Liquid

Playing (there are overlaps, but for different reasons):

• Immersion-breaking concept: The AE concept takes me out of the story every time I zone between missions, and reminds me that it's fake and my hero is uploading his/her consciousness into a system created and run by supervillains.
• Too difficult to find content I like: The rating system is garbage. We need a Youtube-like rating system that drops stars, has likes/dislikes, and has player-created favorites lists that we can follow from in-game. We need short public comments that allow players to explain why they liked or didn't like an arc (e.g. "I wanted a farm", "Nonsensical and riddled with typos", "Awesome hero's journey arc", or "This is a great farm"), so that farmers and story-tellers aren't competing for plays.
• Extremely unbalanced custom enemies: Even in good story content, most custom enemies are grossly overpowered compared to standard NPCs, due to the XP requirements and the default options. For example, Rage and Build Up don't appear anywhere on NPCs in the normal game (outside of Doppleganger tech, which shouldn't use them either), and don't belong in the AE either, without the creator specifically choosing them for the sake of challenge. Custom enemies almost always have more secondary effects than standard enemies. I can adjust my difficulty level, but there is no convenient way to do so while in an AE mission. One step they could take to help this would be to add the difficulty slider NPCs to the AE.
• No end-game rewards: Outside of Dev Choice arcs, you cannot earn shards, threads, or components in the AE, so I feel like my level 50s are wasting their time in there unless I've already maxed out my Incarnate slots.

Creating:

• Story undermining concept: the AE treats all my stories as not being real events, but instead VR games hosted by supervillains. I dealt with this once by actually writing a story as a VR game created by an unscrupulous company, but I don't have much interest in restricting all of my stories to that same framework. I understand marking player-created content as such for the player in the UI, but creating lore around it to mark it as such for the character is both unnecessary and undermines the author's work.
• Buggy, difficult text interface: I have some extensive writing revisions that I have needed to make to one of my arcs for nearly a year, but I haven't done it because my use of HTML in the text has put me way over the character cap, which means I can't just edit it, I have to pull all the text out, remove all the HTML, rewrite it, paste it back in, and apply HTML again. Sometimes I'll be typing and nothing will show up, and I'll click elsewhere and back in and suddenly everything I typed that wasn't showing before will be appended to another location. Sometimes it doesn't line-wrap automatically.
• Too difficult to advertise to players that would like the kind of stories I write: With the only in-system means of advertising to players being the rating system and the (I suspect rarely used) category system, I'm mostly left with self-promotion options that I find tiring or distasteful like spamming channels for plays or forming PUGs to run my own content. Some people have put a great deal of effort via review threads and contact trees in the MA forum, but there isn't much traffic in there, and there should be in-game means to do the same things.
• Extremely difficult to balance custom enemies: It's very difficult to make interesting custom enemies that aren't overpowered, and still give decent XP to my players. We need more basic powersets that are similar to existing NPC groups, so I can make a 1-10 mission with foes that use baseball bats without all of them having a significant chance to stun.
• Tiny population of users: In the early days of the AE (first couple of months), I would get plays and comments frequently, and see lots of people in the AE buildings. I now can go for months without plays or comments, and most AE buildings are completely empty. This is likely because of the reasons listed by players why they don't play (duh), and much of the community generally believing that AE is for exploiters and farmers. Without an active population that might actually contain a few people that would want to run my arcs, I'm not very motivated to work on arcs.
• The Filter: plenty of totally legitimate words are filtered, words that may have been used as a name for some obscure hero in DC or Marvel, but should be totally fine to apply to an object (like "Access" as in "Remote Access Terminal"). Also, actual Paragon IP is restricted so that certain groups and NPCs can't be used.

The AE could have been the best thing that ever happened to this game. It has enormous potential, but it was released in an easily exploitable state and has mostly been updated to add new enemy groups and maps (which is great!) but not often to solve its major problems.

The first major reason I don't PvP in CoH is that I like my PvP to be balanced, and I don't believe it's possible to have balanced PvP in an MMORPG that wasn't designed around it from the ground up. They could, however, attempt to balance the sides. I've made multiple attempts to give PvP a chance here, both before and after I13, and the only time I ever actually had fun was about a 5 minute period where an equivalent number of heroes and villains were fighting each other. Then one side resorted to cheap tactics and the other side started losing members because of it, and it wound up lopsided and boring (and I've been on winning and losing sides, it's only fun for me if there's a relatively even match).

The second major reason is that our PvP "games" in the PvE zones aren't very engaging, and are actually all PvE mini-games with deathmatch thrown in as a way to prevent you from completing the PvE mini-game. The Arena, meanwhile, only has deathmatch. Deathmatch hasn't been enough to sustain a population in a PvP focused game since around 1999. Counter Strike, Team Fortress, and Left 4 Dead all have interesting goals that require strategy and tactics, and they have longevity because of it.

