Samuel_Tow

He ought to speak Latin, yes. This is actually not a bad idea. If you guys can come up with a decent two-word name in Latin, there's a very high probability that I'd use it outright

Hmm... This makes sense, and I like the sound of it, especially your modification. It's just the kind of strange-sounding obscurity Majik would go for (I really need to give him a real name so at least I know what to call him...), but it seems a tad cheating in that it's not a real word. Wouldn't a self-righteous blowhard like him need something that he can point out in a dictionary and then browbeat people about not knowing?

How many suggestions? As many as you can provide, within reason.

You bring up a good point, however. What names do I like? That's not as easy a question to answer as it ought to be, but let me see if I can boil it down to a few simple rules:

1. It can't be a pun. I'm a snob when it comes to that.

2. It can't be a joke. This is srs bzns.

3. Only one preposition for the whole name, no indefinite articles and only one definite article at most, and that has to be at the start of the name. So no "X of the Y" or "a Y of X" or such.

4. The name needs to be capable of being shortened to a nickname that people might actually say in conversation. "Mek Majik" is bad, but it can be cut down to just "Majik" when you have to refer to the character.

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As for descriptive names, I can't think of new ones I like, but I do have "The Spirit of Light" and "The Steel Rook," if that's any help.

This angle intrigues me. Yes, Majik firmly believes he's smarter than everyone else, so it makes sense that he'd pick something obscure and obtuse, then proceed to scoff at people who don't know what it means. I like it! Now we just have to figure out what that might.

I have to play my "I'm not a native English speaker" car here, because for as well as I mask it, my vocabulary of uncommon words in English is actually sorely lacking, and coming up with one is going to be very hard for me.

Could you break that down for me? Despite myself, I actually like the sound of this name quite a bit, but I kind of wish you could explain what the reasoning behind it is.

Also:

Funny how I start with the intention of making a goofy caricature of a face and end up with something I like:

Hmm... That's actually not a bad idea. I like the sound of it. I'm kind of looking for something more high-tech sounding, however. Apologies, I should have mentioned that. See, "Majik" is one of the earliest examples of a group of villains I made expressly to be part of an overall villain's larger group, and Majik was taken in as essentially the "scientist." He's the Doctor Aeon of my own group, the guy who essentially does all kinds of science: Teleportation, other dimensions, energy weapons, aliens, flying vehicles, running the computers, managing the power plant, developing new weapons and armour - the works. Majik is essentially a super scientist, which is why a misspelled name REALLY doesn't work for the guy who's intelligent enough to be hideously arrogant.

I know I'm not great at explaining concepts, so I want to offer my apologies about running all over the place with the idea as I clarify the concept both for you guys and for myself. It's part of the creative process. Please try to bear with me.

*edit*
And Arcanum was a piece of work. Easily the most imaginative Fantasy setting in at least my experience, wrapped around one of the most technically flawed games I've ever played. Yikes!

*edit*
And it turns out I'm having a hard time deciding on the guy's unhelmeted face. So much facial hair to choose from... I want an old man who looks dignified, but do I go for the more eccentric Victorian facial hair or do I throw my hands in the air and use the Dr. Breen beard?

The other 58% being subtext hidden between the lines, I assume?

And I implied it was where, exactly? You do realise you don't have to prove me wrong here, I'm just clarifying why the concept bugs me. If it doesn't bug you, then all the better, but the whole point of the thread is to get the specifics of which things bugs what kind of people out on the forefront so that it's not such hearsay.

Then you need to check your reading glasses, because I said nothing of the sort. Again, I'm trying to articulate a point so that it can be used in the discussion. You seem overly zealous about hand-waving it away as "oh, there's just something wrong with you," and I can tell you for a fact that this helps no-one. You need to understand that this is not a thread that you can "win," because we're all here to share positions, experiences and desires in an attempt to come up with a better understanding of where potential problems lie. Sweeping them under the rug just because you yourself don't feel they're problems is counter-productive.

