Samuel_Tow

This is really all that comes down to. You can make a perfectly legitimate, even tech-themed arm transformation powerset as long as you exercise art direction with a bit more aesthetic, such that you suggest that the arm TRANSFORM, and isn't actually cybernetic (not necessarily). As such, rocket punches are out of the question, but various arm cannons, power fists, arm blades and so forth are very much perfectly acceptable. AND you don't need special arm replacements, either. As long as the transformation objects (say, arm cannons) are big enough, they'll just show up over the gloves. And if you pick big gloves that'll clip... Well, too bad for you. I guess I COULD go for something that makes your actual glove invisible as, say, the power fist shows up, though.

Basically, this is another example of a powerset tied to a concept that it doesn't have to be limited to. Yes, robots and cyborgs are going to be the obvious choice when making arm cannons, but as long as the transformations aren't described as cybernetic, the door is still open. After all, X-Men's forge did just this in one of the newer animations, and he's a mutant. Natural could always work with this, as it's ultimately a weapon and could be described as the skill of using being its super power. Science is obvious, and even magic can work, as a form of willing evil metal over your arms.

The train of thought here is simple - keep it to basic arm cannons, machineguns, power fists and melee weapons. Flail, blade, pincer, spear, crossbow, turret, cannonball, some kind of energy gun, energy blade, chainsaw, DRILL, that sort of thing. Don't go off inventing "arm on a string" and everything should be fine.

You know what... I actually think I WILL go Natural just because you mentioned it. The idea doesn't change - child-looking demon summoning other demons. But the interpretation changes. If he's a demon, that sort of thing ought to be natural to him. Cool, let's go with that.

A friend of mine lost his account to one of these in exactly the same way. A warning that someone had changed his account password came, directing him to confirm or deny the change. He did, then found his account's password changed, then when he recovered it, found his characters stripped of items.

The moral of the story is that you should NEVER follow links provided in support e-mails, just in case it's a phishing scam. It's always better to go to the actual support site manually and log in from there. I used to get mail notifications when I got PMs on the old forums, and I still didn't follow the link from there. I'm naturally cautious and distrusting of official communication I didn't specifically solicit.

A couple of weeks ago I got a fake hotmail account phishing scam. Who the HELL would want to steam my hotmail details? Who WANTS somebody else's hotmail account?

See, what you describe as liking is the very epitome of everything I hate about the game, and the central reason why people do missions over outdoor content. Nothing (including disconnects, power outage, lag deaths and basically anything up to character loss) sucks worse than being given a mission in an area of a zone where everything is +2 to you, and Sharkhead has two of those - the Scrapyarder hunt in The Pits (sic), and the CoT hunt in Moth Cemetery, both of which can be received more than two levels before you have any business going in each area if you're not careful. Aside from being a sucker trap, these missions are as close as I've come to punching my PC peripherals in City of Heroes.

Outdoor content is a gigantic waste of time, for the simple fact that finding anything you CAN do outdoors is seemingly deliberately designed to waste your time. I'm of a specific level, and ideally I'd like to fight enemies of my level. Outdoor spawns being what they are, 90% of the time I'll meet enemies either far below my level or far above it. I'll be given a Family hunt in Independence Port, only to realise that the areas they spawn in are either three levels below me or three levels above me. The areas of town that ARE my level spawn only Tsoo and 5th/Council. And being that Independence Port is bigger than Jack Emmert's head, I don't feel like dragging my *** all over creation just to possibly find one small spawn of three minions that may be somewhat close to my level, amid a see of enemies I don't need to hunt, possibly getting killed by something I accidentally ran into on the way.

Finding enemies my level is a constant problem with Hunt missions. Occasionally, finding enemies PERIOD is problematic, such as the various incarnations of "Hunt 50 Carnies in Peregrine Island," the mission that needs to die in a fire and whoever designed it to be flogged for their sins. And even just doing my own thing and walking around on the streets instead of skipping everything to the mission is not an option. When I'm level 43 and given a mission in Kings Row, I'm not going to fight anything along the way. It's pointless AND boring. At one point I had the good fortune to be about the right level to walk overland from mainland Nerva to Primeva without flying or getting my feet wet (which basically meant walking through Agincourt), but even though I was a couple of levels above everything there, I still had a hard time, because outdoor spawns are bigger and harder than indoor ones.

