Luerim12

It's sort of turned into a "What voice would you like to hear do these characters if there were voice-overs" thing. That's ok, too. Aion has some /very/ familiar voice actors in the US version.

I'm a Shelley Calene-Black fan. I think she'd do more justice to someone like Sister Psyche than anybody else I could think of.

And Mary Elizabeth McGlynn's voice has some strange quality that just keeps me entranced. I'd listen to her read the phone book, truth be told. And she's got a good depth that make her a general fit just about anywhere. She does creepy very, very well. (See Pisha, a hidden quest giver in Vampire: The Masquerade -- Bloodlines. Creepy.) She's what I've heard for Ghost Widow since her character was publicized prior to City of Villains...

Christy Carlson Romano as Mynx. Or maybe Ms. Liberty/Dominatrix. Though I didn't get into Kim Possible until the last couple of years, that same energy and accent/diction fits all three characters, and it's hard to miss it.

For that matter, Nicole Sullivan's work as Shego in Kim Possible really makes her voice stand out a lot when I'm reading some of the dialogue, though usually more incidental stuff.

Chris Patton... He's got this talent for voicing snarky and throwing in impromptu comments that end up in the finished piece. His voice is usually what I hear in my head for Faultline.

Steve Blum, though, I'd drop him into Manticore in a heartbeat. Playing to Blum's strengths there. Dark, but not as dark as Kevin Conroy can be in a *cough* similar role. And capable of really good comedic timing during a mostly serious situation (cf. "The Big O".)

I've definitely heard George Newbern's voice when anything Statesman oriented pops up.

I never blogged before, so I went with what pissed me off more than anything else of late, and that was trying FFXI. Of course, being as verbose as I am, I can't just start there, I had to outline all I've tried before in order to explain just how much it sucked.

http://luerim.blogspot.com/

What I found myself wondering at part 4 in my autobiographical exposition was what if WoW allowed former players back in for free just to play in the PvP areas. I really, really enjoyed the tactical aspects of Arathi Basin. Suppose you didn't get the rewards unless you had an active paying account? I'd still play, I might get an encouragement to resubscribe down the line. It's the sort of thing I can do and not feel bad if things don't work out, and Blizzard would win out by having targets for the PvPers.

I'm curious if other people think this is a viable late-subscriber model for the developing "free to play" business dynamic, where you don't pay to play, but only to get perks other than normal leveling?

When PvP and rational conversation converge, I recognize there's a lot of people who don't get it. I hope this discussion will be an exception, please reflect the wishes of this poster.

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Im pretty sure PC is coming in Going Rogue

Im also pretty sure Going Rogue will be out around 1st September 2009, perhaps a little laster but certainly in beta by then.

Why that date? Its the CO release date. NCSoft will be very smart business people if they unveil an expansion that has most of the stuff CO has been marketing as unique to them (PC for example)

That's my business mind speaking, not my fan boi mind.

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In my experience, shiny widgets last about two hours in the hands of a teenager. Then they're not shiny any more. Eye candy really only works the first couple of times it is experienced. After that, you start seeing the man behind the curtain.

In the MMO marketing game, what's important is repeat business. As I understand it, in order to recoup the initial investment, your average MMO has to have its projected player base renew for an average of three months in order to show profit potential (not profit, just potential). In other words, if a huge chunk of the subscribers ain't coming back for more (cf. The Matrix Online), it's a wash.

It is this reason they (new MMOs) try to make leveling so darn hard. (I recall one figure being around 120 hours of play to reach maximum level for most MMOs.) Casual gamer that I am I've been playing for years and only have two level 50s. The industry has grown out of this for the most part, particularly for some of the more established games, but it's still alive and flopping on the fishing pier.

If CO is going to stand on its own two feet, it's not going to be shiny effects that are going to get it out of diapers. It's going to be solid game play and strong content. I admit, their potential is strong, but frankly, I'm not that big a fan of cell-shaded games. It allows for a lot of corners to be cut, though, so that's probably why they did it.

The other side of that coin is regardless of the functionality of the game, do they have content?

Then there's the shakedown period: are they ready enough to have masses involved? Is their offering good enough to keep people coming back? Is it so similar to CoX that there's no point? Are there game breaking bugs that just make people run away in disgust?

