Samuel_Tow

Using "lrn2py" with any seriousness is embarrassing, Leo. You should know better than that.

You should furthermore expect that I know my characters' capabilities, being that I play them, than you do, being that you don't even know who and what I'm talking about. The character in question CANNOT fight with a third of her endurance bar. A third of her endurance bar is is around 33%. That's just about Cleave, Pendulum and Whirling Axe, the three powers I like to open with. Without Stamina and with all four Shield Defence powers running, I don't have enough recovery to offset this. If I pick a fight with a full spawn at less than half my endurance bar, I will quite simply RUN OUT before it's done. This means toggles dropping, it means waiting around for endurance to recover, it means taking damage I didn't need to take and almost invariably means resting immediately thereafter.

No, thank you.

As far as using the blue inspirations I have on me goes... They run out. If I start relying on them to keep me going, they run out. FAST. If I start one fight at a third health, it means I'll use at least one, possibly two. It also means I'll end the fight at less than a third endurance, meaning I'll use at least two in the next fight, and still be left with almost nothing. It really doesn't take more than a couple bad decisions like this to eat through all the blues I carry, and those don't drop nearly as often as people like to claim. I fight at X2, and slowly, to boot, thanks to endurance problems, so I'm not exactly mowing down hordes of enemies and getting tons of drops.

I will, however, use blues if I'm less than half an end bar away if I get more than I intend to keep. My inspiration tray isn't infinite, and there are more things I need to carry than just 20 blues. Being that this is Shield Defence, I also need to carry greens and a defence inspiration or two, and usually an awaken and a break-free for when I get killed and unarsed to go to the hospital. If I get blues that fill up my one empty slot or the slots for other inspirations, I will use them to save myself an endurance break.

Really, I don't see why you decided to come down on me like this. Did I kick your puppy or something? Does it bother you that I don't play like you do? I slot for endurance. Believe me, I do. I mind my usage, I don't leave Sprint or Ninja Run going in battle, I don't use absurdly powerful attacks on almost-dead minions. I do what I can, but this character simply uses a lot of endurance. I was, in fact, planning to get Stamina for her either way, once I had all my primary and secondary powers. I will now get it for absolutely free, and rather a few levels before I otherwise would have. Why criticise how I play when that will no longer matter in, if my math is correct, less than four days?

Who cares? So I have problems. I won't have problems by Tuesday, or whenever I19 launches. You don't know my character, you don't know my build, you don't know my playstyle, and your rant will be outdated in less than a week. Why go out of your way to make it?

You are demonstrably and provably wrong. In fact, it just so happens that I teamed with an Illusions/Rad controller today, who slapped my character with the 30% recovery buff that is Accelerate Metabolism. Stamina itself may be a 25% buff, but it's slottable, whereas the buff I saw was a flat 30%. That one single buff, in and of itself, solve pretty much the full entirety of my endurance problems, to the point where I didn't even have to worry about endurance for the most part. It was just strong enough to make my endurance bar come back just fast enough between fights to put me at around 3/4 endurance at the start of each fight, my normal habits pertaining.

Stamina will fix this. I've seen it before on characters far worse off than this one, I've seen it with Quick Recovery, I've seen it with recovery buffs. "I'm out of blue" is, in fact, magically solved by Stamina. I know from experience.

Yes, that's not the "range" I was talking about, you are correct The range of power activation is completely separate from the power's effects, as it determines when the power can even begin tracing through its effects stack. However, AoE radius and possibly cone range (both angle and radius) are specific to each effect, rather than just effects that apply to one uniform "area" for the entire power. As such, it would make sense to at least those instances when effects don't conform to what the power suggests. After all, it is a LIE when Thunder Strike tells you it's an AoE, only for you to realise that the bulk of its damage isn't after you've already taken it.

I actually think the biggest reason those aren't in there is, at least in theory, so as not to confuse people. That's the only reason I can think of why Real Numbers pretend pseudo-pets don't exist. However, this doesn't actually make Real Numbers easier to read. It just makes them FALSE.

If I look at Ignite, the game tells me it has an accuracy of 2.0. Wow! That's great! I'll never have to slot it for accuracy, right? Right? Wrong! The summon has an accuracy of 2.0. The actual Burn patch that you summon, and which does the damage, has the standard 1.0 accuracy. Furthermore, nowhere in there can you see what kind of AoE range that Burn patch has, because the type and range listed are those of the summon, not of the actual power.

Want something that's even more fun. Check out the Real Numbers for Mastermind -> Traps -> Detonator. And may the force be with you, because you will fail to get any info out of that. Or how about the resistance numbers for Dodge, Agile and Lucky? "Special"% resistance to all. Yeah, thanks. That really cleared it up.

