Samuel_Tow

That's assuming villain arcs are unambiguously better, which they are not. The only thing they provably are is shorter and in relatively the same zone. Of course, CoV having 7 zones to CoH's eleventy billion helps, but that's besides the point. A lot of the CoV story arcs are very simply dumb, a lot of them are completely pointless and quite a few are really badly written. Operative Kirkland, for existence, has no reason to exist, other than to provide a newspaper in contact form.

Let's not be jaded and one-sided on the Issue, CoV's arcs are also very old and in need of a tune-up. The side needs at least one new zone and some more stories to its name, if for no reason other than because we end up replaying the same stories over and over and over again.

And for the love of pi, please kill the need to go through five paper missions to get a contact! That just KILLS!

Excellent Task Force, sure. Great arcs... I disagree. I don't find the Council all that compelling, I don't find a whole zone that's practically ABOUT the Council to such an extent that contacts have to make excuses as to why you're not fighting Council compelling, and I certainly don't appreciate the disjointed approach to storytelling that sends you on redundant hunts and unrelated tasks that amount to nothing more than busywork while contributing little to the actual story and dumping a "storyline" mission at the end.

I appreciate Faultline in a big way, but Striga is nothing at all like Faultline in the slightest.

Try reading my forum reg date and telling me I shouldn't feel the exact same way as the guy you quoted.

I have a question for you - what use would Numia have for a gym? She's dead and has no body. She's just a ghost. What use would Bastion have for a gym? He's a robot. You will always run into these kinds of problems when you try to design the game around the assumption that heroes have human physiology. Even the canon heroes don't always have that, and even those who do don't always use their physique to power their abilities.

I'm not necessarily against the notion of expanding our endurance bar, but you really, really need a better idea as to how to implement that. And again - remember that expanding the bar also boosts recovery as a percentage of it, which in turn increases the effectiveness of other recovery buffs. And remember also that our powers do not increase in cost as we improve their stats, and only actually DECREASE as we slot them. This isn't like in other MMOs, where a stronger version of a power also costs more, requiring a greater mana pool to not shaft yourself. Granted, getting more powers puts a greater strain, but then it comes down to a question of power uptime and power efficiency, which isn't actually something that should be trivialised. Our endurance bar also determines the number of toggles we can reliably run, and I actually feel this is a good system to limit them. It punishes sets with too many toggles, granted, but then I feel sets with too many toggles are not well designed.

Basically, even if I felt the system was lacking, which I'm not sure I do, I'd want to see a better way to bring this about.

In other words, making it impossible for low level characters to get enhancements. No, thank you. Even if you don't use Training and Dual Origin enhancements, I do and would not appreciate having them vanish from the game and be replaced with 15 000 inf a pop enhancements. Besides, enhancements of increasing strength are one of the ways out power increases, and I'd rather keep them as they are.

Infinite endurance is exactly what people are asking for, even if they're not saying it in these exact words. The fact that you run out of endurance is how the game is supposed to play. Endurance management is supposed to be a meaningful part of the game, and Rest is meant to be used. The way some people talk, you'd think having to stand still for 10 seconds or hit rest is tantamount to a blood insult.

As far as what you can do about it, if you really want to hear me out, there is PLENTY. It requires running some numbers, but it's far from difficult to manage if you really want to. For one, know the DPE (Damage Per Endurance) of your powers and use the ones with the best efficiency. Remeber that AoE and cone powers are less efficient than single targets against single enemies, but can be more efficient if you hit enough. Find out how many you need to hit (cones tend to be 2-3, AoEs 3-4) and only use them against this many. Some of your powers are more efficient, some less. Flares from Fire Blast is more efficient than your other blasts, and Hurl from Super Strength is less efficient than your other attacks. Pool attacks and Epic attacks tend to be less efficient still.

Know your EPA (Endurance Per Activation) and note that even cheap powers can cost you a lot in an attack chain if they cost too much for the time they take to activate. Because damage and endurance are tied together for the most part (0.192 scale damage per unit of endurance cost), so a high DPA power will also have a high EPA, which means you must pick if you want high burst damage or low burst cost.

