_mr3_

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Selection to be included in the closed beta test of Issue 11 is pretty straightforward. We have selected testers who were helpful with previous closed betas and also included accounts who had recently logged into the Training Room.


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what i don't like about the selection process is how the only two factors we know about are experience in prior betas and recently logging into test. about prior betas: it seemed like a mix of randomness and conjecture about who got selected for the first closed betas to begin with. and out of those first selections you get a certain percentage of people that truly are helpful. you continue on in the next beta with them, but the number probably diminishes as people have life situations that intervene. so you choose to replenish the group with people that recently logged into the test server. only problem there is that a lot of people that log on to the test server don't log on to it to test what's there. there are plenty of other reasons to log on to test.

i've never said anything about this selection process before because no other closed beta included new melee powersets for archetypes that have been begging for them for up to 3 years. there are a lot of us that have been playing those archetypes almost exclusively for that entire time and want to help give feedback on the new sets before they get cemented in stone. and out of that group of us, i would bet that the majority of us /bug problems on live not only when we see them but when we suspect a game mechanic might have a problem and we investigate and find one and then /bug it. these new powersets are just a recent example too--there will probably be new sets hitting test in the future belonging to archetypes that some of the rest of us have been playing for years and would like to contribute their experience to the fine-tuning of.

but it doesn't sound like criteria like those are included in the selection process. i don't think that's right.

like odenkirk in 3x1-1, all i can say is...daaaaaaaaaamn

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Guess I'm the minority, my Fire/Ice seems powerful enough to me.

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I think that's the point, and has been heavily discussed in the 3 threads on Fixing Ice Melee. No one is debating Fire/Ice isn't fine in the dmg department, but that's mainly due to the one trick pony of Ice Patch+Burn.

Someone suggested datamining Ice Melee's performance after *excluding* Fire/Ice. Seems like a good place to start.

Let me add: fixing the pause after GIS is more of a bug than a balance issue IMO. If GFS was fixed, so should GIS...and fast.

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You can't exclude Fire/Ice from balancing. If Fire/Ice is "pretty good" now, then if /Ice receives a buff, it goes from "pretty good" to "potentially overpowering", depending on how they do it.

Some sets tend to have natural pairings. Some sets are balanced around those natural pairings. DM/DA, for instance. /DA is a horrible end hog, and can have difficulties with survivability unless played "right". DM provides an end recovery power and numerous survivability powers that tend to mesh with what you're trying to work with in DA. Now, while /DA is hardly gimped... you cannot argue that it operates far more efficiently with DM. Just like Fire/Ice. Like I say, /Ice needs work... but leaving Fire out is dangerous at best.

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i agree that certain combos that might be problematic shouldn't be flat-out ignored, but i think the devs can and should exclude fire/ice from being a *significant factor* in the balancing of /ice. a problem with the combo should not affect what the overall potency of each set should be. if it did, then you could argue that the design of allowing us to mix and match primaries and secondaries is "not exactly working". instead of fire/ice significantly affecting where /ice should be potency-wise, it should only prompt a second look at why the combo specifically behaves differently than other combos.

some sets are designed with each other in mind, sure. but balanced with each other in mind? to what degree? if you only go as far as saying that certain combos were designed to be "more convenient" from a certain purposefully obvious play perspective then i would agree. but in every way one set complements another like this in a designed way, the dev intent appears to me to be that it only goes flavor-deep, and that those combos don't provide anything substantive above other combos.

take your example of dark armor. dm provides an endurance source, but that power also occupies a slot that another primary has for some other trick in the bag. da has at least 6 powers that can be used to provide very end-efficient mitigation. the missing source of end for the other two set powers can be easily accommodated with slotting and/or alternate power choices. in that example, the source of end is just a convenience factor--nothing that doesn't exist in some other form for alternate powerset combos. and that's as it should be. if this were not the case then it would break the ability to mix and match primary and secondary sets.

that's dev *intent* at least, as far as i see it. are there set combos that outperform (better or worse) others? sure. but in every case i've seen, i could personally find what i honestly thought were the roots of the problem in one or two powers from the combo *in isolation*. and in every case, the best way to balance always seemed to be a change to those powers specifically, and not to the overall potency of the sets themselves.

ultimately, if it were me in castle's shoes i would look at fire/ice briefly, but only for the purpose of seeing if the combo pointed at a problem with individual powers. and from what i've seen, with this particular example i don't think there's a large source of concern.

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The irony that the nerfs of I3-5 pretty much insulated Regen from ED was just too delicious.

