Samuel_Tow

Oh... OK, that's not how I read it. To me, a "gross misunderstanding" is rather a simple misunderstanding in a specific, very crucial element of a deal, like those comedy sketches where a woman walks in on a man holding a bloody knife over a bloody, prone cat and faints, when in fact the man just spilled tomato soup that the cat went to eat and lay down in when it was scolded.

What you describe is something I'd call a "complete misunderstanding," in the sense that it's a misunderstanding on all or most possible aspects of a given subject, such that the two sides in question are talking about completely different and totally unrelated things, like me describing a 2011 movie to my mother while she things I'm talking about a 1988 movie and interpreting everything I describe differently.

Pardon my misunderstanding

I'm not sure if you can't have your friend set up a PayPal account, to which you can just send money from a PayPal account of your own, and your friend can thereafter pay for in-game items using that PayPal account for his/her own Paragon Points. I'm not sure what PayPal's policy on this is, though, but I do know they give accounts unattached to a card of any kind still some leeway of use, they just limit amounts on them by quite a bit.

And I DO know you can subscribe to the game using PayPal and Customer Support assure me you can use PayPal to make in-game purchases, as well. I haven't done this and I'm not sure how one could do it, but they assured me it works.

It is a case of misunderstanding, more specifically that people keep calling Freedom a F2P model when it's not. I should have added "more specifically" to the front of that sentence. Also, when I say "simple as that," I mean it literally - that's all there is to it. I don't mean "it's simple, why didn't you understand it," just that that's the entirety of the subject.

I've seen a lot of these threads, and they all read the same way - "Free players don't get this and that, this game is going to fail." And... Yeah, you can't get a lot of things for free, which you couldn't get before for free, either. At no point in official communication have I seen the term "Free to Play" used, nor have I seen a complete gaming experience promised to either Free or Premium players. About the only promise I've seen is "you keep what you pay for."

Did I give the impression that I was refuting the post I quoted?

My impression has been that these issues tend to stem from people expecting to play the whole game for free and finding out that City of Heroes: Freedom is not actually F2P. Simple as that, really.

Eh, I don't know. My instincts told me to try and play hit-and-run, which almost soured me on Stalkers entirely. It wasn't until Leo beat it into my head that Stalkers shouldn't be afraid to scrap that I finally started enjoying them So in this case, my instincts are almost always wrong.

That's where the "square peg in a round hole" feel of Praetoria comes from - I don't think it was ever intended to be a new player experience, and was only retrofitted into one after the fact. And it's NOT a good new player experience, because it's so difficult you pretty much have to have played the game already to not die horribly.

No, it is nothing even remotely close to this. I'll give you an example:

Years and years ago, I created Tyler, a scientist who believes humans have reached the peak of natural evolution and the only logical next step is to use science and technology to evolve ourselves further. When it became clear to him mankind wasn't interested, he realised that the "old" humans had to be removed if his "new, superior beings" were to have the space and resources to thrive. He has so far replaced nearly his entire body with cybernetics, transforming himself into a colossal walking juggernaut of steel.

For Tyler, the only AT/powersets that make sense were SS/Inv Brute. I HATE Tankers as an AT and wouldn't be caught dead playing them and nothing else has both Super Strength and Invulnerability. Nothing else really made sense for him since Tyler doesn't have any weapons mounted to himself, choosing instead to delegate those to other robots, and he is also both amazingly powerful and incredibly hard to kill or even move. Tyler is a giant robot (cyborg, whatever), and that's pretty much the core of his character. This essentially REQUIRES SS/Inv. He is defined by being too strong for anyone to resist and being too tough for anyone to really damage.

---

Years before that, I created Crash, the unfortunate young woman who was mortally wounded in a war, and ended up having her entire body replaced with her genius father's cybernetics. She is from an alternate time line and is thus far close to 300 years old, she has an internal perpetual energy source of nearly unlimited yield, her body is made up of futuristic materials that are both flexible and yet almost entirely unbreakable, her skeleton is outfitted with an entire array of not just amazingly powerful actuators but also "kinetic projectors" for enhanced strength and stability, and her brain is shielded from any form of shock. To top it all off, she also has a nanobot factory for repairs of damage suffered in combat.

Crash is a SS/Inv Brute, because nothing else made sense. I hate Tankers, and I wouldn't want her to be a Scrapper anyway, because her key defining characteristic is that you plain and simple can't kill her. In fiction, I've had her descend from high orbit unprotected, making a very large impact crater, I've had her survive gunfire, explosions, collisions with speeding trains and entire skyscrapers collapsing onto her, all leaving no lasting damage. On top of that, I've had her BE the one to punch a skyscraper hard enough to cause her to collapse on her, toss tanks around like stuffed toys, snap giant steel girders like tooth picks and punch the ground hard enough to CAUSE a massive crater in the ground.

