Samuel_Tow

Can't you just use the Think Tank for that? It already comes with an empty option. You can't make it opaque, though. I tried.

*edit*
Is the Think Tanks still for sale?

No, it's not. I didn't even know about your thread and I knew about the Moon Zone concept. They've had locations for launch pads since I8 or so. People on Test a long time ago found a hole in the map and found interiors for this launch pad with NPCs that talked about the moon. A moon zone is about as abstract a concept as the underwater zone. When people refer to it, they're usually referring to this abstract concept, not to anyone's particular implementation of it via suggestions. Unless you or your thread are named specifically, you really should have no reason to be angry.

And for what it's worth, that point is valid. In a mission titled "we need new mission maps, not new zones," the point that it's better to have a moon base instance tileset than to have a moon base zone is not just a legitimate one, but a natural one to make.

To each his own. I prefer the sandals, myself. They're lower resolution and a more basic model, yes, but they're also a lot less specific.

I suggest this from time to time as a way to still make defeat essentially meaningless but as a barrier while still making sure that kamikadze runs are not a viable option. The reason I don't want kamikadze runs to be a viable option is I believe THAT is the primary problem with a game that has no penalty for failing - you have no reason to not incorporate failure a part of your regular strategy. This is an admittedly VERY harsh way to ensure that you cannot win by repeatedly failing.

I mentioned before that I hate losing, and that's true. But that doesn't mean I necessary have to win to be satisfied. This is not a binary choice, because there is also a very broad third option - stalemate. You can't lose, but you also can't win, so either you have to try something else, get someone to help you... Or cheat. By cheat, I mean drop the mission, level up, go find extra temp powers and so forth.

I've never agreed with Jack Emmert's view on "risk vs. reward," because I've never been a fan of risk. I've always been far more partial to the "time vs. reward" metric that most other MMOs use, and that City of Heroes has been employing for some time. I like this metric because it ensures I can still play the game with relatively little risk - and thus, with relatively little of the stress that accompanies risk - but still have a path of high rewards open to me if I'm efficient about it. Essentially, it's less a question of "win or lose" and more a question of "win or win BIG!"

"Hardcore mode" as it's usually mentioned has its roots in Diablo 2, where this was a chose made during character creation. In that game, a dead character could resurrect back in town naked and then have to do a corpse run, or log out of the game whereupon the body would show up under the Town Portal, but all instance progress would be lost. A Hardcore character, on the other hand, could not do this. If a Hardcore character died, that game was over forever. And since that game auto-saves every time you do anything meaningful, that's the end of your save game.

The crucial bit here is that Hardcore mode is an option specific to the character, not specific to the environment. You very much could have a team comprised of Hardcore and non-Hardcore characters, and it's not something that a whole team had to be roped into. Of course, if your Hardcore character joined a lousy team and you died through no fault of your own, that would be very infuriating, so most Hardcore players tended to be a lot more... Particular about how they played and who they played with.

I still see it as a viable option, even if I pity the people who try it out. And yes, Hardcore characters did get much better loot in Diablo 2, as I remember it. Personally, I have no problem with it. I'd gladly settle for having a slower gain if it meant I didn't have to sweat a permanent game over and especially if it meant I wouldn't feel compelled to bang my expensive equipment together when I inevitably died a fool's death. I honestly don't understand why anyone would want a Hardcore mode, but there are plenty of people out there that I don't understand.

Glad I could help I remember someone mentioning this way back when mouse wheel scrolling was first introduced, so I was forewarned before I even attempted to use it.

I generally like the way City of Heroes options and settings are laid out, but there are quite a few traps like this.

Be that as it may, it doesn't change the fact that I wish the dual backpack were bigger, or at least wider. As I said, it may not be consistent with retro 50s sci-fi, but I'd buy the size we have now, or bigger. It's just how I feel, personally.

I agree with Chad here. That's the sort of attitude that really pisses me off, and is usually a good reason for me to disrespect everything else a person has to say just based on that. Repulsion isn't a choice, you see.

