konshu

Absolutely!

It's just redside getting shafted again, lol.

If the only game in town was Praetoria, it would be so much more interesting, as a villain who was intending to resist Cole, to steal objects and technologies and materials from him, to make alliances with the Syndicate, to create mayhem in Praetoria, and to find ways to divide the loyalists and play them against one another.

What we've got instead (and I've not played the new content) is probably something that makes Primal characters look dumb, and the Praetorians look more intelligent and powerful than they should be.

I'm okay with those playing heroes taking a more reactive role, but the villains should be proactive and imaginative.

I sense ... sarcasm ...

You could probably get by with using the Rikti monkey skeletons for movement and basic attacks, if you want to do custom art and plan on having them basically as contacts. Or if you want to have access to the full player power / animation base, making it easier to have the pets as rescues and helpers in missions, you could run the height slider to rock bottom and make use of the new animal pack costuming.

Or, to create a solution in lore, you could give the pets human-sized animal forms as a consequence of getting Well water in their dish. Just because.

I suppose their main foe could have lapped water up from Hamidon's toilet. No doubt there's some serious mutagens in there.

Anyway ... I can't believe I answered you ... lol

Have a good one!

I think that sketchy as the old mission writing was, it was better and more broadly conceived than a lot of the stuff we've received in recent years. The problem with the old content is that the background was lore rich, but the actual gameplay was simplistic and repetitive. The new stuff we get is much flashier and with more complexly chained objectives - which is nice (to a degree) - but I don't play much of it (just tips right now) because I find the plots are riddled and were probably dashed off in the minimum possible time. (Manager: "I want a new arc/tf completed by noon!" </e whiplash>) Also, there seems to be more of a superhero Saturday morning or Adult Swim cartoon style right now, not the graphic novel or socially-conscious 1970s style that I'd prefer to see.

Furthermore, we've had abundant evidence in recent years that the writers don't research the lore very deeply before creating new arcs and task forces. If the dialog is snarky and snappy, the work is deemed satisfactory and the job is done. Which is a shame.

So if there's no desire to create quality stories, please don't bother following up on dangling plot threads. It will just create more continuity problems, because it will be poorly done.

Instead, just give Statesman some pets that accidentally drank from the Well of the Furries, like a dog and a cat, and write a bunch of arcs and task forces about the amazing adventures of Statesdog and Lord Reclusive Cat, and their friends. I think that would work about as well.

(khonshu <---- grumpy old man with degree in English)

This sounds great, but it's hard to coordinate it with authors and players in AE as it presently exists. Unless someone has a better plan, I'd guess the only way to signal that some arcs are a part of this project would be to add another AE keyword (like REVAMP), but from what I've seen the keyword approach doesn't work outside of a relatively small group players who know the keyword and care to give it a try.

As for individual efforts, if we weren't limited to just 8 arcs, I'd already have written a significant amount of new material for the early hero and villain contacts. I don't know how many arcs I'd have written if I had unlimited arc slots, but I'd guess at least 20, probably more. Like many here, I suppose, I've been thinking about what I'd like to see in the game since I started playing.

BTW, I don't buy the argument that the devs "lack the resources" to add to or revamp lowbie content. It's not that hard. One person could make significant headway. I think the problem is simply that they are opposed to the project; that it isn't a sufficiently valuable use of time for the company.

A super quick interim fix I'd do is take Dr. Creed and Mongoose and turn them into additional contacts available at level 1.

I didn't even get that far. I'm in the tiny community (of perhaps one) who actually prefers the old content to the stuff we've received in the last year.

If you do it, then welcome to the club!

I've got 8 lowbie arcs up that are all canon-related, heroic, relatively challenging, non-humorous stories.

A recent patch broke a map in one of the arcs, "Live and Let Die," and since dialogue with the devs hasn't gone anywhere on that, sometime soon I'll be dropping that one in favor of a new arc, probably one in my "Tutorial Arc" series (which aims to bring new players quickly up to date by condensing all of the core CoH story into about 6 arcs, with some new material too, to keep it lively).

You can find my arcs by searching for @khonshu (spelled differently from forum name).

Are there any other tier 9s that are ally-targeted?

I suspect the soloists would cry out en masse if this was done.

I believe the best course is to make it a PBAoE on the caster, using tier 3 pet values.

