Takin' A Break

I completely agree with what you're saying.

I believe the devs changed Faultline the way they did because the two complaints they received about it were: A) there's nothing interesting to do there, and B) players in the old days (without jetpacks and zero-g packs) were getting stuck in the cracks.

So they took steps to make the zone about 1/3 as craggy as before, and they inserted new content.

If you add a small team to revamp and add new content, it doesn't mean you get fewer new assets and features than you are presently getting.

The original dev team would still exist and would still be making features like the Praetoria expansion.

What you would get is new optional content that includes all of the new assets developed since CoH started. Take the look of the blueside Midnighter arc as an example. A lot of those art assets didn't exist in 2004, but content created now could include them.

You could take the Lost Cure Wand art and animation, if you wanted, and apply it to a new ally or foe group.

You could replace the small old Circle caves with new wider caves.

You could use some of the Rikti maps and objects in new Lost missions.

You could integrate anything developed from 2005 onward into new content for blueside, such as the Hellfrost demons, the Legacy Chain, the Midnighters, Vanguard, and Arachnos.

As for players demanding new assets ... I think if it is done well, story IS an asset.

"That's just you" is a weak argument, Rian, and you ought to know that by now. Unless you want to quote a statistical research you've done proving I'm in the minority and you're in the majority, kindly stop trying to speak for a silent majority that disagrees with me and agrees with you. If you have an actual argument for why the graphical side of Hazard zones is what's keeping people out, then I will gladly hear it, but until someone actually makes a point at explaining that THAT is a problem, I'm simply going to maintain that it doesn't need to be fixed.

Secondly, how can you still maintain that what happened to the War Zone and what happened to Faultline are in any way, shape or form alike? Faultline was remodelled completely, to the point where there is more new stuff than old stuff. The Rikti War zone WAS NOT. The only things that changed about it were closing the old door and putting helicopters on all of the old forts. They didn't do anything to the actual zone. It is now exactly as it was before with only a few VERY minor alterations. All they really changed was shifting spawns around and adding an additional underground component for the Vanguard base. That's it. And this is remarkably like what happened to the Hollows - enemies got shifted around, a vendor and a trainer were added and the entrance zones on both sides were changed up a bit.

So here's my argument which you just keep ignoring - what I want is EXACTLY what happened to the Rikti War Zone, and you CANNOT argue that that has not been a success and received overwhelming praise by the community. I see no reason why the same cannot happen to other Hazard zones, nor do I see a need for anything more than that to happen.

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.

Yeah, that tends to apply in situations when we haven't been flat-out TOLD how hard something is. The Standard Code Rant applies in instances where we have to guess how hard or complicated something is to do. I'm not guessing here. It's a simple fact that adding extra tasks AND art is more resource-intensive than adding extra tasks alone. I'm really not going to get into all the developer commentary regarding this, but we have been told pretty much this several times over through the years. In fact, at one point someone (I think it was War Witch) said it in these exact words. They had to choose between altering the War Zone in any big way or making the new Rikti and Vanguard artwork, and they opted to leave the zone and pick the other option. This is what I'm asking happens with any other zones they revamp - they already have the zone artwork, so I'd rather they messed with making ADDITIONAL artowrk such as enemy models and tilesets, rather than remaking existing artwork that's just fine as it is.

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.

... what...

That, just.

What.

That depends on what kind of text format we're talking here. If we're just looking at ASCII, then each symbol takes up exactly one byte, factoring in spaces and carriage returns. If we take "floppy disk" to refer to the device most commonly used towards the end of the floppy disc days, that would be the 3½-inch HD, which held 1440 KB of memory, which comes up to about 1 474 560 bytes, or just as many symbols. Now, as best I can find, a single page contains between 2622 and 3818 characters, depending on spacing and word usage with a typical font size of 12. If we take the average of the two and go with 3220 symbols per page, then the size of a floppy disk would give us around about 457 pages.

That... Would be a pretty small library.

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.

Yeah, thaaaaat's pretty much what I was thinking. Even unformatted, two megabytes => 2,000,000 bytes => 16,000,000 bits. The Library of Congress has more individual books than that.

