Starsman

In the same way that a poweful Sith was foretold to bring balance to the force.

Or because they wanted to do something "close to home", another super-hero related game, and NCSoft had as much interest in that as they proven to have in this one.

Although it was supported for a long time, it was ignored by most players. I'm not sure if 2007 was simply the year that the latest content update happened to break the client.

Anyways, the fact that the game is "not a modern MMO", still not an excuse to say "cant use it as an example".

But there are others in the list:

Meridian 59 is still running, that's 17 years! (dont go to their website, they exceeded their bandwith )
Horizons changed name to Istaria and is still running, that's 9 years.
Final Fantasy XI is still running, that is also 9 years.
Second Life Online, 9 years
Eve Online, 9 years

The list can go on and on if you bother to double check mmorpg.com's MMO list to see what is actually still online.

If I recall correctly, the 3D client was horribly buggy and universally hated, eventually entirelly abandoned and everything continued in old fashion 2D.

Interestingly, I will miss you almost as much as I will miss her. (Btw that is me saying I'll miss you.)

But... Street Justice, Martial Arts and Martial Combat are just variations on mundane hand to hand combat, not super powered sets!

Well to be fair, most people that get tossed through a wall should splatter into bloody messes before they put a dent on a wall... but how angry would you still be if you were not allowed to punch down every single wall in a mission?

My tought process right now is that game-balance wise, pure any builds are too absolutarian. In games, especially if you designate a true distinction between range and melee attacks, finding yourself stuck at pure melee can be balance breaking.

Rellying on pure temporary powers also can be an issue, simply because they may not be available when you need them.

I quit CoH when GR was released, in part with not being happy with the state of the game, but in great part because I wanted to start my own indie game venture (Starsmangames.com.) Mostly been doing casual silly stuff, a learning thing. Currently working lazily on another crazy project but since I returned to CoH I find it hard to make any time to do any development. Given the game will be forced away from me this Friday, I will likely have more time to resume this stuff.

It is my hope to eventually have enough skill (and hopefully also money) to engage on some more serious stuff. At minimum a Starsman (The Character) game to keep him alive, and at the most ambitious level a 2 player coop super hero online game (think double dragon with super heroes) and maybe, who knows, even further down the path a full multiplayer game a-la-Minecraft.

I'm probing the community now... well... because this community will shatter once the forums are killed, and I’m sure few will transition to Titan.

As for design, this is one of the crazy things that is crossing my head at least for offense.

Imagine a completely free-form character builder. You get a huge list of powers and you can just mix and match as you will.

However, your character has a limited set of "power slots". Right now this is what is on my head:

2 melee power slots.
2 ranged power slots.
2 anything goes power slots.

You are forced to fill the melee slots with melee attacks and the ranged slots with ranged attacks.

The attack in question may only bring animation and secondary effects. Recharge and damage are determined by the slot.

In play, you get 4 attacks.

T1 = if you are at melee range uses Melee Attack 1, at range activates Ranged Attack 1. This attack has zero recharge and zero cost.
T2 = same as above but will do slightly more damage, may have a cost to use and may have a low recharge.
T3 = Does considerable more damage but it's stuck on melee or range, based on your previous selection.
T4 = Again, more damage, only stuck in your previous selection.

Ranged attacks used up close may inflict diminished damage.

Slotting Melee attacks in T1 and T2 adds some survival bonuses to compensate for the fact that your optimal damage requires to be too close.

This is just a very fresh thought process and far from set in stone (heck it's not even set in wet paper) and only addresses offensive powers (I would assume I'd give the true flavor of the build in additional utility slots, be it heals, team buffs, self-offensive boosts, armors, CC abilities, etc.)

I think you nailed it. From the art style to the content itself, they added so many 4th wall breaking elements (even the text ballons) that it felt all... slapstic... silly... just impossible for me to take anything seriously enough.

The bit I played STO, it felt serious enough.

Not entirely by the ear. He at least half-planned the assault on Skyfall (send in troops that will obviously be all killed and then later and gloriously arrive in my big chopper with more minions.) Not as xanatonian as the earlier part of the movie, but still rather planned.

That does make sense. Go in, shoot M and get shot. He already worked up the courage to do it that way. But once it was just him and M and no one to shoot him immediately he flaked a bit, and he tries to get M to do a one shot double suicide (something he should had realized would not happen.)

The character still was amazingly acted, but I would have liked if he had pulled the trigger in that bit.

And the scene of him getting a box in the way down the stairs in the subway (that vanishes in that scene going up the escape ladder) was entirely pointless? He dropped the box in the water? I MAY have to watch the movie again (wont pay for it) but don't think he got the cop uniform from the box, think I saw him still holding the box while wearing the cop uniform. The box was too big to just have the remote phone and a gun in it.


You make it sound like i'm contradicting myself!