This attempt to make Real Numbers "simpler" just serves to make them confusing and false. And I pointed a great many of these problems out when Real Numbers were still in Beta, and I was completely ignored.

No offence, Moo, but that's an incredibly narrow view of what constitutes "stamina." In a game that includes robots, aliens, ghosts, plants, rocks and so forth, trying to view endurance and stamina as some kind of expression of the strength and fitness of the human body is... One-sided. A robot will have FAR greater stamina than a human would, simply because a robot doesn't tire if it has a strong enough batter or is hooked up to a power source. In fact, even Dragonball Z played with this, showing the androids going through intense fights and never becoming tired when people, even when they're stronger, still lose because they run out of breath and out of endurance.

A martial artist who trains daily will have more stamina than the fat clerk at WalMart, yes, but to claim that he will have more than a sorcerer who wields magic and is tapping into all the energy of the netherworld? Not so much. In fact, a sorcerer who wields magic doesn't NEED strength of body to begin with, because he's not doing any physical exercise. Magic doesn't take muscle strength. Hell, that's why so many sorcerers are DEAD and transformed into Liches. Death, a rotting body and shrivelled skin only seem to make them more powerful.

The way I interpret "endurance" varies from character to character, but it almost never comes down to human physical endurance. For one of my Blasters, it's a form of auto-replenishing ammo. For one of my Scrappers, it's genuine battery cell charge. For another Scrapper, it's how much he can exert himself before he starts losing control of his mind and has to stop or FLIP OUT. For a Mastemind, it's just the level of magical power he can bring to bear before he runs out and needs to recharge. For a Brute of mine, it's how much matter he can transmute before his body starts locking up. It varies from character to character.

Having Stamina on all of my characters just means I don't have to worry about Alt-Tabbing to the forums between every two fights. Yes, endurance management will become much less a part of the game. An good riddance, as far as I'm concerned. Yes, it's a legitimate game mechanic, but it's also the one that irritates me the most. I'd sooner DIE and have to run to the hospital than run out of endurance mid-fight and have to run away, hide around the corner and then spend a while watching Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe.

They are fluff which is cheap and easy to make, does not involve introducing entirely new systems or severe alterations to old systems and is just "more of the same." What people keep continuously ignoring is the fact that weather is an INCREDIBLY large investment into the game, and I, personally, would rather see them invest in other forms of fluff that I, personally, actually cared about.

Yes, it's true, the game is about having fun. Yes, it's true, it's the little toys that keep us all here. No, I don't agree that weather ranks very high on the list of meaningful fluff items. Nothing on the world does, actually, as I will always, ALWAYS pick things I can do on MY characters over things done to the settings that don't involve my characters.

Parallels can be drawn between this and power customization, yes. But I don't think they're entirely objective. Power customization is "customization" at its core, and that is possibly the game's single strongest selling point. Anything to do with customization, no matter how trivial or how complex, can be overlooked because, in a nutshell, this IS City of Heroes.

Weather is NOT customization. I consider weather to be fluff where custom power colours are not because weather does nothing for me. Yes, it rains in a zone, but it's not MY zone, it has nothing to do with MY character and it's not under MY control. It's cool to see, yes, but like a cool new arc, it gets old within a week. If that. In essence, it's cool for a few characters, and that's it.

Power customization is cool for practically EVERY character, unless you pick Shield Defence and a weapon. I will enjoy the ability to customize the powers of EVERY character I make, because every character is its own thing and requires different styles of powers. The Alpha and Omega sets will never get old, because I continually find new characters that just look PERFECT with those pieces.

An investment you make in powers, costumes, auras and general customization is well worth it, because people will use it again and again and again. Weather, considering what kind of investment it is, isn't nearly as worth it. Would it be cool? Oh, hell yes! Would it be cool enough to replace, say, muscular skin textures for women? OH HELL NO!!! And it will, if the developers sat down to work on it. I mean, just look at how long they've delayed power pool customization and how disappointing the I19 alternate blast animations are. My hands are still tied on over a dozen characters because I can't make their epics match their powersets.

If I could wave a magic wand and make weather appear, perfect and beautiful, I would. I have nothing against it. But if it replaces other fluff we would have gotten otherwise, then I don't want it, because I want almost ANY fluff more than I want weather.

Good to hear. My solution was to make a shortcut to the executable and set that to always run as administrator, which in turn always asks me for permission. It's something I had to do for Ventrillo, or else it wouldn't capture sound with City of Heroes in full screen.

