NeverDark

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Containment provides a greater damage boost for Controllers than Fulcrum Shift is capable of doing - if you take away Fulcrum Shift from a Controller they can still easily exceed 4x the base damage of a power, but if you take Containment away it will never happen.

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Again, the only problem with Containment lies close to the damage cap. Doubling base damage isn't a problem; it's already possible through damage slotting. Doubling capped damage is definitely on shaky ground - and Kins can cap themselves (and all their teammates) with one power, made very, very easily perma.

I'm saying that it's the combination of the two that causes the problems. (And yes, I've seen Fulcrum Shift do similarly terrifying things on Defenders and Corruptors, too.)

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But hey, why pay attention to what the real issue is when we can gimp a popular powerset, right?

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Looking at Fulcrum Shift is hardly going gimp Kinetics. The set has plenty of other perfectly serviceable powers, or it wouldn't ever get to FS level. Siphon Power, Siphon Speed, Speed Boost, Transfusion, Increase Density... the set wouldn't suddenly collapse if FS got tapped.

And I'd like to see it tapped, not significantly nerfed. Its recharge is probably too low for its considerable effect, especially as the set already gives the user Siphon Speed. I'm pretty sure that Kinetics was never supposed to be able to cap a team's damage all the time.

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There sure are a lot of blind or stupid nerfherders on these forums...

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It's entirely possible to think a power is a little out of whack and not be a "nerfherder". In fact, it's extremely rare to actually be a nerfherder. It's an ugly, meaningless propaganda term that really needs to die.

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And really, Fulcrum Shift isn't overpowered nearly as much as Containment is; a Controller at the damage cap deals 4x base damage on the attack but is limited there, and a Controller with 100% damage slotting deals (with Containment) 4x the base damage of the attack, and can go higher.

[/ QUOTE ]

Couple of problems here:

1.) Damage enhancements count towards the damage cap. There's no point in slotting for damage if Fulcrum Shift is perma-capping you.

2.) Containment doesn't really become a huge problem until you get close to the damage cap. It flat-out doubles your end damage. If that damage is low, doubling it doesn't cause problems; if that damage is high, it's going to make it even higher.

3.) There's no way of changing its behavior at the damage cap without changing its behavior at base damage and vice versa. Containment isn't a damage buff; it literally counts as a second attack. It says, "Take whatever damage you do, modified by damage buffs and enemy resistances, and do it again." If you make it a straight damage buff, you run into problems with the damage cap (it becomes easier to cap yourself, but it does nothing afterwards). And you can't make it do different bonus damage depending on how close you are to the cap.

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That said, I could see it possibly being useful for AVs (depends on how badly they resist -DMG).

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To my knowledge, they don't.

Mine was a Dark Melee/Super Reflexes scrapper, a mix of presence and, well, superhuman reflexes. It worked beautifully.

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And where is fishing in all this?

I see trolling is rampant in the forums, but I want real fishing!

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We at NCsoft are sorry, but something has happened to our database and corrupted your account. In order to restore it to a previous state, we need your account name, password, and your NCsoft master account. This information will not be given to anyone and will only be used for our purposes.

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Crap I forgot about that animal-skeleton thing. No ghost dog for us, I guess.

[/ QUOTE ]Well, consider that in the Real World™, the Fir Bolg and the Tuatha de Danaan were just Irish people. (Normal humans.) Eochai (Eochaid mac Eric) was the human leader/king of the Fir Bolg. Just because the original myth has a dog doesn't mean that if added to the game it has to be in a canine form.

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....Yeah, it kinda does have to be a dog, or we lose the impact of the whole thing.

I am ok with turning normal humans into monsters for the sake of the game, but turning a monster/ghost into a person just doesn't cut it for me. Don't know why.

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Would a modification of War Wolves, sufficiently creeped-up (jet-black fur, possibly the red glowing eye aura) work?

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I did. Call it Tactical Training.

Or do you mean rename every power too?

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And make new animations. And cut out some of the powers, and add in new ones. It can't just be Shield Defense with Shield-less animations, as that isn't going to happen. When players clamored for Empathy villainside, they didn't just recolor Empathy. They reworked it, removing powers and creating new ones until they had Pain Domination.

If you want the way Shield Defense plays, you have to have the shield. You can ask for some of the things that add to the feel of the set (the team-oriented nature, maybe, or the combination of mitigative types), but you're not going to get the same set with a new name. It's never happened before, and it's such a waste of resources that it's not going to happen.