Do you realise what you just said here? There are some things you like and some you don't, some people like the things you don't and some people don't like the things you do. I can't really argue that this is untrue, but in terms of content, it's one step removed from dead air. It proves that you aren't bothered by people not liking what you like and liking what you don't, yes, and this much I can respect. But it contributes very little to the subject of "pay to win" and how it affects people playing the game. Consider for a moment that this is not a fight and that others in this discussion are not your opponents and simply try to elaborate. That's all it really comes down to.

Thing is, that hasn't been my experience. Despite having melee attacks, my Robotics henchmen don't do that. Sure, one Drone will usually rush off ahead, I admit, but I've never seen all of them do that.

That's actually not Mastermind-specific. There's something with the game's pathing algorithms that hampers Henchmen and NPCs alike. The only way I can figure it, based on having observed this behaviour for years, is NPCs don't actually navigate in real time or have any real grasp of terrain. Rather, they use a waypoints system, just with computer setting waypoints for them in real time. However, because of how momentum works in this game, the computer will set up a waypoint for them lower down the slope, the NPC will shoot past it and land long. The computer will then be confused since it went forward, didn't pass the waypoint but it's not in front of it again. It'll play a slow animation, think about it, back up to the waypoint and try again.

That, I believe, is also why NPCs get hung up on railings so much. To an NPC, there's no such thing as "jump over." They move from waypoint to waypoint with no regard about what's in-between. Usually these are positioned such that the NPC doesn't run into anything, but if the NPC thinks its next waypoint is on the other side of the railing, it'll just keep on running forward, back and around trying to navigate the obstacle.

NPCs only ever seem to jump in "non-physics" ways, by which I mean they pick a waypoint to jump to, then play a jumping animation that ALWAYS lands them there, with the trajectory being only cosmetic. Doing this, they can jump through walls and land on places that collision wouldn't normally allow. As I said, NPCs don't "jump over" things. They simply decide that they need to jump ON things, and then run over off of them following that. You'll notice an NPC will never leap over a railing, but instead always leap ON it, then keep running forward.

This IS a problem, I admit, but it's a problem of pathfinding that's been with the game for as long as I have.

That's actually not an AI issue at all. As near as I can tell, it's an "ownership" issue. It's what used to cause pets to turn hostile on their masters when they zoned and why pets didn't zone for so long. See, when you zone, you don't actually carry anything with you - not your costume, not your toggles, not your buffs. When you zone, a new model is created for you and all character aspects imported into it.

Well, "pet ownership" looks to work a lot like this. When an entity spawns, an "ownership" is attributed to it. Back in the day when NPCs could only ever be allied pets or "enemies" owned by the world, if a pet spawned before its master, it spawned hostile to players. I've actually seen this happen: A hero-only team starts a War Zone arc and frees Fusionette. A villain zones in and notices that Fusionette cons hostile to them, whereupon they proceed to attack and kill her. What we figured happened was Fusionette spawned as specifically hero-allied as opposed to player-allied, and villains see hero-allied critters con enemy.

We don't get pets turn hostile so much these days, but they DO occasionally spawn before you, and thus get "owned" by the game world. They're not hostile since they're tagged as friendly, but they also don't "belong" to you so they won't respond to your commands. This is sililar to the desync bug, in the sense that I don't think it's even possible to solve. It has something to do with how you and your henchmen zone and in what order, but I could be wrong.

On this count I agree wholeheartedly. Player-targetd ambushes in generally are garbage, and they're bugged, too. They seem to have sort of a "hive mind," in the sense that the spawn acts like a spawn for as long as it's controlled by the "Find player!" hive mind, but this stops working as soon as the player has been found and engaged. What this means is if an ambush stretches out as some critters run ahead, as soon as ANY of them attack you, the others go inert and start walking around. I infer it's because the specific AI override disappears and the critters drop back to their idle stance. The ones near you, the ones that aggroed, keep doing what they were doing. The ones that hadn't aggoed just turn into a patrol. And when the ambush is required to finish the mission, that means I have to go look for them after the fact.

