Samuel_Tow

That's precisely what I'm saying. In most cases, knockback won't kill you, so most people don't care either way. Today's teams are strong enough to look after themselves. The only situations where otherwise decent teams start to struggle are particularly nasty AV fights or things like Trials, and knockback isn't so much a factor in there.

What knockback is, for the most part, is annoying. When I use Hand Clap, I use it because I want some mitigation off of it, but I'd rather not give mitigation back to my enemies for using it. I want mitigation while still being able to attack, and attack efficiently, like how knockdown allows me. But because Handclap is PBAoE scatter, I hamper myself as much as I hamper my enemies a lot of the time.

In short, knockback isn't a big enough problem to make turning it off universal law, but it's just big enough of a problem that letting me opt out of at least the worst offenders would be a very welcome change.

I think I can do some of the legwork on this one.

According to City of Data, Super Speed has a 3.5 run speed modifier, which comes up to 350%. Enhanced with a single level 50 Common run speed enhancement at 42.4% value itself, that comes up to 350*1.424 = 498.4%. Swift has a run speed modifier of 3.5, or 35% run speed buff. With a level 50 Common, that comes up to 49.84%. Together, two powers provide a 548.24%. Sprint has one 0.5 scale modifier and another one that's immune to enhancing. Together, they come up to 50% + 71.2% = 121.2%. Together with the rest, that's 669.44%.

Base run speed, as taken from the in-game combat attributes, is 14.32. Buffed, this comes up to 14.32*(1 + 6.6944) = 14.32*7.6944 ~ 110.18mph.

Now, I'm pretty sure I didn't make a mistake anywhere in my calculations, but it's possible I'm misreading some of the data. However, it seems to me that all things considered, you can cap your Super Speed with just a single run speed common in Super Speed, Sprint and Swift, only ever using just their default slots.

That's not a safe assumption to make. City of Heroes players have historically gone berserk over costumes, multiple times crashing the PlayNC store when a new Booster Pack comes out. If there's any one Store item category that will see the highest traffic, it will be costume items, especially since unlike powersets, these won't demand a large up-front investment.

Also, keep in mind that once people split their "stipend" down the middle and use half of it to buy trinkets, the other half will no longer be enough for the Powersets. The larger the sum one needs to spend all at once, the "bigger" the decision becomes.

I'm reminded of a game with tanks where I had to buy gold, which I could then spend either on "premium time" similar to a subscription, or on other perks like more garage slots, special ammo, crew training and so on. I could pay day by day and rip myself off hideously, or I could pay for a week or a month. A week's worth of premium status cost me 1250 gold, where the smallest amount I could buy off their store was 1500. The first time I bought gold, I got a week's worth of subscription so I could form teams with a friend of mine. Next time I got more gold, I bought a couple of garage slots for 300 so I didn't have to sell my low-level machines and lose ability to team with my friend, and I dropped below the threshold where I could buy more premium time without wasting my money. So I didn't. And I haven't. And I'm not spending more of my cash on that game any time soon.

My point is that making something too large a purchase is just going to see people "waste" their money on cheaper items and not have enough for the expensive ones at the end or - and I find this to be worse - end up having to NOT buy the cheap, enticing, cool little costume items they want for fear of not being able to buy a powerset afterwards.

Very high-price items aren't a good call for an item store.

I have to agree. Suppressing knockback would be about as "required" on teams as healers are. That is to say, it will be "required" by a select few ******** who insist on micromanaging their team-mates, it may be suggested by a few more forward team-mates, and it will not matter to most big teams these days because any situation that's sufficiently hard probably involves enemies immune to knockback anyway.

Hand Clap is an absurd offender in this case, yes. For most AoE knockback powers, one could argue they just take skill. Position yourself so that you knock enemies in the desired direction and you're golden. But Hand Clap is a PBAoE. The only way to use the bulk of its effective range is to be amid enemies, which in turn scatters them to the four points of the compass. I've heard tell of using it like a cone, thus never using more than a quarter of its total are of effect, but even then it's not very reliable, nor is it all that good of a mitigation power.

