AmazingMOO

Mods, I assume that it's okay to mention other NCSoft games? If not, my apologies in advance.

There's a very prominent announcement on the NCSoft launcher today about Lineage II's upcoming change to a completely f2p sales model.

L2 has never been for me. However, since its launch and and after reading through the website today, I've been enamored of its character models. This is particularly true for its beautiful faces and hair on both male and female characters.

My understanding is that L2 is built on the Unreal engine, while CoH is built on Cryptic's game engine. Most things would simply not work as a 'plug and play' if you attempted to move one from one game to another. Is sharing art assets between the different NCSoft studios a possibility?

For example, here's a screenshot accessible from the link on the NCSoft launcher. The female elf in the screenshot is wearing lingerie-like armor that's pretty typical of L2, from what I've seen. (I'd be willing to bet that it would be nigh-impossible to port that over to CoH character models.) What really intrigues me is her hair. It SEEMS like that would be pretty straightforward to port that model.

CoH also has a wealth of attractive hairstyles that would likely be pretty straightforward to port for L2.

Of course all that is said with zero understanding of how well NCSoft's different studios get along, or of other technical hurdles that would prohibit art asset sharing.

So... despite the barriers, is asset sharing between the different studios doable?

Thoughts on DFB

I've heard of lot of people complaining that 'DFB', as the 'Death from Below' lowbie trial is advertised on /help, is sucking the life out of the game.

And while I do think that there is massively more to the game than five rooms in the sewer, I think that Death from Below is actually VERY GOOD for the longterm health and longevity of the game.

Why?

First, Death from Below is not a farm. It's a real mission. You have to defeat everything in it. The enemies are not super hard, but they're lowbie enemies. New players cannot simply sit AFK at the door and level up. They have to actually go in and participate.

Because of that, New Players learn to play their characters. One of the chief complaints about power-leveling is that it creates an ocean of level 50s with no idea how to play. Even if they repeat the trial until they're 30 (as I heard one player mention), they have a rock-solid understanding of how to use their 1-10 powers. More often than not, these are the player's core powers anyway.

It also teaches players to communicate with their teams. The two conditional badges don't require a lot of coordination, but they do require at least reading instructions. Players who earn them learn very quickly that they're rewarded for paying attention. They also see the players in their team who refuse to communicate and learn pretty quickly how to deal with them.

The most important aspect of the trial, however, is that it teaches players that the best way to get ahead in the game is to find a team and play rather than to look for an easy AFK farm or an exploit to abuse. Players get good experience and decent rewards for playing in the team setting. They're shown that all they need to do to have a good time is to be willing to play with others.

There are problems, as with any new mechanic. The biggest problem is, however, City of Heroes' longest standing retention issue: Variety. Since there is only one trial, players get sick of doing nothing but wading through the sewers... just like they'd get sick of Yet Another Warehouse, Yet Another Cave, and Yet Another Science Lab. We need about four more trials just like this one, but given different, exciting settings.

Also, it HURTS to see the LFG technology WASTED on just one mission, 1-49. Not only do the new players like the LFG queue, but Dr. Kane's House of Horrors shows that it's viable, at least on moderately populated servers. We need to hook the LFG queue up to the Signature Story Arcs, Cavern of Transcendence trial, and Positron's taskforces as soon as possible.

Good job, Developers, on DFB, but don't rest on your laurels or the new wealth of players will trickle through your fingers!

I complain a lot.

One might think I'm terribly dissatisfied with the game.

While I am currently not very happy with a few portions of it, I have to say that I'm actually very happy with it. On a Customer Satisfaction scale of 5 (since so many businesses are using them now), I'm at about a 4.

Why?

Paragon Devs LISTEN to their players. Since Issue 6 or 7, they've demonstrated again and again that they religiously poll the players for concerns, ideas, feedback, and constructive criticism.

This is a very good thing.

Right now is a good time to watch this happening since it's floating at the top of the dev digest. If you haven't read the Dev Digest recently, now's a good time to do so. It's currently full of posts by Synapse as he goes about balancing a new powerset with feedback from players who are testing it. The other big posts in there are from Positron and the others as they talk about balancing and rebalancing new Incarnate content based on player feedback.

