Samuel_Tow

In other words, why governments in real life don't just print more money every time they need more capital. In real life, money isn't created out of thin air. It has to come from somewhere, or rather, from someone else. The government earns money from people paying taxes, people earn money either from other people or from government jobs. Every time large amounts of new currency is printed without an equal amount of old currency being retired (e.i. new bills aren't printed to replace old bills), currency devalues, prices increase and people tend to suffer as they still have the same amount of money, but that money isn't worth as much. I already watched the cost of everything increase a hundred-fold overnight in my own country (cost us a government the next day) and I've had to go through a denomination switch, where 1000 of the old currency was worth 1 of the new one.

In a computer game, players just normally playing the game are constantly printing money. Everyone can get rich, everyone has money to spend, so it takes more money for people to sell, which inflates prices and hurts the few people who DON'T have money to burn. Influence needs to sink out of the game to prevent inflation and maintain a relatively static amount of currency floating through the game. There will always be people who have more, but the point is to keep that more as a percentage of everything, not "just more."

When everyone is rich, no-one is rich at all.

Animated hair doesn't have to be cape hair. It could just be animated, like it is in something like WoW, or even Neverwinter Nights. Or, hell, like in Aion. What WoW has is a few animations for hair, or a pony tail as I've seen. You have it wave while you run and trail as you fall. I don't think we need special animations while we fight, even if I wouldn't refuse to have those. What I saw in Aion, on the other hand, was curly locks that only really trailed a bit, and short hair that sort of just wobbled. Attaching a cape system to the head is actually a pretty bad idea, as it creates and uncouth mop glued to the head, ala Ghost widow.

OK, question:

Given the normal palette of colours we can choose from for normal costume pieces, am I correct to say the following:

We are given full range of hue (0-240), with the rest of each row split in half. First half is the colour's hue, 240 saturation and luminance going from 240 to 120, with the second half having the colour go from the colour's hue, 120 Luminance and saturation going from 240 to 0.

As I see it, our colour rows basically trace the colour circle, and go from pure black, to a vivid colour, then back down to a bright pale colour after the mid point, ending in what is almost grey. That's the best I can approximate without actually diving into the data, and given that our colours are still saved in RGB, wouldn't be trivial to tell.

That's kind of what broke my resolve, really. You can alter left and right arm independently, but you can't alter your jacket sleeves. You can put details everywhere, but the only tops with skin you can have are a very skimpy bra or a full tank top. You have all those face sliders, but you only have one face to work with. It's just... It's great, and yet it isn't. It's one more example why aiming too high and not delivering on it isn't as good as aiming lower but being able to deliver fully. A solid project will always trump one with more potential but less actual execution.

Speaking of faces, I have to bring up Aion again. I don't know why, but all faces I've tried to make in Champions Online end up just the same. I did a little work on Aion, and the face editor there beat Champions clear out of the water. Sliders generally did more, and while there may or may not have been as many, the sliders that were there made more of a difference. For instance, in Aion you have a slider to select the angle of your eyebrows. This can produce anything from scowling scorn to grim determination to neutral indifference to gentle kindheartedness to genuine confusion, just from the shape of the eyebrows. You could also make the mouth be anything from pouting to smiling and it just goes on from there. What Champions does with its preset expressions, Aion allows you to do by hand.

The problem with giving players too much freedom, though, is that they don't know what to do with it. If you're a graphic artist, a psychologist or just a people person, you may have a very good idea, but most people, myself included, will just keep remaking the one face we enjoy. City of Heroes presets do help with that a LOT, since they give us faces to choose from, and it's a lot easier to see what you like when it's presented for you, rather than CREATE what you like with no prior reference. I'm not a visual person in the slightest, so when I make up characters, I don't know what I want them to look. City of Heroes basically shows me character and constantly asks "Is it like this? No? How about like this?" It's effectively someone else drawing my character to my specifications. Too much freedom puts the burden of drawing on me, and I just can't do that.

