Samuel_Tow

While I certainly sympathise with your situation, I cannot agree with this argument. At all. You "prove" you're a fan either by buying from the company or by staying with the company. The proof of the fan is in the commitment, and so long as there is going to be any point to tracking veteran status, then lowering the bars of commitment is just missing the point.

I really don't mind you having access to the Fire and Ice costume set, but I can't agree with your desire to prove you're as big a fan as those of us who've spent a few thousand dollars on the game and stuck with it for eight years through Jack Emmert's antics, through when the studio was cut down to 15 people, through name changes and outages and all of that.

There's the item, which as far as I'm concerned you can have. I don't believe in exclusivity. And then there's status, which I'm much less willing to just hand out.

That tends to involve making the game more fun for myself at the expense of other people, unfortunately enough.

Ugh... I can never remember what these are called. It's some weird acronym with an X in it despite not having a single word starting with an X. I know it's something about "bombs" but the rest is just a blur.

Also... Is that what I said? For some reason, I keep wanting to say IED - Improvised Explosive Device - but there's a U somewhere in the Rikti bomb acronym and my brain gets cross-wired.

Just for the record, my idea of spreading AoE damage among critters hit instead of duplicating it was yours before it was mine. That's where I got it from

Yeah, that's pretty much what I answered, as well. I don't believe in perpetual exclusivity, just temporary such. We, as VIPs, get to buy the stuff early and possibly at a discount, but eventually everyone else can have it. I'd say that's a win for VIP and Premium players alike. Probably not for Free players, but then nothing in the store is a win for them.

That's what I mean, yeah. I find these events to be at the same time hugely disruptive of my preferred playing style (and, no, I don't subscribe to the concept of tough love) and yet not all that popular after the first few days. I mentioned the Banners event for a reason - I've seen maybe one or two of these actively pursued EVER. Most of the time when one shows up, there's no-one in the zone and no-one cares when I announce it, because it's usually about half a week late.

Mine certainly were. I really dislike how the systems I address work in this game and feel they owe their existence more to tradition and technical limitations than to design that's best for the game.

I had something else in mind, but I seem to have forgotten.

Those already exist. The Tactical Sidearm is nothing more than a black Automatic with a scope, silencer and laser sight that's not tintable. There already are Automatics with just a scope, just a silencer, just a laser sight, scope and silencer, scope and laser sight and silencer and laser sight. I don't know if they're available to Thugs Masterminds, but they're available to Dual Pistols Blasters.

Men already get shirts. They only have one model in that category, and it belongs to the Pocket D Valentine's Day pack, which is no longer for sale. I agree with you that it should be made available again and that more shirts should be added. I'm just saying the category already exists, so adding to it shouldn't be as much trouble as creating it.

I've been trying to bite my tongue and just stick to my original suggestion, but I have to add to this.

Monstrous legs need a LOT of help. They need Tights With Skin textures for the upper legs, they need more mechanical lower legs, they need lower legs that look like digitigrade shoes and boots, they need more details that look like clothing ornaments on the digitigrade feet. I imagine the easiest solution would be the standard "foot" guard that's just a metal plate which covers the front of the foot from the digitigrade heel to where the digits rest on the ground. I know the Techbot had some artwork of digitigrade boots somewhere around his machine that I've been trying to get him to post, but so far I've had no luck.

I'll extend the monstrous suggestion with something Frozen Fire suggested in David's old thread - creating animal heads via regular head face details. Specifically, it should be doable to create "snouts" which can mount on faces exactly like gas masks do now. In fact, people have been using gas masks to make penguins, chickens and foxes for a long time now. If they can use gas masks to get a damn good approximation, I'm sure actual snouts can't be that far off. In fact, the Samurai Set mouth piece which looks like a snarling fanged mouth is already usable to create substitute mouths that look remarkably real if done right. This can allow us to have what I've always wanted - antrhopomorphic animal heads with hair and hats. The standalone animal heads are great, but they're very uncustomizable and they don't have humanoid hair to go with them.

I don't mind that Blasters can soft-cap. I mind that BECAUSE Blasters can soft-cap, that much more is expected of my Scrappers and my Brutes, content is made harder then I, too, am forced to soft-cap, which is a process I HATE, as you may have noticed. The reason I keep calling this "power creep" is because as the "average" character grows stronger, content grows harder and it more or less forces me into activities I don't enjoy. If Inventions had never been added to the game, I'd have been a lot happier, because "loot" has never enhanced my enjoyment of a game.

True, true, but you need a lot of tokens to make Tier 9. I forget how many I had, but I believe I had ~45 when the system launched and that just barely got my foot into T9. You're right that it's probably closer to $400-$500, but it's still a long time and/or a lot of money.