So when you have concerns about the game, POST THEM. The Devs DO listen!

'Epic' is a hard thing to nail. It differs from person to person. Some feel it's a one-on-one fight.

There are some spoilers ahead, so please be warned.

There's a Japanese Cartoon I really enjoy called 'Seto No Hanayome'. Without spoiling it too much, there's a big fight at the end that's a group of about 8 of the 'good guys' coming together to rescue the hero's love interest from the super-rich, super-spoiled big-bad. The 8 of them have to fight through dozens and dozens of the faceless lackeys and defeat a couple of dragons while the hero rescues his love interest.

"This one is for Sun! And this one is for Sun! And this is for Sun! And all these punches! These are all for Sun!!"

I personally think the most epic moments in the game fall pretty close to this trope. The End of the Faultline Arc is a great example. The Heroes have to fight 3 Archvillains and save Penny to save the world from the Chronometron.

The last missions of the STF and LGTF are also good examples.

Once the Heroes are done dispatching all the faceless minions of Arachnos, here comes ALL of Recluse's most trusted lieutenants AND an assault helicopter to thrown down on you at once. Only then can you face the Scary Evil Spider Dude himself AND his superweapon of doom.

LGTF goes about the same way. The plucky band of Heroes have to fight through many tough challenges-- Clocky, The Riders, Dragon, HAMIDON... everything the Rikti can throw in their way before they can fight Herodotus. And then, once you've finally gotten close to beating Herodotus, Riktified Hero One shows up to lay the smack down on you.

That's Epic. At least to me.

Having Marauder show up to drink a super-potion at you so that he can face a LEGION of heroes to slowly beat him down is somewhat less epic. It doesn't FEEL like a do-or-die fight. It's a LOT more engaging when you go with the minimum-sized team rather than an army, but still lacks that sense of awesome. It got a little better when teams were encouraged to fight Marauder's reinforcements along with him.

It's not us versus the bad guy and their army. It's the bad guy versus us and our army.

Your mileage may vary.

While the code does indeed deserve to be scrutinized for possible bugs... instead of, say, an accidental commit of future features... Let us not forget that some of the greatest features in the game were originally bugs.

Mayhem Missions, I'm looking at you... and applauding.

Z, if you haven't already, please add my name to the list of those who want free players to be able to respond to tells, legitimately or otherwise.

When it happened to me, I was queued solo in Pocket D.

FUNdamental Design Problems

The new patch notes for the next round of Incarnate content have put lots of ants in peoples' pants. My thought when I heard about them the first time was 'Wow. Why would they do that? They're just going to upset a bunch of people for no good reason.'

I feel a bit detached from the Incarnate content at the moment. I've been doing it only in very small amounts... basically when friends ask me to come along. I'm interested in spending time with friends rather than the content itself. Even at that rate, I've gotten the rewards I care about... the costume pieces locked behind the vendors in Oroborous. (I'd like to think that the developers looked at the wailing and gnashing of teeth that accompanied locking costume parts behind Empyrean Merits and have decided that it'd be a bad idea to do that again in the future. Hah! Good luck on that!) At this point, I feel like I can take or leave the Incarnate system as a whole and never look back if I don't want to.

At least to me, this points at a pretty serious design flaw. Why are there so many rewards attached to the Incarnate System? Why does it have to be 'incentivized' in a way that's completely different than the rest of the game? Why are the designers now 'de-incentivizing' certain parts of the content over others? What's the problem here? Why is there so much 'incentivation' going on anyway?

The very basic root of the problem is that the Incarnate System, as it's working right now, is not very FUN.


There's not a lot of joy in it, the way there is in, say, a Mayhem mission. Nobody has to be asked to destroy part of Paragon City. They go out of their way to find the opportunity to do so!

There's other fun stuff in the game right now that's built using EXACTLY the same building blocks and design tools that the Incarnate System is.

"Death from Below" is fun. Beat up progressively more and more weird enemies under the city and get some shinies and some exp! Fantastic stuff. I've been running about 3-4 a week since it came out.

