Samuel_Tow

I assume you're talking about this post? If so, then this would qualify. I need to get out of my habit of not checking the Dev Digest every day, as a lot seems to be happening there lately. That's all good stuff.

From what I've seen Ghost Falcon discuss, it seems like most of the extras may well be just cosmetic or otherwise consumable services, which is good. He did mention story arcs, but also did mention that those are part of the VIP package, which is even better.

I'd still like to see a list of the expected cumulative price of "one time only" purchases in a month and an estimated price for them, as compared to what VIPs will end up having to pay to get everything. Obviously, they can't tell us what's actually going to be in the Store come Freedom, but I'd like to see a general appraisal of what it might cost.

I'm not sure you can make that assertion. And I say this because I can assert that if an enemy defeats you, you've clearly failed and shouldn't get a reward for defeating said enemy.

Consider the reward for spawning enemies the same as the Resisting Arrest time reward in Mayhem missions. You get no time reward for any individual PPD cop, but you DO get a reward for defeating the whole spawn. Same thing when a mission objective includes defeating an entire spawn, too.

Spawning enemies, in my eyes at least, provide an easy meal. Yes, if you allow them to spawn an entire cadre of NPCs, you're doing more work than you're getting paid for. If, however, you kill them fast, then you're scoring an easy kill, but getting mass gobs of reward. Same with Behemoth portals. Everyone hates them, and I LOVE the things. Sure, if you're on a team, if you dilly-dally or do something very wrong, you can get a huge horde of Behemoths that should be worth a lot more than the gate is. But if you kill them fast, then all you'll ever see is two minions, or two minions and a lieutenant, and the gate is worth more than those by a longshot.

Mine was a little different, and probably irrelevant at this point, but for the sake of an interesting discussion, I may as well put it in here, as well

My idea way back when was for a set to have an additional "spin up" and "spin down" animation that would be appended to powers every time they had to go into combat mode and then get back out of combat mode. It was primarily designed for a long polearm, however, and relied on the speed and momentum that the weapon could keep while being twirled around the body, allowing for faster attacks once it gets moving.

Basically, I envisioned three stages when using the weapon: Standing still in combat mode, twirling the weapon but not attacking and actually animating an attack. Under normal circumstances, you would have to draw the weapon (a delay of around .5 of a second), then spin the weapon up to speed (a delay of 1 second) and only THEN attack, after which you would have to spin down to a standstill (another 1 second delay) and if you wanted to attack again, you'd have to spin it back up (yet another 1 second delay).

However, if you kept queuing up attacks and chaining them one after the other, then you would never have to experience the wind up or wind down delays at all. As long as you kept attacking, you were only limited by animation time. If you employed a "start and stop" approach, however, you'd be delayed a great deal more.

I don't know how the proposed Titanic Weapons set will work... Probably in a simpler fashion But Leo is right. We were simply bouncing ideas of how such a set could exist with the full understanding that it COULDN'T. And now it will, and I cannot wait to see what it's like

Well, if it wasn't meant to me, then of course what I said was wholly and entirely unfair. If you could explain what you meant, then I take it all back, because I can't quite understand what you were going for. I was the only person you quoted, so I assumed the un-directed comment was also to me. Remember - you only named people on the third paragraph, but not on the second one.

Again, if I misunderstood, I apologise. I'd go edit the post out, but now that you've quoted it, it's too late.

I don't mean to say that obvious names aren't good, far from it. Merely that obvious names are almost guaranteed to be taken. I've registered for plenty of online communities and made characters in a wide variety of online games, and this has always been my experience - if a name feels obvious enough that other people would have thought of it, it's usually taken.

I've run into people in-game with "obvious" names, like Miss Blaster. Beyond being surprised they got the name, I'm happy for the person for finding a name they wanted to stick with.

My comment is more to the numerous instances where people will argue that "all good names are taken," but upon further questioning keep coming back to the same one single very broad and obvious name and insisting that nothing else suggested to them is "comic booky" or "iconic" or otherwise acceptable. In fact, I once made a thread because I was happy I was able to get the name "Cecity" (another word for "blindness") and I got attacked by people telling me that THEY wouldn't use that name because it's obscure, not iconic enough, not appropriate for a comic book and on and on and on...

Obvious names are just as good, but they're much harder to get than more obscure, complex or unusual names.

And that's the other side of it. Some people are convinced that a name purge will more than just clean up names no-one's using. It will free up that specific list of names they always wanted but could never get. Sure, I've heard stories from people snagging their favourite names after a purge... Something like a couple stories. Most people I've spoken with said the purge didn't change anything.

