Samuel_Tow

I don't specifically "hoard" them, as such, as electronic mail takes up no physical space, and removing it takes time and effort that produce no meaningful benefit. As such, I just rear my PMs and leave them alone.

I did once have to clean up my PM box when we had to migrate from the old forums to the new and I had to drop them below 500 PMs, out of around 800, I think, and most of what I deleted was at the time five-year-old conversations with people who had long since left the game, like Anti-Catwhroog. My only criteria was to delete enough PMs, starting from oldest to newest, to get my PMs below 500. I probably have a lot more left that aren't at all relevant, but I haven't gotten around to cleaning them out.

I want to cut out this small part of Arcana's post and present it by itself, because this is almost the entirety of the spirit of what I wanted to bring up originally. How uncomfortable are people willing to be when playing games, and how uncomfortable should developers of games allow their games to be INTENTIONALLY?

To add a slight appendix, it's not just a question of whether developers should care about comfort zones or not - in my opinion it's just good sense to at least be aware - but rather a question if developers should DELIBERATELY design games that push us out of our comfort zone. Which, by the way, I'm not claiming is a wrong and evil tactic. It's been made pretty clear to me that some people simply like to be pushed, as well as to push themselves, and face things that could be defined as "unpleasant." Their reasons for this seem to vary, but their reasons for this are irrelevant to the fact that some people simply choose allow themselves to be taken out of their comfort zone.

Should developers be aware that people have comfort zones? Yes, they very much should be. It's only good sense. Should they choose to avoid pushing those, or should they choose to push them intentionally? I don't know. THAT is the heart of the question, and it is a question that has no one right answer, and not even a clearly separable set of stances on it. As Arcana points out, it's a matter of degrees of tolerance and preference, which is why I find the answers given so far to be fascinating and enlightening at the same time.

My position on the matter is pretty much public knowledge at this point, which makes it, and deconstructions thereof, largely uninteresting to practically anyone, myself included. I'm more interested to hear other people's positions on the matter.

The gloves there are Enforcer. You can tell by the oversized screw looking circle right above the wrist. The boots look more like the larger PPD boots we have right now than those in the IDF pic.

Well, that's PMs which have accumulated over the past seven years. I even have a PM from CuppaJo in there somewhere

*edit*
New unread PM is still being listed there, and I can't find one even with people taken off the ignore list. Huh.

Yeah, I checked, I have no bold PMs from the last month. I've been following my PM box pretty closely the last few days, so I'd have spotted a new one if it popped up.

I have, but PMs from ignored people still show up in my PM box, they're just listed as "You are ignoring this poster." Or at least that's how older PMs are shown. Are you saying new ones won't show up at all?

This is a point where a lot of the disconnect regarding "competition" occurs. I once said that a lot of viewpoints can be divided into two categories - those who treat games like a sport, seeing them as something to excel at and compete over, and those that treat them as a toy, seeing them as something to be used to make themselves feel better even if they don't strictly deserve it. Now, I'm not saying that all of humanity is neatly divisible in two easily-definable groups, but if you examine PvP-centric arguments, you'll notice many of the people fall in one category much more than in the other.

As for striving to never be better than anyone else, I feel that's a misnomer, in the sense that I, personally, don't do so. At the same time, I don't specifically TRY to be better than other people. Competition has the tendency to make people not just want to be good, but to be BETTER than other people causing both resentment and stress. I, personally, prefer to play games where I can be happy for other people when they're much better than me, not feel bad about it. When I play, say, L4D2 co-op, I welcome good players and enjoy their company. When I play L4D2 versus, good players on the opposing team just make the game horribly punishing. Especially when I'm just trying to have fun shooting zombies, NOT proving I'm better than actual players.

I generally prefer to play WITH other people, not AGAINST them. Preferably with other people against the computer. There's an easy target for you. The computer is always the enemy, always easy to hate and always a convenient antagonist, because no-one can really feel sorry for machine code. When playing co-op in anything, I get to help other people, and I get to fight an enemy that has no feelings and can never feel bad about losing.

