Samuel_Tow

I have a few friends who sill play with an inverted mouse vertical, and I've seen a few games try to invert both the horizontal and the vertical to simulate you moving the camera around a character instead of looking around from the character's perspective. I get neither of those, but that's why the option to swap always exists.

An inverted mouse vertical is indeed normal for flight sims, because it controls pitch in the same way the stick does, but the stick also controls roll, not yaw as it does in your run-of-the-mill FPS. Yaw tends to be controlled via completely separate pedals. For flight sims, "stick-like mouse look" may be somewhat appropriate, but first-person and third-person games really don't qualify, since I've yet to see one that gives you the ability to roll which isn't some kind of flying craft equivalent.

Then again, the game defaults to giving you keyboard rotate buttons, so I'm probably barking up the wrong tree entirely.

Sadly, this seems to be the current situation.

Personally, I care about the story, and a great deal. I do a lot of writing in my spare time, and a large part of why I grow to like doing this is because of City of Heroes, and because it had such a great story way back when. Sure, it was never exactly told very well, I'll grant you, but the heart of the story was in the right place. It took itself seriously enough to be meaningful and it was full of good ideas, building an interconnected, persistent world of almost unlimited opportunity. This... Isn't the case these days, much to my disappointment.

I think it's pretty evident that a great many care nothing for a good story. What "we" used the Architect for when that came out should be proof enough. But I firmly believe that there are still a sufficient number of people who do care about the stories told here. As was said before, having a good story shouldn't be a detriment to those don't don't care about a good story. They can always skip past the text boxes and proceed to just kill stuff. However, having a crap story really does present a problem to those of us who care.

I, personally, care about the story of City of Heroes just because it was SO GOOD back in the day. The original design for the Nemesis was, and in fact still is amazing. The original design for the Freakshow was equal parts insane and threatening. The original design for the Rikti, back when they were silent aliens and "the greatest threat Earth has ever faced," something which is still in their descriptions, was great. Even the original 5th Column when they were being taken seriously. I fell in love with the City of Heroes lore, and over the past few years, I've had to sit and watch as much of it is bastardised, retconned or rendered pointless by new content and new developments, and what is being added to replace it is badly unimaginative.

I seek a good story, because it helps inspire my imagination, because it helps me come up with ever better, ever more impressive new ideas and new characters. And playing through a story that the creators just did not care about, with as little effort or planning put into it as possible, is simply disheartening.

Finally, I've heard the idea that because players clearly don't care about story, then the developers should stop trying to make good stories. This, to me, is would be the worst thing to do to a game - to attempt to develop it to the absolute worst quality that you can get away with while neglecting as many aspects as possible. This is not the making of a good game, let alone a great game.

I took you seriously, yes. Mostly because that's this is often said quite seriously.

This has been sort of a hot-button topic a few times, and I agree that Masterminds shouldn't play support first or exclusively. However, I firmly believe that if the Mastermind should be babying anyone, it should be his team-mates, not his henchmen. The Henchmen are mindless AI constructs which are expendable, to boot. The other players are far more important. If you can manage to buff both your players AND your pets, then kudos to you, but if you have to choose and pick pets over players, expect to see quite a few frowns on your team.

There has been a long-held belief that villain ATs don't team well because they're designed to solo and because they teach their players to solo first before they learn how to team with those ATs. Masterminds and Stalkers are usually brought up as examples whenever this is brought up. Stalkers notwithstanding, it's commonly seen as a problem when a Mastermind plays on a team as he would play when solo, buffing only his pets and ignoring his team in favour of acting like a Blaster or a Scrapper. But unlike a Blaster or a Scrapper whose powers only affect themselves, a Mastermind's powers can affect team-mates, as well, and that comes with a certain level of responsibility.

More pragmatically, each one of your team-mates is worth far more than each one of your henchmen. If you had to choose one or the other to lose, always choose the henchman. It's what they're made for, after all.

