Samuel_Tow

I don't know about you, but I look at my character's hands all the time. The basic combat stance almost always has the left hand extended, with fingers - or lack thereof - very obvious. Every time I zoom in to marvel at my character, I see those mitten hands. Every time I set foot in the Tailor interface - and I spend a lot of time there - I see those mittens. Every time I try to pick the right gloves, I have to look at those mittens.

When making one particular character, I went through a lot of gloves until I found the hands I wanted to go with. Hands matter. They're easily some of the most distinctive features that define us as humans, especially if they're animated to operate well. Our hands are some of the most expressive parts our bodies, pretty much second only to our faces. They matter.

A success in concept, but I'm not a fan of the peg leg. Thing is, this is a tech guy. If he lost his leg, he'd have a prosthetic, not a rotten wood stick. Even absent of future technologies, we have very realistic, largely operational prosthetics right now. Not sure I like the eye patch, either, for the same reason.

Personally, I'd have gone with a missing arm and given him the Cyborg one as a replacement, and instead of the eye patch, I'd have used that one single cyber eye piece. He may end up looking a bit... Unpleasant, but he'll at least be interesting. And since Robotic Arms torsos don't allow for that cardigan, I'd go for a simple shirt, instead.

To be fair, the monster hands have indented inter-finger spacing drawn into the actual mesh. It's not just textures and shaders. But if it can be done for Monster hands, it can be done for all other hands, too, and it should.

I disagree with you completely. All you ever lose is a few seconds, but what we gain for those few seconds is a very strong sense of immersion. These are real stores, real locations in the game world that we can visit. It shows me people don't just spend all day with their shoes nailed to the sidewalk, it shows me that not everyone sells their wares out of their inner coat pockets. Pretty much the WORST thing, immersion-wise, that you can do in a game is to simply stick an NPC out in a random place in the overworld and have that NPC act as a vendor.

If a vendor has a selection of 50 swords, he's not hiding them in his bag. He's most likely keeping them on racks or in chests that I want to see. And he didn't lug all of those chests to the middle of the forest on his back. He had help. Either he had servants who helped deliver them and would still be milling about to help carry the remaining goods and earnings back, or he used a vehicle of some sort that should still be around. If he's alone in the middle of the forest, he'd need security, most likely a contingent of armed guards, or at least the obvious ability to defend himself. After all, a lone vendor in possession of expensive items is a prime target for robbers.

In-game immersion matters. If I go to a store, I want it to look like a store and have an interior. I want to see boxes of stuff on shelves, I want to see a display case of guns and grenades, I want to see magical artefacts hung on the walls and rows of old, heavily-stacked bookcases. I want to see the intricate futuristic scientific machinery, I want to see gadgets in clear plastic cases hung on racks like spares in a hardware store. I want to feel like this is a real world and the people I interact with have both their own off-camera lives and their own infrastructure set up for accomplishing the things they do.

Trainers I get. They're repositories of knowledge, so they don't really need much more than just themselves. You need to be trained, you go to a trainer, and you two go off to train. I'd like to see training facilities, but I can let that slide. But any sort of physical goods vendor cannot afford to be just alone on a street corner. Take Ghost Falcon, for instance. Ignoring the question of why a clearly technological hero is selling magical stuff, where is he getting it from? He's just one guy standing in the inside of a roundabout. Where do the Merit Vendors keep all of that stuff they give out? Who do they work for? Who do they answer to?

Pretty much everyone on the development and community team has been talking about a higher standard of quality recently. I hope this reflects in the verisimilitude of the settings we get introduced to. I don't want my contacts standing in alleys 24/7 like they're homeless. A businessman shouldn't be leaning against a lamp post. He should be in his office. A scientist shouldn't be standing next to a warehouse. He should have his own laboratory, or at least have set up a secret lab somewhere that I want to see. If I go to visit a weapons store, I want to actually visit a weapons store, not just speak with some guy in the middle of a park who sell weapons. That's not a "store," it just some guy.

I know that simply slapping a random-costume NPC in a convenient location is a cheap solution to adding a store access point, but it's also a very ugly one. I'd really want to see the developers spend the extra time, money and effort to give us more building interiors and convince us that this could actually be a real world. No more cop-out vendors, please.

