Samuel_Tow

I do. I've simply exported the male Tights texture to replace the female Skin texture, and only on one client at work where I don't play commonly. I originally did this as proof of concept for David Nakayama that women with muscles could look good in this game and that there shouldn't be a ton of work to get decent returns. He seemed to agree, but nothing has happened with it since.

To be honest, almost every time I bring out one of those altered screenshots, I get at least one person who asks me how to do that in-game because he or she really wants to. I like to think that's evidence for at least some level of demand

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Also, yes, Titan Weapons are amazing. They're worth the buy, definitely, and it's the most fun I've had with City of Heroes in a very long time now. No new set that I can think of off-hand has had me this excited. In fact, I can think of only three times in the entire game's run time where I've been this excited: when I made the original Samuel Tow, when I made Crash, another signature character of mine, and when I made the original Xanta as a BS/Inv Scrapper back in 2007 or 2008. This is amazing!

That's a straw man and you know it. And not the first time you've used that straw man, either.

At what point in which thread did anyone ask to be able to "faceroll" anything? Hell, go and search my "demigods" thread if you want. You won't find it there, either. No-one is asking for easy mode. What people are asking for is challenges that match the threat they're supposed to represent. If a raid is necessary, then have that raid be against the entire Praetorian army, not just one guy who drinks directly from the tap.

Almost everything I've said in relation to Incarnate Trials has been to the effect that we shouldn't be fighting one big bad guy who's stronger than all of us combined. If we must be reduced to a faceless mass of goons, then the only decent reason for this is if this is a war and we're fighting an equally faceless mass of goons on the other side. If we need to fight as an army, then have us fight an army. Don't have us fight one guy who's god-modding.

Like I've said a thousand times before - it's not a question of numbers. It's a question of presentation. It sucks when I get killed by a punk with a baseball bat, but being killed by a giant eldritch demon? Yeah, I can see that. Maybe a robot of war isn't that scary, but a whole platoon of them? Yeah, I can see how they'd be dangerous. Presentation, presentation, presentation.

As the level of threat escalates, that threat needs to be presented in a more believable way. As gods, we should be either fighting other gods one-on-one, or otherwise fighting entire armies as an army of our own. We should not be fighting level 54(+3) rats.

Superman can apparently be defeated by a gun tossed at his chest. He'll stand there absorbing bullets, but as soon as his enemy runs out and throws the empty gun, now THAT Superman has to dodge, because that stuff is just deadly.

That's actually a very good angle to look at things from, and one I seem to have neglected. Well said. Attacks should indeed look like what they do and... Honestly, I find that a few (of the old ones that you didn't work on) don't quite live up to that. I bugged BABs about the effects of Sniper Blast from Energy Blast, just because it looks like a very wimpy power, yet it does lots of knockback and damage. To my eyes, if it'll be damaging it should be a giant blue fireball, or otherwise if it should be precise it should be a literal beam like Blazing Bolt. BABs never acted on it as this was prior to power customization, but I still hate the look of that power as it just doesn't look like it should hit as hard as it does.

Getting powers to look like what they do is a great idea. I should probably compile a list of the ones I think do that and the ones I think don't. Most Blaster T3 powers fall short, sadly. Bitter Ice Blast is just wimpy and for all the love I have for Blaze, it still looks like a very small fireball. Power Burst is awesome, though I like the way you look at these, and encourage you to continue to do so.

I didn't mean to say I don't like it. The fire effect on Pyronic Judgement is so awesome I'm helpless before it But my expectation of what it would be was informed by Fire Blast's Inferno, which is a giant, loud, shockwave-heavy explosion, whereas Pyronic Judgement is more of a flash burn. Inferno blows enemies up, Pyronic burns enemies. This is where "what do you envision?" comes into play. Do you envision fire as an explosion with a supersonic pressure shockwave of expanding gas, or do you see fire as heat and burning? I ask this, because this defines what characters fire powers work for visually.

That's not to say fire as burning is bad. That's what fire is. But it may leave the door open for an "Explosions Blast" set for Blasters, Defenders and Corruptors, one based around either literal explosives or otherwise projecting explosions at a distance.

