CogSprocket

In general, I liked the badges in Recluse's Victory.... however...

I didn't like the pillbox one. The way it works does not reward the people who actually win the pillbox, but the person that manages to rush in first (this could be someone else entirely who did no work). Couldn't this be based on percentage damage to all of the guns? Or place some sort of central thing we zap after the guns, and percentage damage of that thing. Let more people share in the reward of the pillbox kill. The zone encourages large groups of teams to work together to take over the pillboxes, so let them all be rewarded with the badges.

I helped take over 20-30 pillboxes with my team, but because I was more focused on genuinely helping take them out, and not rushing in, I have nothing towards the pillbox badges. It doesn't seem like the way it should be.

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For those players who have reached the Salvage Limit with one or more pieces:

Is your SG capable of making a Worktable so you can consume some of that Salvage into the raw material? (Raw material has a limit of 99 currently).

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Only a large supergroup would have the prestige for a functional workshop, even with one table. Most supergroups are much smaller, so will hit the salvage limit a long time before they can process anything. If that wasn't as intended, you might want to look over the mathematic reasonings posted in other threads about base costs, and the time it takes to make them. We won't start seeing workshops regularly for awhile yet.

As an update on other things... about 200-250ish grassy DE later, I got bladegrass. That was a mix of razorvines and bladegrasses.

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A full team of 75 level 50 characters should have a bit more than a tiny PvE base.

Not to mention, my tiny SG with less than 10 members will take a year just to get the prestige to make a functional PvE base.

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You get a quite a bit of prestige just for your first 15 members and you earn prestige pretty quick if you play most of the time in SG mode.

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He said he has less than ten members, so I'm inclined to agree with his estimate. My justification is below (I've rounded some things up and down, as you can only estimate these things roughly anyway).

We'll assume he's using an 8x8 plot, and wants five small rooms. We'll simplify and call them 150000 each. Mainframe for 150000 and generator for 225000. 200000 for extra bits like crafting tables. I don't have the costs to hand. The bonus for new members will cover any missed expenses, so we won't worry about that. That adds up to 1325000.

Assume 10 members. Each has time to run one mission a day. This is about right, as people tend to mission more at the weekends, less during the week. We're talking average people, not powergamer people here. They'll earn around 800 prestige per mission. That's 8000 a day for the supergroup.

Divide 1325000 by 8000 and you get around 165 days. This is approximately 5 months, assuming that none of the sg members give up with their mission a day by that point, none of them go on holiday, none of them play other characters, none of them have any personal crisis that might stop them playing and none of them have exams or anything to do during the year.

Therefore, for a supergroup that has less than ten members, that are not hardcore powergamers, and that will have things that stop them playing at times, a year seems a reasonably accurate estimate.

Minus a few epics and isolator, I have all the issue 5 and before badges... so I can't offer insight about whether you need badges as well as the following.

Killing 100 prisoners (any type) definately unlocked Mob Specialist. Seems even some people with the prisoner smiting badge will have to smite more to get it.

Killing 100 grassy DE did not open Bladegrass.

I had a funny moment from the pre-announcement training of him. Sometimes he really does know what he's talking about...

CTab: I like to listen to polka!
Cog: Cog enjoys dancing!
CTab: Cog's a clockwork, though.

On issues of badge sorting, exploration badges are getting less and less great really as more are added... the badge graphics are identical for all of them. Someone with all the exploration badges has so many that you can't pick out unusual ones. Would it be possible to tint the badges for different zones, or maybe different level tiers of zones? Standard colour for starter zones, green tint for the next up, gold or silver for the unique ones, something like that.

I'd also echo the comments of badges appearing in the wrong orders making the lists harder to view.

The addition of badges where you're rewarded for multiple times at an event, and the extra taskforce badges, are a good thing.

Epic badges I'll reserve judgement on. Some of the figures look like they might have been based on people who powergame badges. It's really easy to hit the current (on live) top damage badge by going afk whilst being damaged. But for a person just playing the game, it's fairly hard. The epics may well end up a powergaming only thing, rather than something attainable by actually playing. I don't imagine that's the idea of them.

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((Happy to help. And happy that Sea Hawk called on Vagz, otherwise I might not even have known what was going on. ))

((And a big thanks to everyone who came along: Cog Sprocket, Comrade Smersh, Polaron, Sea Hawk, Vesperi, Wildcat X... and... damme. Sasha. Soviet something...? I'm so sorry! I'm blanking on your hero name!))

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((Soviet Shadow...

Even if Cog did get the wrong end of the stick about what sort of party it was. Still, if you're a tiny clockwork robot, you can get away with dancing anywhere. ))

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I know I'm being pedantic here but from what I can tell this is not a 'global' chat system, its a US cross server chat system. EU version doesn't have this yet (AFAIK) and when they do its pretty unlikely that you will be able to chat between US and EU servers so please, don't call it "Global" until it actually is!

Its kind of like the World Series.... US wide does not equal Global!

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I hope the non-beta version does let people talk to the euro servers. With the current set-up, if anyone I know goes out and buys city of heroes, I can't play the game with them (I imported the game from America at release). At least if global chat let us talk to the euro servers, I could chat to them while I'm playing.

Something problematic with /ghide... if a friend hides, they disappear off your friends list. Totally disappear, not just listed as offline. It is as if you've never friended them.