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We waited so long to get shields I guess we shouldn't be suprised someone would complain that they have to have a shield to use the set.

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Just wait, If/When we get Dual Pistols -blue side- someone will complain about that. Be it the attacks, animation, names..

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I want to shoot bullets out of both hands, but not have a stupid 'gun' there. Can't we have a Dual Pistol set without the pistols?

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That is exactly what we need.

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People, generally, only consider media biased when it contradicts or is at odds with their existing world view.

If you read that article and felt it was biased then it was not written for you.

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Err, bias isn't subjective. The article is clearly trying to paint the devs and their decision in a very negative light. Consider the comparisons, Myanmar and McCarthy. Note the lack of Posi's full quote:

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Only the worst of the worst, exploitive, powerlevelled characters will be removed from the game. We don’t take retroactive punishments lightly, but some offenses are so egregious that no one would question their intent and those ill-gotten gains should be dealt with.

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Note the not-even-trying-to-be-subtle suggestion that the playerbase should be quitting over this. And that's ignoring all the flat-out mistakes, such as the wrong title for Heimburg and the wrong label on the screenshot.

This is a biased article. That can't be argued. If it's an editorial, opinion piece, that's okay; those are expected to be biased. But it reads like it's supposed to be a typical informative article, and the bias kills it and does despicable things to its corpse.

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Give tanks a fury like inherent which increases Def or Res, not sure which would be better.

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As this new inherent would be subject to Diminishing Returns, it wouldn't be terribly useful.

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Give defenders something like defiance that but instead of increasing dmg increase rech with every attack,

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That's really dangerous ground to tread. As the Defender attacks, they build up recharge, allowing them to attack faster, which builds up recharge faster, and it feeds on itself to ridiculous levels. Or it would, but again, it'd be subject to Diminishing Returns.

I'm not against seeing some new Inherents for Defenders and Tankers (and not just for PvP), but I'm not sure that these would really be what they need.

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The "experience required" flag is put onto job postings to limit the number of applicants who flat out would not qualify. It is not, however, a "hard" requirement -- if someone is sufficiently gifted and does very well on the various tests/interviews they can still be hired. It's happened before, it will happen again....but it is rare.

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Need overseas applicants apply?

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As long as you're willing to move to Mountain View, I'm sure they'd have no problem with it.

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including one that has gotten a lot of hype lately

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Eh, CO has recieved about as much hype as CoX has, especially thanks to the Architect and now Going Rogue.

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and two others licensed by the two big comic book companies.

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Two others? DC and what else?

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1. Improve the game engine.

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It still surprises me how few people truly understand what the game engine is. It's not the graphical engine; that's a separate monster. The game engine is, in essence, the game. It's all of the combat calculations, all of the input handling, most of the output handling (the game engine tells the graphics engine what to draw)...

Asking for an update to the game engine is basically asking for a new game. It requires just about the same amount of work.

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2. Stances. It's also long overdue that not all heroes stand with chest puffed and fists on their belts. A simple collection of stance emotes (crouched, leaning, hunched, etc...) or something along these lines could go a long way in this direction with relatively minimal effort. You don't need to imitate any other game that's coming out, but you do need to somehow address that posture speaks as much about a character as costume, and that in a game with so many costume options, there are none for stance or posture (even if only while static).

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Err, so more emotes? Sure, I'm all for that.

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(b) Scabbards, holsters and quivers.

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Okay, but they won't interact with the weapons at all (you won't see your character drawing the weapon from the scabbard/holster/etc.).

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(b) Full shoulder and glove options for characters with sleveless jackets (an oversight, I suppose, but still shameful if this was just a miss in the attention-to-detail department ... if the garment has no sleeves, there will be no iterference with the full panoply of shoulder and glove graphics).

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So, more costume pieces. Again, always good.

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(d) Scour the forums and you will find many many more, some off the wall, but quite a few entirely reasonable and no longer justifiably put off by "well gosh that's a lotta programming hours and extra art assets." Again: 5 years ... it's time.

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High demand doesn't suddenly reduce art time or make the graphics engine limitations disappear. Sure, some of the suggested pieces would be really nice, but if they're unfeasible, they're not going to suddenly become feasible because we want them and the game's been out for a while.

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4. Voices. It's time to bring the game to life and add some auditory texture. An intro / outro vocalization, actual voiceover for certain contacts / vendors / trainers / missions / task or strikeforces, etc.