To end the theme on fire, check out the difference between a gasoline explosion and an RDX explosion. One is a huge, relatively slow-burning fireball, the other is a high-velocity explosive. I'm not sure if both count as fire... In fact, I'm pretty sure the high explosive doesn't. But that's kind of the point - if we view fire as meaning burning, then that leaves the door open for explosions as another theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbLlhufO9CwThis is why adding a bright palette to Darkness, for example, gives me pause. It violates one of our two main goals in designing a powerset - making sure the effects clearly represent the theme. Players are free to pretend their fire is pollen. But ultimately, I have to focus on making fire look like fire, not pollen. Likewise, players are free to pretend that their Darkness powers are souls, or demons, or chest hair. But because Darkness, by its most basic definition, suggests dark colors, I feel obligated to offer you options that are in the spirit of that theme.[/QUOTE]

I have a question here, actually: What's your take on Ghost Widow's "pastel darkness," particularly her Soul Storm and Soul Tentacles? To me, they look like "bright darkness" and while they do look slightly goofy, they also look pretty good and like something I'd use if I could match the rest of my Dark powers to that. I'd just like to know how you feel about those.

And you don't see how that's a tangled difficulty and progression curve? We go from level 1 to level 50 growing ever stronger, then all of a sudden past level 50 we drop back to remedial school. A well-structured path of progression shouldn't blindside toss me as fodder for the Word effect just to show me that, yes, the game can always cheat and humiliate me. There shouldn't BE a godhood remedial school at all.

My general point is that we're done with the trials and tribulations and being pathetic back when we were at a genuine level one. We don't need to be made humble, we don't need to be shocked awake and we don't need to be shown that no matter how much we've grown, we still suck. From a narrative standpoint, by level 50 we should be done with the "rookie ****."

I'm well aware of how you can spin it to make sense. What I'm saying is that I'm not looking for a justification for this. I just don't want it to happen. There are few things more depressing to watch than taking what is an otherwise competent, accomplished authority figure and dumping him into a field he hasn't the faintest idea what to do with. I know Michael Jordon is a great basketball player, but I DO NOT want to watch the mane play baseball. "Godhood" is not the perfect opportunity for our characters to be kicked back to level 1, comparatively speaking.

I guess that's my big problem with the Incarnate system. It should have been an opportunity for us to reach even greater heights, and instead the development team seem to have taken that opportunity to reset the game and flush us back down to bumbling rookie status. This is not what should happen at the pinnacle of one's powers.

Man, I so wanted to find that video of Adam Savage saying "I love...consistent...DATA! HAHAHAHA!" but it's impossible to find. Or it is for me, anyway.

Well, yes, I went out of my way to put pretty much all of Praetoria's eggs in the same basket... But honestly, that's what I would see as requiring a league of two dozen Incarnates. Yes, that would end the story with a massive bang, but nothing short of that should require this many demigods to accomplish. The rest could (and should) be smaller tasks that require fewer people. To avoid having "one big bad" who outclasses all, these tasks can instead pit us against the enemy's forces.

Example time again: Suppose our goal is not to find the tallest bad guy in the lot and punch him in the face. Suppose our goal is to take over a facility and assert control over it. This would mean fighting its entire security force, breaking down its hard fortifications, circumventing its security installations and, all told, waging war in its courtyard. You don't need to have signature characters who appear strong enough to take over a world on their own to head the charge. That doesn't mean you can't have them, but have them be there as "minibosses," where the real trouble is that there's a frikkin' army in the way, not that there's an authority equals asskicking head of command that's stronger than his entire army combined.

I just feel that as godlike Incarnates, we should spend more time fighting armies and less time being the underdogs.

This is standard for standard super heroes, yes. I just feel that Incarnates should expressly NOT be standard heroes. City of Heroes is one of the few games out there that really gives me a sense of "journey." We start off as fairly underpowered heroes matching wits with gangbangers an hobos, we rise in power to where we lock swords with paramilitary organisations and private armies and we end up saving entire worlds by ourselves. The next step, really, has to be almost literal godhood where we ARE the top dogs without weaknesses where we transcend our lives as mere brutes solving problems by punching people in the face and start dictating the results of large-scale conflicts single-handedly. This more or less has to happen or the next step is not a step at all, but merely a trot in place.

