Samuel_Tow

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Are you comparing them to the best dev arcs, or the average dev arcs? Because I've personally seen plenty of MA arcs that rival the brilliance of things like the Citadel Task Force ("Some Council guys stole my blueprints. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more. Go beat up Council to learn more...") or any of the nine thousand 'Rescue Lawyers from the Devouring Earth' missions in the mid-30s heroside. Have any of them topped my favorite dev arcs? Not just yet. But the good ones seem to at least be on par with a LOT of content in the heroside game. Redside, it's a little shakier, but there are still some not-particularly-enrapturing arcs out there (Kristof Jaeger, the VEAT arcs, Vivacious Verandi...).

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Of course, I'm not expecting players to overtop the best developer arcs, if for no reason other than because the developers will always have better tools than the players even at the best of times. But if a developer arc annoys me, a player arc that annoys me only slightly less isn't going to make me jump for joy, especially with all the other stuff the Architect doesn't give out anyway.

Sure, I've seen good player arcs. The problem is they're so rare. It seems like everyone's trying to be oh-so-smart-and-witty, and everyone who isn't seems to come up with material on the level of thrill of To Save A Thousand Worlds or A Hero's Hero: "Hey, stuff is happening! Go to these five locations and beat up bad guys! Move!" And that's before we comment on people's compulsion to always cram their arcs full of the most absurdly overpowered custom critters they can think of, seemingly never interested in telling a story that has much of anything to do with either the City of Heroes or the City of Villains. And don't even get me started about how everyone's story is about their own characters, with their own characters making cameo appearances, and the factions led by their own characters serving as filler enemies.

Someone recommended Ascendant's Crom story arc to me, and I'm still sad I haven't gotten around to trying it. I remember his "I, Crom" story in the Roleplaying forums and I was excited to see it realised as an arc in-game. I just keep forgetting. But even things that look good on paper and start out with a good arc description seem to break down as soon as I set foot inside the first mission.

I tried playing Architect missions, I really did. The missions themselves are their own limiting factor.

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If we have a system that can pretty much mimic(and exceed) most dev created content in terms of storytelling and easily accessible missions, what's the real incentive for players to NOT use it all the time?

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That it doesn't do that in the slightest? Seriously, where do people keep finding these Architect arcs that exceed developer-made content in terms of quality? Because I looked, and I can't find them anywhere. I've tried high-ranked, I've tried low-ranked, I've tried developers' choice, I've tried by recommendation. I've seen a handful of good ones and a whole sea of arcs I'd rather not comment. I might get a few corny jokes or some in-your-face comedy if I'm lucky, and that's a pretty bleak prospect. If I'm not lucky, I end up on such gems that make me regret ever setting foot inside the Architect building.

Seriously, I mean that. It's gotten to the point where I start feeling uneasy as soon as I see the inside of that damn place. I've almost never left with a good experience, not even after making MY OWN arc. Pretty much every time, I leave thanking all the gods that I can set foot outside again, and usually spend a good five minutes just being happy to be ANYWHERE but there.

That's the sum total of the downside. It may be a mechanically superior way to play the game and earn rewards, but it's so awful to play more often than not that it's plain not worth going through it. I guess if all I ever played were 50-54 missions, things might be different. Too bad.

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Wait, since when did Gunslingers not use their cryo and fire rounds at close range? They'd constantly hit my Scrapper with that stuff.

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I'm not sure when they started doing that. At some point someone discovered that Gunslingers had a Cryo Bullet attack that the AI simply never used and enabled it. I believe it has been since then that they never used it in melee or at short range. My Energy/Energy Blaster levelled up off Malta for this precise reason. This has not been true since I14, however. Whatever they did to NPC AI to enable critters to use player powers seems to have affected Malta, as well, overriding their older AI.

Mercenaries used to have the same problem. Spec Ops would never, ever use their snipes at anything less than 50-100 feet, and if engaged at that range, would get stuck there waiting for Sniper Rifle to recharge unless approached or ordered to goto manually. The commando would, similarly, refuse to use Long Range Missile unless he was standing VERY far away, and would then refuse to use anything other than that while it recharged. Which, at four minutes to the use, was more than a little irritating. He may or may not have done the same with Full Auto.

