Samuel_Tow

Oh, right! Now I remember. It was you who's been telling me that, Lemur. OK, that puts a human face (err, name) on my faceless memory of what went on but not who it involved. You were the one chastising me over the discussion about disabilities, right? I don't mean that as an attack, I really can't remember and I hate attributing memories to the wrong people.

On topic: 37 is just a number, yes. But it's a number which takes quite a bit of time to achieve, at least from what I've seen. It probably doesn't take quite as long as it usually takes me, as my approach to levelling isn't very optimised (by choice), but I can't imagine it would take such a short amount of time that a person would learn precisely ZIP about the game. And, like I said, even if a person learns nothing, wouldn't the option to just go back to the Architect and keep doing what he's doing be open? I mean we talk about that guy like he popped into existence at level 37 and has no "roots" to go back to.

I didn't mean to take pot shots at the Architect, because I simply don't buy into the scare tactics of Architect dissenters, quoting hordes of people who got powerlevelled to 50 without ever pressing a button and suddenly not knowing anything at all. I apologise if that comes off as AE doom. It isn't intended to be. All I said that IF this really were Architect doom, then I really SHOULD advice this player to just start over and go up the hard way. Something tells me that kind of advice would not be well received by just about any person who ever lived.

Here's a little background story so that you can understand what bugs me. I see a lot of beggars in real life. My city seems to be full of 'em. I make it a point to spare a coin or two for them whenever I see them. The problem is that they're always there, always the same people always in the same places, and they keep trying to guilt me into handing out more every day. There is a certain critical point after which I lose my sympathy for this poor, unfortunate person and begin seeing him like a toll gate, specifically since they always pick locations where you can't just walk around them. I can see helping out once, twice a few times.

I pass by there every day on my way to work, and then again on my way home, and you can call me heartless, but I don't appreciate being guilted in "please help me" every time I pass by like I'm paying homeless tax. Maybe these people really are unfortunate and have no means of survival. They probably are, despite so many cynics claiming these are some kind of industrialist beggars who run a business and make amazing amounts of money. That's just pure nonsense. But I'm not running a charity, and I'm not exactly overflowing with money. I help people as an exception, not as part of my day-to-day work. I'm not enough of an altruist to feel like I should.

This is what bugged me here. I'm not a nice enough person to operate from the standpoint that I should help anyone who asks at any time for any reason. If a person wants my help, I expect to be convinced that I should help. I don't really need over-elaborate propositions, but I do expect the person to have an actual argument as to why I should help, rather than relying on just "the magic word" as the sole driving force.

Maybe that makes me a jerk to say it, I won't deny it if it does, but that's how I treat the situations when I need to ask, beg, plead and so forth. I don't feel other people should help me just for my saying please. I make an effort to convince them that I really do need the help and that it probably won't be that much of a problem for them to give it. I've asked for Inf, even from strangers. I've also asked for favours, like someone going out of their way just to help me with an EB fight, provide a mentor, help simu-click an objective or just generally help me out. The key, as with most things, is communication and attitude. I don't appreciate an attitude that expects me to help, because that is no longer an act of kindness but rather a service, and I don't appreciate people not being arsed to communicate their request in a respectable manner. And whatever we may say about the complexity level of the game and how easy it is to grasp, forming complete sentences really shouldn't be permitted to be THAT much of a hurdle.

Maybe I was wrong and over-rude. I probably was. I could have been nicer in how I phrased things, but I guarantee you I would not have "given money" just because someone said please. You chastise me for saying I don't "get" other people and seem to believe I could just put myself in their shoes and do. I can't. Maybe I'm dumb, maybe I'm simple, maybe I'm egocentric. I don't know. The point is that I try to put myself in others' places and I still can't seem to understand what would possess them to act the way they do. Obviously, I don't understand them well enough if I reach this conclusion. Hence, I don't "get" them and would, indeed, very much appreciate an explanation that gives reason behind such behaviour, and an explanation more than "just because," to add.

Let me put it in a single sentence - do you honestly believe that someone could get to level 37 doing ANYTHING and yet not have the activity he was doing to earn "stuff" from? Because if you do and you can convince me, then I have no leg to stand on.

Um... You can't play all of your characters all of the time, so it's rewarding you no matter what you do. It's a matter of how you view it. If you view it as a goal to work for, then you might feel compelled to not play a character. I see it as compensation for not being able to play at the moment. I mean, one way or the other I'll have times when I am unable to play due to the need for sleep, work and other leisurely activities. At those time, I am being rewarded for being subscribed to the game. I'm gonna' have those moments one way or the other. I might as well.

It's like they say - if you were gonna' do something anyway, you might as well get paid for it.

