Samuel_Tow

Personally, I feel it's less an issue of what I want or you want or Evil Geko wants, and more a case of what the development team can plain afford to develop in a reasonable timeframe and fashion, and keep in mind that my leeway for both is fairly loose.

The thing is, this isn't the first argument we've had for end game. We've spoken of upping the level cap in the past, adding more TFs or some new kind of progression, and the development team has always given us the same answer: They can't keep up with the speed at which players play through content, and no matter how much extra stuff they append to the end of the game, players will go through it in a week and ask for more.

What happened to this explanation? One possibility is that the development team now is capable of producing more content than the development team which made those claims, but having seen their capability of producing Incarnate content, there's no evidence of this. Another possibility is that they deemed end game so important that it was worth devoting what subjectively feels like three quarters of their resources to just that, even in the full knowledge that that still won't be enough, but I don't think this can be considered a good choice.

When Matt Miller talked about Incarnates when he stepped down as Lead Designer of City of Heroes and promoted Melissa Bianco in his place, he talked about leading a separate design team which would work exclusively on the end game system. He said this both to reassure us that development on Incarnates won't eat into development of everything else (a statement proven false on its face, eventually) and so that they could have creative freedom to design something truly spectacular and groundbreaking. Maybe I'm just too jaded, but what I see in the Incarnate system isn't sufficiently different from normal content to get my panties up in a bunch. It's more complex, yes, but I don't find it more exciting, personally.

---

Basically, it comes down to this: The development team spent years insisting they didn't have the resources to make proper end game and finally did it anyway. And it's possessed of exactly the kind of bugs both Jack Emmert and Matt Miller were citing as making end game impossible before. If you can't afford to make and maintain a game system without halting development on everything else, then either find a better way to make that system or make something else.

After all, when BABs said that power customization would take several Issues over the span of a year and a half to two years during which time the art team would be unable to do NOTHING else, you didn't see fans of power customization (myself among them) come down from the hills to insist "Doesn't matter! Do it anyway!" We understood that this idea was just too expensive and left it alone. And when power customization finally did come, it came because of an increased staff roster and better technology, not because someone bit the bullet and did that in place of everything else.

I understand that end game is important (to some people), but I don't think the development team has the resources to so much as even make it, even with all the cut corners of intentionally designed grinding and farming.

Except train stations are real locations, they look like buildings, they occupy a plot of land, they have moving parts and while you can't see yourself riding them, they do show you the interior of the vehicle just the same.

Teleporters like I've seen them practically anywhere else in the game - Vanguard, SG Base, Shadow Shard cop-out teleporters - have non of those characteristics. They're only a step removed from plopping an NPC down on a street corner whom you can pay to loading-screen you to another location like in Lineage II. And I HATE that. I hate NPC vendors standing on street corners, I hate contacts distributed randomly to alleys and below underpasses, I hate "cheap" solutions to problems when it's obvious how cheap they were. Remember the SO vendors standing in Fort Darwin from CoV Beta? Yeah, obvious placeholder.

If you REALLY want to replace train stations with teleporters, you have to replace them with Teleporter STATIONS at least on the order of magnitude of the underground Portal Corporation gateways. Something big, something which is its own building, and something that looks like it's an actual, believable part of the city built for lore reasons. I DO NOT want to see a dinky "pillar of purple swirly" that I can click on and travel to any zone.

What the intent of that post was that animated hair doesn't have to be animated via the cape rig. As far as I'm concerned, it SHOULDN'T be animated via the cape rig, because that's not designed to handle hair, it's designed to handle cloth, and hair is not cloth.

Story arcs almost exclusively. I like to take my time, read the story, fight everything on the map, explore every corner and generally have free use of my time. Moreover, story arcs allow me to get into the story much better, thus improving my immersion. To this day, I still read all the stories, even though I can quote most of them from memory.

