Samuel_Tow

That's my problem with them. They're not exclusive to VIPs, they're exclusive to people who can justify the gamble, and those don't have to be VIPs. When things like this happen, I start to question precisely what perks my VIP subscription is bringing me, and I'm running out of answers.

That's where I stand, as well. I want to buy these costume packs with points and, by extension, with real money. But I can't, because I refuse to buy all the assorted crap that comes in the gambling packs. Let me buy the sets, and I will. Make me have to roll on them, and I won't bother.

I wouldn't go with "vastly," but I'm OK with female characters having more costume options than male characters. For one, females have just one model to the male's two, and while there are few unique pieces between male and huge, that still gives them a far bigger variety of body shapes. For another, men are largely restricted to male clothes and concepts, whereas women are largely culturally accepted as wearing both male and female clothes, thus they have more concepts to offer.

So, yeah. More costume pieces for women is just fine by me.

And I was serious, too. I would have no problem with a business model which emphasised a specific business practice for early releases, but offered an eventual out if I were willing to trade enough time in return. In fact, if you look at the in-game Market, you'll find plenty of clear evidence that impatience sells, and it sells at a ridiculously high price.

Given that the "worth" of an item is unique to the person judging it, that assessment is valid for a given non-zero estimated worth for consumables, which I simply don't share. That's a complicated way to say I refuse to buy consumables. They could give me that stuff for free and I'd refuse to take it. My reasons for this notwithstanding, this greatly changes the return I get out of these packs for what is effectively a dollar.

Let me put things in perspective. Recently, I spent right around 80 Euro on a Nerf N-Strike Longshot CS 6, and I did this without much of a second thought and much of a feeling of regret. I'm not going to spend a dollar on inspirations and enhancements. Ever.

That's assuming these are worth 90 points to begin with.

Of course, that's what I'm saying. Take your typical, classical RPG, for instance. When you arrive in a new town, you could go ahead and speak with everyone. If it's a good RPG, everyone would have something interesting to say and a few people will have something for you to do. You COULD do this, but you don't HAVE to. You could simply go straight to the people giving you "quests" and do those. You'd probably miss on a lot of the context and have very little idea of what's going on in the larger world, but if you choose this option, chances are you either don't care anyway or already know this.

This, to me, is good design. Give the player the freedom to immerse himself in as much or as little story as he wants. To my eyes, everybody wins. Story writers aren't constrained by the need for brevity as people will have chose to devote time and attention to the read and players don't need to "click next" without reading like like illiterate deathmongers. Everybody wins.

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Again, though, that's still separate from complexity of mission design. And I really don't want to disparage your preferences. I respect that that's simply what you like, and just have to disagree on basis of preference. I like simpler games that I don't have to think about ALL the time, so that I can get in a zone. I don't think that's something that can be reasoned around.

Doesn't that infer that any visual style, irrespective of what it actually is, constitutes a controversy? I'd go on to specify "any visual style different from ours," but City of Heroes spawns rather quite a few styles to the point where describing it as just having ONE seems inaccurate.

Rob Leifeld aside (I actually like his artwork), there's nothing inherent in the anime style that's dependent on specific visuals. I know you're aware, but anime is not defined by giant eyes, spiky hair or bad dubs. In fact, with its cross into 3D, the anime style is currently one of the most realistic-looking out there, despite its bizarre themes, and the latest Final Fantasy games are nothing if not evidence to this.

When people ask to borrow from anime, they're not asking to hacksaw piece off and staple them to this game. We are typically asking for broader conceptual constructs. "Big swords" is, more often than not, a concept associated with anime for no reason other than that's just where it appears most often, but it's not something that's alien to comic books just because it's appeared in Japan. Anime is not a "disease" and concepts that have appeared in anime are not "tainted," yet that's precisely how people treat them. It's to the point where I have to pick my words carefully, because if I avoid any mention of anime when describing a proposed concept, I meet with general acceptance, whereas if I own up and quote my inspiration, I meet with scorn and mockery in large part.

See, I think this is where the disconnect occurs. I'm one of the "lore hounds" who will read every clue, every contact interaction and, against my better judgement, every dialogue option I'm given to say. But "lore" and "gameplay complexity" aren't the same thing. Lore can be explained to me, and in many places it actually is, such as Akharist's writings or Prometheus' monologue. I appreciate having this lore because I want to know it, but I don't necessarily want my actual gameplay ruined to learn it.

