Samuel_Tow

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Instead of thinking of AVs as munchkins, look at it from a comic book angle. Lord Recluse isn't an AV because he's better than you, he's an AV because this issue he's appearing in a team title rather than a solo title. One issue it takes the entire Avengers to take down Doctor Doom, another Spider-Man punks him by himself. AVs are the game's mechanical version of writer's fiat.

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Provided they scale down to elite bosses, it doesn't really matter anyway. That's a reason why it actually work. Thank our lucky stars for that particular change.

I CAN raise the gamma in the game and see at night. It just makes anything that's NOT a night in Sharkhead Island or Grandville horribly washed-out and unpleasant. I'm already seeing the shadow maps of many textures in places that are supposed to be dark.

Any game that has near-perfect darkness, or darkness on a background with a lot of blacks and browns yet does NOT offer a flashlight or other means of lighting your way is going to be hard to see in. I wouldn't mind darkness if I could light it up, but as it stands, my choice is between very dark nights and good-looking days, or visible nights and bleached-out days.

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To those who feel average I'll say that's because you are. It's called City of Heroes, plural. The Heroes in this game aren't earthbound gods - they're cops with capes. On a busy night in AP you'll see more heroes on the streets than you'll see in any Marvel or DC story outwith the most bloated crossover event. I don't care what your back story claims - you are NOT that special.

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Well, that sucks. Why is it so wrong for us to be special and powerful and omniscient by the time we hit 50? Why should it bother anyone else? Why can't the game at least pretend it's about me, me, me? I don't understand how people can like being grunts in a grunt game when the tools are there to make us feel like we really are all that cool and all that awesome.

Besides, the story contradicts you. I beat up Lord Nemesis, Requiem, Tyrant, saved the Statesman, saved a thousand worlds, stopped a nuclear bomb from destroying the multiverse... Oh, and I did it all by myself. I also beat up Lord Recluse single-handedly, slapped around the entire Freedom Phalanx and all the Vindicators, oh, and before I forget, beat up a GODDESS all by myself. And you want to claim I'm just a cop/thug with super powers? Does not compute.

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As for not doing a mission because you're scared of Malta - neither my Scrapper nor my MM shy away from them. In fact I like them, because unlike most other high level enemy groups they present a reasonable challenge to those characters.

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Yes, pick the two most horribly overpowered ATs and use them as a baseline. I'm sure that'll work out great. Scrappers and Masterminds aren't scared of Malta. They're not scared of anything at all. Pick something simpler, like a maybe a Blaster or a Corruptor or even a Stalker and look at that.

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Besides, the minions of most enemy groups can be casually swept aside. If my scrapper focuses all of her attacks on the boss just firing off Spin and/or Shockwave a few times will ensure that by the time the boss goes down the minions around her are either defeated or close to it.

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Oh, sure, so can my Scrapper. My Blaster, though, can't afford to do that because these minions shoot him dead. Using Scrappers as a measuring stick is NOT a good idea.

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Wow, you've been playing an MMO for a VERY long time for someone who just stated that they essentially hate the MMORPG model.

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This is the only MMO I've ever been able to play for more than a week exactly BECAUSE it doesn't follow the "MMORPG model" to the letter. I like this game IN SPITE OF it being an MMO, not BECAUSE of it. If I wanted the hardcore Korean grindfest MMO experience, I'd go play WoW or Lineage II or 9Dragons or any of the other games to that effect. I picked City of Heroes because it WASN'T any of these things.

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THIRTY TO FORTY PERCENT INCREASE in END and Rech.

[/ QUOTE ]THIRTY TO EIGHTY PERCENT INCREASE in DMG
(Maybe if I shout back B_I will listen?)

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Yes, I am aware of a damage buff. My point is that I think the END and RECH punishment in return for that is a little extreme.

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It's also not true, and you should hassle your sources that gave you this erroneous information. The endurance increase was only around 15%, Psychic Shockwave notwithstanding, and the damage increase AT LEAST equal to that, Psychic Shockwave notwithstanding. Then damage was increased AGAIN via a higher AT damage mod, for which Dominators paid with the loss of the Domination damage buff. Get this - it's an overall damage increase anyway, and WITHOUT an increase in anything.