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i know what you're getting at, and i'm glad you've gained a good outlook on it. personally, i felt the impact of ed on my regen just as much as every other change. the change to recharge definitely didn't feel insulated. the reduction on qr enhanceability (and even resilience) didn't either. and the buff on dp was nice, but we still had to deal with all of the negative changes. the wound just didn't need more salt. man, all the hours we burned on test, in planners, on live every time a change hit...heck, the hours we burned on the boards alone leading up to and during every change. it was the first time i really spent significant amounts of time on here. now that i look back, i know the overall goal of the changes was necessary, but the way that geko decided to take us there w/this set...another story. i knew he was trying to do the best thing, but i still knew it was wrong. hopefully he learned something out of it all.

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I don't think there's any possible way you can convince me that I'd do better with lunches at a fast food place than I do at the local watering hole. Black bear with lots of residual body heat, awsome cheetah or boar soups and kick-[bleep] elephant or hippo sandwiches for the win. Ranch tiger with a scotch bonnet pepper in them, Mixed crocodile salads with someone's homegrown crocodile-tail and slices of komodo dragon, or anaconda, or whatever I felt like that day. Gooey gazelle cookies that actually taste of gazelle. real leopard syrup and mounds of fresh fruit on wholelion lions...


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fixed that for ya sc. you're a scrapper, right?

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...and currently in the midst of remodeling part of my house in MN.

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know the feeling there. i've been at it down here for about 2 months now. feels like 4. gl w/it.

ps. when you stop deciding what you want to do with your life, it's time to die. don't stop decidin'

looks like fun

you two rock. i probably don't say that enough.

porn. (nope, couldn't resist)

damn nice work yall...btw you can still catch wacky races on boomerang (cartoon network's hb retro channel). i do, every weekday morning before work. just don't ask me how old i am. or if that channel was the only reason i went with a dish instead of cable.

ps. my fav track on that cd is face to face's cover of popeye...man that number kicks it (even just a little more than helmet's cover of gigantor, one of my fav bands).

hard choice to make. i had to give the nod to choices unique to our game.

ps. wow...i didn't know the boards could make polls and graphs.

*wonders if the boards are becoming self-aware*


*puts tinfoil hat back on*

wow. holy cow. it's truly hard to find words. cj, thanks for some great times. thanks for the heart and soul you've poured into this alongside the rest of us. and best of luck on tabula rasa. when that one wanes though and coh is still up and strong you should come back home. and grats to cricket, she's now at the wheel of a great community.

keep us up to date. heck, keep on posting as another forum friend if you can get away with it.

hey castle, while we've got the hood open on mog...

great work y'all, and that goes to all of us. we talked about it from a lot of different angles and traded some good points. we saw a better way to go and now it's going to happen. us ftw. raise da roof.

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Unbreakable would seem a more reasonable pre-requisite to me. It still takes some effort to acquire but isn't as insane as Nigh Indestructable. Wheras Nigh Indestructable takes a good 2-3 weeks to earn if you farm it.

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Unbreakable would even be an insane requirement. I'm a corruptor, a fire blast/radiation emission corruptor. I'm not suppose to take damage. A Brute might be able to easily get Unbreakable, but like I said I've taken less than 5 million points of damage in the entire time of leveling to 50. Ya, I hit 50 yesterday and I STILL have not taken 5 million damage. I would have to farm more than double the damage I've taken just to get the accolade? That doesn't sound fair.

It would take me 2-3 weeks just to get Unbreakable.

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this new phrase "farming damage" should say enough...it should have never come to be. lol man i'm laughing about it while thinking how it sounds in my head. can you imagine sweatshops running web ads for $1/10000hp damage/hr? the ridiculousness of taking damage for days while afk...'sheesh' as states would say.

i've been gunning for this accolade for weeks now on my brute and i was just starting to get my mind around how much damage that badge that actually is. i thought it was just me at first.

i don't think it's a matter of whether they're going to change the requirement, my take is that it's a given. the question is...where are they going to put it? what line in the sand is fair? unbreakable? don't forget, we've got plenty of options and a good amount to consider: we can leave the badges as they are and decide only what badges are required for the accolade. plus the accolade requires a good amount more than just nigh indestructible. there's that to consider too. plus it shouldn't be much more difficult for squishies to get than beefier toons. [edit] the more i think about it, i'm not sure it's a good idea to place any of the overall accolade difficulty on a goal like damage taken. it just seems too slanted towards beefy toons.

ps. thx for asking castle, spoony_bard. i guess we'll see what he says.

