Serva_Obscura

Personally I fill up my power choices with some of the following:

Stealth
Invis other
Invis
Manuvers
Combat jumping

Along with combat flight/shadow cloak that gives me up to 6 free slots that can take LotG +rech or GotA +runspeed. Having plenty of +runspeed _really_ helps out my dwarf form, and everyone likes a load of global +rech.

I understand the code problem with trying to set either a max or absolute speed, but I don't understand BaB's number of animations statement. I know that Bab's would generally prefer transitions from each stance into any movement animation but to be honest we so rarely see those transition animations due to interrupts and the suchlike, hell I can't even jump across a joze without triggering a lock into the falling animation even when I'm rising.

While I understand that each game devs (rather than software dev's) generally think about the data area that they can change but personally I think this is a client code issue, and the tweak should be more like:

Server says run: Client checks the movement speed and switches between standing still/walking/running/running really fast on it's own. make sure that the animations use the same gait-cycle/number of frames. Then give everyone a "go slower" inherent toggle (anti-sprint that would make some sb-haters happy right there) that just reduces speed int he normal way.

That way, people stop "running" really slowly across a slow patch, running in-place when stuck on a wall and superspeed could look a little more sensible.

I know the game devs shy away from putting in code tickets but as a software dev myself I know that sometimes it's better to let a programmer solve the problem rather that data contributor.

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Also it brings up a second response:

Why do minor bugs take higher priority over balance reasons?

Why correct bugs (That are essentially nerfs) when you have SERIOUS balance issues with animation times in sets? It once again creates unfairness between powersets.

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As a software developer myself if you are working on a given project and a bug hands itself to you on a platter you fix it there an then, in situations like that the time saving are massive compared to doing bug sweeps so chunks of code.

Also I'd imagine that "re-balancing" powers is much more time-intensive that adjusting a couple of number when you notice they were wrong. It all about "wrong" (verifiably incorrect) vs. "unbalanced" (seemingly unequal to similar entities given a specific set of metrics to measure against)

Heh, think yourself lucky that the demorecord doesn't use quaternions (that COH most likely uses internally).

This is all fantastic, but the one thing missing now is being able to see the change in these numbers _before_ you slot enhancement, in the popup alongside the %ages.

Then finally people might stop slotting hover and combat jumping for defence

Arrrgh, My ears they bleed!

Seriously, Would it have killed you to get someone who spoke the Queens English natively rather that get a (probably quite competent normally) American voice actress to murder it?

The mini-skirt was bad enough now I'm never going to be able to take Lady Grey seriously.

For every "counterstrike" there are ten "Second life flying [censored] viruses" player created content is hard, but the payoffs are huge, which is what I was going on about here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....rue#Post8076959

Perhaps Cryptic should impliments a 10% "own project" time like Google, where their art/code/numbers people get 10% of their paid time to devote to any feature they like.

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This has been a wild wild WILD ride for me and it feels like we launched just yesterday. Time goes so quickly! I still remember running around Atlas Park for the first time in beta and seeing another player in there. It about BLEW...MY...MIND.


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Jeebus, for a moment there it sounded like that was running up to a "but now I have to move on...." I nearly had a cardiac arrest.
Maybe we are good players but we do _not_ like letting go of our devs

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I suppose the qualifying factor is this!

Resource allocation.

Would the subscribing consumer base prefer NCsoft/Cryptic to allocate resources to publications that are often outdated due to upgrades within a very short time period.

Or would they rather have new content, bug fixes, game features.

That's the deciding factor.

Ex

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I would rather they spent the 3-5 days it would take a decent web developer to develop a DB to hold the numbers (like city of data) and a quick "final stats DB"->"web DB" exporter script that can be fired off after each patch (Yes, I do this stuff for a living)... Hey you never know, if you actually use the live DB as a data source we might be able to catch the silly errors that happen because most of the powers people seem to do their work with *shudder* spreadsheets.

Personally I can't help but feel this is nothing to do with combat PVP, this is about player created content, no MMO can hope to afford to generate that type of classic MMO "content" ahead of the rate the playerbase can consume it at. So to be cost effective you need to use some of the focus of the playerbase to create content.

This is what guilds are, its what economies are, its what PVP is. All of these things have been done passably well in some games and terribly in most games. PVP combat is cheap player created content for those people who thrive on interpersonal conflict. It's not the be all and end all of MMO's its simply the cheap/easy option.