Oh, and they're crap because they eliminate some of the chief benefits to playing a Stalker or a Mastermind, lest we forget.

I want to comment on this, and I want to comment with an example. Let's talk about Vanguard Weapons before and after the Vanguard Pack. Before the Vanguard Pack, a character needed to be level 35 to collect Vanguard Salvage and then needed to collect 200 of those in order to craft a Vanguard weapon. This is quite an investment if that weapon is central to your character, since you'll have already earned 35 levels and beaten up quite a lot of Rikti. I have earned the weapons on multiple characters, but pretty much only used them on one - Nathaniel, my Mercs/Traps Matermind because it was a long rifle. I admit, I was VERY satisfied because his long hours of using that insultingly small Mastermind rifle were now over and he was using a really cool gun.

Then I "earned" the Vanguard Pack by virtue of being subscribed to the game for three months (so for the low-low cost of $45), and then proceeded to remodel a LOT of my older characters to now use Vanguard weapons, a well as making new ones to us them. Emillia got dual Vanguard Katanas, Kim got dual Vanguard Broadswords, the Steel Rook got a Redding Rail Rifle, Annabella got a new Vanguard Katana, Hagan got a Vanguard Axe and a Vanguard Shield and so forth. Do you know what I remember from that Vanguard Pack? Because it wasn't typing my credit card in. What I remember is the unmitigated sheer fun I had with the characters in ways that I could NEVER have had if I were working under the old rules.

My point here is that praising the satisfaction someone feels from the achievement which unlocks a certain piece of content typically isn't even applicable to the kind of person who pays for it, because that person - like me - cares nothing for the achievement and just wants the content to play through. You're essentially comparing apples to oranges and it's why the "Is it not the effort that makes it all the sweeter?" doesn't work on people like me. Some people have something to prove and are driven by the sense of achievement and accomplishment. Others just want to have something and treat the "accomplishment" as a cost, thus they're willing to pay a cost of another kind if it seems like a better deal.

This, then, becomes less a question of accomplishment and honour and integrity and a question comparing the cost of time vs. the cost of money vs. the cost of effort. Some people play sports for the love of the game. Some people play sports because they pay well. It's sort of the same thing here.

You're missing the point by continually insisting it's about other people when it's not. This isn't about a single-player game that someone else has cheated at. It's a single-player game that offers YOU cheats. You don't have to use them, but they're there. Saints Row the Third was TERRIBLE about that. If you bought any of the DLCs, you would start with incredibly powerful vehicles and weapons in your stockpile. This honestly just about ruined the game for me. Why?

Every time I met a hard situation, I thought "I could go get my tank and plough through this." I could, practically speaking, have done this for much of the game and rendered it boring beyond description. I didn't, for the most part, at least until I managed to steal an actual STAG tank and drive it back to my garage. But the thing is that every time I ran into difficulty, I felt stupid for not using the tank and every time I used the tank I felt like I was cheating.

Here's another example - old-style point-and-click adventures and Internet walkthroughs. When I was younger, games like Flight of the Amazon Queen or Simon the Sorcerer or the Broken Sword would force me to wrack my head, try everything, speak with everyone, invite people over so we could brainstorm solutions, so reaching the end was neither easy nor indeed certain. That was before the Internet. Playing A Moment of Silence a couple of years ago was a very different experience because of this. Initially I tried to solve everything by myself, muscling my way through tough puzzles by logic and brainpower. Then I met something I just couldn't solve and was convinced the game was bugged, so I looked it up. Then I met something else hard and I tried to solve it, but I gave up pretty quickly and looked it up. Before I knew it, I was essentially following the walkthrough and just watching the game play out in front of me with very minimal understanding of how it all worked. In fact, I still don't know what the logic was behind the final puzzle.

It's simple to not take the easy and unfun way out when you plain out-and-out CAN'T. It's not so easy when you can, however, and it turns both options - using it and not using it - into losing propositions. I'd personally rather not be in this kind of position to begin with.

