Olantern

Legend
  • Posts

    1114
  • Joined

  1. Could you get around the left/right hand problem by simply mirroring the image after you've done your demo tweaking? This would work with some outfits, but not with others.
  2. People will take anything as an excuse to call the game oppressive and immoral?
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Lothic View Post
    Hard to say if one of these things directly "borowed" from the other. CoH was live for 6 months (April 2004) before Sky Captain was released (Sept 2004). Seems more likely that both the game and the Sky Captain movie got the name from the Reagan movie and used it in different ways.
    Though I'm not certain about this, I believe that both CoH and the Reagan movie took the name from that of an actual street called "Kings Row," which was located near the original offices of Cryptic Studios. Then as in the time of the Reagan movie, Kings Row did not run through the finest neighborhood, so it became the name of a run-down part of Paragon City. I vaguely remember reading about Kings-Row-the-street in an old (I think) Jack Emmert post. That post contained no indication that anyone at Cryptic had heard of the Reagan movie.

    I'd always assumed that its appearance in Sky Captain was supposed to mean that the theatre shown there was showing the Reagan movie at the time. As a previous poster noted, the dates don't quite match up, but I assume it's there to show the "period." (Of course, the background artists of Sky Captain may well have had knowledge of CoH, too; who can say for sure?)
  4. I often feel like the OP, so he is definitely not alone.

    A few months ago, I believe we were at the most negativity I'd seen on the fora since the dark days of late i4/i5, when the Global Defense Cut, then ED, were hovering over us. For those who were not around then, imagine if every thread were like the story-criticism threads that exist now, only dealing with mechanics.

    As for why there's so much overblown and undeserved trashing of design decisions (like how things should be priced or what kinds of new features should be added) or dev competence (seen mainly in criticism of story, these days), I believe two causes exist.

    First, many players are both fairly intelligent and enjoy minute observation of things. Those are exactly the sorts of people who are most likely to notice flaws of any kind. More importantly for why it generates negativity, those are also the sorts of people who tend to believe they can do things better than anyone else. This tends to generate a lot of unduly negative opinions. It's difficult for someone who's more or less just as capable and intelligent as a dev (I'm thinking mainly of story stuff here) to accept that that developer might do things in a different, but just as legitimate, way. For smart people, objective observation easily gets confused with personal opinion. The fact that the Broadcast Yourself age has given geekdom a strong support structure, including easily-linked lists of everything imaginable, for any opinion anyone wants to render, doesn't help matters here. (Here, I'm thinking of the fact that many story arguments seem to boil down to "I saw this opinion on tvtropes, where anyone can read and adopt it, so why didn't those lazy devs?")

    This brings me to the second point. In the Broadcast Yourself age (note my choice of term here), it has somehow become accepted that everyone's opinion must not only be voiced, but voiced as loudly and stridently as possible. As you've seen in this thread alone, this is often justified by some variation on, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease," or, more precisely, "We only get what we want because we complained for it." (In my experience, neither is true, and a squeaky wheel often gets the entire cart junked rather than getting grease for itself, but that's another issue.) That both encourages people to be critical and gives them a sense of justification for doing so. As for why criticism tends to be so unduly hostile, I believe there's a deep-seated concern among some players that if they don't call decisions incompetent, claim they're being ignored, or blame everything on the Conspiracy of The Suits, that their opinions will be ignored. I think this operates at almost a subconscious level. The poster thinks, "I don't like [X feature], but if I only say 'I don't like it' in a beta thread, they'll just ignore me. I'd better post it everywhere I can and say '[X feature] is the worst thing ever.' Then the feedback will count for me." I also think that we habitues of this forum tend to labor under the delusion that its primary purpose is to give feedback for development and to influence the game's direction, while the OCR folks have been pretty clear over the years that it is meant more as a place for fans to recognize that there are other fans out there and to encourage each other in their fanishness.

    So, all in all, I guess I don't have any answers on how anyone should feel, but those are my theories on why the fora read the way they do. Thanks for reading, those who got this far.
  5. The Turrets are the most dangerous and least-recognized faction in the game. Their fearsome immobility makes the perfect cover for their attempt to seize power over all other factions, which will form the centerpiece of i52, "Bunkering Down." At last, my dream of that radio mission to "Defeat Bunker and his Turrets crew!" is one step closer to reality.

