Tuft__NA

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* Quality of Life: Inertial Reduction, when expiring in mid-air, will drop all players like rocks, causing falling damage. (MadScientist)


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A partial fix to this is coming in I7. Can't say much more than that.


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I was wondering what the UI improvement listed in the press release was going to be, and was hoping it would be some kind of indication that a buff is about to expire. This raises that hope considerably - I cannot imagine anything else that is a "partial fix" to that problem...

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In recent updates, the duration of all mez, PvP and PvE, have been reduced. Few mobs put you out of action for more than 5-10 seconds. While this is a long time in a fight, it is not really long enough to make a reactive stance on de-mezzing possible.

In order to un-mez someone, that person has to realize he has been mezzed, report it in the team channel, the un-mezzer has to see it, finish whatever he is doing, select the target, hit the button, and the power needs to activate. Assuming 1 second for each step (Clear mind takes 4 seconds, but assume 1 for the case of the argument), that is a delay of eight seconds. Eight seconds when few mezzes last more than ten?



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I've found that whenever teaming with a kineticists as a squishie, It's just better to let the stun take its time than to call out for ID. You'll just distract the kineticist from more important stuff, like keeping those Transfusions coming...

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Add to this that the people who die from being mezzed are meleists, those whose mez resistances were reduced recently. Reactive mez protection is pointless for them, as even 0.1 second of mez will drop their toggles, getting them killed. As they absolutely need enhanced mez protection on larger teams when facing (among others) Malta, these powers have to be used ahead of time.


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I guess that he reduction in mezz resistance might partially have been caused by the devs' datamining showing that the PITA of the mezz protections are large enough that they are not used. Thus they want to create more demand for these powers by causing their absence to be a PITA for the meleeists. A PITA/PITA balance, so to speak.

The problem is that isnt really working, since the meleeists' problem is their toggles dropping, not the time held, and only preemptive use can hinder that.

It's kind of how hover is being left too slow for meleeists to reliably use in combat, so that there will be an use for speed buffs - ignoring how rare those speed buffs are in the game.

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Flight is my favourite travel power, and I am actually fine with the speed. The utility in scouting and moving around is good enough. The problem is Hover.

Om my stalker, I have Air Superiority, Fly for strategic movement and the occasional aerieal attack, but my general combat movements is Hurdle + Combat Jumping. My stalker would be very dead if she had to rely on Hover to get away after a boss strike.

I have a tank, a brute and a scrapper with Hover. For a Fire/Fire tank (burnless) it works great. Being a little slower insures Blazing Aura gets the aggro. For a Energy/Dark brute, it works decently. Death Shroud is less able to hold aggro, so that utility is less. The reason I am not complaining is that I tend to team with a kinetic. But my MA/Regen scrapper is hurting, and hardly gets any play time after ED (she is lvl 46). Without Speed Boost, it is simply a pain to try to be a scrapper with Hover.

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Both Blazing Aura and Death Shroud are continous PBAoEs that extends quite a bit, right? Does not help much much when all you got are zero-duration melee range attacks, like say for example MA/SR.

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Hover: We might buff it some, at some point. However, it should never be an effective travel power.


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It would be nice if you could use it in fights to keep up with your team mates and pursue mobs, also when you are a meleeist.

Why should aerial combat be the exclusive domain of those with ranged attacks? Those with melee attacks wants to be able to use some kind of "combat flight" too...

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We just received tech that will allow players to pass buffs onto certain powers (such as Blizzard).

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To me that means once something like Blizzard is cast and exists in the game world, then something like Fortitude or Fulcrum Shift may be cast onto it. Basically, they will now be AI-less, immobile pets. That means self-buffing powers such as Aim or Build-up still would not affect them.

And my money is on Burn NOT being one of the powers that gets this feature.

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I think you're missing the context of previous discussions on the powers we're talking about.

I guarantee you it means buffs that affect the caster now will be inherited by place powers they "cast".

You use Build Up and then Rain of Fire, the RoF gets a +100% damage buff and a 62.5% toHit buff (or whatever the real value is), just like Fireball would.

