ShadowsBetween
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Posts
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Aside from any other issues (Why not VIP Justice? What about Freemiums with characters on Virtue/Freedom? and etc.) There's the fact that, from a marketing perspective, they most likely really *want* to put Freebs on crowded servers full of subscribing players. I know that this is a big part of the plan with that other supers game. They NEED to get people to buy stuff, and that's more likely to happen if the Freebs can see it working. They want the Freebs to see a Demon Summoning Mastermind with the Ascension armor and T4 in all ten Incarnate slots, so that they will say "dang. I need to get some of that."
Anyway, if a free player doesn't have a preference, the game currently defaults to showing them the lowest load server at the top of the list. So yes, "old hands" Freebs from another game may or may not look for the more populated servers. New players will tend to get shuffled onto the other servers though.
I guess Everquest did the opposite: They herded all the new Freebs onto one server, thinking *well, they'll spread out later if they decide to upgrade." Only... they don't. If they decide to upgrade, they just stay on the free server, because that's where all their friends are. Including people who are still free players. So the Free server is now the most active, most populated server, and the "VIP" servers are slowly dying, because they aren't getting any new players. (Or so I've heard, I've never played EQ personally.) -
Quote:The last time I bothered to check, the devs had stated that they were not currently working on a solo path (other than shards to threads) but that they would consider looking into it. To me, that reads as "we're not doing it now, and we're probably not going to do it later." Especially considering their track record of actually fixing/addressing issues that have been shelved "until later." (Like base building and PVP, for example. And even AE at this point, since it's clearly almost too much to ask that they fix major mission-breaking bugs, like the arbitrary "this word is profane" filter.)Originally Posted by BrandX
Havent they said that's already in the cards, just needs to take time. So why are people asking for something they already said was coming?
The fact that they just added a huge pile of costume parts as iMerit purchases says, to me, that the devs really aren't considering a solo path at the moment. Why? Because they're piling more and more carrots on top of the existing Massive Team Content, in a pretty transparent attempt to get more people to play them. "Hey, our data mining shows that some people with level 50 characters haven't run any iTrials yet, even though it would make their level 50 characters way more powerful. What can we do to bribe them into running some? I know, let's add an issue's worth of costume parts, and make them "exclusive" iTrial only rewards!" And now, the only ones not running iTrials at least a little are the few who are making some kind of pointless "moral stand" by refusing to participate. -
Quote:What, you mean the wretched name@globalname system, which defaults to showing the whole thing? No thank you. One of a number of things that irks me about that system is that most people just ignore the character name. After all, it'll change the moment you switch characters anyway. And for the handful of people that have switched the display of the @Globalname to "off," it just causes extra confusion all around: They'll respond to someone by character name, and other people will wonder who they're talking to, and vice versa. It's an ugly, clumsy system. And it's not really much of an improvement when you've got FireDude@Meerkat, FireDude@YoMamma, FireDude@TheBat...Originally Posted by ThePill
Interesting. Very interesting. With as many free accounts opening up soon, it does seem like the time to introduce something similar to the competition, doesn't it?
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The trouble with an "enforced" Roleplay server is that it's pretty difficult to define, and almost impossible to police. I have an account on an RP server in a fantasy game. I've seen heated arguments in their version of Broadcast, because one person is "Thee" and "Thou"ing everyone, and another person thinks that sort of thing is practically griefing. Then you have the divas and god-moders, who get all bent out of shape when they announce some "Fundamental Law" and everyone else ignores their statement that they just ripped Mako's heart out (or whatever it was that they did.) Even within "proper" roleplaying groups, there will be people who really hate certain things and would love to see those players gone. (Catgirls would be an obvious target for this.)
So if you're going to set up a "mandatory" RP server, who gets to define what roleplay is? How constantly does everyone have to toe the line before they risk getting deported? And how do you deal with the situation (which *WILL* happen) where someone just wants to hang out with friends for half on hour, and don't feel like switching characters even though "realistically" those characters shouldn't even be in the same room? (IE, "Did Batman just take Harley Quinn to the drive through?") -
Quote:Standard Coding Rant, or something similar. IE, saying "it would be easy to code this" is usually about as true as saying "to make a fusion generator, you just need to get some hydrogen and make it really hot."Originally Posted by Psyte
¿SCR?