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Doms are not a damage-heavy AT to begin with. Buffing our damage 40-80% [or whatever the percentage was] WITHOUT hamstringing us END or RECH-wise would have brought the AT up to a fun yet challenging thing that perhaps many others would have liked to try.
As this stands now, I don't see this being really popular with new Doms, unless they just go to the MA building and get PLed to [at least] Stamina. If one has to stop and wait and stop and wait and stop and wait and stop and wait, why play a Dom? We could just roll a Brute and have all these issues PLUS more damage and less end-game gimping on top of that.

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Dominators are a high-damage AT now. Their damage-to-endurance-to-recharge balance is the SAME as any other damage-dealing AT. The same as Scrappers, the same as Blasters. There is no disparity here. The only difference is that Dominators are able to fit more separate power picks in their attack chain, costing them more endurance. If you choose to do so, then that is your choice, but you DON'T have to and you will STILL do better damage. You just might have to be more careful about how many attacks you use.

A Scrapper can let rip with all of his attacks and pick from the ones that are active and never really worry about it too much because the recharge-to-animation ratio of their attacks limits the number of attacks they can cycle. Because of Dominators' much looser recharge-to-attack ratio, they can fire off a greater number of attacks. In effect, it's like running more toggles - they're gonna' cost more.

I don't consider pausing for a second or two to be a gigantic detriment, especially if you have other things to do in that time, like apply control or move around.

This post really disturbs me in how close it comes to butting me off the game. A couple of things that caught my eye:

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I like hobbies that are time consuming and difficult - if you're as good as you're ever going to be in the first month, then really, whats the point after that?

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Ugh! I HATE hobbies that are time-consuming and difficult. They're not fun, they're work, and I happen to do enough of that in real life to want to do more of it to have "fun." I LIKE games where you're as strong in the beginning as you're ever going to be, because that just means you have all the tools you'll need to triumph and the game can thereafter focus on making you use them RIGHT. Take any fighting game, for example, from the simplest Street Fighter II: The World Warrior to the overcomplicated Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes - all they ever give you is a fighter, and that's it. You gain nothing for playing that fighter more than the knowledge of what he can and how he should do it, as well as the skill required to actually pull it off.

See, what I have no respect for is a loaded battle that's decided before it even starts. I have no respect for people who brought victory from home. I don't care what kind of struggle and hardship they went through to get there. I wasn't part of it, I didn't play that game, and I refuse to be an NPC to forward their sense of self-esteem. I don't play games to pump other people's egos, I'm afraid. I play them to pump my own.

The only way I can truly enjoy a game and be engaged in it is if everything crucial to the encounter happens before my eyes, either IN the encounter itself or via a choice made immediately before it. I like fighting games because I can pick any character and beat any other just as long as I know what I'm doing. Grinding and working for hour after hour for a significant edge so that the encounter itself can play out like a battle on My Brute is not something that interests me.

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I therefor oppose your suggestion because I believe it will lower the bar of many encounters, making the game less challenging to play, and decreasing my special-ness compared to others.

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I DESPISE contests of "special-ness compared to others" because for every winner, there is always a loser. And it doesn't have to be. The game can just as easily make us feel special against its own enemies in an immersive, moving way, and I dare say much more so than it can by stroking the ego by letting us step on other people's sense of pride and accomplishment. I've always had more fun in single-player games that focused around my character and allowed him to be "all that and more" and had people complimenting him and cheering on him and making him out to be the biggest thing ever... Than I've had in your typical "you are a grunt" MMO. I don't play my games to work hard and compete with other people. That's exactly what I play games to AVOID. When I play Battlefield 2142 and my team gets walked on without a chance to do anything and all I ever did that round was die, I don't feel like I've had fun. In fact, it was an ugly, frustrating experience. And I can't blame the other team - they were just better. It doesn't change the fact that it was a horrible, rotten experience.

I'm never going to have any tolerance whatsoever for for people making themselves feel better at others' expense, nor will I ever be a fan of engaging in it, myself. I prefer to have an environment where everybody can have fun together. You'd THINK that would be a given in a largely cooperative game, but apparently not.

I don't want nights to last any longer. I have my gamma jacked up significantly and I still can't see my hand in front of my face CoV-side. Maybe if we had actual LIGHT in the game, instead of these neanderthal light maps and if we had a way to carry light with us, I might reconsider, but as it stands, dark simply means I can't see. And I like to see.

Besides, I find fighting crime in broad daylight (as well as committing it) much more appealing.

