Samuel_Tow

Actually, the ID editor has been bugged for as long as I've been with the game, and continues to be bugged to this day, though the bugs it has seen have been as diverse as life in the sea.

All the way back when, the editor had a serious problem with text wrapping, randomly failing to wrap words to the next line properly, leaving them hanging out of the text box. If you then tried to backspace or delete over text after places this occurred, the word would alternate between being on the previous line and on the next line, shifting the text you're erasing left and right but NOT moving your cursor. So, for instance, you wanted to delete the word "go" in "Elizabeth then had to |go and speak with God." with the cursor placed at the vertical line. As soon as you deleted "g," "Elizabeth would shift to the previous line and you'd end up with "the|n had to o and speak with God." With the cursor placed at the vertical line, so actually hitting Delete twice would mess up your text in a big way. This seems to have been fixed for some time, but I still see it occasionally.

For a while, the text box allowed 1024 symbols, but coded line breaks as four letters, so if you had a lot of line breaks that pushed your bio size over the limit, the text box would truncate your bio every time you zoned. I had a character for whom I wrote in "the last great war." over thirty times before I gave up, and it took her at least three years before that actually took.

The text box has always had trouble with text manipulation at the edge of the text box. If you manage to string text such that your line before the space goes right to the text box border, you will be unable to backspace over the space and the game will decide it wants an artificial line break right there, causing you to have to literally delete entire words before it will actually take. For instance, if you had "take| that" wrapped at the horizontal line, then you can kill the space and it still won't wrap down as a single word. It'll stay separate. In fact, you can stand your cursor on the bottom line and Backspace, and it WILL kill symbols from the upper line, but will not bring the lower word up. At all. You can end up with "t|at" and it will still be wrapped despite there being plenty of room for it to shift back to the previous line. To the best of my knowledge, this has never been fixed.

There used to be a time when the bio field would randomly kill your line breaks, and that happened long before the Architect, as well. It didn't do it right as you typed, it just randomly ate your line breaks upon logging in or zoning or something like that. I don't check my own bio all the time, so I don't know when it happens. I haven't seen it in years, not counting the latest Architect oops.

And then there was the ever fun bug where the text box put artificial line
breaks at the end of each
line where the text box ended, which caused your text to come off in
line-and-a-half blocks in
the actual bio window, because the window is narrower than the text box
itself. That was fixed fairly
early on, but it was pretty ugly, don't you agree?

And then there's the problem of mouse-selecting... Pretty much anything in a text box that you can actually type in. Click-placing your cursor is out of the question, as it simply does not go where you point, just "somewhere" within the text box. Drag-selecting text has the nasty tendency to either select nothing, or select something which has nothing in the slightest to do with where you actually pointed. And even today, auto-scrolling windows with scroll bars as you highlight text in them causes the scroll bars to rocket at the speed of light regardless of your scroll bar speed settings, so you can either highlight what's visible in the window, EVERYTHING above or EVERYTHING below, unless you have reflexes to rival the Flash. That has never been fixed, to the point of making the mouse useless for anything above putting focus on the text box.

And then there's the problem of basic keyboard shortcuts working. Or rather not working. Sometimes. It's hard to tell, because it's so hard to predict. Page Up, Page Down, Home and End typically work, but Ctrl + End works sometimes and just reads as "end" at other times. Ctrl + C trends to work, but Ctrl + A doesn't always. Ctrl + Z doesn't even register. And with the way the bio field is set up, you can't even cancel your changes. If you delete a paragraph of text and change your mind... Well, too bad! Can't undo, can't cancel, it's gone. Either write it all from scratch (and from memory) or suck it!

The text boxes in this game have been a frikkin' mess from day one, to the point where I'm dumbfounded as to why they decided to apparently re-write existing software and code their own crappy, buggy text editor from scratch. Even something as completely basic as... Err... Word 5, really, which I've actually used back in the day. It didn't have any of the completely unnecessary features of Word 2007, but at least it didn't have any of the completely unnecessary bugs, eccentricities and oddities of the City of Heroes text editor, and it dealt with raw text. Hell, Note Pad is superior right now, and it has all the features I complained about. Why did Cryptic (yes, Cryptic) have to go and reinvent the wheel? All they ended up doing is putting lots of edges on it so it doesn't roll as smoothly.

