srmalloy

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I'm curious as well, since I couldn't see any difference. Both settings start you off with -1 enemies, and end with +1 enemies.

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This is why I like Staggered. I usually get a mix of even enemies to +2 enemies. I rarely get a -1 on Staggered.

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I switched several missions in my published arc from Staggered to Flat because I kept getting -2, -1, and even mobs, and no +1 or +2, with the Staggared option.

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I'd like a pop-up chat feature accessible in MA when tells are sent because I do not want to keep saving and exiting. I find it funny how annoyed some people get when a few seconds have passed before you are able to answer their tells because you are at the tailors changing your costume, or designing a mission and story arc in the Mission Architect. A pop-up chat feature similar to what skype has would work well.

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Up in the right-hand corner of the full-screen MA window, there is a red 'X' button that will close the window and end your MA session. Just to its left is a little icon that looks like two overlapping rectangles; click on that, and the MA window will switch down from full-screen, allowing you to resize it, just like the 'Restore Down' button works with a standard Windows application window that's been maximized. Once the MA window has been un-maximized, you can resize and drag it to expose your chat window and respond to chat. The window position and size is remembered, so you can toggle quickly back and forth to use the chat once you have the window positioned and sized appropriately.

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I have encountered this sporadically. Returning to the objective later, and the bomb will no longer be an invalid target.

I don't know why this is happening, but I have a suspicion. Does your map contain a large number of set features or goals?

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That map contains 7 objectives.

But I found the source of this problem. It appears that I had the enemy difficulty set to Single for this objective. Single is bugged in that it puts no guard enemy next to the Destructible Object. The guard enemy *must* be defeated before you can attack the Destructible Object. So, Any setting (Easy, Medium or Hard) will work, but Single will not work. When I changed the setting to Easy, then one guard enemy appeared and after defeating that enemy, I could destroy the object. Later I went back and bumped it to Hard, which put three guard enemies next to the object.

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That's not quite correct; the guard enemy must be attacked before the destructible object (possibly damaged, not just attacked; I'm not sure, since I never got a complete miss while testing). I was testing the one arc I'd published (#19340, "Through a Portal, Darkly", plug plug ), and I found that if I targeted the guard(s) and opened up on them with Full Auto, M30, or Buckshot, the destructible object would a) take damage and b) become targetable.

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Hmm...maybe color the maps different colors to indicate where each type is?

Also let's keep in mind that it may be coming out in the middle because the map itself says you can't place that particular event in the back. Many people simply aren't looking at the map specs to see what can and cannot be placed where.

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They'd need to fix the map preview too. Still quite a few maps that don't really show you the map setup [and when you have divergent elevator pathes, as is prone to happen with tech labs, it's not clear].

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Not to mention that a fair number of maps show up mirrored -- you can tell from the asymmetrical rooms that show inverted on the map display in the MA, but everything looks normal when played.

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I guess I should post it here too. I started a website for sharing and downloading custom content. The url is www.CustomCoH.com

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Unfortunately, when I tried to save myself time by taking a set of custom villains and the custom villain group containing them, making copies, and editing the .critter and .cvg files with the new names and 'allegiance' (I needed two separate groups of soldiers with different uniforms), the second set of custom villains and their group did not show up in the list of available custom villains or groups, as if the server kept track of what I'd created and didn't know about my additions, even after completely exiting and restarting the client several times.

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LOL! Those ninja quotes are great. Clearly not good with the English language.

I've seen a lot of bad spelling and grammar so far, but nothing quite to that extreme.

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You realize that this opens up the potential for a whole genre of MA arcs built around deliberately ridiculous dialog for its comedic value...

"Studdard isn't half the pizza delivery guy Clay Aiken is, and he won anyway! Did you know frogs only dance if Sammy Hagar is singing lead with Van Halen? But now they don't dance because David Lee Roth makes babies cry!"
"When's dinner? I need to scratch my spleen!"
"The Warriors? They are a rash on the behind of evil! They reek of oatmeal and Aqua Velva! I wish they would sit on lit dynamite sticks and overpluck their eyebrows! Free James Brown! Who's got the remote?"

