Arcanaville

That's a myth, actually. As it turns out, the game engine only recursively applies those types of buffs twice. We actually have buffs that buff themselves and are enhanceable, and its those powers that gave insight into what happens. See: Combat Training: Offensive.

The reasons why those two do not accept ways to buff themselves are partially historic, and partially due to more complex issues related to balancing of the powers and how they would be affected by very high buff values.

If your perceptions are accelerated like Neuron's are, blinking at normal speed must be interesting. I can see why you're getting sleepy: sitting in the dark for hours at a time can do that.

See, that's the thing: in situations like this, I think widespread use of the irrelevant choice would be worse than the railroad to me, and presumably to some fraction of others. I actually prefer the choice where the choice only says what I do, not what I think or say.

Accept the mission
Leave

It doesn't say why or how I accept it. If I choose to believe I gave the contact the finger as soon as his back was turned, I can. But once you start putting in actual choices with actual positions in them, the odds are that none of them, no matter how diverse, will match what I was thinking much of the time.

I'm pretty sure I've been officially exempted from this rule since its inception.

Its worth noting here that at the beginning of time, there was a concerted effort by the CoV team to take the traditional MMO roles, put them in a wood chipper, and recompose them in novel ways.

For example, the traditional "tanker" is a meat shield with aggro control. You'd think those two automatically go hand in hand. But in CoV, the "high hit points" archetype is actually masterminds, with their pets. Its brutes that have the better aggro control, however. In City of Heroes we have a rather traditional support/control class in controllers (even if they do sometimes deal hellacious damage). But in CoV, we took those two components of "support" and gave one to corruptors and one to dominators. Interestingly, buff/debuff went to a ranged offensive class and control went to a melee/ranged balanced offensive class.

In fact, CoV was explicitly designed to have no "DPS" class even in principle: no class doesn't at least *partially* specialize in damage. Brutes and Stalkers both have melee offense and personal defense, Dominators and Corruptors both have powersets that focus on offense, and Mastermind pets are designed to deliver substantial offense.

So who's the traditional tank in CoV? Split up between brutes and masterminds. Who's the traditional support? Split up between Corruptors and Dominators (and Masterminds). Who's the ranged offensive specialist? Corruptors, and Masterminds with ranged pets. And who's the traditional squishy? Nobody.

The reason the roles barely match City of Heroes and don't match City of Villains at all is because only City of Heroes was designed around them, and it was done so badly the whole thing was abandoned by I4. City of Villains was *explicitly* designed to confound those roles so that nothing fits in them by design. The idea behind City of Villains archetypes, and I think the designers did a fairly decent job of it, is that all archetypes can solo, but in different ways, and in teams the traditional MMO roles would arise from *combinations* of CoV archetypes. A corruptor could buff a brute into a tanker. Alternatively a dominator and a mastermind could also control all the aggro of a spawn.

If you want to know just how deliberately and interestingly convoluted City of Villains archetypes are, consider this: a lot of people look at Stalkers as weaker Scrappers. But that's not what Stalkers are. Stalkers are not weaker Scrappers. Stalkers are Single Target Melee Blasters with Defense. Assassin's Strike plus stealth is fundamentally a melee snipe, and that's how Stalkers were conceived.

We accept this in an MMO in the same way we accept that the galactic empire did not spend trillions to surround the Death Star with special symphonic music transmitters. Its sometimes referred to as locally consistent storytelling, and its an example of the sorts of compromises you have to have between story telling and game mechanics in a shared gamespace.

Don't like it: don't play alts and don't team, and ignore all other players in the game.

Its entirely possible the devs could come up with a way to eliminate this problem as you see it. However, such a solution would be highly personalized to you. In the general case your problem is intractable if the intent is to solve it for a majority of players with the problem.

Its obvious or should be from this thread that what people consider limiting and not limiting varies significantly. What you find a solution I might not - probably will not - and vice versa.

Its not a question of philosophically right or wrong. Prior to the new unified tutorial, the total number of possible characters that could be player characters that did not escape from the Zig with help from Arachnos and ended up in Mercy Island as one of the five standard red side archetypes was zero.

There are two different things being discussed here. The first are the limits that in-game canon impose, and those exist and are real. The second is the degree to which in-game canon should impose limits on players, and that's an entirely different issue. Where the two issues are linked, however, is in the fact that all true MMORPGs must make compromises in this area between meaningful canon and limiting canon. The more meaningful the canon, the more limits it by definition has to impose. The less limiting canon is designed to be, the more pointless it also tends to be. There are good ways and bad ways to balance the two, but there are no free lunches that get you everything you want on both sides of that equation, because no matter how brilliant and expansive the writing, ultimately you run into the fact that meaningful canon cannot be ambiguous or contradicted, and the inability to contradict unambiguous canon is the very definition of the limits of player roleplay.