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Voices require voice actors, who tend to cost a good chunk (there's a good bit of dialogue even one contact would have to record) and can often be of dubious quality. Add to that other issues - when the contact talks, everyone in the area is going to hear him and be unable to shut him up. What if contact dialogue is rewritten later (suppose all the old contacts get revamped)?

It's all nice, yes, but what can't be done doesn't become possible just because there's competition now. And even then, that's not a reasonable argument, because there's always competition. New games come out every week, and new MMOs every month. Just because there's one coming in our loosely-defined genre doesn't suddenly mean we've got to remake the game.

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I can't imagine QA for a video game is much different than that. Yeah I love to program them, but I don't wanna watch em.

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Hehe, I've heard it's no picnic.

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Thanks for that, I'll have to look into it. Of course, I'm now in a position where an unpaid internship isn't feasible (already out in the workplace making money to pay the bills), so now I even have to be picky in that regard.

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Yeah, I hear that. You should be able to find something that'll pay at least enough to handle the bills, especially with the ECA's help. Most places should be pretty accommodating.

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I've also already placed one internship under my belt, but due to an NDA I signed (TV pilot) and the subsequent tanking of the project, I have nothing to show for 3 months of work. The studio doesn't even do CG work anymore :|

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Ooo, ouch. Can you at least get references from the studio? Even if they don't do the work anymore, there should be somebody who can vouch for your part in the project, even if it didn't go anywhere.

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Sadly, I've been looking to get into the CG Graphics field for some time (and have had my eye on CoX since getting out of college), and the "experience required to get experience" clause is quite a deterrent, much more so the "have 1-2 shipped titles." You just don't see "have talent in these areas and a hunger for learning" very often...

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That's where an internship comes in handy. There's a surprising number of development houses in odd places; I've got one in town that I didn't know about for years. If you're not sure where to go, check out the ECA. They've got a newsletter just about every day, and they usually post job openings (they haven't for the past week, but they've been covering conferences, so I don't expect that to last). They should be able to hook you up with a developer somewhere near you.

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Work on Mods to popular games in your free time. This isn't "real" game development experience, in that it isn't usually a paid position, but it can teach you a lot about the why's and wherefore's of game development. This is more true if you work as part of a team, rather than solo mods.

[/ QUOTE ]

I often hear of people trying to get started in amateur game design, and my suggestion to them is: RPG Maker. It's a fantastic tool for an intro to development, without requiring any real programming skill (although it does teach a lot of the logical fundamentals), and it really highlights what makes a game good. It's definitely no replacement for actual experience, but it's a great stepping stone.

But the most important thing is to just play games. Play a variety, and look at them critically. What makes good games good? What makes bad ones bad? Why did the designers make the decisions they did? Is there something that could have been done better and still achieve the same results? Reading a lot of reviews (good, published ones) can start you thinking along these lines.

*coughshamelesspodcastpluggoesherecough*

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All without enhancement. Add in the fact that you can enhance by nearly 100%

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Actually, by nearly 60%. Defense and Resistance are Schedule B, not A. It'd still be absolutely ridiculous, as it has better defense than SR and better resistance than Dark Armor, all for no endurance cost. Heal is on Schedule A, so the +HP would be massively overpowered.

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then soon after they applied the big nerf

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What big nerf? The change to the Architect to prevent ridiculous (as in, 1-50 in under 10 hours) powerleveling? That's the only thing I can think of, and it's not exactly surprising.

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Now no one plays regular mission anymore and TFs are none existance

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Err, wait. Something doesn't seem right here. The Architect was "nerfed", so now nobody does anything else? Besides, at any given time, on any given server, there is always a team doing "regular missions", whatever you define those to be.

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Plus when was the last time anyone has ever setup a good raid and or Eden trail mission

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What raids are there in the game? The Mothership? Hami? Both of those happen on a pretty regular basis on pretty much every server. I'd be willing to bet that Eden happens pretty often too, as it has a much lower entry bar (only 4 people and a lower level requirement).

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to many players go AFK during a mission making it nearly impossible to complete one

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Err, how is this any of NCsoft's fault? I'm pretty sure that they aren't going to players' houses and dragging them away from their keyboards. Add to that there's a "kick" button for anyone who's significantly impeding team progress and this falls squarely on the players.

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I am sorry to say to you NCsoft, but you suck at game support and development. I wish Crytpic would come back and make this game right again.

