Samuel_Tow

Oh, yeah, that's the other thing. The Trial auto-sets your level to 38, but everything in it is level 42 and all bosses. This Trial came with I1, back when level difference was one of the primary balancing mechanincs and when having more people on your team could cause the mission to spawn things +4 and +5 to its selected settings.

Having remembered that it's all +4 bosses, I can easily see why people don't run it more often. It's not impossible, or indeed even all that hard, but it's just cheap, and frankly... Even I don't want to do it all that often because I hate fighting purples. The distinction between "purple" and "deep purple" should have died with the purple patch. This is pretty much the same reason I will never, ever touch Apex or Tin Mage ever again, even with level shifts if I happen to earn any.

My question was kind of asking the reverse, though. I get that people want to complete missions - that's the point of the game, loosely speaking. But is that the ONLY thing people want, to the exclusion of anything and everything which stands between one "Mission complete!" and the next? Sometimes I get the feeling that if people could auto-complete every mission, they actually would. At least that's the impression I get when I'm ordered to sit by the door with the rest of the team while one person stealths to the boss, teleports us all there for a 15-second fight, then kicks us all out of the mission so we can do it again about five more times.

I get that we want to complete missions, but I was sort of hoping we actually liked PLAYING said missions to completion, not just skipping a step and jumping straight to the rewards and congratulations. That's kind of why I like missions with lots of objectives like the 21 mystics - I can't just jump to the end, because there is no end. There's something to do in almost every room, so there's nothing that can be skipped.

As I said, I use the term "exploration" loosely, which is why I used the term "traversal" in the title. I, personally, happen to enjoy traversing terrain and marvelling at beautiful vistas even when rendered in mediocre graphics. I enjoy traversing underground caverns and wondering how deep I've descended, or climbing on the outside of buildings and looking down to see how high I've climbed. I enjoy missions where terrain matters in some way, and let's be honest here - most City of Heroes missions could take place in a giant white cube and not much of the gameplay would change.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not asking for missions to be more linear, I just want more to be done with terrain interactivity. The "mixed" tilesets are a big soft spot of mine. If we had a map that traversed between all the terrains we had, it would probably be my favourite.

Generally, when talking about moving through locations, I enjoy the sense that I'm making physical progress along the map. I like to look back and see how far I've gone, I like to look at my depth gauge and see how deep I've descended, I like to look at my map and see how large an area I've cleared of enemies and so forth. I suppose that what bugs me so much is how... "One-off" and unconnected our missions are. I will always pick a larger mission with more objectives over several small ones.

*note*
While I like seeing my name in people's sigs, I think my quote in yours may have fallen out of date. Titan Weapons is awesome!

That's not what I meant. I don't mean phone boxes to click in the overworld. I mean an outdoor instance with important locations on it, like the bunkers in Bloody Bay, essentially. Let's go with an example, actually.

You are out in the middle of the countryside in an open, hilly area. At your starting point is a science team protected by deployable cannons so you can leave them alone for a while. However, they can't move over terrain easily because they're transporting a VERY volatile mcguffin which can't be shaken up or it will explode. What you need to do is fine a suitable location within, say, a mile, and then set up a teleporter beacon there so that the expedition can teleport to a forward location. The beacon is fragile, so you have to clear up all the enemies in the area before you set it up. The thing has a limited range and the map has a selection of applicable locations, so you essentially have to go from location to location to location until you reach your goal. Every location is somehow unique. One could be an old abandoned hut, another an empty cave, another an elevated rock formation, another an old camp site, another still just a place with relatively flat ground and so forth.

Granted, what I'm describing is fairly complex, but I do believe the mechanics to create it already exist.

Speaking purely for myself, these tidbits stick with me. I may not remember the precise information, but I will remember that the Shadow Shard is not natural, but was artificially made, and when the plot point comes up, I won't be as impressed.

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As for the Shadow Shard being made by the Midnight Squad, this dates back to I12 when the Midnight Club was first introduced. The actual club zone has a scavenger hunt of sorts in it, where you click on various items and they give you background lore, some of it from the Dream Doctor, himself. That the Shadow Shard was created to trap Rularuu is mentioned there for the first time.

Personally, I feel that imagining the Shard as a physical or even metaphysical location within which a god is kept is disappointing. I've always wished they would have gone bigger and made the entire place the physical manifestation of the mind of an elder god. That's actually where "spoilers" come into play. One random Shard mission on the villain side of things makes an offhand comment that "as if you're inside the mind of a god." I don't remember which mission it was, I don't recall what it was referring to or how it was worded, but this idea has stuck in my head since then, and it has informed my mind's eye view of what the Shard is.

