Samuel_Tow

I bought everything at full price and I'd be perfectly happy with a pack like this.

I meant this more as a catch-up pack for people who may just now be starting with the game, or who may have been gone for some time. There's nothing I hate more than buying into a game and realising it's being sold for parts and I'm missing approximately 20. I'd much rather just get a complete pack of everything than have to buy everything one at a time, and if I get a bargain out of it, all the better.

And while I realise that some people might just choose to wait for the sale, I know I wouldn't. If I had to choose between buying a costume pack now at full price or six months down the line for less, I would choose to buy it now every time. Besides, this is only worth it if you're missing more than two packs, more if we're talking Alpha and Omega, which means waiting possibly years and purposely ignoring packs you may otherwise want. And if you're ignoring packs you don't really want, then you wouldn't have really bought they anyway.

I thought he was talking about sprites, too, but:

A) There aren't any real sprites in the game outside of power effects that I can think of.

and

B) His description sounds more like textures with fake, painted-on depth, like shot windows, market counters and so on. And I'm really not sure what could be done about those.

I'm pretty sure some of the source material - I think on the actual site - states that Rikti children are born mostly human, but undergo mutation therapy at around adolescence. I'm not sure I can verify this, however.

I've seen double-Quarts spawns semi-frequently, but that was when I played at -1x3. I eventually conceded that that was probably harder than +0x2 and Incarnate Shards would probably still not drop for -1s, so I haven't seen that since I returned to +0x2. These rarely give two-lieutenant spaws, much more rarely, anyway.

So, I guess that gives Elude's MASSIVE defence buff which goes FAR above the cap a point, huh? I had been wondering.

What it would take to improve gameplay as I see it as an improvement is not feasible. It would be pointless to even discuss it, because when it comes to gameplay, what I'm looking for is another game entirely. I don't fault City of Heroes for having gameplay like it does, but you and I have butted heads over how challenging it should be in the past, so you at least know what direction I'd push in. What it would take to improve visuals to the point where I would be more than satisfied with them, however, is much, much more feasible, as the things I tend to ask for are far simpler. More of "this" item, more of "that" item... It's just a question of priorities, not game design philosophy.

It all comes down to this: I am much more easily able to play a game that looks cool and plays badly than a game which plays well and looks like crap. The more the game lets me feel like "I can't believe this is really happening!" in the sense that these characters I've only ever imagined and never thought I'd see "for real," I can now actually play with. As long as they look close to what they should look like and behave close to what they should behave like, I'm more than fine with that.

I completely disagree. Adding tips added precisely nil to my enjoyment of the game. Even if we ignore their sometimes railroading writing, there are, what? 50 missions all told? I ran out of 20-30 tips before I got my first morality mission and had to redo at least a couple. All that lasted me was two days. If that. I'm not interested in doing Tip missions again unless I start having to move characters across factions. To me, Tips are little better than Paper missions, which I only ever do if I can't take on normal content.

I don't NEED improvements to gameplay to stay subscribed and keep having fun. There are tons of gameplay options I haven't explored yet, like most Stalkers and probably half the powersets on Masterminds. I have not touched on these in the slightest, and I keep meaning to. What I need is to make those options cooler, such that I will WANT to play them, and optimizing the numbers does comparatively little for that.

Let's talk about what options opened up. I19 promises Blast power customization. If this allows me to make a Blaster who fires Sonic Blast from his hands instead of from his mouth, I will do that in a HEARTBEAT. For the... What has it been now? Five years? For the five years since Sonic Blast came out, I've never been interested in playing it because "shouting" is one of the dumbest ideas ever conceived for a powerset. Yeah, personal opinion, obviously, but since it's MY character and MY time, it's my personal opinion that matters. Being able to shoot Sonic Blast from my hands and not my mouth gives me one more powerset to use, and one more character to make.

But wait! Blasters have access to Sonic Blast, but have no Sonic secondary? Oh, bummer. Guess I can't make one I like after all. But wait! Sonic is smashing/energy and Energy Manipulation is smashing/energy. Oh, that's right! I can just recolour Energy Manipulation to match Sonic Blast's black and white. Actually, you know what? I don't really like Sonic Blast's black and white to begin with. I think I'll recolour it that kind of orange that the Defender Sonic support powerset has. I always thought that was really cool. Sweet! When is I19 coming?

