Samuel_Tow

It appeared on me twice in the same day, and I had to petition both times, so I'd say it's showing up more often. This is one of these bugs that need to be patched ASAP, not because it's a major emergency, but more because I'm sure it's creating a serious workload for customer support that shouldn't be necessary.

Funny thing is, I ran into four bugged missions in two days:

1. A kill-all map was missing its last NPC. Praetorian Labs are not complicated places, I would have seen the NPC if it were on the map. Auto-completed that one.

2. The mission to save your Power Division team, where you check on Warrant and are told to confront Reese on the roof should point you to a roof access door. This door either did not exist, or was hidden by a wall machine. I had to petition this one and ask the GM to teleport me to Reese.

3. Next day, I ran into this bugged instance on a mission from Praetor Sinclair. Took me a while to figure out what the problem was. I petitioned and the GM teleported me past the bugged door.

4. Later the same day, I ran into the same bugged instance from Aaron Walker's first mission. Petitioned that, waited something like half an hour, left because my dinner was getting cold, made this thread, got a letter from Support, updated my petition and got a GM response within 10 minutes of logging back in. The GM teleported me past the door, I clicked the glowie and the mission completed.

I hope I don't run into that same instance today. That would suck.

I'm probably some of the hardest audience to please when it comes to power balance and mechanics, to be honest, as I'm in the unfortunate position of actually understanding the numbers (for the most part) yet not finding any entertainment in gaming them. I know your stance that if a system is complex enough (while still being balanced) players will not be able to deduce a simple way to tell what's "better," but I'm sure that if I can't figure it out on my own, there will always be "the Arcana of that game" who will figure it out for me and I'll still end up in the same situation.

We simply have different goals on the subject. You want to design a powers system that makes people think, a desire I commend you with. I, on the other hand, prefer a powers system that does not make me think, or at the very most makes me think once until I figure it out and thereafter allows me to forego the thinking and planning stages and just pick things based on what's coolest, rather than what's best.

In fact, my ideal game system would be one which allowed me to have a viable character of the theme and abilities that I wanted without necessarily knowing HOW one goes about making this. The meta-game in any game is uninteresting to me, at best a necessary evil, at worst a show-stopper. That's why I was one of the people (foolishly) arguing against real numbers back in the day - because I was once convinced that a game could be made where I wouldn't have to care about them.

My approach to building a character these days is fairly simple - take all primary and secondary powers, plus two pool powers for travel. The remaining four powers tend to be "whatever fits best." In this regard, I put my faith in set balance, in that I will pick the powers offered to me and trust the game to not screw me over. And for the most part, it doesn't. I've narrowed my AT preference to just the four ATs I can expect to run to my specifications without much fine-tuning, and I basically go without much forward planning. It's not that I can't plan or calculate, it's that I really, really don't want to have to.

Here's my problem with this, as illustrated by an anecdote.

My very first character in this game was a Kat/SR Scrapper. I was determined to slot as much defence into his powers as I could, ending up slotting his toggles for 1 End/5 Def. The problem is that I simply ran out of slots at one point. I was determined to slot his passives with 6 Def, but when I actually ran the numbers and saw what kind of defences these passives were actually adding, I decided it wasn't worth the slots and left them all at just 3 Def, saving 9 slots to use elsewhere.

Now consider the reverse. If my toggles were weak and my passive strong, then I would have taken the passives first, and when crunch time came, probably not taken the toggles at all. They cost too many power picks, they cost too many slots, they cost too much endurance, and for what? Crappy percentages. No, thank you.

I feel that the basic notion is as you describe it. If it costs more, it should do more. What you're suggesting strikes me as Bitter Freeze Ray's balance. It does little damage, it costs a lot of endurance and it's very slow to come out. I'm really not interested what kind of synergy it has with its set at this point, it's just a bad, bad power. This is how toggles will be viewed. And I can guarantee you without without a shadow of a doubt that you WILL get the obvious question - "so if a toggle costs more and does less, why should I take it?" That's not a good question to ask about game balance, in my opinion.

They should, because this is a legitimate question. In fact, I can name at least two movies that put a LOT of people out of their comfort zones: Saw (and its spawn) and the Human Centipede. Dubbed "murder porn," these are certainly not for everybody. More personally, I myself have written a story that the people I showed it to have told me was too dark and unpleasant for them to read, and asked me to either fix that in upcoming chapters or stop writing it, paraphrasing, of course.

However, when it comes to movies and especially books, there's a much broader field to choose from. When it comes to games, this isn't always the case. Of course, looking at Steam and its vast library of indie games, the choice appears much more vast, as for every mainstream game you've heard of on it, there are ten you didn't know existed, and some of those ARE disturbing and trying to take you out of your comfort zone. Amnesia: The Dark Descent comes to mind, though I happen to not share popular opinion on the subject.