And that's what all the complexities you mention do to my gameplay - they ruin the game for me. Not in a big way, of course, not like a showstopper bug or a HORRIBLE plot point *coughoriginofpowerscough* but they do nothing but get in my way and keep me from playing the game.

Text is easy to budget. If a mission drops eleventy clues on me, that's fine. I'll read them all at the same time when I leave. I can't do that with a dialogue tree, ESPECIALLY when I'm getting ambushed mid-way through the conversation. Not all clues make sense to be read at the end of the mission, as some of them say things to the effect of "You just triggered an alarm and will be ambushed." Reading this long after I've defeated said ambush is pointless, and it just leaves me scratching my head as to why I was ambushed at the time.

First Ward really drove this home, because all the content in there expects me to pay attention to the lore at all times. And I BETTER pay attention or I won't have any idea what the Funk and Wagnalls' going on in the story or why anything is happening. Around 3/4 of the way through First Ward, I realised that I DREADED clicking on things or speaking with people because I knew - I KNEW - that as soon as I did, something would happen and I'd have to read at the speed because enemies would spawn on top of me mid-sentence.

Story and gameplay complexity are not the same thing, and a player looking for story isn't necessarily looking for cutscenes, ambushes or conversations. A player could simply be looking for facts and knowledge, not a dynamic, elaborate experience. I could, if I were so inclined, read up on this stuff from ParagonWiki, but that's just cheating. Even so, I still prefer to read up on my history in-game at my leisure than to have plot thrust upon me when I have three ambush waves on me or at times when I really want to kill stuff instead of have control yanked out of my hands and power recharge graphics screwed up on my end for the next minute.

Hardly. It was either I3 or I4 that introduced many of the more maligned types of missions like hostage escort, object defence, running bosses and simu-clicks. I took one look at the list and my reaction was "No! No! Take it back!" Having played them, my reaction was to blow my top and post many angry things. Some time later, I tried to stop Agent Crimson from escaping and I don't think I ever wanted to see an "interesting" mission ever again.

I was never silent about my desire for a simpler game that's easier to play in a zone. I recall as far back as I1 or I2 saying these exact words multiple times: "All I want out of this game is more 5th Column to kill." this statement holds true to this day, though I'll appreciate any non-gimmick enemy ground in the place of the 5th Column, who actually got replaced shortly after I started saying this.

As far as I'm concerned, the simpler a mission or arc is, the better it will be in the long run. There's nothing I hate more than to sit through conversations when I already know how they will end. Sure, from time to time, those are interesting to have, but that's one or two per story arc, not one or two per mission.

Gimmick missions and gimmicks in general have always bothered me. Since my very first time going through the Rikti War Zone, I've resented having NPC "helpers" because they're idiots and damn near impossible to control. And it seems like all but one or two missions in all five story arcs in that zone have at least one person tagging along with you. A lot of the old "revamped" content from when the horrible new mission types came out seems to have concentrated in the upper 20s and lower 30s, so there's a very large amount of "special" missions in there that just grate on my nerves. I honestly want to punch whoever thought giving me a 90-minute timed mission with four objectives to click simultaneously was anything but a horrible idea.

And with Going Rogue and Praetoria, it's worse than ever. Missions that ask me to spend no more than two missions inside an instance and fight nothing, missions that consist of nothing but conversations inside an empty instance, missions that start, have me walk five feet in, throw eleventy billion missions at me then end within spitting distance of the front door... And now it's even worse with the Ongoing Tutorial Missions which are over half padding. I'm sick and tired of speaking with people inside my missions and I haven't had to do that in over a month. It's that bad.

Any kind of mission is doable on a first playthrough when I don't know what it's about. But am I seriously expected to jump through the same hoops time after time after time, to watch the same cutscene that contradicted itself the first time (Frostfire addresses the player in his cutscene, then proceeds to be surprised when he meets the player in the game) and read the same volumes of text when I already know what they say? Because that's just busywork. It was fun once, but I've already done it. Just let me get back to the game.

This is probably where we simply see things differently. You appreciate this system and the variety it brings. I don't. In speaking of simplifying status effects, I mean that quite literally: I want to remove much of the complexity behind status effects and smash them all together into the same system. Obviously, that would hamper variety, but again - I don't appreciate this variety to begin with.