I can't wait for someone to break that mold

EDIT:
Interesting point Psyte, for reference:
Achiever 60.00%, Explorer 80.00%, Killer 6.67%, Socializer 53.33% AKA: plays Uru

No

Nice to see the devs playing AO, I have to say I supprised there isn't more crossover from AO to CoX after all am I really that alone disliking sword+sorcery? Hell my first two PnP roleplaying game werer Traveler and Advanced Marvel Super Heroes.

AO had this fantastic backstory (much like CoX) the things that constantly got to me was how little the actual game used that backstory (somewhat like CoX)

Ok just to ad my tuppeneth.
It's obvious that the devs whant _some_ kind of balancing disadvantage to nuke-type powers, currently these are heavily slanted toward zero end and killing end recovery for a while.

How would people feel about a % health reduction as part of the down side (and less severe end penalty). I mean %-age of _current_ health here. Making the penalty less severe the worse off you are, that would be nice for the finisher-style nukes yes?

But I do agree that activation times need to be lower for this to work. I can understand why that would be a no-no as the devs seem to associate that with re-doing that actual animation not just the timing.

Hmmmm what about this as a formula:
1. Keep animations the same (for minimum art team time)
2. Near instant short mob-disorient/stun (depending) pulse 2+ sec unenhanceable.
3. The normal delay between activation and detonation (to match the animation)

That would require changing the power metadata only, but without sending the animations back to the art team.

I can't believe no one's said this already but I guess that gives me the oppertunity.

The robotic head (The COV new one that matches the "tech-bot" body pieces) in "full masks" is not available for females, I know that its possible because I've added it to some of my characters via demo-editing, and it looks schweet on the more delicate female faces. Could we have some robot ladies pretty-please.

I have no screenshot because I'm at work, sumimasen.

Jay wa totemo sexshi desu-ne.

Ok I finally got onto test for more than 5 mins and got myself a Mayhem Mission.
Short Version: loads of fun, but very buggy

Long Version: LV40 Rob/FF MM getting a mission to Brickstown from Stela in Nerva, set on villainous.

Time bonus's are defiantly getting given for NPC's destroying things, I happened to see a Crey power tank putting the smack down on a mailbox just as I got a mailbox time award. Secondly the item time awards seem to peter out even when there are plenty of items left to destroy, maybe we could be given an idea of how this is supposed to work?

The side missions were a lot of fun, but I only noticed I had clues half way through the mission, should we have got the "CLUE FOUND" float-text when we get the keys?

Blowing up the building resulted in instant fire with a DOT that took over 3/4 of my health by the time I finally got out and clear. If there had been anything outside I'd have been in _serious_ trouble.

Pets, in general I7 seems to turned MM henchmen into idiots on speed and this _really_ becomes obvious in Mayhem missions. Pets would _not_ come out/in of buildings in anything less than 20 seconds which was _really_ annoying (The rescued villain came out well before my bots) There is defiantly a bug at work here because if I teleported my bots out using recall friend they would instantly phase back through the floor into the building (I know toy keep the "inside" parts of the building below the outside map) I _think_ they are fixating on the doorway having seen you go through then are blocking each other from getting through and they don't lose their "doorway lock" even if you recall them or move outside of the auto-summon distance. I had to re-summon twice in battle (thanks for the 2nd tier upgrade recharge reduction)

My hero was an EB Swan! on the lowest difficulty level solo? Surely that was wrong. She fixated on me and while I did keep using the room terrain to my advantage (She had terrible trouble getting through doors that my bots were blocking where I'd just teleport through, it was _glorious_) I eventually got hit with a big whammy and poof, in jail.

Breaking out was easy (with bots) and I got "hollow point" to help me, though he just phased through the cell door when I went near (those who blew up a few doors and gave up, did you not think you look through the viewing holes in the doors and look for a prisoner?) and _thankfully_ swan hadn't regenerated much. Oh yes, Hollow Point was a corruptor so much scourging ensued.

All in all I _cannot wait_ until I can play this with my SG mates (I.E. a couple of friends and one spare account) I envision a Bot/FF Bot/Trap Nec/Dark Nec/Dark group will rock from the delta to the DMZ.

Hmmm, I'd contend that 3DMark would be classed as a "low memory usage condition" rather than COH's "high memory usage condition" and as such performance info mignt not be transferable.

I'll check out the actual "Virtual Bytes" usage during COH/COV sometime If its over the my actual memory then some paging _must_ happen, and in that case it would be best to make it the most efficient paging available.

