Samuel_Tow
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Posts
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Joined
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Quote:They also seem to generate a LOT of aggro, to the point that my Scrappers will routinely lose aggro to vet pets. I think it's funny to watch my friends resummon them all the time and constantly sigh about them dyingOriginally Posted by ClawsandEffect
Well, except for the fact that they die if a Hellion looks at them funny.
I've used the vet pets, and I gave up on them after they consistently died 3 seconds into a fight.
For myself, they're far too unreliable to bother with, and I'm not a fan of functional vet rewards, in addition.
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Quote:I edited my previous post to remove a single sentence: "There's a reason we have a separate Community Digest." I didn't want to touch on this because it might come off wrong to existing community reps, but since you bring it up...Originally Posted by White Hot Flash
The funny part is that when the Community Reps posted a lot, people protested that they wanted to hear more things directly from the Developers, especially when things were changing. We get more posts from Devs, and now people wonder where the Community folks went...
Once long ago, both community reps and developers shared the same digest. Invariably, it became filled up not just with patch notes announcements and such, but with a whole bunch of community events I didn't care about in the slightest, as well as a few rep's off-topic posts on movies, games, events, comic books and suchforth. I personally have no problem with our red names mingling with the community, but I check the Dev Digest because I'm looking for new juicy info on the game, or important comments on the game.
I, myself, never said anything about it, and I don't remember if other people did, but we got the Digest split between Dev and Community, and I know it became much easier for me to track specific developer communication that had significant implications on the actual game. Now that the mods basically hand out announcements and occasionally step in to put down explanations, I doubt the split is as necessary, but I'd lie if I said I didn't appreciate it at the time. -
Quote:To quote Adam Savage: There's your problem! I have neither the desire nor indeed the ability to place all of my characters in a SG, and even if I did, I don't have the patience to design a SG base for every single one of them from scratch. If there were a place in the overworld I could do this, then sure, why not? But as long as it requires a base with a specific item in it... I can see why people never use it.Originally Posted by Dementor_NA
...in your Supergroup Base....
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It's more than just a current state. It's just a current realisation. I've always been fascinated by the absurd, but the bold and by the unusual. It's just that it's taken me quite literally 20 years to shake off basically my entire upbringing and 12 years of school that's probably 50 years behind times. I managed to let society dictate what I should like and what I should hate, and I'm slowly remembering what it was that I had fun with.
Again, as Linkara says: "It's Superman fighting twin clones of Hitler in the future! How do you screw that up?!?"
I'm not opposed to culture, the poetry (in the abstract sense), to drama or anything of the sort. What I'm opposed to (or rather, not a fan of), is the kind of high-brow critique which believes that true art cannot be enjoyed, that true art is angsty, true art is incomprehensible, true art is offensive or whatever other quote you want to pull out of TVtropes. The very notion that I am supposed to approve art that I do not enjoy is alien to me, and this will not change, especially not now that I've been able to put it into a phrase I can repeat.
You very much can have very serious, very moving themes within stories which are otherwise either absurd or ridiculous. I need but mention the title of something like Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! to cause people who haven't heard of it to snerk, but I'll pick that over most stories out there nevertheless, because it's written well. I need my stories to be interesting, to be exciting and to be fun. I have no interest in watching people slowly live out their depressing lives. I don't need a TV set for that. -
The standard police chatter you hear around police drones (seven-three-twenty-five, mumble-mumble) can be heard in every documentary that features police chatter ever (it's like this is the only sound clip for it IN THE WORLD) and the sounds for Forcefields are often used for background noise on many, many Discovery Channel programmes, from historical shows to mystery shows to everything in-between.
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Quote:Considering what most of the old reps posted about was banter and mingling, neither of which I'm interested, I can't say I miss that. The level of actual practical community interaction does not feel to have dropped by a noticeable amount. We get fewer rep posts now, but the posts we do get are down to business, which I enjoy.Originally Posted by UnSub
There are different devs / OCRs working on CoH/V now. Despite their usual "hello" posts when they are announced, they rarely post past that point. For those forum members who have been around a while, there is quite a difference.
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Quote:Ah, I see. Sorry about flipping the acronym like that. I didn't notice I had.Originally Posted by Obsidius
OCR, or Online Community Reps.
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I'm still for Option 1, as I believe we don't need a zillion duplicate listings (ten types of chain, instead of one type of chain with options, for instance), but let me go back on the Tights With Skin caveat for a moment. I want to list out all the options which are patterns vs. all the options which are textures:
Patterns Tops:
Bikini, Angelic, Assassin, Athletic, Bandeau, Bandeau Sleeve, Baroque, Belly Tee Long, Belly Tee Short, Blast, Blocks, Desire, Disco, Eden, Excess, Fade Line, Fire Stripe, Frost, Hacker, Hearts (I assume), Horns, Jungle, Jungle Sheer, Keyhole, Keyhole Sheer, Mesh, Mod, Mod Sleeve, Savage, Sport, Strapless, Straps 1, Straps 2, Tanker, Thin Stripes, Tee, Thorns, V, V Deep, V Neck.
