Samuel_Tow

I tend to give as much regard as I receive. And while I'm perfectly willing to agree to disagree with you (and I do ), when I see a post to the effect of "this sucks" aimed towards something I like, my response tends to be "No, it does not."

On Broadsword, I have to say that it is by FAR my favourite powerset in the entire game. Some powers from some sets I might like more than some powers in Broadsword, but in terms of feel and look, I would accept no substitute. Broadsword is a brutal, inelegant set that emphasises raw hitting power and explosive pillar-of-pain damage, and unlike its cousins War Mace and Battle Axe, it has by far the greatest weapon length, making the swings feel even harder. This is what I enjoy about it, and I have to say - none of the other sword, or indeed melee sets come even close to the same feel. Even Super Strength pales in comparison,

I hope it's understandable that I might not take it well to suggest that it sucks.

It's not a question of realism, it's a question of looking good, and I just don't see this looking good without a hand wave massive enough to start a hurricane. I suppose you could just say you're doing this by building up defence as a secondary effect, but I rather doubt the set's going to have any more secondary effects besides its rumoured variable damage types.

Again, I don't dislike the idea, I just don't think there's a good way to implement it into the game. I actually like it a lot as a concept

Let me turn that around for a second - who are YOU? Far as I can see, the original idea was posted by Perfect Pain, and you are not Perfect Pain. Are you by any chance her equally whiny, passive-agressive husband or her sock pupper?

Let's see... Cry me a river?

No, they very much do not.

As far as getting animation for customization for Battle Axe, Broadsword or War Mace, or indeed any weapon set, is fairly slim, since they already have customization in the form of custom weapons. That's why they got nothing with power customization when it came out.

I am most certainly not in the slightest against adding new animations for these sets, but I cannot agree with your argument as to why it's imperative.

If you start with a name that absolutely, positively cannot be changed, then you start with a name check, have it return a false and end before you really started. There is, however, nothing that can be done about this, as the premise behind choosing a name implies the act of choosing, and if you've already chosen, you deal with what you have. I've had a few that were like that, and some I've gotten, some I haven't. It is what it is.

Practically speaking, even a "set" name can be altered, however. Not by changing the name itself, but by changing how it appears, which part shows up, or if it includes a moniker or a callsign. I couldn't get Sam or Samuel, which is what my namesake character has only ever been called, so I threw in his completely irrelevant last name which I came up only for the sake of completeness. It's still his name, though.

I keep seeing this, and I have to ask: why not just up your difficulty? I understand some people enjoy playing in +over nine thousand, but even if we assume +1xSomething is normal for the lower levels, you can still go up four levels from that, and I have a really hard time believing an arc in the 10-20 range can take you up 4 levels and still keep going. Even if you kill everything along the way. Yeah, if you get trapped not playing it for a while and shooting up a bunch of levels off other people's missions, then I can see that, but it's a problem with all arcs in general, not just lower-level ones, and has been a problem for as long as the game has existed.

I outlevel my arcs a lot of the time. Hell, some of the longer ones I may end up outlevelling twice. It's always as simple as just upping enemy levels, and for the most part, it's like nothing's wrong at all. I mean, the option is there. Why not use it?

I've gone at great length about why I hate this, so let me just reply with the following: There is no chance in hell that I'm going to accept being defeated by a bunch of Hellions when I'm level 30+ without me cancelling my account within five minutes of this happening. Old enemies becoming pushovers is the cornerstone of the feeling of progress the game has.

Because no-one ever asked for that? And no-one ever cheered when it happened? Or is that another one of those "Yeah, but that's just YOU!" arguments that I seem to pick up like a velcro kitty rolling around in cotton sweaters?

I thought I already agreed that low-level zones need to have their level ranges readjusted. You have a good point and I plead no contest, but this is not something that is incompatible with a faster experience gain.