I actually really, REALLY dislike how the body sliders affect female characters for the most part. Physique aside (that's just breasts and butt), almost every other slider just makes your woman "wider." But heavier-set women are not simply wider side-to-side, they are actually larger. You'll see this very clearly if you compare as upposedly big female character from this game with a big character from a game which actually supports this, like Saints Row or Lineage II.

Let's take the Waist slider, for instance. Yes, that makes your waist WIDER, as in it's bigger left-to-right, but it does not actually make it thicker, as in it's just the same thickness back-to-front. What this means is you have a woman with a very wide stomach when looked at from the front, but who still has that nasty curved spine and tiny little waist when looked at directly from the side. Neither muscles nor fat widen a waistline in this way. Muscles, especially, make the waist more rounded, rather than more elliptical.

Or how about the shoulders? If you widen your shoulders, you literally do just that - your shoulder joints pull out of your body and spread apart. The thing is, people who are said to have "broad shoulders" don't have that just because they have unusually long collar bones, but rather their shoulders are broad because their chest and rib cage are bigger. From behind, a broad-shouldered person with a big chest is very obviously different from a smaller person, and it's just not because one person's shoulder blades are farther apart than the other's.

I get that our models are hugely legacy and that messing with them in any way opens up a can of worms, but I feel it's high time we did something to fix up at least our basic skin model so it looks less like a balloon animal. Seriously.

I've run the Eden Trial once, I believe, and I had to argue with people quite a bit that we SHOULDN'T just have someone stealth past all the spawns and teleport us all to the next set piece. I insisted we do it proper and walk to our destination - and we did - which made for a very entertaining Trial, even if the final fight is... Not very good. I enjoyed the terrain, I enjoyed the acid lake, I enjoyed the holes in the ground and the ceiling. It was a fun ride. Hell, I wanted to go back out the way we came in, but everyone hit Exit as fast as they could. A fellow didn't believe me that we COULD go back, thinking a long drop to be irreversible, but he was just looking up the wrong hole on the ceiling.

I'd also put the Abandoned Sewers Trial in this category, if only it were actually designed to happen at the end of a sewer run, which the original 150 Rikti were supposed to simulate but utterly failed to do so. I've run it a few times, and every time I've been teleported to the front door and we'd move back and forth between two rooms, killing the Rikti as they respawned. I would have LOVED it if we had to navigate a mile of sewers IN AN INSTANCE, always sloping downwards, always dipping lower, until eventually we came up to that huge pit where the walls of worked stone give way to bare rock where the Hydra has borrowed below where the city ends. But, of course, then people would just stealth to the head and teleport me there...

Do you know what I like? The instance with the Rikti Saucer at the end of the "Horrors of War" story arc from Dark Watcher. It starts in a cave, goes down to a sewer, then goes down into another cave, then goes down into a Rikti base, which ends up in a very impressive location right under the Shuttle. I also really like the very first mission of the Lady Grey TF, which I've run a few times. I like how it starts me off in an abandoned lab, goes down one floor, then breaks out into a cave, then goes into a Rikti base.

Actually, I've designed an Architect arc around a concept like this, even if it's a bit of a fudge. I started with an office-to-cave-to-sewer map where you find people jackhammering into the ground at the end. In another mission, you're said to return to the same building, but start off in an abandoned lab which I claim was under the sewers, which is actually the Architect version of the Lady Grey map. So, in storyline, you go from office to cave to sewer to abandoned lab to cave to Rikti base, and always going down. I really wish we had a map that did this.

Super heroes are far less commonly limited by the strength of their powers as they are limited by the abilities of others that they have to take care of. To quote the albino bad guy from the Meteor Man: "You can't be everywhere, you can't save everyone!" Maybe you can travel at the speed of sound and become invisible to get past all of the nasties on the way, but can the completely ordinary person with do that? Can an expedition you're leading? Will the sensitive device that can't be jostled survive bull-rushing through a horde of alien soldiers or an army of mutated plants? Of course not. That's why you're there - to ensure this doesn't have to happen.

People hate escorts because escort AI in this game is crap. It always has been. That's fine, you can "escort" people without literally escorting them. Perhaps there is a very easy way to the objective but the door is locked. It can be opened from the other side, but someone has to crawl through a cave infested with monsters. And when you do that and open the door, it turns out you need to do that for the next three doors. That's essentially the entirety of "We've got hostiles!" - a mile-long trek to get to the other side of a locked door. Or perhaps the people you're helping can move on their own if they move quickly, but they can't survive on their own, so you have to clear their path, then clear a new staging area or safe house, then call them in so they pop up next to you without you actually having to escort anyone. It becomes a simple mission - get to the next checkpoint, clear it out, click a glowie.

