Samuel_Tow

Dear BackAlleyBrawler,

Please do not allow our misunderstandings of what you've said stop you from commenting on the forums in the future. You have seen time and time again that we are quite capable of putting words in your mouth even when you say NOTHING AT ALL, so actually saying things typically leads to a lot fewer misunderstandings. I hope our callous ways will not dissuade you from being as forthcoming as you've always been.

I'm sure we all agree to promise to be good

Why do people always list Masterminds when they talk about exceptions to Stamina? Yes, Mastermind outgoing DAMAGE doesn't cost them endurance, but everything else does, and in spades. At 20 endurance points per summon and three summons to drop and 45 endurance points per upgrade and two upgrades to make, that's150 points of endurance, or one and a half times your ENTIRE endurance bar. Even with endurance reduction, that's still a LOT, and that's just recovering from a henchman wipe (which isn't that rare) and not even counting all the costly support powers you may need to spam to delay said henchman wipe until your summons recharge.

Yeah, I guess if you just run around and let the henchmen shoot things, it technically costs you nothing, but when the situation gets HARD and henchmen start dropping, then endurance is pretty much the only limiting factor you're looking at on a Mastermind.

I don't know about Ulterior (I thought that's what the pic was, but I seem to have been wrong), but I can definitely tell you that Enforcer and ExoProto are nothing alike. Enforcer has interlocking metal plates that are actually shiny (and will no doubt be reflecting, come Going Rogue) whereas ExoProto has overlapping, ornate plates held together with belts and clips for a much less "plate armour" look and a much more "stealth suit" appearance. Ironically, the actual Stealth set doesn't look like a stealth suit at all, but rather a lot more like a cat suit. Personally, I used the ExoProto to replace my old Buckled Leather costume to replicate that Solid Snake look I've been aiming for since 2004.

I've not tried Vanguard yet because of its cost, and if Ulterior looks like anything, it looks the most like Justice, which together look more like embossed leather than layered armour, to be honest, and Sinister's "stitched leather" is an actually unique concept in the game, with only the "rough patches fur" set from 2004 coming anywhere close.

Really, though, not liking them is fine, as long as you accept that some people DO like them and enjoy the variety they present. It's like complaining we have too many tech armour pieces, when no two really look alike (OK, Tech Crey is only slightly redundant with Tech Wired, but besides that...). Tech Sleek is sleek and shiny, Tech Crey is scratched, dirty and gritty, Tech Wired is your typical cyberpunk armour with exposed wiring and a more utilitarian design, whereas the actual Cyberpunk armour is on the very bottom of the "shoddy tech" field of cyberpunk. Techbot is on a whole different level entirely, opting for a shiny chest plate and thigh plates over wire undersuit, which is actually a design that's almost completely unique to it, 3D chest details notwithstanding. I guess Armour Plate could also count for a tech armour set, though that's more a man-shaped steam boiler with chain mail joints.

Either way, I'd have to see a full suit of this with its corresponding pattern to judge whether or not it's good. I used to think Ulterior was pretty bad just based on browsing through it in the editor, but seeing what people have done with it, I changed my mind.

Well, if you were the neg-rep in a world of pos-reps, that'd probably stand out, but since so many of us have our rep turned off and so many others get negative rep for stupid things (like daring to so much as mention Champions Online), it's a lot less meaningful than it ought to be. These days I see people with negative reputation not as negative posters but as some unlucky underdog who stumbled into a bad situation, since that's how that usually happens.

You are the one who sounds silly this time around. You don't need "armchair developers" to tell you something won't happen when the REAL developers told you, in no uncertain terms and beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it will NOT happen. Stop blaming the players.

And BABs never said he was refusing because it was silly. He didn't give an explanation as to WHY it won't happen, he only said it won't. Don't chastise him for holding a position he doesn't hold. What's more, he never said power customization wasn't possible or wasn't going to happen. He said, ideally, he'd love to have it, but it was so unlikely to happen as to be unthinkable. But apparently he was still pushing for it, and so it happened. This time around, he didn't say he wants to see this but is sorry it can't happen. He gave you a flat no. If you keep pushing, you might eventually get an explanation, but you will not get a different answer.

