Samuel_Tow

Yeah, this right here is the problem. Who are you to judge people and call out moral fibre? All you're doing is emotional blackmail. "If you REALLY loved City of Heroes, you wouldn't buy from NCsoft!" "If you had any morality, you wouldn't buy from NCsoft!" "Honk if you love Jesus!" Call it hate, call it pity, call it what you will, you have contempt for people who don't conform to your very specific views on morality.

I hate - yes, "hate" - the practice of drawing people into your own anger masked as righteous retribution, and then chastising them for not doing it. I had a very fierce debate with a friend of mine who insisted that if I do business with Sony, I deserve Anonymous to steal my credit card information and post it on the Internet for people to empty my bank account. It's guilt by association all over again, and that's not righteous. It's petty.

If you want people to sympathise with your moral position, then don't come off from a self-righteous stance that everyone who doesn't feel the same way is some weakling worthy only of contempt. Even if I were one - and I have long since lost my ability to be shamed over the Internet - then I'm certainly not going to see things your way for saying this. And I get the the impression you don't want me to see things your way.

You know what the funniest part is, though? I don't actually want Guild Wars 2, and I can play it for free on a friend's account. I still don't, because I don't like the game. But if it will put me in a position contrary to your own, then yes - I will throw away $50 just to spite you. Because to me, the principle of respecting the decisions of others and their right to freedom of preference is more important than saving $50. Because the thinly-masked hate speak you're propagating - and that's what it is, really - is much worse to me than NCsoft or even losing City of Heroes.

Yes, seriously. To me, City of Heroes stands for imagination, creativity and friendship, and I refuse to use antagonisation, shaming and bullying to save it. Maybe that makes me simply a hater of another kind, but I'm fine with it. I refuse to hold people responsible for not taking a moral stance with their free time and entertainment, and I refuse to assert that any player has a "duty" of any kind. We do what we can with the people we have, and we respect the rights of others to look after themselves.

Fair enough, but isn't that sort of the job of the player to explain for themselves? Suppose you're a game designer and I'm a player... Wait, where are you going? Get back here!

Suppose you're a developer and I'm a player. You provide me with a "shadow punch" that looks like a punch but has a shadowy effect, and it's left to my imagination to explain quite what that means. But suppose I said... Well, my character wouldn't punch like that. The punch you gave me is awkward, unwieldy and like something a gorilla would throw. My character is a skilful, athletic fighter who also happens to wield darkness. Please, Mr. Developer, could you give me a punch that looks more like I'm using martial arts, but with a darkness effect? Suppose for a moment that your artist is made of magic pixie dust and he can just make that on the fly.

Has anything been lost? Has the theme of "darkness" been compromised somehow? Am I now doing something that's inconsistent with darkness by punching in a different way? Honest question here.

OK, me being myself, I say "Well, that was nice, but I was thinking... Can that punch actually be a kick?" Well, your artist has run out of magic pixie dust and says no. Because, let's face it, I'm being unreasonably demanding. But your artist wants to please everyone, so in his spare time, he rips the effects of all melee attacks, throws all the animations in a giant pool and lets the player pick an animation first and then an effect and say "this is what I want to use." So now I'm using the crane kick while my leg is bathed in darkness.

Has anything been lost? Has the theme of "darkness" been compromised somehow now that I can pick animations the set didn't originally come with? Again, honest question here.

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What I'm saying isn't that "elemental melee powers don't make sense" so much as "melee powers don't make sense to be only ONE type of thing." To me, it makes more sense to make modular attacks that you can attach effects to, rather than bake effects into attacks, because that leads to unnecessary redundancy. Champions FAILS at doing this, because it fails at allowing us to customize our effects, but it still comes close in terms of basic idea, does it not?

Because I concede that elemental weapons being left off is a problem. Hence, my argument does not extend to them.

Neither do I. What are you talking about?

This is the entirety of the point. Not having elemental powers as melee powers is the exact same thing as not having earth control powers.

Because I'm not? In City of Heroes, all of the elemental sets look the same because they share the same very small pool of fairly simplistic animations. They don't HAVE to look the same, they DO look the same. That's the whole point.

And really, how do you set them apart but with visual effects? How is punching with fire any different from punching with darkness or punching with electricity? Are we going into Avatar: The Last Airbender territory where every element bending is designed after a different general martial arts style? Yes, Water Bending is mostly Tai Chi, Firebending is mostly Kykoshinkai Karate and Earthbending is mostly Kung Fu, except for Toph who has her unique style. And this works for a cartoon where the fighting styles are picked to reflect the characteristics of the people who use them. But as with Toph, that doesn't always work.