The crux of my argument is that when we ascend into godhood, we shouldn't just become numerically more powerful. The scope of our adventures should change, as well. Like how the prince from Katamari Damaci pulls back farther and farther away from his ball as it becomes bigger, going up from rolling up thumb tacks and dice to rolling up cars and people to rolling up buildings to continents to entire planets, so our perspective and the scope of our adventures need to pull back and approach conflicts on a much broader, larger scale. And doing commando raids on Praetorian installations and being beaten down by rocks thrown by civilians just doesn't have the scope I have in mind.

I see nothing wrong with that. Realistically speaking, there are only two ways a hero's career could end - death or boredom. Either the hero gets killed in the line of duty, or the hero becomes so strong that he either retires or is left with no more lands to conquer, so to speak. I get that ultimate power is boring, and yet at the same time, "boring" is my ultimate goal. I want to bring my characters to a level where I could comfortably walk away from them, knowing that they've done all they could and had all the adventures they'll ever need. And if I ever need them, all I have to do is yell "RAMIREZ!" really loud and they'll come back to kick *** some more, then stop a fan and disappear once again.

I get that MMOs don't like to admit they have an "end," but I've always preferred a story that ends because it reached its ending than a story which ends because I got sick of endless sequels, remakes and never-ending ruined ending episodes. I'd rather reach an end and declare a hero "complete" (provided I can still play him regardless) than to be mired in an endless time sink grind that drives me away because I lose patience with it. Yes, true godlike status is boring, but it's also a good finish for a hero's career. I really don't want to worry about what happens at the end of my hero's career. I want to enjoy the journey to that eventual end, and being an unstoppable badass is a good bit of fun towards the end.

That's not necessarily a single player experience, though. At the very least, it doesn't have to apply to only a single player. Imagine that several characters come together and start telling stories. One has defeated entire armies, another has toppled empires, another still has saved thousands of worlds and another still has never been defeated. Just as they're talking, an impossibly numerous alien race invades the world. Alone, none of the aliens are a match for even one of the heroes. All of them together are just bad news for the aliens. It's not an easy fight just because there are millions of 'em, and each character is eager to show off in front of the others. In this example, the aliens are still a pressing threat, but not because their commander is a god so much as because there are millions of them and our heroes must stop them before their world is overrun.

I actually have an even better example from the recent Space Marine game. Multiple times, the badass machismo of the Ultramarines shines through. "The Orks have infested this structure thoroughly, but we can still clear them out!" "If we had a week, perhaps." or "We are Space Marines! Orks are no trouble!" "By the time we are finished, they will have killed everyone on this planet. We cannot let that happen!" At every step, care is taken to demonstrate that it is neither the power of the Space Marines nor their proficiency that is letting them down, but rather they will fail because the enemy is too numerous and there is too little time. Give them a week and they will win any war, but they simply do not have a week.

My qualm is almost entirely one of storytelling and encounter design, honestly. I prefer ego trip storylines that put me against odds which would be impossible for a normal person, but which I soundly defeat with flying colours. And when I am to lose as part of the story, I lose not because I failed but simply because no amount of godlike power could have allowed me to achieve that goal within the time given. I faced overwhelming odds, I was caught in the wrong place to help, I was delayed. This, really, is what separates the gods from the men. A man you can fight and defeat. The best you can hope to do to a god is delay him until he's too late to undo what you have done.

Actually, this is something you may want to address directly - what do you personally see as being the theme of each set? All too often, the same issue comes up where players and artists are seemingly talking about the same things (say, "fire") but what players have in their mind's eye is something very different from what the artist does. It causes issues of false expectations and confounding artistic directions, even though no-one's really at fault, so to speak. It's just that some themes are broader and more abstract than most people think.

Personally, I'd like to hear your take on what at least our most basic themes should look like or resemble. I actually have a few guesses for some of them.

Fire: Are you looking for a slow-burning fire like that of camp fire or the fast-burning jets of fire like that in a blast furnace or a high-intensity fire? Are you even looking at fire at all, or are you more looking at explosions? The Pyronic Judgement, for instance, is something I expected to be a giant explosion where instead it more resembles a fuel air bomb.

