Samuel_Tow

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Because many people only play Villain side.

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I was under the impression that the notion of "villain-only players" and "hero-only players" was abolished with PlayNC's drive to grant both owners of just CoH and owners of just CoV access to both sides, while at the same time offering polite excuses to those who already owned both. I'm not sure you could actually GET just CoV anywhere these days.

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A much smaller, fourth faction tries to actually put forth something that includes realistic reasons why things might be happening the way they do. That faction is always ignored, of course.

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When dealing with people driven by total conviction, factological arguments are irrelevant. This goes for both sides. People who get heatedly involved in this are either bitter or fed up and explaining their frustration away neither convinces them nor calms them down. "The developers hate CoV" vs. "CoV is so much better than CoH" is a debate that approaches religious levels of fervent belief, and always unfolds identically.

That's why you see people talking about pie and cake and ponies - few are the people who are still physically capable of taking it seriously. It's like server consolidation, killing civilians, PvP servers, FFA PvP or healers.

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Because the ALL the paying people need to know.

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Not really. I don't WANT to know. And I'm playing a Brute right now. Resting, in fact, while I post this.

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You may not want to know, but apparently you NEED to know!

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That actually makes sense! Now I'm worried...

What about pie, then?

Well, that would have been my Fury bar had I not rested, as you can't attack without endurance. Moreover, that would have been my health bar, too. Older Dr. Areon? and Professor Echo don't take kindly to being attacked

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Because the ALL the paying people need to know.

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Not really. I don't WANT to know. And I'm playing a Brute right now. Resting, in fact, while I post this.

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Samuel Tow's beam of truth pierces your tin foil hat to annihilate your brain!

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I have it set to 11.

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I7 whine threads about villain content? Exclusive hero content in I8.

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Yup, pretty much. Heroes wined and complained and got their way. But you misunderstand their intent. They never specifically wanted to get content. Even with I7, we still had twice as much as villains. No, what they actually wanted was to deny villains more content. They didn't really care what they got, or if they actually got anything, just as long as no content was being added to the villain side.

See, it's a long-standing practice - hero players would sooner see no content being developed for either side than see anything developed for villain-side. You think any heroes actually liked the Rikti War Zone? Not really. They just couldn't argue against it, because it would have revealed their true agenda. There's a little-known pact between the developers and hero-side players, especially those with exceptionally high post counts, that villain-side must never ever get any new content. Since the developers actually hate villain-side and want to make all villain players suffer, it's a win-win situation.

Then again, I do foresee villains getting some insulting excuse for content somewhere down the line, preferably after they've been looking forward to it for a year or so. Then heroes will get to savour new levels of sweet, sweet rage and lashings out.

Then CoV will be shut down.

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Whats left?
Doing the same kind of missions again and again?

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Pretty much. I'm going to play the same mission whether I'm levelling up or not.

Some people actually like playing the game itself to be more entertaining than planning builds and getting powers. I, myself, enjoy the storyline progression of the game, but I am also very, very happy to know that some of my characters are "done." All I want out of this game is more stuff to kill.

What more do I NEED?

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think you short change the concept of street sweeping in other games a bit -- if all you do is instance missions, an MMO can begin to feel awfully empty and lonely!

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I don't know about other MMOs, but I have to say you guys have made one where this isn't the case. Me, I solo almost exclusively. I hate people and people seem to hate me. Demanding playstyle, you see. And yet over half the time when I play, I'm always chatting with someone who's often playing on an entirely different server altogether. I remember it said that one doesn't have to TEAM with people to INTERACT with them, and with the beauty that is global chat, I agree!

Of course, one can never discount the value of physically (or as close as it gets) meeting other people in the street as you go about your business. Sometimes you team up, sometimes you just exchange exasperated exclamations, and sometimes you just keep on walking. Actually, from my own perspective, you keep on walking every time. Most of the time when I end up next to other people through the things I do, I'd stop and have a look at their costume. I collect ideas from the game. They'd turn to look at me, activate their travel power and move on.

I see the pull of SEEING other people in the game without necessarily having to invite them, yourself, but I gotta' say, seeing them is about as far as it goes. And, frankly, if that's the extent of the random interaction, I may as well be passing by NPCs for all it matters.