That's part of why I don't believe this will ever happen - it changes the system in a fundamental way that might well yank people's playstyles from under them. That's obviously not OK, especially since the system is seen as working just fine, thus my arguments are hypothetical at best, pointless at worst.

That said, if you want to entertain the notion, it is actually possible to string status effects on a linear scale if we accept that many of them will be bastardised and some outright rejected in their entirety. I'd start with immobilization which breaks, which turns into unbreakable immobilization with a breakable hold component, which then turns into an unbreakable hold component with enough mag, which can then turn permanent or extremely long. It puts a damper on opening with control, obviously, as it would take multiple applications to get back to the same level, and that's an obvious problem as a change from the existing system.

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Sideways of that, you say the status effects system is designed to stack, but my question is "how much?" Most bosses can be two-shot held, and often one-shot held with a critical hold or Domination. Yes, status effects are expected to stack, but just a little, which is why the interval of expected protections is somewhere between 3 and 6, or at most double that. But what about something with mag 50 status protection? What about something with mag 100? 1000?

We can kill an enemy who has 100 000 hit points and ridiculous resistances AND regeneration on top of that even though our attacks don't break 400-500 damage, yet we can't really ever be expected to break through 100 mag protection, can we? I mean, seriously - what would you need in order to stack 100 points of status effects all at the same time, and how long could you keep this up?

I get that we're not supposed to be able to permahold things, but I really wish we were allowed to. Not just perma-hold them and chip-kill them. I mean perma-hold them and leave them held literally permanently, such that they count as a defeat. THAT is what I want to see in at least one game that's not so old I no longer remember it.

Though I will admit that Crusader: No Regret had a cool "Cryo Rifle" that turned people into ice statues which you could later break.

Yes, the old hostages. I HAAAAAAAAATE escorting hostages out of maps. It's pointless, aimless busywork that forces my Stalkers to turn off their Hide and just wastes my time and patience. If I'm going to escort someone, then have that someone pitch in. And don't fail my mission of he dies after you spawn three ambushes on top of me at the same time (thank you, Sister Airlia; I'm sure Ghost Widow's just fine).

Since the beginning of time, the team's attempts to make mission structure "more interesting" have done little more than piss me off to no end. Protection objectives, escaping bosses, simu-click missions and worse. As far as I'm concerned, the simpler the gameplay is, the more fun I can have with it.

Let's look at "status" as a counterpart to "damage." When you deal damage, it has a type, and different enemies resist different types of damage in different amounts. However, all types of damage reduce a single stat (hit points) and lead to a single eventual outcome (defeat). Having just one type of control doesn't actually mean you have just one type of control, but rather that all control effects affect the same metre (I like to call it "status") and lead to the same eventual effect (held if we're being realistic, defeat in my dreams).

I don't really mean to eliminate different status effect types, different themes and so forth, I just do want them to stack with each other the same way damage does. You say that having different, non-stacking control effects is a benefit, but that's only true if their effects are immediate and difficult to resist by our enemies. If every minion had mag 10 status protection, every lieutenant mag 20 and every boss mag 30, having non-stacking control effects would turn from a benefit to a serious liability.

I could, similarly, argue that having different types of non-stacking damage is a benefit because we could have many deadly attacks. A good example of this is actually Earth 2160. There, units have four separate health bars: hull damaged by physical weapons, electronics damaged by EMP weapons, crew damaged by x-ray and other radiation-based weapons and mind damaged by psionics. A tank with full hull could still be "defeated" if the crew inside were microwaved, but a tank at 1% crew, 1% mind and 1% electronics that's currently under fire by a conventional gun is still going to have 100% hull and be just as resistant as if it were brand new. This is why having separate damage types that affect separate health status bars is a liability - when fighting a single enemy, you're effectively fighting three of them because your three damage types don't help each other in any way. That's good when some enemies could be one-shotted by certain types of damage so having more means you have a wider toolkit, but when all your enemies are literal and figurative tanks that take many, many shots to kill, having a lot of one type of damage is always superior.

