RuthlessSamael

My main is Mu.

Your first lines are good examples of things which will make me roll my eyes, close the window, and not want to read about the rest of the character. And forget about them ten seconds later.

This attitude that sex crimes are the be-all end-all of horrific villainy has always irked me. Look, they're terrible things and all, but they're far from matchless in the psychological damage they do to people. Any kind of slavery or longterm imprisonment is actually going to have similarly debilitating effects on the human psyche unless effort is made to mitigate them. And none of them carry the irreversible totality of murder, which is something which happens pretty often in-game.

There is actually some content in this game that makes me freak from trauma to the point where I'm deeply uncomfortable playing it. I can make myself do it, but I will spend the next several hours in a state of semi-panicky heightened awareness. This content has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and it's also my problem. I don't particularly mind that it's included in the game, because it's clearly not endorsed by the narrative and I can skip it if I want.

Why should a different flavor of trauma be treated differently?

Forced teaming demands a high server population. Remember that there are times when I cannot play the game I want to on Virtue, one of the most densely populated servers we have. Telling me to wait until later to play a game I am paying for means that I will stop paying for the game, but that's not really the half of it.

Less densely populated servers are going to find it increasingly difficult to form teams for these massive raids as the novelty wears off and they are sustained primarily by alts. That's going to lock less densely populated servers out of chunks of content because it turns out that 24 is a lot of people, and then there is actually going to be a legitimate reason for there to be a server merge. Server merges, for reasons noted every time that stupid idea is brought up, murder MMOs. Any decision that makes a future server merge look like a potentially good alternative to leaving things as they are is a catastrophically bad decision.

This isn't ultimately a choice between occasional forced teaming and 100% soloable content, this is a choice between 100% soloable content and chunks of the game becoming permanently unplayable.

In the 1930s, the Depression took hold of America, and with it, a rise in crime and corruption. Every other politician was corrupt, and every other man on the streets a thug in the employ of a vast criminal conspiracy. But there was no chaos in the streets, no great loss of human life, and the first Freedom Phalanx was able to defeat the enemy after six long, hard years of crimefighting.

This was not Paragon's darkest hour.

During World War II, the 5th Column hid in the shadows of Paragon, causing massive loss of life and spreading chaos with each of their vicious attacks before vanishing once again into the shadows. But ultimately, they failed, the efforts of the First Hero Brigade, the Dawn Patrol, and other like them checking their every advance.

This was not Paragon's darkest hour.

At the end of the war, Nemesis seized control of the capital city and released nerve gas all across the nation, threatening to kill tens of millions if the antidote was not recovered, and killing dozens of heroes in the ensuing battle. But his reign was incredibly short-lived and the antidote was successfully distributed to all the afflicted cities, including Paragon.

This was not Paragon's darkest hour.

A nuclear escalation between the US and the Soviet Union set off by a tactical nuke deployed on Statesman during an international rescue, barely checked by the Dawn Patrol and Freedom Phalanx. The rise of superadine throughout the 70s and 80s. The attack of the Reichsman. The sudden surge in super powered crime surrounding the arrival of Hero Corps and its support by Crey Industries.

None of these were Paragon's darkest hour.

On May 23rd, 2002, at approximately 7:30 PM EST, the Rikti attacked. Causing immense damage worldwide and, for the first time, placing Paragon City firmly behind enemy lines for months, it took the sacrifice of thousands of heroes and the near-total annihilation of the Freedom Phalanx, Dawn Patrol, and Hero Corps to finally follow them back into their home dimension and shatter their will to fight. Finally, on November 27th, over 800 heroes gave their lives to make the decisive strike. But this was only the beginning.

Ragnarok had begun.

Following on the heels of the first Rikti War, before the city had even recovered from the devastation of the war on Baumton or the recent Hollowing in Eastgate, the supervillain Faultline tore the neighborhood of Hollowbrook apart with his earthquake machine, causing a devastation that the area has even now only begun to recover from. Hamidon consumed the unsuspecting suburb of Woodvale, its advance barely kept in check by heroes. The Banished Pantheon overran the town of Astoria, seeking to revive the ancient god Mot.