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Most of the staff that were part of Cryptic at the start stayed on, so there's no significant change beyond having a new name. None of the problems you have are ones that either company would be able to solve, anyway. All of your complaints seem to be that you can't find anyone running content you want to run; there are always teams available to do anything in the game, even if you have to start them yourself.

And why was this in S&I? There are neither suggestions or ideas in this post.

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On the other hand, try taking ALL the cliches here ... and making the world WORST arc possible. It could win you a great cult following -- kinda like that movie "Attack of the Killer Tomatos" or "Plan 9 from Outer Space."

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There's a trope for that too. And it is indeed awesome.

Errg. The thread title immediately sets off major warning bells. Starting with such an accusatory title is never a good idea.

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Returning player here, and having skipped 6 issues

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Welcome back!

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1. Hero side contact calling. Once you reach a contact for the first time, they give you their calling number. It's how it is villain side, and they should have the same thing hero side. It will be more appreciated hero side because of the size of the zones.

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Technically, it takes at least one mission villainside to get a contact's number. And newer contacts are following the same vein; apparently Montague Castanella and Penelope Yin have much better service plans than Colleen Nelson. It'd be nice to go back and tweak some of the old contacts, but it's far from necessary.

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2. Hero helicopter service. Trams are fine but sometimes who want to be able to cross between yellow and green tram lines without having to go all the way across Steel Canyon or Skyway. A helicopter service originating in Talos Island direct to Atlas Park and/or Galaxy would be pretty helpful.

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Err, I'm not sure what you're asking for here. Between the trams, Pocket D, the War Zone, and Ouroboros, it's trivially easy to skip across the city. And that's ignoring SG teleporters.

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3. Cross service TF instancing. I remember the developers talking about not having a number of servers per se, but one large environment. I don't expect that, but having the ability to search for players wanting to do a TF/SF from other servers and have them join you on an instance TF/SF doesn't seem impossible to implement. They'd have to come up with a way to deal with the same names, but that can be dealt with by appending a 1, etc. much like they do on Test Server.

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Pretty sure that's impossible. The different servers are literally different pieces of machinery. The only thing that's cross server, to my knowledge, is the market, which has its own server.

In order for someone on Justice to run a TF with someone on Protector, the TF would have to take place on its own server, which requires a server farm for every instance that would be run.

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4. Co-op Shadow Shard. They already have a cheesy reason to team up villains and heroes against the Rikti and against the Romans/Fifth Column. I think having co op in the Shard falls under the same "face the greater evil" justification.

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It's already been hinted at that the Shadow Shard story (or at least the Rularuu story) isn't finished, so it's entirely likely that something similar will be done. Until then, there's no point, as there's not enough to do in the Shard to justify it.

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5. Backbacks / jetpacks as costume pieces. I've already seen the crab backpacks so this is just a matter of getting them to look right. I think for a lot of natural / tech themed characters, these would add the final touch of why they happen to have a particular travel power.

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Hopefully, eventually the "Back Pieces" option will include something similar.

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* 30 minutes of flight
* 30 minutes of super jump

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With the temp powers from Mayhems/Safeguards, the purchasable packs from the NCsoft store, and the vendors in the high level zones, these aren't really necessary.

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* 5 uses of team recall

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That's extremely unlikely, considering that all version of team recall currently have an enormous recharge time.

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* 1 use of 30 seconds of invulnerability (think MoG + hero force of nature)

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There's no real mechanical way to do that outside of Phasing, which already exists. Anything other method is going to be incomplete. Soft capped Defense can be debuffed or worked around with to-hit buffs, and Resistance is going to be subject to AT modifiers.

Bleh, a lot of the critter difficulty/rank tweaks are really, really ugly. Some of them are really, really nice, but most of them seem to make things worse (I'd swear that whoever set up Mace thought that Clobber was still control similar to Cobra Strike and not the second strongest ST power in the set).

Here's to hoping I15 and its better power selection comes quickly.

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So..do we have a consolidated list yet? o.o If we do maybe they should post it in the help thread so people know what to use and not to use, I think that could save alot of trouble and anger from new ma arc makers...

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There should never be a consolidated list. Ever. No one should be telling people what they can or can't use in their arcs.

We can direct them away from cliches that will hinder their writing, but if they want to use them, more power to them. Maybe they'll pull it off and impress us all.

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Now, I originally thought that putting your own characters into a story was a decent idea until Venture came and told me otherwise.