That's not entirely true. If you leave your mission, switch zones an spend more than about 15 minutes out of it, the mission will deselect itself and reset. I've had this happen to me when I would leave to see a friend's costume, only to come back to a fresly-reset mission.

That said, I still support the idea. Leave mission instances un-reset for at least 10 minutes after people leave, provided the instance has been "initiated." Disconnects happen and, in my case, the nVidia driver likes to crash at random and force me to reset the game. It's really frustrating when this happens almost at the end of a mission, I'll tell you that much.

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On the technical side, this has to do with teams and mission ownership. Do a quick test and you'll find the following: You cannot chat in the Team channel immediately after you log into the game. However, as soon as you select a mission or enter an instance, you start being able to. That's because when you select a mission, an overaching "team" is created that you are attached to, and that the mission belongs to. Your missions, even when solo, do not actually belong to you. They belong to the immaterial team structure that becomes attached to you when you select a mission.

You can actually pass this structure and its properties on to another player. For instance, I was teaming with a friend, he entered his own mission, forcing it to select, then quit the team. "The team" was then just me, and I went about doing my own missions, but his instance was still attached to my team. So when he completed the mission, I got his "Mission Complete!" message, because that only plays for the members of the team which is attached to the mission. He attached his mission to the team I was on but he wasn't, so I got his Mission Complete and he didn't.

The problem you see with missions resetting is because your immaterial team structure dissolves. Teams are set to be removed from memory when the last member on the team leaves, sort of like how you "delete" SGs. The problem is that, when you're solo, you're the only person on that team, so when you get disconnected, the team dissolves. When the team dissolves, the current instance of that mission becomes orphaned and is removed from memory. When you log back in, you have to start a new team, and for that new team, a new instance of that mission is generated when you select it.

To solve this problem, the developers would need to do two things:

1. Make teams persist for some time even if no people are attached to them.

2. Make you automatically rejoin the last team you were on before you logged out, possibly within a set period of time. This in itself may be a feature people would want just on its own.

Once you have both of those features, the unintentional mission reset should no longer happen.

You know... I think I did!

Fixed

Hey, you're right, GG. This is fun. Woefully unproductive, but I guess that comes with the territory, aye?

No, they didn't

Systems like this or the Kinect have the potential to be very immersive and very entertaining, but they require an entirely different type of gaming mindset. Contemporary games can almost always trace their lineage back to the 80s and before, back when processing power sucked and controls were horrible. The old Atari joystick only had one button on it. As such, gaming has evolved to largely sideline the immersion of controls in favour of a simple system that more directly translate commands into pre-fab actions.

Motion tracking in general is not a bad interface for control, but it cannot simply be dumped into games the basic design of which is based around a keyboard or gamepad. It requires a unique brand of games which really revolve around such motions. With full 3D control, especially of both hands, you can create some AMAZING things.

I already mentioned a Naruto-style "hand seal" sort of game which, at least in part, consists of testing the person's manual dexterity in performing the correct actions quickly and cleanly. Many games, cartoons and even some movies have featured magic being cast by complex arm motions, and this more than any other system has the potential to cater to just that. It's one thing to click on Fireball and cast it. It's quite another to have to remember the right hand signs and possibly even "magic" words to cast it.

Furthermore, I'm reminded of a first-person-perspective Mechwarrior game where the player does not control any of the Mech's functions directly. Instead, the player controls the pilot's hands, and head orientation, and must control the mech by proxy through pressing buttons in the cockpit, moving levers, turning keys, typing on keypads and suchforth. Granted, the precision needed to achieve this is somewhat daunting, and it may be a bit cumbersome without one-to-one motion feedback, but I still feel that if the system is sensitive enough and the buttons and levers are large enough, this could make for a VERY cool game.

On the latter, I've always had something of a problem with giant mech games, for the simple reason that it feels more like you're controlling the mech directly as a character in an undersized world than that you're a pilot inside this humongous machine. The same for space sims, in fact. Short of selling a custom-made physical cockpit rig with each game, which is both expensive and cumbersome, having the kind of technology which allows you to use a virtual one has all sorts of cool implications.

Personally, I've always been a HUGE fan of indirect game control, in the sense that some games make it feel like the game isn't programmed to respond only to certain actions, but rather is built as an environment where my actions have procedurally-generated consequences. For instance, if I want to open a door in your typical FPS game, I "use" the door and it knows to respond to being used by "opening," which usually consists of basically rotating along its hinges. The Dark Descent went some way towards having more interesting interaction, but that's just cumbersome with a mouse incapable of full 3D movement and it didn't really do enough.

