Killing pigs

It's like Goldilocks and the three muhmorpugers. "The third one was neither too fast nor too slow, it was just right."

If you can promise animted hair, I'll sign up form alpha now

In the real world, maybe. In MMORPGs, the boars I fight are comparable to rats and bats and beetles.

Yeah it's strange, I hate cooking in real life but it's one of the things I do like in video games. Of course given that most of our opponents are humans adding the ability to cook them might be a little much.... (anyone for a Roast Malta Gunslinger Liver?)

Definitely.

And 5 things I've realised this week that CoH already does that other MMOs should do if they want me to sub:

1. Knockback with ragdoll animation. My MA scrapper is just so much fun. No matter how impressive a game's attack animations are, or how awesome its sound effects are, having the mob stay in exactly the same position/pose for the entire fight going through the same 'being hit' reaction animations isn't good enough. Seeing a mob get punted across a room to dangle over a bannister absolutely adds to the immersion and sense that I'm in a 'realistic' world. But far more importantly, it makes me giggle like a loon and it's just frankly AWESOME.

2. Collision detection. I'll never complain about being pushed out of the way by a civvie or getting stuck behind an MMs minions again. If CoH didn't have collision detecytion, we'd all be in a weird 'phased' state and be able to overlap each other, and mobs too, and that would look and feel wrong.

3. Extensive narrative delivery. Briefings, entry popups, clues, dialogue, more clues, bio fields for mobs, objects, glowies, allies, hostages, escorts, more clues, exit popups, system messages, and more clues allow so much actual story to be told. "Hey, $Heroname, go over there and defeat 20 Hellions, because they're [doing something bad]', followed by the killquest, followed by "Well done, $heroname, here's your inf!' everytime with precious little other story would steal much of the goodness from CoH for me.

4. Instances. I am so glad that when i first encountered Frostfire, it wasn't in an open-space non-instance with dozens of other heroes wandering in and out, some on my team, some solo, some on another team. I remember that first Frostfire mission I did. There were 6 of us. Just us. It was fantastic. And when we got to the last room, there he was, Frosty, and his minions, in that room alone, waiting for us. I'm so glad we didn't have to wait for a group to finish him off and leave, and then wait for another minute for him to respawn for our go. I know that somewhere else in the Hollows there's another team beating up Frostfire when I'm doing it, but I don't have to watch them, do I?

5. Varied objectives. I wasn't here for CoH's launch, so I can't comment on what was available then, but now, look what we can do! Defeat X of mob Y is here, a staple of MMOs since the dawn of time, but they're in a minority, I'll tentatively claim. We can Clear All, Click the Glowie/s, Defeat, Rescue, Escort or simply Free someone, we can Smash things up, Go On Patrol, Explore, and Rob Banks or Stop Them Being Robbed. We can Go Skiing, MAKE OUR OWN QUESTS, marketeer and craft if we want to, and we can even swap our spandex for a tux for when we need to Attend a Diplomatic Party. In fact, about the only thing I can't do in CoH...is kill pigs.

Eco.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Emphasis mine. The sheer awesome of ragdoll physics is difficult to describe. It's one of those "you had to be there" things. I've seen other games with knockback, but all of them had what City of Heroes had at launch - animated knockback. You hit an enemy, they animate being knocked back, the engine carries them back a set distance, they land flat on their backs and bounce. Bo-ring! I cannot tell you all the weird and wonderful fun I've had with ragdolls, both in how they fly and in how they land.

There are the simple things, like hitting someone so hard they go CARTWHEELING straight up and land on their heads. There are the more complicated things of knocking someone back into a desk and seeing him flip head over heels. Or knocking someone off a roof into a nest of pipes across the street and seeing him hit his face on every pipe on the way down like in the old UT2003 Bombing Run map. There was even someone with a pick of the aftermath of a battle, with one enemy sprawled on the ground, one enemy bent over a fence, one lying on his neck with his feet propped up by said fence and one spread-eagled on his back on the fence, with the caption "NO ONE MESSES WITH ME!" I loved it I have a whole huge collection of these pics, myself.

The beauty of ragdolls is their unpredictability, and the fun of them is just hitting hard and watching what happens. And, actually, I think City of Heroes might be one of the VERY few games I've seen that has ragdolls on characters BEFORE they die.

That's one thing that always, always bothered me about other MMOs. Now, I'm a good boy when it comes to that. I read my lore, read my briefings, read my dialogues and generally try to play the game like God intended. Except, in pretty much every other MMO, all I get to read is boring, pointless, uninteresting beating about the bush that's just many sentences saying the same thing - go kill stuff. And when I finally realise that God did NOT intend me to read this dialogue and instead just go for the objective, I stop reading. I can certainly see where certain players get the attitude that reading briefings is pointless - they just played a lot of games where it WAS completely and utterly pointless. Do I really need a long-winded explanation of how the caravan tipped in the river and frogs ate his ore when all he wants to tell me is to go kill frogs and collect items from them?

Granted, a lot of the old City of Heroes missions are pretty bad and, yes, a lot like that. Oh, no! The Trolls raided a building! Go save people! But, actually, a lot of those missions have a twist of some sort. For instance, the mission where the Skulls take over a building and threaten to force people to overdose on Superadine has larger implications, because there's no reason for the Skulls to have attacked the building. It is later revealed that they DID, in fact, have a reason, because they're working for someone else.