The reason I don't like the use of the Xanatos Gambit (thanks BP for that name!) is that in a Bond film, I would have hoped for a smarter approach. A villain worth his place in a great thriller, the kind of things that only so lightly telegraph things to the audience and you suddenly realize "OH!" when they come to a closure.

I also don't have an issue with the plan failing, I have an issue that his final goal failed when they where going to get rid of the character anyways.

It was already decided that she was going to die. She was not going to do any more movies, and it was in the script that she would die. Make it count. Make people remember how this was the one guy that truly won. Still would have preferd a more thought through plan, but this would have redeemed the entire movie to me.

The desires are not mutually exclusive BUT either one on it's own would have improved everything drastically, although mostly M dying at the villain's hands.

Only every single monitor and input device he was using to hack the computer was the same he was still using to access all MI6 security and even access the subway's cameras, so all points at it all being hooked up to the same network.



Only somehow The Dark Knight somehow managed to make everything feel much more chaotic. While watching The Dark Knight, I never felt the Joker's plan was pre-planned, I felt almost all of it was being made on the spot, with extreme calm on his face.

That would have been a much more interesting path to take in the movie. Even the villain had a ready insult for Q in the computer. I feel the character was entirely wasted (Q.) They had a lot of potential for him but he did next to nothing in the movie other than enable the villain and deliver a special gun and gps to bond.

The bomb is a special thing that bothers me, for the bomb to work he had to have gone to that huge chamber, go up some ladder, get to the ceiling, set up the bomb, then go down the ladder again, and then run to the escape ladder where he would be caught and then he would use the bomb to get away. So in short: "we just have this idea for this special fx and want to force it there somehow." If the bomb had never been given to him and already been in place from the start, I would have swallowed it perfectly fine (he already shown he was able to blow up things remotely without even needing to rig bombs anyways.)

I want to clarify two things:

1) I should have said his ultimate goal. I did realize he wanted to discredit her first.
2) My point grudge is not against his ultimate goal, BUT that the guy that was doing so perfectly ended up not getting his trophy at the end. If he was meant to win, give him the whole trophy! Let him actually kill M, and commit suicide while at it (this leaves Bond with the frustration, anger and inability to seek any sort of vengeance.)

First time for everything. Feel good? Proud maybe?

Offended? Why? I'm just intrigued by the fact you don't see the hypocrisy. You went on to call her out on something and then made sure to kick the soap box from under your own feet.

Classy. You must feel very proud now. Best way to counter some one's insanity? Just sink lower than they did!

I think Posi admitted in the lore tread that most the badge lore pre-city of villains was just made on the spot without actual planning. Heck, there are some of these that give lore reasons to bugs, like the mind control villain in Kings Row that was set there due to a bug that made pedestrians go crazy in the area.

But yea, still is a valid question if there is at least some post-fact lore added to the guy.

And large enough to discard "shrinking income" or "failure"


The devs were slowly learning what worked and what didn't. It's my understanding the biggest profit centers were powersets and super packs. They were cranking like crazy on the power set department and they had a super pack that would have launched about the same time as Bio Armor, I guess. Yes, it would have been interesting to see, but my bet would have been in "even better than 2.4% growth"



There are MANY reasons why every business does not compare revenue quarter to quarter and instead compare to the same quarter of the previous year. Plenty of seasonal things affect every single business every quarter.


As I said when I "called it": give it time. (I actually did not expected anything drastic to show up yet, fact that anything did actually shocked me.)

I'll give them only half a star, because although they were technically correct, CoH Freedom did not fail. It was profitable and was on an upswing (if you look at the last reporter quarter year to year.) CoH was killed for entirely undisclosed reasons, but it was NOT because it failed. So, again, half a star. Actually, just 2 arms of the star.

If combat in this game was moronically over-simplified, the combat in every MMO that preceded CoH (and most that came soon after) was comatose.

Not saying I would not love to see something even more active while retaining the same level of absurdity (grenade launchers, point blank nuclear explosions, etc) ... Marvel Vs Capcom comes to mind as a good model (the first one, the last one was WAY too fast for my taste, cant appreciate anything at that speed.) But CoH DID set the bar very high for MMOs 8 years ago. Even WoW still showcases the simplistic auto-attack and spamming of 2 skills/spells.

CALLED IT! (I know I should hunt for my post on this but meh... although maybe I should, so I can say "TOLD YOU" to the ones that told me "you are ignoring the history of Arena.net and GW1".

GW2 cost too much to develop. They will not be able to push first-release-sized expansions as they did with GW1 so they will be forced to milk the hell out of that cash shop.

In my head, I always thought it was this with the minor modification: "other than the one guy holding a globe, there was no actual back story behind any statue."

Honestly, every time they attempted to give back story to the statues I felt eeky. Never felt right, always felt retconed and forced. /shrug