Bladesnow

Well, yeah, but she needs the existing dialog to start the screen adaptation.

Stop adding untradeable stuff to the game, so the market can deal properly with drop inequities.

It is imminently possible to "get ahead" in the normal game without either grinding farms, being magically granted a state of grace by the evil random number generator, or (the true evil) tainting your very soul by dealing with the odious RMT spammers.

There are very simple guides telling you how to make a quite comfortable income with very little investment of time here in the market forums. Pretty sure I've seen a couple of them linked in sigs on this very thread. If I'm wrong, here's a link to a whole bunch of 'em:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=123346

Read one of those, spend 10 minutes every few days playing the market, and soon you, too, will be an ebil marketeer casually throwing hundreds of millions around to buy purples. No cheating involved, just supply something that other people are willing to pay you for.

Two noticeable effects. No, three.

1) as others have noted, salvage prices seem to have slumped a bit. Time to stock up.

2) anecdotal, but a LOT of my friends who can't get rare and/or very rare incarnate components because they won't drop and they aren't tradeable have started farming. I sadly suspect the net effect will be to *increase* the money supply.

3) the insane crafting prices for rare and very rare incarnate components have irritated me. I've soothed my annoyance by ratcheting up my prices a bit.

Hmmn. So all the folks so frustrated at getting a paucity of rares and very rares have just been getting hosed by the RNG. Thanks for the information, at the very least this should put to rest some of the wild rumors and nutty behavior that have been becoming commonplace.

BillZ is gone? Day-umn. He was someone who I always took time to read, and thought about what he was saying even if I violently disagreed. Which I guess kinda speaks to what Arcanaville and MyLexiconIsHugeSon have been violently agreeing about. The ultimate compliment to another forum poster really is when their post makes you stop and reconsider your own position carefully.

Ya know, just a random thought related both to the OP and the purpose of the forum here. If rare and very rare incarnate components were tradeable, the whole issue of a huge disparity in drop rate just wouldn't matter all that much, would it? The market would efficiently and quickly seek the proper price level, and voila! - problem solved.

Have seen a lot of "tagging" going on. A bit harder to put together trials the past couple of days, and Lambda especially is failing more than it has since the first couple of days. Have also had players sending tells to me when leading pointing out someone "tagging" and suggesting I kick them.

QUESTIONS:
1. Would you buy Base Expansion Packs?

Yes.

2. How much would you pay?

The standard $9.99 would not be unreasonable for a good base pack.

3. What themed Base Expansion Packs would you like to see?

A lot of good ideas up thread. I particularly like the idea of adding more functionality to the bases. Market, tailor, whatever, usable only if you've purchased the pack.

4. How many items should a Base Expansion Pack contain?

Similar to the costume packs; one functional item and a good assortment of cosmetic items.

So... eating lunch and hitting refresh on the forums, and every time the little twirly hourglass comes up I hear the theme from Jeopardy playing in my head...

Huh. I am quite taken aback by your information, Arcanaville. Statistics done as carefully as you do them do not lie. I guess I can see how some of the things you say that you HAVE observed as having an effect could help produce the results I've personally seen. I am just surprised that over the 100+ runs I've now made, the majority on one character, that the random element has not evened out at least somewhat. Hopefully we will know more later today.

Doh! *That's* why the network traffic goes up so insanely in a trial. I have a beastly system and a broadband connection, so I've been tearing my hair out trying to figure out why my client gets overwhelmed. Thanks for the tip, and here's hoping the programming team gets around to adding the functionality you've requested.

Will help me in another way, too. I'm on a 5 gig per month account, and trials chew through that limit at an alarming rate. I am sure I am not the only one with that problem, either.

Looks like the most reasonable place to chime in and say I'm plain horrified at the way the Weekly Strike Targets are set up. I am not a fan of task forces in the first place, though I'll go do one with the loose association of players I team with if that's what they want to do. Tying continued advancement in the Incarnate system to TFs like this is one of the most unpleasant surprises CoH has ever handed me.

I've been content to chug along and just accumulate Incarnate shards to build up my incarnate abilities. Pretty grindy, but you could get enough to manage. BUt this... not only requires task forces, but requires MULTIPLE TFs chosen by someone else? I am deeply disappointed.

I don't do PUGs, and it is a rare night indeed when the players I team with can muster 8 people to do TFs. There ARE big events I enjoy doing - the mothership raid is a blast. Sadly those events seem to have been entirely ignored in favor of forcing me to try to scrape together enough people to open bloody TFs I've largely ignored for the 4 1/2 years I've been playing. Put me down on the side of the people advocating a "solo" option, or at least a "significantly smaller than 8" option.

I've thought about something similar to this for quite a while. The way to handle it would be to make the changes in city zones transparent to the casual player. Someone up thread made the comparison to RV, and that's a real good one.

