Grouchybeast

Why? Seriously, why? It isn't like I snuck RotP in as some kind of hack. It's a power someone saw fit to create that deals kick-*** damage. What's wrong with taking advantage of an opportunity to use it effectively?

Anyway, the real point is - I got the impression that wanted your system to have an in-world flavour to a system that penalises character deaths. I think it spoils that goal if NPCs are penalising certain characters who are actually doing something effective. It makes the NPCs look stupid, which to me seems like a bad thing.

I knew I should've put the smiley in there. I thought the tongue-in-cheek flavour would come through strongly enough, but clearly it didn't. Sorry about that.

Anyway. Does your proposed system especially penalise characters with those powers if they use them effectively? I shouldn't think it would, if they're either self-ressurects that don't have spiffy side-benefits, or they rez others. If it does, though, then, yes, I think that's also a bad idea. The more cases in which it applies, the more opportunities there will be for NPCs to look stupid.

In that case, please think of RotP as another version of Self-Destruct, with the death coming before the big bang.

I guess, fundamentally, I just don't have that cognitive dissonance where we're talking about a character that has a power which means death can have a beneficial outcome. Then, there's no logical reason for them to avoid it. Maybe I've just been watching too much Torchwood lately. :-)

Ah! I knew there was a reason I had the last kill all there :-) Of course, if players clear all the other mobs and leavethe EB 'til last, they'll still miss the surprise, anyway, so it isn't a particularly cast-iron reason. So far the options look like:

- leave it as it as.
- get rid of the surprise and have the mission end with the EB defeat. (Although it seems kind of un-Carnie not to have them try to do *something* to the hero.)
- get rid of the defeat all, and make the surprise a mission objective.

Hmm...I shall go and fiddle with the arc a bit, I think.

Thank you very much for the excellent feedback.

This is terribly discriminatory against flame mastery blasters, you know. In fact, any character with Rise of the Phoenix available ought to *gain* reputation for throwing themselves into the middle of the fight, nuking, then rising from defeat in a blaze of fiery awesomeness to smite their enemies. I'm supposed to forego a chance to deliver an extra 600 points of delicious sizzling AoE damage because of some poxy civilian contacts' narrow-minded ideas about appropriate hero behaviour? Feh, I say! Forwards, for death AND glory!

That's awesome! Thank you :-)

The things to make sure you record are:
- exact number of minions, lts and bosses defeated.
- exact number of Pool A recipe and salvage drops.
- map.
- difficulty setting.
- team size setting.
- AT.
- mission conditions (e.g. normal mission map, Ouroboros, exemplared).

DropStats (www.glasspaw.com/dropstats) will tally up the defeats and drops from the ingame chat log, saving a lot of time.

If you have a particular theory you want to test, it takes ~2000 minion-equivalent defeats to get a statistically significant result for any one set of conditions. (Or rather, this will get a confidence interval narrow enough to distinguish between the old and 'new' results as established so far.) The most important thing, though, is to report ALL runs, whether the rate seems high, low, whatever. Selective reporting will destroy the validity of the data gathered.

Says a number of people who've been testing extensively. The recipe drop has been screwed all though beta, and still appears to be screwed in I16 live. You can read the thread here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=188370

If you're getting normal drops, that's both great and very interesting. Would it be possible for you to turn on chat logging next time you do a run, and produce some accurate data to add to the stats? You can generate the stats easily by running the log file through DropStats, which will do all the tallying of defeats and drops for you (www.glasspaw.com/dropstats). If you could, that would be really awesome :-)

I agree that it would be really nice to have the contact screens pop up for everyone in the team. AFAIK, both parts of the mission intro dialogue show up in the mission text, but to let everyone read it at the same time the leader needs to click through them and then wait for other people to read.

At least the clues are given to all the team members in AE. I think that the only text *only* the leader can see is the mission exit dialogue -- at least, I remember trying to put the minumim text in there when I did my arc, and making sure there wasn't anything important to the story shown there.

Actually, you were right, but they've been using the phrase for longer than you thought. E.g. this I10 press release uses the term.


I don't think that 'Rogues' is a good term to focus on.
1. 'Rogues' have a long history as a fantasy game character class, in tabletop and computer games, e.g. AD&D, WoW. It certainly isn't a term immediately associated with comics or superheroes (except in the sense of 'Hey, Marvel own a character called Rogue!').
2. It makes it sounds as if 'Rogues' are a named faction, which I don't think is confirmed by the GR info we've had so far.

These both discard the 'City of...' branding, which seems like a bad idea when that's the strongest part of the brand at the moment.


The devs themselves, and Paragon Studios PR, are all over the place with the names they use. You can find 'City of Heroes and City of Villains' 'City of Heroes/Villains' and 'City of Heroes and Villains' all used pretty regularly. So one of your options is already being used.

But surely they'd want to deal with the portals in Paragon City which allow heroes to attack them in their own dimension? If I were planning a Praetorian invasion, I'd make it a priority to wipe out Portal Court, the Portal Corporation employees who have the expertise and experience, plus any the other working portal locations heroes can access (hmm...the RV entrance, maybe the Shadow Shards...anywhere else?). Then the Praetorians could strike at Paragon City without the City being able to retaliate. Heroes will be forced to Go Rogue just so they can beg portal time from Technician Naylor in Nerva :-)

'Believe'? 'Most'? What kind of wishy-washy hedging hero-speak is that?

I *know* you suck at this game *completely*. :-p

Or, if you aren't in a hurry to get inside the Midnighter Club, save the Lost Cure wand for the Faultline arcs. Particularly for squishy toons with little mez protection, it's a lot of fun to run around curing the Lost bosses in the first missions there. (Downside - if defeating specific named bosses is a mission objective, you have to wait for the cured civilians to run out of the mission before they count as defeated.)

Ah, okay -- I was working from the wiki, which says inf is always split evenly. I guess that's only true for pacted lvl 50 characters, then. I'm pretty sure about that, because I was logged on last night, watching the inf tick up on the ID screen of a pacted character while the pact partner defeated mobs in another zone.

Out of curiosty, did you have both characters logged in while the PLing character was gaining inf?


ETA: I just tested this on the live server with a pair of lvl 14 pacted characters. With both characters logged in but unteamed, inf was split evenly between the defeating character and the pacted character. With only one character logged in, they were awarded half inf for the defeat, and when the other character logged in, their total inf had gone up by a matching amount. I have no idea why you didn't get inf split on pacted characters, but right now on live, the split is working for me.

(If it matters, the defeats were street-sweeping, not missions or AE.)

AFAIK, levelling pacts split inf made through defeats, so wouldn't really be suitable here. It would always be an advantage to be the character standing in WW while the other person racks up defeats for both of you :-)

One way to do it, and incidentally guarantee no cheating, would be simply to make it a race to getting one of the Inf badges on the characters. Pick the badge you want to determine the length of the competition. You'd only be counting inf from defeats, then, but it's a very clear end-point.

Or even get the power for free via Day Jobs, when it can be used every 5 min. (Max. possible of 10 uses before it needs recharging, though.)

In regards to this, the drop rate on live has also been checked, and is in line with the older data. Any difference that's showing up is a difference between the current live build and the build on test.