Wanna' know what else? The Alpha aura has options to apply it only on a single fist, unlike everything but Omega. I have an Energy/Energy/Force Blaster who has that big robotic glove on one hand, as well as that off-centre Gladiator shoulder and a single-shoulder cape, all on the same side. So I made her right hand glow. You know what would be REALLY cool, though? If I could customize my Energy Blast powers to shoot only from her right hand. It'd be cool if I could customize her Energy Manipulation powers to be one-handed, too, but I guess that's beyond the scope of this issue.

Let's inspect something else: Super Speed is the worst, most silly travel power ever conceived. Yeah, yeah, the Flash, whatever. I hate it, have always hated it and will always hate it. In six years, 40 retained characters and Lord knows how many deleted, I've taken this power a grand total of twice, and both times out of guilt that I wasn't taking it. You know what I did with one of these characters? Nuclear Toast generously gave me the DVD Edition code, which gave me Prestige Power Slide, which I started using when I was super-speeding, turning Super Speed into the classic anime Super Slide. Instantly, my enjoyment of having the power increased monumentally. Many times in the past I've considered just respeccing Crash and giving her Super Jump, instead. It'd make more sense, after all. Ever since I got Prestige Power Slide, I simply haven't been able to bring myself to even think about that. It's that cool to use the power. Just imagine what it would be like if I were able to actually customize the thing and get rid of that silly yellow starburst glow?

Shall we keep going? My character by the name of Slime Girl would not have existed were it not for Power Customization. She's basically a teal-greenish creature made out of slime who possesses teal-greenish regeneration capabilities (you can disperse her, but she'll just reform) and team-greenish bio-electricity. Yes, you can argue that it might have worked with blue electricity. I argue that if I hadn't seen the teal-greenish electricity, I would not have been inspired to make the character, an would have been one character shorter and that much less interested in playing the game in general.

Just like Weapon Customization has allowed me to have no less than five Broadsword characters without feeling I'm repeating myself, so power customization allows me to reuse elements without the same fear. For instance, I finally broke down and made another Stone Melee character. Normally, I'd feel odd about this, but his lava-like orange rock is different enough to that of Ezikiel that I don't mind. I'm right on the verge of repeating myself with powerset combos, and being able to customize them to not be the same will help tremendously. Just the mere fact that I left one Blaster's Devices stock and made another's all green (I love green explosions!) is reason enough for me to celebrate this.

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Gameplay changes are good, obviously. But each addition accounts for only one, single improvement. Every addition to power customization ends up improving ALL of my characters in some way. Literally the first thing I do when I log into an old character I haven't touched in years is to hit up the Tailor, see how much cooler I can make his costume and see if I can't improve his stock powers. Until we can customize Epics and Pools, I will never feel complete, however.

*edit*
Just to make a point: No piece of content ever added to the game, with the exception of CoV and Going Rogue, has caused me to make a new character. Not the ITF, not the Khaan TFs, not Ouroboros, not the Midnight Club, not Cimerora, not the Rikti War Zone, not Dean McArthur, not Agent Nancy, not Faultline, not the Shard, not the Hollows, not really anything apart from the creation of a brand new expansion. New powersets have obviously made me create new characters, of course. Typically one per powerset. But it's been power customization which has caused me to make multiples of almost every powerset out there, sometimes many, many multiples. I've made more characters since that was introduced that I think I did in all the time prior to that, and if not so then it's pretty damn close. Just about every character I have has been customized in some way, if not power-wise then weapon-wise. I have a few stock ones, obviously, because when everything is custom, stock becomes a novelty, but that's besides the point.

Yes, adding more content does add more value to the game as I'm playing it. I get bored less, I have more choice, it's easier to level, yatta yatta yatta. It just doesn't inspire the kind of glee I get from a new character perfectly pulled off or a rework of an old costume drawn just spot on. And the fun isn't in just making those. It's in making them and then spending hours in disbelief that a game actually lets me play with MY characters.

Revamp, yes, but not all at the same time. If you remove Mek Men, War Wolves, Vampyri and Ubermenschen from the council, you essentially slash almost all of the story arcs they have from the old content, and a fair few missions besides. Yes, they already did that once... And completely dropped the ball on it because it was a rush job.

