MrLiberty

WARE was the dream team, that is all.

Yes and no.

Yes because: I never really stopped subbing even if I wasn't playing the game more than 1 night a week.

It's that game I love to come back and play after spending a few weeks or a month in another game.

No : If there was no future development, even if it was just finishing out the incarnate slots and tossing out some new powers and costumes every so often that'd be enough to keep me happy.

The big "maybe" would come from how much of the community (and the friends I've made in game) return. Though I'm sure if there was some server consolidation it would be plenty to make the game seem busy enough for me.

Seeking counseling isn't hard. Schools, Churches, Community centers, etc all usually have someone on hand for that kind of thing. There is no need to directly seek psychiatric help.

The notion that you think there is something wrong with you that needs fixing and that you want to do it yourself points to a pretty normal adolescent behavior. In your free time you might want to look for some books (actual books, not online articles unless they are found on something like the American Psychological Association website) about the psychology of adolesecent behavior. If you can objectively look at what you wrote after reading some of those text you'll likely be able to see the patterns of what you posted mostly falling in line with normal adolescent behavior.

There is even a specific psychological phenomenon where adolescents have the perspective that their problems are truely unique to everyone elses and that others are incapable of understanding them because of said uniqueness. Sadly I've been out of school the better part of a decade so the term escapes me. No one of course wants to hear this (that its just a phase) so usually what happens is if the individual continues to have problems, they are counseled until they get beyond this point of mental development.

Not meant to be inflammatory, just the way it is.

So many favorite posts in this thread, so little room to quote them all.

I'd just like to give a shout out to Another Fan and Brilling for raising the bar when it comes to dedicating yourself to tearing down anyone and everyones thoughts, opinions and ideas while speaking from a position of apparent absolute certainty and correctness.

While I'd caution you that sometimes the speed in which your replies come and nature of the attacks (Arcanaville bought and paid for, for example) leave you open for a sort of tin foil hat counter argument, the sheer amount of time and posts you have invested is enough to wash over statements like that and keep the focus on telling everyone they are wrong.

I couldn't help myself. This was my favorite.

1. Looking back, considering everything, which was your favorite archetype in the game?

I'd have to say tanks even though I have a character of each AT that I enjoy.

2. In possible contrast, when it comes to your favorite character, what kind was it? List AT and the two main sets. Fire/SS for a mix of insane survivability and over the top damage. Elec/SS for being immortal with respectable damage. (Pve) for PvP I've always loved my Fire/Energy blaster even after i13.

3. What AT did you evolve to enjoy over the years that you disliked initially?[/B]
The AT I wanted to love since it first came out was the human form WS. I ran one to 50 when they still had the -res debuff in human form and got mezzed every step of the way. It wasn't until incarnates specifically clarion that I dusted it off and really enjoyed how it played.

As someone who has never sat down and watched an episode of 24 (not for any particular like or dislike of it) it amazes me how people could escape the better part of a decades worth of advertising across various media and still remain in the dark about its existence.

It'd sort of be like asking "What is this Star Wars people are going on about?" even if you've never sat down and watched it personally, between advertising, pop culture reference, and its saturation across various forms of media you have to at least grasp the concept of it.

Anyway : http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285331/

And people say you never learn anything reading forum posts. I can now add the word "fungible" to my vocabulary after looking up what it meant.

I don't play GW2 (as I have too many other current games atm) but anything they do *should* be much much better than CoH. Do we realize COH is almost 10 years old? For a time line perspective that is kind of like saying "Super Mario Brothers for the NES did world exploration much better than pong, which was released 10 years earlier."

The fact that a dated game with a dated engine (which was awesome) is being compared to newly released titles is pretty silly.

I'd be embarassed for posting pictures of a full 8 man team with a pain/therm (with incan) 3 doms and 2 blasters spiking what usually seems to be a solo blaster. It comes across as trying way too hard for zones

From City of Heroes, keep the costume creator or at least the spirit of it, speed of the game/characters, powerset models (i.e. allow people to play support via controllers, defenders, corruptors etc with different options outside of just "Heal some hit points"). Keep SG bases / personal space type locations. Keep a loot system that does not tie in to your appearance. Keep the large AOE cap's and ability to melt many minions, it makes gameplay very satisfying. Keep the general idea for tanks. High defense, High resists, high HP, self sustaining if built well and right. Not just a sack of HP for a healer to funnel heals into.

