Samuel_Tow

I suspect the reason those huge zones are comprised of so much water has more to do with the cost in time and money of filling these zones with more streets, buildings, props and so forth, vs. slapping on a single layer of water underneath the entire zone and leaving large sections of it out-and-out blank. Zone construction has been confirmed to be one of the most demanding and expensive things to do in this game, which is partly why we haven't seen many new full-fledged zones since... Err... City of Villains.

As for a seamless world, and this is a general response, "like WoW" is a pretty poor argument. In order for this to happen to City of Heroes, you'd need to fill... Well, somewhere between as much land area as the city already has to TWICE as much land area as that just to link the zones with all the city area NOT included in any of the zones. Remember: the existing city zones aren't directly adjacent, there's a lot of space between them.

And even then, how do you get to, say, Croatoa? That's 45 minutes North of the city by train. Do you make 45 minutes' worth of countryside so that people can have a route to travel along? And how do you even get people to spend 45 minutes travelling, anyway? Out of the question. You have a zone load. How do you get to Striga Island, which was said to be what... 30 miles out to sea? At the average flight speed of around 45 miles an hour, that's what... 40 minutes of travel time. Granted, making the intermittent terrain would be fairly simple - it's flat open water (though water out at sea ISN'T flat like a lake, so there's that) - but you're still not going to get people to travel that. You can't. You have a zone load. How do you make people travel to Peregrine Island? Same deal - long distance over open water with lots of travel time. You don't. You have a zone load.

Or how about in City of Villains? Every damn zone except Port Oaks and Cap Au Diable is on a different island, sometimes tens of miles apart. Even if you opened up the mock forcefields surrounding the zones, where are villains going to go? In open ocean. That's a lot of fun if you're swimming, lemme tell ya. Even if you can hire a boat or a whole ship. And then you have people getting lost at sea because... Well, it's a big ocean with comparatively small islands. And that's true for ALL of them. It's actually amazing how small the islands really are, and I suppose you could introduce other smaller, uninhabited islands as Hazard Zones, but... Really, that can be done now. And let's be realistic - who's going to want to travel miles upon miles on a boat. I mean are there THAT many people who like spending 7+ minutes travelling on a fixed-course bad if they could just teleport, instead?

And then let's look at Paragon City's War wall. The War Walls are coming down! Except... They're still needed. Not only do they regulate the large-scale travel of villains through the city, but they also serve to corral the lawlessness of the Hazard Zones in nice little contained areas where it can't spill over into the rest of the city. It's like a ship's bulkhead system. When the Hamidon broke out of the Hive, he didn't infect the entire city, he only infected Eden, because he couldn't punch through the war walls. When the Rikti returned in force, they did manage to figure out how to stage the occasional raid in city zones, but for the most part they were contained within the Crash Site. We can't really remove the War Walls around Hazard zones, so what does it serve to remove the others when you still have big-huge fortresses all over the place?

And what are people even thinking about when they say "Dismantle the War Walls now!" Firstly, the most you can hope for is their being shut down. They'll ALWAYS be used as regular walls. Secondly, have you any concept how BIG these things are? The city is still rebuilding, and it wouldn't make sense for them to be unable to finish a damn construction job in four years, yet be able to completely uproot all of the War Wall in a matter of months.

Let's be reasonable here. The War Walls are part of the city, part of the culture, part of gameplay and, honestly, one of the things that makes Paragon City truly unique. I know some people don't like feeling boxed in, but then I know some people do. It's an artistic choice that I personally approve of, and I don't see a good enough reason OR a good enough technical possibility to even contemplate this.

This is the point that I feel it all comes down to. Here on the 'net, WHAT you are don't matter in the slightest. It's WHO you are that counts. You could be a guy or a girl, 10 years old or 100 years old, white, black, yellow, red, purple... Hell, you could be a 15-foot tall green tentacle monsters. I can't know. And frankly, I wouldn't care even if I did. What does it matter?

