Samuel_Tow

And then there's that. It's good that we're complaining about repetitiveness and all, and more variety is always welcome, but we have to be careful not to suggest solutions to this that we're not going to like. People keep asking for more challenge, smarter AI, more complicated missions and so forth, but... You know, part of the fun of City of Heroes for me is familiarity and easy. I enjoy a game I can play without working too hard at it, and a game I can reasonably predict at least a step ahead of time. It gives me the kind of confidence that a strong hero would have, in that I know I can handle myself, and it's actually the better side of repetitiveness.

Here's how I see it working - if you're doing something repetitive but manage to find an easy, uninvolving way to do it, then it doesn't sting as much. As someone who does numbers for fun from time to time, sitting down to draw stats from Red Tomax, run them through a calculator and write them down in a text file is tedious, until I find my rhythm, at which point it's actually kind of fun to lose myself in the experience. It's the same way in City of Heroes. I enjoy getting so familiar with my characters that I can get "in the zone" and basically progress through hordes of enemies in a state of... Flow, I suppose. It's a state where I know everything my character has within memory without having to think back or check, I know what that character is capable of and how to use that, and so it's just a question of doing it.

It's been a while since I've read up on the theory of flow in games, but I remember it had to do with just the right balance between complexity and simplicity, as well as challenge and ease. To me, familiarity is what does this. When I only ever have to think, but never remember, look for references or fumble my fingers, that's when I like the game the most. Familiarity with my character, familiarity with the terrain and familiarity with my enemies is what this requires. Only when things start to flow in this way do I actually truly enjoy playing this game.

Cheaper AI, harder enemies, more complicated tasks... All of that yanks me out of the experience much in the same way as pausing a movie mid-way through a high drama scene to go take a leak. It's hard to get back into the experience. I actually recently suffered from this trying to play Mass Effect 2. When I could immerse myself in the narrative and the conversations, it was an emotional experience. Every time someone chose to barge into the room and bug me, it just ruined the experience of the game for a while.

Basically, some repetition is good to get us into a sense of flow. Not every game needs to be approached on a conscious level.

Yeah, every time someone talks about how "great" Striga Isle is I cringe so hard I crack a tooth. Faultline, yes. Striga... NO! To HELL with Striga!

Ugh, don't remind me. I'm a largely humourless person, and Champions Online comes off about as serious as Dragonica. Were comic books EVER so pointlessly silly and intentionally bad? Like, in the 60s or something?

And, yeah, I did pretty much the same thing the two times I've tried Champions Online. It may or may not have had something interesting in it, but the whole thing is just designed with so, so many things that constantly irk me from all directions that it's like trying to sleep on a bed of nails - no matter how you twist, there's always something poking you in a sore spot. Coming back to City of Heroes was like coming back home where, even though the furniture isn't exactly perfect, it doesn't jab you in the hips every time you turn around.

Champions Online is a fairly traditional WoW clone MMO with a few extra bits rammed into the side via obvious crater. And I'm just not a fan of MMOs.

Yeah, that's kind of where I stand. We play an instanced game. Instances will repeat. Even if you play an open world, the open world will repeat. Any game you play for upwards of 1000 hours (and I have that clocked on at least one character) WILL repeat. It's just a question of mixing instances and environments enough for things to not get stale.

And the game fails at that in a very absurd way. Probably much more than half the game takes place in either office buildings or warehouses, and lacking an alternate building interior tileset to shake things up REALLY hurts. Yeah, we have Council bases and sewers and probably more caves than a Tomb Raider game, but the game just doesn't cycle these enough. More tilesets and new tileset pieces would work wonders. Better outdoor instances would be cool, too. Instead of static single outdoor maps, finding a way put outdoor instances together via some kind of modular design would be a great way to fix the problem that we have 20 or so outdoor maps and 20 thousand or so outdoor missions. And, really, with all the apartment buildings we have, shouldn't we have an apartment building tileset at least?

Realistically speaking, though, the game will NEVER have enough tilesets and mission maps to not be repetitive. This isn't a single-player title that lasts you 20-40 hours where you can just tab through a selection of environments and not run out until the end. This is the kind of game that you play for five years, investing THOUSANDS of hours into your characters, replay the same content over and over again and just basically keep on going. It's never going to avoid repeating itself, and I honestly feel that people need to be a little more lenient in this regard. Either that, or go through a LOT of games, because there really aren't any other reasonable options.

There's obviously more to do to help with the "repetitiveness" situation, but let's not kid ourselves - this game is far too big to avoid it in any big way.

