Windbourne

Also what happens in your scheme to groups of friends, or alts, when they suspend their accounts for real world financial reasons? CoX is a luxury not a priority, I'll certainly pay my morgage before I pay my subscription fee. If I'm a supergroup of one, with major alt-itis, and I cancel my account for six months . . . well then I'm going to come back owing close to 6000 credits in base upkeep.

Until I pay it I'm not going to have access to the base, at which point I might want to disolve my group and just join another larger organization.

Running is a good tactic for ranged enemies, or enemies who have some sort of heal ability on recharge, but otherwise . . . well they are going to die anyway so why waste everyone's time?

The exception would be that freak, providing he brought the rest of his new "gang" back with him as reinforcements, he'll still die, but they may be able to get him a bit of revenge.

Players are smart, so enemies should be smart too.

/signed. I'm all for a trip to the moon.

I have a problem with the merits/time equation itself . . . I'm still paying the same money every month whether I'm a kid with all night to play video games, or a factory worker with maybe an hour a day to waste.

If you have the skill to do a task force in thirty minutes, well that's your reward to being GOOD. It's called skill, you know the shortcuts, the enemies, who/what you need to assemble before you begin.

Objectively what this setup tells me is that the more time I have to play the more I'll be rewarded by the game. More time spend equals more tockens, which leads to better stuff, an easier run, and quicker collection of those tokens.

Also, subjectively, how long do you think it will take for this "speed" concept to come crashing down when people realize that by sitting still on "quick" missions they can drive up the number of tokens they get for an easy run?

Lets hope not long because a practiced "raiding guild" decked out in the best equipment is going to run those TF's a LOT faster than any regular group ever could. Which economically will lead to your having to join one of those groups if you want to run the task force and actually get something from it. Just like what happened in WOW.

As I see it Merit "rewards" are just another penalty that discourages me from playing, and certainly from paying to play.

Right now I'm laid off, but during a normal day I work ten or more hours, sleep eight hours, spend two hours commuting, and an hour cooking/eating. That leaves me about five hours to do anything else.

Being a clean person one of those hours should go to cleaning up the house, taking a bath, brushing my teeth, etc . . . so we cut it down to four hours. . . What am I going to do with that time?

Well one thing is play city of heroes, but I need to get the most fun and rewards out of my playtime that I can. Which means I probably should play mostly solo since waiting for a group to form isn't time efficient.

I pay the same money per time every month whether I play COX or not, whether my characters gain levels or not, and whether I'm bored stiff or not. So to keep my business I have to be able to get on, play, and actually accomplish something in a short amount of time.

That cuts out Taskforces in general, which advertise that you need a number of hours to play through them even after getting a group together. And now I need those task forces to get merits?

That's a non starter. I pay my money, spend a good amount of my time on the game every month, and thus deserve to be able to get worthwhile rewards.

Right now I know most players are probably college kids, or schoolboys, but as time goes on your base is going to age. There will be more 30+ folks like me wanting to play an MMO, and the time issue will become larger.

Skill should be the measure of how you progress, not how many hours per month you can mindlessly grind through repetitive content.

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I remember when it was based on total worth, so it was not unheard of to be paying 50k+ a month for that same "free plot" you got to use. When they finally made it based on plot size, I settled on 200k at a time since that was what my wife and I could afford and still be able to save additional funds. Let's see: 200k for 2 people vs. 800 for 3 people. Really, you have a strong case there.

Seriously, the more people complain about going from free to a pittance of a fee, the less sympathy I have for them. Do a mission and earn your rent. If you wait for the power to go out, you are only paying every 6 weeks anyway.

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LOL. I remember playing Scott adams games on the C64 and not having any graphics, and I remember Mud's and Moos where you not only had no graphics, but often the text strings you typed in didn't work quite right. But . . . saying things used to be worse doesn't mean they should be worse again, or that they couldn't be better.

Speaking of better . . . right now I have a huge room in my tiny base that only contains a "Startup" giving me energy and control. One way to make this extra space more useful would be to allow us to move the entrance into it and delete our starter "Secret entrance" room.

Subjectively the big problem I see is that people speed through the task force to get the merit, skipping all the enemies in between, and leaving behind those team mates who actually want to enjoy the scenery, the enemies, or even get the XP. It makes me not want to play in a task force at all.

Objectively farming is inherant in any system where one piece of loot drops X% of the time from a certain enemy. People learn about it and simply kill that one enemy until he gives out the candy they want. If you want to get rid of farming you need to randomize the loot!

Give out a random recipe with X number of random ingrediants, that makes something with Y number of random effects. Sort of like what Diablo Two did with all of it's items.

Subjectively when people learn that enemy X no longer has any candy to give out they'll stop farming him, and probably start whining at you for removing the candy, but . . . the farming will stop.

Subjectively people enjoy showing off loot that is rare. Even if it stinks they'll laugh about it providing it's unique. Plus when you never know what you'll get your freed from farming enemy X and can explore the rest of the game. A lot of us like that.