What I'm suggesting is that there's no logical link between, say, "punch" and "fire" that defines the final product as a singular entity. You can take any "fire punch," swap out the visual effects for, say, electricity and end up with an "electric punch." There's nothing inherent in HOW you punch that's unique to fire or electricity, because those are not mechanical forces which define the nature of a mechanical force attack.

You're right to bring up concepts like fire breathing, fire swords, Combustion and so forth. These ARE fire-specific attacks visually and conceptually that just don't work as well for other elements. Sure, you could have a "breath" attack for ice and toxic, but you can't really have that for electricity or energy. And I do agree with you on that point - Champions does lack elemental weapons.

But here's the thing - I'd rather have elemental weapons for Single Blade, Dual Blades, Heavy Weapon and so forth. My one most prominent fire user in City of Heroes is Stardiver, and she doesn't have Fiery Melee to begin with. She's using Titan Weapons with the Fire and Ice sword. What I'm talking about is already true in City of Heroes - you don't need a set that says "something" melee in order to get both melee and that same thing. I have a wide range of super strong characters, but not all of them use Super Strength itself. One uses Titan Weapons, one Axe and Shield, one Mace.

What I'm saying is you don't need a set that's CALLED what you want if you can find a set that does what you want and can be customized to resemble the theme that you want. That was one of the biggest drives behind our continual requests for "power emanation points" in this game. If you could customize, say, Assault Rifle attacks to come out of wrist-mounted guns/shoulder cannons or Archery to come out of a crossbow, you wouldn't need a special sets called this, you could customize the existing sets to do what you want.

I would always rather have fewer powers with broader customization available for them than many redundant powers made in large numbers just to give them different appearances or secondary effects. As far as I'm concerned, Bone Smasher, Cremate and Haymaker are the same attack (they even have the same cost, damage, recharge and animation speed) with different visual effects and damage type. City of Heroes is a FIERCELY unstructured game and that's what we're used to, but if I had my way, I'd structure attacks into much more strict frameworks and just share them among sets. It makes for much greater customizability.

Such as? Serious question here. Aside from breath powers (which aren't melee) and elemental weapons (which I already admitted was a good point), can you explain to me what a melee attack could only ever make sense to be done with fire but not with ice or electricity or darkness? That's the core of my problem - I can't think of any single type of non-weapon melee attack that is unique to one element but not another. You can SAY they're different, you can give them different numbers, but if I'm on the outside looking in, it would still look like the same attack with a different glow around the arms or legs.

And I fully agree with you on the nature of ranged attacks, as well. As far as I'm concerned, the animation for non-weapon ranged blasts is IRRELEVANT. Pick any blast power from any set, then swap its animation for any other power from any other blast set and the result will still work. Hell, for the most part, you don't even need to touch up visual effects. Ever since the one and only time we got a new batch of alternate Blast animations, I've been a strong proponent for simply letting every power have every animation and letting the player pick. Want every attack in your set to fire using the two-fist-thrust of Power Burst? Sure, why not? Want every power to fire from your eyes using the X-Ray Beam animation? Again, why the hell not?

Oh, sure, technical limitations of animation speed apply, I agree, but those are technical limitations, not conceptual limitations.

"Different" is not the same as "not appropriate." Hence why I'm suggesting that being able to pick animations and effects separately is far more customizable than having effects baked into animations, even for a much smaller pool of both effects and animations. Now, granted, Champions can't do that, and to me that's one of its biggest failings. With as simplistic as their animations are, I could see them just adding basic effects as options for their melee attacks - they already lack the "drop-down" that other powers have in customization.

I can tell you for a fact that if I can make a martial artist or a might user and then put glowing energy auras on his hands when he punches, I will take this over a specific "energy melee" set any day. No, Champions doesn't do let you do that, and it could. That's down to the developers to answer for that omission.

And yet that's the entirety of how Avatar: The Last Airbender's fighters fight. Firebenders have a whole repertoire of fireballs and flame waves, yet they shoot those out from their fists and feet via martial arts moves, rather than pointing. That's actually the genius behind the whole show - making ostensibly "magic" appear as a believable extension of martial arts. But strip the movements of their magic and they're still martial arts first, "elemental blasts" second.

In fact, check out one of the final fights. I don't think things are as set in stone as you present them as, or at the very least I can't see them that way. The way you describe it, there should be only one way for a melee fire-user to fight and a melee electricity-user should fight completely differently, as though there's something "fire-specific" about the way one punches and kicks, and I just don't see that.