I think they're overdoing it on the new stuff. I feel an Architect building in EVERY DAMN ZONE is a bad idea, just as I felt that two, sometimes three Merit vendors per zone vastly overdoing it. It ruins the immersion of having zones matter almost completely, and it's not even NEEDED to begin with. I really wish they'd treated these things like the Arenas - put one or two per level range, not one every zone.

The Architect building in the War Zone is stupidly out of place. Yes, businesses in military areas exist, but they don't exist out in the field where shells fly by all the time monsters fight soldiers as a matter of course. An Architect branch in the War Zone I could see, but but hosted where it can be protected, which is to say INSIDE the the Vanguard base.

You know what I'd find really cool? If they moved the Architect building underground under the Vanguard base and left the building we already have bombed out and shot up. Say, broken glass, charred walls and so forth - kind of like the abandoned hero bases. It would both be a cool addition to the zone (cooler than one more identical tower block) AND put the Architect Entertainment complex in a place that makes a whole lot more sense.

Right now, the only place worse to put that thing would have been next to the Mothership by one of they Pylons.

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I'm not vouching for them either. My whole point in this is to counter the argument that graphical upgrades WILL lead to misuse of bloom, that they WILL sacrifice the style of COX for meaningless detail and that they WILL cause major performance problems for most people. None of those things can be known for sure.

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Not really going to go into the rest of it, because this I agree with and is what I'm saying. I happen to not trust ANYBODY to make the graphics "better" without throwing out the game's style and replacing it with the Unreal 3 engine like every [censored] game these days seems to be made, that is all. Looking at the competition, their graphics are only better insofar as they have more detail and better technology. But when it comes to actually LOOKING better, they fail. At least, to my eyes.

I'm not saying that'll happen here if we get any "graphical updates," but I'm very unconvinced that it could be any other way.

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Yet another idea I support 100%.
If it were up to me,both hero and villains would have the same excat powers to choose from.For instance,you could have a Broad Sword/Shield Brute,and a hero with the same powers.The lsit goes on and on.

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'Cept there IS no Pulse Rifle powerset. There are three Pulse Rifle attacks out of the nine a full powerset would need. This isn't proliferation, this is making a brand new set.

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Light sabers arent going to happen for copyright reasons

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Lightsabres as such and called that, no, but there's no reason why a more general energy blade cannot be in the game. In fact, it sort of is - that's what Talsorian weapons are. Them being in the game, it sort of puts a full energy blade powerset out of the question, though.

You already have access to a hammer weapon for War Mace. I would support adding a few (or a LOT) more hammer options in there, but not for a brand new powerset unless it were two-handed.

Also, an "Electrical Hammer" melee set can easily be renamed into either "Thor Melee" or "Copyright Infringement Melee," and that could be problematic.

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Edit: Worse, it's not intuitive. If the editor equired you to enter markup to get carriage returns that would be one thing. But it looks like it's silently converting them after entry, meaning the only way most people will ever figure out how much of the storage they're using is by trial and error.

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So we're back to the editor truncating the last 10 symbols of bios that skirt the symbol cap? Great. Welcome to four years ago!

Still, if this means line breaks, I WILL MANAGE! I'll gladly trade some limit bloat in return for my bios not looking like a brick wall again. THANK YOU!

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Think mids... cept made by the devs and also ingame...

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Why not use Mid's, then? It's up to date aside from what's happening on Test.

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i came back after 4 years away....
thats big news?

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That's big news from the last two weeks, not the past four years.

If you're looking for big news from the past four years, then I hope someone can post a link to the patch notes archive. There really is no good way to explain what has changed other than that.

I'm going to have to say that all I would demand of the development team is that they provide the raw numbers, and possibly an explanation of what they mean and how they work. Beyond that, I wouldn't mind an official planner, but I wouldn't be terribly heartbroken if there wasn't one. Mids and Suckerpunch did a smashing job with it.

I'm interested in the information. A tool to write it down with isn't as important.

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Is Grav/En viable yet?

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My experience with the combination is very limited, but I can say one thing with utmost certainty - the low levels are NOT a pain to solo with that combination on Test. They're actually pretty enjoyable.

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some reds are blues, are some reds blues?

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wut?

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Wouldn't have been nearly as funny if you'd quoted yhe whole paragraph, huh? Standard IQ test logic question. Seems appropriate when it comes down to a logical debate, no?