Hand Clap is doubly as absurd when compared to its cousin - Fault. Not only is Fault a Targeted AoE which allows you to control knockback direction in cases it does that, but it's also a knockDOWN power. If ever there was a point in my gaming experience where I thought knockdown was superior to knockback, it was when going from Fault to Hand Clap. Fault is an awesome power. I fire it up every chance I get. It comes with precisely no drawbacks, other than cost which can be mitigated (even more now with inherent Stamina) and a whole bag of marvellous benefits. Hand Clap has a similar status effect, but it causes so much scatter it's almost never worth using unless I'm in a VERY dire situation, at which point I'm usually taking off running anyway.

It's amazing how swapping a PBAoE power from knockdown to knockback transformes it from awesome into annoying, and then forces me to use the power in ways that go against its basic design just so that I don't destroy my own Invincibility buffs. Gah!

It's an unnecessarily confrontational "complaining about complaining" thread that tries to go for player-side moderation of the forums. Well-meaning as it may be, making a separate thread on the subject just serves to add to the clutter.

A little too late for that given the title you went with.

Bad analogy. Physical machines are built from physical parts, most of which have their own over-the-counter prices. I have a store next door that sells nothing but tyres and wheels. When you buy a car, it means the manufacturer bought tyres for it, and you can check their price to know exactly how much they cost. You don't need "sophisticated math" to tell that. Furthermore, if I went to buy new tyres for my car and found the old model significantly more expensive, then yeah I'd be outraged. If they were better tyres then I could see them being more expensive, but do you honestly want to open the can of worms where paid-for powersets are "better" than regular ones?

Also, this is not a question of anyone being outraged or angry or any other straw man you choose. Unlike when I'm buying new tyres for my car because the old ones are worn out and worthless, I'm not buying new powersets because the old ones don't work any more. If they'd stopped working and I HAD to buy new ones, that would be cause for outrage. As it stands, it's a case of serious apprehension.

I'm going to state one concept as a fact: The Paragon Store should be a place that people are excited, not a place to dread.

Steam is a much better analogy (partly because everything there has a set price). I almost never go to the regular Steam store unless I want something specific and I've already weighed the costs and benefits, spoken with the people I share a household with and usually already tried a... "Free" copy of the game to make sure it's worth the money. That's a rarity, simply because it's rare for me to want to cash-drop 50 Euro for a game. That's a LOT of money. On the flip side, I always, always check the Steam discounts/special store with great enthusiasm, because I know there's a good chance I can find something in there that I'll want to buy. Typically, these are games I wouldn't really want to pay full price for because I can't justify it, but seeing them at, say, a 66% discount... Yeah, I'm gonna' buy them. Why would I not?

This is how I want the Paragon Market to be. I want it to be a place I go to with enthusiasm, looking for things to spend a little money at a time on. It shouldn't be the place where I go to, thinking "Crap, now I'm gonna' have to spend so much money for the stuff I want..." I know powersets cost a lot of time and effort to make, but you make that money back by selling said powersets to as many people as you can. What, after all, are we trying to hook Free players into going Premium with, after all? Hats?

---

Something else, as well. Someone asked me if I'd rather just not have these sets at all. Of course not! The more sets the better, and even if I can't have them for money, I can't have them, period, if they're never made. No, what I want is just a fair deal. I want shopping for the game to still be fun, not have me stressing over money. Most F2P games that sell some kind of in-game currency offer you "discount" deals that have you spend up to $100 at a time. Well skin my *** raw with a chainsaw, that's not gonna' happen! You don't get people to open up and invest in your game by throwing large-cost bundle items at them. I thought the whole point of the market is so people could spend less at a time?

So what about Magneto from the Fox Kids X-Men series? That's probably the first time I saw forcefields as a kid, and I found them to be pretty dang cool. Still do.

