City of Heroes Does PAX! ~Discussion~

I'm going to try and show up for the Meet and Greet. Like many, I figured on buying a Pax ticket on Saturday and got a rude awakening. Doh!

One question for the Community Reps - How is this going to work? From what I hear, the Billiards Room is a pretty small venue, and you've apparently got it booked for the whole night. If the M&G runs from 6-1, what do you have planned for seven hours? What happens if 200 people all show up at 6pm?

You people in attendance must tell us all the ROGUE news! Must!

I've been obsessively (and I don't like it, I really don't like it. Darned OCD ) refreshing the boards since 2:30 PM Pacific time to find out what was being said at the panel. What was said? *Scratches face and head and has a couple ticks.*

The New Posts button on many forums have ruined several courses for me the past several years. <_< Must refresh....

Was nice to see the NC Soft folks at PAX, I got a code for a CoH costume, unfortunately I keep getting an invalid code notice when I try to use it. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks bunches!

The best news (in my opinion) came not from the panel but just from discussion with Matt and Joe. I'm not sure when it's going to happen (likely I16) but soon at any rate. We are going to get a missing glowie/hunt indicator. When the remaining amount of glowies or needed enemies is 10% then they will show up on the map.

I didn't really think to take notes or anything, but one thing I remember from the panel today was about adding maps to mission architect. There are a lot of maps that they couldn't add or had to remove from MA because they were not completely generic maps -- they included elements that made weird things happen when used in AE. Those maps are supposed to be edited so that they can be added back to AE, but lately everyone's been working on Rogue. But they did say at the panel that there was one new person who was still being trained whose job it was to work on AE maps, so they haven't forgotten about that.

Most of the panel was about their new special author MA missions. They said that those would be sorted above Dev's Choice arcs so you'll see them first when you open up the mission window. The first two are both humor arcs, since one is about Kurtz's Lolbat and his literate rogue's gallery, and the other is about Captain Amazing and his nemesis The Great Face (if I'm remembering the names right).

No Rogue information in that panel, unfortunately. Other than that I played around with I16 a bit, collected my Ring Mistress card, wandered around, bought dice, and then left long before the meet & greet since I was tired and my friends are running a D&D game tonight. (Which I'm ignoring at the moment...)

They only had time for a few questions from the crowd, but of course people asked them about MA boss farms. The two things I remember is that they really didn't expect farming nearly as much as we've seen -- they were prepared to deal with more in the way of language and explicit content as far as misuse of the MA -- and they talked about trying to strike a balance between allowing people full freedom to create custom enemies and be creative with MA and having it give equivalent experience to the rest of the game so that players aren't being cheated by playing MA -- and trying to curb the misuse of AE.

One thing they said was that what people told them at PaX last year had a profound impact on how they did things. PaX 2008 was when they had their big reveal about the upcoming MA system, and everyone told them that you needed to be able to create custom enemies with it. That lead to them completely rethinking it and not releasing it until Spring... and of course, it's a much better system for it (you'd never get the guest author thing they're doing now if they hadn't added custom enemies). So that was just to say how meeting other players and listening to what the players have to say is very important to what they do.

That's what i remember from my few hours at the con. ^_^ I had a Saturday pass, I only wandered around for about 5 hours total.

No ROGUE news? That is really disappointing.

Honestly, I could care less about i16. Power prolif just causes the ATs to become a bit more alike. Colors are nice but not a priority. Ah well.

Just got back from the Meet and Greet. It was a lot of fun, and I wanted to thank the Paragon Studios folks for putting it together. No big game news or anything, just a lot of good conversation and beer.

Also, Scott Kurtz going off on a tanget was the most... er memorable... part of the panel.

I wonder if the AE map editing would include removing the Arachnos flyer from the some of the Safeguard maps?

Oh and one more thing. Posi definitely does want to be able to increase the allowable size of MA arcs but hasn't yet figured out a way to do so. The limiting factor is that even now there are people who complain about the amount of time it takes to load up the missions. I can understand why it takes a bit of time for some. After all, the custom enemy and ally data isn't on your system already like the standard enemy data is so low end systems are of course going to lag out.

Now that I've the basic information and being understanding part out of the way. Would those of you who experience inordinately long times in loading missions, or the market, or zones or whatever do me a favor? Quit complaining and get yourself a real computer so those of us who are capable of handling larger chunks of data can get the goodies? Or if you can't afford yourself a new computer then at least quit complaining about the difficulties you have due to your system. It isn't the highway department's fault that your second hand Yugo has a top speed of 40mph (64kph) and the speed limit shouldn't be lowered just so you can keep up with the other cars.

Sorry for the rant but I just hate it when I hear that the limiting factor in some area of the game is that some systems can't handle it. If the console world went with that marketing strategy then the ps3 would still be using cds and 32 bit graphics just so the original playstation owners could still play the games. I've upgraded my system twice since CoH was released just to keep the shiny bits at maximum shininess.

Not to mention the CoH booth at PAX features very large artwork for Going Rogue. Seems at least a little odd that they would have *nothing* new to say on the expansion.

PAX booth Art #3

I'm concerned that none of the big MMOs will be able to keep their customers though. The Hello Kitty MMO was being handed out for free. And who wouldn't leave for a chance at playing Hello Kitty?

I hear that it's even being ported to the X-Box by Bungie. They are going to call it Halo Kitty.