    ***

    It just occurred to me that turrets might be like Snipers, actually able to move if you stack enough immobilize protection on them. Has anyone tested this with a friendly turret, like those at the Vanguard bases?
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr_MechanoEU View Post
    Well can't sleep so might as well reply to this before heading off again.

    But I swear one of the veteran rewards, the 'signature chest logos' has the Hero Corps logo in it.

    I may be mistaken though.
    The signature chest logos include the Freedom Phalanx (not Freedom Corps/Longbow), the Vindicators, Vanguard, Arachnos, Cage Consortium, and the Circle of Thorns, but not Hero Corps.
  7. Suggestions and observations, in no particular order:

    1) You can't really separate the two Durays. The intended challenge is having to face them together. However, you can choose which to concentrate on. I strongly recommend defeating Primal Duray first. The air strikes will stop when you defeat him, and the battle with Praetorian Duray becomes pretty much a standard AV fight with a Sky Raider ambush partway through (which often gets lost and doesn't bother you). If you defeat Praetorian Duray first, he simply summons a clone of himself.

    2) Primal Duray does indeed teleport and otherwise hare around all over the place. (This is true even on teams that constantly taunt or immobilize him.) Fortunately, your entire team has ranged attacks, so you won't need to be running to keep up with him TOO much. I suspect that your recurring problem will be that his AV regeneration will keep the damage you do from sticking due to the time it takes to relocate and continue attacking him. You simply have to wear him down and keep your eyes open for him.

    3) To avoid air strikes, when you see the honking, flashing arrows on the ground near you, get out of the way. Essentially, they're a device to force characters to move around, much like the blue stuff in the Apex TF. (Unlike the blue stuff, an air strike will not almost always kill its target, though they do hit very hard.) My usual strategy for dealing with this and (2) combined is to blast Duray from the air and move after each shot. I also fight with my view zoomed out a long way, in order to spot him quickly when he teleports.

    4) Additional damage, such as pets, doesn't hurt. However, since you cannot command most pets to attack only Primal Duray, they are less useful in this fight than in most others in the game.

    Aside from those issues, it looks like you have a good team combination for a trio on this. Good luck!
  8. I am getting this issue as well. It appears when zoning, either between open world zones, zoning in and out of missions, occasionally upon loading up a new character into the game, and occasionally when going from the server select screen to the character list screen. Rather than a direct disconnect message, all but one time, my issue will manifest as the game hanging up at about 5% of the zone loaded (going by the zone loading bar, if that actually means anything). I then have to shut down the game from outside in order to get past the loading screen. The time I did not do this, after a very long wait (about 10 minutes) trying to enter a mission, I was kicked back to the open world zone with a mapserver disconnect message across the screen. Additionally, both nights I've experienced it, I've avoided the issue on the first character I've logged in and had it occur only on the second. Both times, I ultimately "fixed" the problem for the evening by logging off City of Heroes, then actually restarting the computer and logging back in. (The second night, I had to do this because one of the disconnects actually "took out" my machine's ability to recognize its internet connection.) Incidentally, even when I do that, the account is recognized as already logged in (though this might not happen if I waited long enough to autolog before trying again.)

    I'm running 32-bit Vista, an NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX, with Ambient Occlusion on, Bloom on (I believe), and Depth of Field on.
  9. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr_MechanoEU View Post
    Judging by the fact that both Glacia and Infernia are contacts 5 and 7 for the Who Will Die story arc I think we can safely guess who is going to replace Statesman. After all, which OTHER Super Strength/Invulnerability Incarnate is there.

    Though I'm hoping he claims back his sword he told a certain lady to 'hold onto' and thus becoming a Broadsword/Invunlerability Incarnate.
    If he returns, he'd darn well get his fantastic cape from the promotional art, the one that looks like it has a layer for each of the crosses on the flag, rather than the pre-printed one that looks like a silkscreened flag seen in the hero cape mission.

