Did You Know - Return of the Son of the Unofficial History Thread

Greetings, Citizens of Paragon City and even you less savory citizens of the Rogue Isles and beyond.

In March of 2006, I started up a thread that I called Did You Know - The Unofficial History Thread. It's purpose was to make a place where the players could record the bits of trivia and history that they knew about the game that were slowly vanishing into the mists of the internet.

The original thread had a pretty good run and it was still being added to occasionally as late as last year, when forum moderation finally caught up with it and it was closed under suspicion of being a zombie.

At its launch, I had encouraged contributors to document not just the past, but also the present as "Something significant that happened yesterday will be ancient history when it's read by someone playing Galaxy of Heroes five years from now".

Well, here it is, five years later, all of that stuff really IS ancient history, and we're now standing at the threshold of the biggest change ever in the history of the game.

The Hellions and the Lost were right all along. The New World Order is here. The Change has arrived.

A lot of things are going to be changing around here, immediately and into the future. It falls upon us at the threshold to spend some effort to preserve some measure of the knowledge of our game, its history, its trivia, its stories and the stories of its developers.

If you know a factoid about the game or have a story or a bit of lore that you think that other players, vets or Freems, would find interesting, then take a few minutes and post it here. With Freedom looming, the caveat of five years ago is even more applicable - Namely, if it's recent that's no reason to hold it back. In five years, there'll be players who never even heard of it.

Oh, and on a related note - TonyV and the Titan Network have done an admirable job of not only documenting the state of the game but of preserving web-based resources that were in danger of disappearing forever, like RedTomax's Guides, The Paragon Times, and Mantid's old emote guide, now improved upon. The current Atlas Park and Galaxy City mission content is going the way of the dodo except for possibly Ouroboros missions. If you have an interest in lore and you have a bit of time, you might run a newbie through one or two of the low level missions and make sure that Paragon Wiki is updated with the latest and greatest before it becomes the recently deceased.

Did You know -- City Hall

In this age of Ultra Mode and honest to goodness reflective windows and armor, it may not be obvious that we still have an example of old school ingenuity in the game.

The floor of the City Hall foyer appears to be reflective but this is an illusion. When the game launched nearly eight years ago there was no Ultra Mode and no video cards that could have handled reflections so well as they do now.

That didn't faze the world designers of Paragon Studios (which was Cryptic Studios at the time). They came up with a simple and clever trick to simulate reflection - The floor is actually transparent. The "reflection" is an exact mirror duplicate of the building above the floor. This is why your characters don't cast shadows on it and why you don't see your own reflections. It's because there aren't any.

If you take the time to examine the "reflection" closely, you can spot minor differences between the lower image and the structure above that it is duplicating. Mostly, I'd guess that's just the passage of time and a bit of dressing up of the "real" building in comparison to the reflected building.

Did You Know -- You can find some of the best threads on the forums (including the link to the "If one of my heroes was on Omega Team" letters thread) at Best Threads Over the Last 6 Years

Did you know?

Faultline used to be an impossible to traverse zone filled with giant, unescapable cracks filled with CoT.

The construction in Steel Canyon was part of a project during the Jack Emmert area. When the game was passed over, the project was, of course, never completed.

Martial Arts used to have a severely long animation that was a little worse than Flurry.

Dragons Tail used to be a cone.

The Rularuu invaded Paragon City when the game was younger, placing absurb spawns such as level 6 mobs with bosses included near Atlas Park.

Did you know there used to be an alternate sitting emote? It was very hard to do. You had to simultaneously use /em dance and /em sit together in a rapid tapping motion (usually binded) to get it to work. All it was, was a simple relaxed sitting emote.

Did You Know? - Ascendant's Phone Calls

Have you ever been hanging around a tram, and seen one of the "cell phone chat" NPC's spit out something like this:

"[NPC] Brice: Ascendant who? Sorry, you have the wrong number"

This is a nod to a particular player whose Hero made a running gag out of standing at the tram, using his own cell phone emote and others as well and having phone conversations for the entertainment of anyone who happened to be in hearing distance. They were pretty universally recognized as being darn funny. heh.

Ascendant eventually posted the scripts to the phone calls in the Roleplaying forum. Have a look. Just reading the scripts and imagining them being acted out is worth a bunch of laughs. Enough so that Ascendant found himself forever immortalized in the game chatter.

Did You Know? - You Want Me to Go Where?

Up until fairly recently, the first mission from almost every level 5 contact had a 2/3rds chance of sending you to a door in a level 15 area of a Hazard Zone. You, solo, level 5, with no travel power at all, trying to sneak down a street with a 2 level 15 Troll bosses, 2 level 15 Troll lieutenants, and 6 or 7 level 15 Troll minions having a rave in the middle of the street.

If you took the straight-line route, you passed right through the middle of even higher-level, equally large, spawns of Igneous. With no room to pass on either side.

Did You Know? - At Least There Was a Ride Home!

After that mission, you almost never had to hospital back to the contact. On every server, there was a corps of volunteer players, in distinctive yellow and black checked uniforms, called the TaxiBots, who were on call to team with you and Recall Friend to bring you back to the Atlas Park/The Hollows gate. That was all they did all day. (You still see one or two people around wearing that uniform. If you see one, thank them.)

