Samuel_Tow

Eh, I might as well - I do sort of agree with this.

My problem with Tankers in terms of their "role" on a team is that their role is stupid, at least as enacted by game mechanics. See, Tankers are not dangerous in the traditional sense. An enemy gains nothing by taking out, say, a perma-Granite Tanker because that Tanker is not threatening. All you really need to do to defeat him is walk faster than he does. And that should be actually quite obvious to any thinking, trained enemy like the many hyper-intelligent veteran soldiers. What possible reason would an enemy have to NOT walk around a Tanker and stick his taser right into the Blaster's suggestive themes?

Oh, right, Taunt. Taunt is what makes enemies stupid and acting in irrational ways by continuously slamming their heads against something they clearly can't kill and clearly isn't by far the most dangerous thing on the field. So can't we come up with a mechanic for taunt that ISN'T irrational? Well, let's see, why are tanker type enemies so fearsome in comic books and movies? Well, because they actually are the most dangerous. Turn your back on the Thing and he'll snap you in half like a matchstick. However, turn to face him and you can dodge his attacks and generally play keepaway.

So why not make Taunt work the same way? Once a Tanker taunts an enemy, that enemy starts taking CONSIDERABLY more damage from the Tanker UNLESS that enemy is actively targeting A Tanker somewhere on the field. This would actually make fighting the Tanker the smart idea. If the enemy goes for the Blaster and turns his back on the Tanker, then the Tanker gets a free shot for massive damage since the enemy isn't paying attention. If the enemy wants to avoid this massive damage, he'll attack the Tanker and keep him suppressed.

Or how about something else? How about if Tankers have reverse Fury. They start out with a lot of damage, but this gets "suppressed" as more enemies attack them. If enemies stop attacking the Tanker, his damage grows until they do, thus giving a VERY compelling reason to keep attacking the Tanker.

Basically, I want to see a taunt mechanic that makes sense.

That's more or less what I wanted to say, as well. These kinds of "adapted animals" look less like something that would be distinct and memorable enough to be a player characters and more like something you'd run into in a random encounter on a boat in Final Fantasy VIII. That doesn't mean it looks bad, but more that it doesn't have anything to differentiate it from an NPC. More on that below.

I think you and I disagree on a very fundamental aspect of character design, which is that I NEED the characters I play to be somehow remarkable, somehow memorable and somehow unique. "A shark man" is not unique. The concept behind the look might be, but the look isn't, because this look is essentially procedurally generated - it's a man that's also a shark. It's un-unique in the same way as a matte black humanoid shape is not unique - there's nothing about it that the creator had to come up with that isn't directly obvious from what the design entails.

To me, that's a lot like using, say, full set Enforcer. The resulting character doesn't look good, but it looks like every other person who picked full set enforcer. It's not unique because there's nothing done to it to customize it beyond what the very general costume set comes with. There's no personality in this costume, it's just the Enforcer set. Maybe the person inside is very interesting, but you can't know that because you can't see that, save for a bit around the neck since the Enforcer set doesn't come with its own face.

To say that NPCs and PCs are differentiated only by who controls them is, to me, really just missing the point of arguing for artistry. That's not to say you're wrong for doing it, of course - it's a matter of subjective opinion. But to me, a character needs to at least feign artistry for me to be interested in that character, and for this to happen I need to see a design that at least looks like something few other people would have thought to make. I've posted a few of my costume designs in the Best Costume Designs thread, and though not everyone specifically likes them, I do often get comments that I've found a costume design others wouldn't have thought would look good. That, to me, is the sign of a successful costume design.

That's kind of why I don't like the "animal heads" as they are. They're just straight up photo-realistic stuffed animal head props, and pretty much the only thing I can do with them is animal-head people. They're not as expressive or as diverse as I'd like to make them. I'd like to make a bovine girl with hair, I'd like to make a lion guy with glasses, I'd like to make a dragon that isn't just a retread of my lizard guy using the same head. Giving me the ability to use props with animal heads would go a long way towards enabling me to do this.