Yes, I will back you up on this all the way. I've said it before - a game with no goals to achieve - a pure aimless sandbox - grows old VERY fast. However, that doesn't mean that everything should be eligible to be gated behind an unlock. Functional "stuff" like greater power, more abilities, higher stats, access to more areas of the game, name colours, character titles, special privileges and such, those I will always support being gated. In fact, I have a big problem with Veteran Reward and Booster Pack powers being available from level 1 (or level 4) onwards. These, to my eyes, should be earned, not simply given.

However, where gameplay is a game (sic), costume design is a toy, at least in my opinion. The gameplay side is something that you play, overcome, defeat and achieve things in, but costume design is different. Costume design is an artistic process, one which is impossible to define down to mechanical terms of "progression." You can't simply take all the costumes made in the game and align them in order from best to worst. Even removed from complex mathematical power balance where the limiting factor is usually a person's inability to work the math required to find the optimal solution, in costume design, there IS no objective truth behind what's good and what isn't.

I take a stroll through the costume design thread and see a costume quoted over several pages with people gushing with praise, and I think "Good god! This is the ugliest thing I've seen all year!" By contrast, I'll see a design that the author rejects saying "Yeah, no, I really don't like that!" and several people proceed to mock, yet I think "I WANT THIS! GIMME THE COSTUME FILE! NAO!" Trying to come up with objective measurements for making a costume "better" with level is an unwinnable fight, because what makes a costume good is different to different people. And, ultimately, the only person who matters is the owner of the character.

My disagreement with unlockable costumes is, I admit, partly due to the fact that I want more freedom in costume design for myself. But it is also in part down to the fact that such gates give costume pieces weight that they do not deserve. Over the years, I've seen plenty of costumes where people clearly just unlocked a new item and just slapped it on a costume it looks really out of place on, just because... Well, they unlocked it, they should use it. It's an achievement, right? In a very real sense, this is like taking a nice tailored suit and slapping on the reverse baseball cap you earned at the fair. To some, it may look good, but generally speaking, it's out of place.

What I value above all else is individuality. When I bought the Animal pack, one of the first things I considered making was "a tiger." The first time I logged into the Praetorian tutorial after the pack came out (on a non-tiger character, luckily), I saw two almost identical tiger characters, almost identical to how I'd have made mine. Why? Because those were the new pieces and everyone was using them not because they were good (even though they were), but because of the assigned value of being new. I have no respect for characters that could have come out of an assembly line, regardless of what in-game achievement that may signify, because it doesn't signify what I find to be the most important achievement in costume design - artistic achievement.

And again, I don't want to insult people who want unlocks. I'm not saying you guys are elitists or that you want to rub your unlocks in people's faces. Far from it. If you can make it work and still produce a good costume with these pieces, then my hat's off to you. But please, don't use "status symbol" costume pieces JUST because they're status symbols. Try to put at least some artistry in it, that I may be impressed by your work IN ADDITION to your achievement.

I actually have something of a suggestion in this regard. For me, my mini-goals are to top myself with each new costume slot. You want a hard challenge? Forget unlocking all the Vanguard pieces or reaching level 50 for that damb Ascension armour. Try competing with YOURSELF Whenever I make a new character, I put my heart and soul into his or her costume, I do the very best I can... And then I try to do even better the next time I make a new costume for that character. If I can succeed at this - and I don't always manage, I find that this gives a sense of satisfaction that no unlock in the game has ever given me. If I fail - and I usually do - then I still have my default to fall back to. But I have a fair few characters who use their third, fourth or even fifth costume as their default these days. As I got better at making costumes, their designs improved significantly.

---

Also, here's something of an anecdote, just to further illustrate my point. I have a character, we'll call her Kia, who's a Sword/Shield Scrapper. When I first made her, I used an engraved Round shield and the then-new Valkurie sword. I thought that if I made the sword "fancy," as that was at the time, then she would look better. But the truth is that I hated playing the character. Something about her was off. VERY off. I could never put my finger on it, but something about her bugged the hell out of me. I could hardly force myself to play her, abandoning her several times and essentially forcing myself to play her.

