Samuel_Tow

Yeah, David, I have to side with the others here - "metal" isn't always synonymous with "reflective." Off the top of my head (and with the help of about 60 seconds of Google image search), I can come up with the following examples of non-reflective metal: an M1A2 Abrams main battle tank, a Komatsu D575A superdozer, a ye olde wood stove and a run-of-the-mill shipping container. What you have to remember here is that you're not just making brand spankin' new shiny tech that just came out of the spray booth. Some of these metal armour suits have been through hell and back and would be scratched up, dinged up, dirty, rusty, dented and otherwise worn out. Not all of them have to look like they stepped out of an art deco paining.

Also - and please understand that I say this with the utmost respect to you, David - I feel that you are a bit too focused on literally and figuratively "shiny" new costume additions. Whether we're talking actual shininess and reflectivity or just general complexity of detail, striking visuals or anything else that turns heads and catches the eye, you seem to all too easily neglect the simpler, stylised, basic costume elements that make characters great. Ghost Widow comes up in your poll again and again not because of her flowing hair rig or the shiny tights or the high-resolution textures or whatnot. She comes up because her design is simple, elegant and memorable. I get the feeling that the mentality around the studio goes along the lines of "Why have metal armour when we can have reflective, shiny, bump-mapped, glowy, ornamental, decorated metal armour?"

Sometimes, less is more. Sometimes, simpler designs without overbearing fancy effects are the most appropriate thing. Sometimes, simple flat colours work better than complex textures. I mean think about it - when was the last time the art team produced metal armour comprised of large smooth plates without some kind of abstract ornamentation to them? The last one I can thin of, really, is Armour Plate from back in 2004, possibly Techbot from 2005. Enforcer only partially counts, since only the chest is flat metal plate, with everything else being ornamented.

Please don't take this as a putdown. It really, really isn't. And don't take it to mean I don't want new fancy costume items. I LOVE the glowing wings tech. I LOVE the reflective Valkyrie pieces. I LOOOVE the glowing resistance gear. But that's not all there should be. Simple, stylised, basic costume pieces cannot be put by the wayside or, worse still, taken out of the game. People cling on to their old pieces not because they're great (most of them aren't even good), but rather because they represent something that the current art team doesn't seem interested in making more of - simple things. Just an easy example: While I appreciate the glowing, spiky, detailed, ornate Ascension shoulder pieces, I still want "just medieval shoulders." Do you remember Romulus? Do you remember what shoulders he uses? Slightly touched-up Gladiator shoulders, only he uses the big shoulder on both sides. Far more than the Ascension shoulders, THAT is what I want - just a simple big Gladiator shoulder on both shoulders. It looks cool, it looks big and I could SO use that, but we've never had that in the game, I assume because it's not fancy enough.

Please don't put a lower boundary that "Your piece must be at least this---> awesome to be made." Not every piece you make has to turn heads.

This is what it comes down to, really, and what needs to be understood before we can have a FUN villainous experience. In real-life, no-one wants "evil" people to win. We don't root for murderers, robbers and kidnappers, we don't want to be shot dead while shopping at the mall, we don't want to feel threatened just walking down the street. In the real world, we're concerned with comfort and survival, and not necessarily in that order.

Video games are not the real world. I can't speak for literally everyone, but quite a few people play games both to escape from the real world and to have fun. As such, rubbing the real-world horrors of villainy in my face as I play is not going to give me an enjoyable experience. This is really what it's all about - I pay to play this game so that I can have fun, and villain-side is specifically designed so that it's NOT fun. Take my word for it - I'm not going to be very excited about subscribing to a game that seeks to torture me.

I don't care about the morality or ethics of villainy. I play a villain for the same reason I play any game - to have fun. It's the developers' job to figure out how to make a villain-centric game fun to play, and there is no excuse for their failure to do so. Not real life, not morality, not life lessons. If you can't make your game fun to play, you shouldn't make a game in the first place. If you chose to make a game about perpetrating evil acts, then you god damn better figure out how to make those evil acts fun and entertaining to a broad audience.

The who of the what now?

If it's any consolation to you, I fully approve of you ruining any ricktrolls you come across.

This is like Fire Swords in a Fiery Melee set - yes, you can explain it, but it's not necessarily a package that intuitively goes together. If I take Super Strength (just to perpetuate that tangent), all I'm really choosing is attacks based on super-human strength. In this regard, ripping chunks from the ground, stomping my foot or sending people flying is all within context. But if you assumed, for instance, that any super-strong character would also have to be super-tough (required secondary powers) and therefore put in a power in the set that revolves largely around being tough... That's now out of context.