Textures Tops:
Angelic Plus, Bioluminescence, Bridal, Bridal & Lace, Excess Plus, Hearts Plus, Leather, Metal, Tank Top (yes, seriously), Witch Bare, Witch Lace, Zombie.
Patterns Bottoms:
Bikini 1, Bikini 2, Bikini 3 (aka thong), Angelic, Assassin, Athletic Short, Baroque, Blast, Disco, Excess, Full Fishnets, Fishnets, Hacker, Hearts (I assume), Holes, Savage, Shorts 1, Shorts 1 + Tights (why?), Shorts 2, Shorts 2 + Tights (why?), Shorts 3, Shorts 3 + Tights (again, why?), Slits, Straps, Straps 2, Thin Stripes 1, Thin Stripes 2 (why is that not under Tigths?).
Textures Bottoms:
Angelic Plus, Bioluminescence, Excess Plus, Hearts Plus, Metal, Witch Bare, Witch Lace, Zombie.
To do a little tally, we have 40 + 27 = 67 pattern options between Tops and Bottoms and only 12 + 8 = 20 texture options between Tops and Bottoms. True, I did count the three Shorts + Tights patterns and the one Thin Stripe pattern as such, when they are in fact nothing more than full tights with a patter, but if we start splitting hairs, then Bio-Luminescence and Zombie have no place in the Tops with Skin category and shoul be under Tights where Hairy an Reptillian are, and that's four a piece.
What I'm getting at here is that we already have a huge library of "paint-on" patterns that people have been using as skin-tight spandex for years. Whatever you do, DO NOT replace those patterns with textures, no matter what your perceived gain may be. If you must add texture versions of the patterns, do so in addition to the original patterns, not INSTEAD of them.
Oh, and David - do you still remember that muscular skin texture for females? Yeah, that'll only work with Patterns unless you want to put an ENORMOUS amount of work into it
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You know, it just dawned on me that I may possibly reviewing this subject from a very skewed perspective. I recently mentioned to a friend of mine "But the movie didn't make me feel good." and he responded "You shouldn't watch movies like that if you want to feel good." It occurs to me that, these days, I watch movies for one reason and one reason only - to have fun in the most literal sense of the word. I play games because they give me a smile (or optionally, an evil grin) and make me go "Yeah! I wanna' do that again!"
I tried to be cultured. Honestly, I did. I tried to make myself enjoy more intellectual pursuits such as deconstruction stories, philosophical stories, intentionally depressing dramas and suchforth. Most I hated, yes, but even the ones I liked, I liked in principle, but not in practice. When such a story was over, I would often tell myself of all the ways in which it was great and creative and amazing... And yet I shuddered at the prospect of watching it again. I was telling myself that this unpleasant, unenjoyable feeling I had just experience was somehow "good" and that even if I didn't feel it, "knowing" it was good made me somehow more cultured.
Then I played this game and I started making characters like a large winged purple bunny girl inspired by a porn comic book (the now-defunct Bunny Love, if anyone cares), then I made a Slime girl, then I made a time-travelling communist elf... The list goes on and on, and I am having such ecstatic fun with all of that that you wouldn't believe me if I described it. When I play most of my newer characters, I occasionally have to stop and remind myself that this is actually really happening. This isn't another one of my "if only" fantasies. This is really happening in an actual, real game.
Somewhere along the line, my preferences flipped completely on their face. I guess I abandoned the not insignificant amount of compulsion I felt towards things I felt I should like, but actually really didn't. I dared to be stupid, and intentionally so. And I liked it. A LOT. For some time now, I've tried to avoid high-brow culture as much as I could, for the simple reason that... Well...
A lot of stories make me wish for The Last Action Hero's take on Hamlet as a remake of the actual stories. A lot of those stories would be completely ruined by that, yes, much like people said about Silent Hill Homecoming's greater emphasis on combat efficiency, but you know what? That kind of ruination is the kind of ruination I approve of. I've watched a thousand monster movies where people barely scrape by and get picked off by the monsters one by one. Even the frikkin' Doom movie was like that. Some days, I pine for the ridiculous over-the-top badassery that was C&C Renegade. "Me against the entire NOD elite? Don't seem fair, does it? Maybe I'll shoot left-handed." I wonder if Duke Nukem: Waiting Forever (if that's actually released) will be like that.
Basically, I'm tired of high drama and the things I enjoy are the things that can at all be cheered on. -
What's an ORC, by the way?
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I'm running it from an administrator account as an administrator. The exe requires to be run as administrator or it won't run, so I have no choice. As far as virus scanners, I have Avast!, but I have Avast! on my XP 32 machine, too.
