Samuel_Tow

I don't know. How many hours was the mission intended to take?

I'm starting to notice something of a pattern here. The people who trounce around "learn to play" seem to often be the ones not knowing how to play, if going by their advise is any indication. "Did you try fighting what's probably a couple hundred enemies one by one?" No, I did not, because that would have taken all damn day. I'd rather run out of the mission and buy 20 Purples between every two spawns than pull every single enemy out of every single spawn one by one. Waiting 10 minutes for Unstoppable to recharge between every two spawns would have been faster. I had it slotted for decent recharge and using the Spiritual Alpha, so it was down to about 8 minutes, I think.

For the last eight years, I've been listening to people beat their chests about how good they are because they:

1. Pull
and
2. Use inspirations

You'd think people would brag about their builds or such, but no, it's always the "I do the blindingly obvious thus I'm a better player and you should learn to play from me." I gotta' say, it hasn't gotten any less old since people were doing it before Issue 1, and it hasn't gotten any more of a "solution" to any particular problem, especially considering those are only mitigating factors when build still matters greatly. Someone suggested having a character who could debuff or control greatly, which ought to be quite an achievement on a Titan/Inv/Energy Brute, but that's besides the point.

No, my mistake wasn't not pulling or not doing whatever other "Use Tic Tacs!" cliché you can come up with. My mistake was trusting the difficulty system to be worth a crap in Incarnate gameplay, and I trusted mission design to be reasonable. And it's not. I was under the impression that bringing help would, you know, help. It didn't. It slashed my reward down to a third and the end result was a mission which was neither quicker nor easier to run than it would have been had I not had help. No, the solution was to simply disable bosses, politely tell Sister Solaris to please go to hell and run it by myself. It would have been faster, more rewarding and far more satisfying, to say nothing of considerably easier and much less annoying.

P.S.
For the record, I did try pulling enemies, and it's impossible. The only - read ONLY - ranged attack I have is the Nemesis Staff, and the moment I'd fire that at a spawn, Imperious would bumrush ahead and engage that spawn in whole where they sat. Maybe I don't have the mad skillz to pull with overzelous NPCs around, but in my experiences, that has simply never worked. Whenever I've tried using it, usually my NPC companions instead rush ahead and aggro two separate spawns.

But, hey, I guess you're better at controlling uncontrollable NPCs than I am. I'd love to hear your expert advise on how to stop them from chasing after runaway critters that run to another spawn, or how to get them to not attack enemies in the adjacent spawn, or how to get them to hold fire until a an enemy is far enough away from its spawn to not aggro them.

*edit*
And you know what the real kicker is? I still beat that mission, fair and square. I just did not enjoy a single minute of the experience. I guess I can just listen to your advise and learn to play a horribly boring version of what is an otherwise much more exciting game.

Which they were in the process of doing when they renamed the old Statesman and Psyche badges to be about Positron and Penny Yin. Luckily, extremely negative feedback got the team to preserve those badges in Ouroboros and simply create new ones for Posi and Penny.

I imagine it's also very unrewarding since NPCs that kill each other for 100% hit points take away all rewards and drops. Or does that not apply to Incarnate content? I remember people used to do this to pass tough fight in the game back in 2004, and I remember it being not terribly different from waiting

Yeah, I kind of suspected you can't just make up a power to put Earth effects in, but I'm just hoping that if you guys ever work on expanding the existing Judgement pool of powers, you'll look into adding one that looks like it might be physical. And if you play your cards right, you may be able to make that physical attack stand in for Earth Control, as well.

Just the same, thank you for listening. I think I'll go check if coloured Forcefields align right and if coloured Poison Traps colour correctly

I want to pick back up on this. I'd love to have the option to have an aura only on the left or right eye. That's not just for the sake of explaining eye patches and single-eye visors. Sometimes, like in the case of Juri from SF4, it just makes sense for one eye to glow and the other not.

Yeah, I pretty much did. Unstoppable, Hasten and attack spam. And why I say I cheated is I'd used Unstoppable on the spawn before, the one with the elite boss, two bosses, four lieutenants and approximately a hundred thousand minions. So I waited. Or rather, I left the game sit idle, Alt-Tabbed and went chatting on the forums for around 15 minutes.

I call this cheating, but it's really only cheating myself, since I wasted my own time. Oh, sure, I could have downed a bunch of purples, but I lost faith in those when my SR Stalker got repeatedly killed by those same monsters while running all her SR toggles, Elude and consuming multiple purples. I realise that that ought to have put e about three times over the defence cap, but I kept getting killed by errant Head Splitters.

