track editor', which let you place pre-defined track sections to make a race course.

Now, I'm sure everyone can, by now, describe in their sleep the 'building blocks' of the office, cave, and lab maps; it's clear that these maps are made by gluing together standard building blocks. However, the mechanisms for doing this aren't user-friendly -- everyone has seen the odd 'black wall' in a map, or watched a mob get knocked outside the map. When I've asked the devs about it, they've told me that the tiles from which the maps are built don't fit together cleanly, and require cleanup after they're positioned to make a map. It seems to me that if the devs could get the map tiles cleaned up enough to where an editor could let players drop tiles into position and have them link together, we could see an explosion in the available maps.

Initially, there would have to be some sort of 'vetting' mechanism, where you could create a map using an offline tool, upload the tile arrangement to NCSoft under your account, and an automated tool on their end would check it for things like having corridors open to limbo, bad links, etc., and would then put it into an area where you could use it in an AE mission, where people would be able to rate the maps, with top-rated maps getting picked up for use as 'stock' maps.

Once a 'snap-fit' map system was in place, it would then be possible for the devs to create an automated map creator, where you fed it a loose description (office tileset, three floors) and have it spit back a randomly-generated custom map, so we wouldn't keep seeing the same maps over and over and over again in tip and radio missions.