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NOOOOOOOOO MYSPACE IS THE REALITY OF THE DEVIL!!!!!!

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He pops up everywhere, that little scamp!

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what was the exploit? curious...most likely it will be corrected once it is live again... that is if its ever brought back.

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As best as I could tell from available information, there was some xp-generating exploit that the CoP allowed that came from the standard way mission rewards were handed out. It might have been similar to the PL exploit, where unsidekicking at the end of a PvP mission would see your character earn some pretty large xp due to lvl differences (eg lvl 30s could get lvl 50 xp rewards) that saw PvP mission rewards nerfed for a while.

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Aim small, miss small.

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So it follows that aim big, miss big?

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Advertising 101.
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If you really want people to hear about your product. Shell out the dough for a Television Commercial.
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Aim small, miss small.

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Actually, thats a bit contrary to what one would learn in Advertising 101, but I can see what you meant. The reality is, however, that telivision advertising is a VERY harsh, expensive, and rather elitist sector. What channel do you use? What timeslot? How do you know if you're reaching your target demographic?

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Heroes? A show about heroes advertising a game about heroes? Or yeah, pick a superhero movie. FX was reshowing the heck out of Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 all around the release of part 3. Same with X-Men and X-Men 2 last year. Target audience for a superhero game might be people who watch superhero movies.

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... which also ignores that marketing department lawyers may not wish to sell ad time to products that could be seen as passing off on the televised IP, or may wish to charge more for CoH/V advertising in order to be "officially licensed" or some such.

If I knew nothing about CoH/V and I saw a City of Heroes ad during "Heroes", it wouldn't be a big jump for me to assume that "Heroes" now had its own video game. Which is the last thing the company who could actually make money off a real "Heroes" video game would ever want to happen.

As for CoH/V appearing before a Marvel film? Not going to happen. MUO will get plastered from here to eternity on Marvel-related releases, but CoH/V is a direct competitor despite being produced by the same games studio. Marvel isn't going to allow their movies to promote a competing product when they have something on the way (and I've got no idea if Marvel comics ever had CoH/V ads in them, or if they still do now that MUO is on the way).

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How do you know if you're reaching your target demographic?

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Gee, if there was only a hit TV show about super heroes that they could pretty much be a goldmine as a target audience for. I see your point, but this is one year that this aspect kind of fails. Before this year, it's dead on.

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Myspace costs time, only. and is 24/7.

A TV ad would cost time and money to make the commerical.

And approximately $171,000 for a 30 second slot during heroes. Once.

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Also:

"So big corporations should keep in mind that ads don't have to be 30-second cinematic experiences to get our attention. The lesson to be learned is that ads need to be relevant. That's why online advertising works so well.

Boring blue text links on Google (Charts) or Yahoo! (Charts) may lack the glitz and sex appeal of a slickly produced commercial but they get the job done. Sure, a big difference between a search ad and a TV ad during say, "Heroes" or "Grey's Anatomy" is that the consumer is choosing to look for something. A TV ad, more often than not, is an interruption.

"TV advertising is essentially an uninvited guest. You are watching '24', the world's about to blow up, and suddenly there's a damn commercial," said the University of Texas' Burns."

From here.

TV has a wide reach, but it's generally pretty shallow. The vast majority of people who would see a CoH/V ad on "Heroes" wouldn't probably pay attention to it. In order for any sort of cut through to occur, NCsoft (who pay for the promotion of the game afaik) would need to run the ad multiple times. Which is why it ends up costing millions of dollars to buy advertising time on TV. And I'd strongly doubt that NCsoft has a seven figure advertising budget for CoH/V this year.

Online, however, the costs of advertising are cheap, the people are already online (because not everyone in TVland is) and if they are interested enough to click through to a MySpace link, they might be interested enough to even try the game out on a trial. And once they've tried the game, CoH/V is in a prime position to actually generate revenue from these people.

NCsoft's aim is not to generate awareness of CoH/V, it's to promote trial and purchase. MySpace is certainly a more efficient way of achieving that aim than TV.

Ok, so here's the deal - MySpace is full of people who don't play CoH/V. As common as it is for even internet nerds to look down on MySpace from the lofty heights of their Livejournal, it's an untapped market for CoH/V. So it makes sense to go for it.

It's a nice looking page that uses recycled graphics from the main site. It may help bring some new players to the game (along with the referral program). And not every one of those potential new players will be an idiot.

I'd like to think we could get over the "OMG MySpace LOL!!!" quickly, but sadly I don't think think this will be the case. Guess it's not the forums unless we can add some e-drama to it.

