Samuel_Tow

That, ultimately, is the critical problem with bags of hit points. For the people who aren't strong enough, it's a no-win situation. For the people who ARE strong enough, it's just tedious. Essentially, a no-win situation.

This actually confounds me to no end. The developers have proven that they can make cool, entertaining, interesting and engaging content... And they just choose not to, again and again. A boss battle doesn't need to be ball-bustingly tough in order to be fun. In fact, after a certain point, toughness just makes it worse. A boss battle needs to be interesting, and while I don't expect every newspaper to end in a clever puzzle, you could at least make your new flagship TF a little more interesting than an AV brawl.

And again - required-AT gimmicks need to die in a fire, right alongside simuclick missions (those aren't fun even on a team!). This is the quintessential, most crucial failure of this game's balance and the balance of its encounters. It all comes down to what you BRING and almost never down to what you DO. Needing a Stalker to take and use a specific power is just bad design. If you needed a Stalker to actually go out and DO something useful for the team above and beyond his state of being a Stalker, that might count, but AT-specific powers? No. Just... No.

For the umpteenth time: Hydra Trial! And possibly Eden Trial, as well, I haven't done it yet. These are great. Did the person who make them die or something?

It's the math surrounding them that I'm not familiar with. Trigonometry in general is less about knowing the functions and more about knowing how to combine them, and I just don't.

Well, of course, but David already pretty much stated that this is not likely to happen, which we should probably read as "forget about it." That said, what are our options?

1. Brand new animations? Not gonna' happen.
2. What we have right now? Works, but looks BAAAD!
3. Some tweak of the geometry without altering the rig? Possible, but it's limited by the rig itself.
4. Some kind of faux recalculation of the leg bones? Not ideal, but it's certainly better than what we have.

So, yeah, it's probably not what I'd wish for if I had SantaChrist's ear, but of the options that seem at least rational (which is funny, talking about irrational numbers), this one looks like the one that has the potential to produce the most interesting visuals without actually requiring reanimating EVERYTHING for.

Of course, one has to wonder if the technology to recalculate bones on the fly like this even exists, but if it did, I'd go for it

You'd have a leg to stand on if I were disagreeing that there is a problem with that. I don't. I freely admit that there probably is one, even if it's not one I personally care about. There's a problem and that's that. What I'm disagreeing with is the way to go about addressing it, and starting with stating all the reasons why you're entitled to it is just not something I find to be productive, and is something I would actually see as VERY counter-productive in general.

Maybe I'm a contrary person, but while I respond well to reasoned arguments, I have the tendency to see "You're a horrible person!" arguments and instinctively react with "Oh, yeah?!? You and what army!"

Ouch... That actually explains a lot. The whole ending of the TF always felt like someone stuck a band aid on a gunshot wound, but knowing it used to be a 120 howitzer hole...

Yeah, that about sums it up. It feels like it was written by someone who knew City of Heroes existed and may have actually played a few missions, but didn't have the first idea about what any of the characters were supposed to represent, who they were or what their motivations were. I mean, seriously. This is on par with the "Hamidon is a what what of what?!?" incident, only this was an offhand promo comment and this is a piece of flagship content.

That whole TF is just... Dear Lord! Why is Reichsman working FOR the 5th Column when in the past they've done their best to work for his Axis Amerika? Why is he wearing a 5th Column uniform coming out of the vat? Or indeed at all? Wouldn't he want an Axis Amerika uniform. Whoever wrote him doesn't seem to have grasped the difference between the 5th Column and Axis Amerika, in that there isn't anything other than ideology common between them. They're not the same thing.

If this is the past 5th Column, where is past Requiem, the one we fight in the Imperious TF? What was he even trying to achieve? Where did the current Requiem come from? Did he go into the past to set up the 5th Column and then leave them to their own devices? Is he commuting between timelines, swapping uniform AND POWER ORIGINS back and forth?

And that's without even touching on the huge frikkin MESS that is the Council storyline... Ugh, I'm starting to wish for another retcon again...