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Quote:I don't remember the name, but I saw an "anthropomorphic animal" themed MMO at one point that offered that as a feature. To the extent that I bothered to pay attention, it looked like there were two types of character: cartoon animals, which walked on two legs and could use tools and weapons, and "real" animals, who ran around on four legs and didn't have hands. The "toon" animals could hop on the back of the larger, faster quadraped players and ride around. That's basically all I remember though, since the game didn't look particularly interesting.Originally Posted by 2short2care
Zwill how can you say no the The Hoff. :P
This has been bugging me for a while, what was that game that positron was talking about that you could ride free players as mounts? -
Quote:If you're willing to live without whatever features the expansion offers, for a year or more, until it gets rolled into "included with purchase" content, that's certainly your right.Originally Posted by MrYukon
i know this much, i wont bother buying anymore paid expansions if they're just gonna keep giving them away to subscribers.
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I've seen this argument before, more or less, in response to things like Pre-order bonus items. "I bought this extra expensive version, or one from a specific store, *just* to get this bonus item, and now everyone can have it. That makes me really mad, and I feel ripped off." Except... why?
The car example occurred to me too. If you run out and buy a car right off the lot, you'll probably need to take out a long term loan just to pay for it. If you wait three years, you can find the *exact* make and model of car for a fraction of that price. In fact, even during the same year, the price will probably drop for cars still in the showroom - if you get a car as soon as the new model comes out, you're going to pay a lot more than someone who waits a year and gets it during the clearance sale when the dealer makes room for the new version.
Another example would be the iPhone. I seem to remember that people stood in line for days to get that when it first came out, and Apple basically immediately set out to make a better more powerful version and sell it for less money. That's the price of being an early adopter.
In the case of digital content, what you're paying for isn't "Ha ha, I got this and you can never, ever have it!" exclusivity. You're paying for exclusive access to it *before* anyone else. There is no promise that they'll never package the item/bonus/DLC as part of a Game of the Year edition, or bundle it in with a future patch. (And if it does get into a GoTY edition, I promise you that someone who's really patient can buy the game *and* every addon for less than you paid for any single DLC when it came out.) The difference is, you got to enjoy that game and DLC for a long time before Big Mega bundle goes on clearance sale. -
I'm glad you figured it out. One thing you might want to consider in the future, is downloading the non-Steam version of CoH. (You can download the game client from http://www.cityofheroes.com/account/...of_heroes.html ) I'll let someone who isn't quite as tired explain why MMOs and Steam don't play well together.
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Honestly, if you play on a crowded server like Virtue or Freedom, the F2P conversion probably isn't going to change much, other than that things will be slightly more crowded, and you might actually get to see someone get banhammered once in a while. (Well, not really. Although I guess there's at least one other game where, if a player is logged in when the GMs ban the account, everyone else gets to watch the character get torn apart by demons or something before the player gets ejected from the game for good.)
Virtue already has griefers and trolls that are paying to be there - F2P just means there might be a few more of them, and they might try and be a bit more extreme before they manage to get themselves banned. -
You said Steam? Normally when Steam installs a game with a serial number key, it pops up a window saying something like "This is your key, you'll need to copy this down and use it to activate your account." If it didn't, then go to your games library, and right click on City of Heroes. There should be an option labeled something like "View Game CD Key" Click on that, and it'll bring up a window with the serial key. This window should also have a button labled "copy key to clipboard," which will allow you to copy it to Notepad to print out, or to enter in another program or on the website.
You also need to create an NCSoft account. If you haven't done that yet, follow this link: https://secure.ncsoft.com/cgi-bin/accountManagement.pl
That's where you create the NCSoft account, and that's where you'll eventually need to enter the CD Key. As part of the account setup, you'll need to choose a master Username and password - I would personally recommend that you NOT use your Steam account info here. (On the off chance one account is compromised, you don't want them to automatically have access to everything else.) You'll also need to choose a password for the game - again, I would recommend that this be different than the master password.