An additional factor is that the computer is almost always gimped. Computer-controlled enemies are stupid, they fall into obvious traps, they obey the spirit of the law even against good sense and good judgement, and are generally intended for me to best, thereby making myself feel better. I can keep on playing, knowing that I'm better than the computer by right of birth, pretty much. When I play against other people, that isn't so much the case. Other people are cheap, because other people are smart enough to use the rules and exceptions of any system to their benefit. When I turn on my Unstoppable, the computer will swarm me with enemies that I can take out before it expires. When I turn on my Unstoppable, a smart player will run away and wait for that to expire, then attack me while I'm drained. Other players are regarded as my equals, and they are not dumb enough to respect the system's rules when they're designed to screw them over like the computer will.

Some people are just not competitive, and will simply walk away from activities that boil down to direct competition as the primary motivating factor or primary operational mechanic. I, personally, was never good at sports as a kid, and I never cared to be. I used to be good at Deathmatch FPS games, but mostly because I played with a solid group of friends, and we essentially cooperated to make for a memorable experience much more so than we competed for points. In fact, we valued getting killed in a particularly spectacular manner even more highly than getting a highly-skillful kill. I lost interest in FPS competition when Counter-Strike made it "serious business."

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To go back to topic, "competition vs. cooperation" is a very important aspect of quite a few people's comfort zones, both pro and against. I've gone on about what mine is, but it's been made clear to me by other people that, to them, competing with an actual human being is what they enjoy the most, precisely because real people are smarter, better and more meaningful as enemies than computer-controlled cannon fodder. In fact, catch almost any unofficial chatter about Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and you'll see people talking about how that game is about the "challenge" and the "competition" and the "tournaments" and suchforth. While I don't agree, there is no denying that this is what a lot of people see as that game's greatest selling point.

To be honest, I feel lucky to be in an MMO where PvP is so isolated. Nothing infuriates me more than having to worry about being attacked by other people just going about my business. This isn't the sort of attitude I come to the game for. Survival of the fittest is FAR out of my comfort zone, for the simple reason that I am - to be blunt - not fit. That's precisely why I play games: To get what I can't have in real life. What takes me out of said comfort zone is being told I can't have that because I'm not fit enough. Yeah, I know, but isn't that missing the point? Well, I don't really get much of a say when I get gangbanged just hunting kobolds for livers that most of them apparently don't have, causing my hard-earned items to drop and be stolen by my killers. I've blacklisted games for less.

Which is why I say that City of Heroes is pretty good in this regard. The worst another player can do to me is be a dick over text, which /ignore solves post haste. But I don't have to worry about fighting for my survival in a lawless world. I don't have to worry about my equals stepping up to take my stuff. The only thing I have to worry about is the computer, but the computer will always be a second-class citizen. I will always be better than the computer, even when it cheats. Sure, it won't always be easy, and it won't always be a sure deal, but at least I'll know I'm intended to be able to win. Which is more than I can say for fighting other people.

In City of Heroes, we have a much higher percentage of nice people, I've noticed, and in my eyes that's largely because the game encourages us to cooperate, and it encourages us to want to help others. The more good players there are, the more success everyone has, because every good player can only represent help and can never represent harm.

Jim Temblor WILL NOT talk to level 20 characters, but he WILL talk to level 21 characters. I have no idea why, but that's how he works.

And I wouldn't know.

Again, though, I apologise for mixing the terms up. My preferences are not very important to the meat of the topic, and I should not have brought them up as prominently as I did.

*fixed for style, spelling, punctuation and presentation.

I really don't have too much to say to this eloquently presented, aesthetically pleasing suggestion, as it contains quite a few things I disagree with and a few more that are far too vague to be relevant.

I do want to comment on the drive to increase the game's monthly fee, however, as I feel this would be a complete disaster. One of the central goals for each and every change to the game should, ideally, be to not alienate virtually your entire playerbase, and charging close to twice the current subscription fee - especially of people with multiple accounts - is as close to a commercial suicide as I can imagine. There are a lot of things people threaten to quit over, and a lot of those are empty threats, but reaching into their coffers is the one sure way to burn practically EVERY player currently subscribed.

As for the suggested changes, some of them aren't bad. Grappling has been discussed enough, to the point that I'll only say it's not going to happen due to technical limitations. Nothing else is necessary. However, at the same time, I have to say that destructible walls are something I've wanted to see for years now. The tech to put it in the game already exists, in the form of jail doors. The easy solution is to add destructible doors in places of the current openable ones. The cool solution, however, would be to model walls with holes in them, then fill those holes with seamlessly-blended destructible "doors" that just happen to look like pieces of the wall. That way, we break the breakable part, and it looks like we broke the wall. Everybody wins. Well, except the masonry.

