Samuel_Tow

I have but one character who would fit the bill, and that is Princess Inna of the house of Inamen, heir to the very power of creation, as handed down to her kind by the very creators existence, themselves. Provided the game doesn't hamstring by making me choose an existing religious deity, this is what I'd pick, and be all the happier for it.

That right there would essentially END the game for me in a heartbeat. I stay subscribed to this game in particular, because I pay a single subscription and it makes me feel like a high-class citizen who is entitled to everything the game has to offer. Whether I want it or have use for it is besides the point - I'm entitled to it, and that's the kind of mental security which makes me sleep well at night.

Lumping me in with F2P players by giving me Store Coins for "free" is NOT the same. It still makes me a second-rate citizen, just a second-rate citizen with a leg up over the third-rate citizens who are intentionally hindered in an effort to bully them into shelling out. ANY game which introduces Store Coins is an instant fail for me, because I no longer feel like my subscription is enough. I no longer feel like I'm entitled to the game. I'm entitled to whatever selection of perks aren't restricted to my subscription, with the rest needing me to be one of "those" people who spend all their money on the game, buying items, levels, experience and an I Win button.

Here's the thing - City of Heroes right now limits us in various ways: We can't respec out of powersets or archetypes, we can't exceed 2 billion Inf on a single character, we get a bar of patrol experience for each day the character is offline, we only get double experience days when the developers run an event, we have to get our items from drops or from the Market and so on and so forth. All of these restrictions feel like they're there to keep the game balanced and reasonable, as well as to "save us from ourselves," in many cases. None of them feel like they're there specifically to make me PAY to remove them.

Once you go into a F2P model, those limits become cash cows. Suddenly, you CAN respec out of powersets and ATs. If you pay for it. Suddenly, you CAN hold up to 10 billion inf. If you pay for it. Suddenly, you can buy ready-made enhancements and purchase double experience for yourself. If you pay for it. Your one subscription fee is no longer "enough." You have been transformed from a first-class citizen entitled to practically everything into a second-class citizen who must either pay for his perks or shut up and put up. And with purchasable character slots, Architect slots, respecs and renames, the game is already skirting this fine like very heavily. I do NOT want it to get any close to the edge.

I wouldn't. In fact, I'd probably quit out of spite, because this would be the dick move to end all dick moves. "Hey, folks, you know what we in Marketing just decided? We decided you weren't paying us quite enough." This undermines the very foundation of what makes me accept the subscription model to begin with.

Someone asked for examples before, and I think L4D, and especially L4D2, are pretty good examples of sparse but good storytelling. L4D2's very extensive dialogue scripting gives you a good idea of who these characters are by the way they react and speak, making me empathise with them more (or not at all, as is the case with Nick). The narrative of the game itself, while largely event-driven and light on story, is still crammed of little hints of a broader picture. Just that one little comment right at the end that "Negative! Are you IMMUNE?" suggests a much broader, blockbuster storyline about the backstory behind the zombie apocalypse and the effort going on to combat it.

The guy in the boat, the village of people who held out for the longest time, the military right at the end - all of these suggest a much more expansive storyline in what can be a very detailed alternate reality world where zombies took over, and many have done amazing plot analyses on what little info there is. Naturally, I don't really care about most of them, but the fact that people bothered means that there are hooks in the game's narrative to suggest that.

To me, few things ruin the experience more than outright exposition or blatant background information. Whenever a character sits down to explain the plot to me, I scowl. Whenever I find an expansive recording of information that I don't expressly need to know, I grumble, especially if it's not easy to tell it apart from information I DO need to know. To me, these are the times when the game pauses itself and slaps me with supplementary reading.

Doom III was HIDEOUS about this, actually. The entire game's plot consists of "Demons! Portal to hell! PDA recordings!" There's a fine line when flavour text about how some person was chatting up another person on his off time turns into a cheap cop-out of replacing an actual story with background trivia. Considering Doom III is a ripoff of Half-Life which is a ripoff of Doom, one has to wonder why id failed so hard where Valve succeeded so marvellously.

I think you misunderstood what he meant. These "Adventure Packs" might well start being SOLD to subscribers, rather than coming out for "free" as it does for us now. As subscribers, we'd likely just get more character slots, first choice of names, customer support and so on, but NEW content will be sold for money. That's the big worry.