I remember it said that in a drive to eliminate griefing in the game, any unnecessary interaction between players was straight-up eliminated. You ended up with a game where you don't HAVE to interact with other people unless you need them. And most people don't. There's no shouting to get off your camping spot, asking for help goes to specific channels and persona banter between stays personal.

I've met other people in this game, and met them a'plenty. Never through just meeting them in the street, though, not unless I meet them 10 times in the same day. Almost always it's been by either being invited to their teams or by inviting them to my teams, both of which happen over the team search function. I can't remember the last time I even spoke to a random stranger outside of the occasional awkward "hi" following by the other guy leaving while I'm typing up a response (hate responding with just "hi"). I'm not sure why that is, but if I had to guess, I'd say that for most people it takes a lot to flip the switch into "OK, now this is social interaction!" For me, it's all the same setting, but I've seen a lot of people that you have to confront in some way before they'll even talk to you. Then it turns out they're fun, talkative, intelligent people, but ye gads you can't get two words out of them when you meet them in the street.

Casual observation.

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You complain about the exterior dimensions of GW's Tower and not those of TV?

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Only because I forgot It feels like Terra Volta is bigger on the inside than the whole of Independence Port sometimes. And even if it's not, its definitely wider. That little, pathetic square at the end of Valour Bridge is a caricature.

It's just that, more often than not, I just do my best not to look at it when I'm passing by. The inside is big enough and at least follows the same pattern. Ghost Widow's tower has enormous spans of horizontal ground and Lord knows how much empty blackness (always wondered why Arachnos waste space like this), all somehow contained inside a tower that's as big around as an Arachnos Flier. Where did they find room to fit so much void in that confined space, I'll never know.

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Size Matters: In City of Heroes, they don't call a six-block (or so) area a "continent."

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Well, no, but they call a half mile by half mile area an island and a 10 feet by 10 feet building a skyscraper

There is a very real fact that the pure size of most everything in City of Heroes is deceptively small. You couldn't really tell, in fact, CoH-side. It's only CoV-side where everything is crammed together that you feel how small the zones really are. An island supposedly out there in the ocean is less than a mile away from the archipelago it's supposed to be away from. The supposed superpit is no more than a quarter mile across and Ghost Widow's tower is about 5 feet wide on the outside.

The scale of the game is massive, but sometimes the size is smaller than you think. Massive high-rise buildings have the footprint of a medium size house, island towns are small enough to walk across with the span of five minutes, towering factories and their courtyards are actually pretty dang compact when you look at the plot size. Just about the only truly big places are hazard zones in City of Heroes. Take Terra Volta, for example. Yes, it's barren, but it's an entire zone devoted to an industrial complex. This thing is beyond massive, beyond diverse. The nuclear power station itself is absolutely colossal, with chimneys with a footprint as large as Recluse's tower in Grandville and shooting up about as high (above the flight ceiling, in fact). Or look at Eden, where you have a massive jungle that's swallowed up entire buildings and a stone spire that's as big at the base as some of the smaller zones and goes up so far above the flight cap you can't even see it.

We have massive. It's just in zones that are designed around it. Most zones are crammed with a lot of smaller things to look at.

Losing access to my powers is the prime reason why I don't like exemplaring in this game. I can handle getting no experience, I can handle being weak. But each character I have, I build with a particular playstyle I evolve, and that playstyle changes as new powers become available, often making it inapplicable when these powers are taken away. It's an unpleasant experience.

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Just wanted to add one thing that often seems unappreciated: ease of targeting.

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Ye gads, of course! Targeting in this game has me so spoiled it's not even funny. In my brief try of Lineage 2, by far the MOST annoying part of my game was targeting the enemies. There, you target with the same mouse button you move your character, and if you miss the enemy character's (surprisingly small) click box, you end up running towards them without having them targeted. I've had enemies beating on me for upwards of 15 seconds without me being able to respond because I'm clicking around the enemy like a man possessed, trying to get a lucky shot and target the gosh-dang thing! Or if, in a melee, I accidentally click on something else, like a team-mate or another enemy, I can just forget about re-targeting what I was originally attacking.