On the flip side, tying power stats to costume pieces is an incredibly bad idea. One of City of Heroes' greatest aspects - and greatest by FAR - is our ability to create not just cool costumes, but cool costumes that match our vision as close as mechanically possible. This gives players a sense of ownership of their characters that using developer pre-designed characters just doesn't hold. Tying costumes to powers, therefore, is not a good idea, as it both infringes on costume design AND eliminates a whole slew of legitimate costume designs that deliberately do not match a character's powers. That girl in shorts and a tank top taking grenades to the face without flinching and tearing chunks out of the ground is that much cooler for not having to be heavily armoured or wearing power gauntlets.

As for the concept of additional environments, I'm more or less for the idea. While, yes, we should make use of the ghost towns we already have, such as Boomtown, Terra Volta, Dark Astoria and so forth, eventually we'll have to expand and add more interesting environments just the same. The Shadow Shard is a good example for an otherworldly environment, and a pretty dang good one, save for legacy such having left it with no content to speak of. The much-discussed Moon zone is another good example, and there are others. An underwater bubble city would be cool, off the top of my head, as would a high-altitude mountain environment, or even an open overworld floating fortress map like what you'd see in Water World, or even Sky Captain's flying aircraft carrier. Or, hell, why not a UT2004 as_convoy style constantly moving ground convoy location? The opportunities are there, but they all require new art assets.

Generally, though, this is fairly typical of brand new posters. It's a mish-mash of laconically-presented ideas, and a mix of good ones, bad ones and ZOMG KILL!!! ones.

I apologise for the mixup of terms. I have no good structure for clearly denoting what's pure personal opinion on my part and what's more general uncharged contemplation. In my case, as Ironic points out, "challenge" is indeed a source of discomfort. Or more specifically, challenge over a long period of time such that a single-time action of adaptation does not solve it.

To bring this back to City of Heroes, the game is by far and away not easy (despite what people may claim), but a lot of its difficulty can be overcome once you know how to do so. I have no problem with this kind of challenge, as it's a solvable problem. This is as opposed to something like Quake 3 Arena, where the "challenge" is the skill level of other people which will ALWAYS be a challenge no matter how long you play, especially if you suck - and I do.

In general, when it comes to challenge, I prefer the kind that's "solvable" or "fixable," as it were. By contrast, I had a friend who wanted - in his own words - for every battle to be a boss battle. He wanted to be challenged all the time. It made the times when I teamed with him kind of... Awkward.

The way you phrased it reminds me of what may well be the best example of a game which is deliberately designed to push people past their comfort zones: Eve Online. In the pase, Eve has been described as "legitimised griefing," and the few stories about it that made headlines (Internet headlines, that is) had to do with grudges, griefing and outright dickishness between its players, and sometimes even between players and developers.

This is the kind of game that haunts me in my nightmares, and when I see elements that remind me of it, it sends chills down my spine. It's a game that's designed to be uncomfortable, from what I can tell, and this is pretty much the polar opposite of what I want to play.

And yet, Eve Online remains one of the more successful MMOs out there even today, with still a solid player base last I checked, and represents a concept that draws quite a few people to it. Clearly, the prospect of creating an inherently unpleasant, uncomfortable world is still to some people's tastes, hence why I wanted to hear from others about it.

I agree with you there. City of Heroes has been both blessed and cursed with a very communicative development team, which has historically entered into dialogue with the players far more often than any other I'm aware of. This means, on the one hand, that people more often feel their voices are being heard, and so are generally happier even with aspects of the game they may dislike. The flipside of that coin, however, is that people also feel that they HAVE to be heard, and as such will be much more persistent in voicing their complaints, and at times even praises. Like so many things, it's a double-edged sword.

To the development team's credit, though, they have historically done well enough to incorporate user feedback into their development cycle, even if it usually takes them a few years to do so. The pot of gold is there at the end of the rainbow for the exceptionally patient.