Then I ran the ITF and unlocked both the Romulus Shield and the Romulus Sword. I tried her with the Romulus Sword, almost as a joke to see how she'd look, as I'd used that sword on another character. And then, in that one instant, I knew what had been wrong - the Valkyrie sword is too short for my sense of aesthetic. The sword was what was bugging me, so I swapped her to the Romulus Sword, and I NEVER looked back. Suddenly, this "off" character whom I hated playing was so awesome I had to occasionally stop playing and pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. She is currently my only level 50 hero on Pinnacle, and I wouldn't trade her for the world.

At the time, I wasn't as aware of exactly what my sense of aesthetic was, and I was kind of stabbing in the dark and trying to replicate what others suggested I might like, so I stuck with a character who bugged me because I didn't know better. I WILL NOT make the same mistake again. I WILL NOT make a costume I hate again, and I WILL NOT play a character I don't like. Because those first 35 levels were not worth it. I want to make a character who looks good from character creation, or I will simply not make that character at all. At all. I have far too many ideas and far too many other characters I actually enjoy playing to torture myself dragging a placeholder costume through the levels until I can unlock what I perceive said character should have had since creation.

Incidentally, I never used the Nictus Sword or Nictus Shield. I didn't even use the Romulus Shield like I'd been planning, because it ended up not looking as good as the Round shield I had already. That's what I dislike about unlocks so much - they're given such weight in the game system (must be level 35, must run a TF twice) - and yet when I unlock them... They don't fit the character. Worse still, a free item fits the character so much better, not because the item is somehow "better," but simply because I've found a better way to use it to create a costume more appealing to my eye.

In fact, I've had a BIG problem with loot-driven games, in that what the developers perceive as looking better (i.e. epic gear) isn't always what I see as looking even good. Most Fantasy MMOs, for instance, draw the elite gear for warrior types as bulky, heavy, giant armour. Well, suppose my "heavy warrior" looks like this or like this? Head to toe fancy engraved armour just doesn't cut it. In fact, in games that allow me to use one piece of gear for stats and another for looks, I tend to use starter gear for looks because it's usually less intrusive.

---

Personally, I'm not against status symbols. I just don't want them to be costume items.

This came out of a discussion over a global channel about auras lagging someone's Dark/Dark Scrapper into unplayability, though he said that lowering particle count had helped and was also looking to "Disable FX when close."

The thing with defence set auras is that not only are they designed as though your character is the only one on-screen who is running an aura, but also as though that one aura is the only one you'll ever run. For EACH of the three or four auras you have. This produces a lot of graphical slowdown for an effect that's actually WORSE because auras end up stacking with each other into a complete mess.

Once upon a time, BABs sat down to redesign the whole of Invulnerability, because every toggle had many of the same effects which stacked overtop each other and produced system slowdown. The effect of it was probably the smartest aura design in the entire game. Allow me to explain:

Temp Invulnerability: "Visual toughness" sparkles along the body.
Unyielding: Ring of light around the feet.
Invincibility: Large glowing aura at the chest.
Dull Pain: Small glowing aura all over the body.

The Invulnerability auras complement each other, and each constitute a distinct, unique logical part of an overall view of what the character should look like with all four auras on at the same time. No aura stacks with another, no aura is a double of another, no aura hides or overshadows another. And all of them are fairly low-key.

Now compare this to what may well be the WORST example aura design - Fiery Aura. The set has three auras on it - Fire Shield, Plasma Shield and Blazing Aura - and all of them are essentially the same effect. Sure, if you use default colours, Fire Shield is orange and Plasma Shield is blue, but they are THE SAME EFFECT, just recoloured. If you do like I do and customize them to the same colour, you simply have the same effect twice that doubles in intensity when you stack it.

---

ALL defence sets need to receive a pass by the art team, and be optimised such that their auras don't lag when close, don't stack with each other so much and that they constitute logical parts of a singular whole, rather than each a complete visual unto itself. Energy Aura needs a pass BAD. That used to just about kill my PC when I backed up against a wall, and most of its auras are a blur anyway. Willpower needs a pass, as well. It essentially has the same chest glowing aura four times over. And there are others, besides.

This really should happen at some point.

Because most of us have the Vanguard pack now.

Game, set, match.