    Also, I thought he used Energy Melee when not wielding his sword, but I may be mistaken.
  10. Quote:
    Originally Posted by TroyHickman View Post
    Actually, Breakneck died because the Circle of Thorns are evil and powerful. If the Phalanx hadn't got involved, never existed, or instead decided that day to watch Jersey Shore, Cyrus Thompson would still be just as dead, along with probably most of the rest of the world (including the CoT; I don't know why they think a demon would want to keep around a bunch of goofs who look like ZZ Top in their nightshirts).
    Well, every girl's crazy 'bout a sharp-dressed mage.

    ***

    With regard to the thread in general, it's nice that someone likes Statesman, and I agree with many things SuperOz has stated (though not all of them). Unfortunately, I don't think a character like Statesman can maintain sympathy from players, or even writers, over the long term in the Broadcast Yourself age.

    The first problem arises from the attitudes of players and readers, the audience for Statesman. Statesman represents authority, and many players create characters who are outside of, or even hostile to, chains of authority, making them inherently unsympathetic to him. Most characters who are granted personalities by their players are to at least a slight degree player analogues. Those characters represent, on some level, their players' desires to be free of outwardly imposed dictates and instead pursue their own morality. Unfortunately, as the face of heroism, Statesman has come to represent those imposed moral dictates. Rather than embracing Statesman as a moral ally against "The System" of players' vicarious enemies (the corporate corruption of Crey, the militarism of Praetoria, the diabolism of the Banished Pantheon, etc.), they see him as another part of The System that their characters stand outside. (Interestingly, the Praetorian storyline could be seen as reworking the melodrama of CoH to focus on this tension rather than the good vs. evil one so many players seem to reject. It's for that reason that I can't understand why the players hate Praetoria so much, but that's a different thread.)

    Sometimes, this tension manifests as cynicism with regard to the internal story ("Statesman is more bad than a villain because he invades the sovereign Rogue Isles!"), and sometimes it manifests as cynicism with regard to the writing itself ("Statesman is a bad character because the devs are bad writers because they say he's the most powerful hero, and saying someone other than my character is most powerful is dumb!"). Much as I tend to criticize this kind of attitude, even I've used it with regard to Statesman in my CoH stories. It's just a natural impulse in contemporary folks. (For more on distrust of authority in fiction and ways in which in skews perceptions of characters, look around for internet reading group discussions of Paradise Lost. There was one called "The Constant Reader" some years back that had particularly interesting coverage of this point.)

    The second problem is similar but caused by Statesman's writers (and developers), not his audience. Players are not the only ones with issues about authority and proclaimed virtue. I'm convinced that some of the writers who've worked on Statesman have used him to work out their own issues with Superman-type characters, to the detriment of Statesman as a character of his own. Mark Waid, much as I like much of his work, seemed to me to be particularly guilty of this, and I see hints of it even in Robin Laws's Freedom Phalanx novel. In fact, the only writer I can think of offhand who didn't use Statesman this way at all is Troy Hickman. "Smoke and Mirrors" presents a Statesman who is sympathetic to the reader because he is, on some level, a writer analogue rather than something the writer is working against. Put much more simply, in that story, Statesman is a sympathetic viewpoint character. But few writers have used him that way, and players have dutifully adopted the more hostile portrayals used by the majority of writers.

    There's a third issue, too. City of Heroes is a game, and that medium shapes the structure of its fiction. Many, though certainly not all, players want to "win" that game. They want to overcome every challenge it places in their path, including the challenge of making a character (in the sense of a bundle of electronic data, not in the sense of a character in fiction) as powerful and kitted-out as possible. Though this shouldn't necessarily have any effect on characterization, I think there's some bleed-through between game design and in-game fiction. That is, players not only want to defeat all the enemies on the map; they want the player character who did so to be recognized for making that effort. That is, after a long mission arc, players want to read, "You succeeded, $name! You saved the world! You're the best!", not, "You cleared out the warehouse, and some other guy saved the world! He's the best! But thanks anyway."