You know what WOULD be fun, though? If we had Requiem in the bubble, then he's released to fight us, only he says "Ha! The 5th Column is MINE! You can't have it!" and actually fights on our side. Be fun to see Reichsman go O.O

Thing is, before someone wiped his *** with the Ubelmann arc and turned into a story about somebody's grandma, this is exactly how he was depicted. Requiem basically set up Ubelmann to take the fall and NOT change the world to where the Nazi won, because Requiem is hypocrite. He wants "his 5th Column" because he wants power, and he's more than willing to sacrifice ideology for it. So it makes sense that he wouldn't support Reichsman who will basically either take his Column or bring about a Nazi future where his Column is insignificant. Requiem has even more reason to want Reichsman to fall than we do.

Plus having an AV's plan backfire in actual gameplay, as opposed to clue-based writing, is a cool gimmick

You're really talking to the wrong guy on that front. If by "on life support" you mean "few people are on," then I honestly wouldn't know. The US servers could have no-one on them and it'd probably take me a year before I noticed. I didn't stick to the US servers because of the population. I stuck with them because I never saw a POINT in having an EU version in the first place, and I still don't. I don't know why WoW has an EU version, either. I just don't get it.

Unless I REALLY wanted to take part in contests (which I don't) or had to have items mailed to me (and... why would I?), what's the difference what version it says on the box? You can buy the game online (you always could), you can register online, you can download it online, you can play it online. Why should actual location even matter, outside of irritating me with pointless localisation that causes me to spend money on items I can't use?

Look, I'm right there with you - I want to see the EU servers added to the list right along with the US ones. Considering both games run the exact same client, I don't see why this complete incompatibility even exists.

*edit*
And, yeah. Ideally, I do.

Yeah, and then there's that

My point precisely. Questions as to the point of the European Lounge notwithstanding, OF COURSE you will get low traffic there, as European players will obviously post elsewhere, too. It's like the old CoV board. Only villain players really went to the CoV boards, whereas both hero AND villain players went to the CoH board, so of course to CoV one was barren and empty. And not only will people naturally gather where people gather already, but you had the double-whammy of pissy CoV players insulting you when you went there, as though playing heroes makes me some kind of pariah who is incapable of comprehending their deep emotional turmoil.

That's kind of what bugs me here. Yes, this is a low-popularity issue both because EU population is lower in general (a vicious circle, I admit) and because EU players do more than just post about it. So you REALLY don't want to add insult to injury by throwing around bad attitudes and presumptuous accusations. I would never try to shut a disaffected customer up, but I honestly don't this has the effect you hope it will if it generates responses like "Not sure if serious."

The worst thing you can do with a legitimate complaint is present it in such a way that makes you come off as a troll, and believe me - this is the LAST thing the EU problem needs right now.

Hence why I said a smarter man I never got the grasp of secant functions or how they work. There's theory I could read up on, I suppose, but I remember being really "scared" of them back in the day.

I guess it's a question of computing time. Do those look like they're very slow to calculate? I mean, slow enough to cause performance degradation? Do we even know how often skeletal positions are recalculated? I would stab-in-the-dark guess once per frame, which would put them at 60 times a second, and I guess speed would depend on the proficiency of whatever internal calculator is used.

However, you have to admit that as far as infeasible rudimentary kludges go, this one is pretty creative

*note*
I actually came up with another biology problem when thinking about this. If we map the digitigrade to to the plantigrade heel, then the digitigrade leg would be standing on air when the plantigrade foot is standing on its toes. If we map the digitigrade toes to the plantigrade toes, then the digitigrade foot will always be forward of where it ought to be (and look like the character is leaning back), and it would STILL look odd if the character stood on his heels.

Then again...

This already happens. For instance, try this - play a Monster Legs character and hit rest. This has your left foot standing on its toes with the heel in the air. Your hoof/claw will end up staying up in the air. That's in-game right now, so I intend to use it as precedent. Furthermore, I talked about problems with crouching, but there are problems with crouching right now. Kneeling to rest will have your digitigrade heel clip clean through your thigh, folding your knee a full 180 degrees which no believable knee joint should allow. Again, it doesn't look good, but I'm using it as precedent.

