Forbin_Project

Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill

Vehicles as travel powers. This gets brought up a lot.

Short answer, don't expect it.

Long answer:
There are a lot of problems with the idea.

1. Movement.

Forward and back,even turning - ok. But you can do things that a vehicle can't - such as strafe (direct side to side or angular movement.) It doesn't work with a vehicle. There are also issues such as drift and "realistic" handling. We can go side to side, as mentioned, and make immediate right angle turns. Cars... not so much.

2. Movement, part 2.

Go stand in the road. No, not you personally. Take your character out and stand in the road, if you're heroside. Or even in the path of civilians. What happens? You get pushed. While not as big an issue with a motorcycle, perhaps, a car would have issues. What happens if two cars meet head on - yours and an NPC, or yours and another player's? Do you just pass through each other? Would you be satisfied with that very odd result? Or would you get stuck? How about those NPCs, can they walk and push your car, or are they walking through it? Neither answer is very satisfying, and intelligent, dynamic pathing is too computationally expensive.

3. Terrain.

Not every place has roads, or even makes sense for "off roading." Go look at Founder's Falls. Go look at Crey's Folley. Or Eden. Try to get to the north islands in Talos. What, do you have a kubelwagen? Look at the Pit in Sharkshead. Try to use your travel power (car) to get up to some of the doorways in high caves. Cars and motorcycles would be more like Superspeed - horizontal movement, period. And look - I'll be blunt - flat out *stupid* tied with, say, Combat Jumping or Superjump.

4. Combat.

You get ambushed on the way. How do you fight? Just have your powers blast out of the rolled up windows? How do you buff or debuff? EVERY power would need a new animation. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Then you want people with motorcycles instead of cars. Redo ALL the animations AGAIN. And they still wouldn't make sense - how do you use Footstomp in a car? Or Stalagmites?

5. Customizing.

Yeah, it would come up. Not everyone would want a sports car, or a mid-70s Buick boat, or an exotic, or a minivan, or whatever else.

6. Making "sense."

This was touched on in terrain - how do you get across water? How about the Shadow Shard? And if you want downright ridiculous looking, go do the heroside 25-34 Respec. Look at the Sky Skiffs inside of rooms or the reactor room. It makes no sense and looks *ridiculous.* Something that, yes, the devs try to avoid.

That's just a quick overview of why vehicles as generally envisioned aren't a spectacular idea for a travel power.
Further discussion

This I think merits a bit of extra commentary, honestly.

"Vehicles" covers a lot of different ground for different people. Some only consider cars/jets/motorcycles vehicles. Others add jetpacks, wings and the like. Much of the above considers cars and similar sized vehicles, with nods to motorcycle type vehicles.

Jetpacks and such, I don't see happening as travel powers. As costume options for Flight? Or as invented pieces that interact with Fly, similar to wings? Absolutely - but they don't need to be a separate travel power for that. I'm all for more jetpack and wing (or combination) designs. Besides, there are so many "temp" jetpacks, I don't see introducing yet another one as really being feasable - just my opinion.

But vehicles - cars, specifically - as a travel power, have issues.

One way to have them "somewhat" work.

For all that, I know some people *would* still like to pull up in front of a mission. So how do we do it?

A temporary power, based on the same tech from the Mac/Valkyrie pack Mission Teleporter. The temporary power would:

(a) be an invention - dropping from enemies. (A reward, because you saved... well, we'll get to that,)

(b) be a single use each time - you can only hold one at a time, not one of each, one total.

(c) use rarely used salvage, because... it's rarely used, and cheap. No Luck Charms here.

(d) come in multiple varieties.

How does this get around the various issues?


Terrain - It doesn't pass terrain. It just arrives.

It follows the same 'rules' as the mission teleporter - it's not indoors, doesn't go to contacts, etc. Just mission doors.

Customizing - It's not "your" vehicle. It's a temp power. You've called a cab, limo, or other transport.

Power animation - since you're skipping the space in between, no powers can be used 'til you arrive anyway.



The varieties?
- Limo: Stereotypical slightly stretched black limo.
- Checker cab: The classic yellow cab.

No one really cares if you don't like the cool names I scored. The truth is you would speak derisively about any name I had posted out of pure vindictiveness because I'm not agreeing with you.

My character's names are no worse than any of these names, and the fact that you claim to think my names are bad just goes to show that you don't have much experience reading comic books. Comics have a long tradition of creating heroes with odd, satirical, or down right silly names. Some of them have their own comics and others are destined to be supporting characters.

DC names

Bat-Mite
Bad Samaritan
Big Barda
Bizarro
Blok
Boodikka
Bork
Bozo the Iron Man
Captain Carrot
Ch'p
Chunk
Clock
Color Kid
Dan the Dyna-Mite
Darwin Jones
Detective Chimp
Dingbats of Danger Street
Flodo Span
G'nort
Genius Jones
Gnarrk
Jack in the Box
Lagoon Boy
Little Cheese
Major Bummer
Off-Ramp
Pinkt the Whiz Kid
Peter Porkchops
Rubberduck
Scarlet Skier
Streaky the Supercat
Stuff the Chinatown Kid

DC Comics Super Hero Names

Marvel Names

Abraham Brown
Answer
Brass
Bling
Blink
Box
Box IV
Briquette
Brother Nature
Brother Tode
Bug
Burner
Butterball
Charcoal
Dirtnap
Dittomaster
Doorman
Doop
Doughboy
Dum Dum Dugan
Elsie-Dee
Fan Boy
Flubber
Hairbag
Honey Lemon
Kangaroo
Left Hand
Nanny
Needle
Poundcakes
Squirrel Girl
Stilt-Man
Sugar Man
U-Go Girl
Widget
Wink

Marvel Comics Super Hero names

Claiming that there are no names left makes one lazy and/or unimaginative.