The truth of the matter is that most "good" names people are after aren't being held by inactive accounts or low-level characters. They're being held by current players, just like I've been holding the name "Steel Rook" for the past seven years. I've even seen a person on the forums with a chat handle by the same name.

So long as names are unique, then there will always be people unable to use obvious names. If ten people wanted the name "Uberguy" which was being held by a level 1 Trial account character, then a name purge won't help. Sure, the name will be freed, one person will snag it, but the other nine will come back to the forum and say "Well, the purge did nothing for ME."

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Also, if you guys think that the VIP server will offer you a chance to snag all those names you can't on other servers, just remember that obvious names will be sought after by everyone. If you're not one of the first people on the server, chances are your name will be taken there, too. I first joined City of Heroes on the 6th of May 2004, less than a month after the game went Live. Even back then, I was unable to use either the name "Sam" or "Samuel," which is why you see me lugging a first and last name around to this day. I also tried and failed to get either "Bubble Gum" or "Bubblegum," either. Obvious names run out FAST.

This is the biggest difficulty you're running into - we can't have a unique map for every mission, or we'd get one mission per Issue. We need resuable, multi-purpose tilesets, so sooner or later, some missions will end up not having a perfect setting, but will instead be put in the closest possible tileset.

Would you prefer that we simply never have missions written that don't take place in one of the existing tilesets? Because I think that may be an option.

I'd like to see a red name say this, however. As players, we're really just guessing and fearing and hoping.

You ask a question, I ask a counter-question and you come back with a passive-aggressive "Oh, woe is me!" personal attack. And then you say you won't "do that" to new players? Because, what? Being passive-aggressive and turning their questions into accusations is better than giving them an alternate view point?

Yeah, something tells me I'll be nicer to new players than you'll be.

*edit*
Also, I DID answer your question, which you would have noticed had you read past the first sentence:

After seven years of change after change after change where they patched one powerlevelling exploit after another, this is no longer an argument you can make. We got target caps, we got a minimum distance to gain experience, Wolves, Dreck and quite a few other missions got timers, both the GDN and ED are partially descended from this, we got numerous patches handling the distribution of experience across the team and over differring levels, and finally they gave us SSK, which makes "bridging" and most traditional powerlevelling practices impossible in general.

I can give you plenty of examples that don't involve crime. Buildings fall down anyway, so why bother having building codes? People die in car crashes anyway, so why bother wear seatbelts? People skip school anyway, so why bother having schools at all? You're gonna' die anyway, so why bother live? Just because something bad and undesirable happens already despite our best efforts to stop it does not mean we should stop trying. On the contrary, it means we need to try harder. Freedom shouldn't be an excuse to legitimise the worst aspects of RMT. It should be an opportunity to find better ways to combat these problems.

Veteran rewards are not "purchasable" in the sense that a new player can't pay 84 months' worth of subscription fees and get remote access to the Market. You get these things as perks for staying subscribed above and beyond just giving money. And even then I don't like it. Veteran players even now have a significant advantage on free players, and I would like to see that gap closed, not broadened even further. It doesn't matter how you break the "haves" vs. "have nots," be it based on time or money. I don't want to have it.

Granted, I've heard that people will be allowed to pick and choose veteran rewards, but I still feel that the full scope of those rewards still remains in place since I don't believe they will be buyable with actual real money. You'll still have to stay subscribed to earn these "Reward Points."

And, finally, the Experienced power has five uses for the entire life of the character ever. I can't reclaim it and use it another five times, I can buy another player's power, I can't extend the duration. Five times, and that's it. I don't like it, personally, but for such limited use (2.5 levels' worth of x1.5 XP gain), I can accept it. Being able to buy this such that you have a constant experience buff, that I do not want to see. Ever.

The look I'm trying to achieve is best described as "turtling" in gaming vernacular. You can't tell from the screenshot, but Spiral Knights provides a pretty cool option to turtle - you hold the shield up front, take cover in your forcefield and then manoeuvre around the battlefield in relative safety (relative, because those fields can break). That's kind of what I want - the ability to move around with my shield out, approach my enemies with shield in front and circle around them with a shield between me and them.

Oh, sure, I know this doesn't make me any better protected. The game doesn't care. Then again, having a larger sword doesn't make my damage better, but I sure as hell "feel" like I'm hitting harder It's a presentation thing. I don't mind the stats as they are, I just want the game to look the part a little more.

