Samuel_Tow

First of all, it very much does ground fliers. Secondly, moving out of the patch does nothing, because so much as setting foot in the patch brands you with a 30-second debuff that persists even when you walk out of it and even after it disappears. This effect reapplies itself over and over while you're in there and starts timing out when you walk out, so moving out of the patch only shortens the duration, and not by very much.

If this were a regular patch that slowed you while you were in it but the effects wore out as soon as you left it as in the case of Caltrops or Quicksand, I would have no complaint in the world. But it's a patch that hands out debuffs.

Your "solution" is to have someone else deal with the Equaliser for me. First of all, Mayhem missions become harder the more people you bring along. You need to break more items for the same time bonuses, you need to defeat more cops for the Resisting Arrest bonuses, death squads are larger and more likely to be triggered and people on Mayhem missions have the tendency to panic and do stupid things. Secondly, "get someone who has a power your entire AT has no access to" is not and has never been a solution, but merely a symptom of a problem.

No, we cannot move on yet.

They're also not the only ones with a heavy emphasis on status effects. There are also the Rikti, Arachnos, the EDF, the Devouring Earth and even Crey in the upper levels. There are also Malta missions sprinkled around contacts other than Crimson, like Daedalus. Finally, I choose to play characters that are capable of completing their own missions. I play exclusively Scrappers, Brutes, Stalkers and Masterminds, and with neither of those have I felt it prudent to complain about Malta.

Suffice it to say, then, that Batman is my least favourite character of all time, and regardless of what DC may claim, he has no place rubbing shoulders with gods. What's more, City of Heroes doesn't really allow for defeating anything if you had a week to plan, partially because it rarely gives you a week's notice and partially because our characters are never allowed to plan or use strategy. Almost every mission in City of Heroes consists of going to a place and beating an enemy into a greasy spot in stand-up combat with the same powers we use on every other enemy.

If Batman were a City of Heroes characters and he had to fight the Kronos Titan, he'd be forced to punch and kick it repeatedly until it went down. That's the extent to which the powers system permits planning and trickery.

The term "vocal minority" as used in most malicious arguments does not describe "a minority defined by being vocal" but rather "a minority defined by having a wrong opinion that also happens to be vocal." All too often I've seen people say "But what about <insert game subject here>? When will we see that?" only to be told "I hope the developers never work on <game subject> because only a small minority like that." If you don't want me to claim I'm in a majority, then extend me the same courtesy you ask for and don't claim I'm in a minority.

Well... It kind of does, but hear me out. I have a whole bunch of 50 characters. Even after rerolling four of them back to level 1, I still have about 8 or 9, I think. I like these characters and I do want to play them. And I would, if I could progress them. Back when we had no end game content, sure, I still couldn't play them, but at least I had the benefit of believing that one day, I might. Now that we actually have post-50 progression and I find myself caring little for it... I no longer have that hope. Does anyone here seriously believe we'll get another type of post-50 progression? Because I certainly don't.

Credit where credit is due - the development team will probably institute a non-Trial path in a couple of years' time. They're already doing things I'd thought they'd given up on, so I won't put it past them. But until such a time, I keep looking at a system that constitutes the opportunity I've always wanted: To make my 50s even stronger, but which I can't take part in because it requires me to do the one thing I really don't want do: Grind multi-team instances.

A lot of posters here seem to misrepresent my position and that of people like me, in claiming in claiming that we want everything for free, even things that are "optional." That's not at all the case. I see a progression system I genuinely want to participate, but I just don't like the activities involved in participating in it. Am I losing something I had before? Not counting teams below level 50, no, not really. But I AM losing an opportunity because of implementation.

On the flip side, the "this is optional" crowd do have a point. Incarnate powers really have no place in regular level 50 content. We were already more than strong enough to handle that content even before we became Incarnates, and throwing more power at it doesn't make it that much more fun, outside of the fleeting fun totally dominating everything with even less effort. But what Incarnate power is most directly intended for is Incarnate content, and right now that content is Trial-only. There is, quite literally, no point for me to seek out Incarnate powers without doing Trials, because Trials are the only place where they're truly relevant. It's like PvP recipes - why would I need a non-PvP way to get them when PvP is what they're mostly useful for? What sense does that make?