No I didn't. I said if the are dead set on having a particular name they should see if it's available on one of the other servers. There's a very good chance that they'll find it available on one of them.

And yet whenever this gets brought up it's always the same players asking for it. The same players that have been here for years. No one has provided any data that backs up their claims that new players are having trouble thinking of names. No links to threads or articles where new players were saying that thinking up character names in CoH was too hard.

In this very thread there have been only 2 people that qualify as new players and neither of them as I recall were dead set against our having unique names.

It would probably be closer to the truth to say that old veteran players are having trouble thinking up new names.

Steam was right about the mass email to get this answered once and for all.

If that's the decision they choose to make with CoH2 that's fine with me.

A good example of what I'm talking about. Sometimes I swear I think I'm going to explode in a Lewis Black rage of explicatives demanding explanations for what I'm seeing on the screen. And rages like that are best done at home and not in public.

NP. I understand why Remaugen would want powers like the ones he's suggested, Heck I'd use them myself, but I'm willing to admit that if I had them back when I started I probably wouldn't be here today.

Being "forced" to travel and explore the zones was what caught my imagination, and continues to keep me interested. Jumping straight from door to door would have gotten old real fast.

I'd have no problem living with the results gotten from an email inquiry. If the demand for it is substantial, and the devs agree to implement it, my only hope is that it doesn't look ugly.

That comment wasn't directed at you or some of the others. We've been civilly discussing different points of view, but we all know the ones who have been outright dismissive (and insulting) of anyone that doesn't agree with their world view of how the game should work.

Well what's good for the goose is good for the gander. We can dismiss their reasons just as easily and with the knowledge that the unique naming policy is already in effect and unlikely to change without a massive upswelling of players demanding it. Which the devs didn't get when they asked.

Yes I did, and at the time I checked Firefly was taken (Don't know if it's freed up since then). Feurfly was my second choice.

Most new players have experience from playing other online games and are already familiar with having to come up with names. While we do get new players who have never played online games before, it's not a large percentage because the advertising this company does for this game (what little there is) sucks.

Tell that to all the Deamons, Elfs, Vampires, Werewolves, Orks, Faeries, Witches, Wizards, etc running around in the game.

With 11 servers NA or 4 EU I find it highly unlikely that they'll spend 2 hours running through possible variations of "fire" to find one that's not being used.

I just got "Feurfly" on Virtue the day GR went live and I got "Deep Friar" in May/June I think.

And another MMO (we can't name due to forum guidelines) based on a fantasy world *cough Gary Gygax cough* has been out for going on 5 years and uses the same unique naming policy we have and people have no trouble coming up with original names.

So your point is moot our competition also uses unique names.

Sorry, but implying new players are lazy and unimaginative is not a valid reason.

Why do we need to do the math when we apparently agree that the smaller the population the more likely you'll run into someone using the same name?

Funny and we've not seen any valid explanation as to why names should not be unique. All we see are variations of people getting mad because they weren't the first to use it.

Actually Rachel the smaller the population the more likely you'll see someone using the same name. It's much easier to spot 10 Batman's in a crowd of 100 than it is in a crowd of 1,000. They can't get lost in the crowd when they make up a significant portion of the crowd.

Works the same way with the Search feature. The more people online, the more likely the search will be truncated and less likely you'll notice duplicate names unless they are listed consecutively.


Now that's assuming that they are online on those characters at the same time. What's far more likely to happen is that those ten guys with Batman will be on different characters at the same time.

I pronounce the punctuation/numbers they use in their names. If I see someone using K1ken or .Kiken, I call them Koneken. periodkiken, or dotkiken. (just using your name as an example. )

Because we make use of it in this game. We have 11 NA Shards and 4 EU shards where everything is identical, and it gives you 10/3 other chances to get the name you want.

I know I'm not the only person that has been told that the name I wanted was in use on my first server of choice only to find it was free on the second or third server I chose. You know what the worst thing that resulted from using a different server? I made new friends. What an awful experience that was, finding new people that enjoyed playing the same game as I do, all because the name I wanted was available on a different server.

Do you have any idea how many people quit the game because they bought the Architect Edition and got bored because they thought the game consisted only of Atlas Park/Mercy Island and the AE building?

They actually thought there was nothing else.


It's human nature for people to take the path of least resistance, and the devs have to be careful not to make the game too easy because people will get bored of it and leave.


We aren't against new travel powers we just want balanced ones that won't end up harming the game.

And before anyone dismisses what Claws has said here, we have already seen this happen with new players just after the AE went live. Heck I even encountered a level 40 something Warshade that never learned what enhancements were or how to slot them. His Vet rewards showed he'd been playing fr 6 months and I ended up answering a ton of questions while showing him how to use the train and took him on a tour of other zones. Up until then his world was sitting in the Atlas AE building. I helped him unlock the store for his contact in Founders Falls so he could start buying enhancements.

Exactly. We'd need a whole set of advances to keep global/racial immortality from being a huge disaster.

Yeah this pretty much sums up the impression I got from reading his responses.

Powerslide came with the CoH DvD Collectors Edition. Basically the power looks like there is a glow at your feet and your character stands still and slides across the ground as if you were standing on something like a surfboard.

I just think that standing animation could be reused on a fly power where the character would be standing on things like a hoverdisc, surfboard, sheet of ice, floating rock, magic carpet . . . you get the idea. Just get rid of the glow aura at the feet or change it to something more appropriate for the desired animation. A sheet of ice could have snowflakes instead of a glow.

Ninja Run for anyone that doesn't know comes with the purchase of the Martial Arts booster pack. And it's a very nice power.