    With that in mind, it's incredibly difficult to make a character like Statesman appealing. At the most basic level, his role is to be "the most powerful hero." Even though, like any good supporting character, he's far less important to the story than the protagonist (the player character), his power level causes a psychological disconnect for players. The player thinks, "I completed a Master of Lord Recluse Task Force on my fully-loaded Incarnate! My character can flatten anything in the game! So why am I still hearing about Statesman? My character's completed way more game tasks than him!" Essentially, the Achiever personality that lives inside all gamers, to one degree or another, is extending its goal from "I must beat everything and be the best!" to "My character must be acknowledged as the best!" As I implied, this attitude is inherent to the game world. No portrayal of Statesman, no matter how sympathetic or brilliant, can get around it.

    Finally, of course, there's the lingering hostility to Jack Emmert that taints Statesman-the-character, due to the (confusing!) practice of assigning real-world people the handles of in-game characters. It doesn't help that Emmert was not good at dealing with fans. Worse, he tended to be perceived as a dictatorial authority on abstractions ... just like Statesman-the-character, as discussed above.

    With all those things against him, it almost surprises me that Statesman has survived so long. And it's a testament to the strength of the heroic archetype that he still has fans. Personally, while I still have trouble understanding why the death would be announced in advance, I can't help agreeing with one of the posters above: for me, Statesman has always seemed like one weary immortal. It's nice to know he'll finally get some rest.
  11. I'd sooner think Wade's involvement means the Power of Statesman (or whatever it's called) will somehow be applied to free or empower Rularuu. That suggests "new Shadow Shard stuff" to me, not "new player incarnate jazz." We'll have to wait and see.
  12. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Golden Girl View Post
    One of the things I wondering about with the big hint from the Player SUmmit that Tyrant is going to be defeated permanently is how that might affect the Praetorian zones - like have they built in some larger scale phase tech that would change the zones to look like they'd been liberated from the loyalists dictatorship, or might they decide to go with the idea that the zones are "historical", so that they'd remain unchanged, as they'd be meant to represent Praetoria pre-war?
    For example, rather than Nova Praetoria being treated like Atlas Park as a contempory zone for all levels where the timeframe is up to date, they might decide that Nova Praetoria is "frozen" at the GR point of the storyline, where the war still hasn't started yet.
    Freezing the zones at the pre-war stoy point would be the easiest way to go, not only because it'd save having to alter the zones to reflect the fall of the dictatorship, but it'd also save them having to make new post-dictatorship content for the zones, whioch they'd have to make if they were going to change the look of the zones.
    I'd like to see Calvin Scott methodically shooting people for not waving enough protest signs while Tyrant's tower burns in the background (after all, this is how I picture Nova Praetoria around level of the PC timeline).
  13. I'm not sure why this was revealed early, even having read Zwillinger's explanations. With this forum, revealing something plot-related in advance doesn't build anticipation. It only gives people the chance to run things down even more than they otherwise would. (Note that this isn't as true of things like revealing new gameplay systems, just story issues.)

    In that vein, the OCR's should have told the dev team by now that the forums HATE anything even remotely resembling a plot twist, or even a plot development. After all, the motto of the fora is, "If it's on tvtropes.com, it's cliched and bad and a Suit ploy (unless one of a small number of writers used it; then it's Brilliant)." (Can you hear the sarcasm in my typing there?) Still, the vitriol being spewed against this arc in this thread disgusts me. If I were the development team, I would have long ago told the players to cram something in their whiny, pompous mouths, only I would've used much stronger wording. I can't fathom why the story team hasn't given up on people when 80% of the feedback they get is needlessly negative. (The other 20% is composed of the 10% that's needfully negative and the 10% that's positive.)
  14. I've found myself using Reactive far more often than the others because it fits more of my concepts than the rest. Now that there are more "and it does THIS kind of damage, too" options, I may start using some of them instead.
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Obscure Blade View Post
    Well, when my villainous Claws/Fire Brute infiltrated the Squad in the guise of Alistair McKnight, no one found it suspicious that he had a tail, ran about on all fours, and was on fire. I'd say that they aren't the most perceptive bunch.