---

Right now, I have two SS/Inv Brutes, one at level 50 and sporting a T1 Spiritual Alpha and one at I think level 42, and I love BOTH of them. Originally, Crash was a MA/SR Scrapper, made in I1 long before Brutes existed. When I sat down to reroll and redesign Crash, I went through a lot of alternatives so as not to repeat Tyler's build. Considering that she is probably THE most important character that I have ever made, more important than even Samuel Tow himself, I could not afford to compromise on her powers. A SS/Inv Brute is what she was always meant to be, and to do anything less would be to betray my favourite character. But then, I didn't want to delete or reroll Tyler, either, because he too only ever made sense to be a SS/Inv Brute. That's what he IS. So I now have two, and BOTH of them are reasons why I'm still here.

On repeating powersets, I think that depends on how many characters you have. Right now, I have somewhere between 50 and 60. Considering I only really play Melee and Masterminds, there aren't 50 sets in the game without repeating them, so invariably some I'll have to use multiple times. I've used Broadsword at least five times just on its own To me, it's trying to never repeat a powerset combo within the same AT, if possible. Even then, I have two SS/Inv Brutes, but that was a special case.

It's interesting that you should mention this, though, as I've often found myself having to choose between repeating a character build or essentially making a character into the "wrong" powerset. It's never an easy choice.

Can you see the problem with the system in your own words, though? Getting your character kitted out was a PITA when I'm sure it was intended to be fun... And it ain't. That's my biggest beef with the Incarnate system - it's not fun. It's work. It's a crapton of work. It's even worse if, like me, you can justify pretty much all of your level 50 characters having that kind of power. Someone (I think it's the TechBot) had someone else's quote in his sig, to the effect of "Incarnates are farming for threads" or something to that effect, and it's true, more or less. When you design a system specifically intended to be a grind, people WILL burn out, simple as that.

I said it a long time ago that "end game" can never be good, because it has to be either very slow, very difficult or very boring. Ours ended up being all three.

That alone makes it the best Issue within the last year, at least from my perspective

Ah, well... Recharge it is, then

As a set, sure. I have no problem. But as a pool, I honestly want DUAL pistols regardless of the set I'm pairing them with, even if that's a one-handed weapon.

"That type of city" is all City of Villains has. Whereas Paragon City has shining, gleaming monuments to mankind's glory as well as downtrodden poor ghettos and quite a few themes in-between, the Rogue Isles only have one theme - depressing. Everything is earth brown and gunmetal grey, the skies are always overcast, everything clean is always juxtaposed next to something dirty and there isn't a single place on the Isles that I could stand in and think "Wow, this is pretty!" without thinking "...unlike everything else."

This assumption that villains can only ever exist in "a hive of scum and villainy" is easily the biggest boat anchor around City of Villains. Fact of the matter is, people like nice things, and the Rogue Isles don't have nice things almost at all. I want at least one new zone villain-side that doesn't look so obviously evil and horrible, reality be damned.

Always a convincing argument practice, insulting your opposition. I'm sure that'll make Bill change his mind.

Every contact in City of Villains treats us like low-life scum only worthy of contempt, but they are forced to lower themselves to dealing with bottom-feeders like us anyway. Willy Wheeler is probably the sole exception from the old content, but the post-I17 content has been much more benign. Vut, if we're counting post-I17 content...

I do, because I love the zones. And I liked Faultline a lot better before they flooded it. What I hate about City of Villains' geography is that everything is small, cramped and almost caricature. Sharkhead has about 10 square yards of Freakshow fort within spitting distance of the 50 square yards of "giant" factory space overlooking the 50 square yards of "city." Everything is tiny and representative and crammed together like someone took five entire zones, cut them down to nothing stitched them together as a single zone. I vastly prefer City of Heroes because there's room to breathe and gives a feeling of size, like this is an actual, real-life city that's tens, maybe even hundreds of miles across, even if we don't actually see most of it. When I travelled to London a few years back, it took me something like an hour by bus just to get to where I was headed and it took me something like 25 minutes by dedicated rail just to clear the city limits from Gatwick airport.

By contrast, most Rogue Isles islands aren't even a mile across, their "cities" consist of a handful of small buildings or all of four or five larger ones and if it weren't for the fog, you'd see the shoreline of the islands from any point on them. The Rogue "Isles" aren't islands at all, they're tiny rocky outcroppings in the sea which couldn't support more than a couple thousand people per rock. The only one with any sense of size is Port Oaks/Cap Au Diable because they're two settlements on the same island, and with what I can see past the end of the zone looks like miles of uninhabited land. That's the only place which actually LOOKS like a genuine island. Everything else is tiny, tiny, tiny by comparison. Way back in I3, I hoped and prayed that the developers would stop with the "Something Island" new zones, after Peregrine Island and Striga Isle ended up small and unimpressive. Then they made City of Island. Feh!

Check out any small Pacific or Atlantic island chain on Google Maps (say, Cape Verde) and note how large those islands are. Sure, not as big as Hawaii's "big island," but they're big enough to all have multiple settlements on them. And, yes, those aren't exactly BIG settlements, but then NONE of City of Villains' settlments are big. They just have tall buildings and tall walls in them. But in terms of land area, all seven villain zones combined wouldn't make up the size of any believable, settle island chain.

