rian_frostdrake

done earlier in thread :P

you are comparing apples to oranges. each of those changes was either a part of a greater change set up by developers or the focus of an entire issue. we are talking about something that you personally going through content would trigger, we have no evidence about that. Full dynamic content is something i certainly would not say no to, but you drastically downplay how much work it woudl really take. MA are entirely consequence free, heck, you cant even set contacts or missions out of the limited area, having real dynamic content would be a great deal more than that. I would love it myself, but the years have made me a pragmatist.

The problem with evil winning in an mmo is that you can never really change the world in an mmo. you can fake it by having bad guys blow up a base that you never see, or robbong a bank that does nothing to your actual ingame buying power, but unfortunatly the villains have an inherent problem that they cant ever really do anything. Thats one reason people who have a hard time with the vivacious verandi arc get angry, the villain is forced to take an act by a guy who doesnt seem to be able to bring about that force, but if the carnies would succeed it would change the game world, so you have a rock and hard place there.

heroside its different because heroes usually react, and thus the status quo can mean you won. Now this doenst always hold true, croatoa you may still be attacked by witchs even after you supposedly helped them, and the rwz is an equal oppertunity offender in that you seemingly resolve the rikti issue..but there still are a metric buttload of them still gunning for you in the rwz. But with redside the issue is You cant beat and enslave bat zul because then the cap zone would have to change because you removed its power source. you cant raise the leviathan because that would mess up the sharkhead zone. You cant ever really beat the freedom phlanx or vindicators because they have to be alive and free to fight you in other content, you cant even blow up parts of paragon for the same reason, its gotta be there for future stuff. And finally you cant overthrow recluse in this world because yet again, that would change the game world, so no taking over even. you cant ever really meaningfully change the world in this or even most current gen mmos, so villains have a problem.

now you can have little victories, dire worg has raided paragon more times than i can count, and he got the cash, raised auto insurance rates for all, and did some nefarious deeds while there, and in some missions i have made little victories over the good guys, but villains just have a problem being represented in games beyond violent thugs and patsies, because it is difficult and at times impossible to make a workable game mechanic around breaking the laws.

cant really disagree with any of that. I have heard some talk that fire on a defender would be unimpressive since defenders rely more on their secondary effects of their blasts..and fire really doesnt have a secondary effect other than damage that still wouldnt add up to much, but i havent really looked too much into it. beyond that, yeah, nothing too bad.

as a guy who plays a martial arts scrapper, i say hell no. It was the only time the manga contingent of this game got any real love outside of the "anime" tech sleek armor, whose anime designation is doubtful.

I made this joke when the info went live, update yaself son oh, and http://unspacy.com/discus/messages/1051/9080.jpg

i play both, but for reasons, i just dont like playing a villain, never have, once gr hits all my vills are getting their alignment setting as blue as you can without switching. That siad, i agree entirely that redside benefitted from coming out after 2 years of experience gained from when blueside hit. The tf's are better, the zones are tighter and generally require less pointless zoning, hidden contacts are a interesting bonus and the writing can be brilliant, and mayhems are a lot of fun.

you can tell a stark contrast between launch day blueside content and striga, cro, faultline and the like, they are what blueside would have been if coh had launched with the lessons learned from the start. but hey, we can play both so do what you enjoy, i do love a lot of the redside at's, and while few others appear to, i love doms.

nothing ruins a good idea like actually doing it :P

hmm..i do miss dr zues, i kind of miss miss kitty, for her avatars if nothing else. and i ..eh dont remember much else, i dont particularly miss my old "buddy" spudlover, he was a malcontent of a higher calibur than the current crowd.

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I was hoping for a longer commentary on the thread as a whole

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Only one thing comes to mind.

[/ QUOTE ]late to the party, but id say that arcana has me pegged with this one.

no servers were merged, nor were any closed, i should know, i tend to play on the least popular ones. and guy, if you want to come back, the best advice is, give it a shot for a month. If you left around the launch of cov, then there is quite a lot new for you to see, and then you can decide if its right for you. one thing you will notice, if you played a blaster or a stalker, is that they play a little differently now, blasters no longer have the version of defiance they once had, but they now can attack with their lower tier attacks while mezzed and build a damage bonus by attacking from range. stalkers as well have a quite a lot of benefits and play far better than you may remember, particularly in teams. doms got one buff, where they get mez protection while in domination, as well as a bonus to domination building in groups, but they are going to be getting another look through, so if you have one, it may get stronger.

so im assuming keetsie bertel is the new character artist jay mentioned a while ago.

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given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.

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I agree. My missions have filler - boss spawns that have dialog, destructible objects for extra dialog and flavor, that sort of thing. I have not yet been able to come up with a mission that has real flow to it.

I've seen a few and they were sometimes great and sometimes not (re-searching a map for a new glowie that appears after you defeat the boss at the end is annoying).

I do seriously wonder though if people want complex missions. I play CoX over other games because the combat is so much better - but I get bored soloing through a mission if it is just standard spawns. I rarely get bored on a large team doing combat - so much more is going on.

If I just teamed - I would just want missions to have diverse maps and enemies. When I team I don't care about the story - the combat is good enough. And doing a complex mission with a team is more of a pain (click 3 blinkies simultaneously sort of thing).

