Samuel_Tow

That came out with City of Hero, actually, which I'm pretty sure was post-CoV. According to ParagonWiki:

I tend to prefer binding keys to "" (empty quotes) just because NOP used to generate system spam at one point. I don't know if it still does, but pressing a button bound to NOP would paste an empty line in your system channel.

No, I don't. I don't want to see zone events at all, and go to great lengths to avoid them when I'm forced to be in the same zone as one. About the only "zone event" I've ever enjoyed is the Rikti invasion phase with the IUDs, just because I can fight the bombs by myself.

Hey, you asked for it, and I like to think big

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Oh, I have another one: I'd scrap the current base builder entirely and instead reinstitute one based around building structures out of solid cubes, with props for added decoration. This could be done either inside a large hollow chamber or in and outdoor location within limited boundaries. Considering people build some of the most elaborate base structures out of cube stone blocks anyway, this will only add to that.

I'd also make the plot for a base CONSIDERABLY bigger, horizontally and/or vertically. If players want a sprawling outdoor camp, let them have it. If player want a tall multi-storey building, let them have it. I'd also institute a large selection of ready-made indoor rooms and outdoor buildings, and include community-made ones in there available from an interface similar to the Architect one, but with a better rating and search functionality.

I'd also dump all "prestige" purchases and institute SG coffers, instead, where players who wish to help build the base can donate INF directly, with all SG base construction costing INF, rather than prestige. Following that, I'd remove the restriction against inviting offline characters to a SG and instead delegate SG invites to an in-game email.

I'm not sure if people would hate me for this, other than the "dump the editor" business.

I'm with this, as well. People shouldn't be hitting various defence caps if they don't have strong defences in their powersets. All this leads to is power creep that puts people in a position of HAVING to get extra defences, which then put the powers team in a position of creeping critters ever upward with higher base to-hit.

This mostly came out of Tankers straining against their caps to the point where they didn't really need any more help in containing the enemies, and only really needed as much damage as they could find from their team-mates to make the killing faster. The "Great Defence Nerf" was squarely intended to end this, slashing pretty much all defensive number more than in half, if not down to a quarter. I remember a time when Combat Jumping gave 5% defence, for instance, and now it gives about 1.125% or so. The whole point was to put Tankers, and to a lesser degree Scrappers, in danger again so they'd WANT those support ATs who help you survive more than they help you kill things faster.

Right, that's very well said. I don't have a problem with villains fighting other villains, but you're right that it is a problem when we're fighting these villains to stop them like a hero would, just with different reasoning. You know, as opposed to fighting them to forward our own goals. Most of the time when City of Villains characters oppose other villains, it's for one of two reasons:

1. "I will pay you to do it!" says the contact where your villain stands to gain nothing from a narrative standpoint, considering "money" is worthless in this world.

2. To stop them from stopping us. Not that we ever actually DO anything, but we need to stop all of these villains with much more interesting schemes so that whenever we get around to doing something, someone won't have beaten us to it.

Both of those are LOUSY justifications, to be honest. They make our villains feel like second-stringers, either being ordered around or otherwise living in the shadow of greater villains whose job it is to make the game interesting while our job is to prevent them from doing it like we're playing the boring police. O noes! They might unleash Vampyri on Port Oaks! That might actually be interesting! Can't let that happen! Stop, vile villain, or taste the bitter flavour of justice that Major Man will serve you!

...where was I going with this?

So when CAN we fight villains and still feel like legitimate villains ourselves? Well, the Spoony One has a very good idea in his Counter Monkey videos. How do you make your players WANT to go where you want them and kill who you want them and still feel like it was their own idea? Steal from them. Steal from people something they treasure, and they will chase that ******* who stole from them to the ends of the Earth, and have a big celebration when they catch him and string him up. Sure, it's just one way to motivate people with a villainous motivation, but it's the idea that really matters here.

How do you make villains fighting other villains be meaningful? Give the player villain a reason to WANT to hurt another villain, as opposed to a reason to HAVE to do it. Westin Phipps is a horrible person. So let me kill him, or at least put him in a full body cast. As a VILLAIN, not a less moral hero. Daos wants to order me around. So let me punch his face concave, toss a whole bunch of Bane Spiders my way, let me break their faces, too, and I'll walk away happy. Dean/Leonard get the right idea. "Protean may have taken your clone lab, but you can get back at him by taking all of his money!" Hell yeah I want to do that! Sure, I may have lost, but I can still make Protean lose WORSE, and that still makes the experience all worth it.

