Samuel_Tow

There's no need to buy them. You can right-click on an enhancement in the Market window and choose "Info." This will tell you what the enhancement does. It's not convenient, no, but it's more conventient than buying the enhancement, going to your Enhancements inventory and checking there, plus it doesn't cost anything.

Once upon a time, the regular vendor interface had tooltips that told you what enhancements did. This became bugged and stopped showing up, and in typical Neuron fashion, it was never fixed as the studio kind of forgot about regular enhancements post I9.

So I misheard. My point wasn't really to comment on the development cycle so much as to support the notion of staggering major releases to avoid having too much stuff plop down all at once. Not to mention doing so prevents the Market from stagnating by having all the major releases lumped together one one date with the rest being nothing. As I said, it's a matter of balance between releasing too much stuff too often and releasing too little stuff too rarely.

Far as I'm concerned, that kind of release schedule is best. Have a major release once per month, then have filler the rest of the time. From the beginning I was opposed to having major releases every week, for the simple fact that these were never "major." Content came out rushed, bugged and light and we were spammed with so much of it the Market was starting to feel like dining at McDonald's. I'd like to see bigger releases staggered more from each other.

I wanted to post a pic like that (and I still will) but Leo beat me to it. I wanted to start out by saying that a shark head CANNOT be made realistic, because you can't put a shark head on a human neck without it looking hideous. Champions Online's HORRIBLE shark head proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Sharks don't have necks, so if ever we're going to get a shark head, it would have to be anthropomorphised to at least such an extent that it fits on a humanoid body.

Personally, I don't like Mako very much, mostly because they did their best to fit a shark head on a human body directly. The guy has a neck like a traffic cone and a head the size of a grape with a fin on top, despite sharks having fins on their backs, not their heads. Leo's pic is far superior when it comes to a person with a shark head or, as one comic said it, "You damn air-breathing shark!" I've always felt that City of Heroes lacked graphics artists who "get" anthropomorphic characters, and I don't just mean Jay's not-sure-if-serious comment about hating furries. All anthropomorphic characters and pieces in the game have simply been left wanting. War Wolves are about half-way decent, but the Monster heads and feet are just "off," then the animal heads and feet are really an ill fit and the various "animal" characters in the game like Mynx and Bobcat are mostly people with animal props.

Simply put, a shark head cannot be a prop, and it cannot be realistic. A shark head would need to be adapted, and adapted by someone with experience in doing so.

We already have the tech to handle four-colour costume items. Capes and trenchcoats have this, where the second set of two colours replaces the skin colour selection, or used to in the old interface. Furthermore, every single costume piece has four colours ascribed to it in the costume data base. Dump a costume file, open it in NotePad and you'll see. Sometimes these colours are used, sometimes they aren't, and once upon a time we could even custom-edit colours that the colour picked didn't offer. This functionality was removed by defaulting non-recognised RGB values to black, I think.

It seems to be that a lot of costume functionality isn't so much technically impossible as intentionally restricted.

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That said, a number of games have worked around this problem by simply making top and bottom items into their own separate geo which snaps over the base body model, in much the same way our shirts do. Saints Row does this, for one, as does that "The Klub 17" mod. Hell, City of Heroes already does this with female shirts options. I would really, really, REALLY like a "naked" option under shirts so that I could put patterns on the female body underneath it, safe in the knowledge that we'll never see nipples because we'll never see a shirt that shows them. That may have changed since I looked last, though.

It does make sense if you think about it in broad terms and accept that people are using whatever term comes to mind even if it's not appropriate. The game doesn't feel "stale" because it's functionally impossible for it to stagnate with this much stuff being pumped into it. However, that doesn't mean that a person can't burn out on it just the same, and believe it or not, TOO much new stuff leads to burnout just as quickly as too little.

Well, that depends on the personality of the player, of course. For those who thrive on exploring the unknown and finding new experiences, there's no such thing as too much new stuff. But then there are others, people like me, who enjoy the game through a sense of habit, familiarity and predictability. When something new comes out, we can't really enjoy it until we've had time to get used to it, figure out all the kinks and commit its function to muscle memory. Without this, new content feels cumbersome, alienating, even scary. It takes time to adjust, and when content releases lead us by the nose into hopping from one new release to another so quickly that we can never get past the "uncomfortable" time of a new piece, the game begins to feel unwelcoming and we lose the desire to bother.

