Statesman speaks at serious games summit
By
2Negative,
Posted on: 2006-10-31 18:17 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
Aside from fixing the cost issues, Statesman, I want to say that having some missions on the Mission Computer would make bases used a lot more.
You don't need them to be crazy awesome original stuff even, if you made the equivalent of Newspaper missions on them designed for groups (and I don't mean "click 4 glowies at once"), and always had a mission type that would have one of several AVs as the climax, I know they'd get use.
It would be nice to get crazy awesome original stuff, but this would be a start.
Please try my custom mission arcs!
Legacy of a Rogue (ID 459586, Entry for Dr. Aeon's Third Challenge)
Death for Dollars! (ID 1050)
Dr. Duplicate's Dastardly Dare (ID 1218)
Win the Past, Own the Future (ID 1429)
The problem is this; we're talking about a group of professional programmers. In practically every other profession, there exist deadlines. I do not think it unreasonable to expect projects to be completed by a certain date.
Software development just doesn't work that way. Software isn't written according to schedules and isn't completed "on time". That's why release dates tend to be fluid and never announced far in advance.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
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The problem is this; we're talking about a group of professional programmers. In practically every other profession, there exist deadlines. I do not think it unreasonable to expect projects to be completed by a certain date.
Software development just doesn't work that way. Software isn't written according to schedules and isn't completed "on time". That's why release dates tend to be fluid and never announced far in advance.
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Software certainly IS written on a schedule. Cryptic just chooses not to do so. Don't think for a minute that if it meant losing their jobs, or getting a raise, that it wouldn't be done on a set date. If the military needs a piece of software by a certain date, it gets done. I'm not saying they have to forget their lives and become hermits - I'm saying they should set realistic deadlines and stick to them.
There should be "major items", which are things that are a priority for an update/issue, and must be completed by a certain date, and there should be "minor features", which are like-to-haves that can be shed if time becomes tight.
I've done my fair share of programming, and when i do it I setup an outline before I even start coding. I set goals for what MUST be done, and make that my priority. Other things, like tweaking menus or little niceties, become secondary.
My point is this; give us something concrete, and show the players that you're willing to give us a commitment.
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But they wont consider (in game) it worth a lot of time/effort to create a space thats customized for group identity.
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I think you've still missed the point. It's not that it isn't worth it to us to customize a base, Statesman. It's just that until the basic functional items are paid for, nobody can possibly afford it. And maybe not even then, not with rent as high as it is.
At 500 to 5000 prestige per decorative item, I can put in 10 or 20 or 30 decorative items. Or I can put in one more teleporter.
On a basic free base plot, there is just barely room for everything needed to make a minimally raid-capable base. It can just barely be fit in, and it almost takes exploiting to do it (namely, taking advantage of the fact that the arcane raid teleporter fits in a 2x2 room but the tech version doesn't). Even if someone could afford the 100,000 prestige to put in the smallest decorative room, there's no place left on an 8x8 plot to put it.
So unless bases were meant to be a feature of only the five or six biggest supergroups per server, you really, really have your costs out of whack here, I think. Please go back to my previous message, where I asked you to perform some basic calculations? Since apparently you won't do it, here, I did it for you.
A fully functional villain base, one that needs only three standard transporters and six beacons, costs 2,424,000 prestige. Except that I know I'm short by about 25,000 to 50,000 prestige, because I couldn't find the cost of the combat logs medical aux item. But let's round it down to 2.4M prestige before even the first non-functional item goes in.
Your average player seems to earn about 250 prestige per hour. So that's about nine thousand and six hundred player-hours of prestige earning just to install the basic functionality. And every, say, 5000 prestige decorative item just set that goal back by another 20 player-hours. And note that that's assuming you cram it all into the 8x8 plot, which can just barely be done: 1 entry room, 1 workshop, 1 power center, 1 control room, 3 teleport bays, 1 medical bay, and 1 vault. No decorative rooms, no place to put them. Add another minimum of another million or so prestige, another 4000 player-hours of prestige, just to add your first decorative room. Also note that that initial estimate of 2.4M prestige includes exactly zero defensive items for the base. Not one.