Convincing, good reasons aren't that hard to come buy. Most people hate missions like these because they hamstring their abilities, but it's possible to free up a person to use his or her own full arsenal of abilities and turn the "limitations" into objectives, instead. You're not hamstrung to a stupid, fragile escort, you're free to roam around, you just have to clear out a specific spot, or open a specific door, or turn on a specific lift or some such.

Well, multiplayer RPGs have already solved that problem. Diablo 2 had teleportation plates that you activated when you first came across them, but could then just teleport to those afterwards, while Dungeon Siege had a "hub" location in a void which could lead you to any place in the overworld provided you were high-level enough.

Actually, we already have something which allows us to save progress based on how far we've gone and whether we've visited a forward location: The Firebase Zulu Mole Points. I know the development team forgot those existed and just plopped down the horrible cop-out teleporters, but once upon a time you were required to visit a mole point personally, become "attuned" to it, and only then could you travel to it. What this meant was that once you travelled to the Cascades and visited the Mole Point there, you "saved" your progress and could continue from there.

Hell, the DFB has this. If you die, you get sent back up near the topside access hatch, but you can teleport down to the last level you reached. Sure, it doesn't last past a single trial run, but it exists as a system.

If save points are the problem, I don't see why it can't be possible to use those techniques.

I'm positive. It's not the discovery of new things, in the sense of seeing content for the first time that I'm referring to, so much as a sense that there's something there TO be discovered, something there that's hidden deep beneath the surface or bar beyond the borders or in the faraway reaches where no-one ever goes. It's a sense of... "Location," if you will. This game can have alien graphics from the future and a city as big as New York and it would still lack that, because every place we go is exactly like every place else in one crucial, inescapable fashion - it's in an area controlled by a civilised nation. Even in the Rogue Isles, you're never more than a single jump away from a place where a regular person could receive help and support and a criminal on the run can hide out.

Look at something like Left 4 Dead. This is almost entirely a game of locations and traversal. The world has gone to ****, no-one is coming to save you, everything alive wants you dead, and you must fend for yourself. This once-bustling city full of people who could have helped you and facilities that you could have used is dead, and worse - more dangerous than any wilderness. No-one is left to help you. Possibly no-one in the entire world. That's not a game which revolved around skipping to the end and pressing the button, because that would be missing the point. It revolves around taking every step, opening every door, fighting through every set piece, all the while knowing that though you and your friends are all barely conscious enough to walk, let alone pull yourself up, if you can just break through that last obstacle and reach that next safe room, you will survive.

Or look at something like Sands of Time. That entire game is one giant trip, a struggle to get to a particular place. From the moment it begins, the objective is one single thing - get to the Tower of Dawn. And once you get there, it ends. And yet the final climb of the Tower of Dawn over the ruined outside is still one of my favourite moments of gaming every single time, even though I've done it so many times already. I feel as though I really am at this location, because the location matters. I can't simply turn on Fly and get to the tower, I need to find a way. I need to find a bridge across, I need to find my way up to that balcony, I need to find a way down to that switch.

Hell, look at something as simple as the original Diablo. That game had four settings, each four levels deep before you met the next one, with a boss at the bottom. And yet it always felt like I was making progress. Every level took me deeper, every level took me closer to the heart of darkness, every level took me farther and farther away from Tristram. Yes, there were town portals and the occasional shortcut unlocked from the inside, but still: When you set foot inside the catacombs, you left the city behind. You were on your own, with no support, no lifeline and only the items you brought with you

I get that we're in a city and that just means we're always within an arm's reach of a police station or a hospital. That doesn't we can't have locations or missions which take us away from this. And not a step away, not a loading screen away, but tangibly far a away from society. In fact, I wouldn't mind a Shadow Shard like zone where vendors did not exist, and we were forced to use forgotten artifact instead of people for training, purchases and resurrection. I get that we have travel powers that make terrain mostly meaningless, to the point where the city could do away with stairs entirely and few of us would notice. That doesn't mean that we can't have missions or tasks where terrain mattered, such that we couldn't just fly over everything right to the end, or otherwise become invisible and waddle to the end that way.

City of Heroes is very good in terms of story and gameplay, but it often feels like you can swap the city for anything at all and nothing in the game would change a single iota. You can host the game in a Fantasy forest or out in the desert and everything would play out exactly the the same. Convenience is one thing, but I fear it's making us loose touch with the game's actual physical world.

