Starsman

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by SinergyX_EU View Post
    Then i worry, will CoH suffer the same fate? Unplayable, crashing and queue's all around us?
    Many want to stay to the very last second, but will we even be able to?
    I think (but not sure) that Tabula Rasa opened up the game for everyone. CoH locked everything down so unless you had an account you can’t do much.

    Also, for Tabula Rasa the dev team was there till the end to craft an event. Here best we will get may be some lingering mod with powers not stripped away spawning lots of stuff on various zones.
  2. Yea, this is just a horribly managed company.

    They been doing absurd aquisitions for insane sums (Draw Something for 180 million?!?) and growing too fast without diversifying their incomes at all. They basically placed all their eggs in the same basket, and then made the basket both, brittle and smell like bear food.
  3. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
    Agreed. If the time gates had been set per arc instead of per day and used the same drop tables as the itrials, I'd have been quite content.
    I am not sure I would have liked that either. As it is, I felt forced to do 2 arcs per day plus a repeatable to optimize my rewards. Remove the timer and you would make me think I had to do all the arcs every day! (I’m not always that OCD but the bug can bite.)

    The entire crafting thing was messy and the trials... too raid-ish.

    I would have gone for this:

    You gain Unlock XP
    You also gain Ability Craft Points (not a random drop, just a consistent reward, make it not drop from minions or Lt’s only from Bosses/EBs/AVs and Monsters, for monsters in huge amounts)

    Make crafting of any ability ONLY cost "Ability X Craft Points".

    Then you add content that grants xp towards every slot that is available. Grinding up this will not be too different from grinding up from 1 to 50, and they don’t have to fear players hoarding up Craft XP for future slots because you can't ever earn xp towards them until you actually add them to the game.

    Point being: If I play only 20 minutes I should feel 20 minutes of advancement, not feel that I need the full hour to make the entire arc or it will be a wasted day, nor that I got to get lucky to feel any advancement at all (yea I was never a fan of the invention drop system either, although Merits sort of fixed it)

    Bah, I'm turning this into the "what will you not miss" thread
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba View Post
    Ahhh, the DA solo grind. So much fun getting a common, two astrals and 10 threads every night after running an arc three times or three different ones. Oh, wait, that's not been fun at all.
    For me personally, it was more fun than grinding Trials. Mind you, still talking about preferring to be punched in the stomach than being hit with a hammer to the head. I would rather neither.

    Quote:
    As we get closer to doomsday, I'm finding myself at a complete loss on where I'm going. It appears that the answer is nowhere. No other MMO interests me in the least. I have no expectation that the plan z initiative will get anywhere after reading those forums last night.
    I'm diving back into game development. Maybe my next iPhone game will make better than my last one

    If I can keep it up I plan to make my own super hero game. Not an MMO though just a game for my characters to gain new life.
  5. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Texas Justice View Post
    Niviene is still with Zynga as far as I know. I haven't heard if anyone in the Bay Area was affected by their closures of studios.
    Hopefully not hit by yesterday's Zynga mass layoffs.
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ogi View Post
    And (post-shard) Incarnate content was why I was considering canceling my sub once I got my invention license. Endless endgame treadmills are a WoW thing so if I want that I'll just log in there. Access to all my characters slots and the bits of new non-endgame content were what kept me subbed.
    Yea... I did the Incarnate grind with one character only, and only to unlock the first tier of the slots, and only what i was able to solo in DA.

    I keep thinking they would have been better off just increasing the level cap and adding more content.

    The homogenized abilities took a lot away from the AT design, and some of the abilities gave way too much power way too suddenly. The addition of levels with and potentially expansion of the Ancillary pools, plus global slots would have been, in my opinion, a bit more entertaining.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Evil_Legacy View Post
    Do it even matter where the quote is?

    Either way someone will always complain.

    I kind of like the bottom quote. You read what the person has to say first then followed by what they are replying to.
    You guys buddies, a couple or the same dude dual boxing the forums? If neither, you guys should consider the first two.

  8. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    You have to, or everything becomes magical or psionic. There's no such thing as the empty set flag.
    OK so a base. May be against the naming, though but I guess the third bucket needs some name. Physics or Physical may be a better name, no?