As do I. The art team has already shown that they are perfectly capable of taking existing animations and adapting them to new uses as it is. Half of Titan Weapons is comprised of preexisting animations, such as Rend Armour using the Assassin's Blade animation and Follow Through using the Sting of the Wasp (or was that Gambler's Cut?) animation. And it works well, for the most part. I'd love to see that happen with more sets. Knockout Blow can definitely use the animation from Crushing Uppercut, for instance.

One of the problems mentioned was that retrofitting these slots caused problems in terms of what powers they could and couldn't be put on. I'm not saying putting them in at level 50 won't cause problems, but what I AM saying is level 50 slots can be placed on every power you own that can be slotted.

To be fair, that's Felicia in name only. It lacks her physique, it lacks her oversized paws, it lacks her RIDICULOUS fur pattern... Pretty much all it retains is the hair. Sure, it looks good, no question there. Kind of cute, too. But that really isn't Felicia, so much as a woman in cat ears, which is kind of missing the point.

See, this is the kind of design I really wouldn't care for in this game. I wouldn't exactly go on a campaign to ban it, but to me this just doesn't look so much like a character as it does like a shark that grew arms and legs. Like I said, I have no love for fish and birds, so this really does nothing for me. The only reason I even found shark-themed characters appealing to begin with is because of those pics I posted, since they borrowed shark elements to place on ostensibly human-looking characters.

To me, that kind of pic is just going too far in replicating the animal in question.

Don't like eating cake? That's OK, eat it anyway and pretend it's very sweet bread. Yeah, that doesn't work. Not for people who actually care about what it is that their characters are engaged in doing.

No, it's not. There's nothing Arachnos-specific about getting a red ball lightning like what I'd get if I tinted my Electric Blast red. And even if you could make that argument, it's a mistake to tie powers this closely to specific in-game storylines for non-Epic ATs.

---

Really, when a person asks for an alternate means of obtaining something, telling that person to just go do the current means of obtaining it is the Internet equivalent of dead air. It's saying nothing and accomplishing nothing because it's sidestepping the point. The point here is finding a way to give heroes access to Patron pool powers without turning into villains. Saying that this can be done while turning into villains is simply dead air.

People keep saying that, but this ignores the symbol limitation imposed on the bio window. Word CAN count symbols, yes, but it's inconvenient for tracking them in real time as the bio window does. As someone who's always running into the 1024 symbol limit, that would be a major pain.

Additionally, importing from a text editor removes line breaks because City of Heroes uses <br> tags, instead, so every time I import from outside, I have to fix the line breaks, which requires me to find where I put them.

You seem to be inferring the request for spell check is to fix other people's spelling so we don't see their poor chat. Personally, I want it so I can fix MY OWN spelling before I chat something illiterate that would make me ashamed to have said it. I don't believe in "reasonable" abbreviations and I definitely don't believe in intentional misspellings. I prefer to chat in proper English, and having something which would ensure I'm doing this would be very appreciated. There's a reason I make sure to install a spell check dictionary on every browser I use.

Well, this is primarily a game design concept than it is a suggestion for City of Heroes. Established games - especially as old as this one - aren't really that malleable to having their basic design philosophy changed years after creation. I'm just speaking in hypothetics.

Then again, that's what the Architect system does, I believe - you get bonus tickets as a mission reward if you defeat more enemies in the mission. I don't really know how it works and I'm pretty sure it's not a percentage thing, but it's a possibility.

The Mission Drop feature was introduced to handle bugged missions and free up Customer Support resources. A lot of City of Heroes mission problems come down to a stuck NPC, a failed objective trigger or the player simply being unable to find what needs to be killed or clicked in order to complete it. GMs would often show up, waste their time for 15 minutes trying to figure out what's wrong, then complete the mission for you anyway. Cryptic Studios at the time decided to give us an option to auto-complete a mission once every three days, figuring these kinds of minor problems were just infrequent enough to where CS would almost never need to be involved with them.

Players have subsequently found other uses for the Mission Drop feature, such as auto-completing difficult or annoying missions. I myself will auto-complete PvP liaison missions and contact introduction missions whenever I can, and have used the feature far more often for this than actual bugs.

