UberGuy

While I was never a fan of mob running, the point of them running to the next spawn was almost certainly to try and lead you into it. Think about what would happen if you were running an anchor toggle on a critter that did that. (As a frequent player of Rad Emission and Dark Miasma characters, I had to think about it a lot.)

But yeah, stuff ran way too much. I never stopped me from playing given ATs or powersets, but I didn't particularly like it.

I know all about how they work, trust me. I have Rocket Man/Woman on 11 50s. I used to gather Warburg biological and chemical nukes on my villains for red-side Hamidon raids.

Warburg scientists don't care if you have stealth running, I've grabbed them on Stalkers, people running powers like Shadow Fall and all that. That has no affect on them as far as I can tell.

However, what you're saying isn't correct. I regularly lost them any time they had to deal with sloped or uneven terrain, even when I was using my slowest possible mode of travel - no Sprint, no nothing. And I believe I know why.

You see, I suspect that they calculate distance to you not based on straight line-of-sight distance between you and them, but rather based on the path distance they believe they have to walk to reach you. Slopes, ledges and other uneven terrain causes their AI to backtrack regularly, which dramatically increases this path length. As a result, they decide they are too far away from you at times that appear to make no sense at all based on intuitive, visual distance, unless you are traversing perfectly flat ground.

Lets not forget that when going up ramps, they had a tendency to go up diagonally, not straight. Then combine that with a dramatic inability to deal with walls when running diagonally up a ramp. Guess how every ******* Arachnos station is accessed by a hostage? That's right, a ramp with tall vertical "curbs" on both sides. I cannot tell you how many times the hostage would get stuck on those curbs mere yards from the door I was leading them to, forcing me to lead them back down the ramp to try again.

And it drove me ******* nuts.

Another "favorite" behavior, though not as infuriating as the things above, was how they would frequently run off of ledges or the edge of ramps. Come on, the server is controlling where they walk. What's up with misjudging their route such that they screw up and fall?

It just really bugged me that they were so error prone, because they were visibly worse than other AIs. Normal mission hostages were not nearly as clumsy about falling off of ledges. While I do believe regular mission hostages suffered from the same "path distance to leader" behavior, they usually seemed to have a much larger margin before they gave up, barring stealth powers (which was frustrating). But the real kicker was how combattant AIs almost never exhibited these flaws in any meaningful ways. It was extraordinarily rare for, say, aggro'd foes to randomly fall off a ledge or cliff without being pushed. They far more rarely got stuck on ramps or stairs. If Warburg hostages had acted even half as competently as most combatant critters, I would have been much, much less frustrated by them

My feeling is that you shouldn't worry about it. If the curtain really closes for good, I'd love to know as much as possible about what could have been. Something about it just feels good.

We need to spread the word about this to base builders. They could use this to fly around inside demos of their bases, which is really damn cool.

Ah, that makes a ton of sense. I don't think Justice peeps retreated all the way to the gathering rock, but it's been a long time and I joined that scene moderately late in the scheme of things. I recall falling back to the edge of the bowl, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was just me doing my own thing, as I am oft want to do even now.

Heh.

Oh, I know all of those things. I just think they sucked in comparison to the hero equivalents. To be clear, I don't think the hero ones are wonderful by any means. I just find the villain ones more boring, more outside the norm, or more inconvenient.

Really, they should all have been tied to things that at least made some sense. Exploration badges? Fine by me. Task Force badges? Awesome. Go out of your way to achieve something you might never achieve normally / naturally (besides finding exploration badges)? Sucktastic.

Well, initially they required PvP badges. Then for a long time they required badges some of us considered distasteful. I long took not having high debt badges as, well, a "badge" of honor. I don't know, there are some very grindy hero accolade badge requirements, but it feels somehow even worse to be compelled to farm debt and damage compared to, say, grey con mobs.

I know the requirements were improved back when they revamped a lot of badges, so I'm mostly going off of the older requirements for my recollection of what I didn't like about them.

Heh. Well, happily or sadly, depending on how you look at it, that's a problem I don't really have. I don't have very many old demo recordings. In addition to a HD loss of my gaming drive that ate some of my oldest stuff, I was never really into movie making, which of course demos rock for. I'm much more interested in it all now, of course, in case its the only CoH fix I can get.

I was always partial to "Orange Bagel". I was pretty amused that I wasn't the only person who came up with that, either.

I was wondering if the beta client would be the thing we should be playing demos into the future with.

Man, I24 (and I25 after) feels like we were about to discover the fountain of youth, with a tree growing on it that had a never-ending supply of fruit that tasted like whatever you were in a mood for. And then a crevasse opened in the earth and swallowed us all.

Ah, thanks. That makes sense.

I actually came to CoH from a series of FPS games with tab-to-target. It didn't actually dictate where your projectiles went as it does here, but it gave you target location beyond line-of-sight (once you had a "lock" - you couldn't initially target someone you couldn't see) and gave you a view of their current health, distance, etc. As such, CoH's tab-to-target was immediately intuitive - and thus very comfortable - to me.

