Starsman

Forum Cartel
  • Posts

    2248
  • Joined

  1. Loved the video.

    Interestingly... I didn't find it sad... not 90% of it. It actually made me smile... until I saw the logout countdown... a tear did roll out as soon as I saw the Connection Lost message.

    So much anger and sadness going through my head... but I digress. Again, amazing video. Always loved your work.
  2. Quote:
    Originally Posted by TrueGentleman View Post
    By the ******* Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, what did NCSoft have against Paragon Studios that they didn't want to invest in it? Were the projected profit margins that small that a no-brainer like this was rejected?
    I have a very strong feeling that for a long time, some people with a lot of power (although not unlimited power) have wanted City of Heroes to be axed for a very long time. I am sure these individuals got in the way of many things over time.

    I may be reading too much into it, but War Witch's post, specially this bit:

    Quote:
    and I was especially proud of Brian, Destin, and Ross who fought so hard for the studio every single day since we opened the doors. More than any of us will ever know, I am sure.
    Makes me think support from the east was always something that they had to fight for constantly.

    The entire thing brings to mind the story behind the cancelation of the original Doctor Who. There was a struggle of power within the BBC, some people with enough power that either wanted more control, bigger spotlight or plainly hated the show did all they were able to sabotage production. Taking away budget all the time until eventually finally they were able to convince the BBC the show had to be canceled.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by DarkBlaster_NA View Post
    I think it's safe to assume that if Matt remade "CoH" (Let's face it, There are many loopholes to be exploited to this end.) that it would be even more awesome, Hell, They would be able to have more freedom with less "Spaghetti" code.
    Maybe, but I think the guys at Cryptic said the same with Champions, and although there are a lot of people enjoying that game, we don't really like it much (why we stayed behind.)
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    I had a couple of tanker ideas I was keeping completely to myself until Blasters got their sea legs post I24, as I promised I would focus on them until they were not just tweaked, but put back onto the road to being continuously managed.

    One of the ideas I was sitting on was giving Tankers a passive-replenished absorb bar that would scale with level, and as it was depleted tankers would get a +dmg buff, sort of like Defiance 1.0 but not keyed to health. This would be automatic and unmanaged.

    And then on top of that they'd get a click that would, when activated, increase their single target damage by burning absorb and adding a damage proc to their attacks that scaled between single target and AoEs. Using this would create the double-buff of having damage procs and getting the damage buff from the absorb shield getting burned down - in effect allowing the tanker to deliberately reduce survivability by burning their own shield but getting more damage in the process.

    I think I could have sold some variation of that to Arbiter Hawk with the right numbers, and I think it could have made Tankers competitive with Brutes without overshadowing them or making their higher survivability broken.
    Not sure if you would have been able to sell it to Synapse, he was very clear to me he didn't wanted to add any additional powers, so the click to consume Absorb would have not been viable.

    I remember opposing the HP based damage buff because certain builds, in certain situations (high immortality line, willpower mostly) can keep a very steady high HP under the same situations others are constantly spiking up and down even in solo play, so it would unfairly benefit those builds.

    I asked him if a more classic defiance version (damage buff on lower the HP) would be accepted and he refused based on the same reasons Defiance was removed (encouraging some undesired gameplay.)

    The absorption thing... would it not suffer similar fate? For one sounds like it would have been a survivability boost (something tankers maybe had no need for) and then it would have encouraged players to be hurt to get the damage benefit.

    Oh one thing I forgot above: his idea was more than just damage. I think it was: at high health, damage buff. At low health, endurance discount, in between a mix of both. Goal (i think, not his words) being to fix tankers endurance issues no matter if you were high or low health. He did seem to feel tankers had very bad endurance management issues, apparently he felt stronger about that point than I did.
  5. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    I don't believe I posted a streakbreaker test within that context. The streakbreaker doesn't really work as expected with tanker single target attacks because they are not really single target attacks and, as Black Scorpion states, roll tohit rolls against multiple targets.

    Something many players don't necessarily fully appreciate is that the gauntlet effect in tanker attacks is not autohit: it has to actually make a successful tohit roll against the target, albeit with a 20% bonus to the tohit roll. Those rolls count because, to be frank, there's no specific reason for them not to count. It may be an undesirable behavior, but to change it would require an explicit exemption somehow coded into the streakbreaker; this is not a case of the streakbreaker "not working."
    I understand, and actually I should say it was not really your error (and again, I may remember it very wrong) but I think I recall the poster claiming that he had too many misses in a row, more than he "should" if the system was working as we know it should (since streakbreaker prevents too many misses in a row.)