Though, to be on-topic: I agree with you. A game does indeed need to follow its own design goals, and not constantly waver back and forth trying to guess what its players want, and I'm obligated to say that City of Heroes has occasionally been guilty of that, as evidenced by the list of abandoned features. So, yes, I agree with your assessment.

Completely off-topic, but: This is why banning spammers by IP is a bad idea.

Personally, I feel the NCsoft Launcher installer needs to be hosted on the City of Heroes FTP. If we'll be using the Launcher, it makes sense for it to be there, instead of those ancient direct game installers and the soon-to-be-deprecated updater, doesn't it?

Ah, I see what the problem might have been. When given bright colours, the adorably crude ice effects start looking like the Holtzman effect from dune, which is to say they look like energy fields... Very blocky, ill-shapen energy fields.

Then again, does Dark Blue fire really look like fire? Because on my screen it looks like ink. And Stone Armour was even given the ability to not actually consist of "stone," but instead of pure crustal.

I keep thinking that ice effects ought to stop looking like glass and be made a lot less transparent, like glacial ice, instead, which is opaque. That way, we may be able to recolour the things without making them look like something TOO far removed from ice.

I honestly don't remember, but I probably did. Here's my line of thinking: Once upon a time, I made a suggestion for a halberd powerset which had an "intermediate" animation consisting of spinning your weapon really fast. If you queued up attacks one after the other, they would come out faster from this intermediary animation. If you took your time, your character would go through a "wind-down" animation to go back to combat stance, and then have to go through a "wind-up" animation before he could attack, this making the set faster if you attack non-stop than if you start and stop.

I did also suggest a very basic, no-frills hammer set in the past. In my head, I kind of combined the two concepts and came up with what I thought was a completely fictional concept. I apologise if it sounded like I was mocking you. I really wasn't.

Personally, I've never been a fan of "self debuff" powers, and this goes all the way back to Unyielding Stance and Rooted. It just seems like an annoying way to balance powers. I can kind of see crashes on certain very potent powers (like Rage), but on a short-duration buff, it just seems needlessly punishing.

That is, unless we're talking about a very long-duration buff, but at that point we're running into the problem of emulating Rage, itself.

I can say this, though - large but diminishing buff does not sound like a bad idea.

I really miss the time when you were a nice guy and didn't resort to sarcasm and prods so much. I mean that.

True, true, no game can match all of its players' expectations perfectly, that much is a given. But that's not really what I meant in this case. It's more a general attitude towards... Let's say "getting" its players to expand their playstyles and try out new things.

Again I keep coming back to Bulletstorm, because it's a perfect example of this. The game is a very decent shooter, but it comes appended with that irritating "skillshot" system and the tagline "kill with skill," which serves to do little more than make the basic act of killing something far more complex and more involving than it needs to be. Is that a good thing? I don't know. What do you want out of a shooter? Do you want to just shoot things dead and not get killed? If so, Bulletstorm is out of your comfort zone. Are you tired of just straight-up semi-cover-based shooters and want a game which challenges you to play in a new and unique way? Then you'll feel differently.

Specifically on the topic of the Market and Inventions, as that keeps getting brought up, it's a bit of a special case. The running mentality is (or at least was) that if you don't like the system and don't feel like going out of your comfort zone to engage in a system you don't like, you don't have to. The problem is that it has become impossible to ask for build advise without writing an essay about why you're not going to use Performance Shifter or Numia's Paizuri or whatever else may be expected of you, and why you don't have multiple hundreds of millions banked on your character. Because this has become expected of people.

As well, as new content is created and people clamour for it to be more difficult, the argument for that is that we're so much stronger now that we have inventions, neglecting the fact that "we" not always are. I'll grant you that to a large extent where the "pressure" to step out of my comfort zone on the subject comes from the players, themselves, rather than from the game's specific direct design, but it's there nonetheless.

To be fair, that's not to say I'm being forced to do something I don't like - I'm not. Far from it. I still play the game as I did before this whole thing, or at least a lot like it, and I still keep away from the system lest I make the game unfun for myself. However, this does beg the question - is it right for people to expect me to step out of my comfort zones and use schoolyard taunts to mock me for choosing not to? Because that's happened. Is it right from a game design standpoint? I don't know. I personally don't like it, but again - I'm biassed. That's why I'm posing this as a question, not giving an answer.