That's assuming temporary travel powers at level 5 were introduced to help with the Hollows, and I will throw you a party if you can find official confirmation that that and only that was the case. Specifically since they popped up in City of Villains before they showed up in City of Heroes. As far as I've seen and as far as I can tell, they were added because people were ******** that it took too long to get anywhere, so the developers decided to throw them a bone. This is a move to which the reshuffling of the Hollows has precisely no relevance. JUST better travel did not make up for it being a terrible zone, and it being a better zone didn't help people travel in other zones.

These are two solutions, but they are not aimed at solving the same root problem, in the same that putting oil and gas in your car both help it go, but in pretty much vastly different ways, and one doesn't really cover for the other.

Erm... Are you asking for things to SEE or things to DO? Because what you're describing here is NOT things to see in any definition of the word I'm aware of. Things to see would imply scenery that's there for you to see it if you can find it, and not specifically designed to actually DO anything. And of that, there is plenty, even in Perez Park. There's the famous little bridge, the little pier and a lot of frankly spooky locations hidden in there. You don't do anything there, but they're just scenery. They're there to be seen.

I can't disagree with more things to do in the overworld, as I've suggested ideas about them, myself, but that's not a failing of zone design, it's a failing of mission design, which isn't really relevant in the slightest to altering or not altering a zone's geometry design. Places to put such encounters in existing zone are plenty. We don't need new places added for this. Stuff them in a tunnel, in a back alley, underground or on a rooftop. There is enough to choose from.

"Outdoing the developers" doesn't assume that what I've seen in the Architect is great, it just means it's better. In the same way that I don't need to run faster than the bear, I just need to run faster than YOU. I hold a few specific story arcs in very high regard, but I can count the number of them on the fingers one one hand, and even them I value more for their overall implications than for their direct writing. Everything else in the game is pretty much, to quote Yahtzee: "Enemies over there. Kill they ***." And it's not even very well masked the majority of the time, especially in older content. The very point of my argument is that the developers could do a LOT better, and that they should actually put some more effort into those missions and clues, and possibly hire a professional writer to write these things. I keep hearing there is one, but I see no evidence for such a person in it in any of the recent content that we've seen.

The fact that players can outdo the developers in terms of content while facing all the serious limitations of the Architect isn't so much a praise for the players that do that. It's a criticism of the developers. One only hopes Going Rogues will change my opinion, but it would have to take a big step forward before that happens.

And even then, the architect has appropriately a zillion crappy arcs in the architect to every half-decent one, so even if there are diamond in the rough out there, I don't feel like diving face-first into the toilet to fish them out.

Yeah, and it infuriates me every time they do that. Smart AI is not always better AI, and plenty of games have proven. In fact, more often than not, smart AI is annoying AI.

As for what's broken... The entire status effects system, as far as I'm concerned. Imagine a combat system where you could only ever kill enemies in one hit and they had no medium stage between full health and dead. That's kind of how it is. Things are either held or they're not, and the difference between something which is held and something which has resisted a hold is all of 1 unit of mag, the smallest subdivision mag comes in. That means large-scale control is either too strong if it's allowed to keep everyone held, or too weak if it isn't. Where damage builds up, control effects do not.

That, and you really ought to be able to turn an enemy to stone or freeze him in ice PERMANENTLY, counting for a defeat, as we've seen happen countless times in other games, movies and, yes, even comic books. Instead, what we have is a binary system sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't.

OK, right down to it, it looks terrible with a very wide angle. A spherical perspective looks odd with a very wide angle, but you can still tell what the heck is going on out in the corners. We already have an example of what I'm talking about in that photo we saw, but I currently don't have access to a game that has enough FoV to show you what I mean about the flat perspective.

Ah, there we go. Basically, a very high FoV with a flat perspective does this. Centre seems to move farther away (it's actually just smaller) and the bulk of the screen is filled with distorted garbage that's good for little more than seeing if something's moving in it. High FoV with a spherical perspective, by comparison, does this. It's still funky, but every location you look at is consistent within itself and could, conceivably, serve as if you were looking in that direction.

