Lothic

I'll admit I still have my doubts. But there have been cases where certain actors have taken on unexpected roles in the past and they've worked out really well so I'm going to try to keep an open mind about this.

I'll admit that $50 would have been a bit steep for this but I probably would've paid that anyway. I've wanted extra costume slots (and as many of them as I could get) for so many years now I was willing to deal with that cost. But if it turns out the total cost will only be $20 I'm totally fine with that.

Clearly this microtransaction scheme will maximize profits for the company regardless of which segment of the playerbase a particular player falls into.

I thought I covered it well enough in my last few posts but I'll try again.

First of all the concept of the "bundled pack" is going away. We will not longer be forced to buy collections of things. If for some reason you want to buy all the items that used to be part of a single legacy pack in the Paragon Market you'll have to pay, in total, more for them. But again it'll be your choice if you want to buy all those items or not.

As to WHY the Devs are effectively raising the price on things that's pretty clear as well. It's business 101 really. The new Paragon Market (if it's like most MMO microtransaction stores) will be organized around a rotating series of sales and discounts. The Devs are simply raising the individual item prices so that when they "lower" them during the sales they'll still make the same amount of money as before. There's nothing really evil or surprising about that - just about every business on the planet structures their prices to entice people to buy -and- maximize their own profits.

I simply remain convinced that the amount of time and effort to "improve" the Walk we have, no matter how much time or effort would actually be involved, is always going to be beyond the Devs' ability to justify it. There are far too many squeakier wheels out there right now to fix and sadly there probably always will be.

Stranger things have happened of course. It's just that those things don't really happen too often...

This exactly why the "standard" prices for buying all the items of a previous Booster Pack are going to cost more than they do now.

During the times a sale is -not- going on a few people will buy them anyway. This means more money to the Devs. Then the Devs can have a sale which "lowers" price making people even more likely to buy. Of course the trick of that is that the "lowered" price is actually roughly around the SAME price they are paying now. The net effect is that the Devs will either get more money for the old pack or the same amount for them. That's pretty much a win-win for the company.

And I suspect that if you totaled those two options (buying only what you want via a la carte and buying a full pack) that on average the cost of those things will be about the same. Yes technically that means we're getting less for our money than we used to. But on the other hand you're theoretically not using those things you didn't want anyway right? Did you really lose out on something you're not using?

Ultimately this new scheme gives us more options while preserving maximum profitability for the company. Seems pretty clear cut to me.

The penalty for getting to buy the exact a la carte items we want is that buying them all will cost more. They are banking (literally) on the idea that the people who end up spending more will cover some of the cost of people who are going to spend less. Basically we get more purchase options while at the same time the company keeps making the same average amount of money. It's deviously brilliant.

If it's important to you to have everything an original Booster Pack included then yes I agree buying all of it a la carte will be more expensive in most cases. But I'm convinced in the long run the old idea of "bundles of items" will become outdated. People in the future will end up only buying the exact items they want which may either be equal to or even less than an original pack cost.

Still I find it funny that this company has basically found a way to encourage people to hurry up and give them extra money now so that they can "save" money later. I think Posi should have been a used car salesman with a pitch like that.

You may have not used the word "easy" but you certainly did imply that the amount of work necessary to make Walk acceptable to you was well within the realm of possibility for a "spare time" project. I simply asked you (without using the word "easy" this time) why your vision of how Walk should have been implemented wasn't done in the game?

Once again I'm quite sure Walk would have been amazingly well developed if the Devs had been able to spend a significant amount of time and effort on it. But since it was in fact a spare time QoL feature it likely had to suffer a major compromise (i.e. power suppression) just to get it out the door without negatively impacting anything else. I know it that makes it "less than ideal" to some people but unless you're willing to insist the Devs spend more time tinkering on BaB's old pet project it's not going to get any better at this point.

While I think there are some players (like myself) who would like to have a lifetime subscription option I've never really serious thought it would ever happen here.

Most MMOs only offer lifetime subs as a mean to re-coop their startup development costs. It makes very little sense for a well established MMO like this game to start allowing them, even in light of this F2P change coming with CoH:Freedom. Bottomline why would any game that's doing well financially choose to give up potential profits in the future?

Yes a lifetime subscription option would be convenient for players. But in the long run I actually don't mind potentially having to continue to pay for VIP status in this game because I don't mind supporting companies that provide services/entertainment that I want.

If this is true then you also have more patience than about 98% of the typical MMO playerbase.