I'm really not going off a belief that everyone should know everything. I didn't always know everything. But at level 37, I knew enough to at least figure out what to do and where to go. Sure, the post-30 enhancement stores were well hidden back then and I DID have to ask about them (they weren't on the paper map like those in all the other zones). I mean I'm not a genius, obviously, but by level 37 I'd well and truly figured out what went where and where to find the things I needed, and that's with barely anything being actually shown on the map. I'm sorry if it sounds like "back in my day," but I had to find the stores without map markers whatsoever, and I still managed to find them every time.

At level 10, obviously that's a new player. At level 20, I can kind of see that. At level 30, that's a bit of a stretch, but this guy was almost level 40. I really don't see how someone can make it through 37 levels and not pick up on how contacts work, where to go or how to get stuff for himself. Even if he levelled up on NOTHING but the Architect, he'd at least know there's the Architect to go earn stuff in and get his enhancements that way. Hell, SOs are easier to get with tickets than they are with money.

And, frankly, if this really WAS one of these mythical "AE Babies," then he very well SHOULD find that being power-levelled to the high levels without any concept of how to play the game is a bad thing and puts you in a position where you don't know what to do, don't know where to go and don't have enough resources to support yourself. New players SHOULDN'T be powerlevelling to the late game before they are comfortable with the controls and contacts structure, or at least without some means of supporting themselves.

Basically, if this were a level one newbie or a level 5 accidentally stuck in Independence Port, I wouldn't have questioned it. But it wasn't. It was a character who was over 3/4 of the way through the game and should have been able to look after himself BETTER than I can look after myself, let alone than I can look after him. I don't care how new a player is. A level 37 character is not a new player.

Fly off the handle? I told him to go kill stuff and earn his money that way. Unless he has spectacularly expensive tastes, even zero knowledge of the economy is going to give him enough money to kit himself with SOs. It's not rocket science. You go out and kill things. Anything will do. Any type of enemy from any mission anywhere of the appropriate level, and I cannot believe a player with a level 37 character will not have grasped the concept of con colours.

If this really was a brand new character with zero knowledge of anything in the game and only beggary as a sole hope, then the best thing I could have done for him was to suggest he delete the character and start over and this time pay attention to the game and learn as he goes. If this really was a so-called "AE Baby," then that, really, is the only solution. City of Heroes is not a simple game, and learning its entire intricacy all at the same time right as you start the game at nearly the end just isn't something I'd wish on anyone but the most hard core. And if he has to go beg for handouts, I wouldn't call him hard core.

I honestly can't imagine a level 37 character belonging to a brand new player, however, not unless I buy into the stories of day-one newbies being powerlevelled to 40 or 50 or the stories of people buying accounts with high-level characters on them.

Granted, it's relative, and I can't really argue with how things feel. But I've timed it.

Once upon a time I was asked to log in my level 50 Scrapper and join a team of old friends. He turned out to be about mid-way into the Storm Palace. Just to be a fool and conduct a thought experiment, I decided to travel all the way back on foot without dropping off the islands (which would have shortened my trip back to the return Horta Vines).

I joined the team and found out that the mission was located in Perez Park. For those keeping score, that's Storm Palace -> Chantry -> Cascades Archipelago (or whatever) -> Firebase Zulu -> Peregrine Island -> Talso Island -> Steel Canyon -> Perez Park and the mission turned out to be directly across from where I entered the zone. All told, and while chatting along the way, too, it took me shy under 10 minutes. That was in a time without teleporters of any kind, and indeed without Pocket D. We may have had the Paragon Dance Party, or we may not have. I don't remember. Essentially, my only choice was to walk.

This is, as far as I can imagine, the LONGEST trip the whole game has to offer without rethreading zones. And even that was not 10 minutes long then. I have to say, if I can cross the entire CoH universe in under 10 minutes, no travel time can be long in my eyes.

It always bugs me when I see people talk about a "graphics update." People, the engine is FAT as it is. City of Heroes is already 5 years old technically and over 7 years old in practice. It looks worse than many of the games currently out, and yet manages to run WORSE than almost all of them. Last I checked, the game didn't support SLI setups, any processor over dual core and has a bunch of other limitations, as well. Simply increasing the graphics requirements on a dated engine that's just as likely to just seize up completely is not a good idea, specifically since I don't believe a marked improvement in detail quality will be worth the cost of admission.

Hell, City of Villains, where the art team went berserk, STILL lags my machine occasionally, and I've upgraded it several times since. The game slowly went from blatantly unplayable to pretty slow to just about decent.

