Samuel_Tow

Well, the only thing I didn't like about that suggesting was that you're splitting the damage between the target and the patch, effectively requiring you to immobilize your target in the patch anyway, in the process not really helping the problem with the power in general. If you can concede to putting all the damage into the single-target portion and leaving down a Caltrops-level damage patch behind to serve as area denial, however, then I can get behind that. I get my single-target damage and people get to keep their area denial.

Or how about something else? Instead of ticking with damage on every cycle, why not have the power infect people with, say, a four-second DoT every time they walk through it like PPD Equiliser Wide-Area Web Grenade? Then anyone just passing through the patch will still incur some damage, whereas everyone immobilised in the patch will incur a LOT of damage.

...

In fact, it'd be nice if that's how Blaster damage auras worked, so that a Blaster doesn't sit his *** in melee and have it kicked in order to get any mileage out of his auras.

Can't really take credit for the dressing room idea, myself. It's something that's been floating around the forums for pretty much as long as Icon has existed, because the creator has never been wholly representative of the real game world. It was actually made worse with power customization because of how transparency works. The hero-side editor is blue, making blue powers feel more solid than they are, and whitening or blackening your background doesn't really do much to point that out. I've lost count of the number of times I've left the tailor with powers that looked solid but ended up looking about as solid as tinted cellophane.

I honestly feel we should be given a "holo" dressing room that we can change to a piece of city street, a piece of cave, a piece of lab, daytime, night time and so on, just so we can test the transparency of our powers against different backgrounds, as well as the ability to test how much powers match a costume and how much they match costume auras.

My latest creation, the eponymous Slime Girl, had a costume that was Spring Green, with Spring Green lightning. Only when night fell, her Spring Grean turned into something between Cyan and Teal, while her lightning colour remained unchanged, causing a really odd effect that the editor would never have shown me.

Oh, that and the editor will NEVER show you the bottoms of your feet. It wasn't until I'd finished the costume and ran around for a while that I realised even Tights boots have uncolourable soles. Can't see that in the editor, since you can't pan vertically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I post too much, my posts are too long, people find them boring. Welcome to last year.

I'm well aware what literal means. I'm also very convinced that I can use it in this context. I'm not speaking figuratively in the sense that it's so bad it's like I didn't see anything. The video is NOT bad. It's just the next best thing to empty. And again - it shows us nothing. Yes, people have tried to explain what it shows, I just happen to disagree that it shows any of these things in a meaningful way.

A video's point is to show us stuff. This does not, hence it's nothing. Literally nothing. You can keep on insisting on semantics argument, or you can accept it as the exaggeration it was intended to be.

And now I'm suddenly reminded of Spoony's review of the Wing Commander movie where he says "No-one saw this movie because it sucks!" I wonder if I should e-mail him saying he's either using the word "no-one" or the word "saw" wrong...

Lady Grey is fighting Rogue Vanguard that can melt Tankers, however. Last time I tried it, they were basically destroying her from full health in under five seconds. And keep in mind certain ambushes, like the one by Ning and Skun, err... I mean by Nin and Skung.

OK, this I honestly can't see. The old crashes were caused by multi-core rendering turned on (i.e. /renderthread 1) back when the game didn't officially support it, and even then it crashed, at least for me, when swapping keyboard layouts. This has been fixed and I've seen no further issues reported. When did the game crash for you and how often does it do that?

OK, I'm not sure I follow you here. Lack of Alt-Tabbing I can see, but how does having an in-game player save you from having to look through playlists? UT2004 had an in-built music player, and all that did was dump my songs in a playlist that I still had to look through, pretty much identically to how I have it set up in WinAMP. If you're talking about just loading a random song and going with it, most players I'm aware of can do that, too, without having to fiddle with play lists.

And if you wanted to play a specific song from that list, you'd still have to find it manually. Because I highly doubt you'd get as decent a jump-to-file support in a home-made music player as you do in WinAMP. Hell, the folks at Paragon Studios still can't make their text editors respect Ctrl+End and not run lines off the text box.

No, I'm not. You could turn it into a semantic argument, but it doesn't change the fact that this movie is quite literally nothing. It's empty space. It's dead air. Six seconds of nothing. Just like a person can speak for hours and hours and end up saying absolutely nothing (I should know), so this "video" is nothing. There's picture on it and there's a timer ticking, but there's nothing to see. Just in the same way as a person saying nothing is technically speaking words, he's still saying absolutely nothing.

