Suggested Co-op Zone: The Staging Area

Here's an idea: Set this staging area on the summit of Mount Olympus. Since we're already well into riffing classic Greek mythology, anyway. Plus, it'd make an opportunity to blend the "armored military" Vanguard theme with the "celestial white and gold" theme of Ouroboros.

The gods Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades would resemble Incarnates Marcus Cole (pick one), Hero 1, and Lord Recluse. The other gods in the pantheon could serve as store contacts, and may or may not resemble other characters in CoH.

Hera = Inspirations vendor

Hephaestus = Enhancement vendor

Athena = recipe vendor, hosts series of on-site crafting tables

Ares = Enhancement vendor

Aphrodite = Inspirations vendor

Hermes = Consignment House contact (for those of us who dispose of salvage and other high-demand crap via market)

Apollo = Inspirations vendor

Dionysus = Inspirations vendor

Demeter = Enhancement vendor

^ this, /signed, now

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.

So...pretty... can i haz it nao?

*ahem* Yes, I'll sign on this. It would be nice to have an exclusive launch point for incarnate trials where we would not interfere with anything else going on in other co-op zones.

I agree that from the player's point of view that would be better (at least for those players who use global channels anyway) the issue is how practical is it for the devs? Teams have always behaved weirdly with people who are out of zone:
1. You can't do a cross-faction invite unless everyone is in the same zone
2. People's AT does not show up on the team window until they are int he same zone
3. You can't rearrange league teams if people are split between zones

This suggests to me that there allowing trials to launch from multiple zones might not even be possible.

Actually your assertions are right, and your conclusion may not be entirely correct. The difficulty to overcome your assertions is not likely to be challenging to the devs to actually resolve. Of course it involves the 4 letter word "work" which to some could be translated as "challenge" To which I do not believe the Devs are against. let me expand on this some, I differentiate tedius from intellectual work or activity. Tedius is not challenging, its a lot of mechanical things to do and likely boring. Intellectual is in fact challenging, for you actually have to think your way through it.

The can't invite cross-faction is merely a flag set by the devs themselves with good purpose, so blue can't invite red by mistake for blue content; same is true for the red side. But if you send a league invite, as opposed to a normal invite; the flag could be turned-off by the devs and "presto" you can invite across zones and factions. There may be an issue, when you league for blue or red proper content such as hamies, banners, etc. where if you disable the flag you could erroneously invite a player of the wrong faction. This could also be resolved by adding another conditional flag where the league leader can set up to say "same faction only" which in essence turns the normal flag back on. Its work, but I would think of it as a light intellectual and light tedium type effort, since most of the mechanism are already there, all you really need is an upgrade to the GUI to activate and deactivate a present flag.

To begin with, if you do a search for players at a map zone, you actually get levels and AT types. So essentially the information is already there, but available in a different venue. So there is little reason why a player's AT can't be shown during a league invite (flag off mode as per above), it is essentially a matter of re-pointing the software to a database with the correct information and perhaps creating another 36 cell temporary data storage matrix to hold the pertinent information. This is in essence another light intellectual challenge with a medium tedium load. A very very cool innovation could actually be done at this stage as well, but it would be more tedius work as opposed to intellectually hard work: The player information could include primary and secondary power names, and a display of the 4 incarnate slots with a number indicating to what level they have been progressed. But this last part, is a nice to have, not a do or die kinda of thing. This last display effort would be a medium intellectual and heavy tedium load.

Can't arrange the teams, it kinda is a mix of the two above. Obviously if you don't know the AT types, optimizing the team compositions, just can't be done in a practical manner. And the league GUI is flagged not to allow manipulation until players are there or perhaps till all the data of the player is displayed, not sure which or what is the trigger for the flag. If the trigger is player is not there, that flag can simply be de-activated. If the trigger is lack of information, doing steps 1 and 2 above solves that issue. Given steps 1 and 2 are allready there, I see this last piece as a light intellectual and light tedium kind of effort.

I expect a few of you, will be very quick to challenge, how dare I categorize the work? What knowledge or experience I have to base such judgments?