Yeah, our tails are pretty crappy. I honestly wish we'd see them animated at least a little bit, and that we'd get tails that actually mattered a little bit more. The skinny tubes we get just aren't sufficient.

First of all, DPS isn't what you want to look at. It's DPA. DPS is only useful if you find you always use your attacks as soon as they recharge, which, if you have an attack chain, is not the case. Recharge isn't the limiting factor, animation time is. As such, let's review.

So far as I can tell, Jump Kick does 62.56 points of damage and has a 1.5 second animation, which gives you a DPA of 41.706. Nimble Slash, since you mentioned it, does 52.56 and has an animation time of 1.03 seconds, which gives it a DPA of 51.029. Obviously, that's more, meaning Nimble Slash is better, but that's kind of how pool attacks are balanced. Let's look at something like Kick in the same light. It does 52.55 damage with a cast time of 1.83, which gives it a DPA of 28.716, which is actually significantly less. Even Boxing, which is generally faster at 1.07 seconds to to 47.55 damage, still gives you a DPA of 44.439, which is more, but more or less as much as Jump Kick.

That's pool power attacks for you. Unless you want to run an argument as to how pool power attacks as a whole suck and need to be taken out of the game or fixed, your argument against Jump Kick has no merit.

So far as my assertion that DPS doesn't matter and DPA does, let me know if you care and I'll explain with examples. Suffice it to say that subtracting a high DPA, low DPS attack for a hight DPS, low DPA attack lowers your damage output over time, and that's provable.

Well, depending on how "realistic" you want to go, you can reasonably fake fur with just skin tone and patterns. Problems come in two varieties, though - if you want to go for a decent enough fur pattern, you lose the ability to use paint-on clothes, as they occupy the same layer as the one you're going to put stripes or a blend on (sat, a white belly), which means you either have to improvise with shirts, jackets, pants, shorts, kilts, skirts and so on, thereby hiding the pattern anyway, or you have to go the old Warner Bros cartoon and just depict characters as "clothed in fur" the same way Bugs Bunny manages to walk around naked all the time.

For my bunny girl, I picked paint-on clothes (specifically, Angelic Plus) since I had enough other weirdness to carry forth the message, specifically large bird-like wings and giant bunny ears. I also went for pink "fur," so the "realism" of such a character was always going to be in question and patterns would not have helped with that. For my panda girl, I went with the Bugs Bunny approach, as hiding her patterns just made her look odd and not like a panda. I also had to make her pretty stocky and chubby, both to give the patterns more room for scale and to make her look a little less like a woman in cosplay gear. Large boots and gloves sealed the deal, and I'm pretty happy with how she came out, though I can't give her alternate costumes due to the amount of things I can't change or hide. But I'm already pushing the limit here.

That really depends on the kind of "full anthro head" you have to work with. If it's more of the same crap as the Monster heads, then you very much couldn't work with it, but that really doesn't have to be the case. As artists since time immemorial have proven, you can make anthropomorphic heads and faces that still emote in a way that's human-like enough for people to connect with them. I'm not even going to quote furry artists here, even though that's what's easiest to use as an example, and will instead direct you to the old Disney classics like Robin Hood, Talespin and the obvious - Lion King. In this particular case, it's not a question "degrees of humanity," but literally entirely a question of artistic vision, intent and, yes, even ability.

This can be done, but it requires an artist that both CAN make it work and actually WANTS to make it work. I don't doubt Jay's ability to produce this kind of material, but I SERIOUSLY doubt his willingness to, and I know that it's best not to ask an artist to work on material that he dislikes. The results are just never on the same level as the artist's favourite work.

I am so sunk...

And many people who have used it find it to be a confusing mess. Unless you want to count votes, do try to avoid vague statements like this.

It's easy to SEE what the sliders do as you move them, but it's not easy to PREDICT what the sliders will do before you've moved them. And since you can't move all of them at the same time, you need to be able to predict how sliders will interact. Additionally, when you're trying to build a character after a specific idea, rather than trying to get an idea by tweaking a character until it clicks, this system is horrid. I want a tough, muscular-looking female. Does that mean I should give her big arms, or does it mean I should give her big upper and lower arms? Or does it mean I should give her a little of big arms and a little of big arms and big upper and lower arms?

It's not intuitive, and don't try to patronise me by suggesting I just don't get it or didn't use it much. Pretty much 90% of the time I spent in Champions Online I spent in the costume creator, because that was the one part of the game which didn't utterly turn me off. The way their body and face sliders were implemented is one of the most unintuitive, obscure implementations I've ever seen in a game, and that's saying something after having played Deus (that's Deus, not Deus Ex).

