Lothic

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The Anti-Farm lobby will have trouble with the Enhanced Difficulty Options, but Whaddayagonnado?

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Think about it this way: Most people who call themselves "anti-farm" are probably mostly annoyed by the spammers on broadcast asking for padders. My guess is that if people stopped spamming for padders that most people would see that as a general improvement. Out of sight is out of mind after all.

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Option C) We're putting up the announcement very soon

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Well I'd honestly like to have heard it was my Option B) but at least Option C) is better than my Option A).
Was that confusing enough for you?

Thanks for the update regardless...

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Its thursday over here! Gimmie!

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oh I bet he'll wait for for 4:16(16:16) pacific to post it, since it seems he made a deal of today being the 16th

and if that wasn't the plan and he reads this, I'm sure it us now!

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Yeah the whole "release news about Issue 16 on the 16th of the month" coincidence seems like something our Devs would think is funny.

It'd pretty good timing too because that might mean we'll be able to start beta testing Issue 16 within the next couple of weeks which would coincide with Champions Online's open beta expectations. That would be a fun way to rain on that parade.

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DOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No more CoH/CoV now only CoX?

I am kidding, i have a feeing the devs have been planning this for years and feel they are finished brainstorming and want to shock us with thier genius.

It will be interesting to see how they get around the problems the OP has brought up. DechsKaison has made a very good set of points, there is much speculation to be had.

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Well there never has been two "separate" games anyway. Even back when the Devs sold CoV as a standalone game the actual software client loaded on our computers was identical whether you had a CoH account, CoV account or both.

As far as the problems with adapting SGs into a cross-factional game I think the idea of all SGs being factionless solves most of them. I don't see why players couldn't decide for themselves what kind of membership they have. For example if you wanted to be in a "villain only" SG just join (or create) one that only invited villains into it. Seems simple enough to me.

The real problem is that we don't exactly yet know how the Devs are going to be implementing the general "side switching" features. Once we know that it'll be easier to understand how SGs are going to adapt to that.

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I'm curious if they're going to allow coalitions between factions, like the bug at the beginning of CoV. Made for some very interesting and fun RP before they took it out.

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Well if they go with my idea that all SGs would become factionless "grey" SGs then that would basically mean any SG could coalition with any other SG regardless. Because of that bug you mentioned we already know that "any" SG can link up with "any" other already if the Devs would allow it.

Basically I think the game should be letting players decide who to coalition with regardless. I'd rather have us players decide on our own if it would make "sense" for cross-faction coalitions to happen without an arbitrary Dev dictated rule against it.

Maybe all SGs in the post Going Rogue game will be "grey" SGs in that it'll be up to the members to decide amongst themselves what type of membership they will allow. There's no reason why players themselves couldn't decide to have "only heroes" or "anybody" type rules for their own SGs on their own.

When you think about it there's really not much that makes a SG mechanically tied to being related to a particular faction. They both have Prestige and 6 ranks of leadership for instance.

The major difference would be the SG badges involved, but the game is already going it have to juggle the larger issue of hero/villain badge organization anyway so I imagine the SG badges will be handled in a similar way. I suspect SG badges will become more generic/factionless so that any SG will be able to earn any SG badge that exists. With a generic set of SG badges all of the TP beacon badges for all zones in the game will become combined and they'll likely be some other way the game will check if a particular character is "legal" to use a particular beacon.

I'm not suggesting the changes to account for Going Rogue and side switching are trivial. But I don't think it's going to be impossibly hard either.

Well I hope you do get yours in 12 days. I'm due to get mine on August 12th. But like I said yesterday in this thread the last time the Devs "forgot" to tell us what the upcoming Vet awards were they were actually late in creating them and everyone had to wait to get them even if their Vet dates had already happened. I hope history is not repeating itself again on this.

Maybe if we're lucky someone who has the 63rd monther already will read this thread and confirm that it's in the game ready to go.

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And keep in mind that they did away with the raiding path rules in base building. Now it's possible to build a base that can't be raided. I would call that a big clue to the fact that base raiding isn't coming back anytime soon.

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That's pretty much the same thing I thought of when I first heard about the change in the base pathing rules. Why bother to make bases more "PvE friendly" if they were ever going to allow PvP raiding in them again?

I agree with the others in that there's not much point in them trying to get the whole CoP/IoP raid thing working as originally planned. That ship sailed years ago now. IoPs were dreamt up in an age even before IOs existed in this game and it's not clear they were ever going to be balanced in the first place. In fact I even support the idea that the Power Liberator/Master Thief badge should be removed from the game because the whole CoP/IoP system never even really existed from the point of view of being a "working" feature. At its very best it was an open buggy beta that snuck out onto the live servers for a week back in 2006.

Regardless I still have hope that they might be able to brush off the dust from the CoP trial and make some kind of usable non-PvP oriented content out of it at some point.