One doesn't need to determine the exact percentage of anything in Going Rogue. Even if you assume all Going Rogue brought us was powersets, they still cost less than what they're being sold for now. That's without counting extra zones, extra stories, extra game systems, extra costume sand more. If Going Rogue were nothing but powersets, we still paid less for them than what they are being sold for now.

And that's looking at Going Rogue. If you look at City of Villains, then the "price of powersets" is even lower.

That's not a realistic binary choice, and I will continue to maintain this until it is proven otherwise. Until and unless I see that the development team is capable of delivering content on the scale of Freedom more than once, or even more than once a year, I refuse to entertain this hypothetical situation. I've seen this twice already. City of Villains was HUGE! That's because it had been worked on for over a year. What followed it for the next 12 Issues was much less huge. Going Rogue was huge(ish) because they'd been working at it for a year. What followed it was rather a LOT less than huge. Now Freedom is going to be huge, because they've apparently been building up content for it since shortly after Going Rogue launched, if not before that. I need to see evidence before I will expect that what follows it will break tradition and still be huge.

If they can, indeed, release so many new powersets expressly BECAUSE they're charging for them, then I might change my stance on the matter. However, I'd have to see that happen before I'll do it.

As do I, but I've often taken Teleport and paired it up with Hover. Teleport Foe is kind of crap, and Recall Friend isn't very useful to someone like me who doesn't team very often. That, and Teleport + Hover works surprisingly well, much better than just Teleport alone. However, if I want the T5 teleportation power, not only will I have to drop something for it, I will also have to drop something else for a prerequisite.

Except the situations with Merits and store prices aren't quite identical. For Merits, it's all gameplay. Whether it takes a longer or a shorter time, you're still playing a game and presumably having fun. When it comes to cash money, however, launching with prices "as high as they think they can go" is just asking for trouble. On the one hand, it feels like they're trying to rip us off as hard as they can. On the other hand, lowering the prices so soon after launch just comes off as a dirty scam, in the sense of "Woah, we didn't think anyone would pay THAT kind of absurd costs, but you guys still did?"

When you're paying someone money outside of an auto-renewed subscription, each transaction comes down to an active decision by the player to pay money. Like it or not, the relationship between the customer and the service provider, then, is crucial, and if they handle prices in a way that comes off as trying to swindle us out of our money intentionally, then that's going to spawn a LOT of bad blood, the kind that doesn't really go away.

Case in point. I live in Eastern Europe yet I've been with City of Heroes since May of 2004 and I'm looking at the 72 month badge right now, soon to be looking at the 75 one, if Freedom doesn't launch before that.

I mean, when I suggest that knockback be swapped for knockdown in, say, Energy Blast, people seem to want to tell me that this would be overpowered. They tell me how awesome knockdown is, but still seem to regard knockdown as "better" and therefore too strong. Just as you suggest, the choice has to be between knockback or nothing. If I'm allowed to pick knockdown, well, that's just way too strong.

At least that's the vibe I get out of the argument.

Nukes notwithstanding, those powers don't come with the risk of getting yourself and your entire team killed if used wrong. Sure, a mis-used Fulcrum Shift denies you a major buff, but at least it doesn't directly harm you. Sure, using Fortitude poorly doesn't help the team, but at least it doesn't hurt it, either. A bad player on a team for the most part offers no help, but also rarely offers a direct detriment. An otherwise good player who simply isn't good at using knockback, however, can kill a team dead right quick.

Nukes are... A subject all to themselves. All I'll say about them is my nukes have killed me far more often than they've helped me and leave it at that. There's a separate thread for that around Suggestions.

I wouldn't be surprised if people complain, that much I admit. But I ask you this: Do you envision more people complaining about you turning off your Knockback than the number of people right now complain about not using your AoEs, not teaming with them, not using knockback properly even when you are and so forth? Do you envision adding such an option causing MORE complaints?