Once you've created an account and registered the key, you can run the launcher from Steam. Once the game loads, you'll be shown a login screen where you need to enter your City of Heroes username, and City of Heroes password. Once those are accepted, then you can choose which server to make your first character on. -
The downside will be on the shared servers: in that other game, it's not uncommon for a "l33tSp34k troll" to show up and start being simply insulting in local chat, or casting buffs or otherwise being a general jerk. "Hey, those people look like they're having a quiet conversation. I think I'll open a dimensional rift right over their table." Not to mention something I saw a few days ago, where someone went afk for a moment and came back to find a serious cretin crouched with his face in the character's chest, making comments about "blueberry bewbies." Yes, you'll get morons who do that kind of thing anyway, but it happens less often when they actually have to worry about getting suspended or banned.
Someone I know had to deal with what was almost certainly a single player, who would show up and annoy until the GMs killed the account, and then he'd use a disposable email address to make another. They were pretty sure the GMs must have killed about six accounts before the idiot finally got bored, or the GMs finally did something more terminal to keep them out. -
Having observed another game through a F2P conversion, this is a valid concern for people that really want to RP. In that other game, it used to be possible to pick up pretty much everything and toss it around The devs there eventually had to basically remove that functionality in the social zones, because there were griefers running around playing Tasmanian Devil with the furniture just to be jerks. *Edit This was a problem even before F2P, but it became much, much worse when free account characters started showing up, since there tend to be lots of them and they don't really care if they get punished. I mean, if a level five freebie gets banned, they've lost... what, exactly?
As far as I know, the roleplaying groups there have mostly abandoned the completely public areas due to various forms of griefing - most people have apparently picked other "always on" instances that are away from the main traffic areas, and a few people have started keeping some of the more atmospheric missions in their journal as a completely private meeting place. (In a few cases, it even adds to the atmosphere. Swing by the riverboat, spend a few minutes chasing out the vampires, and then have a few drinks.) -
As far as "reloading" the birds: I'd guess that's what the second hammer is for. The birds look far too delicate to be grabbing them and stuffing them back in. (Aside from the chance of crushing or twisting some part of the mechanism, the feathers would never survive more than a few reloads before they started to come apart.) And given the high degree of craftsmanship on the rest of the piece, I'd be willing to bet that it is designed so that the bird never needs to be touched directly.
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Quote:I would pay for a booster to unlock the items being added in Issue 20.5 In fact, I would pay for an account-wide unlock of the Roman Armor (from level 1) and for the holiday items, as well. I would also support making the Vanguard Booster available as a purchased item now that the loyalty event is over, for anyone that still wants it and somehow missed the opportunity.Originally Posted by Angelxman81
This include:
Ascension armor
Ascension radiance armor
Auras
Chest emblems
Trails auras
Costume change emotes
Emotes
(
And just in case that's not clear enough: I will give Paragon Studios REAL MONEY for these costume parts, as long as I don't have to run the hateful Trials. -
I'd imagine that "direct orders" means whatever he wants it to at the time. "Hey, I just got my first purple!" "As your guild leader, I'm giving you a direct order to turn that over to me." (Just as a totally made up example.) A slightly more reasonable version would be if he notices that you're playing solo, and orders you to help fill out a team, or some other variation on "micromanage the peons so they don't forget Who Is Really In Charge!"
It seems to me that a group like that can only exist by preying on new players, preferably ones who are new to MMOs in general. I can't imagine that many of his recruits come from players who have spent time on other servers, or even much time in the game in general. Players from other servers would have friends "from outside the family," and probably belong to another SG. (Even if it's just a solo SG with a private crafting table.)
The problem is, that people like that are usually pretty careful to avoid breaking any actual rules. Yes, it's a scummy thing to do to allow someone to join a TF, and then kick them just before the final mission because they didn't want to join his group. But it's not actually a rules violation. Ditto for the insane rules in his SG - after all, the members are free to quit at any time, so they're presumably following the rules voluntarily. (The fact that they might be newer players with no idea that such rules are seriously not Standard Operating Procedure is also not a rules violation.)