See, when I wrote my one and only villain arc, I didn't make it about a "thing." Sure, there's still a "thing" - a macguffin that everybody wants - but the arc isn't about it. Hell, the player villain isn't even expected to care about the thing. What the player villain is expected to care about is the ******* who set him up and stole the thing. See, it's not about getting the thing, it's about being a bully and putting the punk who crossed you in his place. It's about doing all the things that we really want to do in real life, but don't because they're wrong. It's about having an environment where it's OK to do those things and enjoy doing them.

Villains shouldn't be coerced into content. They should be given content that makes being bad enjoyable. That's why Bane Spider Ruben and Brother Hammon succeed so spectacularly - because they don't force us to do anything. On the contrary, they give us an opportunity to be the big bad villain and revel in the empowerment. I enjoyed punching Zukor in the word-emphasising mouth and then threatening pretty much every B-list villain on the Isles. I enjoyed playing Hammond for a fool and seeing Doc Aeon write in impotent rage. And I left grinning like an evil clown

Yeah, it's a technical issue, for the most part. As I said, the reason that Half-Helmets were made their own category was to ensure a static base to which a variety of elements could be attached, and porting those elements to other head types would require some degree of work to adapt them so they look right.

See, when I say "look right," I don't mean to say they should avoid all clipping or that it should all look like it was designed together. Some clipping is fine. Some misalignment is fine. We can work around it. However, when an item looks genuinely BUGGED, that's a problem.

Easy example something happened at some point where many female hairstyles don't fit female heads closely, leaving a gap which exposes back-facing polygons, which in turn puts "holes" in the hair. So far, it's very hard to see because it's a small gap around the ears and it's only evident from a close-up from the front. That's actually also the case with the Mecca Armour jet pack. On the other hand, having my Shield Scrapper's black glove wrist strap constantly clipping through her white shield no matter what I do was visible from all angles and all distances and really bugged me. BABs later fixed all shields to offset a certain distance from the hand based on the glove so this doesn't happen any more, and I LOVE IT!

What really presents a problem when it comes to costume proliferation is there are no "easy" solutions. Everything involves some kind of work, fiddling and fitting. I'm all for proliferating more costume details. For ******* YEARS I've been asking for a whole bunch of Half-Helmet details to be ported over to Full Helmets, but no. I don't think we even have the solid visors, but we certainly don't have any of the Martial Arts or Roman or Valkyrie stuff. I know the Full Helmet head is bigger (and it is), but I'd really like to see all of the Science Pack breathers enabled for Full Helmets. Just as an example.

Honestly, I never really minded this. To me, what makes a cool villain is his victories, but it doesn't really matter whether those victories are over heroes or other villains. In a sense, victories over other villains are often a lot more impressive just because villains in decent stories are represented as much more powerful than heroes, just to create dramatic tension.

See, here's a glimpse of why I find villains so fascinating and why I keep playing:

Say you spend half a story trying to prevent Shuma Gorath from coming to Earth because it would be the end of everything. Then Thanos starts wrecking up the town, tossing heroes around like wet laundry and generally winning. Right at the end, he stops heroes from enacting a final ritual which allows Shuma Gorath into our world. All of a sudden you have a cosmic horror come down and what's the first thing it does? Take on the biggest threat available. I don't know enough about the characters to judge power levels, but suppose Shuma Gorath wipes the floor with Thanos. THAT, to me is a true villain moment - that one moment of ultimate power and domination.

See, the trick with villains, at least in my eyes, is building them up to be a thread. The best way to do this is to build up another character as very powerful, show this other character cleaning house, then have the villain trash that other threat, thus proving to be more threatening. This "other threat" doesn't have to be a hero, specifically. There's nothing about villains which say they should be diametrically opposed to heroes and elementally aligned with other villains. "Good vs. evil" is a basic storytelling approach, but it shouldn't be used as a constraint. I see nothing wrong with heroes fighting heroes and villains fighting villains.

Already possible, and that's kind of my point.

Both ED and the GDN came about because of pretty much the same reason - people were reaching their caps for various stats by themselves, making both T9 God Mode powers and, more importantly, DEFENDERS pointless. There were a couple of arguments at the time asking "Why would you need a Controller to hold stuff when you could get a Blaster to just kill stuff outright?" (City of Blasters) and what you needed a Defender for when his or her buffs did nothing for you.

When I first ran SSA1.7, I was pretty much disgusted with the technical ineptitude of the arc's text, which clearly wasn't proof-read even a single time. It took so much away from the experience of what is otherwise the best of the SSAs so far that it's not even funny. And I don't mean just ugly grammar, I mean writing so bad on a technical level it made it impossible for me to care about the overall plot and story, and just resort to punching things in the face.