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Confirmed...

/me is a sad panda... and out 19.99 because I already have booster 1 and 2...

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Am I missing something painfully obvious here? If your sole intention was to aquire SB III, why did you spend $19.99 on the Architect Edition when you could have saved 10 bucks by buying the booster by itself for $9.99 here.

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Actually, i would buy two more ae editions just because of it. Why? Because that way i can get then faster. Here on Brazil the ncsoft is sold by a company called LEVELUP GAMES. They are incompetent. Right now they even forgot to update their selling options to include the magic pack. But the AE edition is available, and with it the boosters.

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I've been reading posts like yours for a while now concerning how people playing this game in Brazil have trouble getting the latest new content like this new Booster Pack. What exactly makes it so hard for Brazilians specifically? Why do you have to work through another company (whatever LEVELUP GAMES is) to get these things? Does it have something to do with how credit card transactions work when you try to buy something online coming from outside of Brazil?

I could see how it might be hard to get retail boxed editions of games in different places around the world. But it seems like as long as you have a credit card and direct access to a website a person should be able to buy an access key like the ones for these Booster Packs from anywhere in the world.

Well July 28th should be the first legitimate day anyone should have the 63rd month Vet Award and that's less than 2 weeks from now.

By now we usually would've heard from someone who'd gotten the next one some weeks too early and spilled their guts about it here in the forums but I haven't seen that yet. That could only really mean one of two things: either A) the Devs are once again late in developing what the next ones will be and they may miss the 'release' date again like they did once last year or B) they somehow magically fixed the bug that let people get them too early and no one has gotten it yet as intended.

Unfortunately I'm going to assume we're dealing with option "A" again until we hear otherwise.

I seem to remember back when we got the dual builds that one of the Devs said something to the effect of "we made the new build feature in a way so that it could handle the possibility of having more than just two builds in the future". I don't think they were specifically -promising- that we would have more than two builds, but just that they wrote the code to be able to easily handle it if they chose to do it.

Another hint that's probably what they intended was the adding of the ability to uniquely name the builds. The need to name builds doesn't really make a lot of sense if there's only two to deal with, but if we got access to many builds then having them each be nameable would be much more useful to us.

I figure the option is open for them to do it sometime and like you say they might plan to make it be some kind of future award or some-such. They could just be waiting to see what the full impact of the dual build thing is first before they go further with it. Like the other posters suggested there could even be some worry about the market implications as well. I guess we'll see.

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Yeah, people tend to over look that whole tripling to quadrupling of the size of the development team. I mean, I'm sure that had nothing to do with it.

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Who knows maybe they've been working on it since April 28th 2004...

Actually we have a pretty good idea they've been working it for a very long time regardless of the exact dates or size of the Dev team. There was another forum poster (I forget who at the moment) who had collected a series of like 20 different Dev quotes showing how the Devs' responses to the "Are we getting power customization?" question have evolved over the years. From that list it was pretty clear to conclude that they were hinting that they were working on this in some form or fashion pretty much all along.

But it's hard to believe the fact that Champs Online is about to offer that kind of thing a few weeks from now -didn't- encourage the Devs to get a little more serious about it. Remember our Devs chose to officially tell us about the Going Rogue expansion within a week or so of when Champs Online started to release more info after their press open beta event. Things like this aren't always pure coincidences.

If Champs Online does nothing else it'll help motivate our Devs to work a wee bit harder.
That can only be a good thing for us.

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It still hasn't been denied that I16 is the synchronization patch for Going Rogue.

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It hasn't?

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Not when BAB says it.

He may be a good Dev (in fact I know he is) but basically nothing he says in this forum about things happening in the future can ever be completely trusted 100%. He has a bad habit of having "limited" credibility in that area whether on purpose or not. *shrugs*

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Why bother believing any redname, then? They are all subject to the same marketing filter. Can any of us, with 100% certainty, say what's going to happen in the future about anything? High standards, much? Sheesh.

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Marketing filters are bad enough. But beyond that the only standard I require from a Dev is that they not joke around with us so much that we never know if they are being serious or not.

I don't consider that too "high" a standard to follow, but that's me. YMMV.

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Well BAB's has always said it wasn't hard to do, just time consuming.

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Let's just say "something" happened so that they found the time to do it.

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It still hasn't been denied that I16 is the synchronization patch for Going Rogue.

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It hasn't?

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Not when BAB says it.

He may be a good Dev (in fact I know he is) but basically nothing he says in this forum about things happening in the future can ever be completely trusted 100%. He has a bad habit of having "limited" credibility in that area whether on purpose or not. Ironically if he's telling the truth here he's "embellished" other statements so much it's hard to take him at face value anymore. *shrugs*

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it took them as long as it took them to realize that champions was going to have it.

