Aura_Familia

Originally Posted by rsclark

Shouldn't the people "needed to form leagues" be a pretty similar set to "the people who enjoy playing in leagues"?

If those aren't virtually identical groups, then there exists a problem.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Dominators got a design pass not that long ago; among other things their damage was increased substantially to make them offensively balanced archetypes. I could argue that the archetype that is most in need of a balance pass is Blasters. Blasters have been waiting for a secondary powerset design pass for longer than Dominators have existed. In fact, Dominators and Scrappers have a higher melee damage modifier than Blasters do, which is nonsensical.

If I had to rank which archetypes deserved the most attention overall, the list would be:

Peacebringers
Blasters
Stalkers
Everybody else.

The only reason I put PBs ahead of Blasters is just because the disparity between PBs and WSs is ludicrous, and because I don't think Kheldians get enough special benefits for being quantum-bait.

Originally Posted by BurningChick

*looks up* interact with us on the forum? Not everyone wants to watch Z sing show tunes. And not everyone can log into the stream while it's live. It's also easier to sift through posts in the dev digest than it is to sit through the inanities of the stream.

The nice thing about the forum is that it's not live -- you can reply minutes, even hours, after the OP ... and carry on a conversation.

You see ... the devs have, at their disposal, several tools for communicating with us. And some work better than others for different types of people. And, well, they haven't been active outside of the beta forums for ages. All I'm sayin' is that I miss it. No reason to get, ahem, up in my grills.

Originally Posted by Eva Destruction

The thing is, that short draw distance, with things in the fog not being visible until you're right on top of them, was part of the creepy vibe.

Originally Posted by Dark_Respite

I don't think there's a word strong enough to describe it. "Excrement." "Abominable." "Horrendous." "Insulting." "Demeaning."

In a nutshell, it didn't matter that by lvl 20, you were (usually) recognized as a hero of the city by Statesman and gifted with a cape, recognized by at least one, maybe two members of the Freedom Phalanx for exceptional heroism (for the TFs), etc.

Nance didn't like you, and was just WAITING for the excuse to assassinate you.

With super-sekrit hidden invulnerable ninjas.

Yes, it was pluralized.

And that was just the opening story of the arc. It got worse from there. Never mind all the ridiculous inconsistencies about where we were sent, why we were sent, etc. AND it was so badly broken we couldn't finish it to just get it over with and move on to the next arc.

The ENTIRE beta group revolted. We told the rednames in NO uncertain terms that if this arc made it to live, we would stop at NOTHING to tell the entire playerbase not to play it, because it went against everything we as players believed about our characters. We might range from novice to veteran heroes, we might range from reluctant to enthusiastic, from bright futures to shadowed pasts, but we were still HEROES. This completely demeaned everything we had done for the past 20 levels.

To their credit, they asked, "What would you do instead?" We gave them new ideas, made suggestions, hashed it out amongst ourselves and the devs. They tried another iteration - better but still needing a ton of work. We went back to the drawing board. Again and again. Finally they said, "Okay, try this..." And we said, "Yes... THIS will do."

That became the current Keith Nance arc. Later I found out they'd applied those lessons to the sequel arc (Jenni Adair's), and refined it quite well, to the point where it's one of my favorite arcs in the game.

So... yeah.

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Originally Posted by JayboH

This. I am sure the Multiplayer argument is being made by the same kind of people that hole up in their house/apartment that barely speak to their real world neighbors if ever.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

Time-gating Empyreans seems like the simplest way of slowing down the non-Trial progress.

Another interesting thing about the DA revamp is that with the changes to the LFG tool to let players queue while doing missions, I could totally see DA becoming the new Trial staging ground, with players running the repeatables or even the arcs there in normal sized teams while waiting for the league to form - or even just street sweeping.
It's got the potential to totally remove the reward downtime between Trials by allowing players to continue to earn Incarnate rewards in between Trial runs.

Originally Posted by Lemur Lad

The only thing I've been able to think about since I read this is wanting to be there when someone who is 20 yards from completing their last Gold Medal Ski Run gets LFG ported into my mission.

Originally Posted by Android_5Point9

To be fair, I'd expect the same reaction from anybody asking a question and just rambled on with it. Watching any other Q&A session from cons and the like, hearing people go on and on gets to be pretty darn cringe-worthy. Just so happens the topic is PvP in this particular case. You can't expect updates to everything in such short order. It takes time to process feedback, formulate a long-term solution, and iterate on it. It's that or have things being in flux every other patch (which tends to generally get more ire than it's worth).

