The_SiXKillA

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B) CoX players didn't get much more for our 5th Anniversary

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I got a weekend catching up with old friends and two new lvl 50s, one of which I only started on saturday evening. This game is much more casual player friendly than I remember.

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I'm really glad you think that. But of course catching up with friends can be done on both games.

As for a getting a new 50 in a couple of evenings, well I'm not convinced that's a good thing. The Journey is MORE important than the Destination IMO.

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sorry for the 'fix' but it is true

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I'm sorry, but that depends on so many variables it doesn't make any sense to make a wide sweeping generalization like that.

For me the MA is great. It's a quick way to get over that level 1-21 hump, which to me is a source of annoyance more often than it is pleasure. (mostly because of no travel power the first 14 and no stamina the first 20.)

What other people do with their toons is really not my problem. If I get a level 30+ with no idea in my team, well, there are options of how to deal with it. One is helping the player understand what he clearly doesn't, or there's a nice "Kick" button on the bottom of the team tab. In reality though, there's not much difference from before i14, because there were PLENTY of clueless higher levels then too. (Fire Blasters opening up with rain of fire before the tank has attacked, anyone?)

I do, however, see the point which the more competitive players make that it invalidates their earlier 50's, and any future 50's leveld in the "legitimite" way. I just happen to disagree with this as much as I do the "instant gratification" crowd. The thing is I don't understand why I should care either way. The game is still fun to play when you get in a good team, which I still do more often than not. And that is, to me, the whole point of the game. That it's fun when I actually play the game, not when I hang around atlas, impressing all the level 5 n00bs with my uber level 50's..

[edit] Just for clarification; I'm not in an SG, so I mostly ONLY play PUG's. Still I more often than not find good teams, or at least players willing to listen to advice.

I've also noticed that (at least some) changes doesn't get saved when republishing a public arc.

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For me it's simple, if I feel like playing, I play. If I don't, I don't play. For months, sometimes. I don't see why I need to make those decisions into a show, beyond necessary precaution of warning SG mates of not kicking my toons just yet and similar technicalities. If I want critique dev team's decisions I do so. If I feel that what devs did was justifiable I say so. I don't see a point of turning this simple process into something MORE IMPPORTANT and a way to SHOW THAT I CARE. It's just a game, a very good one, one of the best I played ever, but still just a game.

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And that's the most sensible thing anyone's said since before all this drama began.

/signed

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But then the OP goes on to perpetuate the drama by making supposed "counter-drama" posts. Thing is that it doesn't work. The OT is a classic case of trying to change someones mind. Which doesn't work unless you have influence over the person you are speaking to, which you probably don't since you are on polar oposites of a topic you both have strong feelings about. If you'd ACTUALLY wanted the drama to stop, you'd have shut up about it, because what you are doing here with the OT is dragging it out. Salt in the wound. Dragging it out. Beating a dead horse. Get it? If you want it to stop, wait till the people who are moaning have actually quit the game or is so ashamed they haven't that they just stop posting about it. Eventually, though, the drama dies down. IF YOU STOP PICKING AT IT.

Do I have to draw you a picture here?

What's the gosh darn problem with just ignoring the feces out of the people moaning, and just get the heck on with your own dang life. Do you continually pick at scabs from road rash or whatever? Do you know what happens if you do? -It never heals.- If you want people to get over it, just ignore them!

Did you notice how annoying it was when I just kept having at it in this post, over and over? That's you, going on and on and on about how bloody fed up you are with people critisizing the game. It's getting really old, really fast.

I wonder what it is about being head honcho for this game which makes people completely bonkers.

I still remember the day when I lost completely the little respect I had left for Statesman... When he said that his method of tanking was to taunt the minions and let the squishies deal with LT's and bosses, because LT's and bosses did so much damage to him... OH... MY... GOD!! what a complete moron! And unfortunately, it seems from his latest few "announcements" that Positron is a chip off the same old block...

To be honest, I could'nt care less about farming. Heck, after going through the not very well paced original content so many times I look for a weird blue roofed building when I'm going to the train irl, I even farm a bit myself.

What I'm getting increasingly annoyed about are all those people moaning and wailing, like its 1299, about farming. They are increasingly looking to me like that wacko "God hates fa*s" crowd in southern US.

None of you gets inconvenienced by other people farming, so why the heck should you care about it? Because people are asking for teams in Atlas? Whoop-de-doo. How HORRIBLE that must be for you guys. Instead of a mostly empty zone, there are actually PPL there! Oh noes!

Why can't you guys let people play this game like they want to, instead of trying to dictate how others should play.