I honestly wouldn't be too opposed to this, provided they drop the concept of ridiculous offence along with the concept of ridiculous hit points. There is NOTHING WORSE than the intangible Thorn Tree in the Villain Respec trial that you have to run in plain sight of, taking huge damage while not even being able to taunt it. Why do boss fights always have to come with such ridiculous damage output, anyway?

I mean, if you have to run around blowing up generators to drop his shields, then cull in his offence until his shields drop and THEN he lets rip, but doesn't just murder the team while they're going about their tasks.

Again, a lot like the Hydra Head. Yes, if you approach it it will smoke you, but you can take down the shield generators without having to face the head, itself, instead fighting lots of Rikti, perplexingly all bosses.

Neither stupid amounts of hit points nor stupid amounts of damage points are integral to a good boss encounter.

Yes, I was replying to the OP. I neglected to put in a quote.

Even if the answer is "none," do you feel like snark and trying to tell them who pays their salaries will increase that?

There's no counterpoint to make. I sympathise with the plight of the EU side of the game. I knew it was a huge mistake as soon as I heard about it, and I had to turn down several offers to move to the EU side of the game. They were really recruiting back then, but there wasn't any point. There has never been any point. That much ought to be obvious now.

However, I see complaints of lack of forum activity on the EU forums, which is actually made by PLAYERS going there, making me wonder why other European players felt the need to have "their own" forum when that's pretty much what I expected to happen to it. I simply instantly lose respect for complaints, even when they may be valid, when they come off as a snarky rant.

The EU game servers are on life support as opposed to... What, exactly? New development? That's being handled as part of updates for the entire game. What, are they crashing often and no-one is fixing the hardware or something? What do you expect to happen to the servers?

My God... Why would you even think that? I'm not trying to be a dick and insult you here. I REALLY feel bad for you if you actually waited for the stupid mistake that was the EU version, but why would you? It was clear from all of the promos and all of the talk that it would have fewer servers, more localisation support I doubt you'd care about and basically cut down what the US version offered significantly while offering practically nothing in return. Local customer support is not needed, local time is meaningless and, especially for me, localisation is a BAD thing, because I'm neither English nor French nor German. I live in Eastern Europe, so there's fat lot of chance of a localised version in MY language, and I wouldn't want it even if there were.

THAT you can blame on PlayNC, because they basically conned people into switching to the EU version, and I don't know why. That's not even the extent of it. They keep forcing localisation in EVERYTHING. The PlayNC Store always defaults me to the EU version, offering me booster packs that I can't apply on my game, as if trying to trick me into ripping myself off. We made a stink before, so they added Game Title (Europe) to the end of each title so we know what we're buying, but there isn't even THAT any more. All the new booster packs are titled as just their name, with the only clue they're EU being that they're priced in Euros. And there isn't even the "US Version Also Available" link on them, either. I had to wait for a US player to post a PlayNC Store link before I could order mine.

And now the main site constantly redirects me to the EU version despite me owning the US one, showing me server status for servers I don't have access to. And to make matters worse, the little flag at the top didn't use to work at all until we made a stink about it.

Dear Lord, people! Enough with the localisation crap!

OK... I kind of agree with you here

You know, last time I suggested... Pretty much exactly that, people came out of the woodwork to jump on my back with crampons and a bag of dumbbells. Guess it was my mistake to post it in the Blaster forum

I very much do agree with this, however. I've been saying it for years - Snipes are NOT useful as often as they're made to recharge. In fact, they recharge faster than Scrapper and Tanker big-hitters, which are 20 seconds and over. For something that's designed to be used at the start of combat and EXPLICITLY designed to discourage in-combat use, there's no reason for the power to recharge so quickly. The game doesn't "want" you to use it every 14 seconds, so all that does is lead to a power that does very little damage, yet takes FOREVER to animate.

I'd be hesitant to go as high as Energy Transfer damage, but why not? I would KILL for a powerful sniper that was worth using at the start of combat and was a good use of buff duration. I can live with its interruptibility, I can live with its animation time, I can deal with all that if only the power did decent damage. And it just doesn't. Not by a longshot.