    Or that they have some truly wild parties.
    Yet another reason why what I like to refer to as [Transform into Irishman, Possibly Drunken] is the most enjoyable power in the game.
  16. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Frost Warden View Post
    Maybe we should just call ourselves Universe-A, and them Universe-1?
    I dunno. That place kinda feels like a "B" to me, you know?
  17. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mr_Morbid View Post
    Another interesting thing is that the main setting for the game is called Primal Earth. I don't believe it's stated anywhere if our dimension really is significant enough to be called Primal or if it's just called that because of 'our' own hubris.
    I seem to recall a Praetorian mission where a contact explains why the Praetorians call it "Primal" Earth. It is because it's so savage and primitive from the Praetorian point of view. That is, it's "primal" not in the sense of "primary" but in the sense of Tennyson's "dragons of the prime," i.e., the savage dawn of time.

    But I'm not sure that I'm not imagining that Praetorian text blurb entirely.

    Further, none of that explains why Primal Earth calls itself that, though personally, I'd forgive any dimension that produced dimensional explorers for considering itself the "prime" one.
  18. When I read the thread title, I thought, "Didn't they just do that a few months ago? They're killing one again?"

    Then I read TrueGentleman's link and decided they probably will.

    Oh, well. At least that interesting white costume for Spider-Man came out of this (I liked it, though it doesn't really say "Spider-Man" to me; please don't kill me ...).
  19. 1) Citadel, because I like the personality I have imagined for him.

    2) Back Alley Brawler. This one's more complex. Unlike most players, I don't much care for the character. First, I contend, contrary to what my forumites claim, that he has no more (or less) personality than any other signature hero. The combination of aging, "I'm gettin' too old for this" senior crimefighter and infallible, Samuel-L.-Jackson-style street-level bad***ness that the forums attribute to him is primarily something created by the minds of forumites. Second, I just plain despise that kind of practical experience, has-seen-everything, never-makes-a-mistake, "hip" hero. Third, he has an ugly and jumbled costume design, particularly for a character players have annointed "the realistic, street-clothes hero." (I'm not sure that was the intention with him, but if it is, he deserves better and more interesting street clothes.)

    Fourth and most importantly, for better or worse, BAB is "the black superhero." If he's killed off, we'll get two types of feedback, both of which I find irritating and neither of which I consider fair. First, we'll get endless posts of tvtropes links about how "the black guy always dies first" and about how predictable the whole thing was. I despise this kind of jaded, adolescent fun-killing. Second, we'll get a more nuanced but equally unfair set of posts claiming that he was killed off because he was black and that by killing him, the devs are contributing to wicked cultural phenomena. We've already seen things along these lines; when an incredibly minor character was killed off in a recent story arc, we had posts flinging around tvtropes/internet-ism abbreviations for "they killed a female character," arguments that it was wrong to kill a female character, and arguments that by doing so, Paragon Studios was wicked and sexist. It'll only be worse if killing off a character whose death could be occasion for outrage is the capper of a months-long story.

    Fifth, maybe there's a writer on the dev staff who can make BAB more interesting than the character players have imagined him to be, and it'd be interesting to see what could be done with him. There are a lot of directions that character in particular could go, far more so than many of the signature characters, partly because he doesn't have a lot of in-game development.

    (As an aside, the forums' attitude toward even the best of the in-game writing has gotten so hostile lately that it'll be a firestorm of hatred around here regardless of who dies. Having it be BAB will only make it worse.)

    3) Sister Psyche, for similar reasons to BAB. She's the character I most despise, portrayed in every metagame depiction I've seen of her (comics, novel) as a tempermental, pompous, emotionally explosive jerk, yet we're still supposed to feel sympathetic to her for some reason. Still, for the same reasons that killing BAB would be troublesome, killing her would be problematic (though I don't think CoH would receive negative out-of-game-community press for killing her, as I think it might for killing BAB).

    All of that said, I'd say there's about a 90% chance that the character killed will be Citadel (since the devs don't seem to have any particular interest in him) or Back Alley Brawler (since he appears in the smallest amount of content of any of the Surviving Eight and because his trainer-zone has been removed.) Assuming it's one of those two, I'd give it about a 70% chance of BAB and a 30% chance of Citadel.
  20. This thread has confirmed my desire to write up my "if the forumites wrote the lore" thought experiment.

