Ironik
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:Yeah, I experienced that during one of the raids (Lambda, maybe) and it was like cruise control. I basically hovered and sniped through a Tank every now and again while listening to a TED talk.Originally Posted by Machariel
I've come to resent what Incarnate powers (or really, just specifically Judgement) has done to the game at 45-50. It makes a huge gulf between the people who have incarnate powers (including a level shift) and the people who don't - first of all if you're on a 50 team and you're <50, you're two levels down from the incarnates, which has to be frustrating.
But what I really can't stand is Judgement spam. It makes the game way too easy and very, very boring, especially when you've got 3+ incarnates so almost every spawn is getting hit and nuked.
Grouping enemies together? unnecessary, judgement has huge area. Mezzing enemies? they're already dead. trying to reposition yourself to line up a cone or whatever? again, already dead.
I try really hard not to use judgement when I'm teaming. I'm here - and I assume everyone else is - to play the game, not to watch "Judgement Critical!" pop up 20 times every 20 seconds.
What I asked for when Incarnates were first talked about was the ability to go mano-a-mano with giant monsters. That was something that seemed perfectly comic book superhero to me. Instead we got Farming 2.0.
Oh well, hindsight is 20/20. -
True story:
While playing my Scrapper Capt. Blood, I once got kicked off a team led by an anal-retentive scaredy-cat for saying, "Less yappin', more scrappin'!" -
Quote:Nope. PvP was born broken. Flavor of the Month builds ruled all and certain powersets were simply superior. Good PvP requires that everyone be equal -- or as nearly equal as possible -- and that kind of mentality is anathema to MMO players. When a Tank hits as hard as a Blaster or a Stalker survives a Blaster's alpha shot, players start crying foul.Originally Posted by Moderated_IRL
PvP wasn't as imbalanced as some people seem to think. Different ATs performed better against other ATs. While some were outclassed or just not good (mostly the epic ATs), PvP was still great fun. Unfortunately, I13 butchered the PvP community on my server.
The only way PvP works in an MMO is to average out the variety of powers by making it faction-based. That way one group's synergy matches the other. And when you don't have enough people on one side or the other, you fill in the empty spots with NPCs and/or pets. -
Do you have a specific level in mind or are 50s better?
Someone remind me how to copy a character to Beta Server. -
I have a dozen of every AT, but I have more Scrappers, Brutes and Blasters than anything else.
Ironik is a Scrapper.
First in, first down.
Scrapper Lock feels like this. And I love it. -
Quote:And a side of Canadian bacon.Originally Posted by Rangle M. Down
Don't those come with a higher percentage of alcohol, just like their beers?
But also insulin, provided free of charge. So, you know, balance. -
Quote:This is a ludicrous assertion. Pure poppycock. When Hostess restructured, all the employees -- including both unions -- agreed to an across-the-board pay cut and a reduction in benefits. During that same time, the private equity firm who took over the business INCREASED the salaries of its executives AND saddled the company with debts from outside sources. This is the *exact* same sort of vulture capitalism you've heard about so much about over the past year regarding Romney and Bain Capital. These people destroy businesses for short-term profit, walking away multimillionaires and putting thousands of people out of work.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
Right. It wasn't the teamsters that put 18,000+ coworkers out of work by being stubborn greedy pancakes. But you keep telling yourself the bakers union are innocent victims. Everyone else sees them for what they really are.
When those same predators came back to bleed the company some more while demanding further pay cuts and other concessions of the employees, that's when the workers found their breaking point and went on strike. How would you feel?
Stop defending these company-killers. They aren't "job creators," they're business destroyers, plain and simple. -
I don't think there's any real debate that the spine of Star Wars is fundamentally broken. In the writing game, we talk of story arcs, character arcs and throughlines, and Star Wars only has those for a few subplots and some individual characters.
For me, Lucas broke his universe with Empire Strikes Back and the fateful words, "I am your father." That ruined everything. The seeds of awfulness that were the Special Editions and the prequels can be found in the jumbled mess that is ESB, with its terrible dialogue, lame ideas and weak story. Star Wars was youthful and fun and you can excuse the shallowness of it because it has such verve. Trying to introduce adult themes and gray areas into that world simply turned it into a morose juvenile with a bad attitude and worse skin.