NOW do you see why nobody but the wealthiest and biggest and oldest supergroups decorates bases? It's not that the rest of us don't care about these features. On the contrary, when I first started a supergroup, I went all out on decorating it -- only to have my players compliment me on the design, and then ask me every day when we were going to get any new useful items for the base. No, it's not that we don't care ... it's that we can't afford even the first 500 prestige decorative item. Even in the hypothetical best-case scenario of a 75-person supergroup, with no alts, it'll take them 128 player-hours per person just to get to that minimum raid-capable base, 128 player-hours per person before they can afford to put in a table lamp.
So, um, no. You really don't understand what's wrong with the design here.
P.S. That estimated number of player-hours worth of prestige doesn't factor in the lost player-hours' worth of prestige each month to base upkeep. So these are actually very optimistic numbers.
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I honestly think the solution is quite simple:
1. The devs need to commit to a deadline for all future tasks. Tell me when this fix or that fix will be implemented, and assure me that whatever needs to be done to achieve will be done. If you (the devs) can keep to a schedule like that, then faith in the dev team will be restored.
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Hah, not likely. Please try to keep this in the realm of possibility. If you could predict with absolute certainty software finish dates there would be no programmers, only people assembling simple parts of code on assembly lines.
Programmng is an art, not a factory.
Now, if you just think that communication on slippages could be stronger......that is true. But remember, every time they come to the forums and state there has been a slippage then there would be a huge chorus of demands to know why. And hurt feelings and angry customers when replies were not complete enough, or forthcoming at all.
While we may be customers, and have a certain degree of expectation on knowing what is going on, were not the owners of the company. Nor the overseers of the coders.
AND WE SHOULD NOT BE.
Nothing would get done. You personally might well be able to handle this information flow and only rarely ask for a clarification or more informatin. But the crowd would produce dozens of requests a day (at least) and that would hurt production, or if it did not would hurt public relations. Neither is tenable, best not to go down that path at all.
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2. Make all decorative and non-functional aspects of a base cost inf, NOT prestige. Give each member of a SG/VG a "free" room of their own to decorate. This would use personal inf, NOT prestige.
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Bravo, great idea.
As I have stated in other threads: "I approve of this product and or statement 
"
But seriously, I don't give a fuzzy rats butt what has to be put off. I want my own personal space in the game. It's the only thing that I see as a serious and total failure on the part of Cryptic to provide.
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3. Give a big prestige bonus for each member of a SG/VG on a team, beyond the 1st; heck, make it a multiplier. If a bunch of missions are run w/ all SG/VG-mates, reward them for working together.
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Meh, I see to many ways to game that to death. Change the groups so they can have unlimited membership. And give us oure personal space.
If memberships was unlimited I can see some great things happening, supergroups of thousands with huge bases that become fixtures in the game, or that affect the storyline. That would be cool.
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Just a couple responses to things mentioned after Statesman's post.
I LOVE the idea of a portrait of my character as a decorative base item.
Statues of the high-ranked or high-level members is another great idea.
It would be AWESOME for each character to have their own personal space. The clickable door that let you 'zone' to your personal room (a la stores in zones) would be great. I'm not sure how I feel about one "bedroom door", the same way we have one base portal. Actually I would be completely in favor of each character having to have their own unique door - with their name printed on it. Oh man that would be rad.
Long before CoV, I had the idea of letting offline SG mates wander around in the base as NPCs. While I still think that was a cool idea, I realize it will never happen. But portraits, statues, and personal rooms would, in a way, inject a personalized feel into bases. I want to walk down my group's 'portrait hall' and see the faces of the whole SG. Talk about a sense of being a part of something.
Just to address a couple of points ...
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Few people care about the aesthetics of bases. It's just not obviously an expression of one's self, especially if it's been designed by 20+ people, or by someone else. That's the crucial difference between costumes and bases.