After all, plenty of people worry even now that new costumes have never really been a big part of our subscription fees, and have instead come mostly in the form of Booster packs. The Boosters themselves aren't too bad now, because they're rare and because they're not considered an essential part of the experience. A F2P model would not really allow for things you don't want to buy, because they want you to want to buy them.

Are you suggesting he moonlights as a maid? What am I missing?

I have to disagree. The experience as a paying customer is much different in a "Free" to Play MMO as opposed to a subscription-based MMO. Even if your old subscription still covers the same extras, others will be added that even YOU will have to pay for, because... Well, that's how they're making money.

I dislike games which are obviously trying to sell me something as I play. Each time I go to the site there's a "NEW SALE! Get 10 items for the price of five, only today!" or "I could sell you some really cool stuff for a discount, but what you're paying right now just isn't cutting it." And even if YOU don't have to pay for these things, the entire game starts feeling like someone jammed a permanent commercial break into it. It's all over the launcher, all over the updater, you see it in loading screens, it's all over the site... The game is trying to sell you things, even if you're already paying.

Right now, I feel like a paying customer, one who is paying "enough." The game is happy to take my money and never mention it again, to the point where I keep forgetting I'm actually paying for it. Sure, we get the occasional ad for a new Booster pack on the updater from time to time, but that's the extent of it. There are no in-game real money shops, there are no in-game real-money services... There are no real money in-game at all.

You can never pay "enough" money for a "Free" to Play game, because it will always try to suck more out of you. You very much CAN pay enough for a subscription-based game, because your one subscription pays for everything.

Sadly, I honestly wouldn't know. It became apparent to me that many of the things I HATED about Fantasy MMOs were actually selling points to the genre's fans, so I've long since given up on my ability to judge their merit objectively. I just figured there were many, many games so at least one was bound to be good, but I could be wrong.

That's what I had in mind as "alternatives," yes. I'm under no illusions that City of Heroes will outlive me unless I meet an unexpected end, but it is still my hope that the franchise's popularity (such as it is) will be enough to greenlight a sequel or a replacement of some sort, even if it's a spiritual one. I'm most married to the freedom of expression and user-friendly gameplay of City of Heroes than to the actual specific lore in question, even though it's very well-written... For the most part.

I'd be interested in that, myself, but I'd bet money I'm the only one. And I'd be pretty confident that my money is safe, too.

I'm not sure I can agree with that, at least as a personal opinion. I've seen people get embroiled in huge discussions over the meaning of what I consider to be insignificant plot devices hand-waved to avoid the plot spinning its wheels in needless explanation. It's like... What does Spock see on his console when the blue light shines in his face? I don't know. And I don't care. What does it matter? It's a technological doodad that makes the ship run. As long as its function is explained, what difference does it make?

To each their own, though. I know I've spent enough time concocting my own unnecessarily-elaborate fictional sciences, like the science behind magic one, so I'm just as guilty... Then again, if it moves the plot forward and explains why things are happening, is it really trivia?

I love the way you put this! Just to sweep the example under the rug, there was no way that Anakin's transformation into Vader could be better in the movies than what we imagined, because what the sequels implied was that it was a slow, gradual change over many years. By its very nature, a movie isn't good at representing that, so what we got in the prequels was a few key events that compressed what might have otherwise been 40 years of life experience. And that's a change for the worse.

To go back to games, I think one of my favourite storytelling examples is actually the Half-Life games, specifically the original, though Half-Life 2 and its Episodes do a good job, too. In those games, you were basically given events as they happen and no real explanation, other than the musings of badly uninformed scientists and, in the sequel, intentionally-cryptic retorts from characters who clearly know more than they let on. The entire storyline has always kept me guessing exactly because it doesn't bog me down with tons and tons of trivia and instead keeps the action going with only hints at an underlying truth.

In a sense, I like it when things are suggested, rather than explained, at least provided there are enough suggestions for the simpleton that is me to put it together.

