Samuel_Tow
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Posts
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Quote:So would I. They changed the "Power 10" stupidity, even if it took a year if I remember right. I guess they haven't bothered because people generally know to sell to the right stores and buy from the right stores or, much more probably, because the sheer amounts of money being thrown around the Market make the difference trivial. The other day, I got a purple drop, which I sold for I believe 300 million, and it sold instantly. I got a Respec Recipe before that which went for around 100 million. That kind of puts the expenditure around enhancements out of proportion.Originally Posted by SwellGuy
I wish they would take the time to change this already.
Or it would, for the people who do that on a regular basis. It doesn't for me, especially prior to level 12 and ESPECIALLY in Praetoria where "correct" stores to sell DOs do not exist. This is an irritating holdover from an older time that is clearly not supported by modern developments. You'll note that you can sell any piece of the Inventions system to every vendor for the exact same price, and you can buy every piece of salvage or recipe from any place that sells them (Invention tables, Merit Vendors, BOTLER, etc.) for the exact same price. We're left with an irritating inconvenience to do with Trainings, DOs and SOs because apparently, the amounts aren't enough to bother fixing.
I say do this: Male ALL vendors everywhere sell and buy enhancements at the prices you'd find in the "correct" store. Problem solved. -
Quote:"In general." Deviating from the norm doesn't make a character wrong or even weird. Take a look at anything to do with Lisa Cross [Link Removed due to inappropriate content. ~Mod13] and you'll see what I mean. And she's hardly the only woman in the world who looks like this.Originally Posted by AmazingMOO
You'll note that, in general, men have shoulders that are somewhat broader than their hips. Women generally have hips that are somewhat broader than their shoulders. Musculature, bodyfat ratio, and total weight don't really do a lot to change those proportions.
Human body shapes are staggeringly diverse and deviant from the "averages" that you see given out like concrete data. Check this for reference. You'll almost never see people that actually fit those averages outside of cartoons where artists specifically draw those averages and give everyone the same body shape, or possibly when dealing with photoshoot models who are often chosen based on body type and physique.
As for the actual game, JUST increasing the female "muscle" slider is a horrible idea, because it doesn't increase muscles at all. It gives women a bigger butt and a bigger rack, but does nothing for their actual physique, aside from possibly making them more Rubenesque. Crucially, it does next to nothing to give women largerarms, it does not control hand and foot size and it does very little to the waist. Moreover, there's practically NO way to give female characters here a larger rib cage, as shoulders aren't spaced farther apart by being drawn out of the body but rather because "the shoulders," i.e. the upper back, is wider because of a wider rib cage. There's virtually no way to give women a waist that's not only wider side-to-side, but also wider front-to-back, nor make their rib cages look less shallow and compressed.
There are quite a few tricks to making a female character appear big, and all of them involve abusing the editor to trick people's perception into seeing a character as bigger than she actually is. Shoulders are one of those tricks. -
Quote:Also, just for the record: I LOVE the way you think!Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Hoo boy. The things I could write could fill a book...
One of my passions when it comes to designing villains is always that "I make ze monsters BIG!" as the evil professor from Monster Warriors used to say. Essentially, I like villains who think big and act big, and yours certainly do both. In fact, reading through your descriptions, I found myself awed at the audacity, and more than a little jealous. Well done. I love it!
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It's a judgement call that happens to be wrong, and is rooted in some of the old evils that "classic" RPGs and MMOs used to come standard with. One of the things an old MMO will teach you is that not all shops buy your stuff for the same price, and you'll generally get more for it in a shop that deals with that particular type of item. If multiple shops sell the same items, you'll generally get the best deal in the shops that specialise in those items. That's why he SOs you sell to the "wrong" stores, you sell at half price and the ones you sell at those "buy only" vendors in Croatoa or the Shadow Shard or to vendors standing out in the open can be sell for as little as a tenth of the price.