I'll have to do the math on this one, but I'm not terribly convinced a spherical perspective strictly needs a specific viewing direction.

It's hard to find a decent one. We're not a nation of meaningful names, which is to say our names have meanings that haven't been in the language for a thousand years. Picking a word from my language (even when I can transcribe it at all) makes me feels just... Odd to use it. In fact, I secretly snicker to myself every time I read Star Trek Online shortened to STO, because in my language that means "one hundred" and it's just funny in certain contexts.

I HAVE, however, picked names out of the more interesting Slav and other Europen name pools, producing one Yaroslav Murumets, a combination of this guy and this guy. And it sounds cool

Pity my fellow countrymen suck at coming up with decent names.

Yeah, how about no. Let's not cut into MY income because someone else has far too much, please. I've never seen more than about 50 million in one place, I don't play the market, I don't have aspirations of purples... I just want to buy up my commons and be done with it. And it costs to have them RIGHT NOW without busting my *** collecting and crafting on my own.

Again, if you want to introduce time sinks, make sure to cut those that have too much money to sink, but not hurt those who don't.

Considering the original name of the Rikti came out of (I don't remember names) of of the developers asking another one of them to make something out of "Rikki Tikki Tavi," you're on to something.

I thought the reason was because the game was dying and they were letting people transfer off the servers which would soon be closed?

It probably was a typo, as I might have missed an apostrophe (prime notation) somewhere. I'll look later.

The A'B' segment (is that what it's called? ) is equal to the x' (x prime) coordinate as plotted on the viewing plane by the viewing plane's separate coordinate system. Essentially, it's the coordinates of the image of the point as counted by the 2D viewing plane's 2D coordinate system.

This is basically a way for me to calculate a bunch of numbers, then excise the viewing plane out of 3D space entirely disregard anything about this 3D space, and just present the image picture by itself with only the data it holds on its own. Essentially, I want to "print out" the viewing plane on a separate medium as one would save a bitmap or a jpeg.

I don't think I'm explaining this well. When I say distortion, I mean that the way the image looks in the corners of the screen is strange, unrealistic and unbelievable, and that cropping just, say, the top-right corner of the screen would look awful. Doing this on a spherical model... Won't, as you can crop out any section and it will look normal within itself.

You musta' been reading different forums from me, then, because where I was I kept seeing thread after thread about the boring grind and slow levelling and how it sucked. Experience increases were done by player request, and I dare say as a result of player research, displaying analysis of the scope of experience increase with levels that could best be described as "schizophrenic." We got a levelling boost not a few months after this was posted.

And, really, they gave you the option to turn off your experience if you level up too fast. Far as I'm concerned, levelling in the 40s is still too boring slow. Not impenetrable like it used to be, mind you, but then I don't expect a character to last me a year like it was back when I had to burn myself out three times over just to get to the damn end. I am not prepared to be convinced that a levelling speed is too fast. If I miss contacts, I'll pick them up next time around. Or in Ouro. Or I'll disable my experience.

I don't know if that's nostalgia speaking, but as far as I remember, there was never a time when people enjoyed jogging through the Hollows and exposited about how much fun it was to not have a travel power. I don't remember anyone ever looking forward to a travel power with glee (outside of genuinely new players) so much as looking forward to a travel power with a grunt and a snark about how much it sucks to not have one. Even I, who enjoy running around the place, will only go as far as to say that "it's not so bad." I will stop just short of trying to claim it's good, because spastic enemy level fluctuations from useless grey to impossible purple makes such treks increasingly pointless as you level up.

Additionally, asking for "fun things to see" to be put into the zones is... Kind of missing the forest for the trees. There ARE plenty of fun things to see in the zones already, and people who've taken the time to explore can give you a full list. Suffice it to say that even the inside of Perez Park, despite being essentially a generic jungle, still has plenty of interesting things to see in it.