Ideally, I'd like to see the Column get their own missions back. Don't they have those on file somewhere? But I feel that revamping those missions to just be better written as opposed to completely different is more... Plausible? I don't know.

A typical costume file as I have them on my hard drive is 7KB. That's not a lot of data, but it potentially allows a person to cycle through all five of his costumes almost instantly, delivering on the order of 25-30KB of data to everyone around him, and this is possible to keep up... Practically indefinitely. That's a lot of load for people that really isn't necessary. The timer is there to alleviate that.

At the same time, a 30-second timer really isn't necessary. If the point is to keep a lid on unnecessary network load, then even a one-second timer would be sufficient. With that in mind, a 10-second timer should be more than sufficient to not only prevent people from causing adverse effects by "flickering," but actually discourage then from wanting to do so in the first place.

SG costume mode shouldn't be nearly as connection-intensive, as SG is incapable of changing any costume items on your character, and should as such take much less memory to transfer. Provided I'm an idiot and SG mode is just a different kind of costume swap, then you guys would have a point in that it's weird. However, being that I don't know and the developers blocked costume changes but not SG mode, I'll take that as a hint as SG mode swaps not being as intensive.

Incidentally, all of that is conjecture I've picked up over the years. None of this has ever been so much as commented on by a developer to the best of my knowledge.

So that basically takes a defence-capped entity (assuming it's not too far above the cap) and essentially floors its defence entirely? Why is this not considered broken? I... Guess stacking Elude on top of everything else might make up for this, but... Will it? Because I haven't noticed it helping too much in the past.

I remember long ago that I suggested giving us the ability to rename our enhancements and our powers, client-side only. I mean to reiterate that. If I pick Crippling Axe Kick but instead pick the Uppercut custom aninmation, I could rename the power to Crippling Axe Punch or, you know, just "Uppercut." Or I could rename my Full Auto to "Very Slow Fire" or my Long-Range Missile Rocket to just "Long Range Missile" or "Long Range Rocker," or my Electro-Magnetic Pulse Pulse to just "Electro-Magnetic Pulse."

The reason I bring this up is it allows us to redefine our own enhancements just for ourselves. So if I feel it's inappropriate for my character to, say, wear 17 Gauntlets, presumably one over the other, or that it is inappropriate for him to implant 10 Cubernetic Eyes into his face, then I can rename those. Gauntlets could become rings, Cybernetic Eyes can become memory chips in my Targeting Drone.

In much the same effect, the innuendo that is "Back Alley Crippling Blow" could become Cosmic Stun or whatever that name was actually for, and "Dragon Flight" could become "Up up and away!" The pictures are hard to understand enough to let us name then whatever we want and it will work just as well. That solves the problem of enhancements not quite meaning what the player understood the origin to mean.

I actually considered it, believe me But this is actually more about aliens and only tangentially related to what a Natural character is. I'd be bringing this up pretty much outside of context. I have to pick my battles, you see

It's a good thing souls and spirits don't exist then, huh?

"The game" isn't all that good, to be blunt. I can pick any single-player game and get far superior gameplay if that were my thing. But City of Heroes is the only game I'm aware of that has decent gameplay AND the ability to play it with MY characters and not whatever stock choice (if one even exists) that the developers have given me.

Give me a choice and I will always pick Darksiders, Soul Reaver, Tomb Raider, Oni and so forth. But much as I like the character designs in those games, they are not mine. I didn't pick them, I didn't make them and, truth be told, I feel I could do better if given the choice. Which I simply am not in most games, but which I am here.

I can survive bad gameplay. Hell, I've been here since Launch, and the game's only been getting better and better. If I managed to suffer through bugs, stupid game design (would you like to have the old MoG back?) and boring stories, I will certainly be able to keep playing with the current stuff. Functionally forever, even if not a single new mission were ever added, just to make a point.

Good stories are good the first time around. Good stories are OK the third time around. Good stories become a chore the fifth, tenth, fiftieth time around. Good characters never cease being great, however, since I can keep making ever newer and ever better ones. Giving me better character designs gives me 40 characters' worth of improved gameplay, or thereabout, as I can tweak something on everyone. Do you have any idea how many characters I'd like to kill the smoky glow of Fly and Super Jump on? How many I want to give an inky black teleport?