What I'd suggest is that hero's efforts to "clean up the streets" simply create a power vacuum, and other groups OF THE SAME DIFFICULTY LEVEL move in to capitalize on the situation. They have the technology already on hand to do some fairly sophisticated things in that regard.

We already know they track total defeats of the various groups. We also know from the invasions that they can switch out what groups appear on the maps, though that of course is considerably different from changing the "default" spawn of a city neighborhood. Still, it shows that the notion is possible.

The notion of tracking the TOTAL defeats by all heroes of a given villain group since, say, the last server reset, and using that to determine how common they are at a given point, would make the city zones a lot more dynamic. If, say, Skulls took over if Hellions became rare, most of the objections I've seen would be somewhat alleviated. You definitely don't want to change the difficulty levels of the zones, but you could do something along those lines without changing the balance much.

If you REALLY wanted to be neat about it, you could have the appropriate contacts able to give you information about who is strong in each neighborhood, or zone. And maybe the police stations could have a situation room similar to the map in RV, as I believe someone has already suggested. Would help give a feel for heroes in touch with the streets. (grin)

It would also be very cool to have red-side missions to affect the strength of the various groups. If you wanted to be really subtle, you could just have existing red-side missions reinforce blue-side villains, and vice versa as appropriate. If you wanted to get really fancy you could have dialog added to the groups to indicate WHICH hero/villain helped them out. Or cut them down to size, for that matter, we already see citizens reacting to mission outcomes, it might be possible to make villains do something similar.

All in all, some sort of system like this would vastly increase immersion. You could have various villain groups bitterly complaining about the inroads made on their turf and business by some hero, or the great help rendered their cause by some villain. (Reverse as appropriate.) The actions of players would noticeably change things, without affecting the overall game world situation that much. You'd have to be careful to make the minimum presence of each group large enough to not make hunts diffcult, but that would not be so tough.

There need to be objective, quantifiable, and measurable standards. Anything less is a recipe for endless chaos, of the sort experienced by those who lived through the debacle that was SWG.

You probably have a point there. Arcanaville does not seem to miss much. The hover change was the most palatable of these weird little changes that have cropped up lately anyway. I think I even remember Castle making a comment like you describe, too.

Neverdark is likely right, they DON'T probably have written descriptions of how the powers are supposed to work. From Positron's explanation of how the whole "Reformed" badge thing went down it appears they do some change documentation, but clearly some of it depends on the memories and I'll bet saved emails of the staff who've been there for long terms.

Whoever commented that having such documents about would constrain the developer's choices is absolutely right. That is not an unintended consequence. It does not really constrain them in the end, because they can quite easily create events within the game world to explain any changes they deem necessary. Remember the backstory for power proliferation?

For years and many issues before that, certain powersets only existed for certain ATs. Yet, when the design team decided that the time had come to proliferate sets to new ATs they did so consistently, according to established rules, AND explained it within the reality of the game. None of which they had to do - they could have just announced a fait accompli like, say, this pet recharge thing.

BUT, they were wise enough on that big change not to. Having an established set of agreed rules that all participants know about IN ADVANCE helps the game and the fictional reality it exists in run well. Surely you can all recall huge arguments as kids about one make believe game or another when there was a disagreement about the imagined events? Or in a more advanced version of the same thing, if you ever did pen and paper RPGs, or live-action role playing games, the rules had to be clear and recorded ahead of time. Didn't stop new editions from coming out and being adopted, but at any given time the rules were clearly out there and known to any participant who cared to learn them.

For the most part we've got that here. Except that every once in a while, our "gamesmasters" suddenly announce that something we players thought was working fine is actually in violation of the rules. Even though in every way we can check it is in compliance. Except apparently with some secret rulebook we're not allowed to see. That is not healthy for a long term game. Granted, most players just plain don't care - until the changes rise to the level they finally notice, then there's hell to pay.

I'll take "disinterested" for 500 inf, Alex. I can't relate anything you're on about to any of the thread above it. (Executive Summary) The discussion has been about engaging the extensive talents of the player base to help out the development team on an idea to expound their views on powers and foster understanding between the twain. With brief diversions into the in-game text of hover, a brief mention of ergonomics and timing, a fair number of comments about how much work it would take to make any such notion successful, and assorted witty quips and humorous comments by the participants.

How you got to a diatribe against my fellow players out of any of that is a mystery to me quite unworth the effort of decoding. 'Specially since at least once I made the comment that CoX has the best cut of players I've ever seen, an opinion quite unchanged at this time. In short, to quote the immortal words of Fezzik, "I do not think that word means what you think it means". And, of course, none of this has anything to do with the original topic, not that I care that much.

I'll go do that. Do you feel better now?

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Yeah, my observations of Bill over the years lead me to agree with ya. )



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o,O

*closes blinds*

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(laugh) I have the advantage of y'all, been reading your posts for the better part of 3 years. There's a lot of us around who only read the forums in self-defense. Over time you figure out who to pay particular attention to - you may not always agree, but worth reading.