No, because the benefit of the ease is balanced by the drawbacks of a less interesting experience and a slower progress rate. Low difficulty settings are not a "pay to win" solution, but rather the exact opposite - they're "cheap to win" solutions where I give up some of what I'm here for in return for the ability to play the game more easily.

I mentioned what's supposed to be the good part of the game, and to me the good part two-fold: One half of it is throwing down with many enemies and walking out the victor, usually with some degree of ease to stroke my ego. Lowering my difficulty settings puts fewer enemies on the screen and thus diminishes that. The other half is how easily I am able to write my own stories into game, but difficulty settings aren't really relevant to that so it's a null change.

Moreover, what I require in order to enjoy the game long-term is stability and predictability. Being able to find a single, static difficulty setting, or at the very least a static progression of difficulty settings (+0x0 1-11, +0x2 12-37, +0x2+B 38-50, -1x2+B 50+) that I can stick to with all of my characters gives me this stability. Every time I have to mess with difficulty settings as a response to a mission, that breaks this stability and it thus lessens my enjoyment out of the even.

Again, running at the lowest possible difficulty is not the same as paying for progress.

I don't know... For I forget how many years, people have been trying very hard to convince me that the game isn't designed for me, I'm an outlier, what I want isn't good for the game and that the game will never be fair towards me. Hell, the Evil Geko himself once commented that he specifically wanted the game to NOT be designed to appeal to me because of my bad attitude or some such. There's a reason we don't speak to each other.

Somewhere along the line I gave up on arguing with this notion, because it's a rotating cast of ever newer people always giving me the same argument. And besides, the game is always going to be unfair to me if I don't shoot for "the best" but instead only aim for "good enough." It only really bothers me when it gets worse, and niches I thought I had are rendered invalid. You liked Galaxy City and the old missions? Tough, the Atlas Park makeover wasn't aimed at you. It doesn't have to be fair, it has to make money.

That's kind of why I've supported selling power if it's being SOLD as opposed to RENTED out. If we're going to make the game unfair, then at least let's make it consistent in its unfairness and avoid the constant "rental" feel of it.

Yeah, this is one notion I'll never support. Having worked for an item does NOT make it worth more and it most certainly doesn't make me value it any higher. For me, it's actually quite the opposite - the harder I worked for something, the higher its cost is to me thus the lower its overall worth unless it comes with a very high value. The Roman gear... Really doesn't have that high a value to justify its cost. It's only ever worth using if I happen to reach it with a character that didn't really need it but could still probably use it, at which point its value isn't all that higher, it just cost me less since I wanted it less and "earning" it came as part of a different activity done for a different reason.

I operate on the following principle: worth = value - cost. In other words, how much an item earned is worth to me is a function of how much value I put on the item itself irrespective of the circumstances of obtaining it, and how much earning it actually cost me in terms of time, money, opportunity and pain-in-the-***. And yes, it's a very real possibility that earning an item incurs such a cost that the item's actual value can never offset it, and I end up feeling cheated. It doesn't matter how hard I worked for the Inf, I CANNOT spend a billion of it for Excalibur and leave thinking the item was worth getting. Especially since, having seen it in practice, it's not even all that great. What Alex made for Xanta (see my sig) is considerably better, even if it's restricted to that piece of artwork.

This is something that I think people really need to stop and think about, because this emotional response is very real and not something that can just be hand-waved away. I agree with Slaunyeh's sentiment here - when something is made available through "easy" means, then earning it the hard way makes me feel stupid and, more importantly, it makes me feel like I'm wasting my time. When the /auctionhouse command was first introduced, I swore that I'd only ever use it in emergencies and travel to a real Market whenever I wanted to use it. Then I found myself in several situations where I would need to cross three different zones to get to an actual Market. Then I realised it was more convenient to open the Market next to an Invention Table or a Vendor. Then I realised it was more convenient to open the Market remotely period. I haven't visited an actual Market in probably a year, as a result.

