Quinch

I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, the idea of built-in voice chat in, well, any action-based multiplayer game makes me all moist in the eyes. Ventrilo is all fine and good, but built-in functions appeal to the casual gamer in me. On the other hand, the... vocal dissonance would be, ah, jarring.

One way of dealing with that problem might be a built-in mixer - something that could {possibly among other things} raise or lower the pitch to simulate a more masculine or feminine voice for each character. Of course, that would involve that much more coding {or licensing existing technology}, so it might be more trouble than it's worth.

Both global channels and friends lists seem to have been down for the better part of the day; is there any news on what's wrong with them and more importantly, when they'll be back up?

I dunno, works fine for me, though I'm not sure which version is being talked about.

Actually, you can change the options in your quickchat menu - it's a debugging feature. I'm wondering if there are any other, similar features available to play around with.

A quick question - other than customizing the quickchat menu, are there any other ways of changing the UI?

We're all familiar with the problem with defeat-all maps where you need to track down that one last mob in a huge Orangbagel maps etc, so I won't rehash the old arguments.

What I don't remember seeing is this - a command to target an NPC enemy while ignoring the line of sight. So far all the targeting commands available rely on you having the target visible on the screen - if they're behind any kind of obstacle or even just behind you, you can't target them.

So what I propose is a new command, like target_enemy_nolos, that targets the nearest NPC enemy within your targeting range, even if it's behind twenty feet of rock. That way if you've missed something, you can just make a quick sweep through the map and mash that command and as soon as you come near enough to the enemy, it will be targeted.

Of course, the Standard Code Rant applies, but the approach seems a lot less complicated than having to deal with AI behavior, ambushes by the last group on the map, various conditions etc.

Any thoughts?

Well, more variety tends to be good - as for the difficulty effect, why not make that optional?

Currently, we've got separate settings for number of enemies, level of enemies, so why not one for smarter enemies? Except they wouldn't really be smarter, just less predictable.

So sure, why not?

Aaahhh... has everyone forgotten AE? It was introduced to deal with content shortage at all levels, and despite Sturgeon's Law, there's plenty of quality arcs for all levels - if they can be tracked down. Why not then migrate the "cream of the crop" arcs into the official world, using a dev-appointed group of players to track them down and present to the devs if the devs themselves can't spare the time. That way there's more official content, lowbie or otherwise, available for non-AE players and the prestige of being able to say "Oh, that arc? Yeah, I wrote that one." might even provide AE writers to put in extra effort in an attempt to get "official".

Wouldn't you agree that lack of teams,or teaming is destroying the game too?

Lack of teams might destroy the game... if there ever was one. Unfortunately* there isn't one.

*for your argument

That might be because real e-mail spamming operates by a whole different set of rules.

First, e-mail spammers are completely implacable - unlike game spammers, they don't need to replace anything when blocked and zombie botnets make such distributed methods of spamming notoriously difficult to cut off at any point close to the source.

Second, many ISPs now intercept obvious spam messages before they reach the end user, thus reducing the flow of spam toward both unwilling and legitimate {i.e. gullible} recipients.

Third, real e-mail has a much higher potential for abuse - from messages themselves {remember the I Love You virus?} to phishing, imitation bank sites and drive-by downloads, a spam target can still basically hand over the control of their computer to the spammer if they make so much as a wrong click. To hand over control of your CoH account via a game spam, you need to ignore all the warnings by everyone around you, manually type in the RMT site address and... well, I don't know, do whatever it is these idiots do, which basically amounts to an amount of wanton idiocy* that really has no excuse.


*completely gratuitous link

Yes dammit.

Also, delete the file Coh.checksum from your CoH directory - that will force the reverifying and might save you a lot of download time.

Also, why torrent? Downloading the game directly via the CoHupdater.exe will do almost all of the work for you, and generally a lot faster too.

How do tickets factor? Do you get less tickets from lower-level foes?

Yes, but keep in mind that lower-level enemies are also much, much weaker {as even con, that is} than their higher-level counterparts.

Oh, damn. So much for counter-obsolescence, then.

As for the Lv1 farming, though, one can simply create a Lv1 AE mission - one of the recent AE improvements allows the creator to set the exact level range.

A bit late to the party here, but a few thoughts that might not have been mentioned yet...

First, a possible problem. Consider that a character exemplared to Lv1 will have access to their powers up to Lv5 {or was it 6?}. Now also consider that your average Lv1 NPC will fall over from a stiff breeze. Therefore, the exemplared character will still have a major advantage over an even-con enemy, and still earning XP, so I'm worried we might soon be seeing Lv1 Winter Horde farms.

On the upside, is there any chance this might herald an eventual end of contact outlevelling? Since the characters will now automatically exemplar to the mission level and yet still earn rewards, the whole problem of "this stuff is too low for you, move on to your new batch of contacts" evaporates and reduces the need to fiddle with the XP handbrake to avoid outleveling specific content.

What would be the cheapest way of buying the booster packs? I.e. Valkyrie, Magician, Superscience... and any other I might have missed save for Cyborg {which I have}, assuming that I plan to keep playing for the forseeable future, so free play time factors in as well.

Is it still bugged, though? I remember it kept messing with my Hasten for some reason.

Edit: Also, will it stack if placed in different powers?

Lolbat?

Freaking LOLBAT?

I mean, PvP Online is... okay, I guess, but I always throught Lolbat was a throwaway joke character, and not a very funny one either. Why not approach Howard Tayler, resident overachiever of the webcomics community? Or T Campbell with a long-running comic about geeks in a superhero world? Or how could we forget Phil and Kaja Foglio with their track record of mad science?

I mean, come on.

Lolbat.