In that regard, I can agree that the Incarnate system is "optional," but I consider that its failing, rather than its feature. Godlike power is most impressive, to my eyes at least, when it manifests not in situations where it is badly overshadowed by even greater power and needs the help of godlike power from dozens of other people. On the contrary, it is most impressive when it manifests alone against a humbling display of majesty and authority. What this means is that the Incarnate system really needs to have more types of content that aren't as much of a clusterhug. Incarnates are, thus far, only optional in the sense that they are very, very limited and incomplete. The more complete they become, the less this argument will work, and sooner or later the dominance of raids will need to be reexamined.

You can't eat your cake and have it, too. If your characters are supposed to be street-level power, then they have no business chasing after godlike power, and if they're chasing after godlike power, then that's what they'll get.

Now, of course, that's not to say I don't want to see less elemental-looking, energy-type Incarnate powers. I do. I'd LOOOVE to see a Judgement power that's a ground punch or a large-scale sword slash. However, I still expect an Incarnate character's powers to behave like those of an actual demigod - even when they don't shoot various flavours of lightning, they should still look the part of a demigod.

City of Heroes has never been very applicable to the Spider-Mab/Daredevil type character past about level 40. After then, you end up arm-wrestling gods, giving noogies to giant robots, fighting off hordes of slobering monsters by yourself and more. You're quite a ways past brass knickles and billy clubs.

Could... You rephrase that?

Here's something I want to say about just hanging out, and a little anecdote on the subject in particular.

Some friends of mine have a private server for an FPS game I'm apparently not allowed to mention. I live in Eastern Europe, their server is in the US, which means I'm seeing over 300 ping to it. When I attempted to decline an invitation to a planned event on said server, I was at first accused of just wanting to win and score points and be inconsiderate of the community, because... You know, why would I want a game that's actually fun to play when I have other people, right? When I attempted to explain, I was then told to join anyway, because even if I couldn't play for ****, we could all still have a fun evening over team-speak and just goof off. I've elected to just give up and not respond for fear of coming off like too big a jerk.

But the truth of the matter is that if I sit down to play a fun game, I want to play a fun game. If I'm just going to be hanging out, hanging out, hanging out with my family, having ourselves a party, then I don't need to play a game to do it. If I sit down to play a game, with or without friends, I prefer to focus on playing that game. I don't play games, single- or multi-player for the banter, the company, the community or the interaction with other people. I play them because I like the actual games. All of the above is, of course, always welcome, when it doesn't come at the expense of the actual game.

And the funny thing is I always end up pegged as the inconsiderate one for putting game before people, even though putting people before game makes me not want to play the game to begin with. Funny how that works.

Yeah, I'm not a vocal minority, either, at least by the same logic. That doesn't seem to stop people from using that argument in an attempt to "shut me up," as a poster once put it. Majority and minority arguments are pointless at their base. They're no better than "My dad can beat up your dad, so Incarnates are great!" arguments. We, as players, have no realistic view of what opinion is how popular across the entire game's population.

Still, if we are to stop using the "majority" argument, we must stop using "minority" one at the same time, as well.

It's an alternative to what? To shutting down the game and having a sandwich? To creating a new character and starting over? The Incarnate system is only as much an alternative as playing the level 40-50 game is an alternative system to not playing the 40-50 game. It's as optional as the option I have of logging into the game or not logging into the game.

Can we please stop making this argument? The Incarnate system is only "optional" to the extent that the entire game is optional, in that I don't HAVE to play it if I don't want to. It's not an "alternative" system in any way, shape or form, since a supposed alternative post-50 progression system has to be the alternative to another post-50 progression system, and another post-50 progression system does not exist. It has never existed.