In fact, I've been casting an envious eye at Dominators over the buff they got to their snipes, which was basically just that - they went up to 3.56 scale damage and got a corresponding increase of cost and recharge. Actually, Dominators do more damage with their snipes right now than Blasters do, which makes me O.o

Someone mentioned "ranged assassin's strike," and while I wouldn't go quite as far as THAT, I wouldn't mind going half-way. Currently, Assassin's Strikes deal a total of scale 7.0 damage with a damage mod of 1.0 on a Stalker. A Blaster shooting at 3.56 with a damage mod of 1.125 would be doing around a comparable 4.0 scale damage, which sounds like a good deal for an AT that has no practical protection available to it. Be a good use of buff time, too. Better than just cycling T1 and T2 blasts, possibly.

That's been a popular quandary and a popular complaint pretty much since Defiance first came out. I don't think we've ever gotten a real answer to it, but given how much Snipes suck, I doubt too many people still care. Which is a pity, because they have the potential to be really cool, rather than a cheap, unnecessary gimmick.

I doubt it makes enough of a difference between us. I have mine double-slotted for slow (a convention I picked up from SOs which may no longer be relevant) so I'm sure we're both below the speed floor for critters on that one. I honestly don't know why you're able to keep them burning when I'm not, but even at floor speed, they're still able to leave the burn patch within around a second, suffering at most a quarter to a third damage. Granted, that's still not bad, but given my other arsenal of AoE, it's really nothing to write home about.

In my experience, the only real use for Ignite has been to damage a single enemy if I can keep it there for the Burn patch's full duration, and even then it's not THAT great since I waste SO MUCH TIME doing it I could have done about as much... If I had the powers to do it with, with AR/Devices simply does not. If I'd gone with another secondary, like Electric, I'd be able to outdamage Ignite by several times just using melee attacks, which is why my Electric/Electric Blaster doesn't suck as much as my AR/Dev.

I keep hearing about Ignite's use as area denial, but every time I've tried to use it, enemies have taken two steps out of the patch and kept shooting at me. It's even worse with Caltrops on, as they stop IMMEDIATELY upon leaving the patch, whereas unimpeded they tend to run around for something like 10-20 feet before turning around. Caltrops themselves don't do much to mitigate incoming damage. Enemies do try to run around on them, but as soon as their attacks recharge, they just turn around to shoot at me, actually achieving no reduction in damage. It keeps enemies away from me, sure, but Hover does that more reliably, and a Trip Mine at my feet does even better than that

I honestly feel that Ignite needs either a change or a buff of some kind, because it's just too eccentric a power in a set that really can't afford an empty power pick. If this were, say, Fire Blast, I could see an esoteric power like this, but AR is hurting for single-target attacks big-time.

Easier to implement workaround kludges are a lot less likely to be accepted over a decent, working, stable alternative with much more expandability. With just the power customization we have now, the developers have proven they're willing to take the high road, so we should be aiming for that.

Besides, temporary power jet packs have HORRIBLE positioning. They don't account for model dimensions at all, meaning they hover off of your back if you're tiny and sink into your shoulder blades if you're huge. And it's horribly ugly. This is not a solution. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it's a bug that needs to be re-fixed if and when they institute proper back details. And even then, having tempermanent jet packs is rather a few steps worse than having PERMANENT jet packs.

That said, I agree with you on the notion of power pool customization. It's something BABs has said he's looking into (or at least alluded to it) and travel powers would and should receive very high priority. However, when you make suggestions for customization, keep one thing in mind: You CANNOT change the functionality of the powers. So a Super Jump where you crouch before you leap is out of the question, as it would have to delay your jump, and customization can't and shouldn't do that.

Beyond that, different animations for flying, jumping and running are a must, as are different effects for them. Fire teleportation, ice flight and "blur" super speed are just some of the MANY effects we could have, and I certainly hope they jam in as many of those as they can think of.

Or Windows 7 x64. Or wasn't something like five years old. Or wasn't bugged to make bad imports...

I agree with you completely

Having made a DVD is superior to getting a torrent. Not having made a DVD, however, makes burning one impossible when you lack the software, and people tend to not make backups of games they're leaving when they think they're leaving for good. At least the people I know.

