Blood Red Arachnid

I've been looking at a lot of the new MMO things that are coming out, and something interesting (note, irritates me) is that a lot of them don't have Mac compatibility. Through the continuous debates about it on other forums I have learned all sorts of things, like how the games are designed for DirectX and to make it mac compatible will require an OpenGL conversion, which is supposedly such a big expenditure that most gaming companies won't do it let alone attempt to maximize game processes for a new format to allow equal-ish game quality on both machines.

Except this one... somewhere along the way someone went "Hey, lets make CoH Mac compatible!" and so it was done. This is just out of curiosity, but what exactly went down here to make the mac compatible version that didn't happen in most of the other big MMOs out there? Was there someone who did it as a hobby, or were the systems not as incompatible as others are currently making them? Or was Paragon Studios just edgy enough to risk it with the mac market?

Wow you guys are picky. Or I'm just un-picky. That's a word, right? But seriously I didn't get the gut reaction of overly contorted like I do from some comics, so I'm fine with it.

The only part that does slightly bother me is her facial expression. Something about it just doesn't sit right with me.

I personally rarely see my lore pet's heal fire off. Most of the time the support pet just stands around.

In general, +0/x1 is enough for it to really count as an AV solo.

Stalkers are kind of a situation-aware scrapper. Generally things will go like this:


Looking for a fight: Your stealth stops nearly everything from seeing you, so feel free to run around willy nilly since most of the time enemies can't see you. This can cause problems for group members who don't realize that stalkers can't be seen.

Before the fight: Prioritize hard and/or dangerous targets. Your power is to kill something almost instantly, so take advantage of that.

Opening the fight: There are three ways to do this. The easiest is just Assassin Strike or it's equivalents. This kills LTs, nearly kills bosses, gives everything -7.5% To-hit and sends out a wave of mag 5 terror to a fifth of the enemies. After that, just scrap and go from there.

Second way requires the ATO proc. What you do is use build up, then use the attack that has the proc. This will re-hide you, letting you fire off a consecutive attack from hide. Generally people put the proc in Assassin Strike, so they can use that attack then follow up immediately with another powerful attack.

Third way is to open with an AoE attack or one of the few moves that are better than AS. Don't have them memorized. What you do is open with those attacks, and this lets you build up assassin focus throughout the battle.


Ending the fight: There's no middle with a stalker. Either the fight is beginning, or the fight is ending. For end fight, you'll want to be playing just like a scrapper, firing off AS on a side enemy each time you get 2 or 3 charges of focus. If the enemy group has several hard targets in it, then you'll want to prioritize those other targets after you've killed your first one(s).


And that is how you play a stalker; a scrapper that pays closer attention to the enemy group and how they begin the fight.

Exercising their right to prejudice...

Dude, you should totally post that in suggestions and ideas. Like, seriously.

That's pretty pimp, actually. When it comes up, I'll change from the one I'm currently using .

I'm a bit worried about this side project that they're doing. I'm not worried about CoH, but something I have noticed is that a lot of people are making an MMO right now (not to mention you-know-who's upcoming expansion pack). If all of them are coming out at the same time and/or the paragon studios MMO comes out to late, it'll fail to find an audience. The last thing we want is for another Tabula Rasa if you know what I'm saying.

I did not expect to start a trend with this. I really didn't. I thought it was going to be one of those things where I make a topic that gets 7 posts and vanishes. I'm wouldn't even call myself part of the Niche community. It was just something I was wondering about.

You know... when I entered into the game I assumed that PVP would be mostly a teaming thing. When I made my first toon a defender, I did so knowing full well that if I were to go into PVP, a scrapper would pummel me because I have team supporting powers and they have kill enemy powers. I never really expected it to be different, since my job in the game is to support other players more than it is to kill other players. I also assumed this to be true of general game content.