"The use of having pretty and matching blasts" is that this improves the entire game for all of my characters universally. Improvements to the actual game add much, much less. The whole of Praetoria lasted me precisely four characters. JUST the Alpha aura, however, has so far lasted as much, if not more. That ought to tell you something.

Because I want to actually use the costume pieces, and if I don't pay money for them, they'll get stuck behind running the Alpha TF three times, killing 1000 War Walkers, having been subscribed for 100 months or possessing 500 badges or some other nonsense like that.

Recent content seems to suggest this is now less likely the case than it was before, but as long as we have a Vanguard set which costs 1000 Merits, Rularuu weapons which require 100 level 40+ Overseers which always spawn in groups of twos and threes, Nictus Romulus items which require doing the ITF twice on the same character and Rikti weapons which can only be unlcoked in rare, annoying, lag-infested events, I choose to disbelief that anything has changed in a meaningful way.

I think you just read my mind

Nope. Not by a long shot, and certainly not enough that was actually good. People play the low-level content more than anything else because that's what new characters have open to them, so it makes sense there'd be the most of it.

Considering City of Heroes doesn't actually have end game, I'm surprised you considered playing it again at all. And I agree with you, making Inf sucks. Luckily, it's easily possible to just kill stuff and ignore the "economy" altogether. It's what keeps me sane.

And again, you don't have to bother. City of Heroes isn't the kind of game where you HAVE to powergame if you don't want to. There are few things you need a "perfect" build for, and most of the stuff we have can be handled with pretty much anything unless you insist on proving how hardcore you are by cranking up the difficulty and giving yourself disadvantages. Granted, I19 which you won't see comes with Incarnates and harder stuff which requires them, but again - Incarnates are not powergaming or part of the economy. From what I've seen in I18 Beta, they're less about "end game" and more about... Well, more levels. Just keep at it.

Pardon me while I chortle in your general direction. "Too many activities" is not, has never been and will never be a problem. More activities means more choice. You are not obligated to do it all. Choose what to do and what to skip. If you cannot make that choice, then you manufacture your own problems where problems do not exist. It's like having 100 channels on your cable TV and lamenting that you can't watch them all. I have around 50 and I watch around... 3.

This is complete hogwash. Adding more content to any level range is never redundant, because people will be replaying these level ranges over and over again, getting sick and tired of the same old missions. Maybe you only play through the game once and never again, but the vast majority of players here play alts. As far as endgame being neglected goes: GOOD! I'm sick and tired of MMOs that "begin" at the end game. End game as a concept can die in a ditch for all I care. I want a game that's fun all the way through.

Players being "decentralised" is a complete joke. You have a team seek feature and everyone out-equals the level of the mission. Everyone is able to travel almost everywhere regardless of level and, now, largely regardless of faction. Open the team search feature, find players and team with them. Everyone will be able to do everything you propose. Go ahead and do that.

No, it does not. The level cap does not need to be raised. Ever. There's nothing to gain past that. You will have to contend with Incarnate levels. Which you won't see.

Six years ago. And while I know they're never going to remove it, dropping it to 10-15 seconds would still be a major boon for such times when I change to the wrong outfit or my costume change emote misfires, not changing my costume but resetting the timer.

If there's one thing I would describe as "cheap" in the entire game, it would have to be Quartz eminatos. They have, what, 100%-200% to-hit debuff? Why? All that does is render defence pointless, and they show up on a common-spawning lieutenant pretty early in the game. At least Soldiers of Rularuu Watchers have the excuse of being high-level boogie man enemies, but Sentries? Whether or not we solve the problems defence has with to-hit buffs, these have to be slashed, and hard.

I'd have to relook back through your old guides on the matter, but from what I remember... Yeah, I could get behind that. And not just for Ice, but for SR, too. Any set which has defence as its primary protection should be stronger against to-hit buffs than sets which have defences and other things. Not only will this make these sets more relevant with this obsession for softcapping (that I don't share), but it'd make them suck less against enemies who don't really disable anything else as completely.

I would go out on a limb and say that you'd be hard pressed to find characters who can only ever fit into one. Our origins are so broadly defined most fit at least two or three. Not only do we not need more, but it's often hard to pick among what we already have.

In fact, you guys and your talk of Natual Robots (a concept I've considered before, but never seriously) have given me a good idea for a future concept come I19. Thanks