Blood Red Arachnid

Something my sister said once: "The mark of a bad game is frustration". To this I agree. A game that has a death or failure screen that is too punishing doesn't encourage a player to play the game better to avoid the screen insomuch as it encourages a player to quit playing that game to avoid the screen. The same can also be said of harsh death penalties: there is a game I am playing right now where death = lose pretty much all of your items, and the game is based around spending sometimes weeks to get these items. When someone has all their items on them, dies, and loses everything, they don't start again and try to play the game better. They just leave the game. The term "ragequit" is thrown around a lot, and rightfully so.


As far as death emotes go, I would gladly pay paragon points to get access to a pack that lets you choose how you die with varying emotes (like exploding, catching fire, dissolving away, disappearing in smoke, ect). The defeat of a hero should itself feel like a spectacular feat.

/sign.

I generally do not IO out until around level 47 or so. Because of that, I take a mixture of option C and a little of my own personal style.

If you aren't PL-ing through the game, as you play you'll come to find several deficiencies in the way the character plays. In general, you'll want to slot to deal with those deficiencies before you deal with anything else. If you have no deficiencies, then you slot to generally increase the power of your attacks.

Read the whole thread. Liked a lot of the ideas I heard.

I suppose right now one of the best (and biggest) things that can be done for the game is to do away the whole "villains in the isles, heroes in the city" dynamic they have set up. One of the best parts about playing through Praetoria is while going through the different paths you see how all the different stories come together. Events in one arc interferes or explains events in the other, and vice versa. It felt like the resistance and the loyalists were fighting against each other in one gigantic game of poker-chess.

This is me just typing ideas here, since I don't think this can really be done in the game without going as far as CoH2, but just let me write for a moment. I think one of the stronger things that could've been done is to take the dynamic that was in Praetoria, and make the Hero and Villain dynamic work similarly. In the same zones (both paragon and rogue isles will be accessible to everyone), you would have hero contacts and missions alongside of villain contacts in missions. You can only initiate hero content if you are a hero/vigilante, and also join them as a rogue. You can initiate villain content if you are a villain or rogue, and join them as a vigilante. By doing this, you can make it so you are fighting alongside of 5th column in paragon, or fighting against Lord Recluse in the rogue isles. The stories would intertwine with each of the opposing sides taking actions against each other. It would then truly feel like Paragon is a battleground and the rogue islands a slum in need of some great help.

There are some problems with this idea, though. The biggest issue is you won't know who is a hero or villain until you try to invite them to something and find out you can't. The other issue is that for RPers it may break immersion to see their hero walking by a villain but not being able to do a darn thing about it (implement an opt-in dueling system?) and vice versa. The last issue is implementation: there may be some legacy coding with the whole hero and villain thing that can cause problems, and also to make a story like this you'd need to add a ton of content to every zone in the game to accommodate the new alignments in the area.

BUT, the advantages are obvious. The stories are more involving and allow for greater depth than being an arachnos lackey/legacy hero errand boy. This makes every zone approachable by every player, so we won't have to deal with the whole "red side is empty" issue. We can now add content to either the rogue isles or paragon individually without having to deal with that whole "only add to both" stigma the staff has developed (as if a 30-35 SF to redside only will melt their faces). The whole game becomes one giant zone instead of the three way we have now.


EDIT: Also you can expand the praetorian storylines further into the zones instead of vanishing, like other people have mentioned.

I definitely want to take down the Praetorian Hamidon. It makes sense that after we take down Cole we have the post-war mess to deal with, and the biggest part of that being the gigantic monster that wants to exterminate humanity from that entire dimension as well as ours.

It's gotta be huge. I imagine several times larger than the seed. I figure that it will be either a trial or a zone where the Praetorian Hamidon has "infected" the entire thing, with tentacles and monsters covering an entire city.

1)Shilos, future son of sister psyche's clone and lord nemesis has traveled back in time to escape the covenant of tech warlocks who need his mutant clockwork blood to complete the anti-harmonica; a device to eliminate spiritually true musical expression from the world, which is the tech warlocks' only weakness. Team up with Shilos and Kanye West to put an end to the invading tech warlocks and save the present and the future for all!



Something about that just seems so... horrible. A combination of horrible fan shipping with an amalgam of random future ideas and top it off with an 80's generic abstract thing to save.

I personally always prefer to steamroll content: kill what is in your way. This is how I handle most things, though there are exceptions to this due to varying circumstances.

The power lets me travel faster and acts as a set mule. It's pretty good.

