New directions for the costume creator?

It wasnt confusing, just terrible.

Samuel Tow, I could continue to debate the issue, but frankly, I think you just get a kick out of bashing CO to make yourself sound authoritative. Most of you forum cartel folks seem to think you're the only ones that know what's going on and the only voices that should be heard. I don't have time to play to egos. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

ST I wasn't going to respond to you, but I should at least say this. I read this forum nearly everyday and the moment someone has a view that's opposite some of you forum cartel folks you guys ponce on a poster, I've seen it time and time again. You folks post as if you know everything about this game or CO! There are things about this game that I know that none of you know, but I rarely challenge the misinformation that goes out from you folks because you folks will just pounce as you usually do and frankly that's gotten old.

When I initially responded to your post, I only countered your experience with the game, because that hasn't been my experience or the experience of others I've talked too. Maybe I shouldn't have posted, but there are people that haven't had the difficulty that you've had with CO and that voice should be heard too.

You accused me of patronizing you which was never my intent. I was just offering my experience with CO. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe I wrong for calling it out, but I do feel that many of you are elitist and I'm not the only one. I've PMed folks on this forum and they have expressed as much as well. I can argue with the best of them, but too often here, I feel that it's going to be a futile exercise and that the folks here are more concerned about being "right" than considering an alternative view or opinion.

ST, I do enjoy your posts. On many occassion, I've both agreed and disagreed with your stance on issues but I always find your points interesting -- this still holds true. My intent was not to engage you personally, but to simply counter your experience with my own. If you re-read my initial post, with this in mind, you can see that it was not an attack on you, however, I felt like your response was an attack -- a simple misuderstanding. Also in the initial post I did try to see the costume item selection process from your point of view. Though I don't have difficulty navigating it, I can see how some might and I stated that CO's Devs may need to revisit it. My statement about the inventory being daunting was intended only as a statement of fact. Both CoH/V and CO have considerable amounts of items in their inventories. It took time to for me to find what was available in both games and unless your born knowing, you're going to have to search for the items you want in them.

I have noticed over the years that you do vigorously and skillfully engage many forum cartel members on topics. Where I find fault with some cartel folks is that they are way too steadfast in their views and sometimes those guys really don't have all the facts. I've seen posts where some of them are just adamant about a topic and a Dev will come along blow all their posts out of the water with information that's contrary.

I don't think that there some alliance that you and others with high post count have, but I will say that some of them don't seem to consider the other person views. Sometimes they can be very dismissive without fully understanding what the poster is talking about. Obviously, this isn't something exclusive to forum cartel members, but I've notice it happens more with them than with others.

I do get tired of all the CO and CoH/V bashing that goes on these forums. Sure CO has problems, but so does CoH/V! Over on CO's forum I sometimes feel I have to call out those that bash this game. I realize that you're passionate about a topic and that your intent is to bring to light a problem that maybe help improve CO. Though I see many people here that truly bash CO, I don't want to assume that this is what you're doing in your posts. As I see it, this game has more content, but in my opinion it's kinda boring at times and CO is exciting, but doesn't have enough content and they charge you for everything. I could go on and on about these games shortcomings, but the bottom line is that I still like both of them and wish both of them continued success.

My attacking you in subsequent posts is not right and I apologize for that. I still feel the same about some of the other forum members, but I shouldn't automatically lump you in that group because we had a heated debate!

Rather than do another multi-quite, I'll just say that I appreciate the gesture, Xeronus. I did not mean to offend, insult or dismiss. And again, I did not intend to portray Champions Online as some godless failure, far from it. Well... Not that far from it, but not on the merits of its character creator, not by a LONG shot. Maybe I neglected to say it, but I still feel Champions Online has one of the best character creators in the industry. I fully expected it to be better than ours, and I found it limited not by its basic idea, but rather by exceptionally poor design implementation.

Obviously, the first time I tried it my reaction was to try to punch my screen and log out of the game. But I stuck with it, I tried, I looked around, I pushed, I prodded and I did get a pretty good idea of how to use it. I spent relatively little time in the game (as in, almost negligible - one character to 15, one to 10 and a few to level 2) so trust me when I say this - I spent days in that costume editor just trying to make it work. And I did get a few cool characters, make no mistake, largely when I just fiddled with the options and stuck with whatever looked cool.

That said, the place really IS a mess. Even when you know where everything is, it's badly disorganised, with some things borken up into sections when they really should have been the same single section, and some things lumped together when they should have been separate. When I saw tattoos in the game, for instance, I honestly thought they'd be separate from tops with skin, but because they aren't, you only get two top types, each with three tattoo options and an option without, and that's lumped together with the tights-only options. I was looking for something like our Athletic top for women, but it just doesn't exist. And it's a simple colour pattern. Champions should have had HUNDREDS of those. There's no excuse for it not to.