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If no one cares about the aesthetics of bases, it all comes down to function ... and there's not a whole lot of function in there.
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What compounds this is that when I'm being social with SG members, more often than not we're not in the base, we're out on a mission. I'm somewhat overstating things now, bt it's as if you want to remove the acion from the game, and turn it into an AOL chatroom on steroids.
Make no mistake, the social aspect IS important. However for me at least, most of the time it doesn't take place in base.
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We(Cryptic) assumed a certain value to bases which clearly doesnt match up with players perceptions. We assumed that customizability, some gameplay features, layout control, etc. would be considered worth X, but players think its X-Y. That means WE were wrong. No fickleness involved, just something we didnt identify well.
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In some respects it IS worth X-Y - Y being the rent. This is an issue that keeps on coming up, but lets take a second to look at the "financial" differences between costumes and bases.
With a costume, it's a one time charge to change. Pretty tall as well, I'm looking at something in the area of 1.5 million to set up my 5th slot on my main. However, it's a one time cost.
You'd get infinitely less flak if you increased the cost of base items, but completely nuked the rent. If you want to limit the speed of growth, use the following system. Makeit so that you need to construct certain items from salvage to permit plot size increases. By carefully limiting the drop rate of this salvage, you can tune the rate at which SG's will grow. Same applies to items.
The point about this is that it turns it from a negtive into a positive. We need to work to upgrade the plot size. It takes 100 widgets to get that plot size increase. as the SG collects them, there's a sense of progress and moving forward, which is always a good thing.
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Yet a Super Group costume isnt your creation, either. And yet people wear them. The counterpoint is, of course, that a Super Group costume is in addition to ones normal costume, not instead of. Theres no such personal property in the base. We thought (on paper) that the personal items would do the trick, but it isnt really the same thing, is it?
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See above. A SG costume is one slot out of five, and a one time cost. If people had to pay rent on SG costumes, they'd vanish overnight. Trust me.
I hate to keep harping back to it but rent is a "bad thing" (tm). It turns gameplay into a bit of a chore because now I have to work at something. There are better ways to get where you want to be. There really are.
Scrappers are just like chainsaws. Somewhat hard to handle, EXTREMELY dangerous, and by far the most fun when wielded by the slightly insane.
@Alissara - an Angry Angel
The Angry Angels. When it absolutely positively has to be spanked today.
States,
I know it's been posted here before, but one of my biggest issues with bases, really isn't with bases, but with Prestige. NONE of my characters over level 25 run in SG mode. I can't afford it. Unlike power players, I don't have a stable of lvl 50 characters to use as an inf bank. I really don't see a plausible reason why we have to sacrifice inf. for prestige.
Also, when I used to play in SG mode above 25, I could swear that I received less prestige the higher I went and that's at the cost of inf. as well. So, in reality, I am being double penalized for playing in SG mode the higher I ascend. I've also seen where the prestige at lower levels received for a completed mission is MORE than the inf. gained.*
The rules for infamy and prestige should be the same.. as you go higher, you garner more for what you do. How can a level 3 no name villain/hero give his/her SG more prestige than someone who has made a name for themselves in the CoX universe?
Bases might be more affordable if our characters were able to get the prestige we need to pay for them.
*I may be wrong as things might have changed since I played in SG mode above lvl 25.
You don't hit smiling monsters - Sister Flame
Ok States. All I care about now is the delivery of the goods 
How about removing that tax on SG mode for levels 25+
How about removing that constant tax on our prestige!
Just fix it!
H: Blaster 50, Defender 50, Tank 50, Scrapper 50, Controller 50, PB 50, WS 50
V: Brute 50, Corruptor 50, MM 50, Dominator 50, Stalker 50, AW 50, AS 50
Top 4: Controller, Brute, Scrapper, Corruptor
Bottom 4: (Peacebringer) way below everything else, Mastermind, Dominator, Blaster
CoH in WQHD
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I keep seeing posts like this, and I guess a lot of people are still just uninformed. I have a personal SG base, just my nine alts on Virtue are members, and I've been working on it for several months. Great fun, actually.
