Samuel_Tow

I was kind of hoping to just give everyone both single-target damage AND AoE and instead rely on the game's varying situations to provide strategic decisions, but this works too, I suppose. It's less... "Indulgent" than I'd like, though.

Calling it two-dimensional enhancement slotting gives me a pretty good idea of what you mean, actually. Could be a cool idea, but this is probably not the right way to discuss specifics. I've derailed my own thread more than enough already

I was disappointed that the Barbarian shield wasn't bigger, but I don't blame them for keeping to a smaller standard. I suppose it's more in keeping with the genre. I can't really excuse the two Mace options and the Axe, though - those have no reason to be this small.

It could keep you busy your whole life if you value your free time. If you're looking to MMOs just in the form of time sinks, the Incarnate System will be right up your alley. If you're looking at broader character optimisation past the level cap, you can always look at the more rare Inventions enhancements, which could keep you busy even longer depending on how high you aim.

All of that said, my advise would be to enjoy the game at any level, rather than focusing on the end game. If it lets you down, it lets you down. At least you have the whole rest of the game to still have fun with. And it is a fun game if you allow it to be.

That's "blow myself up." I get that these thing still exist in old content from before proof-reading was invented, but why are things like that in newer content.

Also, finally, "he" shows up, and says "Do not presume I think as you do." First of all, how do you know how I think? Secondly, why is the game assuming how I think? Thirdly, why am I still carrying the idiot ball? Like, really, why? Who thought it was a good idea to radically re-write my villain into something completely different and then give me dialogue "trees" that don't give me any options?

And why are all of my clickies not clickes but actual conversations, too?

Eh, it's just an abstract thought on game design more than anything else. The chance of something like this being instituted in City of Heroes absolutely nil. It's like discovering penicillin by accident. I'm well aware that no sane developer would gut open a functioning game to do something like this... OK, I know of one, but I don't want to hit City of Heroes with an NGE.

However, if a future action RPG were ever made that needed to balance area attacks, this seems like a good point to at least start from. Balancing self-replicating AoE damage across a wide target cap just isn't practical because its scale of damage varies too wildly, so just self-limiting its damage the more targets it hits is a good way to scale it. It brings up Claws' problem of wanting to concentrate on a single enemy, which is where allowing players to "swap stance" and do that comes in.

And I don't think this needs to be limited to just attacks, either. AoE controls vs. single-target controls? Why not. You hit 26 people, they get held for a short time. You hit only a single person, he gets held for a lot. Or heals, why not? If you want to heal a whole raid, you'll be healing them for a little. If you want to heal just a single person, you heal them a lot.

I can actually envision letting players hard-capping their own powers and picking their own stances. You could have one stance that's all AoE and one that's all single-target, one that has half your attacks single-target half capped at five and one capped at 10 and so forth. It could bring a lot more situational awareness on the most basic level - number of enemies present - without actually complicating the build system all that much.

Well, so it seems from the outside looking in, anyway. I'm sure Arcana has a boot with my name on it as we speak, but that would be interesting to hear, as well.

I was really mostly concerned about the way you chose to pluralise it, using the possessive "apostrophe-S" form that often gets put in plurals by mistake.

As for "snafu" itself, Firefox seems to recognise it as a real word, so it's really up to you, I'd say. SNAFUs, snafus, it gets the point across and isn't wrong as far as I can tell.

I don't think you mentioned that Premium players only get veteran rewards for real money purchases anywhere, actually, but I may be just failing to see it. However, you say "...can effectively give you pay-for content for no charge after time..." but they can't. To get Paragon Rewards, you have to pay, either in the store or for a subscription. Unless I understand incorrectly and you get them JUST for time spent with the game, but I don't think that's the case.

By saying the above, it gives people the impression that they can play the game for free, or on a very small budget and still get the good stuff, and they really can't. A Paragon Reward point costs you $15, whether that be $15 or store purchases or $15 of subscription cost. That's why I say I don't follow - it seems like you're suggesting that you can do something like, say, in Spiral Knights, where you can earn in-game currency and use that to buy RMT stuff. That's a game where you quite literally CAN get everything the game has to offer for free if you devote enough time to it. City of Heroes doesn't let you do that.