Could you please try to reword that and put in some punctuation? I quite literally cannot understand what you're saying in the slightest.

His old pants are just ripped jeans, which is why they're this kind of blue. I wouldn't worry about keeping consistent with their colour if you're not going for a jeans look.

Everything else on that V2 is aces, though. I love it. It's consistent with the old contact's general look and story, and it came out pretty nice. I approve

Thank you, Uber Guy

I don't think anyone complained that the Council looked worse or more out of place than the 5th Column, with the possible exception of the Mexican Lucha Libre wrestlers. The Council, like the Column, was a paramilitary organisation staffed by masked soldiers. People did miss the skull-like WW2 German army helmet plus gas mask combo, but that's because it's iconic of Stupid Jetpack Hitler more than anything else. The space man helmets were just as good for the neo-fascist alien fanboys, and the variety in both powers and looks that the Council brought is significant. In fact, putting the Column soldiers against the Council ones, the Column looks very dated.

What people opposed to back then the merit of ostensibly renaming a faction and taking away a good story to replace it with a mediocre one, compounded by the "Devs hate Nazis!" arguments. Both the Council and the Column had and have their perks, and the smartest thing to do would have been what they ended up doing eventually anyway - put them both in the game.

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What's a bit upsetting to me is the straw men being built around "the horrible conduct" of the Circle of Warcraft thread, like it's full of juvenile idiots who are having nerdrage episodes and demanding changes. Well I happened to read through most of it, and it's very little more than a bunch of people sharing their opinions of a change, which just happens to be negative. Occasionally there will be one who goes "This sucks! Change it back!" but for the most part we're just trying to verbalise why we dislike the change and what could possibly happen to mitigate it without requiring the scrapping of existing work wholesale.

In general, I find it profoundly unhelpful for people keep on arguing about how other people shouldn't express their opinions, or should only express their opinions a certain way. I'm glad the development team seem to know better than this, and their recent action have earned them a LOT of credit with me, so I'll trust them to sort this out without needing to be told which feedback to read and which feedback to ignore.

Ultimately, the game is made to entice people to play it and pay money for it. Ultimately, the development team is making things for us because they believe we'll like them enough to keep paying for them. Any development team would be foolish to take any position other than to give players what they want. As far as I'm concerned, Matt Miller's promise to do precisely that still holds true.

Furthermore, no-one's suggesting that new changes need to be approved by the community, merely shared with the community at an early enough stage. Obviously, no art direction will be universally liked. Still, some are perceived much better than others, and this is information that the development team can then use in development of the actual art direction. We know what's coming and they have a rough idea of how we'd react to it. Everybody wins.

Well, I couldn't have known, could I? At least I know what the patch does now.

Thank you, that should be enough to tide me over until the patch notes get made. If it's a hotfix, I can kind of cut them some slack on wanting to get that out fast, but I'll still be on the lookout for 'em.

Thanks, folks

OK, but now I have to ask in turn - what was that performance bug? I don't recall meeting with one in City of Heroes for a while.

Hey, I'd use it It has a really neat fire effect, definitely appropriate for lower-key fiery teleport.

Yes, Disintegrating. I prefer to not think about that.

This is really all I think needs to be done. Stuff these things in the Character Creator, but lock them so you can't make a character with the set. That way, when I go into the creator, I can see all the real numbers for all the existing powers, to the extent that "real" numbers are ever actually real, and I can see all of the animations for all of the powers on the power customization screen, to the extent to which you can see summons and toggles and can see what these powers look when flying.

Realistically speaking, a buyer's best choice would be to look for YouTube videos of the powersets and check City of Data and Mids' Hero and Villain Designer, but I don't believe any of these are official sources. I guess the Paragon Store could give you numbers and links to animation videos like how the Lineage II official gear database gives you links to still of the pieces, but I'm not sure if that would be enough.

All things considered, I suspect we'll end up buying blind for the most part even with all the information in the world. You can't really understand a set until you sit at the wheel.

Teleport is probably the one power which can use the most custom options in this game. The current teleport uses a kind of concept-neutral starburst glow that sort of just says "You disappeared!" But there are so many, many, MANY other ways we could teleport. Here are a few of them:

*You explode in a fireball and disappear. Somewhere in the distance, a fireball explodes and you appear inside of it.