Lastly. I'd like to hear clear and concise rationale for being against farming, because to be honest, I haven't heard any that makes sense yet. You've got the people who get annoyed by people asking for farming teams, but you've always had people looking for teams, what's so horrible about putting in the word "farming" in there? Then there's the bunch who complain that the AH will become imbalanced, but with the ability to purchase salvage with Tickets, it seems to me that farmers are spending their excess tickets on restocking a rather meagre AH. The prices for some of the salvage has been absolutely ridiculous. Aaand then there are those who say that there are less teams for them to get on because there are so many farming teams. So there are actually more people who are for farming than against? I wonder why! No. Not really. So, can you guys formulate a couple of reasonable arguments against farming, or are you just against it with the same basic rationale as the "environment-crisis deniers"?

I've said it before, and I reiterate. I really don't see the problem. I've never been inconvenienced by people farming, because it all happens in instanced locales. I'm not much of a farmer myself because I'm not good with mindless repetition. I'd like to be though. Good at farming that is. What I like most about this game is being level 50. Not the level 50 CONTENT nessecarily, but playing my level 50 toons. That's the most fun I have in this game, because that's when your toon is most powerful, and has the most powers. That's almost where the game starts for me, the way there is just a slightly entertaining grind. (I'm exaggerating for effect here.) I'd love to be able to ding 50 in a couple of days, because that's usually all the time I need to familiarize myself with a new toon anyway.

Well. Second 2 hour maintenance in one day. Awesome!

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One can hardly blame a digital delivery service for your connection speed.

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There's nothing wrong with my connection. I max out my 16Mbit connection off US based Usenet servers, and never does it dip below 1.3 M/s. I never have network disconnects (other than planned ones which I get plenty of advance warnings about.) DoW2 should take something like two hours, not ten. And still they charge retail prices.

This would be good news, if it hadn't been for the fact that Steam SUCKS BIGTIME. I've purchased three games through steam, and they all took more than 6 hours to download. One (Dawn of War 2) took significantly longer (10 hours). And the customer support is almost non-existant. They rely more on players on the forum to help players who has trouble, than on actual company rep's. It's a horrible service, and they charge retail price for virtual products. Long live profit-chasing over customer service!

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Still, maybe that should not be the most worrying thing. At present, without indulging in ongoing shameless advertising (which can be irritating for other players, I think) it is hard enough to get arcs played at all, or noticed in the sea of mediocrity and farming missions.

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I know how you feel, my first arc has yet to be published (still sorting out bugs) but as it's my first and probably isn't as good as others out there it'll probably get lost in all the other arcs and won't be played much.

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Don't worry about it. The way the MA browser currently works, even if your arc had been amazing, it'd still be lost in the torrent that is player created arcs. We've recently passed 100K published arcs...

I haven't had this problem myself, but can understand it must be annoying as heck to have to restart the client just to change toons.

Have you tried pressing TAB to change the input box focus? (this probably won't work if the login box isn't already in focus though...)

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IIRC it was that level of detail describing rooms where nothing happens that made me give up on both attempts at reading Anne Rice...

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The thing is that descriptions of empty rooms isn't part of The Story. It might be IN the story, but it's just fluff to fill out the pages. When I mentioned a "novel", I didn't mean that it should -read- like a novel, but that the story would be good enough make a novel FROM. Right? This is not a novel we're talking about, that was just an analogy, this is a game. Where you don't have to read descriptions of how things look, because you can see it.

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How many novels do you read that say "Dr Desparo was standing in the third room on the right, 2.4 meters North West of the left hand starecase. His doomsday machine was in another room, 10 meters further down the corridor, underneath an abstract painting? Most of the time, that sort of detail just isn't nessassary to the story.

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How many novels have you read where the hero just happens upon the main villain in the corridor outside the toilets? And that's after he's rescued his girlfriend from behind some crates just as he walked into the building. And what's weird is that he walked in with some allies, but when he got inside they were already spread throughout the mission, standing around looking lost.

But yes, yes. I know you can work around the limitations. You'd have to in order to make even a single mission with more detail than your average radio mission. That's why I say it's cheap. We should'nt have to work around cheap limitation to make missions of the standard we're used to seeing. It would have been pretty lame if you encountered Infernal in the connecting cave, a couple hundred meters to the left of his portal. Or if Siege had been standing around behind a generator up in the top right hand corner of the map.

Also, just to make sure. You know this is a -visual- medium, right? You don't have to -read- a description of the map, because you can actually -see- it? When I mentioned "novel quality stories" (or whatever) I was reffering to just that. The Story. The map layout is a COMPLETELY different matter, and is as you would know if you'd read the post, the issue.