    Quote:
    Attack types
    • Directed
    • Penetrating
    • Area of Effect
    • Enveloping
    Hmmm, not sure I like that list, and I may need a bit more on what you mean by Penetrating and Enveloping.

    The Area of Effect... not sure I like it. How are you supposed to, in any way or form, be able to avoid a bomb's blast? I (biased I know) like more the idea of direction and range.

    Quote:
    Damage types
    • Physical
      • (Standard)
      • Energy
      • Elemental
    • Magical
      • (Standard)
      • Metamorphic
      • Chaos
    • Psionic
      • (Standard)
      • Telepathic
      • Astral
    Hmmm... I can sort of live with those.... although I would go deeper in those branches with sub-types and rename the "Standard"s to:

    Magic Standard -> Arcane
    Psionic Standard -> Mental
    Physical Standard -> Kinetic

    Having any one type be "Standard" may have the connotation that the other types are rare and/or situational instead of thematic or conceptual.


    Edit: curious, would you note a difference between thermal as an energy form and fire as an elemental force?
  9. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Obsidian_Light View Post
    They finished and opened the casino, and took away all the construction crap from the parking lot. TONS easier to get around (at least back in June it was).
    Casino is open already? Darn... have not been down there in a while...
  10. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Pebblebrook View Post
    Other publishers have cancelled many titles before, but probably not ones you would care about. Sony i think cancelled 5 that i know of, but only 1 (SWG) was something I would prefer to have kept going.
    MMOs? Only MMOs they have canceled that I am aware off have been:

    EverQuest Online adventure (A PS2 game they had no way to keep supporting.)
    Star Wars Galaxies (shut down was decided by Lucas Arts in hopes that those players would move to TOR)
    And Matrix Online.

    Matrix Online is the only one they canceled due to low subscription numbers, and that’s an excuse they had from the day they acquired the IP 5 years earlier when the original owner studio was closed.

    They have other games they canceled, but these are not MMOs (Tanarus, Cosmic Rift and Star Chamber.) These other 3 were only "freebies" they tossed as bonuses for subscribers of their All Access plan. Despite their nature they lived enjoyed between 9 and 13 years lifespans.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    In City of Heroes, Fire_Attack is not a form of energy. Fire_Attacks are attacks that can all be defended against by some abstract form of defense that happens to work on all attacks that are in some way related to Fire.
    I see... I thought you were talking damage types, my brain is checking out already and I forgot the meaning of _attack.

    But yea, the overall type_attack system in this game is a mess, I think a perhaps late in development choice to cramp a lot of comic book concepts into a single system.

    If we were talking exclusively the ability to avoid damage, I would make stats for melee/ranged combined with some form of directional avoidance stat. This would be great for tanking and ranged. Imagine if a pure range build was able to get high frontal avoidance, you can have a strong ranged AT that must play strategically. If he ever got surrounded, it would likely means his end.

    On the other hand, a tank-type or melee type may have better flanking and rear attack voidance. But I think I'm shifting topics here...

    Quote:
    Why have types at all? In my opinion, it should be to distinguish things you actually want to distinguish in the game, and it’s hard to come up with a reason why you really want to distinguish "fire" and "energy" attacks (note: I'm still talking about attack types, not damage types).
    For most games I would say there is no reason. For a Super Hero MMO, you may feel the desire to allow things like The Human Torch, a hero that is vulnerable to almost all attacks but immune to fire, or Superman's vulnerability to magic and a very specific type of alien radiation.

    Another reason to have damage types is mostly Player Vs Environment. As you said before: NPCs don’t get to have fun, so you can actually make use of damage types to give big, exploitable shifts to enemies.


    Quote:
    That's really the only reason to make such typing, and there are no other really sound reasons to do so. In other words, you type things when you need to, not when it seems you should.
    I guess it makes sense to add magic also as a "positional" avoidance stat, along with mental.

    Quote:
    Which begs the question when would you have general vs specific resistances, and what the advantages and disadvantages would be, and would any player actually go along with that.
    There are points I need to expand. For instance, although I would expect all tanking builds to have a rather even coverage, there may be logic behind giving a ranged build some strong resistance to "his thing", like the Human Torch example above.