Exactly what I did. About 1/2 way through the halloween event, I was super tired of "ToT" teams, that's all anyone wanted to do, Steam was having a sale on Mass Effect so I grabbed it and took a 2-week break from CoX. Made a WORLD of difference. That was the longest I hadn't played in the 4.5 years I've been playing and I came back totally refreshed. Finished Mass Effect, and got about 1/2 way through Dragon Age before I couldn't resist coming back to my (still) favorite game.

That's why I don't sweat the "I'm leaving" threads...if they truely loved CoX, they'll be back...if not, there'll be someone else to take their place.

I'm sorry that was a typo. I meant to type "The Library of the CONGO".

Three issues of Reader's Digest from 1986 and a water-damaged copy of Don Quixote?

here is the thing, you said yourself that you dont have an issue with most of the faultline changes, just that you really like dams, and they ruined the dan, so you think they ruined the zone. so unless you' like to change your argument, Your original premise was not that change was bad, but that you disliked a specific change, so now you consider the zone ruined. the rwz was also changed in a way that someone who was equally as specific could have had a similar fit of pique about, so its a matter of you wanting the developers to read your mind when they make their changes.

Also, i'm sorry but since we are going on about our subjective tastes, the old hazard zones are really old, and look it. to me its a waste to invest resources into changing a zone around if you are going to leave it unaffected by the current improvements in the art. so i guess we have to remin in disagreement, because I view its as an improvement if they use the additional benefits that time and increased resources brought to improve older zones that previously looked really unappealing.

I think the disk had compressed text.

It said "TL;DR."

I don't consider the zone "ruined," as it's good in completely different ways. I merely believe they missed a GREAT opportunity to create what could have been the coolest zone in the game. If they'd just left the cracks in the ground as is and simply placed walkways above them and elevators to get out easier, they would have retained the vistas AND made it easier to navigate. The only reason I bring this up is because I don't believe they had to flood it. They already have the lifts and the walkways, the flooding is just overkill.

My original rant was indeed against the flooding because I hate it, but my actual point is about "Updating an old zone takes as much resources as creating a new one, so we won't update the old ones." comment. Given how much they try to change old zones, they are indeed as laborious as making new zones. I just don't believe they HAVE to be.

Yeah, we'll probably have to disagree here. I like the old Hazard zones just fine. Sure, Boomtown may not be very inspiring when you're flying over it for the umpteenth time, but it has something that's unique to it - devastation on a colossal scale. This isn't the out-of-the-way run-down area in an otherwise decent zone, it's not just one block of devastation among others of prosperity. This is an entire, gigantic zone, mile after mile of complete and utter ruin. Boomtown is the perfect disaster zone. It isn't interesting, because disasters aren't artsy. It's just a wasteland with nothing but the wind and the sound of (the inexplicably perpetual) fires. In many ways, this is what make Fallout 3 good - the fact that the wasteland was both a wasteland and the fact that it was pretty damn BIG! It's kind of like in those disaster movies where the protagonists emerge from their hole, only to see the city utterly destroyed as far as the eye can see in all directions.

If there's one thing the game actually lacks, it's a sense of size and scale. The CoV zones are especially bad about this, with everything in them small, smushed onto a tiny footprint and crammed alongside the other dozen or so themes per zone. It's like Future Land next to Car Land next to Pot Land. The old CoH hazard zones are just the thing, in this case - large, expansive, impressive and, most importantly, an already spent sunk cost. I sincerely do not want to see them "fixed" to be less like what they are. I like the fact that there's a themed area that's more than 100 feet across.

And the flip side of this is that, maybe, if they didn't bother changing the zones, they could probably actually get around to update them.

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.

Anyone here remember back to when the devs tried their experiment with things like needing to click bombs simultaneously to succeed? Or when they added timed missions, but didn't add warnings until well afterward. In both instances, even when they made changes, players were stumbling upon ones that the devs missed because the devs' tools lacked what was necessary to adequately search, identify and fix these. Their toolset, like most MMO's under development, was kludgy and usable by professionals under VERY controlled conditions.

A little bit after that, there was an offhand dev comment that one of the problems with editing older content ("original content") is that the editors used for those were rather... raw... and the editors that have evolved since then were essentially not compatible with the old stuff. I'm not surprised- I've heard as much from other developers elsewhere, too. For games developed in that area, and constantly changing, you often get to a point where the old stuff just becomes too sketchy to touch with the updated tools. You just hold your breath and hope the next few patches don't break anything legacy TOO much...

