Samuel_Tow

I'm throwing "never" around as a hypothetical situation, just to describe the kind of thing I don't want to see. I don't know how much money Paragon Studios marketing think they're making, but JUST getting people to acknowledge the Paragon Market exists is not enough to turn a profit. These people need to go there and specifically see something they want to have.

I'll give you an example - the Steam Store. There was a time when I'd order Steam to start straight in my Games Library since I thought to use it just to launch my games. But then I spotted something in the Market, I think it was L4D2, at a 75% discount and thought... "Wow, I didn't really care much for this game, but for that amount of money, sure. Why not?" I bought it, I loved it, and then a while later I went back to look for more discounts. This time I snagged Portal dirt cheap. Possibly even for free, there was a giveaway at one point. Then after a while I caught myself logging into Steam, going to the Store, browsing the "Specials" and promptly logging back out without even playing a game. Eventually, I apologised to Steam and asked it to start logging me into the store first anyway.

My point with this? I wouldn't go to a store and shop if all I wanted was a specific item, especially if I'm forced to log in and claim it at a time when I don't feel inclined to shop. I'd go shopping if I log into the store and see something that's either so awesome I gotta' have it or something at such a discount I might as well get it, and the Paragon Store "Featured" section is a FAILURE on both counts. The featured stuff is crap most of the time and the only discounts I ever seem to see are for consumables like enhancement recipes.

Generally speaking, I fail to see how getting me to go to the store and get an item for free is earning Paragon Studios any money, when the store I have to visit has crap in it that has pretty much zero chance of getting me to make an impulse purchase. That's twice as unlikely when I have to log into the store in a hurry for fear of missing the exclusive giveaway where I REALLY don't want to shop, but I gotta' so better hurry. This doesn't put me in the mood to buy, it puts me in the mood to cash in and run.

I don't need free bait to go to the Market. What I need is discounts on expensive items. And I don't mean week-long discounts. Swap them around every day. If every day was a new discount, you bet I'd be going there all the time just to see if what I want isn't at a discount. Crap of the Hunter at a discount? Pass. Maybe tomorrow. Enhancement inventory increase at a discount? Hmm... Yeah, I'll buy that. What's next? Experience boosters at a discount? No thanks, I have plenty. What's next? Character slots at a discount? Yeah, I can always use some.

Trying to get people to just open the Market and see it exists with about the same subtlety as my mother insisting that no, really, I'll like olives if I would just try them is not something I foresee working. There needs to be stuff in there that I want to BUY, which going there for the freeby would show me, and there just simply isn't. Their discounts, as far as I've seen, have not been exciting.

Sometimes...

Xanta, my giant Troll girl, has a natural hatred for the actual street gang, the Trolls. Part of her backstory has the Trolls terrorising a small community she was protecting, which she didn't take kindly to, plus they stand as an example of everything that's wrong with being strong and irresponsible about it.

Mage-Killer Po, my house cat turned human-cat monster by magic experimentation, is naturally inclined to want to hunt down and kill mages, believing their meddling with nature to be dangerous, especially when done by unethical, horrible people.

Hatarla, my fallen angel, tends to pick on anything demonic or monstrous. As an outcast of her own kind and a person who lived a life of violence and sin, she wants to salvage what's left of her existence by fighting back the evil she used to serve.

Akili, my lizard girl, hates ruthless criminal corporations. Produced as part of a genetic engineering project to create mutant super soldiers, she started out as a pure anarchist fighting to challenge oppression and authority wherever she could. Mad at the world, as it were. Eventually, she narrowed down her anger against just the specific kind of people who harmed her personally, which is people like Crey, Malta and Aeon Corp.

That's all I can think of at the moment, without walking into concepts that specific characters of mine hate, like mind control or torture or the like that aren't specific to an enemy group.

I imagine not seeing people play Stone Melee has more to do with the fact that the set is available to all of ONE AT, and it's a somewhat team-reliant one at that. I don't know if the set is good or not since I don't really play Tankers, but it can't be as bad as people make it out to be.

Stone Melee, though, I CAN sell to you. It's an awesome set. It's hard-hitting, if somewhat endurance-intensive, but I rarely pick sets based on performance. I'll let others handle that, and will instead focus on aesthetics and story.

The couple of characters I've used this on have gone quite a ways to explain the hammers and such. Ezikiel, my flagship villain, has pretty much atomic control over mineral and crystalline structures. He's able to transform any kind of rock into any other at a nuclear level, as well as reshape the molecular structure of rocks to change their shapes, and levitate them at will. As the man is conservative with the use of his powers for reasons of dignity, he mostly uses "rock hands" in combat as a less obvious way to fight. For instance, when stopping an energy blast, he's less likely to cover himself in crystal and more so to cover his right hand in crystal and "grab" it.