And while I understand that it may look awkward to always have a shield up front given how Shield Defence doesn't permit you non-combat stances, I think allowing this stance as either an option or some kind of extra, no-stats movement toggle would solve that problem. People will still default to the same existing run and stance animations, but those who want a more "turtling" approach to shield defence can use that, instead.

Hell, I'd use Ninja Run, but it has a few problems with it:

1. It comes with stats attached, which I don't want, and it comes with a COST attached, which I definitely don't want or need.

2. It's TOO goofy, even for me. The crouch is too low, the stance sway is too wise and the run is too silly. Good for an exaggerated anime ninja, but not for a large burly character with a heavy axe and a big shield.

3. It's not entirely appropriate for a combat stance, because the off-hand weapon is held far, far behind. Good for running so you're not swinging a sharpened stick around, but bad for standing still, because if you want to attack with a sword or an axe held WAAAY back like that, it'll be unwieldy and slow, or at least looks like it would be.

If Freedom really is going to bring us more stuff, then I hope movement animation customization is in there, and something for Shield Defence is included.

Actually, that is kind of the position I take, myself. I build all of my characters with one initial question in mind: "How will I explain this character taking a Kronos Titan down single-handedly?" Because you can do that in at least one mission. As such, I see ALL powersets as inherently super-super. Let me explain:

I have numerous Willpower characters, and none of them is the John McLain type. In fact, let me show you them:

Emillia: Dead for 20 years, she eventually returns to an artificially-created body so that she can once again be with her grieving husband. Her immortal spirit is able to repair ANY damage done to the body, so long as she has the will to hang on to this life and not pass into the afterlife. She is a Willpower character, because as long as she has the will to live, she cannot be defeated.

Alexander: A man who was exposed to a nanobot forge and whose entire body was disassembled into subatomic particles, but whose conscience gained control of said nanobots and constructed a new body for himself. Being made of semi-sentient subatomic machines, Alexander can regenerate from any injury, remerge if he is scattered and take any amount of punishment as the machines rebuild lost units. The only way for him to die is if he lost the will to control the machines that make up his body, hence why he uses Willpower.

Thirteen: A robot who possesses an eldritch energy focusing device which allows her to project a completely impenetrable damage barrier around her body. As long as she has the processing power to regulate and manage the barrier and the intelligent will to not give up, she cannot be harmed. She uses Willpower because historically, the only times she has suffered damage is when she has lost faith in her own sentience.

Inna: An alien who inherited the very power of creation, even if most of that is scattered across the cosmos. She cannot yet give birth to entire worlds, but she is just strong enough to reform her own body every time it is destroyed. She uses Willpower because that's all it takes to use such godlike power.

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That's not to say I disrespect the more traditional super powers, of course. I mentioned a SS/Inv Brute before, and her story is even weirder, though too complex to explain. Suffice it to say that she cannot be harmed. Ever. Willpower or no willpower, she is simply unstoppable, and monstrously strong. And if that weren't enough, when she needs to be EVEN STRONGER, there's always Unstoppable.

In fact, the lack of a proper "god mode" power in most new sets is more than a little disappointing. Yes, with Willpower you can be pretty strong all the time, but you're exactly as strong as you're ever going to be. If you meet anything that can kill you... Well, there ain't much you can do about it. Invulnerability, though, has that extra ~50% resistance to almost everything to fall back on. If I meet something I can't beat, I always have the option of popping Unstoppable on and becoming almost unkillable for three minutes. That, to me, is impressive.

I've seen a friend of mine try to name his characters in Aion, and he was apparently stuck. He kept coming up with names that I could tell him off-hand would be taken before he even tried them in the game. And I was right every time. The names he tried? Things like "Thor," "Legolas," "Superman," "Michael Jackson" and so forth. I never saw him give up in frustration or use a random symbols name, though, he just ended up with a stupid name a lot of the times.

That's like saying "With people committing crimes anyway, why bother with laws to begin with?" Yes, people are getting powerlevelled to 50 in a few days. People SHOULDN'T be getting powerlevelled to 50 in a few days. And we used to be run by a studio that understood this.

I don't know. What do you think they'll do with it? Because things like "optimising the process" and "gearing up to deliver more content" are things I've heard so many times before, and I've yet to actually see them have an impact on the content we get. In fact, Matt Miller made a big huff about restructuring the studio so that they could deliver much Incarnate content without having to halt production on non-Incarnate content. Neither of those happened. Incarnate content has been embarrassingly slow, even three Issues after the fact, and that slowness has put work on EVERYTHING ELSE to just about a dead stop.