That's what it means. Today, you can't do that, and it's been wished for by the players for a very, very long time.

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If I understand it correctly, some powers are implemented as separate "temporary creatures", rather than coming directly from the player character. Thus any temporary buff that the player had, such as red inspirations, fulcrum shift, increased metabolism, etc, does not carry over to that power. Call it a pseudo-pet or something, as it is not separately buffable as a real pet is.

CoH and CoV is apparently written on top of some kind of toolkit, which limits the devs flexibility with what they can do. Now that toolkit has recieved an upgrade that allows buffs on a player to carry over to his "pseudo-pets". The decision to inplement some powers as pseudo-pets in the first place is probably just to get around limitations in that toolkit.

The Base of the S.I.N.I.S.T.E.R. group on the villain side of the EU server Defiant:

The Reception Area
The Reception Desk
Some greenery
The balcony (for speeches)

The Energy Room
The Generator
The Main Switches
The Fuel Tanks

The Infirmary
The Waiting Area
The Waiting Line
Hospital Beds
The Surgery

The Control Room
The Control Pit
Firewall?

The Teleport Room
Dual Teleporters

The Tech Workshop
The Workshop
Work Cubicles

The Arcane Workshop
The Workshop
The Library


Intended Style
(Cut from the S.I.N.I.S.T.E.R. web site)

Ancient with splatches of high-tech, to fit a mixed-origin group such as SINISTER. Also intended to give the feeling that SINISTER is a group with a lot of history.

To give this impression the following textures are used:

Floor: Stone patterns
Lower Walls: Stone patterns
Higher Walls: Stone for sturdier rooms with only equipment, softer plaster/wood lattice for rooms intended to be "lived in".
Roofs: Stone or wood, depending on the higher wall.

The plaster/wood lattice texture used is really from the oriental style package, but it works reasonably well as early 20th century Art Deco.

The base is kept rather dark, with occasional spot lighting. This is to give the proper villaneous conspiracy feeling, but with mostly flame-based lighting it feels surprosingly cosy.

Expect environment-friendly materials and lots of green plants, since the main architect is Wildthistle, who is part Devouring Earth and Eco-terrorist.

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http://www.youngmetaandslack.com/onapony.jpg

... nuff said. ;p

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Either that, or he has ingested too much helium... Imagine him there, giving out his Taskforce with a chipmunk voice...

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Click the spider...

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Ghost Widow! STOP BOBBING!


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She really looks like she's trying to invoke some Gainax Bounce but failing...

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8% of the player base has a level 50
A smaller proportion has multiple 50's

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Ya know.... I remember when this number came out. I didn't buy it then, and I still don't buy it.

It only took me 4 months to get Bill to 50. Without powerleveling. (Mind you for the most of that four months I was on an extended vacation so I played 12 hours a day)

Celmor got to 50 in like 6 months. Maybe less.. can't remember when I-3 came out. Again, no powerleveling beyond less than a level. (Had to find out what was so wonderful about wolf-herding. Bored me to tears.)

If I can get 2 50s in under a year, working now 40 hrs a week, with a son and wife, taking care of dogs, only getting long game time runs when everyone's crashed or I take a day off....

I just find it impossible to believe that only 8% of the playerbase has a 50.

Just doesn't jive with logic.

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Played on US servers from August to January, took time to play WoW February-May, and play on EU servers from June on. Play 6PM-12PM Tuesdays and Fridays, 10AM-12PM Sundays, and the odd hours the other days, so that makes 20-30 hours/week. My highest character is still an old character somewhere at 43-44 on Infinity, so no level 50s for me.

On the other hand, I've filled all my available character slots on the US servers (I did run amok during the winterlord incident) with one account, and all slots on the English-speaking EU servers with two accounts, so I have a lot of alts...

Don't assume that all people are so single-track that they wait with starting their second character until they've run their first all the way to 50. For some of us it's not getting to 50 that is the goal - it's having characters we can have fun with that's important. Getting one of them to 50 means that it's over for that character, and no fun to be had with it anymore.