I agree with you completely, and indeed this isn't limited to gender issues. I've run into the same destructive arguments in regard to requests for new costume pieces which aren't traditionally associated with American comic books (large weapons, medieval armour, etc.) as well as themes drawn from other media (anime, fantasy, etc.), with people insisting that this is a comic book game and shouldn't have these things. That always rubbed me the wrong way, as it's essentially making an argument that people who want these things SHOULDN'T get them. The problem is that this is bad for the game AND for comic books at the same time.

In fact, one of the gender equality counter-arguments was that because comic books are sexist, the game should be sexist, too. Because it's a comic book game. That... Just hurts my brain to think about it. So, yes, I'm right there with you. I will always support people asking for more costumes even when I don't really want them, but I will never support people asking for less choice because it "doesn't belong." Comic books should be used as a source of inspiration, not as a limiting factor.

In general, I agree with you. However, speaking purely of conventional morality, certain concepts and ideas are often seen as... Let's say a "guilty pleasure" for the sake of being constructive. These are technically seen as the moral low road just because they're things we're socially expected to not want, but we want them anyway. They're easy targets for dissenters to shame people into denying what they want. That's why I feel it's important to stand up for those "moral low roads" when they're attacked, just so we can ensure everyone gets to have fun in his or her own preferred way.

The beauty of video games is even if you do something that's generally considered wrong in the real world inside a game, you're really not hurting anybody. A woman walking down the street in nothing but a thong and a tube top would cause people's monocles to pop out of their eye sockets in real life, but in a game? Who cares? Your dime, your time. How we dress and what we create is purely our own business, and people who disapprove of it are free to simply avoid us. Sure, there are a few things we really SHOULDN'T create - racist characters, profane characters or anything else that breaks the T for Teen rating - but those are few and far in-between.

Just because someone happens to like something which isn't the height of moral purity, it doesn't mean the game shouldn't provide. It's an indulgent fantasy.

Aw, hell! So much "this!" Back in the day, most people I knew didn't have Test installed. Why? "I don't know how to install it and I don't want to bother." Because to install Test, you had create a new shortcut to the launcher with -test at the end, which would then invoke a very unintuitive installation process and begin to download the entire client again.

Now, all of those things are in the Launcher. Sure, it will still try to download them from scratch, but you no longer have to mess with shortcuts at all. That's so much more convenient it's amazing.

And that, yes. I get the logic behind it - if you crashed, it could be because your files were corrupt - but the verification never found anything at all. It just delayed me.

Solo Incarnate Trials? No, obviously not. Solo Incarnate content that's NOT Trials, though? Yes, that will happen. It's a feature of I22 - the revamp of Dark Astoria. We don't know very much about it, so I'm not sure how serious of a path of progression it will be, but it's been confirmed, at least.

I've never had the NCsoft Launcher crash on me, and I started using it pretty much as soon as they offered it. Not while patching, not while downloading, not while starting the game. And I run it on at least three separate machines.

With the old CohLauncher.exe, it wasn't unusual for me to have to wait 5-10 minutes for a patch to apply, and I never saw it download with over 150 KB/s. With the NCsoft Launcher, it's rare that a patch takes longer than 60 seconds and I usually download at around 800 KB/s.

Maybe it has a memory leak, maybe it doesn't. I have mine set to self-shut-down once I run City of Heroes. I'd do the same to Steam, but it needs to run to handle the backend of the the games it's running. I've quite literally never had any problem with the Launcher. The old updater used to fail to connect at least a third of the time, especially on patch day, it became bugged to where it wouldn't run on at least two separate occasions and it insisted on opening all my links in Internet Explorer. The Launcher has not failed to load once so far, never become unusable and launches all my links in my default browser.

I'm sticking to it.

It downloads faster, patches faster and fails to connect far less often than the old CohLauncher.exe. That's pretty much enough for me.

That's what I wanted to say, but I couldn't remember the name of the aura. Yes, that looks like the Smouldering aura.

Believe it or not, Nightstar, IVy and the "female" Praetorian Clockwork in general were a huge source of inspiration for me. Partly because they have breasts, but also partly as evidence the humanoid form does not inherently have to be male or otherwise androgynous. There's nothing wrong with using the female form on a creature that, by the nature of its mechanics, does not have separate genders, nor the need for them.

Originally, I held the belief that... If I'm going to make a woman, I might as well make a point out of her being a woman, and if I'm going to make something distinctly inhuman, then there's no reason to use anything but the male model. I happen to believe that I was wrong, and it took someone's interpretation - GOOD interpretation - of a creature which was both clearly non-human and yet still displayed the female form before this dawned on me. Before then, I saw no reason to put a female character in a face mask or body-covering clothes. Why make a female if I was going to do that? It sounds like a stupid thing to ask for a reason - because it is.