This means you don't know if they're still on your list or not. They might have removed you, but you don't know either way. It also means you can't remove them from the list until they unhide themselves (using the interface in the window itself, it might be possible with slash commands).

All round, this is not a user friendly feature. It would be better if like the server friends, it just lists them as offline when they hide.

These are things I found a bit problematic with the global chat (other than the previously mentioned, defaulting to making it so you always speak in global chat channel, and not on the default for your active tab). Some others have said about, but it doesn't hurt to restate problems.

*Can't add people with _ in their names via the add friend box. You must use the /gfriend command.

* Global friends tab of the friends list does not allow width resizing. It would be good to be able to resize the width, and just have a scrolling bar appear if you make it too thin to view all the data at once.

* Global friends does not always show all the relevant columns on first open, nor does it allow you to scroll sideways to see them if the window is too small. This only occured the first time I opened it; I could only see the first few columns and attempts to resize it failed. After the first time, it resized it to show all colomns.

* Global chat channel defaults to being added to your main chat tab at the bottom. Perhaps have a dialogue box asking if you want to make a new tab for it, or place it as a prexisting tab? As making a new tab for each channel it something many players will want to do, it wouldn't hurt to make it a bit easier for them.

* 'Channel Members' box has no obvious way to close it, other than clicking 'leave channel'. It confuses people, making them think they have to 'leave channel' to get rid of it. You currently have to enter the menu (right clicking on the chat tab) and select the option again to turn off the 'Channel Members' box. It does not have an easy close window circle, like all other windows in the game interface have.

*When on mission maps, location is a code, not a user-friendly sentence. Warehouse_45_Layout_02... etc. This seems to be for all mission maps. Zones display correctly.

I had a bit of a bug. Logged into chat, and got an invite to join a channel (by someone I had global friended). I accepted.

Then made a new tab and added the channel.

At this point, I could select other tabs, but it was always defaulting to sending messages to the global chat channel. It didn't matter which tab I had selected.

This was fixed by selecting 'A' from the bottom of the chat window, to make it default to the right channel for the active tab. However, it's going to be a pain to set this manually every time. The active tab option should be the default when people join channels.

(Edited for clarity)

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That's actually only part of what I've said. Solo players should always have something to do...I've never said that everything is solo-able (some missions are, others aren't), or that every Archetype can solo as effectively as another.

If a player sees a boss of his level, he should probably get help...


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The problem with that is at higher levels, virtually every mission has at least one boss at the end. If a player can no longer solo a boss of his/her level, it means that solo player can basically only street hunt. Street hunting is dull for many people, hence they'll stop playing at that point.

I can see that not everything should be soloable, but it seems the balance is a little too far to the not soloable end. We are talking the 20-30 mark, so it isn't unreasonable to let people be able to solo their missions.

Once people hit 40, before the change, grouping becomes a lot more essential anyway. There are AVs in many missions, and many missions with multiple bosses. Most bosses of that level have special abilities that make them difficult to solo... master illusionists come to mind.

In essence, the difficulty raise as levels increased was already there. Not though boss power, but the special abilities the bosses had. Some high level boss types are a lot easier than other, but they could have their difficulty raised on a individual type level. Adding new special abilities to boss types that lacked them would be a logical way to do it. It is the special abilities that make a master illusionist much more deadly than an even level skull boss would be.

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Maybe you should make an exception for people from Quebec to test the French version?

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Anyone over there would have to import a copy to play on the French server, and would not get access to the American servers with that copy. Hence they aren't going to want non-Europeans testing it, because they won't easily be able to buy it/play on Euro servers.

The issue is really that it's a forced community. People don't get a choice where to play... it's down to what version of the game they get. That means to continue playing on US servers, where our friends are, we forgo any chance to get the comic and take part in anything Euro based.

On the other side, groups like French Canadians might like to play on a French server. Or immigrants from Europe to America might prefer to play on the new Euro servers. People doing night work might prefer a different timezone server. Some may like to have characters on both Euro and US servers, to take part in both communities.

Choice is the big issue here. Letting people choose where to play, and which community to get involved in, is important. You can't second-guess people's motives for server choice. It doesn't harm the game to let someone from Germany play on a server based in America. It might harm it if that German person wanted to play with US friends on that server, and they found they had to import the game from the US to do so.

If the servers are going to be the same Paragon, at least it isn't too late to change the decision... it is good to learn from the mistakes of other games that have tried to impose region-based server restrictions. Players don't like them. They do feel segregated, and they do feel their choice has been removed.

How set in stone is this thing about not being able to play on other region's servers? Historically, this has worked very badly for games. Customers don't like it, as they like to play with other countries. It limits their choice, and often it means Euro servers get updated way behind the others for major publishes etc. Not many games have stuck to this policy after trying it, as it is just deeply unpopular.

I've heard some rumours this is due to the Euro servers having a European setting, which raises even more of a concern about the last point of being behind on publishes. You couldn't just use Paragon and pretend it's in England. It's far too American looking for that. There shouldn't really be a worry about European appeal... American settings sell just as well, if the story/gameplay is good.

My main RP character is...

Cog Sprocket, a rogue clockwork.
Supergroup: Digital Justice (robot group)
Notes: Hostile RP is welcome due to being a clockwork. I won't take it personally. But I do have a dim view of poweremoting (*kills the clockwork* and so forth).

I do roleplay a bit with any of my characters, so any character listed in my sig is fair game to approach.