He has his prerogatives and it's ultimately his call. You're going to have to respect that. And driving the argument that he should anyway, despite all the problems is unfair in the extreme, because it suggests the developers should shoot for additions "not because they are easy, but because they are hard," when the reality of the situation is that they tend to shoot for additions that are worth the time, effort and above all MONEY put into developing them. Whether an underwater zone or underwater mechanics have a high value is beyond question - they do, if they are done right. Whether the process of doing them right is prohibitively costly is not something we can guess at, but if BABs said no, he probably has a reason for it, and cost would be my uneducated guess.

Whatever his reasons, though, you're going to have to accept them, or convince him he should. Out and out telling him he should is not convincing.

How many years is this going to go on? How many times do I need to say this? They told you to your face - unless the narrative explicitly says so (and it rarely does), "defeat" can mean anything you want it to mean. Kill, main, beat up, arrest, tickle his *** with a feather, bake him into a giant cupcake, give him a pink pony so he reforms his ways... ANYTHING you can think of, "defeat" can mean that. If you want to say your heroes kill, then by all means, do so. The game will almost never contradict you.

I didn't get the impression that the problem was so much story as poor game design. And personal arguments aside, that point at least rings true. Though, again, I don't think there's anyone who disagrees that five-year-old content is bad, at least among the people who've played it. Which is a shame, because there are occasionally really good stories, but the method they are being told is painful.

I never said I don't care about the system or how it works so much as that I don't care for my reputation being represented by a number on the screen. I keep it hidden exactly because I don't want it to influence people more so than my actual posts, and it's not negative if that's what you're implying. That's all I'm going to say about how much I have. I would personally like nothing better than for everyone else to turn theirs off, because it's our deeds and the impressions of others that should represent our reputation, not numbers on the screen.

That's good enough for me. OK, guys, let's all be reasonable here and just stop the back-and-forth. We're not going anywhere, and I'd hate to let the sentiment in the quote above go to waste. The man said his peace, so let's just leave him alone. There's nothing to be gained from this.

And I'm not saying this to make myself sound important or play the arbiter. I really DO appreciate the sentiment and I'd love to see us honour it.

Throwing around insults does nothing for your argument. In fact, you keep consistently ignoring the arguments raised so far. What do you expect people to respond to when your position is, essentially, "No, there's no reason they should say no." Well, there is. Myself and others mentioned and discussed it already. If you're interested to bring it up and continue discussing it, I'll gladly rejoin. But essentially trading blows just isn't interesting to me.

That can actually benefit from a miracle excuse. Certain characters have the ability to create their own bracing irrespective of contact with a surface. Magneto inside a metal suit would be a good example, but there are others. If you can telekinetically propel an item, you can hold your own body in place via the same means. That, and railroad locomotives are incredibly rigid and made of really thick, sturdy steel, so punching a man-sized hole through that AND through the engine is highly unlikely. You'd probably collapse the engine, but not enough to start tearing chunks of cast steal out of it.

That said, even if you could stop the engine on a dime without causing any damage, all the carriages behind it are going to accordion into it and probably crush each other, killing any people inside. Train derailings aren't deadly for this exact reason.

Actually movies and cartoons made more recently are pretty good about that. Many relatively large objects can't be lifted by their handleholes, but they still have several points of structural strength that they can be lifted under without splitting the rock or vehicle in half. A car's chais is usually strong enough to support the entire vehicle's weight by its frame rails with the wheels off the ground, and I'm pretty sure a bus chasis will hold at least without shearing in half if you lift it towards the middle.

Recently, when people in cartoons and movie lift large objects, they don't grab the car by the bumper, they actually lift the car, tip it to one side, then move under its centre of mass and then lift it from there on their shoulders and entire arms, rather than just by two hands. If you follow a vehicle's axis of structural strength, you can then toss it a little like a spear, and even though it might crumple or buckle, at least it won't fall apart.