Oh. My. God. How could I have forgotten that.

Very few things in CoH ever infuriated me - come on, it's a video game. Hostages frustrated me. Hostages in Warburg? OMG, I wanted to wring their necks. Repeatedly. Even when playing heroes.

Won't miss that. Will miss my base, though, even though it was nothing to write home about. But it was a comfortable, familiar place.

I like this list.

I give a nod to the disparity between group and solo Incarnate progress, but it isn't at the top of my list.

I'd like to add:

• Performance differences attached to things with strong concept/RP implications. See alignment powers like Call to Justice vs. Fear Incarnate. Example no longer in play: un-merged auction markets.
• Levels attached to Inventions, with attendant level ranges sometimes severely limiting the value of certain sets. I get that there's a meta-game here that may have value, but I feel like it was more frustrating in some ways than it was worth.
• "Expiring" enhancements. In many ways obviated by Inventions, and it probably made some sense in the early game, but yellow vs. green enhancements really felt like an explicit time sink in a game that wasn't very bad for having those.
• Temporary power reward drops. Really. Injected onto the existing recipe drop system, these things were really annoying to everyone who cared about Invention drops. Making any of them have rare color coding made it even worse - you'd get excited at getting a rare drop and it would just be another temp power that were for sale in stacks on the auction house.
• Rooting. I saw a dev mention that they regretted the lack of blended animation capability which led to rooting when we use powers. I had never been a fan of being rooted to attack, but I also never had a real problem with it. But I had never seen a dev express dissatisfaction about that before. I've also seen people complain about it when comparing CoH with other games. Putting those two together,I think I now wish it hadn't been like that.
• Small Invention salvage storage in bases. (I hear this was about to be improved ... damnit!)
• "Defeat X" missions.
• Contacts who sent you all over creation, especially if it was for "Defeat X" missions or just to talk to someone, especially if you had that person as a cell phone callable contact.

From the community, I think I most won't people who took two positions.

• Insisted on min/max builds and/or powerset choices even when running content that didn't demand it.
• Attached extreme moral connotations to auction house use.

The first sort of folks insist on optimal performance and look down their noses at people who don't pursue it, or who make choices that don't provide it. If you're reading this and you think I'm secretly talking about you specifically, I'm not. I've "met" a whole raft of people like this over the years, mostly on the forums but also in game, and I've always thought they were both silly and bad for the community. Note that I say this as an avid power gamer - CoH was generally far too easy to demand such attention to what people played, how they slotted, etc. There were narrow exceptions for specific content, but even they usually had multiple solutions, and it usually mattered less what powersets or builds you brought than whether you invited someone with the right capabilities. (Rad, Dark and Traps all have very strong -regen debuffs, for example.)

The second sort of people decided that using the Auction House for profit was morally wrong. There's not much else to say about that except that I find it ridiculous. There were some things people did with the Auction House that I found distasteful, but making a profit, even an immense profit, was not one of them. I also did not like when people somehow insinuated that making money off of the market was some sort of sin because they buyers didn't have to "work for" things they bought with that income.

I haven't really paid a lot of attention, though I did see her at a Gen Con a while back. But regardless, if I was still interested, it wouldn't really be a "boy crush" these days.

If you want to see some absolutely amazing thread mutation, read Bill Z Bub's "OK... now I'm sad" thread.

Someone in the thread mentions it may be the 2nd most random thread they've seen here. I'd like to see the one that tops it.

Citation, please.

No, I'm not. Read my last few posts. I explicitly state that people should be tempering any messages of hopefulness with clarifications that any such hope is a long shot, to put it mildly. We absolutely should remind people that it's possible that we get none of what a lot of players hope for here. We might get zippo beyond November 30 in terms of a playable game we would recognize as CoH. There is nothing wrong with reminding them of that. It's all about how you do that.

Some of you, out of whatever motivation, have resorted to or fallen back on stating only that reminder that it's a long shot, with no cushion. Maybe you're tired of pulling punches. Maybe you're in a hurry and didn't post everything you're thinking. Maybe you're mean. The message I find annoying comes across as "don't be hopeful, the game is probably toast". That's a similar but different message from "it's good to be hopeful, but just remember that we're hoping for a miracle, here".

Any you're willing to split hairs over it. You insist on presenting it in that glass-half-empty way, arguing with others over it. Look back at your response to the CPR analogy.

You're dealing with a lot of people who are emotionally invested in this game in one way or another - if that weren't true, there wouldn't be a "popular" movement to save the game. It's good to call out ridiculous optimism, but you need to expect to piss off anyone who shares that sense of investment if you come in preaching glass-half-empty. Hell, the glass isn't even really half full, but don't come in telling people "hey, your glass has almost no water in it". They want to be reminded that there's a little left.

Why is that even important to mention? Do you get the impression everyone else is or something? Because I don't.