People complained that Beast Mastery was ready and the studio was delaying it for arbitrary reasons. Personally, I feel they were making the right call. Sometimes, too much new stuff splits our playtime and our attention so much that none of it really feels any good. For me personally, if I can't focus on a single item at a time, I can never really enjoy it, to the point that I can feel burnout coming when I start wanting to keep switching characters. I am, as a point of fact, dealing with burnout right now, which is why I'm not playing. Another stint in Lineage II (against my better judgement) may have revitalised my interest in playing Xanta since that's where her original inspiration came from, but that may have to wait, depending on what comes out soon.

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With all of that said, "for free" is really not a legitimate argument any more. This is not a free game. You get what you pay for. Personally, this has been a revelation for me. For years I feared having to pay more and for years I feared continually not getting what I want. Being able to vote with my money, though more expensive in the long run, gives me the power to vote for what I want to have. With the game now focused less on wasting my time (which is a good thing) and more on selling me stuff, it just makes sense it'd try to get me the stuff I want.

Wait, I must be missing a step. At what point does this become "wrong?"

Also, I really would like to avoid the "alternate version of an alternate dimension" unless we want to mess with dimension physics and start introducing self-contained dimension clusters that are allowed to have interlinks between each other without affecting their mirrors. I CERTAINLY do not want to see amoeba style dimension travel where a person leaving his home dimension splits into an infinity of people, one per other dimension so every other one would have an alternate version of that dimension traveller.

I am shocked, shocked, that an "I like thread turns into an I hate thread" post happened. This never happens. So when do we get to complain about people complaining, or does that come next?

Visually, at the very least. All I really want is to be able to use that bubble graphic for personal armour. If that means customization for Energy Aura, then sure. Why not?

This is complete nonsense. Nothing in the theme of Retro Sci-Fi prohibits women from wearing the big boots, least of all the "theme." Women already get the huge baggy top and they already get the huge baggy gloves. It makes no sense to deny the proliferation of the rest of that set because of some unnecessarily narrow view of what "retro sci-fi" should entail.

Moreover, to request that a specific costume piece should NOT be added for any reason under the sun (other than age rating and legality, obviously) is just lunacy. There is no valid argument in existence for why not having these boots is superior to having them. If you don't like them and don't feel they belong to the theme, don't use them. Problem solved. Requestion that I don't be allowed to use them on my characters is not justifiable.

Obviously, if you were making an argument from the standpoint of opportunity cost, then sure. I might buy that. I'd still argue, but I might buy it. But you're not making that argument. You're making the argument that large boots for women are so out of character for the theme of retro sci-fi that they somehow hurt the set by existing. And that's simply not true.

"Magic" and "their gods" are not the same thing. The Rikti are indeed said to have killed their gods, based on the notion that gods need worship to survive. Kill the worshippers, starve the god, lovely jobly. Magic is entirely and completely unrelated to the gods and cannot be "killed." The Rikti don't practice practice magic and thus lack the knowledge of how to use it. They are, therefore, forced to resort to converted descendants of the Mu bloodline to whom magic comes naturally without having to train in it or know what they're doing. One would assume that they, as smart as the Rikti are, they'd have been spending their time since Angus McQueen's Division: Line learning about magic.

You don't need gods to use magic and you don't have to deal with magic when dealing with the gods. The gods in the City of Heroes fictional universe are not inherently magical.

Honestly, with Papa Smurf, I think it's deliberate. It's not uncommon to have a character threaten the player to not do something on pain of death as a que for the player that he should go do exactly this right now. Then have the character carry out his threat, let the player defeat him and you have both your plot railroad AND the player feels like it was his decision AND you give him a boost to the ego. Everybody wins.

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I hated SSA1, and I consider it to be easily some of the WORST content the game has seen in years. And no, that's neither a joke nor an exaggeration. Aside from SSA1.7, they're chock full of gimmicks that distract from the game's strengths - basic gameplay - and the story is... Ugh. I'm glad the OP didn't know who any of the Phanax members were, because I knew at least a little about them, and that arc is an utter ruination for practically the entire group, aside from Positron (of course) and BABs who is somehow never shown to be an incompetent goofy horrible person.