Why it existed in old RPGs and MMOs I can't really say. I guess it's for the sake of realism from a time before game developers had a good sense of which parts of reality to keep and which to leave out, like needing to eat food with every step in early Ultima games or drop dead. Because contacts are not specialised stores, their prices are "worse" for it. And because contacts started selling enhancements a LONG time ago before the studio resolved to stop time-sinking its players, that's not a good way to buy.
If you want a practical answer to this, it's because stores used to only sell "Power 10" enhancements, which was a collection of 10 enhancements deemed the most popular, with all others becoming available MUCH later or at a lower Tier. Contacts, at one point, were selling non-Power-10 enhancements as soon as the corresponding Power 10 became available, but sold them at a higher cost to compensate for this.
In short, it's a legacy system built around impeding players and providing a time and money sink. -
Quote:I want to take a moment to sidestep the "heroes are responders" argument by saying that I simply don't agree with it. They CAN be, much like villains CAN be mercenaries, but I tend to give my heroes motivations as complex and contrived as my villains. Build a corporation to provide security to the whole world, serve as a shining example of heroism to inspire others, protect just a single loved one, save a friend trapped in the Null Void, etc. I CAN play heroes with no motivation other than responding to threats as they appear, but I find that after one or two of those, I want something more substantial. And those usually get deleted, too. I will always remember Insane Rick.Originally Posted by Lycantropus
Villains on the other hand, are instigators. They need choices that heroes or others can respond to. That's really hard in mission writing, but they either need variety in the types of missions, or more choices, and rewards for those choices that benefit the villain. When CoV was in Beta (or after live, I forget) I suggested that initial villain contacts should be based on motivation, as opposed to heroes that were based on origin. At least cater to the destroyer types that just want to break everything down, monarchs who want to rule the world, and the mercenary thugs (where the biggest direction of the villain game writing went) that just want to get rich.
Anyway, that's a lot of text, the tl/dr version is basically, heroes are responders, villains are instigators. Writing for heroes is easier than villains, and motivations should have been better catered to than the mission-giver's desires at CoV launch, but it looks like they're trying to get better (outside of that extended Dr Graves tutorial *shudder*. I like the Shining Stars... don't care for the Graves one at all.
Moment aside, I do agree with you on the subject of villains and their motivation, and the idea of having different starting contacts based on a villain's motivation is inspired. I'm ashamed I never thought of it. Kalinda vs. Burke tended to be a BIT like this, with Kalinda representing the path of cooperation with Arachnos while Burke represented the path of defiance against Arachnos, but that in itself is the problem because it wraps villain motivation around Arachnos. If you're sensing a redundancy of my speech, there's a reason for it - it's all about Arachnos, even today.
Having a variety of starting contacts with even just basic, simple missions might have been fun. The game actually has contacts to that effect scattered about, when you think about it. The mad/malicious people could have started with Vivacious Verandi and her quest to just start all manner of chaos, you could have had a mercenary contact like Vince Dubrowski, someone like Dran McArthur to cater to the empire-building villains and so on. Granted, I listed a lot more motivations than there's reasonable chance to make contacts for, but I was being specific. A lot of those can be combined into the same general storylines. And, granted, it's kind of hard to make an "empire building" storyline without it being origin-specific, but I feel that can be sidestepped by having the player work AGAINST a variety of enemy origins, but receive abstract benefits. "Power" and "Money" work well here.
In general, I agree that a villain's motivation is an integral part of that villain's character. A villain without a good motivation can still be cool based on look, powers or specific interactions, but a lot of the time, the WRONG motivation can utterly ruin a villain. That's actually the downfall of a lot of JRPGs like the Final Fantasy series, as well as many anime TV and OVA series - the villain, when boiled down to what he or she wants at the end - is just laughable. For some reason, it always seems to boil down to either "The world is imperfect, so I must destroy it!" "I will become a god!" or "We ask only for war!" - an actual and horribly narmtasting line from Front Mission Evolved. I get that a villain can be cool and respected and threatening, but when you have to stop and ask: "Really? That's why you're doing it? REALLY?!?" then that takes a lot of the impact away.
