Clintonian

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What if the dastardly villain pulls a small, defenseless puppy out of his pocket (or behind him, or whatever), and punts it for a good 20 yards. Slam dunking a kitten would also be acceptable.

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I just don't think evil enough.

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I know I got a TON of treats last night, and I didn't get anything..nor a badge for killing the Streng (the little Fir bolgs)
Hoping there are still badges for those...WANT MORE!!!

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/sign
I want my (hypothetical) 'Sleepy Hollow' badge for defeating Strengs!

I want the pose where the villain stands with his feet almost three times the width of his shoulders with his arms crossed of fists at waist. Great villain campiness.

Oh, and how about a fetal position for when the megalomaniacal supervillians plans are completely upturned and his mind snaps.

Maybe a donning of the (temporary) black cowboy hat?

Perhaps the one or two-handed messaging of the scalp to facilitate the villain's optimal cognition

How about the 'point the finger at everybody else, it's not my fault' emote?

Gotta have the universal 'it's about the money' emote, rubbing one hand's thumb and fingers together.

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All of my interventions were a surprise. Did they tell you about it?

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I was about say something. Kind of a crappy 'interevention' if it's pencilled in one's datebook. You have to have the sting of surprise to get the addict's attention. Otherwise, the addict is prepared with their rationalizations and malicious counter-attacks.

I posted a link to the GenCon panel notes that were discussed in mid-August that have been delted from the forum, plus a pertinent section on CoV.

Check here.

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Is it just me... or is the head villain of CoH way more friendly and talkative than the head hero in terms of forum posts...?

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Give him time. We'll wear him down, too.

I'd imagine Statesman's got his hands full right now with a bunch of new staff, helping L.Recluse get up to speed, overseeing new game mechanics coming in over the next months that are more involved than we've seen added since launch, as well as shaking off the sting of Update 2's initial rollout. I'm sure he'll be more chipper and chatty once holiday season gets in full swing. Plus, we have an important vote coming up next month - real life trumps CoH occassionally...

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The game's not due until summer/fall 2005, for heavens sake...

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Where is that date from? I was thinking (maybe just my own wish) it would be around first quarter 2005. Could have sworn I was thinking that for a reason.

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Back in the days before inactive posts were deleted after two weeks, several industrious CoH fans took notes at the CoH panels during the summer convention season. Jack Emmert (Statesman) commented that the limited PvP Arena would be out - understandably making an educated guess and not stating definitively - around Update #6 and CoV would follow that. At the current rate of Update deployment of 3 months, that puts CoV at a Holiday 2005 release window.

He also commented that after convention season they were going to try and deploy Updates at a slightly quicker pace. The doubling of their staff recently bodes well for that. However, even if they put out Updates every two months after #3 due around November, that's still putting the CoV release date at no earlier than May/June.

My memory is getting sketchier as the days go by, but I do remember the results of the threads reverse-engineering the timeline putting CoV at no earlier than summer 2005, and likely fall 2005. As with all things Cryptic, things change as the situation evolves. And that's okay.

I think that they're a little gun-shy at releasing details on anything at this point. The dev's that chime in here have gotten spanked by players repeatedly for hawking features that don't make the intended deadline for release. (Examples: Loot vaults, Alliance chat, certain persistent bug fixes (TF's, powersets, contacts), SSOCS, Epic AT's, etc.)

I think they've gotten much better at tantalizing players without over-promising them things. Statesman and others have commented that there are about eight(?) levels of development in CoH, the last 3 or four being separate operating versions of the game. Several times they've remarked that made a mistake in where they thought a certain feature or fix was in the pipeline. I'm eager for details on upcoming developments in the CoH universe, but I'll give a pass on CoV info until around X-mas. The game's not due until summer/fall 2005, for heavens sake...

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the city is already "done", so it's only a matter of adding the villians, powers, minion mechanics, content and lair/mission designs.

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Oh, is that all?!?

I pretty much agree with what you're saying, but considering how relatively small changes in player/mob dynamics in Update 2 caused a change in the orientation of magnetic north, there are many pitfalls to be crossed to make CoV sing like CoH usually does. The base features themselves are like adding an involved sub-game into the mix. I hope they make a separate forum server for CoV when the game comes out, because the amount of squealing piggies is going to increase exponentially for at least a couple of months. (head starting to hurt thinking about it... must go into denial mode...)

I think 12-18 months is a fair amount of development time for a 'linked' game like CoV.

This came up around the time Update 1 was released when ebgames or somesuch had CoV up for January pre-order. 'Conventional Wisdom' at the time was that that was a tentative date initended as a placeholder date in their database in order to take pre-orders. Most dev comments (particularly the ones at panels during convention season) since have pointed to a summer or fall 2005 release window.

edit: Just checked various e-tailers...
ebgames.com - 01/03/05
gamestop.com - 03/15/05
gogamer.com - no entry
amazon.com - no entry

I'm thinking that gamestop and ebgames just want to lock up pre-orders in Q1 2005.

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I have only two outstanding complaints about the Hollows, and one is that mobs are spawning literally on top of players. (

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Now that IS definitely an issue. Looking into it.

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I levelled a new scrapper up to 7 yesterday on Test Server and the spontaneous spawns are occurring in all the lower level zones I travelled through. It was more noticeable in KR and Hollows because the mobs wouldn't con grey/green to me and would aggro towards me half the time (seems to be a short delay between spawning moment and ability to aggro - probably latency).

BTW, my experience with the current adjustment away from '+1 mobs' in missions on Test was positive. I played entirely solo up to level 7 and found most missions spawned even with my level, except for a couple of missions that spawned yellow minions up front, with some blue minions toward the end. The two missions with Bosses had them spawn as an orange. I plan to start up a new controller on Test to see what its like with less flexible options. Obviously, I didn't play around in the Hollows since I was flying solo. Positron mentioned that players will now get a fresh contact before being sent to visit the Hollows, and I found that to be true, giving me an option to do missions in KR or the Hollows at the same time.

Now then, half the missions would be nigh-impossible to solo even at level 3 or 4(due to time required/frustration) with a most controllers/some defenders. Even newbie blasters might have gotten bogged down. I remember things being a bit easier at launch so that I could tolerably solo even a Grav/Kin controller up to 7 or 8 without needing a teammate. I liked that, and it seemed a bit more friendly (pre-Update 2) to newbie players who might want to practice playing by themselves a bit before throwing themselves into the more-complex playstyle of team combat. The current situation on Test is still really close to forced teaming for a lot of builds, though, and I would offer my 2 cents that the dev's do not ramp up the difficulty in the beginner levels any higher. If I'm a newbie, I don't want to get bogged down in quagmire right out of the gate. If I'm a CoH veteran playing a new alt, I want the pace to be as peppy as possible until level 12 when it becomes a DO enhancement game.

All in all, so far the latest version of the game on Test works for me, a casual player who likes to play 10-15 hours a week, aside from the persistent bugs that I understand are being worked on.

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This is a pretty big deal.
Have the devs discussed a separate site for the TR forums? Or maybe just have them "hidden" lower in the forum listing?

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Your suggestion seems to add a lot of work to a system that already intuitively works for the vast majority of people. If there's an issue on the Test server, you post it in the Test server discussion section. There's a stickied thread in every forum subsection that outlines what each subsection is about. Where's the cognitive disconnect coming from? Test server discussion is already on the lowest rung of the 'Development' section.

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