City of Heroes... Isn't very good about this. By its very nature as an open-world sandbox (I keep waiting to find a linear MMO), it kind of has to build an environment out of trivia and let players explore it. But unlike so many MMOs, it actually does have a variety of very involved storylines, and these are often OVERLOADED with trivia. The new Tip missions are a prime example - you keep heading out to do one thing, but you keep discovering information on other things that never have anything to do with the mission at hand. City of Heroes' narrative seems to be attempting to build one large, intertwined picture where all storylines have to be perceived as part of the same whole and be examined as such.

This... Actually encumbers me. I'm not a stupid guy (I think), but when I start having to follow five storylines cross-referencing simultaneously and try to figure out what happens before what, my brain begins to shut down and I lose track of where I was in my current arc. The Rikti storyline is horrible for this. There is so much happening with those guys, and in such an anachronistic way, that I can never put it together, especially since some stories seem to contradict each other. The War Zone arc itself is consistent... But not self-contained. It relies on Division: Line to provide background on the Rikti factions, and Division: Line is a 40-45 arc, which villains don't even get to do. You're just told "Oh, there are these factions. Here, read this!"

I think the worst offender in this regard is actually Mass Effect 2, and for one simple reason: As soon as I loaded in my Mass Effect 1 save game, my Codex received an infodump of MASSIVE proportions, essentially everything I'd gotten in it from the original. That was something like 50 articles, many of them dealing with things I couldn't possibly care about, like what life on the planet of the little guys in space suits was, or what the culture of the jellyfish people was. I tend to try and keep informed of in-game trivia when it's not overwhelming, but this I was NOT going to read, especially since so little of it had voice-over narration. It was like the game handed me a history book and saddled me with homework before I could play it.

To conclude, however, I'm usually much more interested in knowing what I actually achieved at the end of the game than I am about the world within which I achieved it. And that's not the "Achievement unlocked: You have no life!" kind, but basically what did this story accomplish. "Bad guy dead, world saved, you got laid!" is an accomplishment. "You completed the last level!" is not.

Excellent call! I believe I would have use for this.

Basically, this, but in a more extreme form.

I cannot leave character creation unless my costume is just right, because if I do, the character will bug me as I play it. And when the character bugs me, I lose interest in them FAST. I cannot, for instance, make a placeholder costume to fill in with a cape and a Romulus sword, because if the costume were made to require those, then the character would bug me and I'd abandon and eventually delete it.

I HAVE, of course, improved on existing and "just right" costumes when I get my new slots, but that's because I start the creative process all over again. It doesn't make the old costume not right, because it was right when I made it and it hasn't gotten worse. The new one is just better.

That said, no, I don't get all my costumes right from the start. A fair few have been bad, and I have either rescued them by emergency costume repair, or I have deleted the characters outright.

Pretty much this. Arcades have shown us that a simple concept, when well executed, can provide much entertainment for a long period of time. Granted, I still tend to get tired of the same arcade game after a week or so, but there are many one could play and still keep interested and occupied.

Sure, MMOs have a completely different way of attaining staying power, but to be honest... The more complex a game becomes, the less interested I am in replaying it.

*raises hand* Present!

I wasn't foolish enough to take PlayNC up on their offer to sell me a bridge if I moved over to the EU servers back in the day, and I was offered this because I live in Eastern Europe, GMT+2, which is between 7 and 11 hours behind the US. Why? Well, let's list the reasons:

1. I don't care about latency. I'm running City of Heroes at between 250 and 300 ms of ping time and losing almost no packets. I remember someone did some math that just the distance alone gave me 70 ms of ping, which... Doesn't really matter. Anything below 300 ms plays this game just fine with no noticeable delay, because it's not a fast-response action game.

2. The US version has 11 servers, all of which speak English, a language that I obviously speak. The EU version has 4 servers, only two of which speak English. Shockingly, not everyone in Europe speaks English, French and German, and since there were no Bulgarian servers (not that there'd be anyone but me on them), English servers are all I care about. Why the capital F would I pick two servers - with fewer people on them, to boot - over 11 servers?

3. Customer support is more than good enough. I tend to see about half a day's worth of delay when contacting support over e-mail and anything from 5 minutes to about 45 minutes when requesting help in-game. This is sufficient, and I don't see what more local CS (which doesn't exist) would do to help me.