To me, the reason why Nightstar looks female despite being a robot is simple - that's the style Anti-Matter went for. If he has the technology to both make his machines work AND shape them into anything he wanted, why NOT make some of them female? Just because a robot doesn't need breasts doesn't mean it can't have them. After all, a robot doesn't need a human face, yet we keep trying to put human faces on our robots, don't we? The Praetorian Clockwork are not just utilitarian machines. They are aesthetically pleasing machines, as well, something which is intended to be integrated into society's very culture.

Erm... There's no problem with people dressing their female characters in a way specifically designed to please men. That's kind of the point of having such a powerful costume creator. Whether you or I would isn't really relevant to whether someone else should, or whether someone else could. Postulating that isn't a call for sexism or objectification, but merely a call for not excluding costume pieces which could support it. I, personally, happen to be a great proponent of open expression. If people want to use this expression to be sexist ********, then let them. I simply won't have anything to do with it, but it's their subscription, their time, their characters.

You seem to be coming from the stance - and correct me if I'm wrong - that people wanting or making sexist costumes is somehow wrong and people should be ashamed of this. I disagree with this on a fundamental level. If people want to make sexist costumes, let them. If that's what they want in their entertainment, let them have it. Players aren't the issue. What the art team makes and, moreover, what the art team DOESN'T make is.

"He's a good guy, he's just sexist" is pretty much still this. I don't know whether to call it damning with fine praise or just masking attacks as compliments, but it doesn't sit well with me.

I'm probably the last person to talk about being nice or polite, especially given my posting history, but it's generally my belief that keeping the forums a nice, friendly place where people feel comfortable enough to open up and share their ideas is a good thing. Personally, I'd never consider speaking in favour of Furry artwork on any other game's forum but this, just because I know it's an "easy to hate" target that will get me mocked and ignored. That's why the City of Heroes community is different. We're tolerant of people's vices and virtues and look for ways to incorporate both in the game.

Sure, if someone's being an *** an making a mess of the forums, then kick 'im in the shins, metaphorically speaking. I'll be right there with you. But when someone makes a relatively reasoned post, it just feels... Mean-spirited to cut them down like this. I know that's not what you were trying to do, but it comes off like this.

I should point out that I'm not really making this point entirely on MOO's behalf, or because I feel he's hurt. Like I said, it's just a principle thing with me. I don't like seeing people accused of things in what I consider to be an unfair way. In this case, it's even more than that, because what I hate more than anything else is reading statements into people's words that they didn't actually say. Few things get under my skin these days, but posts starting with "So you're saying that..." are one of the few still remaining. I've actually put people who continually twist my words on ignore just because I'm developing an ulcer from reading their posts.

I don't believe you're lying, if that's what you took from it. I believe you understand what he's saying, but believe he means more than he says. I generally consider reading a statement as something significantly different than what it says on face value is a deliberate misreading. That doesn't mean it's wrong (for passive-aggressive people, it's downright necessary), but it's far, far too easy to read into a person's words something the person never intended to say. As I said - I've had this happen to me so many times I just want to punch people over the Internet when they do that to me.

I get that you believe it's clearly said, but I simply don't see it in a straight reading.

Let me ask you this, then: If you knew what he meant, then why pick on something he didn't mean to say and chastise him on it when it was sideways of the topic and thread and general point? That'd be like me saying that after I found Blasters to be garbage, I realised how great Brutes were, and then went on to make a whole post about how great they are... And then you come along and criticise me for misrepresenting the worth of Blasters (that's happened before, actually). Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm not, but that's not the point.

Those of us who make walls of text tend to "adorn" our post with hyperbole, embellishment and sometimes even outright fabrications, not to make the occasional choice done in poor taste. That's just how that goes. Read enough of my post and you'll invariably find I've unintentionally said something racist or sexist or just downright stupid. The other day, someone sent me a PM that a link I'd posted as leading anime jet packs instead lead to a desktop stripper site just because I'd goofed when doing a Google search. These things happen, but if they're not the point, are they really that important? It just feels to me like we're trying to re-educate people on how to live their lives even if their lives aren't relevant to what they're saying.

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I don't MEAN to be the bad guy, here or elsewhere, and I know it's far from my job to police the forums. Oh, god, is it far from it! I have a whole collection of "post deleted" messages from a whole host of forum moderators, and I even got into an argument with a mod one time. I just really want to keep the boards as friendly and comfortable as possible, because that, to me, is what fosters the particular brand of goofy creativity that sets our community apart from the rest.