Yeah, my observations of Bill over the years lead me to agree with ya. (laugh) Your point is quite true, Miko, things might not work out. But, then, the same observation is true of an MMO based on superheroes, and that has seemed to work out fairly well. Some of these things you can't tell 'til ya try. I'll just observe that CoX seems to have a markedly better cut of player than a lot of MMOs I've been involved in, and I think there's at least a chance that some variant of this idea could help in several ways. Probably at least as good a chance it could be a spectacular failure, too, luckily tis not up to me to decipher how to proceed on this or any other topic.

Lets face it, what WE think of any idea is not as important as what the developers think. Which was my entire point in posting the notion in the first place; the hope that they would look at the idea and think about it. We keep hearing from them that they made this, that, or the other (apparently) unpopular change because of how they think a power should work. What I've referred to as the "vision" of a power, and they've often referenced as "intent" or "design". Tao may well be a better word for it. (laugh)

My main point is that if they are going to keep trotting the way powers were intended to work out as reasons for changes, it would be nice to document just what they mean. They have already graciously given us an ingame description, the real powers display, and empirical testing of powers to figure out how powers ARE working. If that differs vastly from how they are INTENDED to work, some warning of that difference might go a long way toward maintaining player/developer relations at the level of semi-civilized restrained seething resentment rather than full scale tooth and nail, bloody war. (Humor impaired warning applies)

Then don't publish them live in the first place. And CERTAINLY don't wait 2 and 3 years to make such jarring changes to correct problems only the devs are even aware are an issue.

Honestly, did ANYONE besides the dev team ever even consider that hover was not rooting? It wasn't a priority to watch for such comments, and I only read a half dozen forums or so exhaustively, but I certainly can't recall EVER seeing a report that hover was not rooting. Probably because nobody had a clue it SHOULD. Which quite neatly brings us back to the concept of "vision" or "intention" descriptions for each power. (grin)

I hadn't the slightest idea, my heroes would twirl in midair and go on with the fight. That and the other changes around the same time to enforce animations had a VERY noticeable impact on the flow of combat. There's a very distinct jerkiness as each of these "corrected" animations grabs your hero.

These changes in timing are non-trivial, because the thousands of repetitions of hitting your powers keys in certain sequences has been programmed into your motor memory. Ask any trainer of any physical skill - it takes far MORE training to "unlearn" any sequence of motions and "program" a new one to motor memory than it does to do so on a "clean slate".

Now, full disclosure, I know enough about ergonomics and training physical skills that I've deliberately set up my control scheme for playing CoH to take advantage of the way your mind and body learn repetitive tasks. So I am quite likely a lot more sensitive to subtle changes in the flow of things than other players. On the other hand, I've seen people discussing keyboard and window layouts in the forums, and several folks advocate layouts very similar to mine.

Anyway, that's the root of my complaint about the continual dull roar of changes to the basic gaming systems. For what I perceive as at best minimal improvement to some esoteric aspect of the game, they keep changing basic elements in such a way as to change the flow enough to badly throw off timing. Took me quite a while to realize why little changes like the hover correction or the recent changes to kheldian shape-shifting were so jarring to me. It is almost a subliminal thing, but every time they put one of these changes in, the game becomes markedly less enjoyable to me for a while. And they'be been doing it a LOT in the past couple of issues. I rather suspect that it has never occurred to them either just how subtly annoying tweaks which change the flow and timing of combat can be.

Yeah, you eventually learn the new flow, and it seldom rises to the level of more than a nuisance. But I think it DOES impact people's enjoyment of the game. At the very least, though, if they're going to insist on putting us through that kind of irritation on a regular basis, it would be polite if nothing else to explain WHY it is so important to them.

Go wade through all 90+ (combined) pages in the two biggest threads of the current brouhaha about pet recharge inheritance. Notice how the tenor of comments changes drastically once Castle started sharing information. You see that effect very often in these tempests in the forum teapot.

I sadly doubt that even taking the entire code base of the game open source, sharing the drives of all their computers, and putting webcams through all their offices would completely cut down on the screaming and yelling when they make changes. But there does seems to be a pretty direct correlation between their judicious sharing of information and goodwill from the player base.

Oh, no worries, I'm a pirate at heart anyway. (grin) Not too sure but what it was me who did the actual threadjacking anyway, too lazy to look up that far. We could probably steer the discussion back to the original topic if we really wanted to, but I can't think of anything interesting to say at the moment. Maybe I'll go start an "Intention of the Brawl power" somewhere and try to get Castle to explain the tao of Brawl. Gotta start somewhere, and if things get outta hand and the discussion causes a nerf, I doubt all that many people will scream and chase me with pitchforks and torches.