Overall, I find a villain's motivation to be an integral part of a villain's character. And not just that, but allowing a villain to act on his motivation is pretty important, too. Really, I find a villain to be the most entertaining when that villain is acting out that motivation of his, because that's when the villain really stands up on his own merits. -
I haven't read through all of the responses, but I fear I'm forgetting what I want to say, so here's a partial response with some observations in it:
First of all, I added a couple more "motivations" to the list. Specifically, I added "kicks and giggles" and "revenge." Again, it's not a complete list or even a meaningful guide, I just felt that people were describing motivations I hadn't really covered.
Secondly, I'm seeing a lot of villains who are either anti-villains (far-end Rogue) or, on the flip side, evil because they're insane. This is something I wanted to address, and there's a reason I didn't add "insanity" to the list of motivations. That reason is that, to me at least, insanity is the sort of no-answer answer to the question of why a character is evil. It's the equivalent of "a wizard did it" when explaining plot points. Obviously, that doesn't make it wrong, it just doesn't explain anything.
Personally, speaking of insane villains (and I do have a few fit the bill), I like to think that there's something more to their evil than just abstract insanity. I like to view insanity as the catalyst which brings up more deep-seated reasons for one to turn to villainy. Think of the "protagonist" from Falling Down, for instance. Yes, he snapped and can probably be called insane by the end, but his craziness is an extension of the frustrations he felt in his life. I don't mind insanity being an answer, I just mind it being the ONLY answer. Again, I don't claim that's a bad thing. I just tend to want more.
Anti-villains, on the flip side, are also strange to me. This has to do with my "evil by choice" notion, in the sense that a misguided villain or one forced into villainy against his will can be "fixed" by removing the circumstances that keep the person a villain. Whether he can be forgiven is another matter entirely, but he can be fixed nevertheless. A villain who chose the path that led him into evil, however, isn't one who can be easily fixed, if fixed at all, because this person made a conscious choice. He isn't "damaged" and thus forced to be evil. He chose to do what he chose to do and he accepted the circumstances. You can no more fix a villain set in his ways than you can change people's political or religious views once they've accepted them consciously.
Even though they're on pretty much polar opposite sides of the "likeability" spectrum, I see pure madmen and pure anti-villains as very close to each other in terms of making a face turn, almost as though the likelihood curve is a circle where the far left and far right sit side by side. Anti-villains are practically heroes with extenuating circumstances while insane villains are practically victims of their madness. In either case, if a villain is made cool enough to where people want to keep seeing more of him, then a face turn becomes very likely, if not in official continuity, then at least in fan fiction.
At least that's how I see it, but I welcome argument to the contrary.
Finally, and this is somewhat sideways of the subject, but I LOVE the idea of having a character serve as a remote-controlled entity while the REAL character is never seen on-screen. Great idea there, and I'll definitely be using it
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Recently, I've been banging on about "true heroes this" and "true heroes that" and every time villains came up, I'd just brush the topic aside with some form of "that's for another discussion." Well... I think now might be a good time to have that discussion. So, without further beating about the bush, let me ask you the following question:
What do your villains want?
Of course, this presumes that you actually have villains to begin with and that these villains do, indeed, want something specific, or at least definable. If that's the case, then please try to be as precise and specific as possible. Villain as a fictional thing is so diverse that trying to be vague just muddies the waters and involves far too many different branches. If you can define a general attitude that all of your villains share, or that you as a player prefer to give your villains, that would be best. If you can't really boil it down to just one thing, then just go villain-by-villain give me a couple of what you consider to be your most interesting.
If I had to break my own rules and give broad general motivations, I'd break them down like this:
Personal gain: Be this money, power, influence, fame or eternal life, your goal is to get something for yourself. The evil you do is a means to that particular end.
Misguided idealism: Whether you want to save everyone, purge everyone, control everyone or what have you, you perform evil deeds because you honestly believe it's the right thing to do. Whether you recognise that what you're doing is bad or believe it's actually good, you do this because you must.
Megalomania: You believe you're better than everyone else and, naturally, deserve better than everyone else. The evil you do, you do because other people simply don't matter, so if you end up hurting them... Well, who cares?