This thread has devolved into harassing a player.

Thankfully I have suggested having AV spawns on maps for players to fight... There is no exclusion between a small guy having powers and a big guy having powers.

I also do not find it impractical to fight giant monsters. The only people who have to resort to the ankle-fighting are players who can't fly or jump (a rarity with the prominence of raptor packs) and also have melee powers. Even then, I don't have an issue with attacking the ankles of a monster, since in all practicality that is what you would do to take down a giant monster: hit him low and cause him to fall over. If only we can somehow make it so giant monsters go from up phases to down phases during combat. That, or get it so you can actually stand on the giant monster. But alas these are small limitations.

BTW, the whole "I'm not saying I have a problem with your idea BUT... (then list a bunch of issues you have)" doesn't mean a damn thing. It is patronizing.

Why must you test me so... seriously, you've really got to take the post as a whole or else you miss things.

/sign with a kiss.

Although the gameplay can be fine by having plenty of instances, something I learned from CoH critics is they hate the lack of immersion the overworld gives. Right now the overworld map serves as little more than a distraction while you move from one instanced map to the next, and the instanced maps aren't stellar. After the initial "ooh" and "ahh" of playing the game you quickly lose interest in exploring anything in the zones. There isn't anything to really explore, either. It goes from one cityscape/island to another cityscape/island with no exploration rewards outside of tiny and hard to find badges placed at fairly arbitrary locations. Did you know that Grandville has an underground section of passages and pipes that spiderlings run through? No, you don't, because you lost interest in exploring the grey ground with grey buildings and grey features littered with arachnos soldiers by St. Martial. There's nothing on top of buildings. There's nothing inside the buildings. There's nothing between the buildings. It is just more buildings. As cool as that under-Grandville area is, other than getting stuck there for a bit and watching the spiderlings there is nothing to do there.

This is also a big turnoff to new players who see the game as empty. Playing in instanced missions is like playing a single-player offshoot from the main game, and lacks a lot of the dynamics that take place in the overworld. You don't get "rescued" in instances, you don't meet new people in instances, you don't encounter overly powerful enemies in instances, and everything that takes place in an instance dies the moment the instance ends. Want to have a big event where someone watches you do something? Sorry, you can't, since if it takes place in an instance then at most 7 other people will see your accomplishment. Instances are just such an isolated and stale environment that it is no wonder so many players become quickly bored with the content in the game.


Needless to say, I will be playing GW2 the moment it comes out. I am looking forward to it greatly.

BUT, as much complaining as I have done, there are several things that can be done in the game to make things a whole lot more interesting:

#1: Missions that occur outdoors only that aren't "kill 10 of x". If, for instance, a mission spawns a large number of mobs in an area that needs to be cleared out, or if there is a protection mission where you need to defend a politician's limo that will be regularly attacked by enemies on it's route, or you need to find a location by overhearing enemies and then go to that location purely off of what they say. Just SOMETHING that is clearly visible in the overworld. This will have the dynamics of an open world game and will also show newer players that the game isn't abandoned and full of soloers.

#2: bigger zones in either one of two ways: creating a subterranean section that has different enemies and going ons, and/or making it so many of the buildings in the game are hollow on the inside to allow for some impromptu building exploration. Either one will work: one of the funnest things I've done recently is get lost in Las Vegas. Walked down to the strip, and got lost. To navigate my way, I wandered into the Wynn casino to ask for directions, and that is when I saw it: a miniature forest of trees near the lobby completely covered with christmas tree lights (or something similar) and icicles and colorful plants. As I walked through those pathways completely lost, I forgot that I was trying to go somewhere and was just distracted by the majesty of the glowing wonderland I had stumbled upon completely by accident.

A similar thing happened in CoX when someone showed me the matrix room. It's a secret room in CoX that can only be reached via a glitch. Once I got there, I spent 10-20 minutes just in awe that such a place existed. That feeling that I had wandering through Vegas was recreated right then and there. Praetoria was very well done IMO, in that everything is unique looking and the zone events are approachable. But alas, with travel powers zipping us across the map in mere moments, having small maps doesn't do much to help the "this game looks abandoned" problem.

#3: Non mission happenings in zones. Maybe after killing so many enemies of a certain faction, something happens like an AV spawns or a riot breaks out or that enemy group goes into hiding and changes their location or you'll get info about big going-ons taking place underground or in buildings. Or if the right NPC gets saved they'll give you a buff or unlock a building for you or give you information on what enemies are doing what where or you'll unlock missions. Or maybe there's a bomb plot you need to stop before a building goes up, or an outbreak of some virus that will turn civvies into enemies and you have to stop it *without* going into a mission. Just put elements into a zone that are dynamic and can change a few things about the zone.