Originally Posted by PsyFox

Great, so the very thing that makes Dark Astoria so intriguing and sinister and has made many, many of us WANT to see its story addressed is going away?!? That's just plain wrong.
Can't they use the phasing tech to, I don't know, keep it for a little while and then make it clear up after we've dealt with the crisis?
Seems REALLY counterproductive to me to get rid of such a distinct characteristic as the fog and disappearing ghost citizens..

Originally Posted by eth_Nargy

Being good at something horrible isn't really an accomplishment.

That's like being proud that you just fell down a flight of stairs.

Originally Posted by Tyger42

No one is saying that it does mean that. Nor are those who prefer to solo being ignored.

Originally Posted by Turgenev

Everyone else: I have a stack of pix of the various slides and what-not of the breakout sessions. Once I've uploaded them to a common image host, I'll post the link somewhere appropriate.

Originally Posted by Ardrea

Four pages of PvP angst? Sheesh. PvP had a chance here and it failed. There's no business case left to waste more resources on it. All you'll get from the Devs at this point is lip service. It's dead in this game, get over it, move on.

Originally Posted by Turgenev

I'll amend that with, "a fine state for what it was". When they discussed (in answering a question of how to combine both "Ouroborii") how COV was originally introduced, they basically summed it up as, "heroes of another type, with different colors". The nature of the two sides was one where player A could only go to sides that supported "A", but not "B". The ABILITY to modify that mechanic is where I compared them to bases; it was a baked-in process that made it very rigid to modify vs other elements in the game, just like bases (which are rigid to the point of stress fractures).

Originally Posted by Turgenev

You're right. He's not a paid employee or required to do anything. The next time, I agree he really should just say "something about pvp"

Originally Posted by Turgenev

As an aside, the Devs discussed why Bases are such a problem: They're a product of a different development team that left a fragile system behind where even the smallest change could break things in unexpected ways. My impression from their comments was it might be easier to build a "better" system from scratch rather than trying to revamp the original system. If I had to guess, PVP falls under a similar problem of design origination.

Originally Posted by Turgenev

Re: Von Kreiger's summation of my Q/A mic time with the Devs as "lolpvp":




The net result: Elements of zone PVP combat would be integrated into normal day to day gameplay, in a way that made sense with the genre, without forcing the combat requirement on unwilling players. The goal is to blur the barriers between PVE and PVP without directly mixing them irrevocably. However, being able to watch the fight happen realtime, in your zone, would frankly be a hell of a thing. Who DOESN'T want to watch the Justice League and the Legion of Doom duke it out on the steps of City Hall?

Originally Posted by Twoflower

ONE SOLID FACT: Team Up Teleporter (LFG queue) will work inside door missions, and has other unspecified improvements to encourage using it. Courtesy of twitter.

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

Well, Diabolique is now based in Dark Astoria

Originally Posted by Golden Girl

So far, the solo content includes:

An Incarnate zone, as requested by quite a few players - and the zone is a revamp of an older one, rather than a totally new one, and is one of the 2 most requested zones to be revamped.

Revamps for 2 of the older villain groups, including the popular and colorful Tsoo.

Non-Trial content in the revamped zone.

Lore that suggests the threat in Dark Astoria will revolve around a pantheon of evil gods - some players have requested similar enemies for Incarnate content, rather than fighintg giant war robots and clone armies.

Lore that suggests any influence from Praetoria on the revamped zone will be quite small, or quite possibly nonexistant.

Lore that suggests the threat will be magical, rather than the tech threat of Praetoria.

Originally Posted by Frostbiter

The iTrials in CoH aren't nearly as bad as raiding for high end content in other games. The queuing alone makes them 1000% better. They're still very grindy and I would expect a solo incarnate path to be 10x worse.

Originally Posted by Elendil

You can save your monthly points to buy the 30 day license. With 800 points (Decemeber-January) you will have 5 months of IO license. No need to stop playing

Originally Posted by UberGuy

Many returning players have asked why this kind of thing didn't exist, as they're used to it existing in other "F2P/hybrid" games they returned from to look at Freedom. While I realize there are some implementation details to work out, I think it would behoove you guys to look into something along these lines into play. I say that because what these premiums I know are doing is looking at what their options are, seeing they can't use IOs without paying, and then leaving again.

While the "off-the-cuff" response to that may be "well, they weren't going to pay anyway, so who cares?", the reason it matters is that if they aren't playing at all, there's no hope of selling them other stuff. Making a few bucks of of them every couple of months is better than making nothing at all.

Originally Posted by Chyll

I'd love an incarnate only zone, with story arcs that allow level shift and have higher level / more challenging opponents as a result. Threads drop. No reward merits - an astral for arc completion. Leave eMerits for the trials. You can solo or team up to 8 normally. EBs are either really tough, or cannot downshift from AV.

That said, I don't expect it.

And frankly, I'm more interested in what they are sharing about assymetrical costumes.