BellaStrega
-
Posts
2397 -
Joined
-
Quote:No, it is the only way to get an effective or useful comparison - scrappers, brutes, defenders, corruptors, controllers, and masterminds are all played by players with various builds and different levels of ability, so comparing across the entire player base is going to give an accurate perception of how well these characters handle teaming and solo situations while leveling up.Originally Posted by Cyber_naut
And to those saying I'm only judging the ats at the top end, best case scenerio, that is correct - obviously if you look at them from 1-50 with various builds and various players with different levels of ability playing them there are too many variables to get an effective or useful comparison.
You don't get accurate data by dismissing data that doesn't fit one's assumptions. That's the same kind of thinking that leads to pathological science. -
Quote:And yet because of raids like that, they streamlined the raiding process. When was the last raid like that designed? How many people raided through it and stuck with it? What would happen if a raid like it were released today?Originally Posted by Ogi
Two words: Molten Chore.
It also hasn't been current content since 2005-2006, and was almost entirely outmoded in 2007 - five years ago. In other words, at least in the US, the model that drove such design is pretty much obsolete. -
Quote:Right, because even though Manticore does tend to be one of the more morally gray heroes in the Phalanx, he's totally willing to kill all the innocent inhabitants of the Rogue Isles just to eliminate Arachnos. He's ruthless, but is he really a sociopath?Originally Posted by Ogi
Why stop it? If his hacked teleporter can get to the the Rogue Isles he can kill a whole flock of birds with just two stones.
-
Quote:Having raided in another MMORPG, I think you're off-base here. Yes, the lure of rewards is part of the process, but I've also seen raids drastically altered because they weren't fun, and the rewards aren't worth it if it's just a boring grind. I also kind of wonder if you've ever participated in endgame content to any great extent, given your rather grim view of it.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I am, actually. I'm not saying end game systems can't be entertaining. What I AM saying is that entertainment, if it's even on the agenda at all, is nowhere near the top priority. Making an entertaining end game system is fairly simple, about as simple as making an entertaining anything, but as others have pointed out, not many people would re-run entertaining content day after day after day with no sense of novelty. And since the raiding end game system is so built as to require a certain critical mass of participation that clearly those who run it for fun don't constitute by themselves, the system is designed to ensnare, addict of compel.
I mean, you're off-base about the entertainment value. Without the entertainment value, people will generally avoid the content for more entertaining alternatives. -
Quote:To be fair, I don't think your extreme example compares to other MMOs at all.Originally Posted by Blood Red Arachnid
^^Incarnate trials do have a lot of the hallmarks of online skinner boxes. Randomly generated rewards to comparatively little content requiring rarer and harder to get rewards in order to preform better at later trials. However, when compared to pretty much every other MMO I've ever played, CoH is a lot lighter on these things. Imagine if it weren't, and you had to play for 30 hours to go from 49 to 50 doing nothing but ITF with full teams. And imagine if the ITF was made up of your character doing the exact same animation against a single critter for 3 minutes at a time.
This is true. They've done a lot to make content accessible so you can do stuff for as long as you want. Nothing is particularly required unless you want it.Quote:Anyway, to talk to the OP about this topic, the thing with this game is that it wasn't specifically designed for end-game content. A lot of the good stuff is in the 20-40 range, which is where a lot of casual players tend to hang out. It is supposed to be like this: the game isn't based around being maximum level, but it is based around giving people enough stuff to want to continue to play to see more.
The thing is that a lot of MMOs do this. The money isn't in the hardcore players who still play CoH even during the week Skyrim was released. It is about appealing to the masses. CoH also has Ourobos, so from this angle it makes sense to front/middle pack the game; you never "outgrow" that content. -
Quote:If he is the Prometheus he was by definition around for it before.Originally Posted by ArticulateT
Well, who's to say Prometheus was around for it himself? Judging by the fact that his only reason for being involved in all of this, and for keeping a large portion of information about the Praetorian war quiet is due to a long standing grudge against the Well and a guy he thinks is the incarnate of a guy who hurt him before, I can't exactly trust the Giant Fiery Smurf in a toga.