Of course, of course. Beating you head against a wall with no chance of success sucks, no matter your patience. It also sucks when the only way to defeat a boss is to fight, die, resurrect, rush off to buy inspirations and re-confront the boss before he can regenerate to full health. Whenever I face a situation like this, I consider it a failure on my part, and it's not very pleasant, even when I can win.

Actually, run the Mender Tesseract SF some time. Yes, I know she's an insufferable *****, but do it anyway. The second mission in that TF has you fighting in a tournament of sorts, squaring off against I believe three to five VERY tough bosses in succession. If you leave the mission (i.e. if you die) the mission resets itself and you start back at the first boss. Now THAT is a fight you can't bullrush. Either you fight the whole thing from beginning to end properly, or you don't win at all. The rest of the TF isn't very good, but that bit is exactly how I'd want to see boss battles go.

The game actually has the tech to do this even if you don't leave the mission. Remember the "leashing" tech? The one where enemies become untargetable, return to their spawn points and become targetable again at full health and all powers recharged? Do that with bosses. Force players to fight a boss such that if the players all run away or the boss loses aggro for, say, 30 seconds, he recovers back to full and the fight resets. That's the kind of difficulty I'd see as fair.

As an option, of course. I have nothing against "hardcore mode" as a concept, even in City of Heroes. If some players feel they're badass enough to attempt it, then why not. Honestly, that's another difficulty setting to me, and so long as I don't have to use it, then I honestly have no problem with it. I'm not against other people facing consequences for their failures. I'm against me facing consequences for mine

Yes, I struggled with the UK when I was there on a student exchange practice some years ago, but people tell me it's just because I was in the Birmingham area

A bit more seriously, I agree about e-mail item claiming. That's a horror show, because those items never seem to use the e-mail body to put in their description and you can't really mess with the size of your e-mail columns. I feel that using e-mails to do this was a mistake to begin with. It needed a better system, one that's a bit better suited to being browsed, or at least one that's full-screen with more real estate.

As for mouse scrolling, have you checked what your mouse scroll speed is set to? The UI has this quirk where you can enable mouse wheel scrolling as an option, but its scroll speed still remains stuck at either 0 or 1, which essentially doesn't scroll. I can't check right now, but there's a slider option for it somewhere in options. Mine's set to about 80, I believe.

Personally, I don't mind "failing" consistently so long as there are no consequences for it. In a single-player game, failure means I die and the game is over. No continue, no reset, no nothing. Well, game over unless you reload. And you can reload as many times as you want, fail as many times as you want, and when you finally succeed, the game treats it like you succeeded on your first try. Because... You did. Quickloads don't count. Essentially, I'm talking about save scumming, but it also applies to MMOs, as well.

In City of Heroes, I can't really save and load per se, but every time I die and have to go to the hospital, I've essentially quick-loaded to before I fought the boss. Sure, some bosses fail to regenerate back to full health before you can rush back to them, especially when doing missions through the Ouro crystals where both the hospital and the inspirations vendor are within spitting distance of the mission entrance, and wouldn't mind one bit if these bosses completely reset when they lost aggro, but that's besides the point. What that long sentence is trying to say is that in City of Heroes, you can "fail" many times over, but you can almost never actually FAIL. You die, you resurrect, you try again, wash, rinse, repeat. Eventually, I'll find what it is that I need to do in order to beat the boss that's killing me so much. It's irritating, but if it's only specific enemies or specific missions, it's tolerable.

What I DO NOT WANT, however, is to be afraid to fail. We're playing super heroes here, and City of Heroes right now really feels like it. I can approach the game with confidence and often even arrogance and still succeed in the end. I enjoy that feeling of power, that ability to dare the game to bite me. The only real reason I'm as brave as I am is because I know that even if I fail, it's no big deal. I can always try again. I'm not a hero in real life, nor am I specifically brave, but it's this safe, no-risk environment that allows me to play-pretend at being brave. When there's nothing to fear, then the feeling of power is almost inescapable. And that is almost the entire gameplay-specific reason I'm still with this game.