#4: more destructible environments. Instead of enemies standing around and just talking, they can be destroying objects that would otherwise be untargetable to regular players. I mentioned buildings being blown up earlier.


I'd love for more of these things to be in game. As much fun as broadcasted zone events can be, there's no reason to be limited only to those events to make zones dynamic.

Zone event: having one of the statues come alive seems like way too much work to actually put into the game. However, I do love the idea of having the enemies in the zone fight off the zone event of their own volition.


I don't do much research into powersets, but you'll need a lot more content than just a single sentence before you get anyone hooked.

Sounds good.

/sign.

The zone events themselves are usually uninteresting and the rewards are miniscule at best. I have had a couple of ideas on how to improve zone events to make them... you know... events instead of some of the random stuff we get now.

1st: All giant monsters need to actually be giant. Honestly, you could hardly call most of them "giant monsters" as much as you would call them slightly larger enemies. The Kraken is an example of this: Half of the fun of fighting the Kraken is just finding where the darn thing. An example of a truly giant monster is the Seed of Hamidon: You can see that thing floating ominously from miles away, making that soul-shaking rumbling sound. I myself grew up on old Godzilla movies, so when I heard about giant monsters I expected something a little more... giant. For a reference image:

http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//f/f...Size_Chart.jpg

I would suggest making everything to the left of the Kronos Titan 5 times their current size, minimum, with everything to the right of and equal to Kronos titan twice as large. Hamidon, Crystal Titan, DE giant monsters, aspects of Rularuu, and the ghost ship would remain the same size. Seriously, the giant monsters need to look like they'll trip on a building before they become interesting. It plays in with that whole "objects we see as so big are so small" thing that monster movies have going for them.


2nd, increase the rewards for zone events by a lot. Zone events have the unique capability of being dictated in how often they are present by the devs, and because of this it is impossible to "farm" zone events if they are adequately controlled in frequency. There is, therefore, very little reason to have such minor rewards as they do now. Currently most zone events give a badge, and maybe 2 merits. This isn't even enough to sneeze at. An exact number for the awards I have not set (I believe 10 merits was suggested for GMs in a suggestion thread), but there's no reason not to give 10 or 20 or even 30 reward merits (depending on frequency) for these zone events. For events that are essentially defense events, greater experience and INF rewards are a nice way to get more people active. A little more on that...


3rd, events where enemies spawn at your feet are not that interesting. You just huddle together and fight the enemies off for what seems like forever. Zone events, with their rarer frequency and higher rewards, should encourage an active part on the player. The ways in which you can do that are plentiful, but my idea is as follows: Make it so the enemies that appear in the zone actually appear throughout the zone and also have some march through the zone on preset paths. Rikti heavy assault mechs and elite zombies will spawn natively during the event without requiring dozens of players to gather in one spot. Then, the entire zone event becomes about street sweeping, finding enemies you want to kill and fighting off enemies that wander in and attack you instead of a stationary tank and spank. This allows you to create goals that can be accomplished that give further rewards, such as cleaning out certain neighborhoods or defeating all of the elites or something along those lines. This also allows smaller groups to fully enjoy these events, and on smaller population servers this is a must. And finally a little more on that...

4th and finally, certain events have aspects that are too hard. The Rikti Invasion has the Drop Ship: flying and nearly indestructible enemies with an unavoidable high-damage laser. This is a pain in the rear to everyone in the zone, and there isn't anything a player can do about it. This needs to be toned down; make the lasers much less damaging and maybe make the drop ships less durable (along with rewarding players that destroy them). Probably the hardest event is, without a doubt, the Deadly Apocalypse. To be frank, I don't think I've ever seen this event completed with less than a team of 24 people, and as fun as this event is it is all but impossible to do on the fly successfully. Completely deadly apocalypse redside is even more unheard of (and this is on the super-populated virtue, mind you). The coordination needed is astounding, the enemies spawn en masse and are strong, the banners are ridiculously difficult to kill with twice the HP of an AV, and it is really hard to fight enough of the enemy spawns to even make the banners vulnerable. The event simply needs to be much easier.



... that's about it from my end.


EDIT: Can't believe I forgot this. It would also be nice for there to be a few non-PVP zone events where an AV will spawn on the map.