    Personally, I never found the fog in and of itself all that spooky. I will miss the ghosts.

    I don't think we've heard anything yet about changes to the backstory, involvement of the Furious Well, etc. But I will restate what I've argued elsewhere, that players are not entitled to a say in developing the writing, no matter how invested in the game they. That is the province of artists (developers, in this case). The reader/consumer's province is to accept or to reject the final product. If people are really as angered by the incarnate backstory as they claim to be, perhaps they should begin voting with their feet. (Full disclosure: I'm not particularly impressed with it, but I don't understand why it upsets people, even after umpteen thorough explanations.)
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    Illiterate? Write today for free help!

    Will the last person to leave please see that the perpetual light is extinguished?

    If you can't hear me, just raise your hand.

    (I have a book of these and can go on for hours ...)

    Also, thanks to Z. for recapping the "missing" panels.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by White Hot Flash View Post
    Not sure what you can base these comments on, considering that the majority of the new content that has been put into the game has not been Incarnate (Trials). Just because they've chosen to include content that differs from previous content doesn't mean there's a fundamental shift in what they want the game to do.

    You don't like massive teaming...fine. Try not to insert that bias in your analysis of the Devs' intentions.
    I base my theory that the new design philosophy of the game is "shiny stuff and one-off purchases to draw in new players; large-group raids to build and ensure customer loyalty" on several things:

    1) First, as you note, a variety of new content has been added recently, but the most notable parts have been at the introductory (new Atlas Park/Mercy Island) or even pre-introductory (new costumes and powersets) stages or as an entirely new endgame (all the Incarnate content). To me, that suggests two different target audiences.

    2) The only part of the game that requires a subscription is the endgame content. To me, that implies that to the developers, "long-term player commitment=hardcore player=primary interest is large endgame raids." Other new content is accessible piece-by-piece through the market, suggesting to me that the devs view it as "for casual players." (Here, "casual" means "likes the game but doesn't feel the need to play a monthly fee to play.") Basically, the switch from a pure subscription to a subscription/minitransaction model enabled the devs to craft sets of content for different segments of the player population.

    3) Other MMO's are characterized by "raiding guilds" and other highly-organized, player-created groups. It isn't hard for me to imagine marketing studies that have determined that such player-created communities make for stronger player commitment to a game in general. As a corollary, the devs are making a new effort to capture the achiever demographic and to build a similar raid community here in hero-land.

    4) The devs have stated on these fora a number of times that they want to make sure that they don't create disincentives for players to run trial Leagues.

    5) I've said this dozens of times before, yet it still doesn't register with forumites: The devs are game mechanics engineers in their professional identities and "gamers" in their hobby ones. They are not, for the most part, artists, roleplayers, writers, etc. For the most part, the story is there as window dressing for mechanics, not the other way around. This issue has always been present, but it has accelerated over the life of the game, particularly with the changeover from Jack Emmert as lead developer (he had a completely different set of hangups and problems) to the more powergaming, twitch-reflexes, button-mashing, raid-oriented Matt Miller as lead developer. This is a strong, strong impression that I get every time I see Matt Miller speak; if others don't see it, I'm not sure why not.

    I'm not sure how to make it any clearer. But the overwhelming impression I get from the redesign of the game over the past several issues is that someone in the development pipeline decided, "The only way to keep a subscriber base and thus keep the game community going is to create a community based on raiding guilds, like other MMO's." That doesn't meant that plenty of other kinds of content haven't been and won't be created. It just indicates to me that the developers believe that the only people who stay with an MMO for the long term are people interested in endgame raiding.

    I'm not even saying that endgame raiding is bad (though there are other kinds of content I vastly prefer, personally). I'm simply saying that (1) circumstances have convinced me that the devs believe it's the primary way to sustain a static player community (as opposed to the transient pay-per-content-item Premium players) and that (2) personally, I think that endgame raiding is only one way to build a long-term, static player segment.
  23. A very, very slow rate of progress compared with the i-trial "path." And LOTS of player complaints about how slow it is, far more than even that glacially slow rate of progress merits, along with the usual claims that the devs are stupid, the devs don't care about players, it's all the Ebil Marketing Soots fault, etc.