It takes some amount of work to figure these things out, but it's not impossible as it doesn't involve any mathematics more complicated than simple division (or, in practice, using the Windows calculator). If you really want to, I can run the numbers for you just as a gesture of good will. But there ARE ways to go around the problems.

It's a technical issue that has to do with activation sequences. BABs explained that it's not something that's there because they fancy having it, so much as something that's there because the system requires it to be there. He actually tried to remove redraw in instances when an attack could fire, instead, but came up with a showstopper problem and shelved it until after Going Rogue.

I actually think both arcs are above decent, and I wouldn't really want to complain about them. Daedalus is written in a way that's believable for someone from his time and background, and his story, though simplistic, is at least solid. His Malta story isn't bad, either, if only we can get rid of the sentence "I tracked the energies to your time." THAT'S NOT HOW ENERGY WORKS!!! Really, even in a fictional universe, at least TRY to make things a little more believable. That said, the writing was good.

Sister Airlia is an interesting case, herself. Her first arc is crap, basically consisting of doing the same mission twice, but her second arc is actually well-crafted. Any story that can make me feel sick of working for a contact gets my seal of approval. And it didn't have any fuzzy science of tracking things through time... Mostly.

Personally, I'm not picky when it comes to stories. I will, of course, gawk at a really great one, but I won't turn my nose up at a decent arc by any stretch. Bad arcs, though... Let me just say that whoever wrote Montague's arc has no business putting words down in writing. That arc has no feel, no character, no interesting events, almost no logical progression... It's just one gigantic mess of bad writing and unwinding plot thread. It's not like Ashley McKnight's arc is anything spectacular, but at least Ashley is written in a very memorable, very characteristic way, so her antics cover up a mediocre story. But Montague's writing is just BAD. He doesn't come off as a wise and travelled leader of an occult organisation. He comes off like a random guy off the street who's trying to sound erudite and failing badly.

Given that the other stories surrounding the Midnight Club, especially Mercedes Sheldon's frankly completely outstanding, superb arcs, is very well done, I'm willing to accept that Montague is some kind of aberration and not hold his HORRIBLE WRITING against the development team.

I'm not sure how you can say that, since Inventions cost more than SOs, are harder to obtain if you want a full set, require more work to acquire and don't do as much until something like level 30-35. Let me put it like this:

From level 22 onwards, I can get a full set of Single Origin enhancements for around 1-2 million. A single rare salvage piece sells for anywhere from 500 000 to 2 million. I get more than four per 5-level range every time. That means I am absolutely, positively guaranteed to have at least enough INF to kit myself out in Single Origin enhancements. This is not true for Inventions, and I'll explain why.

I don't go for Inventions until level 37, at which point I look for level 40 Inventions. A single level 40 Common Invention enhancement goes for around 200 000 to 400 000 on the Market bought whole, and will cost you 60-100 000 to make and around as much to buy if you don't have a recipe and there aren't any for sale (which there rarely are for reasonable prices). As well, if you want to Invent the recipe, you will need salvage, which you will likely not have at the time that you need the recipe, and will not be able to store enough of to make a full transition. I know this for a fact, actually, as a friend of mine with all the possible salvage slots unlocked ran out of room three times over when inventing things for me as a favour. As such, either you have to do a lot of fiddly, unpleasant planning, or you have to buy the salvage of the market, which will either burden you with hours of wait time or hundreds of thousands of cost. Good luck buying seven Luck Charms.

A typical full range of Common Inventions usually costs me between 10 and 20 million, which is typically everything I have at the time, and then some. In fact, lately I've been skipping upgrading to level 45 Commons altogether, because if I try to, I run out of money half-way through and then end up with almost no ability to buy level 50 Commons when I get to 47. So I skip straight from level 40s to level 50s and it STILL costs me more than buying SOs several times over.

I don't know what you're doing to make it so much easier for you, but I highly suspect it's something that's out of norm, like using tickets or merits or some such. And I will grant you that, on the odd charactert hat I've had some Architect tickets banked on, it's been somewhat easier to stock up on Inventions, but I HATE the Architect, and having to grind through it is a major pain in the ***. That's as compared to Single Origin enhancements where I can just pop into the store, spend a total of 10% of my bank, if that, and walk out with a full set of everything.