That's just in - as I've been finding out lately, constant, grating bosses are the BIGGEST problem for Scrappers, much bigger than most any elite boss, in fact. This isn't because a boss is harder than an elite boss, merely because a boss is... "Harder than he is rare," to put it like this. Certain bosses, especially, are a pain in the ***, and they can spawn literally every spawn if the RNG decides it hates you today.

As a caveat, TURNING OFF bosses makes pretty much the entire damn game soloable by any Blaster. In fact, it makes much of the game soloable with a greater certainty of success than by melee ATs, but that's because there are certain rare points which are harder for melee. Melee ATs still have a MUCH easier time soloing everything ELSE. Back when I had bosses turned on, every damn Zeus Class Titan or Master Illusionist I met had to be treated like an elite boss, and when a mission can span 15 of them, preparing for them is simply out of the question. Now that I'm all but guaranteed to not meet more than one in a long while, there really is nothing too terrible to solo through. Yes, including Maria Jenkins' missions. Most of them are in Portal Corp, so taking a trip back to her to restock on purples for the second elite boss in most missions is a small price to pay. Doing it once I can live with. Doing it 15 times... Not so much.

At this point, the only things that really annoy me are high-level Crey, due to the stupid durability of the Tanks, and Rogue Vanguard in areas with a low ceiling. Not even Malta scares me that much any more, as while they ARE dangerous, they're also manageable.

I always type really carefully, simply because I never proof-read ANYTHING, so whatever I post, that's what comes through. Unless the mistake is something incredibly obvious like endless italics or mangled quote tags that I can tell from a glance at my new post, whatever I post is what stays behind. Then again, I use Firefox, which comes with an obnoxiously obvious red underline for misspelled words, I have no compunctions about checking a dictionary about words with a meaning I'm not sure of. This, combined with me actually ENJOYING writing in a... Let's call it "elegant" way means that while I DO pay attention when posting in this thread, I don't do so much more than I do in other threads.

Without proofreading, though, embarrassing mistakes are likely to happen, like the time I took a lot of laughs over talking about the Lick King. Oh, well.

I think I heard something about the makers of I think it was Metal Gear Solid travelling around to actually see and try the real guns used in the game for the sake of authenticity.

Beyond that, I think it's just good to know so I can know what looks feasible when I'm looking for something realistic.

Isn't that Q2 of 2010? I was under the impression we were looking at a release days something like April to June.

Devices is also a very SLOW secondary, especially if you try to play to its strengths. Teams tend to be a good litmus test - if a team would never, ever wait for you to do something, it might be a hint that what you're trying to do just might be too slow to be worth the benefit. There are other factors, certainly, but this right here is a giant red flag for me. Yes, it is technically possible to lay enough mines to wipe out full spawns, but the time this takes is COLOSSAL, especially compared to the benefit, and as mine was AR/Dev, he lacked any sort of self-damage buff if we don't count Ignite, so hard targets and general "kill first" strategies did not do well.

This is, of course, another case where "decent" comes into play, but I look at things in this light - if a powerset trades off TOO much speed for safety, especially a Blaster set, then that set is not well designed. Yes, it may be safe, but it still lags behind all others. Personally, I'd see several of the Devices powers scrapped or heavily reworked, because as they stand, they either have such poor effects, such high cost or so little use that they're hardly worth the power picks.

For all Blasters - Devices and otherwise - this is what it ultimately comes to. For the sake of sane game design, certain enemies CANNOT be quick and easy to kill. For the same reason, such targets are usually either immune or highly resistant to control effects. With damage and control out of the way, a Blaster has... I believe the technical term is "diddly squat" else to defend himself with. It's catch 22. Hard targets need to resist instant death and perma-holds, yet Blasters need to insta-kill or perma-hold things to be safe from them. About the only way out is to abuse inspirations, but this just means minimising the presence of hard targets, and a lot of people feel turning off bosses makes them into wimps. It IS an option, however, and one that works out for me very well.

The thing with the AoE sizes is that Blasters don't really have problems with large spawns of enemies, they have problems with hard targets. I don't think this will change even WITH changes to their AoEs, because hard targets need to remain hard or they lose their point.

To be honest, even as a huge supporter of facial details, even I can tell you that all of that would go to WASTE. You never see faces clearly enough to tell that much detail apart in-game. Ever. The only way to actually see that is to go in first-person view mode and walk right up to another character's face, which still doesn't work if your much taller or shorter. Even at the character selection screen, it's still just too far away for there to be much visible difference.

