Samuel_Tow

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Just as the outside world assumed Jack was a wunderkind for his successful streak of one hit, they also assume all the good parts for CoH were his idea, rather than possibly the work of a more qualified team that was working on the same project. Those of us who've been around have seen him horribly defend really bad ideas and to implement in a really bad ways some good ideas. Yes, he also enacted well and talked well about and implemented well some good ideas. But we who have seen the dark side laugh at the untarnished lionization of his career made by the outsiders looking in. Thus the immense eye-rolling by some of us at the title of 'most influential' in the MMO world.

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That's pretty much how I see it, myself. City of Heroes is a great MMO and I think a clear mould-breaker, and clearly Jack is to be thanked for going out and actually making the game as it is, challenging conventions by the skip-full. We can thank him for the game ever becoming a reality. But past that... Let's just say that his vision for the game went pretty much contrary to some of the most basic mechanical features of the game, the very stuff that made it fun to play to begin with. His "One hero equals three white minions" mantra and insistence that bosses had to be all but impossible for single players aimed to take away some of the best parts of the game, for instance, to name just a couple.

I worship Jack as a visionary and a brave soul to launch a game as different and risky as this one. I highly dislike Jack as a developer for a continuing MMO for the simple fact that he never seemed to care about how the game was actually being played and what his players were pushing for, choosing instead to insist on his own ideas about what had to happen. Frankly, given that he's essentially remaking City of Heroes HIS way now, I'm not sure if I can even still respect him as a visionary any more.

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I think that people who hate him for whatever reason are either being completely unreasonable or having very selective memories of what he was really like.

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False. There was a mile-long thread about reasons to like him and reasons to dislike him. I posted several long posts there that I don't feel like repeating. Suffice it to say that he made plenty of mistakes and DID NOT do plenty of good things for stupid reasons. Also, the game has become a LOT better under Positron's watch because so many things directly requested were added and Jack's vetos on so many things were lifted.

Please don't insult people's intelligence by claiming they don't know what they're talking about.

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The point about CoV is that the player is in charge, so the player's character has to be able to win on their terms. We don't want to recreate standard comic-book scenarios in which evil is always beaten by good. We don't play to lose.

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Setting developer content aside for a second, I really wish more arc makers understood this. All too often arcs are the vessel of somebody else's characters and my villains just help them win. That's not what I signed up for. Even more often, however, missions are just mercenary work where even though you may win the fight, it's not you who "won."

Easy! Dungeon Keeper is pretty much the perfect example - you carve a dungeon out of the ground and fill it with ugly monsters from hell, then proceed to trounce the good guys and turn good land after good land into... Well, hell. Not that I would enjoy doing that now, but there is something to be said about evil.

To me, evil itself has never been a problem when done right, it's all the nasty side effects that evil brings to the table that gross me out. I very much think that evil winning can make for a good story, but only if it is done right. To my tastes, that would mean giving evil class, giving evil ability and giving evil a vision for bigger things. Yes, technically a serial killer is evil, especially one who tortures, but he is also pathetic and limited in a variety of ways. This, along with the obvious nastiness of what he's actually doing turn him into a hatable villain.

For my money, I prefer villains with class and purpose. Ruling the world is an obvious one, but even just gaining a lot of money is respectable. Just as long as the villain has a reason to be evil above and beyond for kicks and giggles. I also prefer a villain with clear ability. Not the bumbling mad scientist or lumbering monster who fail because they're inferior and everyone has a hearty laugh at their ineptitude, but the strong, dangerous villain always in control who is always one step away from achieving his victory. In a sense, the villain who does not win because the heroes were weak, did not cooperate or were somehow impeded, but who wins because he is stronger.

I also like the planning villain. One who is stronger, yet doesn't use his strength to bludgeon everything until he succeeds, but rather one who uses it to forward his agenda ever onward, never truly revealing it unless he has to, either as his crowning moment of awesome when the whole plan comes together, or to trump a situation that he should rightly have used.

When a villain strives for the impossible and has the power to achieve it, yet does not rush forward like a dumb animal and does not murder everyone along the way for no reason, that is when I can see a villain winning. When every step of the way is at most a draw with the heroes, and more usually still in his favour, then I can see him win.