Ice: Are you looking more at players throwing ice shards or players generating ice shards around their enemies? Are we looking at encasing our enemies in ice or literally freezing them? Are we talking about specifically solid water ice, or "ice" as a general term for super-cooled substances, like what the T1000 was turned into near the end of Terminator 2?

Darkness: This is just abstract, so what is your take on it? Are we talking darkness as in literal shadows, darkness like an ink drop in water or darkness like a forcefield like what Raven of Teen Titans fame has? Or is it just figurative darkness that's a representative stand-in for scary illusions? Are we talking demons or skulls or tentacles or even something else entirely?

Radiation: To the best of my knowledge, radioactive radiation is invisible and exerts very little mechanical force, so its representation in-game has to be symbolic, but what does it resemble? Are we talking the exaggerated giant electron orbits of an atom? Right now it seems to resemble green gas in many ways (especially Nuclear Blast, for some reason), but is that it? Are we talking somehow visible x-rays? Moreover, are we irradiating people with direct alpha, beta and/or gamma radiation, or are we contaminating them with radioactive particles and chemicals? The former would be more akin to directed energy attacks whereas the latter would be more akin to gas or dust.

Psychics and mind control: What do these represent? Are we literally shooting bolts of shaped psychic energy? Are we hypnotising people with spinning spiral shapes? Are we fooling people with illusions? Is it a sort of poltergeist telekinesis? There are a lot of ways to interpret psychic powers (my favourite happens to be FEAR), so my question then becomes... Why are they pink?

Sonics: BABs once said "I locked myself in a dark room and yelled until I saw colour. I saw orange" as an explanation for why Defender Sonic powers are orange by default. But what do you, personally, see sonics as being? Do they represent us literally yelling at people? Are they some kind of sub-audible ultra-sound? Are we affecting people's hearing or are we, err... Liquifying their organs? Or are we just producing supersonic shockwaves like those of true explosions?

Empathy: What IS empathy supposed to look like? I get that it's green because green means healing, but what are people actually supposed to be doing to heal their allies? Or is it better that it's open to interpretation?

That's the sort of thing I mean.

Of course not. I'm not sure why you think it would. Luckily, there's a whole other game there to hold people's attention and that seems to be doing reasonably well, I'd say. Hell, I'm still messing with Titan Weapons.

Of course it survived, but serious experience tapers were put in place over the Architect and serious exploits patched up. Moreover, the Architect was advertised as a legitimate progression path, something you could level up from 1 to 50 on. Having people do that was never the issue, only the speed with which they do so. Furthermore, with the curbing of rampant (or at least very public) farming, interest in the Architect died down enough for new players to not immediately be swept up in it and never let go.

Again, the DFB is different, in that I don't believe its intent has ever been for people to level up to 50 on that and that alone. Moreover, the DFB is so popular that it exceeds absolutely all other activities available to new players at the time of character creation. In this case, I don't think "nerfing" the DFB to kill interest is a viable solution (or a good idea, for that matter), but I still believe some mechanism needs to be in place to serve as a limiter and a reminder that there's more to the game than just that.

I'm well aware that exemplaring for content is a good idea and I wouldn't dream of preventing people from earning anything off the DFB. I'm not even talking about reducing experience or drops or what have you. Again, I don't know what shape this needs to take, but I've seen enough people argue with me that re-running the DFB in the late 20s is the best experience and I've seen enough people in their early 20s apparently unaware that other content exists to be concerned.

Let it be popular, that's OK. But we need some way of telling people that this isn't World of Tanks.

They're hitting us in the Achilles knee?

First of all, that's an event. I hardly feel those count. The end of the original Beta included an event where a single Rikti AV held off 50 or so heroes, if I'm not mistaken.

Secondly, what you're saying is simply not true. "Something that big" is what Incarnates should be able to take on. That's the point of having the power of the gods. There's no point in having the power of the gods if your enemies have the power of the gods, too. The point of godlike power is the ascension above ordinary powers, and that doesn't happen if you give everyone else the same powers. You've increased the numbers, but no-one's power has budged relative to each other.