The point of the Architect was to let people tell their own stories. And unless you are incapable of writing or reading, the current system does nothing to stop you from doing just that. And if you are a good enough writer (and many are), there's nothing stopping you from outdoing the developer content which, quite frankly, does not seem to have been written by a professional in the majority of cases. That's the beauty of the Architect - it gives you the ability to outdo the developers in the one aspect that has no practical entry cost - writing. And I happen to think that good writing and good scripting is what makes an arc or a mission good, not custom enemies or annoying game mechanics.

If anything, some of the best arcs I've played have proven that you don't need fancy game mechanics to do it. They've shown this by avoiding any of the "eccentric" and annoying objectives like manual escorts, running bosses and needless kill-alls.

What's wrong with outlevelled content? The whole design principle of the game was to create more content than anyone could do on a single playthrough, so as to foster replayability. There WAS no such thing in the old days, because you ran through all the contacts and you STILL ran out. This is no longer the case, and I feel that's a GOOD thing. Granted, contacts or content that you can never even GET to, such as the second Family arc in Port Oaks (I've never seen it, myself) is a problem, but it's hardly the fault of levelling OR the fault of tight level ranges. Granted, I wouldn't mind contacts being given wider berth in levels, but that can't be all we're talking about.

Those are not story arcs. Those are a grand total of less than 10 missions repeated infinitely, which makes them a much more scattered, much more limited, crappier version of the newspaper/scanner. Which... Is a scary thought, come to think of it. And, seriously, outside of the now-defunct Kora farms, when have you ever heard anyone express the desire to go grind Rularuu in all of one infinitely looping mission? At least Volkov has Nemesis mixed in there...

That generally only works if your friends speak English, though, and many of mine don't There's always the friends I've made over the 'net, of course, but that takes... Days, typically, just because of how slow forums work.

I didn't think of that. But then, I didn't claim I was very smart. Quite the opposite, in fact. I basically fell over backwards into my name As well, "insensate" strikes me as more appropriate for a man.

No overlap with City of Heroes, huh? As in, you didn't require the exact same client with the exact same game? And didn't overlap completely in PvP zones? City of Villains was called an "expansionalone" by the very developers making it for a reason. It was an expansion masquerading as a standalone. It was an expansion to City of Heroes in the same way that Opposing Force was an expansion to Half-Life. It was an addon to the same base game using the same base software that gave you an extra full-length campaign. It was not "another game" in pretty much any sense of the word that isn't purely technical. And that's the thing - City of Villains is a standalone in technicalities only. In actual practice, it is an expansion, and as we both know, the developers finally admitted that at around the time of the NC buyout.

Not quite. It's always 10%, because you have your 5% deposit returned to you in full before a 10% tax on the final sale price is taken. In practice, instead of your deposit being returned to you, it's deducted from your tax. Let me explain.

Say you list an item for 1000 and pay 50 as deposit (5% out of 1000). Some kind soul buys this off you for 100 000, however. So you have this 50 "returned" to you, e.i. deduced from the tax, and you get slapped with a tax of 10 000 (10% out of 100 000). In practice, you pay 9950 (10 000 - 50), and you never have your 50 returned to you, so you still end up paying 10 000. It just gives you an ugly number for tax because it rarely matches. The most you can get burned by is 2 INF because when tax or deposit are calculated, they are rounded up on a fraction, so you can be taxed an extra 1 on deposit and an extra 1 on tax.

As far as influence sinks go... Yes and no. No, because I honestly don't want more mechanics designed to sink my money into the aether. Yes, because... Well, let me buy ready-made Common inventions straight off the rack for some ludicrous price and I'll do it. Currently, I buy 40s for around 300 000 a pop and 50s for around 500 000 a piece off the Market. I'd gladly pay this same amount to the game if it meant not having to worry about availability and greedy bastards.

Except there's pretty fat suggestion all over the place that there may be no curse and that he's just evil on the inside, but unable to admit it to himself as is typical of self-righteous villains. Arbiter Daos lays the same suspicions it in almost those exact words.