Samuel_Tow

Your definition of co-op is so broad that any MMO would be considered co-op because you can cooperate with other people.

This game's definition of a co-op zone is a zone which presents an event that heroes and villains must put their differences aside and team up to combat. Co-op scenarios represent a "greater threat," "common enemy" or "non-conflicting goals" scenarios. The reason we don't want such zones isn't because there's a stigma against cross-faction teaming - such doesn't exist. The reason we don't want these is because they both fail to provide villains with a justifiable reason to participate and furthermore water down the faction divide in ways that should not be compromised.

Yes, it's true that a Rogue can travel to Paragon City and team with heroes, but a VILLAIN cannot. Yet not only can a villain join in to save Paragon City, but he more or less HAS to, because that's the only content for Incarnate power, all the while never having been given a decent reason why a villain shouldn't be looking for a more self-serving path to it, or indeed why a villain should care about the Praetorian war in general.

Arguing that "the whole game is co-op now" is as relevant to the discussion on co-op zones as bringing up the fact that there are other TFs in the 20-40 range is to a discussion of the balance and story of the Admiral Stutter TF. Yes, it's true, and yes, it's completely irrelevant.

"The concept" of that editor, interpreted very broadly, is indeed a good idea, in that it gives you a broader selection of costume categories with a more intricate system of item mutual exclusion, as well as a wider array of sliders having a greater effect on the character. But that's a very vague description of that editor.

What sinks that editor is intrinsically connected to what makes it work. The wide selection of texture materials and shader surfaces brings with it the flaw of lacking texture detail. This ends giving characters an embossed look which makes them look like clay figurines, rather than the more realistic look that high-resolution static textures provide. It also limits the the correlation between its own options, as few shaders work with many textures and many colour patterns. And even then, the editor is reduced to pattern over shader over mesh.

The slider customizability of body and face brings with it its own limitations. For customizable faces to really work, you need to rig a face much more precisely, which in turn means you can only ever rig a small number of faces. Or ONE face, as the case may be. And while sufficient options could indeed turn that face into a variety of others, this is very difficult to achieve, requires unjustifiable levels of artistic skill from the player and often ends up producing people who fell off the top of the ugly tree and hit their face on every branch on the way down, anyway. City of Heroes, by contrast, gives a much wider selection of prefabricated faces, sometimes such that a reasonable complexity editor really can't produce.

And even just in terms of body structures, City of Heroes may have you convinced that it's hard to make a human being that isn't at least reasonable, but that's because the editor here restricts us greatly. Once you are given full control of body shapes and NOT guideline as to what makes a good body shape or, indeed, what any of the sliders do, you end up with ugly things more often than not. As Mirai says, it's very easy to make a bizarrely ugly character, not so much to make a good-looking one. This isn't helped when slider values are redundant and poorly-rigged.

Of course, there are still things to take away. Using variable-strength shaders for skin is a very good way to puck your own level of muscle definition, and giving us the ability to customize eyes specifically and separately from each other has the capability to give a unique look to recycled faces. David has talked about adding a muscular female texture to the game - for which I'm very grateful - but even if/when that happens, it'll still be just a texture swap for skin without the ability for me to make it even MORE ripped if I found it lacking and for another person to make it less ripped but still muscular if he were afraid of brawny women.

As I said - the theory of it is interesting, and NC Soft's own Aion proves what can be done with a solid face editor even if it only has one face. But it does the argument more harm than good to mention Champions Online when speaking about their editor. It's much more productive to distil it down to its usable parts and argue for those without invoking the stigma of butt-ugly character design, hideously unintuitive implementation, poor artwork and baffling selection.

City of Heroes has age well in terms of visuals, that much is true. The game looks dated and, frankly, ugly, but it's far from jarring or unplayable. It's not next-gen graphics, true, but it's no Tomb Raider 2, either. The graphics are still up to par, and if we updated some of the hideously outdated low-res textures (especially character faces and other costume bits), then it would be a reasonable candidate for long-term survival.

However, what sinks City of Heroes' graphics is that you need frankly unjustifiable levels of hardware power to run what is ostensibly an old, ugly game. I can play Oni these days and never really bat an eye at the segmented character models because I know it's an old game, and because I can crank it to whatever ridiculous resolution I want, slap it with anti-alising, anisotropic filtering and so on from the nVidia Control Panel and it will still run at a framerathe that's twice my monitor refresh. Not so for City of Heroes.

