Samuel_Tow

Yeah, I'd place it at close to 180 - 200 000.

Speaking of multiple travel powers, I have one such right now. By concept, she was intended to have a sort of anime super-fast slide (hence, Spuer Speed + Prestige Power Slide), but because of the technology I ended up writing for her, she ended up taking Super Jump towards level 50, as well. I rarely use Super Jump these days, just because it's supposed to be a last resort for her, but I greatly enjoy having it.

I have multiple teleporting characters for whom I would love to take Fly, if power choices permitted me to do so. That's not very often the case, but it's something I want to do nevertheless.

Here's the thing - MY freedom of choice and expression has increased. For the longest time, I felt compelled to pick powers based on what my builds needed, or at the very least pick powers I had some use for. Now that that's no longer the case and I have more slots to go around, I get to pick what I WANT to pick, as opposed to what I HAVE to pick. Multiple travel powers, garbage pool attacks, Presence and so forth. I pick these because I WANT them, not in the slightest because I feel I need them.

In short, I now have the choice to pick the powers I want, when I didn't before.

I never saw that as a common complaint at all. It was common to a few specific people, but of any complaint was given to the low level content, it was always that people have done it dozens of times and are sick and tired of it.

I will agree with you that the new beginning content is pretty cool the first time through. That, however, fails to address the actual complaint of the low-level content - it's repetitive and people who make lots of alts see it dozens of times over. That was made even WORSE by reducing the number of tasks available. And believe me - the new missions are NOT good enough to replace five separate paths.

As far as experience progression goes, I'm all for it being faster. Recently, I deleted three level 50 Blasters to reroll them as a Scrapper, a Brute and a Mastermind, I deleted a level 50 Scrapper to reroll her as a Brute, and come Titan Weapons, I'll delete another level 50 Scrapper to remake her as a Titan Weapons Brute. In addition to those, I have what is probably at this point 60 separate characters, and increasingly fewer of them are 50 at this point. As far as I'm concerned, the easier it is for me to get ALL of those to 50, the better.

Check. OK, now how do I attach this to my character so I can access it from inside the game without having to remember where on which of my hard drives I put it?

My experience has been the contrary. The characters I've usually received compliments for have been the ones with least to say, yet still using 1000+ characters to say it. Specifically, Grimwall's story started as something I wrote in vague first person narrative because I honestly didn't have a good idea of what to write, and she has received numerous compliments. I suspect this is mostly because lack of content meant I had room to stretch my legs and use the kind of verbose prose that's terrible at making a point, but good at setting a mood, and hers is one emotion, longing and hope.

By contrast, characters I'd written a long time ago whose bios mostly come down to a dry description or a basic sequence of events rarely get much notice, even from people I directly ask to read them and give me an opinion. While I generally don't expect people to read my bios, what I want those who do to find in them is not information, but rather an emotion. At the end of the day, it's all fan fiction that no-one cares about. Unless you have an amazingly ground-breaking idea (and I rarely do), no-one cares about your backstory. I try to make something that leaves an impact, and will sacrifice plot points in order to achieve this.

That it does. As I replay old characters, occasionally I'll run into one I made in I16 when the bio text editor was bugged and removed new line characters altogether. Their bios are a right mess of a wall of text that I've had to cut down to at most 600-800 characters lest they become impossible to read. I've tried fixing those up, but ended up scrapping them and writing from scratch. They were THAT bad. I also remember when new lines cost us four symbols instead of one, when you had to manually write in <br> or the editor would simply disregard your new lines. That may have been restricted to the Architect, however, I don't remember.

Point is, yes - paragraphs help, and they help greatly.

They only play on the jump-double-spin claw attack. I want to say Ripper, but I'm not sure what it's called for Blood Widows.

As far as I'm concerned, it is solely for myself. If people want to random-read my bio, great. If they don't, meh. If someone specifically wants to know what my character is about, he'll read it one way or another, and if someone doesn't care, he won't read it at all.

Again, who's going to read a bio has no relevance to a character owner who is not interested reader traffic.

So don't read it. What does your willingness to read my bio have to do with my desire to write it? Not everyone writes text to show it off. Some of us write text for ourselves. So if you don't want to read longer bios... Well, don't. I won't mind. So long as I can actually write it, I honestly don't give a toss who reads it.