And, yeah, you can use the facial sliders to make different racial identities... Of the same face. In Champions Online, you have a choice between that one face, or something that doesn't look human. Either that, or just covering the face up with masks, goggles and so forth. And I'm not making this up. I tried. I really tried. I utterly failed. Plenty of people have tried to get me to play Champions Online and sent me free trials, and all of the ones I've spoken of have suggested using masks to solve the problem of "that one face." I can look at Fallout 3, or even Mass Effect before it, and even THERE I can make faces that, while they mare or may not look better, are distinctly more unique from each other.

It doesn't take longer to create costumes because there are more options. There AREN'T more costume options, that's the whole point. I went into the game expecting to be deluged in zillions of costume options and... I just wasn't. Sure, they have about two dozen tech gloves and boots, but they don't have a sleeveless trenchcoat, or short pants, or a decent short hair for women, or alternate robotic upper arms, or a decent feline face that's not a full sabertooth tiger head, or even a decent alien face. They don't have a high-collar cape, and despite their "better" selection, they still don't have wraparound cloaks. Or, hell, short pants that aren't hotpants.

Oh, sure, they have a pointy shoulder chest piece like Emperor Ming the Merciless and a backpack that looks like a Radio Shack strapped to your back, but they don't have a sleeveless trenchcoat. That's like saying you have an expensive, tailored suit jacket but, oops! You don't have any pants to wear, so you'll have to go out in your shorts. They don't have MORE options. They just have more REDUNDANT options, while simultaneously lacking decent, obvious things. Like textures. Or, hell, a short skirt. It's either floor-length, knee-length or crotch-length, with thigh-length skirts simply not existing in this universe.

You see people here with the same costumes but in different colours very often? Ignoring for the moment the fact that this is such an exaggeration it borders on a bold-faced lie, have you even taken a look at Rate My Champion, like, ever at all? Logged into Champions Online? Not only are the costumes I see unashamedly ugly (which turned out to be the players' fault, not a shortcoming of the game, surprisingly), but most are practically a variant on the same basic "tights" costume or the same basic "ninja" costume. Again, that's not a failing of the system, it's a failing of the imagination of those who use it.

If you see lots of people running around with the same costumes even when the system is as diverse as it is, you have only people to blame for it, and this happens in all games, including City of Heroes, including Champions Online.

There aren't more options in Champions. I thought there were when I first joined up. I honestly thought they would have so much more, that they would blow the City of Heroes costume editor out of the water. I went there looking to see if I shouldn't be switching over. What I found was a costume editor that was not only MORE limited, big shock there, but was actually confusing as hell.

A game benefits from giving the players a greater ability to customize, but this isn't solely and only achieved by hurling "more options" at their faces, it's achieved by creating a system that allows people to produce as much variety as they can with the least amount of prior training in any field of art and science and in as little time as is reasonable. Theoretically, 3D Studio Max is the best, most customizable game ever made. After all, you can make anything you want and make it do anything you desire, but the ability to actually use it requires training, affinity and, above all, loads and loads of time.

The Champions Online costume creator is a lot like the current City of Heroes base editor. It's a jumbled mess of different items thrown together in sometimes barely related, sometimes conspicuously separate disorganised pile and it is left to the player to sort them all out and arrange them over an open field using awkward controls and lots of manual adjusting. Yes, some people have made AMAZING things with it, obviously, but as a general tool for wide use by the population in general, it is an abysmal failure.

The Champions Online costume creator really did have the right idea going forward, and it could have set the industry standard. But somewhere along the line something went wrong and the thing came out with apparently no planning in its layout and UI and with a vastly underwhelming selection of pieces for it. The selection of pieces Champions Online had when I last tried it out was more comparable to what City of Heroes had back in 2004, or at most what it had at CoV launch. It is nowhere near comparable to the sheer number and variety of pieces the game has now, and that came as an utter shock to me.

Why the HELL does a game which allows me to customize the sclera of my eye separate from my pupil not allow me to customize my God damn sleeves?

I don't think the merit of wanting more information was ever in question. It's just the irritation of having a new "So where's my Going Rogue information?" thread made every day is eventually going to start wearing on people. Even the people who actually want information. It's like a car alarm outside you window - not really all that big a deal, until you realise it's been blaring for the last couple of hours and it's actually getting pretty annoying.

We'll get more info. Constantly asking for it won't change that or make it come out sooner.

Pshaw! Loading things within the zone I've already loaded can sometimes halt my system or make my framerate choppy. Making me load OTHER zones just as I come into sight of them would be a capital mistake.