Add to that the fact that activating your auto-attack didn't always cause your character to approach (seemed to be somewhat inconsistent), meaning not only did I have to HIT the enemy with my mouse to select, but I also had to hit again to cause my character to approach.

Here, we have a gazillion methods of targeting, the simplest of which (and one often overlooked) is just activating a power that needs a target. The game ships with the single best targeting system of not just any MMO, but any RPG I've ever seen. You have Tab to serve as selection method to tab through all enemies in view, and you have your target-based powers to select the nearest target. We all take this for granted, but it is a REAL pain when you end up in a game that doesn't have that.

One thing that I think deserves a mention every time sidekicking/exemplaring is brought up is global chat. Nowhere else have I seen a system that let me stay so well in touch with my friends online. Hell, it beats IM programmes sometimes. This is indispensable and goes hand-in-hand with being able to play with said friends regardless of your levels. The people I've met and stayed in touch in this game, they're still here with even three years after the fact. Even if we don't team a lot, even if we don't actually physically see each other's characters for months (blasted faction divide!), we still keep in touch and chat, either person to person or in the greater channel we've established (several times over, thanks to global dying twice).

I remember playing Lineage 2, and if my friend was sitting right here on the chair besides mine, communication would have been a real pain. I remember 9Dragons and its team menu tucked away to the side and so tiny I'd always forget I was even ON a team at all. And it's not like anyone cared. They invited everyone and whoever stayed helped and whoever didn't would eventually leave.

Global is a jewel in the crown in this game and, in my opinion, the way to go in the future. If MMOs are built on their social aspect, then allowing people communicate easily and always keep in touch HAS to be a very positive thing indeed. With a global friends list, you can always find your friends regardless of what character they're playing, even if it's some random newbie they threw together 5 minutes ago and are still running through Outbreak. You can always find them and you can always team with them, barring server and faction divides. Far beyond chatting with people's characters, you're communicating with the actual people, and if there's one thing that fosters a friendly environment, that's a personable medium of communication.

I think global chat is the single-best feature in our game as pertains to our ability to interact with the rest of the player base, along with a reliable and simple interface to make use of it. We all take it for granted, but finding out you're missing it is a rather jarring experience.

I had a similar epiphany when I played 9Dragons a while back. I got into the game and managed to get sucked right into a massive grind and waste of time for increasingly distant rewards. These games seem to be built to lure, offering lots of content, friendly missions and easy enemies in the beginning, but that's where all the really cool stuff actually ends, and the rest of the game is just a grind for the next level. In that game, I actually gained one quest per level, so all I had left to do was find a nice patch of enemies and grind for the next level. Bleh!

Some of the first things I noticed was the interface. We all complain about CoH's interface, but every other MMO I've played has had it a lot worse. For the life of me, could never figure out how to send personal messages to people. The line commands did not work, and forget about clicking on someone's name and chatting like you do in CoH. There were no tabs and channels to talk into, either. It's just a series of commands. An exclamation point - ! - in front of your text sends it to team, for example. There is no such thing as Broadcast, and forget about help. You need help, you run to a populated village and start asking.

Sidekicking is, as you said, a MAJOR benefit. In after the second day I had to sit around and do nothing while my friend caught up, I outright left the game. If I can't play with my friends and the game isn't fun enough on it's own, then it's not worth it. Why aren't more games doing this? If it's true that a community keeps an MMO alive, doesn't it stand to reason that allowing the people from that community to play together more would only help with that? I'm a person who solos most of the time and even I was bugged I couldn't team up with the people I wanted to.

And then there's the presence of reverse progress. I went at length with a few erudite posters on the 9Dragons boards about why it was OK for your weapons to have a change of breaking (as in, gone from your inventory completely) when you were trying to enhance them, and why it was OK for you to lose experience every time you died, and why it was OK to lose Karma points (gained for grinding a LOT and used for a few powerful items) when you died, and why it was OK to lose blood points (used to make the enhancing ingredients for weapons) when you died and so forth. While they did agree it was basically an intentional time sink, I did meet with a few people who felt anything any more forgiving was just not fun. And I don't get that.