Because of bad hardware support that still fails to use more than two cores and slap-dash environment design that leaves areas of unreasonable framerate, you end up with a bad-looking game that nevertheless runs SLOWER than games of vastly superior visual quality. I know for a fact that the Unreal 3 engine at max settings runs faster than City of Heroes at even moderate settings, and Unreal engine games unquestionably look better. This is what's so irritating - I'm paying a high cost of performance for not a whole lot of return.

While I'm sure it is packet loss, the game should have ways to account for that. It accounts for lost packets in other areas, like reward messages and combat spam. Though, on the other hand, the same "failed click" problem that happens with doors also happens with power activations, where you'll trigger a power, the interface will tell you it's queued up for activation... And then nothing. I assume because my command packet got lost.

Can't we have some kind of command response system to where if the client issues a command to the server and receives no response in, say, twice the current ping time, the command is automatically re-issued? Or would that create more problems?

You actually CAN click on an open tram door even today, but there's a catch - NOT the first time you see it open after the tram loads on your client. If the tram door is open when you first arrive, you can't click on it. After it closes and then opens again, you CAN click on it then, but by that point it's completely pointless. I'm not sure why that is, but that's how I've seen it working.

As to why we can't click on an open door - I assume because we can only click on the door itself, not the space inside the door frame, so when the door opens, the click box goes away with it and only returns when the door closes again.

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Speaking of "doors," can we fix the teleport gates in Oranbega so they're not completely random, please? There's at least one Oranbegan instances where you go through teleport gates by clicking on them, as opposed to by walking through them, and the gates there are completely accurate. So why are these left to split teams and send you all over the map? Even LodeRunner had more accurate teleporters than that.

I do not regret going with Dual Blades any more Claws are cool, but the set is kind of oldish and the animations - though acrobatic and fast - aren't as "gun kata." Considering this character was originally Dual Pistols, Dual Blades' fancy style was a closer fit. And it has that animation

This is something that irritates me, as well. I tried matching my colour scheme to the weapon, but that plain didn't work. The weapons should either take the colours of the blade, or outright be give double colours like capes and trenchcoat coat tails are. Now that many people have them, bAss has a point - we should keep asking for that and it just might happen. We got smokeless burned wings, after all.

In my case, giving up on Blasters has actually made me LESS angry and frustrated (even if it's hard to tell) for the simple fact that I no longer really care about their messed-up, user-hostile design. Where before I might have gone on a huge rant about how horrible the set is designed (and it is) and how it undermines the fundamental function of a Blaster and how it feels like a Defender port and probably been left with a bulging forehead vein, these day I just say "Yup. I don't like it." and move on, because I don't have to play these things any more.

I never really liked Blasters. It's a series of unfortunate events that made me invested in Blasters, which then made me fool myself into thinking I liked them and invest even more, all the while growing angrier at the game for it. It's best to let people who like Blasters as they are play them as they are and for me to move on and play something that doesn't piss me off every time I log in.

I mean, when's the last time I complained about Brutes or Scrappers? Sure, I occasionally complain about Stalkers, but even they don't piss me off in actual gameplay. Win-win, really.

The breakdown I posted was not truncated and not based on any parameter. This was simply a search of all people that were displayable to me, as a hero standing in Steel Canyon. I suspect I might see more people were I in a co-op zone, but I'm not sure.

Well, it's certainly better than becoming a joke like I have

Pretty much. Dual PISTOLS suffers a great deal as a supposed trdeoff for having Swap Ammo when Swap Ammo isn't really very good and doesn't add all that much to the set anyway. Yes, secondary effects to attack sets are useful, but having "situationally appropriate" secondary effects has very little actual value.

To be perfectly honest, if Dual Pistols were just physical bullets with Aim instead of Swap Ammo, I'd have been much happier with the set, because then I could argue that the stun in Suppressive Fire should be longer and the knockback effects in general should be stronger.

I'm an idiot. I'll go fix my post.