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*twitch* *twitch twitch*

What's with the hero worship? Venture's got a decent grasp of proper writing structure, but he's nowhere near the leading authority. He's wrong about as often as he's right.

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It didn't matter how I used them, be it an origin story, a moment in the story where you bump into them and they help you, they are OOC put in as a helper against a tough enemy group or av, it's not appropriate.

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That is so untrue it's astounding. It passes the Incorrectness Event Horizon and warps its way back around to being right. And that crosses the line again back to being wrong.

It's only inappropriate if your characters are explicitly designed to be more important than the player character. If the player is tagging along for the ride while your character steals the spotlight, then, and only then, you're doing it wrong.

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It's called mary sue, and idiot ball, if I recall.

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*twitch*

Mary Sue
Throwing the Idiot Ball

They aren't directly related at all. The only way I can see them being correlated is if the writer creates a Mary Sue by throwing the player the Idiot Ball. That is, the writer shows that their character is awesome and smart by declaring the player to be an idiot.

Please. Please, please, please. Anyone who plans on writing a new arc. Read. Comprehend. If you've got questions, ask us ('us' being those of us on the forums who use these terms often). We want you to write a good arc. We're happy to help you in the pursuit of such.

And for the love of [insert deity here], stop worshiping Venture.

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A cliche's very existence in a work would not be something to knock points down for, I think.

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Cliches are bad. Tropes are neutral. As cliches are basically badly-done tropes, this isn't particularly profound. Using tropes is perfectly fine (and, truth be told, expected).

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In the MA there's nothing inherently wrong with using one of your premade characters. Just ask yourself these questions:

1) Is my character there to color the story, or is he there to kick [censored], impress the player and generally make the player a passive participant?

2) Is the story about the player and how they saved the day, or is it just dragging the player on rails through a story about my character?

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Those are the important points, and apply even if the character you use isn't one on your login screen. Mary Sues don't necessarily have to be author self-insertions (although they usually are).

If there is one, and only one, question that needs to be asked, it's this: Who is the most important character in this arc? If the answer isn't "the player", you've got a Mary Sue problem.

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More seriously, though, one of the things I might do if I were going to use my own hero as the contact is to have him be running missions parallel to your own, so that both of you are working towards the goal. Obviously, in such a setup, you can't have the contact hero be doing the glamor work while the player is doing the grunt work (unless, of course, that is the running joke of the arc, and the player knows it going in)


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I love when people do this. It's a way to keep the contact involved in the story without making them the focus of the story. One of the most frustrating parts of running the Phalanx TFs is that the Phalanx never seem to be involved in any way. They aren't doing any work to help out, all they're doing is standing around picking their noses. The TFs could be given by any of the other contacts and it would not change the story significantly at all.

I'd rather see the contact doing behind the scenes work (talking with the victims, working with the police, hiring the transportation, etc) than have them appear in the missions. There can be good reason for it (using them as an ally to help against a difficult foe, if it works in the story), but it usually ends up feeling forced and annoying and takes away from my place in the spotlight.

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Doing that would be difficult to code AND would make it so that if I get shot and slowed, you can avoid the slow by staying close to me.

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If the ability exists to weaken an enemy's slow powers, it'd use the same idea that Grant Cover does. We know it's possible to make a power that affects nearby allies but not the user. The only problem I can see is that currently there are no powers that weaken a target's ability to slow; all -Special powers right now (such as Benumb and Weaken) affect only hard controls, not -speed or -recharge, so I can't say that it's definitely possible to do so. It may be possible, and there are just no powers that do, but I can't say with any certainty.

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An easier solution would simply be to give it the "doesn't stack regardless of caster" flag that Vengance has, instead of the "doesn't stack from same caster" tag it currently uses.

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That would solve the problem of stacking slows if there are too many Marksmen (which I suppose is the issue in question in this thread). There's still the problem that they're dangerous at low levels (when players only have a handful of powers) in any number and an irritating joke at high levels in any number.

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Either make the sods dangerous, or lose the stupid slow.

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I'd agree with that. They're not like Sappers, where they're weak alone, but they set you up so the rest of the spawn wipes you out. They do next to no damage, even with the flame rounds, and the -recharge isn't a big enough penalty to make the rest of the spawn a challenge. Council as a whole aren't strong enough to capitalize on the stumbling block the way Malta are. Maybe if one of the other attacks did more damage, or added another debuff or mez, the Marksmen would be dangerous rather than merely annoying.