Chase_Arcanum

I've been hit on enough times while playing female characters to understand the OP's discomfort, but I agree that a "female only" server isn't the way to go.

....Of course, I have a much easier time dodging the issue- I've learned toinsert references to my wife early on ("Waiting for my wife to reboot. Her PC isn't that stable." or "I don't know much about the markets- that's the missus's specialty")

So you're saying that this is like conversing with a repetitive and annoying chatbot? I agree completely. You can find my own thoughts in the matter at my website http://...

What is it with all these people that think of children every time they see sexual imagery? Pervs! That's just so wrong....

Make it a pool power set. I don't want to be rerolling all my characters.

Darn, you beat me to it...

I think you're just looking for a reason to feel insulted.

"we were unable to present this revamp on our own terms" means that they could preface this with an explanation of what they hoped to accomplish, why other decisions weren't done, and what this means going forward. There's a good chance that this wouldn't change a person's opinion on the merits of the work, but it would give them insight in the devs' rationale, and that can help channel the discussion into more constructive directions.

Also note that it had been mentioned that some powersets that don't require new mechanics or a lot of new animations (like proliferated ones) may be free to subscribers. It won't be EVERY powerset that's pricy.

Ah, understood.

Agree completely.

Architect could have been delivered in a "tip" based system or even via contacts (click on a tab to see this contact's player-generated arcs). The stories could have still been "non-canon" without turning heroes into arcade players rather than actually fighting crime.

Mediporters, much the same. I ignore them in my character bios and my stories. While I think Hickman addressed them as good as possible in the comic, I find they diminish the act of heroism that come from putting your life in harm's way, and I find character death or injury to be too good of source material to discard so casually. (My first attempt at a comic used the arrest teleporters, but it never set right for me and if I ever had the time to revisit it, it'd be retconned away.

Heck, even ZONES and zone barriers could have been done without explaining the placement of emergency barriers or walls that the enemy can fly over and/or turn off at will (or tunnel under via the sewers).


I've grown rather adept at selectively ignoring these parts of the game, but it would have been nice if they'd been left in the background and not been so glaringly hi-lighted.

Funny, I saw pretty much the opposite. I know we can't compare and contrast here, but I sampled 4 formerly-subscription MMO's that went hybrid in the past 2 years, and ALL of them have

- races you must pay to unlock
- classes (with unique mechanics) you must pay to unlock.
- content you must pay to unlock
- market limits applied to you that you must pay to unlock.
- critical advantages (like alternate advancement, broader power/spell selection, ability to use higher-quality loot, etc) that you must pay to access.

In fact, if anything, CoH Freedom is showing a broader range of selection available to all "free" players than any of these.

Can't go into more detail here, based on forum rules, but if you're curious which ones I mean, PM me and exchange ideas on what's available. I'm always interested in broadening my understanding of the genre.

Thanks, hope to get some time to catch up, though I think any chances at dusting off the old comic creator are shot now.

...Coulda used a good medical teleporter IRL this past week.

...which makes sense. Some of the female characters' costumes I've seen don't have room for anything the size of a "star trek communicator."

Beautiful, Amerikatt.

I agree... at least with these animations.


A free hand in combat is really an incredibly useful thing. It can grab the handle of the weapon to help stabilize it, apply extra leverage at critical moments, and/or free the item if stuck somewhere. It strengthens the balance and offers an extra point-of-contact that can make recovering from falls, stumbles, or dangerous blocks much easier. It also gives you adaptability when facing your encounters.

None of that is well-represented in the game mechanics of most MMO's out there, though, so it just ends up looking somewhat strange.

You're simplifying Posi's explanation... and that creates a use of the term "farm" that's so broad that it becomes meaningless. Entire genres of games (from pacman through mario to some of the latests a-listers) would be considered nothing but "farms." There would be no need to differentiate between "raids" and "farms" and "street hunts" and "grinds" and any of the other terms we use to define gameplay.



Put into historical context of MMO's, you had "hunters" that would run around instances, find new mobs, and kill them. A person that found a good respawn point (usually, but not always, with unique drops) settled down to just that spot. Just as hunter-gatherers settled down into farmers, "farming" seemed a natural name to give it.

In this early state, the proponents of "farming" defended the practice as a form of the Bartle "explorer" gameplay. While poking and prodding at the game, you find things that give better reward (over time and/or over challenge) than the way the devs anticipated (or intended), and then you pause to take advantage of that discovery. Developers often DID offer some perks out there FOR explorers to discover- things that just worked better and gave somewhat-better reward rates. The explorer thus saw "farming" as a badge of honor, and the responsible explorer knew to exercise judgement and to report something that they thought went "too far." They were treading in a gray area-- if the farm was TOO effective, they'd be exploiters, and they couldn't easily read a dev's mind to tell where they'd measure that threshold. Early farmer-explorers were some of the best bug-reporters early MMO-devs had.

The problem became that many explorers didn't report questionable discoveries to the devs. Some had the attitude of "if they let it in the game, we can use it... and if they can't find it, too bad." They were broken pieces of the game (exploits) that, if stumbled over once or twice weren't particularly bad, but when FARMED, they could lead to real trouble-- and many exploits in games were farmed to disastrous levels for the MMO. Thus, "farming" came to be known as synonymous with "exploiting" among non-farmers and MANY in the community started putting a lot more anger behind that word.

Finally, we have latecomers that never understood the history of a "farm" or caught the significance of tying optimizing reward into the definition. They incorrectly used "farm" for... well... virtually every kind of grind they encountered. Any kill-all activity. Anything where the primary effort is to run around and beat up stuff. It saves them the "boring time" traveling point to point, and they don't pause to read stories. To them, that's "farming" and they're fine with it... and they don't see the issue with farming because they're using the words in ways that the people who rail against a farm would find absurd (*I* find it absurd).


You can say its all relative and we all should be able to use the word however we want, but from an operational standpoint, the most-broad definition serves no useful function- it defines virtually nothing that "playing" doesn't, and there are more descriptive terms (hunts, raids, missions, "kill[ing] skuls") that offer better function. You just can't exclude the whole "gray area" of optimizing risk/time/reward without eliminating any useful meaning the word may have.

This.

In GR beta, I was missing the first few moral choices entirely (and didn't understand what others were talking about) by just by duo'ing, fighting the occasional street encounter.

Disabling XP is OK if you know the level range you're about to outlevel, but it isn't much good after-the-fact.

Its probably not an easy tech thing to do, but I'd take the Mission Architect tech that makes you auto-exemplar to the mission level and apply it to contact missions. That way, you're TOLD that you have outleveled the content, but are still given an opportunity to experience it.

Agreed. The ComicCon exclusive should've been like this:

<.<

>.>


whew. Glad I'm not the only one.



Excellent work, as always.

He's a bit reclusive