Old Complaints ~or~ 'A More Perfect Superhero Simulator'

I'd have to go with these two as big QOL ones, and anything that encourages ease of teaming I imagine would be high priority since teams (i.e. playing with others) are perhaps the greatest thing a MMO offers for its monthly fee over a console game. When I'm team lead I'd love to be able to list my team as "lfm" while we're fighting away in a mission.

In a more general scope, having some noncombat options would be great, but I'm not sure how to make them better than things like marketing, badge collecting, organizing activities (costume contests, Hami raids), base building and crafting that are already in the game and obviously appeal to some people in it. Some of them, like marketing and crafting and even getting badges for accolades, even improve your character arguably as much as gaining more levels does. Get a couple of Day Job badges and pick up an AoE Sleep power, for example.

How many people stop to fight fires in Steel Canyon, for example, once they have the badges for it?

Very interesting. Do you have the value for 2 capes, as well?

Very interesting indeed! I wonder how accurate can that be in determining how player costumes change the frame rate?

It's something I like doing but it's not an activity I can do solo. The issue isn't not wanting to team (I love teaming) but that there's a unique difficuly to it that most people would rather bypass because they are so blinded by badges. I also like ghost hunting in Port Oakes which adds a twist to kills that actually makes it intriguingly harder for many high level toons.

My Arcs
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Mission Architect Handyman

This was unfortunately not my experience. My main character is named BubbleYumm. She is literally minimum height (both in height and in legs slider), she is a FF/Psy defender, and her (shortened) biography is that she's "A piece of bubble gum that was tracked into a lab on the bottom of a scientist's shoe; exposure to a mysterious lab-ray gave her sentience, then she melded with a nearby semi-sentient robot." I had one costume on her that was a Dr. Doom tribute costume. Keep in mind she's under 4 feet tall, female, has a unique back-story, and her powers have nothing to do with Doom's. And yet someone reported that costume, and that costume got generic'd. (Not her other costume slots.) But then the GM also went through the rest of my account, on all other servers, and generic'd all of the tribute toons I'd made. I had one server at the time where I would make toons and never play them, but I just wanted to see how well I could recreate the costumes. They all got generic'd. If the GMs had looked at the amount of time spent on each of those characters, they'd have seen that it was literally only the 30 seconds to log back out after I created the character. Now that we can save costumes separately, I can fiddle to my heart's content - but Yumm's Doom tribute costume should not have been generic'd in my opinion.

This has been my experience too. In fact, *every* time I try to access the market, my computer locks up for at least 30 seconds, if not longer, and literally half the time I crash. It's absurd.

Agreed. Valkyrie wings on female models, anybody? I mean, just the wings, when the character is just standing there, all the feathers look like they're stabbing the character in the back and legs. That's not only "okay for release", but "okay for release in a product that people are going to pay $10 extra for"? Granted, I want clipping issues fixed (I think all my toons' elbows poke out of "Witch Tight Gloves"), but using that as their sole reason for not allowing certain costume combos just doesn't fly with me. They allow so much of it to slip through, why is THIS one or THAT one forbidden?

Well first, then let's not add a dozen shades of red. But can we have pewter? Khaki? Actually I have over the years encountered several colors that I consider fairly standard, that just don't exist for players, and I can't imagine why. (See next.)

You can still do this, the toon just can't be Caucasian. There are several shades of other colors that you can match both skin tone and costume color to effectively make a nude character. So, what, being naked is okay as long as you're not white?

(EDIT) I should state that I adore this game, and despite there being some improvements I'd like to see made, these issues do not threaten my overall dedication to the game. I'm spending fewer hours in-game now than I was five years ago (wait, almost six now, geeze!) because of real-life issues, but all of these bugs and QOL issues in this thread and every other, will not keep me from the game. They're "nice to have" for me, but they're not game-breaking, they don't utterly ruin my enjoyment. Just... for perspective. :]

Do puzzle games really work in this internet age? Especially online games, where you already have guaranteed access to the web and convenient access to wikis, FAQs, walkthroughs, etc.

For those of us that like to use our noggin, yes. Wikis and FAQs are there for the bored or lazy (or frustrated).

As a means of gating content or rationing out XP, no they don't. As a means of providing entertainment to individuals who enjoy finding out the answers for themselves, yes they do.

You can find spoilers for all sorts of stories from all sorts of media on the Internet, but that doesn't mean people won't want to experience those stories unspoilered.

I don't think the mere logical possibility of knowing the 'answer' to something in advance should dissuade people from including riddles, enigmas, puzzles and so on in game content.

I don't think those work as well on a team, though.

BaBs, do you remember those sliding tile puzzles with the eight tiles and the one empty one? Randomize the start and I'm sure there's not a single damn FAQ on the net that can help you solve it. Though that might just be more frustrating than fun.

There's also... Digital Rubik's cube! We already have the model skeleton in game with the invention system!

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

Amen, brother!

As others have said, "Camera reset" does NOT affect the up/down angle ("pitch"). It only resets the left/right angle ("yaw") and the distance.

I also wish Camera Reset should reset the Pitch in addition to the Yaw.

Example. A work Colleague who got the Wii Sports resort for Christmas, looked up online the 80 or so spots you can visit in the airplane flyby game, just to tag them all fast.

Heh. And the number of pieces in the sliding puzzles change depending on your difficulty. If you're on "1 level below me", you get ones with 2 across and 2 down.

