Offline SG Members in Bases!

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I think this would pose a major programming nightmare, yet it would be an extremely cool feature. I'd vote yes if the technical hurdles could be overcome.

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Agreed. This would clearly take a lot of work. To me, it is justified.

Think about it (and I'm not trying to point out the obvious to you, Chiyo_Mihama, I'm talking to the devs ): what is one of the greatest features of COH, something that everyone everywhere agrees that COH does better than any other game? The costume creator, right? COH characters just look great and they allow people to fulfill their conceptions to a HUGE degree. A Supergroup is like a brilliantly tailored single hero, but bigger. I want to see all the gorgeous characters that I've made and that my friends have made, all the time. When I'm at the headquarters, it only makes SENSE that many of the inactive (offline) heroes will be hanging out there. Yes, there could be minions or servants or whatever to try to lend an air of life to an empty (of online players) HQ. But it would seem weird to me to be watching the Super Friends and see Superman come to the Hall of Justice after stopping a meteor or whatever and have NO OTHER HEROES THERE. Or for Cyclops to come to the X-Men headquarters and have NONE OF THE OTHER X-MEN THERE, not even Professor Xavier. Avengers Mansion, well, OK, the Avengers are always off doing their own weird things. But 2 out of 3 ain't bad.

I guess my point is that for a game whose strongest point is how great and unique all the characters look, it is madness not to showcase those characters as much as possible.

Just LOVE the idea! Would be so frickin awesome! /signed

How about this take on the idea,

Have another state in the SG membership, along with Captains/Leaders, etc.

Guardians: Only 10 members of an SG can be designated Guardians, and when the player is offline (or playing an alt) these Characters appear in the base. Doing every day tasks and defending the base if required. (Gets round the technical aspects by limiting the amount that can be spawned).

This can raise another level of play in raiding. Finding out who in the SG are their Guardians, and finding some way of getting them online and out of the base (To make it easier to raid).

This is the essence of the "Living breathing base" but muted somewhat to deal with technical aspects.

Egor.

I think this is a great idea. So, what is the simplest possible way to implement it? Right now, if you walk away from the keyboard, your character will eventually turn AFK and then, after 15 minutes I think it is, vanish. How about this: if you log out while in your superbase, your character stays in there, effectively AFK, until you log back in? Just like being AFK, if you are doing an emote, then you keep doing the emote while you are away.

Problem: Base raids. Solution: many have been suggested. I think the easiest might be to have AFK characters vanish when the base is raided, or else give them the invulnerability that an NPC would have, but whatever. I think this is a surmountable obstacle.

Motive: This isn't just a fun, silly, idea. I think it's really important and here's why. In SWG, you can have player housing and even player cities. Of course, even hard core players are logged out more than they are logged in, and most people don't spend more than a few hours a day logged in. The result is that every city, even the biggest, busiest, most vital ones, look and feel like ghost towns. It is depressing and demoralizing. Superbases could turn out the same way, which would be sad.

This idea is absolutely golden. But I must request one thing.

When I say, "You have spent 688 hours in Paragon City" to my SG-mates, I demand that my text bubble be my selected text color!

I love, love, love this idea. I don't think it would be a terribly hard feature to code. It would be more like swapping NPC models with hero models. If an interface is set up that lets each SG member pick maybe three different things they'd like their character to do while offline that would also be great. Say the tech guy in your group is running the city wide monitor, fixing a computer terminal, or at a workbench tinkering away. Anytime he switches positions, maybe every thirty minutes or so, you'd actually see him walk from one to the other.

It doesn't even have to be that complicated, though. Just having heroes walking through the halls or doing random things would be awesome and add a LOT to the base not feeling empty.

I don't think we'll see this when CoV launches but I hope to god we see it soon.

I personally think the idea of offline SG members being a graphic within a supergroup's base of operations would rock! Regardless of what it takes or naysayers, it would definately add to the ambience of the whole situation...

I agree with Lord Recluse: servants/staff/technicians/acolytes etc. would be great.

Trying to code offline behaviour for a PLAYER character = taboo no-no for a gaming company if you ask me. My characters are mine to direct, and no one else's!

I think better than offline SG members (which would be awesome but don't think would be workable) would be like someone said have servants, butlers, maids, etc.. Afterall what is Dr. Frankenstein without Igor, what is Dracula without Renfield...I doubt whatever citizens in the Rouge Isles would give up the info like the COH npcs do about time played and such, so why not have whatever servants you have in your lair tell you, that way they give your base a 'not-empty' feel and give you that small info...two birds with one stone...

NPC versions of your heroes comming and going in your base would be a cool idea. It'd also be cool from an RPing stand point to be able to interact between your different characters in base like this. A interface that lets you put words in the second character's mouth, or do animations/move to spots in base would be just all too cool. I could picture Maileah and her adopted dragonling arguing back and forth over the TV, or messing around in the lab.

As for your base being raided, when the raids happen (ie the daily time thing), all the NPC people could be cleared out before the raid starts. This is why we have raid times and such .

It'd be a hard thing to code in, and would mostly be eye candy, but it would be a very cool addition to the imersion factor in CoH and CoV.

I like the idea of servants/minions as well, but face it, that is more of a villain thing. Heroes don't have 400 agents in identical jumpsuits in their bases; their employees, if any, are always personalized, have names, personalities, etc. This is a BASIC difference between good guys and bad guys; individual lives are important to good guys, but bad guys' underlings are faceless, interchangable, disposable.

I have no problem for generic servants for villains, but I still think that hero bases will need the color and splash of diverse hero costumes to really get the authentic feel. You can only have so many butlers before they lose their identities. One or two would be fine, even great, but then you have the empty base problem again.

This is a long dead issue for the devs. I'm glad Recluse responded (months and months and months ago), but sadly it was a pretty shallow response that he never followed up on despite LOTS of good ideas from the player base to make it work. Really, it is a totally cosmetic thing, and I understand that making gameplay work is more important than making the game look good. But without this idea being looked at and satisfactorily resolved, HQs will never be as awesome as they could be.

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The problem with off-line characters being present in the base is what happens if the base is raided (by players or possibly PvE, who knows)? Do you really want to come back on and find out your hero was defeated while you were away?

Servants on the other hand is an interesting idea.

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I loved the idea of having SG members in NPC form hanging around the base before bases were even in Beta. Now that I know how the building portion of it works, I wonder how we could fenagle in having our crew stand around all day... I mean, where do they go if someone starts editing the base?

And, as the Lord of things Reclusive has pointed out, what to do with them when enemy SG's come a-knockin'?

I had an idea for this back then that would work in both of these situations.

Make them leave. Have them say any number of things from "I need to man the outer perimeter" or "Let me get on out of the way, I'm not ready". But then they do the NPC vanish.

As far as my ideas for this particular feature, I'd really like to see a personal preference section in the SG menus somewhere, so you can set if you'd like to recline on any available furniture, or if you'd be near an entertainment piece, or if you'd be near one of the control panels pressing buttons. Something simple, yet effective.