srmalloy

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I don't understand why you're making it even easier to travel to a mission. At least considering giving it a very long recharge timer.

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Um... you enjoy spending a lot of time traveling to missions?


*waits impatiently for the PC version of the power*

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It doesn't take very long to travel to missions. Killing all zone travel makes too many zones vacant which is not good.

Encountering other players is important and brings more socializing to the game.

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I suspect that it will be a 'port to mission door from anywhere in zone' power, as it would be more difficult to set up the power so that it transferred you to the mission zone and left you at the mission door than it would be to port you to the mission door from wherever you are in the zone. The former would hit both blueside and redside equally, while the latter would impact redside a lot harder, since a much higher proportion of redside missions are in-zone.

Has anyone else gotten both a trick and a treat from a single knock? I've had a number of doors where -- playing solo with no one else visible doing the doors in my area -- I will knock on a door, hear the *bling* sound, get one or more rewards, then a couple of seconds later hear the *clunk* sound, and see the door(s) open in front of me to disgorge a trick spawn. This has happened in Peregrine Island, Founder's Falls, Steel Canyon, and St. Martial, so it's not just blueside or restricted to one particular zone.

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For any given character, the timers are, IIRC, 10 seconds between door clicks and 5 minutes between clicking the same door. There does not appear to be any sort of timer preventing multiple characters from clicking on the same door in rapid succession; I was on a team yesterday where we were stacking 2-3 trickspawns to get good AoE payoff. Also note that each door is a separate entity -- if you go to the front of a skyscraper where there is a panel of four doors, you can click on each one at the 10-second interval, then all four are 'used' and you have to go elsewhere.

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Apparently they are also level-keyed, I presume to prevent griefing. A level 41 in Martial, I find, will not be able to ToT at any door- (s)he'll have to go to Grand. I haven't tested this across the full level range, but it holds true for my 40+ and 50 chars redside.

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The doors have been level-keyed from the first Halloween event, although it appears that the devs have made one change that makes it better for ToTers -- I remember from the first Halloween event that if you were ToTing in a 10-19 zone and knocked on a door, that was what you would get -- mobs that could be anywhere from level 10 to 19. Now you're getting spawns appropriate for your level/team composition.

However, it would be even better if the devs could make the trick spawns use the invasion-spawn code, which would let them remove the level blocking, so any players could team together regardless of level or zone, and it would also reduce some of the griefing capability, since people would no longer be able to drag level 39 mobs over to level 31 players at a nearby door.

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This Trick or Treating... can it be done at any doors, or ones that are specifically slated for this event? Because any of them I try it says, "You cannot enter" and that's it. Any information would be appreciated.

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Also they have timers so that each person can only click so many doors per minute and each door can be clicked only so many times per minute. The timers are 30 and 60 seconds I seem to recall.

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For any given character, the timers are, IIRC, 10 seconds between door clicks and 5 minutes between clicking the same door. There does not appear to be any sort of timer preventing multiple characters from clicking on the same door in rapid succession; I was on a team yesterday where we were stacking 2-3 trickspawns to get good AoE payoff. Also note that each door is a separate entity -- if you go to the front of a skyscraper where there is a panel of four doors, you can click on each one at the 10-second interval, then all four are 'used' and you have to go elsewhere.

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I wouldn't worry about adding names or anything in. In fact, blatant photoshopping might be a distractor. I just put my character's name in the file name of all the shots ("Midnight flux front.jpg", and the like) to help whoever's sorting them out. For those that make the finals, I'm sure the pictures will be presented in such a fashion to prevent confusion about who's in the picture. Just crop it down to a good looking picture that shows the character well.

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Besides cropping to various sizes, the only thing I did to mine was to bump the gamma a bit -- screenshots from CoV tend to come out dark -- to bring out a little detail in the image.

Action Shot
Biography

Having CoX support Unicode allows for a lot of tasty bits of characterization...

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I am the Terracotta Warrior...

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"Haniwa" was already taken?

And there are the occasional "How did I get here?" situations...

Sometimes even the best Masterminds have their henchmen go a little funny...

Sometimes you actually see PPD investigating crimes...

And you can find civilians who are scared of the strangest things...

When you start playing with temporary powers, you can get some really silly combinations...

And sometimes you fall asleep in the wrong place and get locked out...

If you're a 'flamer', do you get a little boost to your flight speed?

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/screenshot_ui 1

type '0' instead of '1' to turn it back off

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What I did -- after reading a post about someone else setting up their binds this way, was to create a file 'scrnshot.txt' with the following contents:

SYSRQ "screenshotui 0$$screenshot"
SHIFT+SYSRQ "screenshotui 1$$screenshot"

With each new character I create, I load this bind file; pressing the Print Screen key takes a screenshot without the UI, and holding down SHIFT and pressing the Print Screen key takes a screenshot with the UI, and you don't have to remember which way you left the UI setting the last time you took a screenshot.