I'll take instanced missions any time, any day, because they allow me to pick my difficulty and play the game my way. The less random the difficulty curve is, the less likely I am to find enemies I don't want to fight, the less I have to travel around before I find stuff to shoot, the better the game is. If the overworld scaled to my level and difficulty settings, I might be more inclined to do stuff in it, but as it has to account for all the people who COULD be in the zone, but really aren't, this isn't going to happen. And the game is all the worse for it.

I'll take some more instanced maps now, please.

You know, I hear this from time to time, and it's the sort of thing that makes me want to punch people. This overfocusing on one specific aspect of the game just gets under my skin. When I hate something (and it takes quite a bit for me to HATE it), I have a whole laundry list of things to hate bout it. But just that one thing? You'd think the entire game were nothing BUT looking at the inside of an instance, ignoring the fact that there are enemies in it, that you can make your own characters with your own look and your own power selection. No. None of that matters. I want to look at different interiors. Ugh...

I'm reminded of my reaction to Battlefield Bad Company 2, after being a long-time player of Battlefield 2142. It goes along the lines of...

-Wait, you can't go prone? Why did they do that?
-I don't know, it kind of makes it hard to hide behind cover.
-Ugh... So I hear there are no squad leaders and commanders?
-Well, no, but any member of a squad can give orders, you can spawn at each squad member and anyone can do commander activities via a few different systems.
-But it kills the order and hierarcy! So I hear bullets drop and have travel time?
-Yeah, they say it's more realistic that way.
-The same people who said "Oh, and you can't crouch. Get over it, it's a game!" Idiots. Doesn't that make it hard to hit things?
-Kind of.
-Why's the UAV so damn ugly to pilot?
-Well, it can kind of shoot rockets, so...
-Hold on! Why does my Assault kit not have a medkit? And where's my defibrilator?
-Oh, that. See, the Assault/Medic is a 2142 thing. Remember, in Battlefield 2, the Medic was a separate kit. Now the Support kit is the medic and the Assault kit has the ammo box.
-That's... Really bad design. Why's everything always so foggy, smoky and hard to see?
-Well, see, you can knock down almost all standing structures, and it'd suck to have a wide open field of unlimited visibility.
-Whatever. Isn't the destructible terrain engine terrible? I was playing Red Faction 2 and...
-This isn't Red Faction 2, and yeah, it's kind of bad.
-And all the weapons are realistic?
-Kind of. They at least resemble real designs as far as I know about weapons.
-So, no spawn beacons, no forcefields, no scanner devices, no NetBat helmets, no cloaking device, no rifle rockets, no RDX shotgun...
-Well, anything you spot shows up on everybody's HUD.
-It's not quite the same, now, is it?

And that's just off the top of my head. Any number of things I could have taken, but it's just one thing after another. I can't recall any single game that I could point to one thing and say "THIS is the reason why it sucks." Quite simply, I don't believe any one game, unless it's an utter disaster, can suck because any one, single thing. Not even abominations like Lineage II, my apologies to PlayNC.

Is there an echo in here?

Echo!

...

Hmm... How odd.

You know, as much as I appreciate the work BABs, Castle and the few other lost souls at Cryptic (don't try to correct me) did back in the day, and I DO appreciate it greatly, there's the undeniable sense that everything was a cost-saving solution, done to bring us as much benefit as possible for as low as a cost. We got weapon customization, which can't have been little work, but... Most of the weapons we got were ripped from existing NPCs. We got an overhaul of the War Zone, but as per War Witch, they could either tweak the story OR tweak the zone, and they chose to leave the zone almost as-is.

A lot of the things they did either reused existing art assets (same factions, same instances, same animations and effects) with a few clever and innovative uses, or was a player-benefit adjustment to the system. They were GREAT additions, but they were budget additions.