This is actually largely the case for Shield Defence - because passive powers could not force you to have your shield out, they couldn't be concept-specific to the shield, so the next best thing Castle and BABs could do was to make Shield Defence passives revolve around the physical fitness of the character, rather than any direct result of having the shield. As a result of this, every shield user is hard-coded to be extremely tough, and that's somewhat limiting in terms of concept. Unfortunately, in this case there was no way around it.

Another example, actually, is Dual Pistols. Having and using pistols in no way requires one to be acrobatic or super-fast, yet Dual Pistols -> Hail of Bullets still has effectively super reflexes level of dodging while the power is taking place. Because the set's animations are so fast and acrobatic, people sort of assume every character using dual pistols would have to be, as well. Understandably, those who want to make Wild West gunslingers or no-nonsense thugs are left disappointed as the specificity of the set writes them out of the picture.

In much the same way, lumping invisibility and intangibility together strikes me as an unpleasant decision. There are far too many concepts I can think of which want one but not the other to mention, but the reason I have so many is that invisibility and intangibility are not, practically speaking, the same thing. I'm really not sure what powers you could make around an entire intangibility pool, though I suspect at least a couple could revolve around phasing enemies for short periods of time, or possibly debuffing them.

And that's a bad attitude to take. I firmly believe that the first step towards coercing a Free player into becoming a Premium player is to get them to stick around and invest time into the game. People who get into "free" to play games don't do so with the same mentality as a player who out-and-out purchases a game. They get into these games, a lot of the time, to see if they're worth playing to begin with. If you can convince a player that, yes, THIS game really is worth playing, only then can you realistically go out and start convincing said player to pay money, too.

I've already paid money to a variety of "free" to play MMOs, from Spiral Knights to World of Tanks, and almost every time this has happened several days to a week after I first started playing them. If I wasn't having fun with said games, I'd never have gotten to the point where I felt like the games were fun enough to invest money in.

Treating Free players like garbage is a bad way to get them to become Premium players. You can't run a "free" to play game the same way you run a game which requires you to purchase it first. That makes the Free option meaningless.

*edit*
And on the subject of the villain experience, I'll try to express my stance in a single sentence:

Playing villain-side should make me leave a session as happy as if I've played hero-side. And right now, it's intentionally designed to do the complete opposite.

Isn't that kind of the point of the suggestion, though - to communicate the idea the art team has before it's actually instituted? If you showcase a design and people go "YAY! WANT!" then there's very little chance the final in-game design will be rejected. Sure, some will cling onto minor details, but the whole design is pretty much safe. If you showcase it and people go "Meh. Decent." you're still pretty much safe. Some will like it, others won't, but few will be outraged. But if you showcase a design and get an overwhelming reaction "NO! NO! DO NOT WANT!" then that might be a good time to reconsider if the artistic direction really is right.

Obviously, no-one on the art team should be beholden to what we say on the forums. Most of us are neither artists nor game developers, and few of us are aware of their own preferences and desires in any coherent way. In a lot of ways, we depend on the art team to give us something good that we often didn't even know we wanted and supplant our imagination with their talent of creation. That's how it should be. But sharing concept art with the wider community can only ever be a good thing, as it generates opinions and feedback - feedback, more specifically, at a time when it stands a chance of being relevant.

Really, I don't mind the joke. If I made a big deal out of everything that bothers me, I wouldn't get time in the day to do anything else. This one, however, bothers me because it makes posts harder to read. If it were just a single instance of "pancake" instead of "PANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKE," I wouldn't mind, honest. Hell, I could even live with PANCAKE in all caps. After all, the in-game censorship does <bleep> and <@#$%!> and no-one minds. But a long all-caps uni-word just makes things hard to read, and that does irritate.

And you don't foresee how saying this can make me even more grumpy? I hate Internet memes. I hate them twice as much when they get shoved in my face, and auto-editing my posts because a mod wanted to be a comedian is pretty much the definition of shoving it in my face.

Not to mention it's somewhat distracting.

Err... How? When you pick Super Strength for a Brute, you have to take either Jab or Punch. You cannot make a character without taking either of those powers. Also, I'm not sure why you're picking on an offhand comment that has no purpose other than to say "I can accept prerequisites."

BABs explained that it was just a lot of work to rig a power like that. Brawl, purportedly, is the most complex power in the game because of how its animation is set up. BABs also explained that while this wasn't in the slightest impossible (when I suggested this be done for Kick and only Kick), he knew such a change would spawn requests to do this to all other powers that put weapons away, which he didn't ever foresee having the resources to do.

Giving me a power I can use on myself as a prerequisite would solve the problem, really. I have no use for second-rate team-only buffs on a Scrapper or a Brute. Giving me something that I could buff myself with as a prereq, that I could go with, even if it's not very good.