Picture the following - a Zork-style adventure game has you climb into a machine that you're supposed to drive, but the only thing you can control is your hands. You need to figure out which knobs do what and how they need to be used. And you can drive every machine you run across with the same set of controls, be it car, boat, helicopter or feller buncher. That, to me, is a whole different kind of experience... That doesn't actually exist. Oy vey.

Which don't exist

I don't know. Ask all the psychos who are in love with celebrities they've never met, and then proceed to harass them. Or are their emotions not "real" because waka waka waka?

Your insults are pitiful and your desperation palpable. You seem to have understood precisely none of what I've said, though that's precisely what I'd have expected. No-one ever said that machines, as built by humans today or in the foreseeable future, will ever be human-like enough to matter. What I'm saying is completely the inverse - that people themselves are nothing more than machines made out of meat, and your predictability speaks to this exact fact. Feed the right person the right cue and you produce the expected result. Neurology in action.

Furthermore, you fail on a very basic level here, because not I nor Techbot nor indeed anyone here ever spoke of the reality of machines. We spoke of fiction. And if you need to insult and browbeat people for the fantasies they hold because they don't conform to your narrow-minded view of the world, then I feel sorry for you. Because some of us are fully capable of separating fantasy from reality, and are thus fully capable of enjoying a fictional environment in the full knowledge that not a single part of it is or can be real.

You insult people to their faces, treat them like petulant children, go out of your way to dismiss their dreams and their stories, and then you cap it off with a smilie as though it's cute to treat people like garbage because you think it's funny. Do not be surprised when you are poorly received.

Last I checked, the "real world" ends where my keyboard begins, therefore anything which takes part in this game is fictional, open to interpretation and, above all else, free for people to craft as they please. There are some limitations the game imposes on the stories people can write for it, but robot intelligence and, yes, robot love is not among them. In fact, the game has multiple instances of both, and I can keep naming them till the cows come home. Bastion/Citadel, Luminari, Metronome, that AI you save from Crey, "the doctor," there are plenty of examples to make it very clear and very obvious that this is acceptable in-game narrative.

So you have no right to insult and belittle people over what fiction they write for THEIR characters in a game which not only permits it, but encourages it. Just because you're short-sighted enough to only ever produce a single idea does not give you the right to attack people who have ideas which contradict it. Contrary to what you may believe, you do not get dictate what's applicable and what isn't, nor what is "desperate," "childish" or "anti-social." And every time you try to do so, you are wrong.

But, hey, we all knew that to begin with

This actually reminds me of something I watched on the History Channel's "How the Earth Was Made" programme. The various scientists were talking about the kind of unimaginable forces involved in creating megavolcanos like the one which created the Yellowstone basin, and about plate tectonics in general. The consensus among them is that this "planetary system" involves such unbelievable energy that it's difficult to describe and imagine.

And I remember thinking... They're right. I don't really have ANY frame of reference to compare to. I couldn't begin to imagine what such energy - enough to move entire continents - would be like. I mean, I've seen videos of nuclear explosions, which are about as much energy as humans are able to put forward, but those don't really begin to compare. And even with those I have no sense of scale. I'd watch, for instance, that video of Tzar Bomba and be told that the mushroom cloud extended 40-50 miles straight up. I don't really have a good concept of what 40-50 miles is across land, let alone straight up. To this day I can never imagine exactly where the atmosphere stands in relation to the planet - close by, really far away, I don't know.

Lack of experience is where imagination fails. Just as an example, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale. When people start imagining, say, nuclear explosions, they always underestimate the energy and over-estimate the destruction. When it comes to volcanoes, their pyroclastic flows are rarely realistic. These flows can travel up to 450 mph, yet Pierce Brosnon was racing one in a beat-up pickup truck in Dante's Peak. And that's before we start even talking about larger volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa, which blew an entire island apart.

Whenever I try to write a specific story, this problem is usually the one that stifles me the most. If I want something that's truly big or truly powerful... I have no idea how to describe it, because I can't really imagine it. And it does me no good to pull numbers out of the air, because that just ends up making me a laughing stock for people who DO know what they're talking about. For instance, if I want a very powerful conventional laser device, how powerful would that be? A gigawatt? Several hundred gigawatt? A terrawatt? I don't know. I don't know where the norm is, what's laughably underpowered and what's outright absurd.

Imagination only ever feels infinite as long as you don't bother to define what it is you're imagining, and even then only because you don't actually know what it is you're imagining, so it feels like it could be anything. But that's just an illusion.

