TyrantMikey

Well, whomever they are, in whatever capacity they served, all I can say is this:

THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION to the best game ever, and good luck in whatever it is you decide to do going forward. Your work will not be forgotten.

I've been doing lots of missions in Praetoria (haven't had much opportunity to play in Primal, lately ), and I can confirm that the ambushes seem off.

If memory serves, ambushes historically came in three waves, and no more. Now, they'll frequently come in waves of five or more. I've been in the Tunnels, and it seemed that they simply would not end until I left the area I was in. Exacerbating the situation was that the next ambush spawned almost immediately, allowing insufficient time to use Rest to recover health and endurance.

This last point is the part that bugs me the most. I'm not given enough time to recover. And given that we are forcibly ejected from Praetoria by the time we pick up Stamina, endurance management remains a problem.

The icing on the cake is that Rest takes so long to recover. Even if I had enough time to use it, it's frequently not recharged. And it takes too long to refill my bars.

So here are my choices. I can slot my powers for endurance reduction, which means I'll hit less frequently and waste the endurance anyway, or I can slot for accuracy and hit more often, but still run out of endurance when the unending ambushes eventually wear me down. Because eventually, my meager alotment of inspirations will run out.

This entire scenario is almost Emmert-esque.

Okay, I've seen a few suggestions for changing the way accuracy, range, defense and motion work together.

But there's still a problem.

Assuming such sweeping changes were made, you'd have tons of toons out there that had been slotted and played according to the old system for anywhere from a few days to years.

Changes of this magnitude would require not only the distribution of free respecs, but influence in order to allow those toons who had invested heavily in IOs or specific slotting to recoup their losses as they swapped out accuracy for range (or vice versa). As anyone who's done a respec knows, the reimbursement costs for IO enhancements is frequently far less than what it actually cost you to craft them.

To date, I haven't seen the devs implement any change so egregious that it required both a respec and a gift of influence.

Even if the gift of influence were not permitted, it would likely take characters multiple iterations to correct their builds to a point where they felt that they were finally combat efficient. While some may argue that free respecs are easy to come by (such as Veterans Rewards and the like), I would argue in turn that a player should never be forced to use one of his own respecs due to a dev mandated change of this kind. Especially when it might require several respecs to correct the problems introduced by it.

Now, in keeping with the OP's ideas of the chat channel for the various forms of communication, I wouldn't mind seeing something different visually rendered for that type of communcation as well.

I threw together the following mockup (which isn't ANYTHING like what he mentions--I just grabbed a Crimson headshot and one of his mission blurbs, but it should get the point across), to show would could be used as a kind of distinctive chat bubble for information coming across your headset or police radio ("A bank robbery is in progress!").



Two things of note: the satellite icon to show it's from a satellite communication system, and the "lightening strike" line that should help distinguish it from typical chat.

If memory serves, in older comics, electronic communications or urgent informtion was indicated in a chat bubble like this:



In either case, it would be awesome, I think if, all this type of chat appeared in visually distinctive chat bubbles, AND could be directed to a separate channel so you could read it like a narrative.

These responses have all been extremely interesting. Thank you all for taking the time to reply, and doing so in such thoughtful, insightful, and eloquent ways.

Based on what everyone is saying, it seems like COH has managed to avoid many of the storytelling pitfalls that plague other games.

Our storytelling system largely revolves around contacts, dialog, and clues. You obtain a new contact, complete a mission. During the the mission, you gather clues.

My only peeve with the storytelling mechanism is that clues are easily overlooked because they're buried in the Clue window, and not overly obvious. And they don't seem to be sorted/grouped in any meaningful way. "Clue Found" is your notification that you've found something, but it's rather vague, and when you're racing through a mission on a team, you don't have time to stop and check the Clue window to see what it is. It has to wait until afterwards (if even then).

I'd like to think there was a better way to emphasize the story, the plot, but I'm not sure how to do it. Thankfully, cutscenes are few and far between. Though they might be useful as a storytelling device, there are a few instances where they might get someone inadvertently killed (unintentional aggro during Frostfire, for example).

Again, my thinking is that the story needs to be emphasized more in COH. It's a comic book sotry, after all. Not just a series of random adventures. (At least, this is the case in story arcs.) I'd like to imagine a way to bring the story/plot to the forefront during those arcs, but how to do so escapes me.

That was pretty cool.

/signed

I'm all for more mutantish options, including some of the following:


Glove Options:

• Hands consisting entirely of tentacles that move like animated tails (new code required, likely)
• Hands with only three fingers (it would be a glove option).
• Hands consisting entirely of one big razor sharp claw (more mutant, I know, but still)
• Hands that look like bear paws.

Head & Face Options

• Scarless seams like the one from Splice:
  
• A head with eyes either running from the nose to the base of the skull, or all over it. (Think spiders.)
• Heads covered in tentacles
• Heads covered in short, bristly needle-like spikes
• The ability to completely remove human ears. Human ears should be on the Ears menu, and removed from the shape of the head altogether. (But that's likely a general game change, and nothing to throw into a Booster pack.)
• A head covered completely in short, bristly fur, with only the eyes, mouth, and nose showing, and NO FANGS. It should have no ears on it. You should be able to choose ears from the Ears dropdown.
• Decent dog faces. Several of them, if possible. Some looking all sweet and puppyish, and some looking vicious and pit bullish.

General:

• Chest pieces that are scaled and have gills on the back.
• Fishy fin pieces for head, shoulders, arms, legs, and feet. And when I say fins, I mean like this:
  
• Scaled leg pieces with and without fins.
• A lycanthropy-themed costume set. From head to toe, pushes a new concept of werewolves that look nothing like Warwolves. Muscular, furry, animated tails, slashing claws, decent heads, etc.

That should be enough for now.

Found this Newsweek article in my feeds today: Why Video Games Matter and found it a really interesting read. The interviewee, Tom Bissell (a video game critic and author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter), argues that some of the best games are from smaller companies, are not as well known, and don't try to emulate motion pictures as story telling devices.

For me, personally, I kept waiting for him to refer to City of Heroes, but I'm not sure that's the kind of game he plays. But his opinions seemed fairly spot-on to me, and made me think deeply about how stories are told in video games, and how often it comes out as a clumsy, clunky mishmash of mouse clicks, cut scenes, and travel time.

The article isn't enough to plumb the depth of the issues, but I was hoping it's enough to start a discussion of the story telling mechanics in COH and how we might like to see it improved. As I'm not a professional game developer, I can't be anything more than an Armchair Expert™, but I thought a general discussion of the subject might be interesting. (You guys always have something interesting to say.)

(The link to the book on Amazon is provided because you can actually peek inside that one [as opposed to some].)