Samuel_Tow

Why does my browser keep giving me "Server not found" errors until I force it to try again?

Anyway, I feel the key mistake here was in trying to make the well sentient, which I really don't think was necessary. I DO know why it was done, however: the same reason all of Going Rogue's missions were written as they are - to be intentionally morally ambiguous. We spent years asking for choice, which the developers appear to have interpreted as asking for a morally ambiguous environment, which I'm not sure is the correct reading of that request.

Either way, my interpretation of the Well is that it responds to power and will alone is because it has neither of its own, or rather has no ability to exhibit either without physical agents. I interpret the Well as the power socket on your wall - yes, it holds great power, but it can't actually DO anything until you plug something in. The Well, if left alone, would be completely harmless and completely impotent. It can only act through other people, it can only exert power through other people, it can only speak through other people.

I'm not even sure how much sentience the thing has. It doesn't appear to have a very complex, nuanced character shaped by experience, belief and emotion, so much as it appears to be a broken record going on about power and will and power and will and power. I see the Well less like a character and more like a mcguffin, just one capable of vocalising its actions. It can't actually control you or hurt you unless you let it, and the only way you can let it is if you're irresponsible, or otherwise desperate. But it's no more "dangerous" to a person than your standard issue space ship power core. Sure, it powers your ship, but if you overload it, it blows up, kills you and your entire crew and probably mutates the dwellers of a nearby planet.

The Well's "morality" or lack thereof only matters to the extent that we allow ourselves to be under its influence. Because if the Well can't influence us, then who cares what it thinks or how it feels?

I don't believe Gauntlet could be doing this, because Gauntlet is an effect of all Tanker powers, and power effects aren't even considered if the power's general to-hit roll fails. Gauntlet only ever "rolls" (even if it's autohit) if the power actually hits, at which point the streakbreaker is reset anyway.

Whatever is causing this doesn't necessarily have to be a lot-accuracy power doing rolls. It could be a high-accuracy or even auto-hit power doing to-hit rolls, because an autohit hit would still reset the streakbreaker. If such an undocumented auto-hit occurs between two misses, it would reset the stkreakbreaker and it wouldn't fire on the next attack like it should.

Given that you're able to reproduce this so easily, apparently, I'd blame a toggle of some kind. I do know that damage auras force streakbreaker hits (which is really annoying, by the way) on their own damage and will thus usually deprive your powerset powers of streakbreaker assistance almost every time.

Personally, I don't feel that companion pets should ever be able to get lost. If they never shut down and go "You must come back to me before I will move," then it doesn't matter how far behind they fall, they'll always catch up.

As I've said in the other few instances where I saw this news, this is very nice of them, and I am impressed with NCsoft over this decision. I wouldn't want to measure amount of money contributed with other companies, as competing who would help the most is really missing the point of pitching in to help to begin with, but suffice it to say that I am very impressed, and this earns a lot of respect for them in my eyes.

Ignoring the fact that basic power customization is not yet done, this is really the last technical hurdle we have to cover before this game runs out of things that can be innovated or invented. Let me explain.

Right now, power customization can customize powers, but it can only do so within their own activation sequences. Activation sequence, as defined by BABs, includes many things, but one of them is a call to drawing a weapon. He did alter that call to summon up a specific costume piece, instead of a written-in-stone effect like it is for Fire Swords, thus giving us weapon customization, but we still have no control over the SET of weapons that activation sequence recognises. This can be changed by developers via a patch, but there is no precedent to suggest that the powers system can handle this in real time from user input.

What I'm saying is that while you can pick your rifle and colour it, as well as potentially pick the gestures with which you shoot it and what comes out the barrel, you cannot pick whether you want to use one rifle, two pistols or the bridge of your nose. This is no longer within the realm of power customization, because it concerns a system which is purely in the realm of the powers numbers system.

The way power customization works now - and you can see this if you look at a Powers file, is that Powers call a visual FX script, just as they always have, only you can customize what that script does. This script includes animation, power effects and power colour, but DOES NOT include root duration, power stats or, most notably, activation sequence, which is written into the power.

