rian_frostdrake

so in short, he wasnt sufficiently down on his own work for you, so we go with overblown hyperbole to distort their message. gotcha.

oh and also that would have made one boring as (self-censored) interview, do you prefer sodium pentathol styled interviews normally?

oh and final edit. i notice your quote removes the second paragraph, it helps to show the scope of his answer where he mentions significant changes for kheld players, invuln players, and ea players and toggle changes...that expands things a bit more accurately.

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2. Claiming that Shields and Pain Dom are 'for everyone'


[/ QUOTE ]quote this claim from the article. From my reading, it says that shields was added to halp players complete character concepts(unstated was the poll from long ago that said the community wanted shields) and that pain was a response to player requests for villain requests for a villianous variation of the empathy powerset. Both statements are true, shields does address player requests to complete a theme, both for sword based characters and for cap america style characters, and pain is a response to vill players requests for an empathy varient for redside. please quote where it claims that shields or pain dom are "for everyone" as you claim

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Hi. Maybe you weren't aware, but this info isn't exactly published for us, it's published in an attempt to entice past and future players to the game. It's a given that we, who play the game and read the forums, would know about it. That's like an astronaut saying that space is boring. It's a POV thing.

[/ QUOTE ]mr. bowie is right. This info is for general mmo players, we are unlikely to gain significant knowledge from these, and we never have. the badge thing is nice for me though, im hoping for inventions and holiday to get their own tabs, invention bars just bloat the ui to unuseability.

well, no priest or fire fighter, so boo for that, but overall its a pretty robust system, anda clever answer to you know who's simple rested exp. plus the accolade powers are interesting.

1. i can haz gyro?/how bout a hug?/ three minutes later, jim davis sued his butt off.

2. the hazards of manscapeing./jack of irons, the bris.

3. erin e-surance, the dark years.

4. in texas, this would be a wedding proposal.

well, rian's backstory is that hes a priest, so we need a church to logoff by.

I want to see what happened in dark astoria, what the sleeper is, and what other plans the ban pans have to try to get it to wake up. also maybe save some of the souls? that would mke for a great tf, rescuing 100 souls from dark astoria.

and, as always i want to find out whats with merluna. maybe we need to sink down to an underwater realm and find out? we'd need some costume bits, custom weapons, and new powers, wouldnt we? :P

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Actually, they don't say issue 13 will be the last issue. They just say it'll be the last issue THIS YEAR, which, with only 5 months left in the year, isn't all that unlikely unless things progress really, really smoothly with i13 and i14...

[/ QUOTE ]This is just an announcement to point out that we have made no official statements regarding the timeline or release of our Free Issues. And that the articles have perhaps misinterpreted what was stated.

[/ QUOTE ]Fair enough. Please be aware that many of us have expectations based on previously made actual official statements. Namely that we should expect 3 issues per year. If that is to change we would appreciate an official annoucment of such, and sooner rather than later would be admirable.

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I think when we say 3 issues per year, what we really mean is 12 months/3...as in an issue every 4 months. We're not really paying much attention to where things fall in the calender year, just how much time passes between issues. That's the goal at least.

Are we hitting that goal? At this particular moment, not really. Chalk that up to forming a new company, moving into a new studio, and hiring/training a lot of new people. When you go from being a very tight-knit team of 15 people rapidly churning out issues and snatching up all of the low hanging fruit we can get our hands on to a much larger studio working on very large systems and the type of content that takes the longest to develop...things tend to slow down a bit.

I don't think we're that far behind though. If you look at the amount of things added to the game since the beginning of the year rather than just counting the issue numbers between January 1st and today, there's actually a good chunk of content that you guys have gotten without any additional costs. Probably close to 1 1/2 to 2 issues of content already. There was the mid-issue update for 11 and Issue 12, while not a great deal of new long-term content, was in reality quite a bit of work. We kind of went into I12 thinking it was going to be a smaller issue, but when everything was said and done and we looked back on everything we'd put in there, we realized how much work had really gone into it.

Having more people on the team is kind of a double-edged sword. We've found ourselves setting out to do things that we would have never considered before because we simply didn't have the people to do it. Now that we do, we're really reaching for some pretty high hanging fruit. Player created missions is only one of the things you guys have heard about...but there are some other big things also being worked on as well. Things that haven't been announced yet.

Chew on that for a while. We've announced player created missions. What do you think we might be working on that we didn't feel comfortable announcing yet?



All in all, I feel like we're starting to hit our stride, and we're still looking to expand the team even more to further increase our capacities...bear with us. I assure you, it's just as frustrating for us to have these long spans without new shiny content to keep you guys happily playing the game, but we really are doing the best we can.