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I've given this a try, but there are a few reasons that it never really clicked with me.
I don't really have a primary server. My main is on Liberty, but I've got half a dozen other servers filled with alts and they're all spread pretty equally across heroes and villains. Per side, per server, there's probably only one or two characters I play, and if I stick to playing on a single server for more than a month it's because I got an alt over 25--and Liberty's the only server on which I could afford to start twinking.
I also can't add my alts to my own SG myself; none of my RL friends play any more, and I'm uncomfortable (a) trusting and (b) imposing on someone else to help me add alts to the SG.
Last time I tried it, the starting prestige alone seemed to be enough to decorate the initial room, but there were a lot of decorations I wanted that were too large to fit and it seemed like enlarging the space was going to be out of my price range. I haven't tried it for a while, though.
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I use the base 8 x 8 plot and currently have in my nine decorated rooms:
3 salvage storage
1 mid-lvl tech empowerment station
1 basic arcane empowerment station
2 inspiration storage
1 enhancement storage (I put HOs in it mostly)
1 telepad with two beacons (I switch them out as needed)
Total cost so far for my base: about 1 million prestige. That is not prohibitive for a single individual who plays his alts regularly, it just takes a few months of saving up (and that prestige gift of 20k per member during the double xp weekend helped a lot).
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Not prohibitive for a single individual who plays his alts on one server regularly.
I have to admit that I'm impressed by that base; if there were a way for me to add my alts without having to involve anyone else, I might be encouraged to make an attempt to keep future alts to one server and give this a try. How is your base set for decorative items / aesthetics?
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Yet a Super Group costume isnt your creation, either. And yet people wear them. The counterpoint is, of course, that a Super Group costume is in addition to ones normal costume, not instead of. Theres no such personal property in the base. We thought (on paper) that the personal items would do the trick, but it isnt really the same thing, is it?
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An SG costume is a public symbol of affiliation in a group or club. It's provides a sense of status and belonging. An SG Base does not fulfill these desires. They're apples and oranges.
If there were an Island of Bases, where players could travel down streets and avenues full of the various SG bases, then having the largest house on the block would fulfill members' desire for status in the public eye.
Unfortunately, such an island would be impractical in this setting (not to mention tacky and lame). The possession of a prestigious base is not immenently visible in a character's appearance, and therefore cannot contribute to that individual's perceived status.
A possible means of tying in an uber base to a player's appearance might be colorization or other customization of the SG name displayed over the toon's head.
"Oooh, you have a red SG name with extra stars! Nice, you must have the (fill in the blank base item).... ooooh."
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Heck, Id just like the PvE base raid part first!
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No Offense Jack, but I would rather see PvP base raids working correctly before even hearing about a PvE option that was suppose to be for us PvPers
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Yet a Super Group costume isnt your creation, either. And yet people wear them.
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I've been playing on Liberty for 2+ years and I can only think of 3 well-known SGs that made a serious point of enforcing the use of SG costumes: the now-defunct Hamidon Death Squad, and the more-or-less-defunct Sixth Column and Paragon Taxi Service.
Is it different on the other servers, perhaps?
....so will Cryptic be looking into lowering prices for all things bases then??
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Yet a Super Group costume isnt your creation, either. And yet people wear them.
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I don't
I fight crime in SG mode but I do it in the costume(s) and colors I chose for my characters.
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Yeah, I am sad that SG mode came to have a tangible function. I used to switch to SG mode whenever I was with my SG. We'd all do it and look awesome. Then I'd switch back out when soloing or pugging. Now if I want to do that I have to basically devote an entire costume slot to it. And nobody else does. It sucks.
