Samuel_Tow

Let's see if we can work on a process of elimination. What restrictions have you put on yourself?

1. Your villain of the story has to be a credible threat.
2. Your villain of the story needs to succeed in her plan to raid Paragon City.

On top of those, I want to put a few more limitations of my own:

3. The player villain cannot be a servant to the villain of the story.
4. The player villain cannot be fighting for the greater good or just wrestling over scraps.
5. The player villain cannot outright lose, but can suffer setbacks.

My suggestion is for you to set the villain side of the story to start shortly after the villain of the story has succeeded in raiding Paragon City, with much if not most of it taking place alongside the actual invasion, possibly continuing after it's done. This can give your villain of the story the opportunity to succeed off-panel without needing for the player villain to assist or fail to prevent.

As with a murder mystery, the player villain needs motive and opportunity to be involved. You need to come up with a motive for player villains to want to bother such that it doesn't feel like they're being suckered in, by which I mean this needs to be something the villain wants, but can still resist enough to be able to make an intelligent choice about it. What that is, I can't say. The player villain also needs to have an opportunity to make a difference in the story, such as exploiting the weakness of your villain of the story while her forces are getting hammered in Paragon City.

I'd also suggest going without a specific contact. Present the player with an opportunity in the style of a Tip mission, then use some form of paper or information terminal or some such and word your briefings like common sense conclusions on how to proceed, such that if a villain doesn't see the next step as making sense, he could always just leave by ending the story arc early. This gets rid of the "lackey" feeling entirely. Either that, or use a weasel informant like Dean McArthur who doesn't have any ideas or suggestions, but can instead follow orders and obtain information.

That's all I can do on short notice.

Wowza! I admit, I wasn't a big fan of the original character sketch, but the finished and coloured work is quite amazing. And you made a... Big character. I like it! I wish we could make characters like that in City of Heroes, but the "physique" slider...

If all of the characters I create become property of NC Soft as part of the EULA, I have a hard time seeing how characters people paid to work on the game create don't really fall under a similar clause. Irrespective of who made them, they should be part of City of Heroes intellectual property and as such subject to change and alteration.

And, really, if it's a legal problem, I'd appreciate being told it's a legal problem. I might not like it, but I'd not like it less than what's happening now. For all their super-dickery, I still prefer what Ubi did in saying they weren't releasing the Prince of Persia DLC for "business reasons" over pretending to not know what players are talking about.

I will NEVER support any more craftable costume pieces. If new pieces are added, I want to see them in the editor at character creation. I don't care what I have to do to get them there - pay, most likely - but if they don't appear in the editor at creation, they're worthless to me.

That said, I DO want to see better, more varied versions of Jet Boots. Perhaps boots with jets in their soles, as opposed to freakishly protruding from the calves? Sure, I'd even buy those if they were sold on the Market. We need more oddball costume pieces like those.

Be nice if we could colour the jet flames separately, though.

How about the reverse? How about giving me the option to use the Ninja Run animation without using any of the stats of the power? Just something to replace my base run and jump animations.

I've never been a fan of combining servers when the argument is there aren't enough people to team with. I LIKE that! At the same time, I've also always been a fan of having just one global server for the simple reason that server divides are half of what keeps me from teaming with my friends. A lot of the people I originally met on the forums simply don't play on the servers I do, so we never get to play together. To me, it's less a question of population and more a question of borders and boundaries.

I'm always up for more cosmetic stuff, and if I have to buy it, I will. New animations and effects, especially for older sets, have been a long time coming, and it would be nice to see what the art team can do.

I should point out that the last time new animations were added (for Blast sets), these were met with negativity because it seemed like there wasn't much there, it seemed like powers at random didn't get new ones and because a lot of the new ones were just slight deviations on the old ones. Doing this not for "all Blast sets indiscriminitely, but NOT for duplicate powers in non-Blast sets" is a bad idea. At the same time, doing this for ONE set, so that each power could get something new and that something new can be individual to the set, is a much better approach.

That said, we need to differentiate between "animations" and "effects." What Blasters got was new animations using the same old effects, sometimes without accounting for different body part positions (hello, Power Burst!). This is cool, but it's only one half of the equation. I believe powers also need new effects, as well. As you said - from basic fire to ghostly fire to fire that looks like an ink drop dissolving in water and more are legitimate additions to a fire-based powerset without needing new animations. In a lot of cases, effects would do considerably more than effects, such as with Archery, for instance.

I'd suggest going for packs that are either all animation or all effect, just because new animations AND new effects in the same pack might make it too costly to produce.

The answer is "activation sequences." Every power in the game has an activation sequence, which includes expecting what "mode" the character is in before the power animates. If the character is not in this mode, the character is taken in this mode by taking away a weapon, pulling out a weapon, setting hands on fire and so forth. Some attacks, like Brawl, are coded to expect multiple modes and play different animations for each mode, but this does not appear to be trivial to create and, most importantly, maintain. BABs mentioned numerous times how Brawl is the most complex animation in the game and how he didn't want to replicate this unless absolutely necessary.