Is there really room for more than one non-Marvel, non-DC superhero game? From the money spent, I understand going through with it, as this was originally going to be Marvel Online before Microsoft and Marvel bailed, but still, was it the right decision?

Regardless, something as silly as changing the color of my eye beam ray sure as hell isn't going to have me coming back to a game that doesn't deliver a substantive experience.

Luerim

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People have been demanding and not getting the ability to simply, walk. And now you're requesting new travel powers???

I think the big red ball and duel archery defense will come first.

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I'm still trying to understand, other than RP and in-game movies, why would you want to walk when you can run?

I don't think there's a significant monetary/business advantage for Paragon Studios to devote that much time to producing something that would be utilized by a disgustingly small minority given the cost to produce it.

Would it be nice? Sure, if they did it right and didn't slapdash it together like Blizzard did in WoW. The Matrix Online has superior walking and turning animations, they're like the animation kings. Sad the rest of their little MMO fell apart in the content department.

From a business standpoint, this is where CoX is going to win out. It's got tons of content, but you don't have to experience that if you don't want to. That choice, between the power-levelers and the story lovers, that balance, is what steps CoX apart. You have more choice, in a friendlier format, than just about anything else out there.

For the last four years, I kept coming back because I like PUGing and the surprising combination of skillsets. Watching a good leader pull together the weirdest mix you could think of, and having it create devastation for your enemies.

I'm going to keep coming back, because unlike a lot of other MMOs I've played, CoX keeps getting better. Star Wars Galaxies got worse, MxO stalled like a glider dipped in lead and gilded with uranium, and WoW is fun for about 6-12 months.

Why did this happen? My opinion was that CoX had its eye on being the best it could, like "The Little Tanker That Could". It's still not the best performing MMO in the league, but I'm certain it's consistent.

That opinion changed when I heard the back story of the MA set up. I14 is so ground-breaking, it makes my head hurt. Somewhere in this mess of what is/was/will be a someone managed to answer a request to develop a user friendly mission setup. Something insanely easy to use. It was so good somebody else said, "Why don't we let the players play with it?"

And they let us play with it. CoX is running full tilt, and I don't really see it slowing down much over the next few months. Will Champions Online and DC Online impact the player base? I'm sure it will. After about 3 months there'll be a swarm of newbies who want something on going and not just a 40 hour marathon if grinding for 10 hours of what they thought they wanted..

CoX has a solid plan for the future, plans for stuff that makes me giddy, and it's not the particulars that make me giddy, it's the direction of the effort.

CoX is running at hyper-speed. Why should we start walking now?

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There's lots of general resources for writers, but of course now that I look many of them talk about the process of getting writing published in addition to (or sometimes rather than) the process of writing something good in the first place.

I learned most of what I know starting with a great book called "The Art and Craft of Novel Writing", whose principles IMHO apply equally well to any kind of fiction. (It has mediocre ratings on Amazon I think primarily because it doesn't talk about the publishing process at all.) Here's a good summary of the guidelines for fiction writing: http://www.writersdigest.com/article...vel-blueprint/ - the whole writer's digest site has lots of good information.

I'm sure there's more out there, particularly if you want to focus on genre writing like detective/thriller plots.

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When it comes to genre writing detective/thriller plots, there's nothing that beats the old radio plays. They're solid. Their plots are still used in today's good detective/thrillers. "Castle" is an excellent contemporary example. "Murder She Wrote" is an older example.

The old radio plays are keen in that they're also free. Gotta love expired copyright laws. "The Shadow" copyright is shaky (due to the early 1990s movie), but listening to it isn't illegal.

Candy Matson is probably my personal favorite, possibly because only 14 episodes survive. Barry Craig is a close second.

"The Shadow" laps at their heels, but only because of Orson Welles and its length, and the number of surviving episodes. And bringing it up as the best "Superhero" example available. Recursively feeds into Superheroes since Batman was loosely based on "The Shadow" and my favorite episode of Batman the Animated series was "The Grey Ghost", a directly serious satirical stab at both The Shadow and the 1960s Batman TV series.