I've actually suggested gloves, myself... Way back when. However, claws as gloves have a very specific problem - claws need to animate at the wrist in order to look right. The way the Claws animations are made right now, be they open or closed fist, the arm is often out of line with the forearm, as the forearm is just locked to the elbow and upper arm. You can see this clearly with the Vanguard claws, which lock to the elbow and not the arm. The Claws animations are designed to strike with the blades of hand-mouned claws, so when you mount claws on the forearm-elbow, many of the animations have you hitting enemies with the flat of the blade.

The reason for this is simple: The attack has the fingers of your closed fist pointing in the direction of the swipe, but the fist is rotated from the arm, which is pointing to the swipe direction sideways, causing an awkward sideways "slap" with your claws. Substituting the entire glove for a "claw glove" that isn't animated at the wrist would cause you to jab your thumbs into people, as opposed to swiping at them with your finger claws.

I, myself, was not aware of this problem until I got the Vanguard Pack and actually saw the Vanguard Claws in action. Have a look:



The hand turns, but the claws do not follow, so you end up with a claw that sits on the side of your hand and attacks people with the flat of its blade. And that's not just one animation out of nine, almost all of them are like this. That's one reason why I completely nixed my idea of a Vanguard Claws Stalker - it just looks goofy the way the powers are animated. If the claws don't animate at the wrist, they look awkward.

Exactly. Kinda strange

That said, comic books can get away with this because these characters don't actually have to walk to their destinations. They have transportation provided to them in the form of group jets or even conventional vehicles. I think the larger problem is what to make of it in City of Heroes where we're always on foot. Suppose a bank robber got into a car and fled. What would Batman do? Get into his Batmobile, probably. He certainly won't take off on foot, now will he call a cab. Well, maybe a Batcab, but that's besides the point.

But more is even more.

Unless you imagine those are doable within a week's time week after week, you'll have to settle for getting them about once a month to once per couple of months, as we have been right now. Paragon Studios' spastic schedule of putting something new on the Paragon Market every week is vastly outstripping their resources to produce decent material, so inevitably garbage will end up on the store. They need to stop rushing things to market every week and focus more on quality.

I get the idea behind it - put $5 or $10's worth of "stuff" on the Market every week and people will spend money. However, there is a point after which this starts to feel like a ripoff, specifically after the quality of "stuff" starts nosediving. Sometimes, it might be better to put new items on the Market more rarely, but make sure that those new items are actually worth paying for.

No, they should not have. Not being able to join TFs in progress is one of the TF system's biggest faults, both because you have to recruit before hand and because if people drop, you can't finish. The original restriction on joining TF teams in progress was not a balancing feature, it's a side effect of the development team expecting people to run TFs over multiple sessions. They made the teams static so that people who logged out would not be kicked from the team, which also meant that people could not be added to a TF team in progress.

Joining TF teams in progress is something that should happen, and all TFs need to be put in the LFG Queue. Its primary benefit is ease of access, and that's indispensable. Easily the WORST part of any team task is the recruitment process. Even the worst teams, even the biggest failures, even the most horrible teaming experiences pale before half an hour of sitting on my hands waiting for something to happen.

The LFG Queue needs to be fixed so it works, not sidestepped like people are doing.

And as I said earlier in my post, you're asking for customization that doesn't exist yet. Granted, we've heard tell of Titan Weapons being able to swap animations on the fly based on whether you have Momentum or not, but that uses the "state" mechanic, which is part of the combat system. We still have no precedent to suggest that this kind of customization is possible based on weapon choice, and I'm actually somewhat dubious THAT kind of customization is what Titan Weapons uses.

Adapting animations is a trivial task that just requires time and someone to do it. Actually having these animations be appropriate to the weapon in question, on the other hand, is a problem that I'm not aware of a solution to, based on what we've seen in-game systems do.

Let me expand on this a little bit, just to explain why this is such a big deal. Have you ever seen suggestions that we be able to fire, say, our Ice Blasts out of a futuristic freeze rifle of some sort? How about suggestions that we be able to fire Assault Rifle attacks out of a pair of pistols? How about suggestions to be able to customize Archery to instead have our characters throw javelins? I have (and I've made a few of them, myself), and the one key problem that pulls them all together is I don't believe this is currently even possible. Granted, turning bow attacks into javelin attacks would require far more animation work than turning closed-fist claws into open-fist claws, but the fundamental problem remains the same - the animation system can't alter its power animations based on weapon selection. It's a bit more complex than that, going into activation sequences and such, but that's the basic general problem.