Keep 8 man teams for standard encounters, don't be afraid to make bigger spawns. Its more fun to tear through lots of enemies than to have everyone beating on a sack of HP.


Part of me would like to see it be a twitch based game in that you aren't standing still pressing 1 2 3 4 but are always on the move, chaining combo's and the like dodging big attacks. I like the idea of a base combat system being tied to the mouse with special abilities being bound to number keys.

The idea would be characters would havea combo system of 5 basic abilities that act as finishers. With left mouse (L) being your combo builder and right mouse (R) being a finisher.

So you'd have say L R being a quick blast then AoE fireball. L L R being blaze. Stopping and holding R would charge blazing bolt. The longer you hold it the more damage. L L L L R (which would be about the longest build up) Would end up being a high damage PbAoE. The goal being to have a good mix of AOE and ST finishers with the longer ones in the chain being more powerful.

An easy way to add depth to this system is as you level up, unlocking extra finishers at the end of the combo. For example L L L L R L once you rank this combo high enough would finish by casting rain of fire in addition.

Doing these basic combo's would fill up a gauge allowing you to do your big bang moves such as inferno which would be bound to say 1 / 2 / 3 / 4.
**(This idea is borrowed from another MMO's combat)

For leveling it'd be nice to start out with your basic combo abilities and build on them with special attacks, self buffs, etc as you level up. Special abilities can be tied to building a gauge up similar to domination or simply put on cool downs. As much as I like my 50 alts in CoH I'd love a reason to keep playing them once I hit level 50 progress wise. This can be accomplished by adding in an ability point system in addition to XP. Where you can rank things up as you go and continue to do so after you hit the level cap. You could add in power advantages (like champions has, that add little extra bits to powers) as well as the simple +rank giving it more damage, less end cost, etc etc. Basically in the end, between gear and AP you have a lean mean fighting machine, but a fresh level capped character is sort of like an SO'ed character.

I'm sure there is a lot more, but just the tip of the iceberg how *I'd* like my next super hero MMO to play.

It probably had very little to do with being offensive.

Game is rated T for Teen not M for Mature. So posting clearly mature pics on the board is probably the cause behind it.

Question for some folks since I haven't set up my CO forums account yet. Currently my Power armor character has Int/Con/Recovery as super stats but I'm finding knockback is really annoying and usually the reason for any death I take. I see strength has KB resists in it, how much of the stat would I need to stack to get reasonable resists to normal little attacks while still blocking the larger built up ones?

CO will be an all right (albeit inferior) replacement to CoH.

The powers aren't as flashy, the characters don't look as good, and the combat while better in some areas seems very dumbed down in others.


vs



vs


*Example* My power armor character at level 30 pretty much wins every standard encounter by pressing 3 once or twice. Thats it. It toggles on the mini gun which hits an arc for like 8 seconds which is enough to melt all minions and LT's. Bosses are usually few and far between.

It apparently has some sort of steep DR curve when it comes to making tanky characters. At the moment I have :

50% res all from my defensive slot
24% res all from defensive gear
10% from specilization that activates on ST crit (35% chance to crit)
10% from Phalanx defense advantage
6% res all Aura
6% res all from another crit proc

Flat +80 damage reduction on all attacks

A 31-40% dodge chance that will further reduce damage taken by 20% (+9% dodge when using energy builder)

A 10% chance to heal 20% of any damage taken

A 54% heal (2,258 HP out of 4,200 Max) that is up every 15 seconds

15% of my life returned for every enemy I defeat.

Some crazy absorb power that absorbs up to 1600 damage and refreshes 834 points every time you are attacked with a 15 seconds up / 50 seconds down cooldown. (Can still add 2 more ranks to this power at some point)

If that wasn't enough, I can switch to "Tank" role and gain 10% enhancment on existing damage res rates and 25% increased health.

While the standard 3 minions or 1 Lt 1 Minion are pretty much a snooze to get through (toggle on 3, wait, repeat) its surprisingly easy to get in over ones head in team ups. To the point where I'm holding down block an awful lot (270% extra resistance?)

I feel sorry for the people who go for glass cannons or support, or maybe I went overboard on mitigation. Who knows.

Addendum to Symptoms of online gaming addiction :

Often finding yourself on forum posts that make you feel bad for humanity in general while still making you laugh in that "embarassed for someone way" Also known as the Jerry Springer/Maury Povich that ain't my baby effect.

I definitely have it.