The Star Driver anime series was actually the inspiration behind the name, I admit I first saw it at MassakoX's review show on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, and it didn't look like an interesting enough show to track down (anime imports are... Iffy here), but the name was pretty cool and interesting. Not wanting to repeat it, though, I just cut a letter from it and it turned into something else entirely. Inspiration comes from weird places sometimes

The biggest mistake a business looking to sell things can make is price items such that people refuse to buy them. When it comes to virtual items that have no cost of replication, what you want is to have as many people buy them as possible. It's silly to try and extract as much money out of the few people willing to pay a lot of money for their virtual goods. That's why Steam is constantly having a sale on SOMETHING - because they have practically zero cost of software replication, and any extra players buying it, even if that's at the cost of a dollar, is still better than these players not buying it at all. Virtual goods are not like real goods, in that you're not manufacturing them, you don't have the overheads of shipping, assembly and installation. They're infinitely copyable for no cost whatsoever.

Of course, software takes time, money and manpower to make. That much is obvious. A for-sale powerset needs to make back the money spent making it and turn a profit. Of course. But over-pricing it is not the solution. All that means is people who HAVE to pay for it won't and people who pay a subscription will just wait their free points out and get it like that. The point of Freedom should be to incite people to pay more. One of their driving philosophies was that you didn't have to commit to large purchases and could instead spend small amounts on smaller things. The goal behind this is that convincing people to spend smaller amounts is much easier than convincing them to spend large amounts. And yet we're expecting Freedom to launch with, what? Two, three $10 items in the store, along with how many others? And consumables for money, too?

Overpricing virtual goods is not the right way to turn a profit from them.

That's wrong on its face. What justifies the creation of a new powerset isn't the amount by which they can overcharge people, but rather the amount of people willing to pay money for it. They made powersets like Titanic Weapons and Street Justice not because someone woke up one day and thought "Meh, we have to make SOMETHING, might as well be this!" They didn't just throw darts at a board and decide what's paid for and what isn't.

The reason these powersets exist isn't because they can overcharge us for them. They exist because we asked for them, and because we swore up and down we'd pay for them. They exist because the development team couldn't justify the cost of manufacture before as the sets wouldn't have enough apparent appeal to bring a return on investment as part of a free Issue. Now that we're paying for them, the will have the return required to greenlight them. This is no different from when Matt Miller said the sales of the Wedding pack helped get villain Epic ATs out earlier - with more apparent income, they were able to budget the things earlier than expected.

The point of making these sets is to make people buy them. The point isn't to make them so expensive that people won't want to buy them, or will choose to wait and get them for "free" instead. This doesn't help the team in any way. What helps the team is Paragon Store purchases, and these will only happen in sufficient numbers when the price is right. Overpriced items released far too frequently just kill people's enthusiasm to buy, and I guarantee that this will happen.

I know what you mean. Recently, I came up with the name "Stardiver" for a character who had no concept at the time, and the concept wrote itself in my head around that name. It was pretty much what it says on the tin, too. Obviously, no other name would really do (with the possible exception of Star Diver or possibly Star-Diver), but I was lucky enough to snag it on the first try.

I don't know if it's just a case of people not thinking of some fairly obvious, if weird names or a case of everyone thinking these names are OBVIOUSLY taken, but I've snagged some pretty cool word combos in the past.

To be honest, I really like the bubble forcefields. For some reason, I've always been a fan of these. I'd actually really, really like to see these as an option for Energy Aura. Pretty please with sugar on top?

Ideally, I'd like to see the Forcefields graphics for Energy Aura, with an option for them to only play when the the character is hit (whether the attack was deflected or not), such that a bubble only pops up when you take a hit. Or, how about a bubble that's always on but very transparent up until it gets hit, at which point it turns opaque for half a second, and then returns to being transparent? That would be amazing

I agree on that point. $10 per powerset is just completely out of context with anything we've seen before. If you hit customers with that first thing out the gate, then there's nothing they can thing but that the game is trying to rip them off. And to be honest, that won't be too far from the truth. Freedom is supposed to be a time of new opportunities, so opening it by overcharging people just doesn't seem right.