On a more positive note, IF we eventually do get the ability to switch between different sets of weapons, including a "no weapon" option, then the sky is the limit from then on. Ice Blasts from a bot, Fire Blasts from a pair of pistols, Assault Rifle ammunition from arm cannons, Pulse Rifle blasts from your eyes. Literally the sky is the limit. The sky or art team time and resources, but at least the potential will be there. As of right now, we have no precedent to suggest that such potential exists without further tech being developed, and I'm pretty sure that it would be AT LEAST as big a venture as the original power customization. I'm not sure the team would commit to such large-scale cosmetic additions ever again now that BABs isn't here to push for it.

David has already commented on this topic several times, in regards to a more muscular female texture. Apparently, they have met with as-of-yet undefined technical difficulties in implementing that, from which I asserted that they're looking into tech for blending or overlaying textures. That alone - that is to say, the ability to apply a pattern past with one texture (not single-colour tint patter, an actual texture) over another complete texture - should allow us to have non-human skins with human clothes.

One should note that the reason we only have human skins with tights and such isn't so much that it's HUMAN skin so much so as that it's SMOOTH skin. Most Tights with Skin pieces are nothing more than colour mask patterns not in the slightest different from, say, Isles or Flames or Fat Stripe, which are overlaid over a smooth, nippleless, genitalless model of a human body. What you are seeing is not tights over skin, it is literally colour tint over skin. This is only ever usable with human skin, because human skin is smooth and putting patterns over it makes us think we're seeing fabric, instead of what we're actually seeing. Putting such patterns over, say, reptile scales or rock skin, would be far too obvious that it's paint and not fabric, as the texture's details would be visible through said "fabric." The only reason human skin works is that it doesn't HAVE detail of any kind. Not even a navel, if you look closely, as that would otherwise show through Tights with Skin.

I should note an apparent problem - the developers have almost never used texture overlays for anything in the costume editor, despite the fact that a great many things would benefit from that. The easiest example is pictorial chest details like the Heart or the Fist or the Greek letters. You may or may not notice it, but those are not actually painted on your chest. They hover a slight distance above your chest, painted onto completely separate geometry, an invisible double of your chest offset by a bit. This, I believe, is what's known as a decal in 3D graphics, and it represents a completely separate surface drawn with a pattern mask over another surface. It's what makes bomb charring in a lot of earlier FPS games.

The apparent solution to this is texture blending. While we have almost no precedent for this, that's still ALMOST no precedent. A small handful of pieces exist that I'm pretty sure use texture blending already, and those are the Science Pack goggles. Have you noticed how most of those have canvas straps that clip at the back of the head? Well, I've looked as close as I could, and those don't appear to be decals. In fact, they fit so tightly under even short hair that I'm pretty sure they're not. I am, instead, almost positive those are texture overlays drawn on the head's 3D model OVER the head's own texture, something which the game "shouldn't" be able to do, because if it were able to do so, we should have seen it used a LOT more.

I'm not sure whether this has anything to do with the tech for "splats" or not, but it might. "Splats," as defined by BABs back in the day, are those power effects that paint themselves on the ground and appear to follow the contour of terrain, snaking over street curbs, parked cars, tables ladders and chairs and so on. Originally, these didn't exist in the game, and powers with such ground effects like Quicksand or Tar Patch instead played a horizontal animated decal, which would oftentimes sink half-way into the ground when placed over a slanted surface or into a recess on the ground. Now they seem to instead be animated textures mapped over the existing ground texture straight top-down, to some... Amusing effects from time to time, but to very pretty effects for the most part.

It is for these reasons, and more, that I feel the game is capable of this, and why I take David's promises that they're working on this seriously.

"It's the journey, not the destination" is a very old concept in City of Heroes, one that hasn't shown up much lately (really, not much since I9) and one which I'm not sure newer players can fully appreciate. It originates from a justification we used to give both to explain the lack of any "end game" to speak of and as an argument against power-levelling back in the days of Wolf Farms and Dreck Farms and Dumpster Diving and the like. In simple terms, it represents the belief that the game is, or at the very least it is asserted that it should be, fun the entire way through, and that players will play the game mostly because they like playing it. Note that at no point is it suggested that a player should never care for levelling up or progress, but merely that said player will never be in a position where the game sucks NOW, but will unsuck 10, 20, 50 levels from now.