The poll they sent out via GMOTD actually had this as a question. I forget the exact wording, but I voted that I want to see VIP exclusive items exist, but that these become available to everybody after a certain period of time. I don't know if that also includes T9 VIP stuff since that's to VIP players what VIP stuff is to Freemium players, but I hope it does. I do genuinely want to see T9 VIP stuff become widely available to everyone after a certain time.

I also want to see Super Pack costume purchasable directly, but that's a whole other barrel of monkeys.

You also posted this at a time when an incredibly annoying, largely generic event is going on, one which has the propensity to kill you if you go AFK outside, remove spawns you need for hunt missions and poise you against enemies who outclass you greatly. Because this is pretty much the kind of events we've seen since I10, Praetoria excluded, and they have failed to impress since then.

And it's a real waste, to be honest. A Nemesis-styled event that's just a blunt head-on assault just seems out of character for the guy. Someone suggested suddenly having all civilians pull Nemesis rifles and revealing they were Automatons all along, now THAT would have been more his style. Still out of character, but more his style. Probably still as boring to play, too.

Specifically, this is what ultimately got the game's original "points buy" character build system chucked out the window. The development team eventually realised that people who knew what they were doing could create absurdly overpowered characters while people who weren't that learned could create essentially crippled ones. This created such a massive gulf of power between large sections of the testing population that balancing content was practically impossible.

They introduced Archetypes and Powersets partly to curtail character power by limiting what selection of powers a character can have and partly to force people to take at least the bare essentials for a functional character. That, or at the very least bluntly suggest it by lumping those powers into the powersets you've already chosen.

At rock's quoted veteran status of "two years, almost three" that's still not enough time for him to reach T9 status. T9 is approximately equivalent to the old 7 year veteran status, excluding Paragon Points purchases and a SINGLE boxed edition of anything, so we're still looking at another four to five years or another ~$700 spent on the Market.

T9 VIP stuff is highly unattainable to most people who aren't long-term VIPs, or close to it.

You have a point, though for different reasons than my own. I like the Praetorian events mostly because they aren't thrust upon me when I don't want to participate just because I have business in the zone. I also like them because they're technically possible to do with just myself and a few of my friends, and I don't need the whole zone to participate or, as is more often the case, get people from all over the server to the zone in the first place. Yeah, nothing more fun than a Banner event when I one other person are in the zone, I tell ya!

Zone events also REALLY bug me because enemies in them are always real-level 30s, even if they use GM code to scale. The trouble is that when I attack them, I scale up to 30 and deal damage based on that. But my damage and accuracy mods at level 30 are crap because I'm expected to be using SOs, which my level 10 tosser in Port Oaks can't have. Also, the array and strength of enemy powers is appropriate to level 30, so they hit somewhat harder and with nastier effects than your common level 10 lowlife would.

My low-level Beast Mastermind is damn near unstoppable against ordinary content. I can take on things I really shouldn't have any place attacking and still win if I play smart. As soon as Nemesis soldiers show up, a couple of white-con minions and a yellow-con lieutenant wipe my henchmen within 15 seconds and floor me within another 10 after that, and this is with my trying to keep them alive. I'm sure I'll kick their ***** once I have all six henchmen, both upgrades, most of my secondary, lots of slots and decent enhancements, but at level 10? That's not a lot of fun.

And yet these events keep happening in level 5-9 zones and level 10-15 zones.

I'd like to make a personal request for people contributing here. Please, let's focus on what we want to see more of and just not dwell on what we want to see less of. Please, try to stick to requesting the things you want to see added to the game and just take solace in the notion that if your wishes are granted, you got this instead of what you didn't want.

What I'm saying is I really hope we can see more constructive arguments and fewer destructive ones.

I keep bringing it up only because what I'm suggesting - a new base skin for females that's more muscular - only works with "clothes" that are actually colour patterns. Right now the skin texture on most Tights With Skin tops and bottoms is entirely separate from the top and bottom, because the top or bottom is just a patter over the base skin texture. What this means is the skin texture can be swapped once and still work with all patterns. Baking both skin and cloth together into one static texture pretty much removes all ability to alter the underlying skin texture and sinks my idea quite hard, unless we want to make a double of everything with the alternate skin texture.

When last he spoke on the subject, David was pretty much set on not removing old pieces when and if they were updated, but equally as set on spearheading some kind of option which would enable the game to hide "old" pieces such that players would have to intentionally enable them, thus keeping the public-facing image of the game fresh and new while simultaneously retaining old options for people already invested in them. At the time, such a mechanic was considered unworkable, which was the major hurdle. This is no longer the case, as we already have a tick box which hides all costume pieces we don't currently own. I have to assume it's possible to implement a similar tick box which hides all costume pieces considered "legacy." This should reduce clutter considerably and thus remove the problem of maintaining several versions of the same costume piece.

