Dollhouse

Back to the grind last night, a BAF and a couple Lambdas. The BAF was 16 people, and while we didn't try for the Keep 'Em Separated badge, it seemed to have slightly worse lag than I've seen, post-Patch. I'm not sure what the difference was. Fewer Masterminds,. maybe? The prisoner stage was the usual un-fun lagfest, though.

The Lambdas were pretty smooth, lag-wise, I suspect largely due to being quite a small League. Had one period of rubberbanding (which got me faceplanted...grrrrr), but that may well have been on my end: occasional connection hiccups. The "now you see it, now you don't" Ninja Run bug was a real pain, though, as the character I was running doesn't have a conventional travel power. Makes it a bit tough to get over the wall! Fortunately, a teammate had Recall Friend.

Oh, and one Common table, one Uncommon, one Rare...

Ran my first post-patch BAF last night (been avoiding them for a bit...getting badly burnt out on the grind) on a 16-man team. The lag during the prisoner escape phase, where I've always found it most noticeable, was about the same as it was, pre-patch, on a full League run.

Which is not good...

I also found the lag during the AV fights (especially the finale against both) to be worse than it used to be, despite the smaller League. Not unplayably bad, like it apparently gets for some people on a full League, but still annoying and un-fun. Dropped after one run, which was successful, including a "Not On My Watch" badge, which that character didn't have.

I was willing to put up with the lag before because I hadn't gotten burned out on the endless, repetitive grinding of the two iTrials at that point. Now, with it already feeling more like work than fun, I'm simply not willing to tolerate the lag (and near-complete lack of any opportunity for RP, given the breakneck pace).

This lag issue really, really needs to be addressed.

I would think it goes without saying that a death penalty should fit the game. It should be something that makes sense in that game's lore. Like a lot of others in this thread, I think CoX's current penalty works fine. It's minimal...but that's kind of how the comicbook superhero genre works: they get smacked down a time or two, then pick themselves up, utter something grandiose, and jump back into the fight.

Fallen Earth has a good penalty system. You get "cloning sickness" that begins when you rez in the cloner and lasts for a few minutes. It's basically a debuff of a handful of attributes. It also has stages, so if you die several times in a row, the debuff starts being rather less mild...a not-very-subtle clue that you might need to change your approach a bit. There's also some gear degradation, but it's quite mild. You have to faceplant a lot before your stuff starts to break (and then it's reparable multiple times before it's ruined for good). Works well for that game...just like CoX's current system works well in this one.

Simply superb! You got the look and feel of glossy fashion mags down perfectly.

Roleplayer here, so as you might expect, the story is quite important to me. It's important not only for it's own sake, establishing context and background for my characters, but also as a starting point for RP'ers like me to riff on. We've added on quite a bit, most of which is at least reasonably canonical.

I can definitely understand not being as into the stories as I am, though. For a lot of players, I think just the basics suffice, and they're not even going to notice, to say nothing of object to, inconsistencies.

I suppose I don't understand, however, those who completely ignore the story, don't give their character any sort of background, aren't into immersion, and pretty much just kill pixels. Not that I don't get that kind of gaming at all (I also play shooters...), I just don't see why anyone would choose an MMO for that kind of gaming. MMOs don't do that sort of thing as well as other game types.

There's PvP in City of Heroes?



Wow...who knew?

Just noticed this thread (really don't visit the official forums much any more..), so I missed the event...but wanted to say THANK YOU for doing this! Moar, please...and I'll try very hard to make it (and drag along other members of the Pinnacle Roleplay Congress).

And to the naysayers, there have always been players who used AE "as intended" to make interesting, immersive missions. Exploiters and farmtards tried to ruin it for everyone...but they failed.

I find myself (mostly) on Sam's side here, re: humor in the game. Don't get me wrong, I love well-written, lore-friendly humor, and CoH has the writers to pull it off, too. What I don't like is when the writers fail to honor the "fourth wall."

When game writers fail to honor the imaginary boundary between audience and fictional world and indulge in gamer culture in jokes ("Wait 'til my Build Up recharges!"), I start having a problem with it. Done too often - and a very, very little goes a long way - it crotch-punts suspension of disbelief and just plain hammers immersion. Champions Online is rife with this, and even in a genre (comic book superheroes) which is undeniably campy and in which suspension of disbelief is comparatively easy, it made it impossible for me to become immersed in the game world there.

CoH has been notable for finding the right balance point between humor and seriousness...but there are exceptions, almost all of which involve breaking the fourth wall. I do my best to just grimace and move on, but sometimes the spell is simply broken. No more immersion. I either log off or (worse, really) just grind out a few missions, lapsing into "push the button, receive the food pellet" mode.

I ran on the last BAF that Altigre Lachatte ran last night, and it went smooth as silk. Then Widow Jhulae took over for a few more...and same deal. There were first-timers on pretty much every run, but both leaders provided clear, concise information, and everyone had a good idea of what was up.

Everything went so smoothly, in fact, that Jhulae, Abigail Frost, and my Luna Faraday were able to get in a fair bit of RP "behind the scenes" in private tells! We have a lot of characters in the same SGs and VGs, and we're PRC (Pinnacle Roleplay Congress) members, but often the fast pace of play in something like a trial means you have to put the RP on the back burner if you're going to pull your weight. But these Trials ran so smoothly, we were at least able to get in a good few one-liners in-character!

Lots of great stuff already cited in this fun thread! Let me add one humble bit (that's been in the game a long time) that I love:

Purse-Snatch Victim: "I hope you get cut on the clasp! And I hope it gets infected, too!!"

"Praetor Snooki"

That is all...

My three most effective 50's (out of...well, I've lost count, actually) are effective in very different ways.

My Will/DB Tanker, with a set build designed to maximize survivability and hold aggro, is exactly that: survivable. I haven't done any of the i20 Trials with her yet (concentrating on a different character, who I'll get to below), but there are only a few things in the game that can put her down at all, and outside of Battle Maiden's hilariously over-the-top orbital nanite strike, nothing that can put her down quickly. Toggle-dropping enemies are her biggest fear, and even then, they have to burn through a LOT of hit points to put her down. The joy of playing tankers, of playing the first line of defense between her team and the bad guys, never gets old for me.

My Ill/Kin Controller has, to this point, solo'd 11 AVs (w/o Shivans or Nukes...). Yes, her build has more purple than Welches (perma-PA...), but still...I think that says it all. She's also the character that most surprised me by being effective at all: she was a "for laughs" tribute build to a literary character, with powersets chosen purely for that purpose. I never expected her to become so powerful. Oddly enough, though, I'll very likely harvest all her purples via respecs and delete her in the near future (after trying a couple more AVs, ones I doubt very much she can solo). I'm first and foremost an RP'er, and I've taken her story as far as I think it can go without disresepcting her actual creator.

Last, and the opposite of least, is my Elec/Nin Stalker. Quite simply, the most devastating PvE character I've ever created (and I pretty much stopped doing PvP in this game when i13 hit...). Two out of her three most hard-hitting attacks are PBAoE...with Knockdown. Ninjitsu is an incredibly underrated, effective powerset, with a fantastic self-heal and multiple aggro management tools. Despite her low Stalker hit points, I can confidently march her into entire red- and even purple-conning spawns and simply expect to defeat them. And while Stalkers are undoubtedly my best redside AT, I'm by no means an uber player...the build is just that effective.


I note that the above three are also some of my favorite characters to play (from an RP perspective), not just the most effective. Interesting...