Battlecat

I have no idea how complicated this idea might be to actually implement but recent updates to the game have suggested an idea about how to kill two birds with one stone when it comes to the old contacts in the original CoH game. I've tried to keep this short but there is a summary below.

Current Situation: When the original game was developed there were only two options for leveling. You could do contact missions or you could street hunt. As such, the original contacts were extremely heavily loaded with random "one shot" missions. Many of those one shot mission are simple street hunt but some are quite interesting if you can actually sift through the extra stuff.

But those extra "filler" missions stopped being necessary. City of Villains and Going Rogue along with modern CoH contacts are much more streamlined. Instead they have one major storyarc and maybe one or two really interesting one shot missions. Other stuff is offered through the newspaper and tips missions. This makes the contacts far more meaningful and interesting to work for. Additionally, the XP curve has been smoothed a lot, so now it's easy to out level an old CoH contact without even ever seeing the storyarc that they would offer.

Possible Solution: Part one of this suggestion is to go through the old contacts and weed out filler missions that don't really contribute to the individual contact's goal. Those old contacts would thus be revitalized and it would be easier to actually hit their story arcs before we outlevel them. A particularly important target would be generic "kill X" missions which really just existed to help fill the run to the next contact level in the old game.

Part two involves the old content. It is wasteful to throw it out, especially since many of the missions are perfectly good; the only problem is the volume of missions on a given contact. It might be viable to rework many of the missions into police scanner or tips missions. This way, the excellent writing from one shot old missions isn't lost, but instead they help enrich the modern random mission supply systems. Even the "kill X" mission might be able to find a home in a new system as long as there is some way to make sure three of them aren't offered at once.

Summary:

1: Clear out excess missions on the old CoH contacts to make the storyarcs more accessible. In particularly, the generic one shot "kill X" street sweeping missions should go as they have become obsolete and one shot door missions that aren't strongly associated with the contact.

2: Rework some or all of the remaining missions into tips or police scanner missions rather than discarding old material. It could even be a tip or police call from the original contact to pay homage to the old source.

3: It might even be possible to add street sweeping missions to the police scanner/newspaper. I would recommend that if this is done, ensure that the scanner can only offer one of these at a time.

Anyhow, that's all from me. I'll be interested to hear what you all think about this idea.

[ QUOTE ]
Ok Day Job costumes. Do we sacrifice a costume slot for them? Is there are built-in way to switch into and out of them (spring into action) or is it time to make more macros?

[/ QUOTE ]

Far as I know, day job costumes are just more costume pieces. Nothing unsual about them, no new costume slots.

Best of luck in your new endeavors Lighthouse!

Great to hear things are continuing to go well for my favorite game! Now pardon me while I go pick my jaw up off the floor. Player created misison content?

This could be very cool!

Look like a blast! This would be a fantastic addition to the arena. Everyone who doesn't have repel normally could just be granted the ability as a temporary power during the game. It could be very entertaining.

An excellent synopsis of what sounds like a fascinating article. While we may not always agree with the decisions the developers make, it can't be denied that they love this game and will support and improve it to the best of their abilities.

Any game that can keep my interest for 3 consecutive years is one that is worth watching. I usually only play other games for a matter of weeks. Can't wait to see where CoX will be in another three years!

Awesome pair of posts. Personally, earlier this month I was considering shutting down my account. Then I saw what was comming in issue 9.

Time to put up another years worth of account time!

Seriously though, the reason I love this game is it's still fun after 3 years. How can I argue with that?

Excellent discussion! It just goes to show that there are numerous tradeoffs and options available with the introduction of the Invention System, even with a power like health that could only take one kind of enhancement before.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up!

Nice! Even without sound it looks pretty amusing. Can't wait till I get home from work!

Did you know: Early in beta all three levels of inspirations could be purchased from vendors. The development team quickly realized that there was no reason to buy any other inspirations if you could get the biggest, even at very high influence costs. So the second and third tier inspirations were changed to drop only.

[ QUOTE ]
*snip*
I would love to see some objective oriented missions, but I would hate if they did away with Faultline's unique architecture. I have to agree with the earlier poster; I just wish they had placed in some real world physics so on some of the steeper buildings you slid a lil; or had a few windows you could climb in and gain access to the interiors of the buildings.

[/ QUOTE ]

Faultline is one of the more unique zones from the original game. Perhaps the developers will keep this in mind and re-develop the zone as a series of terraces to keep the spirit of the original zone while allowing it to function as an active city zone.

[ QUOTE ]
*snip* One of the things the Activist shouts is asking the city to begin to rebuild Faultline. Meaning the devs are no doubt looking into revising the zone.

[/ QUOTE ]

He's obviously not planning on being in the construction crew that goes in there to get started. Hope they get good hazard pay.

[ QUOTE ]
As I posted in another similiar thread:

So they will use this to entice back long lost players...that we can't get ahold of because they disappeared off our global lists.