You fail logic forever. You are looking for absolutes, and if I disagree with your absolute, you immediately ascribe an absolute to me and begin dissecting it. That's a straw man, because I'm not vouching for absolutes.

You claim people who don't like graphical updates are people whose systems can't handle it. That is not true because I have a counter example. A few of them, in fact. Your supporting examples do not prove all people who don't want better graphics don't have the machines for it, it proves that SOME people who don't want better graphics don't have the machines for it, but you have no claim over all, because I have proof that SOME people who don't want better graphics DO have the machines to handle them and don't want them for other reasons.

Standard question from an IQ test: "If some greens are reds and some reds are blues, are some reds blues?" The answer is no, because you cannot say whether the reds that are greens are the same greens that are blue.

You can't speak for everybody, that's all I'm saying. And since you're basing your point on dismissing certain people like they don't exist or shouldn't matter, I say you are wrong. You assume people who don't want better graphics don't have the machines for it, and you are wrong. SOME people are like that, SOME people are not, and you really have no standing to step over the latter group unless you can find reliable, quantifiable information proving that they are a negligible number worthy of ignoring, to which effect anecdotal evidence is simply insufficient.

You want better graphics, and that's fine. Don't dredge up false absolutes to back yourself up and discredit people who disagree with you. Your opinion as a customer be able should stand strong on its own without having to resort to "many others" as a crutch.

Damage, yes. Damage increased more than cost did.

But thinking about it overnight, that doesn't paint the whole picture. Damage and cost increases count only if you do on Test EXACTLY what you do on Live. To give a somewhat uneducated example, if on Live you used an attack chain of Power Bolt -> Bone Smasher -> Power Bolt -> Power Blast -> repeat, for the cost and damage increases to be what I predicted, you would have to do the same on Test. But because these powers were slowed down, on Test such an attack chain would have significant gaps, but it WOULD have better efficiency than on Live.

But it has gaps. Gaps in which you can use more attacks, or more control, or more tempermanent powers. Knowing what the playerbase considers efficient and seeing how people describe their new behaviour, it seems that few tolerate waiting these gaps out and instead fill them in either with the other attacks they didn't have the opportunity to use before, or with more control powers. THIS causes a net increase in endurance, and without calculating it, I would wager it WOULD offset the increase in damage against Permadom. Perhaps even the increase in damage overall. But this is also the part that is in the players' hands - people are doing more, and this is naturally costing them more. "Per damage" metrics remain the same, but "per second" metrics tank, causing people to run out faster than they can recover, disrupting the "perpetual motion" many espouse.

My advice, if that were ever worth much, would be to either slow down if you want to maintain close to the old efficiency, or find newer ways to mitigate the cost. Dominators on Test have been given the same opportunity as Masterminds - spam your powers for amazing feats in return for amazing cost. A Mastermind can resummon and re-upgrade all henchmen within 5-10 seconds, but the unenhanced cost of this is MORE than his entire endurance bar. Dominators have much the same opportunity now - let rip if you want, but mind the cost.

Once upon a time, Geko balanced powers based on a formula that took into account damage, recharge and endurance cost, with animation times being assigned completely arbitrarily by whoever it was that was responsible for making the animations at the time (I'm pretty sure it wasn't BABs then). This has led to situations where an animation is far too long for what the power does, such as the old version of Barrage, and to situations where an animation is too short, such as the case for Energy Transfer. I mention those because they have been corrected, so I don't have to prove they're issues. If I'd mentioned Barb Swipe and Blaze, I'd have gotten into an argument, so let's stick to what has been developer-acknowledged.

As I said, certain things have been mended. It was either Castle or BABs (or maybe even both) that at least suggested that future powers will be made with animation times in mind. Though there has been no guarantee older powers will or will not be changed, certain outliers have still been altered, which would appear to mean that the developers have chosen this method for rebalancing powers.

To be a bit more scientific, our powers are balanced with a certain specific damage-to-endurance ratio (0.192 scale damage per endurance point, or 5.2 endurance points per scale damage for single-target attacks) and a specific damage-to-recharge ratio that I don't remember offhand. Damage-to-endurance tends to be fairly static, defined by a power's "nature." AoE powers are balanced to cost more for the endurance they do, if I remember correctly such that you have to hit three targets or more to offset the cost, while cones are balanced slightly more forgivingly, but still on the low side. Claws has an endurance discount, meaning its attacks are balanced to do more damage per unit of endurance than other sets, and Epic/Patron attacks are typically balanced to cost more for what they do.