This used to be the case, way back when, if for no reason other than because people who mostly or only cared about the destination tended to leave the game after about a month, when they realised they'd wasted their time powerlevelling to 50. In fact, we used to discuss about how those people were wasting their subscriptions and missing the point, as they'd ignored so much content on the way up for the sole purpose of complaining that there was no content at level 50. Considering that there is still practicall no CONTENT at level 50 yet people appear to be content, we may have been missing the point.

To me, a game is, and always will be, about the journey. I enjoyed the fact that City of Heroes could be "completed," because it gave me a certain sense of closure. It told me "Your journey has been completed. A winnar is you. Would you like to do it again?" To me, this has always been the hallmark of a great game - do I want to play it all over again as soon as I'm done? Maybe that's an acquired taste, born of my childhood playing Arcade games which were all fairly short and we played them over and over again a lot, but this is just what I want. I don't really care about the destination, personally, as I have nothing to prove to anyone. Instead, I want a fun experience that doesn't have too many aspects which suck, as I'm going to want to experience it again and again and again.

I'm not a fan of end game in general, for the simple fact that it's purpose-designed to practically never end, and this comes with one (or a combination) of three particular drawbacks. End game content must either be so prohibitively hard that even the best players will take a long time to figure it out and beat it, while the not-so-good players can snack on tough cookies, or it must be so crushingly slow that it takes even the fastest players years to make any headway, leaving the slower players with more work than they have life span left short of the invention of an elixir of youth, or otherwise be so soul-grindingly repetitive as to make a small body of fairly interesting, fairly accessible content last a long time as you do it over and over and over again for years to come. City of Heroes' current end game manages to combine all three to various degrees.

But my problem with end game doesn't come down so much to actual implementation as it does to basic game design philosophy disagreement. End game as a concept is intrinsically about the destination. The end game is often considered to be where the real game starts, as that's where the strongest enemies and the best items are. Naturally, everything before that starts being considered filler, the unwanted obstacle keeping you away from the end game where the real game is. This causes "the game" to become a nuisance, rather than what we all came here to do. And this just isn't fun for me.

On a much smaller scale, I've always favoured the journey over the destination even when doing basic missions. When I run TFs, by far the WORST, most unpleasant thing I can hear a team-mate say is "We can stealth this mission." It could be the worst, dumbest, longest mission in the game, it doesn't matter. Whenever I hear those words, all enthusiasm I might have had for the game evaporates like a snowball in hell. It's just gone. I've been known to say things like "I'd rather add an hour to a TF than stealth even a single mission," and I meant that.

Games produce no real or virtual goods. At the end of the day, we play games because we want to do so, and we play games with no real reward at the end. We play them for fun. As such, we have to enjoy what we are doing while we play them, lest we miss the point. As such, I never really care that I'm going to be "paid" in Oranbegan gold, I don't care that I'll be given the unexpectedly enchanted family heirloom, I don't care that I'll be given the Statesman's ridiculous mask. Because none of that really matters. What I care about is taking on a task that's fun to do. What I care about, personally, is finding more guys to beat up in ever cooler ways.

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Slightly off-topic: Whenever I used to play D&D style computer RPGs, especially things like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale, or even more futuristc RPGs like Fallout and Fallout 2, and even in-betweens like Arcanum, I very rarely cared about what the quest-giver NPCs were offering, and for a simple reason. I knew that the treasures I would find in that dungeon I was being sent to clear out, and the loot I would get off the monsters, to say nothing of the experience, would far outweigh any reward the NPC was offering, when they weren't offering plot coupons. It made it very easy, if a bit hypocritical, to refuse rewards out of the goodness of my heart. "No, thank you, old woman. I cannot take your last 100 gold pieces with which you would have bought food for your family. I'm a good person. ... And I also snagged 1000 gold pieces from a chest and this Infinity +1 sword which will sell for 10 000. Which I will most certainly not share with you. Be well!"