Can't say I've read the whole thread, but I figured I'd mouth off anyhow:
Bases? Huh? I have no idea how they work. I've been to my supergroup's base, of course, and I've even clicked that "Add personal Item" button a few times. It's been grayed out, so I gave up on it, espeically since I've never been told that I have a personal item to add. I futzed with the Enhancement crafting salvage stuff, but all I was told was that we didn't have the right table.
My point, Jack, is that there's nothing about bases that entices me, Joe Grunt Member, to give two spits about the thing. I'm invited to a SG, asked to be a little Prestige machine, and apparently I get squat out of it. If there is some benefit it's something I need to rummage the web to find, and frankly I'd just rather play.
Part of the problem is that there's nothing in a base that's mine. Near as I can tell I can't add my own personal rooms, I can't display my souveneirs, I can't name anything I drop in it. It's all about the group, except that the control seems to be in the hands of some often-offline SG member. Basically, I give someone else my Influence in the form of Prestige and I get... well, bupkiss.
If I do get something, then please, please, please have the game tell me. Even if that something's merely a virtual trophy room.
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Interesting point! Some people can see your base, but it's so much easier for people to see your costume.
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I have no base. My supergroup has a base that I apparently have absolutely no control over. I do control my costume. Very important difference.
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But costumes don't provide ANY gameplay function and people care a WHOLE lot about them? My point: bases cost too much for what players think they deliver. What they currently deliver is the ability to create a social space for Super Groups that's potentially customizable to the group's theme/background/etc.
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See above. I think you seriously overestimate the general populace's feeling of investment in some tribe/clan/group without also having an ability to add to that group.
Put another way: if the entire playerbase is in a SG, and the average supergroup is 10 people, and one person has contol over the Base, then Base content is targeted to a mere 10% of the playerbase. I'm going to guess the reality's closer to 5-8% of the playerbase. Costumes, meanwhile, are in the control of 100% of the playerbase.
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But it shows human behavior (and this was the point of my talk): people LOVE individuality. They're willing to express it. But they won't consider (in game) it worth a lot of time/effort to create a space that's customized for group identity.
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...except I, one of the SG's infantry, can't customize it, or if I can that functionality's hidden to me.
Example: My "group home" in SWG. Two real-life friends of mine and three other people we met in the game decided to all move into the same house. We each had our own room in the house as well as a couple of common areas. We each got to decorate our individual rooms and we all tossed our stuff into the common area. Decorating the house was much fun, and it was always interesting to come 'home' and see what new doodad someone else had found.
In short, the group identity was an aggregate of the individual identities. In CoH, that's not the case. I get to invest in someone else's control of the group identity and I don't get anything I can point to and say, "I added that."
I'll take my Influence, thanks.
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Bingo! That was the point of my presentation; that the cost exceeds perceived value. The current ability to customize a social space for ones Super Group isnt thought to be high enough to justify the Prestige amounts.
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As a suggestion or two?
One ... the Decorative stuff is, really, pretty much "pointless" in terms of Base Raiding - rooms, items, everything of that nature. Seriously. So - drop THOSE prices through the floor. Cut them by 90% of current ... at least then, yes, there'd be a reason for bases to be used for social purposes.
Two ... and please keep it firmly in mind, that I'm saying this as someone who has both COH and COV ... open up SG bases to non-COV-owners, in COH. Restrict teleporters, medical bays, enhancement stations, and worktables to those of us who own COV. Restrict base-Editting the same way. But at least let the COH-only folks in to look, yes?
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But costumes dont provide ANY gameplay function and people care a WHOLE lot about them?
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Simple psychology, there, States: the costume represents the fictionalised "self", the base does not. Ergo, a costume is more directly tied to one's sense of self-identity when playing the game; it literally IS a "costume" that we "wear" while visiting Paragon, or the Rogue Isles.
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My point: bases cost too much for what players think they deliver. What they currently deliver is the ability to create a social space for Super Groups thats potentially customizable to the groups theme/background/etc.
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That potential is hindered by locking out non-COV-owners.