    Reason to do it from a gaming perspective? Everyone gets content they can be good at on their own. The Human Torch may be able to easily fight The Magma Men, and Iron Skin Tank Man may be able to survive anything but be faster solo shattering The Glass Demons. Players join forces to tackle bigger mixtures of enemies.

    The biggest challenge is to have enough content over the entire game to justify all damage types.


    Quote:
    Its easy to fall into the trap of having distinctions without differences. Smashing and Lethal damage types are one step removed from being redundant.
    I wrote a lot very long ideas to revamp Stone armor. In every one I think I insisted that the set had only it's Lethal resistances boosted with the goal of finally have some distinction to the two physical damage types. Stone, after all, should be hard to cut but not so hard to smash.


    Quote:
    Which means as obvious as the conceptual distinction appears to be, having those two types was probably 99% a waste of time.
    It's a waste for player defenses (although Kinetic has one power that does only boost Smashing and Energy resistances, always liked that one) but when it comes to players attacking critters it was not a waste. The devs did a bit of mixture here and there (although overused smashing resistances.)

    Quote:
    So when I say I would make magic, science/natural, and mind/psi into some form of fundamental types in an MMO
    I can see the point for magic, and Mind, but science/natural type? Unless you are meaning to flag there anything that is not magic or mental...

    I keep inclining to no damage type at all every time I think too much about this, though, having just an inherent side effect to your choice of "element" or "power" instead of an actual type. Although I think it may be fun to geek out playing with all the stats, it may be too much and never have enough conceptual reach to make a fun difference.
  12. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Lucky666 View Post
    I'm not a business man by any means but that sounds absolutely wrong on so many levels please let me explain myself.
    My statement was based on some stuff I have read, there is additional things that some industries take into account, like inventory (may be meaningless for software but replaceable with subscriber base)

    Some industries DO base the purchase on 100% of the profits for the last year but ignoring all inventory and stock. I think the lowest end of that scale I saw while hunting for information was 60% + inventory value.

    Mind you, there is a gotcha for this one title and it’s that it’s already killed. It’s not the same to attempt to sell an ongoing business than to sell one you already closed down doors on and refunded all customers their money.

    Again I have to say I don’t know if this applies to software. I was not able to find out enough information on such acquisitions with enough information on how much the business in question did on the specified year.
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by I Burnt The Toast View Post
    It's also the only studio that ever bothered saving CoH Had NCSoft not stepped up to the plate 5 years ago CoH would have died then. So you can be grateful to them for the past 5 years of the game.
    That is not entirely true.

    5 years ago, Cryptic was working on the Marvel MMO. They slowed down production in CoH, but never killed it entirely. The one that actually threatened to kill the title was not Cryptic, it was NCSoft itself. They found there was a conflict of interest (there was one indeed) and either Cryptic had to pass full control of the IP to NCSoft or NCSoft would just cancel CoH.

    Cryptic did the same to Champions with STO, they treated it just like they treated CoH, but it still is running 5 years later, so had CoH remained with Cryptic instead of with NCSoft, it's very likely the game would have not been canceled. Would not be in the advance state we have today, but likely would still be running. Castle and BABs may have never been fired either.

    Passing full control of CoH to Cryptic was never an option for NCSoft, though.

    The only thing we can realistically credit NCSoft for doing is ramping up game production, something that made total sense when there were 2 potential big players entering the same arena.

    BTW, not only is NCSoft the only one to cancel that many MMOs, it's also the only one that comes to mind that kills a profitable MMO that is in the middle of heavy development. Every other MMO out there that I have seen canceled slowly phases out development first, cancelation comes as a last resort after the game was just coasting it's fading consumer base.

    Quote:
    And FYI just how many of the games that were shut down were due to not bringing enough subs/profit....
    Not this one, that is something not even NCSoft claims.

    Quote:
    Auto Assault was BLEEDING money
    Dungeon Runners was NOT profitable...it was LOSING money
    Exteel never made back what it cost to produce and so it was shut down due to it being a financial drag on the company.
    Tabula Rasa while loved by a few...was just that..too little of a subscriber base...and it was not making a profit.