Hurricane is one of the most potent powers I have on my /storm. I have it franken-slotted to reduce endurance and give a high -tohit buff. With around -45% to-hit combined with my few IO defenses, hurricane essentially lets me tank I-trial content. I'm not sure how long the -tohit is applied, but it seems like quite awhile before enemies that I have tagged with the hurricane are able to hit anything.

The KB of hurricane is the only reason why it isn't on all of the time. It makes for a great panic button and enemy relocation power though, largely because you're nearly untouchable while it is up. So hurricane is mostly about knowing when it will not be too disruptive.

I suggested something like this in the past:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=287638


Aside from the misunderstandings it is a decent idea.

I support this. Though an additional idea I'd like to add is increased rewards for fighting harder monsters.

The fact is that Caleb spawns on Virtue only, like, once or twice a month, and in all of my time playing this game I have never seen a team recruit for the arachnos flier once. These monsters are hard to get to and quite hard to fight. Something like the Clockwork palaldin practically spawns en masse. Giving the same rewards for both doesn't sit quite right.

I first heard about the game on X-play. Honestly, that's the only time I've ever seen an advertisement for CoH that wasn't me looking for CoH videos on purpose.

Be silly. Even if you have to resort to cheesy puns. Don't believe people when they say they hate cheesy puns, because they don't. The true humor is in the situation in which someone uses a pun, and not necessarily a pun.

There are some minor inconveniences. However, I still really like it as a travel power. It is quite stealthy, actually.

The closest thing I have used to Hand Clap is Gale from the Storm Summoning. It is a bit different from PBAoE KB because it is a cone KB that does extremely minor damage (which lets procs trigger). However, I have it one slotted with accuracy to improve it's horrible accuracy. I use Gale in only two real occasions:

#1: If there are a bunch of enemies around a dead guy who needs to be rezzed, I will use Gale along with Hurricane to beat back enemies before I mezz them.

#2: During trials where I need to move enemies away from terminals or some other jazz, I'll use Gale to push them away. On the keyes trial it is quite effective.

Due to an unfortunate habit I picked up, whenever I make a game I try to always make new characters for that game instead of expy-ing the old characters. With that said, I did have several ideas for heroes and villains that I won't be making in the game due to this principle. They are the following:


A science origin Spines/Dark Armor scrapper vigilante. The story goes that an alien race in the end of a war discovered that certain abstract concepts and emotions could be used as a source of power if harnessed through a specialized alloy found and tempered in another dimension (the netherdimension). This was made into an armor capable of emitting tremendous power. Though time, this armor sucked up the malice of the war, and though the war was over the dark armor still persisted, moving through it's own will and regenerating any damage done to it. This was soon called the Tangible Evil. Eventually it was imprisoned, and was dumped into a volcano on an uninhabited planet as to never be found. Little did the alien race know that they had dumped the armor on Earth in the Americas, on the opposite side of the planet where people were already starting to branch out.

Fast forward thousands of years into the future to a troubled teenager named Tom. Tommy was bullied so horrendously that it couldn't even be called "bullying" anymore, even by his teachers and parents. Tom was sickly and was also unable to defend himself. Full of resentment and distaste for the world, he would wander about at night not caring if he lived or died. Eventually stumbling into an abandoned mine, getting lost and causing a cave in, Tom found himself some very strange bits of metal he had never seen before; what appeared to be a rudimentary glove. The moment he put it on, the walls around him came to life, and the strange rocks attacked him, forming the dark suit of armor. With his newfound incredible power, Tom set out to put an end to all the pathetic rot in the world, even before they were to become criminals. His new trans-dimensional armor assembled, he assumed the identity of what the alien writing on the armor seemed to spell: Raxx.


Alongside of Raxx there are two more in the same storyline (they won't be as long winded). They are Treyson and Epsilon, both of whom have very similar origins. They were both friends in highschool (with Treyson being tormentor of Tom). Treyson's father was an archaeologist heavily studying eastern mythology, particularly war technologies and specific battles. Amongst his research he stumbled upon an old pagan fable about how 4 tribes of earth, wind, fire, and water had fought themselves to death all the while constructing mystical swords to harness each tribes spirit. Thinking there was some truth to this, Treyson's father decided to try and find these mystical weapons. He finds three of them, and takes them to the U.S. to be studied and put into a museum. It was there that it was discovered that these weapons actually electricity/magnetism, entropy states, and thermal states (the water sword was never found). Treyson's father was soon found dead, and his son and two of his friends were later seen with the swords and using amazing element based powers. No one specifically knows what happened. Anyway, the third guy was a one-off who wasn't important. Treyson himself is a Broadsword/Fire Armor scrapper, and Epsilon isn't representable in the game (Katana/Storm summoning is the closest you could get).