Yes, there is - NOT HAVING three licks and a break free. It's always the same story in these threads. Eventually we get to the subject of inspirations and someone goes on a self-righteous tirade about how the people complaining must not be using all of their tools and so on.

OK, so what's your advice when I'm staring down a spawn of 12 bosses, a neat mix of Cyclops and Minotaurs plus Nictus Romulus Plus a Keres, and all of my NPC helpers are dead and my inspiration tray is completely empty? Go buy more? OK, so I go by more and go through pretty much all of them in the next two spawns. Now what? Go buy more? Right, how many times per mission do you envision me zoning out of the instance and trekking half-way across a zone to do this? My machine loads fast, but it doesn't load that fast.

Then the argument inevitably turns around to what I'm doing with all these inspirations and how I can possibly be using them all despite me often having to blow through four lucks AND some greens to get through one large spawn out of, say, the seven I need to get out of Mot's belly after the bank (incidentally, there's no leaving this mission before it's done unless I die). Then it turns from a problem of me not using enough inspiration to me using too many inspirations and the argument loops back to "learn to play."

As long as people continue to ignore the actual complaints made by the people complaining in these threads and instead chastise them for complaints no-one ever made, then I will continue to dismiss "learn to play" arguments out of hand.

Superman is actually a pretty good writer's challenge, because you have a character that's badly overpowered within the world he exists in, and yet writers manage to give him believable stories time and again. OK, so maybe you could have Superman punch some bad guy hard enough to break every bone in his body. Wouldn't this kill him, though? Because as I remember, Superman is big on not killing his enemies. All of a sudden, you have a moral question come up to solve a technical writing problem of how to equalise power levels. Yes, Superman can snap a bank robber's spine in half, but isn't that a BAD thing? Consider the whole "world of carboard" concept that Tyrant actually does in his own personal story mission. He hasn't used his full power in a long time because he worries damaging the city and killing the people, but now that there are no people left and the city is lost, he can safely let loose.

Writing an coherent story isn't hard, but it's not exactly easy. You still need to plan ahead, know your characters and actively look for possible plot holes so you can explain around them without having to bridge the gap with tropes. If it transpires that the villain's plan should have been obvious to the hero, you can't just shrug and say "Derp! It's comic books! Heroes is stupid or we wouldn't have a story!" and expect a thinking reader to buy it. You need to either give a reason why the hero saw the obvious plot but walked into it anyway (which the Statesman never got) or otherwise explain why the plot may have been obvious to us as readers, but the hero's perception of it was somehow obfuscated.

Or, you know, make a trap that is NOT obvious. You don't have to stick with the very first idea that pops into your head and roll with it when it's proven to have more holes in it than Swiss cheese at a firing range.

My mind slipped because I added that sentence about two paragraphs after I'd finished that train of thought. Yes, I meant Cryptic studios, it's a typo.

Then you have no taste. Either that or you're being intentionally obtuse, and forgetting your own argument. You insisted that "tropes" have to be used or a story is no good. I showed you one where the tropes you listed - walking into an obvious trap and a villain being undone by his own over-complex plan - are not used, and now you're moving the goal posts from "tropes are necessary" to "I didn't like it." I don't like pie. It doesn't mean it's not sweet.

You can call anything a "cliché," but that doesn't make it true. You can call anything a trope just because it's vaguely similar to something you read on TVtropes, but that doesn't make it true, either. Yes, Dark Astoria has the heroes walk into a trap. It is by far and wide NOT an obvious one. In fact, the entire story is concocted so as to suggest that that's the right solution to the problem, with the only foreshadowing to it coming too late and being too ambiguous to prevent the trap from being sprung. If you want to argue that that's not the case, forming an actual argument to counter it might be useful, because just telling me it's obvious doesn't carry much weight.

If you think so, you're wrong. I have so far run Dark Astoria on two separate and mostly polarly opposite characters and found the plot twist near the end to work just fine for both of them. I have no idea how "soul sucking and bodyshock scenery" relates to tropes of predictability and genre blindness, but even so, one of the characters I played the story with was a sentient, highly-intelligent, self-aware machine and it fit just fine within the broader storyline of Dark Astoria. The other, as I've explained elsewhere, is a direct, brutish, unsophisticated fighter, and she fits within Dark Astoria just as well. Trying to write an argument away with "it only works for you" is not a winning proposition unless you have an actual argument to explain that position.