This isn't a question about whether games COULD take us out of our comfort zone. They clearly could, as evidence to this exists all over the genre. It's a question of whether they SHOULD, in the sense that "true art is offensive" and any game which doesn't push people out of their comfort zone and "broaden their horizons" cannot be seen as true art. I believe it's safe to say that it's an accepted objective for every game ever made to be good. No-one invests money into making a game while deliberately trying to make a crappy game. Should we consider a game's tenacity in reshaping its players' minds to be just obvious an objective, or can we postulate that not all games need to be like this, and that it's perfectly OK for some games to cater to what players want to do anyway, rather than trying to "inspire" players to do something new or something they're uncomfortable with?

This question is most relevant to MMOs, because they're some of the broadest games ever made, at least in terms of the variety of activities they present. There's the social side, the combat side, the tinkerer side, the explorer side, the collector, the achiever side and so on and so forth. It's logical that the more aspects of an MMO a player is involved in BY CHOICE, the more of an investment said player will have in the game. I feel it is also true, however, that the more aspects a player is FORCED to involve himself in, either by coercion or system limitation, the worse off this is for the player's experience.

But that's just my opinion. I made the thread to hear other people's stances. If it's still alive, then I hope that it can still deliver that. And not get locked

I thought that might be the case, but I it's not with this instance. I'm talking about Aaron Walker's first mission. I ran this one a few days before... Call it Sunday or thereabout. The instance for this mission was not bugged. I don't know if it's possible that it was the SAME instance, just not bugged or if it was a whole different layout, however. My memory is foggy about that. Was there a patch between last Sunday and today that could have bugged this one?

Base enemy to-hit chance is 50%, and defence is subtracted linearly from this. Because you can never be allowed to reduce enemy chance to hit you down to 0% (which would equate to effective immortality), enemy to-hit is never allowed to drop below 5%, so the most you can subtract from their 50% base is 45%.

The reason 45% defence is twice as good as 40% defence is because at 40% defence, your enemies have a 50-40=10% chance to hit you, while at 45% defence, they have a 50-45=5% chance to hit you. Half the chance to hit, twice the chance to miss, twice the mitigation.

Neither of those is specifically programmed into the system, in that no-one sat down and said "We want defence to soft-cap at 45% and it we want it to be half as strong at 40%." This is just how the numbers work out when you run them through what are, frankly, pretty basic formulas, even with enhancement accuracy, native power accuracy and enemy level and class modifiers. It's lots of numbers, but at the end of the day, the numbers they spit our still behave the same.

Actually, Bill, I'd be willing to bet real money with you on that part - call it $15 - that at this time next year, we will still not have seen a single solo-doable piece of Incarnate content aside from Ramiel (which is already in the game). Drop me a line around this time next year with a paypal address and I'll honour my promise if I'm wrong. And, no, I don't expect to be paid money if I'm right

Getting punched in gut also hurts less than getting stabbed in the head, but I'm still not going to appreciate getting punched just because "it could be worse." It can always be worse, but that doesn't make reality any better.

This is a fine idea in theory, but in practice is produces horribly ugly animations, as can be seen in any game which includes non-rooting melee combat, and there are many. For ranged attacks, this may sometimes be appropriate, but then at other times it might not. A lot of the beauty of an attack animation comes from a character's overall stance and pose, as most physical attacks are not just launched from the hands. In fact, people who try to punch with just the hand look positively ridiculous more often than not.

Here's a thought experiment. Imagine yourself running backwards (a feat in itself) and throwing punches to an imaginary opponent running after you within an arm's reach. Now imagine how good this would look. Not very, no. When you treat characters like dollies, with their legs being a wheeled platform for their chest to swivel off of, then you get animations that are about as appealing as what I just described. You also get animations which are about as appealing as 1980s animatronics.

You'll notice that almost any pinup of a cool action pose includes an appropriate leg stance. Wolverine is usually crouching, for instance. You'll almost never see a character doing an over-arm swing in one direction while his pelvis points 90 degrees to the right with his legs in a running motion. Because that's silly.

Our competition has one set for swords and axes. The result of this is that the set looks ugly for BOTH swords and axes. Each specific weapon class you try to make a set for is used in a different way, so to try and design one set of animations that fits all of them just ensures that this set of animations will fit none of them. We see this even here with the Broadsword/Battle Axe/War Mace family - the animations are so generic that they don't really feel appropriate for any of the weapons. Broadsword, for instance, has no thrusting attacks, which a sword should. Moreover, if these sets ever got separate animations here, I'd like to see them get animations which fit the weapon in question, rather than more generic ones.

