Steel_Golem

I very much enjoyed CoH's combat system. There were a few things that did it for me:

1) Positioning engages an appropriate amount of twitch skills. You must align yourself for optimal use of cones, to force AI patterns of behavior and to limit the damage types you are exposed to or keep enemies in aura radius. This is made more interesting by the wide variety of positioning tools available; I find knockback in this game incredibly fun.

2) It let you be extremely overpowered. My force field defender has 90% damage mitigation in the vast majority of circumstances, with 97.5% against the game's most common damage type. He can give 90% mitigation to the whole team. Controllers can permanently lock down entire groups. Masterminds can summon an endless stream of minions who are individually reasonably strong. Blasters can nuke entire spawns to death in a single shot. In SWTOR, the calculated damage mitigation for a tank with the best end-game gear is something like 70%-ish vs. common damage types.

3) It has a difficulty slider. This is very important because of point 2, but is good in general. People have wildly varying skills, and being able to adjust the game so that it remains challenging to you is extremely important. Lacking this feature has killed my interest in many other games, including SWTOR. They fail to provide an appropriate challenge because while they have much better balancing than CoH, if your skill level is above or below average, you're stuck; you can't adjust the difficulty to make the game more fun.

I have never been very active on the forums, and while I think I may have only posted where I got a response for you once, I have always enjoyed reading your posts. When I returned to the game this summer after 3 years away, seeing you were still here posting was like returning home.

I think you're right about the lack of balance being a selling point. CoX let you be grotesquely overpowered, but it let everyone be that way, including some of the NPCs (hi Malta stuns and quartz crystals); and more importantly, it let you adjust your own difficulty to keep the game as challenging as you wanted it to be.

The ability to adjust difficulty combined with the sidekicking/exemplaring system lets you play with any of your friends with as much challenge as you want, and has absolutely ruined me for MMOs without these features. I was drawn back to CoH this summer after playing SWTOR for a few months because I just couldn't play with friends without leveling exactly in sync with them, and even done that way most missions were trivially easy when done with more than one person. It just made me miss everything from CoH until I came back.

I will miss your posts Arcanaville. They were always a delight.

I think it is going to be interesting to see how well they fare. I am only really qualified to comment on the software engineering side of things, but they appear to have the talent on board to at least build the game and have it run successfully, assuming the people that have signed on are actually serious and remain active over a multi-year project. It is fairly apparent that there are a number of professional programmers over there, and they appear to have started the conversations I would want to see for starting a project like this; coding standards, decisions on tools, engine evaluation, development methodologies. They may fail due to lack of overall organization, or key people might decide that the time commitment is too high and quit, but I am pretty sure they have the coding chops to build this if the people stick to it.

I can't comment on the quality of the game designers/writers and artists though. It is entirely possible the game will run fine and be relatively feature complete and still suck if the other two legs of the game development tripod don't measure up.

It should be interesting. I am looking forward to seeing what they do.

I don't think we're going to get official City of Heroes back any time soon. However, I would not be surprised to see it sold off at some point in the future. If NCSoft gets bought, or has a change of management, or goes bankrupt, the assets could get sold off for various reasons. I do not think it will be done voluntarily, however; most scenarios for an official future City of Heroes require NCSoft to fail or at least suffer sufficient losses to cause a change in leadership.

I don't think that will happen any time soon, but I would also not be surprised if the game was available 20 years from now on something like good old games. I just plan to enjoy my final 3 weeks, save my characters with the Titan utility, and move on to other things for now. Who knows; maybe some day 15 years from now, they'll go bankrupt and we'll get our game back.

I was happy to be a part of this. I had money blocked out of my budget in case there was a credible crowdsourcing attempt for City of Heroes, but when none materialized I figured it would be good to give some of it to charity. I figure that if NCSoft doesn't want my money, I could do a lot worse than giving it to sick children. I liked playing in the day long marathon too; I might try and make this a yearly thing.

I stopped to read the movie posters outside the movie theater in Talos, and noticed that Samuraiko was credited as the director on Ascension. That was kind of cool.