The Incarnate system is the only post-50 progression system we have. Arguing that there is some kind of arbitrary "end" to the game mid-way through its content and anything beyond that is "optional" is poinless, because I can make the same argument about level 23 or the point at which you earn 10 million Inf total, or the point when you defeat an Archvillain. The Incarnate system is the only way to progress a character, and as such there is nothing optional about it, nor is there an alternative to it.

Yeah, and then there's this - as with any paid expansion and smart business venture, the studio marketed Going Rogue and the Incarnate system as the best thing since sliced bread. Even I - who had SEVERE reservations even beforehand - bought into the hype and kind of accepted what the Alpha slot seemed to constitute. But the Alpha slot was a lie, because the rest of the Incarnate system was and is nothing like it.

Once upon a time, raiding may have been the default activity of MMO players, the sort of thing you simply just did without asking for justification. In this day and age, however, I don't think it has as mass of an appeal as it once might have. Given this, it's just entirely too unfortunate that they chose to start stockpiling Freedom content pretty much as soon as Going Rogue launched, as it made it appear that Incarnate content was eclipsing everything else.

If I'd known ahead of time that something completely different was eclipsing development on the game, including development of Incarnate content, I might have been quite a bit less upset.

Um... What's more free than a cash shop powerset? How about a powerset I don't have to pay for and, you know, get for free?

Selling power in the most abstract sense is never a good idea.This defeats your entire purpose in suggesting it. Player-created powers always come down to a handful of "best" options and a sea of "horrible" options, so rather than giving people more choice, you give them even less by introducing unambiguously "best" options. This is exactly the sort of thing that failed spectacularly in City of Heroes' pre-beta and delayed the game's release by two years. It let people who knew what they were doing create massively overpowered characters while letting people who didn't know what they were doing gimp themselves hard. ATs and powersets exist for a reason.

Additionally, selling power or real money just creates an environment where those with the most disposable income are always the strongest, and class struggle is not why I come to games. Selling cosmetics and novelty items, sure. Those are just trinkets. But selling actual powers is a no-win situation. You end up either having to pay more, which is not a good prospect, or being less powerful, which is not a good prospect either.

In short: Mechanically difficult, impossible to balance and devoid of any kind of business ethics.

YES! So very much this. Both Broadcast and request are entirely and completely useless as they're only limited to the zone you're in. Irrespective of how many zones there are, most people are inside instances and don't see that. Pretty much the only channel in my Broadcast tab (Broadcast, Request and Help) that gets any use at all is Help, because all people on the server see that, and there's almost always someone who saw the question, knew the answer and cared to explain it. Lots and lots of people both find teams and socialise over global channels, but a lot of those global channels are mostly used to find teams and organise events. As such, for most intents and purposes, they may as well be server-specific channels.

Personally, I would love to see a new, server-wide broadcast channel that doesn't have the stigma of ******** like Arena does or the very specific use of Help. I wouldn't even restrict it to just LFT. Just call it general server broadcast or some such and leave it as a mass communication tool for the people. Free accounts NEED a channel like this. I remember the dark days before global chat, and if you think I don't team now...

While I agree that you can pretty much play anything just on instinct and intuition, a lot of the times this doesn't make for as fun a game as you might think. I think I have a good overview of this, as I spent over six years of City of Heroes refusing to take Stamina, and while the game was well playable and indeed kind of fun, my characters were always sub par and underperforming. The difference between those days and the time when I got Stamina for free is like the difference between light and day.

Sure, you don't HAVE to make strong builds, but the game is many, many times less frustrating when you do, and that's kind of the problem.

