Samuel_Tow

When it comes to performance issues, could we do some kind of compromise between reducing the weight of some of the heavier powerset auras (like Energy Aura) at trading that performance gain back into the game so that we could have dual auras? Obviously, I don't know the ins and outs of the graphics engine, but it seems to me that you guys can save a ton of graphical performance by toning down a lot of the existing defence set auras. Not only are they busy when they stack, but they're almost always drawn close to our screens, closer that the auras of other people.

However, even without adding dual auras, I still feel most defensive sets can benefit from toned down aura effects, as well as a custom effects option where the auras play only when a character is attacked and disappear soon thereafter.

Mercenaries used to be a LOT worse when wonky pet AI prevented the Spec Ops from using their Sniper Rifles and the Commando from using his Long Range Missile. However, I still find Mercs to be a somewhat underperforming set as Serum sucks and the Spec Ops controls recharge too slowly and are immune to slotting. It was good enough to get me through to 50 in the days before inherent Stamina and AoE pet buffs, but it still lags behind the rest of the sets.

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As for a very real response, this mass of powerset proliferation couple with opening up all generic ATs on both sides of the game is a massive increase in freedom of choice. So massive will my freedom become that I actually find myself overwhelmed with choice, unable to even comprehend all of it yet. That's why I made my AT <-> Concept thread, so I could get some idea of what the overlapping ATs represent and what I should see them as. City of Heroes post Freedom should be an amazing thing if it turns out like I hope it will.

I recall a friend of mine hating those because they have neutral expressions, but I personally agree with you wholeheartedly - I LOOOVE the "new" faces from way back when. As Johnny Butane used to say back when the Steampunk faces were on the Test server, they look weird because JUST normal mapping isn't enough to make a realistic-looking face without subsurface scattering and such effects. The old faces don't need these, as the fleshy effects were "painted-on" and integrated into the textures, making them look more like real faces, something the Steampunk faces lack.

But normal mapping isn't why I hate them, though. To my eye, both the male and female faces are just the faces of ugly people, and the HIDEOUS heavy makeup is a large part of what bothers me. They just look like derpy faces. That's not to say I don't feel the same way about some of the older "new" faces, especially the balloon lips ones, but those were a dozen faces, so even if I hate a good half of them, there are still three or four faces I DO like. When they add just two faces and both are aggressively made-up, there just isn't enough variety for me to find SOMETHING I like. Again, look at what face my Victorian Duchess uses:



NOT Steampunk, but instead one of the old "new" faces, which has both better lip colour that doesn't jab me in the eye every time I look at it, a better beauty mark and better eye makeup. It's perfect for this particular use.

I didn't mean to say there was I'm just happy I'll be able to make my heroic Stalkers and Masterminds and my evil Scrappers without sending them through the next best thing to a presidential election campaign. Praetorian has a cool storyline, most definitely, but it also has a very restrictive storyline that only works for certain concepts. Now that I'm not FORCED to do it, I suspect I'll enjoy the environment a lot more when I actually choose to do it.

First things first - recipes are gameplay rewards. They are NOT cosmetic rewards. I do not want to see cosmetic rewards locked behind raids. Ever. That doesn't mean I don't want OTHER gameplay rewards, especially such rewards that are available through other venues, added to the raid reward pool.

Right now, raids reward one thing and one thing only - Incarnate progress. I don't see why we can't use their rewards for other things. I also don't see why we can't get their rewards from other tasks. Ideally, I'd like to give a range of options for gameplay and a range of rewards such that people can do the tasks they want to do AND get the rewards they want to get at the same time. To each his own, you know?

No, I agree with you, I want to see jet packs in the game, and BAD. For the moment, though, I'd like to stick to "small" jet packs like the Jingle Jet or the Goldbricker backpack, rather than monstrous abominations like the Raptor Pack. As they work on their tech and sort out their alignment, then we could look for bigger packs that extend down past the waist, if if we had to have priorities, small backpacks seem like a good idea for a starter, um... "Pack."

I'd go with "Vanguard Heavy Assault Weapon," myself.

That's where I stand, myself. The Incarnate system mixes together two things that I don't necessarily see as inherently related - raids and post-50 progression. I don't see why we can't have both of these things in the game without making them always go together in a pair with each other and never with anything else. I don't see, for instance, why we can't have non-Incarnate raids that award, say, special rare recipes or access to preferrential stores or some such. I also don't see why we can't, for example, have Incarnate progression through things other than raids.