Case in point - on Freedom, I'm part of a supergroup "Young Paragons" ... sort of a "Teen Titans" affair, with characters generally between thirteen and nineteen years old. We HAVe a base - with a surprising amount of non-window-dressing function, actually ... medbay, storage, enhancement stations, and a pretty much COMPLETE heroside Teleporter setup.
We have meetings, twice a week - Sundays and Tuesdays (any chance of a cameo appearance, by the way? Someof us have RP-based connections to one or another ofthe Phalanx after all - check my avatar, for one ... heh). We do NOT meet in our base, though ... even though that'd be the best, most logical place for us TO meet.
Not everyone owns COV. And most don't care to play villains, so ALL they'd get for COV? A few character slots, and being able to go inside the base. Not worth it to them.
So we have to meet elsewhere - the Steel Canyon campus of the University, as it happens. It's the easiest and most convenient congregation-point for our broad range of levels (from 1 straight to 50).
...
If you opened up SG bases, even just for show-and-tell, to non-COV-owners ... you'd put a lot more value on the base, itself.
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But it shows human behavior (and this was the point of my talk): people LOVE individuality. Theyre willing to express it. But they wont consider (in game) it worth a lot of time/effort to create a space thats customized for group identity. Clearly, people dont mind group identity (hence, super group costumes) and they love their own personal costume creation.
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Listed ways to add value to bases:
<ul type="square">[*] Chop the cost of non-function items and spaces drastically - moreso than you already have. The purely decorative should not be worked for; if everything cost 1/10 of current, a Supergroup of 1-4 could at least have an "SG Meeting Hall";[*] Cut rent out altogether, except MAYBE ... base it on functional parts. Rent for a Medical Bay ... sure. For storage or crafting stuff ... sure. But for a glorified meeting-hall-and-hangout-joing? Drop it entirely, please;[*] Adapt the Base Edit feature to allow for personal, private spaces - the individual Lairs and Apartmetns you'v elong claimed to want to add in, anyway. And give everyoen the option to link those directly to their SG's base - complete with a range of options for clickable transport (elevators, doors, Oranbega-style portals ... whatever the SG prefers);[*] Allow non-COVers in, at least to look and RP - it's one thing to limit the Function, but another to not even let part of an SG look at the base they're helping pay for![*] Add something to bases that you cannot get elsewhere - somethign minor, but still "neat". Maybe some new costume piece or other - or several, tied to various SG badges. How about NPCs - to sell inspirations, maybe even enhancements? I can see bases getting much more use, myself, if running to sell stuff could be as simple as hitting your own base. ESPECIALLY if doing so gave the SG a small prestige boost, too - even if doing so meant you would NEVER get the "specialist" rate for selling to a same-origin store.[/list]
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A point well made. Jack's comparison of bases to costumes is wildly off because I control my costume. I help pay for my base, yet none of it is my creation.
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Yet a Super Group costume isnt your creation, either. And yet people wear them.
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I have more control over my SG-mode costumes in the Young Paragons, than I do over the base; I can decide which SG color to use, if any, for each seperate body part ... TWICE: once for the primary, once for the secondary. So, I do have some say over my SG costume.
For example ... my wee little Fire/Devices blaster, "Automatic Justice". His defaults are Red-with-gold, with Red being the overall primary color. His chest emblem is the Scales of Justice. You can see it here, if you wish.
The YP's colors are blue and white; their chest emblem is the starburst-in-a-circle.
AJ's SG-mode look? Change his gold for white, and put the starburst on his chest (blue star in white circle). And, I alone decided on that look - noone else. I controlled the process of decision making, based on the pallette offered to me. If I'd wanted to, I could have simply not used any SG color(s) or the emblem, yet, still beein in SG mode, contributing to the group's prestige totals. You can see a screenshot of his SGmode here, for comparison.
Bases don't work like that; I don't have personal control over how a base is laid out, not even a tiny corner of it, unless I "own" the SG. Yet, I have to help PAY for it - Prestige income in-game, and real-world money spent to own COV.