They have a whole separate section for jackets, yet you can only pick jacket presets, and you can't alter jacket and sleeves independently like you do here. And where we have dozens of redundant jackets (more than we actually need), Champions has a selection of something between half a dozen and a dozen, widely spaced through the whole spectrum of what jackets can be. A character I had required a short-tailed sleevelss trenchcoat. No sleeveless trenchcoat, no character. On the flip side, integrated shoulders, which have something like half a dozen option to the effect of Emperor Ming the Merciless' shoulders, are separated from more traditional full armour, which is basically the same thing, but with different options.

They have all of those animal heads, yet they don't have an animal FACE. The one one non-human face they have (the "geometric" option notwithstanding) looks like a zombie head. I wanted a feline face. Not possible. I tried a reptile face. Not possible. I tried the animal heads, but that was more than dangerously furry, whereas I was aiming for more like 50% of that. And even then, only a couple of the animal heads were actually serious, with the rest looking more like a parody of an animalistic character than a serious take on the concept. I would really have liked to have hair with those animal heads, but no dice. And speaking of hair, I don't know if men had long hair, but women didn't have a decent SHORT hair option. It's either crew cut and bald head or one of those matted giant long hairdos. That killed another character right there.

And colours are just... A mess. Yes, costume items can take up to four colours, but few do. Most use three, but WHICH three they use is a total crapshot. Sometimes it's the first three, sometimes it's the last three, sometimes it's the first, second and fourth, sometimes they only use two colours. And what they colour seems almost random. I basically ended up either making them all the same colour or making them two colours, which basically meant I had to go from costume piece to costume piece and set four colours from a dropdown menu of all things. And it's not like I could have picked a global colour combination because, even with the locking function, not all costume pieces coloured the same (as in primary colour was not always the FIRST) colour, and I typically use two distinct colour schemes for different portions of the body, such as black and gunmetal grey for tech or armour pieces and, for instance, white and light cyan for fabrics.

The sliders in that game just confound me. I tried to make sense of them for DAYS, and I just gave up at the end. Redundant sliders that all move the same thing are notoriously difficult to predict, at least for me. Is it better to go full-scale on one, low-scale on the other, the other way around or half-scale on both? I enjoy systems where each variable is tied to one and only one affect, and I saw no reason why upper and lower arm sliders needed to be overarched by a global arm slider. That just makes things more confusing without adding anything to the actual creative freedom of the editor.

Face sliders were similarly a mess. Where City of Heroes splits them by axis and gives you 3D control of everything, in Champions they're sort of limped together, so the only way to tell which axis a slider affects is to move. Worse still, several sliders do multiple things, like the ears slider making them up-pointing on the left, not pointy in the middle, and side-pointing to the right. This is a task that should have been split into three separate sliders, not one omni-slider that lacks the bulk of the options I wanted to do with it. And, worst of all, not all options have control in all three axis. The nose, for instance, can't go up and down, you can just twist its tip up and down. Since I happen to prefer faces with longer, lower noses, that REALLY sucked. As well, female faces have a very concave nose bridge, like your typical anime face with sort of the "muzzle" portion extended forward, and HELL if I could fix that. Really, the nose is one of the most heavily defining features on a face, and if I can't fix the bridge of the nose, I'm basically replaying the same face over and over again. It's like trying to make a hot rod without chopping the roof. It just doesn't work.

And for all the pieces that ARE there, which I will admit are many, even if I don't agree they are as many as you feel, they have the oddest, strangest gaps in them. You have a lot of metallic options, admittedly, but most of them are just... Too "tech" looking. The first character I tried to make was a remake of a fighter here who wore Medieval pieces, and I couldn't get anything with a nice engraved pattern. Why? Because Champions Online has almost no textures to speak of. You pick tech pieces, and they're all high-poly models, but they all have a flat metallic finish. I guess that makes pieces more universal to use, but it just makes them soulless without their textures. And there really aren't any decent tech-looking boots that I could find. It's all either some kind of abstract metal plate, or something way-out robotic with tubes swirling around like planetary rings. I could have gone with the base Tights boots and worked off them, but they're not big enough (big are barely bigger than regular, at least on women) and they lack texture entirely.

I thought that perhaps bump map shaders would do the job, but they don't, party because there were too few shaders when I last tried it, partly because you don't have corresponding patterns for all shaders there are, an partly because no matter what you do with shaders and patterns, they cannot and will not replace textures. I wanted something akin to our Medieval, which is a collection of plates with some engraving on them and chain mail inbetween, but you just don't get that there. And the Cloth/Leather/Metallic texture is fun at first, but as the old CoV costume pieces have show, just slapping a shiny shader on a detail wholesale does not work. Jay has produced some amazing pieces that blend shiny and non-shiny parts, and that's where the real beauty lies. Enforcer, for instance, has those reflective plates against a matte "fabric" background. Just picking metallic for large costume pieces is the same as what we get when we pick metallic on our CoV pieces - the shiny filter kills the texture and pattern. And a lot of the time, I can't even tell the difference between fabric and leather.