The problem with faces in particular is that you can hit the uncanny valley VERY easily. Take the example of something I did in Aion. Tabbing through the sliders, I found one which could make my girl's mouth smile. It should have looked nice, but it just looked creepy, and for a simple reason - people don't smile with the mouth. In fact, you can have a smile that has almost no mouth involvement at all. People smile from the cheeks and from the eyes, it's how our faces work. That's why it's so easy to spot a fake smile done by someone who doesn't know what a smile actually is. That's why TV ad photoshoot models look so disturbing when they "smile." A graphic artist will know this, and so give you a face that's properly smiling. A player will not, so either he will make a face that ought to be smiling but just looks creepy, or he will be unable to find a face that doesn't look creepy to him.

I tend to think of myself as a people person, and a person of strong taste, so I appreciated Aion's ability to give me EXACTLY the face I wanted, despite the fact that my friend who was showing it to me constantly kept telling me my choices looked bad. Just off the top of my head, I made a girl with a lower mouth and a longer nose, which he felt wasn't pretty, but I overruled him because that's what looked good to me, which, again, I appreciate. But I haven't tried making a second female face, so I'm not sure if I'd be able to make it truly unique.

I'm not against the notion of having sliders or even having more sliders. I'm against the *** backwards way they're implemented in Champions Online. You have sometimes three to four levels deep of redundant sliders that all affect the same thing. You have general body mass, then you have arm thickness which affects the upper arm, lower arm and hand, you have upper arm thickness that does the same thing, lower arm thickness that does the same thing, and a few hand sliders that do the same thing as the above, as well as the same thing as each other. I'm not an idiot. I tried to figure them out, but the way they interact with each other is NOT intuitive, and I don't have the patience to figure out stupid design in a bad game.

City of Heroes is superior in terms of user-friendly design, for the simple fact that each slider only affects a single thing, with the exception of the general bodymass slider, which acts as a multiplier for a few things. If you want to give us more control, then just split the general bodymass slider into separate bodypart mass sliders and give us the ability to link them together and slide them around at the same time, rather than adding redundant sliders. Because the way Champions Online does it is like adding a fifth wheel to a wheelbarrow.

Their whole system is like that. It's designed in complete chaos. You have a section for heads, a section for torso... And a section for just hands alone? Huh? Base textures (where they even exist) are hidden in a sub-menu that I had to comb the options three times to even FIND, and they're mixed in with bump maps... Sometimes. You have texture, pattern, bump map, shader and not always in the same order and not always the same things. At the same times, you have jackets, but no control over their sleeves. And the "benefit" of clicking on your model to pick specific costume items directly is just a pain, because I keep mis-selecting random junk that takes me away from what I was doing. And the inability to tab through costume pieces without using the dropdown is a PAIN IN THE ***!!!

And it's not like I looked at it and gave up. I spent a full God damn weekend trying to make sense of this thing and I continually failed and continually furstrated myself with not being able to find things I knew were there or mis-selecting things or just fiddling with crappy dropdown menus. And I STILL didn't manage to end up with any even halfway decent design, because the whole game has digital vibrance crammed up to over 9000 on top of a mild cel shader, so bright colours blend into a flat soup like I need glasses and half the costume pieces are just intentionally stupid, added in more for the kicks than for any use they may have.

Like I said, I came into Champions Online with a lot of expectations, and found that the game really, really had potential to be something great. But it's just... Clunky. And not in one or two isolated issues, it's all over the place. Every aspect of it is just cumbersome, tiresome, irritating and just plain and simply badly designed. And, yeah, I know City of Heroes wasn't exactly the pinnacle of good design back in 2004, but Jack touted this as the next step in evolution, a better game. He can't afford to compete with City of Heroes as it was back in 2004. He needs to compete with City of Heroes as it is in 2010, and his game just can't. It offers its own host of unique elements, and I want to take nothing away from them, but the overall quality of design is just... BAD.

I actually think this would be a decent balancing mechanic just in and of itself. If you can afford to run around non-stop by investing in Stamina or just crunching numbers a lot, then that's your reward for doing so. But if you don't, you can always just rest a lot. It won't be nearly as fast, but it won't be nearly as dull as it is right now when you run out of endurance, Rest hasn't recharged and all you can do is basically turn the TV on and watch that for a couple of minutes.

