Article Discussion: Redesigning Hamidon

Scientist · 03-23-2007 07:21 AM

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As it is now, Holding Hami only keeps him from spawning mitos, but he continues firing his attack.

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Are you sure? Having never been on the taunter's team, and given that I lose Hami at the end of raids, I'm not sure, however I thought the Taunter's countdown timer for "Hami Held" was started when Hami stopped attacking. No?.

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That used to be the case, but awhile back (6 months maybe? Don't recall if it was an Issue or a Patch) Hami was revised so he still shoots. Now someone who doesn't lose sight of him has to watch the graphics to see if he is held. And the taunt team has to keep going through the raid. Which does add some element of risk, last raid I was on on Triumph Hami fired a dozen or so times on the Hold team at various points, which is a good way to lose hold lock because everyone gets knocked back and sometimes people die, forcing someone else to rez them and generally use time *not* holding but healing and such instead.

I agree that having a time increment a bit less than 24 hours would be nice so you could do it repeatably 2 nights in a row; my evening time tends to come in chunks a few days long a few times a year, so thats when I'd be doing this. And I'd hate to be watching that clock as raid #2 or 3 in a row was coming to a close and saying to myself "Boy, if I could only stall this by 10 minutes, I could get a HO, otherwise I won't." Even someone who doesn't consider themselves a griefer could be sorely tempted to stop attacking for a bit. . .

At worst, though, you could alternate between a HO and a recipe, so your time wouldnt be wasted.

Darkonne · 03-23-2007 07:36 AM

The article is very a very interesting view into the mindset behind the changes. It was much more insightful than most of the recent press releases, and that's a welcome change. Also, hello, Mr. Brawler! Nice to see you here at last.

That said, I'm rather underwelmed by the changes mentioned so far: from my point of view, it seems like they will do almost nothing to actually improve the experience.

Limiting the zone to only 50 people feels pointless. I suspect 50 players is still more than enough to cause problems for low end machines, and since the raid structure seems largely similar (with Hami and his Mitos), I doubt this will do enough to prevent Hami from disappearing. Beyond lag, though, that's still a lot of people to assemble and organize, and there's plenty of room in that for griefers who still cannot be removed. But it also means that if there are 60 people on the server who feel like fighting Hamidon at any given time, 10 of them will now be out of luck, since I cannot believe Hamidon will be defeatable with much below the maximum possible number. I'd rather have people leaching and able to participate than have them left completely out in the cold.

Without knowing the details, I can't say for certain whether the redesign will actually make raids more interesting and pan-AT friendly. But from the article, I suspect it will not. Given the wide disparity in what the various archetypes can do, the notion that a difficult trial will be equally accessible to everyone while *requiring* none in particular feels pretty far fetched. The very fact that some of the Mitos are flying seems to imply that issues will remain.

More importantly, the devs seem to persist in the notion that 50 random players should be able to coordinate a complicated battle plan when it's fairly clear that players will ALWAYS develop stratagies that are as simple and foolproof as possible. Organizing players is like herding cats. If you need to get 50 of them on the same page in order to succeed, that page had better be in big print with lots of pictures. Whatever notion the devs intend will almost certainly be bypassed in favor of an unexpected strategy that is easier to explain and execute, with the side effect of being less interesting. In the long run, we're in this for the prize; tedium plus shiny trumps exciting failure once you've fought Hami a few times.

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Leortha · 03-23-2007 07:39 AM

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At worst, though, you could alternate between a HO and a recipe, so your time wouldnt be wasted.

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Yep. Though far from perfect, this does offer at least one solution to the whole 24 hour limit issue. From my reading of the interview, we now will have two separate 24 hour timers on the two choices. If you got an HO in a raid near 24 hours ago, take a recipe this time to be safe.

And, while the following is pure speculation, it would make sense from a programming standpoint... I would not be surprised if the HO/recipe timers are a single timer per reward type, across both Hami raids and LRSF/STF. I'm saying that, if you get an HO from an Hami raid or SF/TF, you cannot get another HO from either for 24 hours. It's one timer for HOs, whatever the source, and one timer for the recipes, whatever the source. As I said above, this is just speculation, until we can actually get onto Test to attack the issue, but it would make sense to me for them to program it that way.

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Darkonne · 03-23-2007 07:41 AM

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It would be better IMO if they made it every 20 hours rather than 24 hours or perhaps if they made it one HO per day.

Hear me out before crying doom...

You go to the raid sometime after 7pm. You get done 30 minutes later and have your HO in hand.

You show up the following night around 7pm but get done 25 minutes. Due to the timer, you can't get another HO because it hasn't been 24 hours.

So why not tie HO & recipe rewards to 12am Central? From 0000 to 2359, you can only get one reward of an HO and a recipe. That would mean you could complete a HO raid at 2355 and then start up another HO raid at 0001. But once you completed that, you can't get any more HOs as a reward until you enter the next calendar day.

In other words, base the reward timers on DAYS not hours. It would make it a lot easier to manage from the player perspective and STILL stays true to the reward limits the Devs have set.

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I agree entirely, but I rather doubt the Devs would ever do anything to make these rewards easier to schedule.