Is it worth doing? Hell yes. I've said it many times that being able to pick our weapon class (including "no weapon") and having that be applicable to all or at least most powersets is one of the last big things the character editor has left to achieve, but if that's ever going to get made, I highly doubt Beast Claws will be the reason to invest in it. If ever we see this at all, I suspect we'll first see it in a powerset that's built around this, and then we may see it cloned around the other powersets.

I want this to happen as much as you do, but you need to recognise that this is not a simple case of swapping a few variables, or even as simple case of making a few animations. The animations are the easy bit. Making the system customizable enough to accomplish this is the real hurdle. You are frankly far better off simply asking for Beast Claws as a whole new powerset with some kind of eccentric gimmick, as that's considerably less work and requires considerably less new tech. In other words, it's a lot more likely to happen.

You need much more than that. For one, you need open-hand animations for claws, but much more than that you need a system which can alter a power's animation based on the weapon you have chosen. To the best of my knowledge, this functionality simply doesn't exist in this game. And if the argument is to make it happen, then that's really not a job for the art team, but more so for the programmers, and I'd wager it's far more complex and time-consuming than flipping a switch.

Thank you for that.

It's a lot better than I do most of the time. I sell salvage and recipes, on the market and off and still I often find myself unable to get a full set of DOs by level 12, let alone ++, let alone having 300 000 left over. I'm not sure what that test did right that I'm doing wrong, but I thought I was selling to the right stores.

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Speaking of "the right stores," it's high time we dropped the price disparity between stores of different origins, as well as time to stop "buy only" vendors from ripping players off at a tenth of the price they'd get by selling to the right store. Praetoria (I know, purchased content, bare with me) is especially bad about this, because it doesn't HAVE right stores. The Nova vendors are Training vendors, but there are no origin-appropriate vendors for anything there. What this means is you get massively ripped off on your enhancements sales.

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More than anything else, I feel SOs are the problem much more so than DOs. Even at the worst of times, I've been able to buy at least half a set of them. When it comes to SOs, I usually can't buy more than about half a dozen when the time comes, unless I've made a lucky Market sale.

And this fixes the LFG tool how, exactly?

The LFG Queue is a great idea in concept. The problem is that it just doesn't work. People don't use it since you can't do anything worthwhile as you wait, people mostly make pre-formed Trials, the function to join a Trial in progress has never worked once for me and it has no real feedback. "Average wait time: 5 minutes" it says, but that's a lie. Unless I can SEE a list of the people queueing and the teams that are forming out of it, I can't tell how long I'll have to wait.

Using the LFG queue while in an instance should be the highest priority.

Why not both? There's nothing to say they're mutually exclusive.

Travel powers need to be treated differently from other pool powers, because travel powers are, largely, non-combat abilities. They don't help you fight better, they help you get TO fights better. Travel powers are a solution to the time sink that is travel time, and as such need to be in a category of their own.

As a point of fact, I feel very strongly AGAINST putting travel powers in travel "pools" with combat-related powers as a general thing, and have felt the same way pretty much since 2004. In much simpler terms, I don't want to have to balance my ability to travel with my ability to fight, because all that means is I'm balancing performance against convenience, leading in turn to "balance by annoyance."

I like Champions' approach to having A travel power as a separate pick from your regular powers, and would like to see something like that implemented here. If you want multiples (like I did for Crash), THEN you have to pay with a power pick, but even then, I'd still like to see travel powers excised from their respective pools and possibly all put in the same pool called "travel."

We have 10 (well, 9) pools, and four of those are "travel" pools, thus imposing both a mechanical and conceptual limitation where one shouldn't exist. Well, should or shouldn't is a matter of opinion, so let's say where one doesn't have to exist. I'm not talking about other pools, nor even about other powers in travel pools. I'm talking about PURELY powers related to travel.

Which isn't what people actually said. "Beast claws" is impossible for Claws, but there's nothing to say you can't have Beast Claws as their own powerset. I mean, we already have Street Justice and Titan Weapons as proof that new powersets don't have to reinvent the wheel, thematically speaking. If you want bestial claws, ask for bestial claws and stick to it.

None of us could. "A study" that would in the slightest be meaningful for the general population of the game would include, if not the total population of the game, then at least a sizeable amount of it, and by "population" I don't just mean people, I mean all the characters a player has. We haven't been given player numbers of late, but let's be conservative and call the game at 100 000 players, if we restrict ourselves to just VIPs. Even if we're conservative and give those players just a handful of characters, say two or three (and many have upwards of 50) that's still hundreds of thousands of people who would need to be tracked down, "infoed" and written down. That's thousands of manhours of work just so that I can "win" an Internet argument?