Moreover, it feels patronising to me as a player. After quite literally years of requests that our characters be brought up to the level of the signature NPCs, the writers instead go and murder many of them, then discredit the rest, all the while we remain exactly where we were. In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, I just wish we didn't have to poke the eyes out of everyone else to do it. And this also tells me the writers believe that I hate the signature characters for being better than me and want to see them killed and humiliated. I really don't. I wanted them to remain respectable so that when I eventually reached their level, the achievement was worth a crap, but the people SSA1 depicts as running the Freedom Phalanx are unworthy of admiration or imitation. They're horrible people worthy only of contempt, and that's by design.

If it weren't for Dark Astoria - a GOOD story - I could swear we've just fired all the writers and were improvising on the spot. We'll see what Night Ward feels like when it launches (I hear it DOESN'T involve humiliating and killing Katie Hannon, so that's a step in the right direction), but even if that turns out great, I still have very little desire to try SSA2 if it's anything like SSA1.

Isn't the Space Pirate one only available through Super Packs?

Hah! Thank you! That explains a lot, and it's actually a pretty cool idea to follow up on. "Incarnates" always bugged me as a basic design, being servants of the Well or, at best, defiers against its will but still using its power. Including the "Ascended" concept as a self-made, self-contained, independent powerhouse is much, much more attractive. Thanks for going through the trouble of reposting this.

Is there any other amazing info like this that Prometheus won't say unless I run a specific iTrial?

No. When the costume first showed up, it lacked a "glow lines" torso and legs texture, which it now has. A lot of the ring items didn't glow, and that was fixed. The costume is still being worked on.

I REALLY want good dreadlocks hair, myself, but ONLY if it comes without a goofy colourful hat, at least as an option.

Well, the set is still on Beta, so there's still a chance these are just not finished and will show up eventually. We can start complaining loudly if that makes it to Live.

And in the meantime someone took your shtick, but isn't doing nearly as good a job of it. We missed you, Ultimus I'm actually serious.

Is there any place where one can read through Papa Smurf's plot exposition dump without having to suffer through the iTrials? I wanted to try ParagonWiki, but was advised that what's in there is incomplete and redundant.

Neither the gods nor the Well of the Furies are magic in nature. For the gods, that's actually stated repeatedly in canon. Both Virgil Tarikoss and War Witch agree that first there was the power of the divine, and then there was specifically and separately magic. They disagree on who discovered/developed/invented magic, with Virgil insisting it was humans from whom the gods learned it (and he's probably wrong, given Ermeeth's fate) and War Witch insisting that Tielekku discovered magic and taught it to the other gods, who in turn taught it to humans. This is actually a central point in the war between Tielekku's pantheon of good gods and Lughebu's banished pantheon of dark, life-stealing gods. Lughebu and his allies were monumentally stronger than Tielekku's alliance, having one god to each of her hundred, and still nearly winning. It was Tielekku who brought magic to the battlefield that eventually turned the tide and earned her the victory.

What the Rikti did on their world wasn't to "kill magic" because magic is not a thing. You can no more kill magic than you can kill the concept of objects moving in relation to each other. What the Rikti killed was their gods, which they accomplished by murdering all of their followers. Magic they did not kill, simply stopped practising it and forgot how to do so.

The Well of the Furies is never specifically said to not be magic, but it has also never specifically been said to be. With that in mind, to just ascribe anything that's unexplainable to "magic" is a mistake, especially since this game has such an abstract take on power origins. The well is not of a specific nature, but rather it boosts the nature of whoever is using it. The well is all origins and no origin at the same time, because it depends on who's benefiting from its power.

I don't know what the actual nature of the Well's functioning is since Angry Smurf won't tell me about it unless I raid stuff, but I have heard tell of Wells dying if they don't have people to powers, since the well appears to thrive on "recycling power." My impression is that these things are sort of like power sinks, granting great power to individuals who are already powerful, but then taking it all back AND taking the power the individual originally had when said individual dies. And the Well seems to like pitting these powers against each other. I could be wrong, but from my perspective, it's a clever idea - give great power to everybody, send everybody on a great war, then take back everything you gave out, with interest.

I'm not sure if the Well can actually die, however, and the Rikti's Well is tied to the Rikti themselves. As I understand it, as long as they exist, so will it.