Sooner or later I'm going to lose my teeth repeating that. Just because villains don't get to fight PLAYER heroes does not mean they can't get to fight NPC heroes. No, the problem is that someone decided to flanderise the concept and make the City of Villains a city of villains ONLY. Which makes no sense, since City of Heroes has more villains than heroes in it and yet no-one ever complains that, because there's no PvP, heroes never get to fight villains. They do. Because villains are on every street corner, in every alley, on every rooftop, in every park, inside every building and just basically all over the place.

Segregation and closed-options PvP aren't the problem. If City of Heroes is a city of heroes and villains, then City of Villains is a city of villains and villains. And villains. And THAT is the problem with the game design - single-minded, one-sided, short-sighted design that saw the villainous counterpart to the all-encompassing hero game be rendered with such needless limits. I've taken enough flak to shoot down a flying aircraft carrier over this, but I still say that City of Villains was designed to be too evil, too depressing, too run-down and with too many villains. The actual CITY in City of Villains didn't need to be that much different. Ideally, heroes would live in a crime-ridden city that needed their help and villains would live in a crime-free city that gave them opportunities to be evil. Realistically, both cities needed to have good sides and bad sides. Our heroic city has places where it feels like the heroes have won and only petty crime remains while other places feel like crime has taken over. Villains don't have that luxury. They can pick between dirty places where crime rules, dirty-ish places where crime rules or evil-looking places where crime rules.

To my eyes, Going Rogue won't really add all that much to City of Heroes, as it will add THE OTHER DAMN HALF of City of Villains that should have been there from the start - a nice-looking place to be evil in.

I don't know... BioWare games have traditionally been very good about allowing all manner of solutions to most problems, often going as far as to let you avoid a boss fight if you're good (or bad) enough to do it. And the interesting thing is... Let's take Mass Effect 2 just for the sake of example. The interesting thing is that stories don't actually vary by much in terms of storyline. You still follow through the actions, plot point by plot point, only specific events that don't alter the storyline by much change.

It's actually kind of like Kain's theory on time travel and the reason why neither he nor Raziel can really change anything, in that time alters unimportant events or remove the errant, restricting change to the immediate future, but ensuring the timeline down the line remains the same. "Drop a rock in a stream and the water just flows around it."

I think that, when people talk about "branching story arcs," I believe they're going about it in exactly the WRONG way, in that we don't need story arcs that split off into numerous independent, unrelated paths so much as we need story arcs that follow the same path, but give you choices to make as to how to handle it. Again, Mass Effect 2 does this right - at one point you meet a cornered hostage holding a gun to you, and you can either shoot him, or risk getting shot until he calms down. To some extent, we already do have this in our own arcs in the form of failable missions, in that win or fail, the story goes on, but the method by which you got there changes ever so slightly.

What I feel we need is the ability to make decisions in a more civilised manner than just letting a timer run our or a hostage get killed, which is to say make decisions by being presented with options to choose from in real time. Add this, and add some kind of summary or effect notification at the end of the arc or in the souvenir and we're set. Again, Mass Effect does this in the form of messages to your private terminal from people thanking you for saving people. I can't see why a souvenir can't have that sort of thing in it, at least theoretically. I can't say whether it's technically feasible within the confines of the in-game system.

As do I Pity the game itself is an unashamed Lineage-meets-WoW clone, which I physically cannot stand to play.

But their hair is actually pretty interestingly done. The curly locks hair I tried looked like each curl was a separate semi-free-floating object which simply traced after the head as it moved, similar to Raziel's wings in Legacy of Kain. I really think they ought to do something more with hair, though. I'm tired of my hair jabbing through my cape.

"Cape hair" only really works on that one specific hairstyle and could possibly work on a mere handful of others. That's not a big deal for Ghost Widow, since that one specific hairstyle is all she has, but it is inapplicable to player characters, since they have to account for more variety. It's a popular concept for NPC costumes to have player-inapplicable pieces, either "just because," or very often because they're hard-coded into the NPCs themselves and won't work on players anyway. Backpacks are a good example, as are the "skull pants" which are actually part of the Skulls' monolithic, inadvisable models.

You are correct - cape hair is completely inapplicable to player models. But finding a good alternative is still not out of the question, even if it's somewhere between pigs flying and hell freezing over in terms of likelyhood.

Rep comments no longer exist, no-one reads tags and I don't even know what these "stars" you're talking about are. As far as using them to make someone feel bad, yes, you can. You can also make use of posts - the very backbone and point of a forum - to do the same thing, but you can't seriously suggest we prevent people from making those.