The first page gave me a chuckle, by page 4 I was in a youtube loop thanks to the songs posted.

I think you missed what I was saying for the most part. I was speaking of i13-present. There was a point where the devs felt PvP deserved attention and tried to incorporate it into the game moreso than it was. Hence arena bug fixes, damage normalization, PvP IO's, etc. With some things, they missed their mark (HD, TS, DR, etc). Not many will argue that. But when they didn't see a return for their time investment, it was pretty much echo'ed in the statement by Positron. The desire was there, but the manpower wasn't, especially not for the expected rewards from said investment of man power.

I don't think I'd go so far to say there was never a level playing field post i13 in the leagues. There were a few held on champion (5v5 and an 8v8) that didn't have "That team" involved. That team being the best of who were left from the old test teams. In those leagues you ended up with a lot more close matches and there was no one team that stood out above the rest (like you saw in a lot of the post i13 freedom leagues).

Broken means broke means unplayble. Broken is being unable to enter the zone or join arena matches.

Broken means there exists a power that is an I-Win button for one group or another.

Broken means only one powerset/combination is playable.

What you are refering to are bugs and power balance issues. By which standard would mean all MMO pvp is broken.

I like the idea of going leveless with a stipulation : Have it make sense that the hellions who gave me trouble at level 1 are also giving me trouble at level 50.

Its not all that tough and we even have an example of it in our current game, though it my be a little backwards. (CoT, backwards part ruin mages).

The level 1-20 (Yellow) hellions use guns, LT's and bosses use something like dragon's breath rounds/ flame throwers. Level 20-40(Orange) Hellions still use guns, but they are magically enchanted. +10 fire damage + 3 acc + 4 damage vs lawful good heroes. (Kidding). 40-50(Red) Hellions have bound demons to themselves or something and start breathing demonic flames, using pure fire attacks, etc etc.

For XP distribution I'd pitch/tie it in with the following idea.

You have two kinds of XP. Task/Event XP and Combat XP. The first one is how you level up and get new powers / stats (HP/ End/ ETC). You get this by completing missions, doing city events, progressing the story, finishing arcs, etc. This XP caps out at the level cap, after that point you can figure out something else for it to do.

Combat XP is what you get for actually fighting the bad guys, it is spent on rewards like Enhancment Slots, Power Ranks, Power perks, etc. (Examples of the last two, say Blaze Rank 10 does 300 damage, at rank 9 it does 310. For a perk, lets say it can proc "Melt armor" giving the target -7.5% res all. ) Combat XP would unlimited (without a cap), where if you play your character long enough, eventually you can unlock it all. You'd still only be able to 6 slot a power, but it gives you a reason to keep fighting rather than just rewards. The goal being, having it where by level 50 you have enough combat xp to create a well balanced hero.

Where Combat XP ties into the foes without level is pretty simple. Yellows grant 1 Xp, Oranges 3, Red 10. Groups of yellow hellions are less risk, therefore less reward. Scaling that with leveling up, you could create an XP curve that would leave you with a balanced hero come level 50. For example say, At level 1 your first enchancment slot costs 100 combat XP. By level 49, they are costing you 10,000. For level 50 + you can scale from there.

The end goal I'd have would be by level 50 you'd have the combat XP to create a hero similar to what you can right now. After level 50, the more you play the better you get. You could still have a stable of alts or you could choose to focus on a main or two. Or you could do some combination of both and end up with plenty to do.

*edit* Something would likely need to be added for support oriented characters, to smooth Combat XP for them.

Honestly, I've always been under the impression that arena PvP has been playable. Its different than it was, arguably less complex, but playable. (Alpha only / pre incarnate days).

Really it wasn't "Broken" per say, not perfect, but also not broken/unplayable.

That being said, I think they realized that the people who enjoyed PvP would be there in some form or another. Those that didn't usually were not avoiding PvP because the system was less than perfect. They were avoiding it because they weren't into PvP in the first place. CoH is a game that caters to letting players feel very powerful. PvP does pretty much the exact opposite.

There were of course some people in the middle, who stopped PvP'ing because they didn't like it but stuck with the game anyway. I imagine it was a pretty small % but they were still there.

Realistically, we see 10-30 people in freedom RV at any given time. For the past few leagues you see 50-100 people signing up usually. Last estimates for the game pop were between 60k and 100k subs. Even if you increase those numbers 5 times over, it still ends up being a pretty insignificant number to justify spending resources that were already spread thin.