Ninja_Squirrel

I've been slowly building up a stone tank. I'd probably build him up faster if a future of visual mediocrity and conformity weren't waiting for him.

The Devs hate game design. Castle is actually the office coffee boy.

This is what I get for not making C/C++ part of my balanced coding diet. Plenty of dev experience and none of it at all useful if I want to work on my favourite game.

[ QUOTE ]
This game gives some great opportunities to be original but...*snip*

[/ QUOTE ]

I disagree. I find that the pieces from the costume sets can be combined in several different ways. The only parts that do not seem to mix well across sets are the chest and legs - since it doesn't seem like there's very many sets which actually appear as the same colour, when the same colour is selected for both. Very often seems to be mismatched.

That being said, I think that you're right, some new relatively basic shapes and textures to work with would be great, especially for doing classic super hero designs.

My mantra for this evening: "Be extra virginal"

In my opinion, none of the reward systems in this game have ever been remotely fun, so you can't claim that something enjoyable has been lost by changing it.

Honestly, I don't understand how people can boot up a game and start worrying about efficiency and ROI. Maybe it's because I get bombarded with that all day at work, but I think you're all crazy for even mouthing the word "optimal".

My fun is optimal when I stop worrying about how I can purple out and focus on hanging guys off of lamp posts with knockback, or getting PUGs to roll over Invincible missions, or completing Sara Moore on Invincible, without an emp (7 horrible hours well-spent). In all the time since I started, in beta, no changes made to the game have ever really changed that.

All this bickering over rewards systems is just symptom that the game is not providing rewarding new experiences frequently enough. I hope the mission architect helps to alleviate this. Loot is a bonus, not the goal.

My wife and I play a duo, this is them.



Character Names: Angelo Palladini and Crey PCA 021


Angelo's Description and Concept:
Assault Rifle/Mental Manipulation Blaster

Angelo is a veteran of the Paragon Police Department organized crime unit. He spent over two decades under cover with The Family, using his considerable psychic prowess to avoid detection and learn valuable secrets. His background and relations within the organization made him the perfect choice for this job. Now that his cover has been blown, he's fighting crime in a much more direct way.

He has the introspective and thoughtful nature of a film noir detective, but with the directness you'd expect from a military officer. He's in his 50s but looks ten years older. His time living inside the crime syndicate has left him looking tired but determined. He thinks that heroes have it easy because their world is so black and white compared to what he's been through, and it's made him bitter. The innocence and earnest nature of his new sidekick often puts him off balance, cracking through his tough facade, which he tries his best to hide. When he saved her from Crey, he sustained massive injuries. His jaw and chest have been re-enforced to replace brokenbones and his entire right arm has been rebuilt.



Crey PCA 021 Description and Concept:
Forcefields/Energy Blast Defender

The Crey Personal Combat Assistant protoype 021 is a compact defense robot, part of a Crey programme to develop more cost efficient means of protecting its assets. During testing, this particular model displayed a lot of strange behaviour, often disobeying orders and refusing to engage in combat trials. The head researcher was order to dispose of it, but secretly kept it around as a pet project, nurturing the budding personality he saw there. Eventually the project was discovered by Crey management, who had the researcher killed. The robot's memory was wiped and it was marked for remote disposal.

Because she's a prototype, she should look somewhat unfinished. very shiny and clean otherwise, like any Crey technology. She still has the personality she developed before her memory was wiped, like a bubbly 12 year old with a protective streak and too much energy. Angelo calls her "kid". She looks up to him and always comes running if she's in trouble.



The Meeting Story:

Angelo found the Crey PCA 021 during an arms deal when he detected her faint consciousness inside of a container. In freeing her, he blew his cover and was attacked by Crey power suits, resulting in his extensive injuries and, later, reconstructive cybernetics. He only survived the incident because the little robot had become imprinted on sight and fought off the Crey agents until Longbow arrived.




http://i41.tinypic.com/2hqx8d1.jpg
http://i40.tinypic.com/2mn21oh.jpg
http://i43.tinypic.com/2mydukm.jpg
http://i44.tinypic.com/2iswe86.jpg
http://i41.tinypic.com/v5y9lw.jpg

Geldon: It seems to me that CoX has its greatest strength in player customization and ownership over content, and that the Mission Architect is intended to expand on that strength.

Think of it like stock options. Instead of turning employees into owners, the MA and other customization features turn players and subscribers into authors and creators. Big bonus to retention and level of engagement.

I think that it's a good step towards making CoX stand out from other MMOs with much larger teams behind them.