    Seeing the trend here?
    Yes, it seems NCSoft's capabilities at managing the titles were very lacking. That is too many failures to start blaming the individual studios.


    Quote:
    And while CoH was not unprofitable it was not bringing in the profits NCSoft wanted..so they shut it down. It is a business...
    Canceling profits when you just face a loss is stupid business.

    Quote:
    CoH was dying...
    No it was not.

    Quote:
    and if you fail to see that then you are simply refusing to see the facts.
    I think you are making up facts. CoH profits went slightly down after going F2P but it was in a slight increase compared to the previous year quarter. There was potential for at worst a couple more years of steady profits or even an increase in profits.

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by I Burnt The Toast View Post
    It's also the only studio that ever bothered saving CoH Had NCSoft not stepped up to the plate 5 years ago CoH would have died then. So you can be grateful to them for the past 5 years of the game.
    That is not entirely true.

    5 years ago, Cryptic was working on the Marvel MMO. They slowed down production in CoH, but never killed it entirely. The one that actually threatened to kill the title was not Cryptic, it was NCSoft itself. They found there was a conflict of interest (there was one indeed) and either Cryptic had to pass full control of the IP to NCSoft or NCSoft would just cancel CoH.

    Cryptic did the same to Champions with STO, they treated it just like they treated CoH, but it still is running 5 years later, so had CoH remained with Cryptic instead of with NCSoft, it's very likely the game would have not been canceled. Would not be in the advance state we have today, but likely would still be running. Castle and BABs may have never been fired either.

    Passing full control of CoH to Cryptic was never an option for NCSoft, though.

    The only thing we can realistically credit NCSoft for doing is ramping up game production, something that made total sense when there were 2 potential big players entering the same arena.

    BTW, not only is NCSoft the only one to cancel that many MMOs, it's also the only one that comes to mind that kills a profitable MMO that is in the middle of heavy development. Every other MMO out there that I have seen canceled slowly phases out development first, cancelation comes as a last resort after the game was just coasting it's fading consumer base.

    Quote:
    And FYI just how many of the games that were shut down were due to not bringing enough subs/profit....
    Not this one, that is something not even NCSoft claims.

    Quote:
    Auto Assault was BLEEDING money
    Dungeon Runners was NOT profitable...it was LOSING money
    Exteel never made back what it cost to produce and so it was shut down due to it being a financial drag on the company.
    Tabula Rasa while loved by a few...was just that..too little of a subscriber base...and it was not making a profit.

    Seeing the trend here?
    Yes, it seems NCSoft's capabilities at managing the titles was very lacking.


    Quote:
    And while CoH was not unprofitable it was not bringing in the profts NCSoft wanted..so they shut it down. It is a business...
    Canceling profits when you just face a loss is stupid business.

    Quote:
    CoH was dying...
    No it was not.

    Quote:
    and if you fail to see that then you are simply refusing to see the facts.
    I think you are making up facts. CoH profits went slighlty down after going F2P but it was in a slight increase compared to the previous year quarter. There was potential for at worst a couple more years of steady profits or even an increase in profits.


    Quote:
    Things that led to this point: Inhospitable forums...
    It's obvious you never been to any other MMO's forums.

    Quote:
    way too many servers spreading the population thin...lack of advertisement...
    Ponder who can we blame for that...
  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU View Post
    City of Heroes, Dungeon Runners, Exteel, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa...

    What is the 6th one?

    And by closed, i mean *fully* shut down in all regions, and not just closed off in a region.
    City of heroes is actually number 7. I would still make a case for 8 due to the us version of Lineage 1, but figured some would nitpick about that.
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by I Burnt The Toast View Post
    Yeah because NCSoft is the only company to close an MMO.
    It's the only company to have closed 6.
  16. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Gangrel_EU View Post
    Check on the Titan network forums, poster by the name of Ammon chucked something up concerning it.