I can't imagine they would bring Vader back, but even if they did, so what? We've seen the nadir, so I can't imagine it could get worse. They could be objectively worse, but for I personally have nothing invested in these characters or that world, because it seems to me the good parts of it were simply a fluke.
I'm gratified to see Lawrence Kasdan back on board writing one of the sequels, because his dialogue crackles with cleverness and his stories are actually *fun*. Just as I don't understand the praise heaped upon ESB, I don't get the hate aimed at Return of the Jedi. RotJ manages to recapture the spirit of the original despite being saddled with the missteps of ESB and the Lucas-dictated Ewoks. (Which, come on, are hilarious. They are literally killer teddy bears.)
I wish Jeffrey Boam were still alive to take a shot at writing one of the sequels. He also knew how to take an existing universe and stable of characters and breathe new life into them. And he had great turns of phrase which seemed to evolve organically out of the characters. I mean, it's hard to find a flat moment in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and it's mind-boggling to me that he wrote that thing without an outline. -
Well, you have me intrigued. Killer last line.
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Quote:Join us! We have extra cushions on our Hoverounds, megaphones to yell at the kids across the street and the heat is turned up to 82!Originally Posted by Starsman
BAH! I'm becoming a cranky old man!!!
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Quote:If you start pulling at that thread, you'll soon find the veil lifted from your eyes.Originally Posted by Father Xmas
See now you are talking wealth, not income. They are two entirely different things.
The Buffet's and Gate's and Job's of the world may be ridiculously rich on paper but a lot of that money is just that, on paper or in assets that aren't easily liquidated. The actual wealth is tied up in stocks, real estate, bonds and not Scrooge McDuck vaults full of cash, jewels and precious metals. A Ferrari, a thousand shares of stock in Apple or a classic work of art isn't going to be able to fund a homeless shelter or soup kitchen if they aren't converted into cash first. And you can't do that if there aren't anyone around anymore who could do so.
As for the military, I would rather see us spend money on force multiplier weapon systems than resort back to WWII level requirements of service for the 18-35 crowd. You think five to 10 thousand US deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were tragic, and they are, but in WWII we had what would be nearly a million deaths today or 85 thousand from Vietnam, both of which were shorter wars. Wars aren't a planned expense, we wouldn't borrow the money we use to prosecute a war for regular programs. It would be like "hey the furnace didn't break this year so lets all get new clothes with that money we weren't forced to spend." There is no such thing as a peace dividend beyond not having young men and women die on foreign shores.
If the tax laws weren't so complex that only the wealthy and large companies could afford people who could figure out ways to minimize their taxes you wouldn't have examples of the very rich paying a lower effective percentage in income tax. However 10% of a million dollars is a lot more than 20% of forty thousand. In my case I've recently paid off my condo after 25 years, on paper I'm now "wealthy" but if I sell it I may be considered rich but I wouldn't have a place to live either.
ALL wealth is fiction. Yours, mine, theirs. The debt and deficit are entirely imaginary. But here's the thing: just like a movie which requires rigorous internal consistency to allow us to suspend our willing suspension of disbelief, we have to all participate in the fiction or it falls apart. So if we owe ourselves and our creditors imaginary money, and some people control more of that imaginary money than other people, then it is beholden upon the people to contribute more of their imaginary money (i.e. "wealth") to maintaining the fiction. That's the only way this thing works.
While it's true that 10% of a million is more than 20% of forty thousand, when the average car costs $30,303 and a house costs $272,000, the millionaire can still buy both of those things while the middle class person can't. The millionaire can afford to give 60% without feeling the pinch, and if he's genuinely concerned about the long-term affects of the national debt, he would. But people are greedy and selfish and therefore don't do such things.
How many times have you gone bankrupt? Zero, probably. If you had, do you think a bank would loan you money to buy a house? Go look at how many times Donald Trump has declared bankruptcy. Look up how many billions of dollars the banks have given him afterwards, only to lose it all again.
The system is rigged against guys like you and in favor of men like Trump. If you refuse to hold them accountable, then they are going to continue to screw you over. -
Quote:I've been saying that exact thing for years. Are we friends on Facebook or something?Originally Posted by Smersh
This.
And, as long as we've gone this far down the rabbit hole, I'd like to point out this: anyone who claims our current president is a redistributive socialist who will take everything - on economic issues, Barack Obama is arguably to the right of Richard M. Nixon.