the more i think about things like this, the more i find myself wondering if the devs really understand the zen of their scrapping at. yes, i know they can't be expected to live and breathe all of the archetypes, sets, and combos. i just don't think there are many of them that realize the gold they stumbled onto when they created scrappers. from what i've read, i *think* castle gets it. i'm not sure many others do.

the thing that stands out in my mind the most is the decision to make scrappers "more scrappery" by increasing damage. at a time when they could have just as easily decided to put some or more of that added potency back into our defenses (to preserve the original feel of the archetype better), it didn't come across to me as very good news. because for once i started to suspect that they just didn't get scrappers...that they just didn't fully realize what they had created. to really run a scrapper, to know what it's like...i think anyone knows that if you change the a.t. as drastically as they did when they reduced defenses and increased damage then you're not going to have the same thing you started with.

what makes it more difficult to understand: realizing that they beefed up scrapper damage while they were developing cov archetypes. specifically brutes. i honestly don't want to think that they changed scrappers with reasons related to brutes in mind...that they needed to ensure no two archetypes were "too similar". because dammit scrappers were here first. and to change something that golden because a toon type in a separate game might be too similar...ugh.

what makes it extra hard to take is that i actually enjoy the newer version of scrapper. and yes, i'm hooked on brutes too. i blame the addiction though. and i blame that on the devs. damn you, devs.

down with the ppd! up with anarchy! rip the system!

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and remove some of the nastier mission doors in the HEART of the Perez Park maze


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*tons of toner cartridges fall from the ceiling*

ww, you're sitting on the easy button. now how are we gonna catch deth by cot in the endless forest maze?

i swore i saw link jump over my dead body in there once.

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Beyond that, we are looking to release another Issue building up the story towards our next retail box, due in 2007.


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(in south park voice) posi, you killed deathdoom!*


*deathdoom: fear of 'armageddon', felt and/or expressed

your ability to detect subtle unintended irony is legion.

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If I were to wax philosophical for a moment – I wonder whether it’s the genre (super heroes), the medium (City of Heroes) or the nature of the internet which has led to a greater demand for individuality.


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states, i think that's a good question. and i also think it's a source of disconnect between a good number of us. sure, mmo's were born from things like p&p rpgs (among other things in my history of the world). but i think this thing called coh that we create and join together in originally had (and still has) more mass appeal than a lot of the things it was born out of. having broader appeal of course attracts more people (and a more diverse group in our case), and i think a large percentage of people value freedom of choice in general. not just in terms of the rules of the game, but also socially.

i don't think this is tied to the genre, the internet, or anything else...i think those are just some of the mechanisms bringing us together, us with our desire for freedom (a trait that i think we've always had in the same proportional amounts). and when you get a lot of different people together, notions like traditional game rules and mechanic are sometimes forced to change...arguably evolve.

a rule of the mass seems to be freedom: in appearance, ability customization (this touches on issues like e.d. btw), toon development, etc. this mass isn't going to be tied to constructs like traditional rpg rule theory. heheh--i think we've seen both great advantages and disadvantages in that observation. and the fact that we face it is a testament to how solid the game is.

on that note, before i get too rambly (my head is filled with topics like convincing ncsoft to invest more development resources in successful endeavors)--thanks y'all (all y'all!) for the great city. i don't say that enough. and to sam--i applaud your ability to be open and honest. some people equate that to violins. others might equate it to...being open and honest. it's a funny thing how that has a way of facilitating dialog.

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Now to find you a nice buggy avatar...

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"go mantid! it's your birthday!". too funny, "cricket" + "avatar contest" = you're the first person that comes to mind. to a ton of us. your service to the city does not go unnoticed.

ps. to miss kitty and co: happy anniversary!

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I thought that Plutonic was "Of or pertaining to Mickey Mouse's dog."

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yep, that's what the dictionary in my world says too.

(more on-topic: i refuse to look up 'self-fulfilling prophesy')

i don't understand why so many people are so hot about this. there's a forum girl usa pageant going on and people are eating it up like candy. but we're going to gouge each others' eyes out about the finer intricacies of pvp morality and how unfair things can be in open pvp zones. i just don't get it.

so here's another solution. sc is like the wild west. if you guys like fc, and you like to do it in sc, and it's outlaw country with few rules and little law, and that's causing problems...then why not just take the law into your own hands? build a coalition. call it 'fc bouncers' or something. you can form teams and build a perimeter around fc. when people come to disrupt, it's "gank bishes" time. sounds like fun? voila. hell, i'll even pitch in.

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-that the name Rikti came from a conversation where I said "Rikki Tikki Tavi is a cool name. How can we get that into the game?"


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you showed our age on that one.