You're looking at this in terms of unnecessary absolutes where what I'm referring to is a matter of choice. I recently bought Diablo III, and its death penalty is pretty mild - your gear takes damage and you need to pay to have it repaired. Or you can play on Hardcore mode, where death is permanent. Get taken out once and it's all over. Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel had a similar option. When starting the game, you could select an option which allowed you to only save in Bunkers, which are the games between-mission hubs. What this meant was once an actual combat mission had started, you could never save mid-way. You'd have to start the mission all over from the beginning.

Yes, Farmville and the like are popular, but to conclude that they are popular BECAUSE of these aspects seems like a leap of logic that's somewhat uncharacteristic for you. It strikes me as the conclusion that WoW has raids, WoW is popular, therefore anything which has raids will also be popular while ignoring context. For one, Farmville does not give players a choice. Are you as convinced that if players had the choice to make their crops not die and waste resources, they would choose to keep the threat of penalty in the game anyway? Or are you saying players would choose to remove the threat but then the game wouldn't be as popular? Again, it just seems odd for such speculation to be coming from you.

I merely bring up "hardcore" players as the type of player who actually enjoys the threat of penalty as part of the thrill of the game. I oppose this to the "toy" type player who doesn't play games for a sense of thrill or accomplishment but more simply for recreation. MineCraft may be more popular than Jesus, and yet even this received a "Creative" mode with pretty much all the gameplay aspects removed where people could simply build without worrying about survival or resources. Every block breaks in a single hit and the player has access to infinite amounts of every single block type. And I've spent more time in that mode than I have in the regular "Survival" mode.

This is another aspect of games with no or little penalty that I really enjoy - failure is not frightening, therefore the game encourages me to be brave. The thing with players is some of up play games because we're not as awesome in real life as our characters are in-game. That's why we play to begin with. And this isn't limited to matters of physical strength or skill. They can just as easily extend over matters of mental prowess. My character, for instance, may be a brave warrior, but I might be a complete coward too skittish to take risks and capitalise on this character's warrior's skills. My character may be a great detective adept at word puzzles, but because English is a second language to me, I might not be as good at riddles.

Something City of Heroes has don that really very few other games have managed is to make me a lot braver than I am in real life. In life, I'm a cautious individual who insists on being able to know the outcome of an endeavour before I engage in it. In City of Heroes, I really don't care what I fight or where I have to go simply because I know that whatever I may face, I can handle it. Why bother worry about the future when you know you can take care of anything that gets in your way? And more than anything, I get to be this brave because... Well, what's the worst that can happen? So maybe charging in a room with three Sappers isn't the smartest thing to do, I admit that. But so what? It's cool and I might just pull it off. Can't know if I don't try, and try I will because there isn't much to lose.

I don't want the game to allow me to keep tossing my corpse at a problem until it goes away, but I do want it to allow me to keep making mistakes without intentionally working to piss me off.

I'm not sure. T and G are right next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. But if it is intentional, I'm still using it

*edit*
Oh... OK, never mind. It's still cool even if it's not accidental

See, that's why I say it's probably just a case of opinion, because the Valkyrie shoulders and the Valkyrie boots are my favourite bits. I'm using them on a few of my female characters, and I quite literally bought the entire pack for those pieces specifically. I never really used the chest, the weapon and ESPECIALLY those horrible gloves with the ice cream scoops at the end.

That's why I suggest simply skipping a fight you can't win, but also skipping the rewards it would normally bring. I've never had a problem with letting people get on with the story if they simply can't win a specific fight, but the gate remains on the reward. I will never really accept the concept of earning a reward because you could afford to die 20 times in a row to chip away at an enemy's health. If you're reduced to this, you're not succeeding in beating the gate, so you're not being let in. You can move on with the story, but you can't have the "stuff" that's behind the gate.

Say I'm unlucky and I run into a room where three spawns have merged and three Sappers are aiming their guns at my head. Say I feel I can't beat that. Then I say "skip it" and all three spawns disappear. I earn nothing from them and I take a hit on the final mission reward because of it. It hasn't stopped me from completing the mission so it hasn't caused me to "fail." I've simply chosen to forfeit the reward for a victory I couldn't achieve.