4. I do not care about contests. Even ignoring the fact that local contests never actually took place, even if they had, I could not care less about them. I'm excluded from US contests for some legal reason I never understood, but it's just as well. I do not care.

5. Time differences are irrelevant. I'm not the only European on the US servers, so even if all the US players suffered a massive narcoleptic attack every evening at 10 PM and didn't wake up until 6 PM the next day, I'd still have plenty of European, Australian and Asian players to play with. Since not all Americans are narcoleptic, I get to play with many of them who get up very early or go to bed very late. These last few days, I kept catching a friend of mine up at what I figured to be 6 AM his time.

The more the merrier, I say.

I haven't remembered almost anything, actually. I try to, but I keep forgetting what anything but Schedule A is. What I HAVE remembered is that I don't want to put more than three enhancements of the same type, and in most cases the third enhancement doesn't really add enough to bother with it. That's all I know. That's all I NEED to know. I don't have to worry about what percentages each enhancement gives me, because it doesn't matter. If it's an unimportant aspect, I won't slot for it. If it matters, I'll single, slot it. If it really matters, I'll double-slot it. If it's damage, defence, resistance or healing, I'll triple slot it. That's it.

Any time people start talking to me about procs and about how much what defence they get out of how many sets in how many power and how many of what sets I need in which powers at what level to soft-cap and how many of what in what I need to get how much recharge to get what kind of attack chain at what kind of DPS... I change the channel. Even simple dual-aspect enhancements get on my nerves without accounting for Set bonuses. Luckily, we'll never get Common dual-aspect enhancements so I'll never have to deal with that (because if we did, I'd feel like I had to at least figure out if they're better - and they often are), but the point remains.

I don't want systems where I have to decide how many percent of which aspect I want to enhance down to a hundredth of a percent point. For instance, if I have 100% to split between accuracy, damage and endurance reduction in a power, how would I split it? I don't know, because my enhancement doesn't come in large lump units. It's much easier to tell if I want one or two than to tell which of the 10 000 possibilities I pick between 0.00% and 100.00%

You seem to have misinterpreted my point. I never claimed I wanted bosses to be hard in a better way. I'm perfectly fine with them being easy. I'm perfectly fine with the game not having any challenge. Just fifteen minutes ago, I quit out of a L4D2 game because some ******* kept voting to increase the difficulty and finally managed to succeed. I don't want to play a game of optimization where I'm "challenged" by what comes down to a numbers puzzle.

Let me put it this way - if I had my way, I'd prefer to play games like Soul Reaver or Darksiders or Advent Rising. Games that include levelling up and powering up, but where the system isn't complicated.

I'm really not motivated enough about this idea to actually try to move it forward, but it's an idea which I probably wouldn't challenge if it were suggested. I like the idea, just not enough to bother writing up an actual suggestion. If you make one, though, I'd support it.

Well, obviously, but pushing Epics down a couple of tiers would do something kind of like that. Even down to 38 or 35 (and I'd like to see them get lower) would be a boon.

Ideally, I'd like to see more choices per level up, not counting pools. Adding what must amount to hundreds of extra powers to double up on every powerset is crazytalk, of course, but there has to be something to make my power choices post 32 less obvious.

To be replaced with these current days of siphoning cash from our pockets directly by having us pay for our costumes. And you know what? I LOVE THAT! I would gladly pay through the nose if I could get that new and awesome costume piece at creation instead of at level 35 locked behind a TF and a defeat badge of things that don't even spawn anywhere.

Whereas Corruptors enjoy critical hits in theirs.

While I agree that it's probably not something to fight over, as it were, it's still a nasty artefact caused by technical limitations, rather than conceptual or balance reasons. As such, I don't agree with "live and let live." It's a technical flaw, even if it's working as intended, and we should want those technical flaws to be fixed.

Generally because it's easier to just port things over unchanged. However, adding a powerset to an AT that never had it before does not invoke the Cottage Rule, because the AT is receiving a NEW powerset, not having an existing one tweaked. As such, you can rearrange powers, swap effects, even replace entire powers. The less work the better, obviously, but if Parry is somehow problematic, then Parry can be tweaked or replaced.