I could see this if you were making an argument for weapons. A sword can slash and stab. A spear can only stab. A axe can only slash. Just as a rough example. How you animate using the weapon depends on what the weapon is, because we have real-life examples of how those weapons are used, and even if we didn't, their size, weight, shape and "killing end" configuration depicts how we use them. But "fire" has no such inherent logic behind how it's used, because from the moment we start talking about "punching with fire," we're already disregarding the realism of how fire is used. Once we've started disregarding realism, then I see no more need to limit ourselves. Why NOT have kicks that throw fireballs? Why not backhand chops that shoot electricity?

My argument isn't that "elemental melee" is a dumb idea, so much as that it's not a "groundable" idea. I looks like whatever you fancy it looking, thus to me it makes no sense to claim that you can only punch with fire one way but only punch with ice another. My problem isn't that you can't do what you're claiming, but rather that you can't do a whole bunch of other stuff besides.

So your concept is very specific to a darkness-using martial artist. Fine - pick the melee martial arts attacks, give them a "dark" effect and ignore the ranged ones. It's what I did. But you wanting to make a dark martial artist shouldn't preclude me from making a dark brawler or a dark rifleman. And that, actually, is the biggest drawback to Dark Melee in City of Heroes for me - I frikkin' HATE the animations. All of them. Too much punching, too stiff, too awkward. If I could replace them with Martial Arts with the same visual effects, I would.

Now, if your complaint is that Champions doesn't do a good enough job of making your punches LOOK like they're attacking with darkness, then I'm right there with you. Power customization isn't as good there as it was here. Effects are VERY basic and colour selection is severely limited. No white, no black, mostly generic glows. I agree with you that that's a problem, but the solution isn't to add "fiery melee," it's to let me turn the regular melee sets into fiery melee. As of right now, the game has two unarmed melee sets and three weapon-based ones. If I could pick fire weapons for the weapon ones and fiery hand effects for the melee ones, that's a HELL of a lot more customizability than having just one fire melee set, especially when that will likely consist of a small handful of attacks stuck in-between the cracks into "fire."

Ever since BABs left, City of Heroes has been getting an increasing number of non-physical weapons. Right now, if I want to play a fire user, I can pick nearly any of the weapon-based sets and use the Fire Sword and/or Fire Shield for them. I can make a ton of very different fire users, all by using sets OTHER than the ones that have "fire" in their names. Out of the many ones I have, I think only one here is Fire/Fire.

Such as? Again, genuine question. You keep telling me THAT using fire in melee is somehow different from using ice or electricity in melee, but I still don't get a good sense of HOW you see it as being different. And I don't just mean how it COULD be different. You can have ten different ways to shoot a gun, but that's not the point. How are those different in such a way that they can NEVER be the same? How are they so different that they can't be played by the same animation if the player happened to have similar concepts for how his fire, ice, lighting and energy users fought?

Please, explain this to me.

That's not what I'm arguing. Not even close. I'm asking HOW it's not the same thing, and you keep tripping over yourself to assume me that, no, really, it's not the same thing. Do you honestly expect me to throw my hands in the air and go "Welp, you said it enough times, I concede!" It's not a discussion if you just restate your position, it's "IS NOT! IS TOO!"

Let me simplify the question: If you could take any melee attack and attach any visual effect to it, how is that different from having an elemental attack that has one animation and one element hard-coded into it? Let me pose another: In what is meleeing with fire unique different visually from meleeing with ice, that cannot be accomplished by swapping visual effects around? That's all I'm asking, and if you can stop trying to prove me wrong for a minute and actually elaborate and explain, we could probably move on.

OK, I wasn't going to buy Guild Wars 2 because I don't like it as a game, but if it will put me in direct opposition to that kind of hate, then I might consider it.

How is Guild Wars 2 free? *edit* For that matter, how are Guild Wars or WoW free?

Really? Are you operating under the idea that palm thrusts are not a sensible physical attack? And I mean that as an honest question, because I'm pretty sure all of Raiden's hand attacks are all palm strikes.

You're talking about extremely old sets that all use the same animations. It's utterly alien to me how you can say Electric Melee is more about "interacting with electricity" when it has Air Superiority, two punches, a palm thrust, a jumping double axe handle and pretty much only a couple non-contact attacks, those being Lightning Rod and Jacob's Ladder. And again, the "non-punching" attacks ARE represented in Champions.