Both of those have been fixed, I think they were done away with either in I12 or I13 when the various Mastermind changes were being done. This one in particular was a HUGE improvement in the outbound damage Mercenaries were able to lay down, and it HAS made a big difference. Apparently, the same happened to the Malta Group.

I guess I shouldn't really complain, because them not using half their powers due to poor AI was a rather cheap exploit, but the problem remains that fighting them with a squishy suddenly became a LOT harder, and it was never exactly easy to begin with. Fighting them with a non-squishy, however, is still as relatively uneventful as ever. Which bugs me, because I was finally starting to feel like Blasters stood a chance at being at least roughly in the same league Scrappers, but the things seemingly specifically designed to kill them keep on multiplying...

One side effect, in addition to the greater damage, is that Gunslingers use their status effects a LOT more. Before they wouldn't use them if you approached, which kind of makes sense since they look like they have to take careful aim for them. Now they open with them.

Then again, Tac Ops have ALWAYS been just that horrible with their minute-long stun grenades...

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But yeah, like I said...game play wise, I love the set. It's just having the shield...it limits the concepts for such a great set.

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That picking Shield Defence limits a concept to using a shield is pretty much the point - the set was introduced to allow people to use a shield for their character. Asking for shield defence without the shield is little different from asking for Assault Rifle without the assault rifle or Broadsword without the broadsword. It is what it is.

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What the guy's asking for are the Iron Man gloves that have repulsors in the palm, Captain Cold's freeze ray (that pistol doesn't count as it's a 25 minute one shot), Weather Wizard's wand, or Green Lantern's Ring: An actual physical device or weapon that is the source of their power.
Personally, I think it's a marvelous idea. I doubt that the devs will put forth the time or effort into it. But, I think it's a wonderful idea nonetheless.

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No-one disagrees it's cool. We all want it. But when BABs posts things to the effect of "Well, we could do this at the cost of two-three issues of NOTHING else getting done, and that's just customizing power colours..." Well, let's just say that it's a technical limitation, stated, restated, explained and re-examined by BABs and always, always to the same effect - far too much effort, not enough time to do it.

What's being asked for here are several things the system can't really do, not least of which is changing what a power animation displays on the fly. The animations we use for powers call up FX scripts which hold the animation, props and effects in them. The only reason we have weapon customization at all is because weapons are animated costume elements with two frames of animation - visible and invisible - and powers just animate them. BackAlleyBrawler (I think, I don't remember) described it as a workaround or some such at the time it was being introduced. And that's just for weapons.

It has been said that it's possible to retool all powers to call up variable effects scripts and have those scripts call up variable effects, but it all has to be done by hand and is a mountain of work comparable to an entire expansion just in itself, from how I've understood it. It's cool, we all agree. It's just that, unless Going Rogue delivers a miracle, it's plain not going to happen.

But there was one? I'm not just imagining it? I thought there was one in Suggestions, but I looked and I couldn't find it.

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Sure I grit my teeth against them from time to time. I watch my steps more now. Maybe I'm just slightly masochistic like that, but this? FUN!

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I can't say I agree. Dying from a single Missile Swarm I could deal with when I could cause it to not be fired if I were careful. Getting one-shotted by a Gunslinger duet I could sort of see when I had means to prevent it from happening. But they're shooting their heaviest hitters first now, making it REALLY hard to do anything about it, and that's before we even look at bosses. A Gunslinger boss was always nasty, but a Fire Bullet from it isn't something I even want to consider.

I like my enemies threatening. They were threatening before. Now... They're more than a bit over the top. I'm afraid to test an actual Blaster against them, seeing what they're doing to my Scrapper.

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Great satire, but... what exactly are you satirizing? I must have missed the uproar about multiple characters per account that inspired this...

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actually this is a satire of anti-powerleveling. How some players selfishness is hurting the game, how you can't have fun powerleveling, how there is one proper way of playing.