Vehicles have been suggested very often, but this always ignores some significant problems. First of all, this has to do with animations. All current travel powers allow you to fight as you travel. Especially with Flight, this is a big thing, as you can melee flying enemies or keep out of reach of melee enemies while you shoot them from the air. This requires specific animations for every attack designed to work with our generic hover pose. This cannot work with vehicles.

There's also the question of bounding boxes. A character of any size, from the smallest 4-foot midget to the biggest 9-foot fatass have the exact same bounding box, which is what they use to interact with terrain, collide with walls, fit through doors and so forth. What bounding box should a VAN have? Even if we assume that a van can turn in place, would be it be usable inside an office building or in a cave? Because it wouldn't fit. But if you don't allow said vehicles to be used indoors, then you penalise said vehicles greatly, because a character using Fly or Super Speed can still use those in an office, in a cave, on a boat or in a coat.

Finally, vehicles constitute a major workload project for something which will, at the end of the day, be a gimped version of existing travel powers. And before you quote your credentials, have a look at the Standard Code Rant chart below:



First and foremost, trying to argue that people shouldn't be able to have or do the things they already have and do is a grave mistake. You're highly unlikely to get any support for a suggestion that reads like "Doesn't anyone think we should take some people's cookies away?"

Secondly, "it's like this in comic books" has historically been a very poor argument which never really carried much weight. City of Heroes may be a comic book inspired game, but it's not a comic book simulator, and it is most certainly not a comic book. It is, first and foremost, a game, and as such, good gameplay always comes before genre identification.

Finally, not everyone wants to be in huge groups with 74 other people. I haven't had this many friends in my life, for instance, and I certainly don't want to be roomies with strangers. Small or even solo SGs allow for people to make their own personal bases, lairs, appartments, whatever works for them. This was originally unexpected, but with the revised base rent costs, it appears to be working as intended now. As well it should.

There are plenty of missions which take you across the divide, all taking place in instances of the other side's locations. Every villain Mayhem mission does just that, and there are are a pleathora of hero missions which take you to villainous locations. Off the top of my head, Levantera has one in Cap Au Diable's PTS exterior, Serpent Drummer has one in the PTS interior and the Dark Watcher has one at Cap Au Diable's WSPDR building. There's also a Morality Mission hero-side which takes you to the heart of Grandville to rescue a Bane Spider slated for execution.

We could theoretically ask for more of these, true, but we can't and shouldn't ask for open-world PvP, which has been a BAD idea every time it's been suggested. Heroes opposing villains does not need to constitute players opposing players.

Ignoring my profound disinterest in bringing life back into PvP, this comes with a host of problems that I'd rather not face. One of the reasons those of us classed as "carebears" had for wanting PvP segregated away from the PvE game was so that we could distance ourselves from the PvP mentality of constant competition and jerkassery. I know that not all PvP players are bad, and indeed most are perfectly cool folks, but just the mere presence of a convenient outlet for personal vendettas has the potential to carry the WORST parts of PvP right in my back yard.

A "duel" option has the potential to be used as a "Let's you and me go outside!" sort of thing, and while you always have the option to say no, or even block such pop-ups, you haven't the option to block the jerks who are prone to this from harassing you in other ways. This brings nothing to the game that's of any value while coming with a host of its own problems.

Finally, PvP has a rather different system of powers, where powers behave differently in PvP zones. The trick is that it's the zone that decides what your powers do. There's no way to enable a "PvP mode" in a PvE zone, because your powers will act in PvE mode when in a PvE zone. This alone makes duelling and open-world PvP technically impossible without major changed, and such major changes would be hard to justify.

You can use the /localtime slash command. This will print your local time in your System channel, and this local time is taken straight out of your system clock. Granted, you have to do this every time you need to check the time (though you can always make a bind or a macro for it), but it still exists if you don't want to or can't tab out to your Desktop to check out Windows time.

I will agree, however, that having a second-resolution clock in its own window, issuing the /localtime command to refresh itself should probably be doable and would be a nice addition for those who don't have physical clocks sitting on their desks, which was my solution to the problem.