Again, maybe I misunderstand the system or what you're saying, but the impression I got from that doesn't match the impression I had of how the game works.

Yes, indeed, I might come up with my hands up. I also might come up with my hands at my hips, or with my hands on my face, as turned out the be the case. Also, come out of where? we're in the middle of a giant room, indoors, underwater. At most, I'm coming IN, not out, and how am I really coming in or out when all I'm doing is crossing a big open room.

Look, I'm a non-native speaker of English, and to be perfectly blunt, a lot of this text seems to have been written by someone who speaks English as a foreign language. I know I said I wouldn't demonise the writers, but a lot of these mistakes just make no sense unless the writer responsible genuinely didn't speak English very well.

This is Roy Cooling all over again - an idiot ball storyline which explains nothing at no point in its plot and that's written badly and rife with text errors. It's almost go out on a limb and say the same person must have written both arcs, but I'm probably going to be wrong and there's no way to tell. But my point is that this arc in particular is just really, really poorly implemented.

The central idea is not bad. I don't mind competitions, I don't mind competitions with rules, but we have to be competing for SOMETHING. I don't want to compete for "the portal tech" ... Sorry, I don't want to compete for "power," I want there to be a tangible price that would make logical sense for someone to want. We don't know who's giving the reward, we don't know what the reward is, and chances are we're just being used by some yahoo with too much time on his hands. And yet we never stop to question what the bloody hell we're doing and why we're doing it, like we're all a bunch of fools who can't see past their personal squabbles to grasp the big picture. For the NPC, that might be the case - they're all head cases. But for my characters? Mine should be better than that. I wrote them to not be idiots.

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I'm going to follow the arc to its end. As I said, it should be worth doing at least once. It's new content and I'd be a fool if I didn't at least try seeing it. If the subsequent arcs are good enough, then I can re-run the first one without reading any of its text, like I ended up doing for Roy Cooling on characters who accidentally got stuck with his arc. However, I have to say that a lot of the newer stuff I've seen smacks of fanfiction Architect work, and this one is one of the worst offenders. It's unpolished, it tries to do way too much and detracts from actually playing the game with gimmicks and endless dialogues and it assumes way, way, WAY too much about a character, rarely in flattering ways. If this were a standalon story or a single-player game with a fixed protagonist, these stories would work, but in a custom-character MMO, they just come off as GM god modding.

I was going to go with Zim, but Nal works, too I've always found it useful to have a shorthand name for people in conversation so you don't end up saying something like "Farewell, John Spartan. Be well." Incidentally, I kind of wish in-game contacts would stop calling me by my full name, too...

The yellow parts here concern me. The first one effectively says "the developers has stated," when that should have "the developers have stated[/b] as "developers" is plural. I'd say even organisations should be addressed in plural, but in this case, "Paragon Studios" is a describer for "developers," which is plural.

Also, while "snafu" may not be a real word, it should still be subject to proper pluralisation, and so show up as "snafus." Firefox even recognises the spelling. I'm sure this is just a typo, but I still want to justify it.

The yellow text here should say "there are," because it's referring to three tiers of payment methods, which constitutes multiple items requiring a plural form of address. I know "there's lots of things" is often accepted colloquially, but I still feel that you need a plural descriptor here.

I think there's something missing in the yellow text here. This should probably read either "one month's subscription" or "a one-month subscription." Otherwise the construct feels incomplete.

That's not entirely accurate. There's a HELL of a lot more stuff in the Market than your 400 free points can cover, which is kind of the point - your subscription gets you some ways into the Market, but there will always be things you need to pay in order to get, especially if the development team gets content out as fast as they seem to be hoping to. The VIP stipend helps, but it does not make the market "free," especially with the many consumables it has, so representing it as such is highly misleading, and has been the cause of many a flamewar here.

Also, I'm not sure if the 1200 (more, actually) grandfathered Paragon Points are relevant enough to include in a review. The people who will be earning them are already subscribing and should be aware of this, and the people who aren't subscribing and so unaware won't be getting the points.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that Paragon Rewards can give Premium players pay-for rewards without having to pay for them? Because I understood that the only way for Premium players to earn Paragon Rewards is via store purchases. And if we're talking about VIP subscribers, those guys are already paying in the form of their subscription. It's possible I'm wrong or misreading, however.