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People have been asking you guys to update the CoH/CoV main page to be updated since I first started coming to these forums. Instead of doing that you're going to spend time creating a MySpace page.

I know you guys want advertisement and more players, but does CoH/CoV really need more players of the type that typically haunt MySpace?

"Sorry, don't have time to fix the Cathedral of Pain. Too busy responding to friend's requests for the MySpace page."

RAOFLMAO!

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Cause Web Developers and Game Developers are the same people .....



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Everyone knows that Sexxy Jay could fix the CoP trial any time he wants to. He'd just sexxify it up and it would work perfectly.

I gave I9 5 stars.

It's not perfect - I'm having some problems getting the IOs I want, but not because I can't get the recipes at a reasonable rate, it's because I can't get the salvage I need. I'm stuck looking to get multiple Pangean Soils, Essense of the Furies, Prophecies et al which are going to bankrupt me long before I even try to craft the IOs that need them.

However, at the top level, I9 is a great issue that has added a lot more life to CoH/V.

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Overall, I'm not happy to see the comic go. It seemed that the quality of it was just starting to improve, mainly led by Sean Fish's writing. I know that another thread has just taken delight in thumping on issue 17 and 18, but honestly, they at least show the Freedom Phalanx and Vindicators as generally able to take care of business on their own, not the deus ex machina to save them as was commonly used to end arcs.

But I also understand that it probably wasn't a commercially viable venture. People knew they could get it for free online so they didn't buy it.

Hopefully Lighthouse and Co. have a few things up their sleeve to replace the loss of the comic.

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Not allowing player created content in fear of things that are buggy or inappropriate is ridiculous. Other games have PCC and they are just fine.


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Which games and what content?

I'd just like to be sure we are comparing apples with apples, rather than a full player made CoH mission against flags in PotBS.

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This can't be anymore of a problem than creating the content yourself. In fact if anything it'd be much less manpower intensive.


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Just on this point, the big difference is that the devs can trust internal resources so don't have to pour over every molecule of such content. QA can catch the bugs before the players see them. The systems already exist internally to develop new content.

However, player submitted content, especially complex content such as a mission, needs a lot of scrutiny. I could easily be racist, sexist or any other of a whole lot of -ists without ever using an offensive word. I could do it so that my language only means something offensive to other Australians, because the US doesn't necessarily understand Australian slang.

Also, simply skimming for offensive language misses the issue of players creating / violating existing game canon. I can only imagine the fanfic that might be possible if players are allowed to write a mission that (for example) allows players to discover Numina's and Ghost Widow's 'special secret frienship'.

And then there is the whole management of testing. Players can rate player missions, but who is going to do it? If it's up on Test, over time fewer and fewer players are going to be interested in testing another cruddy player mission, or such testing will stop when new dev content is launched. But if it is on the live servers where player submitted missions are tested, Cryptic runs the risk of offensive material and / or buggy material (and I mean really buggy, holes in the mission maps, completely uncompletable mission buggy) being seen by their customer base.

It's not necessarily developing the content that is the time intensive bit. It's QA, it's continuity, it's management of the process that takes up the time.

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I think people are taking a big step forward in saying that we need a mission development toolset released in order to start this player submitted content ball rolling. The Suggestions forum is full of ideas, some good, some bad, but I feel like that sub-forum is somewhere the devs rarely go.

In order for the player submitted content idea to move forward for CoH/V, what we need first is dev support. They need to be willing to consider player submissions. The fact that Statesman has posted his support is a good one.

I'd say that if he was serious about the idea, the next step is to ask players to design a set of missions (or Task Force, or Trial, or whatever) on paper. Hold a competition. Provide a template to use that might even be an official Cryptic design document. Make players write it all down for dev consideration in a format that can be assessed quickly.

It should be stated that all submissions are property of Cryptic and that there is no guarantee that even the best submissions will ever be used. But it will give you an idea of 1) what the community wants from a story arc / TF etc, unblinkered by knowledge of what is currently possible with the existing mission toolset and 2) you could use it as a gauge of interest in (and correspondingly, required resources for) player submissions.

So, how about it Statesman? How's the idea of holding a contest for player submitted missions strike you?

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Well I'll be... I just hit my 666 post mark and my 90 day mark today, and I wanted to break the count in a stylish manor.


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I wanted to make my 10000th post from a fancy mansion, but, alas, it was not to be.

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*studio audience groan*

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Congrats on getting the first issue out! I look forward to reading future issues.