It wasn't until later that I learned that the game was being designed so every AT could solo it, and also that PVP was being designed in a similar fashion, too. This seemed a bit counter-intuitive to me, expecting every AT to be able to solo and survive every other AT in the game despite vastly different tools, different survivability, different damage output, and different set bonuses. All of the other games I've played that has had PVP (and even ones on MMOs) have always attempted to balance things in very rudimentary ways, like having three kinds of damage in one big paper-rock-scissors game. Any way you slice it, that is just re-skinned damage (the funny thing is that this still fails miserably at being balanced). That, or as Zwil said it is a never ending babysitting campaign where things are tweaked rather arbitrarily just to see what would happen and what works.


Though I13 does do some things that I kind of agree with. In theory it would be possible in pre I13 for a single dominator to perma-hold any non-defense based tank despite mezz resistance. My solution to this would've been to drastically crank the mezz resistance differences between classes, so instead of scrappers having 10 and tankers having 13, tankers would've had 24 and scrappers would've had 12. Sure, a tanker could probably go right through a troller with that mezz resistance (barring several factors such as incomplete mezz resistance or other debuffs), but in contrast a tanker couldn't do very well against a blaster that can continually blast the tanker from afar with very high damaging attacks. The blaster, however, has no mezz protection so the troller could hold it and then lay down containment damage.

Stuff like that. I haven't gone through the entire set of the game's powers to determine what would work and what wouldn't and what magnitude to put everything at, but I do think that there were alternate solutions to the problems that I13 attempted to solve.

Heck no! I have to be entertained by shiny new things endlessly or I'll just go away...



Alright, enough with the jokes. IMO overhauling bases, AE, PVP(?), some tip and radio missions, instanced maps, zones, and all that stuff itself can be considered new stuff since it is, indeed, all new to the players. Sure, it isn't necessarily a new storyline or some new power set, but I'll sure as heck enjoy using my old powerset on an instanced map that isn't Large Warehouse #3.

I've made an arc and played through several arcs. In general, I don't use the AE though.


For making arcs, the biggest issue is how much time it takes to go through them and make sure everything works. Making the arc well enough to be playable requires running it several times to make sure everything works correctly and there are no glitches you can exploit or bugs that cause impossible missions. It gets harder the more complex you make your arc. While creating an arc that is full of several dynamic elements, I had to run it privately about 30 times to make sure something stupid didn't happen. This difficulty is amplified for every single custom enemy you put into the game. I, personally, reserve custom enemies to Bosses and AVs, since it makes balancing them a lot easier. But, I've been on missions where there are 5-6 different kinds of custom enemies in one large enemy group that makes up the whole arc, and it is very easy to get things wrong.

The second issue is the rigidity of the AE system. I'll have an idea in my head that is outright impossible with the current AE system, so I have to change it and conform it to work. But then it does something stupid like refuse to give AE tickets or experience, so then I have to dumb down the arc even more. Then when I go to revise the arc it is incompatible because of some stupid name copyright that is being violated somehow (Seriously, someone tell me how Van Ruhle's Spectre is violating copyright), so I have to rename the characters for the arc. Then, I have to be extra careful with spawning bosses and spawning glowies and ambushes and escorts because I can't actually control where things get placed in a mission; I have to tell the game where to put them in a large general area and just hope for the best. The fact is the AE system is only an average system, and it lacks some of the more refining tools that would be necessary to create an epic mission.



As for playing AE arcs, there are two things that seem to get into the way of me playing them.

First issue is getting a team to play them. It is that old self-reinforcing problem in that no one playes AE because no one playes AE. The rewards for non-farms are only average, and getting a bunch of people together to do these missions is incredibly hard to do. I've only managed to get a team of 6-8 on an AE arc once, and it took half an hour to do it on Virtue. Not every AE arc can be truly appreciated while solo. The AE arc I designed myself wasn't meant to be soloed at all; it was built for teams to maximize chaos, what with warring factions and supplementary NPC allies and all. The only time I've ever heard someone say "forming an AE mission team!" that wasn't a farm was when a redname was doing it.

