Samuel_Tow

I very much agree with the Zombie. Power pools and Epic pools (at the VERY LEAST) are quintessential to power customization. I can understand why they wouldn't want to handle the whole package all in one issue, but to put it off for two now, and likely more is... Unsatisfying. Every Blaster I have ever made - and I've made quite a few with no less than three at 50 - requires Epic pool customization. Without a fail. That's because every Blaster I've made has taken a pool which matches his or her powersets. So I have Fire/Fire/Pyre, Energy/Energy/Fore, Ice/Ice/Cold and so forth. I don't want green fire with green fire with orange fire. It doesn't work.

So far, my solution has been to just not customize these characters' powers, but you know what? "Just don't use it" is not a solution to the problem of "that don' work right." It's not a question of preference in that I don't like how it customizes. It DOESN'T customize, and if I can't keep all powers consistent when custom, I'll keep them consistent when not. Which makes the system inapplicable in far too many instances.

I will give power customization a 10 out of 10. This is the game's single most powerful feature and the one thing we have that NO other MMO out there has anything even remotely of the sort, including Champions Online. I want this more than end game content, more than more missions, more zones and even more than more costumes. This has to happen.

Now, I will give them the benefit of a doubt. They ARE working on power customization. It may not be for pools and epics, but they're working on it. We're getting a bunch of new animations for Blast sets, right? That ought to let me customize a few of my "default-power" Blasters. So they're doing SOMETHING, and I can respect that. Even if it's not necessarily for pools, I will be satisfied with that power customization. For now. Eventually we'll have to get it, but if we get other kinds of power customization (as long as it's not a token nod), then I can wait rather a bit more.

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On the notion of Epic AT customization... Well, I would definitely want to see customization for Soldiers of Arachnos, because a lot of their powers are doubles of existing player powers, Psi especially. Let them customize their stuff. They already wear non-standard pink uniforms. And if we let Soldiers of Arachnos have some degree of customization, it only makes sense to allow Kheldians some degree, as well. How much, I don't know. And for that matter, I don't care. The AT just doesn't work for me, and from the looks of it never will.

So I give this 10 out of 10.

Have you seen the Domesticated Rikti Monkey next to a "wild" one? That thing is ginormous!

The original poster.

All henchmen are pushable for all players, it's just that henchmen you don't own yourself push much more slowly. Robotics were, in fact, pushable even before the current personal-henchman-push mechanic we have for Masterminds right now. Pets aren't pushable if there's nowhere to push them to, such as if they're up against a wall or against a player (and players are not pushable... almost), which may come into play on a choke point or a door. However, keep running into them, and they will slowly move out of the way.

That said, I have no problem with simply disabling clipping for all henchmen for all players, to include pets from non-Mastermind powersets.

I should also point out that there's a difference between how a Mastermind "pushes" his own henchmen and how another player can push them. A Mastermind simply has no clipping restrictions against his own Henchmen, and will displace them in the same way civilians displace us - the Mastermind is allowed to walk inside the henchmen's bounding boxes and the server will move them aside to resolve the conflict. Players pushing another Mastermind's Henchmen, however, need to push them much more literally. I don't believe invasion of personal space is involved.

I bring it up because you combine two of my most hated game mechanics - escort missions and NPC helpers. Actually, what you describe is even worse, reminiscent of horrible missions I've yelled at in RTS games, where a convoy I'm supposed to guard will move on its own, requiring me to keep up, setting my pace for me. HATE!!! In general, every time I lose a game for something other than me dying, I start to grumble. When I lose a game because an NPC died, I tend to ragequit. That's one reason I LOVED Half-Life 2 - your allies are almost indestructible and they're always very smart.

Again - anything that comes down to me having to escort an NPC with other NPCs as help is just going to be frustrating. If you HAVE to have combat underwater, I would very much like to make it player vs. enemies with no "allies" to get in the way.

I'm not sure why they don't now, but yes. That would help existing Monster heads, as well.

Precisely. What a term means is often less important than how the use of a term is meant, and that particular one has become an insult. Most people who ascribe to that will simply know better than to use it, which only leaves people seeking to offend.

Well... There really isn't anything I can say about this other than "OK." It can't do much harm since I can simply not use it, so really, I can't argue against it. It's just really hard to argue FOR it, as you've explained yourself. Schmuck bait aside, it's harmless, just... Unlikely.

This is the kind of crap that pisses me off more than any change ever made to the game. When people act like self-righteous jerks just because someone complained, it ruins my experience for me without even having to log into the game.