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A lot of my corrections are minor nit-picks, but you did ask for them, did you not?

I know. I thought about it

That's the impression I'm left with. Having run the first "trial" of this competition, I left the mission thinking "What is this I don't even." Maybe it's my poor understanding of English, maybe I missed something, maybe my brain died, but I have not the slightest clue what the hell I just did in this mission, how I achieved victory or what that magic voice-activated "secret-telling device" that Crosscut gave me was. I remember Yahtzee talking about going through a particular game with no knowledge and zero understanding, and that's me going through this arc. I don't know why I'm competing, I don't know what I'm competing for, I can't understand what I'm doing...

Whoever was writing this arc was just trying WAAAY too hard. I mean, I actually like Twinshot's arc hero-side. It's just as railroading, but at least the action makes sense and I'm allowed to not be a dunce. But this one is just a miasma of "what the hell?!?"

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Also, to reply to Nalrok_AthZim (what can I shorten your name to? ) without doing a huge quote:

I kind of agree with you, but then I kind of like these characters, too. Yeah, Zephyr is useless, Omnicore is a troll and Dollface is a brat, but I kind of think that's the point. They're the pathetic villains we're supposed to beat because we're not mentally handicapped. Hell, even Crosscut - the most unsettlingly creepy villain I've seen in the entire game - is kind of drawn up to the same purpose: They're all flawed and broken and there for us to beat.

The problem, to my eyes, is more that we're not really allowed to beat them. I mean, OK, you can't kill all competitors on mission 1, that would negate the whole arc. But at least let me humiliate them, or at the very least let me defend myself so they don't humiliate me. I don't need Dr. Ugly to play big daddy for me. If Omnicore wants a piece of me, let her have it. I'll kick her ***, won't kill her and we all go on our merry way. But no, we can't lay a finger on each other. Or on Dr. Graves - funny how his name was prophetic, by the way.

I must admit that I don't hate everything about this arc. I do enjoy watching Graves be endlessly irritated with practically everything I do. It gives me an almost childish glee to piss him off and then watch him metaphorically stomp on his hat, unable to take action. That's exactly what I wanted to see more of.

Yes, and that's a choice I intend to make for every subsequent villain. I can't abandon the arc itself, since that means I'll have an open arc forever and ever. Even if this no longer blocks subsequent arcs, I hate having old contacts stuck on my list.

I'll run the arc once. I'm all about giving content a chance. But I sure as hell hope that the payoff for this humiliation I apparently chose to put myself through in the name of extremely undefined "power" and empty promises is worth it in the end. And I mean Time After Time levels of "worth it." I have a sneaking suspicion it won't be, but if I get to kill any or all of these people, I'll consider that a success.

Whether or not the boot is in proportion doesn't really impact its appearance that it is a mile long. For instance, the hands on the Male model are HUGE, but they don't look out of proportion to my eyes because the rest of the Male body is pretty bulky. The Witch Boots may or may not be the proper length, but they're not the proper shape to e legs of this length. Much of the boot is quite obviously a hollow toe, unless your feet have toes longer than the fingers on your hands. If it were a flat boot with enough volume to have an actual foot in it, I might feel differently, but it's an elevated heel (which should make the footprint smaller) that's bent in such a way that you can't have a real foot in it that goes all the way to the end unless you have alien tentacles for feet.

From a dialogue. So the game really is suggesting that I'm going to get backhanded like an errant puppy, and the only reason I'm not is because the Arbiter doesn't feel I'm worth the effort. And, of course, if he did, we'd have that lovely "You can't overthrow Arachnos" dialogue for the umpteen bazillionth time. Why must the stories keep putting me in these situations? I thought the revamped villain-side was supposed to let me kill some of my contacts? Why am I being forced to humiliate myself publicly?

That's the one thing which frustrated me, actually, though I can't say I'm surprised. With players essentially being able to manufacture these by just making new characters, it's only natural they'd be soulbound. I honestly would have wanted to give mine away, but it turns out I can't. Oh, well. The trash can fairy never refuses donations.

No?

That would be interesting to see...