Where do you get off being patronising and condescending that I haven't done it? Unless you are interested in doing the work yourself, then strutting your stuff here insisting that it COULD be done, but you can't be arsed to do it makes you... A bad person, let's put it like that and avoid me getting modsmacked twice in one day.

Or it would, if you had any way for us to travel back in time to do "a study" on people's characters prior to Inherent Stamina, which by my recollection was a year or so ago now, and that many people respecced out of on the day it went Live, embarking on a respec spree that saw many people thoroughly exhausted. It is functionally impossible to compare build variety between now and last year, because it is functionally impossible to examine build variety from last year unless we enlisted the help of Holsten Armitage.

The only people who would "could" know are those on the development team, and even then I'm not positive they track this kind of data. But if they did, they'd know. Sadly, I'm not on the development team, as can be inferred from the whiteness of my name.

And finally, no, I don't think you say this to make yourself appear smarter, and it's not working even if you were. I'm convinced you do this so that you can take a cheap shot at both sides of the argument while still trying to retain the moral high ground. The only thing players "could" know is the system. How the playerbase uses this system is no more knowable to any one single person than which American movie is most popular in India is knowable to any single Indian citizen without the aid of a nation-wide statistical poll, and even then I'm not sure the results would be realistic.

What I DO know is that the number of possible permutations of powers is greater now that we have more power picks than it was before Stamina. Whether that's more options to Remus or to you or Jack Emmert if he still plays is... Well, not terribly relevant. Unless there are reasons to believe that everyone is taking the same powers - and there aren't - then the system offering more choice is all that has any real relevance.

But, hey, go ahead and prove me wrong. Conduct a survey of several hundred thousand character builds (in-game, since only a small percentage of players come to the forums) and show me that you "could" know. I'm willing to be wrong if you're willing to waste your time to prove me wrong. That's what you're suggesting I do, after all, is it not?

I actually tried for a DFB trial villain-side about mid-day my time (so about 10 AM US time on a work day) and spent about 30-45 minutes chatting in help with I think one other person who was also queuing, until another person showed up, invited us and started broadcasting for more. My reason to join a DFB was because I was playing a "mute" character and wanted to skip the new contacts that ask me to speak with them, but the truth of the matter is I'd have gone farther in less time if I'd just street-hunted in that time.

Team balance honestly doesn't concern me. It never has. As long as there are enough people, anything is possible, and I ran said DFB with 6 people without a shadow of difficulty, to the point where a good two or three of us could stay behind to level up and the rest of the team would be to the end of the level by the time we were done. What keeps me from teaming isn't the specifics or the balance, it's the hassle of putting one together. The LFG Queue was intended, I suspect, to alleviate some of that. And if it worked, and if it worked from inside an instance, and if people actually used it, it would. But right now, it's like trying to play multiplayer on Section 8 - lots of empty servers that you have to join and hope someone else joins, too, and then you two have to mess around until more people join. In other words, it doesn't work.

It is what it is. I dislike time-gated content because I run content whenever I can be arsed to do so, and by the time I get around to it, it's out of season once more. Meh. If it were available all year round, I'd run that content from time to time, just like I run contemporary TFs from time to time. However, I suffer from an extreme case of anti-hype, meaning I avoid what's popular at the time and get around to it when its popularity wanes.

And if that existed as a solo-capable task, I'd do it. Probably multiple times. From what I hear, it was a lot of fun, but I simply wasn't in the mood for teaming at the time, doubly so for a holiday event. Meh.

I was actually really disappointed that we couldn't make overworld contacts for the Mission Architect. That was a let-down, because it made all the Architect feel like an old arcade game with no exploration, just instance after instance after instance, always cooped up in that one single room.

To be honest, I've often wished we had missions that somehow made us travel on foot from place to place. Say we're escorting an NPC who can't run and can't jump and we need to get him from point A to point B to point C to point D on a huge outdoor map. I remember back when I was playing games like Dungeon Siege or Gothic, and how just the act of travelling from place to place was an exciting adventure in itself. So I had to go from this town to that town, but the road takes me through a forest, through a cave, through a swamp and then through a goblin stronghold. It's the same in games like Left 4 Dead.

With City of Heroes as "travel light" as it is, all of our missions usually come down getting exactly where we need to go, skipping everything in the way, clicking an objective and then moving on. Actually having a classic style dungeon crawl and actually having reason to become familiar with the overworld would be very welcome, at least to me.

