kviri

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A few places where the Head seems to clip with the hair/hat on Huge and Male heads can be seen here: Assorted Head Clipping

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I've also seen head/hair clipping issues with some -- but, oddly, not all -- female characters using the Shag hairstyle. It comes out looking like the character has a bald spot on the very top of the head. I don't know if Jay has access to live-server character configurations or not, but just in case:

My girlfriend's character, Butane Girl (on Virtue) has this problem with her first costume.

My character, Schadenfraulein (on... actually, every server ) doesn't have this problem at all, despite having the same hairstyle (Shag) and face (Young Face 9).

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Obviously side quests (re-capture the Villain, etc. ) will increase your time limit.

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I can't help but visualize the Safeguard Mission side quests as the "old lady's cat is stuck in a tree" sequence from the first scene in The Incredibles.

"Hmm. Nemesis forces are attacking City Hall, but... yeah, I've still got time."

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Whether you share his level of annoyance or not, you are A; a paying customer B; paying for testing and C; paying for careful analysis. These are things that you ARE paying for.

Whether you think he's right or not, his statement is accurate. He is saying what HE wants and then stating, quite truthfully, what we are all paying for as we all pay the same rate.

And he's 100% correct.

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Well, as far as that goes, sure.

However, the point here is that I don't feel that the occasional minor slip-up, if efforts are made to correct it in a reasonable timeframe, qualifies as a major failure of "sufficient testing and careful analysis."

The last time I tried to relate my own experiences in software development to the CoH development process, it turned into a HUGE digression that served no purpose, so this time, I'll just say this: he's not the only IT professional in this thread, and my own personal belief (based on experience on much smaller projects) is that expecting nothing of this sort to happen in a development effort as immense as CoH/CoV... well, that's just a total pipe dream. In my opinon.

So, he shouldn't imply that anyone else should share his outrage. The rest of us can decide that for ourselves, and calling us "lemmings" if we don't agree with him isn't going to earn him a trace of sympathy from anyone.

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What I WANT is proper testing, and no spin doctoring. Those of you following along the nerf trail like lemmings must not work at jobs with any level of responsibility. We are paying customers. Hundreds of thousands of us. We pay for testing. We pay for careful analysis.

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Note the use of the word "I" in the first sentence.

Note the use of the word "we" in the last four.

Speak your mind all you want, it's part of what these forums are for. But kindly don't imply that you speak for "hundreds of thousands" of paying customers, because -- to be quite frank -- quite a few of those people clearly don't share your level of annoyance on this issue.

I happen to be one of them.

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So then anything that has DOT damage can take that 1% away and you still die.

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Not if you're out of enemy range by the time the first attack's animation completes.

If I understand correctly, this does fix (or at least mitigate somewhat) the "sniper hits you with AS while you're moving quickly, and you die 200 yards away when the animation completes" broken-reality problem. If they (or one of their friends) aren't legitimately in range when the AS completes, they're unable to finish you off and the assassination attempt fails. Instant reduction in "cheap" drive-by one-shots.

Seems like a pretty significant improvement to me.

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Just to make sure, PvE and PvP?

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I believe he's gone on record (on these forums) as saying it would not effect PC one-shotting of NPCs. (NPC one-shotting of PCs in PvE, I'm not sure about.)

Also... "if anything occurs within a fraction of second that brings a player from 100% Hit Points down to 0" (emphasis mine). This would also seem to indicate that NPCs aren't going to benefit from this change, and can still be one-shotted.

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It's NOT about ego, it's NOT about me bring right. It's about asking people to at least think about some of the paranoid crap they're spouting, and actually consider the possibility that the devs might have a good reason for operating the way they do.

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What gets me are the posters who are trying to shout people down for being disappointed in the second issue in a row over a period of 6+ months that doesn't add anything to CoH's PvE game. It's almost like some posters are telling other posters what they should care about.

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You quote me as if you're referring to me with that comment...

...did you miss the posts I made in this thread expressing my disappointment that there wasn't a little bit more CoH content in I7?

I like to think that I can be dissatisfied with an update, offer constructive criticism to the devs, and ask for things to be improved in the near future without getting adversarial towards the devs, calling them liars, and generally going out of my way to make myself the sort of user a dev wouldn't want to discuss the future of the game with.

That's all.

