Issue 7: New Base Features!

These buffs going to carry into arena matches? Logic dictates 'no', but then again that seems like a 'special time of need' when they'd really matter.

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These buffs going to carry into arena matches? Logic dictates 'no', but then again that seems like a 'special time of need' when they'd really matter.

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That's what I was wondering, can you wear them into PvP?

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But, better to start at "too weak" and buff as needed, rather than "too strong" and nerf it, right?

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Bingo.


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So, based on your guys time frame with letting Trick Arrow be an at best mediocre power set for months on end now, we can expect the empowerement buffs to be useful sometime in 2007?

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Positron has said, over and over, that these additions are going to be for small SGs. It's just ludicrous to come up with something like 'so the station is cheap but OMG what if you have to buy a big room to put it in!!!! Then small SGs won't be able to afford it!!!!'

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I'm kind of surprised at this attitude.

It's entirely possible for a design to fail in implementation, and this is one of the potential failures we might see show up in play. If the empowerment stations are really only useful if you have minimal travel time (ie, a fully set up base w/ telepads), then it's entirely on topic to wonder if maybe they're not really such a big buff for small SGs after all. That's before you even get into the question of fitting everything on the basic plot.

Also, if you're trying for the "ad hominem" route, you should replace !!!! with !!!1eleventyone!!. It gets across what you're aiming for much more effectively.

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But, better to start at "too weak" and buff as needed, rather than "too strong" and nerf it, right?

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Bingo.

Making the buffs be Inspiration or Click-power like is just ASKING for abuse. Besides, that's the type of stuff the Invention System should deal with.

Empowerment stations are instant buffs. You are bathed in radiation/magic/etc. on the spot and get a bonus to your travel speed/lethal resistance/attack speed/endurance recovery/knockback protection/whatever you need at the time, right then and there.

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Uhh... abused how?

You mean PvP huh?

*grumbles at PVP screwing up CoH/V in so many places*

Ever think how much trouble you could save people if you just said "screw PvP, it can't be balanced if we want to keep adding fun things to the game"

Look at stalkers. Neat idea for a class, fun to play PvE, yet totally broken beyond all fairness in PvP. Who friggin cares about balance there when there are stalkers killing half the players in the game in one hit? Do you think a buff from a SG base is really going to change that? If anything it might make the cont/def/blaster/mm/dom NOT get one shotted(or two shot with I7 whoopdeedoo), and that would be a good thing right?

Is abuse of a power buying it, then getting on a group, then using it at a tough spot? That doesn't seem like abuse to me, that seems like a temp power.

If there's another way to 'abuse' a temporary power I'd like to know what you're talking about, since I doubt this means anything apart from PvP.


What the heck can be so amazingly broken about choosing when to use your boost that you paid for, rather than run and load and pray you have 3 minutes left when you get back to the fight... that is if the team really feels like waiting for you to trek to your base and back.

Man I thought this idea was going to be great.... Now I'm probably not going to use it at all, plus I get to cringe every time I have to put 5-10 more minutes delay in a game where teams sit around and do nothing for about half the time they are together anyway. I can see it now:

*group waiting outside mish*
guy #1: im almost there sorry, i need to go to every store to get the most money(another fun thing devs put in to waste our time)
guy #2: ok, ill sell too then i guess even though i only have 2 enh
guys #3-5: dang we have to wait more? ah well.
*5 minutes later, boss kicks parties butt*
guy #3: Ok this guy too hard, must get SG buff
guy #4: yeah me too brb
*10 minutes later, they get back, party is half asleep, but the battle is won finally... 4 mobs later the buffs are gone, another boss shows up*
Guy #2: oh no another boss, guys go get your sg buffs
guys 3-4: kk
me: *shoots self in head*

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It's entirely possible for a design to fail in implementation, and this is one of the potential failures we might see show up in play.

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Oh, don't. The Devs would have to be an entirely new category of stupid to make all this noise about doing stuff specifically for small SGs and then require you to have rooms too big for a small SG to afford.

As Posi said, that sort of thing doesn't make sense.

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If the empowerment stations are really only useful if you have minimal travel time (ie, a fully set up base w/ telepads),

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That's obviously not part of the design, is it? Positron says that we'll be given enough time to get from the base to the mission and to the sticky point before the buff wears off, and if fifteen minutes isn't enough, then it'll be increased. If they were anticipating telepads, they'd hardly offer to increase the buff time, would they? The whole idea is to make them useful to the kind of SG that DOESN'T have the resources to get telepads.

<-.-> <nerfs the thread> COME ON PEOPLE!

This is ridiculous. Its not on test yet; you have *no* idea how it will work 'in practice'; how much things will cost, how big the buffs are, how much salvage they'll eat... NADA.

You know *NOTHING* yet; except for the duration.

As has been mentioned:

Solo; yes, you may have some difficulty returning to your mission in time, thats part of the risk of playing solo. I personally play solo with all the ATs save Defenders (just a personal preference).