I'd imagine that he does also manage to spoil the game for some players, and that at least a few have quit the game entirely after some time exposed to this group and no other. I'm also certain that some players are actually proud to be part of such an SG. I played That Fantasy MMO for a while, and frankly some of his rules seem absolutely sane compared to some of the more psychotic Raid guilds. I know of at least two on the server where I played that had rules about the minimum number of times per week a member was REQUIRED to be available to join raid teams. Players weren't guaranteed to get a slot in the raids, but they were required to be online and ready to join in the moment the Guild Leader asked. When the game switched to the system where a player's Real Name became their equivalent of the @Global here, I know at least one group was planning to require that all members give their Real Name to the leader. Anyone failing to comply would be kicked from the guild. With the threat that they'd be blacklisted from any team lead by the Guild Officers in the future. It was my impression at the time that such rules were actually considered normal there, or at least not completely psychotic. -
Quote:Split the difference, and call it "Issue 20.75" The real trouble will be if they release three intermediate upgrades;Originally Posted by Zombie Man
The Player nomenclature will come into trouble if there are two interstitial Issues between major Issues. E.g., let's say the Devs release the next Incarnate Trial with a named issue release before Issue 21 and call it: Issue 20: Incarnates Descend
Will we call it Issue 20.6?
Issue 21
Issue 21: Subtitle
Issue 21: Subtitle: The Revenge
Issue 21: Big Darn Patch. -
The website announcement of this week's sale mentions that "you can purchase server transfers now at 50% off and save them for later." How does that work? The last time I purchased a character transfer, picking a target character and a destination server was part of the purchase process. IE, you had to pick a character and move them to buy the transfer at all, just like you have to pick a character to rename to buy a rename token. Has this changed, or is the website announcement just incorrect?
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The other thing to keep in mind is that with Super Sidekick now, you don't have to join teams at your level. You'll still get XP from joining a level five team kicking the Snakes around, or from a Peregrine Island team looking to pick a fight with Malta.
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The current push towards "cloud computing" is about to hit a wall, I think. For one thing, it takes a lot of bandwidth, even if you're just using it for data storage. And at the moment, in the US at least, a lot of ISPs are moving to try to seriously limit the bandwidth available to the "average" customer. Especially the cable companies, who seem to view low cost high bandwidth internet connections as a direct threat to their revenue stream. Or: Why should I pay $60 a month for cable TV, PLUS an internet connection, when I can just have the Internet connection and watch most of what I want (without commercials) from Netflix/HulaHoop/Whatever.com.
The other problem is - if you're dependent on off-site data storage or CPU time, you're kind of up the creek if there's any kind of service interruption. Bad connection? Doom. Scheduled/unscheduled maintenance on *any* of the systems? Doom. Company that owns the hard drives that hold all your data gets robbed/goes out of business/burns down? Doom. Plus, you're at the mercy of someone else for data security. In some cases (such as users who think "Password" is a clever password) this might be an improvement. In others (coughSonycough) this might not be such a good thing.
As far as the original post about data size: I know someone who has a closet full of Commodore 64 and 128 computers, and a lot of the gadgets for them. Commodore 64 (with 64kb onboard RAM) and an external five inch single sided serial floppy drive with 128kb (and fairly fragile) floppy disks, a 1024 baud modem that will only work with the old Ma Bell style telephone receivers (most modern cordless phones won't sit in the cradle properly) and a tape cassette drive. Oh yes, and a dot matrix printer that weighs as much as a small scooter. -
So... they're taking comics in terrible condition (yellowing paper, brittle and even missing pages) and recycling them into a comics related trading card. I'm not sure I see the problem. Especially when the alternative, as demonstrated by the closest local comics shop, is to either put them in "5 comics for 50 cents!" (and get this the hell out of my store) grab bags, or to just recycle them outright. As in, send them to the rendering plant to be mulched into pulp and turned into 40% Recycled Content grocery bags.
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Team leaders have no automatic rights. If the team leader wants me to do what he says, he has to *earn* that privilege by not being a blithering moron. And if the team leader insist on being a dipwad, barking idiotic orders, or otherwise trying to threaten or intimidate me... well, my Ignore list hungers, and I'm always ready to feed it. Especially now that it is no longer choking on the festering remains of RMT spammers and their throwaway billboard zombies.
Really, the "team leader" has a little yellow star. That's it. It doesn't confer intelligence, experience, or any level of tactical acumen. Nor are any of those things required to get the star. And considering how often my friends have been disconnected due to lag or a bad connection, or even just the server being weird, being the "one with the star" doesn't even necessarily mean that someone went to the effort of creating the team in the first place. -
So... it would be better if they turned the servers back on before they corrected the underlying problems? I don't know about you but if, say, my bank discovered a serious security problem, I'd be *really* ticked if they opened for business before it was fixed. "Yeah, that missing wall in the vault isn't fixed yet, but people want to cash their checks and get free cookies. We had to focus on what's important."