Higher purpose: You do what you do not because you want to, but because that's simply what you have to do. Your actions are out of your hands, you have been chosen for this. You don't see any evil you do as your responsibility, because you really feel you have no choice.
Pure malice: You like to see people suffer, you like to see good things destroyed, and sometimes, you just like being bad. You do evil because that's simply what you enjoy.
Kicks and giggles: Maybe you're bored, maybe you enjoy a challenge or maybe you just enjoy fighting. You do evil not because you necessarily want to be evil or even because there's anything to gain, but just for your own personal entertainment.
Revenge: At some point, somebody did something to you that you cannot forgive, and have now devoted your life to exacting brutal, unfair revenge. And not necessarily just against the people who wronged you.
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That's just a general guideline, though. Don't feel like you have to stick to it.
Personally, I like to give my villains some kind of ultimate purpose that they're always striving to achieve, but never quite able to go all the way. The purpose itself is usually evil (destroy all humans, conquer the world, take over people's minds, etc.), but the means by which my villains achieve it is also evil in itself. These are people that often have morals, honour and even basic human decency. It's just that they have all of those sometimes, usually when things are going their way anyway. But when things go South, my villains WILL prove exactly what makes them evil, because they're rotten at the core.
I like to ascribe to a "villain by choice" rhetoric, though by that I don't mean a Saturday morning cartoon villain who sings a song about "I do it all because I'm evil!" In our everyday lives, we often have to make choices. Not necessarily between good or evil, or even right and wrong, but often between ourselves and others. Mine are "villains by choice" not because they chose to be evil, but because time and again, they chose to do things that hurt others, destroy lives and doom others to a grim fate. Though they never explicitly chose to be evil, it is still the choices they make that define them as villains. These are not misguided, confused or "salvageable" people They made their choice.
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But that's just me and mine. What do your villains want? -
Looks like I'm about 20 pages too late, but I have to say this nevertheless:
Thank you!
This is amazing news, and for a whole lot of not entirely related reasons. In fact, let me count the ways in which this is awesome:
1. A developer worked on this project in her free time, just because we asked for it. Awesome!
2. We kept asking, and our voices were heard, giving us what we wanted. Awesome!
3. This brings a ton of variety to female costume design that's not limited to just being the distaff counterpart and girlfriend to the make hero. Awesome!
4. It's just a cool thing to do, and that, my friends, is awesome. I honestly can't find a single thing to complain about with this addition. -
New powersets means new concepts open up, old concepts are made what they should have been all along, and it broadens our toolset for creating our characters exactly as they were meant to be. For me, City of Heroes has never been about good or bad, cool or stupid, strong or weak. It's always been about one thing and one thing only - how close can I get to what's inside my head? The closer I can get, the better the result is, and the more tools we have to work with, the closer we can get.
*edit*
More specifically, though, I'm always looking for new stuff that's unlike anything we've had before. Redundant stuff is cool for improving the finer points of fine-tuning a concept, but breaking new ground opens entire new avenues of possibility which were never even conceivable before. -
Where does the question of "aura-only body parts" stand, then? By this I mean, for instance, an option for Robotic Arms that doesn't have any 3D mesh or texturing - no arm model at all - and is represented only by a effect. Gaming is full of concepts like these, such as a very familiar type of meteorite demon that's essentially rocks connected by green fire into a humanoid body.
On the one hand, it IS a costume part since it messes with the 3D mesh, but on the other hand, it shouldn't require much 3D art, should it? What would be involved in giving us aura arms or aura upper legs? Or an aura head, why not? -
I'm not sure if Dark Astoria even offers Astrals (I suspect it does), but I do know it drops threads, so doesn't that just divide your efforts between two no-cooperative modes of progression? For instance, say I only have 9 Astrals, in obtaining them, I've also earned around 30 Threads? Would it be smarter to go with Threads, then?