That said, I'd still like to see higher resolution versions of the existing patterns without turning them into textures just the same. Some, like the Sports Bra for females, are just pixellated and misaligned, and fixing them would be a benefit not just for Tights With Skin, but for using them as colour patterns over non-skin costume items, as well. I'd say the resolution for the Sinister pattern should be the benchmark.

Yes, but doesn't that return to the key to its original binding? I have the habit of accidentally hitting the T and C keys a lot, so if they're bound to their default values, I keep toggling windows on and off. A lot of the time, even if I'm not using a button, I may want it to specifically do nothing to avoid messing up when I hit it by accident. I have rather imprecise fingers.

Right, so I don't qualify. Dang it!

I've often felt that the omnipresent overlord which is Arachnos was always a mistake. As far as I'm concerned, every island should have had its own independent governor and faction ruling it. I could see both Mercy and Grandville being Arachnos land, but the rest? I'd rather see Port Oaks as the crime-ridden port town with a glitzy villa area for the rich mobsters, Aeon City as the beautiful city of the future built over the tomb of a demon and run by a mad but actually INTELLIGENT scientist, Sharkhead as the small mining town of poor people and dirty jobs, Nerva as the independent peaceful state and St. Martial Island as the perfect, gleaming city of the rich where the poor undercity is invisible unless you know to look for it.

I'd have liked to see a Nemesis island, too, which would be a perfect utopia where everyone is genuinely happy and content and with good reason - their benevolent master provides for them and asks for nothing in return. No Praetorian façade totalitatian state, an honest-to-god perfect island with which Nemesis can demonstrate the argument he's always making - that he's better at ruling the world than anybody else.

So, yeah, I agree with this. I'd honestly prefer to see the Rogue Isles as the perfect tourist destination - beautiful nature, lots of expensive resorts, clean and neat cities, with all the evil hidden away where the dumb tourists won't go to look for it. Being a bad guy in a good place is far more satisfying than being a bad guy in a rat hole, but City of Villains wasn't intended to be satisfying. It was intended to be depressing.

That's not true. People prefer to have fun, and for pretty much the last seven years, red-side has consistently failed to be fun by presenting itself as one part morality lesson that crime doesn't pay and living a life of evil is unpleasant and two parts trying to cater to a demographic which never existed - that of the sociopathic players who enjoy seeing others in pain, suffering and agony and want nothing more than to commit the most vile acts imaginable. Yes, specific people who enjoy this kind of fiction exist and that's a legitimate form of FICTIONAL entertainment, but there have never been enough of those to constitute a demographic.

City of Villains was originally envisioned to be like, to quote the Ultimate Warrior, "**** dribbling down your throat for all eternity. It was designed to be grotesque, revolting and unpleasant because that's what someone thought evil was. And while that IS how evil generally is in the fictional world, what someone forgot to account for is that whether people play villains or heroes, they want to have fun, they want to leave satisfied and they want an experience which makes them happier for having played it than they would have been if they hadn't. Hence, the above.

At least those do damage. Now compare these to the various Hand Clap clones (that, Thunder Clap, Lightning Clap, etc.) which do no damage, cause massive scatter and only impart a short-duration, Mag 2 (minion-only) stun at a vastly reduced power accuracy and a significantly increased endurance cost. Essentially, I'm spending a power pick and spending a lot of slots to be able to use a power which, even at the best of times, will push enemies away from my Invincibility/Rise to the Challenge/Against All Odds while doing precious little to them. And I'm supposed to want this?

The over-abundance of defence Invention Set bonuses is not just a problem for T9 God Mode powers, especially since so many of them don't even grant defence. It's a problem with primarily defence-based sets in general, which includes things like Super Reflexes, Ninjutsu, Energy Aura and so forth. I call this power creep because as I step from the regular game into Dark Astoria, suddenly I'm expected to have far more defence than I do, because I'm expected to have defence-granting Inventions Set bonuses. If my defences aren't based around defence, that's fine, but if Defence is all I have, that's a problem. It's essentially the same old problem of higher-level enemies gaining higher to-hit which Arcana fought tooth and nail to get changed into getting accuracy buffs, instead.

The last thing I want out of the game is to worry about the super hero equivalent of Gear Score.

If you're implying that melee cones are balanced around the expectation that you'll hit a single target and anything else is a bonus, you are sorely mistaken. The cost and recharge of melee cones, which inform both DPS and EPS, are balanced around the cone formula, which takes into account maximum targets, cone angle and cone range. There are a small handful of short cone powers balanced as single-target attacks (Dark Maul is one, Sands of Mu is not by virtue of being unenhanceable), but these are the exception, not the rule.