Dysmal
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I don't know if its been mentioned, i'm a CoH soloist, it would cost me $50 to have a base since i would have to buy a game that i don't want (CoV). at least i believe that to be the case
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No, it really wouldn't cost you $50.00. I can find CoV locally for between $15 and $30 Canadian. At $15.00 its actually less than the value of the included month of play.
Just buy the game. Its cheap now, you get a month of playtime credited to your account, more costume options, bases, and four more character slots per server.
Heck, somewhere online was selling CoV for $5.00, there was a big thread about it in the CoV forum.
A quick trip to Amazon reveals the following. Click
You can get CoV for $10 US according to that page. Thats less than the value of the month of play that will get credited to your account. -
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were not the owners of the company. Nor the overseers of the coders.
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Well, of course we aren't. We're just the people whose money ensures they have jobs to go to every day. -
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Infact the overwhleming theme lately seems to be more Pirates of the Carribean than City of X, IE:
"Let's see how much we can accomplish with only a Skeleton Crew"
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LoL. Thats a great line. -
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Cryptic has failed to deliver an advertised feature of CoV in a working format a full callendar year after the game went live. Had the Cathedral of Pain and Base Raids showed up in anything vaguely resembling a timely manner, there would probably be a much higher level of interest in Bases, despite the flaws in the system that many posters have listed here. For whatever reason, whether it be lack of staff resources, focus shifting to other priorities or indeed other projects at Cryptic, this is a pretty big failure on Cryptic's part.
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You are absolutely right. We are working as hard as we can, but that doesnt excuse it.
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I am glad that you guys acknowledge this, and I'm impressed that you agreed with my asssesment of the situation. -
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Hello all,
Please forgive this "out of the loop" question...hehe
But can anybody please direct me to the link that talks about Statesman no longer being part of the dev team? Or did I hear a false rumor?
I've checked "Announcements" and couldn't find anything stating what happened and where he went.
Again, I apologize for not remaining in the loop.
Thanks much!
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Statesman is still very much involved in CoH, he's just no longer as directly involved as he once was, as he's now "Creative Director" at Cryptic. With Cryptic producing the Marvel Universe Online game as well as working on some other project, he's likely got his fingers in a lot of pies as it were.
However, don't let anyone tell you Statesman is no longer influencing the game. _Castle_ has posted recently that power change proposals are reviewed by a group of people including Statesman. He even took time recently to post in a thread responding to some comments he made at a game conference, mentioning that he reads and goes through some suggestions.
According to Cryptic's website.
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Cryptic is now developing several un-announced next-generation online RPGs, both internally and with outside partners.
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As Creative Director, Statesman no doubt oversees all of these projects. -
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I think there's some misinterpretation here - or my speech wasn't clear.
Let's take a look at costume creation. It's been embraced beyond belief by players...we have in game costume contests and events organized by you the players...Some say it's the best part of the game. The single most requested item in CoH is to make the costume creator standalone...
Intestingly, costumes have no gameplay value. They don't boost damage. They don't boost resistance. They don't boost defense. They're only for show.
Now, let's take a look at bases. Take away the teleporters, take away anything game related.
As just a resource for expressing something unique, base creation is on par tech wise with costume creation. Admittedly, there's not quite the same amount of textures, colors, etc., but there's still a lot of versatility. And the layout possibilities are endless.
But what's clear from this thread - and from many, many posts - is that bases are "too expensive". To me, that's interesting (as it is to the Serious Games crowd). Costume changes come with a minimal cost that no one really complains about, but we complain about the costs of bases. Evidently, the costs exceed the perceived value of creating one's own HQ (btw, I confess that many other games have the notion of personal property, but aside from Second Life, I don't think they offer as much customizability as our bases).
Let's turn to the idea of an architect. We foresaw that some people would feel alienated if they weren't the architect. That's why some things (Personal Items) can be "crafted" by individuals and placed in the base. But even if there's an architect: many super groups have a member who designed a single costume which all then use. In other words, they're more than willing to accept someone else's opinion in the group identity for their avatar appearance. Again, the primary difference is cost (I think).
That's what the point of the talk was. I completely agree with many of the suggestions raised in the Base Construction forum, as well as one's mentioned here, would improve Bases to some degree or another. Posi and I go through them at length; really, it's just a question of time & resources. Some things would take astronomically long to do - or perhaps there's something else even more requested or popular.
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Statesman, you didn't mention this, but its something that needs to be remembered, and shouldn't be minimized.
