Creole Ned

If the patch is ready, I expect it to go live this week. It's got some important fixes in it and I doubt they'd hold it back for marketing purposes.

What an excellent thread and a terrific advertisement for the City of... games!

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cov does have alot of uniqu thing in it other then alts, ie we get to fight, snakes(they tast like chicken), long bow( witch are everywere), some crapy magic guys, a few sf were you do not do any real evil other then lrsf. it may be cox but the devs HAVE already made it a 2 sided game i am pritty sure other games like WOW that has 2 side is a bit more even.

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Other games didn't wait until an expansion pack (even if it could be played standalone) to include "the other side". CoV will never catch up in sheer quantity of content due to CoH's 18 month headstart.

Moonbase = generic tech maps with new flavor text. :P

I'd rather see something that would force the devs to actually work in new tech, like an underwater zone where you are actually in the water, not just in a "secret underwater base" that's a generic tech map.

That aside, I'm confident that 2008 will bring us at least one nutty new high concept zone. Whether it's a frozen world, something under the sea or a romp through a primeval world filled with dinosaurs, who knows? But I'm pretty sure we'll see something that isn't just another retooled old zone or another same old/same old variation on an existing area.

In fact, if I could pick one thing I'd like to see on a 2008 wish list, it would be more variety in the game's environments (both outdoors and in), linked to more varied missions.

Thank you for that installment of "The Orouboros Portal, Debt and You".

Smoothing the XP Curve

Real Numbers

Highlighting the two biggies for me. I've been an advocate of showing the actual numbers since the game was in beta. It took a long time but I'm glad to see it's finally coming.

I've also long thought the game had too much of a curve at certain points for leveling. Hopefully the smoothing of that curve will get more players to, well, keep playing.

All in all, some very nice improvements coming to CoH/V.



P.S. Lighthouse's corporate avatar is about as exciting as dish water. :P

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I understand why GOOD missions and GOOD story arcs would take a while to make and why they would require specific arcs, but why aren't we getting masses of random missions all the time? I'd really like to see a developer response as to why it's so laborious to make them one of these years.

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We already have random missions -- newspaper and police scanner missions. It's possible the devs think the variety offered therein is sufficient. As you note, most missions are pretty much the same, anyway.

If the difference is just cosmetic (a different-looking contact, different flavor text), how important is it that the devs spend time creating what would essentially be a variation on existing paper/scanner missions? I'm not asking to be snarky, genuinely curious how new random missions might differ.

EDIT: Sam answered while I was posting. Never mind!

The best proof for me that this is one game and not two is the fact that you can play both for the same monthly fee.

If NCsoft treated CoH and CoV as separate games, they'd have you pay $14.99 to play each and both would have their own dev teams and separate updates.

But that's not the case.

In my view, Cryptic bungled the first (and so far only) paid expansion for CoH. It shouldn't have been billed as both a standalone and an expansion, firstly, especially in light of what we ended up getting. It shipped with more content than some expansions but far less than a full game -- and much of what is in CoV was directly lifted from CoH and plopped down into CoV with the thinnest of justifications because time and budget demanded that they use shortcuts to create a "full" experience. I think they did pretty good considering the relatively short dev cycle CoV had.

Villains should probably have been integrated into the existing game world, not shunted off into their own. The additions and changes since CoV shipped indicate the devs realize they kind of goofed so we see co-op zones (RWZ), co-op missions (save Baby New Year) or parallel versions of the (mostly) same content (Orouboros).

Anyhoo, my two cents on it.

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One thing I'd like to add on is the intelligence of the respawn logic here. It's made easier by the use of instances, but still didn't have to be done this way. They go out of a way to make sure that an enemy will (usually) not appear out of thin air, not spawn on top of you.

I hate that in other games, where I walk into an empty field, think I'm fine, and suddenly enemies are appearing out of nowhere and aggroing on me. Because as it turns out, someone went through and cleared them all 9 minutes ago. It's immersion-breaking and it's annoying and I couldn't stand it.

Here, even ambushes come running from around a corner. You may leave a spot, come back and find it repopulated, but for the most part it's always behind your back in a way that could be believed.

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Quoting this and agreeing 100%. There are times when spawns will appear in plain view in CoH but it's pretty rare (I've seen Malta and Carnies spawn on sidewalks in PI this way with a kind of teleporter effect). Even better, though, is that if you clear an area, it stays cleared until you leave. It's logical, it's clean and it works. Much better than the automated respawn timers so many other MMOs use (or if CoH has one, it's long enough that I've never particularly noticed it).

(To be fair, this design could be a problem in games that rely mostly on spawns in the overland part of the world, as it would be pretty easy for a player or players to clear an area and then effectively grief others by preventing a named boss or something else from re-appearing by simply staying put in the spot they've cleared.)

I agree with Sam and Leatherneck. The exemplar system is nice but too restrictive. I can deal without gaining XP, I can deal with losing some powers but both...eh, I'd rather play content at my character's actual level, frankly.