Right now, we don't need better graphics and more details. We need whatever kinks are even realistic to be ironed out of the engine so the game can run better on existing hardware. City of Heroes and City of Villains actually have a lot of graphic delight to give, if not for the fact that many people have to shut down so much of it or lag down.

I wouldn't count on Going Rogue increasing minimum requirements. If anything, I hope it makes them more realistic.

The Glowing Eyes face still exists exactly as it was back in the day, and it has a special pattern that lets you colour the eyes only. It's somewhere in the Supernatrual section of the faces category. Shouldn't that work?

Oh, boy... You should have handed him a Good Luck inspiration and hoped he'd get the subtlety of the implication

Apologies for removing your pics, but I don't like making ginormous quotes.

Some time ago I had an idea for (and suggested) a slashing ploearm set which relied on keeping momentum of the weapon to increase its speed. What I had in mind was that each attack had a specific windup animation that first went into this swinging stance, and then each animation played in this stance would execute without the shift to this state. However, if you allowed yourself to drop out of this stance, you'd return back to normal and then the next attack would have to wind up again.

The idea behind the set was to create a style that relied on constant attacks and unceasing spinning of this bladed weapon to ensure maximum effectiveness, whereas the usual melee set would fight more in fits and stops. Thanks to packet loss and high ping times, I've seen how animations playing so late that the next animation over intrrupts and I know it looks at least good enough to be really cool with some work done specifically to it. The idea, as well, was to create a combat style that did NOT return to the default combat pose unless you lingered.

However, that is not a new AT, but rather a new powerset for melee ATs.

Worst part for me is I'm not playing dumb when these things drag our. I don't know, maybe I AM dumb, or maybe I'm just used to communication with a LOT more concentrated and potent information flow, but when I speak with someone who only uses half-words in sentence fragments with not context for me to fill the gaps, I feel like I literally don't speak English. Granted, this isn't my primary language, but I like to think I'm proficient enough to not meet with situations where I just don't understand what people are saying.

Leave it to Internet slang and an over-active effort-saving campaign to prove me wrong.

But again - can we really count a level 37 player as being "new?" I mean, I've heard the stories, but it's still difficult for me to accept that.

You know, it's entirely possible for something to be serious AND funny without breaking character in the slightest.

You know, thinking back on it, I think that's what bugs me the most. I've tried speaking with people like that. Oh, Lord, have I tried! I even gave my all to try to explain to a 7-year-old how to type /stuck and that I did not have Teleport. The fact of the matter, though, is that I don't feel like playing charades and 20-questions with random strangers demanding money just so that I can glean a bit of context and coax them into forming a complete sentence.

Seriously, sometimes when I speak with these people, I feel like I don't speak English. I can't understand half the things they say, and the other half that I do understand I can't parse any meaning out of. They speak about context which they assume I will assume. I don't, I don't get it, I ask, they don't know what I'm not getting, I don't know what I'm not getting and it becomes a lengthy, laborious task. As of late, I've opted to be curt with these kinds of people and end these dialogues before I get bogged down in another "Oh, so when you said 'rez' you actually meant 'resistance,' not that you wanted to resurrect me, and that you actually had a buff that gave resistance that you wanted to give me. OK, now I understand." How the am I suppose to glean all of that from "rez?"

Back on topic, this is what the case was this time. I knew from the moment I saw this guy's name and mannerisms that speaking with him would be like solving a puzzle. I wanna' help people, I really do, but hot dang! Put some effort in it, people! Don't make me do all the work! Trust me, when someone initiates communication that THEY ACTIVELY LEAD, I will gladly participate and cooperate with anything they need. But landing next to me and demanding that I not only provide a handout, but also take on the initiative is just lame.

Take it from me - communicate. There is almost no case in which better communication will not produce at least SOME improvement in outcome, and many, many cases where it will be absolutely pivotal to any positive outcome at all.

Given how cavalier they are about causing evil and mischief and how much they enjoy the suffering, I would say that is a conscious choice. You can't feign inescapable fate if you delight in fulfilling it to its fullest.

It was funny the first time around, but it grates really, really quickly. Like all gags, it's amusing when you see it once, but I got the game looking for a cool fighter, and instead got an unashamed caricature. That sort of thing just grates too quickly, especially when you consider that Dragonica is a horrible, terrible grind on the order of Lineage 2, that just doesn't hold water. If the game were COOL and entertaining to look at for days on end, I might feel differently, but this is like a Simpsons cartoon. It's admittedly pretty funny the first time around, but very soon I find myself wanting something different.

Personally, I'm a lot more forgiving of games that start out as parodies, comedies or just wacky and zany. At least with them, you know what you're getting into. But getting into a game that looks and feels serious and discusses a lot of quite profound themes, it is blatantly out of place to have joke characters, much less recurring joke characters. For instance, Becky the Tarantula Queen I accept. In fact, I laughed my *** off at her the first time I saw her. Even Fiusionette was funny the first time around. But it just keeps on going and going and going, like I accidentally walked into the set of Tripping the Rift.