His other argument was one of completeness. Can he afford to do that JUST for Kick since that already works? What about Boxing? What about Reconstruction? What about Web Grenade? I actually did bring up exactly this problem to him - make Kick work like Brawl works for Archery, and that was a part of the argument then. I don't remember the whole argument, but this was a part of it.

Additionally, Shield Defence is instituted in a similar way. Shields are essentially weapons with their own activation sequences and all powers that can ever be used with them have to expect to be used with this activation sequences. When creating this power set, the great majority of the work BABs and his team did was just fixing up activation sequences for existing powers even though the new animations were exact clones of the old ones. There are relatively few new animations for Shield Defence specifically, though a number are "tweaked" to blend in better. As I understand it, the majority of the work was just what you describe - making sure all powers a Shield Defence character could ever use wouldn't try to put the shield away.

There's also the problem that the game's animation engine can sometimes have a loose interpretation of what it's expected to do. If the engine is told to fire up an animation that doesn't exist, it'll do some kind of next-best match and play whatever comes up. That's why doing /em bow with a Katana out used to do a bow-firing animation back in I1, why Whirling Sword started playing the Whirlwind animation when falling down and I assume that's why Heightened Senses is now doing the Dragon's Tail animation instead of what it had before (the "jumping out of a snake hole, looking around" one).

This is like the problem of removing redraw: It seems simple, but there's more to it than you think. Specifically, removing redraw wasn't as simple as just removing it. BABs tried and the system refused to work because it expected SOMETHING there. You can also see what happen when you remove redraw in the effect asynchronity in Titan Weapons. If you use an attack with momentum without having drawn your weapon, the attack will fire early, but the effects will delay for the animation time plus the draw time. It's also evident in what Assassin's Strike out of combat used to do, which is not play ANY animation if you didn't have your weapons drawn.

The City of Heroes animation system is a lot more finicky than it seems like it should be.

You know, when I first heard about Staph Fighting, it sounded like so much fun. It had a lot of promise - I'd be helping people, possibly helping myself, and I got to do it in cool ways. Sure, it involved some unconventional tools and possibly a new approach to fighting, but it still looked a lot of fun.

But it turns out it's just a disappointment.

See, Staph Fighting just fails to do decent damage all too often. Penicilin, the bread-and-butter power of the set, just doesn't seem to do anything because almost all of my enemies seem to resist it these days. I guess I could slot it for more recharge, but that doesn't really seem to help.

Well, OK, I lied. The set does occasionally deal decent damage... To my kidneys! A lot of my enemies seem to be weak to Gentamicin, but I just don't like using that. I know it's a decent power, but the self-damage component just isn't worth it. Yeah, I know what you're thinking - if I could regenerate, the self-damage component would matter. Well, if I could regenerate, I wouldn't need Staph Fighting, now would I?

Of course, it's not all bad, though. There is one power I actually really like - Methicillin. Sure, it costs a lot and, yeah, there is the occasional boss that's resistant to it, but it works most of the time. But this thing is just balanced by annoyance. I mean, it works most of the time, but using it is so unpleasant it just makes me sick. Literally sick. Whoever designed this really dropped the ball.

Overall, Staph Fighting just seems like a missed opportunity. It could have been so much more, but instead it's unpleasant. Maybe in the right hands it could be potent, but it just needs such clinical precision to use right that it feels like I need to have, like a degree in medicine to use it or something.

So, yeah, wasted money there. I'm going back to Typhus Weapons. That thing was just so much more deadly.

So here's my question - if there isn't much else for an epic storyline, then... Why does every storyline have to be "epic?" Why does every storyline have to involve 24 people? Why does every storyline have to be max-level Incarnate stuff?

And again, Mot did just fine presenting an epic storyline that didn't require a zillion people. I haven't run the Large Breasts trial since that's Praetorian stuff and requires a zillion people, but the actual storyline of the zone worked just fine without being a war against another dimension.

And again, I've been on a Hamidon Raid that consisted of around 200 people and crashed Victory twice. I've been on a Hamidon Raid that consisted of over 100 people and actually succeeded, horrible gameplay experience notwithstanding. The game seems to be perfectly capable of presenting large group content without having another dimension invade us.

I'm sick and tired of inventing brand new never-before-seen bad guys who eventually just fall flat while we staunchly ignore the good stories of the past and the interesting bad guys that brought many of us into the game's lore to begin with. What about the Sky Raiders, what about the Family? What about the Goldbrickers? What about the Warriors? What about the Council? What about the Circle of Thorns? Hell, what about Nemesis? I haven't heard anything about him since Issue 10.