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I'm surprised to see there isn't an official power levelling thread yet, or if there is one I can't find it.

Now, we all know Malta are very tough, right? They have a lot of cheap, nasty tricks, those insufferable Sappers, lots of resistances, obscenely accurate bosses, many, many, many status effects and so on... But it wasn't always all bad. For a solo Blaster faced with stupidly ridiculous amounts of incoming damage, there was always at least one refuge - mid-to-close range. See, Gunsligers would not use their Fire and Cryo bullets or their Sleep Darts (bosses) at anything less than about 30-40 feet and Titans would not use any of their Missile Swarms or, for the Zeus, its Quad Plasma Battarey, at anything less than 50, maybe 100 feet.

Very quickly it became obvious to me that if I accidentally strayed away from a dangerous target, my Blaster would flatline faster than my brain could register what was going on, so I stayed close. Granted, they were never exactly gentle at close range, either, what with Tasers out the wazoo and those amazingly powerful Titan punches, but at least it was bearable. No longer, it seems.

I consider it my infinitely good fortune that I was playing a Blaster when I noticed this, but just a while ago I noted a Gunslinger shooting Sleep Darts at me from what looked like far too close range, but I figured I'd gone too far. Then a Hercules began shooting its Missile Swarms at me in what I could swear was no more than 10 feet away. Finally, specifically looking at it, I noticed a Gunslinger unload both Cryo Bullet and Fire Bullet from not just "effectively" but plain and simple literally melee range, which he'd never done before.

Now, this concerns me greatly. I've seen what those attacks can do. An Incendiary Missile Swarm from a Zeus is pretty much enough to one-shot Blaster, as it does enormous up-front damage and then a LOT of DoT after that, and a Fire Bullet from a Gunslinger can take a Blaster down to half health, and they almost never miss. I guess I should count myself lucky to have taken two Blasters to 50 and not having to trudge through these... These monsters again any time soon, but... Yikes! What happened to these guys? And just what the heck am I supposed to do now that they're this much stronger?

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You know how we have the immediate "quit to descktop" option?

I would love to have an immediate "quit to log in" option. 30 seconds takes forever!

seriously.

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The problem with that is that the game will instantly auto-log-out any character that is currently logged in when you attempt to enter your password. Logging out to the log-in screen instantly will allow you to type in your password within about 10 seconds of logging out, thereby circumventing the countdown for the most part. Quitting to desktop is rather different, in that getting back into the game takes in the neighbourhood of 60 seconds anyway, and my machine isn't slow.

Well, we have good Statesmen and bad Statesmen, but... Is it just me or is Lord Nemesis evil in absolutely every dimension?

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(My god how did this get 33 replies? lol)
Actually I presumed there'd be 3 bike models (at least female, male athletic, and male giant). I had a big hub-bub with a friend of mine yesterday about the amount of work it all is. And yeah, I know pretty much anything is a huge bunch of work. But... that's what the suggestion forum's for, right?

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The problem here is technical. Power effects DO NOT scale to character size or model. They are written in FX files and execute when the power is called with no regard for what it is that's calling it. For something to scale to the character, it would need to be a costume piece the same way weapons are, and that creates the problem of "costume item slots." BABs or Jay have said that they have 50-something, and that currently almost all of them are full. We're hoping they have one to spare for backpacks and jet packs, but generally, you'd need to add "bike customization" for just that one power, and I'm not sure that's feasible.

Granted, we already have weapon customization for Epic pools like Munitions Mastery and the various Mace Masteries, but bike customization seems a bit much. Even without the ability to customize them, they'd still take up an extra costume item slot, which is something the developers have traditionally been reluctant to do.

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Personally, I wouldn’t include attacking while riding. It takes the Super-Bike from “Cool alternate travel animation” (which is how I envisioned the suggestion) into “fully-realized game-mechanics expansion”. At which point you go from “That’s an awful lot of work for a cool visual effect” to “ARE YOU FRELLING HIGH!?!” *chuckles*

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That depends on what you want it to be. If you want it as an alternative animation to Super Speed the way Flight Emotes are, this would be big problem. While Prestige Power Slide proves that we can edit our running animations, your restriction on not attacking while riding it would put it at a significant disadvantage to all other travel powers. While Super Speed, Super Jump and Fly suppress in their movement speed, they still allow you to attack. A travel power one step removed from a power suppression field, however... Is a great liability.