    Cant remember the thread, but I know you can search by poster.
    If I'm not wrong the "standard" for most industries is for businesses to be priced at about a year-worth of income. I think that would set the sale of Paragon Studios at a minimum price tag of about 8 million.
  17. Quote:
    Originally Posted by I Burnt The Toast View Post
    You can flame me all you want...for telling the reality of things; because again I realize this is just the internet... and CoH is JUST a game...that is ending.
    It's "just a game" that you just wrote 460+ words dismissing.
    It's "just a game" that you claim unable to find a replacement for.
    And it's "just a game" who's community, you included, helped raise several thousand dollars for charity.

    I ponder if the "it's just a game" posts I keep seeing from a select few are just attempt at convincing themselves about it...
  18. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Sigium View Post
    I have a crazy dream of sandbox-like tools being released to the CoH community, where people would work with/modify polygons, smooth out edges in their favorite pieces and make radical designs while experimenting with settings, defaults, customizations, sliders, angles, lengths, widths, depths, translucency and a myriad of other tools that would allow players to create their own costume part.
    You should take a look at Star Trek Online. It is not THAT far, but the things you can do with faces amazed me. You can decide the XY coordinates and rotation of scars! Give me just pieces I can use to build my own shoulder pads, similar to how I can build my own faces in STO! Let the community managers take care of offensive creations.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    Here's a question. Conceptually speaking, what's the difference between an Energy_Attack and a Fire_Attack? And I'm using the underlines to emphasize the nature of the question.
    Damage types are another thing that I am very split on. My stance seems to depend on my mood that day. In one side, sometimes I think damage should just be damage and not be complicated with typing. Other times I feel it's not complex enough.

    In the complex category... Not sure if this is what you are talking about, but technically Fire is a form of energy. If I was to go complex, I would make damage types a tree, not a list.

    By this I mean, imagine you had Elemental_Attack type, and then under it you had Cold_Attack, Fire_Attack and what the heck, Wind_Attack and Earth_Attack.

    If you have 30% Elemental resistance, you would resist all those attacks.

    At the same time, I would have an Energy branch that is subdivided into Radiation, Electricity and perhaps also Fire.

    This may mean that 30% Elemental, 30% Energy and 30% Thermal all combine in a diminishing form to result in, perhaps, 65.7% final Thermal resistance.

    The Kinetic branch may house Smashing, Slashing, Piercing, and potentially also Wind. Earth maybe too?

    What I'd do with Magic? Holy, Dark and Runic come to mind.

    I know there can always be things like magical fire, but I think that goes down to "power customization" (allowing the player to select fire fx for his magical attacks.)

    This is going too far but I would not have the extreme disparity in resistances/defenses we currently have in this game. Even if your primary element was Fire, this would simply give you a slight edge against a type at a marginal expense of a logical opposite or maybe even selected type, but never a crippling hole.

    One thing is sure: If I go complex, I do so in a way that allows easy expansion of that complexity. If I want to add a toxic type later, it should be easy to plug it in and everyone that selected a survival boosts may start seeing the standard values where they apply.

    BTW: more often than not, I just incline towards no-typing. At that point "typing" is just a thematic thing that determines your FX selection, plus perhaps a few non-damage powers.
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    Here's my take on Origins. They are a mess. They don't map to anything significant in terms of gameplay, they don't map to anything comprehensible in terms of story, and yet they are not 100% free choices. That's about as bad a set of design decisions you can make.
    I would have no "origin" and Magic would simply be another "elemental force" (not in the literal element sense) that determines a damage type and side effects.

    The only reason to give an origin like we have in this game should be to determine some kind of atmospheric story branch. Example: pick magic and not only your first contact, but most contacts that get introduced to you will direct you towards magic-themed story-lines.

    I think they sort of attempted that in this game but didn't take it past level 5 in the original game and did nothing with it in CoV (and horribly insulted me in The Origin Of Power with it.)

    For a while I thought such a thing should be there, but today I'd say: let the player decide what type of content he inclines to via his own actions.
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    Going farther, wouldn't it be interesting if there were no declared factions at all? Everyone's just a superpowered someone, and whether they are a "hero" or "villain" is completely irrelevant: they can choose to help or hurt any contact or faction in the game, and the game responds accordingly. You could (or at least attempt to) be an ally to the Hellions, but then crackdown on the Tsoo. You could foil Arachnos, but secretly work for Nemesis. What if every NPC reacted to you based on their own judgment of whether *they* think you are on their side or not?
    That's basically what I mean with an EQ-like faction system, although not as granular as to go to individual NPCs (simply because that may be a bit too hard to manage.) Although various NPCs may be tied up to various factions.