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Devs' response prior to superhero MMO competition: "That's going to take too much work to ever do."
Devs' response after advent of superhero MMO competition: "We're going to provide that ASAP!"

It's not that it's cynical to suspect this is how it happened.
It's just that it's good to know that our Devs can respond to valid MMO competition regardless.

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It still hasn't been denied that I16 is the synchronization patch for Going Rogue.

As was pointed out in a different discussion I6 was not City of Villains, it was Along Came a Spider which added 3 PVP Zones to the Hero Game and included a graphical update.

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Yes I've also noticed that the Devs have not been too precise in clearing up this particular point. The Devs have told us that I16 is -not- the Going Rogue expansion but that doesn't mean the Issue is not going to go live "coincidentally" with release of the expansion the same way I6 and CoV did.

We'll eventually find out the truth of this matter of course, but it is fun to speculate.

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Before the heat death of the universe.

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Someone's optimistic.

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Especially since some of the latest theories about the universe suggest that it periodically oscillates through Big Bangs, expansions, contractions then Big Crunches to endlessly repeat that cycle. Exactly the "death" of how many universes in the future are we talking about here?

I never really quite understood why the character sliders in this game didn't have some kind of visible scale and/or GUI fields that would allow us to set values precisely. I think it must have followed the same "fuzzy logic" that motivated the Devs to originally not give us access to the numbers associated with power stats. That whole mindset of keeping "numbers" hidden from players was a cute idea to simplify things in theory but a very irksomely restrictive concept in practice.

Now that we have access to all the numbers saved in costume files it's not like hiding numbers from us in the character editing screens really makes any sense anymore (even if it ever did).

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I could use that function if it helped with glowies. I have to be the worst glowie hunter ever.

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A fair point if it would help with that.
But for me I'd almost care more if the power came with a cool emote associated with it.
Firing it off for a cool emote would be about all I'd use it for.

Ironically it's the "AE babies" who would actually need a fog of war clearing power.
Most of them have never left AP/MI right?

Anyway if we assume the "Clear Fog of War" power is going to be the 63th (or any month) Vet Award then I could only really see that being useful in the case that we ever get any -new- maps (like in the Going Rogue expansion).

As far as existing maps go a power like that would relatively useless to me or any 63+ month Vet. My main alts have already cleared maybe 95% of the total area of every zone in the game years ago and I've played so many door missions I could probably draw most of those maps with my eyes closed.

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The game's monetary system is inherently flawed. You can create money by fighting enemies to spend on the market. However when you spend it on the market you're just giving it to another player.

Very little money is -leaving- the system while millions more is being added per hour. And since the market is cross-server I'm comfortable saying millions per hour. Even the really SLOW hours. :P

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I don't "blame" players for buying and selling these things for as much as the market will bear.
If someone's willing (dumb enough?) to pay a billion INF for a single recipe then more power to them.

But this point about INF being generated far faster that it's being destroyed is a valid point for concern as far as a balanced game economy goes. There are really only two ways INF gets sinked out of the game: the market transaction fees and the "INF to Prestige" conversion outlet. It's completely arguable that these two methods are not being used (or used enough) to prevent a general inflationary trend which could end up making -everything- in this game cost 100s of millions of INF.

I'm not against the market setting the value of things but I am against runaway inflation.
If nothing more is done about removing excess INF that's exactly what we may be faced with.

*passes Castle a copy of the Geneva Conventions turned to the page about torture*

I suppose you could always claim you were just "following orders" when the players storm your corporate offices and put all you Devs on trial for war crimes.

Oh don't be so cynical with all that...

Anyone with a bit of sense must realize by now that Posi is saving up all of his super-secret I16 info in order to unload it as a counter to any upcoming announcement made by the folks creating Champions Online.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the requirements for the Portable Workbench accolade. You mention that "hardly anyone but the hardcore badgers" have this accolade. So what? Why shouldn't there be at least a -few- badges in this game that actually take a little bit of organized long-term effort to get? And the idea that invention badges should be account-based as a compromise? *sigh*

Empath was the only badge in this game that was set far too high for ANYONE to get naturally and that was finally addressed last year. Once you get past the handful of other top epic badges such as Immortal and Leader there are roughly only 20-30 badges that are "moderately" challenging (as in require several weeks or months each) to get. Beyond those as KitsuneKnight implied 95% of the rest of the badges in this game are effectively trivial to get (taking less than a few hours total each) by comparison.

It's suggestions like these to "carebear nerf" various pseudo-hard badges that are probably motivating the Devs to offer us a bunch of "do X once to get a badge" badges like the Issue 15 Arena badges. I fear we are doomed to a future where all new badges will be obtained almost as instantly as they are released and there will no longer be any badges to offer us challenges to earn.

Please stop giving our Devs the idea that we generally want -easier- badges to earn.
Too many of them are already far too easy to begin with.