[/ QUOTE ]Ok babs, glad you responded, while my freakout was in the other thread, that answered a lot of my questions asked there. And i understand to a degree how hard it is to do this on budget and thank you guys for your commitment, and for the forthcoming anture of the devs who post here, it makes a (no pun intended) massive difference in how players feel to get these kind of breakdowns of whats up. This is my 4th mmo i have played, and if the other devs had been this forthcoming, and had let the players know the reality of the situation like you guys do, i wouldnt have left the other 3. lucky for me i guess that the right game had the right dev team

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not bad really, one of my biggest worries is that they are going to stick an amazing reward up in the insanely high badges like these, and its going to be really unfair to anyone who is just buying the game now(i'll get it, of course :P ) so this is actually fair, though at 54 i am going to have one butt kicking level 1 attack chain.

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and thats why they are recycling powers instead of making something super awesome that could potentially upset game balance. Fairness.

[/ QUOTE ]no, its because that super awesome thing would be so laughably far out of any new players hands that it would be more demoralizing than motivating. If you have something that super awesome, keep it out of the vet rewards and give it to everyone.

not bad really, one of my biggest worries is that they are going to stick an amazing reward up in the insanely high badges like these, and its going to be really unfair to anyone who is just buying the game now(i'll get it, of course :P ) so this is actually fair, though at 54 i am going to have one butt kicking level 1 attack chain.

where can it go? the sengoku period in japan, the three kingdoms in china, in amerca, pre european colonization, to see coyote, fox and bear, the mahabhrata legends of india, any case of larger than life entities who could be ancient heroes. heck, even the original battle between mu and ornabega.

kind of funny reading this, remembering when cops just ran away screaming, rather than threw on hardsuits/zapped them with psi powers/zapped em with alien symbiote powers/just capped their butts.

this is cool and all, but really,do you want to start setting absolute dates? really? you are inviting the evil gnomes of game-stopping bugs to screw with you here, guys.

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I am glad I am not the only one that has altitis to this extent. Most of mine though are under level 20 though. I love the poses and costume variety. There are several I may steal a thought on

[/ QUOTE ]this, which is very good by the way, is pretty mild for the hardcore alters, a number of posters maintain multiple accounts just to store more alts. I consider myself a lightweight alter and have 30+ alts.

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For those who go down the Wolf Spider route, they have the choice between Crab Spider and Bane Spider at level 24. "This is the first archetype that we've designed that halfway through their career they get to choose what path they're going to go down," Grubb told us. The Crab Spiders have some pet and stealth tools to go with their melee arsenal, while the Bane Spider takes the warrior thing to an even further degree.

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That has got to be backwards. Right?

[/ QUOTE ]yeah based on the video, thats a backwards, we saw that banes summon backup and hit from stealth(as most of us find out in grandville a little too often).

woah, branching dialogue??? i just got happy, like partrige family happy. that was something i have begged for for a long while. the forum censors will not allow me to say how happy this makes me. maybe we will see this implemented with weston phipps and hardcase? so ethical villians can tell weston to stuff it, and real nasties can work against hardcase?

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Last time I checked, though, Blasters were at the rock bottom of performance, which is why they needed the Defiance changes. What happened to make them kings of the world that I missed? Surely it cannot have been the Defiance changes just by themselves. They weren't making my Blasters any more survivable than my Scrappers last time I checked.

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Survivability is in the eye of the beholder anyway. My Blaster survived VERY well without Defiance 2.0. I remember the Stalkers' defense being quite right in "Blasters need to learn to play." 'cause it applied to me.

My scrappers barely do any damage when compared to blasters, we're talking like... with the same buffs and everything, a good 200 damage less on an attack chain. Factor in that I rolled EM, so I have access to two excellent melee attacks in Bonesmasher and Total Focus...

Excuse for "damage is less" is that they can't be mezzed as easily. Which is true. It's still pretty sad to find out that, the undisputed "king" of melee damage Hero-side gets outdamaged by Blasters who pick EM.

Kinda understand why I feel gimped whenever I play my Scrappers now, and probably why I've pretty much given up on bothering to IO out my MA. Especially since I primarily play in teams, where a Tanker would take damage better than I would, and a Blaster outdamages me like hell.

[/ QUOTE ]well, the response is that your blaster ties up the buffer more to keep him/her unmezzed particularl in the end game witha lot of aoe mezzes, and your tank, unless its a very specific build, is not going to do anywhere close to the damage of a scrapper. the deal is that the scrapper will solo better than both of them, but individually they will contribute more to a team, and thats really how it shoudl be. a tnakers job is survivability and aggro management, and a blasters job is pure damage, a scrapper is mostly a solo specialist but has both survivability and damage. and yes hatman, em is a broken powerset, its broken on blasters, broken on stalkers, broken on brutes, it offers way too much single target with too good of a secondary effect with too little sacrifice, comparing anythign to em is going to hurt becaue its a stupidly overpowered power. bottom line is your blaster may be outdamaging scrappers in melee, but once a few rikti mentalists pop out, or carnie master illusionists you either have a tray of breakfrees, or you are down to only 3 useable powers for the majority of the fight. whereas the scrapper is almost totally unaffected and still fighting.