The world in City of Heroes may be static, but it's a lot less OBVIOUSLY static compared to most other MMOs where everyone knows everything as soon as you log in. In City of Heroes, the game at least pretends it has a time-line that advances as you gain in level. All new characters are trying to figure out the identity of Dr. Vahzilok, then they end up arresting him, then they look for the identity of Colonel Duray, then they confirm ours is the Real nemesis, then they stop him, then they learn a whole bunch of things about the Rikti and Malta and stop the Carnival and break up Crey and so on and so forth. Yeah, everyone does the same and we, as players, already know everything, but the game at least tries to give you a story.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Put simply:

The marketing people behind the game are not a patch [sic] on the developers.

Great product but nobody out there knows about it.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Sadly true.

The people in marketing should be taken out and SHOT, because they don't DO anything.
Either that, or there IS no Marketing department, which would make more sense.

No google ads, no ads of any sort, only very, VERY old copies of the game on the shelves (this is in the UK, no idea of elsewhere).
Even the other blooming game has google ads! And charges £30 on the shelves!

Come ON, marketting, stop being a self glorified censorship department and DO something.
Either that or it will be the players going out and making posters and advertising.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Add on:
6. Moving from point A to point B is not content!

That's still better than getting killed by a tree stump at level 2. Which isn't as bad as being killed by a Baaad Sheep, sporting Mr. T's mohawk, a dozen gold chains and a black and orange tiger stripe.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Moving from point A to point B could be content if you had to break through a blockade on a besieged town to bring something vital to the people resisting inside and re-establishing a communication line, then joining the besieged for a special operation where you capture the enemy general while the main forces launch a diversionary counter-attack on a different point.

But I digress, that's not the A to B that's usually been "sold" as content.

I'd like to see an attempt at a game with diminishing returns on advancement to hobble those people who want to play 8, 10, 20 hours a day for days on end. NORMAL people can't play MMO's for that kind of time. NORMAL people can play for an hour or two a day at best before they have to get back to their REAL life. As a NORMAL gamer I'd like to someday have a shot at honest-and-for-truly being the first person to see a new game area, fight a new monster or NPC, achieve something no other player has yet. Naturally, my chances would then be no better than 1:X, where x=the total number of players, but as it is my chances are nil and somehow that doesn't seem right or fair.

Which also requires a game engine and design which can be ADAPTED to players ideas. "We can't give you X because that will break every Y in the game, or will require reprogramming every Z to make it work."

So the game system should be inherently designed to be biased against the most loyal customers? That doesn't sound like a good business decision.

So, because I get enough time off to get to do so - or, for instance, on a slow work day, leave my character ... say... in the supergroup base (making it a 10 hour "game" day) so I can hop over, play around for a bit until I have to take care of something, park it again, etc, I should be punished?

How about no?

How about you don't worry about what or how much or how someone else plays?

Oh, and your chances of seeing a new monster/area/etc are as good as everyone elses, as those sorts of things are put in during patches - before which they kick everyone off the server anyway. So the person who gets to hop on for an hour after the servers come back up have the *exact same chance* as the person who's going to spend multiple hours on.

Walking.
Power customization.
Weapon customization.
Waist capes.
Co-op zones and teaming (with further improvements coming.)

Shall I go on?

See my Guides and Tutorials

Good luck with that. Considering how overly broad and subjective #1 is and the razor's edge you have to tread to make #2 perfectly balanced (if it's not perfectly balanced, it's not true), it's easier said than done.

Uh yeah, that sounds like a great idea. So I guess in your view, NORMAL people have piss poor time management skills. Yet another "You play more than me so you're not NORMAL" post. I don't tend to play 8+ hours a day but I can easily hit that average. Slow day at work, holes in my schedule, I can play during the day. Plus, I don't tend to grip my pillow for a quarter of every day so that opens up even more time. Penalizing people for playing a game, is such a horrible business model, it'll never see the light of day, thankfully.

That's also not just moving from A to B, that's a quest/mission/assignment that involves more than just killing anything that moves.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

#1 is entirely an issue with having decent writers for quests/missions/story arcs/etc. You can easily give players a sense of power and importance without allowing them to trash the universe at their whim. All you have to do is write the game as if, from the beginning, player characters are better than the average Joe.

As to #2, the only "perfectly balanced" system is one in which everyone has absolutely everything the other side does in the exact same magnitudes. You can achieve a close enough balance using comparative benefit equations, but it will never be "perfectly balanced" because you naturally have to arbitrarily assign hard values to naturally inconsistent variables in order to fit certain things into the balance equations (i.e. how much damage/survivability is a mag 3 hold the equivalent of?).

You can actually encourage team play without requiring it (though I believe that certain activities such as raids should still be restricted to team play in order to preserve the magnitude of the situation) by allowing every character the ability to solo respectably and making it so that nominally "team" tasks scale based upon team size. Soloing might require a completely different playstyle and strategy than is used in a team or by other characters, but it should at least be an option. This isn't to say that every character should be just as good at soloing as every other, but the binary "canSolo" should always be true. The additional benefit of teaming is always rather easy to accomplish because you simply have to allow characters to specialize (which is already pretty much what happens) and grant greater rewards for larger teams (which is true, on average). Of course, it's not as if CoX is unique in that is has encouraged teaming while simultaneously supporting soloability. Most MMOs have already subscribed to that mentality.