Is the network outage inconvenient? Yes, probably, if you are one of their customers. But it's not the end of the world. And seriously, if your biggest concern at this point is "I can't play my games!" then I envy you. I'm a lot more concerned about the possibility of ID theft, which is something I might have to deal with if the network *never* comes back up.
I can't imagine that keeping the network down is Sony's first choice - they're effectively losing customers every minute it's offline, on top of the online transactions they can't receive. And they've already stated that anyone who does stick around gets a free month, *plus* free time to match the outage. Which at this point is a solid two free months to everyone who hasn't already quit for good. And that's in addition to whatever it's costing them for the three or four security consulting companies they've hired, and the programmers and engineers who are probably working around the clock to re-write the entire network from the beginning, or whatever it is that's taking so much effort to fix.
And that's not even counting what this will cost them in legal fees, lost sales, and lost customer goodwill. (Yeah, it was the online division that blew it, but if you were affected, how likely are you to buy a Sony television at this point?) Considering that SOE just canceled several in-development games, and laid off a lot of staff, this really might kill them off altogether. So I *really* don't think they're keeping the network down just to make people angry. -
The only Incarnate power I've seen so far has been Ionic Barrier, I think. (A sort of shimmery, spark-like spherical shield, in any case.) I'm not having exactly the difficulty you describe, but I *DO* find the FX strangely difficult to look at, and highly distracting. I think it's largely due to the nearly stroboscopic way the shield FX displays on my system. I have a similar reaction to the pulses from Disruption Arrow and the Longbow Disruption Grenade, but the impulse really *not* wanting to look at the FX is much stronger for the Barrier FX.
I don't have a similar reaction to any other FX in the game that I've noticed. (Although I've seen FX that I strongly dislike, especially with color customization.) I'm sorry if this isn't quite the information you need. -
Quote:This really makes no sense as an arguement. And if it really does reflect your view of the Incarnate system, the *why do you still care?* I ask this as a player who has decided that I will not participate in the Incarnate system at all until there is a realistic solo path. (And no, Shards are not realistic for anything but Alpha, and only barely for that.)Originally Posted by Eiko-chan
The Incarnate System has rewards beyond just moving on to the next level (of Incarnate Abilities)?
From my point of view, the "reward" of the Incarnate system is that your character gets more powerful. For the Alpha slot, you get a little faster, or a little stronger, or a little more durable. The other slots add additional abilities that your character didn't previously posses: pets for melee classes, shields and powerful AoE attacks or debuffs, and the ability to alter the basic nature of many of your other powers. (IE, adding a proc to you attacks to boost damage or debuff the target.)
This is really nothing like Portal, where solving a puzzle results in being rewarded with... another puzzle. Possibly a puzzle with a slightly different set of available tools, but those are built into the design of the puzzle itself. The only upgrades Chell gets in the entire game are being given a gun to allow her to open one portal, and then getting it upgraded to create two linked portals. That's it. That's the sum total of her powers for the entire game.
Trying to continue to make some kind of comparison between CoH and Portal is silly. First, it's like comparing apples and pantyhose. Second, it's a good way to get the thread auto-killed, or at best pruned to the point that it doesn't make any sense.
The fact remains that "Portal-like puzzles" don't work as well in a multiplayer game, and especially not in a situation where you're going to need to run the content repeatedly. Trying to make a "random puzzle generator" is a HUGE undertaking. For one thing, the puzzle generator would probably have to be built to not only design the puzzle, but to solve it - unless you're willing to deal with it randomly generating puzzles that can't be beaten.
In CoH specifically, you'd also have to come up with some form of puzzle that makes any kind of sense in the game world, and that will remain challenging for characters with huge variety of skills, and no guarantee of having any *specific* skill needed by the puzzle. "Jump across the lava without touching it" would be pretty challenging for a "natural" character with only Ninja Leap, completely trivial for a flyer or teleporter, and either easy or really annoying for a Super Jumper, depending on how low the ceiling is. It'd probably be impossible for a character with just Sprint. Pretty much the only way to avoid that problem would be to introduce a randomly generated mini-game that has *nothing* to do with AT or powers at all. And at that point, you're awarding Incarnate Threads for playing Bejeweled, or Plants vs. Zombies.