The reason I mention this is because it feeds directly into any "per second" metric you're going to see. The more DPS a power has, the more EPS it costs to do so. That's because recharge is balanced to damage and slated to favour short-recharge powers. Cycling Jab continuously would do significantly more damage over time than cycling Knockout Blow, just to give you an example. Jab will also cost you more in the same amount of time, despite the power itself being so much cheaper.

You would think, based on the above DPS balance metric, that Jab would give you more damage in your attack chain than Knockout Blow, but there is another side to this coin - expected performance vs. actual performance. DPS metrics assume a power is cycled as soon as it is recharge, but in reality, that isn't possible. Powers spend time waiting while other powers animate, thus taking them away from their "ideal" DPS. People naturally favour big attacks to open with and big attacks when they are recharged, and depending on your AT, battles can last less time than it takes a big power to recharge. This gives a natural tendency for big attacks to end up closer to their ideal DPS, while smaller attacks, which spend a lot of time recharged and waiting to serve as filler, end up farther away from their ideal. This, for the most part, counteracts the DPS and EPS superiority they have. Essentially, for the DPS increase you get from smaller attacks, you pay with more rooting and less room in your attack chain.

The point, I suppose you could call it, is that shorter-recharge powers spend more time animating while longer-recharge powers spend less time animating. Giving longer-animation powers a shorter recharge is actually to the detriment of the player. DPS increases, yes, but so does EPS, and on big attacks that end up close to their ideal DPS and EPS, that can be significant. As well, because the shorter the recharge of the attack is, the more times it ends up being activated and, being that it's a long-animation attack, eats up a SIGNIFICANT amount of time that could have been used for other things, that is actually detrimental not just to damage, but to utility as well, because it removes the "gaps" that utility powers tend to be best suited for.

You have to look at it like this: a longer animation time on a short-recharge attack is a BAD thing, because it both swells up the attack AND eats up a lot of your biggest resource - opportunity. Long animation times are actually best suited for long-recharge, high-investment powers because the relative overhead is generally much cheaper compared to the power's overall opportunity cost.

Let me put it this way. Which do you think is better? Using a 4 second recharge, 3 second animation power lots of times, or a 20 second recharge, 3 second animation power as much as you can manage? I would answer the latter. The former takes up 3 out of every 7 seconds, which is a little over 42% of your time with just that one power. The latter takes up 3 out of every 20 seconds, which is only 15% of your time. Yes, technically the latter would do less damage, but it would also cost less, net, and it would give you the opportunity to do something MORE than cycle that power over an over.

The last thing you want is slow attacks recharging faster.

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My understanding is that /energy [on test] is using 30% more END and that /psi has had its END usage upped 40%, due to this "buff." This correlates with what I've seen on my /energy on Test; the END problems are just horrible now.

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That truly depends on what you're trying to do with the sets. The "cost" you pay for the damage you do has actually gone down, with endurance cost for Energy Assault going up by 15%, but damage going up by either 30% or 85%, depending on whether you compare to permadom or regular play. However, because attacks have been slowed down, that means you can stick more things in your attack chain and that WILL cost you more, bit it will also bring in more damage faster.

If you're looking at endurance cost per second, then by far the biggest factor in that is playstyle and how people choose to adapt. Damage per endurance cost, however, has actually gone up, meaning you do a LOT more damage for a LITTLE more endurance, only now you can also do more still.

Running the EPS calculations should be fairly simple, though it would also be a massive pain in the [censored]. If you're really interested, I can run them for you when I get a couple of hours of free time, but I'd really rather not commit to that for no reason. It would probably also be unreliable, as attack chains and filler powers also factor into this, and those aren't very easily predictable.

Let me conclude this with a simple observation: Power cost and recharge increased along with the increase in damage. The balance of the new powers is the same as the balance of the old power - ~0.192 scale damage per unit of endurance, so each attack costs no more and no less for what it does on Live, they all just come in bigger chunks. You do, however, have an AT base damage increase which gives you extra damage at no added cost, which actually makes things more efficient at the end of the day than they were before, in or out of Domination.

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Number one is certainly true. The number of people who still complain about never getting to play the Calvin Scott task force is a testament to how much players want to have all content at their disposal. I don't have any good answer to that except the old adage that "If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs."