I really don't have much to say on the subject aside from the fact that as a group leader, I tend to pick Defenders over Controllers, and as a Defender I've never had a hard time finding a group, at level 31 now, and I have been sk'ed onto teams in the 40-50 range. Rads especially. The Controller version of Accelerate Metabolism is a bit of a joke compared to the Defender one.

Hmm, I like some of the direction this is going in, but I think it does hamper team unity in some cases. I've never been much of a fan of team separation, since I prefer to hunt reds and up with large teams rather than going after lesser villains in smaller groups. I just find it a lot more fun that way.

But, I recognize that splitting up is a very viable way to tackle some of those defeat X missions, and i think that there still needs to be room to do this. I also think that those who have mentioned shopping and levelling have a point. How likely is it that teams will allow people to go level as soon as they can now? The whole team will want to make the run at the same time to avoid XP loss. Same goes for shopping. I just see it causing friction when people are really set on levelling immediately because there's a power at their next level that they want ASAP.

Here are my suggestions:

1. Allow the team leader to exclude team members from XP calculations, setting them to "non-combatant" or something. The team member should obviously be informed in some easily noticeable way. To be clear on this before people point out exploits, I just mean in terms of dividing it up based on range. This should not work for characters who are outside acceptable level ranges.

2. Allow teams to split up in some officially recognized way. Maybe let the leader assign players to a secondary group, and then apply these rules to each group seperately as if they were still the same group. If the two groups end up fighting within range of each other, I suppose it would be good to apply the rule across the whole team in that situation.

This would allow teams to maintain the unity and not have to drop out of the team if they felt it was best to split up and complete a mission. This still doesn't allow people to get XP for battles they didn't fight in.

I agree with the people that have said the death timer needs to be extended. 1 minute is much shorter than I am usually dead in a large battle. you can be lying there for a few minutes easily if you're doing an 8 person door mission and something goes wrong. 5 minutes is not long enough to even put a dent in the debt of dying in the first place, so I think that would be an effective limit.

[ QUOTE ]
I see nothing wrong with Rad Blast and RAd Emmision END cost. It is comperable to all other sets, and identicle to their counterparts on others sets.

[/ QUOTE ]

Quick Summary: I don't think that the usage levels of Rad powers are equal to the usage levels of the equivalents in other Defender primary sets, and the bias is leading to higher overall end usage under field conditions.

*****

Hmm, interesting. Experience has suggested otherwise. Maybe the low end usage powers in Rad Primary are underused for some reason, leading to a tendancy towards using a lot of high end usage powers? Running Ennervating Field and Radiation Infection simoultaneously while attacking is pretty much standard fare for a Rad Primary, and that will kill your endurance in no time flat, in fact I can't even solo a blue con minion and a white con lieutenant (they were Tsoo, standard ninja type and an Ancestor Spirit) without running out of endurance half way through the fight, and taking more than a negligible amount of damage.

I'll keep playing Adam Smasher, and pay closer attention to how I stack up against other Defenders, it might be just perception, but the experience is pretty common from the people I've talked to.


Also, I don't think AM is better than Stamina. I'm trying to find the hard numbers to calculate, but the fact that, unenhanced, AM is only running about 22% of the time offsets its approximate 30-something percent advantage in terms of end regen. Better to have a less effective power that's always on than a slightly more effective power you barely get to use. I know the hard numbers are out there somewhere to do the calculations, I just can't seem to find them. I suppose that once you are using SOs, the higher base regen on AM would drive a sizable wedge between it and Stamina in terms of peak effectiveness, but the downtime is very unwelcome, I prefer my power to be consistent rather than spiking erratically.

Rather than keep pushing for AM to be completely reset, I'd like to urge you to please look carefully at end usage in the Rad set. The reason there is such a clamour about AM no longer being able to be made continuous by around level 20 (or at least to be usable in the majority of battles) is that Rad Primaries have chronic endurance problems, even with AM running constantly, I would have endurance problems, even with 4 level+3 generic end regen enhancements in Accelerate Metabolism, and DOs or SOs end reduction in my toggle powers.

Maybe the adjustment to AM was needed for group balance, but something is wrong with the Rad set, because it was very much dependant on AM's effect on the hero in order to function on an equal level to other Defenders. Now with AM not filling the role it did, Rads are not competitive.

I'm not going to make demands in terms of changing AM, as much as I'd like to. All I want is an explanation of why its recharge was increased so damn much, and what kind of testing was done in terms of the viability of Radiation after the change. I will bear the frustration and anger and try to group using Adam Smasher tonight, and see what I find.