And it's not just the old content compatibility in new tools- it can be about- finding the old art assets as well. Look at this game's age. Source management software adoption was in it's infancy... and the game industry was notoriously poor at adopting it as most of their source was for a single game... maybe one sequel, but even that was frequently on another box with different specs and entirely new models.

My point: "Revising" old content may not be much more of a time-savings than producing all-new content. You might not be able to say "you can do two revisions in half the time of a new arc" or any other kind of estimate. And since some of them aren't notably "bad" - they've just been "run too often" - you hate to remove that content entirely from the game when newer players may not have tried it. Why add 20 hours of play but remove 10 old usable hours' worth rather than just add 20?

And why, if you've got the compelling new moral-decision and branching tech do you really want to create content that follows the same old story as before... why not change the story to use the new tech? And why put moral decision content in a zone that's accessible to ONLY the good guys... or bad guys... why deal with the segregation-of-content issue again? And for that matter, why mix them in hodgepodge with the older content, where people have to dig through the old and the new to find what they want?

You could replace everything, but that's an expansion-level project. Maybe that's what's in store for the expansion AFTER GR?

I'm not sure why, but it seems there's a communications issue related to revamping.

What I've called for is not so much retouching the old material as adding new lower level missions without creating new zones.

Yes, I think we should be able to make some fairly easy changes in the old arcs, such as changing when the contact gives the player the cellphone button. I would be sincerely surprised if it isn't just a matter of going to each contact and putting the command to display the cellphone button earlier in the contact's mission list. We see arcs that give cellphone at all different times; surely this is because it is hand-coded as to when the cellphone will be given.

Fixing the cellphone issue is completely different from going in and making changes to spawning points on specific old maps, or developing completely new artwork, or whatever it is that people are associating negatively with the term "revamp."

To me, a reasonable revamp of the lower levels and under-utilized zones simply involves adding new, optional content.

I'd be okay with it too, as the old content was so sketchy anyway, but you know how it is ... SOMEONE will be miffed if the old missions are removed.

On the other hand, it should be perfectly easy to add more content, and do it in such a way that people can choose to do the "old Azuria" or "new Azuria," for example.

Cell phones are given at first relationship upgrade (and suddenly I feel like I'm describing a dating sim...), which is pretty much a fact for almost all contacts. When you reach that first level isn't always static, because it's a percentage of completed objectives, and some contacts just have an assload of missions, so it takes longer.

See, the thing is... Some of the old content is WRETCHED. And not just low-level content. Things like Unai Keme's "Search dimensions 1, 2 and 3" plethora of missions and Maria Jenkins' atrocious spelling and crappy narrative are direct eyesores. Plenty of old missions are defeat-alls for no real reason, and, in fact, Tina McIntyre's mission against Bobcat is a defeat-all in an outdoor map with patrols. What sadistic meanie designed THAT particular mission?

A lot of the ways the old content needs to be redesigned don't involve new graphics, tilesets or enemy design. It involves cleaning up embarrassingly bad writing and purging utterly pointless missions that add nothing to the plot. I am sick of story arcs consisting of a few important mission and a good dozen "Your princess is in another castle!" Some need shortening, some need spell-checking, some need an actual WRITER to look through them and set all the terrible exposition straight, and some just need their needlessly sinister objectives reviewed.

And this needs to happen, because these missions and arcs honestly ARE a blight upon the game.

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.

While I might not have been quite so dramatic about it, I can definitely agree with the general gist of this post. The old content has a LOT of bad in it. Grammar, storytelling and just plain tedious design that stems from the old MMO concept of 'if it takes long and is annoying then its got to be worth it'.

I know the devs are reluctant to touch old content because of ancient code that may affect things they are unaware of etc. But really, leaving it in there can give a seriously bad impression of the game. Most new players might not know enough to avoid the old bad and concentrate on the good new like Faultline. It's certainly something to consider for the future of the game. First impressions mean a lot.

1)Adding new content missions to the same old zones. If you were going to add new content with new tech that's easy for people to find, do you put it in a fresh area that also hilights emerging tech, art styles, and advancing storylines, where someone will find ONLY new stuff, or mix it in with the older stories, so someone has to sift through or play trial-and-error to find the new "good stuff?