I, personally, think it's too late to salvage the PvP in this game, due to the damage done to the community, the age of the game, and most importantly, the fact that the original design wasn't focused on PvP (and probably never even took PvP into account until Issue 4 was being worked on). However, if they wanted to make an attempt, I'd say that improving the actual gameplay of PvP should be top priority, and that means new or improved mini-games with actual PvP objectives, and balanced sides. If PvP had something to offer, PvP gameplay-wise, besides trying to kill other players, and players trying to prevent you from getting Shivans and Nukes, more people might try it.

I still don't think it will ever be well balanced, because we've got tons of powers that were never designed with PvP in mind. They've been tweaked for PvP, but some builds are just weak or strong due to the basic conceptual design of the powers involved. Good PvP games have abilities and options specifically designed for how they will work and complement each other in PvP.

Slow brain, though. I can't believe that I didn't see it until just now.

Glad to see we're getting content for the 30-35 range, it's been sorely needed for a long time!

I agree with those that say that it depends on what the AT offers in terms of powersets and options.

If the powersets are new, but you are limited to a single choice for primary and secondary, then price them the same as the epic ATs (1000).

If it will use existing sets like a Range/Defense, Melee/Debuff, or Melee/Control AT, then price it like Controllers and Masterminds (1200).

If the powersets will be radically different, and come with multiple options, then I'd say 1600 points might be acceptable, but it would have to be really innovative.

I wouldn't go any higher than that. If you go above $20 for an AT, you're approaching "didn't I pay $30 for Going Rogue, got 4 powersets, new costumes, and 4 (6 if you count each underground as its own zone) new zones worth of content, with branching options that changed the outcome of my story, along with the tip system and side-switching?" territory, and plenty of people are going to feel ripped off, and wonder what else they could be spending that money on.

Looking awesome!

I personally think the new login screen image is awesome, and my eyes are drawn to the star on his chest, not his crotch.

That being said, the image with the rainbow is hilarious.

I bought the Gunslinger set this morning because of the female jackets that were added. Thanks Dink!

I am posting this here because I couldn't find the thread where she announced her additions, and I also had two suggestions related to the pack, the first of which is probably best suited to this thread so Ghost Falcon sees it:

1) I'd like to suggest making the Gunslinger pack a featured item next week, with an updated description to mention the jackets (maybe with a "UPDATED!" in red text). I know several people that skipped the pack because it didn't have a gunslinger outfit for women, and now that it does, hopefully you'll get more sales if you notify people outside of the forums.

2) I'd like to also suggest adding a second Gunslinger option to the Costume Set dropdown in the Character Creator for the ported female parts, for new players to easily find them.

Thanks again to Dink for porting those parts, and thanks GF and others for listening!

I may be wrong, but I remember the meme existing before CoV, and the Issue 7 rescues being added as an in-joke referencing the meme without being ham-fisted about it.

Looks and sounds awesome, happy birthday, Dink!

It's awesome to see War Witch's career at Paragon continue to advance. Congrats, Melissa!

Congrats on the move to the new project, Nate!

I'd like to say thank you for not making this set time limited. The costume set also looks amazing. Unfortunately, it's way too elaborate to be my style. However, I bought it anyway, as if I'm going to not buy things that I want which are time-limited on principle, I suppose I should go the other way and buy some that I'm not interested in, that aren't time-limited.

I'm glad to see the costume slots on sale, too. My fiancee bought two of them last night. (I personally only have one character with more than 5 costume ideas, so I have little reason to do so)

Wow, great work, Dink, I'm really excited for this set to come out!

Welcome, Hit Streak!

As someone that bought Two COV collector's editions, a hero gear kit, and a late CoH Collector's Edition for $80, I support selling all the contents in the store, and/or providing them through Paragon Rewards.

As for the problem with selling badges... that badge was already a badge you had to purchase. I have no problem with selling it as long as you never sell any other badge.

Even better, you could always put that badge in the game to be earned, and then sell the rest of the goodies on the Paragon Market.

P.S. since it's called the "VIP" badge for heroes, I think it would also be fitting to give it out for subscribing for at least one month. You haven't nixed subscription badges, given some of the "stay subbed for 3 months and get a badge and other goodies" promotions.

Alignment change tokens are great, and will save badge hunters time when new issues come out with opposite-side badges. They also will be great for roleplayers that want to RP a sudden change of personality or alignment (for situations like mind control, possession, curses, etc).

800 points, however, is exorbitant. That's the price of a new powerset. Featuring the entire alignment change system also highlights how expensive it is-- 800 points for a one time change on a single character, or 1200 points (900 right now!) for the ability to do it with any character, forever, after running 20 tip missions and two moralities, and bundled with it is new content, alignment powers, and alignment merits.

It's too bad, I was planning to buy these. I was expecting 80-160 points with how minor their effect is.

I'll probably be running the new SSA tonight, looking forward to seeing the impact of Statesman's death.