Samuel_Tow

General response to everyone and anyone:

For Azuria: I hate the Steampunk skirt and the Steampunk faces. This isn't restricted to just Azuria - I simply hate the parts with a passion - but they keep showing up on her. I also dislike overly dramatic mystical fancy looks for a woman who has thus far been shown as more of a seer and a book keeper than a combat mage. I much prefer the costumes that stick close to the original, with only slight variations to incorporate only small mystical aspects.

For Daves: I like the version with the Robotic Claws. The Piston Boots do a good job of demonstrating robotic legs. I'm still not happy with the Robotic Claws themselves, however. I'd have gone with a full robotic arm straight from the shoulder and a fully human other arm. When you're looking to make someone look crippled and disfigured, it's best to avoid symmetry as much as possible. I do like the robotic eye, however. Very good show.

For Holsten Armitage: Overall very good design, with the receding hairline and all, but I'd prefer to keep him using the traditional lab coat. The double breasted science jacket is a chemistry worker's attire, as are large thick rubber gloves. I know Holsten sells "Science" enhancements, but he's more of a theoretical physicist, given that he created a time machine, and as such would be prone to less hands-on work and more theoretical science. I'd much rather see him in a basic lab coat, in that case.

That's all I have for the moment.

I have a lot to say on the subject, so please bear with me

*Ghost Widow: Because it had to be said. Ghost Widow's design is very stylised, very striking and very memorable while managing to still be simple and unobtrusive. The start monochrome contrast of colours underpins the sleek, elegant design of her suit while the predominantly black theme gives her an air of mystery. Whoever designed this, top marks!

*Hequat: She's singularly unique in the entire game for having an almost entirely shamanistic/tribal theme going. I don't think there's a single costume piece on Hequat that I don't want, but everything she wears more or less works to a theme that's wholly absent from our own use. That, and the... "Feather boas" she has on her hands and feet give her a more robust look, which this game's female characters sorely lack otherwise.

*5th Column Requiem: I love how in a faction stocked with 10-foot-tall super soldiers, giant robots and towering werewolves, the biggest, baddest guy used to be this short petite guy in a simple uniform. Sure, he had a flaming head, but he was still a normal-sized guy, yet he was one of the strongest characters in the 5th Column prior to their subversion. This is a concept I just love - power doesn't equal size, and oftentimes being bigger just makes you slower and more unwieldy. It's only the most awesome of bad guys who manage to be strong AND compact. Requiem has that.

*The Real(?) Nemesis: Going back on my previous point, I like Nemesis' many Fakes because they're big. They're roughly a third to a half taller than the biggest we can make, and they come with giant boots and gloves. If ever there was an enemy in-game who had a sense of weight and power to him without also having a sense of fat and immobility, that would be the Fake Nemesis automatons. These things really look like the battering rams of the Nemesis army, and I've always loved their design.

*Rikti Chiefs: These guys are incredible. They were great before the I10 redesign, and they're so much better now. Mentalists, Mesmerists, Soldiers, they're all amazing, in all incarnations. Their feel of very heavy, very bulky armour is almost unsurpassed thanks to the Rikti's odd frame of small torso with large hands and feet. This makes them look big without feeling fat. The jetpack things on their backs also add to the overall design, and the fact that they glow at night (and only at night) is just AMAZING! By contrast, though, enemies like Hro and Yukon are more than a bit absurd, strictly because of their unnecessary size.

*Black Scorpion: This is almost exactly what I had in mind when I designed my own giant cybernetic man. The melding of machine body and human head is interesting enough, but the fact that the body is so big that it comes up over the head is even better. The downside is that this makes the character look a bit fat and unwieldy, but the design is good enough to stand on its own anyway. I think the scorpion tail is the only thing I don't like. Butt-mounted weapons have never been my "thing."

*Lord Recluse: Everything the Statesman's design does wrong, Lord Recluse's design does right. He is dark and sinister, he wears actual clothes and armour and his helmet covers his entire head. And if her were just an armoured spider, that would be cool enough, but I really think what ties the costume together is that fur collar he has going. This takes his costume from just a power armour dude into an actual high-class ruler, because let's face it - that fur collar has no purpose but to look snazzy. And when you can combine evil metal armour with snazzy fur and classy clothes... You've got it going on! He's also the only "spider-back" character in the game who has his spider legs spread out, rather than clumped over his head in a broom, at least that I can remember.