That's one. Two is the technical challenge, which is NOT to be underestimated. Yes, Champions Online have something along those lines, and we've all see what that has led to - one face per gender. It's not even appropriate to talk about character faces there, because the game has a grand total of one character face, as in singular. One face. That's the price you pay for too much customization, because faces differ in a lot of ways. Just sticking on another those like you're wearing funny glasses is not an option, because that sort of thing LOOKS BAD even from afar. And I can guarantee you right now - such a system would SEVERELY limit the full variety of faces it can produce, and I rather don't want to have to do like I did in Champions and try to hide my face so it's not all the same all the time.

Eye customization would definitely be cool, but our faces don't have enough detail for that to matter, and even if they did, not all of them have eyes.

That's actually a good point, come to think of it. If you're gonna' take the position that "anyone who disagrees is wrong," then predicting negative reaction is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kind of like predicting that poking Cthulu with a stick will get you killed. Yeah, I kind of figured that one out.

Oi lordy! I've taken to playing at -1x3 as early as... Well, about level 4 or so, so for the bulk of my career, I'm taking on spawns comprised of five to eight enemies, sometimes even more. I swear I've seen spawns of at least 10 minions, all -1. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a cheat, but HOT DANG if it doesn't feel cool to wade in like you own the place and wipe out the lot of 'em

And unlike other games, the higher I go in level, the more things I can take on by myself.

I have a wrist watch with a broken chain that I grew out of the habit of wearing now that I have a cell phone, and I use that to sit under my screen. Very handy.

Hey, I can still use English as a second language as an excuse for not knowing

I didn't look up Zombie Man's words, but I believe "proscriptivistic" is a heavily compound word in this context. At least as I read it, it breaks up into "pro" "script" and "ivistic," making it an adjective describing a noun as being in favour of writing. English is not my first language, and I say this not as a brag but to explain that my first language is heavily based in the use of compound words created out of multiple prefixes and suffixes, hence why I may be reading this not as intended. English spell checkers and dictionaries generally don't recognise heavily compounded words, possibly because they don't exist in common usage very often, hence why spell checkers wouldn't recognise things like "funnily" for a while.

As a joke, we have the word "непротивоконституционствувателствувайте," which I'm told is a real word and breaks up into something like a dozen prefixes, suffixes and a bunch of deprecated crap that was dropped out of colloquial language 50 years ago, but it is, technically, a word. Basically, it means something to the effect of "do not oppose the constitution" but all crammed together in a single word. And if I can untangle THAT mess of crap and made-up word structure, I hope I will be forgiven if I see "proscriptivistic" as something other than what it was intended to be

Good point. However... Well, I've never really seen a lot of people around the Black Market, even back in the day. At most, I've seen maybe a dozen people camping out, but that was back when people spent literally HOURS in there just learning the system. It very quickly petered down to only a few at a time, and even then it hasn't dropped too much. But here's the thing - the Black Market is a functional location that people go to because it has a lot of their needs in close proximity to the same location, AND it's in a place that tends to be easily accessible from everywhere. You'd expect a lot of people to be there.

Atlas Park, though? Other than boredom and some kind of flatline nostalgia, why WOULD you go there at all? I knew a few people who went there, and I know exactly why they went - the people. One liked the crowds, the other enjoyed studying the characters. When the people moved on to the Atlas Park Architect building, there was no more reason to hang out in the plaza. Those who went there for the people left, the people who hanged out stopped hanging out since it wasn't as crowded so they left, and no-one has returned, because no-one has had a reason to. In fact, expecting the crowds to come back to the plaza after the bubble burst is a lot like trying to unscramble an egg. It just doesn't work like that.

And there's another reason why you rarely meet people in general. Ours is a HEAVILY instanced game, to the point of being almost entirely so. The few overworld missions the game does offer most people regard as junk and something to skip, and most of the travelling that the game offers is seen as a nuisance and a waste of time. The days of hunting Hydra in Perez Park are gone. Unless we had SO MANY concurrent users that the airspace were jam-packed, all you're really going to see is people dashing from one place to another, people who went AFK or people doing business in a public location like a store or a trainer. You're not going to see people in the streets en masse, because there is no REASON for them to spend much time outside. Let me quote Yhatzee from his Wolfenstein review. I think he says it best.

And it is difficult to quote Yhatzee without getting hit with the language filter at least once. While I am obviously not applying this as a direct description, as I don't feel our overworld is crap, the point remains that the freedom of exploration is limited, so there's not much of that to do, and as long as there isn't much to do in it, the overworld DOES become just an obstacle to get to the next ******* stage. Hence, you won't see a lot of people there.