Look, I'm generally not a hateful person. I don't dream dreams of seeing annoying characters die. But I gotta' tell you, sometimes I wish someone would out-and-out get KILLED if for no reason other than so the couple of comic relief idiots would take the GOD DAMN FATE OF THE WORLD a little more seriously. In that regard, the fate of Lt. Tendaji is a VERY powerful moment, as is WMD's reaction to it. I guess amid all the jokes and cliches, there can still be a bit of good storytelling.

Who knows, maybe I am clinically depressed. I'll have to have that checked out at some point. But, basically, I laugh at things that feel real and natural, even if I KNOW they aren't. For instance, I laughed a LOT more at Vernon losing a page of his grand master plan because it slipped out of his notebook, ridiculous as that may sound, than I did at all the lame attempts to make him over-the-top. It's just so much more clever than typing out JAHAHAHAHA!

I'm not sure if I'm reading this the same way as it was intended, but to me it's all a matter of how you ask. I like helping people when I can, but I despise other people expecting such help for granted. "Ya hafsta team with me/give me money/help me kill stuff/give me exposition!" I've seen a lot of people who demand things like this, though admittedly never in such straight text.

And, really, what has happened to the game if a level 37 player counts as new? And why hit up a character that much lower level? Why not hit up one of the 50s in Atlas Park, or just pick someone off Team Search? Why speak in Local and not tells? If I'd been just a second faster on my feet, I'd never have even seen his "wait."

I don't know, maybe I'm too badly adapted to Internet communication, but lacking complete sentences, any kind of context and any kind of obvious reasoning, how am I suppose to sympathise with these people? I mean, here I am sitting down and pondering this over and over, and I still can't quite comprehend it. How was I suppose to parse that in real time? Maybe I'm just slow, I don't know.

I don't know what City of Heroes was ideally supposed to be, but what came out was a good game that didn't end up TOO close to comic books either in thematic or gameplay. To me, that is a good thing, because I was never a comic book fan. The chosen thematic of the game was a little more sci-fi, a little more fantasy and a little more action movie. Yes, I know that comic books can be these things and more, as they encompass a very wide selection of themes, but...

But Champions Online IS a comic book game. It has all the camp, all the corn and all the disappointment that drove me away from comic books when I was a kid, right down to the "Freem!" and "Bamf!" visual sounds when enemies charge up for big attacks. Whether that's the game's fault or the intellectual property's fault I can't say, but the game is a cheesy representation of VERY old-fashioned comic books. I mean, "Mr. Zombie?" Seriously? Someone must have been up all night thinking up THAT pile of blandness. And the whole game is like that.

It's true - just like in City of Heroes, I can make everything I want in Champions Online because the universe looks like it can take it. I'm not sure if it has as much precedent for the full spectrum of weirdness as City of Heroes does, but finding that out would require paying money for it, something I'm not interested in doing at this point in time. The point, though, is that even though I can make-pretend any hero (but not villain?) I want, the world itself just doesn't seem to be as diverse, as modern or as... Well, as serious as what we have here.

Of all the games I have ever played, City of Heroes is the only one where everything seems to make sense.

That puts these powers at a significant disadvantage in relation to all the travel powers which can, and often should be used indoors. There are many tight spots in instanced maps, yes, but there are also plenty of gigantic open chambers where travel powers really benefit you. Not being useful there is crippling.

Then there's the other problem with these pools every time they are suggested - lack of an actual combat power. Every one of the current travel pools has one. Flight has Hover, Leaping has Combat Jumping, Speed has Hasten and Teleport has Teleport Foe. Because travel powers are intended to be used only for travelling, smaller, more low-profile versions of them are typically available to allow players to retain the travel effect while in combat.

You are also ignoring the fact that most of the current travel pools also have an attack in them. Flight has Air Superiority, Leaping has Jump Kick and Speed has Flurry. Yet whenever "Vehicles" pools are suggested, it's always a collection of vehicles to travel in, never any real utility.

I've long since become convinced that IF we get vehicles in City of Heroes, it won't be via a pool power, but rather a whole separate game system entirely. An argument can be made that nothing you don't carry on you can be viewed as your direct super power, so vehicles ought to be treated as possessions, rather than powers. And perhaps not the only possessions, either. If we ever get personal apartments/lairs/bases which aren't hamstrung by the need of large-scale group participation and needless rent, we could have an entire system for these kinds of possessions not necessarily limited to just vehicles.