Far as I'm concerned, any game which has, as part of expected gameplay, the activity of "stop playing for 180 seconds" is not a game that's entirely well designed.

Actually, having looked through Aion, I think we also lack any decent curly hair. And, no, the Afros don't count.

Really? It's kind of hard to make out, but I'm pretty sure mine says T for Teen on it.

Go look for straw men somewhere else. Being able to reload a weapon instantly, rather than waiting on ludicrously long cooldown timers is far superior, and I will easily trade the limited (read: not really) resources that you trip over every time you round a corner for that convenience. I would much rather have a sniper rifle that reloads almost instantly after a shot over one which overheats on one shot and then cools down for four seconds.

Just because YOU dislike a particular design implementation does not make it bad, nor does it mean other people agree with you. Try and keep a bit of perspective.

You know, there's trying to tidy things up and then there's being pedantic. You talk about "schoolyard antics," yet you're trying to suggest some kind of strict authoritarian order that is, quite honestly, on the exact same level. Let people have their fun and stop trying to enforce rigid rules of behaviour on people, specifically when they do no harm.

Or you can, you know, take both. I'm not sure what your interpretation of "godawful" is, but it's a quick, weak attack not unlike pretty much every quick, weak attack in every melee set.

Precisely. People keep asking for a "mature" server and every time it comes down to wanting to do juvenile things on it. Fact of the matter is, if you get name-busted for something, it's not because the game isn't "adult enough," it's because it's in incredibly poor taste. Believing an "adult" server would permit this is believing that adults have poor taste. As an adult myself, I'd never set foot in the place, and I'm sure juvenile teens would be lining up to join.

Selectable stances are cool, but as we've seen, not out of the question for City of Heroes. Additional detail slots I'll freely give you. Upper arm and upper leg details especially, though I highly suspect backpacks may be coming. Either that, or someone needs a brain replacement.

As far as four colours go, though... No, thank you. There are a mere handful of pieces that need more than two even in Champions Online, let alone in City of Heroes. I can't say I'd be opposed to it, but I hardly think it's something that's that important.

This tends to be my standby response, and even though I got accused of promoting "mob justice" through it, I stand by this point. The forums population doesn't so much police itself, as it sets a very high standard that just isn't very accepting of idiots. Where in other communities, being a jerkass will inevitably get you some notoriety and other jerkasses queuing up to high-five you, here they just get the cold shoulder. It can be pretty disheartening to be disruptive in a community and realise you've made yourself almost completely unwelcome in doing so, shooting down any support you may have otherwise had. We do get our fair share of idiots, but we rarely get serial idiots as it's just not pleasant to be disruptive in a community that doesn't stand for that.

Specific notable people do manage to be largely mean-spirited and still tolerated, but they're tolerated in the same way as a bullet in the body. Once everyone grows to accept the person and stops taking them seriously, the disruptive person can no longer be truly disruptive if no-one is disrupted by them. And so the community just flows around them.

Personally, I credit the actual people that make up these forums for why they are as cool as they are.

You know... That's actually a very good point. A lot of the reasons other forums tend to be unpleasant is a distinct "us vs. them" mentality that exists over different parameters. It could be veterans vs. newbs, horde vs. alliance, casual gamers vs. min/maxers, PvE vs. PvP... You name it, people will hate each other over it. And, yeah, we see some of that in our own community, but it rarely becomes a problem. For the most part, with the game being as open as it is and outwardly encouraging players to try things they may not have otherwise been inclined to creates an air of tolerance. Yeah, we did have a lot of the "us vs. them" thing back when we had separate CoV boards, even though many of us played both sides of the game, but it's been a long time since that.

See, in my experience, bridging the gap and at least TRYING something you may have "hated" tends to make people a lot more lenient. "The others" are no longer such strangers, and so don't seem as easy to hate. The game promotes diversity, liberty and, to a large extent, adventure in a way that other MMOs just do not. Other MMOs constrain you. They define you. They give you a character, give you a class, give you a task and severely punish you if you deviate and screw up. City of Heroes is different. It plops you down into the game and more or less ORDERS you to go wild. Go on, make a crazy costume! Come on, play recklessly. Die, if you have to. It's not so bad. Go out, have an adventure, let loose a little. We don't mind. You don't have to do what gaming tradition expects you to do. You can go wild and actually do what YOU always wanted to do.