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See, the problem I have with this adage is that people always use it when they're making an omelette for themselves, yet they are looking to break MY eggs. As a guy, I'm not too fond of that, specifically since I don't really like omelette to begin with.

Point being, people like their game world as it is, like the old stories and running through them, like having, as you put it, all the content available to them. I've seen plenty of suggestions like this, and always there are a good number of people who simply don't want their content going away. Simply painting it as a necessary evil is NOT good enough, especially since there are other ways. Specifically...

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If we agree that dynamic story-telling is a good thing, that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an END, then we are perforce accepting the premise that the content is eventually going to go away when the story is finished. It can't be helped, though it can be worked around if a mechanism exists for returning to old content via a flashback mechanism such as Ouroboros.

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You can have dynamic content without it being time-dynamic. The story in a movie or a book may change through in-story time, but the previous scenes and the previous pages don't cease to exist after you have read them in real time. Fictional stories in any medium are governed not by real time, but by whatever time the medium runs on.

In City of Heroes, that "time" is levels. By level 20, you've defeated Dr. Vahzilok and you no longer meet any of his minions. Yes, you can go back and see them still in the streets, but there are never any stories about them. By level 35, you've learned that the Nemesis Army really is led by the Prussian Prince of Automatons, something you didn't know before. By level 40, you've discovered the existence of the Malta Group. Yes, you can technically go to Peregrine Island at level 1 and see them hanging around, but you can just leaf forward a couple of hundred pages and read what's there just the same. By level 50, you now know the full story of Praetorian Earth, who it is ruled by, what it is like and so on and so forth.

In fact, somewhere between level 40 and level 45, you discover Clockwork Earth, and your first reaction upon going there is to be amazed at the sight of Clockwork, something you haven't seen in 20 levels. In-game this is described as some derivative of "a really long time," but the fact remains that levels are used as time, not the actual time spent gaining them, itself.

Yes, you can break continuity and go forward or backward in the story, but on your own, by design, you are locked into a step in the story progression that is appropriate to the point in "time" you are currently in, ignoring what you can see of what has happened before and what you know will happen afterwards. Each character is his own story, locked in a specific moment in his own personal instance of the world. Even in this big world where heroes outnumber normal people, that still ensures our stories are our own, about us, following us. I would really not be interested in being a grunt in someone else's story. That's the primary reason I do so few Architect arcs.

You can have continuity without removing content, just as long as you honour the chronology of the levelling curve, provided you can accept the world revolving around you.

I'm going to have to make a sort of destructive response here, because I feel compelled to challenge your ideas of what a new player would expect to see and should be exposed to.

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Imagine a first time player walking into Atlas Park or Mercy Island and to see a massive GM picking up a car or smashing a building, and seeing groups of fellow heroes/villains coordinating to take down the threat. I understand the ideals of these first zones being safe havens. But a GM could be programmed to ignore players unless it is attacked first, could impress newcomers and maintain a relatively safe atmosphere in the zone. Just an idea, but these first zones really need to have something to WOW the first time player, and keep them impressed with the game.

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If I walked into a new game I knew little about and was just starting playing and walked into a gigantic mess with a bunch of people fighting a big giant monster, my instinct would be to walk away very fast. Away from the encounter at first, and if it persisted in showing up in my way, away from the game in general. I like the fell of the starter zones as it is - they're quiet, safe, uneventful places that provide a training ground for our abilities and a grasp of the game's mechanics without the worry of undue complication. I REALLY do not want that balance upset by encounters designed with the sole intent to be flashy and eyegrabbing.

Maybe I'm not the audience you're targeting with this, but what I want out of a game is that I be able to play it with confidence first and foremost, and only THEN take on the really interesting stuff. The Tutorial is badly insufficient for this. Essentially, 1-5, and even 1-10 is the game's real tutorial. That's not the right time to be fighting giant monsters, that's the time to be figuring out which button to press to jump and how to get to King's Row.

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The time of day should also be synchronized to a real world clock, and server clock times introduced. The period of one day in-game should take 24 hours, this would make those events that only occur at night or day much more manageable as well as giving the world a much more realistic feel.

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I REALLY dislike any suggestion to tie in-game time to the time in some place half-way around the world from me. Do this, and you're essentially putting everyone who's not in the US in the twilight zone. Even besides that, some people's schedule is such that they always play at the same time, which can lock them into eternal night. And if that time just happens to be in the middle of the day with the sun glaring into the monitor, yet it locks you into a permanent night in CoV, it means you will never be able to see anything ever.