I'm done worrying about that, though. For the moment, the developers are pedalling raids. When they're done with that, we'll see. Long as I have my Titanic Weapons and proliferated powersets and power customization, I'm not all that worried. At least now I know what I'm waiting for.

Hey, if you can clean up the dense energy field where the blades overlap, I would SO buy that weapon! I love it!

I'll second that. They have some sweet weapons in the resistance, but why can't we use them?

To save you guys sole fast-forwarding and rewinding:

Link to first attack

Link to second attack

My measuring stick is going to be the Legacy Broadsword for women. What I want to see is for every single Titanic Weapon model - even the smallest one - to be bigger in the hands of a Female model than the Legacy Broadsword is. If this isn't the case, then I intend to make myself a pain in the *** campaigning for them to be made bigger. "Titanic" Weapons - in the sense of really big weapons - is the name of the set. I expect really big weapons, not "big weapons except for women, who shouldn't be using big weapons anyway."

I agree with you completely. The rescaling of weapons is probably my biggest point of disagreement with BABs back in the day. His argument - which does make sense - is that they scaled weapon models down for women because women had really small hands. Leaving aside the fact that I don't like women having such small hands, the result is that almost all of their weapons are TINY! If it's at all possible, I'd love to see Titanic Weapons being as big for women as they are for men and Huge characters.

If the hilts on some of those end up a little too thick for the female hand to hold... Well, how about expanding the grip on the hand a little bit? Right now, characters hold weapons with a fist closed so tight they couldn't even cold a piece of string. They use, as a point of fact, a fist closed for punching. If they expand the grip a little bit, then the hand will be able to grip larger objects.

I ran into a similar problem when designing Brutticus, as you can see here. The shaft of the Legacy Battle Axe is still scaled for the Huge model's giant hand, and as such is too small to be held by the Female model's tiny fingers. My solution was to go for manhands and use the Large Gloves so as to increase the size of the gripping hand. And it worked so well that I've been trying to suggest adding a larger bare hand for women as a custom glove option. It's clearly possible if Large gloves can do it.

OK, I'll grant you that But I just feel that keeping civilians and most non-monstrous NPCs at the same general average height, within 6'', give or take, would be a better choice in terms of visual appeal. A lot of characters are defined as much by how they relate to ordinary people as they are about basic numerical stats. As I mentioned before, my giant robot is supposed to tower over almost all of his enemies unless they were somehow giant, which would require him to be as big as a Fake Nemesis in this game. Having him be about as tall as so many seemingly ordinary people irks me. Inversely, my feline mystic assassin is supposed to be in the shape of a somewhat tiny woman, relying on speed, stealth and a cat's reflexes to win fights. Having her be smaller than most of her enemies is almost a must-have. I didn't make her TOO small since I wanted her to still be somewhat comparable to Paragon City civilians, which made her taller than almost all Praetorian women O_o

Never mind fighting or committing crime. Heels are a bad idea for something as simple as walking up a very steep hill (last time a lady tried to do that in heels, I had to essentially carry her up and down), walking over uneven ground (like the busted-up rotten sidewalks in my town that women in heels always walk around) or walking on sand or soft soil. I had a hearty laugh in the Harvey Maylor mission about the missing reporter when she makes notes about meeting a contact in a cave, one of which is: "Wear comfortable shoes."

In which case the running animation doesn't even matter I have a few characters like that, myself, as I do eventually grew to like the shape of some of the high-heel boots the game offers. And, yes, these almost always fly, and never land unless they have to rest or unless they get dead. Interestingly enough, I can't say that the actual WALKING animation looks like it's don in high heels. Sure, it has a lot of butt wiggle, but that's perfectly doable in flat shoes, too.

That's kind of why I've always been in favour of adding custom running animations, even if we have all of three options. I just HATE how women run, and have hated it since all the way back in 2004 when I made my first female character. I'd like some more options here, at least for the women I have running around in Large boots. Changing their footsteps to not sound like high heels would be nice, too.

I don't really have a problem with heroes and some NPCs being bigger than normal, but the thing is that the game has no "norm." Most of the old NPCs are giant, including the old civvies, most of the new NPCs are tiny, including the new civvies and rescaled old ones, some NPCs are ridiculously huge, like all of the Freakshow and most of the Ubermenshcen/Cor Leonis soldiers, and some NPCs are ridiculously small, like most of the Crey Agents, Scientists and Security Guards. And then there are the giant university professors. I guess PhDs make you grow a good two feet taller.

