Samuel_Tow

I'm sorry, but I don't agree that this is a power you should not have to turn off often. Its high cost is there for precisely that - to make you turn it off often, especially when you actually need your endurance. If it didn't have to be turned off, they'd have just axed the power and given us a base run speed buff, or just made it inherent.

That, and you can get around that rather easily. Just turn it on when you have to move fast and turn it off when you stop. I have mine bound to V, so that's what I usually do, packet loss permitting.

Really, I'm not sure I want to see Sprint go the way of Brawl. It's a toggle buff, and toggles need to have a reason why they're not just passive powers.

This is a MONUMENTALLY bad idea. Outright removing costume pieces out of the game based on nothing more than "I don't like them!" is a catastrophically bad suggestion. You don't have to like them or use them, but other people DO like them and DO use them, and having their faces yanked out for what amounts to no good reason cannot and will not go over well. I'm not averse to touching them up a bit, but I wouldn't dream of removing them outright.

While I'm right with you on wanting something like this, I'm not sure you appreciate quite what that really means. Right now each different face is a separate underlying mesh with its own texture, with many faces having meshes that are more or less detailed than others, which don't really correspond to each other. Animating existing faces would have to be done one at a time, face-by-face, and for every new face added to the game. While I'd like to see that, certainly, I doubt it'd happen.

Breaking faces down into eyes, mouths, noses and so forth is actually even worse, because it leads to the Champions syndrome - one face for the whole game, slightly altered. Right now our faces are as diverse as they are because each face is separate and made in whole. If we broke them down to a piece-by-piece creation method, we would more than certainly lose a LOT of what we already have in terms of final options. More specifically, we're very likely to lose the non-human options, such as Feline, Protoss (I forgot what it's actually called) the tusked monstrous ones, the Roswell alien and the many stitched together faces. Remember, the stitches go over the entire face, not just one section.

I would definitely like more facial animation, but I would not like it if it comes at the cost of facial customization. I like my faces, and I don't want to lose them.

I don't see a reason to disagree with this, but again, this comes back to a question of workload. While it'd be great, it'd turn each face into half a dozen to a dozen times the workload to create, not to mention taking a huge toll in retrofitting the 70 or so faces we already have. I can't say how difficult that would be to pull off, and I WOULD like to see this as the most elegant solution, but I'm not confident the developers will go for it.

They do? They looked like the inventor dwarves from Fantasy games to me.

Exactly like the old forums. A lot of the time they're fast and responsive, but sometimes EVERYTHING stops loading and page loads just hang around for a couple of minutes, or until they time out. In the meantime, I can still load other sites just fine, but I have to wait for the forums to wake up. Exactly like the old forums, indeed. So what did the changeover fix, then?

Yeah, what they did to the Shard was an outright travesty. This is the worst hack-and-slash cop-out kludge I have seen done to this game since the Council takeover, and unlike that takeover which was smoother over, the Shard has only been made WORSE! I've been calling the portals to the different zones the "cop-out teleporters" for a reason. They had their Mole Points, but making more of those would have taken a lot of work. Do you remember how many years it took them to make the Mole Point interior visible again?

I want to see a remake of the Shard that axes all of those cop-out teleporters and replaces them with mole points hidden in the caves. I want to see the jetpack vendors GONE and replaced with just one in FBZ. I want to see the seller NPCs either gone, moved inside the new Mole Points, or moved AWAY from the zone entrances.

Seriously, the whole thing feels like one of those "private" servers for other MMOs, where all of the big bads of the game stand around your starting point in a neat row, selling you epic gear. It just looks like such an epic kludge it REALLY ruins the atmosphere.

You know, a lot of the times our development team remind me of the awesomeness that is Mythbusters - taking old, seemingly unrelated parts and cobbling together something that not only works, but proves everyone before them wrong. "We pressurised a plane. They said it wasn't possible, but we did." That, considering Smash Lab tried the same thing and THEY concluded that pressurising a plane really WAS impossible. Poor guys...

I will say one thing - CoH's engine looks good enough. If they can work out the teething problems which cause it to have such a comparatively bad performance AND add on to the graphics, then I really don't see why I need a new game at all. In this day and age, making a game good-looking isn't in the slightest down to graphics and hardware, it's mostly down to having a capable art team to make use of that graphics. Frankly, after playing a lot of MMOs, I have to say we have the best art team here. Their style and approach is what makes the game look as good as it does with as old as the engine is.

And again, retrofitting cutting-edge graphics into an engine that's 7 years old at this point is nothing short of amazing. Be disappointed all you want, people. You just don't appreciate the miracles that are taking place here.

Redundant zones are a good thing. I can't say whether adding more to, say, CoV-side would be resource-smart, but since we already HAVE them CoH-side, I can safely say I'd rather have them than not. CoV-side feels small and claustrophobic, like I know every square inch of every zone. CoH-side feels (and is) a lot bigger and a lot more diverse.

I enjoy the multitude of large zones and I enjoy travelling them. I've never complained about the act of travelling itself. I complain about travelling for no good reason, like being sent on garbage missions that I don't need, don't want and don't get any reward for.

OK, that one pure gold. Trick or treat! Wait! Are you a trick or a treat?