Tragically, very few stories in City of Villains have anything at all to do with this. Most of the jobs are fairly basic grunt work of the "go kill him for me" type. We don't get to have class, and as we cannot have style in-game and no contact ever comments on it, we can't have that, either. We can't have any vision, because there are never any opportunities to work for our own goals. And what's worse, the game often mistakes "dirty" and "disgusting" with "evil" the same way many horror films mix up "scary" and "bloody." You can have evil without eating babies, burning books or cackling like an idiot. It's not easy to pull off, but it is VERY rewarding when done right.

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At launch, CoH brought some very good innovations to the MMO market, with the sidekick system being one of them. I remember during the beta that there were other things that impressed me as well, that helped streamline the game. They further advanced this with CoV.
Was Jack always right? No. Did he handle everything with player base well? No.
But this game deserves some props for altering the MMO genre of games, and Jack was a large part of that.

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Pretty much this. Whatever Jack may or may not have done post launch does not change the fact that City of Heroes did do a lot to show people there was more to MMOs than EverQuest.

I agree. Paper/Scanner missions aren't actually BAD. In fact, when I haven't done one in a long time, I must admit they're actually pretty cool. They are, however, EXTREMELY grating. The insert_name_here replacements are always obvious ("The Arachnos," anyone?) and the plots they involve really are as simplistic as they get - beat someone up, steal something, kidnap someone. I guess the developers expected that bad jokes would make up for it, but the fact remains that the uniformity of them all grows really old, really fast.

The old bank robbery missions are a very good example of what could be done better, though they are so rare. Rather than just "go into instance, beat stuff up, go out of instance" that most Paper missions smack of, having a variety of both settings and setups could have helped make them that much less irritating.

It doesn't help that most of the stuff posted in the Architect is glorified paper missions made by people who seem to think putting a single objective on a huge map to grind through is good design.

What I think would actually be cool is if we could pick body parts that actually WERE an aura, rather than a 3D model. Say, for instance, I'm picking wings, but instead of physical wings made out of... Matter, I pick wings made out of light? Or a head that isn't a head but just a glowing blob.

The easiest example I can think of is what a Dark/Dark Scrapper turns into when he's running all his toggles and hits Soul Drain - a glowing yellow man of light inside a big cloud of tendrilly darkness. On a per-body-part basis, this could be really, really cool. Imagine a solid body, but with arms made out of energy ala Robotic Arms (e.i. from the shoulder down). Or a man in a heavy coat and pants with a head that's just, say, flames. The options are plenty and, best of all, shouldn't really require new technology to implement, just new costume pieces made up entirely of sprites, or 3D but textured to look like fire or energy or what have you, kind of like how Energy Blasts are made.

Come to think of it... Just look at Fleeting_Whisper's avatar for a graphical representation

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My low-forties Scrapper: Hunt 100 Crey mission. Seriously, ONE HUNDRED? What the.... I don't think that hunt missions should ever be more than 25.

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At least on the Redside most Hunt missions will count the enemies that you fight inside door missions as long as they didn't specify a zone to fight them in. I regularly knock out two missions at once that way.
Blueside? Nope, pretty much never works. Really annoyed the last hero that I leveled to 50.

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It almost always works for me unless they specify a zone. Can you give an example of a place where this doesn't work? *Shrug*

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A lot of CoH hunt missions are "Hunt these guys in that zone." which is where I assume the problem is. Typically, every level range has a Security Chief with a zone-specific hunt and five contacts, each with two zone-specific hunts and a city-wide hunt. Beyond that, hunts that appear as parts of story arcs typically don't include a location.

CoV is actually worse in that regard, as a LOT of what hunt missions it has are restricted not just to a specific zone, but to a specific are in that zone, and a LOT of the time that zone is 4 or 5 levels higher than the lowest level you can get the mission at. Scrapyarders in the Pit, Circle of Thorns in Potter's Field, Circle of Thorns in St. Martial and so on are just a few of the examples. Following the stupid "Striga model," CoV has a lot of the same silly oversights that shouldn't have been put into the game in the first place, let along written down as good ideas. One only hopes that Faultline's model of doing things will replace the backwards thinking that gave birth to a lot of these nuisances.