How I explain the hammers is through the use of "quantum sand," a substance Ezekiel can produce which is rock in a sort of state of flux and doesn't represent any type of real rock that exists. It's the raw material which he can "solidify" into physical objects, and it has the appearance of yellow, weightless sand. Zik can produce this from anywhere on his body, and will often just trace a line through the air with his hand, leave a train of this quantum sand and simply grab it to form the shaft of a stone hammer, with the hammer head forming on its own after the fact.

Of course, mine is Stone/Stone, so I get to play around with the various armour and various attacks, but it's how I explain it.

I go to Sweden for a week and I miss this? OK, then enjoy my "on the outside looking in" perspective.

It's ridiculous to me to see a poll go so clearly and unambiguously in one direction and yet have the decision made in the other direction. I haven't seen the reasons for this, but I can't think of a justifiable reason to pick what the poll clearly showed people did not want over, say, NOT updating the forum background. If you have to, leave a flat back background with the City of Heroes logo until you work out whatever technical problems there are. And I hope there are technical problems, because otherwise this casts polls from our community team in a very negative light.

If I could, I'd vote for option 1. I find Penny is in a much more appealing pose in there. Her head doesn't look like Trollface and she isn't constrained to the "people leaping at each other" motif that we've had going for some time. If we're going for a static shot I'll be seeing over and over again, I'd rather it were a more neutral one, because I don't really enjoy seeing my heroes perpetually scowling like I logged into the City of Leifeld forums. Pick poses and pictures appropriate to the environment you'll be using them in. Penny standing up looking strong and tall is, to me, much more appealing than penny twisting her spine, twisting her ankles and twisting her face.

I dislike the current loading screen Penny pick. In my case, it's not so much a question of sexism, so much as I just feel this is a terrible picture. I don't know who made it (David?) so I don't want to spit on it, but I really do not like it. The one offered as Option 1 is not only superior for the forums, in my opinion, but I'd also like to see it in the actual game. To me, it's simply a superior pic. In fact, the way she's posed and with the low-res pic, Penny's face paint kind of looks like tattooed tears, making her looks a bit like Diamanda Hagan, which just makes her look all the more impressive.

In short, this decision is gravely disappointing, more so with the poll results.

Does anyone have a pic of the sword... Or an explanation of how to craft it? Can a level 50 character do this retroactively? I'm actually actively looking for a pic to show to someone.

This looks... Wet. Seems like a decent set visually, but it falls in that category of perfect storm of things I'm not looking forward to. It's a blast set when I can't play any of the ATs that have access to it, and it's water blast which, kind of like animals, really isn't something I ever really asked for.

Of course, that shouldn't take away from the set. The visual effects on it are pretty dang good, and I'm sure it'll make a lot of people happy. And wet. Read that how you will.

Ah, I see. Thank you. I checked and it's still free. Says it will be for another 10 hours or so. I still hope it's purchaseable for actual money after the free grace period expires, though.

Wait, princess hat? I was abroad and had no time for City of Heroes. What did I miss? Was it exclusive? New? Can I get it after the fact for real money?

Wait, I can run that through Ouro? Can I drop the AV at the end down into an EB?

Just yesterday, I came back from a very gruelling business trip and my back feels like a sumo wrestler tap-danced on my shoulders while carrying an elephant balanced on top of a piano. For seven days straight. So if I ramble on, please forgive me.

For a while now, we've had this debate about gating cosmetic items, which eventually brings up the subject of gating powers. I don't want to get into this debate all over again since it's been going for close to a decade, but I did finally manage to put my finger on why I feel aesthetics are a fundamentally different aspect of a decent game than gameplay. Now, most of you will probably say "No duh!" but hear me out. I have a good reason for WHY they're different, and it comes down to objective and subjective values.

Let me ask you something: What looks good in this game? Pretty open question, right? Because what looks good, especially in costume design, pretty much depends on who you ask. "Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder" doesn't quite cover it here, since it's not always even a question of beauty. I've seen a fair few people make specifically ungainly characters to serve a concept or just to make a statement, and they still play those with enthusiasm.

What it comes down to is you really can't do cosmetics wrong, from a "player using the editor" perspective. Can you make a costume I won't like? Sure, I'm highly opinionated, but I don't pay your subscription so what do you care? Can you make a costume that art critics will pan as the worst thing ever? Of course, but do we all really aspire to be recognised artists? Can you make a costume that goes against the art team's aesthetic vision? Well, every artists who's ever posted on the forums has held fairly strong views - BABs didn't like clipping and giving players "ugly" options to trust them to make them work, Jay famously joked about hating furries and David seemed to really like high-detail, high-fidelity pieces while seeing older, simpler ones as needing an update. But going against the art team's vision is not doing it wrong, it's simply having your own vision that might just be harder to achieve.