If you're going to write text for your arc more than "go there do that," you need to make sure that text is worth reading.

Except a lot of these things don't have textures at their "base" and would thus expose back-facing polygons. I can deal with some clipping, some misalignment and indeed floating details (that's what the Carnival of Light antlers are) but I really can't condone 3D mesh artefacts like that.

I'm not saying I don't want to see helmet details on hats, I just know that they need to be adapted. I've seen far too many "simple" costume piece proliferations that introduce very ugly bugs that make the piece unusable. The easiest example I can actually give you right off the top of my head is the Mecca Armour jetpack backpack costume detail. It's designed to be used with an Armoured torso where the back is about an inch further out than on the Tights torso, so when you use it with Tights, the flat "base" floats in the air and the pack is attacked only via a narrow girder which protrudes further from the base. I don't know if those are adjustable... Shields adjust to the glove used, but it looks kind of awkward. Since this is the only jet pack I have, I will use it, but it does not look as good as it could have.

Isn't that what vigilantes and rogues are for?

That's what I'm saying - the "hats that are actually helmets" are the wrong shape to use those details. Full Helmets could use them, but even those hats... Hell, even the actual helmets in the Helmets category, don't really conform to the Full Helmet shape. And it's a very specific shape and size.

I don't actually know enough about robes to say. That's the case for Jackets, though, and it's been a bone of contention for some time. I don't like it, myself - I wish there were no need for two different kinds of jackets, but this is pretty much necessity. There didn't use to be two different kinds when the "new" jackets section replaced the old generic "Suit Jacket" category, but they added those after the fact because they pretty much had to.

Yeah, that's a good point. Still, it seems considerably more complex than multiple binds, is what I mean. I saw the thread on the subject and the ideas weren't bad, per se, they just seemed like more complex ways to accomplish fairly simple tasks, just with fewer binds/macros. I get that I could take multiple powers out of my trays that way, but I actually like having those IN the actual trays so I can see when they're recharged.

That's not me trying to criticise. I like the idea, especially since I was messing with Java's Swing package recently for work. But I can't really come up with a way for me to use them directly.

There is a queue. If you lose network connection while "Retrieving character list" you'll be told that you were dropped out of the queue and lost your place, or something to that effect. There is a queue, it's just hidden in the UI.

Yeah, that's the dance you dance with these. I actually kind of enjoy this part of the powers, as well. Can I be sure that I'll be able to take that guy down before my Tier 9 expires? It's a risk, but unlike nukes, it's a calculated risk that I really should be making from an informed standpoint.

Take my fight with Marauder on my Titan/Inv Brute, for instance. Titan Weapons is all Smashing damage, and Marauder is highly resistant to Smashing damage, becoming damn near immune when he uses his Unstoppable. He hits pretty hard, so it was difficult for my Brute to just outlast the guy for the whole fight AND the three minutes it takes for his Unstoppable to crash... So I beat him at his own game. I stood my ground until Marauder fired up his Unstoppable, then I waited. Around a minute later, just when I was running out of inspirations, I fired up mine. For the next two minutes we kept hitting each other without any real progress. Then Marauder's Unstoppable dropped and drained all of his endurance. He still put up a fight, but I had over a minute left on mine, which was more than enough to beat his now non-resistent ***.

"God Modes" aren't really "I Win" buttons and they still come with their dangers, pitfalls and limitations. However, they're still a decent tool if you plan ahead for them. They may not be great, but they're not really bad as such. Not to everyone's tastes, sure. I can get behind that. But even despite the crash, there are still uses for them, and still situations where they help tremendously.

Not everyone plays at x8 and not every team is made up of 8 people. Plus, even at x8, on larger outdoor maps the spawns can start pretty scattered. And even then, most melee sets don't exactly have huge PBAoE powers.

I didn't want this when the DC MMO was doing this and I don't want it now. One of City of Heroes' greatest strength is its fast-and-loose setting which allows us to create characters who are uniquely our own. Throwing that away to play as other people's characters feels like missing the point.

Clipping is one thing. Having costume items hovering in mid air attached to nothing is just unprofessional. You may not see it immediately, but the Half Helmet is CONSIDERABLY larger than a regular head, thus all of its details would float on a lot of the hats. One horribly misplaced detail (and the Celestial face plate is HORRID) is not a justification for making it worse.

What, really, do you gain from being able to use those pieces on hats when they match pretty much not a single hat?