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To me, the decision to make a game that already had no more than a third of the contacts of City of Heroes AND lock a good third of THOSE is one of the worst decisions made by the development team since the I3 boss buffs.

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It's a snowscreen. It's precisely because they only have a third of the real content that blue-side does that they do this, it ensures that a character never runs out of contacts before they roll-over into the next quintet of levels.
Of course, I couldn't give two poops about that, all I know is that it's an annoyance and an impediment to the game. I'm fairly certain that's the reason why it is, but quite frankly as far as I'm concerned knowing the answer (probably, I don't know for sure, for sure) doesnt' make it any less irritating or disruptive.
I only have one character in Villains, a level 31 Brute, and I never play him because I can't bring myself to do four more of those [censored] newspaper missions, so there he'll stay unused and morose until Rogue comes out, then over to Paragon he goes.

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I meant unlockable contacts like Veluta Lunata and Agent Viridian, but what you're saying is also true. Having to do five Paper missions and a Mayhem missions just to get ONE contact is a major PITA, in my opinion, and it's a stupid way to blow up content with repeated fill-in-the-blanks missions. Far as I'm concerned, if CoV contacts started introducing each other tomorrow, I wouldn't bat an eye. In fact, I'd be overjoyed because I won't have to do any more filler before I got to the real content.

I haven't done a Scanner or Safeguard mission CoH-side in months, and there is a very good reason for this - they SUCK. Sure, one safeguard every now and then, maybe, but I got too burned on CoV's stupid setup to ever want to go near a scanner mission unless I absolutely had to. That I absolutely have to CoV-side keeps me away from them, as well. And people talk about better design. At least CoH-side I don't have to spend two hours to get ANY contacts in my current level range.

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Got any sample builds?

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I have one, but it's likely a build most people wouldn't like anyway. No Stamina and no Set Inventions and all that, which ought to make it uninteresting to most.

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Any suggestions on how to spark something in this regard?

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Pretty much what I'd suggest is watch movies, read books and play games. Any time you find a really cool character you'd really like to play as or watch an episode about or read about, that's your inspiration. Don't copy other people's work, obviously, but think about what makes the character cool and try to put that into the game.

One of the easiest examples is one of my own villains, Alexander Cromwell. He started out as a cross between Shaman King's Marco and Hellsing's Alexander Andersen, both of whom dress in white uniforms and espouse a rhetoric about destroying evil and fighting for goodness, yet end up as little more than stone-cold killers and hypocrites. So, I made me a Brute inspired by them who dressed in white and looked almost like a hero whose entire "thing" was that all of his powers could pass for heroic and all of his outfits would make him look like a messiah to the casual observer, yet actually thinking about it and paying attention to what it is doing as opposed to saying would make his villainy quite evident.

Or you can go with what CelestiaCoH said and try to invent reasons behind why a character has specific powersets. Maybe willpower means just a John McLain tough guy. But what if it meant more? What if a character is almost completely invulnerable and able to repair her (in this case) body as long as she could will herself to hang on to it? Then it's not physical injury that will defeat her, but one would rather have to defeat her spirit and break her will to make her stay down. Willpower plays VERY well to this effect, granting both regeneration, some resilience and the ability to keep on getting back up.

The point of it all is to find a character you think would be very cool OUTSIDE the game. Say, someone you'd want to see in a movie or would like to have art drawn of, or someone you'd want to read about in books and comics. When who and what the character should be as an image in your head is more important than what you're seeing on the screen and the stats surrounding it, you're just about done.

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She looks so cute when she hovers while in melee, I'm starting to wonder if I could put together a build that would make perma hover combat viable. With the increase in melee range a few months ago, and the recent increase in hover speed, do you guys think it would possible?