Which probably should have been something to think about before adding content that required such a sheer number of players to be within such close proximity of each other with so many NPCs and powers being used by both. And I'm not just talking about Incarnate Trials. This has been going on since the game's original Launch back in 2004, with the Hamidon. In fact, part of the player guide for defeating the thing included how to target the Hamidon nucleus when it disappeared due to sprite overload and how to use your powers under the effect of server lag.

When server hardware limitations are a large part of a widely-accepted strategy, your event design is faulty.

I'm not sure what server you play on that has more than 50 matches across all level ranges, much less across smaller sections I just know that the ones I play on - Victory and Pinnacle - never seem to muster as many. Usually, the total people online are fewer than 50 altogether. And that's hero-side. Praetoria usually displays around 20, if that, and I haven't checked villain-side recently.

Also, I realise that NOW is not prime time in the US, being somewhere between 1 AM and 4 AM on a work day, but it's mid-day my time. Running a search for other people right now on Victory hero-side reveals 23 people total. These have a more even split in levels, however with 9 50s, 11 40+, 3 20- and the rest in the 20-40 range. My character right now is level 27, and I see three other characters within three levels of me, one of whom is solo with a "pst; blind invites ignored" comment, which usually means he/she would join if I asked.

Not bad that bad, actually.

Specific portions of the theoretical design of that editor are decent, but the editor itself is some of the worst, least intuitive things I've seen in a while, and it's stocked with about 90% garbage. Also, because of how many of the things are rigged, it's next to impossible to make anything that isn't butt ugly unless you stick to a small selection of predefined body and face shapes anyway. As a thought experiment, that editor works. As an actual tool to use, it's horrible.

*edit*
Also: Neogumbercules, when you post a gigantic inline pic that stretches the horizontal, the rest of your post becomes incredible to read. Either crop/resize your pics down to no more than 800 points horizontal, put them in as links or post them in their own separate posts if you intend to make a long post thereafter.

I'm with Rian on this one. That's one of the central things I want to see out of I21, and indeed any Issue ever.

Oh, this reminds me of my own anecdote:

Recently, I've been playing a Mace/Inv Brute. She's pretty strong and I'm good enough to know when to leg it to avoid death, so I should have been almost unkillable. Except I haven't been. I've died. A lot. Most of the times, deaths come to a few factors:

1. I'm chatting with friends and die because I'm too lazy to back out of the chat half-finished.
2. Inattention to my health bar, getting low on health without realising it.
3. Posting on the forums while Alt-Tabbed out of the game, coming back to find myself killed by a patrol or a nearby spawn.
4. Getting blown up by Steel Canyon Fires because those have the dumbest possible penalty for failure to no reward for success.

In order, what have those taught me?

1. Don't chat with people while fighting. No, really?
2. Pay attention to your health bar. Obviously.
3. Don't Alt-Tab out of the game in the middle of a mission. Yeah, right.
4. Don't bother with Steel Canyon fires and lobby for a removal of the final explosion. Done and done.

Is that seriously the lessons players should be learning? Because if I'm any indication, players aren't learning a thing. All this means is I will, in order:

1. Still chat while fighting, but I'll be more careful when I do it.
2. Not pay attention to my health bar because it's fine most of the time.
3. Still Alt-Tab in missions because I like posting on the forums.
4. Still do Steel Canyon fires because I'm apparently not very bright.

I don't see that as a penalty at all. I see that as a requirement. You cannot enter Cimerora until you have finished the Midnight Club arc on the side you are on. This is irrespective of whether you feel you are capable of finishing this arc. Finishing this arc is a requirement, plain and simple. You cannot get Vanguard Merits until you've finished the first mission from Levantera. That's not negotiable, it is a requirement. I see this in the same way.

A penalty is something you are slapped with IN ADDITION to failure, and for the most part it is something that either makes it hard to try again, or otherwise slows you down. It is what keeps you from trying again, or makes the whole attempt that much less useful. Penalties are not designed to balance, they are designed to hurt and force players to avoid dying out of fear and discomfort.

A reset, by contrast, is a balancing mechanic. It simply ensures that a player is capable of tackling a specific bit of content as it is designed to be tackled before it hands out its reward. It's not a system that's intended to make a player fear death. Quite on the contrary, it's a system that's intended to make a player NOT CARE about death and instead focus on success. It's a system that's intended to provide as benign an environment as possible while forcing the player to take no shortcuts just the same.