Personally, I've grown to detest global events of any kind. They require too many people which usually aren't available when I stumble onto an event, and even with enough people, they just constitute a soup of effects taking place in a giant mosh pit of compete boredom, the equivalent of launching warm bodies out of a catapult aimed at a horde of enemies.

That said, I really can't argue AGAINST such a system - anything that makes events suck less is a good idea - but I honestly couldn't care less about the whole thing. My only concern is that events don't happen in zones I have hunt missions in. Beyond that, they can do whatever they want, since I won't be around to see it.

This is something I wanted to say originally. While a Mastermind's support set may "feel" like it's designed to help the Mastermind, himself, that's still a support set which should be used on team-mates first and foremost. A Mastermind's role on a team, as it were, is as much support for the team as pets. As such, if a Mastermind can't manage to buff both his pets and his team-mates, then his team-mates come first and they should be trusted to provide support for the pets by drawing aggro and killing things, at the very least.

On the larger question of returning Mastermind henchman upgrades to what they used to, there's more to this question than simple convenience. For one, upgrading now costs significantly less. You have two upgrades, each 45 points of endurance in cost, whereas before you used to have one upgrade which cost 10, I believe, and one which cost 20. On six henchmen, that's 180 points of endurance or thereabout.

Additionally, the AoE buffs did not just expedite buffing at the start of a mission, especially not now that henchmen will zone with you. It also expedited re-summoning in combat. When your henchmen fell in combat before, you could re-summon them quickly, but re-upgrading them took a LOT of time, which a battle bad enough to wipe them in the first place would rarely afford you. Now it's quick and easy, just cycle both upgrades and be done with it. Even the slowness of the second upgrade is no longer an issue, since only the henchman you target is slowed down, while the others are upgraded and free to act.

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More to point, almost all single-target buffs come in pairs and constitute a 2 second activation time. In general, buffing an entire team of 7 takes 7*2*2, or ~28 seconds. Call it 30 seconds, since I think they're slightly longer than 2s. That really is a lot of buffing, but on a five minute timer, that still constitutes only 10% of your time, and considering that a lot of those sets don't really have much else to do in an active fashion, that's a small price to pay. Hell, just Hurl Boulder by itself constitutes 23% of your time if you use it as soon as it recharges, and that's with no recharge bonuses.

On the flip side, buffing seven people twice with buffs that cost around 8 points of endurance is quite a significant investment, and one not really very balanceable via AoE, for the simple fact that 7*8*2 = 112 points of endurance. Making a buff power which consumes your entire endurance bar and gives you no option to be selective about it is not going to happen. Even Dark Regeneration doesn't cost this much. It used to cost 45 points of endurance, but now costs only around 30.

There's also a problem of making cost dependent on people affected. Even if the system could be made to distinguish between people buffed and people not, you still have to code the cost as a proc which taxes you for every person affected, similar to how Repulsion Field is coded. The problem with that is it is impossible to slot such a proc for endurance. Endurance enhancements only affect a power's factual cost. The procs themselves don't have a cost associated with them, they constitute endurance drain effects which are not affected by endurance reduction enhancements. The most they could be affected by is endurance modification enhancements, but those would actually increase the drain, not decrease it.

The only way single-target buffs can be transformed into AoE buffs is via a large-scale redesign, and I highly doubt this will come out very favourable to the power. Mastermind upgrades came out reasonably favourable when they were changed, as they became vastly superior powers, but I'd consider this an exception, not a precedent. Support sets simply don't require a buff as significant as what Masterminds got, so any change to a power that turns it from a single-target to an AoE will burn the power in some what somewhere.

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All of that said - yes, I very much do find buffing annoying.

*edit*
All of my numbers are drawn from memory. If any of them are wrong, it's probably because I remember them wrong.