And I don't think that's an error. I know the Updater is designed to close itself and restart itself in certain situations, such as when an updater update is launched, which isn't all that frequent. I don't know why it does it every time, however, unless it needs to restart itself with extra options or start a different version of itself.
One interesting thing I noticed when I wrestled with the bug which changed my Live shortcut to launch off my Beta folder was that the updater seems to want to create a cohupdater.something on Windows 7 64. The reason I know this is I deleted my CohBeta folder (don't need it any more), but neglected to alter my "Start in" setting on the shortcut, which still pointed to CohBeta. When the new patch tried to load, it told me the system can't access C:\...\Desktop\CohUpdater.something, and I found three empty files like that on my desktop after trying three times. Every time this occurred, it would happen when the updater closed itself, but failed to reopen with that message.
I fixed the problem by running CohUpdater.exe straight from the City of Heroes folder and subsequently by fixing my shortcut's settings. But I still think the updater creates a file when it runs on Windows 7 64 that I don't see when it runs on Windows XP 32. -
*edit*
I meant to say UPDATER, not editor in the title, but I can no longer alter the thread title to fix the goof. Sorry.
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I just want to clear something up - I'm not talking about a bug. However, every time I run the City of Heroes updater on Windows 7 64, it spends a while doing nothing, then closes itself and reopens anew, and only then does it allow me into the game. Now, originally, I thought this was just how the thing was changed to work, since I don't know how it actually works.
However, running it now on the Windows XP 32 here at work, I don't see any such thing. The updater looks for a patch, finds nothing and then proceeds into the Next -> I agree sequence in the same window. No self-closing, no self-restarting.
Why is that? -
Quote:You can try, but she has pants under hers. And she's not as tall.Originally Posted by Zikar
To Battle Maiden! She's the next best thing I guess.
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I just want to say that if I'd been allowed to just pick whatever name I wanted without the system telling me there are other people using it, I'd have ended up with much worse names on a large number of occasions.
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Quote:Valkyrie doesn't have a skirt.Originally Posted by ResidentBaka
Do you mind, Sam? We're trying to look up women's skirts here.
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I'll respec as many times as I need to, if I'm respeccing into a better build. As long as it's a no-cost improvement, I'll do the leg work to have it.
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Quote:Nemesis snipers don't have special AI, they have a passive power which immobilizes them.Originally Posted by Lycanus
Fight from position/Fight at range - the Nem sniper AI, orders pets not to chase but to stay where they are and fight with their ranged weapons (or melee if something gets close) only
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I just wanted to add in something I've been wishing for this entire time: Dual Pistols Mastery. I may need to swap out a few powers, but I'll explain why that is.
Pistols:
1. Suppressing Fire
2. Pistols
3. Swap Ammo
4. Dual Wield
5. Empty Clips
This has one more attack than most other Epics, but that's mostly because Dual Pistols doesn't really HAVE that many support powers - a total of two, in fact. I also moved an attack power up ahead because I wanted to force a pistol power to be taken BEFORE Swap Ammo became available. -
Heigh in this game doesn't matter for clearance. Your character's collision box is the same regardless of what size your model is or what your pose may be.
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Quote:I actually have to agree that more isn't always better. When I have to scour a huge list of options and yet only ever really respec, like, one or two, that's not more options. That's just more clutter. Some of the old options are just embarrassingly bed, even by the standards of 2001.Originally Posted by Commander
I know players that sit by and cry "More is better! More options is always better!" Well, it's not. If you are someone that uses any of the newer costume pieces, you can plainly see that 80% of the older files look horrible when used in conjunction. Why take a step backwards and make the newer pieces compatible with the older pieces? You're only making your characters look less than "super" when compared to the scenery (and upcoming scenery changes.)
An example? Faces. The old faces are just terrible. Sure, I use a few here and there, but MY GOD are they bad. Horribly low-res textures, very low-poly meshes... It was actually eye-opening one day when I was tabbing through the old faces when I came up to the Organic Armour face. I went from something that's blurry and unclear and obviously ye olde low-res and into Organic Armour, which had incredibly sharp lines, amazingly high-resolution texturing and really did look like a face that came out of a completely different game. A much better game. Sure, I don't like the actual face, but THIS is the level of quality the entire game should supply. This is what would make City of Heroes stand out as a game which belonged in this day and age.
I love City of Heroes to death, believe me. But even I don't want to see the old Quake 2 level costume pieces retained in the editor. They're just an embarrassment to the game.
