Necrotron

Probably at 11am, when it actually proper starts.

Now we're getting zombies. And probable GM attacks.

WAIT THAT'S &^%$@#£ LORD RECLUSE!

It hit an hour early. They didn't mean 11am BST, they meant 11am GMT. We have a Kronos titan and two winter lords in atlas right now.

Yes, really. Just existing stuff.


EDIT: A disturbing number of people don't know about this event. Even more just want to farm on the Architect after seeing it. I don't know what's more soul destroying, the event itself or the players...

Well, I suppose this makes sense. 5th anniversary, 5th column, just like they said. If this is an update that launches within a week of today, within a week of the anniversary, I'll be happy.

What, no beta? It's two task forces, new costumes, and tools that the MA will only be better for, small bugs be damned. That isn't a lot to test.

Um.

You can't expect us to believe this is all you've been working on, guys.

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I may well be in the minority for saying that I have relished every moment of the MA and designing missions. Other games can whistle for subscriptions as far as I'm concerned.

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^ This. I shall gift you with several internets.

As for I15, more graphical swishery is almost inevitable in my book.

If I15 is a re-vamp, which I'm convinced of, they'll go through all city zone instances.

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Imagine the recursion you could get if the new buildings were all present and functional on the various city-maps.

Start a Mayhem in Atlas, enter the MA building there, select a mission set in the Kings map, enter the MA there, select a....

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Hmmmmmm. That's an Xzibit joke.

Yo dawg, I heard you like architect, so we put an architect in your architect, so you can play while you play!

A thread? For... me? o_o You shouldn't have. :3

CoH players on Steam? Hot dang, sign me up. Whenever I find time to game, TF2 is up there with CoH. It's all about the teamwork.

Speaking of special offers, the Orange Box is going for 66% right now. Figures. I just bought it for my friends' birthday.

One last note. Is this going to quieten the CoH doomsayers? People who say the game will run out of players and shut down? 'Cause as player spikes go, this is gonna be big.
First person who says DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM to me gets a thwack to the back of the head.


EDIT: Weird, it still thinks it's my birthday.

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So, possibly a stupid question, but I'm presuming you still require an NCSoft master account and get provided activation keys from Steam that you apply to said account.

Basically what I'm getting at is that buying the Architect Edition is better value for money (1 month play plus booster pack of choice) than buying the booster pack standalone, but as NCSoft have so far not offered the Architect Edition as a digital edition on the EU NCSoft store Steam appears to be the only game in town for this route at the moment.

Can anybody confirm that purchasing through Steam would behave as expected (ie much like purchasing from the NCSoft store as far as being provided valid keys to upgrade your CoX account with)?

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It's my understanding that you can buy the game via Steam, and use the key you get in the regular NCSoft site to upgrade your existing account. A redname US side posted instructions on how to do just that.

I just don't know if the Steam version available to UK players is the EU edition.

Pretty swish birthday present.

This is the first time in my memory that they've announced Positron's address in advance. Announcing an announcement, as it were. Either it's something really hueg, or Paragon Studios have become a team of suits. There isn't a middleground here.

Steam is absolutely great. I can install it and download all of my Half-Lifes, Team Fortress 2, all the iD games, pretty much every game I play APART from CoH, without any hassle. Everything will be installed, verified, defragmented, and updated without any intervention from me. It's absolutely brilliant. With boxed games, if I lose the key, or if a CD gets damaged (very possible on multi-disk games like KotOR), I have to pirate it if I want to play the game I paid for. With Steam, I can download it an infinite number of times on as many computers I want. If I want to put my games on a CD or DVD, I can do that, using the built-in backup tool. As for manuals, they become useless whenever the first large patch, content update, or expansion gets released. This is especially true for Valve's own games, and for City of Heroes itself.

As for the digital distribution sales model, it does yield much higher revenue for Valve than selling their games through regular channels. Bandwidth costs money, but this is irrelevant next to how much game developers are nickel-and-dimed by the bricks and mortar sales channel.

First, the developer makes their gold version of the game. Then they have to sell it to a publisher who will be willing to manufacture and advertise it. This publisher will take the lion's share of the money. They will then sell boxed copies of the game to the actual stores where you buy them from, and THEY will take their cut. At the end of the day, a developer will be lucky to see £5 of the £35 that you paid in.

Then we go to digital distribution, the biggest one-finger salute to publishers and retail stores in the history of the games industry. You pay the developer directly, and they pay for the bandwidth. £20 for several gigabytes worth of data, to the developers, is printing money. And without The Suits meddling in the game to make it more saleable, developers can make whatever they want, without any deadlines but their own.


Now. What will Steam mean for us existing CoH players? Not a whole lot. Steam is great, I already have it running in the background all the time, but it's still running the regular updater and whatnot that we already use. It will give NC a sales peak and mean more players on our servers, but that's about it. I'm all for any change that means a bigger playerbase.