Objectively the system MMO's have adopted for granting loot causes the farming. The merit system may limit it if the costs are lowered, but at the expense of making "rare" items more common and causing people to concentrate their farming on things that do give out merits, rather than actually playing the game they way they want. That's rushing, changing toons every few days, etc . . .

Subjectively it's simply not fun to have a common item, it's also not fun to do the same thing 1 million times over. I do that at work, they pay me because it's not fun. It's boring. Are you going to pay me to farm merits?

Of course some people would say your paying me with merits for farming these task forces and story arcs. I then use the money to buy the candy I want. So objectively your paying me to stop playing the game and just farm things in a certain way. ::grins::

If you want to get rid of farming this isn't a great way to do it.

I'm glad your huge base is only costing you 1200, but my tiny one is costing me 800! That's only a few hundred less.

Our not so "Super" group is just three of my friends from real life who got the game a few monthes ago and want to play together.

We have the smallest lot and no teleporters at all. Just a couple storage racks (and we need more for our salvage already), a vault access, an inspiration storage, and an invention table.

It's really ridiculous how we jumped from paying nothing for our tiny base, to paying only 400 less than you are for your huge super-base.

Worse that 800 is coming from 3 friends, and I'm the only one who really plays fanatically so it's pretty much coming from my level 35. Which crimps into me saving up for other things, such as our first teleporter, or a medical bay.

Our base it the smallest, we're just three friends with a bunch of alts, and we have not teleports, just some storage racks and an invention table, yet this month rather than having the free "small" base we had to somehow pay 800. As stated all of our racks would have been just one previously and we'd have had the smallest possible base/no rent.

Madscientist has a good point about the level bar . . . I made a character last night to try out and nobody was on to make a pact with . . . so I had the choice of either trying out the power set and being too high a level to pact. I generally don't know if I "like" a character until at least level twelve. That's my personal bar. Sometimes (if I do a sewer run) it takes longer than that because the run levels you a lot faster than solo missions/grinding. Generally if a toon hits level 19 without me deleting it, then it's golden.

Subjective:

(1) I like the idea of sheilds as a pool power, I keep wanting to have a defender with a sheild, it just makes sense in my head.

(2) Shield powers without a melee weapon just look funky. I know that would also be the case for sheilds/defenders as they have no melee, but it would look better to be crouched behind a sheild shooting a gun or blasting a fireball than PUNCHING at the enemy! That just looks aweful.

(3) For the elemental shields . . . the shield looks awesome but there is generally no armor set to match. This makes the sheild really stand out unless you take the matching armor set, which is . . . wait a second . . . also in the same set of primary/secondary power slots, and thus unavailable with the shields!

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The big problem with your suggestion though is that what you describe is better suited in-game playwise for Dominators. What it sounds like you want is a Pain based set for dominators with holds, immobilizes, and status effects based on inflicting mental pain, with one or two low level heals.

That actually sounds like a really good idea.


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Your exactly right, what I'm describing in the initial post is "Pain Domination" and it certainly would be something I could see a Dominator or Mastermind using effectively. My problem with it being "Pain Emptahy" is that when the developers opened up the topic of "Pain Domination" they specifically said that they had a problem with giving us empathy, they simply didn't think it was villainous.

Just renaming the set is both a kop-out and a let down.

If your going to give us empathy, just do it. Some villains do feel empathy for members within their own cause, or for underlings who are useful and should be kept around (and kept loyal) for future missions. I (unlike the devs) have never had a problem with villains gaining the empathy powerset.

However for "Pain Domination" I'm looking for something else. Heres a sample of what I want to see:

Inflict Pain: The target and everyone close to him suffers from a quick blast of intense pain. This causes them to be momentarilly immobolized and take moderate damage over time.

Agony: The target suffers intense pain causing them to move and attack much more slowly and with lowered accuracy. The target also takes moderate damage over time.

Remove Pain: For a short time your target feels no pain. This buff heals the target a small bit and gives them some decent resistances to all damage types for several minutes.

Inflict Pain: a single enemy falls to the ground and wriths in agony while you or your pets are able to attack them.

Transfer Pain: Heals all allies in a 25 ft radius of you and transfers that pain in the form of damage to all enemies within the same radius.

Numb Pain: While this toggle is activated members of your group are numb to pain. This gives them extra resistence to all damage, but as they are no longer aware of being hit their defense goes down.

The concept is Pain Domination, I buff my friends and hurt my enemies by total control over pain itself. This is the exact reverse of empathy, it's a set for people who like to inflict, feel, and manipulate pain.

Objectively I say what we have is empathy renamed not Pain Domination. Subjectively these are my suggestions for an actual "Pain domination" set. It's what was advertised, even at the start of this topic: The antithesis of Empathy.