This is the compensation they promised us for that. However the press releases make it sound like some big special event. I think Cryptic should have owned up to their mistake and admitted they were doing it for a major error on their part. Cryptic is taking this and spinning it into a marketing ploy for themselves. As a business guy, I can respect that. As a player, I'm disgusted by it.

[/ QUOTE ]

The first test of the XP doubling showed up on the Test Server before the global crash, Issue 7 and the layoffs by NCSoft. They had to be planning this long before these errors occured.

Just a bit of a note for the conspiracy theorists here:

The first test of the double XP system was before the following things:

- Layoffs at NCSoft
- Release of Issue 7
- Crash of Global Chat

For it to arrive on the test server before all these things it had to be in the planning stages and internal testing for at least a couple months prior to that.

This should be fun, I've got a few characters I want to get up to travel powers!

It could be real, the same announcement showed up on Warcry. Very cool if it is, I've got some characters that could use some leveling!

One possibility is the opening up of zones around the world. Statesman mentioned during one interview a long ways back that he'd like to see heroes travelling around the world fighting evil and villains travelling causing evil.

*Edit* Figures I'd finish posting only to discover somebody else posted the same thing earlier.

[ QUOTE ]
I have also done the global searches, and it shows always less than 2000 players now on Justice...often closer to 1300, where before I6 and CoV it used to show more like 2500-3000 at peak... I am finding it more and more difficult to find groups these last several days, and it is discouraging.

In case noone noticed, the global search DOES show villains in its count as well.

[/ QUOTE ]

The global search only shows villains in PVP zones. I've not managed to located any villains in the CoV PVE Zones.

Although some of the stuff listed by Statesman might be relatively easy, I wouldn't think that reformatting a task force is a small task. I think we should at least give them the time to get it right. Although, I will be the first to admit, I'd like to see these changes sooner rather than later.

Summary:
1. Colorize exploration badges on a tier system to help break the monotony. (Details below)

2. Separate or at lest sort the achievement badges in a more logical manner. (Details below)

3. Perhaps the new Croatoa badges are a bit big and should be reduced to be more in line with the rest of the badges.

4. Some options for varying the sorting of our badges would be nice in the long run: ie: Alphabetical by zone, by name, by target.

5. Also in the long run, some way of displaying all our badges next to a picture of our character. Sort of like the costume design screen but with badges instead of costume options.

Details:

1. [ QUOTE ]
I was hoping you all would colorize the exploration badges based on what level of the game you got them (Atlas Park - Perez - Kings Row - Galaxy City is the first tier.. then -- Steel - Boom - Faultline - Skyway is the second tier... and so on....) -- just to break up the plain look of all the badges...

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd like to second this. There are far to many exploration badges for them to be all the same in appearance. The tier coding should just be a minor color alteration to the current badge images and would work best by grouping them in the same manner as the history badge plaques as follows:

Tier 1: Atlas, Galaxy, Perez, Hollows, Kings Row
Tier 2: Steel, Skyway, Faultline, Boomtown
Tier 3: Talos, Independance Port, Terra Volta, Dark Astoria, Striga, (Croatoa?)
Tier 4: Founders Falls, Brickstown, Eden, Creys Folly, (Croatoa?)
Tier 5: Peregrine Island, Crash Site, Shadow Shard (If ever created), Portal Missions.

This may not be exhaustive but it gives the general idea. Each tier should be a different color and we should be able to sort them in different ways either by zone or by tier.

2. As for the other badges, some logical grouping of the Achievement badges so they aren't scattered all over the place would be nice. An earlier reply commented about splitting achievements into two groups such as trophies for hunting badges and achievements for statistical items such as damage and healing.

Conclusions: All in all, the badge system is far more amusing and entertaining than I orignally expected. There's always room for more badges, but only if the organization and display options are improved.

Don't forget, Statesman is answering a fair number of questions in one shot during the biweekly Ask Statesman posts. Each answer should really be considered seperately in my opinion.

I remember getting into the preorder beta at 6pm on the last day, and waiting 4 hours for the game to download.

I remember playing until 3 in the morning right after the game finished downloading.

I remember the pure amazement after launch when they had only minor issues.

I remember when mapserve disconnects were so bad I almost gave up on the game.

I remember the relief I felt when an early patch fixed the major mapserver problems.

This is my absolute favorite game now, and I anticipate it will remain so for a very long time.

[ QUOTE ]
Portal technology has been around for years, it was possible even back when half-life was was starting to get more heavily modified. The technology was widely used with Half-Life2 as well where a polygon surface essentially behaved like the viewport for a camera and basically rendered things in the world twice. Once for the world itself and once for what the viewport was displaying.

I'm sure given time its something the CoH engine could be adapted to do especially since it would promote a more social aspect to the arena because players physically gather around one another to watch the match.

[/ QUOTE ]

Only catch with the half life 2 version of the TV screen is that it ups the minimum requirements for a game something awful. My computer ran HL2 fine except in the rooms with TV monitors.