Samuel_Tow

Exactly

To be honest, though, I'm not so hung up on actually being able to see my reflection in the guy's *** so much as I want to see the metallic textures still shiny in black, which they currently are not. Think Gish, as an example.

By the way, here's something I should probably mention - specular reflections. We don't seem to have too many of them in City of Heroes, and they REALLY add a lot to the shininess of objects. I haven't seen them too much in 3D graphics, but I've seen them a lot in painted artwork, especially well-drawn black-and-white manga. Abusing specular reflections can make an object seem more shiny than even a mirror reflective surface will.

I can't blame you. It's a question of taste and preference, and it may well be just a guy thing. I've already expressed inability to see men as cheesecakes, so I can imagine women have the same response to other women. Imagine, as in "guess." No hard data here. I've also seen a fair number of people, both men and women, express dislike for revealing concepts for women. In fact, I have a friend who's a guy that I had to spend probably a year suggesting concepts to before he conceded in making a more revealing female concept, because he just felt uncomfortable with it.

Speaking as... Basically a former prude, myself, I can certainly understand this. I've never been a fan of things like high heels, short skirts (or skirts in general), cheesecake costumes and so forth. I always saw those as insulting and objectifying, to be honest. But over the years playing this game, I basically wanted to try a little of everything, and I can definitely say there are tasteful ways to go about it.

Of course, there are tasteless ways to go about it, too, and some concepts just call for exactly these

I'm sorry, but that's an infinite monkey argument. It's also a very serious assumption that 1% of costume combinations will yield naughty pictures. I can state with a pretty serious degree of certainty that NO combination of patters can produce anything that can be unambiguously described as offensive. You calculated over a hundred million permutations. Can you cite even ONE instance of an offensive possibility?

Because bare bones stats are kind of uninformative here. Allow me to demonstrate. Pick a Tights chest. You cited 88 patterns. Each of those patterns can take two colours. Each colour is picked from a selection of 12x10, or 120 colours. So that's 120x120x88, or 1 267 200. If just 1% of that are offensive, that's 67 200 offensive combos. Here's the thing - NONE of them are, and that's provable by definition. No single pattern is offensive, and what you colour them doesn't matter. You can't just assert that a system of multiple patterns will produce offensive images with no evidence that that's even possible. Proof by not knowing does not work.

Incidentally, how DID you get 100 million on your combination? 88 options combined with 88 options combined with 291 options is 88x88x291 = 2 253 504.

That's something I've always maintained, especially from the viewpoint of a new player. We hate the low levels not because the low levels such (not by too much), but because we're used to how the high levels play and we're trying to apply that level of performance to a stage in the game where it really doesn't belong. I don't doubt this could be achieved, but I feel it would be a great disservice to the game. A sense of progress is, to me at least, one of the BIGGEST motivating factors for playing an RPG. If anything, with its scaling mechanic, City of Heroes has a bit too little of that.

Basically, it comes down to thinking "Man, I can do so many things I couldn't even imagine at level 1!" To a large extent, our "coming into" our modifiers is a great deterrent from that. A Blaster starts the game one-shotting things with an unslotted moderate-damage attack at level 1. A Blaster at level 50 can a little over one-shot things with a three-slotted extreme-damage attack plus Build Up plus Aim. As such, I see my performance actually DECREASE, to the point where I have to work harder at doing the same thing, which, to be quite honest, kills my sense of progress. That I can make that difference up with stronger attacks sort of balances that out, but non-damage-dealers don't have that luxury.

That's what it comes down to. I don't LIKE endurance management, and I don't WANT to run out of endurance. Ever, if possible. But its very point is to run out and limit people. We may complain about this, but that's what it's designed to do. If we "loosen it up," as it were, to where no-one ever complains, then that means we've simply made it irrelevant and unnecessary, so we may as well just drop it out of the game.

Put it another way - endurance management is supposed to suck, so that powers like Accelerate Metabolism, Recovery Aura and Adrenaline Boost are welcome and desired. It's the old pre GND Tanker argument - if Tankers can hit their caps on their own, who needs Defenders? Same deal here. If we can recover more endurance than we need, who needs recovery buffs?