It is more complicated than that. Paragon Studios isn't a publicly traded company; you can't buy it unless NCSoft agrees to sell it. NCSoft has not yet given an indication that they are willing to do so, other than rumors of talks taking place with the Paragon Studios management.

I would love for NCSoft to name a price and allow us to try and crowdsource funds for it, but unless they do, you can't set a fund raising target because you don't know what they would actually sell it to you for. Further, you can't just fund raise as the playerbase; you need to incorporate as an entity that can actually do multi-million dollar deals, which means you have to found some type of corporation or non-profit entity. This requires legal resources and has tax implications that could severely burn those setting it up if they do it wrong, and takes time to do. Things get further complicated because everyone has a different idea of what exactly buying the game would entail and how it would be run post-acquisition.

And that is mostly why no credible attempts have been made to buy the game via crowdsourced funding--yet. I hope it gets a chance to happen, I have a decent chunk of cash blocked out from my budget in case we do get that chance, but am not holding my breath. I know I wouldn't want to be trying to set up a corporation to do this, so I am not terribly surprised noone else is either.

I still remember a discussion in SWTOR, where an in depth analysis of various tanking builds showed that with layered defenses, against attacks where all the defenses worked (so not things that bypassed armor and shields), tanks in the best gear in the game could reach approximately 70% damage mitigation.

My invulnerability tank caps damage resist (90% mitigation) and defense (approx 90% mitigation) to smashing lethal (or everything, for 3 minutes), for about a %99 level of damage mitigation; he is about 30 times tougher to kill by his most resistant damage type than a SWTOR tank, even before you take into account the fact that he can heal himself and regenerate in combat. If buffed by a single friendly empath, he can reach a point where he is regenerating over 280 HP/sec, which would require an average of 28,000 dps in S/L damage to beat his regen, or 800% of his life per second. In any other game of which I am aware, a tank+support duo would melt in less than a few seconds taking that kind of punishment.

City lets everyone be grossly overpowered, then allows you to up the difficulty until it hits you with threats designed to require that kind of power to win. Its one of the things I love about it. It isn't just armor either, control powers are grossly overpowered compared to a lot of similar games.

I absolutely would rather have the computer be under control. Computers don't get tired. Computers don't get distracted. Computers don't get bored, or hungry. Computers obey traffic laws, even laws I don't know exist. Computers don't get lost. Computers can see in 360 degrees and don't have blind spots. Computers can potentially use sonar and other sensory inputs I don't have. Computers don't get intoxicated (well, I don't either, but some people do). Computers have a reaction time in microseconds, I have a reaction time in tenths of seconds.

On the other hand, computers can have bugs. I don't have bugs, other than all the aforementioned things that could be considered bugs, and would definitely be considered a bug if a computer every exhibited any of the behavior humans do all the time.

As for trusting a computer to drive the car, if you have Anti-lock brakes, your car already has a computer deciding how and if you stop when you hit the brakes. Fancier cars can quite likely take nearly complete control of your vehicle, should they be so inclined.

A computer driving car does not have to be perfect. It just has to be better on average than people. Liability for accidents would shift to the car companies, who would buy insurance at a lower rate than people currently pay and roll the cost into the car.

Personally, I hope this becomes available by the time my parents are no longer able to drive themselves. We recently had issues with my Grandmother and Grandfather still attempting to drive despite the fact that he has semi-advanced Alzheimer's and she can't lift her arms to the top of the steering wheel. We ended up getting his license revoked, but it was a giant mess, and she can and does still drive. Everyone would be safer if they were in a self-driving car. Hopefully, by the time my dad turns 80, I won't have to try and get his license taken away for his and everyone else's safety-I'll just get him a car that drives itself.

When I saw this, I thought: oh, this is cool! I should go find my paypal info when I get home.

And then it filled up.

I hope we get a chance to have a firm number to try and crowdsource to buy the game. I think it might be surprising how much money could be raised.

Could I have lot 11, the other Defender ATO set?

My Global is @7th Seal1

Thanks!