I was going through a directory of old pictures looking to see what I no longer needed, and I ran across this image, and my immediate thought was "Okay, I can see why that powerset never made it out of beta..." Obviously, I need to go to bed...

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Uh, they've never said Power Customization is undoable due to the engine. They've said that the amount of work it would take to make every single power in the game customizable is so massive that we'll never see it. I don't think building a new engine would fix that problem, as it would, again, require a butt-load of work, no?

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BABs recently posted a new engine wont solve the power customization problem.

The problem is the way the game itself was coded not in the way that it runs on the engine. We've already had an Engine update when we got CoV.

To give us the power customization they, to my understanding, would need to nearly completely rebuild the entire powers system and how it interacts with the AI.

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Close. What makes it so much work to do is that the animation artwork for all the power visuals has the color(s) of the powers drawn directly into the artwork. In order to make the color of, say, Energy Blast's snipe attack customizable, they would have to go through each piece of artwork for the power effect, redraw it with uncolored visuals, then create a mask for the application of the chosen colors of the power, then change the database structure for the power in a player's character data to store two color values for the primary and secondary colors of the power. And this would have to be done for every piece of artwork for every power in order to allow just the colors to be customized. Allowing you to customize the power animation would be rougher, because it would involve creating a new set of model animations for each body type for each customization, making sure that they integrate with the existing movement animations (which is the reason why the Katana animations that have the blade swung with one hand use the left hand, rather than the right, which all kendo and kenjutsu schools teach; it was an artifact of making the animations work with the existing movement animations).

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Day Jobs: My question about this is, what if you don't log off in the same place every day? Or better yet, what about when you loose conection to the game and you don't actully have controll over where you loged off at? How can a player maintain his or her day job? It kinda sounds like we're forced to log off in sertain areas if we want to maintain a spicific job and that's NOT something I'm looking forward to.

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From my reading, you get themed credit toward in-game benefits based on where your character is when they're not being actively played. If you want to maintain a fixed 'day job' for the character, you'll need to take them back to the same spot -- or at least the same-themed spot -- before you log out. I expect, for example, that any university would give you the same benefit.

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The Merit Rewards System: This one just confuses me, don't we allready have this?

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They're different from the Vanguard merits. You get these merits for completing Task or Strike Forces, and can trade quantities of them for specific recipes, or a smaller quantity to get a random recipe. Think of them as being like the strips of tickets that you win from games in an arcade, which you can take back to the operator to exchange for prizes, rather than having the games themselves award the prizes.

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New Invention Origin Sets: Have not liked Inventions. It looked good on paper but have more of a hassle than I care to deal with.

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I suspect that they're filling out some of the gaps in the sets -- for example, there are no Healing sets that give a bonus to Accuracy, even though several of the heal powers require that you hit a target to get the heal. Whether or not you use them is a personal choice; if you don't, that gives you more things you can sell on the market to get influence/infamy.

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new Costume Sets: Allways welcome! I love this, no complaints here.

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I'm interested in seeing whether any of the suggestions I made to Blue Steel at Comic-Con -- most of which involved using the existing costume pieces and masks in different ways to increase the number of effects you could get with the costume pieces -- show up. However, the lead time from Comic-Con may be too short for any of them to be implemented; I'll have to wait and see.

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a Patron Power Respec: This is an AWSOME thing. Now Villains will be able to change their Patron powers like Heroes are able to change their Archillary powers.

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It would be awesome if the patron pools were buffed to where they were comparable to the hero Ancillary power pools, and even more awesome if heroes got a set of pools similar to the villan Patron pools whle villains got non-patron Ancillary pools like the heroes, but adding a bunch of power pools, plus the story arcs for the hero Patron pools, is a lot of work, particularly with the move to the left coast and integrating new people into the development team. I really don't see that happening before the following issue at the earliest... but I can hope.

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Over all, I'm still overly excited about Mission Architect.

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We will be able to get an idea of what amount of effort actually goes into building a coherent story arc, which will for some of us give a better perspective on what it is we keep asking the devs to do in producing new content. I expect, though, that we're not going to have as much flexibility in design as the devs have with regard to spawn makeup and placement, in order to ensure that what gets created is comparable to the existing missions. And I don't think that we're going to be able to tweak spawn reactions much -- it would make missions harder, but it still bothers me when a runner goes charging off through another spawn, only to get dropped by a snipe attack that fires a bolt of fire/energy/electricity through the spawn, and none of them react. Or how no one in a room reacts to a door opening, especially when they can't see anyone that might have opened the door. Another of the 'wait and see what we can do with it' categories.

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You guys are nutz. NOTHING should require you to do a TF 30-50 times. That is just horrible. If a pool C recipe costs 20 tokens, a typical TF/SF should reward at least 5 tokens. Anything more than that is just ridiculous.