    I'm just thinking the user might have been doing his testing with at least two enemies in range (perhaps never mentioning it,) hiding the actions of the streakbreaker.

    The only reason I remember the incident, as vaguely as I do, is because it was the last time I personally saw a "accuracy been nerfed!" thread.
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Llydia View Post
    Tanker questions are for Arbitor Hawk.
    I was holding this one secret since I still had hopes... *sigh*

    My understanding was that they wanted to do two things for tankers:

    1) Make them more desirable or better at aggro management. This may have meant increasing their threat modifier to easily steal aggro away from brutes and increasing all Gauntlet radiuses so it was more useful.

    I was all in for the radius expansion, but was thinking that perhaps tankers should not be able to accidentally steal aggro from brutes, as then brutes would feel tankers would be counter-productive to team with. Having only Taunt get a longer duration may had done the trick without increasing threat across the board.

    I also figured Taunt should have been increased to 7 targets for tankers.


    2) Damage would get a conditional boost with the goal of making them a viable DPS AT, although still lagging behind the other 3 Melee ATs enough to justify their superior survivability.

    One idea was to give them a damage buff that would be based off HP. 100% HP would mean full damage buff, and it may have dropped to no buff at 50% or some other percentage.

    I hated the idea for various reasons and was attempting to convince for an alternative. One alternative that seemed to sound good was to give tankers Nega-Fury. A Fury bar that would start full and every attack you execute would take a bit of fury away. This "Fury would refill slowly only once you are out of combat.

    This would have turned tankers into big hitters when they enter combat, with potentially high alpha capabilities but unable to sustain that DPS.

    I was told they were sold on the idea BUT that adding a fury bar to an AT that never used it before was non-trivial and very likely a show-stopper. Although the idea was good, they would refuse to go for it without the ability to add a fury bar.

    Eventually I was told this idea was canned, not sure if due to the fury bar or other potential issues (like too much alpha damage.)

    I had other ideas suggested but never heard back on it. One was the idea to add randomized damage to tankers, damage that would be higher against healthy enemies. Think something similar to Corruptor scourge, but instead of random proc, just random damage.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Black Scorpion View Post
    And I am also pretty sure they contributed to streakbreaker, so it was probably undesired that such things were happening off "powers system trickery" like the above.
    ... Wait... I’m having a flashback now...

    I may remember this loosely, but I think when Dark Melee got ported for Tankers, someone complained that the streak breaker had to be broken...

    Arcanaville, like always, did her usual math magic and determined that not to be true, that all statistics pointed for streak breaker to be working properly...

    Is there a chance she never tested it against crowds and that the complaint was right: streak breaker was not working for tankers since it was wasted on invisible taunt checks???

    Is another possibility that I just remember everything wrong ?
  8. I can’t talk for others, but in my case I have avoided the forums more and more due to a combination of as sholes that insist on trolling everyone that cares about the cancelation and the constant "maybe you should play THIS other MMO" spam.

    I think at one point we had 5 threads on GW2 in the first forum page alone. They seem to have calmed down too, though, along with everyone just slowly giving up on the forums.
  9. Starsman

    Name Conflicts

    As far as this game goes, it's a policy thing. For the most part, it was never about raw names but full cloning. There were many names set in a filter to avoid them due to their high notoriety (Spiderman, Wolverine, etc), but it would be impossible to ban every name ever used. I think every single word in the dictionary has been used to name a comic book hero or villain at some point.

    If it was less notorious, I would not be shocked if a name like Lobo would have been allowed for a werewolf until someone actually did a DC Lobo clone.

    BTW, as far as I understand, the Marvel MMO is going to be more of an action-figure thing, you won’t create your own characters instead you pick existing characters from the Marvel Universe to play as.
  10. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Tenzhi View Post
    Strangely, it's seemed to me that many of the posters who in the past have been known for being a bit mean have actually been mellower of late.
    A lot of argumentative players only did so due to passion towards the game. It's natural that, once balance discussions and future changes get entirely removed from the realm of possibilities, they would just join the mourning, ...maybe even more so because fewer people were more passionate than those that argued about the game.