Second issue is quality problems. I've been on enough crappy arcs to know that the search function doesn't provide what you are looking for and the rating function is useless. User generated content is like a box of chocolates, except the box is old and a lot of the chocolates are going to be stale. I've been on arcs that don't work, arcs that suck because they're just farms, arcs with overpowered enemies that can't be defeated by a team of 8 IOed out toons (Giving the AV Rise to the Challenge isn't a good idea), arcs where your levels jump around drastically from mission to mission, and arcs that are incomplete test arcs that were published just to see if the system worked. Without an adequate quality control system, a lot of AE arcs just aren't worth playing. You can't find the diamonds in the rough very easily, either.


But don't let that stop you. If you're on virtue and you want to run an AE arc team that isn't a farm, hit me up if I'm online. I'll gladly join you.

I tend to play... whatever song I want to hear at the moment. Lately I've bee listening to boss music from Touhou (particularly Heian Alien and U.N. Owen was Her?). Though I will also stream some tracks from Kingdom Hearts games (Enter the Darkness from KH:BBS is great for speedruns, Armor of the Master and Darkness of the Unknown have a great epic feel to them).

For generic rock, there are two places I will recommend you to. First is GuiltyGearRockYou's Melodic Instrumental Rock / Metal Arrangements for some generic rock music. It's a long playlist that I keep on in the background for awhile. The channel has a couple other much shorter playlists that have some gems that aren't on the main channel I just linked you to.

The other generic rock comes from 311Erock's channel, which has him rocking out to a ton of different songs from retro to pop culture. In the end, it'll make you wonder why many of these songs weren't rocked out in the first place.

I usually have a primary focus between two characters and then an ancillary focus on the remaining ones I have. I also try to get into the character quite a bit so I stay with them.

There is a very big difference between competitive talk and the filth I've seen spew from some players mouths. I, personally, have always envied sumo-wrestlers for their discipline in and outside of the ring. They compete, and whomever wins and whomever loses isn't a big deal. I like to play the game, not put up with someone else's nonsense. I don't even like to watch many sports nowadays due to all of the hostility in them. Years ago, that hostility was absent from a lot of sports, and as a kid I grew up thinking that sportsmanship was something to aim for.

For an example of player nonsense, calling someone an idiot for not plugging their ears and going "la la la!" whenever they enter a PVP zone isn't competitive talk; it exists solely to degrade someone who is different from you and ignores all reasons why someone would want to keep their chat on. It is an anti-thinking response that benefits no one but the speaker. In a similar vein, it isn't productive to taunt someone after you defeat them. It isn't acceptable to insult someone for several days after they've lost. It isn't healthy to hold grudges and try to endlessly harass whomever beats you. Belching a slew of random swear words strung together isn't clever or entertaining. Being impersonal isn't a sign of strength. Threatening someone with real life violence when you are losing should never be tolerated in ANY place. And ostracizing players who admit that they don't enjoy this isn't going to encourage them to PVP any time soon. In fact, none of these things encourage people to PVP, since it has been shown and is said to drive away players.

Truly an interesting conundrum: PVPers drive away the people that they would PVP with. Now, I haven't seen all of those things happening in this game, since I have taken very few forays into the PVP world of CoX. However, I have seen them happen in countless other games. It only takes one guy who alts to 2 different accounts and gets his entire SG group to /tell you insults on a daily basis to just quit with the PVP thing as a whole. This is worse for PVPers, because it is the players themselves who are the content. PVPers making themselves as unpleasant to deal with as possible just removes any fun that could be had in the game. Take a show of hands on the question of "Do you want to fight some guy who spouts cheesy RP one-liners, or some guy who just aimlessly swears at you before, during, and long after the fight", and you'll see exactly how contradictory to it's survival the whole PVP environment can be.

So what I'm getting is... you killed Zwillinger and you liked it?

After reading the responses, it is as I feared: community is a part of it.

The thing with the community in PVP is that the bad parts are emphasized. In regular gaming, whenever you encounter a troll on a team or someone annoying in the game, you can kick and/or ignore them and then that is the end of it. But in PVP, it is those very players that become part of the gameplay, and are capable of influencing the outcome of events directly. This ascends trolls to the level of griefer, which is far more dangerous. The power in the situation is shifted to whomever is better at PVP combat, and unfortunately it isn't always the righteous that win.