Then there's something like Dual Blades. This is a set which has numerous stab attacks. I've been through the whole process of people telling me about how you can totally thrust forward with a hammer and it would totally hurt as much as being stabbed. I still don't buy it. Hell, it looks stupid with even some of the swords we have, let alone with spike-less axe or a flat mace.

And if you DO make concessions for each of these sets having different animations, then there's really no reason to have them be the same set.

I'm not sure how well this would work. "Character stats" are one of the things I hate the most about not just MMOs but conventional computer RPGs in general. That and gear. I'm not sure why adding "permanent equipment" is seen as a good thing, but I'm much happier with how City of Heroes allows me to customize each of my powers individually, rather than customizing my entire character in some sort of compromise between all powers. If you look at most contemporary RPGs, you'll note that most of their skills can only ever be upgraded along a linear path. Fireball -> Fireball II -> Fireball III and so on. What part of the power improves with each upgrade is a whim of the developers. Here, by contrast, I can pick which aspect of my fireball I want to enhance, and I prefer it that way.

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I don't want to seem like I'm picking a fight here. However, IF City of Heroes 2 ever came out, I don't want it to be more like all the other MMOs I didn't subscribe to, and the above suggestions go in exactly that direction.

Situational adaptability requires situational awareness, and quite comprehensive such. The first thing I did when I made my Dual Pistols Blaster was to download Arcana's spreadsheet of enemy resistances, and the things I found surprised me greatly. Some resistances are obvious, like robots resisting lethal damage or robots resisting psi damage, but I wasn't aware that Tarantula cyborgs in general resisted almost everything, or that either DE trees or DE mushrooms are weak to fire but not lethal while for the others it's the reverse. I'm already forgetting much of what I learned from that spreadsheet.

Dual Pistols in general is almost a sucker trap, in that it gives you this apparent adaptability, making you believe that you should know which ammo to use when, and the fact of the matter is that the end results aren't all that different from one another anyway, so you can never tell if you're doing something wrong, if you don't know enough or if the set's basic design is just screwing with you - which is usually the case. And then on the flip side, if you DO choose to "just use incendiary," you will inevitably meet with people who browbeat you over it like you're some knuckle-dragging idiot who picked the "simple" option where one doesn't have to think.

It's a design that sounds good on paper, but I've never seen it work out in practice.

I'm not sure I agree. Look at Broadsword. It's a set that has 7 out of 9 attacks that consist of "swing sword," and there aren't all that many ways to swing a sword. In fact, the set ends up doubling up on its own animation, with Head Splitter constituting a slightly more brutish version of Hack. Axe, Mace and Katana notwithstanding, Dual Blades is in a similar situation - it consists of slashes and slices from beginning to end. Even Super Strength isn't all that different, though that does demonstrate what lateral thinking can produce.

What I'm saying is that a set can be cool and different and interesting enough on its own without having to have a "sore thumb" gimmick on top of it. It comes down to art design, visual effects and power balance.

A while ago someone reminded me that Dual Pistols actually uses TWO pistols, taken out of context. This got me thinking if that basic nature of the set couldn't have been used in some way. Roll with me for a while as I think out loud:

Suppose you have each attack only concern one pistol, allowing the player to mix and match attacks if the player chooses. Such a thing WOULD make for a complex, probably unintuitive control scheme, but it would also allow one to, say, choose to do an attack and a short-duration stun by mixing an attack with a stun, or a stronger attack by mixing an attack with itself, or a stronger stun by mixing a stun with itself, or an attack that has two different components to it by mixing two different attacks. I'm speaking off-the-cuffs, so chances are I'm not making much sense.

I'm not an opponent of innovation, so much as I'm an opponent of innovation for the sake of innovation, rather than for the sake of good balance. I wouldn't be against a gimmick if it felt like it worked to the set's benefit, rather than detriment. I've complained about DB Combos quite a bit, but at the end of the day, they work, and the set is fun to play with them, once you figure them out.

The reason I speak against Swap Ammo is because of how things are balanced around here. If what you describe were possible - that Dual Pistols could get decent numbers on all ammo types - then I would be all for it, but that's not how Castle balanced things, and I've no reason to believe that his successors would be any more lenient. When it looks like a set has more tools at its disposal, the developers WILL cripple ALL of these tools to balance that versatility, to the point where not only is a set no longer versatile, it's actually not even any good.