I prefer commons, but they are not, in any way, shape or form, easier to get than SOs. And that's considering I sell ALL my drops and never use anything from them, so I'm not getting SOs handed to me.

*edit*
As far as staying on topic goes, I like all level ranges, but I actually prefer the low levels. It doesn't bother me that I'm weaker, it just highlights how much stronger I'll become later on. I like the low levels because of their dynamic pace. I get powers, I get the slots to expand them and before I turn around, I get even more powers. I'm slowly building up my capabilities, and each addition matters. Later in the levels, this process slows down, I'm left with powers that have effects which are hard to detect in actual gameplay, everything stretches out and I'm no longer getting much stronger, instead getting auxiliary powers that increase my utility more than my performance. I enjoy just revelling in the power of a high-level character, but they just level up too slow for me to be as excited.

Yes, I'd like a thousand new maps, as well. While we're at it, I'd also like a 50-foot kitty that dispenses cheeseburgers and tax-deductible gold bullion. And a pony.

Realistically speaking, this is not going to happen, because it's a very poor investment of time and resources. A few new tilesets, many new tileset pieces, sure. That's more or less what I expect from going rogue. But "a thousand new maps" is basically several issues of nothing but, and I'll bet dollars to kittens that not a lot of people will be overjoyed at that.

Let me put it like this - I have a day off work today, I'm up and ready for my day right now... And I'm here reading the forums instead of playing the game. That ought to tell you how much emphasis I put on the forums. Those twenty-something thousand posts don't make themselves, you know

And that's actually eaten into my playtime a lot over the years. I'll be playing the game, and constantly wondering "Mah, I wonder what that guy responded to me with. That should have been enough time. Why don't I Alt-Tab and go check..." And so it goes. In fact, I know that I'm getting burned out on a character when I spend more time in the forums than in-game.

I'm currently in a state where I get burned out on the game really fast, but even so, I just keep coming back to play it. I've tried other games, and they hold me for a week (Mass Effect 2 held me for two) and then I'm back here. I try other MMOs, and they hold me for an hour, possibly two and I'm back here. MAN do other MMOs suck. There's a reason this was my first and will likely remain my only serious one.

So, yeah. I've been playing pretty much this exclusively for the past five years. And I don't plan to stop

From how I've seen it, it's not so much that power colours were baked in (they are no less "baked in" now than they were before), but rather that both the artwork and the infrastructure to tweak them did not exist. As you'll note with customizable powers, the effects they use aren't exact copies of the default effects. The default effects have their colours written into the power, which allows them to have more than two colours, allows them to get away with some pretty elaborate textures on the sprites and generally gives them a much more professional look. You can't do that with a basic greyscale sprite because it's limited to... Well, greyscale.

From what BABs has said and what costume files have revealed, the game references specific effects scripts for powers, and the system simply does not allow you to define which script to play in real time. I'm not confident that has changed, so much as you are now able to alter the script itself. This required technology to implement, it required UI to handle and it required specific artwork that could handle it.

As to why not add it from the get go? Ignoring the fact that MMOs tend to run into deadlines and have to launch with whatever is ready (and, no, City of Heroes is not an exception), it's the simple fact that you just can't plan for everything. Even with all the planning in the world, you're just going to run into features that you want to do but can't without making massive changes. Either those features come up after the fact, are overlooked or are simply not anticipated. To give you an easy example, commas in the Market interface. Originally you needed a pretty sharp eye to tell 1000000 from 100000000. It wasn't something you'd immediately think the system needed, but people burned themselves and the problem became evident, so they adjusted.

Your analogies don't actually work, since "writing a story" is really only the very crust of what writing actually is. Anyone can write a story, and I dare say anyone with a good grasp of the English language can write a decent story, but being a professional writer largely involves writing OTHER people's stories at times and on topics where you simply lack the spark of inspiration. It involves keeping to specific time lines, creating stories on demand, rather than when you think of something cool, and keeping a large continuity in check. If you look at the job of a writer as someone who writes things for the game as a hobby the way we create Architect arcs when inspiration strikes, then yes, it very much is an easy job. It's also not a job you're likely to get paid for.