The brand-spanking new Halloween Trial, "Dr. Kane's House of Horror" is fun. Go into a haunted house, find the secret of the crazed dermatologist who's been spree killing partiers and turning them into zombies. Fight a couple NASTY AVs, get some shinies, a little exp, and a Halloween-themed costume bit at the end. I LOVE everything about this mission, and plan to do it a LOT while it's available, mostly because I love haunted houses.

And despite being built from the very same legos, the Incarnate Trials lack that fun.

I suppose a good way to look at it is to ask yourself, if City of Heroes were a sandbox game and the rewards were removed completely, would people still play simply for the sake of playing?

Like I mentioned, mayhem missions would be on the upper end of the 'Oh hell yes!' scale. Not only would people still play, they'd compete to see who could do the most destruction in the shortest amount of time.

Regular Arcs, repeatable missions, non-incarnate Trials, and Taskforces... There's a lot of fun, engaging story in there, and a few unique challenges, but a lot of that stuff is pretty repetitive. Those who would play it with no rewards would find a few favorites, but for the most part play through the content once and go, 'Time to go beat up another bunch of fascists in YET ANOTHER office designed by LSD-Man. Okay, this is getting played out.'

Incarnate Trials... ah, here we go. Would people play through Incarnate Trials simply for the sake of doing them? There's some good design there, but if there were no rewards attached, even the most dedicated players would play through them exactly as long as it took to come out successful. Once. Many wouldn't bother with even that.


So what makes them unfun?

This is pretty subjective, and it's going to be different for everyone. I'll list what makes them unfun for me.


Confusing goals aren't fun.

Keyes Facility is currently the worst about this. There are dozens of subgoals with frequently only slightly differing requirements and a not a lot of information to tell you how to meet them. My experience is that most people get through Keyes the first time and still don't really have much clue what was going on.


Being Insta-killed isn't Fun

There's at least some of this in all the trials. In a lot of cases, players are defeated with no warning and through no fault of their own. In cases where they have warning and can evade death via skill or sheer toughness, it's great! In cases where you can't even see WHY you died, it's simply frustrating.


Zerging an Objective isn't fun.

All the trials suffer from this to some degree by including so much unresistable damage and insta-kill effects. The single worst offender is the glowie hunt in Lambda. When a player is defeated and has to run back into the maze after going to the hospital, chances are the enemies left behind in the mad rush are going to zap him again before he catches back up to his team.


Sitting in the Hospital while other people finish the challenge isn't fun.

All the trials have the frequently pointless 20 second lock on the hospital doors (as does Death From Below!). That's frustrating. However, the worst single example is when a team leader asks part of the group to sit in the hospital while another part finishes an objective. I've seen this happening pretty frequently on Keyes as players attempt to earn the badges. Players who have problematic hardware-- they can't see the green patch or lag too badly to avoid it-- are asked to stay in the hospital. Neither the team leader nor the rest of the team begrudges them the badge nor holds them responsible for their hardware issues. Still, I wouldn't even WANT a badge that I didn't help earn.


Grinding for Currency to Buy Rewards isn't Fun. (It's called 'Work' in the Real World.)

What can I say? Some people really enjoy Skeeball. I like the rolling the balls part of it, but the collecting tickets bit comes off as just kinda dumb to me.

In the same way, getting 1 or 2 Empyrean merits a day and then discovering that you need dozens of them to get the costume pieces you want is EXACTLY like getting 12 tickets from a Skeeball machine and then discovering that you need 5000 of them to buy the crappy black and white TV at the rewards counter.

In the real world, you can say, 'Screw this. I'm not enjoying the game any more, so I'll just go to Best Buy and buy the TV I want.'

In the game, however, there's no way to do that. By gating those rewards behind untradeable, uncraftable Empyrean merits, the designers can say, 'No! You cannot have that unless you do EXACTLY what we want you to!'


Downtime is no fun.

Queuing for an incarnate trial could work if people used it, but most don't, perpetuating the problem. Instead they sit in Pocket D or RWZ shouting 'LFT for BAF!' over and over again.

