Techbot Alpha

Originally Posted by TrueMetal

I like this idea, but I think it has potential to be OP. Especially now pets can travel through zones.

Freak tanks, Shivans, Night Widows, Longbow Wardens, ... are all quite strong npcs, especially when buffed and healed by players. Now have 8 of them on a full team.

So some restrictions should be in order. e.g.: mak them unbuffable, put them on a short timer, ...

(On a note: I personally feel the Summon Shivan temp power is rediculously overpowered and wouldn't mind seeing it removed from the game.)

Originally Posted by Zombie Man

Originally Posted by TyrantMikey

I completely concur with everything you've said.

I will freely admit that I left COH for 60 days to play AION. And one thing that struck me that was positive about AION compared to COH was the sheer volume of things to do in the early levels, and the free-form order in which you could do it. (Sure, you had the Campaign, which was story-driven and required you to complete it in stages, but you had just a mind-boggling array of things to do.)

What COH really needs, and what would seem to be fairly easy to do at this point, is a revamp of the zones with a Meg Mason style contact in each zone. Yes, absolutely, GR is coming out Soon™, but we have no idea how soon Soon™ is. In the meanwhile, you have to think about what is going to draw and retain new subscribers. And five year old content doesn't seem to be doing the trick (anymore).

Certain zones in the game seem to never get used at all anymore. Boomtown is a ghost town unless you have a mission there. Dark Astoria is the same way. Independence Port is dreaded because it's so large that travel times from one mission to another are often excessive (quick fix: move all contacts closer to the trains/gates/base portals and have them give out their numbers much earlier). I could go on but you get the picture.

In my personal opinion, I'd rather see the zones revamped with new content added to them than a new zone. Yes, a new zone would be very cool. But it would only stretch the existing player population out over an area that doesn't really need to be made any wider.

Originally Posted by Schismatrix

Corrected.

Originally Posted by M_I_Abrahms

Well, that is if you can actually see that room.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

I'm not sure screaming your hate of marketing will make marketing give us anymore info any sooner

Originally Posted by Rial_Vestro

Your reasoning skills are flawed and so are your comprehention skills.

Originally Posted by Lord Mayhem

Yeah I can certainly get behind the suggestions for more realistic building interiors and re-scaling NPC models to be more realistic compared to our heroes/villains. Both of those things do irk me.

Maybe I imagined it, but I seem to recall that around the time of Herocon there was something about instanced maps in Praetoria being linked logically to mission doors in the buildings of each zone, so that the building size/style/layout would match inside and out, and that the enemy groups outside of the building would match those present inside the building - and also that randomised doorways for instance missions would be a thing of the past for new content in CoH/V. I can't find the link now (admittedly I didn't spend long looking for it and my search-fu is weak) so did I dream it?

Originally Posted by Dante

Union is also the EU's unofficial RP server so if that's what you're looking for, you'll find more on Union. Still not as many as on Virtue but probably more than on Defiant.

Originally Posted by Dr_Mechano

A large group of friends is actually interesting in doing an ALL VEAT LRSF just to see how things would go.

Even if the rule of "if an AV has 100% resistance to it, -res debuffs don't work on that resistance" an 'even split' VEAT team of 2 of each of the branches has enough non-smashing/lethal damage to usually make up for it (All night Widow claw attacks deal toxic DoT as do 90% of Bane Spider attacks, Fortunatas are all psi damage which almost no AV has any decent resistance to and Crabs deal Smashing/energy or have a toxic effect on their ranged).

Originally Posted by The_Killbot_5000

Oh, and you people and your cake / pie debate... we all know that all pastry-based treats are a lie, but did you know that Praetorian Clockwork is PEOPLE!

Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain

I dunno why Babs, is here? Perhaps he is trying to convert me?
BLASPHEMY?!?!?!!?

Castle is the awesome one, I know it!!! He is the little ray of hope I cling too... While the announcement may come from Positron, I know... Just like any good speech writer, it really came from Castle. He is the guy behind that other guy who really makes it all happen.

/weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee eeeeeeee

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow

Because this was quoted. I have an excuse to dredge it up. I have two things to say about this.

First and most important, those closed doors we see in office buildings are there to imply that there is more to the area, we just don't go there. For instance, where we find a corridor circling a large area of "blackness, there are doors to that to suggest this isn't a void, but rather it has rooms in it that we just don't go into. I don't really have a problem with that... Where it makes sense. Offices are a good example of it making sense. Warehouses... Not so much. They don't have any doors to suggest there may be other sections closed off. At most, they have cargo load doors to suggest there's a lorry parking spot OUTSIDE the building, which a review of the outside of any warehouse-holding building, there isn't.

And then there are Arachnos bases. Who the HELL thought any of that made sense? Why are their bases essentially see-through mesh corridors hanging on the inside of a black hole. Does it strike no-one as absurd that the apparent intended look was that Arachnos bases were built inside some kind of titanic, pitch-black chasm just... Floating in mid air? That kind of thing wouldn't make sense even as an alien construct, and it just serves to make Arachnos all the more goofy. They're SO adamant about being bad that they excavated the inside of the planet just so their bases could float in darkness. Ugh...

Secondly, I completely agree on the notion of logical design over "dungeon offices." With or without the out of doors, locations simply look better when they make sense. I refer to Oni when I talk about these things, because the game has buildings that ACTUALLY LOOKED LIKE BUILDINGS, both on the inside and on the outside. That TCTF HQ you get to see from the outside? All of its internal space makes sense and actually fits snugly on the inside of what you see from down on the street. All, like, 10 floors of it, which is an amazing design. Even when you can't see the outside, even when you're underground, Oni's maps still manage to feel like real structures, rather than chaos architecture. And it's not even that hard to do. The University instance is a pretty good example. Instead of making odd-shaped rooms floating in blackness, just make rooms that fit together snug a are subdivided into smaller rooms within them. In fact, I wouldn't be terribly upset if each large office map were broken down to a grid of large squares, each as a predefined set of smaller rooms inside it.

Or, heck, take a cue from UFO: Enemy Unknown, AKA X-Com: UFO Defence. That gave you outside locations complete with buildings with realistic insides, and it gave you inside locations (like attacks on your base) that had what I described above - large sections or "facilities" as the game called them, formed into large square blocks, each subdivided into basically a corridor and a few rooms. It made the bases feel a lot more realistic, even though the process of making them was so simplistic. Simplistic enough, in fact, that they were made by the PLAYER in a Dune: Battle for Arakis sort of style.

I've heard tell that the buildings and instances in Going Rogue will "make sense," so I have my fingers crossed to see that.

Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker

You can keep him as a very effective guy with a gun if you continue along the straightforward SoA path. Don't specialise into Crab or Bane.

Originally Posted by Westley

K that's wicked awesome D_R.

I think the devs should find some sort of use for that room.... let us use it in like a mission or something.