On the Dark/Dark I died a lot because Dark's shields are too weak, and the pre-20 game doesn't give me access to Dark Regeneration or any of the strong control powers. It's really not a good combo to level out of the teens with. That said, even with three shields going, I had little problem with endurance.

As well, the disagreement here is a question of semantics. You ask me how fast I can run through a mission, highlighting the problem as you see it, and the one I agreed to - recovery between fights. You run out of endurance during a fight because you were forced to start it with half of your endurance bar missing from the fight before. This is the old EQ vision of after-action recovery, and is the problem as I see it. Eliminating recovery between fights, however, would fix that, because I still maintain that you shouldn't be running out of endurance during a fight you started with a FULL BAR. Do you honestly run out even then? Because THAT I have a hard time seeing.

That was actually the point I was trying to make by bringing up takes on recovery. I don't want the EQ recovery that leaves you crippled and waiting after each fight, needing to be "healed," but I don't agree with the CoH mentality of ending each fight as healed up as you started it. The middle ground is Rest - a power which forces you to wait... A little. It's still a form of after-action recovery, but at a token cost, enough to acknowledge you need it, but not enough to suck.

I'm not convinced that is a good idea. Beginner's luck only sort of works, because you tide into better enhancements well, but it still has rough spots where your accuracy suddenly sucks. Given that our endurance bars never increase (naturally) this has the potential to REALLY cheese people off, especially those of us who don't take Stamina. Suddenly sucking wind and getting WEAKER as you level up is probably the worst thing that a game could do to a player, young or old.

You have to remember that the kind of endurance performance you are after is not baseline, and I don't think it ever will be. The system does allow you to achieve it at a cost, but it's never going to just hand it to you and tell you that this is how things are intended to be. Because they're not. Whether we like it or not, endurance running out is its actual point in existence.

Maybe my knowledge of materials is failing me here, but what I mean is:

You know those coloured balls you hang on your Christmas tree? If a red Christmass ball can be shiny, reflective AND red, can we not have one that's shiny, reflective and black?

Don't remind me... Oh, here's a fun thing to try - run Unai Kemen's arc. No special conditions, just grab his arc and play it through. Then come back to me and tell me if "Your princess is in another castle." rings any bells.

Seriously, massive overhauls are badly needed. And not necessarily full facelifts with new writing and unique enemies. We just need someone with more than half a brain to look through the missions and take a hack saw to the objectives wherever necessary. Needless defeat-alls, filler missions that don't lead anywhere, repetitive missions that have you do the same thing five times... That sort of thing is easy enough to spot.

I challenge the truth of the above statement, because it contradicts what I do on a daily basis practically every time I log into the game. That's what annoys me about these arguments - the constant insistence that you CANNOT get through a fight on a single endurance bar unless you have Stamina. You very much can, and without waiting between attacks, running away, using inspirations or dropping your difficulty.

Yes, I do mean pre-20. I will grant you that some characters have an easier time, and no, I don't mean Willpower or Regeneration. I played a Dark/Dark through to the 20s just fine without sucking wind much at all. Hell, I died more often than I ran out of endurance, and that's saying something with Dark Armour. And that's on the old Tenacious. Currently doable easily on the equivalent +0x2 +bosses -AVs. It's doable and I've done it, many times over. If you want, I can run down the list of characters I've done it with, but I doubt anyone really cares.

Endurance issues pre-20 exist. Endurance issues pre-20 ARE NOT crippling. Endurance issues pre-20 may be annoying, but that's an entirely different argument altogether, and it does that argument no good to exaggerate it.


I capitalised "your" merely to explain that insufficient endurance is intended and build into the system. Running out of endurance means the system works (well or not is debatable) and it falls on you to mitigate it, not on the system to fix it. We can argue about how much of a problem endurance should be, but if we start suggesting that endurance should NOT be a problem and that the game itself should take care of our endurance problems, then we should start discussing the removal of the subsystem in its entirety, because that's more or less its entire point in existence.