Throw in Ellory Queen's one minute mysteries... And what survives of Nero Wolfe's contributions...

This isn't a genre I discuss without solid background.

Luerim

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Oh. Avatar. Gads. Really, does it really hurt hitting three more keys?

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He's just trying to threadjack. Don't let his low post count fool you, he's an expert in these matters.

Regarding the OP: Nicely done. Honestly I think you should turn this into a guide - all it needs is some more formatting (to guide the eye) and maybe some references to online fiction writing resources (of which there are many). If everyone followed your advice the quality improvement would be dramatic**.

** Edit: pun intended

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Actually, if you could point me towards the nature of those resources, I'd appreciate it, as I pulled 90% of what I wrote out of my posterior. I'm a B to A- writer, and I'm ok with that. I strive for constancy and volume over quality. I can point the onion analogy to the Vampire: The Masquerade Storyteller's handbook (circa 1995), and the rest was experience with writing. It's the sort of stuff I wish I had somebody telling me when I was first starting out on this path.

It's easy to tell a person how to use the MA system, a user manual if you will, but it's extremely difficult to explain how to write a story. In my experience with the latter, it's a matter of throwing things at the wall, and hoping something sticks.

It's similar to trying to explain how theoretical temporal physics works. You have to throw seven different sort of close approximations at the student and hope 2 or 3 stick to the wall. The discontinuity of the student vs. the wall is exactly the nature of the difficulty in describing theoretical physics to the lay person.

And I work in a little booth, hoping people don't blow themselves up pumping gas, and enjoying the fact I get to spend my free moments reading or writing. Not a dream job, but I'm content.

Luerim

Oh. Avatar. Gads. Really, does it really hurt hitting three more keys?

Yeah, the irony was my wife clicking the picture without having a clue about the "shoulder kitty" costume choice. She thought it was just adorably cute with the kitten on my shoulder. It was about a week after we got her. Her name is "Zala". And she's proven a hand full. That picture was taken about 16 months ago.

Yeah. It's not about me. It's about the Zala.

Luerim

What's an "ava"? Really. Never seen it before. I hate not knowing things. It's bugging me.

Luerim

After trying out some Missions in MA, I ran into a whole lot of ego-centric missions. "{My big bad-[censored] guy kicks [censored] all over Paragon City, Rawrz!}" Not a direct quote, but you get the idea. Quite simply, this isn't about YOU. It's about US. This is a community, and a community effort. As such, I put this together to help people who might never have really given much thought to this sort of thing, or haven't ever tried to develop a story beyond, "Dude, my dog, like, puked when he ate my Cheetos (TM). It was funny." I'm not going to get into how to use the MA editor, there's a lot of other people out there better than me at that mess (wonderfully elegant and dynamically useful mess). But telling stories... Sit right back, I've got a great bunch of suggestions (great referring, in colloquial southern, to a large number, not to quality). Keep in mind I'm seeding ideas, and this isn't a class on creative writing. But free's good, right?


I've seen some interesting takes on what to do with the Mission Editor, some really interesting stuff. A large number of people have interest in working in it, but don't quite know what to do with it. How do they create a story that is engaging, or even remotely interesting? Personally, I'm approaching this from a short story writer's perspective. While there's a lot of room for creativity, there's a lot of basic foundations and limitations in the Mission Architect system that are going to lead some of the best stories into a fairly basic formula. Hopefully, I'll manage to introduce some ideas that will enable people who want to write mission arcs to be able to produce things that won't fall apart before they're finished.

First of all, we have to understand that virtually the whole mission system revolves around the investigatory detective thriller plot.

1) Someone introduces a problem
2) The "detective" investigates that problem
3) Complications develop
4) Problem is a facade, or leads to other evidence that introduces new problem

Repeat this 5 times and you have a 5 mission story arc.

This has been described before as "peeling the onion". Each layer uncovers something more, until you get to the heart of the onion, and find the "Big Bad". It's a simple formula, but virtually every story arc mission already written into the game by the Devs follows this formula. We can argue particulars for days, but that's just people who want to argue. The Seer Marino arc, one of the best, in my opinion, in the game, definitely follows this pattern.

