Suggestionator

Nope. It's never been mentioned or thought of before. Also, no one has ever made this objection before. Congratulations!

I like the "build your own power out of attribute Lego" approach. Interesting. I do see it as a lot of coding, though. Also, you'd have to consider that the devs would potentially need to rebalance every scenario - since up to 8 people running a mission can do something totally off the scale every 30 minutes. Maybe it's only accessible if you are solo, or maybe duo/level pact?

Yeah, I get all that - but it falls short as an argument. Here's why:

* In the age of fully-indexed databases and the Google engine being pretty cheap - a keyword search should be all that's necessary. This search engine sucks on this forum.

* Making infrequent but interested posters feel like it wasn't worth visiting or bothering to contribute because anyone with 100 posts to their name tends to act like an A-HOLE to anyone with 99 posts...is counterproductive, to say the least. Probably even helps lose customers.

* There's no reason that a mod, or even someone who has earned "trusted user" status should be able to move a post to the right location. I'm not going to look for it where it was - I'm going to search for it, anyway. A subject-tagging system for posts could do this job with minimal resource overhead.

* To those who really just wanted to point me to the right place - thank you. Read your posts before letting them fly, and try to figure out if you sound helpful, or condeseding. You may be exactly right, and have your message fall on deaf ears because of the delivery.

Now, back to the idea. Mine avoids most of the objections. There is no additional animation needed. There are no additional mechanics or balancing needed. If everybody has one Super Super power...it'll mostly balance out. The min-maxers will all be clones, and really, in PvE, who cares? The signature power is turned off in PvP, as with some already existing powers (or characters with signature powers can't enter PvP zones - whatever is simpler) so that's not a problem. Between the ability to make one power great in up to 6 different ways instead of 2, and Power Customization, they could really pull this off without much effort. It would be cool, but it's not necessary. It was just a....suggestion.

Posting here reminds me why I stopped posting here. Too much to ask to discuss the idea - much more fun to point out that buried somewhere else in the forum someone once said something similar at some point. Oh, you've seen the idea before and it should be in some other location? Fine. Sorry. My bad. Now, drive on. Once it's posted, it's posted. An idea is not worth talking about if it's not in the exact right place you'd like to see it? OK....

I guess it depends on whether or not you'd class this idea as a 'customization'. If a mod wants to move it, so be it.

That sounds interesting. Guess I need to check out the rumor boards.

How cool would it be if you could designate a power as that character's 'signature power' - giving it special attributes that make it stand out from the norm? Currently, ever 'Ebon Eye' (for instance) functions like every other Ebon Eye in the game. Power customization gave us a wonderful ability to make it *look* different from the usual, but your Ebon Eye is still the same as mine. Slotting gives us additional ways to make our two versions of the power different, but most folks slot their powers *roughly* the same if they wish them to be efficient. So, really, most powers in the game are roughly similar despite wildly varying origins and characters. I think that could be changed without reinventing the wheel.

I admit that my main reason for wanting this would be role-playing centric, and not advantage-seeking. Many superheroes have a single power that is really central to the character. That's the one that looks really cool in the panels, and defines the character the most when people think of him or her. Think Cyclops' eye blast. Nightcrawler's teleport, Spiderman's weblines, or Green Lantern's ring. As I said, in the City games, we can make a power look different - but we really can't base a character around one, supercool power in the set.

I'll outline how I think my idea could be implemented in a way that wouldn't require massive reworking of code or mechanics, and retain some semblance of game balance.

1) How do you get it?

It could be a Veteran Reward. Alternatively it could unlock when you get a character to 50, like the Epics (or even when you get both a Hero and a Villain to 50, I don't know, doesn't matter that much).

2) When do you get it?

Upon character creation, you designate a power in one of your sets (you need not be eligible for it yet) as your 'signature power'.

3) What does it do?

Here's the tricky part. The first thing that occurred to me is, "there's no ED for that power." But I think that might be hard to code and might break a bunch of other stuff. So, before you scream about what it would do to PVP - let me say a couple things. A) I don't PVP very much. B) Other things get turned off or changed in how the function when you enter PvP, so...this would be subject to the same system. C) You can have alternate builds now, so maybe a build with a signature power just can't PvP at all. You switch out to your 'normal rules' build if you want to take that character into a PvP zone.
My second thought was cooler though, I think. Forget suspending ED for that power - suppose each slot multiplied whatever you put in it by three (or up to the cap)? So you put one Damage IO in slot 1, and it counts as three of that enhancement. This lets you make a power really stand out, because for you level, it can potentially be max damage, max range, max accuracy, max knockback, etc. Now my Ebon Eye is pretty spiffy - and yours is just the little supporting power it was always intended to be.