Also, his skin color is irrelevant to his reliability as a narrator (which I do not say is 100% reliable, but that he is more likely to have accurate information than someone who repeats received wisdom).
Possible, but trite.Quote:That, and after reading both bits of information, neither seem to implicitly challenge or really touch upon what the other has said. War Witch focusses on entities that were around before prehistoric man, while Prometheus focusses on entities that were brought to light during Ancient Greece. Until one directly challenges the other, it's entirely possible that both things hold true. -
Quote:Perhaps it sounds like personal opinion because I explicitly stated it as such. I was under the impression that "I actually think..." and "...strikes me as a lot more interesting..." were indicative of opinion.Originally Posted by TheDeepBlue
That sounds more like a personal opinion rather than intelligent speculation on the nature of such beings in the CoH universe. The truth is that two origins for godlike beings have been given so far in the canon and we don't know which, if not somehow both, remains true.
Your jibe about "intelligent speculation" was irrelevant and unnecessary.
The truth is that one of those origins came from someone who couldn't possibly have been an eyewitness, and who could have been repeating received wisdom. She wouldn't be the first unreliable narrator in City of Heroes, nor the last.
The difference between what she has to say and what Prometheus has to say is that at least Prometheus was there for it. Of course, Prometheus limits himself to mentioning two names, but by extension that really should mark multiple others as incarnates as well, simply by association. -
War Witch wasn't there and what she said has a sense of myth to it. She's not a firsthand witness.
I actually think having gods be these special things apart from humanity is rather trite. Having them be human, or at least formerly mortal, prior to effectively apotheosizing strikes me as a lot more interesting and makes a lot more sense. -
Quote:Only in the special edition.Originally Posted by Dark Energon
Seems like self defense to me, the Hellion opened fire 1st.
-
Quote:Actually, I would disagree with this. Fundamentally, if endgame content sucks (and boring content sucks) it's not going to keep people coming back to do it. Endgame content tends to add challenge and new situations that players have to learn how to adapt to. I have been part of a raiding guild (I still am, actually, but I am not raiding right now) and I don't think most of the guild found raiding boring or they wouldn't be doing it.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
The Incarnate system in particular and MMO end-game systems in general are a boring time sink. They're intentionally designed to be one. Developer can't create content faster than players consume it, so the only way to keep players from reaching "the end" is to throw down a slow field generator and run like hell. End game systems are not designed to entertain, and ours is no exception. They're designed to slow and impede while giving a false sense of progress, like any Skinner box worth its salt.
I am not going to say that you can't find this stuff boring, but I think it's a bit sweeping to state it as if it is an objective fact. -
I don't see that requiring praise necessarily means that a deity couldn't be an incarnate. After all, Magus in Marvel draws power from worship. Gladiator's powers wax and wane in relation to his self confidence and faith in himself. There's an NPC in Mutants & Masterminds: Paragons who becomes more powerful from positive attention.
And I don't know why War Witch would know anything about how Incarnates work, either. The number of characters who did know were fairly small, and most of them were paragons themselves, I think. Statesman tried to conceal the source of his powers for a long time. -
Actually, Prometheus specifies that Zeus and Tartarus were human incarnates. He didn't make a sweeping statement about gods.
I am inclined to believe that gods in general are incarnates, although not always necessarily human. I am also inclined to believe that Scirocco probably isn't an expert on deific theory. -
Quote:Originally Posted by ryu_planeswalker
Can you be an Incarnate if you are an actual god? Cause I think The Leviathan is actually a God of some sort.As I recall, Prometheus states that gods are incarnates, and that the reason you have Statesman and Imperious being incarnates of Zeus is that they inherited Zeus' power (which suggests that Zeus is dead, based on his other explanations).Quote:Originally Posted by ArticulateT
Well, Deities and Incarnates are pretty much seperate things, but I think the Leviathan is the Incarnate of Meluria, isn't it?