*You get encased in a large ice crystal which then shatters, leaving nothing behind. Somewhere in the distance, an ice block forms and shatters, revealing you inside of it.

*Similar as above, but sand swirls around to form a large rock. This rock crumbles back to sand and pebbles, leaving nothing behind. Somewhere in the distance, another rock forms and crumbles, revealing you inside of it.

*A column of opaque light/energy shoots down from the sky and envelops you. When it narrows down again, you are gone. Somewhere in the distance, another column of light shines down and you appear inside of it.

*You know what in does when you drop it into water? Well, an inky explosion like this happens around you and you disappear in it. Somewhere in the distance, an inky explosion happens and you appear out of it.

*Within the bling of an eye, you drop down into the ground. If standing on the ground, you drop slowly. If flying, you streak down fast. Somewhere in the distance, you pop out of the ground and reappear.

*You lean forward as though to run, then simply disappear amid speed lines suggesting you moved ahead so fast no-one could follow you. Somewhere far ahead, you reappear amid speed lines once more.

*You ninja-leap high into the sky and far off-camera. Somewhere in the distance, you ninja-leap-return back down. The animation for this already exists in the costume change.

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Actually, you know what? Make ALL costume change emotes into custom animations for Teleport, only instead of swapping costumes, you appear farther ahead on the map.

Say, did anyone else hear a loud, high-pitched noise? My ears are still ringing and I can't tell where it came from.

Anyway, the Mediport system is only "perfect" in the sense that it keeps our meta-game characters from being permanently killed, wasting our time, effort and - let's face it - money by losing progress. This has nothing at all to do with storytelling and everything to do with good game design. If you'll expect the player to invest a great deal in a game, it only makes sense to not be a dick and put in traps that rob the player of the progress he's made. This is a lesson NCsoft appear to have had to learn the hard way after the horrors of lost progress in Lineage II, but that's besides the point.

In-story, however, the Mediport system doesn't have to be, and indeed isn't, perfect. As Venture explains, if you get killed before being teleported, then there ain't a damn thing the doctors can do to solidify your liquefied head and glue it back together. It doesn't happen to us, the players, for reasons of meta-game (the story doesn't matter if your audience ragequits), but it "could," in the very abstract sense. It does, however, happen to NPCs. I'm sure people like Cyrus Thompson and Sefu Tendaji would like to have a word with anyone who doesn't think heroes in Paragon City can die, even if they'll be having it from beyond the grave. I'm also pretty sure that the Shining Light and the Invisible Falcon might object to you counting them as alive just because they were cloned into mind-controlled super soldiers after they died.

Point is, people can die even with the Mediport system, and it doesn't take a genius writer to write that. The simple fact is that the Mediport system is pretty much just a very high-tech, futuristic version of medevac. You get taken down, you call for extraction and you're evacuated. Just as in real life, if you die, you lose out on the chance to be evacuated and treated. Because you're dead. Typically what happens - and the game actually graphically depicts this - is you get mortally wounded, you drop down AND THEN call for medevac. You don't disappear as soon as you sustain an injury, the system is not automated and it definitely can't save you BEFORE you get hurt. So it's very possible to die without it kicking in if you die before you can trigger it.

Sideways from that, the game offers multiple ways to suppress the system. Roy Cooling - hideous as his story may be - already gives us precedent for the wholesale suppression of the entire system. The Praetorians have "tech" to suppress the system entirely when they attack, and you need "tech" to prevent this. That could be what happens. Furthermore, on at least one occasion, the Sky Raiders nearly take control of the Mediport system so that wounded heroes are pulled "to a Sky Raider brig" instead of a hospital. So it can be suppressed, it can be overridden, and I'm pretty sure it can be disrupted so that it teleports you to three hospitals at the same time. In pieces. And, of course, there's that random NPC comment about how Ghost Widow looked at someone wrong and "The guy just drops dead. No teleporter no nothing!"

In any case, the Mediporter system isn't the issue. Resurrection is. You can mess with the system in just the right way at just the right time to let someone die. It happens. The bigger problem is how you keep this someone from being brought back to life or rebuilt or cloned or what have you. Unfortunately, to this I have no answer.