I think that's a lot of the problem: if you're not going to raid ... there's little or no point in having a base.
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were not the owners of the company. Nor the overseers of the coders.
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Well, of course we aren't. We're just the people whose money ensures they have jobs to go to every day.
Heroes
Dysmal
Lumynous
Sam Steele
Pluck
Wile
Slagheap
Pressure Wave
Rhiannon Bel
Verified
Stellaric
Syd Mallorn
Villains
Jotunheim Skald
Saer Maen
Jen Corbae
Illuminance
Venator Arawn
Taiga Dryad
Tarranos
A quick comment on decorative items. The last time I checked (been a little while) you still can't stack decorative items. You can't place a phone on a desk, so what is the point of having a phone? There are a bunch of cute little items that can be placed, but they all must be on the floor. 
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Yet a Super Group costume isnt your creation, either. And yet people wear them. The counterpoint is, of course, that a Super Group costume is in addition to ones normal costume, not instead of. Theres no such personal property in the base. We thought (on paper) that the personal items would do the trick, but it isnt really the same thing, is it?
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For me that hits the nail on the head. I belong to some SGs, and some have bases. But most of my toons are homeless since the demise of my main SG back about a year ago. And i really just havent hurried to find them homes.
However what is more an intrest to me would be the idea many put forward of a BAT-Cave for lack of a better term. Or perhaps a Fortress of Solitude if your more a fan of that. Yes prestige is nice for a large group. But many people playing since day 1 have had piles of Influence that they would be willing to spend. Hell most of my tons are sitting on 15-20 costume tokens now so i dont even pay to do that anymore.
I dont really want to base raid, nor do i really PVP. But it would be nice to be able to make a Personal space, that i can give access maybe on a "Freinds list" type status, so all my character have access. Dont have to worry about raids, control, power etc. Its just my getaway has some storage options for my stuff. maybe a limited teleport as in like 1 machine so i can personally select 2 zones to port to but no more. (just kinda giving me a option to speed up some of the longer jumps of travel without having to run through pocket D if i choose not to)
But mostly i would be willing to spend influence and infamy on a person space. Or at minimum allowing the currect SG base to have some type of influence use better then that current exchange for buying starter items so people could use the current system to create non raidable spaces for themselves.
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1. The devs need to commit to a deadline for all future tasks. Tell me when this fix or that fix will be implemented, and assure me that whatever needs to be done to achieve will be done. If you (the devs) can keep to a schedule like that, then faith in the dev team will be restored.
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So easy to say when you're not a programmer. A programmer that commits to a deadline either gives it *way later* than really expected, or fails the deadline; a single unmatched } in the code can stop you for a day, or go unnoticed and cause lots of bugs that you don't realize for months. And COH/V is not a *small* piece of software. It's unlikely that the entire programming team is the same that started working on the code 3 years ago; getting used to old code that you didn't write is twice as hard as writing your own code.
www.SaveCOH.com: Calls to Action and Events Calendar
This is what 3700 heroes in a single zone looks like.
Thanks to @EnsonsDeath for the GVE code that made me VIP again!
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Here's the writeup of his speech.
The only thing that jumps out at me - he claims bases are unpopular because people don't like paying money to contribute to group identity. I don't think that's correct. I think they're unpopular because
1) they're too expensive for casual players, and
2) they don't have anything to do with our day-to-day activities in CoH/V.
Now,
- make them cheaper
- let us place NPCs, scriptable bosses, and a scripted win condition in them
- let us open them up to other players to run as missions
- get raids working
and see if that makes them more popular.
*waves magic wand*
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not only get raids working, but just get the base working in general, I don't want to do several million prestige worth of changes, only to have the base server boot me out and I have to do everything again. Or when I try and use the functional parts of my base, I get inside the base make it partway to the telepad and boom, kicked out again.
In addition to that, I would be more supportive of a base, if all my characters could use the base, and support the SG, which with the current cap on SG members, they cannot, at least not without considerable hassle.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. It really helps to see any redname post on a subject, it lets us know were not talking into a dead line.
