Chase_Arcanum

Are you guys sure your projections are right?

I just got the following in-game popup:

We're sorry, your account has already received its full allotment of XP. If you wish to continue advancement with this character, delet unused characters to recycle their XP.

Congratulations. You're King / Queen / Warduke of Pragon Studios for a day. You can order the team to do anything, but it must be completed during your reign. What will you order them to add/change/fix?

We all have our wishlist of grand ideas we'd like to see in City of Heroes. Some of them are.... rather.... ambitious. What about the smaller things? For those that are experienced in the industry, don't get too hung up on "nothing could really make it through planning, production, and testing in a day" thinking. The goal here is to limit the scope, not test people on time management.


My Royal Decree:
- Let supergroup officers invite offline characters... maybe via email. At the least, let us invite our own @$#@ alts. (my priorities are skewed by recent experiences .)

Many of these items would be great, but most of them would really be as much work that they're more likely part of a CoH2.0 than something for the existing game.

Take Tertiary colors:
1) The system would have to be re-encoded to support sending a third color in the datapackets that we currently have. Right now, they're very lean, so adding another value to transmit means modifying the parsers that make sense of that data, too... To give you an example of how tricky this is, pretty much everything we've gotten to date (including powerset customization) has used existing bits in the packet. (Somewhere, sometime back, BaB even alluded that there were only a few unused values left, too)

2) All/most of the art asset textures would have to be configured to apply a tertiary color to them, or all this is just a waste of resources for a few art assets. They also have to be able to appear similar to the original one for reverse compatibility, lest we lose some of our favorite designs.

If you're going through THAT level of effort this late in the game's life, you start to wonder about just saving it for wholly new art assets for a newer Directx11 next-gen 2.0 version of the game, if there was to be one.


... Or take "more flexible body structure options"
Roughly speaking, the more extreme the bodytype customization, the less likely the animations will look right. Make longer arms and the animations that show arms crossed will look even worse than now. Hands that clasp together will instead cross over one another. Hands on hips clips more than they do now with the various costume pieces. Art direction tries to balance flexibility with quality here, and adding more flexibility WILL result in quality loss when it comes to how these work in the world. Again, designing from scratch for a certain level of tolerance is more effective than retroactively applying them.


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Me, I want

1)more variation of existing pieces.

- Take the samurai armor and give me an ultra-mode shiny texture for the high-tech silver samurai clones (unlikely, since its a vet power, but its the idea).
- Take pieces that have particular textures to them and give us a more neutral versions that can better mix-n-match existing pieces (again, ultra-mode pieces that look crappy against non-ultra pieces come to mind).
- Take something as simple as the biker jacket and say "how many other pattern variations would work with this?"

- STANDARDIZE a few things. I take a leather top and matching leather pants, and they appear consistent. I MIGHT find one leather-ish set of boots that appear the same color when the same color is applied.... and then I try to add the leather skirt (to make the top appear more tunic-like) and again, the colors don't match.

2) Back details.

3) Asymmetrical costumes, even if that means that we'll be adding to the list of pieces that only look good when part of a set.

Its the journey for me... but sometimes I get caught up in finding out "what I'm missing" and feel obligated to force myself to do things that don't work well for me-- large group events that make the weaker PC struggle, Task Forces where I risk having to leave midway because of being on-call... archvillain fights that just seem the antithesis of my interests. I forget about the journey at those moments and generally find the game less fun because of it.

That's what happened when I19 was announced... and I had so many of my characters stabled in their 40's (what was the sense of getting to 50 when the high-level game mechanics become less interesting to me?). I felt like I HAD to have characters ready to experience the new 50's journey, so I focused my time on getting those characters to 50 to be ready. The destination became the sole focus.

Then, I19 came out and so many of my level 50's had more to do. It felt more frustrating than fun-- I thought they'd already reached their destination, now there's more to do. Granted, I didn't bother with the highest tiers-- just enough to get a level shift then shelve them again. I still haven't even done THAT on most of my 50's, and I only have a little over a half dozen.

Then, I20 preview came and I saw what was to come, and in a good way, it kinda threw me out of the "destination" funk again. I stopped playing my 50's and stopped caring about getting them ready for Incarnate stuff at all. I'm on my long-neglected lowbies again and rediscovering the joy of just playing without thinking of where things eventually go. Some will likely be stabled in their 30's, some in their 40's, and occasionally, I'll break out a 50 just to see what's going on in the incarnate world, but I don't feel compelled to keep up with the latest and greatest to remain at the ever-shifting destination anymore.