(dialog shamelessly stolen for illustration purposes from the Tales of Marga webcomic)

Arc Name: Through a Portal, Darkly
Author: @srmalloy
Publish Number: 19340
Morality: Heroic
Length: 5 Missions
Difficulty: Does not require a team
Description: The Council has raided a Portal Corp. warehouse and stolen equipment to build a portal generator; if they can open a portal to Reichsman's world, they can flood Paragon City with stormtroopers and overrun the heroes. They have to be stopped.

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Kind of like how saying Bloody in the U.K. is like dropping an F-bomb here.

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Lolz. Who told you that? This Englishman occasionally uses bloody in polite company.

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Now spaz, that can get a game banned .

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Ooooh... That's just.... I mean, Belgium, man, Belgium...

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Cool you guys found one of em. Keep looking though, the biggest Grandville easter egg has yet to be found

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Oh wow, busted.

Watch, it's probably up in the butt of Lord Recluse's statue.. lol.

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And you could get lost in there for weeks.

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..and I touched the AWESOME BUTTON! O

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Bad touch! BAD TOUCH!

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1. There is, at present, no tool in the game for removing badges and contacts from a character, once earned. Any system of side-switching is going to have to overcome or work around the hurdle of how certain achievements are labeled. The matter of level-dependent badges would have to be worked out (for instance, if your level 35 Mastermind switches over to Paragon City, should he even be given the level 20 "Defender of Truth" badge that all Heroes get?

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Why change them? When you reach 10/20/30/40/50, you earn the level badge for the side you're on at the time. Some switching would have inherent benefits -- heroes can earn the Atlas Medallion accolade at a low level, while the equivalent accolade for villains requires participating in the LRSF, while villains can get the Demonic accolade at a low level but the hero equivalent is... painful... to earn.

There would need to be some mechanism to handle Ancillary/Patron pools; a character that switched sides would be able to continue to select powers from their chosen pool, but if they ever did a respec, they'd have to drop the pool; the devs would have to make Ancillary pools for the villain ATs and Patron pools for the hero ATs; a hero turned villain would still have to do a patron arc to get access to the patron pools. And I expect that it's here that we'd see the maximum amount of screaming, depending on the way that the new pools got created.

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3. The character would have to be booted out of the SG or VG he's presently in, as well as any team he's on, which means he'd have to be kicked out of any associated chat channels.

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See #5 below.

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4. There will almost certainly be a minimum level for side-switching. Logically, if you could swap over from Hero to Villain at level 1, they'd just open up the Archetypes to both sides, right?

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They could very well do both. If the devs implement side-switching, there's no real game-mechanic reason why it would be horribly unbalancing to, say, play a level-3 Brute in Atlas Park.

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5. There will probably be some kind of Task/Strike Force associated with side-switching, which presents a problem all its own. How do you make sure that all the players on that team really want to switch sides? Given that it would probably strip them of all their possessions it would have potential for griefing unless the Task/Strike Force technology is used. (Example: if side-switching were a regular mission, you could try to lure somebody on your team and not tell them that it's the side-switching mission.)

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Now you're inventing a problem that doesn't exist, unless you really believe that when a team finishes a Respec trial all the team members are immediately forced to start a respec. Completing the prerequisite for side-switching earns you a token that you have to go to a specific contact to claim, just as you do for earned respecs. When you claim the side-switch, it could be handled just like a server transfer -- the character is taken out of the side they're on, losing any group membership, and then stuck back in on the other side. Since you would have to be logged out for the process to complete, that would take care of any team membership issues.

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6. Access to doors, trams, ferries, helicopters, Pocket D, bases, and other inter-zone travel would have to be rigorously tested so that you could not (for instance) side-switch and then use the Valkyrie Pack Mission Teleporter to zap your "heroic villain" from Steel Canyon to your mission door in Sharkhead Isle.

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All your missions except for RWZ and Cimerora missions would have to get blown away; you should keep your contacts from the other side, with the devs adding some kind of rejection text for a contact to use if you call them and you're not on the right side to get missions from them, the same way Daedalus and Sister Airlia (sp?) do if you're on the wrong side and try to talk to them.

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7. Buffs and debuffs and mezzes of all kinds would probably be stripped away as you switched sides, particularly Confuse. (Cast Confuse on somebody and get them to switch sides... suddenly your Corruptor is a Hero, but he's Confused, so he can lay waste to newbies in Atlas Park...)

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Making the side-switching work via the code that handles server transfers would address that, since you'd be logged off the character while the transfer occurs, and the transfer generally takes long enough for buffs/mezzes to fade.