This is from the mentality that you don't HAVE to win every fight in order to proceed, but being able to do so rewards you with more "stuff." You're not penalised for defeat since you can always just try again with nothing lost, and you're only rewarded if you manage to succeed.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. It sounds to me like you're saying the old Armoured top and bottom categories are not flattering for women (and they're not), but I should point out that all of the old Armoured textures use the exact same mesh. Techbot, Tech Wired, Tech Crey, Armour Plate, Medieval, all of those use the exact same top shape and the exact same bottom shape. Tech Crey has a unique Armoured bottom for the Male model, but not for Female and Huge, where it uses the same mesh as the rest, with some ugly texture misalignment as a result. I say this because you seem to imply the different textures have different shape problems, and they're really just different skins over the same body shape.

Bringing up Defence and Olympian Guard confuses me further, since I don't think those are even available for the Armoured top. For Tights, they simply conform to the basic Female model same as all Tights With Skin. Initially I thought you meant the way armoured textures wrap around the breasts and distort costume lines, but that's also the case with Defence and the Olympian Guard set, as well.

I'm not trying to argue here, I'm honestly trying to see what you mean. If you're just saying that the old Armoured chest is bad, then yeah it is. It's not just bad for women, it's bad for everybody. It has a crappy shape. Newer Armoured details use different body shapes. The Retro Sci-Fi top is Armoured, but it has its own shape, as do the Mecca Armour top and bottom. You're highly unlikely to see future Armoured pieces that still use the old shape unless those are direct ports of textures designed to be used for Tights, like the Valkyrie one.

And you mentioned boots and calves. Are you referring to the old big boots here? None of the old armour sets have boots which aren't usable with all of the old boot types, including Smooth and Stiletto. Well, Steampunk doesn't have boots at all and its only gloves are Large Robotc, but I happen to believe that Large Robotic are easily the coolest gloves in the game, and easily the least buggy large ones.

I'll see if I can't get pics to explain what I mean. If you have any, I'd like to see them, just so we're on the same page.

It also doesn't mean getting fewer slots than power picks. Life is not made up of binary extremes, and it's entirely possible to give players more slots without giving them more slots than their powers will actually take.

Also, I am SO using the term "automagically." I know it's just a typo, but the word it produces is actually very cool

Because Devices doesn't use a weapon, it uses power props that are unique to the power. A "weapon" before Dual Blades came out was a power-independent prop that was linked to an activation sequences that affected movement animations and persisted outside of using the specific powers. Devices doesn't do that. What devices does is mechanically identical to what Electric Melee does - plays an animation and summons a 3D prop. Fire Blast does more than Devices since it actually has a "weapon-type prop" in the form of the flaming hands, which has its own unique activation sequence. Yeah, figure that one out the hard way.

Devices COULD have received alternate props with power customization, but when BABs and crew first made this, they had so much work to do they didn't add much more than what was there at base. The idea was that they'd add to this over time. There was even the implication that weapon sets WOULD get power customization options, which they didn't get at the time to save on workload. However, when BABs left, it seems like the art team locked the idea of power customization in a safe and threw away the key, since aside from a token effort here or there as busywork for a new artist, we have gotten nothing at all added to it.

I meant to say "hoversniping" but my brain got cross-wired. When all melee enemies were given ranged attacks, hoverblasting stopped being broken and became just a smart idea. Hoversniping still remains a tactic some tried using, where they'd hover up to the height of their Snipe range and snipe enemies on the ground, most of whom had 80-foot-range attacks. This is completely safe, but your DPS is limited to what JUST your Snipe can produce, which is pretty much crap.

I didn't mean to discredit hoverblasting. I've used it extensively when I still played Blasters. In fact, I couldn't play a Blaster who didn't Hover for this precise reason. And no, it's not relevant to sniping aside from me mixing my terms.