LOL

Seems like this could be fixed.

I can see where a big problem might be meeting deadlines, with design quality getting sacrificed in order to have new things released to keep the player base happy.

As I've said a million times before ...

If we had a small number of people (1-4) on the design team whose sole job was to release new content on a monthly or similarly frequent basis, it would buy the rest of the design team more time to complete and fully test the larger new features. There would be less of a need to rush projects out that are barely half-baked, as AE was.

It's possible, perhaps, that the new people you are seeing are part of the existing player base who switched servers.

I know I've made some changes with my toons and in the past several months have played a lot on Victory, Liberty, Triumph, and Pinnacle, and hardly any on Freedom and Virtue.

I agree that content with a good story and appropriate rewards can be played more than once. However, most people would appreciate playing several new stories in a row before returning to good stories for replay. It's hard to have this in the game right now.

As far as canon content goes, it's clear to me we need more of it, with more frequent introductions of content and more of higher quality. Players have been requesting this for a long time. I think it is possible that if players felt rewarded by content, at least some players would be spending less time grinding to exploit loopholes in the system.

In other words, it's possible that to some extent the exploiters are bored with the current status of the game.

As far as AE goes, I think we need better systems for managing it, like bookmarks / favorites, a different rating system, and so on, which should have been part of the system from the beginning. Players have been requesting this since AE's beta. Some of these features are not very time-intensive on the part of the development team.

Paragon Studios has the skill and intelligence to do all of this right. But for whatever reason - whether it's a drive to meet deadlines, poor dev + player communications, narrow developer focus, insufficient number of staff, overly ambitious projects, or whatever - we keep getting problems.

I think the devs have just reconciled themselves to the belief that there will always be problems, and maybe this is a realistic view. But I suspect there are better practices which could be used to further minimize the problems.

(BTW, no, the current nerf really doesn't bother me, and in fact none of the nerfs introduced to the game have EVER bothered me.)

I believe it's possible for the devs to fix AE, and to do so relatively quickly. But the fact that so many bugs slipped by during creation and testing of the feature, and so much time has passed since their introduction, that it makes me uncertain about the abilities of the dev team as a whole.

Perhaps each dev is doing their job properly as it has been defined. Yet the results of the collective effort are not always encouraging.

To me it's a simple issue: make it self-targeted.

It should be a click power, not a toggle. It's a tier 9 / nuke. Are there any tier 9s that are toggles?

There would be no range enhancements, as it would be PBAoE on self.

While I'd leave the fine details of balance management to the devs, I see no reason to drop the minor chance for hold.

I'm not sure why there should be a big problem with it. It seems pretty easy to me.

Just think about how the power was justified for a Mastermind, then translate that to a Defender or Corruptor. If anything, because the power is oriented on the caster, and not on a disposable pet, it should be stronger than it was on the MM. This could be handled in many different ways, but I think the most likely way would be to give it a slightly lower end cost and/or a slightly faster recharge than what is given to MMs.

But I think the power is going to be largely in balance if you just make it a PBAoE centered on the caster, at the same 125% strength given to MM tier 3 pets.

Well, that's not a difficult problem to overcome. Just consider "self" to be equivalent to the tier 3 or whatever gives the highest debuffs.

If the power is centered on the caster, then the caster will also get the aggro from the affected mobs. So since there is increased risk, the reward should match appropriately.

From my perspective, you don't really need to change the name. I mean, Spines already has toxic effects, other power sets have poison powers, etc.

My first Poison toon is likely to be a cute monster that has Poison powers because it is a monster, but it has decided to fight for good.

This is a good question. The difference is small, but important.

A narrative pop-up is always brief. It could pop up as a result of any trigger. It appears automatically. It demands immediate attention. It goes away with a click.

A clue, on the other hand, can be long. A number of events can trigger them, causing them to collect in your clue basket. They don't demand immediate attention, so they are best used to give background information that can be read at leisure.

Narrative pop-ups can be used to inform the player of things they need to know at the moment that may be inobvious during the course of play. An example already used in the game would be, "You need a key to open this door."

Clues are not a replacement for narrative pop-ups. Clues are there to tell you about the things that were not revealed by the contact and were not apparent during play.

If a story depends a lot on clues, it is best if the player is solo. Then they can take breaks, read clues, and grasp the story.

