Alien51

As for purple IOs I understand they would cost way too much merits to add to the merits vender's. How about a random roll for a purple IO. It would cost less and if we don't get what we want we can sell it for enough inf to help get what we want.

I know merits are only awarded to the owner of a story arc normally but are merits awarded to only the owner of a story arc done through ouroborus?

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Okay, so out of 8 pets, why are there only 2 different buffs?

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Originally, there were 2 pets: The Faeries. Then someone (may even have been me, I don't remember) brought up the fact that Faeries won't match everyones concepts and so, the Wisps were born. Then, someone suggested the Drones for Tech types and at the last minute the Oscillators were tossed in. All told, a more classic example of Feature Creep you will never find!

So, since there were only two pets originally, there were only 2 powers made. I didn't have time to make 6 more powers to match the new entities.

As for why they are so fragile, let's just say if they were at all "tough" I could exploit them horrendously. So, they are fragile. They CAN be kept alive if you are a ranged AT, but melee types will have a hard time of it.

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Perhaps you can extend the range at which they follow?

I get mine May 16. Yay!

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Ok, so here is the problem with this change.

Synapse. 8 people. I know all of them and love them, 1 of them is my husband, 1 of them me.

About 30 minutes in, hubby and I start mapserving occasionally. Nothing big, haven't dropped, but we're getting a little annoyed.

2 hours in. We both drop - cable's out.

Now there's a team of 6 (Synapse requires 4). Because we went link-dead, we're still on the team. But the cable's out - who knows when it'll get back on, and hell, maybe we're so annoyed with the mapserving we say screw it, and rent a movie.

...

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If you understand it is your connection when you start dropping (like say resetting the cable modem fixes it), then realize you may hard drop and tell your friends you'll bow out rather than risk it (or at least discuss it with them to see what they want to do, maybe they think, given the team make up, they could brute force it even if you two do drop).

At least this way, their is your ability to control it. For an example, what if the Task Force was one with a 6 person minimum and you started it with 6. Under what's currently on live, you'd have no recourse and the team would be doing the mission with 4 people with spawns of 6. With the change, you can at least realize what is going on and preemptively quit and allow the spawn size to scale.

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But I don't want to go 5 hours on a TF to get my badge only to preemptively quit and then only to find out my cable wouldn't have gone out to begin with. I would take the chance and stay on the TF as I am sure many others would as well. Not everyone is as courteous as you are LH.

And don't forget many children play this game too and I doubt they would recognize the need to logout early to protect the TF. Some would not even inform us they are logging off for good (but not quitting).

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Am I the only one that sees a problem with everyone being able to tint any power any color?

Right now certain types of powers have certain colors, for instance, heals are green. If all of a sudden someone can make their heal purple or red, or blue, then if/when I team with them, I'm going to be pretty confused as to whats going on. Dunno, maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure things out otherwise, but for the most part I think the colors as they are, are a big indication of what power is being used. Custom colors is just going to muddle the whole thing up.

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With a limited selection of power colors this shouldn't be too much of a problem. For example allow the heal to be green, blue-green or yellow-green.

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The explanation that the devs gave us as to why power customization was not possible was that the auras and power effects could not be changes, they were 'baked into' the animations themselves.
Of course, redoing the animation without them and adding a way to select which power effects you want and their color and stuff (basically power customizaiton) was possible, technically. But was not realist in term of work load for them.
Now, if there is a way for the player base to give them these animations already done... then, I guess, power customization become doable.
It is one of the most desired feature for the game, from what I read...

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No, the colors for a lot of particles are 'baked in' to the particle's texture. The FX scripts themselves are completely separate from animations. In fact there's a lot of animations that are shared between different powers with entirely different FX.

Power customization has some pretty big hurdles to overcome.

1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There's no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn't a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can't even begin to do costumized FX or animation.

2) Colors in FX are often baked into the particle textures. Most of the time they're not, they use a greyscale texture and tint the color with an RGB value, but there's enough that do use a colored texture that it would require quite a bit of work to overhaul and set everything up for customization. We did test a more global system that could just shift the hue of the entire FX script around the color wheel, but it's not a complete solution to the problem. Namely that FX aren't normalized to a common color, there's no way to dynamically change this 'shift' value, and there's still issues with blend modes.