Debuff resistance is the same as buff resistance, but most buffs are irresistible. Say you have 25% resistance to Defense Debuff. Well, you also have 25% resistance to Defense buffs, except all Defense buffs are flagged as "cannot be resisted" so the only place this resistance ever applies is in the case of debuffs.

Likewise, turns out Healing is a damage type. And like all damage types, it can be resisted. The difference is that it's used exclusively with negative values--it only ever grants HP rather than takes it away. Ally heals are one of the few buffs that can be resisted, so when you get pegged with Heal resistance (such as during a Hamidon encounter or if you use Share Pain), it's more than aggravating. The only irresistible heal I can think of is Siphon Life in Dark Melee.

"Illusory" damage from Illusion Control is typed Psionic, but has a delayed negative damage effect that results in a heal. If you're, say, Willpower and resist Psionic damage, it's possible to detoggle your shield before the heal ticks off and you'll actually receive a bigger heal. This healing effect does not occur in PvP, which turns things like Phantom Army into untouchable murder machines.

Hamidon, the Terra Volta Reactor, the Unstoppable crash and the Crystal Titan all have their own damage types as well, which can be resisted (except for Unstoppable et al) via specific means like Essence of the Earth and the radiation shield.

Lastly, Damage Resistance is actually a permutation of Damage. Same can be said for Damage Buffs. The game sees something like "Smashing Damage" with a function applied: Inflict, Resist or Buff. This is why a Hamidon Enhancement that buffs Damage can exploitatively be used to boost Damage Resistance in a power. Resistance Debuffs, unfortunately, are flagged as "cannot be boosted," so they're exempt from this quirk.

Having said that, since the word "resistance" can only apply to "damage" in terms of the Inflict function, it's impossible to resist Resistance debuffs. Or -Damage debuffs. If you stack a few of those on Arch-villains or the like, there's nothing they can do about it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SlickRiptide This is why your characters don't cast shadows on it and why you don't see your own reflections. It's because there aren't any.

Not because we're all vampires? Maaaaaan.

The same reflection method was used in the Chantry and Storm Palace, as I recall. Could be wishful thinking, though.

Did you know that practically every zone (Atlas Park, Kings Row, Mercy, Steel Canyon, etc.) has at least one new billboard that was player created? Keep your eyes peeled to spot them.

Did you know?

Jack Emmert was actually the second Lead Designer for City of Heroes, not the first. Rick Dakan was the first. Rick approached his friend Michael Lewis with the idea for the game, and they formed Cryptic Studios in June of 2000. Jack, one of Rick's friends from Grad School, was brought on as a Game Designer. Rick remained the Lead Designer until a shakeup at the end of 2002/beginning of 2003 where he was fired and rehired as a contract writer for the game, and Jack Emmert took his place as lead designer. It was also around this point that the game changed from a free-form power system to the AT system we have now. Rick wrote the bulk of the Story Bible, created many of the games original groups (including Nemesis, the Rikti, and the 5th Column), and also wrote the Blue King comic books. He ceased all connection with the game as of the final Blue King Comic book.

From release until Issue 2, most melee attacks that currently cause Knockdown used to cause Knockback. From release until Issue 3, all Tanker defensive powersets had incomplete status protection (Ice, Fire), or status protection that immobilized them (Stone and Invulnerability, including Scrapper Invulnerability), with their only means of movement while protected being Teleport, or perma-Unstoppable (yes, Unstoppable used to overlap with enough recharge prior to Issue 3).

Dual and Single Origin Enhancements used to have a sub-group called the "Power 10" that included commonly desired enhancements like Accuracy, Damage, Recharge, and Endurance reduction. Any enhancements outside of this group were unavailable for sale until higher levels-- for example, you could not buy level 25 Endurance Modification SOs.

Did you know that the War Walls went down once?

For a short time there was a gap at the top of the War Wall where it meets the "sky" in Steel Canyon. Players could fly/leap over it and see what was behind the wall.

Turns out that the silhouette of "distant buildings" you see through the Walls are literally just gray boxes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hyperstrike English does not borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and rifles through their pockets for loose grammar.

Did you know Gravity used to not have Singularity and instead had a power called "Fold Space?" It basically summoned the entire team to you.

For 71.25 Endurance, even.

Did you know? - Teleportation

Originally in the game, the physics of using the Teleport power were substantially different. It used to be that your momentum would carry when you teleported, and there was no grace period of hovering. You would basically start falling as soon as you teleported, and each teleport while you fell would start you falling faster the next one. I can't remember when this was changed.

Did you know you used to get level 50 TOs and DOs from NPCs?

It was determined they did more harm then good (full inventory=no useful drops) and drop rates were adjusted to remove them from the level ranges where they were obsolete.

Did you know people cried Doom all over the forums when the Devs said they were removing upper level TOs from the game?

Very nice explanation.

So far as I can tell, the Great Central Weirdness, for me, is the bundling of attacks. If an attack is listed as doing both Smashing and Energy damage, then your Smashing Res resists the Smashing part, your Energy Res resists the Energy part... But the best of both defenses applies to the whole shebang, which either hits or misses.

If attacks that did two types of damage were simply determined as though they were two unrelated things, I'd probably have a much easier time modeling the game's combat in real time. As is, I have to think about it out of combat to figure out what's happening. (I have a very naive model of RPG combat systems, which has a clear limitation here.)