You could have posted six seconds or random pixels or six seconds of RickRoll and it would have been the same effect. You could have posted six seconds of the Invisible Man in outer spate and it would have been about the same.

Seriously. I don't mean to crap on people's parade, because more Going Rogue information is always cool. But I'd literally have appreciated a single high-res still screenshot of the two more than that "video."

The ambushes are not the problem. Her propensity to aggro a second spawn mid-way through the fight with the previous one is what often got her, and now gets me, killed.

That's part of the problem. If you keep going to check, you have to accept that some comments are going to be unpleasant. When rep comments were being fed to our User CP, I had about one comment a week to the effect of "cermons are for the church" or "you're an idiot," but because I chose to read them, willingly and knowingly, I gave up my right to complain about what I saw. It's the equivalent of putting a poster on ignore because you don't like what he says - if you keep stealth-reading his comments and they still piss you off, that's not a problem with the system.

You are given the tools to ignore reputation. Actually, no. You ignore reputation by default, but are given the tools to see it if you really want to. If it bothers you, don't look at it. If you choose to look at it, you need to accept the consequences. You can't have it both ways.

And if you think removing the anonymity will make the comments stop, you only need to look at this thread to see that this couldn't be farther from the truth. The whole of the Internet represents anonymity. The people who don't care about being ******** aren't going to care about sullying a moniker on an internet forum, and people like me who stick to what they say aren't likely to make use of anonymity to begin with.

All of that said, I don't leave rep comments outside of specific outliers, like bigots or racists or such. If I have a problem with a post, I say so. It stems from my disrespect for reputation. If I ignore its meaningfulness, it doesn't make sense for me to rate people. It's like saying you hate the Internet on an Internet forum.

P.S.
I will say one thing, though - if you want to feel good in the forums, you basically have to make a point out of it, as people here are very responsive to these kinds of things. But if you expect the forums as a general thing to be relaxing and reassuring, this is very much a vain hope. If anything, the forums are a stressful place that's liable to ruin your fun of the actual game, and that's not a a criticism of the people involved. The forums are only interesting when there's an argument, otherwise there's not much point in posting the obvious, and arguments are simply tiring and dreary, especially when people get entrenched.

Maybe I'm just immune to fun, but I don't find this place to be relaxing in the slightest. Fun, sure. Often exciting. But not relaxing.

*edit*
See what I mean?

It's not just walking up walls, it's the ability to transition between different angles of incline, which is something the engine doesn't currently do, nor indeed something which would look good if it did it, not with the complicated, fiddly terrain we now have. The ground has a universal orientation: down is down, up is up. You can't give walls that kind of orientation because they vary far too much, and you can't just go off polygon orientation because a lot of locations have polygon widths smaller than our character's footprint. How would you feel if you went through horizontal every time you went up a sidewalk?

The other problem is clutter on the waylls. We've all seen that a curb a couple of inches tall is too tall for us to walk and we need to jump it. Even assuming we can jump OFF a wall, rather than UP from a wall, you still have the problem of falling DOWN not towards the wall.

This also brings in the can of worms which is vertical-less travel. Right now, jumping is the equivalent of flying straight up with some degree of horizontal movement along the way. If you're jumping off walls, then presumably this would be the equivalent of jumping not up, but off the wall, so inclined sideways, which will either need to be several motions at once or rotate our axis of "upness" in ways the engine currently has no precedent for.

To put it in a nerdier way, what we have now is reminiscent of a character-centric polar coordinate system, whereas what would be needed for wall-running to work is a spherical coordinate system.

And what difference does that make? I saw them rendered in-game, and, shockingly, they look exactly like their matte paintings, which were no doubt made after the in-game models.

And how much of that did you see? I had to watch the movie something like three times just to spot what's in the background, and in the end... It's just more white buildings. I guess I might be excited about them once I'm in-game looking at them for myself, but seeing split-second glimpses of them is hardly news. Especially considering this whole place looks like the mock-up of Praetoria they've been showing around since very much the first day, that place with the tall tower and plaza in front of it.