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8. Side-switching would almost certainly not take place in any PVP zone. The cooperatives zones, however, seem like good candidates: Midnighter Club, Pocket D, Rikti War Zone.

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See #5 above; having to go to a particular contact in order to get transferred from one side to the other would let the devs control where it happens. A contact in the Agincourt Longbow base in Nerva would be the obvious place to put the villain-to-hero transfer contact; given that there's a redside mission that sends you to a Boomtown in reconstruction, putting the hero-to-villain contact in Boomtown would be a decent choice.

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9. Your first contacts are given to you for free when you begin, but almost every other contact from that point is given by your other contacts. If switching sides means you lose all your old contacts, there must be some way to grant the side-switched character access into this self-perpetuating chain. Content for the side-switched character would have to be created, probably in the form of a "Welcome to Paragon City, you untrustworthy turncoat, here's how you can prove your loyalty to us." This is more difficult than it sounds; in order to dispense a mission to your Paragon City Brute, that contact is going to need to a) be easy to get to, no matter what level you are; b) have missions you can do at a wide range of levels (eg, against Lost/Rikti, Council, or COT), c) give you access to one or more ordinary contacts fairly quickly.

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When you transfer, you keep all your old contacts, but they stop talking to you (see #6 above). The game mechanics would automatically give you a detective or broker contact when you entered a zone, so you'd be able to do radio/paper missions to start setting up your contact list. If that means you're pretty limited for a while, that's what you get for changing sides; it takes a while for people to trust you. If you switch sides before level 5 or 6, you'd automatically get the first-tier contact that any starting character gets.

And since no one has designated the Riktified lines yet...

Designation: Buck. Objective: Relations with women. -- Kill Bill

Food: Royale with cheese. Flavor: Tasty. -- Pulp Fiction

Plan: Make him a offer. Refusal: Impossible. -- The Godfather

Your speech: Directed at me? -- Taxi Driver

Show me: The money! -- Jerry Maguire

Elementary: Dear Watson. -- Any of several Sherlock Holmes movies

Necessity: Larger watercraft. -- Jaws

Admiration: Clever girl. -- Jurassic Park

Gentlemen: Cannot fight here! Location: War Room! -- Dr. Strangelove

My name: Hedley. -- Blazing Saddles

An interesting bit of trivia is that "Elementary, my dear Watson" does not appear in any of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle, yet it has become the signature quote of the character.

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Been playing since closed beta and now you guys wait until I cancel my account to finally have a worthwhile Vet reward...

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Oh, so you were the one whose account the devs put the "No really good vet rewards while this account is live" flag on...

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So let's look at the two you can't easily replace with temp powers - Teleport and Super Speed. Teleport temp powers are rare and to the best of my knowledge not possible to attain on a permanent basis (for one Siren's Call has to be in your faction's control, and the other is a villain-only temp that's not renewable - yet, anyway).

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There's a hero-side teleport temp power that you get from one of the mid-20s contacts, I forget whom, but the power is a mixed bag -- you teleport and arrive phased, then phase in over a couple of seconds, and the power goes away when you turn in the mission. One of my characters hung onto the completed mission for more than a year just to be able to keep the power for its occasional utility.

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I think they should just allow people to buy Vet rewards early. That way you can wait get em for free, or if your one of the noobs screaming DOOOOM!! you can just open up your wallet and pay $5 per reward.

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Now wait a sec. I paid 720 dollars to get the 60 month reward after "waiting" for 5 years, and a newbie gets them all for $100. Granted I understand that would be upfront and I could see a discount being applied for shelling it out in a lump sum, but that is one hell of a disparity.

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Except that they wouldn't be getting the five years of game play that went along with your $720...

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I can already think of ways to make certain builds even better by simply dropping one travel power-pre req.
Of course if you never put anything in your pre-req than the default slot then, yeah you really aren't getting much back.

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It depends on the travel power. Hasten is useful enough to take for itself even if you don't take anything else from the Super Speed pool. For example, Air Superiority is an attack that has the useful characteristic of Knockdown, which puts the target on its back and not attacking -- but it requires that you be up in melee to use it; characters whose most effective role has them standing back from the melee only get use out of it if there's a leaker from the Tankers and Scrappers on a team; for them, another power would be of greater use to them, and this would free up that power choice. It also increases some of the flexibility in power choices in the low levels if you're taking Stamina early -- instead of trying to fit a travel power, its prerequisite, and three powers from the Fitness pool into the twelve powers you get by 20, you only need to find space for four. On the other hand, as you get up into the higher levels, having the power choice freed may not give you much of an advantage, depending on which powers you want to take and what levels they unlock at; you may find that, having been able to take powers two levels sooner because of not needing the travel power prerequisite, you're stuck at a higher level where the power choices open to you aren't ones you want.