I'm not saying I won't get the things, especially if I have the "free" points lying about at the time, but it comes down to me cash-dropping $20 or $30 ON TOP of my $15 subscription? Yeah, no. Not gonna' happen. It will be the first time I've said an in-game item was far too expensive to justify. And this is coming from someone who bought the Party Pack.

I agree completely. The costume editor shines the brightest when it comes to variety and to creating your own unique characters - in the literal sense of that word. City of Heroes already does quite well when it comes to tights costumes. If there's more to add in that regard, then by all means - ask for it. I'd support you. More stuff in any theme is still more stuff in the editor. If you feel we need more "costumed" NPCs, then go ahead and suggest that, too. I'd probably back you up in this regard, as well. More variety can never hurt.

It's when people start asking for LESS variety and for LESS costume options in anything that's inconsistent with their definition of what "super heroes" should be that I take issue. This game is a little of everything, and the more themes it covers, the broader its appeal. Yes, even when it covers things I don't particularly like, like Steampunk gear or Carnival of Shadows costumes. Arguments about what the game shouldn't have or have less off don't really help anybody.

Personally, I'd be happy with getting an equivalent amount of Paragon Points to what I spent to buy Going Rogue. What was that, by the way? $20? Isn't that something like 1600 Points?

More specifically, I don't like making multiple versions of the same character. There are issues with names, issues with servers and who else these characters need to share a server with and issues of why a character can use some powers sometimes but not other powers at other times which I don't want to tackle. But, really, the one reason that's quite impossible to argue with is I just don't want to. And that's fine, really. I'm 110% positive that Titanic Weapons will serve Xanta far better than Broadsword does now. And as my post in your sig suggests, the only reason I could ever have to not use Titanic Weapons on Xanta is if they suck, and bad. Given that Shield Defence doesn't, I feel good about Titanic Weapons even if it sacrifices performance for gimmick.

That, and I want to remake her as a Brute. The option to do this did not exist when I first made her, and she was level 50 long before Going Rogue came out. But to be perfectly honest, being a Brute fits her concept much more so than being a Scrapper. Her key defining characteristic is that she's big, tough and very, very, VERY hard to kill. Iconic as the sword may be to her look and feel, her primary descriptor is still old-fashioned super strength, and a large sword is just an expression of this without having to use the Super Strength set, which at the time of her making wasn't even an option for a Scrapper. In fact, when I remade Xanta in Champions Online (and she was my highest-level character there, too), I went with "Might" and essentially made her a punching super strong fighter. I'd have liked to pick a heavy sword for her like I did here, but that game only seemed to have light, fast sword attacks at the time which really didn't fit, and they didn't have big swords that I could find, either.

Once upon a time, I made a suggestion for "dual class" characters which worked in pretty much the same fashion as you describe. They were kind of like multiple builds for the same character, only instead of builds, they were entire different characters who just happened to share the same name and appearance. In effect, this was an extension of my suggestion to let a player reusing his own names on the same server where he has them.

Provided each build takes up a character slot and each build needs to be levelled up separately, I don't see this as presenting a major balancing problem. If anything, it would just constitute making several characters who share the same costumes and whom you can switch between without going to character select, mechanically speaking. Conceptually speaking, it would allow us to claim that, for instance, each suit of power armour comes with different specs. One is a blaster, another is a scrapper and another still a controller. Or we could explain it as a character using multiple weapons and each one coming with its own unique stance and sensibilities.

Believe it or not, I actually agree with what you're doing here.

So would I. It looks like a lot of hats have the same hat line, or at least similar hat lines, so they may be able to add hair to a lot of them without having to make each hair piece individually, thus saving some amout of work. It's like how most Half Helmets have the same helmet shape, so helmet goggles work on most of them, you know?