Removed due to not reading the original article thoroghly...

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I find these kind of numbers hard to fathom unless you are using Microsoft Access as a database (and I am pretty sure you are not).

Seriously, working with db's as I do, make an archive of pre-I5, query against that and make your list (basically extract the result set to a view and then store it in another table). Then, post-I5, dump the temp set back into the main db (well, a back up to make sure). Re-query and compare the new db to the old to check for errors and voila. Now the process would change ever so slightly depending on said db, but the theory is the same regardless.

This will not necessarily be the easy route (well, the easy route is saying "sorry, can't do it" ) but would sure not take the time estimates that you are posting. If it would then you either have really bad hardware, processes, or db admins.

note: I am not a badge hunter and this does not affect me either way but it always bothers me when a reason is posted and people that normally don't work with said technology go "oh, that makes it ok". It doesn't...people are getting ripped off for their time and effort.

As my statistics prof used to say "stats can be made to say anything you want them to".

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It may not be a matter of just asking the right SQL question. To grab a possible explanation from thin air: Imagine if such a datamine required you to physically restore 18 months of daily database backups, or something like that. How long time does it take to do 540 total database dump/restores for each server? Without impacting normal operations?

I'm not suggesting that the system is set up in this manner. I'm suggesting that there may be factors like this that we don't know about...

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EDIT: Also want to throw my support to those suggesting the badges for TF's be reworked somehow to include the story text. A better way of presenting the story to all the players while the TF is happening would be welcome, too.

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One very convenient way of doing it would be to add a new chat channel (like local, combat, system, etc) that contained new mission breafings and clues for your entire team.

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You don't need charts and forum posts to see the dwindling numbers. Look at server status, always green for all servers,
travel around the city looking for heroes, hell just use the find team utility and look at the number of players on each server.

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Server size was increased in one of the earlier Issues, so if 1000 people played on a server and set it to yellow before, now, 1000 people will only green out a server.

When everyone starts at the same time, as they level up at around the same pace, they will populate the same general areas of the game. As time goes on, say six months after the game launches and the only time everyone will have an equal starting point, people will have a wide range of alts, who level at different paces, who go to the increased number of zones then was in the game at startup.



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Also remember that people use hide to get away from PL and bridging requests....

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While I also am not a big fan of I5 and share some of your concerns, your comment is incorrect. The CoH subscription base has held steady or increased each month since early 2005 (post WoW release).

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Numbers please?
Where did you get those Numbers?

Im glad Jack is concerned with Tie In Products. If Issue5 is still unpalatable when it hits the Live servers I plan on writing a letter and sending it Registered Mail to NCSoft and their Business partners (AEG, Eden Studios, ect) explaining why I will not be purchasing any of their products.

If any of you plan leaving because of Issue5 I suggest you do the same. Jack may ignore the Ice Tankers and IH Scrappers, but he wont ignore the money men.

If Issue 5 is how the game was always intended to be played, I would have stopped paying after the 2nd Month.

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Also see http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...Number=3538859 :
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Forums: States says that the forums represent about 4% of the gaming population. They represent their own world, independent of gameplay, and the opinions reflected here do NOT reflect the whole accurately at all. When asked how he did determine what reflected the whole, he replied that they got info by playing the game, jumping in on teams with people and listening. He even took the time to illustrate an example of a game that listened too heavily to a target group, made the changes that were clearly demanded by them as a whole, and watched the approval ratings for the game plummet. Whether one agrees with his statement or not, it shows that there is thought going into it.


Overall, the impression that I got is that the game is being engineered towards the casual gamer. According to Statesman, only 8% of the population have A level 50, let alone several. Furthermore, for all the DOOOOOM on the forums and complaining in broadcast, subscriptions have actually gone up. And States does pay attention to the people that say "Screw it! I'm leaving", and then are still posting a month later from an active account. In short, the game isn't going anywhere soon, and apparantly, neither are us subscribers.