Finally, there is much leeway for a middle ground. While it's easy to come up with an excuse for why 24 people would need to fight a single instance of Anti-Matter, that doesn't change the fact that this is both humiliating and not what godlike power should enable us to do. It shouldn't take a zillion heroes to take on 16 Praetorian signature characters, because those Praetorian signature characters shouldn't personally have the power of the gods. It's not necessary, save for the need to have raid bosses which we don't need to have for raids to work. The War Walkers shouldn't be these unstoppable monsters. The Goliaths, maybe, but not the ordinary ones. The "Praetors" shouldn't be one-man armies. WE should be the one-man armies and they the people who need an actual, literal army to oppose us.

The whole balance is skewed in the wrong direction. It's not the NPCs who should be strong and we who should band together in armies to oppose them. The reverse should be true - WE should be the strong ones and they the people who need to band together to defeat us.

Nothing makes me think we do. I think we SHOULD. That's my point.

That's actually precisely what I'm saying - things don't NEED to be bigger and tougher. Things can be exactly as they were, only they can now be achieved by fewer people, instead. That's kind of the point of being godlike - you're no longer subject to the limitations you once had, so you're free to BE a god and go save the world by yourself where before you would have needed people helping you or people providing transportation for you or people telling you where to go.

The catch here is it's not the same people holding both opinions. I've never had a problem with Incarnate powers trivialising old content because they SHOULD. We're supposed to be so strong that old content would be easy mode. That's how we tell we're more powerful. In terms of pure difficulty balance, yes, new content needs to balance its difficulty with our level of power, but this increased difficulty needs to be handled better than just inflating pre-Incarnate enemies with a basketball pump.

An Incarnate shouldn't have to band together with 23 other Incarnates to even have a prayer at taking on an Incarnate^10 enemy. An Incarnate should be taking on an army of the kinds of enemies he could only ever fight one at a time before. That might still be as difficult, but at least it's justifiable difficulty. "You can't be everywhere, you can't save everyone."

That's actually exactly the opposite of what I want to see. In my eyes, a serious Incarnate should be by far the strongest thing around, and his or her enemies should have to team up against the Incarnate, look for forbidden, very dangerous weapons and conspire to draw the Incarnate into insidious traps.

I my eyes, inventing new enemies to make our Incarnates humble is as bad as - if not worse than - getting defeated by a rock. At least with the rock, some explanation is given as to why we're normally stronger than this. With a super giant monster, no explanation is given. We simply suck compared to our enemies. It's the game telling us that no matter how strong we are, the NPCs will always be stronger. As far as I'm concerned, the point of giving us the power of the gods is to make us STRONGER than the NPCs, at least in terms of storyline.

OK, I laughed

Say, didn't Batman hate rock and roll?

This.

As in, this is starting to reach ridiculous levels. I mean, I get that Crey scientists punching us in the 30s is a bit ridiculous, but they do barely any damage at all, and their real powers are their science doohickeys that raise their allies, heal them, infect us with radiation or freeze us. The scientists are pushovers and only dangerous if you let them stand on the sideline and attack you with the power of SCIENCE! They don't take you down with the power of their furrowed brows.

Whoever is designing the Incarnate content needs to step back and take a good, long look at what Incarnates have become, then question if this really is where we want to go. Because from where I'm standing, by far the worst thing the story could do to us once we've become "godlike" is make everyone else ten times as godlike and have us get killed by very powerful rats... Pretty much.

The DFB is uniquely different from all other in-game tasks, especially other TFs and Trials, in that it's what brand new Free players meet before they have a chance to even understand the game. It's entirely possible for them to believe that's all there is to the game, especially since a lot of F2P MMOs have pretty much just that as their content. Other TFs notwithstanding, the DFB in particular needs some form of control mechanism or limiter.

Whenever I've had the misfortune of watching Family Guy, "laughing" was never on the agenda. Grinding my teeth into pulp is closer to the truth. Being offensive is not the same thing as being funny.

That said, I watch the Angry Video Game Nerd and the Spoony One, and these guys drop F-bombs all over the place. But here's the thing - they're not subject to a set of rules which forbid profanity like we are in-game. They're also not calling ME names.