    The biggest problem right now is a handful of very loud posters that really just seem to enjoy the trolling and have taken the opportunity to poke everyone's wounds, turning on the fans with bags of fine salt in front of them. So basically: our true trolls are now very visible as they go about condescendingly mocking anyone who cares for the game.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
    In all honesty, I found it disappointing. Nothing like learning unpleasant truths about people you had enjoyed chatting with for years.
    You mean finding out how someone thinks extremely different?

    Or the cases were people just started calling out names and insulting instead of politely disagreeing?
  12. Anything with excessive endurance drain or -recovery. Mainly: Carnies and Arachnos
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Black Pebble View Post
    The Striker AT, from my recollection, was the melee support AT that Synapse/Phil wanted to make for a while. You can think of it as the next step in making something like EAT's, but with newer tech.

    The Striker was meant to have burst melee and range dps, and the ability to survive high damage for a short amount of time.

    The Striker could start out ranged, and start building up a melee damage buff. Once the buff is maximized, the Striker would then pop into melee range and then begin building up a ranged buff. Take a few alpha strikes, pop out and begin again. There would also be some CC abilities as well in case a breather was needed.

    Oh, and one of the melee Power Sets for Strikers would have been a variation of Dark Melee, but.....with a shadow scythe.
    Interesting. I would not have been too crazy about that. I know a few people liked the Epic AT model, but I honestly was never too fond of it. The best AT design in this game happened with the original 5 villain ATs, and I always thought a lot of time was being wasted on creating these new VEATs that had such unique structure.

    I would have loved to see more unique re-purposing of the exiting power set structure, not unlike what we saw with the launch of CoV.

    I made a thread not too long ago where I entertained the idea of 5 new ATs using sets that are rarely used.

    I especially liked the idea of the sidekick AT in the list (Assault primary, stalker armor secondary that replaces hide with a pet.) Synapse seemed to like the idea and did mention a in a few times that he would love a ranged/melee hybrid... I guess the Stryker is what he was hinting at.

    Here is my fiction post just for the hell of it:

    Quote:
    [Disclaimer: This is fiction, just for fun!!!]

    Today, August 8, 2020, The devs have finally announced 5 new ATs being introduced to the game!! These ATs promise to take the focus away from Melee and Blast sets and set the highlight in other type of sets the game has to offer: Summoning, Control, Assault and Manipulation sets. These sets have usually s been dismissed when new power sets are created, since so few ATs benefit from designing such power sets. That changes with Issue 48, titled: FINALLY!!!!

    The revealed ATs are:

    Sergeant:
    The Sergeants commands a squad of brave soldiers into battle, fighting among them, all as equals. On their own, each member may not be superhumanly strong, but together they can take on most meta-human opponents.
    • Primary: Dom Assault
    • Secondary: Summon Secondary (weaker henchmen, replace the 3 attacks with 3 armors but no mez prot)
    • Epic: Dom Ancillary pools.
    • Inherent: The Sergeant’s defensive toggles from his summon set scale in power with the proximity of his squad members.
    Suppressor:
    Suppressors move through the battle field entirely unnoticed, looking for any opportunity to weaken the opponent and empower their allies. Suppressors are equally skilled in ranged and melee skills.
    • Primary: Dom Assault
    • Secondary: Buff (50% of defender values) Lose one power to Stealth.
    • Epic: Defender/Corruptor Ancillary pools.
    • Inherent: Suppression: All suppressor melee attacks used from hide will land a Mag 3 AoE hold. Ranged attacks will land a Mag 3 AoE Fear.
    Dynamic Duo:
    This dynamic duo acts like one! You guard each other’s back, and take on any challenge with perfect orchestrated maneuvering.
    Primary: Assault Primary
    • Secondary: Stalker secondary (replacing hide with a permanent pet.)
    • Epic: Brute/Tank Epic Pools
    • Inherent: Synergy. All your toggles and passives also buff your Sidekick pet if he is within 20ft. Your pet being near slightly buffs your damage. You can’t directly command your pet but he will take offensive mode for about 10 seconds with every attack. You stop attacking, the pet resets to follow/non-aggressive mode.
    Overseer:
    The Overseer does not typically join a fight, directly. They tend to oversee and direct the actions of a strong group of men. When the Overseer acts, it's not to attack, but to control a situation.
    • Primary: Summon Primary
    • Secondary: Control Secondary (Overseer control effects will not inflict damage)
    • Epic: Controller Epic Pools
    • Inherent: Every time the overseer commands their pets, he grants them a stance appropriate buff. "Aggressive" will give them a 20 second Damage/Accuracy buff. "Defensive" grants the pets a 20 second Resistance + Def buff. "Passive" will give all pets a recovery/regen aura.
    Manipulators:
    The Manipulator heads into a fight, manipulating its surroundings to make things safe for him and extremely uncomfortable to those who oppose him. Manipulators have a limited range of melee attacks and no ranged attacks, but they have a way to make foes think they are being hit harder than they actually are.
    • Primary: Blaster Manipulation (T1 replaced by a melee attack)
    • Secondary: Controller Control
    • Epic: Dominator Epic pools.
    • Inherent: Manipulators are not kings of burst damage, but all their attacks have a high chance of making the enemy think they are being hurt even when they are not. (Manipulators have 50% chance to crit, not necessarily 2x, illusionary damage that heals back after a while.)