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Quote:I'm sorry, but I couldn't disagree with you more. There's a reason people say that greatness is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. A good story is good almost entirely based on how it is told. Ideas are cheap. Any even moderately-savvy movie-goer can give you good idea after good idea all day and never run out, but a good idea told in a sentence is nothing more than an empty, unrealised concept.Originally Posted by New_Dark_Age
It isn't the way you write that makes your character good. Its the concept you have. Having a direct to the point story/description increases the probability of other players seeing that concept. So you would probably have twice as many people congratulating you on your story if you just wrote more directly and wrote to capture attention and put spaces in your bio.
Imagine, if you will, trying to retell Luke Skywalker's story at the end of A New Hope. "He's a young boy who got drafted in a war and blew up the Death Star." Exciting! Maybe you see it differently, but I see nothing about this character that I care to explore, because that one sentence tells me nothing about him that's interesting. It's a statement of fact, and unless that idea you're talking about is pure divine providence, that fact is not interesting.
It is my experience that some of storytelling's best stories are also the simplest, most basic ones, made great not because they are such novel and unheard-of ideas, but rather because the people who put them together were very, very skilled.
This, really, is a large reason why contemporary writing in City of Heroes is in such a sorry state - because it does what you suggest. It boils every story down to its bare bones essentials that even a distracted 8-year-old could stick out to the end, and as such simply excludes everything that makes a good story good. It gives me no reason to care about any of the characters therein and thus I lack any investment. It fails to give me any any real emotion because that takes pacing, build up, structure and payoff. It fails to give me anything more than a plot synopsis would.
The soul of a story is in the telling, and a character's biography is that character's story. Granted, it's a very SHORT story and there certainly is a science to making one, but it is a story nonetheless. -
Quote:Wait... What Merits turn into Shards and how does one do that?Originally Posted by Trilby
T1 Alpha, shards (a total of 12 merits turned into shards if you are doing it just via merits)
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Quote:Many times through earlier level content, you're sent to save Crey facilities under attack by various villains. All over the city, you see billboards advertising Crey products. On numerous occasions, Crey actually help provide supplies to forward your story.Originally Posted by Agent White
I'll be honest, I didn't even know it was meant to be a secret that Crey was supposed to be a more 'neutral' group at first before uncovering them. The game is pretty hamfisted about them being villains from word one, I mean, there's no point you can run into any of them in any area and they're -not- immediately hostile to you. It's really less "Are they evil? I dunno, HMM" and more "Ok, they're clearly evil, I wonder why".
Just because you've never run into Crey Security, that doesn't mean Crey themselves aren't part of the story. Until I12, the Midnight Club didn't exist as an actual faction, but it was still well explored in the story. You keep hearing about their old labs, about their old researchers, you meet former members, you use their arcane knowledge, you run across their old books, many people remember all the things they did in their heyday.
Once you get to level 30, you're already starting to piece together that Crey is an evil corrupt corporation, but it's featured in storylines far earlier than that. -
Quote:So? People don't want to read, I've grown to accept this, but I fail to see how compromising my story is going to solve that. None of what you suggested as good strikes me as something I'd remember after having read it.Originally Posted by New_Dark_Age
People dont understand, especially on Virtue, that no one wants to read a novel so if your character isnt summarized quickly in your bio like an Encyclopedia article...its worthless cause no ones going to read pass the first 3 sentences unless it grabs their attention. Sorry Virtue ...
This is the old "brevity is the heart of wit" argument all over again, and it's one that's never going to be settled. YOU aren't going to read longer bios. That's fine. I've had plenty of people call me up specifically to congratulate me on my extremely long ones.
There's no one "right" way to write a story because there isn't one single type of audience in this game. -
Quote:Playing the bad guy doesn't make me feel bad. I have plenty of villains who would scare the pants off Mr. Phipps. It's playing THAT KIND of villain who brings only vile and no class that makes me feel underwhelmed. You very much CAN do evil without seeking to revolt your audience.Originally Posted by Demonic_Spark
I have to agree with others, if playing the bad guy makes you feel bad, then maybe a bad guy ain't for you. As for playing the bad guys you want to play, yeah you can RP that all day, but unless you make the game up (and rules) yourself, I don't ever really see any game being the way I myself want it, but I am just fine with the way this one is!