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Forgive me if this has been asked, since there are like 12 pages of posts already.

When we got the 2 free slots to start, is that 2 slots per server? or two slots for us to place on a server of choice?

Same thing for the vet reward slots and the purchased slots. If I purchase 5 slots , will that be 5 slots each or just 5 slots that I can assign to what ever server I want?

Also, is there going to be any way to move slots from one server to another? I mean, since I never play on pinnacle, and those slots go unused ,could I transfer all those to Virtue?

[/ QUOTE ]you pick the server, and add the slot to it, so only one free slot, not one on every server, that would be 12 free slots in that case. and no transfering unused slots from other servers. max is 36 slots per server.

nice, so i got 5 extra slots, great news!

yeah ma scrappers were bad around issue 1, i stuck it out on pure stubbornness.

final fantasy XI is still around and maintains a large population, if i recall correctly, care to be deleveled, thus having all your armor and weapons suddenly unuseable?

wow also has degradation of equipment, which can be fairly expensive, or time consuming corpse runs that are vulnerable on pvp shards to corpse camping.

also from what i understand death in eve online can be significantly punishing.

eq2 had pretty wimpy debt penalties, though when i played they did have the some what annoying aspect that you could get debt from a teammate dying.

id say coh's exp debt is fairly mild by comparison, particularly since it has been reduced at least twice.

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During the first month or so after Release, I sent an eMail to Statesman, and outlined everything that I saw as a potential problems with the game. He graciously and politely wrote back to me. He seemed to understand what I was saying and encouraged me to hang in there until they got all the kinks worked out. A lot of the problems I noticed have been addressed: The insane leveling curve, the overly-zealous Debt mechanics, the lack Enhancements that don't decay with levels, the complete uselessness of Scrappers, and so forth. However, there are still big, huge problems that are keeping the average gamer away- the biggest being the entire Bridging/Doorsitting/PLing nonsense. Normal gamers won't play a game with those issues. But instead of fixing it, as it should have been fixed on Day One, the Devs ignore it.

So, I guess the bottom line is this: If the game exists to cater to a relatively tiny core of hardcore fans, then congrats, mission accomplished. If, however, it's a business venture that actually wants to grow and expand, then the Devs absolutely MUST throw off the Fanboy Yolk, and start paying attention to what the market wants, and not just what the loudest, most obsessional fans want.

[/ QUOTE ]hmm i think you are confusing devoted fans for fanboys, there is a strong seperation between the two, and while coh may or may not have actual fanboys, our retention rates are anomolous enough in to be mentioned by the former lead dev, and our churn rate does seem to be lower than most mmos, even those with significantly higher subscription numbers.

But as to wether fans have ever improved a game, well, you just need to look at the past few issues, particularly issue 11, the devs have been very responsive to the fanbase and have tailored the game to include things that either they have found out through polls, like dual blades, or through just reading the forums and caring, like oroboboros flashbacks, weapon customization, and the exp leveling that you just mentioned, and that has made the players happy. The use of the term fanboy is one that i find incredibly irksome because it polarizes the discussion needlessly and sets people in ideological camps that just makes it harder for them to relate witht he points made by people who may disagree with them in parts and agree in others.

and as for pling, honestly every game on the market has to deal with pling, its a part of the genre. measures have been made repetedly to curb pling,and classic pling from launch is gone. but you cant fully excise it without making some seriously draconian affects on legitimate play, and most of the fanbase agrees that its easier to just use your ignore list in peregrine islands and let the plers pl themselves where it dosen't affect us than to take harsh measures agaisnt legitimate teaming and ruin everyones game.

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Well I haven't seen this suggested yet. How about try a lil...

NINJA COWBOY!

The best of both the East and West worlds!

[/ QUOTE ]urge to post link to "rizing zan" opening theme rising.

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Just goes to show you.. It's not the size of the team on the field, but how they play the game (in this case, that of development) that really produces quality.

Heck. I still like this game better then my other main game. <.<

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Agreed. I recently quit EQ2 (with no hate, just 4 years in one game), but I'm still able to get really excited about CoH. That's amazing at this point in its lifecycle.

lolchampionsonline

[/ QUOTE ]you quit eq2? im surprised, i remember you being a really vocal booster of it. im looking at maybe switching out myself to there for a month or 2. ill still be here, but just feeling some burnout, so might chill a bit till i12 hits.

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BAB was leading probably only one or two people in looking after animations (he'd need someone else to hold the camera while he swung his sword around - bow wow chicka chicka bow wow! ;-), SexyJay probably had costume design all to himself or as part of a small art team (two or three people).

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I've actually been the sole animator and FX artist since Issue 8. So glad to say that's no longer the case XD

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So who filmed you with the taped sticks? :P

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Tripod.

[/ QUOTE ]i did no such thing.