At any rate: If you are solo; how often *do* you come across a "sticky part" in a mission, honestly? Most spawns are near-identical to eachother; with just a little variation, more than likely if you've been a soloist until now, you already have a good feel for what you can accomplish alone; and have your difficulty tuned to allow yourself to do it.

Here are the 2 situations I see where you could need Empowerment solo.

Elite Bosses: Which if you've already cleared to the EB, you aren't likely to fail getting back to him with enough time on the buff to fight. (Even crossing 3 zones to do it; thats about 12ish minutes travel time most often).

Multiple Bosses together: Usually a fair number of inspirations can handle this; but I'll admit, there are times; especially on squishy characters, where 2 bosses together can be really really tough. Again though; if you've cleared the mission to this point anyway; you can indeed make it back.

If you didn't take a travel power; well, perhaps ignore this feature. I don't have a travel power on my SR scrapper (Granted, I'm still fairly quick); but as you may have noticed he mentioned specifically that you can boost travel speed.

I cannot see how anyone with a travel power could have trouble getting to a mission within 15 minutes to take out a few bosses. You won't get 15 minutes of buff of course... I don't think that was ever the intention; the extra duration is just a matter of letting you get there.

Sorry if I'm comming off harsh here but jeez; EVERY time a new feature is announced it turns into a gripe fest, and has since I3.

Chill out, wait, test it when it goes to test (that IS part of what an issue going to the Test server is for; granted, its not always perfect; but it is part of it); and *then* complain if it turns out to be worth it.

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That's before you even get into the question of fitting everything on the basic plot.

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The screen shot shows the size of these things. Assuming (which I don't care to do, but will in this case) there are 2 different types of stations, you could fit both in a 2x2 room with lots of space to spare.

the small one fits on a quarter of a tile, and the large one takes up a full tile. That means you could easily fit 2 small and 1 large one, in a 2x2 room, and still have a bit over half the room left over.

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15 mins is not enough time for a master mind
by the time we get to the zone and set up our pets and run to the "spot giving us a hard time" the buff would have worn off.

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No way. Every single zone in CoV has a base portal in it.

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But it takes around 8 minutes summon, equip, upgrade, buff our bots / ninja / undead / mercs / and soon to come thugs and really buffs to damage / speed / def etc help the MM but it would be better if it helped our henchmen.

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It's entirely possible for a design to fail in implementation, and this is one of the potential failures we might see show up in play. If the empowerment stations are really only useful if you have minimal travel time (ie, a fully set up base w/ telepads), then it's entirely on topic to wonder if maybe they're not really such a big buff for small SGs after all. That's before you even get into the question of fitting everything on the basic plot.


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That's it entirely.
Even if the cost of the equipment is cheap, even if the Room type that you are required to put it in is cheap, what about the support equipment and cost of the real estate?

If the room itself is too big to work with inside a basic plot in conjunction with other features that do require control and support, that means that an plot upgrade will be required and that IS very expensive and cost prohibitive even to a successful small SG.

So even if the cost of the Room, Equipment, Power, and Control are all free, the space required could kill the whole thing.

The cost of empty space is quite high.

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So even if the cost of the Room, Equipment, Power, and Control are all free, the space required could kill the whole thing.

The cost of empty space is quite high.

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And the Devs won't have thought of this because.....?

mistform, when people in your groups are leaving every 20 mins to go get buffs, I think you'll see what I mean. Implementing it this way to save PvP does no good at all.

I like the idea of a 5 min clickable, you hold it, then choose what 5 mins you use it in isntead of haul butt, pray for no long loading times and/or crashes, then hope you can get to the fight and kill what you're trying to before it wears off. Just make it so you can hold one at a time and there should be no problem.

If everyone is so scared of PvP becoming even more broken, then why not just disable them in PvP zones? That would give us PvE(you know, the original way this game was made) players a neat useful thing that wasnt nerfed into a total waste of time because of something alot of us don't even care to do.


Think about this too, say everyone in the group leaves to go get the buffs, do you start when the tp people get back? or do you wait for the ss and sj-ers? or do you wait even more for the fliers? If so, waiting for all the flying toons in your group to slowly fly to base and back, that could very well take near 15 minutes depending on where your mish is.

EDIT: changed haul butt didnt know the other one was censored, sorry.

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But, better to start at "too weak" and buff as needed, rather than "too strong" and nerf it, right?

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Bingo.

Making the buffs be Inspiration or Click-power like is just ASKING for abuse. Besides, that's the type of stuff the Invention System should deal with.

Empowerment stations are instant buffs. You are bathed in radiation/magic/etc. on the spot and get a bonus to your travel speed/lethal resistance/attack speed/endurance recovery/knockback protection/whatever you need at the time, right then and there.

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Ok, again reserving judgment until I can experience this for myself, but I'm not sure I understand the abuse side of this. If you make it so the empowerment stations give you a temp power that can only be used for 10 minutes, but only lasts for 20 minutes (like how the Nemesis Staff goes away after 3 days), how would that be open to abuse?