I'm not sure about you guys, but I love our debt system. Sure, it may slow you down as much as loss of experience can, theoretically, with it at least you can never get stuck re-earning the same span of progress over and over and over again. Sure, you're improving slower, but you ARE improving. You never go back, only forward. I've never had a moment in this game when I've though "Well, gee, with that death now the last two hours I spent grinding are gone down the drain. I wish I'd gone to see a movie, instead." The only time I've regretted time spent in the game has been failing TFs I'm exemplared to, and even that only when the team wasn't fun. Other than that, everything I do in this game has some value to me, and even if it doesn't necessarily progress me, it never brings me back.

And that's another thing - unlike all other MMOs, this game has a consequence for failure that, while significant, is not something to really be concerned about. In other games I've seen people outright freak out when they die, costing themselves sometimes days of hard work, to say nothing of hours of travel time. Here, you fall, you take your debt, get back up and you're back and running where you left off within minutes. And that's before you even consider the wide, WIDE availability of powers that can wake you up on the spot without missing a beat. A Lineage II player would die and tear his hair out. A City of Heroes player would die, pop Rise of the Phoenix and keep on laying the smackdown.

And, I don't know about WoW, but most MMOs I've seen don't actually HAVE a team search function. You form teams basically by running into people grinding the same monsters you are and blind-inviting them because they move out of Local range before you can type a proposal. I'm starting to see where this culture of just inviting random people as soon as you get the chance to comes from.

Which brings me to the value I place in the community of this game in general. Sure, I'm not a big person on communities and, despite spending way too much here, I don't particularly need a community to be part of. But the people who make up our community are, individually, a lot more communicative and responsive than the people I've seen just about anywhere else, plus their spelling and grammar are worthy of much praise. People in game are open to talking in a coherent manner, will respond to communication and are generally helpful and nice. It's not a 100% guarantee, of course, but this is the only game I know where I can pick up a random stranger and we could have a nice chat while we go about our business. All other games I've played feature people who mostly play together because the game requires more than one person, not specifically because they like the company of other people.

Plus, this is the only game where I can cut people with swords, shoot them with guns, burn them with flames, blast them with radiation, send armies after them, where I can jump, run, fly, teleport, where I can look any way I like and where the story really intrigues me, all in the same game. Yeah, the boys at Cryptic and NCsoft really did something right here

You just mentioned one of my favourite voice actors. Tony Jay's unique voice makes him a master of confident, autocratic figures, and would probably have made him ideal for this role

However, the voice actor here reminds me either of one of the Aurelian troopers from the Advent Rising game, or LeChuck from the Curse of Monkey Island. That's what three screenings are telling me so far

This has got to be the single-best trailer this game has ever seen officially made. The voice acting is in a class of its own, and whoever that voice actor is, he deserves major, major props. Even at the points where function superseded impact (like the parts where he explains details and technicalities) the voice acting still held true and retained its strong effect.

The text itself is both outstanding and a bit forced at the same time. Where it was written free-hand just to sound cool, it sounds VERY cool. Where it was written to explain game-related details, it turned rather too... Specific and lost some of its appeal. But the overall line of thought would always pick back up and carry on. A smashing success.

The camerawork is a little jumpy at places and I saw a belt clipping through the abdomen of one of the menders in at least one shot, but such is to be expected given what I know about the game and the editing of its videos. I would have liked a bit more of a fine-toothed comb, but what was done was by far better than most others, rivalling even some of the full CG movies we have of the game.

The story is certainly very interesting in and of itself, and even if I had never played the game, I'd still love to see it. That something's rotten about that Mender Silos guy is obvious from the movie, if for nothing else than his patronising, evasive mannerisms. "The less you know about this, the better..." is pretty dang in-your-face, but his constant referrals to "a coming storm" and problems that need to be solved without actually saying WHAT he sees going wrong and WHAT needs to be done to fix it, is going to be suspicious no matter who it is that says it.

I love the play with detail in the speech, too. Who cares if we'll never see the other 10 methods of time travel (I'm assuming we won't). Talking about them like they're no big deal makes a HUGE difference in the overall impact. As is specifically mentioning his menders by name. They may have names in-game, but talking about them in the movie makes the whole experience a LOT more scenic.