Control effects in this game are binary by design. Because there are so many types of them, the game makes it easy for enemies to be affected, as no-one is expected to have the capability to stack much of anything. They are binary exactly because it's so easy to apply a hold's full effect on an enemy. And by "full effect," I'm not talking about duration. That's really not something I feel is that interesting to play with. I'm talking about the actual effect. Hit a Wolf Spider TacOps with Char and he'll be held every time. Hit a Night Widow with Char and she'll be held never at all. You could try stacking it if you build for recharge, but how many times can you conceivably stack it?

Now contrast this with something like Power Bolt. I shoot Night Wolf Champion with Power Bolt and he takes damage. Only a little damage since he's resistant, but he'll take a while to regenerate from that damage. In the mean time, I can keep hitting him over and over again. I may have to use Power Bolt 20 times, I may have to use it 50 times, but eventually I will win, because the damage I do doesn't expire in 10-20 seconds. In fact, imagine a game where every attack was Spectral Wounds and healed back up to full within 10-20 seconds of you inflicting it, so the only way to kill an enemy is to either one-shot him or burst-kill him within seconds. THAT is a binary combat system.

The reason I want only one type of status effect is so that status effects can always stack and have the basic ability to overcome high levels of protection, so that enemies can then be given high levels of protection. Once the game supports fair ways for high levels of protection to be overcome, our own can then start being overcome without it feeling like the AI is cheating.

Status resistance is, to be frank, wholly uninteresting to me. Whether I'm held for 2 seconds or 6 seconds, my Blazing Aura is still dead, my Hot Feet has been disabled and I have been held. I'd rather be held as rarely as I am defeated, but when I am held, that I feel my defences have been overcome, rather than like I was just cheated.

What I meant is that if you don't like Akharist's infodumps, you don't have to read them and your understanding of the plot on a factual level won't suffer. The Envoy of Shadows wants to bring about the end of the world, the Circle of Thorns want to help him, but one sole traitor is helping you stop it. The "why" of it and the "behind the scenes" stuff is put away in Akharist's writings (which I rather like), meaning you can have your walls of text and infodump AND still keep the core story concise for those who don't want or already know the side details.

Mine are still pretty talky. If you ever want a sample, give "The PDA That Knew" or "The Greater Evil" a shot and let me know. I ran against the text field limits a lot there and had to improvise to fit in more exposition in unorthodox ways

Here's the problem, though - where you see synergy, I see limitations. Yes, some sets work well with each other, but suppose my concept calls for a set combo which doesn't? My foray into control ATs was a Gravity/Energy Dominator. Energy's primary form of mitigation is knockback, which either Crushing Field or Gravity Distortion Field suppresses.

To be quite honest, I feel that creating artificial limitations for the sole reason of promoting specific approaches is not the best of approaches. I say this to explain why I feel having a single status effect type might help things along.

If all stuns contribute is the thematic of a person being smacked silly, then holds already do that. In fact, holds like Knockout Blow and Seismic Smash already have all of the graphics of a stun, just without letting the enemy affected walk around. It actually took me nearly a full year of playing a Stone/Stone Brute back in the dawn of CoV to figure out that Seismic Smash wasn't actually a stun.

I have nothing against having different status effects look different from each other, but having many types of them means it's harder to stack them.

Heh, I've still been able to put walls of text in my Architect arcs

More to the point, though, this game can't be treated like a movie. You can't explain too much, you can't show too much, you can't explore characters too much. That's not because I don't want it, the genre simply isn't right for it. When you DO try to do too much over text and a limited interaction engine, you end up boring your audience as that sort of characterisation and exposition just takes up so much space.

A movie can tell a lot with very simple visuals. A character can appear sad just by how his or her actor behaves, but over text, you have to spend paragraphs describing very simple things, like the way he sighed or the way she looked around. A novel can afford to do this. A game can't. For the most part, it's smartest to just avoid exposition wherever possible and rely on first hand accounts, then cut those first hand accounts down to conversation length pieces.

A random example would be how to introduce the existence of a mind control device of some sort. You can either have someone pause the game and dump exposition on you, Matrix Revolutions style, or you can have two NPCs in the mission talk to each other. One goes "Can we really control peoples minds? I mean, really?" and the other responds "Well, they said they tested it and it works, so I guess so." If you need to ensure that the player has seen this, include a two-sentence clue to that particular spawn which says "You heard two soldiers talk about a mind control device. They seemed to believe it actually works." It's not ideal, of course, but it's a way to put the information in there without having to extend your contact's briefing or introducing dialogue trees.