*Malta Titans: These are probably the game's best representation of heavy mech. I know Heel Cole's Warworks Robots are supposed to be many times stronger, but the Titans look the part much better. They're slow, heavy, ponderous and LOADED with heavy weapons. If you took a tank, then gave it arms and legs, you'd get something a lot like a Malta Titan. These things don't look like people, nor should they. They look like machines, like walking heavy weapons platforms, which is precisely what they are. Sure, they look like they'd be slow to walk and slow to turn and difficulty to move around close quarters... As they well should. This things are tanks. These things are AAA Battareys. They shouldn't be trudging around corridors. They should be raining artillery fire on buildings from a mile away. And I love 'em for it!

*Baphomet: Baphomet is a big fiery demon. That's really all he has going for him, but my god does he do that well! One time I walked up to what I thought was a regular behemoth before realising it was three times as tall as I was. I listened as it gave out booming, blood-curdling roar before realising I had just walked in serious, serious, SERIOUS trouble! Sometimes, simple designs work best, and this couldn't be more true in the case of Baphomet. All he needs is to be a fire-breathing demon, have wings and be big. And he does amazingly well in all three categories. Yes, it's cliché. Yes, it's been done. But it's been done because it's good!

*The Wolf Spiders: Breaking the rules just a bit, the entire faction of Wolf Spiders is probably the coolest in Arachnos. They use conventional rifles, they dress mostly like futuristic soldiers and they're all black. Whenever I've imagined "evil faceless soldiers" for any of my army commander villains, this is what my imagination has given me - Arachnos Wolf Spiders. I SO want these guys as custom models for Mastermind Mercenaries!

*Tarantulas: To keep to the rules set up, let's go with the Toxic Tarantula, but the whole line is awesome. These are some of the game's most interesting enemies, partly because they're non-humanoid, partly because they're big, partly because they have those big, glowing slicing blades, and partly because they're spiders! I honestly don't know exactly what it is about the Tarantulas, but they're much cooler than the game's other multi-legged enemies, like the Arachnobots or the Jaegers. I suspect it's because they sit much lower in their legs, with much of the body hanging underneath the legs structure, whereas all others have their bodies on top of their legs like they're on tracks. It puts their centre of gravity high up, whereas the Tarantulas look much more stable.

*Doc Delilah: Obvious, when you think about it. I think she is the ONLY woman in the ENTIRE game who's actually big. "She's enough to give a girl a complex," as Penny Yin puts it. I like the Doc because she's a heavy fighter, she's a hands-on sort of person, and because she's defined as being a super strong before she's defined for being a woman. Sure, her costume is pretty simple and uses entirely player-usable pieces and, yeah, she looks like a supersized ordinary woman when they could have honestly done a lot more, but I still like her. She represents a concept that's not very common in this game. I know she gave ME a complex when I realised my "giant" woman was tiny compared to her. Thank heavens for the Science booster pack

*3K Kelvin: I admit, his costume isn't all that interesting and his personality is two-dimensional, but what Kelvin represents is what counts here. Most of the game, the Hellions are represented as the butt monkies of the street gans, acting as bottom feeders and getting bullied by their girlfriends. 3K Kelvin (and Duke Mordrogar to a lesser extent), however, demonstrate that this gang actually does have a shot at the big time. They have "heavies," they presumably have a semi-competent leadership, so they must have the potential to do more than just snatch purses and torch buildings. That counts for a lot, and now puts the Skulls in the bad position of not having any interesting personalities.
*Greater Devoured: These creatures are fairly simple, but their design is still very well done. Their tall, bulky shoulders melding into a lowered head give them a very stout, strong look while their wide, muscular limbs make them appear far stronger and tougher than a creature of their size should be. Furthermore, their actual size is HUGE, significantly bigger than what players can achieve, making them into truly imposing threats. Finally, the eyeless, mouthless tentacle face just adds so much to their creep factor. I recall one time my mother walking into the room when I was fighting a Devoured and being disgusted at the squirming tentacles. Juvenile as that may sound, this is precisely the kind of response they SHOULD elicit. Job done.

*Akharist: In general, all of the Circle of Thorns high mages look very good, in part because of their robes and in part because of their funny tall hats. They really DO look like pretty much what you'd imagine an arcane wizard might look like. Akharist in particular works really well because he stands out from them quite very well with his white pyjamas against their darker skirts, and he really does look like an evil walking corpse trying to turn over a new leaf. I just wish Baron Zoria could have been given his own unique model in the remake of Troy Hickman's Smoke and Mirrors, instead of using Akharist's model, right down to the description test mentioning Akharist by name. Opps!

That's all I can think of off-hand. If I meet or remember other enemies, I'll add them later.