When I do run a trial with friends, I typically pull out something to read while I'm waiting for everyone to assemble. I'm not even PLAYING the game at that point, let alone enjoying it.


Trying to Corral 16 or 24 Strangers is not fun.

When I'm trying to meet new people and play with others I haven't before, I feel like that if there are any more than about 5 or 6 others, I can't really keep track of what's going on, especially if I'm also providing any kind of leadership.

Trying to do the same thing with 16 others is about as much fun as listening to a screaming baby in a restaurant.

You can't immediately weed out the bad seeds or the abusers simply because there's too much going on to keep track of everything.

Regardless of the Designers' desire to make the trials accessible, they DO need leadership. Someone has to make decisions, even if it's only flipping the coin to decide who pulls.

When you're on a team of 16 and 24 and there are no leaders, or worse, there are several people on the team who refuse to listen to the leaders who do step forward, it's not just the crying baby in the restaurant any more. The screaming baby's 3 year old brother has just taken his pants off and is running around the tables, half-naked. He keeps running up to your table and trying to grab your dessert and his parents won't do a damn thing about it.


I, and a lot of others have made suggestions to alleviate some of these problems in the past, but I think that the trial designers need to go further than simply tweaking numbers. They need to step back, take a hard, deep look at what they've built and ask themselves 'Why isn't this fun?'

If you get it right, you won't HAVE to keep fiddling with the drop rates, cool-down timers, and introducing new currencies to keep people's interests. People will do the content because they WANT to do the content. Right now, a lot of people simply don't WANT to do the content and that's not something that putting a new stereo up on the counter and tagging '8000 Tickets' on it is going to fix.

"Event Failed to Start. Your group has been placed back in the queue."

I'm getting this message pretty frequently when queued solo for Dr. Kane's mansion. Is this a bug, or Dr. Kane's trial having both a min and max of 4 players?

I've been hearing this repeated fairly often in /help chat 'What other trials are available?'. The first time I replied, I explained the Cavern of Transcendence, the respecs, the AST, Eden, and soforth. I realized that wasn't really what they were asking for.

The new players LIKE the LFG queue interface. It's a good interface, especially for single-group teams. They like it a LOT and would prefer to be able to do more content via it.

So plug Positron part1 and/or Virgil Tarikoss to the system so that players can queue for those. I think it would dramatically increase retention, especially as those players start to look outside Atlas for more to do.

The newer ties, scarves, and what have you only work with Jackets and Shirts There are also a lot of items in there that would work well together, if only we could select two from the same category

For example, the new Vampire Frilled Ascot is mostly a neck piece, and would look lovely on a bare-shouldered female model wearing the steampunk corset. If the VFA was in Detail 2, that would work, but once it got moved to Chest Detail, the possibility ended.

There are lots of pieces like this, and these restrictions limit the creativity by more than I'd personally like.

So, very seriously, can get duplications of items in 'Detail 2', 'Shoulders' and 'Chest Details' to make these items available to a wider array of costumes? We'd still only be able to select 3 different items total.

How much work would this entail for the developers? Is it a matter of cutting and pasting into lists or would there some more serious code-work required to get it off the ground?

I just came off a successful 'No Green Stuff' run with a close call that had me cringing away from my screen.

Antimatter locked his disintegration effect on me. I called out to the emp, a good friend and someone who I've been grouping with regularly a few years now.

I died before he could heal me out of the Disintegration effect. Immediately, he popped his targeted rez on me.... and was immediately targeted himself by the Orbital Obliteration Cannon cross-hairs. He scampered as soon as the animation would let him and BARELY made it out of the green stuff.

My KO'd body let the rez counter expire and watched as the green column of death slowly faded away, and then went to the hospital.

I wasn't sure it'd work, but after the end of the trial, we did indeed see that we'd successfully made it out of the Green Stuff and earned the badge.

If I'd accepted that rez, which probably 99% of players would have, we'd have lost out on the badge.

My healer friend's suggestion was straight forward afterward. Forbid rezes during the AM fight. If someone dies, make them go to the hospital and walk back so that neither the rezer nor the rezee gets caught off guard in those long animations during the fight.