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It's been possible since day one, but it's much easier to do now that Hover has been sped up on no less than three separate occasions. I would mostly suggest slotting three fly speed enhancements in Hover. Even back in the day, that would bring it up to almost run speed, and this days this puts it to almost Sprint speeds. The cost of Hover isn't that much, though I may suggest a reducer in there if you're running too many toggles. Most of your cost comes from attacks, however, so you should look at mitigating that before you worry about toggles too much. Generally speaking, slotting toggles for endurance reduction makes it easier to recover when moving between fights, but not slotting attacks for it means you run out MID BATTLE and end up having more to recover anyway.

Details aside, it's very much possible to do that and be viable. I have no less than half a dozen melee characters who always Hover and all of them do just fine. Hover slotted for speed actually gives you superior speed than what you'd get out of base ground movement, and with Swift it's just gravy. It also gives you better positioning ability, as you can more easily hover over things than it is easy to jump over them and you can hang just off ledges to fight things you couldn't find good footing around, or even to limit what can hit you.

About the only problem with this is direction control. On the ground, your character moves in relation to the horizontal, so moving forward moves you forward along the ground and moving backwards moves you back along it. When Hovering, that's not the case. As most people play with the camera tilted down for a better view of the playing field, moving forward will run you into the ground and moving backward will force you into the ceiling. There are ways around this, of course. Moving forward is easy, as it's fairly simple to direct your camera forward, but moving backwards can be counter-intuitive. What I do is either I look STRAIGHT DOWN and move DOWN (in relation to the camera, which is now "back" in relation to the ground) Or looks slightly up and move backwards. It's really something you have to get a feel for, but Hover-fighting in general requires a lot of use of mouse look.

Once again, however, it is very much doable and is, in fact, superior. If you go with Hover and Fly and have constant status protection, you can actually play for hours without ever touching the ground

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Swing and a miss!
The point is this: There are only so many ways to point a gun at a target and pull a trigger. Of those there are only so many that make any sense. Of those there are only so many that make for a decent animation.
Slug, Burst, and Beanbag are the only three single target attacks. They could possibly go into 'cryo' rounds and incendiaries. But ultimately the animation is identical: Level rifle, fire bullet.
-Rachel-

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How about this, then: Remember Gunslingers and their Incendiary Rounds? They shoot what looks like a regular pistol shot (the same as for their Snap Shot, Cryo Bullet and Sleep Dart) but the impact is a fiery explosion similar to what Cremate produces, which deals a lot of damage and imposes some DoT. Why not have something like that for Ignite, only it would deal more DoT and less damage up-front. Slug, Buckshot, M30 Grenade, Beanbag, Cryo Freeze Ray and Sleep Gas Grenade already all use the same animation with different hit effects and projectiles. Why not have one with a fire hit effect that deals fire damage?

Alternatively, on my other suggestions, increasing the damage done by Buckshot by about twice but narrowing the cone to Headsplitter levels, or alternatively leaving it as it is but lowering the endurance cost to where it's balanced as a single-target attack. Personally, I'd like to mess with Buckshot, but many people seem to not want me anywhere near it. Failing that, I'd like something more done with Ignite. There is potential for it to be a lot more useful, or at least a lot less fiddly, and the set could use some more direct fire, as it were.

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I want to lie on my back, clutching a lily at my chest. Like some cheesy old movie.

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OK, that I just gotta' have! This beats all the ideas I had originally, and it's just priceless

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You paying the subscription only gives you access to the servers, no where does it say you won't need to work to get things you want in-game. The point of this game is to progress, not to pay someone to have god mode in a virtual world, the game would have failed if that was what it were about.

Basically you're wanting something in-game because you pay your sub, if everyone did get something for paying the sub what would the game be? City of OMG-I-Just-Got-Everything-I-Was-Grinding-For-Now-I'm-Bored-I-Quit?

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False to an extreme. I'm not asking that anything be handed to me. I still have to gather prestige, pay for my base, craft the stuff I can't buy and so on and so forth. What I'm asking for is that things not be TAKEN AWAY from me. Think really long and really hard and give me ONE other example in the ENTIRE game where anything, anything at all, requires upkeep or it is taken away from you. I'm interested to hear about it. Because this game has a very, very strong tradition of never bringing a player back, not even by a little, and at best only slowing them down. I can die 50 times in a row and I will never lose a single point of experience. Any experience I gain after that will STILL move me forward. Rent simply does not work that way.