Cryptic has failed to deliver an advertised feature of CoV in a working format a full callendar year after the game went live. Had the Cathedral of Pain and Base Raids showed up in anything vaguely resembling a timely manner, there would probably be a much higher level of interest in Bases, despite the flaws in the system that many posters have listed here. For whatever reason, whether it be lack of staff resources, focus shifting to other priorities or indeed other projects at Cryptic, this is a pretty big failure on Cryptic's part.
As for the comparison between costumes and bases. Well, as others have pointed out, costumes are far cheaper. Furthermore, our costumes are visible to anyone in the gameworld, regardless of if I'm teamed with them or not. I can be standing at Ghost Falcon buying enhancements and see other people and both give and receive compliments and feedback. Or I can participate in an informal social activity like a costume contest. Costumes are something that can be shared within the normal structure of the gameworld. Bases, on the other hand, are divorced from that gameworld.
Futhermore, Costumes are individual. While its true that some SGs have SG Uniforms, I've never seen an SG that requires that everyone use the uniform for all their costume slots. Even for uniform using SGs, the individual had plenty of oppertunity to experiment and personalize a costume. In fact, this illustrates a key difference between bases and costumes. Everyone can have both a group identity costume, and individual costumes. The obvious parallel for bases would be to implement personal rooms within SG bases, as has been suggested in this thread. -
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Yay, let's continue to crap on Statesman! We're at 10 pages now, keep it going!
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Oh noes, honest critcisim of developer misunderstanding of the playerbase's attitude?
As for number of pages, its only two for me. In your My Home you can increase the posts per page from the standard 10. I have it at 50 and it makes reading the forums much easier. -
Heck, hasn't player created housing and the like been around since the days of UO? I'm not sure where Jack gets off thinking bases are some sort of novel creation.
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I love my base. It's awesome, and would be a very cool place to hang out. Unfortunately...No one hangs out there. Why? Because there's no reason to.
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The random crashes and booting people out are sort of a buzz killer for that sort of thing too. -
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Here's the writeup of his speech.
The only thing that jumps out at me - he claims bases are unpopular because people don't like paying money to contribute to group identity. I don't think that's correct. I think they're unpopular because
1) they're too expensive for casual players, and
2) they don't have anything to do with our day-to-day activities in CoH/V.
Now,
- make them cheaper
- let us place NPCs, scriptable bosses, and a scripted win condition in them
- let us open them up to other players to run as missions
- get raids working
and see if that makes them more popular.
*waves magic wand*
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I'm going to just cut and paste my response from the topic on this in the Base forum.
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Hah, yet another example of Jack's lack of a clue in regards to what players think. This is almost as silly as his ill informed ideas on how to make use of defiance, commonly refered to on the Blaster board as "stupid Blaster tricks."
People don't *hate* bases. They're *indifferent* to them. They are little more than a glorified storage and transportation system. A year after CoV went live, they still haven't gotten the Cathedral of Pain working properly, there is only one task force through the Mission Computer for villains, and none for Heroes. Oh, and lets not forget the overly high prestige costs for everything, and the high rent, which limit access to much of the bases to bigger SGs. Which is great if you're like me and in one. Not so much if you aren't.
Jack, if you're reading this, if you want people to make use of the base feature, make it more accessible. Lower the rents, lower prestige costs, and give us something to do with bases! Put in some Super Group only missions and task forces! Give us a reason to use bases as something besides a shortcut through Paragon.
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i'm not sure but i heard that there won't be any Epic Achetypes for CoV in I8
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You'd be correct. -
Hmm.
War Witch's real name is Melissa Bianco (may have spelled that wrong), so Melissa must be her. Not sure who Mike is though. One of the artists was a Mike Apolis I think. -
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But really, the thing is, comparing devices to another secondary that acts completely different is in a nutshell, a bad idea
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Incorrect. Comparing them is the only way to determine if they're balanced against each other. They don't have to be identical in performance in all situations, they just need to provide sufficient benefits that they're useful in a relatively equal number of situations. One of the problems this game has is that some primaries or secondaries in every AT are significantly weaker or stronger than the other powersets for that AT, giving characters with those powersets a noticeable performance boost in play (PVE or PVP, depending) over other powersets.
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And thus why Flavour of the Month builds are so common. -
Pfft. I can cram Buckshot, Flame Thrower and Full Auto all into one Build Up window on my AR/Ice blaster.
Thats not five powers, but it doesn't need to be, because it pretty much kills everything in a spawn.
Devices is a blaster secondary, it is really pretty insane to argue that we can't compare it to the other secondaries. -
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O_o scary...