It was fun watching the server crash. Team and League chat quit working, followed by broadcast. Eventually everyone got mapserved.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

I told myself after the Fireman's Hat that I would PREVIEW new items in the character creator before I bought them.

The, lo and behold, if it isn't the new Halloween Pack! Happy day. Oh, and it's going to be only on sale during the event. I might as well. Even if there's a few nits to pick, it's not going to be horrible. Right? Even the bugs with the fireman's hat don't quite make it unwearable.

Okay, yeah, I'm pretty dumb for thinking that there wasn't any room for failure on this one when I SHOULD have known better.

There are a few obnoxious bugs with this pack, what what stands out to me is a couple bugs that make the costume pieces simply unwearable. The Frilled Ascot appears BEHIND the head rather than in front of the neck and below it. The Bat broach hovers a hand-width off of the chest so that people even moderately close to you can see that it's just floating there.

How did these guys make it past even Internal testing? I mean, surely one of the artists glanced at the pieces and said 'Whoa! We need to check the origins on those before they go live!"

The worst part is that by buying the set based on the tiny pictures in the icons rather than making sure that each and every piece worked in Icon, I have set a precident. It's a strong reinforcement for NCSoft to slap crap together and call it a costume set.

I apologize to the other players who've I've screwed, even if only in a tiny way.

Artists... PLEASE take a few minutes to QA this stuff before it goes live!

Because you didn't, this will no doubt be put in the bug queue behind several other more serious issues and not fixed until well after the event is over.

Me? I've been burned twice now. No more spur purchase from me. Marketing folks: You had your chance to have a loyal Apple-style fanboy who'd shell out money for anything you trotted out the door. There is now no way in HELL that I'll ever purchase one of these again without careful preview work.

The Think Tank leans back about 10-15 degrees from the female model's shoulders, making them look like they're leaning way back away from something. The tank should be straight up and down, IMO.

Vampire Frilled Ascot does not show up in the fight place when selected on Female models. Instead it appears BEHIND her head, just a little above eye level and slopes down. It doesn't have a backside, so it doesn't render if you look at it from behind.

The easiest way to see this is to make a bald model, select the ascot, and then turn the model about 15 degrees.

How'd this get past (even internal) testing?

Vampire Frilled Ascot also does not appear under 'Chest Detail' for Jackets and Sleevless jackets... like all the other scarves, ties, things, etc... You'd think it would. I'm quite okay with all that stuff showing up in both detail 2 and chest detail. I think most players would be as well.

Vampire broach for capes float well, well above the chest of the cape wearer. About 3-5 inches.

It also does not have a back side so you can see it disappear as you turn the model to about 70 degrees

The Vampire broach exists as a gold item, but accepts colors anyway. The primary color seems to tint it very subtly. The secondary color does not affect it at all.

It makes a lot of sense for Vampire Broach to be copied into the Chest Details categories, so it can be used as a pocket pin or a lady's broach without having to wear a cape.

The wolf model in the new Haloween content shows us two things:

a) The devs have a working quadruped skeleton and are starting to look at how they can use it and

b) They have placed it viewable in the new event at least partially in order to gauge how players are going to react to it.


Now, the obvious ultimate destination for the fulfillment of this technology is to have quadrupeds be a valid player model. Saying that's going to happen is like saying 'As soon as we get us some rocket fuel, we're on the moon, Baby!'. The idea of recreating literally every power animation in the game to work with a quadruped model rather than a biped model is staggering. I suspect that it would ultimately be MORE work than what's been done on Power Customization.

However, not too long ago, Power Customization was 'not able to happen, sorry'.

So, if the stars align, the staff is willing, the pocket books are open to the right page, etc... and so forth... and the developers are able to let us make quadruped characters, these are my requests for functionality:

1. The very first thing I'd create if the possibility exists is a hamster. Therefore, such a model would need to be allowed to scale much, MUCH smaller that what we've seen anywhere else in the game. Currently, I'm making do with the Panda shoulder pet for displaying this character in his rodent form, but I could go even a bit larger than that. I'd be willing to go so large as 'Basketball' size.

