Samuel_Tow

No.

Not at all. This is the proper way to proceed with it, I'd say. I've found that people are a lot more reasonable when you approach them politely than when you yell at them, so I'm definitely with you on that count.

A rose by any other name would still hide your junk. I like the costume piece regardless

Here's the thing: I won't get any one single character "Incarnated out." Ever. The system itself isn't fun to me. It's about the worst thing I can do with my time that still passes for entertainment. I don't care about "rewards," as I don't have a habit of earning something and then marvelling at it and calling it my precious. I play games where reward is only part of the fun and gameplay itself is the main driving force. Rewards are fun, but if earning them isn't fun, I'll never have them. And earning Incarnate rewards is pretty much the polar opposite of fun in my eyes.

But again - the most direct solution is to just stop doing what I don't like doing, and I have chosen to do just that. During the Ustream marathon, I asked Posi and Zwill a question: "I21 has a good balance of Incanrate and non-incarnate content. Can we expect this to keep?" In a nutshell: "Yes." Believe it or not, that does make a difference to me, hearing it straight from the fedora-wearing the source. Incarnates are a system I cannot and will not enjoy until and unless that mythical solo option materialises. Until such a thing happens, I'll simply focus on my newer characters and treat my 50s as I always have - as complete. I may pursue Alpha stuff with them if I have missions left to run, but a Common or Uncommon of that type is as far as I go.

Not necessarily. The way Cobra Strike is delivered, it could easily be depicted as hitting foes in a line behind you target, just visually speaking. My goal, though, is more to ape the broader concept of "Like God of War, But..." games, such as Devil May Cry, Darksiders and Legacy of Kain: Defiance. In these games, all of your attacks, basic and otherwise, hit everything along their arc of swing or along their line of thrust. If you swing a sword from left to right, you clip all enemies it passes by. If you punch straight ahead, you hit your target, the two people next to him and the person behind him. Sideways of that, I'd also like to ape L4D, where if you shoot at someone, you tend to shoot through whoever is in front of that someone and whoever is behind him, too, making shooting high-powered rifles into crowds of virtual undead some of the most inexplicable fun I've had in my gaming history.

My point, though, is to eliminate the discrepancy between single-target and AoE by allowing everyone access to AoE all the time and balancing around that. As the sole user of single-target attacks on a large team fighting twenty enemies at a time, it's easy to see how single-target damage falls by the wayside. Typically, an AoE attack is at least half as powerful as a single-target attack, a third to a fourth as endurance efficient and not all that rarely half or more as DPS efficient, to say nothing of DPA. It doesn't take many more than three enemies in the same fight to have AoE attacks become vastly more practical than single-target attacks, and this is something that I sense with my gut long before I comprehend that a difference in statistics actually exists. I just "notice" that I "want" to use my AoEs more and from there try to deduce why that is.

Using Cobra Strike when it was just a stun in a melee of 20 people with seven other team-mates blasting AoEs feels like I brought a knife to a gunfight and everyone's standing around laughing at me. It makes no difference, the enemies I stun die by the time the stun takes effect just from collateral damage and I'm just so much better off simply spamming even as weak an AoE as Dragon's Tail.

So I say make all attacks AoE and have their damage spread across all targets affected. Then, allow us to "concentrate" said powers so that we could focus on a priority target in a crowd without losing damage potential via dispersal, and you have a legitimate strategic decision to make - do I use my powers as AoE or do I focus on what's most dangerous? Right now, this decision doesn't exist - use AoE, obviously!

It's a pie-in-the-sky ludicrous idea that won't ever happen in this game or, likely, in any other MMO and/or RPG, but I'm adding it to the pile of impossible changes I'd like to see nevertheless.