Long-winded, elaborate, intricate exposition and character exploration is still a good idea, but done as separate, non-central art pieces. Akharist's writings on the Oranbegan war are a great example. Every other mission in the Envoy of Shadows arc, you get an Akharist excerpt written in his pretentious style. It tells of the story of the ancient Oranbegans, but that's all flavour text and backstory. If you simply didn't read it, you'd still be able to follow the central plot without much problem. You'd miss out on some great writing and not be as immersed into the living world, but that's up to the player to decide. And if you've already read those texts and know what they say, you don't have to waste time re-reading them.

The game's main storyline doesn't need to be that complex. Any complexities necessary need to be moved to external, non-mandatory sources. That way, completionists and story junkies will go out of their way to seek them out on their first playthrough and those who just want to kill stuff or have run the content a dozen times already can move on without much trouble.

I don't think it would have helped by much. David was on the right track when he said they'll aim for narrower themes. I'd much rather to they focus on doing one thing for all character and then another thing for all characters than bits and pieces from one theme and bits and pieces from another theme sharing a set that's only tangentially about either.

We can get broader variety with more sets, as opposed to wider sets.

Holds stack with other holds, but a hold can't stack with a stun because they apply different types of magnitudes. What this means is that, instead of a toolbox of tools that he can stack, a controller gets a toolbox of tools that only really stack with themselves. Gravity Control, for instance, can only ever stack Gravity Distortion with Gravity Distortion field or Crush with Crushing field, and it has nothing to stack Wormhole with.

By contrast, a Blaster (much as I dislike the AT) can use any attack on any enemy and still contribute towards the one effect damage eventually leads to - death. There is only one kind of death and every type of damage contributes to it. There's more than one way to fall under the effect of control, however, and each type of control only stacks with other control effects of its own type. So instead of being a control powerhouse being able to pull all his might together and hold some tough foes by attrition, a controller is given effect that are not just mutually exclusive, but often mutually detremental. An Earth Controller who wants to use Earthquake for its mitigation but accidentally hits all his enemies with Stone Cages has just screwed up his own powers. By himself.

To be honest, I feel that games of this type only really need a single control effect, which is "hold" and everything else can be debuffs like slows, damage resistance debuffs and so forth. If we had only one control effect, a Controller would have a large collection of redundant tools which he can stack to overcome high levels of protection, thus allowing enemies to HAVE high levels of protection and also allowing bosses to have much higher protection than minions.

Right now, status effects are instant, ultimately only secondary. You can control things, yes, but not for long and you eventually still need damage to kill things. I'd like to see controls be made less instant, but much more deadly. Even if you can't kill things through direct control, I still want to see both NPCs and PCs have the ability inflict ridiculously long control effects, but ONLY if you stack enough first. Let's look at an example:

Suppose there's only one type of hold, and all our hold powers are mag 2. An enemy has mag 3 protection and mag 7 "critical protection." Anything below 3 doesn't affect him, so a single hold does nothing. Two holds bring you up to mag 4, so the enemy is held for as long as you maintain a magnitude of over 3 on him. Slap a few more holds, however, and you build up to mag 8. At this point, the enemy is held as long as even a single hold of ANY mag remains on him. In essence, you've broken his resistance and he's easy to control from here on out, until you let him go and he regains his senses. We can go even further and give gim mag 11 "final protection." Once you exceed that, the enemy is not only held from ANY hold, but the duration of all holds applied to him is doubled.

Now, that's just a concept I came up with in 60 seconds, so I'm sure it's broken in a number of ways, but my point is that if we could stack holds, we could design enemies who become increasingly more crippled and increasingly more vulnerable the more holds you put on them. After a while, they're held. A while after that, they're held more. A while after that, they're permaheld. If we want to be diabolical, a while after that an they defeated through status effects alone. THAT is the kind of control system I want to see. I just don't think there's any room for it in this game. Control effects are support, pure and simple.

Those were just examples, really. What I meant to say is that there's nothing wrong with having a simple if big mission that has only a single objective. We don't need cutscenes in every mission, we don't need dialogues in every mission, we don't need gimmicks in every mission. In a lot of ways, I'm perfectly fine with the game telling me to go somewhere and do something and simply providing me with a reason to do so. That's more than enough. I don't need scripted events and complex mechanics. Tell me what I need to do, tell me where I need to go to do it and tell me why I'm doing it. That's enough.