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Really, I get that it's "something new," but are we really THAT desperate for more Going Rogue stuff that we'll jump at what is literally and figuratively NOTHING? Maybe I'm biassed, considering the zillions of "Where's mah GR info!?!" threads a few months back did little more than irritate me. Maybe I'm immune to hype. I don't know. But if this were another trailer, a developer walkthrough, a movie that breaks at least a minute's worth of footage, maybe I'd be excited. But a 6-second spin around two characters that have no business standing back-to-back? Ugh...

This is the equivalent of that Half-Life 2 pre-alpha that got leaked, like, a year before the game's release, only it's even LESS.

My biggest fear is damaging my expensive hardware, my desk, or possibly my the bones in my hand, really.

Personally, I don't mind creativity as such, and if this is even possible and, indeed, doesn't bog down the servers, then I have little problem with it as a solution. It still leaves niggling problems like the fairly un-useful Ignite and Lackluster Full Auto, but then it gives the set more punch in single target.

As far as this goes, my biggest worry is balance. You say even centre-line damage would not be as good or efficient as single-target damage, but the problem is that there really isn't a very good middle ground between what we have now and single-target efficiency that people will actually notice.

See, AR's central problem is single-target damage, which only more single target damage can fix, but if you're scaling these changes to prevent cones from being useful as single target damage powers, then you're not really solving the problem, and if you DO scale them as single-target attacks, then you make them overpowered as AoEs. A set with lots of poor attacks will always underperform compared to a set with a few good ones. You're just making it underperform less, which is better, but still not good enough.

If we want to "fix" Assault Rifle, then we'll need need a decisive fix which will make a difference. Just tuning things up won't do the trick. And I'm not sure there's a good balancing point in giving powers extra narrow-cone damage without them being either underpowered or overpowered.

Easy example - look at Piercing Rounds. It does pretty much exactly what you're suggesting, and it's balance is... Ugh! Don't remind me. Good if you can hit multiple people, but it's so costly, slow and inefficient that you're really not going to rely on it to help you with single-target damage any more than you'll rely on Flamethrower to do that. And considering my AR Blaster actually does just that, it should be evident how sad the situation is.

Cottage or no cottage, a power in Assault Rifle will need to give. Maybe it'll be Ignite, maybe it'll be Buckshot... Maybe it'll be Sniper Rifle, who knows? But a power needs to become tangibly better for the set to really shine outside of nuking things on a large team.

Stabbing in the dark here, but there ought to be a way to target an entity directly by addressing its unique identifier, rather than indirectly by reading its identifier from a target area. How it's coded in City of Heroes I haven't a clue, but I would assume that a power listed as single-target simply doesn't read off the radius field.

It doesn't really serve as precedent, but back in Dual Pistols Beta, Arcana went through the process for applying XX times chance for YY DoT, where it was said that leaving the chance field blank made the power simply skip the effect's to-hit roll. Granted, it's possible single-target is just AoE with an arc of 360 and a range of 0 just like how a "melee" attack is a ranged attack with a range of 7 feet and hard-coded immunity to range-altering effects. It's possible, but it seems unlikely to me, as then it would view "pseudo AoEs" as powers centred on the area an NPC is occupying and taking the reference of the NPC in the area they are called upon, which is doable, but a very roundabout way of doing things, when simply addressing the target NPC directly and then centring an AoE around it if necessary seems more intuitive.

Then again, as Arcana likes to say, when we guess at how things work, we're always wrong, so who knows? It just seems odd to go the roundabout way of targeting a single NPC when you can treat your target differently from everything else in range.

As I understand it, cones are rigged the same as AoEs centred around the player, but affecting only a specific slice of the full circle centred around the line between caster and target. More specifically, the "range" of a cone power is actually completely independent of the radius of the cone. They're usually the same, because otherwise it's problematic, but they don't have to be, and in fact a few times bugs have given powers different ranges, causing a cone to activate but do nothing.

This is actually further proof that single targets are handled differently from targets caught in area effects, as the distance to a target for cone attacks is clearly calculated differently from the distance a cone is able to affect targets at. Then again, it's possible this is a necessary kludge with how cones are rigged and not evidence of how the system operates behind the scenes. I wish Castle would come down to explain, but historically he has been reluctant to just sit down and detail the minutia of the powers system in great detail without a good reason.