If I were a new player and joined a game that put me in eternal night because I was governed by time 10 timezones away from me (typically how things go), I would be sorely disappointed. You're already seeing Australians like Excession and Cambious complaining about how maintenance hits during Australian prime time and it happens at 4 PM here. That's a system technical requirement, so I can live with it, but having the actual game governed by this is unacceptable to me on a very high level.

That's the sort of thing that would tell me, as a new player: "Turn around. You are not welcome here. This game was not made for you."

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Giant monsters really are the high point of every super hero's career. Nothing is more public and iconic in comic heroism then the hero taking down a monstrosity that is several times his own size and strength. One thing I have noted as a Badge Hunter is how static the giant monsters seem to be. Lusca should be wrapping her tentacles around a large tanker, or the Kraken smashing buildings or grabbing a helpless civilians. These monsters are threats to Paragon City/Rogue Isles and should be interacting with their respective city causing havoc, instead of sitting in one location until a bored/badge team come along and put the idle threat down. GMs should be serious threats to Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. CoV has done a somewhat better job with the GMs having them appear as a result of certain activities or events. But after appearing, Deathsurge should rampage through the city smashing things and consuming electrical energy from whatever source it can find. Giant Monsters need to a serious threat and not rare spawn badge enemies.

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That depends what you mean by "a serious threat." If you're looking for graphical updates that make Giant Monsters do something more than roam around, then SURE! But if you mean an actual threat to the players such that it would force them to fight or flee, then I am squarely against this. Nothing speaks worse about a game than logging on and being flatly unable to play because a monster is blocking what you're trying to get to, or has a chance to run through a location you need to be in to trade and prepare. The Ghost of Scrapyard going straight through the Sharkhead Black Market, making shoppers have to always look over their shoulder, is a pristine example of how NOT to make monsters meaningful. A nuisance that's denying you the ability to play, which you are not interested in fighting at the time, is not a good first impression. In fact, as a fist impression, it's in the same vein as things that would make me go "Forget it. That's not worth it."

I actually almost gave up on the original Diablo because the random spawn generator spawned me a whole big square room with pillars PACKED TO THE GILLS with zombies and skeletons that I had no chance in hell of even thinking about fighting. I saved, I quit and didn't intend to play it ever again until a friend of mine bugged me to. Upon reloading the second level, I found it a LOT easier and managed to turn the game into one of my all-time favourites.

Rule number one of first impressions - never kill your player unfairly with the belief that he'll like the challenge and the carnage.

Anything I haven't mentioned I have no problem with and would support as a change to the game.

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Because of course, you are automatically right?

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Re-read what is actually wrong: People who don't want graphic upgrades are people who have older systems. False on its face. People who don't want graphic upgrades are people who don't like graphic upgrades. Like... ME! That statement is simply false.

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And here we go. I hate something so of course there is no merit in it or the devs doing it because...I hate it.

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And what would you have me say? I hate it, so the developers should do it? A statement was made that assumed why people were against a certain thing. That statement was false because I have at least several examples to the contrary, and at least one other person has chimed in to the same effect.

Also, if "other MMO" you mentioned is the one I'm thinking about, then the "improved graphics" made Northrend completely unplayable for a friend of mine who never got to see it. And for what? The place didn't LOOK all that impressive for all that lag and invested effort. The Outlands looked and still look better, just not as detail-busy.

Detail does not equal quality, and it's fairly easy to make a high-detail mess while it's not in the slightest impossible to make a low-detail item look good. It's all a matter of style, and for the most part, City of Heroes is a highly-stylised and detail-light game.

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Ironically I'm not arguing that I hate the current COX graphics...I'm simply saying that because you(a singular person) does not want something to happen...does not mean that it isn't to this game's overall benefit.

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None of us can talk about what is to the game's overall benefit but to express what we want to see added to it. We can theorise about what everybody is going to want, but we are also going to be wrong about it more often than we are going to be right. What I said was not what's best for the game's future, but rather what is NOT unambiguously best, and that the people believing so do not hold that belief for the selfish reason that their systems can handle it.

MY system can handle it, yet I still don't want to see it. That's one piece of information that you're either going to have to dismiss by dismissing me, or you're going to have to work around. You can't take the stance that "better graphics" are good for the game based on the belief that better graphics is just better.