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To all those like myself whose glass just went from half-full to full,
WIN. To all those whose glass is seems is always half-empty, what would YOU suggest as a meaningful reward that doesn't alienate three quarters of the CoX population?

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Perhaps something outside the game mechanics completely, such as five server transfers...
Or, if the database and game engine could be made to support it, a slot that you could allocate to any one of your veteran powers -- being able to slot a Recharge enhancement in Assemble the Team, or an Accuracy enhancement in Nemesis Staff, or the like, would add variability to the effects. But I expect that's a lot harder to do, with the various database changes that would have to be made to allow it to happen.

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Your Digsite description reminded me of the ever deeper circles of Dante's Inferno. That thought itself is chilling and makes me really want to see it. If the devs could capture that feeling of abandoned hope as one works their way down the dig...wow, just wow

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I don't know if the CoH engine will do it, but if it could, make each level you descend into the pit reduce the saturation on all colors being rendered, so that as you go deeper into the pit, the world around you, and even the most colorfully-garbed villains, fade into shades of grey with only your powers bringing brief splashes of color into the area.

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I'd just like to be reassured that there are female versions of the costume items, and that they look good. Considering that a valkyrie is traditionally female, it's odd that the pictures have focused almost entirely on male characters.

But the mission teleporter is tempting, even with the two hour recharge.

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Here is a link to the city scoop article I did on the pack a few weeks back. There is a screenshot of the female Valkyrie set

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...umber=12792403

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That's why I said "almost entirely". That's the only picture of a female valkyrie outfit I've seen. If that's all there is to the female set, I'm not really interested.

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I'm kind of disappointed that the Valkyrie helmet has neither hair (for females) nor any sort of neck guard in its options, as the samurai and Roman helmets do.

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Subjective:

Please, for the love of anything holy, NO MORE BABY NEW YEAR! And while we're at it, since the V-Day event is coming up, NO MORE SNAPTOOTH!

BNY is just, to put it bluntly, a pain in the butt. Escorts are amongst the least desirable mission types in the game, so what happens? Put it in for the event mission type.

How could this be resolved? Rather than actually taking BNY to the mission door, simply let the mission end once Snaptooth has been defeated. No need to escort him to the door, no need to deal with the rather...eccentric...escort code, no need to deal with hairpulling frustration.

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Actually, from about two days into the event the first year we had the ski chalet, I've never had a problem with keeping the brat following me, except for the one time I deliberately left Shadow Fall on to see what it would take to keep him in trail, which was painful.

I do think that a couple of changes could be made to the mission itself, however...

1) Change BNY to be 'recapturable', the way some hostages are in regular missions, so that people running speed missions can't just dash in, frag Snaptooth, and run back out dragging BNY through dozens of Redcaps. If he pulled off to be recaptured by any Redcaps you ran past, it would make it necessary to clear out most of the central room to be able to get him clear. That won't affect speed runs, since a high-level character could wipe the chamber in short order.

2) Increase the reward by adding 5 canes to each reward (to a total of 10 if you just want canes) and make all BNY mission mobs use the GM code. That would eliminate the 'player too high' issue, ensure that people who want badges and people who want XP could be on the same team, and level the playing field for everyone. It would, however, make speed runs harder, which is why I would raise the reward.

The presents in the zones should also spawn snowmen under the GM code; I rememeber the first year, when my level-12 character could hit the present near the Mutant quartermaster in Cap au Diable and get level-19 snowmen. Flattening that would, I think, result in more people wanting to clear the 'naughty' spawns instead of running from +6 mobs they can't hit.

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Appendix 3: Life Up in the Cut

First of all, consider Kinetics' only healing power: Transfusion. In order to use it, you have to practically stand toe-to-toe with an opponent. That's a spot that would make other types of Controllers run for cover, but it's where you gain back your Hit Points! The risky behavior of getting up in the cut is built into Kinetics from level one.