It's the punching attacks that are missing. If you're perfectly capable of imagining that Dark Melee never punches... Why is not having punches in a dark set a problem, then? That's exactly my point - I couldn't imagine my energy user punching people as her main mode of offence, so I went with ranged attacks. I would have done the same in City of Heroes if Blasters didn't suck. In fact, Inna was a level 50 Energy/Energy/Force Blaster before I rerolled her as an Energy/Will Brute.

Again, if you don't see Dark Melee as punching with darkness, why is it important to replicate punching animations with darkness in another game? Wouldn't that be your opportunity to pick something that corresponds to what you actually see?

Didn't EA and BioWare respond to the "Mass Effect 3 ending" debacle pretty quickly, though?

This is what struck me, as well. So many people are listed as living in random places in the Pacific ocean where islands don't exist. Are there maybe floating cities I'm not aware of? That belong to Brazil?

To be fair, I don't mind "anime" in general, just the weird crap Korean CGI "anime" games tend to come up with. Aion, Lineage, Tera, this one and so on just have this mish-mash over overly ornate gear that looks chaotic and unrefined to me. I'm a fan of simpler designs.

Same here. The more I learn about it, the less interested I am.

To me, it looks like a less **** version of 9Dragons with more fanservice. That's not saying much, but suffice it to say that "martial arts" games have been made before. It has never been a style that appealed to me.

I'm completely the reverse: I hugely dislike traditional martial arts themes and that art style just repulses me on a purely stylistic level. Guess I'm lucky I don't suffer that kind of dilemma, but it's just one more reason for me to dislike NCsoft as a business - they offer no variety in their products, just minor alterations. Any non-Fantasy game they've had, they've cancelled at this point.

You completely misread the problem I'm having. To me, elemental melee powers (aside from elemental weapons, obviously) are things you can describe in words, but which TO ME make no sense in actual practice. City of Heroes may be visual, but it still suffers from a lot of the limitations of "verbal combat" like what D&D has. You can say you did a lot of things and you can craft systems around them that have them make sense, yet end up with things that just don't work when put into a movie or a cartoon.

The problem I have with this is that once I start writing free-hand fiction for my characters that have, say, Dark Melee, I run into a brick wall immediately. "Well, what does that mean?" Well, you could say it's just like punching, only your hands smoke evil, but that's visually very unimpressive, not to mention practically not terribly different from just punching people. There's a huge disconnect between what you SAY a character is doing and what you can SHOW a character doing in such a way that it makes a lick of sense visually.

You can say your character is a martial artist who uses kinetic energy attacks and I wouldn't argue with you for a second. However, when you put that character next to a martial artists who just happens to have magical glowing gloves that make him punch harder, you'll end up seeing the exact same thing. Once that's the case, I'm perfectly fine with giving just one Martial Arts set and handling the difference with hand auras. Which I have, actually, in City of Heroes itself.

I'm not saying Champions does it right, mind you. "Stone" powers there are tank powers, so they involve armours and punches, but no serious control powers like turning people to stone, liquefying the ground, raising dust storms and so forth. Similarly, stuff like "Celestial" powers are support-centric, offering you only a VERY small pool of attacks and a comparatively large pool of buff, heal and resurrect powers. That game has far too many sets pegged as doing only one single thing when they could do much more than that.

However, I don't need redundant powers that look the same but have a different hand effect. I don't need ten versions of Air Superiority with fire, energy, ice and other effects. One Air Superiority is fine if I can give it all of these effects. Damage types do matter, but most Champions PvE enemies don't have much in the way of damage resistance anyway, so you don't have to worry about cutting robots or burning fire enemies.

Basically, my problem is that you can't always SHOW everything you can SAY, and "punching with darkness" is exactly in that spot for me. In fact, that's exactly what Dragon Ball Z suffered from - everyone was supposed to have these different, unique, special techniques that only they could pull off, but at the end of the day, everyone was throwing seemingly the same fireballs and delivering seemingly the same knee and elbow strikes, with the only difference coming from how the gawking support characters would describe them. Sure, Son Goku's aura was red because his Kaio-Ken technique was red and Vegeta's aura was blue because... He was wearing blue tights, but again - that's a superficial difference.

What I'm saying is I'll never argue with how you explain something, but I might argue about exactly how specific that something's representation needs to be. I just wish Champions' animations didn't suck so hard.

What does "that" refer to? If you're talking about sexist... Sorry, "sexy" costumes, then that's not a problem at all. In most games with any degree of customization, you have the option to NOT walk around in a string bikini.

My problems with the art style is that it's confusing, nonsensical and weird for the sake of being weird with no options to break the specific style. So what if I DON'T want to look like I combat-rolled through someone's second hand clothes closet and then tumbled down a steep cliff? Can't.