And you may be very correct to do so, I do not know the OS used to run and program the game, but I am fairly certain that regardless of the OS and development format used the overall "good-practices" are essentailly the same. I actually can program in several computer languages, I do so as a hobby, but I do have many friends who are professional programers for NASA and DoD, and they do critique and teach me on such practices. Among those practices, is the concept of modular programming; a wonderful practice. Thus once you have a module completed, you then have central code which serves as a traffic control system and you use flags to regulate the traffic control system as needed. Thus a "GUI" is a means to control those regulatory flags and where to "point" the program to collect information to be displayed by yet another software module. With this in mind, you have to decide how difficult is to do any given component of the process. The GUI usually is more intellectually challenging to do than a module, I said normally, modules can get pretty hairy at times. But in the case above, setting a data storage matrix is not particularly difficult. Loading the data into said matrix is a bit more intellectually challenging, but again not that difficult since its a matter of pointing the loading mechanism to the correct module containing the data and being instructed on how to collect it. Once more these efforts are not that intellectually challenging, they are every day occurring events, but they are mildly tedius to do.

I also asked several of my software programming friends over this game and what I suggested, and I got mixed responses . One commented, are they trying to simulate landing an instruments package on an asteroid millions of miles away? Guess that kinda places things into perspective, does it not? On the other hand, one did comment "Unless they have attrocious software development practices, and have spaguetti code as a result, then even the most rudimentary change could easily be a nightmare"

So maybe I may be mistaken, but I would think that our devs are truly pressional and are sharp folks, and as a result, they do follow industry good practices.

Hugs

Sue

Sue

A Zeus <-> Cole link makes sense; Cole is an incarnate of Zeus. But Richter is an incarnate of Tartarus, not Hades. The only connection that I can see between Hero 1 and Poseidon is that Hero 1 became an incarnate after receiving Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, and a lake is totally the same thing as god of the sea. (Also, the Lady of the Lake is/was an incarnate herself.)

You... have no idea what you're talking about.

No, let me correct myself: you've got just enough rope to hang yourself with.

Actually we have no way of knowing if this is true. It's possible that it's true but depending on the actual implementation fixing it could significantly more difficult than you think. Remember that when CoV was originally released it was effectively a separate game. It could feasibly setup so that inviting a cross-faction player is disallowed by default and the co-op zones are making an exception to that. Also you'll recall that it used to be that leaving a co-op zone would kick you off of a cross-faction team which also supports the idea that cross-faction teaming is not allowed by default.

My point isn't that the information is unavailable (because obviously the server knows it). It's that the server does not communicate that information to your client. In theory changing it should be easy but that raises the question of why it was implemented that way in the first place? I cannot come up with any logical reason not to communicate that information to your client ASAP so why, when the team code was first written, was it not done that way? That suggests that either there was a technical reason not to send the information immediately or there is code in place to save bandwidth and processing information by limiting information transfers (not unreasonable in a 7 year old game). If that is the case then removing that code without breaking anything could easily be a very tricky problem.

The optimization thing is a player concern, not a technical one. On the technical side I think this actually ties in with the team invite problem mentioned above. If you track system messages when you move people between league teams they are technically quitting one team and joining another. I suspect the system handles this as the following set of commands:
1. Stormfront quits current team
2. Adeon sends team invite to Stormfront
3. Stormfront accepts team invite

So unless they can fix the cross-faction team invites so that you can always invite a new member no matter what allowing us to rearrange teams in different zones may well be an insurmountable hurdle.


At the end of the day the Standard Code Rant applies, none of use really know how easy/hard any of this is. However, in most cases these are features that would be nice quality of life features even disregarding the current trials. The fact that they haven't been implemented suggests that the technical problem is significantly larger than changing a flag in the code somewhere.

If this is not used anymore then it would be awesome to recycle the art for this purpose.

/signed in general and specifically for this room

Do you program at all? If you did, maybe, just maybe, you would be able to understand the most basic principle I was describing.

Sue

*spasmodically giggles until her head bursts*






Sorry, Stormfront...you might want to take a peek at FW's posting history before making comments like that.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

You're right, Agge, that is pretty funny. (Say hello to the Titan Network programmers! http://www.cohtitan.com/about) But yeah, the devs are just low on programmer power. Producers think it's more worth it to keep them working on new content rather than the hundreds of fixes and improvements they could be making.