If letting windows manage your pagefile on your boot drive crashed 3DMark BiilZ I think you have larger problems with your pagefile (IMHO)

I agree wholeheartedly with almost everything the BillZ has advised here, save one very important thing:

The Pagefile. Those who think that disabling the pagefile obviously results in a boost in performance on current (2-3GB mem) machines should read the following thread

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/grou...5/r/7680979175

Now I'm an old school Linux dev so I used to think "Virtual Memory" when I saw "Page File" this thread really hit home to me that that two things are so radically different that disabling the Windows pagefile is almost always the wrong thing to do on a machine with current amounts or RAM (I.E. anything under 4GB)

This _is_ counter-intuitive to me and (I'm guessing) to most people but after spending some time on the subject I'm quite sure that disabling the page file does not do what you might think it does and thus does not providde the performance boost you might expect.

Ok, my main (lv40) is a bot/ff mm. The next highest is a (lv26) rad/rad corruptor

To say I'm unimpressed would be an understatement. the only thing that even remotely interests me there is the fact that Scirocco 's Mu mastery will most likely look cool.

Everyone gets a pet _but_ the MM, why do they think people who like the MM's play one? what do they think they might want from the PP's?

I've been really impressed with COV, it brought me back from COH bordom induced cancelation. This is.... just dissapointing.

Sorry to add another voice of dissention to the announcement thread, but... wow, the dissapointment is.... palpable.

I don't really care about any badge that doesn't have a tangable impact on my character in the game. Maybe if we could really wear the badges on your character model I'd care more.

But..

I wholeheartedly support a way for those people who started there characters pre-isolator to get the badge.

I have yet to see any argument against it that isn't simply (mostly over-excited over-stated) personal opinion and I think the reasons stated why people should be given the oppertunity to get the badge are mostly common sense.

(not keen on the OP's implimentation but overall)
/signed

Yup Solo'd 5xSnappy with a lv 14 Rad/Rad Corruptor and a level 40 Rob/FF MM

For the Corruptor the range on her snipe was greater than the range of Snappys ranged attacks and the Rascals. It was just a matter of time.

For the MM, it was:
1. Defeat Lt snappy
2. Back off and switch on PFF, the rascals came straight for me (being a targeted wave) ignoring my bots totally. Rascals die
3. Defeat Boss Snappy
4. Repeat #2
5. Defeat EB Snappy using force bolt to keep him back.

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But Statesman, I'm confused.

We were told long ago not to worry about CoH issues being delayed because of work on CoV, due ot the fact that they had seperate Dev teams working on them.

And yet, now, somehow the CoH team is failing to provide content for the update, and your reason is that you were busy fleshing out CoV and that CoV is priory numero uno.

But what about those who only have CoH?
What happened to the CoH Dev team being seperate from the CoV Dev team?
The CoH Dev team has had just as long, if not longer, than the CoV team to work on the update, and yet the COH only players are getting absolutely squat for new content.

I understand CoV needs to be finished, and needs work.

But so too does CoH.

2 games -> 2 Dev teams.

That's what we were told.

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Unless I'm very much mistaken the comment about seperate CoV CoH teams was back _before_ the subscription cost was finalised. I'll admit that the "seperate dev teams" comment hasn't been officially redacted but my common sense tells me.

No additional subscription fee == No dedicated teams.

I'm really dissapointed about the lack of CoH stuff, but PPP's and the run from 40 to 50 in CoV will keep me busy I hope (Well my CoH main stalled at 44, I got my mission slots filled with AV's lost all interest and quit till the release of CoV so maybe it won't)

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My 9 year old is named Wesley.

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That is a very cruel thing to do to a kid. Wesley is a horrible name.

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Wesley is a wonderful name

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With unlimited funds and a willingness to bend the law to suit their ultimate goals, it remains unclear the extent to which Wyvern would go to bring down the villains of Arachnos.

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Well aparantly using credible weapons is one step too far. Seriously, can someone please give these poor schmos a real weapon. It's embarassing chewing through these guys

..... and the salvage is lousy

Yeah, I was starting to get worried when Hardcase was giving me missions to rescue an all mekman team of hardened gamblers from... The Council.

What was it, some kind of Fascist gambling intervention?

And on a related note, how do Wolfpack robots get promoted to Archon?

Wyvern, oh man they make my MM laugh.
I mean they wear the same brown leather outfits as Manticore, use bows and then there's the attitude and name.. I mean _come on_

My MM feel so damn sorry for these guys. I think she might start running shipments of laser rifles to them, I mean theres something embarasing about slaughtering guys who are bouncing arrows off your combat robots as you sear them under a hail of missiles, laser fire and plasma.

Seriously Manticore, I mean Longbow have "bow" in their _name_ and they're not stupid enough to use them. Someone give these poor schmo's a real weapon.