This is subjective, but I would find a changing booth in my base to be quite useful. It would let me put all my storage and crafting tools right next to where I'm messing with the new build. For fun you could even use the current "Bathroom doors" as the model for the changing room. ::grins::

Ok, a bit of reading has suggested that the problem has to do with too much data flowing around if your gaining XP every time you should and having it divided between your two pact characters. This may or may not be true, but if it is I have an idea that should fix the problem.

Add in a new bonus power for pact characters, give it a moderate to slow recharge time, and let it divide the points when used. You can still have the points auto-divide on entering and exiting a zone, but even if I'm on a sewer run or in the middle of a huge mission I can hit that button every 2-4 minutes and get my XP.

This "kludge" fix also has the bonus effect of giving a skilled player who knows he has earned enough XP within the instance a new strategic decision. Does he take the level right away, or wait until he needs the resulting bonus? Leveling improves all your powers, but waiting could save you in a tight spot later in the mission.

Which transforms my current issue with the Level Pacts into something people would actually enjoy. I can see wanting that option extended to all of my characters . . . Including those outside of pacts. The current bug thus becomes a useful feature and everyone is happy.

Implimenting this for all players would also cause the amount of data flowing in and out of your system to drop significantly. You'd be getting one number 300, instead of 40, 30, 20, 10, 15, 15, 20, 20, 30, 10, 15, 10, 5, 40, 20, 10 from every player! That should save a lot of bandwidth and improve performance quality.

The additional power wouldn't be too hard to program either. All it needs to do is trigger the same code your already using to divide XP whenever we enter or leave an instance. It's almost a kludge fix.

To impliment it for all players you'd just need to start everyone out level pacted with themselves. You wouldn't even need a line of code to check for the pact that way, just need a pointer to show where each half of the xp is going.

Edit: Oh you would want a line of code to make sure you didn't show yourself as a "Level pact friend", that would look wierd. lol

Lets hope they get the fix in soon then, this is almost worse than losing a few points here or there for the lowest levels.

Take the sewer run for example . . . it's a great way to go from one to ten, but it's suicide for a pact-mate now. You keep going lower and lower and not levelling until you finally die, gain your levels, and run back?

It's possible, but it's annoying and unless the whole group is going to wipe your going to have to either leave it and seek another or try to find your way back down to them alone, taking who knows how much time.

I say almost because it depends on how many points are lost. If it's one or two every once in a while well . . . I'm already accepting half XP anyway, but if it's a lot or happens often that could cause some people to get mad and give up on the pact idea altogether. Which wouldn't be cool.

Hmmm . . . what I'm going to suggest is sort of a cheat but it should work . . .

Why not go back to the very basics, I'm talking 1980's level programming here, and use two string files? One attached to the character, and one attached to the power?

Then you could have a pointer in your partical program that would grab all the needed data from the characters $tring file, write it to the power $tring variable and poof, instant animation.

This gets rid of the problem where a power starts out customized and then loses it's color as it hits a villain, while not increasing memory use/bandwidth that much at all. After all those memory problems were why we used strings back when computers had less memory and storage than todays calculators and cell phones!

The new routine could default to using the old data should it ever encounter a null string, so corrupted or missing data wouldn't cause any huge problems. Sure it's tedious work, but . . . it would give us some cool abilities.

Plus since your not changing the entire engine, just adding some pointer code and a couple string files you can do it a bit at a time. Start out with one powerset and see how it works, then add another set every few months/weeks/etc . . . until you finally have it done.

I have to agree that not getting XP until I change zones or leave a mission is annoying. Especially on those days when I'm bored and just want to solo street sweep away tons of enemies. I have to frequently log out and back in just to get my XP to show!

However overall I love levelling pacts. I work nights most often and seldom get to play with my friends, but when I do play at night I generally level faster than they do, so this is a great way for us to "team up" and work together on something in game.

My one complaint is that I can't pact my old characters and now I feel a bit guilty when I want to play one of them because my RL friends could wind up getting half XP for nothing if they play the pact character and I'm tooling around with my old favorite.

I'd suggest that after level 5 you get the one time ability to pact with another toon of your level, just to let old characters team up.

If you want you could have this ability refresh if you remain outside a pact for five levels. That would let you dump a pact-mate that wasn't working out and then re-pact with someone else. But you'd pay a price. It would also let you delete a pact character you don't like without screwing your friend out of the ability to be pacted again.

Well the biggest problem I see is that, as is, this isn't the antithesis of Empathy, it's pretty much just empathy renamed so you could stick in on the villains without being laughed at. It talks a lot about suppressing or removing pain, and that's fine but . . .

Where is the villainous side? When do I get to cause the enemies to fall over and writh on the ground in agony? When do I get to slow them down with arthritis-like pains in their joints?

It's great to be able to heal my pets as a mastermind, but all the heroic acts of taking on or removing anothers pain just don't seem villainous . . . I mean why is my mastermind suffering pain (taking damage) to heal his worthless underlings? He can always summon another expendable chump later.

So . . . sure leave in some of the heals, especially early on, but could we get some attack powers to balance things out and make the set seem like something new, rather than just a variation on empathy?