I believe it actually looks like the My Little Pony version of hurricane: its a multicolored swirling cloud-like vortex centered around you. If very low graphics settings are making that invisible, then that's something specifically worth noting to the devs. That's why I mentioned that I was going to try to investigate that by turning my detail way way down on the next run I happen to be on (I don't need that visual cue because I can key off of the targeting message).

I don't have a screenshot, but I do have a demorecord of it: I'll see if I can extract a screencap of what it looks like centered on me. It may take a while, since its a very long demorecord, to get to that part of the demo and I don't want to hack it to put the aura on something unnaturally.

I always, by policy, read an entire thread before posting. Believe me, that rule was a pain for AASQ. However, I believe my post has relevancy because there's no guarantee they won't restructure the archetype forums, or at least revisit the question down the road. I think its important to note that even by Zwill's priorities, and also by general user interface principles, the *methodology* and therefore *mindset* that triggered the thought to merge them in a certain way is problematic. It would be problematic no matter where it was applied, elsewhere in the forums or elsewhere on Earth.

It might be hard to see where WotE is coming from when its on another person nearby, but I find it difficult to believe its hard to tell when its actually centered on you. When its been on me, it could not be more obvious than if it shape-shifted me into Jurassik.

That's three things.

Rule Zero of user interfaces is: clarity trumps all. User interfaces should not require complex explanation: the best interface is one that is self-documenting: it is obvious what it does, and (not the same thing) it is obvious how to do a particular thing with it.

So lets look at it from both directions. Suppose we were to have something like you mention original, or also anything remotely similar to it. I'll use it for example purposes but this applies to any and all suggestions remotely like it:

- Tanks: Brutes and Tankers
- Ranged DPS: Blasters, Corrupters and Dominators (Doms could also go under support)
- Support: Controllers, Defenders and Masterminds
- Melee DPS: Stalkers and Scrappers
- HEATs and VEATs: Peacebringer, Warshade, Soldier, Widow
- Build Sharing/Critique

So a new player is looking at the forums, and is looking specifically at the Melee DPS forum. What does going there do? What content will they see? Question: will they see Brutes in there? Brutes are considered "melee dps" by many players: they nominally have nearly the same melee DPS as Scrappers (and by the way, we don't have DPS classes in City of Heroes in the same way as in other MMOs, so this terminology is not used by the player community in general: encouraging new players to use it will only cause players like me to have to correct them). Suppose we put Brutes in there to fix the problem. Now we look at Tanks. Are Brutes in there? Most people consider Brutes to be a tanking-like class, but if you go to that forum you won't see Brute posts. Or worse, *some* Brute posts will go there and others will go into the Melee DPS forum.

Maybe this would work if all the defensive brute discussions happened in the tanking forum and all the offensive brute discussions happened in the melee DPS forum, but that won't happen. Even if you tell people to do it, discussions are often much more fluid than that.

So even by your own rules, players will now need to use more mouse clicks to get what they want: they will need to read two different forums to search for discussions about what they want.

In any case, because many archetypes fit into multiple common groupings, organizing in this way reduces clarity. It actually increases the amount of work necessary to find what you want. Lets go the other way around: if you want to start a thread or look for a thread about a particular topic, which forum should you pick. As I said, at least in theory if I wanted to I could put all my Brute offensive questions into the melee dps forum and all my Brute defensive questions into the tanking forum. Suppose I have a question about Domination. Where does that go? How long would it take for me to figure out that Domination questions belong in the Ranged DPS forum.


I would just leave it alone myself but suppose I was charged with reducing the number of forum sections, period, in this particular part of the forums. Then what I would do is this: segregate by *powersets* and *special topics.* For example, off the top of my head:

- Damage sets
- Defensive sets
- Buff/Debuff sets
- Epic, Ancillary, and Pool sets
- Min/Max and Build discussions
- Archetype-specific and playstyle discussion.

That at least matches how the game currently works and how discussion about the game currently revolves. Not my first choice, but at least not my last choice either.

I get the sense that both the new character creator and the proposed forum grouping is at least partially intended to map City of Heroes archetypes into common MMO class types, i.e. Melee DPS. But because City of Heroes archetypes are not designed that way, don't play that way, and don't function remotely closely to how they do in other MMOs, that might look like it makes things more approachable on the surface, but you'll simply encourage new players to believe something that is not true: that their preconceived notions about how MMO constructs work in other games is transplantable here. And the existing playerbase will react to that by constantly correcting them. That may be a much more serious turn off to new players than a forum with too many sections will be.

Nevertheless, there are conditions on new characters besides "origin, AT, primary powerset and first power, secondary powerset and power, costume, Power customization, and name." What's more, all of those "conditions" are actually essentially free choice, whereas the two I mentioned are not: they are outside of your control.

And incidentally, obeying the law in general is a prerequisite for being a hero most of the time, but registering metahuman status isn't (unless you think half the Marvel Universe turned villain during Civil War), and the official status of "vigilante" didn't exist until I18. Moreover, you cannot *create* a vigilante which means this basic initial condition is still a limitation on new characters.

