MTS

I agree with this 100%. I've been playing 2 and a half years, so I'm not exactly new, but by no means an 'old-timer'. Currently I have 65 characters on my "somewhat active" roster. Some more active than others, of course. Ten of those are level 50, six are level 10 or below, and overall they have an average level of 26. That's playing fairly casually, mind you, mostly on weekends with some friends.

Despite all the different combinations I've tried, I'm still coming up with new ideas, and there are some themes I feel like I've barely scratched the surface of. I have a friend who has well over a hundred characters, and still hasn't tried everything.

I tend to prefer lower population servers, but if you like seeing lots of people running around outside (and spamming broadcast channels ), Freedom is the place to be. Virtue is close in population, and may even surpass Freedom some days.

Whichever server you pick, keep in mind that CoH is a heavily instanced game, so if people are on missions you may never see them. Find out what global channels are active on your server and join them -- that seems to be a good way to keep up with who's doing what.

Damage procs do work, but their damage scales with your level. They still can be a nice bonus at lower levels even despite that, especially in AoE powers.

Also, all damage procs have their values set as unenhancable, so they are unaffected by damage buffs like Build Up, Assault, red insps, Defiance, Fury, etc.

Was lucky enough to run across Eochai in tree form the last time I was hunting him.

Not so well hidden...
Oh my!

But random guessing is so fun, especially when people are giving cryptic hints

Hmm, let's see, something that could be perceived as a critter power level increase, is a fairly obscure mechanic change, possibly related to survivability but not necessarily in an obvious way, and possibly exploitable in some way. I do love a good riddle.

Well, the only critter power level changes that come to mind are Malta getting "buffed", but IIRC that was really just an AI script bug fix. The obvious example is the Titans not using their ranged attacks up close. They always had those nasty attacks, but very rarely used them, so they seemed easy. That's not how they were intended to operate, and the devs fixed it.

BP Totems do seem more dangerous now -- they used to be a complete pushover. I don't have any hard evidence on that one, just perception which may be flawed, but I suspect it was a similar issue (not using all of their powers).

That seems much too straightforward to be the answer we're looking for, however. And it was discussed on the forums a bit, which rules it out.

As far as game mechanics that are possibly exploitable and related to survival... Hmm... A while back there was a change in the way powers that were in the process of activating when a critter is mezzed / defeated are handled. Originally I recall being able to hold an enemy that was in the middle of animating say, Hurl Boulder, and have the enemy power be effectively interrupted and not go off. Ditto for defeating them mid-cast. A few issues back in (curse my memory, I need to start taking notes of these things), there was an undocumented change so that in BOTH these cases, the power would successfully activate and deal damage. For a while, this caused some amusing "double KO" scenarios where a critter would defeat you after you had defeated it.

The defeated case was reverted at some point after that, so now on live, if you defeat an enemy mid-cast, the cast still fully animates but does no damage. They still do damage if you mez them mid-cast, however, which might be perceived as a nerf to control sets. I'm not sure this is what you're talking about, however. The defeated case was discussed, but I don't recall the mez change drawing attention.

The only other readily exploitable mechanic I can think of is the rooting mechanism. That's well-known, though, and as far as I know there haven't been any changes to it. Well, I know don't if "well-known" is the right word, since many people exploit it without even knowing that they are, by jumping up from behind cover with a power queued, or using momentum to carry you out of range of an enemy during the activation time.

There's still a bug somewhere in the animation priorities that occasionally causes you not to root when you should. I haven't narrowed down which animation it is that's the culprit.

I have a feeling you're joking, but I find this amusing.

I do cross-fraction arbitrage on WoW as my primary income in that game, and while it's not a simple or risk-free process there, it's certainly a lot less than a 2 week turnaround.

I've found that the net effect of arbitrage is actually to lower high prices, as it smooths out the sudden demand spikes or supply shortages. Generally I end up buying at a little bit less than market average for one side, and selling at a little bit more than the long-term average on the other, but still much, much lower than the currently listed "buy it nao" prices. Flippers must hate me . With enough volume, after a while they meet back close to the middle and I move on to something else that's unbalanced...

...and make a tidy profit in the process. Hey, everybody's gotta make a living somehow.

Aha, and judging from the change set, that was your mission teleporter icon that slipped in, too. I noticed the color had changed.

The alternate fortune icons certainly looked nice, they just gave up a lot of the utility factor that I like from Vanden's

Economics 101 time. Marketeers don't make everything overpriced. Buyers, inflation, and the lack of influence sinks makes things expensive. When people have billions of influence and nothing better to spend it on, they can and will spend hundreds of millions (or more!) to be first in line for purple or pvp recipe drops.