This was dialogue I read after I did the BAF and Lambda for the first time. -
Quote:I agree with everything you say here. I mean two of my TW weapons are directly inspired by a tabletop RPG called "Exalted" which isn't well served by the sound of a hammer hitting an oil drum. Explosions or some other high-impact sound that transmits the idea of "this is going to wreck you" would be very nice.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
I believe that comparison is judgemental more so than descriptive, meaning it sounds less like an actual waffle bat and more sounds "weak." The trouble with these things is real life isn't nearly as impressive as movies have conditioned us to expect with a great many things. The Mythbusters had a whole episode devoted to testing "Hollywood sound effects," and many of them were well off. Actual fists come off sounding more like a slap with none of the crunch and thump and car explosions are much faster and emit a much narrower frequency of sound. If anything, the exploding grenades in Half-Life 2 were much closer to reality, but left the player asking if that was it.
Considering how ludicrous the whole concept behind Titan Weapons is, I don't believe we should be confining ourselves to what a real large chunk of metal would sound like if swung at a real person or even at a wall. To be frank, the resulting sound wouldn't be all that impressive. If you've ever heard sound effects of people breaking rock with hammers or digging tunnels with pickaxes, that's more or less what the Buster sword would sound when hitting rock or thick metal. Hardly impressive for a weapon of that size.
What Titan Weapons needs to sound like is an explosion with every hit. You're not just slapping your enemies with a large object, you're DESTROYING your enemies with your absurdly oversized weapon. If any powerset in the game needed to feel like super strength aside from Super Strength itself, this is the set. Titan Weapons certainly look like superior strength is involved, but they certainly don't sound like it. I hear that exact same sound every time someone opens the large sheet metal gate to my yard. That's not super-powered.
The third has a fusion powered lightning hammer, which also isn't well-served by the sound effects.
I just couldn't see it when people said they could barely hear the impact over the whooshing sounds or that it sounded like a wiffle bat, neither of which was true, and I don't get why exaggeration is necessary when the reality is not all that impressive. -
Quote:Yes, I have played super strength recently.Originally Posted by Hopeling
Have you played, say, SS or Stone Melee recently? Or even just something like Broadsword or War Mace? TW definitely has sounds, but they sound like a wiffle bat compared to most of the impact sounds in the game.
I'm not trying to say y'all are wrong or that the sound effects don't need improvement, but the only person in this thread who has described the sound effects that I hear is Samuel_Tow. He's right as to what it's going for and what it's perhaps not achieving.
But it doesn't come anywhere near to "wiffle bat" to my ears. -
Quote:Currently, only one of my attacks causes knock-anything, and it's not the knockback sound in any event, which as I recall is more of a thump.Originally Posted by Nos482
You sure that isn´t the sound of the lots of knock ups/down/backs your attacks cause?
Right now, I'll just go with having no idea what y'all are talking about. TW sounds pretty substantial to me. -
Quote:The give and take you suggest would be taken in terms of what it costs you, not what it gets you - unless the reward is so useful skipping it would be a mistake, and that'd be a mistake too.Originally Posted by Lycantropus
Then to get that and the goodie would mean the goodie would be a pretty piece of useless data in your tray, because to keep it balanced with heroes just getting the regular xp/inf instead of the more specialized villain 'cherry picking' choices, would mean the Temp Power would be pretty much effectively worthless. The Death Ray of Doom would barely hit, and when it did, would probably do brawl damage or something. I could see hero players complaining that villains get all the 'good stuff' in Temp Powers and whatnot anyway. There's gotta be a balance of give and take to justify it.
I don't think new rewards will fix Redside issues. The problem runs deeper that, or it seems so to me. While I would like to see it become more appealing to the playerbase, I don't have any suggestions to make it so, or I'd be throwing them out there.
I do happen to like playing villains, and still make them, but I think this comes down to a problem that tends to happen in games with two factions - one nearly always ends up more popular than the other. So I think it's more about not failing players who like to play villains and insuring they get content so their characters have stuff to do than it does to finding a way to convert players from blue to red.
I think the way things are now are the best they have been in a long time (not the best of all possible City of Heroes/Villains, but better than the past). And by that I mean the way the devs have blurred the lines - any character can access red or blue content and any character can team up for much of the endgame content without the need to go rogue or vigilante.
Not that it can't be improved or that distinctiveness can't be added to make CoV more appealing, but I think doing it in a way that gives with one hand and takes with another will get reactions like Bad_influence's, which I think is fairly reasonable. I think any changes that are actually to be for the better should not directly impact infamy gain or XP. -
Weird, the impact sounds seem louder to me than other people are saying.