In essence, a penalty is intended to make a player fear failure by making it suck more. A reset system is one which encourages the player to care about success by making defeat trivial. Obviously, such resets can't reset TOO much, or that WOULD suck, but the idea is sound nevertheless.

There's also the fact that resets are much more compatible with keeping a player's sense of flow, if a player is liable to reach that. A penalty makes you stop, it makes you slow down and it takes you out of the experience, because you need time and effort to recover. A reset system simply throws you back into the encounter IMMEDIATELY, allowing you to keep on retrying until you succeed. To my eyes, this is a far better way to make people better at the game. The more times you can retry the same action, the better you learn it. The harsher the penalty for an action is, the less likely you are to try and repeat it and the more rare the repetition, thus the harder it is to actually learn from your mistakes.

I'm not the only one in the game world, but I'm the only one paying my subscription fee, and I take slight with people who tell me I'm playing wrong and should either be playing differently, or that the game should force me to play differently without simultaneously offering to pay my subscription for me. I team with other people, despite what the forum drones may have you convinced, I just choose the people I play with such that I try to only play with people whose personalities and playstyle I like. This works fine for me, because I get to play how I like, they get to play how I like and we all get to have fun our own way.

You take slight with being called selfish, yet you don't fail to come off a supposed moral high ground just the same. You team and I don't (purportedly), therefore the game should ignore me and be designed after you. You put your own playstyle and preference as some kind of objective truth and then hold game design accountable for that, to the point where you advocate excluding playstyles because they aren't the kind of playstyles you personally want to play with.

Let's ignore the propaganda for a second and admit that I, too, team fairly frequently. In fact, I was in a mission with a friend of mine a couple of hours ago. Suppose for a moment that I prefer to play with people who aren't cautious, who are willing to take risks, fail spectacularly, laugh about it and try again anyway. Suppose for a moment that I'm bored to tears when I get on a team that insists on pulling every spawn one enemy at a time. Suppose I dislike being on a team where one person is convinced he knows how I should play my character better than I do and keeps informing me of this. Suppose I dislike being on a team with edgy people who explode in profanity the first time they fall in battle and then proceed to leave the team in a huff.

It's clear you and I will never see eye to eye and should never team, not out of any specific feeling of malice or discontent, but simply because out playstyles are simply too radically different. I have no problem with this, and applaud your willingness to excel even when the game doesn't punch you in the gut every time you fail. So why do you act as though one of us has to die before the other can have some fun. Why are spastic monkeys a problem for you, yet stuck-up jerks simultaneously not a problem for me? Why is your preferred playstyle of able and calculated team dynamics any "better" for the game than my preferred playstyle of "making it up on the spot?"

This isn't about teaming and not teaming. It's about letting people play as they will and then picking and choosing your team-mates. You don't get to dictate how people "should" play, only who you play with.

No.

When you fail to defeat an elite boss, that elite boss regenerates before you come back. You can try as many times as you want, but unless you defeat that elite boss, you are not making any headway. Any content which resets when you lose is content that must be beaten proper in one stretch. Flinging your own dead body at the enemy doesn't work, because progress only "counts" when you succeed. You lose nothing and you gain nothing for failure. You are free to choose a different task and return to your current task later, possibly stronger or better prepared, you are free to enlist help and you are free to simply pick another task to do. This is not a linear game.

I have an arcade system emulator at home, and it allows me to play arcade games with virtually unlimited credits. What this means is I can beat any and every game by simply hitting my enemies as much as I can before they kill me, dying, entering another virtual credit and continuing from where I left off. I don't condone this kind of gaming, because it requires nothing of the player but the knowledge that buttons exist. My solution to that has been to limit myself to one or two credits only. If I die, I start from the beginning of the game. I lose nothing for dying, because my ability to start from scratch exactly as strong as I was last time is not impeded, and my ability to progress through the game on my second, third, fiftieth try is not impeded in any way.

I personally have no problem at all with seeing content bits self-reset when a team-wipe occurs. That AV gets his spawn back and all his triggered ambushes recharge. That large spawn returns to its original number of fully-healed enemies. That ambush which killed you resets when it kills you, and keeps doing so until you defeat it or get past it. I'd take that over "punishment" every time.