My point is you can't do cosmetics wrong. I said that already, and I meant it. And this, really, is what sets them apart from pretty much any other aspect of the game and, hell, from cosmetics in damn near every other game out there. The game simply has no rules to dictate what looks good. Your appearance is separate from all gameplay aspects, and thus essentially doesn't matter. When I made Praxis, my Mary Sue goddess, I made her fond of giving people non-choices. "Follow me or die. The timeline will remain unchanged either way." That's essentially what cosmetics are in this game. It doesn't matter what you pick, the game will play out exactly the same way, and this is liberating in such a way that I don't think any other game has fully grasped. When there are literally NO consequences for ANY look you pick, then this frees you to look like whatever you want. Fire up your imagination and go wild. There is no wrong way to do this.

Then the actual game starts and practical concerns start cropping up. Which powers do I take? How do I slot them? Which Set Inventions give me the best bonuses? I've heard a fair few MMOs advertise themselves as having great customizability in character building, and this always scares me. Recently I wondered why I'm so reluctant to accept build customization when I like cosmetic customization, and I think the answer is... I don't know what I want. More specifically, I don't know what I'm supposed to want. That's really the crux of making a great build. I can crunch the numbers and do the averages and figure out what stats a build will give me, but I'm never really certain what kind of balance of stats is actually the best. I never know what works, but unlike cosmetics, there actually ARE things that work and things that don't and these are objectively measurable.

The truth of the matter is you CAN do a build wrong. City of Heroes makes this harder by comparison, but the fundamental construct which creates the situation in the first place is still here - there are right ways to build and wrong ways to build, and thus character building depends on recognising what works and what doesn't. Sure, the point of build customization is for me to find the thing that works that I like, but what if none of what works mechanically works for my sense of gameplay? What if none of what works mechanically is something I can achieve in a way I enjoy? I've made such a fuss about it that I'm sure everyone knows I dislike Inventions, and this is where that comes from - it's less a question of customization and more a question of optimization.

To step back for a moment, the crux of my argument here is that aesthetics and gameplay are measured in two philosophically dissimilar ways. Aesthetics are judged based on subjective taste and opinion, while gameplay is judged on an objective, testable scale of performance. Oh, sure, there's wiggle room when multiple ways exist to produce similar performance, but the aspect of having to produce performance in the first place informs what a build looks like and thus puts an objective guiding limit on it.

Now, my whole point isn't to claim gameplay being objective-driven is a bad thing. Far from it - that's kind of sort of the point behind games. Take that away and you have Second Life, more or less. But what I AM trying to say is that cosmetics and gameplay are two very different aspects to a game, and it does that game a disservice to let the design of one bleed into the design of the other. Granted, a game works best when aesthetics and gameplay click together, but that doesn't have to happen by having gameplay dictate aesthetics, when player choice can often produce a synergy much more powerful for the one person who really matters - the one actually playing his own creation.

The idea behind Wing Raiders is sort of the same behind Eagles - they run away and shoot at you from range. The problem is that this is caused by a pulsing self-fear power which mimics this behaviour by a means that's not exactly precise. They'll run away, sure, but what they do AFTERWARDS isn't always predictable. If the NPC's AI had decided to use Brawl, it will probably come back to that after it runs. It's why Eagles have no melee attacks.

Porters and Sorcerers are probably using a different AI quirk altogether, but I highly suspect it's some kind of pulsing AI command that orders them to use Teleport. Because they seem to have control over this only when they're teleporting TO an enemy, they just port around at random.

Fun fact: Teleportation is not instant relocation, it's just REALLY fast movement. If a Sorcerer teleports past you and you have an attack queued up on him, you'll hit him, even if he started from out of range and appeared still out of range. You can see this if they have a debuff on them, how it stretches between the point of teleport and appearance.

Yeah, PK still has his forum and a stable user base, to boot. I can't really speak of the site's current status as I haven't been there in a while, but last time I was, it seemed friendly.

NPCs taunting is kind of like NPCs using Fear powers - you can't jut give them a direct port of the player power without adapting it in some way. Being unable to target other enemies would be a good idea, as a way to know what's taunting you, and instituting some way to ensure your target doesn't get swapped too often might be good, as well.

At the very least, I'd like to see one application of taunt cause the player to rebuff any further ones until that one runs out.