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Powerlvlers

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Honestly even if you base everything off of prestige and not influence, you'll still run into the same scenario. In the new scenario they'll be farming prestige instead of influence, that's all.


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Wouldn't that assume that Prestige is given in the same way that XP and inf is today? What happens if it's given by mission completions, story arc completion, TF:s done, badges collected?

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Melee types have little need for Hover, as Hover is just too slow for melee combat. For them, Air Superiority opens up the pool for Fly and gives them an attack with pretty decent side effects.


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I've got very good use out of hover for my melee characters. As you say elsewhere in the guide:

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[...]Hover 6 slotted for speed [...] goes about 46 f/s which is nearly base Fly speed. It gives great maneuverability in combat or missions, doesn't get suppressed, and doesn't cost much END.


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The speed is enough, and it is a joy to be able to get into melee everywhere where the terrain would otherwise be very tricky.

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how would i do the bind to set the overhead text while im typing. i thought it was: /bind enter "startchat$$afk enter message here"

but that isn't working.

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Switch those two:
/bind enter "afk enter message here$$startchat"

It's in AP you can pick up a bunch of extra Inf by participating in various costume contests and similar player-run events. Because galaxy is dead, there are no such activities there... It's also much easier to pick up a team there.

Mystic Emerald, Union (Euro)

Adding my vote for:
<ul type="square"> [*]SG limit of 75 accounts instead of 75 characters.[*]Separarate SG color settings for each costume slot.[*]Alternate placements of SG logo: Chest, chest pocket, shoulder, leg, belt buckle... Also per costume slot.[/list]

Superspeed does have one great disadvantage for me: It's the only movement power that induces motion sickness - especially when you are rubberbanding due to lag....

You would think that superjump would do it, but so far I've only felt it on SS characters... My elude character flies (or tries to), so I haven't tried "elude speed" enough to see if that also has the same effect.

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Everytime flight speed comes up, people point out 10 good reasons flight is bad, and one third that many people come in and say, "but its the safest" despite it having been said in almost EVERY post regarding upping the flight speed cap or flight speed in general, like in this case, that SS is just as safe, if not SAFER than flight, unless you start every trip going as high as you can go, and hitting autopilot, which makes it take even longer. With SS you are barely there long enough to catch aggro, not to mention the nice stealth bump you get, and if you get aggro, your gone before you feel the first hit, which also happens to be the last. And lets not forget indoor missions. My bit to add is this: try using hover/fly in a low cieling room/hallway and tell me its safer than SS, granted not travel, but where other powers give you some help(yeah, TP too, since you can port anywhere you can see regardless of obstacles), flight is a hinderance.


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To be fair, there is one situation where Fly is "safer" than SS - ambushes. When you fly from contact to mission, you often don't even notice that you have spawned an ambush...

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*waves hand* I'm the friend he's talking about. I can tell you how I have them slotted... 1 run speed in Swift, one in Sprint, and one in Quickness. No run speeds in Elude, just 5 recharge reducers and 1 defense buff (no Hasten, so I need that extra recharge).

I personally agree with Geko. Hey, I have to take 3 powers to get this and didn't have it until level 40 (actually, level 42 for me, but I could have had it at 40 had I slotted right). Plus, if there's a 10 foot wall in front of me, I have to spend 20 minutes looking for a way around. Plus, I have that annoying [censored] backflip ever 2 minutes or so, which stops me dead in my tracks, and kills my Endurance so I have to wait a few seconds before I can Sprint again...

Plus, it's hard to turn it off whenever I need, so precision moving is nearly impossible.

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But those are powers you would have taken anyway, right.

I've got them, and I still try to fly everywhere (due to character reasons). And a backflip every two minutes is not annoying - compared to crashing from an altitude every two minutes...

As for precision moving - that's what hover is perfect for... (And for that 10 ft wall, If you don't have fly)

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Colisseum.

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So, how about some togas to wear?....

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More costume options, inculding changing body size/height/type for each costume

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That would be great!!