Multiple sleeves with bare arms do exist, but those are a grievous problem for one simple fact - these aren't your real arms. Specifically, the short shirt sleeves on Jackets use a replica of a bare skin arm regardless of what you have under it. If you're robot wearing a shirt, then tough - you get human skin arms. If you're a lizard wearing a shirt, then tough - you get human skin arms. It was actually hilarious when women got the male arms with the bulging muscles and the veins and everything with those sleeves.

This is a problem we DO NOT WANT to replicate, and I cannot emphasise this enough. Forcing human arms on torsos that aren't human is a big mistake. I mean, I don't mind it as an option, maybe in Robotic Arms, but if that's your vision of how sleeveless jackets would work, you're going to break a lot of costumes.

Yeah, and that happened AFTER the various Stone Armour toggles were made to not be mutually-exclusive. There used to be a time when Stone Tankers were called Poo Tankers because Rock Armour was a total model conversion to something akin to the Earth Control's pet. Back then, you could only run one toggle at a time, which is why Granite Armour made sense - it gave you ALL toggles at once, but at a higher penalty. Yeah, that psychic protection the set is so famous for? If you needed that, you had to shut down your physical protection to get it. It's a good thing you never take physical damage when psychic damage is involved, right?

Oh, and Rooted used to literally root you to one spot. Self-immobilize with the exact same effect as Stone Cages. You think Granite Armour is bad now? Before it was even worse. You want status protection? Have at it. Now you can't move! Forget street curbs and low running speed, you couldn't move AT ALL.

Granite Armour makes sense for Stone Armour as it was back in 2004. When your only status protection rooted you on the spot and you could only run one toggle at a time, then having this Tier 9 great power which gave you almost all protections AND status protection while allowing you to move, albeit slowly, was a great trade-off for most of your accuracy. You weren't supposed to run it all the time, but it was there when you got in situations with too many damage types and effects.

Now, though? Now the set is kind of weak without Granite Armour because the toggles aren't that strong AND being able to run four armour toggles plus Rooted PLUS Mud Pots just puts too much of an endurance strain for what it does, exactly because the set was not designed to have all shields run at the same time and nothing was ever done about it. Like Stone Armour, Dark Armour was designed with mutually-exclusive shields, but soon after they were made concurrent, Dark Armour shields were reduced in cost significantly. I believe down to 0.19 from 0.26. Sure, Cloak of Fear is still hideously expensive, but that's Cloak of Fear for you.

I actually really like T9 God Mode powers because to approximate their levels of protection, you really need to build with Inventions and I just don't like that. I'm sure an Invulnerability Brute can cap all of his damage resistances to 90% with some weird build and inspiration use, but mine can do that with just Unstoppable. It's VERY strong for not that much of a build strain, plus most don't need too many slots.

Now, yes, the crashes are harsh, but it's kind of to the tune of the powers - you get three minutes of extreme survivability, so you BETTER have killed what was threatening you by then. The game gave you a generous window of opportunity, so if you fail... Well, you have only yourself to blame. Besides, with power blinking, it's easy enough to tell when a T9 will drop. Unlike other click effects, T9s start blinking LONG ahead of time, I think at least 30 seconds early or some such.

Again, they're not ideal, but they give you a fair chance. Compare that to, say, Blaster Nukes which pretty much pull your pants down after you use them. If you don't kill everything, you're vulnerable, and there's no way in hell the game will let you kill everything in a single shot every time. Blaster Nukes are designed to be a gamble, and one that the game loads against you. God Mode powers are an opportunity, Nukes are a roll of the dice.

And that's NOW. Before, they used to stun you for five seconds after you used them.

Aha! OK, that makes it slightly less bad, but it's still bad. It counts time, and I need to make sure I'm using that time if I want to get my money's worth. Now, you can argue that this is just me being pedantic and that I don't HAVE to spend every second of an XP Booster earning rewards to get a "good" return, but here's the thing - that's precisely what I get with Patrol XP.

Patrol XP does not count time. It counts experience. It's only every used up when I modify my experience. If I spend half an hour chatting in Pocket D, then I lose nothing, because my Patrol XP will wait for me to start killing again with great patience.

Generally speaking, I hate being rushed, so I hate anything that's time-gated. When I'm paying for "time," I feel like I'm wasting that time by not getting the most return. When something's gated by USE, however, as Patrol XP is, I don't feel pressured to worry about it. It'll be there when I need it. It's a static investment that I can redeem at my own convenience.

Besides, I'm already paying for a time-gated subscription.