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You are not arguing whether what is being done is right or wrong, you're arguing over whether some ignorant player's assumption of what things might be like inside a place he's never seen in a company he's never worked for, is right or wrong! He doesn't know any more than you do, so it might be a nice idea if we dropped the massive egos and talked instead about something we do have information on, or opinions about: the game.

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Which is, at the end of the day, all I'm doing -- pointing out reasonable explanations for why the developers' decisions aren't based on idiocy, malice, duplicity, or favoritism.

Is my view of the way things work within Cryptic/NCSoft accurate? I have no idea. But I think it's a lot more likely than some of the hysterical conspiracy-theorist postulations that I've seen crop up in this thread (and others), and just this once, I decided to step in and (gasp) defend the devs. Because, honestly, I think they've been doing some good work lately.

It's NOT about ego, it's NOT about me bring right. It's about asking people to at least think about some of the paranoid crap they're spouting, and actually consider the possibility that the devs might have a good reason for operating the way they do.

Edit: Geez, could I have made a worse typo than "It's not about ego, it's about me bring right" if I had tried?

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Well as it is even when we get stuff it breaks alot of stuff. They bring out an update and have to patch it to get it to work. Go play CoV with an ATI card. Or go back to Oct and try getting half the badges...many of which are STILL getting fixed.

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Welcome to the world of PC development, where there are 100 configurations you can't test on for every 1 you have available to you.

Bugs happen. Honestly, I think the CoX team does a better-than-average job keeping the game running and playable, under the circumstances. (Obviously, you have the right to think I'm nuts.)

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Missed where you have to overhaul code to add more levels...aside from lvl 40 contacts directing you to level 41+ contacts...

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Well, for one thing, it's quite likely they're adding a few new villain groups... who will probably have combinations of powers we've not encountered before. That will, in turn, result in interactions between AI and PC powers that haven't been seen (or, in some cases, anticipated) by developers, which will in turn require some changes to one or the other, which will impact other AIs and PCs... etc.

I could outline similar thought processes for mission maps and city zones. And then, outside of what can strictly be called "41-50" content, there's the ripple effect that the addition of Mayhem Missions and new villain ATs will have on the rest of the game.

Make no mistake, I7 is very likely to involve significant changes to a lot of common code. There's no such thing as a "trivial change" when this many additions and updates are visible to the end user.

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Different software teams--bad: agreed.

Different design teams: different story.

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Yep, you caught me. I added an edit to that effect, but apparently not before you read it.

I've just heard this (mis?)quoted to apply specifically to development so often that I finally broke down and griped about it.

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The design teams cover things like look and feel, visuals and such. Having different teams for those areas is perfectly fine.

And, it's not uncommon to spin off a software group to work on cutting edge stuff, then roll the updates back into the base. Overall, though, I'd agree that the two teams need to collaborate or it's going to be chaos.

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Especially if one team is overhauling large chunks of the code base, as would be necessary in order to add 41-50 villain content.

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We shouldn't have to share the development sandbox.

CoV is suppose to have it's own development sadnbox; we were told this in the beginning.

That way both games get updated, not just one.

The Devs changed their minds (without telling us) however, and people are irate about it.

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I sometimes think I'm the only one who's not the slightest bit irritated by this dev quote (if it is a quote, I've never been able to find it).

Why?

Because it's a bad idea. Totally disparate development teams working on an application with this much shared code is an express train to Nightmare Town (for the developers involved) with a stopover in Bugsville (for the end users).

It's the kind of idea that software company managers with no experience writing actual code come up with, announce at annual employee meetings, and which gets quietly buried by the worker bees within three months in order to keep the process working.

(There, I said it. Sorry, the programmer in me had to gripe for a minute. )

Edit: Two separate content teams -- design, art, dialogue, etc. -- that I'll buy. But not development.

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Is the plan to make CoH a "finished" game, because that's not what I expected from an MMO.

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Ok, this is the sort of conversation thread that is going to cause the devs to roll their eyes at us.

CoH isn't "finished", and the devs have no illusions that it is. CoV did need the lion's share of attention in I7, for all the reasons stated multiple times by various people in this thread.

Once and for all, just to make myself 100% clear... I'm not walking away from the game (I did, once, for six months, for better reasons). I'm not going to bash the devs for their decisions about what and when to release (especially since I know how the software business works, well enough to know that some of these decisions were likely made by people higher up the food chain). I'm not going to call Jack a "tard".

What I am going to do -- what I'd expect users of the code I write at my job to do -- is to make it clear what is and isn't working for me, in terms of gameplay, communication, and release schedules.