It hasn't been broken since the Architect came out. It was broken at Launch, and it's actually LESS broken now, if you can believe that. At Launch, it was damn near unusable. It'd routinely leave you writing past the end of the box, then randomly shift lines between warping or exiting the box. You'd hit backspace and all of a sudden your cursor would shift 5-10 symbols to the right. You'd realign it, hit backspace and then it'd shift 5-10 symbols to the left. Over and over again. It was borderline unusable. It's just annoying now.

That said, I'd love to have a spell checker in the game, especially for basic chat. I take pride in my command of the language, obviously, but a lot of my eloquence here on the forums comes from Firefox's spell check dictionaries. Without those, I'd be writing full of typos and bad spelling.

Aside from Elemental Order (which I don't have access to) could you give me an example of pieces that look too big on women? I really can't say I've noticed anything of the sort, and I play more female characters than male ones. The only one I can really think of is the Retro Sci-Fi chest only showing up in Armoured tops, and possibly the Mecca Armour set being only Armoured. But aside from Elemental Order, what can I look at for reference?

There's a theory about professional sports, where a player performs better when pressured and heckled for failure than when complimented on success and encouraged on. I don't know if it's true, but an anecdotal experiment by Sports Science seemed to suggest that. The athlete in question reported that he was more motivated to show up the heckling coach than he was to live up to the praise of the kind one.

Here's the problem, though - video games are not a sport. They can be, there are plenty of video game tournaments, but they don't HAVE to be. I know there are some who treat them like sports where the point of the game is to excel, perform and win. There are games for that. Eve comes to mind. In those kinds of environment, having defeat suck makes sense, since the player is expected to be highly competitive and highly motivated to win. A humiliating defeat is supposed to piss the player off and make him try harder next. People who give up or don't try hard enough don't "deserve" to win.

And that's the problem - these kinds of games are not for every type of audience. As the game market expands and video games become a more widely-accepted form of entertainment, they start attracting people who aren't at all consistent with the hardcore competitive gamers of old, but are instead those looking for relaxing entertainment. There are few better examples of both worlds than City of Heroes, or at least there used to be few. I remember many players who explained that not only was City of Heroes their first MMO, but their first real game at all, aside from Solitaire and Minesweeper. There are plenty of people who admitted they sucked at video games, but came here for the costume creator or the super heroes or because of the community.

What I'm saying is that while you can treat games like a sport, you don't have to, and for many of us games are a leisurely activity, with emphasis on the word "leisure." I agree completely that, for me personally, a frustrating game isn't one I'll keep coming back with the intent to beat it. I'm perfectly fine with giving up and being defeated by a game. I'm sure the victory will look all the sweeter for it from inside my Recycle Bin. To me, a game that has an element to it intentionally designed to NOT be fun so I'll be frustrated if it happens is a game that I don't want to play.

People say that defeat should suck so people don't want to go through it. Why? Why can't defeat be part of the game? That so many people consider self-rez powers to be "useless" because you have to have "failed" to use them confounds me. As far as I'm concerned, no player has ever lost as long as he has the ability to keep getting up where he fell. To me, dropping down and getting back up with Rise of the Phoenix shouldn't be "frustrating," it should be awesome. It's a cool power and a cool ability. Hell, half of Wolverine's coolness comes from the fact that you can keep killing him and he'll just keep getting back up.

I've occasionally been told that my solution to using defeat as a gate rather than a penalty is worse than what the game does now, but I stand by it. If you a spawn takes you down or defeats your whole team, have the spawn "leash" back to its spawn point and return to full health. Elite boss beat you down? You can try again, you just have to start over. Ambush took you down? You can go back to the mission, but the ambush will spawn all over again. Death doesn't have to "cost" anything if you can't use it as a tool. Really, the only purpose to making death "suck" is so that people don't consider it a valid combat strategy to just keep tossing themselves at an enemy, chipping a bit of health and dying over and over again, and there are better ways to prevent this than pissing people off.

I have a very simple rule of thumb - if I log out of a game because I simply don't have the time to play it any more then that's a successful game, but if I log out of it because I'm pissed off and I can't stand to play it any more, then that game failed me. Sure, I might come back, but it really only takes about two or three play sessions that end in frustration before I learn that this game hurts me and I stop trying. A game achieves nothing by frustrating me.