In short, I play City of Heroes because it coddles and babies me. I like that, so I continue to pay for it. I've played and paid for other games that treated me harshly and forced me to look after myself. I paid for them for a while, then felt they weren't treating me well enough to be worth the spending, so I no longer pay for them any more. I play this game exactly because it ISN'T like those other games. I don't have to worry about failing, and that lets me sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Take on space aliens? Sure, let's go. Fight a god? What's the worst that can happen. That sort of thing.

There's nothing "logical" about a slippery slope argument unless you live in a fictional world without any sense of moderation where every notion is taken to its illogical absolute extreme with no regard to reason or consequence. It's the same old "if you give a mouse a cookie" argument that never actually worked. I'd quote it, but I don't remember the exact wording and Google is being difficult.

Let me put it as simple as I can: Not being able to fail a mission is not the same as being guaranteed to succeed at that mission. All it means is that the mission has no specific fail objectives, and it implies nothing beyond that notion. Anything beyond this is your own invention and has nothing to do with anything I've said.

I want precisely none of that in my game, and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure none of that is ever introduced. There are plenty of games out there where death is meaningful, and I play pretty much none of them, in large part for this precise reason. I like the fact that debt is meaningless. I like the fact that most missions can't be failed even if I get killed repeatedly. I like the fact that the game treats me kindly and lets me have my cake and eat it, too. The side of my argument you continue to ignore is that I don't want challenge, I want involvement. I want the game to require my participation, even if it doesn't necessarily require my success.

This is where your ridiculous slippery slope argument fails, in fact - I want a game which requires my action to proceed, but which does not permit my actions to lead to failure that has consequences at the same time. If I die, that's part of the game. I restart and try again and nothing has been lost. I wouldn't mind one bit if bosses healed to full when I went to the hospital or my team wiped, but that's not a penalty. That's just the mechanic of giving me another shot without making suicide runs possible like they are now. Any game that requires me to be awake to play is "challenging" enough for me even if the game doesn't uninstall itself from my computer every time I fail.

Failure means I tried to do something and I failed to do it. Failure means I get pissed off. And I don't subscribe to games to be pissed off. I learned that lesson from pretty much every other MMO out there. "Failure" as a mechanism of choice is easily one of the worst implementations of choice that exists in gaming history, and it's something I hoped would die in a fire in the old Bishujo games where getting one girl required you having to completely mess up with another. In fact, it's a system that City of Villains used to employ which I utterly HATED. Do you blow up all of Amanda Vines' generators or do you fail? Yeah, that's a choice in terms of words, but it's still a choice between beating a mission and failing it.

City of Heroes has far more sophisticated mechanics for enabling choice now. That our writers are using them to break open coconuts is besides the point, they are there and they are far superior. Making me fail a mission because the protection objective spawned with 100 hit points and a Chief Soldier one-shotted it before I even came into view (ah, the memories of the War Wall Defender badge...) is bad enough. Making me have to fail a mission ON PURPOSE so as to get a choice is considerably worse.

As long as I'm paying a subscription to this game - and I am - I will not put up with consequences for failure, be they bad or good. As far as I'm concerned, debt can go away entirely and I wouldn't bat an eye. At least it would mean I wouldn't have to worry about using Rise of the Phoenix and Soul Transfer.

I want to second this, myself. I love the dual jet pack, but I'd love it if we could get a version of the same thing, but with a different nose cone. Maybe a pointed nose, maybe just a flat head. I get that this is a retro sci-fi pack, but if it's not a monumental challenge, I'd really like to see that.

I've mentioned it in another thread, and I HATE it. I don't mean that from an artistic standpoint, which is to say I don't think it's made badly. It's made well. I just don't feel it belongs. City of Heroes has a semi-realistic, largely stylised art style which draws looks from more realistic media but depicts them in a cleaner, more simplistic way. That's good, because it allows us to have costumes that look a lot better than a real person could look in the same costume in real life. There's a reason tights look goofy in live action movies yet look so much better in games - because in real life, they can never stick to the body as tightly. They fold, they crinkle, they stretch, and they simply don't look good.