Pretty much And both of them are complete bastards. At least they're likeable, unlike that Hitler-looking dude who wants war because... War is fun? I forget his reasoning. I do wish Hellsing did a better job with their bad guys and their motivations, honestly. Or good guys and theirs...

This actually is how at least a few heroes have been presented in fiction, though. Most of the ones I can think of, however, haven't actually been used AS heroes in their own stories. I want to say Major Man from the PowerPuff Girls, but I'll actually resort to a couple of Anime examples:

The X-LAWS from Shaman King. They dress in white, have a blond, dashing leader and constantly espouse slogans about justice and righteousness and good. However, they are the de-facto VILLAINS of Shaman King, going out of their way to out and out kill people for siding with Zeke/Hao and generally show complete disregard and often outright contempt for anyone who disagrees with them.

Alexander Andersen from Hellsing. An honest-to-god Catholic priest, holy man and warrior against evil, clad in white robes, constantly quoting the bible and using divine strength and human science, the man comes off as a saint. And he would be one, if he weren't also an unrepentant killer, complete bigot, sadist and all around BAD GUY. That's not to say that anyone in Hellsing is actually a good guy, Alexander is one of the recurring villains of the franchise.

I'm not sure I can come up with decent examples from American Comic Books, mostly because I don't really know much about them, but I'm sure the concept of... Oh, right, I remember!

Teen Titans, the animated series, episode Troq. The brave space hero Val-Yor comes to Earth and all of the Titans are wowed by his greatness and heroism. All except Starfire, whom he despises, calls "troq" - a derogatory insult - because she's from the planet Tamuran. Proving himself to be not just a jerk but an outright racist, the team end up shunning him by the end. Val-Yor is never played as a villain and is actually played as a hero for the most part, but he remains a negative character in the episode.

What you're talking about is just as made-up.

Yes, they can. Mental illness, mind-altering drugs, delusions (case in point) and a fair few other methods can create experiences that are far more real than actual experiences to the person exposed to those stimuli. That has been proven in practice enough times. If you choose to disbelieve it, you're only fooling yourself.

The reason such an idea can be dismissed so easily is arrogance and ignorance, for the most part. For someone who claims that imagination is limitless, yours certainly seems to be running against its limits pretty much the entire time.

Look at yourself.

Actually, it doesn't. "Why we're here" is an empty statement, unless you delve into religion or detached psychology. I don't need to believe in something to justify and appreciate my existence, my life or my experiences, therefore I don't need to tell myself lies to feel like these things matter. The truth is that they don't. We're not here for a reason, and any reason you make up is nothing more than fantasy to make yourself feel better.

There's nothing wrong with escapist fantasies. I should know. However, your right to swing your fists ends where my nose begins. You can live in your own detached fantastic world, and I will salute you for it. But don't presume to have the authority that my fantasies, my stories and my philosophy is wrong. You have neither the authority nor the right to claim that.

Your insultingly patronising tone and self-righteously passive-aggressive rhetoric do not serve to endear you to anyone, so you do not have any credit to dictate what's right and what's wrong. Speak for yourself and keep out of other people's beliefs, understandings and fictional stories.

*edit*
And if it sounds like I'm needlessly mean, it's only because I'm sick and tired of your sugar-coated hypocrisy and veiled bully tactics.

Or bigger shoulders I generally find control interfaces that require full arm involvement to be really tiring, myself, as I have my PC at home set up so that my arms are always are rest on the desk, with just the wrists doing the action. Whenever I move my setup around for whatever reason, I get really unpleasant arm cramps until I figure out where the new rest positions are.

Nevertheless, the concept for this thing is really cool, and I dare say more interesting to me than what Kinect does. As I understand it, Kinect is more a system to track whole body movements, but isn't very good at tracking hand gestures, which is where the most interesting aspects like, in my opinion. For one, it doesn't require me to get off my ***... I hope, and for another, people's hands are some of their most expressive tools. Plus, you can code gestures that don't make you look like a dolt

What I find the most exciting is that this reminds me of a few specific shows I've seen in terms of possible interaction. The easiest example is the hand seals from Naruto, and I have to wonder if you can't use something like that. Moreover, I can't imagine how cool it would be to control games like this. That's actually reminiscent of how spells were cast in Black and White, where you lack any sort of interface and have to basically draw your spell shapes on the ground. I can imagine activating powers via more complex motions, like that "You were made for cinema!" finger screen, or just basic clasping of the hands.

Incidentally, how fast can your device track? I mean, how fast can you move and perform these signs before it starts missing its queues? Or is it faster than people can pull those off accurately? As well, can you track distance from the camera, such that bringing the hand forward or back would register? This really is interesting stuff