I personally feel that Phase Shift is just out of place in the Invisibility pool. It's not an invisibility power, it's an intangibility power. There are characters who can turn intangible while never being able to go fully invisible, and it is just these characters that I'd take Phase Shift on. By contrast, almost none of the characters I can think or conceive of who CAN turn invisible can also turn intangible. The conceptual link there is very tenuous.

I'm really not sure why the Fear powers are considered so strong here. They're very crappy control powers using an effect that's not all that consistent in its mitigation, yet both of them cost A LOT. I realise that something like Touch of Fear is a powerful tool, but Intimidate ain't it. Its duration is short and its recharge long. It's good as partial control of a single enemy, but hardly something I see as overpowered. I can totally see the single-target taunt and fear powers being moved to first and second position with the AoEs needing to be unlocked.

And I hope you're not surprised when things suspiciously like them end up in the game anyway. I'm pretty sure Halo doesn't own the patent to what is essentially a glorified steak tenderizer/axe blade hammer. I have one of them in my home.

Wait, scratch that, let's try again: I saw one of them in the Freedom promo pics. Yeah, that's better.

I respect anyone who spells his colours and armours with a U

It also doesn't account for the fact that "The Final Countdown" was already playing in my headphones.

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I'm not against revamping the Epic pools, because I agree - Dark and Weapons kind of suck. However, I don't think the OP and I are on the same page as to what constitutes "good" powers. Scrapper Epics are not ranged attack sets, they are control sets with ranged attacks in them. Even the Patron Pools they get from Stalkers aren't all attacks. I'm not sure if I agree with this or not, but that's how they're designed and that's what we should judge them by.

I find "Weapon" Mastery to be underwhelming because it doesn't really have weapons in it. I'd have expected a bow (which didn't exist at the time, granted) or guns (we had single pistol and rifle powers back then). What it IS, by contrast, is Devices, more or less. With the addition of a fifth power, it became even more like it. The shuriken powers just don't thrill me, personally. I mean, OK, the one shuriken, maybe, but, but the exploding one? The hell? Why not have a barrage of them? OK, I know that when Epics were made, it was on player complaint that "What, so in the 10 new levels I get to take the powers I didn't want before?" so they couldn't really afford to add much new artwork, but we got Cryo Freeze Ray, didn't we?

I really don't mind Weapon Mastery's balance, though. Web Grenade has a recharge debuff on it, so it's good for that and Caltrops is not a damage power, it is a run speed debuff. Aside from wolves and other "fast" enemies, with enough debuff in the thing you can more or less slow a whole spawn to a crawl. It's useful for making a retreat if need be, it's useful for sewing chaos among enemies and it's useful for keeping them from scattering too fast, which can help tremendously with lower-level enemies like those of the Steel Canyon fires.

Dark, on the other hand, I hate because it's just stupid. I get that Epics are not attack sets, but this is just... Ugh! Dark already has a ton of support powers. Why can't we have had a decent AoE or cone? Torrent is just offensive. It should have been put in a support slot, not a damage slot. I don't actually mind Dark Blast being in there because A) it looks VASTLY better than Gloom with the damn skull thing which I hate and B) it delivers its damage instantly, as opposed to over time, which seems to be Dark's "thing." The only thing I'd like to see happen to it is for Torrent to stop sucking.

When it comes to Pyre Mastery, I actually really like both the immobilize and the hold. They're not THAT useful on a Scrapper as status effects, but both of them do some SERIOUS damage, which is always a plus. And Body Mastery's Conserve Power, though on a long recharge, is still very useful. Yes, granted, a constant endurance bar increase is useful, but for the time it's active, Conserve Power has a MASSIVE impact. Even before inherent Stamina, I was using it to fight enemies with heavy endurance drain and run the old super-expensive Focused Accuracy (it's much, much cheaper now) so I value having a safety net for when my end drops like a stone.

I feel the central, serious fail of villain-side stems from what I can only describe as a profound lack of understanding of what makes a "good villain" on the part of the development team, and this goes back for years. I know Golden Girl would say something to the effect of "Crime doesn't pay " but seriously - why is all of villain-side designed to be purposefully unpleasant? Honest question here.

When I play a hero, the game is uplifting, hopeful and positive. I save the day, people who deserve good things have good things happen to them, everyone is happy in the end, and I walk away with a light heart, feeling good about myself. When I play a villain, the game is dirty, rotten and depressing. I ruin lives, defile innocence, crush dreams and break hearts. In the end, everyone is broken, hurt and hollow inside, everything is dark and glum and I walk away feeling physically sick. What the hell, writers? Do you honestly think I play your game to destroy my mood?

What makes a good villain isn't the torture, murder and mutilation, it isn't the depravity and brutality. I didn't choose play a villain because I watched Salo but think it wasn't quite disgusting enough. I didn't choose to play a villain because I'm rotten on the inside who wants to enact his perverse torture fantasies in a medium where I won't go to jail. I DID NOT choose to play a villain for the evulz.

