Another_Fan
-
Posts
3571 -
Joined
-
Quote:He is a mutant who can channel people's belief into the power to kill or heal ?Originally Posted by Arcanaville
- Black Pebble overseeing Zwillinger's weekly broadcast for unauthorized information releases.
who was Positron ? Doctor Theopolis* ?
*Always wondered if City of God was intentional or meaningful. -
Quote:Back in the I13 beta there were two features that were present that got removed before I bothered to screenshot/document them. One was the subtasks for badges (I am certain for field crafter) were showing as check boxes. The other was you could roll at the level you picked. Letting you roll at your desired would have been great all around it would have also encouraged people to play through content instead pling to 50 then IOing out and complaining there was nothing to do.Originally Posted by UberGuy
While I agree strongly with this, I will at least say I doubt that was the original intent. I think they just didn't think it through that well. Granted, a lot of us told them that it was going to work that way, but probably very late in the total design.
The issue wasn't so much the IOs themselves. You can build pretty decent exemplar builds assuming unlimited access to the IOs you want. Not as rocking, perhaps, as a build slotted with straight 50s, but still way, way better than it would be otherwise. The problem is that "unlimited access to the IOs you want" was not close to typical. I gather it wasn't an insurmountable problem for a lot of posters in this thread, actually, but I don't think we're very typical.
I have no interpretation for not being able to roll at a chosen level other than they wanted less than max level IOs tp be rare.
Fun is always going to be a matter of personal taste. My problem was always going from great to gimp because I exemped.Quote:I will definitely concede that some powersets are way, way stronger with one or two of their powers, and that they can be comparatively mediocre without them. The thing is, whether people can have fun progressing stuff we consider mediocre is very subjective. As long as a powerset met a certain basic level of functionality, I could play it through 25-odd levels on baseline or near baseline difficulty, then start bumping it up once I picked up the heavy hitters. I realize not everyone has that patience. To me, though, this was more a matter of "could be done better" as opposed to "is really bad". -
Quote:If you follow this to it's logical conclusion you get blasters never needed to be fixed and balance is of zero importance. Seeing as they were the most abandoned AT there is a contradiction here. There are certain levels of performance that just weren't acceptable and people were concerned about overall power.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
Your enjoyment is just as subjective as anyone else's. You just get your enjoyment from trying to manage the highest performance you can get in the game, whereas others do not. That others do not view this in the same way or seek the same fulfillment from the game does not make it unreasonable and pointless, and logic should not lead you to the conclusion that it is unreasonable and pointless since - as it is a subjective measure of enjoyment - you cannot quantify these things through an application of logic, even if you can quantify some of the things in question in numerical or statistical fashion. I would argue that there are many things in the category you've determined is unquantifiable are actually quantifiable as well.
I personally do not care if my character is the most powerful or not. That's not what grants me enjoyment in CoH. What does is having characters who can solo reasonably well and who can contribute measurably on teams. However, not all of them will be able to solo to the same degree of efficiency, nor will all of them be able to contribute the same amount on teams, and these two things do not correlate directly to each other.
At the level of performance it seems most people play at, most missions get rolled over very quickly and efficiently with few defeats. In that context, your build's solo performance is not really all that relevant, and on a team you're contributing to make rolling slightly faster than otherwise. Or, that is, not a sufficient improvement to really justify any claim of superiority.
If you have fun with the way you play, more power to you. But just because you rely on numerical and statistical performance for fun does not make your preference inherently more rational or logical. It does not make your playstyle superior. It does not demonstrate that other playstyles are pointless, especially as fun as a goal in and of itself is a perfectly rational and logical goal, and automatically means that goals other than your own automatically have a point and are automatically reasonable. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Ironik
Firefall has Orson Scott Card writing for it. Automatic fail. Firefail.Always fun to see which side truly believes in free speech and toleranceQuote:Originally Posted by Father Xmas
I take it that Ironik isn't thrilled over OSC's politics/beliefs.
-
Quote:Originally Posted by TwoHeadedBoy
AF: Now paying a sub fee to read my 'discussions!'
...What?
not since august. -
Quote:The discussion ? Ehh not so much. Watching how the sides are shaping up and the patterns of attack and defense, that's like looking at a grain of sand and seeing all the world* mirrored in it.Originally Posted by BellaStrega
I am not angry. I still think this discussion is pretty darned funny.
*Well at least all the issues that lead up to that steep decline in subs when the rest of the industry was growing. -
Quote:What is the spirit of the game ?Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
I think I'm going to retire Johnny Butane and become someone else for the next great super hero MMO, on the slim chance there is one.
Arcana's involvement or not, I think a month or two after CoH shuts down, most of the people on these forums are going to be climbing the walls for a spiritual successor no matter who it's being offered by.
.