That sort of game design really lends itself to a much more relaxed type of atmosphere. Less pressure and more freedom make people less likely to lash out against each other, less likely to segregate and band in small, exclusive groups and just generally more likely to have fun their way. When everyone takes part in diverse activities, there really isn't much ground to hate anyone else because, chances are, you have a lot in common anyway.

When the game doesn't piss you off, you have less reason to be grumpy, basically.

I most vehemently disagree. The Champions Online costume creator is utter garbage, a tangled mess of unintuitive sets of unrelated costumes scattered around obscure menus with STAGGERINGLY limited options do not a good costume editor make. Combine that with the fact that half the pieces themselves are garbage and you have a big problem. The only real thing it has going for it is the ability to alter left and right costume pieces (gloves, boots, eyes) separately. That's it. You can try and bring up the "fabric, leather, metal" toggle, but given that Champions costume pieces LACK TEXTURE ENTIRELY, it doesn't count. That, and having only one face is just sad, considering how little it changes with slider values.

And their sliders are just a frikkin' mess. Multiple redundant sliders that count against each other and alter multiple things, aren't arranged in any logical way and don't even always work... The more MMOs I play, the more I realise just how orderly we have things here. Take face sliders, for instance - you have sliders for a bunch of things, like head size, brow position, chin size and so forth, and each slider comes in three versions - X, Y and Z direction. Champions has some that only have X, some that alter both Z and Y, some that alter one thing part-way and another thing the rest of the way and they're just spattered onto the screen like someone distributed them via salt shaker. And that one face and one face only doesn't help.

If anything, I'd look to the Aion character creator in terms of faces. It lacks face masks, goggles, horns and such, but in terms of sliders, it is VASTLY superior to that of Champions. It's actually superior to City of Heroes, too, even if the sliders are still oddly jumbled. It still gives you only one face, but you can alter that face in such a big way that, unlike Champions Online, you CAN make characters rather different. That's largely because you have much greater control of the actual face, such as controlling the curve of the bridge of the nose, just to give a random example. Where Aion fails is in terms of colour selection. You CAN pick from a continuous colour field, but you can only pick colours with Saturation under, like, 50 or so. Pretty much everything comes as a greyish washed-out version of a colour, unless it's very dark, in which case it comes off as black-ish. And they have animated hair!

Let me explain something about hair and hairstyles as seen in Aion - they aren't "flowing" in the same way Ghost Widow's hair is (which is actually a cape), as hairstyles remain static when you stand and don't appear to be some kind of complex construct. They just seem to be animated to wave when you turn around (even when you spin your character on the creation screen) and do a few simple actions when you move and jump around. Personally, that's a good way to implement it. Not all hair can "flow," but even short hair ought to at least wobble.

Just so long as "the end" isn't one of these goals, I don't have a problem with that.

It has as much reason to exist as Boxing or Kick, and its long animation was fixed AGES ago.

To be even safer, do this:

Target a stationary NPC, then do ++forward$$++left$$++autorun. Or, if you want to be fancy, do just ++left$$++autorun. It works best if done with a girl. You'll proceed to circle around your target in a foxy walk. Rrr!

Ahem...

Yeah, that would be very good. I can deal with Monster heads not being affected by facial sliders (even if I don't see why they shouldn't be), but the female versions are just absurd - tiny and stuck at the end of a long cone neck. They just look goofly.

And can we get a few more monster heads that don't have the huge ugly jaw? Or a few with the mouth closed so it doesn't look like a cheap Halloween mask when it never moves?

It's no more jumping through hoops than you do in Champions Online, what with their huge extended tutorial and all. It's four missions. That's it.

And I don't know about new players, but I do know that the Kings Row detective lights up as soon as you set foot in Kings Row. That might merit some further explanation at some point, and NOT directing people to Wincott at level 5 would really help, however.

I teleport to the edge, then over to the roof while the Hover holds. And, no, I've never wished I could zoom out far enough to lose sight of my character.