*edit*
Ah, I have one more!

*Countess Crey: I love her design, or rather designs, as it were. Clarissa was clearly inspired by Sin's Elexis Sinclair, who was a very cool character, herself. Wages of Sin suffered so, so much by not having her in the game... Anyway, Clarissa's deal is that she's not just a high-powered executive and office bunny, but rather a temptress, as well. After all, she seduced Count Crey and took his money. It makes sense for her to run around in ultra miniskirts and flaunt her sexuality. It serves to only further highlight the depravity of her personal character, in that really nothing at all is beneath her. About the only serious complaint I have is that it makes no sense for her to have psychic powers, or at the very least it's never explained or even mentioned.

We haven't had a controversy about this in a while, so I think now is a good time to talk about challenge in more abstract, general terms without always trying to read an agenda in each other's words. As such, please do what you can to avoid using current in-game hot topics as examples as I really want to get to the bottom of the players' perception more so than just critique this particular game.

Now, I'm sure we've all seen the debates and flame wars about what's challenging and what's just frustrating, and I think it's pretty clear that very much everyone has his or her own idea of what constitutes a challenge. That's to be expected. But I want to try and put our individual perceptions into words and see if we can't give them a bit more context, see if we can't make the abstract, amorphous concept of "challenge" a bit more real and concrete, something we can measure, even if we don't agree on each other's measurements. As such, let me ask you this:

What constitutes "challenge" to you, and where do you believe it just becomes frustrating?

Obviously, I can only speak for myself, but to my eyes, the truth lies in untangling challenge from difficulty, as they're not really the same thing, not in my mind, at least. To my eyes, "difficulty" is just a simple measure of how much the game cheats. It's a concept intended to punish the player and make his game time harsher. That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, as many games use inflated difficulty to balance encounters such that they're not boring easy. However, in and of itself, difficulty is not "fun," I don't think. Its purpose is hurt the player, ultimately, and that's really not what I play for.

"Challenge," by contrast, I see as a much broader concept than basic "difficulty," as challenge is a state of mind more so than a collection of game settings. Pretty much every game out there gives the player a certain collection of tools to use in beating it. To me, a "challenge" is a situation in the game where all of those tools are called into action, a situation in which the player has no easy way out, no solution that involves just using one tool over and over again. To me, "challenge" isn't about difficulty at all, but rather about involvement. Even the easiest of encounters can feel challenging to me if it required me to be involved with everything I'd brought to it, if it pushed my character's skills and abilities to the limit and they turned out to be JUUUST enough to succeed. "Challenge," to my eyes, is the ability to design encounters that simulate difficulty, but ultimately let the player triumph for that artificial sense of accomplishment.

I also draw a very hard line between challenge for the player and challenge for the character. A lot of games, especially Nintendo-hard games, tend to test the player's skills, reflexes, abilities and so forth, giving him essentially a stand-in avatar to act through in the game world. Personally, as a largely mediocre player, I rarely find that sort of challenges terribly fun, since either it feels like I can never win, or I won by some incredibly cheap tactic. Sure, occasionally I'll find a game I'm good at and beat it like a pro, but that's rare. For the most part, these days I see myself as more of a storyteller than an actual player, so I much prefer to face challenges for my characters, instead.

Especially here in City of Heroes where we're given a corral of different characters with their own powers, abilities, skills and stats, it's sometimes all too easy to see combat more as a Pokemon fight than an "I'm in the game punching things!" type of ordeal. In some sense, I tend to feel like I've made these characters, prepared them, and now I'm sending them into a fight to see how they do. Sure, I'm still at the controls, but it's the character doing the work. As such, I much prefer to see encounters that challenge the character directly, such as requiring that character to use skills that are often not necessary.

I do have a direct example of the above: My old Stone/Stone Brute. Before he had Stamina, he had to fight very slowly. However, when I found myself in a hard situation, I could always just attack faster and compensate with blue inspirations. If that proved to be insufficient and I was still getting hurt, I could always resort to Earth's Embrace to heal myself and become tougher. If even THAT doesn't save me, well, there's always Granite Amour. And when an encounter actually goes as far as that point and then the character wins in the end after all, THAT is what I consider a challenge. The character was pushed to the limit, which is what I count. Sure, it's rarely very difficult for me as the player, but that's rarely what I look for in a game anyway.

But, of course, that's just me. What do YOU find to be challenging?

Incidentally, I also feel that putting people on Global Ignore should act like /hideall, but just towards that particular person. If the person tries to send you a tell, the game says you appear offline. If that person has somehow gotten you on Global friends, you appear offline. If that person has your characters in local friends, they appear offline. If that person runs a Team Search, your characters don't show up. If that person shares a Global channel with you, he can't see you in the list of members online.