He does in the movies, though, and that's one of his primary melee attacks in that AWFUL Lord of the Rings third person action game.

Gandalf is actually about as close to the Dream Doctor as they come, in that he spent most of his time in combat hitting things over the head with his staff. Now we just need a "street lantern on a stick" staff option.

THE NEWEST actually do. Hop onto Beta if you can and check out the Retro Sci-Fi set. It comes in "leather" and plain finish, i.e. in "shader" and "no shader" variants. Not quite "matte/leather/metal/chrome" like in Champions, but within reason, at least.

The 5th Column could have made for good villains, and Requiem is one of my favourite bad guys in the game. However, they were never THE villain group, they were just one of many. That distinction has really only ever been given to the Ritki, to Arachnos and now to the Praetorians. Hell, read the Rikti's description some time. They're "the biggest threat Earth has ever faced"

I like Arachnos because they held the place as biggest, baddest villains, but that in itself kind of sunk them, because the writers felt compelled to shove them into EVERYTHING. I get introducing them hero-side where Arachnos had very little presence, which is why I don't mind them being in Faultline at all. What I DO mind is everything and anything villain-side being sent through the Arachnos bottleneck. Wanna' take down some random villain? It's to gain favour in Arachnos. Wanna' make some money on the side? It's by working for Arachnos. Wanna' go mess Paragon City up? It's Arachnos who take you there. And when you're not doing all that, your grand objective is to join Arachnos. THAT is what made so many people reject them back in the day.

Because they're so omni-present and we kick them in the teeth so often, they lose face. If I were redoing the Isles, I'd make them a collection of independent states. Arachnos would hold Mercy Island and Grandville, and then have either embassies or safehouses on all the others, but the other islands would not belong to them. Here's how I'd do it:

Port Oaks: The port belongs to Guido "The Mooch" Verandi and downtown belongs to Emil Marcone. The dockside is your poor people's working are while Marconeville is the clean, shiny sin city where people with fancy suits drive nice cars.

Cap Au Diable: Doc Aeon, the mad scientist, rules the island from behind the facade of a puppet government in the hands of Marshal Brass, an ambitious upstart who wants to kill the good doctor and take control of the island for real. Aeon City would be a city of the future - a clean, safe, happy and perfect ivory tower for the select few patrons of the good doctor who directly benefit from his experiments and fund his research. The rest of the city would be a slim for the refugees who gather at the walls of Aeon City, but are denied entry.

Sharkhead Island: Kirk Kage more or less bought an island for himself and move in on the local population. He lives in his secluded villa off the coast in decadent luxury while forcing the people of the island to work in his mine for minimum wage or be run out of town. Clashes often take place between his heavy-handed, brutish guards and rioters from the local populace. At the same time, the Family help run the docks and handle shipping of "sensitive" materials for a fat cut of the profit.

Nerva Archipelago: A small chain of islands formed together into an independent state. Lacking any sort of muscle, the local governor has requested assistance from Longbow in order to keep the peace and deal with pirates in the local waters, going as far as to lease an old fort to them for an indefinite period of time, as well as handing over excavation rights on the uninhabited island of Primeva. As the only island with a legitimate, non-corrupt government, Crey have taken this opportunity to set up a branch of their corporation in the hopes of turning the archipelago into a company town, trying to employ as much of the population as they can, as well as presenting a good face by assisting Longbow.

St. Martial Island: Using his meteoric success and mob connections, Johnny Sonata was "elected" as governor of the island, vowing to save it from poverty by turning the place in the one of the world's premier tourist destinations. Using the massive renovation of the entire island's populated areas as cover, Johnny reconstructs St. Martial into a giant protection seal to keep the Wailers away from his soul. The city is an ever-gleaming, every shiny paradise for tourists from all over the world, with poor people being forced into underground sewers or walled-off ghettos where hapless tourists are unlikely to run across them.

Terra Nova Island: A new zone consisting of a single small independent nation, ruled by Lord Nemesis himself, who constructed the island with his own technology in the middle of the ocean. It is a perfect utopia where every citizen is provided for in all ways, no-one has to lift a finger and machines do all the work. All are welcome on Terra Nova so that they may witness the truth of Nemesis' ways, provided they obey the law to the letter. Local residents are forbidden from leaving the island, however, not that they'd want to. Can technology really support this kind of utopia, or is there more at work here?