And, no, I didn't miss the shot of requiem when Mender Silos talks about events reaching their crescendo. It didn't escape my eye that there was a shot of a 5th Column bunker (the hanging stairs room with a couple of boilers below) when he talks about that his mission will meet difficulties. Being that I haven't done any of those missions yet, I fully expect the 5th Column to play some specific role in the problems.

It's also worthy of note that many of Diviner Maros's ramblings about a second rising of the tower appear to make some semblance of sense when viewed in the context of the Oruborous organization. We'll see how that turns out, but the movie is made of win, as it were.

Cool, that's good to know. This is a pretty powerful source of knowledge for the game, and it's nice to see it being improved ever further.

The link of the original post that should lead to the guides on enhancements loops back to the original post. The only way to get to the post on enhancements is to go to the next section and scroll up to the previous post in this thread. This could be a problem for people.

I hope that's the right place to post this.

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I wonder what useless twit is necroposting and deleting his posts in an effort to hide his tracks.

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Hopefully the mod tools for this forum software allow Ex or the others to find out, and then ban whoever it is.

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Or at the very least, I'd expect our ability to delete our posts completely to be removed in favour of *Post deleted by Frikkin Necroposter*

Agreed and understood. I feel a basic misunderstanding has been happening here, is all, and I hope to offer some assistance to rectifying it. Yes, things have been said that shouldn't have been said. From both sides, in my opinion. But the thing is, if my assessment is correct, then it should be fairly straightforward to get things straight even after the fact and just generally come to terms.

I don't know, maybe it's because I'm a loudmouth who's had his share of both offending people and being offended, but I've been taking the approach that I'd rather look at things logically and address them with facts even if they seem like little more than basic insults or gross exaggerations. Surprisingly, it's made for both a more pleasant experience around these here parts AND for a more convincing, if easier to overlook position.

None of that matters, though. All I'm saying is that I think the best solution at this point is to just try and work this out without entering into too much emotion, as I feel this is more of a misunderstanding than it is a confrontation.

As far as sweeping generalisations being interpreted as such unless stated otherwise, I agree with you. It is generally bad practice to to make absolute statements about large groups of people and assume full certainty. But on the other hand, I find it a good approach to such to simply look at them and state their limitations. "People suck!" "Yeah, sure, some people do. You didn't mean everyone, right?" OK, so the answer to that may well be "Yeah everyone!" but the point remains

No quotes. Look up the post I'm responding to for context.

I think both sides here are arguing semantics and talking about different things. There is no denying that a number of have expressed a feeling of entitlement to compensation for having bought that which is now being given for free. I believe we can safely agree that the compensation for having paid for something before is having been able to use it first and before it was being given out for free. Of course, for people who have bought either game very recently, that will not amount to much. Compensating them would sound justifiable, but would open a can of worms, so unfortunately they will become the sorta-victims of this promotional give-away.

I don't have numbers to support this, but a rather larger number of people have expressed an opinion that, while not a necessity, some sort of a bonus for people who HAVE bought both games would be a smart economic and promotional move. There is no disagreeing with that, and whether such a thing is at all implemented would, I assume, fall somewhere in the sphere of nice bonuses when there's extra time and manpower lying around the office. Given that the development team is moving house at the moment, I do not expect to see such at all, or at best to see it some time after the fact.

The conclusion one has to draw is that both points are simultaneously true, because they do not contradict each other. It is quite easy, based on the evidence in this thread alone, to accuse a number of non-specified people of indignant self-entitlement. It also follows, however, that it is impossible to accuse pretty much anyone else of the above, as most people have stated an opinion of what would be a smart move as opposed to a declaration of entitlement. It is possible to decry one group while simultaneously not criticising the other, and the address of each and every post on the matter needs to be examined carefully, lest people find accusations where such were meant for others.

In layman's terms: if it doesn't apply to you, it probably wasn't meant for you.

Nether more or less did what I wanted to, which is to quote the single-most optimistic and actually excited post from a developer we've seen to date. What's even better is that by far the biggest problem holding new stuff back - too much work - may actually be resolved soon. If "the sky's the limit," then I fear very good things may be upon us indeed

I wonder why Troy hasn't showed up yet when we mentioned him by name. I wonder if the curse that immediately teleports him into any thread that talks about him has been lifted. Let me try something...

Troy Hickman Troy Hickman Troy Hickman!

Did it work?