Now, bigger objects like mountains and buildings... Yeah, that's just silly.

Yeah, that's pretty much absurd. No way to explain around it. That's part of why I keep asking for Super Strength to start summoning up and and tossing some of the Propel debris, rather than that stupid chunk of asphalt. It may not make much sense where you got the debris, but it rarely makes sense where you got the asphalt AND it looks silly. Again - where do you pull a chunk of asphalt off a metal catwalk or while standing on powerlines? And can't you pull a junk car or a forklift out of the same place?

I think this is where we need to just not think about it too much. Yes, flagpoles and street lights would technically buckle under much stress on the shaft, but at the same time, swinging a giant thing around is too cool to worry about something like hat

That's actually why I found tossing things stupid in about any game I've seen it, though - because liftable objects seem to have no apparent mass and have uncompromisable structural integrity. You don't lift a troop transport truck by its driver side steps. If you tried, it'd just come off in your hands. You don't toss vehicles like you're throwing a medicine ball, nor do you hold them like that. Most assuredly, you do NOT jump with trucks on your shoulders. Even if you can carry the thing without its chasis collapsing, if you JUMP with it, it'll just snap in half over your back when you come down, if you don't sink into the ground to begin with. I think WWF's Lex Luger had a move exactly like this.

If you actually read some of the thread instead of barking like a leashed dog, you'd have realised that no-one is defending the bad content or denying its existence. What everyone is speaking against is irreverent, insufferable people trying to insult their fellow posters and paint them as despicable, and no matter how hard it may be to believe, people don't tend to respond well to that.

Don't paint yourself the martyr. You're not receiving heat because people are secretly rallying to hold the truth you speak down. You're receiving heat because you act like an insolent jerk. Cut that out and I'm sure everyone will get right on board with you.

Only to point out that back in my day, we didn't have it as good as we do now, and a few relics from then still remain to show you just how bad it was

Consider that the PI arcs were once held to be some of the game's best. That ought to put things in perspective in terms of how much everything has improved.

By the way, I neglected to acknowledge this. Thank you for the clarification, and this answers my question. I apologise for this, but I'd rather ask for clarification than assume and misunderstand, at least when I suspect I may not be reading something correctly.

Personally, I'm actually interested in discussing opposing viewpoints as long as we can keep off the malicious arguments (straw men, faux-facts, armchair psychoanalysis, fortune telling and so forth) and stick to opinions and extrapolations off confirmable information. I actually prefer discussing things with people who disagree with me, because when I discuss something people I agree with, we end up patting each other on the back "oh yeah"-ing a lot. Which is good for morale, mind you, but a bit less productive.

I certainly don't expect them to ever let people lock themselves out of certain servers, and I would never really expect to see this in any big way. But pulling, say, up to one page of slots off any one server and being allowed to add up to one page more on any one server is, technical difficulties aside, at least something we can reasonably discuss.

I don't actually have the two servers I play on maxed out, by the way. I filled up Victory back when we only had 12 slots and colonised Pinnacle back at around 2005-2006. Since then, straddling two servers like that has caused me no end of problems because my friends with characters on Victory have almost nothing on Pinnacle and my friends with characters on Pinnacle have almost nothing on Victory, with me left sort of straddling the servers and attracting ire no matter what I do. Well, relatively speaking I'm still a long way away from filling them up, but that time will come, too, and when it does, I shudder to think about colonising another server.

And it doesn't happen with them all the time, either. A lot of times if an enemy explodes and leaves no body behind, projectiles headed for them will curve and fly straight up into the sky as though the enemy was transported above the map's flight ceiling. I'm not sure what causes hanging projectiles to happen, but I almost never see them, so I suspect it might actually have something to do with packet loss. Do you guys who see that experience a lot of lost packets?