However, in a team-oriented game, it is often inconvenient to read the clues as they come up, or even between missions. Usually this is because other members of the team have already played this content and know the story, or they are primarily tactics-oriented players (as opposed to being primarily story-oriented). In this case, a player usually can't read the clues till the play session has ended.

While some players will always like clues, my design goal is to have as much story shown as possible, and as much story displayed automatically as possible, so that even tactically-oriented players can be aware of the story.

Let me try to illustrate this another way. Let's say we have an issue of a comic book where the story is told through all the art panels with action, dialog, and narrative captions. Then let's have two pages in the middle of the comic that have no art, just blocks of text. Virtually all of the audience will read the portions of the comic that have the art, dialog, and captions. A much smaller subset will also read the two pages of prose.

It makes sense to understand your audience and to write to them. So you tell as complete a story as you can through the panels of art, dialog, and captions. This story is told in a very economical fashion, with as much communicated by the art as possible. Then, if you want to add supplementary information that is not absolutely required - it's really just for the hardcore fans - you can put it in the two pages of prose at the center of the issue.

My goal, in writing missions in architect, is to tell the story as much as possible through the art and action, and to use the other tools (contact exposition, dialog, and pop-ups) only as needed, with an eye to economy. Clues could be used - and maybe I would use a few now that the file size has been increased - but the story should never depend on these. Clues would be like the section of prose that is optional content composed for the small population of hardcore fans.

The way I see it, glowies should only be used if they are essential to either the plot or the game play. The appearance of the glowie should fit the purpose. There may be some text associated with the glowie describing the interaction, but other than that ... yes, I don't insert glowies just to provide supplementary information (clues).

I can't argue with your instincts. Having only body bags to represent fallen bodies is a shame. We should have the ability to make prone, inactive spawns: dead bodies.

You'll note that devs have the ability to put dead bodies on the floor. That's the right way to do it. Hopefully we'll get that ability in MA. [Edited to preserve NDA.]

Actually, the devs have both clues and pop-ups in their engine because they're not the same thing. They don't serve the same function.

That's why we don't get clues telling us we need a key for that door.

Clues are not bad. They're just easy to misuse. One of my big complaints about the game, particularly the content from the first few issues, is that the clues were poorly used.

What the devs did wrong is they used clues to tell the story, and everything else the players saw and did was more or less inconsequential. Contacts would say, "Go bust Unlucky Pete," and you'd enter a warehouse and furiously click on your power tray for a while, and that would be it.

I'm saying we can do a better job of telling story at the moment of play, as opposed to telling story via clues that are optionally read after play.

I don't like fanfic, and I can well imagine your sense of dread at the thought of hours upon hours of chained cutscenes filled with tea-sipping drivel.

War Witch: "My heart is heavy at the thought of this terrible misfortune. It is extremely, truly terrible." Sips tea.

Ms. Liberty: Looks at wall clock. Looks away. Looks at watch. Scratches itch near hem of skirt. "Yeah. I know what you mean."

Yes, that's pretty much my view. If someone is AFK and something happens that they miss, then either the team fills them in or they don't know what's going on.

If the story is decent, it shouldn't be all that difficult to fill someone in. There should be a logical progression of events. If the story is not so good ... well, maybe it doesn't matter if you go AFK.

Well ... I do read. I usually spend most of my day reading. But when I play a game (that is not a text game), I like to play.

I don't think this game is designed to give us text in a fashion that meshes well with game play. I don't even like the contact exposition, and would do away with it if I could.

For example, if instead of the team leader journeying to Atlas to get a block of exposition from Azuria, I'd prefer it if we could journey to an instance where Azuria is present, and by clicking on one thing or another we might trigger a sequence of dialog / animation bits where she speaks and gestures to all of the team that is present.

And if the leader communicates by cellphone, then I'd like for a small cellphone window to automatically splash up on the screens of everyone on the team.

As for clues, what I'd prefer is that there either be text clues that automatically pop-up on everyone's screens, or cutscene type clues that everyone on the team sees.

I'd particularly like to use cutscene type clues at the start or end of arcs to provide a sense of prologue and epilogue.

EDIT: Oh, and another form of "clue" I'd like to use would be a narrative pop-up that could appear as a consequence of any event, not just mission entry or exit.