To me, Swap Ammo is a death sentence for Dual Blades, because it condemns it to a jack of all trades, which means it will never do anything well. The only way we're ever going to see an improvement in the set's numbers is to lose some of its functions, because a set that has many uses AND is strong in those uses is seen to overshadow all others. Martial Arts is practically the poster child of death by versatility, and most of what has happened to save it over the years has come at the price of crimping that supposed versatility for more solid performance.

Basically, I don't want to see the search for novelty to produce a sub-par set. I'd sooner have a set that works than one which is eccentric but not very good.

Like I said - it's probably an unpopular opinion to have. I know a lot of people were overjoyed at the Swap Ammo mechanic.

I do want to say a few words on Assault Rifle and Archery, however. Originally, way back in Beta, "Assault Rifle" was actually a set called Heavy Weapons or some such, and you pulled out a different weapon for every attack, hence why we have an attack called "Sniper Rifle" and the propensity of shotgun ammunition, as well as "Flamethrower." As I hear, the redraw proved too visually annoying (even if it didn't slow the set back in those days, with power animations padded to account for it), so the set was unified into the same one "frankengun" or "omnigun." This is why you'll see a lot of arguments around the forums that "Assault Rifle isn't an assault rifle set!" Because... Well, it isn't. It's a "mish-mash of different weapons that were made to share the same model" set. That's why I don't like to use it as precedent.

Archery, on the other hand, is very much "shoot arrow" from beginning to end. Note I say Archery, not Trick Arrow. It is, basically, Shoot Arrow, Shoot Arrow Again, Shoot Many Arrows, Shoot Arrow That's on Fire, Shoot MANY arrows plus Shoot Bomb and Shoot Rock. And, really, I like the set for it. Sure, I'd have liked it to be a little more fancy, such as faster arrows with more visceral hit effects (than just "thunk"), but the set is pretty much what I'd expect out of a set about a bow shooting arrows. All the actual fancy tricks you can do with it are relegated to Trick Arrow, and I'm personally happier for it.

I fully believe you can make a weapon set awesome without deviating from what that weapon set actually does. To sidestep the issue for a moment, you can make a sword set awesome even without including attacks where you shoot things out of the sword or where you teleport with it, or where you imbue your sword with different elements. Dual Blades, I believe, proved that - make a set with effects and animations which convey the superhuman nature of the character, then put in a mechanic which revolves around cutting and stabbing things with your swords.

You don't really need special conditions for a set to be awesome. You just need to approach it with enough visual flair to where the set stands on its own and isn't just a palette swap with another set. Dual Pistols has that, in spades, both with its amazing animations and with its actual internal set structure. JUST Piercing Rounds is enough of an innvoation to change how a Blast set plays, and its "nuke" is one of a kind, and awesome to boot. To me, the set would have been perfectly cool and perfectly unique even without Swap Ammo. In fact, I feel that the set came out WEAKER because of it.

If you have a few years to spare, maybe. Saying that Trials are faster than conversions is like saying that Earth's escape velocity is faster than a brisk walk. Yes, it is.

That's kind of my point, though: It's an oddly specific gimmick to use. Maybe I'm missing context not being an avid comic book fan, but the biggest variety I'm aware of in pistol ammunition is between bullets that make different kinds of holes. To put it in perspective, what I was expecting the Archery of Dual Pistols, and what I got was the Trick Arrow of Dual Pistols. Not what I was expecting, to put it like that.

Complicated to code and balance, perhaps, but not really all that complicated to use. I've had quite a lot of experience with Dual Blades, and while I will admit that pre-defined combos can be restricting in the attack sequences you use, they're really not that hard to remember, especially with power tray guides. All you really need to remember is where a combo starts. The rest the game will do for you.

I will admit that having a set that gets faster the faster you use it might be... Difficult to use, that much I'll agree. But I was really just speaking off the top of my head.

As a game mechanic, the ability to control chance occurrences by power activation IS good, I'll admit that much. However, what I'm referring to is the decision to give the set a variety of largely redundant debuffs and transform it into the jack of all trades of jacks of all trades. This game seems to have a balancing rule that the more things a powerset can do, the less able it is to do ANY of them well. After a certain point, this rule makes adding more secondary effects to a powers an actual weakness, because ALL of them become far, far too weak.

Dual Pistols' design promotes adaptability to the situation, but that's really not how it works out. How it works out is you don't need most of your utility most of the time, but you're paying for all of your utility all of the time. The design of the set makes it "fat," which is a large part of what ruined it for me. That it's glacial slow didn't help.