What I wonder, though, is if you edit a published story, will the local file change to represent this, or is it just the published (uploaded) file which is changed? If it's only the uploaded file which gets edited, will the published file overwrite the local file if you unpublish?

Also, when you unpublish an arc, will it just get deleted from the server or is it downloaded to your local client?

Yes, we can write top of the line, novel quality stories, but unless you have only one objective, the random element makes the story seem ridiculous (barring some incredible miracle which makes everything spawn where you want it, but like I've said in some other thread, it only spawns correctly once out of 100 runs, because of Random.)

I don't mind people farming. Why the heck should I. But I sympatise with the OP in that it's nigh on impossible to get teams these days, though I think that may have changed after todays patch, where they fixed the bug where teams got less ticketst than solo players.

If I want to farm some (which I do occationally, because I think it's dead fun with my level 50 fire/fire tanker,) I just make a farming mission, publish, complete the mission then delete it again. Makes for variation even though its really just farmin'.

One question though. What's the difference between a mission using city-map 1 with freaks in it, and a farming mission using city-map 1 with freaks in it?

Option to make a boss teleport away, or run away without the mission failing. There are loads of missions in which this happens, so the function is already in the game.

Option to make bosses spawn on top of blinkies and destructables when that objective is complete. Too annoying when you for example have to destroy a cloning tank, but when it's destroyed and a boss is supposed to emerge from it, the boss spawns across the whole map...

Option to make Battle objectives not deal damage to each other until the player shows up. Nothing is more disappointing than entering a room and seeing a ton of mobs lying around being dead, when it's supposed to be a huge battle going on. Showing up just as the dessert is cleaned off the table, sort of thing. I've yet to use the Battle objective, but through no lack of inspiration for its use, but because it's bloody USELESS.

Option to start the mission with allies, instead of having to find them in the mission.

Option to enter advanced spawn control, so you can manually pick out spawn placements for specific objectives. There's nothing more bloody annoying than RANDOM mob placements. Impossible to make serious stories in the current build, because RANDOM makes everything RIDICULOUS. The only stories possible to tell are simple, silly stories and farming missions. This is to me the biggest bloody stupid flaw in MA. RANDOMNESS MUST GO! (Oh, and note the "OPTION" part. Everytime I've suggested this, I get a ton of grief from people who aparently can't find the enter-button with a map, who can't believe how dificult the mission editor is already. Which it ISN'T. It's EXTREMELY simple and basic and CHEAP.) And whatever you say in response to that, systems like this have been created for an infinite number of games already. (For a finite value of infinite anyway.) And if it's impossible to implement in CoH, they must really have botched the programming job to heck and back, since people with NO BUDGET WHATSOEVER (fan-made) make applications like this for games which wasn't supposed to have them in the first place.

Option to pick search tags for your arc. This makes it dead easy to find other arcs which are similar to the ones you like.

And lastly, just a couple of NESSECARY changes that NEED to be made.

FIX THE ARC BROWSER!

And let us bookmark arcs in the browser!!

I fully agree with the OP, and it is the main reason I feel that a map editor (a limited one at LEAST) is required for any serious attempt at making a serious arc. This random stuff just makes every arc ridiculous. Unless by some miracle all the objectives spawn where you want them, in which case it'll only do so once every N mission anyway because of Random.

I have several stories I really want to make, but I won't because they are serious stories, and would be ruined by even tiny ammounts of Silly. (Imagine Scarface, where for one scene in the middle of the movie, Tony Montana does a Carrot Top impression. You wouldn't take that movie seriously after that.)

What I see as the problem with the mission browser, is that its not really a mission browser, its a ranking list. Sure you can sort for other criteria, but no more than you could for any other ranking on the internet. Its not a browser, like iTunes, amazon etc.

As an author, you should be able to pick categories and tags and in addition to a scoring system, it should have a "thumbs up/thumbs down" system so the software can recomend missions.

While this wouldn't be easy to implement, its been done before so many times, it couldn't be very hard.

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based on prestige accumulated

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That's pretty much inviting in infiltrators. if you just have to do a little grinding for prestige to then rob an SG...
be prepared to get robbed.

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Still, doesn't change the fact that the permission system is extremely poor though. I mostly stay away from SG's, so I've never had any trouble with people stealing from SG's, but even I can see that it's a problem. Yet another corner cut way too narrow by the devs..

I dont' see how the argument "it would look silly" would still have any meaning after the Trenchcoats, and a dozen other remarkably stupid looking costume-pieces. If "It would look silly" had been a legit argument, 1/3rd of the pieces currently in the game would have to go.