Take a look at Lord Recluse, for instance. Yes, Arachnos as a whole do some very, very bad things that, when you get down to them, will make your skin crawl. But Recluse himself? Everything any story of his comes up, it always focuses on the ways in which he's awesome and glosses over the ways in which he's repugnant.
He's powerful, both personally and in terms of followers. He's smart, enough to usurp and run his own villain organisation, to say nothing of his own sovereign state. Every time his name comes up, it's treated with either respect and admiration or respect and fear, and every time his name makes a splash. Daos and Mako and Brass and the others may be trying to play their little games and chase their little agendas, but every time Recluse gets involved, everyone shuts up and listens because he IS the big guy in the isles.
That's the kind of villain I want to be - the cool kind. If that doesn't involve murder, kidnapping, selling people for body parts, murdering civilians and so forth, then so be it. I want a villain with a cause above and beyond being evil, and whose character is expressed in more than the evil he or she does. The kind of villain I want to be is defined by his dreams and aspirations, not his body count or his penchant for cruelty. Those are, ultimately, just means to an end. What that end is defines what kind of villain we're dealing with, and most of what's out there for player villains is vastly underwhelming.
Mind you, it's not underwhelming because it's not "evil" enough. It's plenty evil. It's underwhelming because "evil" is all it is. -
Quote:I just checked, and you are correct. I can't. Well, that makes the whole thing moot then, doesn't it? Since I can't make Astrals... And there wouldn't be a point even if I could, then the conversion idea goes down the drain.Originally Posted by Mazey
You can't unfortunately.
What you saw was a 1-1 conversion from astrals to shards.
A single astral merit is worth either 4 threads or 1 shard on any character. Threads themselves cannot be converted to shards at all.
Well, I guess "never mind then" is the order of the day. Aside from running the WTF if and when I feel like it, there really doesn't seem to be a point to trying to make stuff with Shards if I'm going to want to spend the majority of my time in Dark Astoria unlocking the other slots and hoping for Thread and Component drops.
Too bad. -
Quote:Isn't there? Let me check.Originally Posted by Necrotech_Master
i wish there was a thread to shard option, personally i like how shards work but shards are only good for getting alphas
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I like to call this idea "Combat Teleport," and I've always wished we could have that. In my ideal world, this would have an instantaneous (say, 0.1 to 0.5 seconds) or near-instantaneous animation, very short range on the order of 10-20 yards, and use the basic reticle, have no hover time. This would then be used to reposition yourself across the field without the danger of getting hung up on chairs, having doors blocked on you or bumping your head on a low ceiling.
Granted, care needs to be taken to ensure this power does not top the long-distance travel capability of actual Teleport, but this can be done via recharge. At base, Teleport travel 100 yards with a 2s animation. With a 20-yard Combat Teleport of a .5s animation, you'd cover that distance in 5 hops for a total of 2.5s. Now add a recharge of two seconds to the power and you bump this up to 12.5s, and that's well within tolerance. -
How about earning threads, but turning those into Shards and gaining components that way? I mean, I know that pure Thread/Shard paths aren't ideal... And are pretty much rock bottom the slowest, but if both of those actually are viable, wouldn't Thread->Shard be the better option?
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Quote:I'd have thought the first thing you thought about would be "who can I chastise today?"Originally Posted by GuyPerfect
The first thing I generally think when I wake up is "What can I get to eat," but not so much "What can I complain about today?"
For completeness' sake, I posted this in the evening after the second long play session of falling out of geysers that misshoot for no discernable reason. Furthermore, I didn't post to complain, but rather to suggest. Specifically, to suggest that if the Shadow Shard is ever to get any real traffic through it, it needs a more dependable method of transportation. The cop-out teleporters and cop-out jetpack are only workarounds that try to avoid the core problem, and the core problem is that the geysers are fundamentally flawed.
The reason the geysers are flawed is rooted in their basic design. They're a means of travel that assumes a fixed landing point - many shoot you towards VERY small floating islands - but has no way of actually guaranteeing accuracy of any kind. The geysers follow a ballistic trajectory with no means of adjustment to account for any variables. That sounds fine - you can just ask players to turn off their travel powers - until you realise that not all variables are even capable of being controlled.