No, seriously. Can you formulate an explanation as to why that has any point? It doesn't matter if I agree with you or not. I just want to see what advantage an in-game music player has over currently functional, perfectly free third party players.

Since when does six seconds of absolutely nothing count as a video? This one has nothing that we haven't seen in the various screenshots, only it has Desdemona doing the /em cutthroat emote. I don't mean to be a dick here, but this "video" is just empty space.

Well, I guess if I'd never seen absolutely anything else about Going Rogue ever it could be great, but I've seen the promos, I've seen the trailers, I've seen the screenshots, I've seen the site. So, yeah... Not really excited about a six-second screenshot.

That's basically the only way to keep Lady Grey alive in her respective escort mission, but I don't consider that one anything less than completely broken, even after her hit points were raised above those of a lieutenant. Any time you have to circumvent intended design and you have to actually DREAD rescuing the person you were sent to rescue, that's bad design in its purest form. It shouldn't be like this.

It's kind of like Yahtzee's review of Resident Evil 5 and his tales of how he ran away from his partner brandishing an expensive large herb with more terror than he felt from any of the monsters. When you're more afraid of completing the game's objectives than you are of facing the game's enemies, something is seriously wrong.

You know, I never bought the complaints with rep comments. Before when they actually showed up, you had to expressly go to your User CP and scroll down to read them, in essence specifically going to look what other people have to say about you. Now that that's gone, the only way to see rep comments left for you is to specifically check the rep for every post you have made, several days after you made it, by trying to rep your own posts. And that's if you even know that trying to rep yourself will actually show you your post's current reputation and comments.

Do you have any concept how much work and commitment that is? I don't remember half the posts I make in any given day, or the places I put them, and on the off chance I remember to check for rep, there usually just isn't any. And even then, I have multiple posts in a thread spread over multiple pages, so checking them all on the off chance that one has a message from someone saying I suck is so much work I am NOT willing to do it.

If you're systematically checking and rechecking all your several-days-old posts and looking for rep comments on them, then you have no ground to complain about the things you find. There is no excuse for why you couldn't avoid seeing them, when you have to go so far out of your way to see them you end up in another state altogether.

If rep comments bother you, then stop going back to your old posts and checking for them.

You can't really make that argument for your allies and your foes and not make it for yourself. And if you make it for yourself, then the whole game becomes pointless, because who cares what happens to my character when there's an infinite number of duplicates around the multiverse?

That specific double is given characterisation, is a recurring character and is shown to have a strong personality. You can claim there are others like it, but they're not THIS particular clone. Furthermore, you can make the same argument about twins. Though they may look alike, they are not interchangeable.

In fact, I'd go as far as to state this as a rule of general fiction - once a particular character has been singled out of a mass, given characterisation and developed a history of actions, this character stops being just a faceless goon out of that mass. You can take your typical faceless mook army, grab a soldier from there and give him enough screen time for him to distinguish himself, and then you have another "faced" character, despite there being nothing to distinguish him physically. It's basically what Genndy Tartakovsky's Staw Wars: Clone Wars is built on, and unlike the 3D "The Clone Wars" cartoon, his clone troopers don't speak and never remove their helmets, yet because we keep focusing on a specific platoon and their commander, they develop into recurring characters for whom death is not cheap.

Basically, if you give a character enough screen time, you HAVE to do something with said character. You can't just go "Oh, well." and drop a bridge on him for no reason. Granted, that's more or less what happens to the double here, but at least the narrative tries to make a point out of it, rather than just shrugging its shoulders.

Are you sure about that? I've never heard that, but I've been wrong before. Are we sure there's still a radius measurement at all?

I say this because I know auto-hit powers don't just have very high accuracy, they simply skip their to-hit check.

The developers never said "never" on these things. Plenty of players did, however. Whether out of spite, out of ignorance or out of wishful thinking, I don't know, but many did indeed say that. They were proven wrong, obviously, but that doesn't change the fact that this was said.

*edit*
I don't think many posts still exist that are five and six years old with all the purges, forum changes database problems, and even if they did, that's posts numbering in the millions. Going through millions of posts five years old to find an offhand comment by a person who hasn't posted since 2007 isn't really something you can reasonably ask people to do.