Friends and family are always flabbergasted at how little I know about the people I've met online. "But what does he work?" "I don't know." "Where is he from?" "I didn't ask." "How old is he?" "He never said." Heck, a lot of the time I don't even know if I'm speaking with a man or a woman, but then what difference does it make? A cool person is a cool person. That's the only thing that matters.

That's also why I find "minority supergroups" to be an absurdity, I'm sorry to say this. Yes, I realise persecuted minorities like to stick together in real life, but this is a game replete with anonymity. If there is ANY place where even the most unusual individual can fit in, this is it. Why ruin it by parading you're a minority and seeking to seclude yourself from the majority?

That's actually an interesting item of note. "European" isn't a national identity and Europeans don't share common language or culture. As such, aside from the notion of preserving the feel of a separate European forum as existed before the merge, it seems kind of... Ridiculous to have a "lounge" especially for Europeans as though they weren't as different between each other as they are from the Americans.

When the offer to move to the EU servers came out, I refused it out of hand, even though I live in Europe. Why? Well, why would I move? I speak English and Bulgarian and, sadly, do not speak "European" so the German and French servers would be locked to me. Why, then, would I want to trade 11 servers that speak a language I can understand for 2!!! servers that speak that language? It didn't make sense to lump Europeans in the same basket then and it doesn't make sense to do so now. So what if I'm 7-10 time zones ahead of the bulk of the players? I'm 1-2 time zones ahead of most other Europeans anyway.

I guess my point is that this division between Americans and Europeans is silly. Not only are Europeans nothing like each other just within Europe, but Americans are probably just as diverse within the US.

Yeah, I'd like to be able to mix-n-match origins, myself. Silly as it may sound, one of the cooler decisions I have to make when a character is levelling up is what kind of DOs do I get for him. OK, so he's Technology, but I don't really want to give him Natural/Technology. Those are largely weapons that a Batman would use, and my dude is a robot. So, Technology/Science is better for him. You know, all those forcefields, and metal alloys and AI and suchforth. It's not meaningful and, as far as RP goes, pretty dang cheap, but it's a cool choice nonetheless.

I would very much like to see an option for multiple origins.

Interestingly, a lot of a Balkan countries (except Greece, obviously ) are slav and share a very similar language, to the point where it's often almost possible to understand each other without actually speaking another language. I know Serbian, Macedonian and Bulgarian sound very much alike, and Russian isn't too far removed. Grammar is quite similar, though not enough to be comparable, and a lot of the words double up with different meanings. In a way, they sound very much the same, though speaking them can be a HUGE problem with similar words

I've often offered to write people's supposedly Russian bios for them in Bulgarian. It's not quite Russian, but it's still better than the garbage Bablefish gives you if you try to auto-translate into Russian. And now I can do it on the forums, too!

Bulgarian, actually. From what I've seen, Ukrainian seems to consist of a lot of Latin, or at least latin-looking letters, whereas Bulgarian's alphabet is practically indistinguishable from the Russian one, have the exact same letter except for "ы" and "э." That sentence structure is very similar and many words are identical (albeit holding different meanings a lot of the time) makes the languages practically indistinguishable to anyone who isn't familiar with Slav languages.

Well, that's in the list of features for I16, but exactly WHAT they are is... All over the place. Some people posted hand-held camera footage of them from the Comic Con, but I'm not sure where those were posted.

Not much of a waste, really. They're hideously cheap. You can buy a full set of the things at the cost of two, maybe three DOs. DOs are rather more expensive, themselves, of course. Still, though, not being as strong in the low levels as you'll be in the high levels is part of the fun. One of the really depressing things I faced back in the day was the fact that once I got to SOs, nothing would ever be enhanced any more than it was at level 22, as I simply didn't have the slots to add more of most things.

I know only slightly more, but I speak a language that can pass for Russian almost perfectly in front of anyone who doesn't actually speak the Russian language

This is my biggest problem. Before, threads with new replies in them used to light up in bold and a different background colour, so seeing which thread had new responses in it was easy. Just scan the thread list. Now it's like a scavenger hunt. Is this thread ever so slightly bolded? Does it have a microscopic triangle next to its title? Is the icon next to it a closed envelope or the almost identical-looking open envelope? It's doable, but in terms of convenience, it's one small step forward and one giant leap backwards.