Not wishing to get into the argument of zone travel (yet another of my unpopular opinions), doesn't it strike you as unintended to be able to completely trivialise and marginalise endurance management? Or do you see that as a benefit worth its cost? Honest question here.

I wouldn't object to easier endurance management. The problem, as Castle used to lament, is Stamina itself. As you yourself have pointed out in the past, there is no build that doesn't benefit from Stamina, and there's almost no such instance where more recovery cannot help. It doesn't matter what you do to low-level or high-level endurance management, people are already too conditioned to take Stamina for that to matter. The mere fact that I know people who take Quick Recovery, Stamina, Conserve Power, do massive endurance slotting and STILL complain that their endurance bar so much as twitched tells me enough about that.

I guess I could go with your suggestion of taking from Stamina and dropping into base recovery. That would make its impact less significant and more in line with what it SHOULD be, as well as ease things up in the game.

But...

What about Quick Recovery? What about Recovery Aura? What about Dark Consumption? Or all the various endurance management Inventions? A lot of powers in the game are tied to base recovery, and boosting that would boost them, as well. Are you prepared to see them drop in percentage, as well? I would, but I'm not exactly objective in this case. Moreover, are you willing to see endurance become MORE of a problem at the exchange of it being less of one in the lower levels? Because these things will come up if and when this is actually considered.

Can't say I'd complain if they did, but here's the flip side - progress. I realise it sucks to start out weak, and maybe I'm biassed in this regard, but I enjoy being weaker in the lower levels, with weaker powers and weaker enhancements. Not because I enjoy being weak so much so as because getting stronger is a tangible change that actually makes me feel myself progressing through the game. Given how many things scale and how much everything feels the same no matter how high up you go, the switchover between enhancement types is a big part of the levelling experience.

Again, if they let me use SOs from level one, but I can't say I would support the change overtly.

Not to go off on a tangent, but this fits into both something I've heard and something I've observed. The former is a saying to the extent that sexy clothes are often more exciting than just a bare-naked body, because a naked body is just "there," whereas sexy clothes imply what's underneath, allowing fantasy to paint a more exciting picture than reality can ever produce.

In much the same vein in costume design, I've noticed what I'd describe as "naked spots" that can make a costume with an otherwise high cloth-to-skin ratio seem exceptionally revealing. These constitute areas on the body that, if left bare, will heighten the sense of titillation without actually requiring a heavy cheesecake costume. Breaking established clothe trend lines is a good place to start.

As I've only experimented with female costumes in this regard (being that I don't find the idea of revealing men attractive enough to bother looking into), the lines I've seen as most effective are the waistline, back and straps. Typically, the bare minimum acceptable clothing for a woman is a bikini (i.e. underwear), which relies on a solid waist line, a solid strap around the back and solid straps over the shoulders. Removing those via patterns such as Angelic, Savage or Hacker actually leads to interesting effects. I should note that Savage is one of the most fully-covering patterns in the game.

That's just idle observation, of course.

Took me a second to realise why you had to translate that

I actually did much the same with a sorta-demon dude I have. His actual body is dark green chitin plates over dark red muscle, designed to look repulsive. Gloves, boots, belt and helmet are black tech with blue patterns, however, as part of his story that's not interesting enough to shoehorn here. He, too, is technically naked, but since he has nothing to hide, being a warped and mutated human returned from the dead (hence, Revenant Jack), so it's all good. Or ought to be. No-one's complained yet.

Heh, this is a sentiment I can fully get behind

By the way, would you like me to have a look at the MA/SR numbers and see if I can't help you out? I haven't done numbers for those yet (haven't had reason to) and I wouldn't want to do it just for the sport of it, but if I can help, let me know. Via PM, if need be.

This reminds me of the "Almost Naked Man!" episode of Samurai Jack, for some reason

When it comes to describing the character, I agree - it comes down to the norm. I had my fun talking about "naked aliens" back when the Rikti used their old models, but by and large this comes up when you're trying to discuss whether a character should or should not be seen as naked without any clothes or armour.