And yes, I'm well aware what my subscription pays for. I'm also aware that I'm not going to waste my time with an activity that is not just a constant drain on my prestige, but a hit on my Inf gains, as well. I'm not going to bother, and I don't. They peddled them as the next step after the costume creator, but they are so, so much worse than that that it's not even worth bothering with. I can travel just fine without base teleporters and it doesn't cost me a dime.

It's funny to me how every time I mention that something isn't worth the cost and that working shouldn't be part of a GAME, people immediately accuse me of being spoiled and selfish. And all that while STILL slyly avoiding addressing the fact that there is no good reason why there has to be rent in the first place. There simply isn't one, but there is rent regardless, so there it is. Circular logic then takes over and it's here and it's not so bad so that's the reason for its existence. So, in essence, we have rent because we have rent. Not good enough.

PvE is nowhere near drying up, and if I have to be quite honest, I am TIRED of big, revolutionary systems being added to the game. I would be perfectly happy if they concentrated on adding new zones, new missions, new costumes, new contacts, new powersets and even new ATs. We've had too long a run of adding new systems with precious little content behind them.

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I'm thinking, maybe Maros needs to move a bit, stand around the corner from the Qmaster, or on the other side of the street. He just seems very out of place where he is now.

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Yup. He used to be next to the edge of the pier, but now that the pier has been extended to accommodate the Architect Entertainment building, he's standing... Sort of in the middle of an open parking lot, sans the line markings. Yes, move him, please.

And move Serafina, while you're at it. She's standing in the middle of the sidewalk, facing the street. Her location together with her outfit makes for some seriously unintended implications. She used to have her back against a building, but that building was switched out for the Architect Entertainment skyscraper that has an open first floor, so she now has an open space behind her. Let's put her some place more appropriate, please.

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If you want to complain about missions, how about the whole thign where you have all kinds of busy work before you actually get to do any of the real content?
That whole "do five newspaper missions, then rob a bank before we give you a contact to do any of the actual content" drives me insane. It's a stupid busy-work timesink, I hate it. It's one of the primary reasons I don't play red-side.
Lemme play the game, stop putting road-blocks up.

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Mega-QFT!
And what [not nice word] had the bright idea to have unlockable contacts in a game with a dearth of content in the first place?

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Ugh! Don't remind me! The damn game has barely enough content to carry you through once, and they have so many UNLOCKABLE contacts? If "adding insult to injury" were appropriate anywhere, it would be here. I'd say it's high time we dispatched with this stupidity and returned all unlockable CoV contacts back into the regular contacts chain. The game is starving for content, and that would be at least SOME stopgap to helping with that.

To me, the decision to make a game that already had no more than a third of the contacts of City of Heroes AND lock a good third of THOSE is one of the worst decisions made by the development team since the I3 boss buffs.

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*wants female at-rest stance now*
I like the one we have now, but just sayin' it would be a nice one to see cycled through, too.

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Bad, I want to take every chance I get to completely agree with you My first reaction when I saw this was "WANT" and I continue to feel this way even now. Altering the base standing animation seems like it would be out of the question at this point, though I can't say entering it into the cycle shouldn't be doable (if a little odd). I still firmly believe we can have an emote that does that, though, and I would simply LOVE it.

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Anyone remember that old video (WARNING: 20MB download!) of City of Heroes that came out, what? 2000? 2001? The one with all the cool tricks that never made it into the game, like body part targeting, that little flip when you jump, flying above the clouds and so forth.

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Yes, yes I do.

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I keep forgetting you have a bunch of cool guides like that I had a quick look over your guide, though, and I didn't see a mention of the female idle stance. Is it there and I'm just missing it?

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Sorry Sam. I work in health care, specifically in the field of cardiology. Heart muscles DO NOT degrade due to enlargement.

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Hey, I have no medical education if you don't count the Discovery Channel, so I completely accept that I could be completely wrong I watched a particular medical examiner show where it was said that a large heart with tick, dense walls would actually find it harder to beat and be more susceptible to actually quivering and not pumping blood, causing it to stop. I'm not sure of the exact medical reasons and cases that can lead up to this, but I've seen that exactly reported as cause of death a lot.