    Hero or Villan status would mostly be determined in the eyes of certain "lawful" factions like The Police, The Army or Citizens of Atlas. Heck, maybe the citizens of Atlas will see you as a hero while the citizens of Steel Canyon may see you as a villain.

    This faction system will not just determine what type of content you can unlock, but also potential perks you may gain access to. (Police may have you to arrest on sight if you approach any public transportation area but you may be a good friend of Crey who may give send a chopper to pick you up.)

    But yea, YOU determine who sees you how, and it can be up to a player to act as lawfully good as possible, "grinding" his hero status in the face of all citizens and all law enforcement bodies across the world. It would be a rather epic Super Hero MMO.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    This ignores the separate issue of balancing AoEs in combat which can swamp almost all other attempts to balance anything.
    One idea I liked for a long time is a diminishing value per target and also based on range from a "sweet spot". Example: The guy at the center of a fireball will always take more damage than the guy 10ft to the left. In theory, the sweet spot does not have to be the center of the explosion. A dark sphere may induce more damage on its rim than at the center, for instance.

    In addition, the system maybe should count how many targets will be hit before deciding how much damage will be applied. Then with a formula (non-linear) the more enemies you hit, the less damage you do per enemy.


    Quote:
    I've always felt that one way to tame AoEs is with friendly fire. And you don't always have to have absolute failure modes or defeatable civilians with friendly fire. It could be something as simple as adding destructible environment and rewarding players for performing the minimum amount of property damage while defeating all the enemies in a building. Even villains can be given the choice between burning it down or looting it, even if they don't otherwise care about preserving it.
    That idea has crossed my mind, but I get a gut feeling that despite it being balanced, it may not be considered to be "fun" by most players (not just a small minority.) It may lead to things similar to knockback hate, were anyone with an AoE may be automatically disliked for lowering the final team reward. Also opens up for trolling.


    Quote:
    Oh, and since the topic is the perfect superhero game, I'll just say that while I understand the economy of scale, the perfect villain game is not the superhero game reskinned, or even replotted. It ought to fundamentally readdress anew questions like "what do we reward?" and "how are objectives completed?"
    A tangent to your tangent: I remember brainstorming an "ideal" super hero mmo before I even read anything about CoH. I always thought you should start your life at your "origin point", where you acquire your power or skill or whatever. From that point forward every action determines if you are a hero or villain based on your actions and a classic EQ/WoW-like faction system. It may also open the doors for things like being a hero that the citizens love but the cops hate (property damage caused by you may be a good fit here; property damage may lower your rep with law enforcement factions.)





    Quote:
    Back when CoV was in beta, I mentioned my belief that, however the logistics of the games were going to be managed, I would not have made a Rogue Isles. I would have dropped the villains right into Paragon. It would have allowed for the possibility of indirect faction competition. In other words, CoV players could have been the ones setting fires to buildings in Steel that CoH players could try to extinguish. CoV players could have been the ones setting bombs that CoH players could have tried to prevent. They could have been the ones opening portals to dark dimensions in the middle of Peregrine Island rather than anonymous relative non-entities (at the time) like Antimatter. There were lots of potential opportunities for faction-based mini-games that could have expanded the grey area between PvE and PvP, rather than make direct PvP be an isolated marginalized activity.
    I would have liked that better than what we got. The entire RI was a cool looking place (except Grandvile and every Arachnos structure), but the idea of splitting the community was something I never liked.

    I am not sure if it was your post that started the threads I remember on a similar line. I just recall the /jrangers arguing that they didn’t wanted to play villain in a game where they can’t attack every hero they see (something that went down the toilet with coop zones.) I ponder if that was one of the strong reasons for the devs to pursue the separation.
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
    That's extremely difficult to do to an arbitrary standard. In fact I would say its impossible to do without targeting a specific person's definition of "viable."
    IMO, the goal should not be to make every build viable, but to allow players to backpedal.