Much as it pisses me off to think about it, I do hope 3/4 of the studio was busy making and holding back content to sell to me on top of my subscription and that now they'll be back to working on regular content, but at this point I have no faith in Paragon Studios either as being ethical or as a business. I have faith in them to try to squeeze the most money they can out of me while delivering as little content as they can get away with, trying to wow me with bright flashes and pretty colours that have no substance. I pray that I'll be proven wrong, but I've seen enough hollow promises to have low expectations for it.

I do expect them to see an increase of revenue from Freedom - out of my pocket. I don't expect that increase of revenue to mean much more than the increase in revenue from City of Villains did, or the increase of revenue from Going Rogue did. Both of those came with promises of all the stars in the sky and ended up with years of content droughts, scraping by to find the cheapest, easiest, fastest additions and me wondering what's going on.

However, at least back with the CoV drought, we still had Castle and BABs who spoke with us and seemed to genuinely care about the game. Now we have Marketing spin doctors feeding us advertisement speak about how rosy things are looking and how the future is so bright I need to wear shades and all that. And I don't buy it. The Development team is all but silent, and God knows what happened to David Nakayama or Tunnel Rat. You'll occasionally see a post from Black Scorpion, clearly run through the Marketing censors before it ended up on the forums, but that's a far cry from Castle and BABs posting like they're part of the community.

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Personally, -I- will be very surprised if Freedom doesn't end up costing me more while delivering less and turning the game into class struggle with "pay to win" options. I want to be wrong, but I'll believe it when I see it. Promises are cheap.

1. You HAVE seen the Blast set animations, have you not?

2. Judgement powers were made customizable at sizable player request, which was not in the original plan, and as I understand it, UI for pool customization did not come with it.

3. Power customization came out in I16. Nearly two years later, we've gotten about five new animations that didn't get applied to nearly the full scope of powers which could use them (such as Blast powers being used in Assault and Melee sets), and still gotten nothing to mitigate the horrible colour selection in ice-related powers, the limited earth powers colours, to facilitate the customization of pool and epic powers, to give ANY customization to weapon sets at all...

Just because they did SOMETHING doesn't mean power customization isn't on the backburner, especially with its chief advocate - BABs - gone. That's like saying they gave 15 000 for the first new SG members and made only active items cost rent, so clearly bases aren't on the backburner. Or like saying that dropping a few new instances in the Architect and opening up new Boosters for purchase with tickets means the Architect isn't on the backburner.

I expect to see a MEANINGFUL addition to the system, not token additions here or there.

The problem is that this messes with game balance and bestows real in-game advantages to those who pay. This is the bane of every F2P game I've ever played, and it's one of the BIGGEST worries I have about Freedom. I've so far only ever seen one F2P game I've wanted to stay with, and I've played a LOT of them. If this game is to become another one, it should avoid "selling out" like that.

First of all, that was BABs who said it, and he got sacked (unfortunately). Secondly, what BABs said that large weapons looked silly if they were put in sets whose animations did not impart the proper weight to the swing, making the big weapons look like they were made of Styrofoam. This has been remedied by making these their own set, thus giving them proper weight in animation. Thurd, he did not want to put in weapons which did not look like they could do the damage type that the set was doing, so no pipe wrenches in Broadsword or swords in War Mace. I expect to see this set deal both Smashing and Lethal damage, or even just Smashing damage, so most weapon types apply.

Finally, and worth its own paragraph, was BABs stout refusal to put in stupid weapons in the game, like fish, clown shoes, balloon animals and suchforth, not because they were goofy so much as because they don't pack a punch. This is not the case with any of the weapons we've seen for this new set. They may be crude an unusual, but hit someone with them, and they WILL feel it. Not so with a fish, which may have weight to it, but has little structural strength when compared to metal weapons. There's always room for absurd weapons in the game. You just have to make sure they'd be at least marginally useful as actual weapons.

And why is he punching with his left hand? I mean, I'm sure the Incarnate of Zeus is allowed to be ambidextrous, but it just looks weird when you frame it like that, especially when you can't even see his right hand thanks to that... Blur thing.

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Also, Pacur - why is there a space towards the end of your signature between the AAA AAs?

And if we didn't think finding a name that hasn't been take was a problem before or at any point in the game's history? Then what?

I hate to be the jerkass here, but whenever these threads come up and we get down to the nitty-gritty, it's never a question of not being able to find names, good names, appropriate names or interesting names, it's about not being able to use SPECIFIC names that are both obvious (and so obvious to others who've already used them) and part of a needlessly restrictive naming practice, like Something Person.

That's not to say I'm against rerunning the name purge script again. That IS to say that I don't want it to be made any more strict or severe.