Given the popularity of the Behind the Mask section, you may with to implement a consignment house-style "donation" system that will allow players to "suggest" that they be interviewed with increasingly large bundles of cash in order to get good PR. It's how they do it in real life :-)

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This is comics, so Vangard doesn't actually have to be evil for heroes to go up against them. They just have to be working at a cross purpose to your contact.

Say your contact is a reformed Rikti, or a Kheldian. S/he may send you up against Vangard on entirely reasonable grounds. Vagard don't have to be corrupt or evil to be misguided or just not see the bigger picture.

One thing I think players need to realise is that powers customisation is at least three different things:

1) Weapon Model Customisation: so that your Katana Scrapper can choose what their Katana looks like (or even if it is a katana). The power function is the same, but the weapon model is different. Since I don't have to do the work, this is probably the easiest form of customisation to implement, but also the one with the smallest reach (because not all powersets have weapon models).

2) Power colours customisation: as discussed by BAB. Make your powers all the colours of the rainbow (and my retinas die a little thinking of the possibilities...).

3) Power animation customisation: also as discussed a bit by BAB. Players can choose the animation that goes with the activation of their power. The widest reaching of all the customisations and one that opens up the most worms.

I can see a lot of problems with colour and animation customisation. Ignoring the difficulty of actually implementing the change, it would change how players interact with each other when suddenly the established visual cues of how powers work were thrown out the window. Someone already mentioned how recoloured heals would be confusing, but it could also lead to some fairly ridiculous things happening to some powers eg auras / shields (I can easily imagine the flourescent pink Dark / Dark character - "Look mommy, a walking ball of cotton candy!").

On top of that, there would soon be the 'best' animations for each powers - people would pick the one that rooted for the shortest time, for instance.

So, popular as it might be in some circles, full power customisation is a huge step with a lot of ramifications. For the record, I don't think powers customisation is going to attract new players - CoH/V already has a character customisation system that is seen as best in MMOG genre, so adding more options to it isn't going to attract more people solely on the ground that they can customise their character further.

Oh, and I'd like to second that this get held in Australia. Hooray for group business trips!

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This is a really good idea and one I've agreed with in the past.

I'd love to hear Statesman or Positron talk about where things are going and to show off some things that might otherwise be months away, or to be able to talk about why certain decisions were made (at a high level, of course, and not open for debate - that's what the forums are for!).

A complete sideline, but does Statesman or Positron ever call their vehicle the Crypticar? The thought just struck me... :-)

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Got mine last night (I've been out of town)--very nice.

Thanks, Ex!

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So, is it just the standard Statesman CCG card that's signed, or is it a limited edition version?

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Not only is it a CCG signed Statesman card, but it is riddled with Ex Libris fingerprints.

Aha!

*now what to do with all these cards*

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Dang, now I'm wishing I could have entered. How am I suppose to clone you and use an army of Super-Libris-es now?

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You can't clone Ex Libris from her fingerprints! The only thing you could do would be frame her for a crime which she did not commit...

Scrapulous, great guide, but one thing...

For section 5, I got myself confused by thinking I ONLY had 67 slots for enhancements (what do I know? I've only been playing CoH for 3 years! :-) instead I think the total is 91, of which 67 are allocateable. It might have just been my skimming of the guide, but you may wish to consider adding in the total number of enhancement slots you get, including those that come with powers.

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No, if you already have a Devistation: Acc/Dam slotted then you can't slot a second Devistation:Acc/Dam. But you could slot a Mako's Bite:Acc/Dam.

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Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the help TerraDraconis.

Oops, one more question:

I know you can put IOs of different sets into a power to get various bonuses, but can you slot multiple versions of the same set into the same power?

Example - I'm looking at Devastation for both Burst and Slug (AR ranged powers). However, I don't really care about the final two bonuses in the set, I'd rather just get up to the fourth level set bonus (a +DMG set effect) then slot two more Devastation IOs to activate another first level set bonus (a +Regen). I'd end up with a set of four IOs and a repeat set of two IOs from the same set in the same power (and I say *repeat set* since I wouldn't want to complete the set, so I'd get a repeat of IOs I already had slotted).

Can you 'half-set' IO sets this way?

Thanks for the info - I think I know what I need to plan out my IO sets now.

This is a dumb question and I'm pretty sure I know what the answer is, but I'd like to get it confirmed:

Can you slot the same IO set in multiple powers on your character? ie have the full Devastation set in every ranged damage power that you have?