Trust me, I'd have stronger words if they were No, they're not Inventions or Sets, and that's why I find nothing wrong with the things. They act like them, though, and it bugs me. Luckily, I don't need them to enjoy myself, so no-one loses anything

The thing is, if we HAVE to have dialogue trees, then those need to cover a much wider range of responses. If they're not going to cover a wider range of responses, then they really shouldn't be handled by dialogue trees. Sure, I hate not being given the opportunity to respond to NPC smack talk when they deliver it in a non-interactive clue or text dump window, but being given the opportunity to respond yet no choice in HOW I respond is actually worse. The old system had no freedom, that much is true, but it was easier to write that off as the system itself being incapable of giving me said freedom. The new system very much has the capacity to give us freedom of interaction, which makes it all the more grating when it DOESN'T.

I get that dialogue trees have been the new shiny for some time now. Great. Good. Go at it. But if you use a dialogue tree, then make it a damn TREE, not a single linear conversation where my "next" button is masked behind inane dialogue that my character would never say.

Dean McArthur's arc had dialogue trees, and at nearly every step those trees had multiple options. Sure, none of them really amounted to anything other than moving to the next mission, but at least it gave the appearance of choice. These don't have choices. Ever. Why are we bothering with dialogue "trees" if I have no choice in how to answer and the answers don't cover more than one specific set villain concept?

Considering the log-in music makes me feel like I'm about to log into Jurassic Park, it seems only fitting that I quote the movie: "You were so busy trying to see if you could that you forgot to think whether you should." Yes, we know that dialogue trees can be put in every mission. That doesn't mean they should be, and if they are, they should be put in with more interactivity than one option on every window.

That's really my biggest grief with this. My impression with the new mission tech that Dean McArthur and Keith Nancy introduced was to give us more options in the type of personality and disposition our characters had in interacting with the environment. It lets us have at least cosmetic choices. So why can't we have them here? Why can't the arc play out as it does now, only give me options that don't make me sound like a lost chihuahua?

I can't buy iiOs in stores for a nominal price without relying on random drops or an even more random player-run marketplace. As long as this remains true, the "entire old-school enhancement system" has a vital place in the game. But, hey, if you want to argue in favour of selling commons in stores for SO prices, then hell yes I'll buy them!

I enjoy a simple game, really. I enjoyed City of Heroes back at launch a lot more, at least in terms of character building. We had only one type of enhancement that did only one thing and had no extra effects to it, which made things easily replicable and very orderly. We didn't have zillions of temporary powers, we didn't have these complex builds. The technical side of the game was easier and prettier.

And, yes, I enjoy the game. Greatly, in fact. I finally got to make an Axe/Shield Scrapper AND start as a villain, and the new villain content (save for Graves) has been great. I love the IDF set and the possibilities it brings, I love the Barbarian set a lot more than I thought I would and I cannot wait for Street Fighting and Titanic Weapons. But, no, there is nothing in this game that I like without caveats. Part of the problem of having an opinion is that this opinion is never as simple as a yes/no binary choice. It's impossible for me to take something in its entirety and say "like/dislike." Every time we're speaking of complex systems, there are things I like and things I don't. Isn't that true for anyone?

I did what I could to not present my original post as a rant or a complaint. I honestly have nothing against these enhancements, and I'm glad people enjoy them. I just don't think I can, and there's nothing wrong with that. I played the game just fine without them, I'm sure I can do just fine without them in the future, too. Hell, I've never complained about anything in the low levels anyway, not before inherent Stamina, not before the "beginner's luck" to-hit boost. I like the low-level game the way it is.

The which heels are one of the worst boot designs I've seen in my life, and that's saying something. The foot looks like it's a mile long, and it just looks wrong. I remember a girl from my school was facing a similar problem with poorly-chosen heels for her prom. She was a tall girl who wore shoes the same size as mine (and I have big feet), which made it really questionable why she picked heels with very long pointed toes. It made her feet look cartoony.

The Barbarian heels aren't nearly as bad as the Witch heels, even if they're still bad, but I honestly lost any reason to complain about them when I saw women also had actual Barbarian boots. That's one usable boot out of the pack, and it's more than I was expecting. Far as I'm concerned, that's more than enough.