What made that arc good, though? I'd argue (rhetorically) it was the characters. They made you want to find out more about them because they were well described, in their own way. You got an idea of how they would respond to certain stimuli, and the climax was sort of based around that. You were wrong, of course, but even that was because the characters were fleshed out just enough that you didn't feel like you'd just gotten bamboozled.

What makes a good character, then? Even in a world of superpowers, as Stan Lee and Frank Miller realized ages ago, just because you can blow up the corner grocery mart, does not exclude wanting to get Sally Jenkins from homeroom to kiss you at the school dance. You're still human, with human emotions. Androids and Aliens are not exceptions to this observation. Since we don't have Androids or Aliens in our real life, you have to realize they're analogues for foreigners in new cultures and technological environments, or mirrors to show humanity's better or worse aspects. These are the sort of things English majors write papers on, so we'll give it a wide berth and move on to practical aspects of characterization.

First, Motivations. What motivates that villain or hero? Why are they breaking into the bank? Why are they rescuing that damsel in distress? Just being bad, or just because it's the right thing avoids a lot of potential. What if the reason the villain is breaking into the bank because he needs the money to create the next Discombobulator chip for his evil superweapon? Or the damsel being rescued by the hero is actually his ex-girlfriend? Right there you have the seeds of a second mission.

There are more motivations than can described in this missive. What really excites me are the hidden motives. Why is that villain creating that Discombobulator chip? Is it to take over the world, or is it revenge against the corporation that leaked toxic chemicals into the sewer where he worked, giving him radioactive powers, but making everyone he touches begin to die? Is the hero rescuing his ex-girlfriend because he still has feelings for her, or because she has knowledge of Crey's attempts to create a "Buy more NOW!" ray?

Both can exist in parallel, the obvious and the hidden. With well made characters, even simple sketching of ideas, they can suddenly leap out and start living. When they start living their own lives, overriding what you're trying to make them do, then you know you've got something.

With that out of the way, we get to plots. Non-experimental plots develop because people do stuff. I remember a story about an old guy catching a fish in the sea and talking about baseball that was stretched into a novel. It was written by a guy named Hemingway. We'll berth very, very wide around that story, because there's nothing in it that actually warrants it being more than a short story other than Hemingway's need to pay his bar tab. What it does speak to is that plots can be pretty pedestrian and still be considered good. It's all in the execution.

I'm going to keep it simple though. Remember the peeling onion. The MA system makes the most sense when used to reflect a detective story, with clues and developing plot threads, and unearthing new information leading to the heart or climax of your story.

We're lucky, our setting is fairly well defined, as a setting, but there's a lot of empty places to write our stories. It's a fanfic writer's wonderland. Additionally, since the Mission Architect is NOT CANON, being a Virtual Reality experience, you can break a few odd "rules". You're not allowed to go via the canon (or via the cannon) back in time beyond around 3721 BCE. Screw that. Have a Coralax vs. Snakes beat down in the "Old days", and you're caught in the middle. Just remember, you've got to connect it to /now/. Include characters, like in Planet of the Apes, where an ape scientist was led to try and understand the human, and became his friend, to connect your audience.

Additionally, with a well developed setting, you have a lot of baddies to use that have lots of motivations already described for you. Some of those holes I mentioned earlier include a lack of any sort of AV battle with King Midas, leader of the Goldbrickers. All it takes is some time with the main site, under the "Game Info>Know Your Adversary" section to unearth loads of little goodies. Even beyond that, look at permutations: What happens to the Outcasts after the arrest of Frostfire? What if "The Weaver" who controlled Arachnos before Lord Recluse came to power is not truly dead? The Mission Architect can let us explore these things, and we don't have to wait for someone else to do it for us.

I cannot urge you enough to strongly consider writing out some kind outline, no matter how rough it is, before you log in. Arguably, the rougher the better. That way, you won't have to rewrite a whole introduction just because your ideal situation doesn't work out. If you log in to see whether a vital aspect of an idea is even possible, that's encouraged, but remember: be flexible.

Luerim

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AHAHAHAAHAH

/recalls Zork I

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*Grunts* I remember playing Zork I on my uncle's TRS-80, when Zork was still being distributed by Personal Software. I was 6 or 7, so I never really got very far with it. It wasn't until my family got a TI99/4A a few years later (1983) that I got really into the adventure games.