Character progression and raid grind are not the same thing, and they aren't intrinsically linked. You can have character progressions sans raids, as the old Inventions system demonstrated, and you can have raiding without character progression, as the Hamidon and Rikti Shuttle raids demonstrated. Choosing to roll both concepts into one is not the natural state of things, it is a conscious design decision, and one I happen to disagree with.

Which is why people should be allowed to voice their opinions, concerns, criticisms and complaints and the professional game designers left to decide what to make of those. As long as players play forum police against each other, doing their best to suppress dissenting views as if for fear that "a vocal minority" will be heard and bad changes made, these arguments will happen.

My only concern, in this thread and others, is to make my opinion heard and not have it pissed on by other players. I've no illusions that I can force the development team's hand or bully them into submission. The best I can do is present a strong argument and cross my fingers.

At the end of the day, players yelling at other players that they're playing the game wrong or their opinions are wrong or they're horrible human beings is pointless. We are all customers and we all have the right to request the game be made more like what we like, even if that means making it less like what other people like. It's neither our job nor our place to define which direction is right. That's why we have a professional development team - they get to make that decision. We can only appeal to them, and it would be a lot nicer if we could do that without having to elbow our way through a wall of players blocking the way.

Eventually is fine. I waited how many years to get free access to the Vanguard stuff? I can wait a while more, so long as it happens.

I actually agree with Leo somewhat here - Broasword isn't graceful. At all. It has animations which were intended to also work with a bashing weapon, after all. However, I actually like the set BECAUSE of that. If you make a large enough character and give him (or especially her) a large enough sword, then the unwieldy "Urk!" animations of broadsword actually work to the character's benefit, replacing skill, grace or even any sort of aiming with just brutish, violent swings. I made characters on exactly this premise several times already, and I have a sneaking suspicion I'll be remaking all of those characters come Titanic Weapons, hence the question.

Possibly, though a lot of the characters I feel like remaking are actually based around raw strength more so than skill. You've already seen Xanta (everyone has ), and her entire shtick is that she's very big, very strong, dressed in very heavy (if still very revealing) armour and swinging around a sword longer than most of her enemies are tall. I'm pretty much positive that Titanic Weapons will be a better thematic choice for her in absolutely every case, barring total set suckage. But the rest... I don't know. Does that armoured knight look like he makes sense to have a bigger weapon?

That's kind of the point of me asking, though. I'm not looking for a straight, objective answer as there isn't one. More I want to pick people's brains and see how they see things, get some perspective and maybe re-evaluate my own style and preferences. It's good do a pass on long-held notions and opinions from time to time just to see if you haven't outgrown them, you know?

---

Something interesting and mostly unrelated that I want to say about Broadsword:

I dislike most of the existing Broadsword models because they look like one-handed weapons, and in more than just hilt length. The weapons themselves look like they're about the right size and shape to swing around one-handed without putting undue stress on your wrist, and they look like they hit about as hard as you would with a stick.

This isn't the case for the Legacy Broadsword for women. Not only does it have a hilt more than long enough for the weapon to be wielded two-handed, the weapon's apparent weight and length make it seem just too big, bulky and heavy to swing around one-handed without something in the system giving or breaking, superhuman powers notwithstanding. It just LOOKS like a two-handed weapon, so even though my character isn't using it with two hands, it still looks like a two-handed weapon.

In general, though, I seem to prefer LONG weapons over anything else. There's a sort of "critical length" beyond which a swinging weapon feels like it attains a sort of inertial force of its own, delivering hits at a force greater than just the strength of the arm. This is true for all weapon classes - swords, axes, maces and beyond. When a sword is too short, to my eyes it looks like a knife, in that it can cut, but it can only cut with about as much strength as you have to force it into your opponent's body. A longer sword, on the other hand, can more than cut. It can HIT things and it can hit them with an apparently great force of impact.

Titanic Weapons being all two-handed and big means they'll be long, as well, and that means they'll have a LOT of apparent strength of impact. As such, I'm having an increasingly hard time justifying my use of anything else.

In no particular order:

*New powersets (plural) now, as opposed to in six months.