What are the things that define it to you ? -
Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
That's a good question. It seems unavoidable that this requires special handling. Actually, now that I think about it specifically, I wouldn't be surprised if Cur *normally* worked on the range of 0.0 to 1.0 and it was specifically the attributes tied to HitPoints and Endurance that had special handlers. It would explain some of the attribute structure in the attribute tables.Quote:Originally Posted by Codewalker
Well, honestly, I suspect even the devs themselves have trouble with that part of it, considering that one of the accepted aliases in the parsing engine for Abs is kCurAbs (kCurrentAbsolute)... ;-)
Natures way of telling you it's time to rethink. -
Quote:You know before "THE ANNOUNCEMENT" I was gathering data to calculate the most efficient way to gain rewards through regular play. I found a fun little fact, Itrials on average took the equivalent of 2/3rds of their runtime to get setup on the servers I played on, and on a personal note I had a 1/5 chance of crashing at some point during them. There was also the problem of league leaders having to gate access to the trials instead of having the game do it. As far as I know no one enjoyed telling people get at least +2 over here for this.Originally Posted by Ogi
In this gear, grind, and raiding with 80* of your closest friends world, yes.
CoH was a lone light in the MMO wastelands. -
Quote:Originally Posted by TonyV
It was neither. They asked me to remove the e-mail addresses, and I voluntarily complied since I felt that its purpose had been served and leaving them up longer would likely mostly incur more troll e-mails than legitimate communications.
Also, please note that I received another update today, which I've posted in the top post. We now have an e-mail address set up specifically for us to use to communicate without interfering with company operations.Well on the plus side at least it shows we bothered them enough they had to do something. I have no doubt a certain Italian Polymath at NCsoft is going to have spam for a long long time.Quote:Originally Posted by DarkGob
It was awfully nice of them to take the time to redirect an e-mail address directly to the trash bin. -
voted up and posted a supportive comment.
-
Quote:2 Million units shipped in 2 weeks @ $50/unit. I think they got their money's worth from their marketing dept.Originally Posted by Starsman
No.
For now, GW is making money, it better be. They spent a bucket load in ads last quarter, enough to drive the company into the red when the game didnt ship in time.
Well GW1 had the PvP pack something we really could have done with here instead of the PvP we got. But it's not like we didn't have that here, Amplifiers, boosters, team insps, 5 minute insps, auction slots, storage slots, and SBEs.Quote:That aside, though (because that line of thought gets me grumpy) GW2 sales will slow down drastically. Once this happens, the only source of income will be gone. Expansions are expensive to develop, and the team already has shown this game is overwhelming them so I doubt they cant push out an expansion in a timely manner needed to keep the profits moving in.
GW2 WILL become heavy on the micro transaction side. For now it's just cosmetic stuff, but expect PayToWin potions in the market eventually. -
Quote:Mighty Mouse.Originally Posted by Jack_NoMind
Is this a "Who Would Win in a Fight : Spiderman vs the Green Lantern" thread?
My money's on GL. -
Quote:While I tend to agree with this statement it seems to characterize the game as having a much more consistent vision than it actually did. IOs are a good counterpoint to that. They are all heavily biased to max level builds as difficult as it was for some people to make IO build, making exemplar friendly builds truly a PITA. It had been getting worse with newer powersets where the builds fell apart without particular powers. Time without farsight comes to mind, Kin is an old one that I try to forget about without set bonuses and pool defenses it became really painful. With the upcoming snipe changes you would have had even more brittle builds when it came to exemplaring.Originally Posted by UberGuy
Wow, you so do not get other people's perspective at all.
50 is not "the game". Forever and a day, CoH has provided an environment where the point is the journey. 50 has never been the end-all, be-all. -
Quote:I always thought CoX needed more sandbox. AE was a step in the right direction so was the phasing tech but they just never took them further.Originally Posted by Mind Forever Burning
OK, I really should be doing other things, but my mind just started going crazy with this.
Suppose this new MMO supported user-generated creative goods: costume pieces, missions and story lines, etc. Suppose further that users could sell them to each other, and the role of the main coordinators was to provide a store for these goods, taking a cut off the top. Would such a model be sufficient to keep the game running? I don't know how to answer that, but it's a tempting answer to the problem of never-ending content in a game that has minimal direct funding for development.
There are previous models for this, such as 2nd Life, but I think CoX has an edge in that it is an actual game and not just an empty playground. -
Quote:I am reading this post shortly after I am going to eat dinner. I am sure Positron ate dinner before the decline in subs. The game declined after Positron had dinner, its going to die after I have dinner. It's obvious dinner is the problem, don't have dinner.Originally Posted by Cobra_Man
I can only put this one way.
MA was introduced and shortly thereafter game revenue took a nosedive.
It doesn't take a psychic to figure that there might be a connection here. My personal experience is that there was indeed a connection between the two.
Then the lack of new content is the problem. MA was originally meant to make it easier for the devs to generate new content. They used to use some sort of spreadsheet system to generate content. It's doubtful MA deprived any of us of "Official Content". Going Rogue however, I can't say the same for.Quote:I (and a lot of other players) were waiting for new content (new zones, mobs etc) and we got MA instead.
Right off bat, I wasn't happy with the lack of new content.