For certain things, the process of obtaining them is part of the fun of having them. For instance, I wouldn't want a paid option to start at level 50, because getting there is the majority of the fun. HAVING this option constantly looming over me, however, causes my subconscious to constantly bug me about "You do realise you're wasting your time, right? You know there's an easier way, right?" That's all fine and dandy for as long as I actually enjoy the journey unconditionally, but even for someone as stuck in his old ways as I am, certain things just bug me. Now when that happens, I grumble and muscle through them because, at the end of the day, one stupid mission full of MoG-using Paragon Protectors isn't that bad. It sucks, but it's easy enough to ignore when it's part of the process. But when I have a choice to just skip it all entirely and shoot straight to the end? Yeah, that effort seems all the more wasted and the annoyance of the situation all the more insufferable.

After having considered my options, I don't mind paying to circumvent built-in annoyances the game has to offer, but I'd rather not have the option to skip what's supposed to be the good part and the point of the game. Even if I don't take it, knowing that I could sours the experience.

But you're not comparing red-side to blue-side, you're comparing red-side to Atlas Park and possibly Steel Canyon. Not all of blue-side is "sterile," and that's precisely the point of zones like Kings Row and Skyway City and Independence Port and Brickstown. In fact, the game at Launch was pretty much designed this way for the most part - two zones per level range, one clean and nice like Metropolis, one dirty and crime-ridden like Gotham City.

That was actually my primary complaint with City of Villains at its own launch - where City of Heroes at least tried to juxtaposed the clean with the dirty, City of Villains was all dirty all the time. Oh, sure, some sections of some high-level zones are clear, but there are long level ranges where only "dirty" is available. Sharkhead Island is probably the worst offender - that entire place is depressing, and it's the ONLY place to level 20-25 in.

Well, I suppose you could bring up First Ward, but that's also dirty and devastated and it's really not part of "red-side."

Throw in another change and I'm game: Let the NPCs in those zones work like regular contacts, as opposed to contacts you have to flashback to. Have them only ever spawn missions within the Echo and put them in my contact list along with all the others. Make the Echo play like a real zone, and I will never complain again.

And, really, Ouroboros is the perfect excuse for this. They're the hub between an infinite number of divergent timelines, trying to sort through the possibilities and find the one which doesn't end with us all dead. Anything we "lose" can just end up there as just another alternate timeline charted and catalogued before the ever-shfting time-stream changes history once more.

I think I can offer some perspective here. Not an explanation, mind you, and probably not something that applies to anyone but myself, but give me a few minutes just the same.

My cynicism of our Marketing team notwithstanding, I generally dislike "pay to win" as a concept because it "corrupts" the game. Let me explain. Typically, a game is something I do because it offers me things that real life can't, and specifically because it isn't subject to the same restrictions that I dislike in real life. Our heroes never have to use the restroom, they never get sick, they never get parking tickets (or need to own cars...), they never sleep in or sleep at all, they don't have walk the cat or buy headlight fluid, that sort of thing. Most of that comes with the limitations of what the game can emulate, but some things a game CAN emulate that I really really don't want it to.

One of the things I really don't want games I play to do is mix real money into the game. It's not a question of other people getting more than me or me having to pay for more, or even a question of community. To me, the money side of things is one part of real life I don't enjoy, and having it rubbed into my face in-game is not pleasant for me. A game is escapism. Whether we achieve this through a sense of achievement, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of victory or a sense of invincibility, we are ultimately crafting for ourselves an illusion of success that, like in most entertainment, we use to make ourselves feel better. When the real world intrudes into the game, the illusion is shattered and its greatly diminished.