Oh, that, right. Yeah, I remapped those keys so fast I didn't remember they were ever otherwise

I think this picture is a good example of most of what's wrong with the Victorian face, both new and old. You know how a person with a lazy eye will sometimes seem like one eye is sort of off-centre and looking away? Well, both of the eyes on the Steampunk face are lazy. I don't know what that woman is looking in, but her eyes are pointing in two different directions away from centre, producing a very derpy look. MegaMan demonstrates:



Whenever designing a face with fixed, painted-on eyes, care must be taken to align those eyes such that they appear to focus on a common point at slightly before the maximal distance at which a player can be expected to actually see orientation of the eyes before distance loss of detail kicks in. This makes the person the face is trying to emulate appear alive, because the face seems more real as it tries to actually see. What we have right now is the equivalent of putting a T-spreadeagle character right out of the editor directly into the game - it's very fake very obviously.

Simply put, when I turn my character to look at me, I want my character to actually look at me, not look out both sides of my screen simultaneously.

P.S. Apologies for cross-posting, but I felt this was more relevant here.

I think this picture is a good example of most of what's wrong with the Victorian face, both new and old. You know how a person with a lazy eye will sometimes seem like one eye is sort of off-centre and looking away? Well, both of the eyes on the Steampunk face are lazy. I don't know what that woman is looking in, but her eyes are pointing in two different directions away from centre, producing a very derpy look. MegaMan demonstrates:



Whenever designing a face with fixed, painted-on eyes, care must be taken to align those eyes such that they appear to focus on a common point at slightly before the maximal distance at which a player can be expected to actually see orientation of the eyes before distance loss of detail kicks in. This makes the person the face is trying to emulate appear alive, because the face seems more real as it tries to actually see. What we have right now is the equivalent of putting a T-spreadeagle character right out of the editor directly into the game - it's very fake very obviously.

Simply put, when I turn my character to look at me, I want my character to actually look at me, not look out both sides of my screen simultaneously.

That in itself is sort of a problem, though. I recall someone retelling his teaming experience recently (can't remember if it was a Trial or TF), and it went something along the lines of: "I can't see anything and anyone, so I'm just fighting targeting reticles and wrestling health bars. What happened to the super heroes and super villains that the game was about?" Very large team fights sort of remind me of those old text-based DOS games that had no graphics and would essentially tell you what was happening in plain text.

You target Reichsman.
You activate your Head Splitter.
HIT! Your Head Splitter power had a 95.00% chance to hit and rolled 45.56.
You split Reichsman's head for 320.13 points of Lethal damage!
You hit Rechsman for 320.13 points of additional critical damage!
Reichsman HIT you! Foot Stomp power had 87.13% chance to hit and rolled 11.73.
Rechsman stomped you for 9999 smashing damage.
Build up is recharged.

And on and on. Because that's quite literally all I see from the game - a text crawl telling me all the relevant events as they happen. All those fancy graphics that my video card is overheating for? Can't see 'em. My screen is awash in a solid blue-green light, so all I can see is his targeting reticle, his health and endurance in my target bar, my own health and endurance in my main window and my combat tab. It's a MUD at that point.

Yeah, using the same animation with a sword as you would with an axe or mace is kind of... Odd, but I can see why it was done. City of Heroes was meant to launch in 2002, I think, so when they remade the AT system from scratch, I think they ended up scrambling to release ANYTHING, which is why we had so many reused animations, crappy effects and questionably balanced power at release. Way back in 2004, City of Heroes was one of the best launches of an MMO to date... Because it actually worked. But it was still rushed. TFs didn't work, you could get stuck with the Vahzilok Disease permanently, the last 10 levels didn't exist, the 35-40 content was BADLY rushed and padded to hell... Hell, we had to wait until I2 or I3 before Katana got its own animations and MA got new animations that didn't take an hour and a half per power

These days, though, I'd definitely like to see some custom animations for each of these sets that more closely matched how each particular class of weapon is used. Perhaps some stabbing attacks with a sword? Two-handed attacks are a bit... Iffy, though. Maybe it's just my odd sensibilities, but for a weapon to be used two-handed, it kind of has to be over a certain length. It has to do with leverage and mechanical disadvantage. Regardless of how strong your arm is, a heavy melee weapon puts the most of its stress on your wrist, and when the weapon becomes longer than a certain point, it simply becomes impractical to wield it with just one hand as the mechanics of your wrist are being overloaded. You need the leverage of two hands so that your hand doesn't get rotated out of its socket.