That's actually how I see it, as well. I know quite a few people were in outright war with Jack Emmert to keep him from "fixing" the mistakes that made the game so fun, unique and cool. Remember that whole "1 hero = 3 white minions?" Yeah, that's out the window now, and GOOD RIDDANCE, but that's just one example of Cryptic believing they were developing one kind of game when they had inadvertently designed something completely different that players were really enjoying, broken designs and all. When you look at City of Heroes, it looks like an innovative, bold, brave game that seeks to stand out from the pack.

When you actually look at the original design INTENTION behind it, however, it's an attempt to create a paint-by-numbers MMO that Cryptic simply dropped on its head and it developed into something wholly unexpected. It took the sale of the franchise to NCsoft and Matt Miller's promise to "give the players what they want" before the people in charge actually accepted that we really did like the game we were playing and didn't require it being "fixed" to be more like other MMOs in order for us to enjoy it. City of Heroes is the result of very poor forward planning leading to a game system which plays out very differently than what was intended and thus very differently than practically any other MMO I'm aware of. That, I feel is its primary strength - it's a game of its own possessed of bold new ideas (intentional or not) in an MMO world of pallet swap game clones.

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As far as AoE goes, I still maintain my opinion from that other thread - a system of distributing attack damage across all affected foes so that the more people you hit, the less damage you do would be a nice balancing factor, especially if it came with the change to make all single-target attacks have AoE potential. That's neither here nor there, though.

And also because a lot of them suck hard, were made on a shoestring budget and follow the same trite old MMO formula. I'm not saying the one you're speaking of is like this (I haven't seen it, but will), but I played a game called Divine Souls which sold itself as being an action MMO. Thing is, it was a Korean grindfest MMO that sucked your soul for playing it, only it had twitch-based combat in it. A lot of "free" to play games are like this - they're terrible whether you pay for them or not.

Still, there are a few of these that aren't quite as bad, Spiral Knights being one that I'm aware of. What I like more than anything, though, is that whether City of Heroes is actually "free" to play or not, there's still a great game behind the system, and getting better all the time. At one point I was convinced the team was content to squeeze the maximal amount of money from us for the least amount of investment, but I was wrong and for this I apologise. Right now, it feels like City of Heroes is only getting better, and I honestly don't see the need for other games for the foreseeable future, unless that Darksiders sequel comes out sooner than expected.

Making a string of powexec_toggleon commands will allow you to repeatedly press the same button and activate all powers in it in sequence from right to left, however. It's a quirk in how the engine works.

Personally, I'm getting more than a little tired of getting legitimate travel powers for money. I now have more tempermanent powers on my character than all of my build powers combined, and at some point this starts to take over. I do not like it.

I was just fooling around, really That was a pretty cool costume, as well. I'm trying to justify using that "tube dress" design, myself, but we'll see how that goes. The belt kind of bugs me in that it dips right over the crack of the butt for reasons that aren't entirely clear from its design. I know that's to match up to the top and the skirt, but it looks odd from behind.

The more different games I play, the more I realise what kind of cosmic collision of chance City of Heroes is. The game started off unintentionally prone to being broken, we snapped it over a knee and then the developers had to scramble to fix it while at the same time not making it any less broken. It's interesting how our unintentionally overpowered characters proved to be the forbidden fruit of MMOs, something all players seem to instinctively like, but also something players really shouldn't have if a game's combat system is to be easily predictable and controllable.

I was riding shotgun with that column until about the mid-point, where it took a turn down 5th and Bananas and started talking about how the abstract term of "balance" was holding MMOs back and how making MMOs unbalanced and consequently broken would make MMOs more like real combat. However, before the author stepped into the Twilight Zone, there were a few very good points, as Arcana points out, and as we do kind of have covered here.

MMO combat in general is quite boring because it's slow, long, uneventful and a bit too reminiscent of mining for silver in the nasal cavities of your enemies. Ours isn't like that at all. I imagine at one point it was intended to be, but most of our "damage dealers" are capable of ending fights mere seconds after they started. In fact, one of the peak draws of Build Up type powers despite their statistically low contribution is that they make fights that much faster and our characters, by comparison, appear that much more powerful.