I'm probably the only one here who feels that the jet packs are TOO SMALL. At least the twin jet pack is, in my eyes. When it comes to jet packs, what I've always wanted is something akin to the Raptor Pack, but without the long protrusion that clips with your butt. I like that it has a very wide wingspan, and that's precisely what I'd really like to have. Both of the retro sci-fi jet packs look like mini-packs, almost like backpacks that have thrusters on them. Hell, neither of them extends past the person's shoulders.

Maybe that's just what the retro 50s sci-fi style calls for, but I'm just saying I don't think they're too big.

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And because I forgot to snag a quote, I also want to second the notion for an opaque helmet. I get that it'll end up obscuring a lot of head detail that's still there, but I'd like to see it anyway. I wanted to see it with the Think Tank, too, but it was impossible to achieve.

To be honest, one of the reasons I like Doc Delilah is exactly BECAUSE she hasn't "cleaned up." That's not to say I like 'em dirty, to stave off the obvious joke, but rather to say that I've never been a fan of what the common image is of a woman who has "cleaned up." Most often, this means she's in a dress, in high heels and with a hairdo that costs more than my house. Ever watched Miss Congeniality? That's exactly what I don't like. That whole movie felt like they were simultaneously beating me over the head with what a woman should actually be like and ruining a character I liked the most right at the start.

Call it unorthodox tastes, but I honestly prefer unconventional character. Someone mentioned "cleavage" as an important trait for an attractive female character, and I honestly feel completely the reverse.

I agree completely. Well, this and Nightstar, of course, since they use essentially the same model. I really like the design on the female Praetorian Clockwork. Once upon a time, I thought putting boobs on a robot was the height of tastelessness, but that's until I actually saw a "female" robot design that actually really worked. Both traditional Praetorian Clockwork and the Victoria/Nightstar kind just have the kind of style and design that works almost like the design of a car. It's based on well-crafted, sharp lines accentuated by curved surfaces and rough detailing. In a way, I find the Clockwork attractive less because they look like busty women and more because they look like a work of art. Whoever designed those (David, maybe?) gets a gold star.

Sure, OK, I also like the female Clockwork because they look like busty women, but that's only part of it. Inversely, I dislike the male Clockwork because they look like square men. The body shape they've been given doesn't work as well with the lines and detailing, I don't think.

And now you know why I've been banging on about this for two, maybe three years now. I'd LOVE for this to happen, but if only...

Tattoos would be a much more powerful draw than you give them credit for. There are a lot of things City of Heroes does right, but the one thing it does HORRIBLY WRONG is body art of any kind, and that's not something which is unpopular. For men, you can somewhat fudge tattoos on the chest by using basic patterns on a bare chest, but so few of those patterns actually resemble tattoos. For females, you CANNOT have tattoos of any kind on the upper or lower body because you can't show skin in such a way that you can put patterns on it, thanks to how Tights With Skin is coded. And on neither gender can you put tattoos on the legs.

I keep tossing this girl around as an example for a whole lot of different things, but one of the big ones is body art, and I might have a version that has even more body art on it. I'll have to check. The point is that this would actually be a big thing, in my view.

You need to spend a couple of decades here, then. We have plenty of self-deprecating jokes around here. Ones like "Our cauldron in hell doesn't need to be guarded, because every time one person tries to climb out, another person pulls them back in." or "It's not important that that I succeed, it's important that my neighbour fails." around here. I couldn't begin to tell you where this rotten mentality comes from or what fostered it, but I can tell you for a fact that it very much reflects my contemporary society. And no, that's not an ideal. It's a society in which specific people may be decent, but most people are malicious, vindictive, jealous ******** for no real reason that I can determine.

You know, you can talk about dictatorships or oppressive states, but at least there it's a few people oppressing the many, a few people that are bad against many who are good. What I'm talking about is a whole society of people who spend half our time backstabbing our neighbours and half our time shaking our heads at our plight, a plight which is entirely our own fault to begin with. I don't know where you grew up and I don't want to tell you what it's like, so long as you extend me the same courtesy of not telling me you know what my society is like better than I do.