And again, how does what type of character I play have anything at all to do with the tropes you mentioned? Are you implying that if my character were somehow hyper-intelligent he'd have seen through the situation and seen the trap and the story would be over? Because A) that would be going against clear evidence, which is both illogical and irrational, B) it doesn't really accomplish anything since the scene with Mot and Tielekku is not a deliberate trap so much as a misunderstanding of the clues and C) it doesn't really change much of anything since the player would still have to track down Hazen's diaries and finish the ritual regardless. I suppose not losing Tielekku would have made this easier to do, but not by much.

There's a difference between having a hero who's smart and aware and one who's omniscient to the plot. You CAN create a trap that works without requiring the hero to be stupid, and you can have a hero win against a strong plan without requiring the villain to be stupid. No-one is infallible. Everyone makes mistakes. The trick is to write a story where those mistakes come off as genuine, rather than the result of either the hero or the villain being an idiot or intentionally impaired. Dark Astoria pulls that trick off because the situation it presents which turns into a trap is logical and reasonable, and because the villain's modus operandi makes sense once you realise that Mot is more powerful than it has let on.

It's not just a question of me liking the story. This is a competently written story that makes sense and has a logical progression of events. You're free to not like it, but unless you have an actual argument for why it's not technically competently written, you can't really dispute that it's good.

What do you take me for? "Show me your arcs so I can make fun of them?" Yeah, because there's a chance in hell you'll give them a fair shot. Here's a thought - if you're so intent on showing me how you're right and my story arcs are bad, find them yourself. It's not like that's hard to do.

*edit*
Furthermore, even if you do get around to making fun of my villain story arc written with this in mind, the game already gives you examples of how this can be done, in the form of Dean McArthur and Leonard. It's not hard to do.

My concern is about Incarnate content, which I'm already playing at -1. It doesn't make the enemies considerably easier since they can't spawn at 50-1, but it makes my allies considerably weaker since the CAN spawn at level 49. Did you not read the post where I outlined this?

*edit*
And that's not just an Incarnate problem. Setting a mission that you're supposed to win with NPC help to -1 does not make it easier. Yes, the enemies are easier, but your NPC help is weaker, too. And as luck would have it, your allies will spawn at -1 while your enemies will still spawn even con anyway. At least that's how it works for me, more often than not.

I know. I was asking about the pants and asking if there is a matching top to those pants from the Retro Sci-Fi pack. I know what the top is, that was never in question. I don't know what the pants are and hoped that there was a tights top to go with them. Turns out there isn't.

This is very true, and it frustrates the hell out of me. In a lot of cases, lowering my difficulty setting actually increases my practical difficulty, so I'm forced to play at higher difficulty setting than I'd like. Take, for instance, last mission from Sister Solaris where I have to defend Cimerora. I played the rest of the arc at -1, so 49, knowing that DA enemies can't spawn below 50 and so it would ensure they're all my level... Except then my helpers themselves spawn at level 49 and die like idiots. I could up my difficulty to +0, but then my enemies would spawn at level 51 and kill ME, and my allies would still probably spawn at 50 and be -1 anyway. I could turn off bosses so the fights aren't as hard, but then my allies would degrade into lieutenants and be no use at all. Yet accepting through help slashes the rewards of that mission down to a third.

I think I've finally decided to just screw the whole thing, keep it at -1x1, disable bosses and just refuse help. Then I can run it all by myself and not have to worry about allies sinking into the ground, aggroing extra enemies or - as happens practically every time - die mid-way through the mission and leave the BIGGEST spawns for me to fight alone anyway. It'll be harder, but at least it'll be less frustrating.

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Let me be very clear on one specific point: I HAAATE NPC helpers. I've hated them since the Rikti War Zone decided to have three in every PANCAKE mission. Their AI is garbage, they die way too easily and it's impossible to pull with them. I REALLY hate it when my success in a mission relies on NPCs that can die and leave me SOL. At least in the Lazarus TF, if I lose Nosferatu and Brukholder, all I'm really losing help for is one fight, and I can deal with one fight. In the Cimeroran mission, if I lose half my squad because Imperious is an idiot and aggroed two spawns at once, I still have the whole frikkin' map to clear by myself anyway.

---

Lowering my difficulty should not make fights harder, and I'd like to have the option to have my fights harder or easier as I choose to make them via the various difficulty options.

I was. I love the pants, and I'd really like to retrofit them into Stardiver, but I can't do that because I can't use that chest with the Armoured top, nor would it look very good if I could. Besides, I drew up Stardiver as a chibi type of character, so I need a smaller, skinnier torso anyway.

Please understand I don't mean to insult you when I say this, but this is complete nonsense. Tropes may not be bad, but they are never necessary. Villains don't need to have stupid plans and heroes don't need to be stupidly genre-blind. It's up to the writer to make people's actions, reactions and plans seem reasonable and logical. To say that "oh, you have to use shoddy writing" is merely an excuse for not doing your job as a writer.