Telling people to leave the game IS A BAD THING. Never, ever resort to this unless the player absolutely, positively just wants something completely different from what the game actually is. And while I typically disagree with Johnny, what he wants and what he has wanted for the past how many years is very much in line with what the game already offers - the ability to log in a hero and beat up cool bad guys. Far as I'm concerned, that's what the game is about, and the more that stands in the way of doing that, the more unnecessarily cumbersome the game becomes.

The notion that Praetorians are designed to be stronger or that they're designed to require Incarnate level power is a joke, and a bad joke at they. They are not and have not been. What Praetorians have is numbers, organisation and preparation. They do not have some kind of hidden raw power that we need to be demigods to stop. They simply have a tactical advantage.

Listen to Mender Silos - an invasion will occur and Earth will be unable to defend itself because of extenuating circumstances. Removing the circumstances and releasing Primal Earth's full, concentrated power would thwart the invasion, and thus this is the ultimate goal. The invasion itself is not "unstoppable" in any way. It is very much stoppable, we're just caught with our pants down. The reason we need Incarnate level powers is because we're fighting at an extreme disadvantage, not because we're fighting against superior foes. In fact, Maria Jenkins' arc demonstrates that while the foes are strong, they are by far not superior, not by a long shot. We can beat them as long as we focus on doing that and aren't distracted by infighting, other invasions or whatever else the Coming Storm entails.

The game does not need cheating enemies as regular spawns. The odd super-incarnate like Recluse, Statesman, Tyrant or Reichsman or Imperious or... How many Jack Emmert clones do we have here? Anyway, for them, I can see that as an exception. Even though they still scale down to EB levels when solo. But for regular spawns? There's no need to be fighting spawns of all bosses (I'm aware of the Hydra trial) or spawns with EBs in all of them or on and on and on. Not in regular content, and Praetorians - high-level ones included - do show up in regular content, like Maria's and Tina's arcs.

The threat from Praetorian Earth, as exemplified with the I19 TFs, should come from superior numbers, surprise tactics or other subterfuge, NOT from us being wimps and them being juggernauts. The game's currently-existing plotline does not substantiate this in any way. Yes, Praetorian Earth's forces are nasty. But they are not boogymen, nor should they be.

It's an orangish, brownish tinge, the kind of marker I'd have used for, yes, flesh when I was a kid (incidentally, the colour I never had). It doesn't just mesh poorly with light colours liike white and other low-saturation colours. It also doesn't mesh very well with the darker, more vidvid colours. You can't really see it with just Tights with Skin, but the moment you mix this together with pure Tights, you get tangible seam lines between the slightly different shades.

That's not really an NPC conversion topic, but one more for the general All Things Art thread, or possibly even a separate suggestion. But I still maintain what I've held to be true for years - skin and face colours need to be redone to be greyscale. Even if they keep their current colour selection, making them greyscale would make the colours much more true to what we pick and much more controllable, to boot.

That's what I'll do on the other PC (once it's done formatting 900GB worth of hard drive space that the god damn thing has been at for an hour and a half!) but I don't have CoH on this laptop. It was on the other hard drive, which is now in a plastic bag on my bed. I seem to have lost the access information for my router and I wouldn't know how to set up a decent file sharing system between the two computers anyway, so I'm setting it to redownload. That, along with Steam.

There's a brown tinge to all the textures that doesn't tint very well with all colours. Almost all other textures are saved as greyscale. I'm not sure why this was done, but I suspect it's to avoid naked characters, as absurd as that might sound all things considered.

*edit*
As an idle point of fact, I'm pretty sure I could write a small programme to parse through a costume file and check if the skin colour doesn't repeat anywhere in the rest of the file. Standard Code Rant obviously applies as who the hell am I to say this, but I keep thinking that a validity check would be a far superior solution to the problem of nakedness than essentially nuking your own costume creator.

Debuffs aside, I prefer to stay away from the forums' notion of "challenge," which just results in enemies I can't fight. Either they're too annoying or they're too strong and I'm not awesome enough, or they come up in weird situations, like that 30 Fir Bolg mission. I am just fine with them not being much of a challenge more than normal bosses.

I managed to fight a few of those things on the Maria Jenkins arc. They didn't prove to be too hard or too tedious to kill, though admittedly mine were scaled down into lieutenants, just like all my bosses are. They were fun fights and I would very much like to do more of this without it becoming more complicated.