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I think the idea is that different recipes cost different amounts.

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I think that would be a big mistake (devs putting a quantifiable value on certain rewards vs others).

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Then drive the token value off of a function based on the last five sales of the recipe at the auction house and the minimum-bid price of any posted recipes.

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Now, under the new system, you can know exactly what you need to do to get what you want. In my mind this is a much more friendly system for any player - hardcore or casual. We'll have all the details of the token system in a future feature update on Issue 13.

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This reminded me of something I wanted to throw out for consideration as a QoL enhancement for story arcs. Many story arcs, when you complete them, give you a pick-list to select an enhancement to receive. I think that getting the option for a random recipe drop (either from pool B or a rare from pool A), as the TFs do now, might be more desirable for characters, particularly after they reach levels where they start getting IO'd out. Since it was done for TFs/SFs, I know it would be possible, but I don't know what the programming effort that it would entail versus the interest from the players in the idea.

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I skimmed through 6+ pages of 'woo boy' to get to some realistic feedback. Here's my concerns:

1. Merits for tf's to get rewards-any CHANCE that might be retroactive? One of my 50's is decked out with EVERYTHING, and that would be pretty cool. I'd hate to have to repeat things. Sorta.

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You completed the TFs and didn't get any drops at the end? If you got a recipe or SO drop, then you already got your reward; getting merits for them retroactively is double-dipping.

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It all sounds great -- I'm thinking both Shield/SS and MA/Shields as options for alts. Possibly even a Pain Domination villain.

But... conspicuously absent from this announcement is any mention of further powerset proliferation. Does that mean there simply won't be any this time? I hope that's not the case, since the talk leading up to the Issue 12 release definitely made it sound like proliferation would be an every-issue type of thing.

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Originally, PP was not scheduled for 13. Then, it was added as a Stretch Goal ("If you have extra time...") At this point, it isn't terribly likely, but who knows? Maybe there won't be any bugs in Beta!

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From more than two decades of experience with software development, my first thought when I read that comment was "...and winged monkeys are going to fly out of my posterior..." (or something similar). Good luck with that retreat from reality, though...

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ummm Zombie, the 5 drop includes Base Salvage already. The only thing that can 6 drop is a DE monster.

Base Salvage
Invention Salvage
Recipe
Enhancement
Inspiration
Essence of the Earth

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Just as an appendix, since no one has mentioned it before, there is the other sexfecta, from Rikti:

Base Salvage
Invention Salvage
Recipe
Enhancement
Inspiration
Vanguard Merit

Although that could actually be six, seven, or eight, depending on whether you were bagging a minion, lieutenant, or boss, with the varying number of merits you get.

I don't have enough data to be able to state for certain -- is the automatic SO drop for taking an AV separate from the random-chance enhancement drop? If so, you could do six from an AV if you happened to be the team member that got a regular enhancement drop in addition to the SO, and more for a Rikti AV.

The Unicode support in CoX has other uses, as well. Way back, around Issue 2, my character was in Peregrine Island when I saw, in the chat window, another character's chat containing the three Cyrillic characters for 'dlya' ('de', 'el', 'ya', spelling the Russian word for 'for'). This turned out to be a transmission error; the character whose chat it was had no idea they'd done it. However, I was intrigued and investigated further.

I discovered that you could use many of the online translation web pages (such as the Google Language Tools or PROMT's translation page. For characters outside the normal 8-bit ASCII, you need to have a font that supports the Unicode page of the language your translating into, or you won't see the translated text correctly. And some languages, you'll find, are either not supported properly in CoX or in the font that CoX uses to display chat text; I haven't found out which yet. For Russian, Japanese, some Chinese (Korean should work, given that CoH was released in Korea, but I haven't tried that), and languages that differ from standard ASCII mostly in the use of diacriticals (i.e., German, the Scandinavian languages, etc.), it works well. I use the translation tool to translate text from English to the other language, and then copy and paste the translated output into a bind. For example, with the characters I have that have Russian backgrounds, I would take the standard F7 ('Ready!') bind and change it so that the character says (in Cyrillic letters) 'Gotoviy!', or 'UBEGITE!' instead of 'RUN!' for F6, or 'POMOSH!' instead of 'HELP' for F8 (keeping the original colors and any poses). Then I would make up a set of binds for 'Hello!', 'Welcome', 'Congratulations!', etc. Because actually editing the binds was impossible with a normal text editor, I eventually turned up BabelPad, a free Unicode-enabled text editor, which let me edit saved bind files containing Unicode directly.

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... you know, I could swear I remember running across a Nemesis-run dimenstion, although I'm not sure it was Steampunkified (it's been a while since I did the Portal Corp. missions)... even a mission chain that involved several Nemesi duking it out. Anybody else have anything more concrete on that?