The article speaks of Jedi and how they should be these instantly lethal super badasses. And I agree with it to a very large extent. But that's pretty much what our Scrappers already are. Brutes are this to a lower extent since they need time to get going and can't just get up from the conference table when the ambassador turns out to be an assassin, but even they qualify. MMO combat CAN be fun, and not necessarily by making it twitch-based. City of Heroes proves that without a shadow of a doubt. Sure, there are a lot of things that City of Heroes does wrong - I agree with Arcana's take on the folly of AoE - but these are things that are fixable on their own without ripping the guts out of the entire system and sending us back to the stone age fighting one orc for half an hour at a time.

City of Heroes is the freak misfit of MMOs, and it was also my first MMO ever. Back in the day, I was convinced that all MMOs were evil, horrible and treated their players like cattle. I played City of Heroes and became convinced that I was wrong, for here was a game which was fun and treated me like a champ. It turns out I was completely right all along, it was just that City of Heroes was not, for all intents and purposes, an MMO, but rather something which kind of works and sometimes plays like an MMO but is an entity all its own. We've seen competition try to emulate it multiple times now, but those competitors are MMOs through and through, even the one which kind of isn't. As Arcana has said before - City of Heroes is unique because in order for it to work as it does, it needs to be broken in several ways that no developer with a sense of self-preservation would ever repeat. Not only was the fate of how the game turned out a collision of chance, but its existence ensures that it won't happen again. If anything has ever served to keep me here, it's that there is no game like City of Heroes in the world and chances are there never will be.

Now, I don't believe that what problems City of Heroes have can't be rectified in a spiritual sequel without killing the spirit of the game. I just don't think any developer will have the guts to NOT make a WoW clone AoE with a super hero skin in the future. City of Heroes was Rick Dakan's baby and Geko's handywork. It was an experiment that took a life of its own. I don't think we'll see that again any time soon.

It's a question of game direction and the mentality of the people making it. At one point, after about the 12th month of hearing about nothing but still more Incarnates, I was beginning to get the feeling that this is all we were ever going to get. Not literally "only ever more raids," but what could be described in broader terms as "no-fun time sinks," which is to say game systems designed to keep us docile and addicted without having to spend inordinate amounts of time or money to make enough content to achieve this. I complain at times that there isn't enough Incarnate content PERIOD, let alone enough that I specifically like, but there isn't much room for accusation here - it's a whole new level range that content must be made for from scratch. It's only natural that a complete experience CAN'T be made right out the gate or even any time soon, if ever at all.

More than anything, it was the Neuron approach of giving us the bare minimum tolerable before moving on to the next gimmick, as though trying to keep us distracted by the shiny just long enough for the next shiny to pop up, ideally so we never have enough time to stop and look at what we're actually doing and how sad everything has become. That's how I saw things - Paragon Studios aren't interested in entertaining me, they're interested in swindling me out of my cash.

Yes, it's a few costume pieces. Yes, it's the promise of a large sword. Yes, it's shiny baubles. But there's more to it than that. It's an ideal, a promise, a very real hope. These are things that, in themselves, can't really make us addicted, can't keep us repeating the same content a zillion times over, can't keep subscribed for another seven years making half a percent progress per lunar month. These are, at their core, toys. Giving me barbarians and cowboys and street fighters and more gives me hope, because it tells me that these guys really do care about making a good game, about making a game people actually play because they enjoy it, rather than because they're compelled to play it through their addiction. It told me the studio still has a soul, and this counts for more than most people realise.

Today it's a girl abs. Tomorrow it will be a buster sword. The day after that... Who knows? But I'm sure it will be something else cool and fun and exciting. And that's really all I'm asking for - something cool, even if it's not statistically guaranteed to get another 750 hours of gameplay per character out of me. These guys are good at making cool stuff, and I'm happy to believe that they're willing to do it now that they've gotten enough iStuff to hold the system together. It's a vote of trust and a vote of confidence that I expect good things, rather than the exploitation I expected before.