I believe all the most important points have been brought up repeatedly in this thread, so rather than just rambling about what I would like for bases I would like to adress a few comments made over the months by both yourself and Positron.
I'm not sure that Bases are too expensive overall, rather I believe that it is the combonation of Influence trade off, high space/item cost, and maintenence that is too much for most of us. Elimitating, or reducing, even one of those would by the large adress most of the problem. Just by doing away with maintenence you would make it possible for any SG to eventually work up to the best base.
The Personal Items button seems inappropriately named, rather it could be labeled 'Crafted Items'. Only expensive, salvage crafted items can be placed using this feature.
Adding Decorative items to the Personal Items button could be the most basic way to increase involvement in Base creation. Obviously there would need to be some way to limit this, at least with overall SG setting, but preferably on a room to room and character to character basis. In time the options could grow here much as the vaunted Costume Creator has.
In another interview you mentioned suprise that high level SG members were not aiding lower level members with Influence (or Infamy). Considering that trading was initially limited to 9999 Influence, and later raised to 99999, to prevent 'twinking' it comes as no suprise to me that many do not do this. 99999 Influence is only enough to buy 3 or 4 SOs, meaning to really help out an SG-mate, you need to do 10, or even more, transfers; and that every five levels! I'll not go into all the self sufficency ramblings that this brings up, thats largely irrelivent. If you want us to engage in this kind of behavior then we need the influence trade limit raised again (to 999999).
Some time ago Positron commented that personal apartments would not be coming in the near future as it would require too much work, especially to get the proper scale. As far as I can tell the base editor is only missing three general catagories of objects to work fine as an appartment editor. Walls, Stairs and Upper Floors/Ledges. Remove the functional base items, and anything else inappropriate, and we can create our own personal space. Obviously more complex than I'm making it out, but more simple than what I think Positron was thinking of.
Still, I imagine that Bases would have been loads more popular if everything had actually functioned a year ago. Best of luck to the staff working on nailing down those bugs!
Thanks again for coming to converse with us!
I still think Statesman is trying too hard to connect costumes to bases as having the same value system and metrics, but I respect that he has taken more than one stab at this thread's stiff commentary and seems to be perilously close to 'getting it'.
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But costumes dont provide ANY gameplay function and people care a WHOLE lot about them?
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Costumes don't provide "ANY gameplay function" the same way that mission text and the narrative of storyarcs don't. I've already offered a hypothesis for why this is something of a blind spot for Statesman, so I won't belabor the point.
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But it shows human behavior (and this was the point of my talk): people LOVE individuality. Theyre willing to express it. But they wont consider (in game) it worth a lot of time/effort to create a space thats customized for group identity. Clearly, people dont mind group identity (hence, super group costumes) and they love their own personal costume creation.
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In part, the devs created the heightened expectations. Much of the rest of the game works so well and integrates together so nicely. If bases were more accessible to non-SG people and were actually situated in the game world instead of some small pocket dimension, maybe they wouldn't need to have more obvious utilitarian functionality. As it is, bases are an expensive distraction from the rest of the game world - even if the CoP Trial were active. That's what I find mildly ironic. The CoP wasn't expected by the playerbase to be anything but a more streamlined Hammi raid, and now the company has already evolved their raid vision past even that into being along the line of the LRSF because many people have clamored for something less numbers intensive than Hammi and the devs seemed to have concurred. So while the company is continuing to develop raid/SF 2.0 content, they've still got this wonky instance of raid 1.5 content from 2005 that they've got to wrap up. I'd offer more sympathy about that, but I have no idea whether they tripped themselves up this past year or whether they're the victim of several unfortunate circumstances that caused things to go awry.
Cheers.
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Yet a Super Group costume isnt your creation, either. And yet people wear them.
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I don't
I fight crime in SG mode but I do it in the costume(s) and colors I chose for my characters.