It's a question of stances. On the ground, players have a few that they have animations to go between, such as idle, ready, combat and so forth. In the air, they only have one - flying. For what you are suggesting, you would need AT LEAST one more, and given that they've generally refused to make any new ones, that's a pretty tall order. Essentially, we're looking at a completely new set of animations for each character rig, which doesn't strike me as something that would be approved.

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The pitch problem is definitely legitimate. Although if the rider was simply in a bike-riding emote position they wouldn’t *necessarily* need to pitch, perhaps just the bike that was node-attached to them. Yes, there’d be clipping issues. My Shoulder Mantle Cape clips like mad with my Wedding Pack Tuxedo, too. We live with clipping to a degree and hope it gets better. But the pitch problem does add a bit (I use bit here to denote ‘an amount I cannot enumerate with any accuracy) more complexity to the bike itself.

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Player character feet already stick deep inside inclined surfaces and even simple stairs, and even that is pretty bad. A bike would be several times longer than a regular humanoid footprint and would as such stick over half-way in not just some, but MOST inclined surfaces. Remember, where we "are" in terms of height is determined by the centre of our footprint. If that centre is on a slope, then anything in the direction of the slope will clip. Think "the entire front tyre most of the time." Like I said before, they've been very careful to avoid ugly when they can and even those some items still clip, it's a minimal problem. Clipping half-way into terrain most of the time is rather more than just minor.

Furthermore, the engine cannot read terrain incline in such a way as to affect power animations. One could theorise that it could be fudged with some kind of PhysX device like what debris uses, but the fact is that power animations are hard-coded and animated. How the items summoned behave cannot be random and encounter-dependent, it has to be pre-defined, so a bike cannot conform to the terrain without the rider and the rider cannot conform to the terrain as the engine cannot do that currently.

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As for the size/footprint issue, I’d opt to just enforce the footprint of the bike in regards to where it can and can’t fit, and not allow it in buildings, bases, or missions. Water issues… as far as I know you can’t superspeed run on water, so I can’t imagine why you should be able to take your superbike into the water. Jumping and difficult terrain I’d just give a pass to “You’re Just That Good”.

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Limiting where the bike can go creates a SEVERE limitation that would simply make it unworkable. Yes, you can stick to just main roads, but that still eliminates half the available land area, especially in City of Villains. Take a turn into an alley in Mercy and you'll immediately get stuck on a trash can or garbage container. Furthermore, you cannot limit the bike from going into water, as that would simply slash its usefulness by more than half. As any Super Speeder worth his salt will tell you, a lot of what they run through is water, be it in the form of ponds and lakes or the sea separating the islands. You can't even get to Primeva without getting wet or Super Jumping.

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I’d think (and keep in mind, I’m not a programmer or a CG artist. I’m a 2D artist primarily, these are just that… “What I would think”) that mounting and dismounting the bike would just be a matter as simple as ‘bike appears, you mount’ animation, and ‘you dismount, bike disappears’ animation. I’d stop to wonder if this was lazy or copping out… but then I remember the beaten bodies of our foes that regularly vanish into thin air.

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Appearing and disappearing items are nothing new in this game, but an animation for mounting and dismounting is. Not only would it have to be made, but it would also take time to animate, which is something no other travel power has to contend with. All the others toggle on and off instantly as needed. It would be quite a disadvantage if you root the player during mounting and dismounting and quite ugly if you don't.