Had them before have them now, occasionally I even am one. It never bothered me how you leveled, and I was able to find people that didn't know what they were doing before and after AE. The whole AE baby phenomenon always seemed just another opportunity for people to try and take a shot at something they didn't like.Quote:Then we got the the surge of power levelers that took a few hours to get to 50, that plenty of people (including me) felt devalued the leveling system completely.
Yes but this is wrong as AE was a tool for the devs to generate content even more than it was for us.Quote:Two things combine - both caused by the fact that the devs brought in MA - instead of giving us meaningful and canon based content. -
Quote:Follow through is everything and that always seemed to be lacking with this game. It's one thing to have a great idea, it's another to get it working, it's something entirely else to perfect it. Look at microsoft products, IE 1-5, Windows 1-3. You have to keep at things till you get it right.Originally Posted by Captain-Electric
Other games have picked up the torch, and games will continue to pick up the torch, but it was a sad thing to see a great system with so much potential receive so little care after its creation. Still, it was amazing to see what my favorite authors did with so little. We created worlds.
-
Quote:What you are doing is like what psychics do but in reverse. You are matching an effect to the particular cause you want.Originally Posted by Cobra_Man
Another Fan ..... Not sure what you're on about. The revenue figures tell a story that's hard to ignore.
I could just as easily say PvP changes killed the game and it is just as valid as your conclusion. There were many things going on in that time frame and many many problems in the game. You consider AE a real annoyance ? There were people around that were certain the market killed the game, that high end loot killed game, that the incarnate system, that the merit changes, you name it someone is certain it killed the game.
It's like you are looking at the death toll from the World Wars and saying the German love of Sauerbraten did it. -
Quote:I always felt this was a cancer eating at the game. You had slow declines and sooner or later people were logging on wondering where everybody went. Then they have a decision to make, try to move and integrate into a different community on a different server, or to just try something new.Originally Posted by Pebblebrook
High player density does influence how quickly you get teams.
This whole thing in one way an interesting development. Seems like Freedom and Virtue are experiencing what the other 14 servers have been dealing with for years.
Before the announcement, those 14 servers tend to be around 200-400 unhidden players while the top 2 usually hovers above 1,000. And now Freedom seem to be around 250 and Virtue around 500ish. -
Quote:The Revenue figures say nothing of the sort. You might as well associate your need to use the toilet with the chance your phone will ring. The best you can say is that changes to the game over the period of decline, weren't enough to reverse the trend, and maybe just maybe if you had more data, that going rogue didn't sell outside the people already playing the game.Originally Posted by Cobra_Man
The revenue figures - and my personal experience say otherwise.
Those players that used MA as it was intended to be used - such as yourself - aren't what this thread was aimed at.
The problem was that the devs gave far too much scope for abuse with MA - and it most certainly was abused to such an extent that people left the game because of it. -
Quote:
He puts his hands over his ears and yells "STOP THAT" ? Looks like my subclassing comedy had a syntax error.Quote:Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Scream's behavior is not a bug. As I explained above, the reference to "My Brute" wasn't intended to imply tremendous oversimplification, but rather eliminating all of the surrounding effort required to create a 3D engine, mapservers, and all of the other trappings surrounding the core engine that correctly computes what happens when a set of entities N activate a set of powers P over time.
Yes I understand and a very complex thing is something you would need if you wanted to make predictions on how this game would act as a physical construct.Quote:A significant amount of the complexity of the attribmod system is in the fact that attribmods can have durations and activation periods. An attribmod calculating engine must be able to handle those, or its not an attribmod calculator, its a calculator. -
Quote:He puts his hands over his ears and yells "STOP THAT" ?Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Here's my first test of the attribmod engine. Take the Brute and the Corruptor and shoot the Brute with Scream. What happens?
Sorry couldn't resist, especially since this thread started with someone asking for a my brute type of program and now its focused on simulating a software bugs, quirks and all. -
Quote:Well you have your guy telling you that. Most of the forumites chose to believe people that told them things they wanted desperately to hear. All I can see is people on these boards put more trust in the devs than I would my immediate family.Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
I can't help but think this must hold some water as I had an NCSoft employee tell me that CoH was headed for shutdown 5 or 6 months ago, but as we had heard it all before, I didn't give it much thought at the time.
Guess I should have. -
Quote:So true I can't think of a time I bought something because I was concerned how it would help the company's bottom line.Originally Posted by Intrinsic
We were never talking about profits. We were talking about revenue. The OP is talking about revenue. So was I. What those companies do, or fail to do, with that revenue is another story.
-
Quote:To me, the dearth of new content looked like effort was going into going rogue instead of the regular bits we would get with each new issue.Originally Posted by Cobra_Man
You've touched on of the reasons that caused many people to leave - lack on new stuff to do.
The problem was that the new stuff was MA. The devs thought they were giving us the ultimate tool to make new stuff, when what they actually gave us was a power levelers dream ticket.
The two are definitely linked - MA and lack of new content at that time.