That's missing the point. You add a villain game, and then proceed to come up with newer and newer justifications for why your villain players should play the hero. You can explain everything away with sufficient amounts RP, that's not the point. The point here is that I don't want to have to explain this, because I don't want to have to do this. It's not a question of villains having no reason to team-up with heroes. You can always make one up. It's a question of villains having no GOOD reason to team-up with heroes, where "good" is something that actually forwards them as villains, rather than requiring them to suspend their villainy.

That's really the clincher: Heroes get to engage in co-op content by continuing to do what they were doing anyway - being heroes. Villains don't. On the contrary, villains need to stop doing what they were doing and be heroes, and we're just thinking up excuses for why they're justified in doing that, all the while ignoring the fact that, in a well-written story, they shouldn't be doing that in the first place. Yes, maybe once or twice, but we already have "once or twice." We have the Rikti War Zone, which is "once," and we have Cimerora, which is "twice." Three times is too many, and we're already looking at more than that.

Every time concept-related arguments come up, the pattern repeats itself. We look at a given bad storyline and try to justify why it's OK for it to be bad, when all along the point is that it's bad in the first place and it shouldn't have been written like that. We can't really hope to change existing plots, but the least we can do is ask that new plots aren't written the same way.

That's ProtEan. And, yes, hearing about this makes me happy. I'd like to see how they make the transition between magic almost not existing and this, especially when it comes to retrofitting magic in the overworld and existing content ranged. The reason I say this is it might seem a bit odd if you went through 20 levels of no magic and then suddenly "Oh, and there are these magic guys we... Didn't think to mention until six movies in."

Don't think I'm not happy to hear the news, though. I am. Seeing more about the magical side of Praetoria and finally seeing this Carnival of Light (and why Anti-Matter's clockwork would confuse them with the Primal Carnival of Light) as well as just "magical stuff" would be a boon. There's really nothing much I can say about it without more information, but I'm glad to see they aren't set on just not showing magic in Praetoria.

So, good deal!

I can think of one, possibly subjective downside: A feeling that the toggle is not worth it. In the realms of endurance management, toggles constitute a not-insignificant drain on my total endurance. I justify running them anyway because the benefits for doing so, and the loss for not doing so, are considerable. They are, as a point of fact, worth the price of admission. Not so with Tough and Weave. I'm sure that, in specific situation, those few extra percent are going to make all the difference, but for the most part, I don't find that a small defence or a moderate resistance buff is worth the additional cost.

What you propose reduces all toggles to "small" buffs, to the point where I start having to wonder if they're even all that useful. I know that was part of your point - an all-passives build would be worthwhile. But the simple fact remains that people's psychology is that if they're paying for something, they expect a return. If they don't see that return, they either don't take the power, or they feel cheated for taking it.

The downside is I would feel like a right fool paying 0.26 points of endurance per second for getting, what? 7.5% damage resistance to JUST physical damage? That'd put me in front of a choice with two wrong options, and those are the kinds of things that make me resent an entire game system.

You either actually chose not to read my post or chose to ignore everything said in it. I have no desire to argue that way. Have fun being right.

Um... If an inactive account doesn't show up on my Master Account, how I can I access it to reactivate it? The only way I know of to access my PlayNC game accounts is through my PlayNC Master Account that they're tied to.

This only happens if you logged out inside a building and shut down the client last time. Next time you load the game up, it will only load what's inside the building, so when you step outside, you'll have to load the rest of the zone. The game have some sort of strange priority algorithm that only loads a combination of things around you and things that you're looking at in memory. I say this because I've had instances where the game will load the same one skyscraper in memory over and over again each time I turn around to look at it.

To be honest, short of being removed and replaced with nothing at all, I don't believe it could be much worse FOR ME. I've always had a severe problem with "jack of all trades" sets that supposedly offer a lot of different utility and for that reason their utility has to be crap. This is adding insult to injury because having more variety in utility comes at the cost of having a lesser ability to stack, and making slotting difficult. To take a performance hit on top of that is just too much.

Personally, I'd have much rather seen the set come with a different mechanic of some sort, one that would make it less complicated and unbelievable and would instead add to its damage, which is kind of sad because of its animation times. I've always liked to see a system of speeding up your own attacks if you attack quickly, such that they'd either play their animations faster or interrupt each other. Or, hell, even just Dual Blades combos would have sufficed, in my opinion.

I've always felt that this need to innovate in EVERYTHING is doing more harm than good. The novelty of an unusual mechanic isn't always worth avoiding mechanics that work just fine. Yes, a new set is unique and different, but if it's not GOOD, then what's the point?

An account's name can always be viewed from the owner's PlayNC Master Account, which is where one would go to retrieve a lost password anyway. As well, most sites I've been a member of have systems in place for retrieving forgotten account names, as well.