The problem with vehicles in general and bikes in particular is that you have to impose so many limitations on how they behave and what you can do with them that by the time you're done, it's either largely pointless or horribly ugly. Yes, War Craft has mounts, but if you take one look at the terrain there, you'll realise that it IS pretty much just flat, open ground. Even buildings and dungeons are ludicrously spacious, as if built for people 20 feet tall. By contrast, our city is a lot smaller with many tight, cramped quarters, claustrophobic caves, small doors and corridors, sheer cliffs and rugged terrain. Regular Super Speed often has trouble navigating, let a lone a much-limited bike.

I'm not opposed to the idea. I just don't see any way for it to work in a good enough way.

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Voids have been nerfed to near-joke status as it is (losing the damage type that made them a threat to Khelds,) They no longer do Nictus damage, exclusive to Kheldians. Only negative energy.

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But a LOT of it, and they never lost their resistances or stuns and knockback. A Void lieutenant (Seeker?) is worse than a non-void boss, and he tends to spawn WITH said boss and IN ADDITION TO the rest of the people in the spawn.

No particular relation to the point of the thread, but I just wanted to point out that they are still a very serious threat, even if they're not the death sentence they were before.

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Dual pistols and demon summoning will be added.

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Has that been officially confirmed? We're getting new characters that use them, yes, but then we still have signature heroes and villains with powers we can't have.

Plus, the bad guy in the video is only using a single handgun.

While I wouldn't mind seeing Tyrant get a bit of a makeover, I'm not sure I want to see him become unbeatably strong, because he still has to be beaten solo in the Hero's Hero arc

What's more, Lord Recluse the elite boss is also pretty weak, and would be a pushover if it weren't for the legions of Bane Spiders he summons. It seems generally evil isn't as strong as good, but evil also cheats, so it balances out. Could we maybe make him cheat instead of being super powerful?

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Best know (and hated) mission of thiis type is red side where you have to prevent Crimson from fleeing.


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No no no no no. The best known and most hated is Biff, the super arachnoid boss who takes off like a god damn bullet and is, for all intents and purposes, immune to slows and holds. God help you if you're solo, cause there's damn near no way of stopping that son of a [censored] when he decides to tale off.

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To be fair, Biff is a genuine Elite Boss, whereas Crimson can spawn as an Archvillain (Hero, to be precise). A running AV is... Not my idea of a fun time.

A few counter-points:

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5 new ATs with their own mechanics probably took a fair amount of the development time. Granted, we don't know if GR will have new ATs, but I personally don't expect another 5 entirely different ones.

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People (myself included) have been pleading for new ATs for YEARS, even before CoV came out. There is plenty of material to make new ones and still be able to reuse a majority of existing powersets, such as Defence/Assault, Summon/Control, Support/Melee, Melee/Control, Blast/Control and so on and so forth. To my eyes, NOT giving us a few more basic ATs to play with would be a tragic mistake.

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The team was significantly smaller and less experienced throughout the dev cycle, with a lower budget. With NC's backing, Paragon Studios can put a lot more effort into reaching milestones faster.

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According to things Jack, Positron and people at PlayNC have said, the team was drastically downsized by NCsoft down to 15 people at around I7, I believe, due to CoV not bringing in the revenue it was expected to. Before that, while we've no solid idea as to the size of the team, it was understood that it was a regular-sized professional team of developers. Growing to the ~50 people they have now may well be more akin to returning to old numbers, but in their own personal studio.

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CoV was in closed beta for several months. With GR only having an open beta phase (as far as I'm aware), bugs may get squashed a lot quicker, leading to a faster release.

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Open Betas tend to make catching bugs actually harder, as many people submit many ambiguous reports about the same thing. The reason they've been doing Closed Betas for some time is that a smaller, more focused group of testers working towards specific test objectives tend to be a lot more productive. What's more, during the time CoV was in Closed Beta (that I saw) it wasn't really about catching bugs. The game was literally unfinished, with significant, sweeping changes being made in real time. We were asked, for instance, to please delete our Ice/Ice Brutes because the powersets were being removed from the game.

One other thing one has to remember is that this is a full expansion. I don't believe it's realistic to expect it to take as much time as a really big Issue, because it's presumably a lot more than that. By my estimate, we're looking at a year, or at the very best case, the end of this year. I'll be glad to be wrong and see it sooner, but I very much doubt it.