Notes:
Yeah, there's a lot more I could have suggested by way of truly customizing a power, but I purposely limited the idea to what I thought could be accomplished without a lot of coding.
I know it would play havoc with enhancement sets - you'd have to choose. Am I going to eventually slot this power with the 'Positron's Meltdown' set, or do I want to make it my signature power and render it ineligible for set enhancements?
If you really want to go nuts, you could have any number of 'signature powers' (like Superman - he's really got a slew of them) - but I figured you'd be throwing game balance to the wind at that point. One power shouldn't be *too much* of a problem. Yes, inevitably some players would min-max, exploit, and so forth - but so what? In PvE it would hardly matter much; and I've offered ideas for making such behavior a non-issue for PvP.

What do you think?

Rodion, EXACTLY. I could have written that, it's so close to how I play.

A...helpful response suggesting a solution? *falls over*

You realize someone is probably going to report you for that? Surely it's against the rules.

Dementor - I completely agree, and said essentially the same thing in my original post ("the game ends at 50" or something close to that). But your argument falls apart, because few people play one character to 50 and then leave. Even if you like only one AT, you have scores of variations on that AT to try. So if you level one of them to 50 in 20 hours - so what? You're probably just going to roll up another one. CoH is a "serial toon" game, whereas something like WoW IS largely linear. You get one or a very few characters to 80, and then continue to play them for long periods of time because WoW *begins* at the level cap.

An insult requires a target. I merely provided a shoe, it's up to you if you want to see if it fits.

"Um.. wow, thanks. Usually I just get neg rep'd in these sort of discussions. "

Yeah, well, you see....if you actually read my stuff instead of just jumping all over my @#$% because you're some forum snob turd thing that lives here - you see that a) I love the game, b) ask thoughtful questions (sorry if I didn't read thousands of pages returned by a crappy search engine to make sure my question was original first), and c) can admit without ego when I've made a mistake or had my mind changed by a good argument.

It's funny: I have not been here in some time - and the same folks that turned me off to these forums back then, are still at it. I'm glad they have something to distract them; it probably reduces their negative impact on the real world.

[QUOTE=EricHough;2323284]Honestly I don't think it was the AE changes that pulled everyone out - I think it was the changes to the rest of the game.


I'll buy that. It's at least accounting for some of it, and probably a fair bit of it.

"Everyone pays a subscription to play this game. However, when those who exploit certain systems stand to gain the greatest rewards, how is that fair to the majority of the playerbase? Although the markets are optional systems within the game, how could they not be affected if a swell of Influence causes prices on items to skyrocket, or if a once rare items suddenly becomes so commonplace that game balance becomes questioned? In the end, exploiters (but not all farmers, mind you) can hurt the entire playerbase through their actions."

That's a good argument. When I wrote my post I was thinking mostly in terms of fast leveling alone - which really doesn't hurt anyone else.

Thanks.

SlimPickens,

1) Thank you. You understood.

2) Some of us don't live on the forums, so I have not seen the deceased equine flogging you and other bemoan.

All,

No one twisted anyone's arm to read or respond to this post. And if you can read, you know where I was coming from and that I'm not some troll looking to start stuff.

Captain_Photon: I guess then you missed AE building full to bursting with players. Because, now, they are *EMPTY*. That is what I meant by murdering it. Sure, it's still a GREAT system. It works fine. There's great stuff on it amongst the crud...but it's empty. You are bringing a team in there with you, or you are soloing now. There's no more just poking your head into the building and getting 5 invites in 3 minutes. I liked that.

Je-Saist:

1) I'm not presuming that the developer's vision doesn't matter. It's extremely important. It is not, however, *more* important than customer satisfaction.

2) Your argument about who was having fun and who was not, while well-made (and I do hear you) does not hang together. There are a lot fewer people on now, and AE is a ghost town. The fun is not boss farming, the fun (for them) was leveling quickly. People not knowing how to play their toons is a self-limiting problem - they are quickly identified and dropped from teams. They affect ONLY PUGs.

