A system to give our characters more personality

This is an idea that came to me in a burst of inspiration. In comic books, heroes and villains banter about in fights quite a lot, but in CoH, our characters are rather silent. In order to get your character to talk in combat and banter about, you have to make binds, macros, that sort of thing, and building up a sizeable repertoire of things to say is quite complicated and usually requires assistance outside of CoH itself.

My suggestion aims to remedy that, and make it easier for the average player to make use of characterizing chatter in combat. The first thing is to add a new chat channel, let's call it the Banter channel. This is the channel that all the things your character would say with this system goes out on. Having all the chatter go out on its own channel would keep the battle banter from spamming other chat channels. Next, there would be a window with a list of different triggers. These triggers would range from things that any character could do, such as "Revived from KO" or "Attacked Non-Aggroed Enemy," to AT-specific things like "Domination Activated" or "Scored a Critical Hit," to powerset-specific things like "Used Power Bolt." For each trigger, you could add phrases for your character to say on the Banter channel when that trigger happens. These phrases and their associated triggers would be stored clientside, so there would be no limit to how many phrases you could associate to each trigger. "Activated Rest" could have one or one hundred different things listed for your character to say when they use Rest. In addition, you could set the likelihood of a phrase being said; for example, a power you use constantly, like Fire Blast, you'd want to have a lower chance of activating a phrase, but a power you use rarely, like EM Pulse, you might want to have say something every time.

Of course players would have some control over how other people could affect their gameplay with this. If you don't want to risk your monitor being a sea of chat bubbles during combat, you can turn off Banter. Alternatively, if you want to enjoy well-done banter without having to endure terrible or obnoxious banter, you could choose to ignore specific players' banter while still being able to hear them talk on normal channels.

I think such a system would give players the opportunity to really flesh out the personalities of their characters. As far as I know, no MMO has a system like this in place, so it would also be another innovation for CoH.

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Issue 16 made me feel like this.
Warning: This poster likes to play Devil's Advocate.

Eh.

I know you have it set up above where you can adjust the frequency - but I can see far too many people learning about this and *not doing so* because their little phrase is "lulz kool." I already see that, fortunately rarely, with binds.

Personally, I'll keep my characters personality in my hands via RP. Putting in an in-game system, I think, would turn most "personalities" into simply "annoying." (Yes, I *do* see where you can "just ignore their banter" or "ignore the banter channel" - I think within a week it'd be shut off on all my characters second only to Depth of Field.)

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Eh.

I know you have it set up above where you can adjust the frequency - but I can see far too many people learning about this and *not doing so* because their little phrase is "lulz kool." I already see that, fortunately rarely, with binds.

Personally, I'll keep my characters personality in my hands via RP. Putting in an in-game system, I think, would turn most "personalities" into simply "annoying." (Yes, I *do* see where you can "just ignore their banter" or "ignore the banter channel" - I think within a week it'd be shut off on all my characters second only to Depth of Field.)

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This. One experience teaming with somebody who had a macro to shout mystic-sounding gibberish for every single attack on his mage-type character is enough to make me not want to encourage anything similar. It'd look a bit silly for characters to be jabbering an endless string of quips during battles, anyway. If it were capped at about a 5% chance of triggering on any given event and you had multiple lines available to mix things up a little, it could be tolerable.

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Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.

[ QUOTE ]
Eh.

I know you have it set up above where you can adjust the frequency - but I can see far too many people learning about this and *not doing so* because their little phrase is "lulz kool." I already see that, fortunately rarely, with binds.

Personally, I'll keep my characters personality in my hands via RP. Putting in an in-game system, I think, would turn most "personalities" into simply "annoying." (Yes, I *do* see where you can "just ignore their banter" or "ignore the banter channel" - I think within a week it'd be shut off on all my characters second only to Depth of Field.)

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This. I was once teamed with a VERY flimsy imitation of Hank McCoy once. My friends and I RP as we go through combat (requires a team that knows what to do when someone is typing and a high keystroke per minute count) And though we'd attempt to engage him in social intercourse he just kept hitting macroed binds and keybinds with long-winded prose about various philosophers and how their field of expertise coincides with his pummeling of evil-doers.

It was -exceptionally- annoying.

-Rachel-

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Eh.

I know you have it set up above where you can adjust the frequency - but I can see far too many people learning about this and *not doing so* because their little phrase is "lulz kool." I already see that, fortunately rarely, with binds.

Personally, I'll keep my characters personality in my hands via RP. Putting in an in-game system, I think, would turn most "personalities" into simply "annoying." (Yes, I *do* see where you can "just ignore their banter" or "ignore the banter channel" - I think within a week it'd be shut off on all my characters second only to Depth of Field.)

[/ QUOTE ]

This. One experience teaming with somebody who had a macro to shout mystic-sounding gibberish for every single attack on his mage-type character is enough to make me not want to encourage anything similar. It'd look a bit silly for characters to be jabbering an endless string of quips during battles, anyway. If it were capped at about a 5% chance of triggering on any given event and you had multiple lines available to mix things up a little, it could be tolerable.

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Oh [censored] Gods yeah. I remember walking an SG mate through setting up binds and macros. Turned out he used it to set every power he had at his command with a name that the character would shout when using it. Which in the course of a single combat produces an amazing amount of spam. And it gets repetitive after you've run the first mission together.

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[ QUOTE ]
Eh.

I know you have it set up above where you can adjust the frequency - but I can see far too many people learning about this and *not doing so* because their little phrase is "lulz kool." I already see that, fortunately rarely, with binds.

Personally, I'll keep my characters personality in my hands via RP. Putting in an in-game system, I think, would turn most "personalities" into simply "annoying." (Yes, I *do* see where you can "just ignore their banter" or "ignore the banter channel" - I think within a week it'd be shut off on all my characters second only to Depth of Field.)

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Oh lawdy, lawd. I remember back in my lowbie days, I was teaming with Mind/Kin Controller that had a bind for every last attack he had. Eventually the leader told him to lose them, or he'd be kicked from the team.

Two seconds later, the team had a free spot.

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No thanks, sometimes enemies can be annoying enough about this. For example...

"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"
"You'll save nothing, hero!"

For trivia, that's what happened when the Empath supporting our Tank at the end of the STF was too busy asking "Now?" after the Tank had announced he was going in and the leader said attack the towers.

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I'll go against the grain and say I actually think this idea is kinda cool. With the right controls it could add a lot, I would say having a command to ignore a specific character's banter (but no other channels) would be almost required though.

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Infatum on Virtueverse

When it's done well it can be very entertaining. I remember duoing on a BNY mission with a blaster named, I think, Original Patriot, who was like a cross between Captain America and Hugh Hefner. He had two sets of binds - one for blasting the enemies, and one for socialising with any heroine or villainess he encountered.

Every so often he'd get them mixed up, and start flirting with Winter Lords

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