To restrict ourselves to this game, let's look at Dark Astoria. Tielekku banished the Banished Pantheon that Mot is a member of once already, and she has already been notified of the rise of the Banished Pantheon cultists in the Scroll of Tielekku arc. It's logical to believe that to defeat Mot now, you'd need to summon the goddess to banish him. Given Mot's actions and influence over the Tsoo, it's also not unreasonable to believe that he is afraid of the goddess and is pushing Tub Chi towards summoning and weakening her. Given this, the Letter Writer's plan to make what seems like the obviously correct choice is not a stupid decision. It is a sound, prudent decision given the circumstances. You would, in fact, have to specifically expect a plot twist to believe that this will fail, and the only reason I knew it would fail was because it took place with the Letter Writer's contact bar filled in only a third of the way. I KNEW there were many more missions left to do, so I knew this couldn't be the end, but if I didn't have this information, I'd be positive that would be conclusion.

Inversely, Mot's plan is really neither stupid nor convoluted. He wants more power and he wants to consume everyone he can. He knew the Tsoo wanted to summon the goddess Tielekku, so he egged them on. Whether Tub Chi stabbed her with the god-killer sword or not is irrelevant to Mot, because all he wanted was the goddes' power. Whether it's all within Tielekku or half in her and half in Tub Chi doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. In fact, having her weakened might have helped, or, as it turns out, would not have made a lick of difference. His plan is simple, solid and quite direct, and the only reason the heroes fail is because they're pressed for time and forced to rely on what they think they know, as opposed to tracking down every bit of David Hazen's journal. From the Letter Writer's perspective, it's easy to see how he may see the bulk of Hazen's research and conclude that he understands what the man was trying to do. The VERY FIRST clue that all may not be as it seems appears just moments before the plan backfires HARD, so it's not like the player had tons of warning.

About the only part of Dark Astoria that's telegraphed a mile in advance is Marcus Valerius' fate, and only because his personal story arc comes up too early in the story. However, cut out that story and Dark Astoria makes sense, presents a compelling, believable and still very tense story, and does so without insulting my intelligence with hack writer tropes.

Any City of Heroes writer pretty much HAS to remember that his audience is smarter than this. Sure, not everyone cares about the story at all, but those of us who do enjoy these stories because they're imaginative, exciting and above all INTELLIGENT. Dark Astoria is an intelligent story, which makes it great even despite its many minor, niggling flaws. The same goes for SSA2.1, as well. City of Heroes can do better and has done better than to subsist on the dumber of comic book plots.

It's not nearly as complex once you stop trying to write the player character's motivation instead of the player. Put players in the position where the narrative acts as though they're in control of events, but NEVER explain WHY they're doing the things they're doing. Simple. When a plot development needs to inform the player character's decision, present it as a logical progression of events, NOT as the game telling the player what he wants.

It's really not as difficult as it seems, it just takes a different type of approach and at least a little experience. I'd volunteer to do it, but Paragon Studios would never hire me

There's plenty of content for that already in the game.

Because it creates situations where a player attacks the PPD, another player wants to defend them, but he can't since it's not a PvP zone. It's not necessary. Why mess with Phasing is so you don't put people in situations where a reasonable hero's reaction would be to attack the villain and thus raise questions of PvP. PvP in non-PvP zones will not happen, so the less we bring it up via creating situations where it's logical, the better.

Yes, and it was a miserable failure. The tech needed to make billboards change dynamically and per player is, last I heard, proprietary and ill-understood, so they can't use it. The only way to alter the billboards is for an environment artist to hand-edit them and put it in a patch, which is how they added the Cap'n Kraken and such billboards last year.

Besides, even at the best of times, the advertisement wasn't making anyone any money.

It IS slower. Used to be draw was baked into animations such that the draw and non-draw would be the same length, only the non-draw would have a pause at the end. BABs changed this by popular request, making weapon draw separate from the attack animation, thus speeding up weapon sets considerably, but introducing a "penalty" for drawing by making drawing and firing exactly as long as just firing used to be. Removing weapon draw is not a simple task. BABs tried it, but said the animation sequencer expected SOMETHING there or it would throw off animation timing. He was in the process of putting a null animation, I believe, when he ran into a snag with Shield Defence and a weapon set. He then left the company and no-one has stepped up to finish his work. Simply put, removing redraw is possible, but not simple or easy. And it seems to be low-priority in favour of game mechanic tweaks. Low enough that Titan Weapons and Assassin's Strike would occasionally miss their draw animations, causing the rest of the animation and effect timing to be thrown completely off.