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I feel that I should point out a two-word omission here. Your comment on Transfusion should read "In order to use it on yourself..." I have found that Transfusion gives a /Kin Controller a level of utility on teams that surpasses the Emp, Rad, or Dark AoE heals -- you can stand back with the Blasters, using Siphon Power to bump them toward the damage cap, and still throw heals into the clot of villains around the Tanker(s)/Scrapper(s) that don't know they're defeated yet. Unlike the other three AoE heals, you don't have to run up into melee to heal the DPS crew; you can take a more static position and still deal healing to the group in melee.

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Ask Agent Ruby:

One of the things that many players will want to ask you about is the difficulties with in the past is using some of the higher-end effects, such as High water effects, FSAA Depth of Field, and other settings with ATI graphics cards in general. Do these settings still cause problems with City of Heroes/ Villains? If so, are they being addressed?

Thanks for stopping by our forums!

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Great question - there are some things still being tackled, but being a CoH player myself, I can tell you that there have been a lot of improvements over time. A few things to point out:

First, AMD releases a new CATALYST driver every month with performance and feature improvements, so it's always a good idea to keep your drivers up to date

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Now that ATI has signed an agreement with nVidia regarding its PhysX physics engine, will ATI be making PhysX an integrated part of the Catalyst drivers, or will it be a separate software product?

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Ask Agent Ruby: (Thats so RP, but to the question) I just Bought the new ATI HD4870 X2 and I was wondering where i can find some great wall papers that actually fit a 2560x1600 Resolution? Hopefully something cool, I remember getting wall papers and a screensaver on my old graphics card but not on this one..... I was sad

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That's a tough one - we have wallpaper on our site, but nothing close to that resolution. That would be a very tough one to find options on...

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For high-resolution wallpapers, you might want to put search terms like "Dual monitor wallpaper" into Google; I can find sites like 2560x1600 Wallpapers and The Ultimate List of 2560x1600 Wallpapers. Also, 1920x1200 wallpapers have the same aspect ratio as 2560x1600, so they won't distort when stretched to fit your screen.

If you like astronomical images and are willing to do some editing work on your own, you can look for the high-resolution images taken from various telescopes. A good source for images is the Astronomy Picture of the Day site; the large images behind the daily picture (such as this image of the Trumpler 16 open star cluster in the Carina Nebula, as well as other images linked in the descriptions of each day's image, are often higher resolution than even your display -- the Trumpler 16 image, for example, is 1788x4000. Putting 'nebula' into the search engine at Google Images, then restricting returns to 'Extra Large' images, will net you images like this 6000x6000 image of the Orion Nebula or this 4877x3815 image of the Pleiades Cluster, or the Eagle Nebula, showing the "Pillars of Creation" popularized by images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Misc

Castle says: “The [IO Set Bonus] rule [of 5] is based on the NAME of the bonus, not the numeric effect. If you use the Combat Monitor, you can see the name of each bonus.”

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Um,does this mean that you could only have,say,5 recharge bonuses from sets no matter their value?

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From the description, it sounds as if you can't have more than five "Large Recharge Bonus" effects, or more than five "Small Recharge Bonus" effects, or more than five "Minor Recharge Bonus" effects, but you could have five of each one, as opposed to being limited to five Recharge bonuses in toto.

I do wonder whether, given that "Large", "Small", and "Minor" appear to be numerically different values of set bonus in different sets, the back end is smart enough, should the situation occur, to take a case where a player had six Large bonuses for, say, 11%, 9%, 9%, 7%, 7%, 6%, and 5%, to drop the smallest of the Large bonuses, rather than it being random or in some arcane order not determinable from outside.

I'm not sure that this is a weapon customization suggestion per se, and I don't know if it's practical to do.

There are a number of the Halloween costume powers where the model the costume is taken from uses a weapon. I think it would add a little additional flavor to the costumes if, when the character activated a power that used the same type of weapon as the costume's model (i.e., any attack from the Assault Rifle set or the temporary Beanbag or Holy Shotgun Shells powers while you have the Nemesis Soldier Costume power active) that the model's weapon would be used. So, in the above example, your character, looking like a Nemesis soldier, would draw a Nemesis rifle to make those attacks. If it was a power inconsistent with the costume's weapon, the character's effect would be displayed as normal (i.e., claws with the Nemesis Soldier costume active).