I've always been of the opinion that story is best delivered through context rather than shoved into your face. What I mean by this is we can have side characters who provide exposition or background if we choose to explore that option, we can have extra, non-critical clues that hold extra information and, more than anything else, the narrative itself doesn't have to explain everything to the last detail. It can suggest, infer and allude, and that will be just enough.

Recently, I watched Aliens, and I recall a bit of "cheeky exposition" that really impressed me. We open a scene with Bishop giving a more or less three sentence explanation about Xenomorph biology, which he has been working on for the better part of the movie thus far. Rippley lets him finish, then confronts him with: "That's great, Bishop, but it doesn't help us get out of here." Yes, Bishop's exposition was pointless from the standpoint of the characters, but it made sense. He's an android fascinated with Xenomorph biology, it's natural that he'd feel it's important to talk about, plus the audience needed to know that, but the movie didn't have to devise a scene where this had to be the subject of conversation. A throwaway line is enough to explain it, and it fits with the theme just fine.

A lot of the narrative in City of Heroes can be pulled off the main briefings and out of the lengthy conversation and put away in clues, NPC comments, side characters and basic allusions. If the game's writers accepted that this game will never really be "cinematic" and worked with its design, the stories would flow much more smoothly.

Also:

City of Heroes is a game which promotes replayability. As such, you HAVE to expect that your players will run your content more than just once or twice. They will run it five times, ten times, fifteen times and more. You cannot afford to create content that's GRRRATE! for a first time playthrough, but then becomes unbearable to replay because of how it's assembled. Dialogue trees are fun once but a chore thereafter, an as such need to be kept to a minimum and only ever used when there's an actual decision to make. Conversing with people inside missions takes a lot of time and is very fiddly, and as such needs to be used sparingly. Scripted events, empty missions, runaround deliveries and "plot twists" lose their lustre once you know they're coming, and they too need to be handled with care.

Don't work for first impressions, at least not past level 10. Work for third impressions, instead. In fact, once upon a time, it was said that the game was deliberately made such that you could never experience it all on a single character. So why not weave stories such that we can't appreciate them fully in one playthrough. Mysteries that you can only really get after a few playthroughs, hidden connections, obscure references, interconnectedness between stories, that sort of thing. Don't blow your load on first impressions, because it's replayability substance that rules most of the time anyway.

You're missing the point. There's nothing wrong with corsets. There's something wrong with corsets IN THESE SETS. There's a time and a place for frilly dresses, string corsets and spike stilettos. A "gunslinger" set ain't it. You got the corsets that you wanted. That's fine. I wanted gunslinger stuff for my girls, which is in the name of the set, yet I didn't get that. Maybe it's arrogant of me to say this, but I feel I had more right to expect coats and hats from a gunslinger set than you did to expect corsets.

Again, make a corset pack. Make a "fashion" pack. Make a period dress pack throughout history. I wouldn't mind. I may or may not buy it, but what's in it will make sense. But Saloon Girls are NOT gunslingers, and as such have no place in a gunslinger set.

And again, this set has the unfortunate implications that boys can be action heroes and wear cool clothes while girls are helpless victims and have to wear cute clothes. And that's the more positive interpretation.

I would hope there is more than four hours' worth of content, to be honest. I'm really not interested in over-complex Incarnate content, but more just a large volume of it. A few story arcs on the calibre of World Wide Red (last I checked, that's around 14 missions) would be just fine. World Wide Red itself tend to take me two or three days to complete, so around 8-10 hours, with clearing every mission included. And that's just Crimson's arc. He also has seven "mini-arcs," each with around three instances, so around 21 missions on top of his 14 for World Wide Red. That's the LEAST I'd expect from solo Incarnate content, and that corresponds to just one existing character.

Again - I'm not expecting poetry and theatre mission after mission, and I have no problem being told to go into a huge instance and kill everything I can target. I'm perfectly fine with missions that have large maps and simple objectives. I rather enjoy "Defeat boss and crew" or "click 21 glowies" and indeed even love the "Save 21 mystics from Oranbega." Missions don't need to be complex or expensive, they just need to be numerous. Simple, straight-forward, laconic missions are much easier to replay when it comes to that.