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The 'Nemesis Rex' mission from Maxwell Christopher, where you fight an alternate-dimension Nemesis, who had succeeded in taking over his world. But the last time I faced him on one of my characters, it was just another laboratory-map mission. To the best of my knowledge, there is no specifically 'steampunk' map, although I would love to see the laboratory map tiles redressed in a wood, leather, and brass pseudo-Victorian style, with add-ins of cyclopean machinery -- dynamos, steam engines, piping with occasional jets of steam, huge wall panels with dials, levers, and control wheels, and the like -- all laboring away to Nemesis' hidden purposes.

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Rikti taste like chicken. How would you like your chicken dinner cooked?

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Actually, from the information you get through a couple of different avenues, Rikti would theoretically taste like pork. So you could argue about it being luau time...

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Hawk, the Coralax will ambush you if you run in the river or right at the shore. You don't see them above water unless they're ambushing someone, at least that was my experience in Red River.

And I found quite a few of them too!

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If you have a little altitude, or pay attention to the water, you will occasionally see a group of four 'riffles' in the water; that is the location of an 'ambush' spawn of Coralax, and if you run through or near where the riffles were you'll trigger the ambush.

The same is true for the Devouring Earth shroom spawns in the water on the north side of Crey's Folly at night; there was a brief period during the early days of CoH where the DE shrooms had inadvertently been given a vulnerability to Lethal damage about five times what it should have been when the fast track from 30-35 for /Regen Scrappers was to hit Crey's Folly at night in teams, split up, and each deliberately aggro two or three spawns of DE shrooms, herd them up, and AoE them back into the water, then do a quick mission at sunup, coming back to Crey's Folly at sundown.

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The Hollows is a Hazard Zone, so the increased difficulty is deliberate. To those who perceive this as an annoyance rather than a challenge, staying in the city zones is better fit. The changes have certainly made the zone more survivable than it used to be, so "mission accomplished" in that regard.
EC

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Have you read War Witch's information about the revamp?

The Hollows is now supposed to be a mixed zone. The areas that are partially under control are city-zone level spawns and the wilder areas are hazard-zone level spawns.

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Except that the Trolls, Hellions, and hydras have pushed out many of the CoT spawns in the south end of the Hollows, and the spawns that remain have been significantly toned down, to the point where you have to do some serious hunting to find Madness and Ruin Mages; in one half-hour cruise of the southern quarter of the zone, I found two Madness Mages and no Ruin Mages -- 90% of the territory on the east side of the Red River that had been alsmost exclusively CoT spawns was now populated with Trolls and Hellions (both as short on boss spawns as the CoT). The south end of the Hollows used to be a good place to go to hunt CoT for Arcane salvage drops, particularly Luck Charms, but the spawn changes have significantly reduced the return on time invested, diminishing the availability of low-level Arcane salvage on the market and driving prices up.

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Seems the devs are trying to un-confirm what was posted in the IGN article about the mission creator. Notice that they made no effort to cover up the statement about powerset proliferation.

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As was previously stated, regarding those articles, we have not officially confirmed any information regarding what was reported.

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Can you give us a time when Posi and the COX crew will be making any announcements at Comic Con??

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The Pocket D party Saturday night would be a good bet...

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I'll also add, GET YOUR TICKETS NOW.

Don't wait until you show up in San Diego.

In 2006 they sold out for Saturday. 2007, only Thursday WASN'T sold out. It's also cheaper to get it early.

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Saturday is sold out now, as are four-day memberships; they are about 40% sold out for Friday, 25% for Thursday, and 20% for Sunday. Their website also cautions, "No onsite membership badges will be sold!". So if you don't have your membership when you get there, you wasted your time and money.

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I will definitely be there, all 4 days of course. My birthday's the 27th. So there better be (wheat and dairy free) cake.

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Better have your membership purchased already; they were out of advance-sale four-day memberships and some of the one-day memberships, and will not be selling memberships at the door, because of the turnout; they sold completely out of memberships last year during the con.

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Choice 4: Find spots that are away from those in the zone for *real* levelling. It takes marginally more time - not much - and besides, respawns are always popping up, and so if someone who *belongs* in that zone happens to cross your path, you won't be much impediment to them.

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A good idea, when it's possible. The problem is that some of the kill badge mobs only spawn in one place. I've only found one place that spawns BP Spirits, for example. And sweeping the Perez Park streets is about your only option for Damned.

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There is the area around the buildings in the SE corner of Talos Island that will spawn BP spirits at night, and there is a park in SE Dark Astoria that they also spawn in at night. Beyond that, there are three or four specific locations in DA where you can get spawns including spirits, but it depends on the last hero/group to go through there, as respawns scale somewhat in response to the size of the group that took the previous one out.