Now, a cynic might call me naive, and I probably am. The reality is very likely to be that the studio is no longer looking to make money off endless subscriptions through time sinks as it is looking to make money off toys through ill-advised microtransactions, instead. In other words, the reality may well be that there's no more of a soul now than before and it's just a different way for them to reach into my pocket. I, personally, choose to believe this isn't the case and that these guys really do want to make a great game. But what keeps me safe in my naivete is that even if this were the case, even if this were a plot to get me to spend more, I'm happy to oblige. Because, honestly - that sort of awesome is worth the extra money (which I haven't even had to pay yet). To some, it may be just another kind of ripoff. To me, it's not a ripoff if the price is right for the service.

MMOs are, by their very nature, evil, horrible and treat their players like cattle. They have to, in order to keep us around. Maybe City of Heroes: Freedom will make money more through seduction than through addiction now - and that's a good thing - or maybe now that iStuff is rounded out, there will be more time for other stuff. Either way, if things keep going as they're going now, then I see nothing but good times ahead of us. Short of utter poverty on my end, I no longer see any reason for me to leave the game within the foreseeable future. And that's not something I could have said even as recently as a month ago.

It may not sound like much - and it probably isn't much - but to me, this is a very big vote of confidence that I don't tend to give out lightly. I21 has made me believe in the game again.

This picture looks so wrong on so many levels...

I was kind of hoping Paragon Studios would do it better pretty much on sheer faith in the development team. They didn't, and THAT was a stark disappointment. I haven't gotten over it, I've simply chosen to ignore the thing wholesale. When it no longer sucks for me, then we'll see, but that's likely years away.

I hate the Incarnate system, but I should not have insulted the people who make up the development team for it. It's the system and the values it exhibits I despise, but they don't necessarily have to mirror the values of the people responsible for it, as subsequent additions have proven. I wanted to apologise for condemning the whole game and its creators just because only one part of it was some of the worst gaming I've ever had the sad misfortune to be part of. There's still a great game behind my subscription and that is a testament to the great people who make and maintain it.

Playing a furred character who is also dressed in the fur of dead animals seems a bit... Odd, truth be told

Arcana speaks the truth. My argument against buying costume slots (for myself) is half that it costs TWENTY ******* DOLLARS and half that I rarely have use of all five that I get for free. Justifying spending $20 on more slots I most likely won't need is difficult, to say the least. Same with enhancement, salvage and recipe slots - I don't hoard, so inventory size only determines how frequently I have to sell, and it ain't all that frequent now, especially when Trainings and DOs stop dropping.

These services are expensive, but we have very expansive cheap alternatives already in the game.

Normally, I'd say "just customize all of your powers to match each other," but I have no reason to expect that the custom bubbles are not still bugged despite me reporting them about five times via at least three different channels, so... I don't know. If you do try to customize them, though, note how people have the tendency to jump and step out of their bubbles as their powers animate, because the bubbles are locked to character position, rather than to character model.

The servers are back up. I still haven't decided what to with Brutticus, if anything, but here's what I made of her quick-like:



It's not very muscular (sadly), but it does display muscles in texture and bump map, and that's more than I can say for the smooth, flat skin of the base model.

That's a good way of putting it. We're a pretty unpleasable fanbase around here, but even though there are a few people still left bitter, the overwhelming sentiment I've seen for the Issue has been positive. I don't know if that's because lots of people can't post on the boards or what, but it's a far cry better than most regular Issues. No-one's every completely happy with everything, but it seems like this time around, people are focusing on what they're happy with and not dwelling on what they hate.

I know I am.

Provided the Market never gets anything else that's more interesting, which it will. I'll always pick costumes, powersets, missions and such over shelling out the price of an entire retail game for one extra row of enhancements that I somehow did just fine without up until a couple of days ago.