My brother -- who has become increasingly Tea Party-like insane over the past decade -- sent me the video of Obama's speech in front of the Constitution where he talked about creating a legal framework for permanent detention, as if that somehow "proved" something evil about Obama. My response was that I have been saying for the past 4 years Obama's policies are to the right of Nixon's (he knows this) and, oh look!, that video is more evidence. I haven't a response from him on that in nearly two weeks, which is an eternity for him.
He hates it when I'm right.
I was at a fundraiser last weekend with a bunch of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, one of whom literally shouted that we're going to have socialized medicine now. I told her that was good, because then we could finally start saving money as a country, spending $100 per uninsured person versus the $300 we spend now. I said if I have to pay for schools, police and firefighters -- none of which do jack for me -- then she can help pay for medicine I might need. Fair is fair.Quote:The Democratic party, on broad economic issues, is very conservative. The GOP has just reduced its economic platform to an unsustainable anti-tax, anti-union free-for-all, with bonus hagiography of the one percent.
I'd like to see an actual left-wing (on economic issues) public figure. These days, merely defending the idea of a social contract gets you labelled a communist by the right
I have been a registered Independent for the entirety of my 30-year voting career. As a fiscal conservative ("Don't buy what you can't pay for") and a social liberal ("All humans are equal"), neither party really caters to my point of view. Despite the compromises he made in policy (such as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"), Bill Clinton is the first President in my adulthood that has lined up with my core beliefs. If we could change the Constitution, I would vote for him again in a heartbeat. If he had just kept his pants zipped, he would've been considered one of our best Presidents. This is the first election I voted a straight Democratic ticket, because the GOP has gone around the bend, riding the crazy train to la-la land. -
Quote:You're recalling correctly, that's how the game works. Except in the newest zones with their open-world quests. It's something that both WoW and CO fail miserably at, because if you don't put down the enemy immediately and move on, another spawn *will* pop up to kill you. It's one of the main reasons I hated the revamped Atlas Park so much. It's an annoyingly good chance for faceplanting. I think it also happened in the new Dark Astoria, too, but I was only there once.Originally Posted by Codewalker
Bad things:
<ballmer>Currencies, currencies, currencies!</ballmer>
Ambushes spawning right on top of you is terrible. Even spawning right in front of you is very immersion-breaking. I could have sworn that long ago the game would try to spawn critters out of line of sight and they'd swarm on you from around a corner, but my memory may be playing tricks on me.
Yeah, raids. Ugh.Quote:Wasn't really a fan of the incarnate trial grind. I used to raid in WoW. If that's what I wanted to do, I would have stayed there.
Crafting was interesting at first but quickly got tedious, especially when it came to incarnate abilities. In-game tools to streamline it would have been welcome.
I didn't understand the point of the complexity of IOs, except as a method for removing Influence from the players' coffers. The level-restricted choices seemed like a holdover from the original design, but the weird 2.5% of this and 1.7% of that versus 10% of this and 12% of that meant that certain sets were always in demand while others were orphaned. Much better to make them Acc+Dam bonus *or* Dam+End bonus... which do you need more? That would've led to more customization, I think. -
Looks like the original defeat dialogue.
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Quote:Prolly not.Originally Posted by GadgetDon
I know that as OP I have no control over the thread, but I'll still ask:
This thread was set up to discuss mistakes made in design and execution in the game. It really wasn't meant to be one more thread to endlessly discuss the shutdown and NCSoft and the Titan group and the SaveCoH movement and so on and so forth.
So, consider this a request, can that discussion be moved elsewhere?
To borrow an advertising slogan: "It's everywhere you want to be." -
Quote:Ah, the Tony Robbins "my millionaire friends and I don't have enough money to pay for everything" defense. It's nonsense. The top 400 richest people in America have more wealth among them than the bottom 180 million. Read those numbers again: four hundred versus one hundred and eighty MILLION. Where else do you propose the money comes from?Originally Posted by Father Xmas
The problem I have with the 99% crowd's attitude is that everything will be alright if we just take all the money (through taxation or paycuts) from those rich people. All social programs will be funded that the world will be a utopia. There isn't enough rich people to do that. NASA funding isn't all that large either, or the Dept of Education or NPR or foreign grants to other countries (to balance the argument).
