NCSoft and Massively

Heh...it seems that listening to 'us' isn't always a great idea.

The trick is to filter the good stuff from the bad stuff.

Merge servers cause game is dying! = Bad
Total respec so my Earth/Storm can become Fire/Kin! = Bad
Power customization cause I want rainbow energy! = Good
Side Switching so I can play a good Brute and evil Blaster! = Good

Sometimes players have good ideas, and sometimes bad. Sometimes the good ideas have few supporters and don't gather much attention. Sometimes bad ideas have a lot of people rallying and agreeing. It's nice we have a dev team that's devoted to giving the players more or less what they want. Especially for those of us who existed in the "my vision" days.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

nemesis system....although as implemented...meh.

Don't cut off my hands and feet!

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Did you really really REALLY need them?

Fixed. Management-compliant software design uses UML now.

Well, with the female walk making a return to the game, I might need my hands, at least.

*edit*
To play the game with!

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.

That's fun and all, but the biggest (and about ONLY) thing I really wanted to take home with me was customizable eyes. Champions faces suck hickeys, but damn if those eyes weren't cool. It opened up a brand new level of customization that I'd never even considered. Pity that there wasn't a good enough game to go with it.

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.

Other then being able to do them separate from each other what was so great about em?

Bad Sam! You get a time out!

Well, once you realize that the experience they mean was probably the hours they put in playing Marvel Ultimate Alliance in the break room during lunch...

Err... The ability to customize them? I never did eyes different, but even just being able to give someone deep green eyes was a lot in my book. In City of Heroes, almost all the faces have perfectly normal human eyes. The only faces that don't are usually horribly ugly otherwise, suffering from crippling scowls or eyeborws of evilnessnessness.

In Champions, I went overboard with this. I had a giant green woman I remade from here, and I don't know what her eyes are here, but there she had very nice deep blue eyes. A cyborg girl of mine, on the other hand, had a green sclera and a red pupil-less eye. A demon woman of mine ended up with jet black pupil-less eyes, whereas a blue alien girl ended up with pure white eyes.

In my view, eyes are a very important part of a character's personality, so picking the right eyes ended up being not just crucial, but outwardly character-defining in a way I'd not experienced before and in a way I've not experienced since. I brought over character I had in City of Heroes, and the added eye customization made me think long and hard about characters who were supposed to have been designed and done.

And that's something.

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.

I see examples all over the place, although I don't always think they learned the right lessons.

Some things they did seem to learn, though:

1. Diminishing returns
2. Designing for the maximum achievable stats
3. Implementing PvP from the start so it has to be balanced simultaneously with PvE powers evolution (whether they are balancing well is a separate issue)
4. Reduced AoE effects
5. Reduced stackable buffs
6. More involved tutorial
7. Ability to test powers before making build additions

Some would also say they learned players prefer unrooted combat and earlier travel, but those are mostly optional design decisions, not lessons.

I also think a core lesson they learned that isn't obvious to the average player is to design and implement their game systems in a more modular way to allow for easier changes. The rapid development incurred in the months before open beta seemed to me to occur much faster than Cryptic has ever suggested they were capable of doing for CoH at any time from closed beta to post-launch.

One lesson they seemed to have learned, but I don't think they executed well on, was implementing numerical balance methodologies for powers from the start. They clearly did so rather than mostly just guessing, but I don't think those methodologies worked as well as they should have (they didn't work at all correctly for defensive passives).

The lessons they didn't learn still have me shaking my head, but its clear to me they did a much better job the second time around.

I've no doubt they learned a lot on the mechanical end of things, but Jack's big boasts weren't about that. To hear him speak, you'd think the game would be like City of Heroes, only many times better. Not only is its being better debatable, it's practically nothing like City of Heroes at all. To the point where I can't understand what the people calling it "CoH 2.0" are thinking. It's like taking Pro Evolution Soccer and calling it God of War 2.

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.

And some more non-city zones - I liked the look of the desert and Canadian zones in CO.

If rep was still a useful feature, I've +rep'ed this post with a supportive comment.

Since it isn't, I have to compliment you in public.

LOL sam!

I agree Sam's best statement.