Implementing the inventions system isn't really comparable to small-scale writing. It's more akin to creating the entire Praetorian storyline lore, locations, characters, backstories and such, and then integrating them within City of Heroes without outright contradicting or ret-conning existing stories. Furthermore, it's doing that while still leaving enough room for future reveals, plot twists, surprises and general expansion. And you need to do all that in such a way that it accounts for the actions of player characters, gives them a choice in their decisions and possibly even alters based on what players do. That is by no means a simple or easy job to do.

There's one thing I can guarantee - most people are going to crack if they are burdened with the task of writing something professionally, and they will either devolve into poor, rushed material or shut down completely. And unlike a lot of other professions, in writing this is a danger than never goes away.

*note*
I don't want to sound like I'm some kind of big expert writer, but I like to think I have some experience with it and at least some overview of the difficulties involved. Writing really isn't something you can speak about unless you've had some experience with it, as it looks a lot more glamorous from the outside looking in than it does once you actually start trying to do it. Everyone seems to think it's an easy, cushy job that should be fun to do, and once you start trying to put together a meaningful, longer, consistent story you inevitably hit a point where you hate your life.

Ah, yes, the other thing I wish we could steal. Let me explain what this does in a bit more detail, because it's not obvious.

Champions Online has a skin texture that's barely a texture and more a flat colour, but laid over this is a pretty high-res bump map of a ripped, muscular body. The "muscle" slider does not alter the body's geometry in any way, shape or form, it merely changes how pronounced this bump map is. Full left on the slider gives you smooth skin, full right gives you inhumanly ripped skin. Interestingly, the belly button is also tied into this bump map, so if you don't want to be very ripped, you'll have to make do without one. Sorry.

This ties into something I've always wanted to see in City of Heroes, and that's a selection of base skin textures. As we all know, the bulk of our "with skin" options are already as simple as a colour mask over a "naked" body, so technically speaking, they should apply over ripped skin just as easily as over the skin we have. They won't apply well over highly-detailed textures, though, as it'd be like slapping a pattern over Tech Wired - it looks painted.

But, yes, the Muscle slider is a very good idea and I enjoyed toying with it.

As someone who's done both writing and code development, I'll take code development over writing every time. It's not an easy job, but it's a doable job that you can figure out and work through. Writing is NOT an easy job and, contrary to what some writers may try to suggest, is never anything that can be understood and replicated free-hand. And that's just on the level of inspiration and linear writing. Once you start trying to keep a continuity together while you inject stories at different points along the line and trying to keep an interlocking world of interconnected events making sense without turning it into this... That takes skill, talent and possibly a lot of luck.

And while City of Heroes has often made me question whether an actual EDITOR ever looked at the game's stories, let alone a professional writer, I do know they had and have writers on stuff for just this exact reason. One only hopes they're too busy working on Going Rogue to bother with City of Heroes and City of Villains at this time.

Unless we get it animated in some fashion, that'd actually seriously interfere with player animations. I'd like that, mind you, but I have my doubts whether they'll actually want to do it.

There's nothing to explain. You can get a Raptor Pack at LEVEL 5. The only problem is that this isn't explained well enough and people miss it. I can't say messing with the powers system is superior to simply making sure people are more aware.

I'd love to see a hard landing after a Super Jump, myself, but ONLY by choice. Champions Online mandated this, which made it completely impossible for me to give my ninja-style guy super jump, because his super jumps were supposed to land softly.

I can't resist... "Should of did" is a kind of grammar that doesn't exist in any language I've seen. What you want is present perfect: "Should have done." Come on, man! I'm not even a native speaker and it bugs me to hell!

As for the topic at hand, yes, I fully agree that a more subtle approach would have been nice. Ever since the PlayNC buyout, we've been getting new additions in a very... Haphazard way. Merit Vendors? Five per zone, every zone, all over the place. Do we need this many? Architect buildings? All over the damn place, even inside an active war zone, with no prior construction. Come on, guys! Put a little more heart into it!

The old construction zones were cool. We'd see buildings, then we'd see a huge hole in the ground with workers milling about, then we'd see a new building pop up over there. Now... They feel like they were dropped from space.