3) Uh...I have the 45 month badge to prove I've been here as long as I say I have? Alternatively, you could look up the date of my first post? Wait! I know, *it's right under my name in a little field called "Join date"*!

4) I'll take your word for it that more people were happy with it than not, and that the membership rate was unaffected. I certainly hoped that was the case.

OK, I'll state few things first so you know where I'm coming from:

1) I've never power-leveled or been power-leveled in the nearly 4 years I've been playing. I don't get it. The game (for me) ends at 50 (I don't badge hunt) so if I'm enjoying a character, the last thing I want to do is accelerate it's lifespan. I played none of my favorites this weekend for that reason. I did get several new ones to 20, which is when I tend to really start to enjoying a toon.

2) I love AE. It's the best enhancement to the game, ever. It's infinite free content, even if alot of it was dreck.

3) I LOVE CoH, so my motivation with this topic comes from a desire to help it, not kick a hole in it.

So...in an environment where there are new challenges to CoH's prosperity (Champions, other games current and planned) - what is the logic behind the decision to 'nerf' AE in i16 so severely that the place is literally empty in all zones on all servers most of the time now?

If a player is paying their $15 a month, who exactly cares if they are level-grinding their pointless little hearts out? For those of us that don't care about "getting bigger numbers in order to get bigger numbers" (power-leveling) it made for ready teams and active servers. For those that love that sort of thing for whatever unfathomable reason - why curtail their fun?

Was the decision to murder AE worth it? If, I don't know....say 10000 players quit because of that, that's $1.8M in lost revenue that probably ain't coming back. Seems expensive to preserve...what? Design philosophy? I'd think happy, paying customers would be more important that some abstract disparity between a game element's actual, and intended, use.

Just curious.

Droooooooooooooool.....

[quote
I'm still failing to see the police officer in that. But I guess that's just me then.

[/ QUOTE ]

He'd be a *secret* police officer, of course.

Hey there. I'm a relative new-comer to CoH, and I am having a blast with my Blaster, but he's certainly not an 'optimum' build. I have a respec coming (if I ever beat the damn mission...) and am trying to figure out what direction to go from there. The defense guide here is out of date, and many of the articles are pre-ED, so I'm looking for some kind individual to correct my thinking about how I want to rebuild.
I should give any potential advisors some useful info:
1) I have an Energy/Fire Blaster. The idea was a blaster with some close in 'Nuke' powers in case bad guys managed to close with him. It didn't work out too well. The Fire secondary attacks are END intensive, and as a result I have neglected them severly in terms of slotting. A respec could fix that, if advisable/useful.
2) I want something good for both PvE and PvP, not necessarily something perfect for one or the other. I'm willing to compromise.
3) I enjoy the character and RP, so I'm not looking to build the best EN/Fire blaster possible (stop laughing at the very idea), just the best EN/Fire blaster possible that fits my concept for this character. That means Flight is a must; Leadership, Leaping (the actual movent power, not the rest of the set, necessarily), and Teleport are out, as they do not fit the character. Superspeed also doesn't fit, but I can flex as it is not a concept-breaker. I WILL have hasten, it's too useful to go without for a blaster, so actually, I guess Super Speed is a given... Stamina also seems very, very desireable. Stealth really doesn't fit, but is the only place to get Phase Shift, which does...so I might be convinced to go that direction if it is good for defense (and it is fun, I have other charcters that have it). I just don't see a guy glowing with plasma as very stealthy....
The two basic questions I have are:
Is the very idea of trying to build defense for a Blaster a waste of time? Blasters are not supposed to be tough, so is buying Combat Jumping, Weave, etc. a waste of valuable power and enhancement slots? Should I go with the 'the best defense is a good offense' theory and max out my killing power instead? Are a few shielding inspirations a better idea than built-in defenses for this blaster?
Secondly, given that I've learned to keep my distance pretty well (which never lasts the whole fight, but serves pretty well much of the time), is it better for me to slot for 3 Damage and 3 Accuracy (in general) or three accuracy and three recharge? (Granted, some things may be 3 dam, 2 acc, and one other - like range increase) Hit harder, or hit more is the basic question? Also, can sniper be made combat useful with 3 SO recharge and three SO reduce interrupt - or is that a silly idea?
Any help and/or suggestions will be GREATLY appreciated!