Personally, I'd be all in favour of doing a pass of all NPC models and re-evaluating which ones are supposed to be giant (like the Freakshow are now, and like the Trolls should be upscaled to be), which are supposed to be normal height (like Crey personnel and Malta soldiers) and which are supposed to be tiny (like the Red Caps and Wailers), then rescaling all of them as necessary. Civvies need to look like they can fit in the cars they drive and walk through public restroom doors without smashing their foreheads on the frame, after all.

Inversely, it will for me as I don't put my characters in Super Groups. Now that Global Chat is as prolific as it is, I see no reason to bother.

More than that, though, any character I put in Praetoria has to be somehow politically minded. I can't just have a nice guy who wants to do nice things, because in a grey and grey morality, there are no nice guys, just different shades of *******. If I DO ever make characters with a keen political mind and an overpowering desire to belong to community, group or faction, I'll return to Praetoria, but for more general characters who, you know, have THEIR OWN background, it's the old game for me.

And I thought I was alone in feeling this way. You are now the second other person to say this, and they say that three is a crowd

Yeah, I have a hard time making purely human characters, especially in appearance. I know they're a staple of comic books, but I just prefer weirder characters. They aren't all giant, of course, but a lot of them are aliens, mutants, monsters, robots and the like. In a game that gives me this much freedom, it makes sense to me to explore as many themes as possible.

And I'd actually like to make even bigger characters, as well. My ultimate dream when it comes to height is for my characters to be able to look a Fake Nemesis in the eye. I probably wouldn't use that height on more than a couple of characters, but at the very least Tyler could use being bigger. And speaking of monsters, I've long since given up on making Xanta look like a real woman. That's not the point. She's born of the bloodline of the Trolls, inheriting their physical strength but not their ugliness or stupidity. She's supposed to be towering, grumpy monster that, luckily, had a kind heart to her just the same. Her entire point in thematic is to tower over all of her enemies and be imposing.

I apologise if that's how it came off. Yes, I'm aware that, in reality, women tend to be generally smaller in stature than men and generally weaker in physical strength. However, City of Heroes gives me the freedom to make a woman who is inhumanly stronger than any man, almost completely invulnerable and cool besides... But yet doesn't give them the freedom to make her not walk like she's in 12-inch heels or be taller than most men? Just doesn't seem fair to me, especially in light of bigots like Golden Girl who believed that women SHOULD be inferior to men in every aspect.

I had to fight tooth and nail for the recognition that women can have muscular bodies, a prospect that seems to make some people's heads explode (Whadyamean all women aren't Victoria's Secret models?!?), eventually having to resort to swapping in-game textures to produce those screenshots I keep banding about before even David Nakayama was convinced that the idea wasn't horrible and incredibly ugly. I'm merely asking for more options, and I get ridiculed for being a "pervert" over it.

That's Golden Girl for you. Every now and then I'll hear people talk about what kind of good, helpful person she is and wonder if maybe ignoring her was a mistake. Then I catch one of her posts in someone else's quote and remember exactly why I decided why I never want to see anything that woman has to say ever again. I've tried arguing with her and it doesn't work. It's like arguing with a rock. I just wish the forums would hide quotes from people I have on ignore, too, so I don't end up getting accidentally pissed off over things that I didn't want to see anyway.

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You know what I'd like to see? An in-game slash command which would give us the height of any targetable entity in feet by the ruler, or at the very least the height of the humanoid ones. Then when I make, say, a 6'1'' character and every NPC towers over me, I can do a /getheight on them, see that it reads 7'5'' and use that information to give context to the problem. Because I'm sure most civvies in Paragon City are over 7 feet tall.

It is there for Males, but it's only very slight. The Legacy Broadsword is only slightly larger than the Painted Broadsword, and Rularuu's Bane is significantly larger. The disparity is reverse for Huge models, actually. The Legacy Broadsword actually looks small in comparison to the oversized weapons Huge use, which are actually oversized even in comparison to their body size.

In essence, Legacy weapons are the same size for all models, and as such serve as a nice measuring stick by which to see how much a model's weapons are shrunken or oversized. The Legacy Broadsword for women, furthermore, is what I'll be measuring Titanic Weapons by. We'll see how that goes.