Sorry

You know, I think the clincher for me was when he finished explaining all the new graphics settings and said "Well, let's take all the new graphics away." Screen wipes, and I said it right alongside the audience "GAH!" It's surprising, because visually, they're not big changes. The architecture is the same, the light is the same, but one version looked almost like a movie, whereas the other version looked like a player mod for Half-Life. Ugh! It's amazing how big a difference something like this makes over the SAME terrain. Not only does this make Praetoria better, but it makes the WHOLE game better. I hope my card can sustain this, I really do.

That's the thing, though - I don't dislike the actual CONTENT of the low-levels. Sure, some missions are better than others, but it's not he content itself that's the problem. The problem is missions which AREN'T content, but rather... Well, a waste of time. It's like sitting down to have a big dinner and having someone constantly have you get up to pass the salt, grab them a drink, change the channel on the TV, get a glass out of the cuboard, etc. It's frustrating because it takes you away from what you really want to do - sit down and take a bite out of crime.

...

I can't believe I just said that.

Yeah, I thought about the Architect buildings, too, but they still don't quite cut it. I mean a literal block of a building covered in plate glass windows on all sides. Architect buildings still have ornaments, terraces, windowless brick sections and so on. On the other hand, every time I think about the American skyline (by which I usually picture the New York skyline from movies) these tall, glass building blocks are the first thing that comes to mind.

I'm an idiot, that's the problem. I meant to say dynamic LIGHTS. I saw the dynamic shadows and I like them, but I've always wanted to see dynamic, coloured lights, like you had in Tomb Raider 3, and I didn't see that in any of the pics. Lights were still static, they just cast shadows now.

I'll go edit my previous post.

The problem with that is that I'm sick and tired of the Hollows and Faultline, and Striga and Croatoa have arcs that are downright terrible. This is only a small subsection of the content, and the the bulk of the hero-side content is still the conventional pre-I1 contacts. The only way I can avoid boring myself to tears after 5 years of playing this game is to mix up the content, and this simply precludes me from playing, say, the Hollows twice in a row on two new characters. I can do it on one, but the next one will need something else.

Try a Mastermind.

Good job on hitting 50 on the evil side, PK. I hope you'll have an easier time playing the bad guy in the future. As long as it's play-pretend, it can actually be quite an interesting experience. You just have to find the right kind of "evil" for you. The approach you took with this guy is a pretty good one, though I'd resist crossing him over as a hero, myself, and instead cement his side of the moral divide by personal choice.

I call it a bug because if the power roots you on the ground (and it does) it should root you in the air. That's how all other powers are set up. This won't be the first power that I've seen which doesn't animate or behave properly while flying (flying Lightning Clap was very wrong, I'm not sure if it still isn't), and I've no reason to believe this one is any different. Of course, it's up to BABs to decide.

I'd still like to see a boxy tower of glass here and there, though. I enjoy the Gotham City architecture, myself, but diversity in buildings is what makes the zones interesting, and we could use a few more.

That sort of design instantly reminded me of those tourist trap "free" to play MMOs out there. They get you to log in, start you off with cool, exciting quests and plenty of location and enemy variety, give you lots of cool gear and generally show you a very good time. Then at around level 20-30, the story dies up, the enemies loop, the gear and experience grind becomes horrible and you are ever so slightly nudged to spend real money to help yourself along. It's like the first part of the game is one elaborate tourist trap to get you hooked, and that's pretty much where the good development which costs money stops.

Granted, in our case it isn't like that. The newer zones are simply better made with the experience gained over years of examining our tastes and preferences, but it can FEEL like that if you go from the new content back to the old one and you suddenly feel like you were cheated. What? Was that all? Will the content from here on out be so bad? I was ripped off!

This actually happens with the Hollows if you go that route. Now, let it be known that I HATE the Hollows, because the story ends in an 8-man timed Trial which I've never been able to do, but at least it IS a story... Kind of. So you do this somewhat concise story which ends in a large unique map and a pretty cool fight, and the zone ends. You go back to your regular contacts, and what missions do they give you? Bloody Bay liaison, Hero Corps field analyst, Skyway City Security Chief, visit Jim Temblor. And even if you work with Temblor, you'll get kicked out of Falutline before you hit 20, and be faced with the Boomtown Security Chief first thing. Ugh! We should have such a step-down in content quality.

One thing I will agree with you on - axe the redundant contacts and give the remaining ones unique costumes. I've talked about the benefit of having them redundant in the past so that you can never really get that sense of "I've done it all!" that you get in City of Villains where I know them all by name, but I'm going to have to change my mind. No-one remembers the contacts anyway, we remember their missions and arcs, and we don't really need more contacts than those. In fact, the redundant contacts are what makes the CoH content so dang confusing. You can never tell who offers which missions so finding an arc you like requires Paragon Wiki.

I'd keep away from redoing their actual missions, though. Just axe the time-wasting ones, pull the Security Chiefs into their own contacts who give endless hunts (and stuff them along with Brokers/Detectives) and leave the missions as written. I wouldn't be opposed to constraining them in the same zone as the contact a little more, though HOW much is up for debate.

Generally, though, I just want out of the introduction missions. They're pointless, they give no reward and they cannot be avoided.