Yes, and people have been "making excuses" like these since 2004. You know what they say - even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Unless you've turned it on and saved a default options file, then yes, Free Camera is turned off by default, just like your mouse look vertical is inverted by default (even if the game calls it "Normal" - it's not normal to move my mouse up and look down). I know this because I used to have to set all of my options manually for each character I made before they allowed me to save a default file.

This has always been my thought: Give a relatively easy access to the basic powers, but then gate their upgraded versions behind raid grind, as is the norm. This would follow existing loot rules, where Common inventions can be bought off the rack, uncommons and rares can only drop and very rares (Purples) are just that - very rare and very expensive to get from other players.

However, that would indeed require the introduction of these mythical Incarnate story arcs, and like the 5th Column return, I'll believe that when I see it. And like the 5th Column return, I'll eventually be proven wrong. I just hope it's not five years from now.

Surprisingly, by being near the ground. I've gotten knocked back while hovering near an Earthquake before, though in retrospect, that might have been a long time ago.

Technically, that's already true for Super Jump even now. Every time you land from a jump of any height, you play a little landing animation. It's very short and very low-key, but it's there. However, if you hold down your jump button (and haven't disabled jump repeat), then the landing animation will interrupt and you'll immediately switch to the jumping animation for the next jump. Similarly, if you land and keep pressing forward, your landing animation will interrupt and you will literally hit the ground running.

I assume that there is no technical reason why this couldn't work for a longer, more elaborate animation. The way it interrupts, you will only see that animation if you take your hands off the keyboard and let the character land unassisted, and even then you could lose the animation if you land on an edge or on a slope.

That said, the reason we have just that one low-key landing animation is because the game has no way of varying your movement animations based on the distance you dropped from, or at the very least we have no precedent for it or anything like that. So, we need a landing animation which works for small hops, since that's something EVERYONE will be doing. That this makes little sense when dropping from a large jump of falling from a great height is a necessary evil. At least at this point.

Or while eight years old. I've had that happen on one occasion. The character had "I'm 8 years old!" in his bio, though he was reasonably competent at killing stuff. However, like a faulty AI, once something more complex than targeting enemies and pushing buttons came up (he got stuck in a wall), that player completely failed at the simple task of typing /stuck and continually requested that he be teleported out, heedless of my lack of such a power.

So, yes, it's not hard for me to imagine that some players are, for whatever reason, outright incapable of following instructions.

And they call me anti-social for not clinging to every stranger I meet on a TF? Such a strange world we live in.

Along that line of reasoning, I strongly advise against counting how many Merit Vendors we have in the game.

I don't mean a teleport to the tailor, as that would have the benefits of transportation as well as costume changing. I mean the ability to edit your costume, including height, at any place and at any time you so desire, just from the Costume window, for the same fee, of course. This, then, wouldn't need to be limited.

In fact, I wouldn't be opposed for this convenience costing double or triple fee just to give people a reason to visit the tailors anyway.

Congratulating yourself seems like an odd choice to me.

Multi-team content. And while I'm aware one of them can be run with as few as 8 people, it has room for multiple teams, which makes it qualify.

There is no functional distinction between Trials and TFs, and there hasn't been one for quite some time, unless you want specify failable missions.

Once upon a time, a "Trial" was just a mission that could be taken by a single player, but which was so hard that it took many people to complete. That's when the Hydra Trial was in its heyday. This changed with the introduction of the hero Respec Trial as someone on the development team woke up and realised that "just a mission" is a terrible way to set up a team for a failable objective. Henceforth, all "Trials" were nothing more than TFs, as evidenced by the fact that they put you in Task Force mode.

You can try and draw distinctions based on content design within the TF system, but that's like trying to draw distinctions based on content in regular missions. They could be defeat-all, timed, part of an arc and so forth, but they are still missions. A TF is a TF is a TF. Unless you break the TF mould and involve more teams, there's no reason to call it anything else.

What you call the Incarnate raids is irrelevant. Raids, Trials, Friends With Benefits, it doesn't change what they are. A rose by any other name, as it were.