The only thing I can think of is maybe checking out what keyboard layout you're using. I had a similar problem with using a UK English keyboard layout that would switch the places of @ and ; that I can remember. I know some installations of Windows tend to assign a default language and keyboard layout based on what location the computer is set to be in, and if you're in the UK or in some other place with with a non-standard standard keyboard layout, that could be throwing you off.

Check your Windows Language Bar to ensure your default is English (United States) or at least make sure that's what you're using when you're playing the game.

If that's not it, then I have no idea.

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I've been seeing this for many issues. Maybe it's even been going on since I1?

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Not quite since I1, but it has been happening for a good long while. Months, if not a year. I often joke about it with my friends: "Man, I killed him so fast he doesn't know he's dead yet!"

It's not restricted to any specific collection of powers, however. Anything that can one-shot a non-aggroed enemy has a chance of producing this.

I didn't say what you quoted me as saying. Please denote your quick replies as such.

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Psst. They upgraded the servers in like 2006-2007 and the new "1 blip" indicates a lot higher load than the old "1 blip."

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Could you cite your source?

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Eaten by the forum monster long ago, but this has been posted by the development team repeatedly. The dots on the server select screen do not denote population, they denote server load. One dot means light load, three dots means overload and over that the server is locked to ensure the people on it don't lag out. Rather than more dots being good, it's actually a BAD thing, because it means the server is overloaded, likely lagging and in danger of being locked so that you can't log in. That means the number of people currently logged into the server is close to exceeding the server's hardware capacity. In practice, one green dot is how all servers should look like, because it means they're operating well within capacity and load problems shouldn't occur, while three red dots means overlad, which is generally bad.

That's why servers with the heaviest load were put at the bottom at Launch - to get people to pick the lower-load servers where they could play with less problems. They were flipped once, but then returned to lowest-load first, highest-load last because it simply overloaded Freedom and Virtue. Even these days, when popular events like Double Experience happen, Freedom gets locked. You'd think many dots would be a good thing... Up until it's so good you're not allowed to log in, and until you realise that even when you do, it lags.

There is no reliable measure of population.

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... or cumbersome, especially with a smaller sword being used. It's one of the things that bugged me about BS (and one of the reasons I rarely dust off my 50 BS/SR.)

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The Broadsword animations have no finesse or technique, and that is PRECISELY why I love them Is it cumbersome? You bet it is! But then, so is Jurasik's car axe, and that doesn't make it any less impressive. I specifically returned to the Legacy Broadsword because, on females, it is simply HUGE! Bigger than even the Rularuu Sword, and that's saying something. I have a couple of other swordsmen, and both of them are written to be more able, less "smash it with a sword" and both of them use smaller swords - the girl has the Valkyrie, which is pretty short, and the guy has the Romulus Sword, which isn't very big. This one, though... She's 7 feet tall with a 5 foot sword and that's... Pretty much the sum total of why I made her in the first place

You can always just pick smaller swords for Broadsword, though. The various Roman swords and the stock Gladius are all pretty small, but... To me they just don't look right with the "Urk!" animations the set has.

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Sad part is, no one can make a build without stamina that I can't make more survivable and more capable of non-stop carnage with stamina.

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That's the big thing with Stamina - it's both the EASY choice and the RIGHT choice if what you're after is maximal performance. In terms of cost to benefit, it's "cheap" in a very broad interpretation of terms. But, as you said, not everyone does, or indeed should, shoot for maximal performance as there really is very little in the game that actually merits anything more than a moderately powerful build.

To that effect, Stamina is only necessary if you're shooting for more power than regular difficulty levels require, at which point the cost becomes justified.

To put a bit of perspective, to me the overriding objective is always how closely the character I build corresponds to the powers, style and feel of the concept I have envisioned. To that effect, raw performance beyond "does well" is immaterial, which makes Stamina very "expensive" as it costs me power picks that could have fit the character better, where a few more slots here and there generally don't "show" on a character and so are cheap to hand around.

It's all down to what people want out of the game.