Most of those were the Scott Adams series, which had a very different sort of charm than the Infocom games. By the time we were gaming heavily with the TI99/4A, it had been discontinued, which made finding a lot of games much more difficult.

When we finally got a PCjr (another computer that was discontinued shortly after we got it), the big game was the IBM port of Wizardry (the super-bishop ID 9 cheat code was disabled in the port, so it was like "hardcore" Wizardry). When I wasn't playing that, I was running through Witness and Zork on the TI99/4A. I still have fond memories of Suspended and all those little adorable little robots.

We eventually got a copy of the Infocom "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". That ate up lots of my time. The big problem I had though, was a turn based bug. If you didn't get everything done before turn 500 or 1000 or something like that, you couldn't get the door to Marvin's room to open. There were a lot of random elements to the game, so I never actually finished it until many years later (1992).

Closest I came to a multi-user mud before 1993 were turn based BBSes. One was a turn based PvP arena gladitorial set up. As I recall, you had to duke it out for two whole day's worth of turns to kill somebody at full strength, so adding in movement into their square, it would take 3 days to kill them. Of course, if they logged in after your turn, they could disengage and you'd have to chase them down. Didn't have anything like health potions, so lost HPs were lost. I remember reading on the message boards about one battle taking over a month because two people kept running around in circles. The sysop finally rebooted the game and declared a tie.

And people wonder I'm so darn patient when I'm playing MMOs...

The amazing irony of this conversation is that the subject line for me cuts off "titles" after the second "t", thereby creating a word that would be censored if it was in the body of the post.

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Heh.

Okay, I re-read it, and as someone who dabbles in modding for other games, pretty much everything here looks like good advice =)

#3 is something that I can relate to. Making something so wonderful and complicated, but then it doesn't work or it's too taxing for the existing system or it just can't be pulled off.. it's a real downer =(

Anyway, we'll see how it goes once we get I14 =)

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Thank you very much for this. What I'd like to see is a strong community based around what we know is going to be there, and what we've experienced previously, and is ready to respond in a positive and beneficial way to this game we love so much.

I posted with the intention of setting up a support base for what we're not going to be able to do. There's always limitations, the pushing back of this to I14 is reflective of how strong the community's response is towards removing as few creative barriers as possible. It was a huge, brilliant, realistic response to a valued desire. The go-backs involved in marketing alone was a big step, sucking a good chunk of money into marketing to redesign.

I think that with a forward thinking mentality, we can minimalize the shock that many might find at trying to produce a storyline that other people want to experience. What tools are available outside of any eventual mission building experience? What can the support of a whole group of people produce to help those at a loss for one (relatively) small issue of decision or factual deficiency?

I just want to see people ready for the impending storm of complaints, ones that aren't going to be smashed by trollers and snarky hitmen. It'll be a learning experience for all of us. I'm damn well looking forward to it, and we can make the final experience better by being better prepared for it.

What I would love more than anything else? Some of those "trainees" for the Cimerora arcs hinted at in recent interviews train us on what they didn't get first off. What areas got them stuck in doing what they did? The system's going to be the same, let us have the potential to hit the ground running on this and let us have the ability to do a lot of support work for the Devs, and the flexibility to respond quickly.

Please.



Luerim

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That's what happens when you type something out in Notepad with Word Wrap on, and then copy and paste it from there. Does strange things.

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I spent half an hour trying to dump all the line breaks. It finally looked fine in preview, and I pressed continue and SHAZAM! it was right back again. Thanks for the tip, I've already edited it.

Luerim

Preliminary I14 Guide to using the Mission Architect. This is intended to be a work in progress, but there are basic things that, given my experience with a lot non-MMO creatures of this nature lend themselves to basic concepts and plans.
I'm throwing this out there as a list of things that can be addressed in very basic concepts and allow discussion among us as to help out community.

Ok. I know it's going to be MONTHS before I14 goes live. However, there's some reasonable basics we can work on, and this guide is intended to address those.