More than travel powers affects a geyser's trajectory. Any sort of movement-boosting power throws a spanner in the works, and there are several of those which cannot be turned off. Swift, Hurdle, Quickness, some Inventions bonuses and so on. This creates a system that gives no means of calibration either to the system itself or to its operator, yet is used in a way which requires significant precision.
Yes, players are given SOME air control, but even that is a double-edged sword. The more you try to correct, the more air speed you lose. You have no real means to gauge distance, speed and landing spot aside from years of experience, and despite me actually having those years of experience with the geysers, I still misjudge all the time as the window of opportunity between when you're close enough to judge a landing spot and when you actually land is very, very short and our control very, very sluggish. If you use powers that enhance your air control, you get more precision, but said air control eats up a LOT more air speed, meaning that if you try to control, you fall short. Yes, I've tried it. It doesn't work.
Finally, the entire system makes second-hand use of the game's fairly basic physics system, but what that means is every time anything on the physics changes, the system is thrown off-balance, and I'm fairly certain something change at least once at some point.
Now, you can ignore all this and just see me as complaining for the sake of complaining as you have, but my intention is to bring up all of the ways in which the geysers themselves are a problem in order to highlight that they CANNOT be fixed. They need to be replaced with something else. What that something else is and how closely it replicates existing geysers, I can't say. Personally, I'd like for something that gives us those exact, no-clip jumps NPCs make sometimes in order to retain the thrill of the jump without the "thrill" of falling off islands over and over again.
Yes, I'm sure that they can probably be recalibrated to account for Swift and Hurdle and any physics changes that have been made, but this has to be done on a per-geyser basis and is most likely a ton of work. This ensures that they're nearly impossible to maintain, meaning that a better system needs to be implemented.
Were this back in 2005 or 2006 when it seemed like the Shard was simply entirely forgotten, I wouldn't have said anything on the matter. Why I bring this up NOW (in addition to that's what I was playing at the time), is because it seems like the Shard will have a major, MAJOR role in stories soon to be told. If it does, then its basic, fundamental method of getting around needs to work, and it needs to work well. We can't afford to go through the same botch that the place was back in 2004. -
Quote:You forgot to insert "care bear" in there.Originally Posted by lordlondis
You shouldn't have been a villain, you should have been a baseball player. If playing a bad guy in a video game makes you queasy you should stop playing bad characters and maybe watch some My Little Pony.
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Recently, I commented on a global channel that it looks like Shards are being phased out now that the "solo Incarnate path" of Dark Astoria isn't going to drop Shards or Shard components, but it was explained to me that there would still be plenty of things to do that still drop those that I'd want to do despite chasing Incarnate progress. Morality and Alignment tips were brought up, which is a very good point, as were most non-Incarnate TFs.
So, since I'm learning new stuff recently, I wanted to ask this in plain text: Come I22, will there be any point in Shards at all, or should I just try creating Alpha stuff with Threads, instead?
Now, what prompted me to ask this question was I finally did run an iTrial - Behaviour Adjustment Facility (confused the hell out of me, in case you're curious) and left with two rare thread components, around 5 Threads, an Astral Merit and an Empyrean Merit. This caused me to finally check out what the Empyrean and Astral vendors are actually selling, and to my surprise, they do sell "Shard Vouchers" that can be redeemed by any character, I'm assuming including the one who purchased them. These seem to be a 1-to-1 conversion.
So this got me thinking... I already have an Uncommon Alpha enhancement slotted (just now, after tonight's ITF), so what would it take to make a Rare level-shift one? Well, using Shards, a Notice of the Well, which is either a WST or I believe 56 Shards. What would it take to make one using threads? Well, four Uncommon components, each 60 Threads in cost, so 240 threads. One of my concerns about Dark Astoria was that Alpha was getting punished since Thread components are five times as expensive as Shard components, and I'm not sure Thread drop rates are five times as common as Shards are in the normal game, but here's the thing...