Still, feel free to surprise me, Devs! :-)

-D

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Hyp3r · 03-23-2007 07:45 AM

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To be honest, this isn't an official site so the reviewer are probably under some misconception about Hamidon.

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City of Heroes / City of Villains: Redesigning the Hamidon
By Christopher Bruce, Cryptic Developer

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Yeah, I actually found it a little annoying that one of the Devs knows so little about the game (even if he were trying to use "elder god" in a figurative sense) that he referred to defeating Hammi as sending it (him) back to the dimension from which he came.

Duh, read through a story arc of the game you code for once in a while.

It just looks bad to me. Cryptic's own developers (at least this one) know very little about the background of something that they are writing an article on... one that said dev knows full well is going to get published online and read by actual players.

I mean, come on, spend the 1-2 minutes it'll take to skim through the text of the arc and find the part about Hamidon being a scientist who mutated himself.

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What if it wasn't a matter of "just" a mutation? What if when he mutated himself, what actually happened was that it opened a gate to the Elder God Hamidon who then uses his body as a way into our world? What if this Elder God consumed the scientist's body in such a way so as to not require the scientist's actual body to reform here, which would explain the lack of such a body each time the Hamidon is defeated, or assuming this, repulsed from this dimension?

It's possible there is more to this than we currently know.

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Aside from the fact that this is nothing more than pure, unadulterated conjecture and imagination on your part, there is the possibility that they may change the background of Hamidon.

However, the fact remains that Hamidon's background is currently what we all know from having done the DE arcs, and every bit of documentation currently available that describes the changes to Hamidon do not make any references whatsoever about a background change.

Ultimately, its just a game, so it doesn't really matter. I just get annoyed by stuff like that in general.

Ullikummis · 03-23-2007 07:55 AM

Thanks for clearing that up, but could you please stop calling me "kid?" I'm over 10,000 years old...

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AncientGuardian · 03-23-2007 07:56 AM

OK, i havn't read this thread all the way trough, so my comment is based soley on the article i read

First off, IF ANYBODY FINDS A WAY TO BEAT HAMI, don't make a player guide about it!!!! just tell all your friends via PM or tell

2), DON"T SHOW UP LATE to a raid, or your gonna be one of those 50+ people in a compleatly separate instance of the hami.

3) its gonna be a compleat failure for a while. don't expect any HOs unless you take a STF run.

just my thoughts.

but my questions are this...

since we have to defeat the monsters in the zone to spawn hami, is there like a group of monsters we need to look for to achive this, or are we gonna be left in the dark runing around for 6 hours trying to defeat every monster in the zone. because, if it takes to long to defeat monsters, then screw raids. id rather do a nightly run of the STF

Hyp3r · 03-23-2007 08:31 AM

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Hey gang. Here's what happened. Matt's been swamped with Inventions and I9. He approached me a few days ago about helping him write this article as I was the one who wrote the original design doc on all of the changes we're making to Hamidon in Issue 9. I wrote out the article for curse-gaming and at the very top, I left a blank section to talk a bit about Hamidon's back story, the history of raids over the years, and reveal what Geko's original idea as far as player strategy was.

I'll admit, I was a bit hazy on the back story. I've done the arc myself and I had the vague memory that it had something to do with a mutated scientist named Hamidon, but couldn't remember the details. All I could remember was his creation of the Devouring Earth, and part with Terra and the love letter. I didn't want to mess anything up and get the facts wrong, so I just left that section empty and set it back to Position for him to fill in. When I read over what he'd written, I didn't think that sounded like what I remembered. "But he's Positron," I thought, "Surely he'd know.

Well, he got it mixed up obviously. Between his own hazy memory and more importantly just being really busy fixing things for Issue 9, he came up with something about an ancient god. Brian, one of our mission/story writers, set out an email shortly after the article went up that that basically said "The Hamidon is a what what of what?"

So Brian, who actually knows what's going on in the story and was conveniently ill the day we sent this article out, has rewritten the backstory and we've asked curse-gaming to update the article.

Other than that, I hope everyone enjoys the article. I had a lot of fun writing it.

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So it was actually Posi who screwed up Hammi's background that badly? Yeesh. Wouldn't have thought that in a million years.

Well, kudos for owning up to it. Busy or not, it helps to have the background straight, so having Curse-Gaming update the article w/ the correct background info is a good thing, IMO.

Overall, it was a good teaser article, I thought. Definitely seemed to get the gears turning of both the nightly-raider and the non-raider alike.

BlueHeeler · 03-23-2007 08:56 AM

Hi BAB.

It will be interesting to experiment on this without worrying about a mito pop ruining the attempt. Villain side should be very interesting.

I still don't like the cap of 50 players. What happens if a large number of tanks or stalkers show up? Will a group of 50, with the majority melee AT's, be able to win? Will players be told "nope we have too many tanks/stalkers already, get out or we won't even start?"

Rajani Isa · 03-23-2007 09:04 AM

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New Red Name!!??!!

=O_O=

Gleeee!!!!

*pounces Back Alley Brawler and smuthers him with Otter Huggles*

=^o^=

And here I was going to post how I'm a little, okay, really dissapointed that the 'new' design sounds to be 'more-of-the-same' but 'easier'. Maybe it's just how I read the article though. *shrug*

=. .=

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yeah - he registered just for that post.