    Issue 48! Headed your way NOT Soon(TM)!
  14. Am I the only one that remembers the announced-yet-never-released Shaolin Soccer inspired Soccer Fury?
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Hit Streak View Post
    I've been through the death of Earth and Beyond, Auto Assault, Star Wars Galaxies and now City of Heroes. It truly sucks to see characters, relationships, adventures all gone in an instant.
    I gone through the death of Tabula Rasa (got TWO collector’s edition of that one so a friend and me were able to play together, wore those dog tags until after the game got canceled), Auto assault, SWG, Exteel and CoH. What hurts more than seeing my characters die, is having it be done to me 4 times in a row by the same company.

    Quote:
    Don't stop playing because of what happened to City of Heroes.
    I assure you: it matters not how good any game NCSoft releases in the future is, nothing will make another one of their games worth playing in my eyes.
  16. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
    I changed mine with the same password I've been using. Honestly thought I had just been banned...
    For a bit I thought the same until I went to the Titan forums and saw everyone was having the same issues.

    May start considering the Titan forums the official forums soon. This place is shaking.
  17. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Garent View Post
    Arcanaville made a post about endurance costs and toggles vs. passives at one point that applies to this, but I can't be arsed to go searching for it at this time of night.
    I think Arcanaville wanted toggles to cost no endurance, at least primary/secondary self-defense toggles. The toggle-dropping that came out of endurance cost is one of the most annoying things of the endurance system.

    I argued a few things, like "what is the point of toggles being toggles?" or "don't you think that would boost damage too much proportionally speaking (since more endurance budget now goes to damage.)

    An Idea that crossed my mind out of that conversation and I wanted to push in the future was to change how endurance works for toggles. For one, remove endurance cost on all toggles. Then add all toggles a self -MaxEnd debuff. This results in a "burden" from toggles that justifies them being toggles and not passives, removes the randomized toggle dropping from running out of endurance while also keeping a significant design choice that toggles should lower your damage endurance budget.

    Rebalancing this would have been tricky, though, the entire model may end up changed and new rules set for different types of toggles. One of the reasons I was planning to propose this post i24, needed more time to come up with a balanced proposal.
  18. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Heraclea View Post
    The endurance mechanic still annoys after being largely ameliorated. You know I always was carping about this. This is also why I loved Willpower as well. For the first six years and more of its existence, the game showed its worst face to the new player. Endurance was the biggest QoL problem, and Stamina was what you were more or less forced to take to get around it; and after Stamina was on and SOs available the game started to get a lot more fun to play.
    There is a chicken and egg thing going on there. The first time I leveled a character, before endurance costs everywhere got slashed with ED, I felt I had lots of fun with the game. It was once I experienced the game with Stamina that rolling a new character was torture.

    In fact, recently I started leveling a new willpower character and I felt the same way again... I was tired of crafting random enhancements only to get by until I was able to do a real build that I just went with SOs.

    Not having access to an IO build, with pure SO, reminded me of the same deal all over again. With IOs it's easy to have 95% damage, +30% accuracy, +40% recharge and +40%-90% endurance discount on all attacks. Especially if you are willing to do some frankenslotting.

    So even with "dual stamina" on a WP tank, I felt endurance was lacking drastically.

    Quote:
    If players had the QoL improvements from the start that they have now, this game might have so many subscribers and be making so much money that nobody would dream of closing it.
    I think the biggest reason for players to not stick around long was lack of content. No high end content forced players to re-roll new characters to have something to do, and that forced them into a much harsher experience than they remembered, not to mention before free-to-play, the low level content was spread all over the world making travel powers nearly a requirement.