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This pretty much sums up how I feel about CoX in general. Just about all missions are simple grinds. It's great for teams because it makes grinding fun. In fact, sometimes there isn't enough chaos. But solo, or even duo, it's boring. Sure I'll do a new arc solo once, but other then that it's what is the fastest way to move to the next mish.

[/ QUOTE ]yeah, but thats the issue of mmo's in general, latency, inability to meaningfully affect the game world, team dynamics, enforced slow leveling for non farm non insane players, and general entrenched design ideas make all of them become a grind. you either cope, or abandon the genre, because thats not going away.

now dont get me wrong, i WANT things to get better, but lets face it, we have played this game how many hours? Even my absolute favorite games, like the original legend of zelda or morrowind dont approach one tenth the hours i have put in this game, so its no surprise, you just cant keep things fresh when you are playing for over a thousand hours. Chase and i have had long, insomnia curing discussions on how to combat grind and reshape mmo design, and almost any idea that we have come up with that would remove grind would also change design quite a lot, and with "world of entrenched gaming conventions" currently reminding publishers that change is bad, good luck getting something ground breaking out there.

given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.

mod 8 is coming to work with a chainsaw tomorrow.

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I see

[/ QUOTE ]Its surprising that 4-5 people at most could do that much damage

badging, itf, stf/lrsf, running lower level task forces with much higher powerlevels than the people who are naturally that level, recluses victory, mothership runs, exemping and getting total newbies into the game(nothing like running exemped to 4 or 5 but with purples), making fun of camo on lbx, and now ae stuff.

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We need more sarcasm STAT!

[/ QUOTE ]yeah that is totally what we need.




better?

no idea, hopefully within a few weeks.

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/stupidity

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Now if only the devs would do this... sadly, my "joke post", made to seem utterly ridiculous, is how they've handled things this past week.

[/ QUOTE ]except they haven't, its a purposely inaccurate straw man for a much more serious case and you know it.

they just didnt take off. and the economy in general is not in a forgiving mood. It is sad, if bigger name gaming, comics, and movies had been able to advertise here, i think they would have reached a receptive market. I mean really, an athletics shoe and a niche-market skateboarding customized gadget? in a game with no skateboards even? they never quite struck me as a good fit, but most likely they were a victim of the larger economy and the idea just not bringing in enough sales to justify the cash.

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Didn't Posi say that the were not going to revamp the Shards? Something about putting the effort into new zones.

[/ QUOTE ]Well, to be accurate, he was asked if they were going to be revamping new zones, and his response was we would rather make new zones. Now that is not a great answer for the shard revamp fans, like myself, but it doesnt explicitly rule it out.

On a personal level i dont like having a huge number of zones when the playerbase is not that dense that we can get all of them having a healthy player mass, and some of the old zones are really just coat hangers at this point. So my PERSONAL feel is that revamping what we have would be better serving the community than building add ons to be neglected in the future for other new shineys. I mean when faultline was revamped, it may as well have become a new zone, it salvaged a zone that was generally unused and it used an area that already had reasonable connections and space on the map, it just made it usable, and it was an amazing success. now the shard is a good zone already, and the backstory is really a great setup for a story, so the zone could be absolutely freaking amazing with a warwitch style revamp, same with dark astoria and boomtown and crey's folley, and even eden, which tends to be avoided outside of the task force, and lets make abyss/monster island a little more distinct, I mean its freaking monster island, that's godzilla style territory, and all we get are scaled up devouring earth monsters? all of this before we start building another floor of zones

. so lets say i am very on your side of the issue. add more zones when all the zones count.

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The metaphorical boy has cried "wolf!" 1000 times too many about this tempest in a teapot; it goes in one ear and out the other now.


[/ QUOTE ]the metaphore police would like a word with you about unauthorized blender operation.

as for my take, i had hoped it would come by now, but right now ma and go-ro, which were probably not being heavily planned back when paragon was cryptic's unloved step-children, are tiding me over nicely. So while i would love to know what the end of this little game of xanatos lazer-tag turns out to be, i cant say that i'm dissapointed with what has come in its stead. latest word is that they are a ways off, im guessing that the infusion of ncsoft cash and new hires may have shaken up the release schedual some, so I am not too scared...but there better be frikkin dinosaurs when its all done.

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WITHOUT getting into a discussion of the pros and cons of each style, I'm interested in how many different playstyles are distinct enough to have their own names.

I'm aware of:

Farmer

Powerleveler/PLer

Roleplayer/RPer

PvPer

Badger

(Ebil) Marketeer

Any others?



(Casual vs. Hardcore is more an expression of attitude towards the game than a specific playstyle.)

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My only issue with your list is farmer = powerleveler.

Farming for XP .....

[/ QUOTE ]not all though. some farm for money or some form of currency for io's, so both types exist and should be counted.

I noticed a "teamer" but id add the pugger. Whereas a teamer focuses on long term relationships with other players to make well coordinated teams, a pugger thrives in the protean nature of randomly grouping with strangers with no regard for team makeup or reputation. Puggers have all the debt badges, but you also gain learn some impressive adaption skills when your team is thrown together by random chance, and you meet some interesting people by pure chance.