I greatly enjoy CoH, and I will continue to enjoy it even if there isn't a true PvE content update for the hero side until November. But I'd enjoy it a lot more if Cryptic/NCSoft could find a way to "soften the blow" of the (justifiably) disproportionate attention that CoV is receiving right now.

Jack himself said that there were CoH-specific pieces considered for I7 release... so, fine. Throw the heroes a (small) bone, one that won't disrupt I7 and I8 schedules too much. Pick one nifty piece of CoH functionality that's close to release, isn't mired hip-deep in balance issues, and can be easily "broken off" from the rest of the I8 development (and QA) effort. Then, bend the unwritten rule that content updates get saved for updates, and work that chunk into a patch when it's finished... preferably, no more than a month or so after I7 goes live.

There. Done.

That's all I'm asking for right now, the rest can wait. Is that such an unreasonable request? I don't think it falls under the heading of "Issue Hysteria".

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#3) Make Hazard Zone versions of Warburg, Bloody Bay and Sirens Call with the PVP element/Zonewide game removed, but the missions intact so people who don't like to PVP can access that content without risking PVP.

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Best idea I've heard in months.

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And STILL no word on Flight speed / Hover speed buffs and sound loop issues.

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In defense of the devs (hey, did I just say that? )... this doesn't bother me. Partly because we've already gotten confirmation that the sound bug is being worked on (even if I can't find the post right now), and partly because those are the sorts of bug fixes and QoL improvements that Cryptic has always been willilng to release in patches between issues.

Content is another matter. That's generally been exclusively released in Issues, and I'd like to see an exception made this time around, since the "distraction" of releasing and "catching up" a second game strikes me as an exceptional circumstance.

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I agree with you about PDP, but I am still not convinced there won't be something to do there come i7...

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Neither am I -- although it's the sort of thing I'd have expected to see listed in the I7 preview, if it were happening. It's new, it's colorful (great imagery for press releases), and it's looking like cooperative hero-villain play, which would be a big new feature worthy of notable marketing.

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the 'newspaper tech', or whatever it's going to turn into for CoH, I could see that being added mid-issue...

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I could also see it happening -- that's why I brought it up. I'd just like to know if the devs could also see it happening before I get my hopes up (again).

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well, they appear to be adding the new PDP (Pocket D) mid issue (granted that's both games), so there is hope that other changes would be made the same way...

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This is true -- but, that said, Pocket D's actual story content (missions from DJ Zero, and whatever else is planned) hasn't been released yet. So I can't quite bring myself to call it new story content, for the moment.

Honestly, I expected and accepted that I7 would be massively tilted towards CoV. Even as a non-PvPer and someone who much prefers hero-side play, I was OK with that. But I was hoping for something more like an 80/20 split than the 95/5 that this has turned out to be.

I'm not asking for much... and I'm not being unrealistically impatient. As a software developer myself, I understand perfectly the occasional need to cut features to get a release out on time. But, could we hero-types at least get a small "point release" once the CoH additions originally planned for inclusion in I7 are ready, so we're not staring down the barrel of a full 3+ month (plus time to I7 release) Issue development cycle?

Heck, just tell me that whatever Newspaper-ish system Statesman has in mind for CoH will see release in advance of the next issue, and it'll be enough to placate me for a few months. And maybe one new (borrowed or otherwise) powerset, just so Miss Kitty doesn't revert to a feral state and claw some poor red-name to death.

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I had the option of releasing I7 or waiting until we could fill out the City of Heroes content. Obviously, I chose the former. New content should get out there when it’s ready.

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Should I take this to mean that the CoH content (not QoL fixes or graphics/costume improvements, actual story content) currently under development now will not see the light of day until I8? Or does "when it’s ready" literally mean that the hero-side content originally considered for I7 would be released immediately upon completion, as part of a patch release between I7 and I8?

If the latter, I'll feel significantly less disappointed by I7. It's not that I need more CoH content NOW NOW NOW (want, yes; need, no). It's the thought of the looooooong wait for I8 that's getting me down at the moment.

On the subject of in-zone cues that a fire is in progress... We already have Police Drones that spit out random police-band radio chatter. How about changing that chatter to something indicative of an arson in progress (or a Troll rave in progress) whenever one is occurring (or about to occur)?

Since there are Police Drones at all of the tram stations, this would be a simple way to check for "major crimes" in an area when you first arrive.