And again, their costume editor conspicuously misses some REALLY basic stuff, again like a basic shirt or a sleeveless jacket, yet is crammed full of esoteric, confusing things like REALLY ugly giant goofy robotic feet, Jetsons style floating metal rings around your feet, some kind of "tentacle mess" hand that doesn't look like it could grasp anything, a hugely oversized shark head, odd-looking belts that are so long they clip with your knees, giant bulky jet packs... You know, I'd have LOVED this character creator, but whoever the artist was for that thing, he really dropped the ball. Genuinely good costume pieces, like the square-toed segmented armour boots, share a selection with "What the hell were they thinking?" costume pieces the world's worst backwards knees. If I want something as simple as, say, a cardigan, I can't find it, but I can cover my torso in a rat's nest of segmented tubes. If I want something as simple as an unassuming flak jacket, I'm out of luck, because everything is bulky or off-centre, or has knives and guns I won't actually ever reach for strapped to it. Seriously, I looked and looked for a decent flak jacket from the armoured options and just gave up and went with an armour plate, instead.

Honestly, this editor had a LOT of potential, and it DOES offer great variety. But the implementation, interface, stock and artwork just turned me off completely. I knew I'd hate Champions Online's gameplay before I even got into the game, that much was never in question. But I honestly thought I'd be able to at least play with the editor for hours on end and curse my luck for finding such a jewel in such a bad game. I did the same with Lineage II and that didn't HAVE a character editor to speak of. I'm doing that with Aion these days (obviously, neither on my own accounts, as I wouldn't pay for a game I won't play), but for Champions Online? Almost every time I try to make a decent costume, the game gives me just enough to get a HINT of something great, but then drowns me in teething issues and I rage-quit for the umpteenth time.

I will agree that City of Heroes has a lot to learn from Champions. Asymetrical pieces, back details, more robotic legs, integrated shoulders, upper and lower arm details, the list goes on. But that's technical stuff and new additions. I still far prefer the guts of the City of Heroes character editor, because even though it's limited in some respects, at least it's orderly and easy to get around in. OK, the power customization screen leaves something to be desired, but at least we GET such a screen at creation. In Champions Online, I didn't even know what GUNS I was picking, because the editor wouldn't show me. I just know I picked, I think, Gun 3 and only later found out that it was some kind of revolver. With a white pistol grip, as well, since I didn't know what the colours were affecting.

The editor feels unfinished, like something that shouldn't have made it out of Beta without a massive overhaul and a big infusion of more serious pieces. I CANNOT BELIEVE that there is not a single decent selection that could pass for sunglasses with any sort of style. I ended up going for the Granny large framed glasses and colouring them black. Maybe in a year or two, if the game hangs in there and a few miracles happen, this editor could become a thing of beauty. But right now, it's a hint of greatness buried teething issues and confusion.

*edit*
And, yes, I know this is another retread wall of text, but I wanted to fully expand upon my experience with the editor and provide as much direct example and experience as I could, just so it's clear I'm not talking out of my *** and making assumptions. I tried, and this is how my experience with it went.

Quote:

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.

Thank you ST for a very informative wall of text (apologies on the wall of text diss earlier). That did give me a lot of insight on what you experienced with CO's creator. I have to agree with you on many of your points. I did noticed many of the same things, but I looked at some of the deficiencies as things that may be introduced over time. I guess I likened it to this game because when it started, there wasn't some of items that we now enjoy like cape and wings. I'm with you on the lack of textures in the creator, that's been a pet peeve of mine since beta.

One the main reasons I have such a favorable view of their creator is that I'm able to create costumes that I can't create here. Things that I wish were in this game but are not. Fortunately, this game is doing great things like the power and weapons customization. I will admit that I think the power customization is better here than over in CO. Also, I have to agree that CoH/V user interface is superior to CO's not only in the creator, but throughout the game.

Hopefully CO will resolve some of their more pressing issues and tackle some of the problems it has with their creator.

I'm hoping for great new things with GR. I know that Jay is awesome and I can't wait for the next new set of costumes.

I shouldn't have painted my statement about the cartel with such a broad stroke, but I stand by my statement because I see it so often. I think many of the cartel are very smart people that have lots of important points and opinions. I just wish that some of them would not be so quick to shoot down the points of others and afford the same consideration they would like to be afforded.

*puts a hand on my hips and waggles the finger of my free hand at the two of you.. taps a foot for good measure*

If the two of you aren't going to be able to play nice in this thread and instead make it into a personal conversation, then you should take it to PMs. While seeing new posts in this thread is good to keep the thread alive, I can't help but wonder if your massive walls of text and insular discussion isn't driving people away from reading or posting in the thread.