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Heheh, no problem Zortel.

... and re: undercutting their own plaync store - absolutely no idea, unless they have yet to update the site.

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Who knows what NC do with pricing these days? They have different editions, timecards, boxes, and whatnot coming outta every orifice.

You've been playing for 3 years without a break? No wonder you feel jaded. Too much of a good thing will feel stale quickly.

I actually took a month break before the I14 launch, and now I'm rediscovering everything awesome. Rediscovering how to play my stalker, how beefy my scrapper is, how awesome Crab Spiders are, and how exhilarating warshades can be. And at the same time, I'm discovering some seriously well written arcs on the Architect.

Most of them are garbage, but if this feature - which has taken so long and caused so much pain to implement - grants us even one awesome arc, it will have been worth it.

Plus, I have a small insight into the world of games design, and I'm positive that the next issue is something these guys have been brewing for a very long time.

I'm confident enough in my second arc to finally submit it for a review.

#85541, The Hand of Cobalt. A scientist needs help with a simple problem. But a clandestine organisation is pulling the strings... (Two Elite Bosses in separate missions, and a fleshed out custom group. Comments and feedback are demanded!)

I think this arc is much more polished and engaging than the first, due to being much newer, made with the experience I got making the Butcher's Telemetry. But that might just be me saying "Oooh, new, shiny!", so you never know.

This arc isn't designed to be frustratingly hard. I tried to make it only slightly more difficult than a canon arc. You may find some Bosses frustrating, but after encountering a Master Illusionist while doing some canon arcs, I realised that nothing of mine was really bad. Every boss in the story has their flaws.

It's also a much brighter arc than my first. It isn't particularly lovey-dovey, but the ending is more satisfying.

If a Boss or Elite Boss gives you too much stick, throw us a comment. I'll fix it.

Shields are awesome for riot police. In fact, I'm going to make a riot cop right now, just for the hell of it.

Whelp. I'll put my neck out there on the chopping block. Here's my arc to go to the back of the pile.

Arc #2022, The Butcher's Telemetry. This is a holographic log containing some of my darker memories, displayed here for posterity. (A fairly challenging arc, with a very hard final mission. Is under constant improvement. Comments and suggestions welcome!)

The arc is designed to be hard. I see far too many high-level teams in CoH simply flatten all opposition without a challenge. It's got to the point where battles aren't battles anymore, but races to see who can kill the enemy first. I have tried to fill that niche, provide a challenge that will wake people out of their farming-induced stupors. And no, I'm not just talking about farmers being challenged, as a team of top-tier players who care about the plot and characters can defeat anything the game throws at them without contest.

However. What I haven't tried to do is make an arc that isn't fair. No Archvillains with /regen, no massed Psionic damage, no masses of unmezzable enemies. I want to encourage tactics; take this guy out first, make sure these guys don't swarm you, play it cautiously, and you'll come through.

So if you tell me the arc is hard, good. That's what I wanted. If you tell me it's hair-tearingly frustrating, I have failed, and it's back to the drawing board.

Magic Bolero? On MY Crab Spider?

It's more likely than you think.

Well, servers are up.

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That said I do agree that it would help the games survivability considerably if they upgrade the graphics somehow. I have seen nothing to indicate that this is not in their plans already.

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It wasn't so long ago that it was confirmed the Paragon team are looking at possible graphical improvements.

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So yes personally i would love to see the graphics ramped up but i have a relatively good PC what about those that don't have good PC is the possibility of getting a more subscribers worth the risk of loosing loyal current subscribers?

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You have nothing to fear. You can run CoH in a state very close to pre Issue 6 graphics. You can even lower the settings beyond that. It would be wasteful to discard these lower settings.

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PS: The Champions graphics are not so much better then what CoH allready has, they use the same engine for [censored] sake, an engine originaly created back in 2000.

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I don't think the problem with CoH graphics is the engine as much as it's a lot of rather dull and same-y graphics that needs to be reworked.

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Correct. The engine (of which I have many bugbears) is not the only problem. Art also plays its part. You can expect much improved art to take advantage of whatever new swisheries that any graphical beefing-up provides.

As an example, compare the graphics of your average Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 game to that of Metroid Prime 3 on the diddy Wii. Look for full EDTV screenshots. While the beefier console will give you brown-looking areas where everything looks laminated, Metroid Prime 3 looks frankly stunning. And it's running on much weaker hardware at a lower resolution.

With Jay even remotely connected to the art department (I don't know by how much ) you can rest assured that new assets will look Awesome.

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That said I do agree that it would help the games survivability considerably if they upgrade the graphics somehow. I have seen nothing to indicate that this is not in their plans already.

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It wasn't so long ago that it was confirmed the Paragon team are looking at possible graphical improvements.

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I like this little snippet/tease/wink wink, nudge nudge/hint.