A completely different issue arises over the question of whether a character is allowed to be rendered without clothes or not. Humans, even in animation, generally are not permitted to, but anthropomorphic animals sometimes are and sometimes aren't. Someone once gave an interesting example - Buster Bunny constantly walks around pantsless and no-one bats an eye, but take Minerva Mink out of her bathrobe and you'll have moral guardians descending down the mountainside like partisans overthrowing the evil oppression of capitalism. Not all characters are "safe" to be drawn naked, whether or not they are actually perceived as being naked even by the show's own standard.

I think your avatar is actually pretty telling, in this regard. By the way, that's as good a time as any to say this - you have a pretty cool avatar. I don't know what the transformation implies, but I like the artwork in it

Well, no, but not being able to play a character for a month and a half, specifically a character I want to play, isn't really a small price to pay. And even then, don't those powers eventually run out, requiring more staying offline?[/quote]

To be fair, that's another problem, as well. I can see the obvious answer to the above problem - you can earn that reward while you're not playing. Ignoring the fact that character I stop playing right now likely won't see the light of day for another year, it still leaves the problem of having to log in and move them, and that's just the kind of busywork I don't want.

I do acknowledge that power as a solution, granted, but my problem isn't the need for the power itself. I neither need nor want it. The problem is what consequences I'll be facing for its lack. As it turns out, probably not many, so it's all good in the end.

Huh. That... Sounds really far-fetched. I know what most of the existing chest patterns are, and I know chest details weren't described, so I have a really hard time even imagining what something like that would look like. And as with most other times these concerns come up, I have to ask - why not just ban people who do this? That's part of what GMs are for.

Well, the problem with "naked" really is, as you mentioned, genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. Basically, female nipples and everybody's crotch. Everything else is fair game, so if you can manage with a character that lacks both (well, has a crotch, just with nothing on it) then yes, censors will generally allow you to go with that. I'm not sure that counts as "naked," though, not unless you can establish that your character's species and culture typically go around wearing clothes of some fashion.

You call a cost of 42 days "problem solved?" That's a month and a half.

Having the real numbers goes a long way towards just that. Before, you knew Brawl did damage. How much? How does it compare to, say, Hack? Dunno, but it's an attack, so why not slot it? Right now, you can look at its damage and tell just how much it does. That's a big benefit right there.

Going naked is not an options of pretty obvious reasons, but I dare say many people spare a thought to this particular problem at least partially. I have a Stone Brute, for instance, who doesn't need any sort of artificial protection, but still wears armour anyway, just to prevent his clothes getting shot off his body if heavy resistance is to be expected. Similarly, I have a few who run around in shorts or jeans simply because armour isn't going to protect them, anyway, so why not dress casually?

As far as I'm aware, our endurance pool remaining stating is done on purpose. It's to give us a maximum allowed "budget," so to speak. This both determines how many toggles we can run and how fast we can attack, as well as requiring us to balance both. You CAN run a lot of toggles all at once, but you'll kill your end FAST once you start attacking. Inversely, running fewer toggles means you can attack a lot more, but get less toggle benefit. Being able to both run lots of toggles AND attack a lot sounds... Well, broken to me, at least based on how the system appears to be balanced.

Let me pose the question in the opposite direction and see where this gets us: What is the point of having an endurance bar AT ALL? What is the whole system of cost, drain and recovery supposed to accomplish? What is it supposed to mean? Because if we let most players have enough endurance for most things most of the time, then endurance becomes meaningless in most cases. Unless we want to start discussing its outright removal from the game, we need to keep in mind that it has to have SOME point in existence.

The only reason I bring it up is because it's one of the most common misspellings in actual character names. Artic, Angle and Rouge tend to pop up very often. I'm a fairly solitary player, and even I've seen these on actual characters a few times.

As well, my spell checker doesn't seem to recognise the word "vinyls," but it does recognise "vinyl." Time to append my dictionary so this doesn't recur.

Ooh! Ooh! I got one more! "thats" Sorry, just fooling around.

Huh... What "questionable designs?" When was that ever brought up officially? If you can't make naked characters now, how is putting on MORE clothes going to make that more likely? I'm sorry, I just don't follow. Do you mean adding skin-coloured patterns? Because we can't use skin colours for anything but skin. Not even white, not any more.