Eh, it's not like many Kheldian powers are so functionally unique Peacebringers get Energy Blast, Energy Manipulation, Energy Aura (or Dark Aura if you prefer) and Regen. My thought was that their visuals and audio are unique to them and them alone, which is what makes them novel, at the very least. If you have this in mind, then I have nothing to complain about.

Why not? We get plenty of Global badges through the PlayNC store and just for existing, and Jack said that you could "craft" almost anything through Inventions. I figure you could just log in a character with that badge and have both the AT and the costumes become unlocked for your entire account. Like what we do with 50s.

Tech aside, though, having that at character creation is my top priority. I have no quarrel with the actual costumes.

I know one thing - I HATE NPC companions that I can't control. HATE them. On a Mastermind, it's tolerable because if the henchmen get unruly, I can just force them to passive and they obey. On missions where I have companions I can't control, I tend to leave them behind or let them get themselves killed, because the time spent waiting for them and the extra danger from absurd aggro just isn't worth it.

And on top of it all, a Mastermind has other powers to use in addition to the henchmen. A lot of the time you can just let them run around and do their thing while you focus on support or, as I often do, focus on cycling your utter crap personal attacks. And that's WITH Mastermind controls. Without them, NPCs just irritate me to no end, doubly so if they're my only output.

I wouldn't be against underwater exploration if the water were safe to travel or, at most, if you gave people harpoons and torpedos or something to replace their lost powers. But I don't want to be running away from enemies, and I don't want to be carting allies around. Those are the two things that kill this for me.

That's pretty much what I meant. I saw this in a tech demo of the Unreal 3 engine (I think) shown shortly after Unreal Tournament 2003 came out (in 2002 O.o), and it showcased just that technique used to make a high-detail brick wall that was, in fact, just a square flat surface. How many years later when the U3 engine actually came out, it didn't seem to actually have that. Which isn't too dissimilar from what the Source engine boasted about having and completely failed to deliver at Half-Life 2 launch.

I don't know what the technical side of Tesselation involves, but I do know that it feels like too new of a technology to be looking into quite yet. As part of a brand new engine designed for a brand new game, maybe, but when you want to introduce features into an engine that just about rivals that of the original Half-Life, more or less, you need to pick your battles. I'd like to see this in action in a game I can buy and play before I can go ahead and suggest we get it in this one.

I say the 5th Column is lacking, because it's like the Council but with less variety. They are an old, deprecated enemy group that needs a facelift. Resources considered, only one can realistically be expected to get said facelift, and I just feel it should be the one which needs it more.

Besides, redesigning the 5th requires less of a storyline justification, considering all the named Columnists are already in the Council. So instead of inventing reasons for them to be back, I say introduce new players and new factions. That way, there's less old content that gets invalidated.

That's not actually a Catch 22

The central problem with what you're suggesting is you're highly unlikely to convince anyone in power (or many people in general) that it's a good thing. You're working with something that most people would look at and as "So I don't get anything for gimping myself? Why would I want to do that, then?" I understand RP concerns... Somewhat well, but at the end of the day this is still a game, and adding what amounts to a sucker trap that you'll get more people picking without realising what they're doing than anything else just isn't very likely to happen.

I tried playing a Kheldian. I swore to never try playing a Kheldian again unless they were vastly improved. Voids were a large part of that. Voids are cheap enemies. They tie your hands behind your back, nullify your powers and then taunt you for being a hard fight. I level up for the powers. I enjoy seeing my character grow stronger. To suddenly have the game just disregard my strengths and essentially cheat me does not motivate me to try harder. It just pisses me off.

What has ruined so many characters for me is a simple recurring problem. I meet a lieutenant, I realise how hard the fight is, and I realise that this lieutenant is harder than most bosses on other characters. I then proceed to parse through my vocabulary of profanities and ragequit out of that character, never to be logged in again. A void encounter is what caused me to do this to my Peacebringer.

A weakness for the sake of having a weakness only ever works if you're forced to take it, or if there's a benefit to taking it. Arcanum used to force you to take one specific strength and one specific weakness. For instance, you could be incredibly handsome but dumb as a rick, to include lacking most dialogue options, or you could be incredibly strong, but allergic to magic, to include making the game unwinnable when you had to equip a magic amulet for part of the main quest. That system worked because having a weakness felt like a legitimate part of the game's balance system. Having a weakness for the sake of having a weakness, however, is an extravagance which would in all likelihood be difficult to realise but would bring almost no practical benefit or - and I mean this - much added value to the game.

In an ideal world then sure. Why not? But I just don't see this realistically.