3) Particle FX most often use an additive blend mode. Additive means that the closer a color is to white (in RBG values), the more opaque it becomes. Secondaries like yellow (255, 255, 0) are more opaque than primaries like red (255, 0, 0). Black (0, 0 ,0) ends up being completely transparent. So to take the Energy Melee FX for example and make a black version or even a dark purple (64, 0, 64) or dark blue (0, 0, 64), we'd have to do more than just shift the RGB values around.

4) Even if the system could accept more than one animation or more than one FX script for a power, we don't have an in game system for allowing the player to choose this themselves. We could make one (probably based off of the costume editor in some way) but it's still another chunk of time to devote to this.

Those are the major issues that I can think of right now, there's other minor little issues here and there but it all adds up to a tremendous amount of dedicated work from multiple departments to pull it off.

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So why can't you make a whole set of "new" powersets? For example. WE have a fire blaster. Why not add Fire-Blue, Fire - Green, Fire - Purple, etc etc. It would be power custimization that would work with this system. For the engines pueposes its a new powerset calling on a specific FX for that powerset useing the animations you guys use. From our end we have green fire.

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This hack is a great idea. Can it be done?

I personally want the Fall from Grace/Redemption feature more than any other feature. There is no "missing content" from converting sides since a player can just go through that content with an alt. Most all players have alts. If I take a villain to level 20 then convet to a Hero sure I "miss" levels 21 through 50 content on the villain side but I get levels 21 through 50 content on the hero side. If I choose to stay a villain at level 20 I "miss" the hero content from levels 21 through 50. The players are smart enough to know that they will be chooseing a different set of content when they change sides. They wont be making an uninformed decision and they know how to get to that content with an alt. Please let us switch sides sooner rather than later.

I personally would prefer a temp power or even better a level 4 insperation.

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In CoH Beta, players were able to push NPCs rather than the other way around. Quite reliably, players would then herd the NPCs all into a small area, causing AI issues and horrible server lag.

I hate being pushed around, too, but I don't believe it will change any time soon. (NOTE: I could be wrong!)

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I've been informed that whoever told me the above misinformed me (well, the language wasn't quite that polite. ) In any case, the true reason appears to be physics collision checking (Players check collision, NPCs do not.)

I apologize for any confusion!

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But the NPCs know where the walls are and other NPCs are. (At least I haven't seen them run through each other.) There are two ways that I know of to solve this problem.

1. Give the NPC's a very simple detection system by treating the PC's like a small box wall that is in the way. Make sure to test the NPCs collision before testing the PCs collision.

2. Do it through the AI system: Have the PC broadcast (hidden broadcast for those of you who don't make games) that they are colliding with the given NPC in given direction. Wait a frame or two to let the NPC back up, but if still colliding then back up the PC. (This is not the easiest thing to do.)

I am a programmer in the industry. I have been in the industry for 5 years now with 4 shipped titles.
I thought I would add that I have seen a number of testers get promoted to designer or producer.

I would just like to say that I am amazed at how big an issue this has become. Both sides have made some good points, however I think I have a compromise that might work for everyone.
Treat the HOs as like merit badges for level 50s who can't level any more. Then use the HO count of a player to determine the extended weight class of that hero.

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Are you ever going to do an mid or south east coast?

and what is GDC?

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Game Developer's Conference

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I'm still waiting to find out if States will be at E3 this year

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Of corse he will be there. E3 is a trade show. They need him there to help sell CoV to the retailers. It would be absurd for him not to go.

My place of work is walking distance from the Moscone Center where WonderCon will be held so I will give some thought into going. I WILL however be at E3.

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on a full team, have a combination of defense and ranged offense that's second to none

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Umm, isn't that supposed to be a defender's role?

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Defenders have terrible defense and lower range offense than a Blaster. So no.

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HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Thats frigging comedy gold right there. 3/5 Defender primaries have awesome defense. The AT name kind of gives it away.

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Perhaps they can give OTHER players awesome defense, but they sure don't have any themselves. I've never seen a Defender herding mobs before.

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Storm Summoning and Force Field can herd, not sure of the others. I can herd with my controller using the SS secondary, so I know that a defender should be able to do it better. If I remember correctly Rad should actually the be most effective at if they know how to use RI properly.

Sailor eX
"Not in the face!"

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My level 40 main empathy defender stood next to a level 45 minion yesterday that couldn't touch him. Probably had something to do with 6 slot Manuvers and 6 slot Stealth. I suspect he can herd even con without a second thought. But that is power pool stuff helping him.