2. In order to make a rodent quadruped from a generic quadruped, The legs must be shortened dramatically. In terms of character modelling and animation, this means that the same skeleton necessary to model a wolf would also need to be able to model a dachshund.

3. Rodents as basically big balls of fat and internals on top of those tiny legs. The skeleton would need many, many animation bones, including a rounding bone that works similar to the way the 'Physique' slider works on biped models.

4. Unlike many rodents, Hamsters are born with short, stubby tails. A selection of tails would need to be made available.

5. The texture I need is orange and white spots.

I crashed after Keyes last night. I zoned into Oro from Keyes and then tried to zone back into Pocket D while attached to a league.

Seen during a Zombie Invasion in Talos:







So Halloween is going to be interesting this year, I think.

There are a lot of lingering issues with the costume creator.

One of the issues that causes the worst problem, however, is integrating all the new textures and pieces into existing menus.

A relatively new example of this is the fact that the new Barbarian corsets won't work with the Steampunk Victorian jackets despite the fact that the Victorian corsets will.

There are issues like this all throughout the various super-booster sets... The various ties made available with the 'Day Jobs' jackets and items a long while back are still not available to wear unless you've got 'Jackets' selected.

These issues seem like they ought to be fixable with fairly minor text edits. 'Allow piece x in category y'. My possibly optimistic assumption is that there's not a huge amount of work in getting these items sorted correctly. They haven't been fixed yet because the developers responsible simply don't know about them all.

Too much to hope for, maybe?

I /bug these issues every time I come across them. I've recently been hearing chatter that a dev stated that they look at the Bug Reports forums more often than the submissions from /bug, so I've been trying to post there as well.

How can we, players, help to categorize, list or otherwise make the developers aware of these issues if not through /bug or posts on the Tech Issues/Bug reports forums. Would a spreadsheet of issues via email be helpful?

Tell us what we can do!

For female models, Bikini 2 and 3 are not available as bottoms with 'Skirts and Shorts'.

On female models, Barbarian Corsets are not available when wearing Victorian Steampunk jackets. This is despite the fact that the Barbarian Corsets sit quite a bit lower on the model than the Victorian corsets.

Part of a series of annoying bugs with power customization...

Since the latest patch, if you create a new power customization file and attempt to load it, it won't even show in the file list window.

I encountered this while trying to edit costumes for my Beam Rifle/Energy blaster. The power customization defaulted to red/red despite the fact that it should be white/gold.

I've been going out of my way to group with brand new f2p players. It's kinda difficult since they, y'know, can't answer tells or anything.

The way I've been doing so is by sending tells to players in the 'Search' window asking them if they'd like to group with me. If, after a minute or so they haven't responded, I'll send them an invite.

However, you're never given any kind of warning that a player can't send tells if you send them one and they don't have access.

This evening, using this 'hesitant blind invite' method, I grouped with a new storm corrupter in King's Row. She'd been playing the game for three days and was really enjoying it. She'd made a really good lizard woman costume and wrote an interesting bio.

I'd already run into a few frustrations trying to drop inspirations on her when she was low on health and being told she didn't have permissions to trade. But what really took the cake for me was when I sent her a tell praising her costume and bio. I realized after a few seconds she probably wouldn't be able to respond. However a few seconds later she sent a message to the group window saying, "Thank you! I'm sorry I can't figure out the tell interface."

"If you hit backspace, you can reply to tells," I responded. "But you may not have access to it if you're a free-to-play player."

"That's probably it. I'm poor. " was her response.

I grouped with her for quite a bit more during the evening, and was very careful to let her know exactly what was going on since she was a new player. The whole time I was seething.

By keeping BASIC chat functionality away from f2p players, I realized, the restrictions are also making the game more difficult for me. I'm a paying player, a 'VIP', yet I have to go through EXACTLY the same hoops to communicate that f2p players do.

This needs to be fixed.

In addition to a 'Free to Play' channel, we need an option like 'Receive tells from free players'. At the very least, if I, the paying VIP, send a tell to a free player, they should be able to respond to me.