City of Villains needs more zones and it needs much bigger zones, or at the very least it needs zones that are only a portion of an island. For instance, we pretty much know that the Etoille Islands are what Hequat pulled from the sea to house the cast out Mu. Fair enough, only in Oranbegan lore, she is said to have pulled "an island" - singular - from the sea. If all of City of Villains too place on that one island, with each zone constituting a port city, with probably one - say, Grandville - situated inland and land-locked, then I wouldn't have a problem. But City of Villains doesn't have seven zones because the development team thought fewer zones were "better." It has fewer zones because they couldn't afford to make more.

Charming repartee, there. No, it's not right for a "lesser" villain to be me, because I don't want to be a lesser villain. I'm never a lesser hero snubbed for being weak and ineffectual hero-side, so I shouldn't suffer fools villain-side. ESPECIALLY villain-side, mind you. As a hero, I'm bound by a certain moral conduct which prevents me from slapping my contacts upside the head. Villain-side, if my contacts talk to me the wrong way, I should have no qualms against crushing their heads with my hands. Villains, you know? I didn't sign up to play City of Lackeys. Sure, Dean McArthut has a decent arc and Vincent Ross has something of a decent one, but that's still TWO contacts against a sea of Darla Mavis, Mu'Drakhan and Arbiter Leery.

Yes, I too remember 2004. Your argument is laughable. People play hero-side because it's a better game that has more people in it which makes them feel good. People avoid City of Villains because it's the game the development team forgot, which ends up making people feel dirty for playing it. If you want to insult my intelligence with stupid allegations, that's the only argument you deserve.

Considering I want to use a two-handed weapon and dual pistols combo, that would instantly END any use whatsoever I might have for this set. I HATE holding my gun in my off-hand.

Hmm... Good point. Enough experience with character creation probably leads to a much wider field of interest and a much more expansive comfort zone. In terms of RPGs and character creation, I'm still kind of "young" and inexperienced, something I have the tendency to forget from time to time. Quite literally the sum total of my character-making experience is those seven years of City of Heroes, as it's this game that taught me the value of a good, well-developed character, as opposed to a functional "toon/avatar/critter." In a sense, I'm still discovering all the things I like and dislike, and I can imagine how someone who's been doing this for many years might have already gone through that process.

On the flip side, we learn as long as we live

I like your way of segregating the issues, as I more or less share your approach. Character concepts are always fun to explore regardless of how bizarre or uncharacteristic of us they become... So long as they play well. I've been called a bad roleplayer before (duh!) because I choose mechanical advantage over pure character concept, usually when I refuse to play Defenders and Corruptors. And, yes, admittedly it IS limiting to try to make everything as melee, but at the end of the day, I'm not reading a book or watching a movie. I'm playing a game. If that game's not fun to play, it's a waste of a good story, and melee is what's fun for me.

To each his own, obviously, but I did my class experimentation way back in 2004-2005, and you know what the result was? Playing Blasters for seven ******* years without being to admit I hate the AT, ending up with THREE level 50 Blasters and a lot of foul memories. What's the highest number of 50s you've deleted? For me, it's those three level 50 Blasters, plus a 50 Scrapper I wanted to remake.

That's kind of the heart of the issue, in my eyes. I've noticed that a lot of people are willing to make characters that don't fit their preferences, but they do this as an exception to what they like, not an extension of it. You describe yourself as preferring to make "old men, robots, and monsters," and I can respect that completely. But the way you phrase your posts, it sounds like while you can just as easily make and play other things, those are what you prefer to do. That's kind of what I meant when I said sticking to the thinks you know you enjoy.

Now, granted, it's very possible my definition of "looking for the next new like" may be so extreme as to be inapplicable, but I'm speaking of actually an entirely different way of thinking about these concepts. Speaking purely for myself, I place enormous value on creating a character that I love from a thematic that I HATE. For instance, I HATE pirates and consider them to be one of the least interesting genres of storytelling that history has ever seen (personal opinion). Thus far, I've been unable to even conceive of a pirate concept that wouldn't bug me. However, if ever I were able to find a pirate that still worked for me, I would treasure that character for all time.

It's rational to create more of what we like. But is it irrational to create more of what you DON'T like in search of a way to like it?

Who said anything about a SET? We're asking about an EPIC POOL, like all the other Epics and Patrons Scrappers have access to. These have ranged attacks in them, these have ranged control powers in them. ALL of them. Energy has Laser Beam Eyes and Energy Torrent, Pyre has Fire Blast and fireball and Char, Weapons has Web Grenade, Caltrops, Shuriken and Shuriken. What is your problem with shooting my ranged attacks out of a gun as opposed to out of my hands?

No-one is asking for Pistol/SR Scrappers. What people are asking for Kat/SR Scrappers with a Pistol Epic. Do you know what Brutes get in their Mace Mastery? Mace Blast, Disruptor Blast, Mace Beam Volley. How is that not a ranged pool?

*edit*
Yeah, noticed the correction. I'm still leaving the post in, though. A Pistols Epic, if its powers are chosen correctly, can be well within the pattern of existing Epics and Patron powers.