I didn't think it was this many, myself. Personally, it's not the lack of need to add another levelling slowdown that I mind, it's the fact that this essentially FORCES people to occasionally drop out of levelling and work for these things, because there is no tradeoff for not having them. A character of a given level who has worked for this redundant system will ALWAYS be stronger than one who hasn't, given similar builds. Frankly, this isn't something else to do in the slightest. It's the SAME thing to do, but for different reasons.

Practically speaking, I'd like to see a greater variety of actual activities, and a lesser variety of actual effects, such that it forces us to split our efforts a lot less. I DO NOT WANT to face the same problems I did back in the day with enhancements, where I HAD to stop levelling for a while and just build up Inf to replace them, or I would lose my enhancements and in so doing lose my ability to progress altogether. I don't want to see an actual mechanical benefit attached to turning out your experience gain.

Once again, I'm not against this idea, not in a big way, at least, but if we're looking for post-50 progression, I would like to restrict this to the post-50 game and only the post-50 game. And even then, I wouldn't make it infinite. I expressly DO NOT WANT infinite progression in this game, because I am perfectly happy with my ability to "finish" it, so I can start over. Closure, as it were, is important to my game experience.

That sounds a lot like Lineage II, and if it sounds like Lineage II, you're probably talking about Aion. Suddenly, your "pay for everything" comment makes so much more sense

I agree with you completely, but you neglected a key benefit here. In other games, if you want to improve a skill, power or spell, you basically have to pick it all over again. Not only does that consume a power pick which could have been used to take something NEW, it also doesn't let you pick WHAT you improve about it. In City of Heroes, if I want my Fireball to do more damage, I slot more damage in it. If I want it to shoot faster, I put recharge reducers in it. If I want it to cost less, I put endurance reducers in it. In Traditional MMO Redux, if I want to improve my Fireball's speed, I have to cross my fingers and hope Fireball II has better speed, which it usually doesn't. And, what the hell is up with stronger spells costing more? That just kills any sort of efficiency gains, making the benefit from an expanding mana pool somewhere between "far load of good" and "bugger all."

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And here's another thing you didn't mention - difficulty scaling and tailoring. Why is this so underused in current-generation MMOs? In City of Heroes, difficulty scales completely automatically and independently as your team size increases. So you can be playing solo and the difficulty will be about right, then you can hop on a team and the difficulty will STILL be about right. This is such a simple thing we take for granted, but it makes it possible for any number of people to take on any challenge and still have a decent time of it. Most other MMOs give you a static difficulty, which often makes things too hard when you're alone and too easy when you team up with a lot of people. Even if a lot of MMOs try to counteract that by limiting teams to, like, two people max, it's still an issue.

And then there is difficulty tailoring. Game too easy? You can up your difficulty, take on more enemies, take on harder enemies, or both! Game too hard? You can make enemies easier and turn off bosses. Feel like being fancy? Do what I do - drop enemy strength but triple their numbers. You end up close to where you started, but it looks so much cooler! Despite the epidemic of bosses, I am having more fun now with the new difficulty settings than I ever have before, and I think I found my perfect sweet spot. At -1x3 no bosses, I'm in hog heaven. It's a relatively easy game, just the way I like it, it pits me alone against veritable LEGIONS of bad guys, just the way I LOVE it, and they do make up for being -1 by sheer weight of numbers, and it makes the "tough guys" of the game easy enough for me to match wits with an win on MY terms.

Here's something that had me dashing outside to see if flying pigs hadn't made the sky fall - I actually ENJOY fighting Malta! For the past five years, I've done nothing but rant and rave about how much I hate these guys, how much they cheat and how much I think they should be redesigned, so imagine my sheer amazement when I took on them, with a Blaster no less, and I actually enjoyed the fights. Sure, they weren't easy, but they weren't cheap, either, as long as I knew what I was doing. Facing them at -1 meant that their stupid-nasty controls missed a good bit of the time and didn't last as long, it meant they died a little more easily, and it meant my controls lasted ever so slightly longer. Turning off bosses meant that the cheap, cheesy, unfun fights were simply GONE. However, their sheer numbers, with, on average, two lieutenants and a Sapper in every spawn, still made for good hunting. Such an unexpectedly powerful tool, the difficulty settings are. They made my game at least twice as cool

While I realise you are going for sarcasm, that kind of skips over a point I made in the post you quoted. Things Blasters can't kill tend to be things Blasters can't control, either. Bosses, elite bosses and large groups of enemies in the absence of four AoE attacks are good examples. You can reduce incoming damage by killing things, but you can't kill faster than you are being killed. This is GUARANTEED to happen simply by how encounters are designed. Things you can't kill faster than they kill you, you can't actually control, either, not for the most part.