I agree with Kali on this one. As far as entertainment goes, this game is probably as cheap as it's going to get for me. $15 a month isn't LITTLE money in my country, but compared to everything else... Let's just say I'll blow away more money if I went to the movies twice or to a bar a few times. In fact, I made the mistake of going out to a couple of pubs in the UK once, and I ended up spending TEN POUNDS. By today's estimate, that's $15 in a single evening, and it wasn't actually all that enjoyable.

And it doesn't even compare to standalone games, either. A new game goes for around $50, which is over three months of CoH subscription, and I've not played a single-player game that could hold my interest for more than two-three days. I'd need a HECK of a lot more than a new game every three months to offset that. Now, granted, when I was a kid I could replay the same game over and over again day after day, like I did with the original Diablo, but I can't do that any more. I can't force myself to suffer through burnout like I used to, and frankly, I have more fun with my games now because of that. I can and do certainly go back to old games and replay them plenty, but even then I need more than I can afford. And, yeah, I know you can pick up certain games for $20 at a discount or over Steam or such, but even then, they can't hold me a month. I bought Portal for about as much recently, and the whole game from beginning to end is exactly an hour and a half. I played it once a day, all the way through, finishing it I think three times, then I played the Flash Version map pack, I think three or four times over, once a day, and that was still no more than a week of playtime. After that, I went back to City of Heroes.

As far as money spent goes, City of Heroes is by FAR the cheapest entertainment cost I'm currently aware of.

I've played all Brute Primaries other than Dark Melee. All of them have the same problem - if it's just me and an enemy that won't fight back, building Fury from attacking is a bum job. It doesn't happen, at least not in any timeframe I care to wait around for. Again, attacking is about good enough to roughly maintain a level of Fury, but I've never seen it be good enough to BUILD it. Building Fury for me has always been a result of diving into a huge spawn and very much never anything else.

But, as was mentioned, now that we can make our missions have huge spawns of weak enemies, I'm in hog heaven. I think my Brutes became a LOT more fun now, and having about half a dozen of 'em, that means a lot

I have two arcs, but I haven't exactly strived to make them easy, specifically. I did my best to keep AVs out of them, though, and only resort to EBs for special occasions, like once per arc. Beyond that, there isn't much I can do to make an arc easy that isn't in the hands of the player and his difficulty settings.

My hero-side arc, "The Greater Evil" ended up harder for the simple fact that I used Malta, but my villain-side arc, "The PDA That Knew" is relatively easy and has as close to a truly self-serving storyline as I've seen in the game.

However, given that both arcs have had less than 30 playthroughs between them, I've had no motivation to make new ones or even update the old ones. If you decide to play through them, feel free to PM me any bugs or changes that need to be done.

Precedent suggests this isn't a problem. Propel debris already works with those caves without causing problems, because propel debris has no mass or resistance. Even if it's a junk car, you can kick it around like a beach ball, and if you manage to jam it against a wall, it will just osmosis through the wall and disappear. It's not a problem of getting around, and while it IS ugly, it's on the exact same level as what's already in the game. Personally, I find the wimpy rock to be more ugly than wonky physics, so even if it's a step into beach ball forklift land, it's still a step up.

"If I were a dev, I'd figure out" is a remarkably bad argument to operate out of, specifically since there's nothing to "figure out." It's a matter of time and resources, as much as you may dislike me using that argument, because all of the things mentioned are technically possible, but simply not worth the effort, some because they are inherently silly and some because they are just far, far too much work. And underwater zone would fall under the second category - too much work for too little return. And again, I'd like to see it if it were at all possible, but I just don't expect to.

And, really - is BABs indebted to explain himself? To you, to us, to anybody that's not his employer? He says "No, won't happen." and we can only speculate as to the reason, but again, the reason is almost certainly workload. Doing this well, as opposed to half-***** and half-finished, isn't something he sees as worth the workload involved. And whenever BABs has put his foot down on questions of appeal, I usually agree with him. I'd sooner have something done RIGHT or not having it done AT ALL. The in-between state of done half-***** is actually WORSE than not there at all.