    I do agree if I was to make the game anew I would definitely change the endurance mechanics, but mostly with the goal that they are constant throughout the game, across every build with very few very carefully considered exceptions.

    One thing I would definitively do is grant players a startup travel power pick.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha View Post
    'Exhausted all options'?!

    Bull fething horse dookie!

    Hell, if they were serious about that, why not TELL us the price, and the players can buy the damn game!
    Honesty was never one of the options they would be willing to consider.
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by BrandX View Post
    You already bought it. Can't return it. So, wouldn't it be better if you kept playing it, but never bought an in game item, that way you took up space on their servers?
    Actually... there is an interesting thing, how freemium games work (and despite the box price, GW2 IS a freemium game.)

    You see, there is an expectation that a huge percentage of the playerbase will never spend any money in the game. Just a smaller chunk ever will. Those that don't spend any money are likely going to serve as publicity for new players.

    If a friend asks "what were you doing last night" and you replied "playing Guild Wars 2" that is publicity.

    I’m not saying you should stop playing, but by stopping and spreading the word about how backstabbing this company is towards their fan base (with 5 killed MMOs in their trophy wall) you CAN do something that is even more effective than a personal boycott.

    If enough people quit GW2 over this, they actually will notice the harm they have brought to themselves.
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Brillig View Post
    Not aware that any of them sold at a premium.
    They sold for what they were worth: in other words what the interest parties were interested in offering.

    The CoH property has zero value to NCSoft if they will not use it (and we know they won’t) even as a tax write-off it makes no sense. The write-off, from what I understand, can still happen if they sell the property at what can be considered a legal loss.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by JohnRobey View Post
    Dear Hit Streak/NCSoft Team,
    We the fans and loyal customers would LOVE to know which avenues were explored and why things failed. 1. Some transparency here would help many of us with understanding and reaching feelings of closure, rather than the feelings of betrayal by NCSoft and sorrow and anger. 2. As demonstrated, the CoH Community is really quite interested in seeing City of Heroes and Paragon Studies continue/get re-established and would be willing and eager to work pro-actively with NCSoft to develop a win-win scenario where we get to keep our beloved MMO in a manner either cost neutral or even profitable to NCSoft -- keeping in mind that the good will of the CoH Community may in fact be GOOD Public Relations policy for NCSoft.

    CoH was my first MMO and I played from Issue 15 unto this present day. (I'll be logging in tonight and every night, until I no longer can.) Prior to the "sunset" notice, I've been very happy with NCSoft, and, like everyone, looking forward to Issue 24 and beyond. I urge NCSoft to consider ways it could hand off City of Heroes, if NCSoft no longer wishes to publish this MMO. (I appreciate that the profits to be made from CoH may pale compared to the profitability of other business opportunities for NCSoft.) Please do what you can to help us save our beloved MMO. Thank you!
    Dont waste your time, they are not actually interested. They never were (NCSoft.)

    If they cared, at minimum the servers would had been sustainable without a dev team. I hope no one comes with the "better off shut down than without updates" would have been the biggest b.s. that can be tossed at us right now.
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Heraclea View Post
    It had ever been my understanding that WP was meant as an offense oriented set. Willpower tankers were expected to rely on attacks rather than auras to hold aggro. As such, they had more endurance than other tankers had, and a weaker aura. But inherent Stamina diminished that advantage somewhat, if it did not erase it completely.
    For all that matters anymore, given the final nail has been hammered into the coffin:

    The real "intention" for willpower was an "all passives" set. There was some stuff about a purely passive set being impossible under game design balance so instead castle did a toggle set that had few toggles and the toggles it had would be offset by Quick Recovery to give the player the feel of an "all passive" set.

    Willpower at the end turned a bit sturdier than he expected.
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Brillig View Post
    Yes, and all of those are such hot properties that a day doesn't go by that I don't hear of some company attempting to buy one of them...
    Funny you say that: at lest 3 games in that list have changed ownership. Some of them several times.
  25. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    Unless the negotiations were formalized, I doubt they are covered by confidentiality clauses. However, its likely all of the participants are unlikely to discuss sensitive negotiations held in confidence and off the record anyway. Doing so would damage your own personal reputation in that area.

    Now, if one party were to publicly lie about the content of those negotiations, all bets would be off.
    I don't think they are lying lying, more like just saying the side of the story that makes them look less bad.