Nope, no blocking here -- we only have five employees and believe me, none of us are blocking anything -- for better or worse.

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Okay, since it is obviously only affecting me, can someone repost links to the images Ex Libris posted? Unless I quote her message, which reveals the HTML, the links in her posts all point to the main Photobucket page, not to the pics she actually linked to (and if I try pasting the links from the HTML code it just times out trying to pull up the images).

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your wish has been granted

Positron

"Hero 1" Joe

Lighthouse hard at work

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Thanks!

The pics are still timing out. It may just be my work PC, which I think is using a tin can and string to connect to the Internet. I'll check when I'm home. Thanks again, though.

Okay, since it is obviously only affecting me, can someone repost links to the images Ex Libris posted? Unless I quote her message, which reveals the HTML, the links in her posts all point to the main Photobucket page, not to the pics she actually linked to (and if I try pasting the links from the HTML code it just times out trying to pull up the images).

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Second, the event is [u]supposed[u] to be [u]fun[u]. Well, from reading these forums, it seems like the developers have missed the mark when it comes to the ski badges.

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Agreed on this. The ski run misses the mark of fun so much its not even funny.

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And yet the players who do find it fun and are happy with the way it is now...?

Erm, am I the only one seeing Ex's pics as generic Photobucket links that only go to the main Photobucket page?

Contact support here.

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Question: Does this free time count towards veteran time. I know the free days you get from buying the game don't count. So do these?

Because if it doesn't I would rather just send them a personal email to get them back and pay for my time so I can get my goodies sooner.

Thanks

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Does this free time count toward veteran time? The answer is yes.

Ex

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To further clarify for the person you're responding to here, Ex, yes, the free month that you get from purchasing the game does indeed count towards Veteran Reward time. Not sure where he'd get the idea that it doesn't.

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Well like I said in my original post. Time you get from buying a retail box of the game doesn't count. So I was under the impression that any time given for free wouldn't count as well. But thanks for the explanation. I appreciate it!

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Time from retail boxes DOES count. The one month you get free when you buy a boxed copy DOES get counted for vet rewards. If it hasn't counted for you, your account might be bugged.

In my account info, I have two extra months of time on my vet rewards that are not paid -- the free months I got for the CoH and CoV retail boxes.

Yeah, I know, but no one forces a player to create and play dozens or scores of characters. Is it an inconvenience to have to log in each character individually to opt out? Yep. It's the same when you want each character to get one of the log-in (ie. anniversary) badges, too.

I've already agreed that a global opt-out option on the web page would be nice, it just seems a number of people are making posts as if there is *no* way to opt out of the system.

Hey, JKevinCarrier, did you know you can completely opt out of the system before it goes live?

No, the default should be ON, the system will likely fail otherwise. The devs are already giving you the option to opt-out. Use that option and let the system be used by the rest of the players without crippling it from the start.

Also, the solution to people demanding to know your builds is to not team with them. Simple, effective. If they continue to be annoying, /ignore them.

I don't care if someone can see my powers or build, it's just a video game. I don't think it was necessary to hide builds in PvP zones, either, but the devs have apparently detected that the CoH playerbase is unusually concerned over the privacy of their video game characters. So be it.

But defaulting everything on these new pages to OFF is taking that too far and impacting the quality of the entire system as proposed.

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If there was no way to turn the options off I could see the arguments. It may be an inconvenience to have to turn the option off on every character but you do it once and it's done. It just doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

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And I don't see why NC can't offer a web-interfaced option to batch-adjust all of your characters, with a single mouse click, to "hide me completely". Then, I can go back in and specifically elect what to reveal, and about who. Most of my characters will have the majority of information displayed ... but not all of them. And I don't want to go through turning off everything for NOW, before reaching the point of deciding "what will I hide and what will I display" after seeing what the web output is like.

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I'd support that, obviously, but the system could go live without it and I wouldn't mind, either.

It's already been said by others that if the options are turned off by default it's likely the majority of players will never realize the options are even there, making the system largely pointless. I believe the default must have everything ON in order for the system to be effective.

If there was no way to turn the options off I could see the arguments. It may be an inconvenience to have to turn the option off on every character but you do it once and it's done. It just doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

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It's good stuff, but I'm just not seeing any cause for all the exuberance.

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This is the most unsurprising statement you've made this year, I think.

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I'm assuming City Life will be a new forum which will open containing only the 'saved' threads.

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Read Ex Libris's post. The General CoH forum is being turned into the City Life forum. Only threads from General - CoV need to be brought over. The threads in General - CoH won't be going anywhere -- including yours.

It was part of the discussion in the giant (and now locked) suggestions thread Ex made in the Suggestions forum. No need for tinfoil hats!

Or is there?

I support, endorse and otherwise approve of the merging of the CoH and CoV forums into a single entity. I think it will be good for both sides of the fence, but especially for CoV.