Inversely, it should also act as ignore in the opposite direction. Anything you say, someone you've ignored cannot see. If you speak in a global channel, Broadcast or even on a team, if you somehow end up paired with that person, he can't see anything you chat. Like you aren't even saying anything. If you run a Team Search, that person's characters don't show up for you.

I want /ignore to be as close to making both people not exist to each other as game mechanics would allow. If I thought it was workable, I'd ask for the player's in-game models to become invisible to each others, so right-click chat info doesn't work, either.

If I put someone on /ignore, it's because I want nothing at all to do with this person ever again. That's not restricted to just receiving chat. It extends to every single facet of interaction the game provides. I do not want to know that someone I've /ignored even exists.

I don't think a female only server would solve anything even if it were enforceable. What, you think women never harass other women? I don't care about how sexist an exclusionary server may be, what I find to be insultingly sexist is the belief that somehow only men ever harass other people, and men never get harassed themselves.

To my mind, not allowing us to turn our toggles off when incapacitated is just unnecessary. That's going from one extreme to the other. Once upon a time, when I was held, all my toggles dropped, I fell from the sky, my shields disappeared... Now, when I'm held, I can't stop flying, I can't turn off the expensive toggle I wanted to run for just a few seconds... Just seems like overkill.

Anecdote time: Once upon a time on my Blaster, I popped a Break-Free and nuked a Malta spawn with Nova. When this was done, I kneeled down to Rest. As I was Resting, my Break Free expired and I fell under the effect of a TacOps' Stun Grenade. Only not for the standard 45 seconds, oh no. You see, Rest actually debuffs your status resistance by quite a bit, so you can get held of I think up to three times as long. I'd have disabled Rest and abandoned my healing process, but you can't disable a toggle while stunned.

Similarly, I've had instances on that same Blaster where I'd fire up Personal Forcefield, get stunned for 45 seconds almost immediately, and then end up practically incapacitated. Why? Well, the PFF doesn't toggle-drop. Its defensive value suppresses, but its "Only Affecting Self" doesn't. What this means is I'm trapped in the field, I'm not protected by it, but I still can't use my Defiance attacks through the status effect anyway. Ouch.

Or how about this? When you're stunned in the air, your "grip" is reduced to nothing. What this means is you cannot accelerate almost at all, and if you're already moving, you cannot stop. What this means is if I get stunned while hovering, I have about an equal chance of drifting into the next spawn over uncontrollaby, or otherwise be HELD up in the air since moving with Hover while stunned is practically impossible. Before, I'd have dropped to the ground and been able to stagger out of damage patches and around corners, but now not only won't being stunned drop me to the ground, I can't stop flying even if I wanted to.

It's very irritating.

I'm of two minds about this.

On the one hand, anything NPCs have, I want to have. I can somewhat swallow signature pieces, like Posi's unique helmet, Numina's coat, Manticore's "mane" and so forth, but every non-signature piece I want to have. To a large extent, this feeling is born from the belief that if they can use it, I can use it for all technology is concerned, and the game is just artificially keeping me from using it. Anyone remember the Shadow Bane sword? How about the Blue Shield? Yeah, like that.

So, on the one hand, I'd like to see any humanoid NPCs be made with the same rigs we're using so that we can always use their pieces.

On the other hand, the humanoid rig is very, very limited. For one, it's limited to only depicting humanoid characters. What about quadrupeds? What about snake people? What about legless ghosts? What about creatures on tank tracks... What about TANKS? Or how about formless enemies, like a big glob of jelly with mouths all over? There are many, many, MANY things that the humanoid rig cannot produce, and restricting our game to just humanoid characters is, I firmly believe, a mistake. We need the Snakes and the Hydra and the Titans and the Storm Elementals and the Sky Skiffs and the Spectrals and so forth, because they bring variety to the game in ways that wouldn't be workable for custom player characters.

So, on the other hand, I still want to see unique, custom NPCs who are vastly different from what the humanoid rig can support.

I suppose the balance point, as I see it, is in what's even conceivable as being used by a player. If I see dudes in tunics, I want them. They're humans, I'm a human, I want it. But if I see a dude with a swatch of tentacles where his lower body should be... Yeah, I can see that I won't be using that for my martial artists any time soon. The game needs custom unique characters, but they need to be so unique as to be impossible to conceive as being used by players. And this actually is a sustainable point of balance, I think.