*More power customization, specifically pool and epic customization.

*More weapons for existing weapon sets.

*Custom animations for existing weapon sets.

*More costume pieces and auras THAT I CAN ACCESS, for money if need be.

*That muscular skin texture for women that I almost made David promise.

*Removing redraw from weapon sets when a power can be used like BABs promised.

*Solo-capable content that is specific to the Incarnate storyline and offers us non-punitive speed of progress.

*Fixes for, underperforming powersets and specific powers, or even entire ATs.

*New power pools, new epic pools (electricity for Scrappers, pistols for Scrappers, etc).

*Something that doesn't have anything to do with Praetoria or Incarnates, be it story arcs or zones.

*Powerset proliferation, specifically Axes for Scrappers and Stalkers and Swords for Brutes.

*Better colour selection for air- and ice-related powers, better colour selection and "themes" for darkness powers, more colours for earth powers.

*New mechanics in costume design, such as non-robotic items in "robotic arms" torsos, animal muzzles as face details for normal faces, animated/moving/wobbling hair.

*Fixing inconsistencies in the editor, such as lack of shiny tights for Large boots and gloves, lack of scaly texture for Monster hands and so forth.

*Fixing at least some of the numerous bugs in the game, such as Keith Nancy's final mission where the dialogue with the "double" no longer happens.

And that's just off the top of my head.

Now that you told me what to look for, yes, his last name was Valentine, one of the two Valentine Brothers who assaulted the Hellsing mansion

I actually think Alucard is a good example in this case, not because he's god mode sue, so much as because he has some of the widest range of abilities in fiction while still making sense to have them. I'm somewhat leaning towards that interpretation of "godlike power," in part because of how the system is designed and what our enemies do, but also in part because I see godlike characters as needing to be independent, and this requires a broad range of abilities to achieve. Sure, you can afford to not be able to jump or attack and only carry a big shield if you're always going to be partnering with another character who can only run and jump and another still who can only shoot arrows and attack with a sword, but when left on your own, you end up slightly less than godlike.

For instance, much as I dislike Prometheus (because he's a giant jerkass and ugly as sin), the way he's presented still gives him an air of godlike ability. He seems able to travel through time and space at will, he has a fortress somewhere on another plain of existence, he has agents all over the multiverse, he has intimate knowledge of the Praetorian military effort and apparently a host of other powers that he doesn't talk about and gets grumpy if you ask him. That's kind of what a "god" typically is in most non-religious stories - a plot architect who has the power to not just follow the plot, but actually set it up.

It occurs to me, in fact, that my desire for specialised godlike power may be a bit... Misplaced. Characters of a specialised skillset make for very good protagonists because they're easy to restrict by plot contrivance, and are then forced to exercise their speciality to defeat said contrivance. Gods, on the other hand, typically aren't as easy to limit by plot without EXTREME contrivance, as they usually possess powers that can circumvent many of the difficulties the plot presents. Hell, even just the power of FLIGHT would render a lot of video game plots about 15 minutes long down from 12 hours.

Actually... Flight is kind of a good point. We're already kind of sort of demigod-like as compared to the protagonists of a lot of other RPGs. Have you noticed how many contemporary RPGs revolve around getting to places and fighting through hordes of enemies along the way? We don't have to do that. We can just... Fly! Turn on your flight power, fly up above enemy projectile range and just fly to your destination. This kind of sort of eliminates missions that ask us to reach a location, missions that ask us to chase an enemy or missions that ask us to cross large distances - because we already have the power to circumvent the limitation of physical location and render it obsolete.

I wonder if that's how we're meant to see Incarnates - less so as specialist powerhouses and more so characters who have lived a long life and gathered a whole bag of tricks, as most "veterans" in stories tend to have done, especially with super powers. An item from here, a technique from there, a genetic alteration from that one incident, some lost knowledge from a specific enemy, and all of a sudden, the character is more than just one or two powersets. Hmm...

---

By the way, I ask these things not to criticise, but more so to try and conceptualise the system and then try and comprehend what it means for my characters.