One of the reason I solo so much is because I make builds based on concept first and on "however much I can be arsed to try" second, and they end up being pretty sub par. This doesn't stop me from play-pretending that my characters are awesome, I just lower the difficulty and have an easy time. That doesn't quite work when I team with someone with an actual strong build. The illusion of power disappears before the reality of power, and I'm left disappointed in general. Now, obviously, this is a quirk of mine, but the broader subject remains:

When the real world and real money start intruding into a game, they tend to corrupt the illusion that the game is really about. They make the game too "real," in a sense. All of a sudden you start trying to figure out who deserves to have what, how can you prevent people from having things, when do you allow people to have things and so forth. All of a sudden it starts feeling less like a game, and that tends to take the magic out of it.

To loop back onto the subject of Amplifiers, why they concern me isn't that other people will play better than I do - I wouldn't be teaming with them either way. It isn't that I'll suddenly have to pay too much - I still control my own spending. It's that my performance in-game all of a sudden starts depending on my wallet, and I start asking a question that I really don't think I should be asking in a game - can I afford to have fun? This is the question I should ask myself before I log in, and once the answer has been found to be "yes," then that should be the last it comes up. Part of the point of a game, at least to me, is to put those questions aside and act as if I could afford the good stuff and as if I do deserve to be the best. Maybe not really, maybe not objectively, but within my little illusion, at least.

Injecting "pay to win" in a game runs a very real risk of corrupting what it is that makes a game to begin with, more or less.

Well, that's what Ouroboros is for. The problem with it RIGHT NOW is that it has all of two zones - one with no content in it but street-hunting and one which ends ten levels before a character can access Ouro to begin with.

If, for instance, the developers decided to retire Independence Port and all of the old 20-30 contacts, then I'd gladly go into the Echo of Independence Port as soon as I hit 20 and run contact missions there. Provided I don't have to actually Flashback to them, of course. Just leave the contact in there active as they are now.

You called? Actually, I'm quite serious. I never considered buying Inventions off the Market since I figured it wasn't worth the money, but if I can get the stuff I feel I need AT LEVEL 50, then I might have to look into this. What kind of recipes do they sell there? Just purples or can I find simpler ones that just happen to be stupid rare on the Market? Say, Red Fortune?

Posts like this are actually turning me around on the subject, especially when they draw parallels to unlockable costume pieces. Remember what I've said about those? I will gladly pay to buy a costume set because if I don't, the developers will just stuff it behind some inane unlock like defeating 100 level 40+ bosses or running a 35+ TF twice over. It occurs to me that if it that part of the game bothers me THAT much, it may be worth paying to circumvent it.

Nobody loses anything, since I probably wouldn't have teamed with you guys anyway, and I'll be motivated to play more and thus dump the purples I get on the market for 5000 and watch them sell for eleventy billion while you supposedly score a killing on your "lowball" bid of 200 million.

This is pretty much where I and Evil Geko have our irreconcilable differences that see us not speaking to each other: I don't believe in the concept of asking whether a player "deserves" to enjoy a game. It's a game, it's mean to be enjoyable and every player of it deserves to enjoy himself. Within reason, of course, but the basic statement stands. You can't claim that a player hasn't done enough to enjoy himself. If his requirements for enjoyment break the game, of course I can concede. Wanting to play PvP but only enjoying it if you win is not a workable proposition, since then you're actively breaking the game. But wanting to experience a portion of the content or play with a portion of the tools? Yeah, I think everyone deserves that. Especially since most people looking for assistance in that regard are already doing what they can to manage on their own.

Personally, I highly dislike the attitude that a player can only enjoy something if others don't "deserve" enjoying the same. This brings real-life competition to a place where it really, really doesn't need to exist. I like City of Heroes because it's a cooperative game. If ever I interact with people, the worst they can do is nothing, and if they do anything at all, they help me. I don't have to worry about other people not having the things I do, because all I really care about is what I have. What others have doesn't impact me.

You know... If you have too much money, how about I mail you my Set Inventions list next time I hit 50? I promise it'll be almost entirely Uncommon

True, but it's a lot less funny when it happens to your own Assault Bot and you essentially lose it for the rest of the fight. Or permanently, as I've had to dismiss and resummon henchmen due to ragdoll stiction.