Over the next two years, the almighty Rularuu attacked Paragon City from his own dimension, his infinite might barely held in check through serendipity as much as the combined efforts of the hundreds of heroes who arrived to fight against him. The Council fought an open and bloody war in the streets against the 5th Column, their stronghold of Striga Isle looming over Paragon.

In 2005, before Eastgate or Overbrook or Baumton could be rebuilt, before Perez Park or Woodvale could be reclaimed, before Venice or Astoria could be restored, things grew perhaps exponentially worse, as the villains of the Rogue Isles began slipping into the city in vast numbers, robbing banks and causing general mayhem on a regular basis, brought on by a massive jailbreak out of the Ziggurat staged by Recluse in his search for the Destined One who would make him undisputed ruler of Paragon City, while Arachnos and Longbow fought openly for control of Siren's Call, recently devastated by the death of the hero Sunburst, and the threat of toxic annihilation from Warburg would be an unceasing possibility until modern day.

In 2007, the Rikti returned with a vengeance, opening up the war for Paragon once more and again turning the city into a warzone for months. Throughout the year 2010, whispers came that the alternate dimension of Praetoria, a super powered threat to the city for years, was now planning to invade Paragon and seize Primal Earth once and for all. Preliminary skirmishes were fought between supers and many poured into Ouroboros and Praetoria, seeking to embrace their new Incarnate abilities, leaving Paragon all but undefended...

The Shivans attacked. Galaxy City was added to the list of regional casualties in the Ragnarok that had begun more than a decade ago. Mot awakens, and with this, Astoria is perhaps forever lost.

Such is modern Paragon. Half the city lies in ruins. The Banished Pantheon, the Rikti, the Praetorians, the Devouring Earth, Arachnos, and more besides still threaten the safety and stability of the city every day, kept in check only by a constant flow and constant sacrifice of heroes.

And even as Paragon's enemies multiply, Statesman, the eternal protector of Paragon, the man who had seen the city through all of its previous crises, was killed, leaving Paragon with no match for the ruthless and determined Tyrant. Not even Statesman was strong enough to weather this storm. Not even Statesman could survive Ragnarok, let alone see Paragon through it.

This is Paragon's darkest hour.

The typical introvert mocking is basically impossible on the internet. Not only are forums static environments not much like clubs at all, if you just observe and don't interact...No one notices. It would take absurd amounts of stalking to know that someone has been watching a thread but not posting to it.

Back on topic, you guys remember that post I made about Guild Wars? Yeah, Guild Wars has fully one hundred percent of its PvE content equally available to both soloists and groupers. CoX could do the same thing and it would probably be trivial (it would definitely be trivial if they had planned to do so from the start, but legacy code might cause some issues at this stage). Seriously, just make everything that currently has to be teamed work like regular missions: The street sweeping portions are trivial anyway and the meat of the content in both story and mechanics comes in instances, which scale their opposition to however many players are in the instance.

Incidentally, this isn't how Guild Wars makes its content 100% available to soloists and groupers, but the specifics of execution are actually pretty trivial. What matters is the end result: Everyone gets the gameplay they want, all the time, with all the content, even if the kind of gameplay they want changes with their mood (I know there's times when I want to team and times when I don't, and also times when I want to team but don't have the time to put an 8-man group together).

You are not doing much to endear yourself to the community, nor to dispel the notion that you are pretentious or self-absorbed, by becoming hostile when someone points out, correctly, that your advice is useless in context.

I hadn't thought about it before, but they probably will.

Related question: Is there a way to make an ally just meet up and join with you instead of being captured by the enemy at start?

Well of course they're not advertising the product if they're still in the phase of assembling the team who will build the thing. They've got so little to show for it that building up hype now will just mean it will be more likely to have died out by the time they can actually sell something.

Regardless, there's no denying that the CoX engine is a mess of kludges and workarounds. When we can see things like Null the Gull and Ouroboros from the outside, the tangled code must have reached Gordian levels behind the scenes, to the point where the only real solution is fairly Alexandrian in nature. On top of that there's the processor chugging. I have to run the graphics at minimum level and still occasionally get single digit framerates, and yet my computer can run Guild Wars and Mount and Blade no problem. The lack of any built-in system for proactive villainy has been grating on nerves quite a bit of late, and building one into the existing game is just not feasible. And so on, and so forth.