Maybe this is different for Male and especially Huge, but none of the weapons Women have access to, with the singular exception of the Legacy ones, look either long enough or heavy enough to require a two-handed grip. Not many of them even have room on their handles for it. That's kind of why the empty off-hand bothers me - the weapons don't even look like you COULD be wielding them two-handed even if you wanted to. There's nowhere to grab and they're not big enough. They were built and designed as one-handed weapons. I'd love to see extra animations for them, but like the Ghost Slaying Axe, these are liable to just look weird.

I have to admit - once upon a time I was a big proponent of adding two-handed animations to the existing weapons, back before custom weapons were put into the game. The old weapons looked big enough. But when BABs added weapon customization, that put an end to that. I ended up simultaneously asking for bigger weapons and animations appropriate to them, until I realised I'd need an entirely new set for that. An entirely new set I never thought would happen. And now it is... And I cannot wait!

I'm really not trying to contradict your idea or paint is as being somehow bad, Leo. It's just not something I like very much, and this stems not from my disagreement with you, but more from my disagreement with the entire status effect system. I don't really think we can "fix it" or that it will ever happen, but I do believe that giving more characters more same-type control effects and allowing them to stack them more easily might make the system less binary.

Here's the thing, though - what character has access to more than a couple of immobilize powers? OK, an Energy Melee one. Shifting gears, what character has more than a couple of Hold powers? Not very many. You'd think a Controller would be able to stack status effects, given that Controllers have so many, but their control effects are all different kinds that don't stack with each other. Immobilize, Hold, Sleep, Stun, Slow, Knockback... They have many tools, but these tools don't stack with each other.

Compare that to, say, a Blaster. Sure a Blaster has many secondary effects to his attacks, but all Blasters have the same one primary effect - damage. All of their damage from all of their powers stacks with each other and works to diminish the enemy's hit points, and all of this effort stacks with that of every power from every other Blaster on the team, as well as with that of every other damage dealer in general. This kind of universal focus is what I feel control in general needs.

Now, I have to agree with you to a point still - I'm not really opposed to different control EFFECTS, even such that don't always work on the same targets. Diversity of control effects helps keep things interesting... As long as their magnitude stacks anyway. That stacking is all I'm after, and whatever system ends up achieving it, I will stand behind 100%.

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Again, I'm really not against your idea. It even sounds kind of interesting. I just kind of... Hate the status effect mechanics in City of Heroes.

And they should not just be allowed to, but encouraged to. It never ceases to astound me how some people think it's a good idea to take away MY options in some doomed attempt to make me play the game their way. Not gonna' happen. Let every person play what they want, how they want it, where they want it and trust the players to come up with explanations and justifications.

If I want to play a hero who happens to be a Brute and happens to play like a Brute, then LET ME. I clearly want to play a Brute, I clearly want to play a hero, so why not let me eat my cake and have it, too? It's an escapist fantasy.

Err... I cannot think of ANY games off the top of my head, where A and D were for turning. I've heard but not seen it in person that WoW uses that layout, but beyond that, I could never tell you. Is this like a holdover from the old days where third person 3D games didn't have strafing at all, or at best had it as some kind of slow sidestep like in Tomb Raider? Because back in those days, these games defaulted to using the arrow keys to move, not WASD, and they didn't tend to use the mouse at all.

The first game I ever played where I HAD to use WASD was Bungie's Oni, because the game's interface didn't allow for button remapping unless I wanted to hand-edit an INI file. Since then, any game which gave me either strafing controls or free 3D movement defaulted to WASD. Games like the Sands of Time Trilogy from a while ago, games like Darksiders recently, any "over the shoulder" shooter that ever got ported from a console, the old MDK games, I believe. As a point of fact, I don't recall having played a 3D game with mouse look in which keyboard turning was even relevant, aside from maybe Shadowgrounds, and even that defaulted camera turning to Q and E.