That's one reason why (we've been told) there will be an entirely NEW starting area in GR. One that focuses on the new tech and the new options available to players.

2) Contact "display phone number" early in the arc... If I'm not mistaken, the phone number used to be given at the SECOND relationship point but at around the time of CoV's release (which made you get them earlier) this was changed to the FIRST contact point, so they've already streamlined that once as a QOL issue.

It also wasn't entirely flawless. CoH had some arcs where they EXPECTED a travel to the contact (for an ambush point) so they didn't actually give a delivery mission to that contact to go with the ambush. The earlier phone number borked that. Some contacts also had CUSTOM text in certain points that referred to phone numbers you'd already seen for some time.

None of these were game-breaking, but it illustrates some of the issues with just 'changing a flag'


3) I'm not entirely a naysayer to revising old content, I just think there are systemic issues that should be addressed- and that will probably be addressed BEST by a zone re-imagining (like Faultline) than wasting time tweaking existing arcs very much or slapping new arcs into the same aging instance. Heck, some of these issues are side effects of other game improvements that have changed some of the core assumptions that went into the zone design.

a) We level too fast. (the improvement) Really. It's gotten to the point that it really has started to diminish the new-user-experience because the introductory zones' range of contacts are out of sync with true leveling progress.

Really.

We come into Atlas, Galaxy, or Mercy at level 2 and can find ourselves sent elsewhere (Kings, Hollows, and Oakes) as early as level 6... and Kings and Oakes only go to level 9, really.

We barely touch those zones. With the repeatedly revised leveling curve (I'll exclude patrol XP from the equation for those that don't "create and park" a hero for a while) we barely complete a SINGLE arc in those areas before being sent off to another... despite there being MULTIPLE contacts to visit there... (IIRC, some are second-tier contacts that are VERY underused here... but not sure. last time I bothered with a SECOND contact in Kings' row, I was fighting foes that were going blue/green/gray before I was finished... so I just move on now).

New users that don't "know better" easily outlevel the first safeguard/mayhem and miss one of the better rewards. Heaven forbid they actually think about fighting bad guys they encounter on their way to contacts or mission doors- they'll outlevel the mission they're going to.... or be fighting grays in a story arc they've flown past.

Add more content to those zones? Maybe after we clean up the expected path-of-progress, but let's not make things more jumbled up yet.

Heck, Villainside I usually try to make a point of getting the atlas and Kings' Row mayhem missions for the two travel powers. I level so quick, though, that I have to skip out on the second Mercy Island contacts (Mongoose or that Mad Scientist) just because if I did THEM and then the 3 'newspaper' missions, I usually leveled past 10 and missed the offer for the Atlas park heist. Don't even get me started on the "Unlockable" contact in Port Oakes. If you don't discover her early and focus on unlocking her first, you'll outlevel her before you ever get a chance to take the arc.

b) We travel too easily. Again, I'm serious. I LOVE IT, don't get me wrong, but the world wasn't originally designed with the idea that we'd run door to door, ignoring every spawn in between because we so easily could. That creates an imbalance... and one that we've only made worse over time.

Once upon a time, the devs were concerned that people did nothing but random "street hunts-" so they upped the mission rewards. Since then, we've had our own "Architect" issues come and go and come again, as people realized new and improved paths to maximize XPPS, but I want to rewind to the street hunts.

See... the zones themselves have become virtually irrelevant. Most groups fly past the baddies, running door-to-door because they really aren't worth the time to stop and fight. Or we run past foes that con so much lower than us that they're irrelevant. Half the time we get a "defeat X baddies" we usually just find low-level foes that aren't worth any challenge or effort (or spend more time than should be necessary trying to FIND a challenging spawn). Even zone events like the "Troll Rave" are usually visited by badgers well after everything there cons grey.

c) We have multiple starting zones, but many players have shown a determination to run the same pattern over and over again. They'd rather roll a new player through another Sewers powerleveling session than try new arc x or y. They're oblivious to changes that were done to other arcs because they've already mapped the "optimal" reward path (or, as I confessed earlier, see some things like mayhem/safeguard travel powers as "essential" and skip over other content to make sure they get it). Will new parallel content in a zone mean more options taken, or just mean another single path people take (and complain about) as the rest go underused?