I thought about this. Unfortunately, as people have already pointed out, there is no realistic way to raise this kind of money via normal donations. They have a market cap of around $5billion; you would need $2.5 billion at minimum to buy them, and there are not enough of us to have that kind of money lying around.

If such a plan were to be attempted, I would think the best way would be to have a reputable investment institution set up a fund for the purpose. Have the fund's stated goal be to collect investment funds and hold them in bonds until sufficient value had been collected to make a buyout offer, then buy out NCSoft.

The idea would be that you could move people's 401ks into such a fund, and if it never reached its target, they would be relatively safe and treated like a normal bond fund. I don't know about anyone else, but I definitely have a -lot- more money in my 401k than I do in cash on hand; we might actually have $2.5 billion in the player base that way. You might not even need to get that high, since the threat of a hostile takeover could provoke concessions from NCSoft with no real takeover attempted, similarly to greenmail payments.

Someone would have to do an analysis to see if such a plan makes any financial sense though. Corporate raiders do stuff like this all the time, but they usually choose targets who have net assets that can be sold for profit after the purchase and are easy to take over, and I have no idea how vulnerable NCSoft is or how much their assets are worth if sold.

Such a plan would only work if it actually made financial sense. When you're talking billions, you're talking real money, and anything on that scale has to be a plan to make money, not just make a moral stand.

It actually might not be that bad of an idea for an investment company to set up a fund like this though, unless there is some legality I am unaware of. By far the most likely thing that would happen would be for a bunch of people to transfer their 401(k)s to them, fail to reach sufficient funds to buyout NCSoft, then have it operate pretty much like a normal investment fund.

I would have wanted to learn how their system works, and write code for it, working on whatever features needed to be done. I would have also like to do tools programming for internal use to help make development easier.

Also, I would want to make the various Makeup options accept different colors for eye shadow and lipstick, as a gift to my wife.

I did apply to work for them, fresh out of college. Made it to the on site interview, kind of flubbed it up. Not sure if it was the lower amount of C vs. C++ experience or lack of video game development experience, or something else. I still have good memories from the interview though, the people were really nice.

I would probably be willing to pay $50 or so per month for as long as I am enjoying the game. The monthly fee is not really the dealbreaker for me.

I don't think the game would be very successful reaching new people at that rate though.

I bought a lifetime sub to CO, and although I haven't played it in 2.5 years, I was thinking about checking it out again. MMOs change; I took a year long break from CoH shortly after it launched as well, and it was a lot better. I'll have to see what CO has done to improve since I left.

Sidekicking and the difficulty settings are the two big ones for me. I cannot stand not being able to adjust the difficulty to be reasonably challenging. Also, lack of sidekicking just stops you from playing with other people, which is terrible. There is no way I am going to any MMO that lacks those two features.

Personally, I think they should just proliferate blast sets to tankers, and raise the ranged damage modifier some. You don't get a TankMage in the classic sense from this, since TankMage implies you do a high amount of damage at range along with a high amount of defense; tankers wouldn't do that, since they do low damage at range. In fact, if you just straight up proliferated the blast sets and changed nothing else, tanks that took those sets would be severely underpowered, not overpowered; they would be even stronger defensively than current tanks, but would do even less damage, and that is not really a tradeoff most tanks need right now.

This wouldn't replace blasters any more than force field defenders currently replace blasters. Just because someone can get high defenses, mez resistance and leverage all the advantages of ranged attacks well doesn't mean people will want that over someone unprotected that does almost twice as much damage.

I personally like playing games that are hard. One of the things I missed most when I switched to TOR from City of Heroes was the lack of a difficulty setting. I love the City of Heroes difficulty settings because some people are not looking for a massive challenge when they play, and for them they can solo on the default setting without much difficulty. I can up my difficulty to the level that I get a good challenge, and I appreciate it greatly.

One of the main reasons I quit CoH for the first time in issue 0 was that I got bored at how easy missions were. I don't remember if we didn't have difficulty settings yet, or if I just didn't know they existed, but the lack of challenge just kills games for me.