But again, with the caveat that PATTERNS SHOULD REMAIN PATTERNS AND NOT TURN INTO TEXTURES. -
Quote:It's interesting that the first thing I tried to make in Champions Online wasn't a remake of the titular Samuel Tow, but rather a remake of Xanta, my Lineage II orc inspired giant troll woman here. Then again, the only thing the Champions Online editor had that I couldn't get here was the muscle slider (well, and the ability to buff up more), so really - that was the only thing which interested me anyway. Makes sense I'd start with that.Originally Posted by rian_frostdrake
honestly for coh, thats a victory, in most other games female is the default gender for my characters. in the competing superhero mmo, i only have 2 males, and they are a dragon and a robot. in others my rosters are entirely female.
But then, it's not just Champions. When I first tried [url=http://brutticus.mybrute.com/]MyBrute[url], Brutticus the fighter girl was the first thing I made. As I mentioned, the first time I tried Lineage II, the first thing I made was Xanta, the Orc woman, who was probably my first "giant" woman who expanded my characters in that direction. When I tried 9dragons, the first thing I made was a girl WuTang Clan warrior, though I forgot what I called her. When I tried Dragonica, the first thing I made was a remake of Brutticus as a fighter.
Hmm... That's actually a serious step sideways of what I used to do, where the first thing I always used to do was "me." I guess this loops back to my "identifying vs. cheering" debate, but I went from wanting to put myself in the the game to wanting to put people who I'd want to watch a show about in there. -
Quote:One time when I was playing a female character of mine, a guy tried hitting on her and I accidentally managed to lead him on quite a bit without realising it. I guess I'd make a good girl?Originally Posted by bunkerbuster05
I am a guy, and I roleplay. I refuse to make a female, because the first time I would get hit on, even if it wasn't for nasty nasty, just regular RP, I would be completely grossed out. That's just me. I don't want to play a girl.
It helps that this particular character, having an artificial body, tends to be very unconcerned about these things. The part that she's completely indestructible and strong enough to punch things past the sound barrier helps, too. -
Quote:This bears repeating. "Painted on" patterns over skin should not be "fixed" to be anything but higher-res patterns over skin. If "more detailed" versions of them are added, then they need to be given the "Plus treatment," in the same way as Angelic vs. Angelic Plus, Excess vs. Excess Plus, Hearts vs. Hearts plus, etc.Originally Posted by UberGuy
Please do not replace things that look "painted on" with things that do not look "painted on". This is a change in basic function of a costume piece for anyone who has intentionally gone for the "painted on" look, which is actually fairly staple of real comic graphics.
I want to retain the look of perfect body-tight spandex, even if it has to resemble bodypaint to achieve it. Better resolution, yes. Pattern to texture, NOOO! -
Quote:I disagree completely. Do not replace "painted-on clothes" with anything other than better painted-on clothes. There is a place for tops with skin textures, and there is still a place for tops with skin patterns. I do not want to have all tops and all bottoms "bonded" with the skin texture for no good reason.Originally Posted by Feycat
As far as the tank top goes... you know, I'd say replace all the "painted on" pieces for sure, but don't automatically replace them with something that looks wrinkled and curled and weird. Not everyone wants their heroes to be wearing ill-fitting clothing!
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Every time this comes up, inevitably someone brings up butt-watching or poor run animations. While I enjoy just turning on Walk and enjoying a lovely lady, I don't spend 750 hours doing that. I spend the bulk of that time killing stuff, which entails looking at my enemies, staring at my power trays, looking at my health an endurance bars, watching enemy health, surveying terrain and watching TV. I actually have to keep reminding myself to drop what I'm doing and just look at the character I'm playing. That's actually the primary reason I use Walk - to force myself to stop looking at the game pragmatically, lean back and just enjoy the costume I made. That's for characters of all genders, not just females.
Furthermore, I don't get the running animation complaints. Males may run a bit goofy, but it's still superior to the repugnant, ugly run animation females have. They bob up and down like a cork in the water, they swivel their hips for no reason and they "run with their elbows," so to speak. Every time I play a basic female character, I feel like I'm watching Peg Bundy run. Ugh! If I can, I'll try to always keep a weapon or a shield out, or otherwise constantly fly, because that running animation offends my senses.
As far as sexism goes, I can't testify to any. I used to make mostly male characters, but then Serevus showed me the plethora of amazing female designs he had. I stole a lot of his, then started making more weird concepts, and I've been experimenting with both females and males ever since. I don't know if I have an even split (I wouldn't know), but I know I don't have any preference of any specific kinds of characters requiring a specific gender. My girls range from fighters to rangers to casters to everything inbetween, and my guys are usually esoteric in some way. I have kids, I have spirits... I even have a few animals. It's too across-the-board to make any generalisations about.
However, the one instance where I WILL show sexism, though I don't know if it counts, is with "genderless" concepts. If I'm making a robot, a monster or, as of late, a swamp creature. If I have no gender characteristics to something, I'll use the basic male model as a "default humanoid shape." That doesn't mean I don't have female robots or, at the latest, a bug lady, but when I do design females, it's only if I have some reason for them to both BE and LOOK female.