That's a very... "Convenient" position to take with no information available on what people want, but I see your point. Here's the thing, though - before Inherent Stamina, EVERYONE told you that Stamina was mandatory. It wasn't, but I don't recall seeing more than one or two people admit that. Now, people still claim that this pool is mandatory or that pool is indispensable, but here's the rub - it's never the same pool. Yeah, people still feel some things are mandatory, but since inherent Stamina, now-one can seem to agree on what is objectively mandatory. Instead, people have their favourites and they stick to them.

I say your position is convenient because you're not arguing power balance and power popularity, you're arguing what some specific person at some specific point might want. That, in all its incarnations, is irrelevant. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it is impossible to design such that the sensitivities and sensibilities of each and every single person are accounted for and catered to. There will always be people who end up errant of a change. That Inherent Stamina may have reduced the choices FOR SOME is irrelevant to the larger question of power balance. Stamina was the King and Queen of Cheese, it was the one "right" choice that reigned above all others. That was an objective observation, not subjective opinion. Removing it levelled the board. There are some powers seen by some people as somewhat better than some others, but that's specific to specific people and specific characters. There are no powers which are objectively epidemic, contrary to what Remus might insist.

Now, if you wanted to argue that there are certain powers which have now taken up the place of Stamina and in so doing simply replicated the problem, that would be a relevant complaint, but that's not the argument you're making. You just make the classic "you never know" argument that hinges on the whim of an undefined hypothetical person. No, we can never know, but by the same token, we should never care. What we should care about is power balance, not individuals' opinions on power balance. If a problem can be argued to be genuine, as opposed to a case of like/dislike, then this would be relevant. But because someone somewhere might only like Stamina and now doesn't know what to take is not relevant to game balance any more so than Toggle Man or the Determinator are relevant to game balance. They are exotic exceptions which go counter to the system's basic design, therefore it is their owners' own responsibility to make them work, not the responsibility of the system to support them.

In short, right now there are no powers that "people" want. There are powers that SOME people want, but having looked at many people's builds, what those powers are varies from person to person.

And, by the way, I say this as someone who always takes all of his primary and secondary powers and slots those and uses those, and I say this as someone who attempts to take four of his five Epic powers, as well. I hardly want to take 10-15 Pool powers, and I have still found more diversity since Stamina than I had before it, largely because I always built WITHOUT Stamina, and with it now Inherent, it saves me much endurance reduction slotting and it saves me much heartache and anger over constantly running out. I can run all my toggles, I can support all my attacks AND I can actually slot those powers I didn't have enough slots for before because I had to double-slot everything for endurance reduction.

My point is that the LFG queue should be used as a facility to enhance the ability to find a team, not as a replacement for contacts and mission doors. For everything startable from the LFG queue, a double should exist that's startable from the actual overworld.

I never claimed anything of the sort. From the beginning of time, the number of pool powers you have absolutely had to take has been six, and what I "claimed" was that even at that number, the number of choices is greater with Inherent Stamina than without it. Without Inherent Stamina we had 10 pools and 8 Epic/Patron pools across six power choices, but in practice we only really has three, as the other three were taken up by Hurdle, Health and Stamina. We now have six power picks over four fewer powers. That's a clear increase.

I'd get into the statistics of it, but I'm liable to misrepresent them. That's more in Arcana's field, if Arcana hasn't done it already. The complexity comes from the four-pool, one-Epic limitation, as well as the hierarchy within the pools themselves, making it difficult to describe if one isn't interested in writing a dissertation. JUST the choices between how many powers of how many pools in what order to pick comes down to 64 separate paths, and the number of options in each does vary.

Here's a basic rule of thumb, however - extra slot choices increase variety considerably more so than increasing the raw number of choices, at least as long as the choices themselves are significantly more than the slots. When Stamina become inherent, we went from 10 pools of 4 powers each and 8 Epics/Patrons with 5 powers each (a total of 80) down to just 9 pools and the same 8 Epics/Patrons (a total of 76). The decrease is not that meaningful, but gaining three more power choices was.

*edit*
Also, both of your examples are garbage and useless. The game has, at most, 20 pool picks (four pools, one Epic) and still has over 76 pool/Epic powers. Your "6 sloots to 6 powers" example is irrelevant, because it's impossible. Under all realistic circumstances, extra power picks lead to more diversity over extra powers.