After that little series 7 or so years ago there was another set of hero-like individuals that me, my sister, and a friend actually tried to make a show out of. All ambitions were struck down upon finding out that making an anime in flash takes forever and a day to do and is hard as hell. Things kind of fell apart between the friend and us, so this idea is essentially killed, but alas here is what we had.

In the immediate future the discovery of a new element with strangely radioactive isotopes and alterable quantum states caused scientific advances to jump forward rather quickly. Genetic engineering became so advanced that the wealthy class were effectively choosing the traits of their children, and hidden abilities could be unlocked or even invented in the genome. With the new element in high demand and the world generally not at ease, a cold war started, with nations dumping tons of money into genetically engineering super soldiers that would be unstoppable through nearly all conventional war tactics. Alongside this came technological advancements, in particular nanotechnology. With the world's wealthiest powers dumping all of their money into nanotech and genetic engineering, eventually those participating governments went bankrupt. The northern EU union, the southern EU union (there's two in my fictional world), China, U.S., Australia, and France all suffered economic collapse, causing a near worldwide depression and widening the divide between have and have nots so far you could barely see one another. What we are left with are genetically engineered supersoldiers with no war to fight, the results of rampant and reckless nanotechnology experiments, and a strange phenomena when frequent exposure to a rare isotope of this applied phlebotinum would result in strange superpowers manifesting for little to no reason. Amongst all of the side characters, there are several main characters that could easily fit the CoH power sets.

The opening protagonist (named after her voice actor, so I won't be saying it online) would've been a katana / regen scrapper. Made near the end of the genetic engineering projects, she had many powers, such as an enhanced reaction so quick she could nearly catch a bullet, increased strength, increased speed, a great healing factor, enhanced immune system, and a specially calibrated metabolism to constantly keep a fat reserve for colder climates (reoccurring joke about how she was genetically engineered to be husky). She fights with a sword because, being that fast and strong, a handgun isn't a superior weapon in any sense. She works for a small government run company tasked with dealing with the super-powered menaces as they crop up. The story essentially revolves around this company and all of the... strange company it keeps.

The second main protagonist was another woman, extremely skinny and shy, was for awhile friends with the daughter of a husband/wife team of scientists who discovered the applied phlebotinum. Giving their daughter an amulet made out of a rare isotope of the material, their daughter soon gave it to the second protagonist as a gift. It just so happens that the main protagonist had some precise non-genetic physiology that would give superpowers when exposed to the rare isotope. She slowly develops telekinesis and telepathy over time, discovering these powers in a fit of rage which tears a college up in a psychic storm (which I personally animated...). Being a rage induced psychic bomb that was otherwise benign, she was dumped into the company to "deal with her" since she nearly blew up the prison she was staying at. Closest CoH power set being a Psychic Blast/Mental Manipulation blaster.

Last one (I SWEAR!!!) was caused when a very ghetto and pregnant woman signed up to be in a clinical trial for nanomachine treatments. Of course, you weren't supposed to sign up for these if you are pregnant or nursing, but she was the epitome of ghetto. Some of the nanomachines became lodged in her fetus's brain, instead of passing through the urine like they were supposed to. Fast forward 20 years into the future, and the now man (later to be named Vigilant) got himself into trouble when he chased a purse snatcher (a 13 year old girl) down, and using her youth made it look to be the most horrible scene possible. After being tased several times to the point where his heart stopped, he awoke in the hospital to find something very strange had happened. Those nanomachines had become lodged deep between the frontal and parietal lobes of his brain. Their programming had ceased, and upon being blanks for so long they reverted into basic calculators that his mind had inadvertently wired into. Once tased several times, the nanomachines activated, and Vigilant began seeing numbers and equations and wireframe models and projections in his head. These equations allowed him to calculate the immediate outcome of events with incredible accuracy, so accurate that he could essentially see 5 seconds into the future, as well as tell you important facts about things such as weight, length, velocity, density, and other such random facts. Using his new powers he broke out of the hospital he was confined in, and went to work for a rival company than the one story takes place in. Powerset wise, he'd be a martial arts/super reflexes scrapper, but this also skirts the lines since he would also use gadgets and guns and stuff.

That last one is one of my favorites, since whenever the "what superpower would you like?" thing comes up, I always select math-powered minor omniscient super reflexes that can very accurately predict the future.