Honestly though, I don't see travel time as too big of a concern. Realistically, how much time does it take to get to a mission, especially when you have a base portal in every zone in CoV and every cityzone in CoH?

Also, is the invention system going to use salvage as well? If this isn't coming in I7, this might be something you want to clear up beforehand, otherwise you are going to have people upset that they used all their salvage stuff for buffs and wouldn't have anything to play with once Invention is implemented.

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mistform, when people in your groups are leaving every 20 mins to go get buffs, I think you'll see what I mean.

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That might happen at first, and then the Salvage will start to run out. Hard to imagine, I know, but just think how quickly people will get through the stuff once it has some use.

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And the Devs won't have thought of this because.....?

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Because they have not given any indications otherwise, and in fact, by posting those picture, have proven the very opposite by advertizing large rooms.

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And the Devs won't have thought of this because.....?

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......because they are the Devs? They don't have a stellar record going at the moment. It is common and appropriate I think for the player base to be skeptic. If the player base is this way Lady_Sadako you have to wonder why we are this way. We aren't questioning them for no reason.

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mistform, when people in your groups are leaving every 20 mins to go get buffs, I think you'll see what I mean.

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That might happen at first, and then the Salvage will start to run out. Hard to imagine, I know, but just think how quickly people will get through the stuff once it has some use.

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I think this will be one of those things where they'll really have to be careful with how they balance cost and effectiveness. If the buffs are too good and also cheap, people will want to get them all the time. If they're mediocre and expensive, no one will use them. I imagine the goal is to have them good enough that people want them, while priced where you'll have to wisely choose when you activate it.

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Because they have not given any indications otherwise,

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Of course they have. These additions have been pitched as being the boost that small SGs needed ever since the Devs started talking about them.

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and in fact, by posting those picture, have proven the very opposite by advertizing large rooms.

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Which are obviously to show off the colour tinting and the banners as well as the Enhancement stations. They are promotional shots. They're big and dramatic. There are at least four items carrying SG logos shown off in those pictures: the transparent pillars, the banners, the conference table and the floor panel. That doesn't 'prove' that you need a big room to put such a station in. All it proves is that people will go out of their way to find reasons to fret.

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And the Devs won't have thought of this because.....?

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......because they are the Devs? They don't have a stellar record going at the moment. It is common and appropriate I think for the player base to be skeptic. If the player base is this way Lady_Sadako you have to wonder why we are this way.

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I'm just as much part of the player base as you are. And I think you're fretting.

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by posting those picture, have proven the very opposite by advertizing large rooms.

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Those rooms hold serveral empowerment stations. The size of the unit itself is easy to figure out. You can easily fit 2 small and 1 large station in a 2x2 room.

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Because they have not given any indications otherwise, and in fact, by posting those picture, have proven the very opposite by advertizing large rooms.

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Oh, c'mon. Let's not have another round of the "in your bedroom" thing.

From me to Positron:

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I was wondering if, to use the upcomming base gear intended to help we little guys, we would still need power and control?

Thanks!

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From Positron to me:

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All of the Empowerment Stations are self-powered, self-controled. i.e. it's Power use is 0, and it's Control use is 0.

Salvage storage is the same. Enhancement and Inspiration storage does take power and control.

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So, my SG which consists of myself and a friend and a couple of our ALTs which currently has 3 rooms, power and a computer can sell the power and computer back and probably have Prestiege to spare.

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Costs for a 10-slot inspiration bin? 1million!

Cost for a 10-slot enhancement container? 500K!




I'm just afraid to even ponder how much these things will cost.....Everything even remotely nice is priced so that small groups can't get them. I'll wait till it hits test to see if my SG has a chance at ever owning one.

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Just so you all realize, the prices Lektrik wrote are completely made up.

Everything in this issue will be "reasonably priced". It doesn't make sense for us to set out to help small supergroups and then charge large supergroup Prestige for the items.

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Cos everything is sooooo reasonably priced for SGs that don't have 75 members now... :grumble: When the hell is a 0 going to be dropped off the end of ALL prestige prices for smaller Supergroups??? Nooo lets not oh I dunno SCALE IT to the number of people in your SG. </end rant>

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Cos everything is sooooo reasonably priced for SGs that don't have 75 members now...

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You don't need 75 members to have a nice PvE base as is. In fact many SG's consisting of 2-3 active players, and their alts have a nice PvE base.

Posts like yours do nothing but confuse the issue by throwing out statements that are completely false. They fill the actual discussion with whitenoise that makes it even harder to get anything acomplished.

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Nooo lets not oh I dunno SCALE IT to the number of people in your SG. </end rant>

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How exactly would that work? I start a SG with 10 people, buy all my stuff and then add another 60 people after that to buck the system?

A agree that the prices are pretty outrageous but since SG membership is anything but static I don't see scaling the prices working to anyone's satisfaction...