In essence, I rarely need the game to pretend to reward me for my adventures, when it is said adventures that I came for in the first place. ESPECIALLY when said adventures are badly designed because it's easier and cheaper to develop rewards than it is to develop content.

Now I need to figure out what to do with it

I was positive that this wouldn't work, but it did. Here's the scenario:

At the release of Demon Summoning some time before I18, I created a Demons/Thermal Mastermind with the intention of making him a hero. I got said Mastermind to level 32 and put him on hold before I18 rolled out. He's been on hold until earlier this week.

I spent the last few days getting this guy to Paragon City, doing Rouge and then Hero Tips, and when I finally hit Paragon City, I realised I could take missions from Serge and Lauren - the costume slot missions.

My Mastermind had four costume slots unlocked before he left the Rogue Isles. He had his default one, he had his Halloween costume slot, he had the costume slot from the Facemaker and he had the one from Gorgeous Glenda (was it? The one in the Cap Facemaker). That's four slots. So I come into Paragon City and immediately snag a mission for Serge, thinking that I'll just do the mission and not unlock anything new, like what happened with the Cape arc I did beforehand.

To my surprise, I just walked into the Steel Canyon Icon and was given the choice to edit my fifth costume slot. And my question is: Why? Actually, I suspect I know why - I'm somehow not tagged to have taken this slot, as I didn't take it from Serge, so I got the same slot twice, but... Isn't this unintentional? Wouldn't this have been one of the first things to make sure wouldn't cause a conflict when Side Switching was being planned for? Did I meet some kind of odd bug? Is my character just too old? What gives here?

So what do I do about this? Report it? Not us the slot? Should I do Lauren's costume mission that I have already started? Should I do Carson's mission coming up soon? Should I try to cash in another set of Halloween salvage at Annah instead of Granny Old Woman? What?

I still don't see a point to making origins matter more without enforcing MUCH stricter definitions as to WHAT they actually matter. There's no point in attaching a pointless minigame to making origins matter more unless you expand on the conceptual idea behind origins, and you can't do that without assuming too much about a character.

So far, I have a natural demon, a technological magician, a mutation alien, a scientific construct which was not created by sentient minds and so on and so forth. Trying to impose any meaning to origins would render those errant, which I would not appreciate. Trying to impose meaning to origins which would include those would render a great many other concepts errant. Trying to impose meaning to origins which is inclusive of all possibilities is so broad as to be meaningless, itself.

This is like trying to make hair colour more meaningful by giving gingers more damage, brunettes more intelligence and blonds more luck. It's needlessly arbitrary, needlessly exclusive and needlessly needless.

I'm not going to bother fixing the OP's mess, but I will say this:

People who have any sort of illusions that this game will get a "new engine" need to wake up. You can't take City of Heroes and stuff it into the Unreal 3 engine. You'd need to make the entirety of City of Heroes from scratch in the Unreal 3 engine. You'd need to make a brand new game. And for a game that's taken seven years to get where it is, the prospects of doing so are more than daunting.

I'd like to see better graphics in the game. I'd like to see "a new engine." And while we're on the subject, I'd like a flying cat which dispenses harps.

Speaking of chain attacks, there appears to be some kind of problem with passing on an effect off a dead target, which affects more than just Chain Induction, and indeed affects Assassin's Strike, as well. Personally, I'd push for a solution to that problem (why not through a pseudo-pet, instead of an enemy-granted power?) first before abandoning the concept of a T9 chain power.

More interestingly, though, I've always entertained the notion of a sort of "spreading disease" power, which goes as far back as Star Craft's Terran Science Vessel, which had a radiation infection power which hopped from unit to unit.

I'm not sure such a power would be appropriate for a melee set (unless its effect allowed the character to score criticals or some such), but a power put on an enemy which deals no damage, but has some other negative effect and is able to summon clones of itself to any enemy in AoE range, thereby spreading through a large mass of enemies of potentially unlimited number over potentially unlimited distance, seems like a cool thing to have, at least if said spread weren't too fast.

Just something I thought was interesting to bring up.