CoX 2 would have to be a different game, taking place in a different city, a different time period, an alternate continuity, or whatever. It couldn't just be CoX 1 but with updated graphics. It would have to be something which could be, and which would quite possibly be better off as being, advertised as an entirely different game. A spiritual successor.

I wouldn't recommend making the game a globe-hopping deal. The super hero genre is primarily about heroes who guard just one city and make very occasional forays outside of it. Yes, Spider-Man, Batman, and Superman have all visited foreign locations on occasion, but they pretty much stick to New York, Gotham and Metropolis. It's one thing for CoX veterans to come into the new game and go globe-hopping with old characters, but new players need to be able to get a full super hero experience with just CoX 2, which means at least half the content, especially at launch, should focus on a single central city.

Luddite economic arguments are as irrelevant now as they were in the industrial revolution; the market will adapt. Regulations for new inventions already exist, the fact that the new invention is absurdly revolutionary wouldn't actually change much. New technologies are actually something the world is pretty much equipped to handle.

The only problem arises from the incredibly varied nature of super power origins. On any given server there are roughly 5-10,000 supers in Paragon City alone. Even assuming Paragon is a magnet for super activity, that's still tens of thousands of different super powered individuals, the vast majority of whom are gaining their super powers from unique, non-replicable sources. These supers are almost certain to market or donate their powers, but they're a totally unreliable resource.

Anyone who thinks that $2.5M net profit isn't enough to keep the servers on has no idea how cheap servers are.

The MMOData numbers are inconclusive because of when the numbers stopped being released, however at last report CoX was holding steady at approximately 125k subscribers for about two years. The only reason it seems like a downward trend at all is because of that spike from 2005 to 2006, soon after the release of City of Villains. Similar to how CoX reported double their normal profits after releasing Going Rogue.

Hopefully the Clubber pack will cover this. /signed in case it doesn't. In particular, I need a hoodie to make one of my toon's street clothes work.

Hm. I'm new here. I haven't really explored the game in-depth and so the need for a sequel doesn't seem at all compelling to me. But thinking logically, I think the devs really do need to start seriously considering when and not if CoH 2 needs to start pre-production. And whenever that is, it should be soon.

The game is already a hodge-podge of kludges and quick fixes, because the infrastructure of the game can't support more elegant solutions. Ouroboros, Null the Gull, etc. etc. There are significant problems with the way villain content is implemented on a fundamental level, and while better writing could go a long way towards fixing this, a total reboot would give an opportunity to build a more proactive villain game from the ground up, or at least leave room for it at a later date. There are a lot of advantages to going into CoH 2. Maybe see if you can get some guys from ANet to help out one of their fellow vassals, those guys are awesome at what they do.

Regardless, definitely make VIP access shared between both games, as you don't want to be competing with yourself, and also try to make a lot of store items cross-game too. For example, I've got a few costume part unlocks on my CoX account right now, a hypothetical CoH 2 should have similar costume parts which are automatically unlocked if the linked CoX account has the equivalent store item already. If you have CoX trenchcoats, you have CoH 2 trenchcoats.

That being said, I actually think the rate and technical quality of the content being produced right now is fine for the immediate future. The only things that irk me right now are occasional writing gaffes and an emphasis on group content. I want MMOs to provide the option of grouping together so I can do multiplayer when my friends are online, not require grouping so that I can't really play at all when they're not.

It went over your head, then.

Question: Besides the game not keeling over, what makes you think Freedom was a financial success? What little data I have available from after Freedom's launch (and public data is pretty scant and released on only a quarterly basis) suggests that there was pretty much no change in revenue at all after Freedom's launch.

There is actually a writing solution to this problem. It is not as satisfying as a mechanical revamp to the Redside mission system, replacing contacts with some form of proactive scheme-based system, but that is an extremely tall order, so I'd be perfectly satisfied with their just rewriting existing villain content such that you have more lackeys and peers for contacts, and fewer superiors.

And I'm pretty sure the people of Germany would've been happier if romantic contact like kissing hadn't been censured in their cinemas back in the 1930s, so if you disagree with rewriting Redside content that basically makes you a Nazi.