As for buffs go, Blasters don't have any buffs that directly protect them from what I have seen, and buffs that boost their offence don't protect them when offence DOES NOT WORK as defence. A few sets to have debuffs which do offer some degree of protection, thinking of Ice Manipulation, specifically, but from my own experience, while they do help, they're not enough to protect you from a hard target.

That's not to say Blasters can't solo hard targets. I made it a point to try all the common complaints of unsoloable targets, namely Nosferatu, Ghost Widow and the Madame of Mystery. Each I soloed with a Blaster that is not in the slightest power built. Hard targets are very much soloable, with inspirations and with the proper preparation. That is, if you expect a hard target and buy up, or it shows up so rarely that you can amass inspirations, then that works fine. But with the new difficulty changes, bosses have been showing up head over heel, and some enemy factions have bosses that, to a protection-less Blaster, act more like elite bosses, and I am simply incapable of taking on seven elite bosses per mission.

In fact, I had a mission a while ago that spawned a Dark Ring Mistress or a Master Illusionist on HALF of its spawns. And that was on the Moth Cemetery map, so that's a lot of spawns to count. Thankfully, that was on a pretty kickass Scrapper, so it wasn't impossible, but it still took forever and killed me several times. That would have been out and out impossible on a Blaster, I can tell you right now. Following that, I turned off bosses in my missions and have not looked back. Eliminating the constantly recurring hard targets from missions has made my Blasters play a LOT more smoothly, and I can actually appreciate the occasional elite boss who won't scale down from his rank. I don't gripe about this, but I realise that saying that always makes people look down on me, like I'm cheating and therefore should have no right to hold opinions on difficulty.

Atlas Park is a pretty bad measuring stick for a variety of reasons. For one, it assumes that people loitering and NOT actually playing the game are a flat percentage of the population, so a higher population density will invariably produce more loiterers. While I have nothing against them, this is not a given in any sense of the word. Secondly, the developers broke the back of Atlas Park loitering with the Architect changes. When they instituted the Architect, the crowd moved to the Atlas Park Architect Entertainment building, because they could both loiter and powerlevel, so it made sense. When they kicked the Architect in the nuts, the easy money ran out and people left, but they never really returned to Atlas Park. See, people hang out under Atlas's butt out of habit and tradition. Once that was broken, few had a reason to return, and even those who did left when the many didn't.

Finally, trying to judge player population by one single location is, to be quite honest, unreasonable. Easy question: what location would you measure City of Villains population by?

I've been with City of Heroes since May of 2004, and to be perfectly honest, no, I have not noticed a decline in teams. I HAVE noticed a decline in random blind invites, that much is certain, and for a while I did notice a decline in invites in general, but lately it seems like people just won't leave me alone, and I have to think of ever more creative ways to say "No, I would not like to team. Sorry." Especially now over the Winter Event, but the last few days, not a night has gone on without someone asking me if I want to do missions. I tend to be otherwise busy so I rarely take people on their offers, but the invites are there.

As far as the Winter Event goes on, people have complained that not enough show up a lot of the time, and I have a very good reason for that one, too - both dislike events AND I'm sick of being invited to take down the Winter Lord. No, I very much DO NOT WANT to fight giant monster or take part in events. And I know I'm not alone.

The problem, as it were, is building an AT around damage as a sole means of defence, when that damage can't defend them in specific situations that WILL occur with regularity. It's kind of like Controllers and the POTD. Even when a

Scrapper runs afoul of a damage type he can't fight resist or defend against, he typically has other means to defend himself, either smaller amounts of another defensive type, heals, enemy debuffs or SOMETHING. When a Blaster finds something he can't kill, which is also something he typically can't control, he has no alternative but to cross his fingers.

*look over shoulder* Quit spying on me!

The call for proper grammar and spelling is so that a person can be more easily understood. Being intentionally cryptic, therefore, proves nothing, other than that that particular joke was old before I was born. Come on, man. You're better than this.