As for shooting non-weapon sets out of weapons and shooting weapon sets out of bare hands or other weapon categories, this comes up very often, and it's always a good idea that I will fully support. This is pretty much the last major thing we have left when it comes to customization in this game. We have jet packs now, so this is the biggest thing we have left. Once we nail this one, we will officially be playing the best game ever made.

Trouble is that this is not trivial, nor is it in any way comparable to swapping weapons or swapping power animations. Nor is it indeed comparable to swapping weapons AND power animations together. Let me explain.

Each power in this game has its own "activation sequence," which includes altering (or not, for most powers) the base set of combat animations that a character goes uses. So much as queueing a power with an activation sequence that requires a non-standard mode will put your character in that mode. It might change your basic stance, it will make the weapon in your hand visible if you're using a weapon set and it will make you run, jump, fly and fall using animations that might not look different to use, but are entirely separate sequences to the game engine. Drawing a sword would put your right hand in a fist, and you will run with the fist closed and jump with the fist closed and fall with the fist closed. If you wanted to use a left-handed weapon, instead, even if animations for left-handed attacks existed, you'd still need to alter your state via a different activation sequence. If you wanted to use a Fire Blast attack, this would put you in a state that spawns flame pros on your hands, which persist for all movement animations, and which are tied to the power customization interface.

This game has no precedent for the end user being able to change a power's activation sequence. This can be changed by a developer and delivered to people in a patch, but as far as the engine is concerned, this is not a part of the power which is dynamic. It's not read from the character's personal files, it's read from the game's power database. You can no more alter a power's activation sequence than you can alter its animation time - the mechanic for this doesn't exist. For it to exist, I assume the same would need to happen as with weapon and power customization.

It used to be that weapons were just power effects, props called by the power's FX script. This was not customizable, so what BABs did when he made Dual Blades was to introduce a brand new costume item - a weapon - which was animated to alternate between being visible and being invisible. This "visibility state" was then tied to the activation sequence the weapon power called. In effect, a Broadsword Hack power doesn't call a weapon at all, it just puts you in a "broadsword mode" and relies on that mode to make the weapon costume detail you were forced to take visible. This was clever, in that you didn't need to mess with the FX script, and could actually implement complex customization of the weapon using the costume interface, such as what you see for shields.

As for powers, what they did for those was alter the FX scripts of each power read not from the animations database, but actually read from a separate database attached to each character. That's why every customizable power you could ever take without further unlocks is customizable at the start - you NEED this database to be complete for the system to work. The scripts, then, read from this database and play what's in it, and you control this database via the power customization screen.

This itself has problems, however, since not everything you control there is an FX script. Powers like Spines were never put into power customization because you could customize the spines on your body as a costume element, but could not customize the spines thrown as those were an effect summoned by the FX script which never passed through the costume system. However, Spines were still weapons with their own activation sequence and draw animation, with each type of Spines having their own activation sequence so the game will know which type to summon. What this means is that if you pick different types of Spines for different Spines power, you will induce redraw within the same powerset. If you Throw Spines with metal spines and then Spine Burst with crystal spines, you will be forced to redraw between the two attacks. If, however, you Throw Spines and Spine Burst with crystal spines on both attacks, you'd see no redraw.

You can't have them be a costume element as the power effect would need to match them and you couldn't alter colours per attack, and you can't have the power customization screen induce a costume element because the two are not connected and you'd, again, lose the ability to colour them separately.

I explain all of this to explain why this is pretty much the BIGGEST thing the art team will have ever done with the character creator, and how it would involve extraordinary amounts of work not even counting the process of creating brand new animations. First you'd need to mess with the costume creator interface, or possibly with the powerset selector interface, such that it allows you to pick a "weapon type." Once you pick a weapon type, the costume editor would have to show you only weapons of that type, which would be appropriate to the animations that this type would require to work. You'd then need to retro-fit the activation sequence required for this weapon type into the entire powerset's collection of animations to ensure that they play the right movement animations so you can carry the weapon. You'd then need to make sure that the animation sequencer always called the right version of the animation appropriate the the activation sequence from all possible situations, so you don't have Whirling Sword play the Whirlwind animation when you activate it while falling. Then you'd need to attach multiple custom power FX scripts to the same power and make sure the powers editor always showed you the list appropriate to the weapon type you've selected.

It's a huge job. I've love to see it - boy would I love to see it - but it would be a major project that will probably be the star act of its own Issue and might well tie up art resources for the two or three Issues preceding it.