You're the one who brought up how real societies behave to counter my example of a theoretical malicious, amoral society. That's why we're arguing this in the first place. Ignoring the fact that super heroes aren't complete unfounded unrealistic fiction, if we're taking the stance that real life doesn't matter, then you really have no leg to stand on to tell me the society I've constructed for my villain to grow up can't exist because people always have morals and ideals and any villain has to be a deviation. If we're not basing an argument on real life, then that society is what I say it is, because that's pure fiction, I'm the author of it, and I can depict it as whatever I want to, even if it disagrees with rational notions of society. If we're ignoring the real world, then anything goes and there's no argument.

The larger argument here is whether people are born good and naturally strive to be good as you suggest, or whether they're born evil and strive to be evil unless prevented from doing so, which has been my own experience with people I've interacted with. If you want to ignore the real world, then that's fine by me, but if we do, then you really can't argue against my vision of an evil world which breeds villains who are evil because that's what they were brought up to be by the society they grew up in. You don't have to like it, mind you, but that kills your argument dead. Either we argue about things are in he real world - and we clearly see things differently - or we argue fiction, and there are no facts in fiction.

That's one of the tricks you learn pretty early on when you develop the habit of writing cosmic horrors for characters time and again as I have for quite some time. It's very easy to write characters of immense power and unbridled ambition, but it's not so easy to explain why they actually aren't all-powerful from level 1. There isn't quite an art to doing it, but it's still tricky. I feel inspired to give a few more examples, actually.

Vox, my necromancer, was once immensely powerful, enough to shape the world around him. Then he got killed and left dead for 10 000 years. He returned to life somewhat recently, and he's been rebuilding his power since. I forget what I wrote him as wishing for, but I believe eternal life for himself was it.

Kragoss is probably my most powerful villain by far, wielder of a perversion of the power of Creation which destroys everything it touches and reduces it to literal nothing. He's not all-powerful now because shortly before the start of his story, he got his *** handed to him by the awakening power of the true heir of Creation. His power scattered across the cosmos and now said heir is drawing it away from him and to herself, so Kragoss has to start all over, pretty much.

Cedric is a monstrously powerful villain who draws on the power of many worlds that he's conquered, but he's not all-powerful here. See, our Primal Earth is so mired in portal fudge that coming here sapped much of his power and broke his link to his empire, so Cedric's been looking for alternate power sources.

That sort of thing. It's not too hard to come up with a decent explanation, but it can be hard to realise you really should have one

While your post is mostly constructive and quite welcome, starting it off with THAT increases your chances of getting yelled at ten-fold. This is known in Internet circles as a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you come to a forum and predict that the stupid, mean, evil people there will insult you... They probably will, but not because your prediction was accurate so much as because you threw a passive-aggressive insult in their faces and induced in them the desire to insult you.

Take my advise - whenever you're posting in an environment where you're worried people might be rude to you, your best bet is to be nice and courteous. Usually, you'll find that even otherwise rude people respond to this approach positively and those that don't will usually themselves be shouted down by their peers. At the very least, this gives you the moral high ground of having done the right thing.

Let me ask you this, though: What did you hope to achieve by opening your post with a backhanded insult tossed in the community's general direction? I'm not trying to attack you here, I'm honestly interested to know in what way you believed this was helping you not get attacked.

ParagonWiki is a lot like what someone else suggested as a real-time-updating story journal which would record everything as it transpired. That might be a good place for non-mission-holders to consult for storyline info, a well as a good place for a mission holder to check up on conversations past and the usual clusterhug of NPC chat that transpires at the climaxes of recent story arcs. If that story journal had some way of ensuring these came in the correct order so they're not jumbled, this would be great.

Of course, that still doesn't leave the option open for large, complex dialogues to be present without the aspect of boring your team-mates, but I feel that that's an acceptable trade-off. Even right now, experiencing a story arc with a team - even a team of friends - is simply more difficulty than it is to experience it alone. I enjoy reading all the text provided for me, but I'm always keenly aware that while I spend a few minutes reading the debriefing, briefing, sendoff and mission start clue, my friend who joined me to run a mission before he has to rush off to work is tapping his foot on the other side of the Internet. He's too polite to say so, of course, but he is.