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This has no basis in medical science or exercise physiology. Body Building is in fact very good for you barring some underlying condition. Body building does not equal abuse of anabolic steroids. Abusing steriods has a host of consequences that result regardless of whether you ever set foot in a weight room.

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Well, in the case of the Trolls, what's happening to their bodies sounds very much like something equivalent to steroid abuse. They're not growing more muscle naturally through training and exercise, they're being pumped full of... Something and growing unnatural, hulking muscles. While in fiction such mutations are usually harmless, like a person can grow an extra arm and it will be fully functional, in practice mutations like these that exceed what humans can do by several fold cannot escape having severe drawbacks in wear and tear on the body. If a sports trauma can sometimes last a lifetime, I'm sure the stupid stuff the Trolls go through on a daily basis HAVE to have some eventual negative effect, miracle exception perfect regeneration notwithstanding.

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This is a large misconception surrounding body builders. It is biologically impossible for muscle to turn into fat. Regardless of how the muscle mass was created, discontinuing weight lifting (or what ever insane drugs you are taking) will not cause the muscles to turn into fat.

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I don't mean muscle would turn into fat, but rather that muscle would lose tone, which is also something I've no means of backing up. However, I've seen what happens to people who trained a lot and then suddenly stop and resume a more normal life. The more normal of them just lose tone and strength and begin rounding up. The steroid monsters turn into wrecks.

Think about it, though - Trolls are going through muscle and bone on a daily basis, relying on the regeneration provided by Superadine to keep them going. Take their superadine away from them, wait for the effects to start wearing off and they'll start turning their muscles into hamburger meat and their bones into gravel with no means to heal them magically. Trolls are fuelled by Superadine, and stopping its consumption will rid them of... Well, the thing that keeps them together.

Grated, I'm really illiterate when it comes to this, but I don't think we can really hold huge hulking green monsters to human medical science too much, and I'm pretty confident we can feel free to make a few things up as we go.

I don't have to like Jack Emmert as a person or as a designer to admit that he HAS been incredibly influential to the MMO market. Look at how many people are currently working to rip off City of Heroes, and not all of them developing super-hero MMOs. I firmly believe that City of Heroes has played a role, be it big or small, in moving MMOs away from the dark ages of EQ and its faceless grinds and into a more story-driven, more interactive framework.

City of Heroes did indeed break the mould, and though it was hardly the first to do so, it managed to stick around and leave at least something behind. And much as I may dislike him, Jack DID have a hand in that.

Here's something interesting I thought of when lying dead, waiting for a team-mate's resurrection power to recharge - why can't we have a few emotes that we can only use when we're dead? Maybe rolling over in pain if I so chose, maybe turning around to lie down on my back, maybe waving to team-mates to hand me a Wakie, or maybe even just lounging around, displaying that while, yes, I have been defeated, I really actually let you win, but it was an amusing fight.

This is more just an interesting concept than anything I ever expect to see, but still - I'd live to be able to emote while dead

Have to agree in general. I love Ignite, I really do. I used to have my whole build centred around it. I always found it a chore to use, however, only somewhat manageable most of the time. It manages to be both too powerful when used right (yes, I firmly believe that) and not powerful enough in that it's not very easy to use. Plus, now that it's been slowed down, I keep ending up forgetting about it, because it also comes with the added overhead of having to immobilize stuff I otherwise may not have.

It's cool, but I think the set would be cooler with another single-target attack. I've played a few Blaster sets, and this one always felt like it was struggling more than the rest.

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I see your point wikked, I just do not agree. I do not have any statistics to back it up, but I don't think all of the powerets appeal to 4/5ths of the player base. It is the variety of choices of sets that makes it great.

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Not making a point, but providing an example, I have played every single Scrapper powerset there is, many multiple times. I enjoy them all greatly and one of by far the coolest parts of making a new character is figuring out which powerset best matches the character's concept. They all appeal to me, personally, and it's the look of the character itself and the concept behind him or her that defines the nature of what the powers "should be."