I never said that all means of communication need to be fully permitted without need for moderation. Just like posts are moderated, so must all things, and one of the reasons rep comments were disabled was to free up moderators from having to chase after the idiots who abused them. I never said tags should be allowed to escape moderation, but "snarky" and "nonsensical" tags are not things that should be shot on sight. I'm perfectly willing to clamp down on bad behaviour, but going as far as to try to clamp down on bad taste IS a strict authoritarian order.

I'm sorry for your friend, but trying to make all-inclusive rules never works in practice. It ends up hurting the innocent while offenders simply skirt around them.

Yeah, making decent anthropomorphic character is pretty difficult, insomuch as it's hard to make them NOT look like people in face paint and cosplay gear. I have two - a bunny girl and a panda girl - that I went a LONG way to make sure they looked the part. I'm not interested in cosplay characters, so I had to improvise with patterns, faces, proportions and specific costume pieces, and I think I did a good enough job. But it's hard. Really hard. And I don't think I'd be able to make another one, what with only one anthropomorphic face that doesn't look like a butt crack with fangs...

You can use a hairstyle that covers the ears. It's not ideal, but it's better than nothing.

Tweaking Buckshot to count as a single-target attack would single-handedly SAVE the set in my eyes. As it is right now, it has a lot of AoE, but between caps, resistances and the general lack of single-target, that's not a well-balanced set. Just a third single-target attack would help it a lot.

As well, most any game I've seen presents shotguns as VERY powerful, but only effective at close range. Almost no game I've seen represents them as a weapon useful for hitting multiple target, so much as a weapon useful for hitting a single target HARD. It'd too late in the game to suggest Buckshot be made into a single-target heavy hitter, and adding more damage to it would not happen, but at least lowering its endurance cost to that of a single-target attack of the same power would be GRRRATE!

I'm sure it is, but that doesn't stop it from being unacceptable.

That's a pretty underhanded straw man, since I never saw anyone here claim that the game consists of nothing but puritans. And I'm not sure where Virtue came into play, but I didn't notice anyone mentioning it as "the glorious good server where the serious players are." If anything, I've seen some of the most numerous behaviour and character criticisms levied towards that particular server. But even if all of that were true, what difference does your anecdote make? So a bunch of people have exceedingly poor taste and sensibility. If you minded that so much, you could have reported them, rather than trying to use that as a cudgel to drive home an incorrect assertion.

Which is totally irrelevant to anything being discussed here. The tools are just that - tools. A bread knife allows you to murder people and you can pick locks with light bulb filament. Last I checked, police weren't mandating all people use candles for light and break their bread by hand. It's not what you have in the editor that matters, it's what you do with it that counts. It's technically possible to make complete Wolverine clones and pretty decent naked women. Those get genericed on the spot, and I have a hard time believing you can drive an argument as to how that's wrong if the editors allow it. It's a question of final product, the sum of its parts, as it were, not what specific pieces you put into it.

We're "ganging up" on you, because you can't make a place where "children can't enter," since verifying age is not possible. We're "ganging up" on you, because such a server is not needed in the game, because all it does is create a heaven for the children who can't enter to be juvenile and adds nothing that the rest of us adults can't actually have within the context of the game as it is. We're "ganging up" on you because your idea is simply bad, and if you can't detach your ego from the merit of this one particular idea, then that's your egg to stand on.

And I'm tired of hypocrites who cite statistics that are completely unprovable, speak for a silent majority of people and criticise a different majority of other people unified only by the particular attribute they're trying to shoot down. What you're saying is, basically, "people are dicks." So? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Those people aren't asking for a no-powerlevel server where they can live in the purity of their own self-righteousness while at the same time powerlevelling their ***** until they resemble plate glass. Much in the same way, no-one that I've seen is saying that they would never consider using adult themes for their characters, merely that they don't feel such a server has any point to exist and that GMs acting on them is not something we're going to argue. If you want to stretch the rules, be aware of the possible consequences.

There is no need for a "mature" server, as there are no normally acceptable mature themes that you can't pull off in the current game given enough caution on your part. You really can't expect more from a T-rated game, and it's foolish to pout about it.

You know, that's kind of what it comes down to. Game Masters don't patrol the game. Ever. If they take action, someone reported something, and if someone reported you, then you offended someone. And if you got genericed, the Game Master agreed. The ability to have "mature" gameplay in everything but name, practically, already exists - merely ensure that you do so in an environment where this is acceptable. Look up adults with a more lax sense of humour and you'll be fine.

But an 18+ server won't give you that. An 18+ server will be filled mostly with underage kids, just as practically everything that's forbidden for minors.