-
I definitely hear an impact - kind of a boom/crash sound.
This was on a TW/SR brute. I'm sure I recall it from my ElA/TW tanker and TW/EA brute as well. -
Quote:This here. I like the idea of varying up the rewards, but doing so at the expense of end of mission XP rewards and inf strikes me as an unnecessary tradeoff.Originally Posted by Bad_Influence
.... 4 out of 5 of those seem like nerfs to me.
We've overcome so much as villains, including being 50% poorer for YEARS due to the market. We were "set apart" enough, thanks. We have fewer zones, fewer task forces, fewer badges, the list goes on and on. How about NOT fewer rewards? Becasue telling me that I might get a temp power but no xp or infamy just feels really..... nerfish. -
Quote:Yeah, it sounds much the same as what he said, with the addition of Incarnate elements.Originally Posted by TheDeepBlue
I don't see much difference between what you read before and what we may be getting in the future, so I don't know why you're disappointed. All of the essential components are still there.
And why wouldn't the Well try to act in its own defense? It seems to possess some degree of volition. -
Quote:Yeah, I'd rather stand around flipping a coin while recovering, instead of standing around flipping a coin waiting for rest to recharge.Originally Posted by Zortel
Funny you should mention rest and recharge, that was one of the better things that I found when playing an MMO released close to Christmas time.
Especially on Endurance heavy early level powersets like Titan Weapons.
I was playing a Titan Weapon brute when I was reminded of this discrepancy, although my problem was more taking a lot of hits from Manticore's Arachnos kidnappers. -
Quote:On Champion, I believe Hamidon raids were a common occurrence for a long time. I know I attended public raids on multiple occasions. After the latest change to Hamidon (and adding Hamidon raids to villain side), there were regular raids for that as well.Originally Posted by Remidi
It might indeed be a matter of perspective, and/or server difference. As I said earlier, I joined the game when it was a year old. It might have been more active at that point and I didn't notice because I didn't have any high level toons yet, but by the time I did the Hami raid was a rare event. There might have been 'private' raiding groups that I just didn't know about, but a public Hami was a novelty.
-
You're comparing edge cases to consistent performance. Not all of the debuffer characters can solo giant monsters. Putting a scrapper on a team with buffing and debuffing ATs means the scrapper will benefit from those buffs and debuffs as well as the ATs doing the buffing and debuffing. On the other hand, scrappers can just blow through the vast majority of leveling content with little difficulty, whereas controllers, defenders, corruptors, etc. are often more vulnerable during the leveling process, especially solo. This isn't always the case, but it does seem frequent enough.
The study in question, if I recall correctly, was based on datamining number of defeats, leveling speed, etc. across the board. That is, looking at behavior across the entire playerbase. -
Quote:Buying things for characters doesn't have anything to do with having a "main," though. It can have something to do with having a "main" but a lot of it for me is about buying things to use with new characters. I mean I want to make a big atomic hammer-wielding electric cyborg/clockwork tanker. So that's the titan weapons set, the titan weapons customization pack, and the cyborg pack (but I bought that two years ago). It may also be an aura.Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
What I buy for City of Heroes is never aimed at any character in particular, because I have no "main." Not even the character whose name I use on the forums. There are no mains, no favourites, no special ones. They are each cool in their own way. What I buy, therefore, either serves to improve them all by improving the scope of my choices, or otherwise serves to enable new ones to exist.
To be honest, most costume sets and powersets these days I buy without ever having an idea what I'm going to do with them. I buy them not because a character needs them, but because they represent an opportunity.
Further, I actually purchased the titan weapon set so I could make two characters (both brutes) based on a tabletop RPG, and one of them needed one of the atomic weapons (so I needed two from the pack, which cost as much as three, for all four - and I liked the other two options).
I unlocked bio-plasma aura specifically for my two kheldians, neither of whom could by any stretch of the imagination be described as a "main." So far, for the character that comes closest to my main, I've spent about 80 points on the runes aura. And that character I barely played in the past because I am often focused on leveling newer characters.