Also, why would the devs (or anyone else for that matter) care if some dude wants to make a toon with analfloss? It's their problem if they look silly. And who has the finaly say on what looks silly and what doesn't anyway? Jay? He probably couldn't find his butt(cape) with a map.

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Do you feel that the Devs have wasted effort on PvP?Do you feel it is a waste that PvP exists? Do you feel that the majority defines that everything but PvE is a waste?

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Personally, I think PvP is a ton'o fun, heck, I'll even go so far as to say pvp in wow was dead funny. Problem for me, with pvp in CoH is that the state it's in is a waste of effort. To clarify; It should be there, but it should have been implemented in a completely different way.

Also, the type of combat coh sports lends a lot more to pve than pvp. In wow it is the other way, where the combat is so slow it just gets boring pve, but is just right for pvp. CoH has WAY too many powers, they cover much too big an aspect of a character's build and they have entirely too short recharge.

And the travel powers probably ruin pvp in coh the most for me.

Anyway. This is my opinion, and if *someone* doesn't agree, then Go You!

The americans has had it too easy for too long.

Anyways, I'll be the first.. ok, maybe not the FIRST, but perhaps the second, to say that there's not one single definition to this.

But some pointers should be; sustained 'abuse' over time directed at a specific player, continued 'abuse' after the target has said "that's enough", personal remarks with no -obvious- roleplay value and comments to a -player's- sexual orientation/intelligence et cetera. As hard as it is to come up with these things out of the blue, it's pretty easy to recognize them when they happen.

Like last night I nipped by Siren's, there were hardly any villains in the zone, and the heroes that were there were gathered on a rooftop, dancing and just mucking about. after a few minutes, another hero came up and said in local something along the lines of "Hey all you people whose buttocks I could whup fairly easily." (comment directed at everyone present with no serious negative content.) but then one of the heroes that had been there a while started talking about this newcomers sexual orientation over broadcast, and how he had nothing in the zone to do because of it, and he kept at it and twisted everything the newcomer said to make it look like he was right. this is in my eyes obvious and intended abuse. after a little while the new guy just excused himself and left, and as I had never seen verbal abuse to this extent I was rather outraged, I asked the 'victim' if the two really knew eachother and was just pulling legs, but he answered me that he had never laid eyes upon this fellow before in his life.
(OK, this isn't the most well-written piece of rant I've ever made, but hopefully it's so close to understandable tha you will, indeed, understand. )

I feel exactly the same way you do, Qi.

Saying "it's on the internet, you can't possibly take it seriously" is like saying that if a person insults you over the phone, it's okay. like there's a set range at which insults no longer work. There's still a human being sitting behind those handles you throw [censored] at.

Telling people to grow a spine and just ignore the insults is just another insult, and in any case, I can stand upright, so I DO have a spine. Just because I'd like to beat the living [censored] out of griefers and insulting bastards don't mean I'm pathetic, it means I don't take kindly to people who think they are better than others and disrespects anyone and everyone. I'd like to tear out their own spines and jam it into a meatgrinder, but as I can't actually do this (mostly because of the long distances), I get frustrated and angry, because I can't for the life of me tolerate disrespectful people. (And I KNOW this is kind of a paradox, but that's just me. I can't tolerate people who don't tolerate people. How do you think it makes me feel about myself. )

Why the HELL is it nessecary to insult and disrespect people you don't know? Why do people HAVE TO BE [donkey]holes to human beings? I got one answer, and that goes for the people who acts like this, and the people that supports that behaviour and everyone who tolerates it. LACK OF SELFDIGNITY. If you have an ounce of it, you don't HAVE to insult others. If you got a pinkie-sized amount of it you don't need to ground people into the muck of your own brain.

The only real way of showing people how great you are is to be able to give compliments, to admit that others MIGHT be better than you at certain things. Insulting strangers and causing them grief only lessens your status in the eyes of people who understand these things.

I'm a 'special' case however. I understand these things, but having been the victim of harrassment and bullying for all my 12 years at school, my fuse in these matters are extremely short.

There is no excuse whatsoever to act like a [donkey]hole, and especially not to strangers. Also, supporting or just plain tolerating it is no better. Not at all, it just deepens the frustration of the victims. It's not all fun and games when people bully and harrass others, and just because it's over the internet doesn't make it any better. There is still human beings on the recieving end.

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Why is it always seen as a weakness to be nice to other people? Why is it the [donkey]holes who are always seen as the strong ones? And like Stasis said, why is it the people who are nice to others and generally doesn't do anything wrong who has to change their ways?? OMG! IT'S ALL GONE TO TEH AMERICANS! (at least it will if it's always the nice people who has to adapt to the [donkey]holes)