Actually, you just gave me an idea. Elves are usually written with a sort of "royal aristocracy" mentality which seems to value status and the more intangible qualities the most. It would be fun to actually tie an elf to Leninist and Marxist ideology, just as a break with tradition, and it would actually go a long way towards threading all the random ideas I had on the subject into a coherent whole.

...

Do you realise you're running the risk of giving me ANOTHER character before Going Rogue comes out? This is scary!

The thing here is that the story didn't HAVE to be paper thin. Yeah, we're all too eager to turn on the other contacts, but I dare say it's because they're intentionally written as jerks, idiots, or both, as is the case with Black Scorpion. We're meant to feel animosity for them, and the story is pretty heavy-handed about making sure we do. Ghost Widow is the one character who is written as sympathetic, and to give her the WEAKEST excuse to betray he is just bad storytelling. You don't build a character for sympathy and then just stomp on said character for no reason whatsoever. City of Villains is depressing enough without MORE pointless crushing of dreams.

More specifically, the story point sucks because, yet again, IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS! There are dozens of legitimate reasons to convince a player to choose to do this, even if there is no practical choice in the matter. Or if you're going to go the crapsack world needlessly depressing approach, then at least give me a choice in the matter.

Yeah, Daos does what he's told. Yeah, Recluse needs her dead more than alive. Yeah, Arachnos threatens to beat me up. So? Let 'em. The game can use a bit more confrontation that's instigated by our characters, rather than instigated by the contacts where we're sent as their agents. Daos says "Jump!" I say "You and what army!" I'm roped into a needlessly difficult fight and I instantly feel better about the world around me. That is, as far as I'm concerned, what a good story should be ABOUT.

They don't have to be, because as far as I'm aware, you're never told what you THINK and what you WANT, only what you KNOW. And please understand I mean no offence when I say this, but what you know is easily predictable because what you know is what the game tells you. The game tells you "this is a switch, but you don't know what it does." Later on you find a sign on a door that says "press switch to open door" and the game tells you "you remember seeing a switch earlier on." This is not bad writing. This is basic description of events as they happen, because I'd struggle to think of a good reason why NOT remembering the switch would be terribly important.

I can't speak for the hero-side missions, because they honestly aren't, but the villain-side missions very much are. D-Mac's sole purpose in life seems to be asking you what YOU want, helping you sort out the problems with your clone and basically serving as errand boy for any information you need to know. Basically, every time you pay D-Mac a visit, it's because YOU need HIM to do something, not the other way around. In fact, outside of the very FIRST mission about encountering the invulnerable dude, he doesn't even think for himself. It's what you want, what you need, what you're after. He's just there to provide.

Later on, Leonard's is even more about you. He basically spends two missions telling you "We need this, we need that." and then basically says "We'll handle the rest. You kick your feet up." Pretty much the rest of the missions from there is YOU going out to find out a few secrets behind his back because YOU want to find out the secrets, not because someone told you you should find them. And my jaw actually dropped when I got Dean in my nav window, because I was just wondering how I would find that information. Well, obviously, call D-Mac and have him find it for me. Of course!

Sure, the arcs do go out of their way to tell me what I want and what I'm after, but I can easily deal with that as long as the story is about what my character wants and what my character is after. I'd sooner have a story be about me even if I don't get to pick how I'm depicted than have a story that I'm unimportant to that's generic. If I want generic stuff, I'll run paper missions or go streethunt.

*edited to snip the animation*

You know... On the one hand, I agree with you completely, but on the other hand, I keep wondering if there isn't a systemic solution to this. Practically, there most probably isn't, but at least theoretically, there might actually be. consider the following rig for one leg:

You have a hip joint with three axes of rotation.
You have a knee joint with one axis of rotation.
You have an ankle joint with, err... Is that one or two axes of rotation?
You have "a toe joint" which I'd actually give a full two axes of rotation.

Now, swapping in a digitigrade leg, you can actually re-map the joints as follows:

Digitigrade hip maps to plantigrade hip.
Digitigrade knee maps to nothing at all, but is calculated.
Digitigrade ankle maps to nothing at all, but is calculated.
Digitigrade toes map to plantigrade ankle.
Nothing maps to plantigrade knee, but digitigrade knee and ankle are calculated from it.
Nothing maps to plantigrade toes. Joint is not used.