Cut a couple of those defense programs the Pentagon doesn't want, there's $1.2 trillion. End the massive entitlements to wealthy industries like Big Oil. Tax the rich and corporations for the rest. Since the 1% own 38% of the wealth and the bottom 50% own 1%, you ain't getting it from bakers and armored car drivers.
I'm not a fan of unions in most cases. I *am* a fan of history and I understand why they came into existence, but the pendulum swung too far in the opposite direction and unions got greedy. But now it's swung back to the conditions that created the unions in the first place. If the rich people don't pony up -- and soon -- people will take the Occupy movement to 11. Warren Buffett is one of the 400 and can see where this is heading, and protecting the entitled upper class from the unwashed masses isn't the answer. Ask Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette how that went. -
Quote:Your union.Originally Posted by Knight_Marshal
WoW! They make that much an hour?!
I have been working working in the armored car industry for 18 years where I risk my life constantly on a daily basis and I make less than that an hour.
Who do I complain to that a baker makes more than me? -
Quote:By law the biggest players aren't allowed to dominate the ad market. Which is why you see ads for local businesses during the Super Bowl.Originally Posted by Evil_Legacy
Yeah, there are so many spots per thing and some companies like Disney spend more on advertising in a month alone than what some companies make in ten years.
Why do it cost millions for a commercial during super bowl while any other day on the same channel it may cost a thousands? Because major companies are willing to pay premium for it that smaller budgeted companies cant compete with. That is why usually a person can basically know or have an idea of what companies will have a new commercial during the super bowl. Forced marketing. And even advertising goes by the standby of supply and demand. -
Quote:So it's all YOUR fault!Originally Posted by CannonballJack
Lacking faith in miracles, I reacted to the end of City of Heroes by looking for another game. The one I liked best was in many ways the anti-CoH: a crafting-focused, violence-free browser F2P named Glitch. Weird, silly, and far dirtier than youd expect from its cartoony façade, Glitch starts out fun and gradually becomes even better as you find new options to explore. It also has the second-best community Ive seen in the MMO world.
Naturally, it will be closing on December 9th.
Stay away from Planetside 2 and Tribes: Ascend, please. I'm trying those next. -
Quote:What on Earth would that have to do with advertising in theatres? Disney doesn't control what ads are shown in front of their movies, nor does any studio.Originally Posted by TimTheEnchanter
Doubt that would've ever happened though with Marvel being a rival comic company that is owned by one of the most powerful entertainment empires in the known universe.
Actually, not too long ago I was wondering if Disney taking over Marvel could've factored into the shutdown. Kinda like, "Well, now there's definitely no way in Hell we can compete. Might as well quit while we're ahead." -
Quote:GR went ghosty long before the new tute. Even on Virtue I barely saw anyone there. Implementing side-switching could've been done so much better than creating that entire new area. I suppose they did it to make more money from box sales, which is a good short-term strategy, but it was clear it was going to do the same thing to the playerbase CoV did.Originally Posted by BrandX
I don't think GR split the player base. It gave people a new zone to get ATs that werent available to the other side from the start. Tip missions did the same, and I found most prefered to just go the GR route.
But after GR, making the new tutorial, that turned Praetoria into a ghost town, and thusly GR looked like a waste of time. If the new tutorial had happened a couple of years down the road, that probably wouldn't have been the case. -
Quote:Define "better." Slightly better image quality, sure. Able to hold more than 45 minutes of footage? No.Originally Posted by BrandX
Don't mistake greatness with successfulness.
A good example is VHS vs Beta Max. Beta Max was better. VHS got all the business (porn industry being supported by VHS but not Beta Max, helped in that regard).
This is a huge, HUGE miss on NCSoft's part. The point here is not to cut and run but to double down. Make some kick-*** trailers and get them in theatres showing the various superhero movies.Quote:Advertising is another.
Subject matter is another. I know plenty of MMO players, who are more than willing to go around in armor (skimpy or not) wielding a sword, playing spellcasters, but the idea of running around as a superhero (with or without spandex) is just stupid to them.
I think with the recent successes of superhero movies, this could change for a MMO, but CoH suffers from being old and unknown. The others have their own failings going for them.
"Be a superhero! Free to Play! Bonuses and even more content for Subscribers!"