I see your point. This was something of a realisation for me way back when - that it's not a matter of gritting my teeth and getting it over with so I can go back to "the rest of the game," because that was missing the point of the system. Inventions are not a means to an end, they are an end unto themselves, a system intended to be entertaining and engaging in itself so that people will want to engage in it and keep engaging in it for the long haul. To treat it as a gate is just missing the whole point.

That in itself, however, presents a problem, in that the whole system then becomes extraneous if one doesn't enjoy engaging in it. Unlike a bit of content which can be played past and forgotten (say, defeating 100 Overseers) but which would leave you with a reward that outlasts the pain, Inventions really are a gameplay style choice more than anything else. For those whose playstyles fit that regardless, I'm sure this is a great boon, but for those whose playstyles don't work that way, it... Isn't. So then the question becomes - how much should the game do to get me out of my static comfort zone and teach me to like Inventions?

As it turns out, not much, not in this game, for which I'm thankful. But again, not all actual players appear to agree with the game's "if you want" approach, which, again, is where the thread's central question becomes relevant.

I want to be entirely subjective for a moment here, just to provide a bit more context:

I have to disagree with you almost completely on this point. I don't question what you like and dislike - I respect your preferences. I just want to explain that I really don't share them.

When a game is trying to "teach" me something, it brings to mind your typical Kung Fu movie of the wise teacher trying to instil some humility into his arrogant student, an make him understand that he knows nothing. I'm sure this is true in real life, but coming from a game I chose to play, it usually comes off as patronising. "You don't know how to have fun, young grasshopper. Forget what you've learned and do as I say, and I shall teach you how to have real fun." No, thanks, sensei. I'm pretty sure I already know enough.

Now, that's not to say I won't give a new game or a new addition to an old game a chance, but by the same token, I won't give it endless credit and endless time. If it doesn't catch me before I run out of patience, it doesn't catch me. I don't care if it would have taught me the meaning of life; I'm not putting myself through unfun gameplay with the promise of providence.

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Completely separately, I just thought of something to say on the subject of "providence." I can't speak for anyone else here, but I can divide my experiences of new "things" in two categories: 1) Meh, what is that now? and 2) Holy hell! Why didn't I think of this before?!? In a lot of cases, I don't mind my comfort zone challenged, provided it's being challenged by something which inspires me right off the bat. I'm not sure I can even call it a comfort zone challenge at the point, actually, since it just demonstrates to me that my comfort zone was larger than I was previously aware.

However, that's only with response number 2). With response number 1), my charity is far more quickly drained, as I essentially find myself doing something unpleasant and hoping that it will either end or get better soon. Not only is that not a good experience, but it has the potential to be a remarkably BAD experience once I realise I was barking up the wrong tree all along and said experience will NEVER get any "better," because I was already experiencing the "good" part and just being unable to appreciate it.

As I understand it, Black Isle went under and were bought up by... Someone, I forget who. And either way, Fallout: New Vegas isn't a game in Black Isle's iconic style, it's a mission pack for Fallout 3.

True, true, they're not the same thing. However, the former here assumes, as I mentioned before, that you can go out of your comfort zone, but then go back into it soon thereafter. Such a slight excursion is really not something I think games can, or indeed even SHOULD avoid, as it's not a big enough problem, I don't think.

The latter, on the other hand, assumes that one either change his tastes or otherwise suppress them for long periods of time. My opinions on the matter have been made clear, so I'll instead say that this is precisely what some people have advocated to me, in pretty much those exact words. Comparisons have been to real-life military service, real-life sports and even real-life martial arts, which tells me some feel quite strongly about it.

If you ask me, there's really no doubt as to the answer of the question. But I'm not an important guy, which is why I don't want to impose my own answer to people, but instead hear people's answers from their own reasoning.

And in this you are wrong. Completely. I've explained why that's not what I'm talking about, so I don't feel the need to repeat myself.

In fact, I find it hugely disappointed that you can't look past current events and see only loaded questions when I specifically explained that that's not what I'm talking about, and have not used that as an example anywhere in the tread at any point.