First of all, DON'T PANIC!. When something goes wrong, (and there's not a single soul, anywhere, in anything similar to this that would discount this advice) don't freak out. Please. There're numorous areas something can go wrong. More than I can count, and at my age, I can count pretty high, which is a good thing as those candles are starting to tickle my smoke alarm.

The first area of concern, probably long before publishing anything, is going to be De-bugging. Most likely, at first blush, there's going to be a walk-through available, much like the current SG-base thing. That's a guess, but it's existing tech, and is probably based on what they used to create the games mishs in the first place.

The compiler, or let's call it the "School Marm" is going to have a run over of what you just turned in. How intelligent this School Marm is going to be is beyond the scope of this Preliminary examination. It's like having a hall monitor tell you that you have to have your biscuit buttered before you can tell the school bully to dye his hair. "School Marm"'s job is going to be to tell you cannot do something. ("You can't have more than 2 attached beacons on one Teleporter!!!") How insightful this information is going to be remains to be seen. Chances are, however, that you've screwed up something in a very normal and usual way that you just didn't catch.

In my experience 90% of bugs are typos. The rest are logical issues you didn't catch the first time around. It's ok. We're a vocal and generally supportive community. Some of us LIVE for bugs, and helping other people fix them. And not all of us are [censored] about it. (A separate forum community for mish builders would be SWEET!!!)

After de-bugging, is the problem of what can be done with the tech given us and what we want to do with it. The decision to break I13 into two issues is going to catch most people's complaints up to this point. The hints of progress in this regard moving forward should grant us some promise of interesting tools. In the meantime, however, we're going to have to get creative.

I've been a member of a lot of odd creative groups. I've seen some amazing work come from a simple suggestion, or basic idea, and seen it expand like a fractal screensaver into things of beauty. NEVER BE AFRAID TO POST ABOUT WHAT'S GOING WRONG. There might be a work around.

There's 3 ways around any roadblock on a "mish" creation.

1) IT'S A BUG! KILL IT! KILL IT!
It sucks. I won't deny you that. You simply cannot do what you want to do because it just doesn't mesh with something else. Here's where creativity comes in. You have to be willing to let go of what you wanted to do and let what you can manage within the confines of what's available. It's like a poor scultor who wanted to design the perfect athlete in motion. In marble. Marble has nasty faultlines. The cheaper the marble, the more faults. You have to work around those, or you end up with a mass of marble rubble. Several Rennasance sculture works were limited by these, and are considered even more remarkable BECAUSE of the limitations in the medium.

2) Ignore it or enhance it.
If it's not mish-breaking, you might even be able to get lucky and have it benefit the mish. Some weird stuff might actually benefit your situation, or lead you down a road you hadn't planned for. There's a phrase in screenplay writers' jargon (actually applies to a lot of other fictional writing as well) called "hang a lantern on it", if all else fails. You cannot for the life of you figure out how to get a particular AI to do something you've weighted all the variables for, and synched the powers just right, but he still won't build-up before he tries to assassin strike your PCs. What do you do? You "Hang a Lantern on it"!
NPC1: NPC2, NPC3 seems out of sorts. I think he's developing a concience or something. He won't give it his all!
NPC2: Pah. Honor. Wants a fair fight.

OR!!!

Insert a new mish into an arc, or new goal in a pre-existing mish designed to deal with this. Maybe, if it's a tech NPC, their build up is based on a particular radioactive element. You can have a mish, or goal, to wipe out the element. If it's a magical character, you can have there be a counter charm that the PCs must find.

3) Redesign the mission.
Yeah, this bites the big jalepenos. I hate this one the most. This is the one that's going to separate the Heroes from the sidekicks. I have never liked this, but it inevitably ends up happening. You've got to remake your masterpiece into something that fits the medium you're working in. You have to suck it up and bully through something you think is less than perfect. Make it a different mission. It hurts, but it's neccessary if you get to this point.

Small sidenote: There is no perfect. Really. It's an illusion. If everyone was perfect, we'd all be Pulitzer prize winners and PhDs. Even Isaac Asimov, a man who wrote over 100 books in his life time (a VERY conservative measure based on recycled material) admitted that not every word he wrote was golden. If this missive misses the mark, then obviously I'm not perfect either, and quite frankly, I like that idea.

I hope ends up helping people, even if it just ends up a basic assistance guide and idea foundation.