If you put a 100m limit on purple recipes, here's what it will look like:

Ragnarok: Dam/Rech/Acc
0 for sale
1217 bidding
Last 5 transactions:
100,000,000
100,000,000
100,000,000
100,000,000
100,000,000

Want one? Well, put in your bid for 100m, and see you in a couple months...

The only way to lower prices on rare items are:

1. Increase drop rates. Of course, that makes them not really rare anymore, so I don't think the devs want to do this.
2. Add influence sinks to reduce the ever-growing amount of money in the system. Something that you either have to regularly spend inf on, or want to spend it on. Cool costume parts or temp powers that you unlock by dropping gobs of inf on them. An inf penalty for dying (a la "repair" costs, maybe for high-end IOs only). Increase crafting costs. Maybe let you buy a respec for 100m inf.

Increasing the market cut doesn't really work, because that will just drive more people to private trades, especially with email in I17.

Long standing graphics bug that happens on Intel integrated chipsets (possibly on anything that falls back to the texenvcombine renderer). Honestly I don't know if it's even on the radar to be fixed.

Using "-compatiblecursors 1" on the command line may help, but didn't work for the one laptop I've encountered this on.

We need a WW task force. If we don't get one by issue 19, I will quit the game.

...

Ok, I won't really quit. But add the WWTF anyway!

You definitely used to see them when you moused over the enhancement in the store. I remember being highly irritated when they stopped showing up. For some origins it's obvious enough, and most of them I can tell from the color and the order in the list, but there's still a few I have to right click to double check.

I think it broke around I14-ish.

Fire/kin... mitigation? I don't think I'd be jealous of fire/kin's mitigation by any stretch.

I say this after having leveled a pair of fire/kins together. Sure, they have decent control, but it's very binary and has very little margin for error. Either you get everything perfect and you win, or something goes wrong and you're dead before you have a chance to recover.

Earth/storm, on the other hand, now that's mitigation

I do agree the defender /elec damage is very low, and you could probably say that any AT/powerset does better damage. On the one defender I have with it, I gave up and slotted for endmod, but was lucky enough to be on a static team so doing next to no damage wasn't an issue.

And don't forget about Singularity! It's repel is a lot of fun when you summon it right in the middle of a large un-aggro'd group

Vanden's icon pack colors the fortune buffs a distinctive orange, making it very easy to see at a glance who has them and who doesn't. My method is to just look at the list from time to time and use it on the first person who doesn't have one.

No, what's happening on this particular map is much worse, and a different phenomenon. In Talos (and other zones), the "missing" objects slowly fade in as you get closer to them. That's just a case of the "doodads" (not sure what CoH devs call them, but they're stock objects pasted on top of the terrain) having a shorter draw distance than the map geometry itself.

On the LGTF mission, and at least one other arc where that map is used (don't remember offhand), vast chunks of the geometry are disappearing simply from spinning the camera around. Not those a ways off, but sometimes the walkway that you're standing on top of. IIRC partial objects are being displayed as well, where in Talos for instance it's an entire rock at a time that fades into view.

EDIT: And while we're at it, the first cutscene of the rescue Lady Grey mission in Gaussian's arc (Spring the trap on the Renegade Swords) is bugged and shows black space somewhere outside of the map.

Just more proof that Cimerora isn't really in the past, but rather an elaborate "theme park" style facade created by Lord Nemesis for some nefarious purpose.

That is a little odd that it worked. I've tired to "exploit" the base crystal before to see if I could get a lowbie team to do the Maria Jenkins arc for fun, but it won't let you start the arc if anyone on the team is below the minimum level. I don't know why the cape mission would be any different.

I don't know if it's worth the trouble to set up, but if any of your systems people are unix geeks, here's an idea that might be worth tossing their direction to see if it's a doable.

Like many systems, FreeBSD can bet set up as a router/firewall. The interesting part is that its ipfw firewall has a feature called DummyNet. With that, you can limit the bandwidth, add a delay to create latency, and even tell it to randomly drop packets with a specified probability.

I believe Linux has similar capabilities with something called netem (Network Emulator), though I don't have personal experience with it.

So if you have somebody there who has some experience with one of these systems, you could throw one of them on an old obsolete computer and put it between your in-house test client and the rest of the network. That way you could test things that are only reproducible on bad connections.

As I said, I don't know if you guys want to take the time and effort to set something like this up, but it is a possibility if you really want to track problems like this down

EDIT: Looks like Arcanaville beat me to it, with a premade distribution even. Running it in a VM is certainly a novel idea, though the local network setup might be a little complicated to ensure you're routing through it.