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million people worldwide saw The Avengers. Even if only .1% of those viewers checked out CoH, that's 100,000 people showing up. -
Quote:No offense, but I don't buy that. Well, okay, for CoV, I get it, but not for GR. At that point everyone already knew that having a separate area and faction was bad for the playerbase. And GR came out -- what? -- five years after CoV? And by then the population had diminished to the point where it was obvious that further segregation would be a terrible idea. Going Rogue was simply a retread of all the mistakes made with CoV, albeit in a much more attractive package.Originally Posted by Black Pebble
HOWEVER, I do agree that while both COV and GR introduced incredible content and systems, which certainly injected new life into the game, they did have the unintended side-effect of also dividing the player base.
So to wind this back up to the beginning, I'm not sure I'd say that COH went wrong with having multiple factions. They did have a tremendously positive impact on the game. But I think in hindsight, there were a lot of consequences down the line that no one could have seen coming.
CoV also had the problem of not actually feeling villainous and making everyone a minion, thus putting the story on rails and straitjacketing player creativity... which is what we saw with GR, too. With the added weirdness that we got to choose a faction, yet that choice meant absolutely nothing. We still had to beat up our own kind to maintain the fiction-within-a-fiction that we were "undercover." Yet another dumb story element used to explain game mechanics. -
ED and GDN were colossal missteps. Many people have forgotten, but the outrage over that literally destroyed the forums.
PvP -- I'm a huge fan of PvP. I had to sell my copy of Halo to get my life back, and I have no idea how many hours I played multiplayer Call of Duty 1 & 2. But in a rock-paper-scissors MMO? It fundamentally doesn't work. And worst of all was the spill-over into PvE. Travel Suppression has no reason to exist outside of PvP, yet it affected everything, making one of the best aspects of the game borked. Once "good enough" alternatives to travel powers opened up (helllloo Ninja Run + Sprint! and the earnable jet- and jump-pack) I never took another travel power again.
Good ideas poorly executed -- AE, bases and IOs are chief among these.
- AE -- Player-made content is a no-brainer for community vitality. But when it was first announced everyone said that Sturgeon's Law was going to be a severe underestimate as to the quality of the storytelling. When we finally got a taste of how it worked, warnings of the exploits were ignored and -- my personal bugaboo about this game -- using the in-game story to explain game mechanics slapped you in the face with the "virtual reality holodeck" aspect of the AE.
- Bases -- this is kind of related to cramming PvP into the game, with no clear plan as to how base raids would work. Making bases just wasn't fun. I've seen screenshots (and videos) of incredible player-made personal housing in Star Wars Galaxies. To make an incredible base here required too much investment of time and needed too large a group of people. And yet most still looked like a poorly-lit basement. Where were the personal lairs? The Batcave? Peter Parker's apartment? Avengers mansion? The Hall of Justice? The Satellite of Love? I mean, just look at this one-person abode in SWG. It's GIGANTIC. And it has NPCs moving around in it. Why weren't CoH's bases 10 times better?
- IOs -- A lot of people claim that IOs were the reason for ED, but they were added so many years later that I find that hard to believe. It feels more like IOs were added to mitigate the damage ED/GDN did to the original ATs. I also think they're too complicated. I know a lot of people simply didn't bother with them because of that aspect.
Too many currencies -- I stopped caring about what kind of money could buy which kind of doodad years ago. I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn about these merits, those merits, this reward, that reward. "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is a truism for a reason.
All the new content -- I hate raids. I hate open-world quests. These are two big reasons why I hate WoW and CO. Why they were added here I have no idea. After the second time through the new tutorial, I skipped it AND Atlas and went straight to Kings Row.
Dissolution of the playerbase -- why were new zones continually added, further scattering the population? Just make dead zones co-op or RvR areas. Dark Astoria, Boomtown, Eden... revamp into RvR areas, or if you must, co-op raid zones.
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Issue 24 had enough coolness to it to get me to re-sub anyway, so the fundamentals were still there.
I feel that CoH2 would've solved some of these issues, but I think there was a bit of push-me-pull-you going on behind the scenes that led to these weirdly-implemented decisions. -
Quote:Two words: Ep and Ic.Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Last month, but still time for art!
Feliney Assault and Feliney Mischief, taking down the lab that made FA....
...you know what I mean.