This is both incorrect and terribly one-sided. Games pushing us out of our comfort zone, or indeed not doing so, is a design decision, and one which plays quite a crucial part in a game. Look at the literal metric ton of Modern Warfare sequels, spinoffs and knockoffs. Their entire goal, stated or otherwise, is to give players very much exactly what they expected, just more of it. They play to their genre, they play to their theme and they play to player expectations. These games are literally built on the assumption that this is what people want, so changing as little as absolutely necessary about them is the winning strategy.

Now take something completely different - an FPS game without the S part: Portal. When this came out, it was pretty damn revolutionary, and indeed set something of a precedent, despite one not really having been followed (outside of Darksiders). These days, most people wouldn't describe Portal as a First Person Shooter, largely because it helped legitimise its own genre of first person puzzle games, even though such existed even before. However, when it came out, it was very much out of the comfort zone of most FPS players. But it was good.

Contrast this with Mirror's Edge. This game really isn't a First Person Shooter, either. To be honest, I don't know WHAT it was trying to be. However, it pushed FPS players out of their comfort zone, and into a zone that... Frankly, I don't think many were OK with. I know it got critically panned, and I know it ended up quite awkward, as a First Person Parkour game just doesn't flow as well as a third person one, especially when all you see the bulk of the time is a face-full of wall, hence the majority of its problems.

If Modern Warfare was an example of keeping people in their comfort zones, then Portal is an example of getting people to expand their comfort zones and Mirror's Edge is an example of getting people to recoil from the uncomfortable. That, in a nutshell, is what I'm talking about.

P.S. You'll note I didn't mention the Incarnate system in any of the examples above.

To be fair (and specific), I'm not against adding more ways to play the game, with papers, tips, the Architect and so forth. However, I am somewhat disappointed that regular missions seem to have been relegated to such a low priority of late. Sure, we get a few new ones occasionally, that's not a problem. But with the advent of all the different types of rewards for all the different types of new activities, it seems like the old activities have fallen behind.

To be a bit more genera, there's a tendency in game design to make your newest addition also be the new focal point of the game and the best of the very best, even when it's not appended to the end of the game. This creates a sort of content power creep, where every new expansion, DLC or mission pack has to be "better" than the previous one, to the point where the strongest items in the game are those from the current expansion and the rest go in descending order by the age of the expansion they came with.

In City of Heroes, we see this with the Architect, which I'm told is a source for easy drops. After that, we see this with Alignment Merits, which I'm told are an even better source for easy drops. Many people, when confronted with my trademark "What are you up to today?" greeting will respond with "Running Hero Merits." Normally I'd ask why even if I can guess at an answer, in the hopes that the person would elaborate and so strike up a conversation, but in this case there just isn't anything to talk about - it's good rewards. In fact, I've considered asking people why they don't run just ordinary missions, but I realise I have no argument to entice them with even for the sake of idle conversation. And that's unusual, since I can make an argument for almost anything.

WoW, as I hear, is notorious for sort of "replacement" design, where they'll always creep their level and their gear and their raids to up the ante, as it were, leaving older raids and older quests to gather dust. Now, I did hear they'd repurposed some of their older raids into level cap raids, but I don't know enough about that to comment. I do know, however, that this sort of design can and does often lead to a part of the game stagnating and becoming that much less enticing, if just by comparison.

Now, I'm still here, so the old game has clearly not stagnated in my eyes. I wouldn't be paying out of my pocket if it had. However, the "Neuron design" approach does run the risk of getting there eventually. At this point, I'm really not sure if the old game is indeed officially supported and recognised as an intended part of the game, or if it's regarded as outmoded legacy content still in the game because the money and manhours haven't been there to retrofit it to be like the new content. And honestly, I'm not sure which case is better.

To summarise: Yeah, I'm probably in a minority, but it keeps me here and subscribed, so it has to be good enough.

Err... I apologise. I pulled the word "momentum" out of a hat to make it seem like I had more examples to give than I actually did I didn't realise, or rather didn't remember, that you'd actually suggested it before. That was my bad.

Really, I just want a power that grants a short-duration, high-yield damage buff so as to give me a very strong alpha strike, and Build Up is just the best power I can think of to do that. I know it may be passé, but I'd rather look for innovation elsewhere.

Secondary effects are an interesting opportunity, as is a non-standard utility power - as you mentioned, like Parry. I keep thinking Lingering Radiation, or something like it, might be a good fit here, and it would be quite novel among melee sets.