And speaking of PuGs, it's next to impossible to experience an actual story with one. People on a PuG are always rushing, usually steamrolling content, they keep insisting we stealth and a lot of the time they want nothing better than to grind Tip missions, and before those to grind paper missions. When pulling in strangers, your chances of pulling a team of strangers who even care about the story is slim to none, let alone strangers with the kind of patience to let YOU enjoy the story while they wait on the side.

When I solo, I do so for my character and my story. I do so for the immersion. When I team, I do so for the company and for the team dynamics. I do so for the gameplay. As such, I really have no problem with certain aspects of the game's story not being very conducive to being played on a team... Largely because that's always been the case. So long as these aspects are skippable and don't interfere with gameplay, I'd be happy. Hell, whenever I team with random strangers, I never offer my own missions to begin with. I save those for myself. I'd rather run missions for someone who doesn't care about ruining the story for his own missions - and most people seem to fall there - than run my own.

Detail 2 for Males is where facial hair is. You can't have a bubble-helmet-wearing man with a moustache, for instance, which for a retro sci-fi set just seems... Backwards? What self-respecting retro man DOESN'T have a moustache?

Seriously, though, I know a lot of Detail 2 facial hair would probably clip with the bubble, like the King of the Seas long beard, and probably a fair few gas masks, especially the ones with the large disk filters, but that's where the ninja masks are, as well as some of the chin guards. I'd really like to have access to this category from inside the helmet.

Personally, I feel that City of Heroes has no real, set genre. Super Hero comic books are just one source of inspiration, but the game really is supporting of many, many other concepts that aren't common to American comics. I've always been of the opinion that while "It's in comic books" may work as an argument FOR something, "It's not in comic books" can never work as an argument AGAINST something. The only thing that's really decisive here is whether a new look can fit within the style and fictional universe of the game, and with as broad as those are in City of Heroes, pretty much anything already can.

I mean, consider what we have right now. We have a "Prussian Prince of Automatons" whose troops dress like 19th century parade cavalrymen, we have 1920s mobsters who dress up in fine suits, we have ghost pirates who dress like pirates, we have faceless corporate agents who dress like the Men in Black, we have wizards in Fantasy wizard robes, we have ninja in corny Hollywood face masks, we have medieval-looking knights that dress in helmets and plate mail, we have circus performers that dress like clowns and sideshow members, we have a guy in a Nazi uniform, we have aliens in power armour, we have vampires and werewolves and ninjas and wizards and pirates and walking plants and zombies and robots and ghosts and demons and angels and gods... What, really, is there that doesn't fit a fictional universe with a style this abstract?

*edit*
On point - is it possible to make the Bubble Helmet a separate head type so that we have control of face, hair and facial hair all at the same time without having to give up a category for it? It can have a complete copy of everything under regular Heads, plus all the options for Full Masks.

I don't know what it is about that kind of art style, but it REALLY rubs me the wrong way, ESPECIALLY the faces. Those "arrow smiles" just creep me out. What I mean by "arrow smiles" is the way the corners of their mouths resemble an arrow shape.

There really are three things that creep me out about people's faces in drawn artwork: depicting the lines from the nose to the corners of the mouth, depicting people's gums in a regular smile and this - the arrow smiles. It makes the expression look less than genuine, which artwork really shouldn't have an excuse to be.

This actually reminds me of that company showcasing their amazing face-capture technology by motion-capturing a live actor and transferring those to 3D mesh faces. At first I thought their tech really sucked because the 3D characters creeped me out with their unexpressive faces, fake smiles and simulated animation... Until I saw the actor they captured the faces from. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the tech, they just motion-captured a crap actor.

Conventional 2D artwork, as well as proper 3D artwork, need to approach realism with extreme care because if they get close enough, that artwork starts having unfortunate implications. Because honestly... Without speech bubbles and with no background on who Luminary is, she looks like a villain in that pic.