This actually gives us a fairly straightforward mathematical problem, defined as such:

Define a transformation from plantigrade hip, knee and ankle orientation to digitigrade hip, knee, ankle and toe orientation, ensuring that the angle between digitigrade thigh and shin is equal to the angle of digitigrade shin and foot at all times. Map thigh and foot orientation directly.

This should actually be geometrically solvable, stated like this, at least if give the give the plantigrade thigh joint a normal vector (basically, a direction which tells is which way the broad side of the bone is facing). With this, it's fairly easy to define a plane foe the digitigrade leg to be drawn in, and with defined thigh and toe joint for it and the rule of always keeping the angles on the leg equal, it's mechanically simple to recalculate a new leg. You can then calculate the angle of the digitigrade toes off the foot by taking the angle of the plantigrade angle off its shin and adapting the calculations.

The best part about this is that we actually eliminate all the subjective variables. By defining a plane to draw the digitigrade leg into and fixing its "start and end" joints, there really is relatively little judgement to be had into the calculation, just a lot of analytical geometry and possibly vector mathematics. It also transforms what is ostensibly a 3D problem into a 2D solution with an added definition of the 2D space (plane). The reason this is possible is that the knee only has one axis of rotation, so thigh and shin will ALWAYS be in the same plane.

I can actually formulate this mathematically if anyone REALLY cares, as well as probably type out the exact equations. Somehow, I highly doubt people would be lining up to read that, though

Now, of course, whether this would actually LOOK GOOD is a legitimate question, but I suspect it would look about as passable as a fixed ankle joint on a digitigrade foot.

*edit*
Yano... When I got down to do some math on this, I ran into a little problem, and it's not the math. It's more a problem of biology. As a human, I can crouch down by bacisally sitting on my heels with my toes extended as far up as they will go, and I'm pretty much down to the ground because my feet are so short. A digitigrade can't do this. If they sit on their heels, as it were, they are quite a ways off the ground, pretty much the height of their feet, which on a digitigrade is significant. For such an animal to actually get low to the ground, it must do what Standing Cat did and basically put the whole foot flat on the ground. However, when you do this, when you have your creature do this, its toes are no longer under its butt, they're far, FAR forward, kind of like a human squatting, only much farther forward because of the much longer foot.

The reason this is a problem is that I'm trying to map plantigrade ankle to digitigrade toes, but we can sit on our ankles, whereas digitigrades physically cannot sit on their toes. I played around with the IK tool in Flash, and when I put in the proper joint restrictions, this is what I found out. Digitigrade legs are physically incapable of doing some of the things plantigrade legs are, at least if we want to remap animations joint-for-joint. It's mathematically calculable if you disregard joint rotation limits, but with them... Not so much.

Now, there IS a way to get the same poses to work for both plantigrade and digitigrade legs, but this involves some truly bizarre biology, and in a thread that includes things like succubuses, drenai and lizardmen, that's saying something. Basically, if the creature's shin bone were TWICE the length of its thigh and leg bones, then simple geometry would put the toes right under the butt with the legs folded in, but... Does anyone actually think such a travesty would look good? Because I have my doubts.

*edit*
Well... You be the judge. I can't say it looks as bad as I thought it would, but at the same time, I can't honestly say it looks GOOD. And if THAT'S what it takes to have interchangeable animations, then no, I don't think a direct copy is PHYSICALLY possible. Forget technical issues. The bone structure of such a character would simply not allow it.

Incidentally, would anyone have a good answer to the following two questions:

1: Are human thighs and shins the same length?
2: For a given thigh and shin length (call it 50-50), what length digitigrade legs would you use?

The first one is just me being curious, but the second one is THE showstopper at the moment. I tried equal length bones at two-thirds the length (so around 30-30-30 thigh-shin-foot), producing the problem in the first edit. But maybe it's my lack of imagination causing it, so I'd like to know what people imagine. For reference, I'd eyeball the length of limbs in City of Heroes to around 5:3:3 thigh:shin:foot, which looks really awkward to me.