Samuel_Tow

When it comes to the "colour" of the Steampunk pack, I'm not really upset that it was designed around brown Steampunk, but more so that options for OTHER colour schemes weren't given to much of it. The point of costume Boosters is greater customization, and that sort of assumes that you'd be able to customize those pieces in ways not necessarily consistent with the singular inspiration that created them.

I have a question that's sort of short notice: I have a chance to snag a new video card, and I wanted to ask what a good, strong one is for the current generation of cards. I'm looking at an nVidia card, just to specify.

I haven't kept up to date on video hardware for some time now, ever since I got a GTX 285 that seems to be able to run most everything, so I haven't the foggiest as to what's current and what's a scam. Any advise on the subject is very welcome.

P.S. I'm swapping out of this one because it has a hardware gremlin somewhere that I'm tired of trying to fix.

It's nice to see City of Data updated. It's really the only place that has real, unobscured numbers any more, like what active period a toggle has or what power summons which pseudo pet. That's definitely good news.

I would personally like to see at least one more suit of specifically medieval armour. Not Greek, not Roman, not Fantasy, not Asian - Medieval European armour. We have one set that's pretty good - Medieval - but it's showing its age. Low-poly surfaces, low-res textures, crappy shaders, no shininess effects and so on.

I'd especially like to see new designs added to the Medieval Helmets category. What we have in it now is exactly what we had in it back in May of 2004, with the possible exception of a secondary detail or two. But we've never gotten any extra helmets for that, and I'd really like to see a few more. The bucket helms and round helms and cross helms are nice, but I'm sure we could see at least a few more like them.

I don't see missions or contacts as "abandoned." If all people want to do is grind endless repetitive missions, then yeah, I can see how contacts may seem old hat TO THEM. Personally, I find contacts easily rewarding enough to play through, and I find they offer far superior and much more diverse content than the... What is it, like... 10 Tip missions per 10-level range? It's been seven years and I still have contacts I haven't worked with more than once or twice. I did all the Tip missions the game had to offer within about a week or two of that Issue launching.

By the way, while I seem to dislike Vanguard Claws greatly, I'm finding that I really like all of the other Vanguard weapons... With the possible exclusion of Dual Blades, but that's besides the point.

I finally got around to remaking Emillia to use a pair of mismatching Vanguard Katanas, and I have to say, I'm really happy with the look. The long blades describe impressively wide swing arcs, the colours are pretty good and the longer weapons "feel" stronger than her previous short swords. The screenshot I'm listing is old, by the way, and I couldn't quite figure out what I did to get that look.

Still, while the claws may have hurt me, the rest of the weapons are very cool, two-dimensional as they may be. I'm actually planning for a character who will use the Vanguard Shield but swap to an identical costume without the persistent folded shield when out of combat. Just need either Axe for Scrappers, Sword for Brutes or Shield for Stalkers to do it

This shouldn't be such a complex question. Throughout a character's career, that character gets 24 power picks: 2 at creation, 15 more levels 2 to 30, then 32, 35, 38, 41, 44, 47 and 49 for another 7. You have 9 primary powers and 9 secondary powers for a total of 18. That's 6 power picks that you have insufficient primary and secondary powers for, which means you have to engage in epic or pool powers. And, no, epics don't count as primary or secondary. The thematic matches aren't that strong or that frequent.

Is it fair for the system to work like this? Yes. Yes it is. Unless you want to operate under the assertion that you should never have to take a pool power, and I fail to see how that could be justified. The way the game is set up, there are somewhat few ways to build a particular powerset and fewer still to build a particular powerset combo. Pool powers, therefore, provide one of the primary methods for differentiation between characters of the same AT and powersets.

Personally, I believe that any task which gates one large reward at the end is going to encourage people to rush it, skip to the end and repeat it as many times as possible. Yes, you can time-gate it (and you probably should) but time-gating is a really bad solution when it's the ONLY solution present. If you time-gate an activity to too long a period, you discourage people from playing past the gate, and if you time-gate it to too short a period then you just have speed gamers farming it for disproportionate gains.

I personally look to experience and what it has done to the game for me. I've always had a particular quirk when it comes to RPGs - I want to accomplish and obtain EVERYTHING I can before I meet a particular milestone, because in the RPGs of old, that meant I was "ahead of the game" and better prepared for its difficulties. More broadly, every time you have an activity which is itself directly rewarding with a smaller reward at the end, you give people more incentive to dive into the activity itself, rather than skipping to the end. If you take one big reward and spread it into bread crumbs all along the way, you make players more interested in the way than in the final destination. Yes, they can skip content, but that won't save them time or effort in the long run, it'll just replace time and effort spent doing one thing with time and effort spent doing another.

The experience system we have, I think, is about the best expression of this notion, at least looking at just City of Heroes. Yes, you CAN speed-run to the end of missions and collect mission rewards fast, but killing everything along the way is about on par with that. What this means is you have motivation to take your time, because the more enemies you kill along the way, the more reward you will leave the mission with. In fact, I recall clearing a large outdoor mission and scoring around 150 000 experience points. When I finished the mission, it gave me just 15 000.

I say about the Incarnate system what I've always said about it: I'd prefer to see progress broken down into far more, far smaller pieces which drop far more frequently, possibly even with a guarantee. Even if it actually took longer, removing the random aspect from the whole thing and removing the "big reward at the end, time sink before that" I'd still have a much more positive response to it. The trick here is that I'll be rewarded for my actions, not just for the results. And, really, the trick to making a cool game is to get the player interested in PLAYING it more than he is interested in BEATING it.

A system which rewards each micro step of actual gameplay is far superior to one which only gives rewards at the end, at least in my book. The former motivates players to play it all the way through, while the latter makes players resent the actual gameplay as a no-reward gate. And I'd much rather have the former.