Our newer, bigger development team is starting to get ambitious. They're starting to cast their eyes on things that AREN'T cheap, fast or easy, things that don't represent the veritable low-hanging fruit. Power customization, requiring so much work on art assets, the Architect, an entire new system that had to be built from scratch, new powersets built with their own graphics FROM THE GROUND UP, an overhauled graphics engine, and even a paid expansion with brand new zones and completely new enemy groups.

And you know what? It shows. When you see what was literally "more of the same," you can tell that they were basically trying to make do with what little resources they could spare. When you look at the newer things, you can tell the quality and polish in it.

I liken this to City of Villains, kind of, and I'll explain why. Grab a Necromancy Mastermind and use your upgrade. Now watch the effects. The "red smoke" followed a very elaborate swirl pattern where two or three possible entities coil around each other, making a really beautiful effect. And as it travels, it leaves behind a trail of worms, beetles, bugs and other critters that scurry away in all directions. That's just one power, but it has SO MUCH detail put into it. This is quality, and this is what adds oodles of value into the game.

And everything I've seen from Going Rogue tells me there is a LOT of quality in that. If we can only pick two of the trio of fast/cheap/good, they're emphasising the good a LOT more now.

Sorry to skip most of the thread, but the premise of this question confounds me, if only because my answer would be "I don't know" and it still wouldn't matter. Why not matter? Well, simply because whenever I see a TF of ANY level advertised, my response would be "Would you take a XX level XX AT?" Unless I'm suggesting something that physically can't take part, I don't see why you wouldn't ask. Seems easier and safer than trying to guess.

I realise some people might snark you back with some lame put-down about how you should have known, but **** them! I'm not psychic and, frankly, a yes/no question doesn't deserve getting attitude in response, specifically when attitude takes a lot more effort than just ending the query in two, possibly three key presses.

Tell that to LiquidX

Yikes!

The old complaint as I remember it was "Stop adding new content and make several issues of nothing but bug fixes." Those of us with the ability to see into the future would keep on saying that this would not work, that people would complain, that people would leave, etc., etc., but some people's heads are made out of granite, so...

Woah, seriously? Sweetness! I'm already downloading. Thank you, Sir!

Crap, now I wish I'd saved mine. I did have one of those in your pic, but since this needed to be connected to a tape recorder, I never used it. I had a newer version, I think, that had the cassette reader built into the device, and mine had at least four colours, roughly comparable to CGA graphics of later times.

Man, that had some good games on it, too. The sinisterly hard Green Berets, the awesome Army Moves, and who doesn't remember Jetpack? But that thing was a pain and a half to load games in. The awful sound already mentioned, the minutes and minutes of strange wavy lines and psychedelic graphics on your TV screen...

I still have a box of old games for that, too, though most of them I didn't play. Things like Gauntlet, Attic Attack, Lunar Jetman and the various vector space sims I was just too young to really appreciate, being, what... 5? A lot of old games like that I remember as being hideously hard and utterly confusing, only to go back to them and find out I was simply too stupid to grasp basic concepts, and they're actually quite easy. Not Green Berets, of course, but still

Granted, a significant level difference does guarantee that ALL enemies will run, but look at the core of the problem. One enemy will almost always flee and multiple enemies will flee semi-frequently. This is NOT good design. As far as I'm concerned, even one enemy should very, VERY rarely flee and multiple enemies reasonably close to your level should NEVER flee under ANY circumstances not specifically involving Terrorize, Afraid or Avoid effects.

A few points:

1. We were told of a change that made Taunt stop fleeing enemies. To the best of my knowledge, this has NEVER worked consistently. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. It should. Every single time, unless an enemy is immune to Taunt effects (and let's face it, a few SHOULD be).

2. Terrorize effects should override AI behaviour. Every time. There is no reason why an enemy who should be cowering in fear IN PLACE should instead just break status effect and run away. There is no reason why an enemy running away hit with a Terrorize effect shouldn't stop and cower, but that never happens. Ever. And it should. This is a status effect. If they must shoot through it, then let them. But they should NOT run away.