You can't truly randomize the starting positions because there are many more possibilities that are impossible to solve by sliding than ones that are, but something like this could still be done.

If by "work" you mean "allows a developer to laugh at his cleverness knowing that, if the player just hits a wall, he's doomed to keep hitting hits head against the wall unless he just happens to think of this the right way", no they don't.

If by "work" you mean "gives players a fun challenge, something to cogitate on, and if they get stuck, there's a way around", yes, they work even better this way.

I never really got into Secrets of Monkey Island when it first came out. Ran into some puzzles, and just got stuck. The revised version for XBox Live, in addition to a graphic update, includes a hint system, where you can get hints from "vague pointers" to "OK, do X, Y, and then Z". And I had a blast with it.

Exactly. Look at it this way: How often do you go look up spoilers for a movie before you watch it? Unless you're going to an advanced screening, it's entirely possible to know the entire movie without having ever seen it. But do you do that? No, you want to experience the movie for yourself, so you avoid spoilers. Puzzle games would be the same way - I'm sure some people looked up how to solve the Midnighter puzzle without trying to figure it out, but I quite enjoyed the task myself.

And by "an XP reward" I meant like 10 or 50 XP (the same you get from exploration badges). Not enough to make it worth farming, but enough that players have a reason to do the puzzle again, should they so desire.

(EDIT) And I prefer that Page Down only reset yaw, and not pitch. Or if they change it, I'd like to retain the ability to have a key that only resets yaw. I tend to view the game from a slightly top-down angle, and use Page Down a lot ... if that functionality totally went away, I'd be rather miffed. :P

It's not. The server doesn't render costumes. But the server is struggling on that map.

Imagine that the server constantly runs in a loop. But it's not just a "tight" loop where it processes as fast as it can. Each pass through the loop is effectively on a timer. When the timer ticks off a mark, the server runs through all the updates it has to do to make the environment reflect changes since the last timer tick.

This bookkeeping to involves a lot of things. It has to process all the commands all the clients send it, decide what all the AIs on a map do, count down power durations and activations, and update the position of mobile entities. When it's done with all that, the server basically waits for the next timer tick, and then does it all again.

Now imagine that the bookkeeping takes too long, and the server can't actually finish it all before the next tick comes in. Basically, it has to defer the next tick until it finishes all the bookkeeping for this one, then immediately start the next one. But that one takes too long too, and so on.

This is why our powers recharge more slowly on that map, at very crowded Rikti raids, and at pre-I9 Hamidon raids. There's too much bookkeeping to do to update it all in the window of the server ticks, so the ticks start taking longer. But the game defines one second of "game" time in terms of a certain number of ticks, so longer ticks mean that one second of game time starts taking longer than one second of "real world" time.

At one point someone told us that there were two performance issues on that map. One was the number of patrols and ambushes and another was the Shield Defense powerset of the Cimeroran mobs. Consider what that powerset does. Several times a second, for every Cimeroran mob (well, the ones with Shields) the server has to figure which other mobs are within a certain radius around it and use that to control the defense and mez protection of each mob.

Now, if the Cimerora mish makes your framerate go down, that's different. That won't affect your actual power recharges, or generally cause your character to rubber band.

By the way, there's a fix coming for this exact issue. They've developed tech such that when you get to 10% remaining of glowies and/or mobs in a 'defeat all', they'll show on the map. When they announced this, they were vague on if it'd be rolled out before Going Rogue. It can be, but it may not be. I'm also not clear on if this is something that'll be automatic or if they have to enable it on a per-mission basis.

This was the main area of my interest and suggestions in Earth and Beyond. It was pretty clear that the devs of that game were trying to make something new -- three separate games that were combined into an MMO. You had the combat game, which was based on other MMOs on the market at the time. You had the trading game, which tried to be something like Elite but failed miserably. Then you had the Explorers.

That was the problem though. What did the Explorers do? Most of them mined for XP, but that wasn't available to the other classes. And it wasn't really a goal of its own, it was part of the crafting system. Likewise, there were plenty of people who felt that crafting for the Traders was meant to be their primary source of XP and complained that it was so low. But if the trading system had been robust enough to support its own form of gameplay, it probably would have been fun as a career choice.

The general Exploration XP was finite, because the universe itself was finite. The developers couldn't possibly base Explore XP on adding new zones. So the closest they seemed to come to it was puzzles, like unlocking the Maelstrom, and the occasional mission that made you investigate the unknown. The problem with that, of course, is that once you know the secret, going through the steps and collecting the XP is easy. Perhaps too easy, since most people don't seem to enjoy "sandwich runs".

I actually had a lot of ideas, from randomized puzzles that could be repeated for XP to the collection of special artifacts or data which could be delivered to a location (essentially, "mining" for information) to space rescues where you restored a damaged ship or diverted an asteroid on a collision course with a colony. None of this ever came to be, but I never hesitated to suggest an idea, no matter how far fetched.

The problem with CoH is that random content is usually so predictable that eventually it isn't seen as varied any more. See the Newspaper Missions. Or even the fires in Steel Canyon. There's plenty of examples of how to make combat with another MOB interesting, but very few MMOs have dealt with puzzles or exploration. Most examples are single player games that aren't that repeatable. So honestly, I have no more idea how to solve the problem than I did back then.

Dodgeball with travel suppression...sounds fun!