    I have been playing this addictive iPhone game: Devil's Attorney. It's sort of an RPG. Biggest annoyance I found is that you can easily gimp your build and have zero way to fix it without restarting the game.

    I think a few things should not be easy to change or able to change at all (AT/power set selection.) Like you say, though, anything that would be fixed should not be integral or able to extremely change the balance of reward acquisition.

    In most MMOs I always hated the idea of “trash character”, the concept that your first ever character should be considered a throw-away character you will mess up because you don’t know the game rules yet. It would be great if at least that was impossible, to mess up a character entirely because you did not know the game rules.

    Quote:
    Design the game around earning rewards for skill-based accomplishments that are not explicitly tied purely to combat performance. That can be by adding out of combat leveling options that are comparable to combat rewards, or devaluing combat defeats over completing task objectives, or some form of reward scaling by combat performance.
    One idea I always liked (and D&D Online went for, don't think it's "failure" was due to it) is the concept of rewards being attached to the mission as a whole, not to individual kills. This opens up the doors to so many things. You are suddenly able to do things like "if you hold a minion for 30 cumulative seconds he surrenders".

    There are other balance things to keep in mind but mission design may be done in a way that things like stealth are viable but not extremely fast either. Speed and stealth exclusivity? Or at least the need of additional skills like time consuming hacking to stealth through missions with minimal combat?
  24. OK, I will try to keep this short so it will be oversimplified (but I predict it still will be overly long)

    There are 3 big factors that are very important for a "perfect" super hero MMO.

    1) Customization of character AND headquarters
    2) Relatively free-form build and fast paced combat system
    3) Heavy story driven content and instanced/isolated adventures that make certain YOU feel like the only guy that can save the day.

    Customization of character AND headquarters
    For customization, I'd say look a Star Trek Online for some tips on how to take things further down the right path. You don't only select facial features there, you can even rotate and position scars. Take their level facial customization to the whole body.

    Headquarters are tricky. This game had a very boring base system. You were restricted to flat walls. It was impossible to have round tunnels or caverns, or an underwater dome. A better base system would offer players the same tools map making devs get to work with. Imagine if you had been able to create your own base out of Oranbega or even blue cavern rooms.

    Relatively free-form build and fast paced combat system
    Combat in this game was rather spot on, but the building system could have been better. I won’t get into deep details but I would borrow a few ideas from DCUO and mix them up with this game to do the following:

    You select a two combat "styles". This means you can select a range of martial arts and fighting styles or weapon arts, including things like dual pistols, archery, or plain hand blasts. Your selection will be of a melee and a ranged style.

    You then select an "element". This can be fire, cold, earth, darkness, toxic, psionic, pure willpower, etcetera. Among many things this will determine your damage type, secondary effects and visual fx.

    With certain restrictions or penalties you may be able to select multiple elements.

    Finally you get to pick from a tree of skills. These skills can fit in the following categories:

    Damage boost
    Survival boost
    Team Support
    Crowd Control
    Pet summoning

    You should be able to dive in multiple trees but never be able to master them all. The list of available powers may variety a bit depending on your selected elements.

    The combat system should be much more carefully monitored than it was in CoH. AOE should be much more controlled than it was in this game, but it should also be much more widespread (no one should feel their build is locked out of the AoE game.)

    Heavy story driven content and instanced/isolated adventures that make certain YOU feel like the only guy that can save the day.
    Story writers should have access to better scripting tools. They should be able to completely script any given spawn in a mission. Enemies should never just be standing about in a room looking all threatening. They should be either patrolling, actually doing some animated action or guarding doors.

    Speed running should not be encouraged, there should be series of guarded doors/gateways/areas that can’t be advanced through without defeating "mini boss" encounters.
    ----------------------------------

    This is not all I would do, but it's the core of how I would start. I would also follow a Mine Craft server style instead of a dedicated server, for one. As Arcanaville pointed out on her thread, this would make sure such a game becomes immune to cancelation.
  25. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane View Post
    I got a little excited when he tweeted "Start over, use the lessons learned in your defeat" until I saw that this was advice for playing X-Com.
    Or was it....