3. Avoid effects should make enemies avoid whatever it is that has the effect. It should NOT make them flip out and run over the end of the world. If the AI is intended to avoid a Burn patch, then let it do so. Have it move a few feet to the side, get out of range, then STOP. There is no reason for AI looking to move out of a Burn patch to run down a corridor, up a flight of stairs, past two doors, down two floors of sheer drop and across the hall. Have Avoid effects STOP a running enemy from running as soon as the Avoid effect times out, which most do within the tick duration of the power that applies them, usually between 0.5 to 2 seconds.

4. Afraid effect are... Obsolete, as far as I'm concerned, at least for general consumption. Afraid effects are what Fear powers had prior to I4, which made enemies run away. This obviously questionable utility was recognised, so these powers were given annoyingly long durations, and it all balanced out. With I4, Fear effect duration on numerous powers has had to be cut down because of how much more useful the Terrorize mechanic (when it WORKS) is. And that's how it should be. I don't see any reason why non-exotic player powers, and indeed NPC powers, should use the Afraid effect. And just to be clear I'm not making this up, Hot Feet does Afraid, which self-stacks, no less.

In closing, I need to restate that running enemies are ANNOYING. They add nothing to the difficulty, they add very little to immersion (we should all be well past looking for "realism" here), they add nothing to the game's dynamics... All they add is a needless irritation. It's like a tasty fruity snack that's also round and slippery so it's almost impossible to stick your fork in it. Enemies running away contributes NOTHING to the game other than pointless busywork. It's not a question of how many or how often. It's a yes or no question. And as far as I'm concerned, the answer should be "No, enemies should NOT run away outside of special occasions."

Because I'm an idiot.

I meant to say 5x4. I don't know if anything other than 1280x1024 is actually of that resolution, but that's what's native to my screen and what I play City of Heroes in.

Well, Cuppa assured me PlayNC took it seriously, so it ought to count for a bit. As for me, I tend to put my real birth date only on something that is legal, but in the sense that it's not illegal, or possibly immoral, like pirated software, porn sites, faux e-mail accounts and so forth. My PlayNC account is completely legit, so it has all my proper, real info.

You miss the point. Such a set is boring because there really are only a handful of ways to fire a rifle. Basically, it boils down to "fire once" then "fire multiple times" then "fire even more times," but beyond that you ARE repeating yourself. Redundant powers that all look the same but do different effects is a remarkably bad approach to game design, and it's one of the primary killers in classic MMOs. Think back to older "action RPGs" like the original Diablo - that game had five weapon models and three armour models and that was IT. Then, it might have passed for great. Play it now, and its flaws are glaringly obvious.

As I said before, suggesting a more boring set of animations for Dual Blades NOW when it has all of its cool ones, that could very easily fly. You have a set that works and is interesting, so it hurts little to add to it. The set exists. Adding the set like you're suggesting would NOT have happened, simply because it would not have had a point. You don't make a boring set and add cool animations later. That's called a bust. You make a cool set and possibly add boring animations later, like what happened to Martial Arts.

As a general rule of thumb, you need to ensure that any suggestion you make is actually interesting, and to be honest, I'd be hard-pressed to agree that more "long firearm" powersets count. Hell, I WANT a two-handed sword powerset and I wouldn't agree it's interesting enough to add to what we already have. Alternate animations for Broadsword and a selection of larger swords (PLEASE!!!) would cover that gap sufficiently.

Well, the system can already handle this with ease, as seen on the plethora of animated textures we already have in-game. The easiest example I can think of in-game is Brimstone Armour, which has an animated, "flowing" texture to it. As of I16, we can even recolour it, and to the best of my knowledge it still remains animated. Hence, this is technically possible.

As I don't see a request to alter all existing textures to be animated, this really shouldn't fall into the "too much work" department, as it's a request for future additions. And for what it's worth, that WOULD be a very good idea to have. It doesn't have to be every texture, but a few here and there would be lovely.

I don't think the title is appropriate for this thread, though. In context, I can kind of deduce what it was intended to mean, but seeing this title in the thread list had me scratching my head. I'd suggest that the OP alter his title to something a bit more clear, like "Animated Textures." I'm still on the fence of invoking Jay's Costume Request thread, as this isn't just more costumes, but rather a core policy redesign.

Oh, while we're on the subject, can we get a few GLOWING textures, too?