I'm actually trying to figure out if there exists a set of graphics settings that make Will of the Earth invisible. I don't have to explain why to you: at first I was stunned by the question. But I try to give every benefit of the doubt when I can.

Perhaps oddly, I find I just don't die very often on Keyes, and also most of the Keyes runs I've been on did not have a preponderance of dying. I've died more times in the less than dozen UG runs I've been on than in all the Keyes runs I've been on combined. And that's on a blaster for most of those Keyes (and all of the UGs so far).

I do.

Nothing prevents them from being translucent spheres with animations that make their surface reasonably easy to discern.

For as long as I've played this game, I've known that there are two kinds of teams. The first kind are teams where everyone is working together as a team: every member seems to intuitively know what the team needs, and does it. Very little "instruction" seems to happen. The other kind are teams where eight soloers happen to be in the same instance, and if the other seven people disconnected or phased out of the instance it would hardly matter.

*Most* of the PUGs in City of Heroes are the latter. People think good teaming is whatever they did yesterday on a team because it worked, when in City of Heroes rolling your face across your keyboard will work 99% of the time.

What the trials are requiring is teaming of the first type, and punishing teaming of the second type. And many players simply cannot adapt to that. They either don't want that kind of gameplay, or don't even realize they weren't doing it in the first place.

When the only two trials were BAF and Lambda, I thought that the players would eventually adapt. But with Keyes and Underground, its clear the learning curve is too steep for many players. Its easy to blame the devs for that, and I can certainly blame them for things like disintegrating frozen players. But I'm finding it difficult to blame them for things like players forgetting instructions they were told ten minutes ago or incorrectly executing an instruction on par with "shoot that, don't shoot that."

If its not done right, it might not be fun, but the notion that any task in the game that requires significant thought or the level of understanding of the task that requires a few minutes of time to explain and process is just too hard for "casual" gameplay suggests a level of braindead that I think should not be synonymous with casual play.

The problem isn't complexity, its that the devs need to focus their design energy on making fun complexity. There has to be a learning curve within the trials that rewards stepping up to the complexity, rather than punishing people for every little mistake. Personally, I don't think the trials require any major level of thought to do correctly. But there's not enough balance between rewarding good tactics and punishing tactical errors.

On the hero side, there is the in-game canon prerequisite that you register as a metahuman and abide by the laws of Paragon City. On the villain side, there was the in-game canon prerequisite that you accept Arachnos help to break out of prison. Its a little different now, in that you now accept that Arachnos is watching over your shoulder more than normal.

And its interesting you say you can play the game however you want but are forced to act like cowardly stupid henchmen in Graves. I did not picture myself as a cowardly stupid henchman in Graves so that was not mandatory.

I think there is virtually unanimous consensus for #1, but I think #2 goes too far in the opposite direction. Without the threat of death, Antimatter is too trivial a pushover on his own to award a badge just for essentially defeating him three times with no other real restrictions.

I think if the issue of defeat itself is a problematic one for Loves a Challenge, then Loves a Challenge itself would have to be completely redesigned, probably by adding a completely different challenge component.

As I'm not on the development team, its apropros that I would do neither of those two things.

Its broader impact for casual players is that even if you don't get particularly lucky, its not hard to get a few million easy, even at low levels. And "a few million" is a trivial amount of influence in current terms, but as I'm sure you probably remember it used to be very difficult while leveling up to keep all your enhancements green; it could take hundreds of thousands to millions of inf every tier. Today, any casual player that sells their drops with zero market intelligence is extremely likely to eliminate the influence bottleneck on slotting with SOs. Casual players do not need very much influence in market terms to be swimming in more influence than they can burn at least from level one through 49.

My original post presented my position that a good story should not automatically supplant canon, and I gave two primary reasons for that. The first is that contrary to what Positron implied about players seeking "open" environments, many specifically find it interesting to integrate with the existing environment to the best extent possible. You cannot therefore presume which parts of canon are more or less important: players can gravitate to minutia as much as grand story lines when it comes to leveraging pre-existing story.

The second is that simultaneously considering storyline canon to be stifling to authors but historical gameplay worth preserving presents the prejudice that story writers as creative authors deserve to be unfettered by game history, but gameplay designers as creative authors do not.


In a separate post the subject came up about whether the game *ever* retconned anything. And its obvious they have. But that's ancillary to my original point. Nowhere did I try to argue that the devs have overturned canon in ways that reduced my enjoyment of the game. Whether they did or not is not relevant to either the question of whether canon should be trumped by good story, or whether retcons have occurred in the past at all.

I'm curious to know how you managed that, since the largest obstacle Ghost Widow presents isn't damage output per se, but her mega hold which breaks through melee mez protection and her heal which would make defeating her solo much more difficult without very high defenses.