What games have I not played that set the reverse as a standard?

Actually, they kind of did, though knowing what we know now, this was probably more due to building up paid content for Freedom than due to the Incarnate system itself. Also, the people who wanted post-50 content and the people who wanted raids are not the same set of people, nor is one set of people strictly speaking a subset of the other. So you end up with a situation where some people want to keep progressing their favourite 50s but don't want to participate in raids to do so. Hardly an unfair position to take.

This is close to the reality of the situation. I've been in the situation of wanting to voice my concern about one aspect of the game or another, but when certain people made it a point to tell me how I was wrong regardless of what I said, how worthless my opinion was and how much they wished the developers never listened to me, among other such nonsense, that pissed me off far more than whatever it was that I was going to complain about to begin with. When people react with disproportionate hostility towards dissenting opinions, those dissenting opinions become just that more entrenched. You can't change a person's mind or behaviour by belittling him.

I rather doubt that much of what we say to each other over personal chat reaches anyone it's actually about. Some days, though, I do wish the development team did read our personal chat, if for no reason other that people tend to be a LOT more honest and direct with their friends than they'll ever be on a public medium, if for no reason other than because friends are far less likely insult or belittle you over opinions you probably share anyway. I find that things said from player to player inside the actual game are far more representative of public opinion that anything we say here on the forums.

No question there. I don't know who designed them, but they look like creepy pod people. Especially the women.

Oh, I don't disagree that a free hand would be useful for a real life encounter. I mean, much as I love pistols akimbo, anyone who's ever tripped with both his hands occupied knows how... Unfortunate this could be. Either you throw whatever it is you're carrying catch yourself from smashing your face on the ground, or else you try to fall on knees and elbows, and I happen to know from experience that that HURTS.

However, in the context a purely fictional action-oriented combat game, the free hand looks extraneous. It bugs me mostly because I keep thinking I could have stuck another weapon in there, or a shield, or at least kept a second hand on the weapon, or done SOMETHING with it, if only the game would LET ME!!!

Ahem...

Historically, I've always been apprehensive of using single one-handed weapons on my characters. The balance of them just looks wrong. Yes, you swing with one hand... And the other does what? Well, as far as the game is concerned, nothing. It just tries to keep out of the way. Sure, occasionally you could punch with your left hand, but that looks even worse, especially with the Brawl animation. So I try to pick weapons which are too big to look one-handed and go on to pretend they're two-handed, instead. Either that, or I stick a shield in the offhand, but really - how many Sword/Shield Scrappers can I make?

To a large extent, I agree with you - the off-hand has no purpose at all in a one-handed weapon set, and as such it looks extraneous, especially when a lot of the custom one-handed weapons are designed to be too small to be held with two hands. I hope Titanic Weapons will fix this. Even if it featured one-handed animations, I expect it to have its biggest ones be two-handed, which will still give the off-hand a purpose in the set. No longer will my weapon users be precisely as effective as a one-armed user of the same weapon, for all the game shows.

Indeed. Pretty much every free-range 3D game I've played since 1996 has used WASD for moving and the mouse for turning/looking around, at least games that gave you movement controls to begin with and didn't just rely on Click to Move.

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I think what's HORRIBLY designed from a new player's perspective is that the map is docked to the Nav window, which defaults to the centre of the screen, so if you open the map, you don't see where you're going. Considering this is sold as a "mini" map, I feel it needs to default to one of the corners of the interface, such that you can easily have it open AND see where you're going so you're navigating by the map as you see the real world. Of course, you can move it there yourself, but it takes time new people even realise this.

Also, I feel that more explanation needs to be given on what the different map markers mean, especially train stations and ferries. When I was first given a mission in Kings Row, my first question was "What's a Kings Row and where in Galaxy City is that?" Luckily, my team-mates informed me.