I think people need to realise that the "big numbers" from the secondaries arent what you need to focus on, overall damage benefits a team, if you build for solo, expect to solo, team wont wait? maybe because its faster exp if you ignored the mines and only used them situationally.
blaster damage is much better, you just have to know how to use it.
oh and i agree, FF gen is mediocre at best... teamed with one corr who took acid mortar w/o ff gen, and one who did the opposite... guess which party did better.
and the accuracy increase from TD adds more damage potential than most defensive corr sets, and the 25% more damage is far more useful if you actually team.
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Yeah, Targetting Drone is way better than having Tar Patch, or Enervating Field.
In bizzaro world! -
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Funny, up until ED everyone said it was bar-none the best blaster secondary out there. Suddenly after ED everyone's saying it wasn't that great before... Funny how revisionist history tends to happen on things like this...
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They did? No they didn't, not for a long time. Energy Manipulation has had that crown for a long, long time. -
Christ on a cracker Gothbat. Devices wasn't overpowered prior to ED, certainly not in comparison to other powersets. Do you understand that the key reason most people took devices prior to ED was because Targetting Drone permitted you to six slot damage in your attacks, and that this was widely considered to be a fair trade for not havening Build Up? And that since ED, that trade off is no longer possible?
Trip mine and the other damage powers in the Devices secondary certainly dont make up for the lack of Build Up, as all the other secondaries get multiple damage sources (Even Ice Manipulation has three decent damage attacks, though Freezing Touch is a slow DoT) as well as Build Up.
Sure, the bugs with Smoke Grenade and Caltrops overpowered Devices. Which is why those bugs haven't existed for two years or more now. You seem to be a bit stuck on ancient history. Which isn't suprising since, as you've admitted, you haven't played the set in nigh on a year.
Given the radical change that ED brought to the game, and to Devices in particular, I don't see how you consider yourself able to contribute any valueable commentary to the discussion if you haven't actually used the set in the conditions that the rest of us have been operating under for eleven and half months.
You might as well be talking about tiddlywinks, as pre ED experience with Devices is about as relevant to the discussion of post ED Devices. -
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Yup. Just saying that it's still possible, once in a blue moon, to one shot things with trip mines. The other 99.999999% of the time they're left with a bit of life.
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Mob resistance is important to take into account though. Carnies and plant based DE being about the only groups in the game that are lethal vulnerable.
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I'm not disagreeing, just commenting. -
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Yup. Just saying that it's still possible, once in a blue moon, to one shot things with trip mines. The other 99.999999% of the time they're left with a bit of life.
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Mob resistance is important to take into account though. Carnies and plant based DE being about the only groups in the game that are lethal vulnerable. -
And trip mine does some lethal damage I believe, which Carnies are weak to.
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Like I said, /dev is not the godmode it used to be, but it's not as horribly weak as people make out.
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Name a power with the exception of web grenade, caltrops and taser, and I can point out it's flaws.
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But, then, there are few powersets that the same couldn't be said for. It is my belief that the majority of the griping comes from being too used to the set's previously overpowered status suddenly finding themselves knocked down to the status quo.
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Then you really don't know what the hell you're talking about. I mean, according to what you say above, you haven't used the set in over a year. -
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Gadgets is the internal name of Devices. It's a Legacy issue and it was my mistake when adding the patch note.
As for the change itself, there was an exploit involving TFoe and various stationary entities (like Auto Turret.) In fixing this, the player versions of these entities were locked down as well. I do realise this impacts one of the tactics Devices players used to bypass the limitations of the set. I'll be keeping an eye on this to see if the change hampers the gameplay too severely.
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And I was hopiong Gadgets was a new scraper defensive set à la Batman. THAT would be nice!
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Just a note, there has been some data for just such a powerset in the pigg files since CoV beta. Or so I hear. -
As well, Tar Patch recharges fast enough with three SO recharges that it is up every fight. Pre-ED you could self stack the thing.
Its funny how something like that, which we told the developers was overpowed as soon as we could test the addition of -Res to Tar Patch was left alone for ages, and yet, specific action is taken to nerf Auto Turret? Misplaced priorities. -
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Wait a second here ... <shakes head in disbelief > ... let me get this straight. So not only did Devices not get the help it needs (which every */Dev has been asking for since I3 or so)
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Before ED, /dev was unparalleled as a blaster secondary. WHo in their right mind thought it needed help?! ED hurt it, but now it's about average. Definately not sorely in need of help.
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Are you serious?