Sure, I can see myself making one or two characters in that style, but there are only so many I can make that are defined as "weirdly dressed" before I run out of material. That's been at the centre of my pro-anime arguments since day one - anime in general is more than just THAT. It encompasses many styles, genres and visual approaches, yet Korean MMOs always seem to go for the exact same one, and I happen to find that one to be both ugly and overdone.

I disagree. "The overworld" is easily my least favourite part of Guild Wars, and I simply hate the spontaneous events. This probably has to do with my ambivalence towards super heroes as a thing, but I don't imagine any of mine "going on patrol" because none of my heroes are "reactive" in any capacity of the word. I've gone over this at length in other threads, but I just don't make heroes who wait for crime to happen and then go stop it, because I don't make crime fighters in general, but maybe a few. Each of the characters I make have their own plots that they follow and seek out action in person, since they are driven by a larger plot.

Besides, I hate overworld missions as a general concept. Give me an instance and I will always, ALWAYS, pick that over an overworld task. I don't care what that overworld task is, if it's not in an instance all to myself, I don't want it. Zones still have a point - they represent the journey to the mission, and unlike many other players, I do enjoy fighting my way from the contact to the mission door. Sure, it's pointless no-story filler, but it is a "travel mission" of sorts all its own. I'd do it considerably more often if enemies scaled a bit better... And I didn't have to trek through a forest or a desert.

Partly, yes. A major moment in my young adult life was coming to terms with what society and peers expect me to want and need me to want in order to get along, and what I actually want for in my heart will never be the same, so I've spent the better part of the last 10 years basically cleaning house of old habits left over from my childhood. "Clearing maps" is where that was born As such, for me to say that I feel like I should make the most of the time left and play the game despite not enjoying the time, yet refusing to do this is a big thing. It's coming to terms with why I feel the way I do and eliminating much emotional dissonance.

And yes, I do know of emotions other than anger and contempt

Partly, though - and this is very important - I actually stress myself out if I do something for "fun" while under pressure. This is a lesson I've been trying to teach many of my over-stressed friends, including my mother who's very high-strung most of the time: If you're doing something that's supposed to be fun, but always worrying about something else you have to be doing, you're not actually resting. You're stressing yourself out. The only way for me, at least, to rest and recharge is to forget my duties and responsibilities - forget about the real world - and just empty my head of pressure. I can't do that with a death clock ticking over my head, because it's reminding me my time is running out and I shouldn't be goofing off fighting fires or watching Mythbusters and I should play, PLAY, PLAY! because there isn't much time left.

It'll be a while before I come to terms with the fact that I can't play this game long-term, so I can log back in and have some fun while forgetting about the looming future. But for now, the stress of real life is encroaching on the escapism of the game a little too much.

Guild Wars 2 is even weirder than that. I allows you to have a non-unique account name BUT NOT a non-unique character name. That was the first sign I wouldn't like this game - a whole hour spent trying character names.

Now, I know I've been on the other side of the fence in the past, saying you can always be creative and come up with something else. But apparently, there was next to nothing left to try. I tried Botis, the Midnight Club demon, I tried Sphyra, Brutticus, Xanta... All taken. I tried qqqq, taken. I tried qwerqwer, take. Forget "creative," I had to mash my keyboard for I think three attempts straight just to get a name through, and even then it was something like "sdflkasdjfhaldhjalsjkf." At least it proved the login server wasn't down and rejecting any name. Someone had actually taken every name I tried. I didn't get that in WoW or Lineage II, for crap's sake!

So it got me wondering... Why give me a non-unique global name, but NOT attach my local character name to it? Elsewise, why not force me to have a unique global, but then let me have a non-unique character name with my global attached like Champions did. Why is global - that people will usually not see - more important than a character name? And how the fudge puppies were all the random key combos I tried taken?!?

Trouble is, that kind of cultural chauvinism is not going to endear them to a Western market too well, just like how City of Hero bombed. I'm not saying Korean games are bad (OK, I kind of am) so much as that a company which has options and games of different cultures has a wider audience.

The let 'em have it. But I'm not going to support that. Not with my money, nor with my business.

And it might have worked, had the game itself not been trash. And I paid 50 or 60 Euro for that thing. I forget how much, but it was too much.

Pretty much what Bubba said. I feel the future of MMOs is in personal control of social interaction and team play. If I want to play with others, I log in and play. If I want to play by myself... I'm still paying the same for the game, so I'll go do that. To me, this is the ideal structure where those who want to be sociable can be, whereas those who want to keep to themselves can, and all help the parent company.