I chose to play a villain because SOME villains are cool. I chose to play a villain because I watched Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! and thought the Skeleton King was cool in that he kept coming back to life even when he got killed. I chose to play a villain because I watched the Teen Titans cartoon and felt that "Slade" was a powerful, cool villain who was always on the ball. I chose to play a villain because I watched the Swat Kats and felt that Dark Kat's deep, booming voice treatment as THE villain was awesome. I chose to play a villain because, sometimes, villains are cool.

Funny enough, I'd say Dean McArthur is probably the best kind of villainous contact in the entire game - he's a sort of slimy lackey who's working for me, and enthusiastically, and who sends me on missions of more defined by ambition than by evilnessnessness. Playing though Dean's arc and then through Leonard's arc leaves me with a fat grin on my face and a song in my heart. Sure, the kind of satisfaction I get from screwing over Protean is probably not entirely virtuous, but damn if the guy didn't deserve it.

THAT is what the villain experience should have been - uplifting, self-satisfying and more than a bit arrogant. Even the most virtuous among us still succumb to arrogant pride from time to time, and THAT is what the villain-side content should be. If a hero is morally superior to his enemies, a villain is "simply better" than his enemies. In all cases, making the players happy should be the goal. It is expressly because City of Villains is written to depress that you see so few people care to play a villain. Oh, sure, there are a few for whom the game won't be "evil enough" until we can murder civilians and wear their severed heads as hats, but by and large, people won't pay for a game in order to be depressed.

*edit*
Censoring words by replacing them with "PANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKE" has got to be the worst, least productive idea in forum moderation since my sig was removed because it said "Other games." [censored] was a good way to remove a word but still keep the sentence meaningful. By contrast, randomly PANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKE inserting PANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKE into sentences just makes them hard to read.

This is not funny, mods.

Meh. A "rocket board" is a single power - you travel around on a rocket board. Everything else about it goes into "shield melee" territory.

On the flip side, I DO NOT want to see this as just another throwaway temporary power. I have eleventy billion of those and I'm sick and tired of getting more and more powers that bastardise the powersets/pools/epic system. I want it added to the game as some kind of more meaningful power, if necessary as part of a pool, so that this can be drawn up as a costume item, because...

Quote:

Originally Posted by RavenSoul 2- How many here would prefer the board to be customizable, ie, coloration and form?

This needs to be customizable. Not just a selection among five different "rocket board" powers, I mean genuine customization. You take the power, you enter the costume editor and customize the board. You pick between models, you pick the colour of the models and possibly even the effect the models leave behind. "Board customization" needs to look like weapon customization. Anything less would be disappointing.

Attacks are not gonna' happen. City of Heroes has static animations with no ability for animation blending, as per BABs in those exact words. What this means is that each power animation needs to start from a predefined stance, play out and return to a predefined stance. In turn, what this means is that each stance requires its own unique animations for EVERY attack in the game. Ninja Run and Beast Run sort of get away with it, since they essentially self-interrupt and return the player to the default "left foot forward" stance for as long as you keep attacking, then return you to the hunched-over stance of each.

This can't work for a rocket board, however, since for one, the flying animations use a VERY different flying stance, and for another, the rocket board would need to disappear. What's more, with rocket boards being a prop, it means attacks would actually require a separate activation sequence like with weapons, or the board would have to disappear every time you did anything else. Essentially what needs to happen for combat to happen while on a rocket board is like what needed to be done for shields, but ten times more work. First of all, Shield Defence needed its own new tech to keep the shield out at all times and mix its own activation sequences with those of other weapons. Secondly, it needed unique "with shield" animation for everything. However, a lot of those animations were nearly identical to their stock counterparts, because shields used the same basic stance as normal attacks. For Rocket Boards, they'd need much brand new animations for everything.

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I suppose the only way I could see combat while flying on an aerial platform is to have the character retain an exact copy of his ground animation, but standing on the flying platform. That way, you can just reuse all of ground animations, but pass them off as aerial combat. I'm not sure if David would be interested in this, but I'd be interested to see it. If the platform is big enough for the character's gait, then technically, this shouldn't take anything unusual to make work.

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As for toggles, yes, I want to see us keep our toggles with both rocket boards and Walk. Outside of a few specific model-skeleton-altering toggles (Granite Armour, White Dwarf, etc), there's no reason that I can think of to knock out our toggles when we use these powers. Shield Defence MIGHT be problematic because of activation sequence black magic, but even then - why not disable JUST the problematic toggles instead of ALL toggles? A running toggle does not involve an animation, so it shouldn't be an animations problem.