    I also expect it to look almost exactly like EvilGeko's "Incarnate Strikes" proposal from some months back. While I only sometimes agree with his opinions and almost never with his overall beliefs about design, he has a proven track record of being able to read the devs' minds as they design systems.

    ***

    Remember, the devs believe, rightly or wrongly (wrongly, in my opinion, but I'm not the one making the decisions) that large-group raids are the foundation of an enduring MMO community. They're afraid of doing anything that will decrease player interest in i-trials for that reason alone, quite aside from any concerns they have about exploitability, people getting bored with a solo system, etc.

    It's time to the players to accept that developer conceptions about what the players like/want/need have shifted, probably based on some study of MMO's with rather different dynamics than CoH has (or had, until recently).
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by UberGuy View Post
    I don't know what it is specifically, but something seems badly broken about the bug prioritization process. Someone who filters and prioritizes what bugs need to be fixed first is acting as a black hole in relation to what players think are important bugs. I know sometimes players are going to claim the dumbest things ever are world-ending bugs, but interface stuff on this scale seems like a really dumb thing for you guys to have to scramble to fix. I imagine someone was busting their hump yesterday trying to figure out if this could be fixed by this morning, and that totally could have been avoided if this had been prioritized as something the players would surely freak out about.
    I wonder if the increasing tendencies of the player base to overreact to and criticize absolutely every decision made in development and every feature and patch released has anything to do with this. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that player feedback of any kind is given absolutely no weight whatsoever because so much of it is so whiny, unreasonbably demanding, and negative. That is, when players point out something as a real problem, the devs ignore that feedback because everything else they do is greeted by players with the same amount of vitriol.

    I have no problem with players reporting major issues, but I (and, I suspect, the devs and community team) am annoyed by the refrain we've heard constantly from the players lately that "the devs are stupid" and "the devs don't care" and "it's all the ebil marketing soots fault lolz." The more you trash the development team and insult them, the less likely they are to value your opinion. Indeed, I suspect that player opinions are now considered the worthless griping of a group of tantrum-prone infants around Paragon Studios. No wonder design decisions aren't based on them.

    All of this just exacerbates the existing perceptual chasm between developers and consumers. (For instance, the team believes large-group raids are the foundation of a strong, committed player community, while players seem to focus on other kinds of community-building, such as global chat channels. Similarly, story-focused players are looking for a postmodernist, manga-like story, as well as having an idiosyncratic checklist of pet peeves, while the story team is more interested in telling a political morality tale. These are just examples.) Unlike many players, I recognize that I am not the one creating the game, so I expect to be subjected to the creator's own fixations, interests, and priorities. However, I think it would go a fair ways toward placating the increasingly angry player base if they were told in no uncertain terms that players do not take part in development or set priorities. Mechanisms like betas are designed for mechanical stress testing, not so players can have input on the game's published form. This is a fundamental truth that very, very few people seem to grasp.
  25. Olantern

    WIR? (Spoilers)

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Steelclaw View Post
    The problem I have with tropes in general is if you see it happen more than twice... or even more than once... the concept of a trope means you have the right to instantly scream "Hey! It's no longer original so it must be a gimmick!"

    The danger of such thinking is that it robs you of the drama of the writing because it turns every thing into a parody or cliche.

    Here's the truth about our world: Everything has been done.

    There you go... writing today in a nutshell. No matter how original you think your idea is... no matter how artfully you contrive it... it's been done by someone at some other time. You don't have to be Professor Chaos watching Simpsons reruns to understand that.

    Here's another way of looking at it... 50% of the population (roughly) is female... don't you think that's a helluva lot of refrigerators?
    Excellent observation. Since it came from someone players respect (respect for his craziness, sure, but it's respect, dangit), maybe someone will finally listen.

    I will echo this statement by repeating something I've stated elsewhere: tvtropes may be fun to read, but if one of your rules of fiction is "it can't appear there," then you're going to be constantly disappointed, and your standards are, dare I say, out of whack.