I'm generally crappy with guides, so we'll see where this goes in the long run.

Luerim

(*edited: Word wrap... Who would have thought....)

Of course, since there's no agency comparable to the SEC in Paragon or the Rogue Isles to minimize predatory trading practices, $inf farmers can, after a few days' worth of time investment, accumulate enough rare pieces of salvage and recipes to get a foot into the trading market.

Once that door is open to them, they can then begin to manipulate it at their whim. Praying on underpriced recipes and salvage and forcing a higher return for their investment by jacking the prices up. With a partner, or even an alt, possibly even double boxing it, they can then quickly trade the same item back and forth, quickly making the trade prices look legitemate.

I have read some work written by game theory experts regarding Silent Auctions and though all the literature I've seen appears to promote it for lots of different things interested in fairness, it's never, to my knowledge, been attempted on the scale that Cryptic has attempted. I think that in any large system involving money, corruption is bound to seep in, and I've definately seen signs of extensive oddities in the ebb and flow of the market. Also at issue is that in the academic studies of silent auctions that I've seen, the participants had no way of speaking with one another to achieve a mutually beneficial result.

I recognize this is essentially a rough blueprint for market manipulation, and cause to have this post censored, however I think it's an activity that needs to be monitored, and as it only takes a few minutes a day, the return for time invested could be phenominal.

After a complaint like this, I like to offer some constructive advice to solve the problems mentioned, and the easiest way is to change how prior transactions are listed. Showing the last 5 or 6 transactions is a poor market indicator. Something showing the average or mean, or both, over the last 30 days would be brilliant. Computers are glorified calculators, let them calculate.

In response to the "I will post" bit: My favorite things were the little quality of life stuff. The rail line added to Founder's Falls and the yellow and green lines being in both Skyway and Steel Canyon. The trainers (store) added to King's Row, and Castle's addition to Peregrine Island.
The rest I really couldn't care two beans about. It's like when I was still a smoker, and was in a car. I liked having the ashtray and the electric cigarette lighter and occasionally used it, but since I already had a lighter in my pocket, and an open window rarely saw reason to make use of either (except to snub out my butts in the ashtray; I hate littering).
I almost feel bad about relaying that, because I know you worked very, very hard on it, but I've never been that big on the economic stuff in games.

Luerim

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There's a secret 7th reason that I am not going to give you because of reason #7.

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Wouldn't have anything to do with that secret garden on the roof the employees seem to keep sneaking off to on breaks when they think nobody's watching, but would explain many, many, MANY things?

Or the ill-chosen Juice vending machine that somebody forgot to plug in until after everything inside fermented in really disturbing ways?

Or that loaf of pumpernikel the intern left on the table on Christmas vacation, and ended up in the cupboard, only to be found a couple of weeks ago, and assumed perfectly edible since it's surely only food coloring?

CuppaJo left her Coffee maker and special beans behind, and somebody forgot to clean it out first?

Luerim of the Lively Work History
"I've seen it all." --Me

Before I'd gone through the story arc that gave Hamidon's backstory, I had assumed from the screenshots that Hamidon was some sort of Elder God of School Cafeteria Jello. The Mitocondrias were some sort of floaty faux fruit chunks.
Even Cthulu cowers before the alien J'ello from the distant planet Kr'aft and their ambassador of doom Kros-bi.

My first (and so far only) 50th level character (Steel Snowflake) is an Ice/Storm.
I agree that what really makes this power combination shine is all the powers that work in synergy to take out the baddies.

One of my favorite tactics, on a high damage team, against a secluded spawn, is to drop the AoE immobalize and then freezing rain immediately after. Well slotted for res and def debuff, they usually don't last long, and suprisingly rarely get the "Why'd you cancel out the knockdown?" when the mobs drop faster than a mishandled bowling ball. If there's any still standing, after Freezing rain runs out, then I drop Iceslick, and it's rare anything lasts long enough for that to wear off too.