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I've heard so many of them over the years I've learnt to filter them out as irrelevant to what may or may not actually happen in the game.

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It was a hint dropped by GhostRaptor on the subject of CoH's future. Seems reliable to me.

Furthering that, a beef-up on the eye candy may be one reason we haven't had much in the way of new art / content.

I'll tell you one thing. The awesome bug allowing capes with the Bolero has been partially fixed. I can't enter the game, but I can create a character and get to the editor. It doesn't let me load up a costume that uses the fringe.

Maddeningly I can still put a cape on it. It seems the high collar capes (basic, arcane, occult) and the Valkyrie cape can still be used with a Bolero. But this doesn't make any sense, because those capes clip horridly with the Bolero. Only the fringe and scarf capes looked right!

Just goes to show what happens when you don't put your patches on the test server.

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All I know is that I15 is going to be a make or break issue for me. If it doesn't come through with lots of additional content AND modernizing the game to compete with CO & DCUO, then I think I'll be calling it a day, at least for a while.

I'm not really playing at the moment, I'm barely even logging in and my posting in the forums has reduced a LOT in recent weeks. Effectively I'm taking a break as I'm just burned out on CoH and am waiting to see what NC come up with for the 5th anniversary event (if anything) and I15.

If they don't come through, then there's nothing to stay for, really.

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Da, I agree. ONE of these issues is going to be absolutely hueg.

Not only has new story been thin on the ground, new art assets just haven't been seen. The last chunk of new art we had was with Issue 12, with the Midnighter Club, Cimerora, Centurions, a new kind of cave map tileset, two very large outdoor areas, and a small outdoor area. That sounds like a lot but it's about average for a new issue, nothing special. The Freem Fifteen could have made it by themselves.

But I13 and I14 have had absolutely no new art. Oh sure, day job outfits and the Architect building, but that's slim pickings. That's a small amount of art launched over a whole year.

Content in general has been quite slim since I10. I12 did have some impressive new zones, and I11 has some beefy Task Forces, but nothing on the scale of previous issues.

I remember listing all this off in a much more well-reasoned post a while ago. I'm sticking by my guns. They have something incredible cooking. You don't triple the size of your team with talented people only to reduce the amount of stuff you put out.

As for my CoH playing habits, I purposefully took a break from CoH when I13 launched. I knew that I wanted I14 badly, so I prevented myself from getting to that burnt-out stage. Now all my toons feel fresh again, especially when playing the rare gems on the Architect.

I just had a brilliant idea. This may have been suggested before but it's stupendous.

Rather than just showing a rating out of 5, show how many people rated things 5 star, how many 4 star, etc. Like Newegg.

Then we can judge for ourselves if it's a Marmite arc.

Controversial? Whenever I do use the search, I look for 4 star arcs. Which is a pity as there are a lot of awesome arcs with 5 stars.

Paragon Studios will be datamining all of this, finding out how many 5 star arcs are farming missions and how many 3/4 star arcs are well-written stories. They hold all the cards, and they'll fix it. For now I'm quite happy to use community-managed recommendations through global channels.

Again, they need to Web 2.0 this up the backside. I'll say my three words again: Comments, related, and tags. On Amazon, I can browse through reviews, find out why someone gave it 5 stars. I will be shown items that other buyers liked. The search isn't limited to just the description and title, it works on metadata.

While I don't like the term Web 2.0 as a general rule, feeling it's a bit of pointless jargon, the ideas and concepts grouped under that umbrella are not only perfectly suited for the Architect, they're desperately needed.

As is, I don't use the search function. I talk on the Mission Architect global channel to find arcs that are worthwhile. As PRAF put it, this disadvantages a huge section of the playerbase, but it's the only way I have found to filter out the garbage.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Paragon Studios will rectify the search side of the Architect. They were simply more concerned with the messy area of getting the darn thing to work.

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The costume parts look really good. Considering how long and how often people have suggested costume change emotes, though, I'm a little annoyed that they couldn't put a couple into the game proper before starting to sell them in the booster packs.

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It's all about the money, to tell you the truth, I'm suprised that NC haven't pulled the plug on CoX for not making enough. They've already killed two of the other games I used to play.

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Are you mad? NC make money on City of Heroes hand over fist. The servers are quite literally bursting at the seams, they've been running at Double XP capacity ever since I14 went live. When the magic booster came out people fought to buy it as fast as they could, bringing the poor PlayNC store to a halt. They literally clambered over one another to give NC their money.

This kind of high sustained population is well above what's normally seen on an issue launch. A whole bunch of people are resubbing with the architect as the main hook. While this isn't quite scientific, I'm sure we all have numerous friends who once played CoH, who are now playing again. Then you have the vigorous advertising push, the Mac Edition, the Architect box in stores, all adding towards a significant retail presence. Players, old and new, are swarming the game.

I usually try to be a bit more restrained with my opinions, but honestly, CoH's future has never been more secure.