I highlighted the key phases of your post. It's obvious the way they implemented Walk could have been better in many different ways. It's not perfect and I don't think anyone here is claiming that it is. But what is fairly safe to assume is that for a feature that was a "spare-time" project of a Dev it's relatively cool enough and is as functional as could be expected. I highly doubt if BaBs had a choice he would have -chosen- to have Walk suppress powers. Clearly that was a necessity to keep this thing as simple and easy as possible without negatively affecting anything else.

As features go this thing isn't a $100,000 Ferrari and was never supposed to be. It's a $10,000 Kia. Sure we can "suggest" it be improved but let's really not look a gift horse in the mouth shall we?

You have a legitimate concern about this, but again I don't think it'll be too bad. When you take a look at the history of this game we've gotten on average roughly 2 new powersets per year (not counting the introduction of CoV). It's not like we're instantly going to be getting a new powerset option to buy every week.

So I figure if that historical rate holds it won't be that bad paying for a new powerset like once every 6 months or so. It'll be spread out far enough that most people shouldn't have to worry about making tough choices if they are on a limited budget.

I didn't make a blind assumption about this. After looking at the screen pic several days ago (that Snow Globe was kind enough to dig up for us) I concluded a reasonable educated guess. Yes I may be wrong about this, but that would go counter to the actual GUI presented.

Welcome to the game.

This game really only has a couple of examples of "unlocking" powersets like this. Those are the Kheldians and VEATS at level 20 (used to be level 50). The whole idea of "buying" powersets is obviously fairly new. I think I understand your idea about this potentially being a game breaker but I think it'll be limited enough not to be annoying. They are only going to be selling a few powersets leaving the majority freely available to everyone. If it got to the point where we'd have to pay extra for -every- powerset we wanted to use then I'd be worried.

Then answer this question: If it would have been apparently so easy to make Walk work the way you suggest why wasn't it done that way in the first place?

Again I do my best not to be hyper-critical of bad writing on the Internet. Gods know while I'm playing this game my in-game chat typing tends to suffer. But I am willing to admit that if I don't know a person and all I see of their writing is nothing but constant "cringe-worthy linguistic contractions" I'm going to initially think less of what they have to say. I may learn later that they are reasonably smart people who simply can't write well, but that won't be my -first- impression at any rate.

When you only have a person's written word to go on you tend to make value judgements about that person based solely on that. It might not be strictly fair or even completely open-minded, but it's going to happen regardless.

I'm quite sure with the amount of animation work involved that it would have -never- been green-lit as an official assigned project. Far too much effort for too little benefit.

The Walk we have is a nice little bonus QoL RP feature that, as you say, was a side-project that they managed to slip in during their spare time. It was never meant to be a full fledged travel power. The restrictions on it allowed BaBs to sidestep many of the design problems he would have otherwise had to deal with if he had tried to make this a fully incorporated movement scheme.

Basically this was a glorified "ground-pose" emote that gave us something that was better than nothing. Sure it could be better, but it's not likely going to be improved upon at this point. *shrugs*

I'd probably want to be able to use powers while walking for RP purposes. I think the real question is why would you'd be walking if you're in a stitution where you need to be using your powers? Think about it.

Again the animation compromise was put in place so that it'd be clear that Walking was never intended to be used anywhere near a potential combat situation. I agree that the way they did it is a bit restrictive, but doing it that way very likely mitigated many of the design problems they would have had coding this otherwise.

Actually there are very clear reasons why Walk was implemented the way it was. As Liz Bathory said it boils down to how the standard movement/combat animations work.

When this game was designed its basic character movement (forward, backward and side-to-side) was hardwired to a running motion. All movements whether they be at normal speed, while Sprinting, while Super Speeding, etc. all use the same body animations. The only real difference is how fast or slow they move on the screen. This allowed all the core run animations to be reused for any of the ground-based travel modes at the time.

But when it came to doing a proper Walk it was obvious that they couldn't just make it look like a really slow motion run because that'd look silly. The way the arms and legs move for a Walking stride is different enough from running that they really had to come up with an entirely new core animation for it.

The problem with that was the only way Walking would look "right" without suppression would be if the Devs had come up with an entirely new set of animations to account for all the possible reactive motions that could happen while using powers or moving in combat. That would have been far too much work to make a Walk worthwhile.

So the Devs came up with a sensible compromise: by suppressing powers they could get away with only having to come up with a basic Walking motion without having to worry about how that new stride interacted with all the other powers and movements in the game. Without that compromise we likely would have never gotten ANY kind of Walk.