My style with Steel was also a bit close-in and physical, so I took Air Superiority and even dropped into the fighting pool for an attack and the damage resistance (Knives of Artemis) until I got the Ice Armor. One thing that I would do is have her run in and turn around so I was actually on the far edge of a group of mobs, looking back at the rest of the team. It gave me an angle where I could watch the rest of the fight and fill in where needed, or move my Steaming Mist buffs where needed. One PUG teammember once remarked that they'd never seen a controller move so much except when they were running away from something.

That's part of what I like about this set of powers, they're very flexible, and they definately reward tactical thinking. An additional benefit is that even as the lower level "filler" to round out an 8 person team, even if you can't hit the broad side of a purple minion, you can still contribute meaningfully to the team with buffs, debuffs, and decent heals.

Well, I've got a "Stupid Noob" story. Humbly enough, I'll even admit that the noob was... Me.

One of my first characters was a fire/fire blaster. I'd mostly soloed with him until he was 6th level and got rain of fire. Loved that power in solo play. As a soloer with only ranged attacks, it made sense to disperse the mobs. I'd target my feet with it, and pick off the mobs as they ran away.

I ended up in this pick up group about half-way through 6th level. I'd barely been on any teams with that character. We got a mish in an office building, somewhere in the Hollows, I think. I'd not seen a lot of tankers before this, since the I5 nerf was coming down the pipe soon, and if there were any tankers they were all busy getting PLed before it hit live.

On this team was tanker, though. We hit our first spawn. He runs in, and suddenly: He's surrounded! Those baddies are going to kill him! So what did I do? I dropped rain of fire at his feet. The mobs disperse all right. Then they regroup on me. I face planted real quick. And there was still debt at level 6 then. :P

I understood aggro, I just didn't understand that anybody would actually want to attract it.

[ QUOTE ]
"I9 brings with it a huge new gameplay system: Inventions. Players will be able to craft Enhancements and Costume pieces for their characters using recipes, and salvage that they find while adventuring."

He mentioned Enhancements and Costume pieces, which is all great. But I was kind of hoping to also craft my own temp powers. Like a pack of 6 Web Grenades, similar to the ones you could buy from Siren's Call. I dream of being able to consturct my own gadgets and equipment and have a utility belt of temp powers.

[/ QUOTE ]

From the first moment I heard of the Invention system, I've been wary. I've played on a lot of muds with "loot" creation or crafting or variations on the theme, and they tend to take years to get all the bugs and balance issues worked out. The lack of such a thing, a place where anybody could buy "enhancements" aka loot, with nothing more than a monetary expendature, was the single most appealing feature of CoH beyond the basic premise of the game.

I've heard a lot of "well the invention system is going to be different" but not a lot of solid information on how exactly it will be different. I'm not against a system that:

<ul type="square">[*]works[*]is enjoyable for anyone to at least dabble with[*]avoids any sort of camping for materials to produce specific items (*HATE* that aspect of MxO)[*]is balanced so that you don't need something to defeat even leveled mobs[*]will not start a retroactive redesign of a significant number of powers to force people to use this new system[/list]
Those are my only concerns, inter-related of course, but they are issues I've seen crop up else where and should be either addressed outright, or at least given serious consideration so that they do not cause extensive problems.

*Edit: As described above, being only with enhancements and costume pieces, is perfectly acceptable, but if they start throwing in invention oriented powers, the above list of concerns will definately apply.
Luerim

[ QUOTE ]
But then, everyone's welcome to call their walking, fighting collection of polygon bits whatever they want to call him or her

[/ QUOTE ]

I prefer "Debt-bait", myself.

Luerim

Well, back when I could be have been considered a newbie, I would have found the list very useful. Quite frankly, I think that's what the poster had in mind. These are very tactical, situational powers, by and large, that require a person to have at least a decent understanding of how powers inter-relate.

Particularly when in a team, a new player's not going to have that. There's a certain expectation, based on community norms, of what each AT is going to bring to your average PUG. If the player is griped out for using a power poorly, then that player's going to stop using that power, there-by creating a "useless power". Though more properly, it should be called an Unused Power.

Now, a lot of readers have already stopped and hit reply and are implying that, of course, they are never like that. They are always helpful and courteous and so forth.

Well, then, in these cases, I prescribe playing a melee fighter a team with a newbie gravity controller who just got Dimension Shift. Take two hours and reply the next morning.

Luerim