I have about 5 threads. If I dump that Astral to 4 Threads and that Empyrean to 20 threads, that'll give me around 30 Threads, give or take. If I then cross those over to Shards via Vouchers, that's already half a NotW... Or, like, 3/4 of one, I can't say off-hand. Now, granted, an Emp merit isn't something I expect to see in Dark Astoria since I don't believe those drop out of anything, but my point is that if we really CAN turn Threads into Shards at a 1-to-1 basis, then isn't it far smarter to disassemble disassemble my components to threads and then turn them into Shards since that's much less expensive in terms of total number?
Again, I want to stress that I truly and honestly do not know what I'm talking about. I checked the in-game conversion interface, I looked at ParagonWiki and I'm inferring the rest. So seriously - is it better to work with Shards or Threads when working on your Alpha stuff? -
Yeah, I use the GvE Jump Pack and the Steampunk Jump Pack for that. However, even so, it's still difficult to navigate and, really, quite a bit of a chore. If it worked well, I wouldn't really mind the difficulty, but when I do my best to prepare and control and I still fall short and faceplant into a wall, that's just no fun.
Worse still, if you miss a jump by even just a little and forgot to pack your jet pack that morning, you go all the way back to the beginning. See, if I were returned to the last stable platform I was on before jumping, like in the next-gent Prince of Persia game, that wouldn't be so bad. I miss one jump, I go back to the island and try it again. But no. If I miss the jump to the island with the FBZ Horta Vine - the very last jump farthest from the start - and drop down, I get sent all the way back to FBZ, and I have to repeat all the island-hopping I did to get there, only to fall down on that jump AGAIN since it's bugged, and that's if I don't miss a jump along the way.
I mean, I get what they were going for, and I honestly defended the geysers once upon a time. And since I posted this, I made many successful jumps without being in danger of falling. The trouble is that this is both in stark contrast to pretty much anywhere in the rest of the game (leading to people avoiding the Shard), but it's also needlessly punitive for even small mistakes, and that can get frustrating REALLY fast.
The first character I ever took to the Shard was Samuel Tow himself, back before jump packs and jet packs, before geysers were on the map, back before even the co-out teleporters. If I wanted to go to that island "at the top of the world" in the Cascades, that meant going all the way along the One-Way path and nailing the final jump which is both crooked and aimed at a very tiny platform. If I missed that, I dropped on an island below and had to circle all the way around THE ENTIRE ZONE. See, the One-Way Path is true to its name - every island has a geyser only to the next one in the path, but not one to the previous one. To get to the start of the One-Way Path, I needed to scale Crimson falls. To get to Crimson Falls, I needed to follow the other path back to the beginning. That's essentially a round trip all around the entire zone. And if I missed the jump AGAIN? SOL.
I'm not sure if people these days can really appreciate how annoying this is. We're used to thinking: "Oh, it's just one jump. I'll use my jet pack/jump pack/temporary power of some sort just for that one." Back then, I HAD no alternative. Temp powers disappeared at the end of the missions that gave them, temp travel powers didn't exist and no powers had been sold for money. I literally had my Super Jump and that's it. If I fell off, there was no catching myself. If I took a wrong jump, there was no going back unless I took the long way around.
I stuck with the Shard and with its geysers through that kind of experience, but I just realise that the game no longer has a place for this kind of frustrating navigation. I want to keep the geysers if at all possible. I really like the concept behind them. But unless someone can make sure that those are ALWAYS accurate no matter what auto powers we have that we can't turn off, they WILL keep people out of there. -
I agree with the general premise of the thread. I've always felt that, with the exception of villains needing at least one more zone, new zones really aren't that necessary. Zones are cool as a persistent overworld, but for the most part, we spend most of our time inside instances. THOSE are the places where the environment artists need to spend the bulk of their time.
Frankly, I've always felt that old office and warehouse maps should have gotten at least one new room per issue and at least a few new layouts that I don't already know by heart. That's even before we consider entire new tilesets.
We can use a full mansion tileset, a school one, a hospital one, a museum one, an airport one, an apartment building one, a subway one and that's just off the top of my head.