Good people can make boring things entertaining. Watching a horrible movie with a funny friend is a whole lot better than watching a horrible movie alone. The inverse of how a bad person can ruin a good movie is also true. You can apply this adage to a lot of things in life, and applied to PVP it quickly demonstrates a problem with PVPers.



From what I have heard, I13 did quite a bit, what with all but removing travel suppression and giving diminishing returns to buffs/debuffs. The way I always pictured how PVP in CoH would be is largely team based, since not every AT or powerset if well equipped to be by itself. I think they should go back to the pre-I13 model.

I suppose my greatest issue with PVP is a mental wall that I have. I've come from quite a few online games where the penalties for death are harsh, the community so horrible that I can't even stand them, and to even be below average at PVP you need umpteen ridiculous items of incredible cost and rarity. I fear those issues may have carried over to pretty much every game. Somewhere along the line playing in PVP quit being about having fun in a competitive environment and instead became about taking out the frustrations of the world onto whomever they happen across. The toxic environment spreads. I remember being part of a game that was *only* PVP for awhile. Everything was great until they showed up, then suddenly it was all about being as rude as possible. It's like honor and shame just vanish in lieu of calling others a retard.

There are no harsh penalties for death in this game, but the power changes do put me off in a very similar manner. If I want to PVP, I have to go and make a PVP build, and I have to buy the IOs for that PVP build, and the worst part is since I don't know a thing about PVP I don't know if I'm even doing it right. Every mistake that needs to be corrected in the build equates to wasted respecs and wasted money. There isn't any environment to raise you up that will make PVP familiar. You either know it, or you don't. Due to the innate hostility of PVP in games, this isn't a good thing. With all of my powers essentially drained and working in ways that I am completely unfamiliar with, these two elements combine to form one off-putting area.

My third issue would be just how "elite" the PVP requires. I know there are FotM all over the place in PVP, but those are usually FotM because they're effective at what they do. Running into a zone that is full of nothing but psi-blasters and regen stalkers isn't fun, but if the environment calls for it then this is a big turnoff.

I saw another thread about Zwil, and this made me wonder a bit as to why it is I never set foot into a PVP zone. Through word of mouth I hear only 5% of players ever go there. I can count myself as part of the 95% who don't, but I am starting to wonder what it is that makes me part of that 95%. I have very little experience in the matter, but nothing quite so concrete to make me shy away from PVP in the game...

Now, I can go and make some 3 page report on my thoughts as to why it is I never go slugging it out with someone else in the game, but who wants to read that? So, for now while I collect my thoughts I come to the players to ask why it is you don't PVP yourself.

You guys are breaking off on way too many random tangents. Honestly, who cares if people are truly good/evil here? That doesn't have any practical application here. We're just talking about putting more content in a divided game where the division is obviously levied against redside. This was mentioned earlier, but something a lot of people neglect is that players still have redside toons, even if they play blueside more often. The only people who can't enjoy the redside strikeforce are the people who have only blueside toons and have none of them aligned as a vigilante. I'd be so brash to assume that this makes up a very small percentage of the player base. If the devs are still making releases on both sides, it mean that the devs are still concerned enough with redside to bother with it. Redside can't be bad for business if the devs are spending 50% of their time on the updates providing for it.


Now, I do think they should have a 30-35 strike force for Redside; that section of redside is a profound level range in which there isn't a lot of interesting content to do anyway. Whenever I make redside toons, it usually is full of me racing to get through those levels to get to the Mistral/ITF/Patrons. I haven't brought a toon through there since the contact search function was added, however, so this problem may have been remedied. Still, there is an empty range where it is harder to find a team because there isn't anything profound to do in that range.

Making an SF can't be too hard. Each of the signature story arcs released are about as long as a short SF, except with custom enemies and custom maps and custom powers and cutscenes that are more than just centering on a person's face while they talk. Just do half of that, but make it a little longer and put it as a redside SF.