And why not simply have the old functionality where clicking on a thread's title automatically takes you to the latest new reply? It's what people are going to use the most. Who the HELL goes to the first page of threads every damn time, even if they've read and responded to them? Latest unread reply is the default functionality, so why shunt it over to the world's smallest triangle?

I don't know what they did on the technical side, but they killed the majority of the convenience and usability features the old boards had.

If you mean plain and simple changing the animations of powers that have been there for five years without the option to keep the old ones, then HELL NO!!! Keep your hands off my powers!

If you are suggesting the addition of new, alternate animations for these powers the same way Martial Arts and Super Strength are getting alternatives, then I'm sure pretty much everyone on these boards is going to agree with you and support you.

You almost had me fooled there for a second, too

You won't see new players complain about "the grind" until they've been around the block a few times. I know I didn't start complaining about Training enhancements until a year into my game time. It's cool for new players to have more powerful enhancements and all, but you shouldn't buy into the rants of jaded veterans who believe that Stamina and SOs are the only way to play. Yeah, when you get used to the performance of a level 50 character, you're gonna' gripe when you get bumped down to level 1.

For me, though, that progress from suck to rock is part of the fun of the game. Going from Trainings into DOs at 12, then into SOs at 22, then into Common Inventions (for me) at 32 or 37 is just part of the progress. I really wouldn't want to ruin that by having enhancements peak too early. What you're suggesting, effectively, is capping enhancement performance at level 12, and then not touching it for the next 20 levels. I don't agree with that. Enhancement choices should be meaningful. And they are, just not right out the door. Getting stronger is half the fun.

Incidentally, I wouldn't buy into the gripes for "low-level grind." When you've been over the low levels a zillion times, you're not going to be looking to make them more fun, you'll be looking to SKIP them faster, and that's what people really want. Me, I don't subscribe to that notion. I believe the lower levels are a fun part of the game where character growth is fast and things are still relatively easy. We don't need to make it any easier. It ruins the effect of getting stronger later on.

You mean like the idea of having a level 1 Hellion be a meaningful threat to a level 50 hero and a level 1 hero be a meaningful threat to a level 50 Council, say? Or did I neglect to post this in yet another "no more levels" thread? The point of levels is to denote progress through an obvious increase in strength. An expansion of the SK/LK system to allow one player to bring along more friends (potentially an entire team) is something that may be somewhat acceptable, but plain opening all levels of content to all levels of players, both up and down, is decidedly not an idea I can get behind.

Ever.

I kept hearing about this all weekend, but I spent all my time on Pinnacle Friday, Saturday and Sunday and my connection to the game was better than it's been this past month. Granted, that's likely my ISP getting off their ***** and fixing their damn packet loss, but the game ran perfectly. No a lost packet or ping spike in sight.

Я чакайте, сериозно ли можем да пишем на кирилица вече?

*edit*
Woah! I guess we can! Sweet!

Which is exactly what happens now. Dodge animations with the shield out do raise the shield. You could make a point for raising it even more or in a more pronounced way, but it happens. It's just that sometimes traditional dodge animations also play for some reason.

"Heroes vs. villains" does not translate into "player vs. player" directly, specifically since what you are suggesting is more "heroes vs. heroes" and "villains vs. villains." If you play a hero, there are plenty of villains to beat up. If you're a villain... Well, there are SOME heroes in a few places to beat up. Largely Longbow in Nerva. But the point is moot, since you're not going to meet player heroes in the Rogue Isles anyway.

Nor should you, per chance this was suggested and I missed it. No crossing over into each-other's territory, with or without PvP. There are ways to achieve this "covertly" that I've discussed, myself, but they are all ways to AVOID PvP while dropping by for a visit, and as such aren't terribly relevant to this idea.

Single sentence: In no way do comic books justify player vs. player combat, such that they cannot justify player vs. NPC combat in exactly the same way.