Info on Issue 20.5

Incarnate slots are character progression. Incarnate costume pieces are fluff. Even if I unlocked them, I tend to doubt that I'd use them on any of my 11 level 50 characters.

The argument could be made that changing pieces of clothing that do nothing for stats, abilities, function or general game mechanics in any way does not classify as "character progression". I don't particularly care either way about the armour (I think it's ugly) but I think that's the main problem people have with the level lock.

The abilities and level shifts? Fine, they're effectively new levels. The ability to wear slightly shinier shoulders that do nothing? Kind of odd to lock it.

Like I said, I don't mind about it at all (well bar the auras, dislike the way they're handled but I'm not gonna raise a fuss) but that was what I was getting from people.

It's the same thing: A reason to keep paying that monthly fee. You might not be one to do that, but others will. And making them actually play the game makes people more likely to keep paying.

Except that people have proven themselves wlling to spend a lot of time (and time=money in the MMO world) in order to earn cosmetic rewards.

I thought gear was stuff that affected your stats?

You have a very strange view of a business model. The kind of view which sees customers as cattle to be herded into whatever position earns you the highest revenue while keeping them as docile as possible.

This completely ignores that people PLAY THE GAME for the character creation aspect of it. Playing dress-up doll gets really old really fast as costume addicts will tell you. The point of making a great costume isn't to sit back in your chair and go "By Jove! I made a great costume!" and then go do something else. It's to PLAY THE GAME with this costume.

Here's a personal anecdote: By far the characters I play the most are those with the costumes I love the most. They aren't always great costumes or interesting costumes, but they're ones that I like. I play them because I like them, and the more I play them, the higher they get in level and the longer I spend in the game. By contrast, characters whose costumes I hate get left behind to rot at a low level for a while until either I give them a better costume, or I delete them for ones with a better costume.

What keeps me playing the longest is being allowed to play the character I want when I want to play that character for as long as I want to play it. Making me play characters I don't like with the vague promise that I may like them more some day is about as convincing an argument as making me keep striking my thumb with a hammer with the promise that I'll stop feeling the pain eventually. If I'm dumb enough to do it even once, I'm not going to want to suffer the pain until it improves.

Keeping me from my costumes keeps me from playing the game. In fact, I have a thought experiment for you: Take away ALL costume pieces out of the editor and force everyone to start the game in their underwear until they start unlocking pieces at level 10, one by one through specific tasks. Then tell me how many people stick around for your "business model."

So here's a thought - LET ME SPEND REAL MONEY FOR THIS. Don't gate it behind arbitrary limits. Put a dollar price on it and I'll probably pay it. Put a time price on it, and I probably won't. Seriously, how much time do you think this will buy for anyone?

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.

See, I'm more likely to keep playing if I have a variety of fun things to do. Tricking me into playing unfun stuff by dangling nice looking fluff just wouldn't work on me. I suppose that kind of thing does work on a lot of people.

But I have plenty of fun things to do in the game anyway, so I don't plan to leave anytime soon. I feel a bit sorry for people who will only keep playing if they can work to unlock fluff.

Fair point, though it would just be nice to think that the developers listened to the people playing and not just the jangling of their wallets.

Like I said, I don't mind. In fact for me this update has nothing I can physically use bar the aoe buffs. It would be nice to be able to get the auras, but my disappointment lasted all of five minutes.

Generally though this move will probably annoy quite a few players, several of them quite vocal, though I have no real idea what sort of portion of the population that would entail.

Of course they know that, and that's why they're doing all sorts of content updates as well. (not neccessarily what you personally find fun at the moment, but then again, resources are limited) but a lot of people are willing to pay for new shinies.

The jangling of their wallets IS the voice of the players.

And it's not as if the devs have a choice: The game needs to turn a profit or they won't get paid, and thus can't offer any kind of content at all.

While my disappointment has been going stead for about six months now, if not more, I'm pretty much in the same boat. My thought process went something like:

1. Oh, cool, costumes!
2. Wait, there has to be a catch.
3. They're level 50 only.
4. Son of a #$%!
5. Fine, whatever, another patch note I don't care about. What else is in there?
6. AoE Buffs. Huh... Well, that'll make my Masterminds a lot less tedious. Cool.

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.

Oh, they do have a choice. They can either attempt to "give the players what they want," as Positron once promised, obviously to the best of their ability and keep people coming back because they're satisfied... Or they can build their game on Skinner box design and keep people coming back because they are clinically addicted. One design approach makes for a better game than the other.

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.

Well, yes. I'm cynical when it comes to these things. Doesen't mean the devs aren't trying to make a fun game, but they need to make money. And there's always a tradeoff: How much work do we have to put in? The devs aren't your friends. They're selling you something, and they want your money. They're providing a service in return, but to expect them to forgo making changes that might earn them profit (which means contiung tooperate the game, mind) is naive.

And that's fine. You're not responding. But some people are. Are more people like you than people who like unlocking stuff? (And remember there's a bit of an exclusivity thing as well "look, I'm special!") I don't know. Maybe the devs datamine these sorts of things.

The trick of course is to always give you a taste of something: Not give you everything atonce (then you'll get bored and stop playing) and not too slow (then you'll give up in frustration) of course, that sweet spot is different for everyone, and for the devs it's largly a guessing game.



They're doing that too (Steampunk pack). They're not putting all their apples in one basket in this regard. But some people prefer paying directly and some indirectly (and some do both)

What players though? Where? You're not neccessarily representative. (You might be though)

And the way to see if the players are satisfied is... *drumroll* if they keep playing. (Mind, thre are a bunch of other factors that don't directly tie in to the game itself to why people play or don't playbut that's a different matter)

The devs are trying to catch as many players as possible, but that's not possible (and it's not just amatter of limited resources either: Some people just like different things)

I'm just curious: What DO you want? The last big updates we've gotten pretty much every kind of content update (story arcs, tf's, trials, low-level content... The only thing lacking is PvP) I'm genuinely curious. (The two things that they've kind of put on a back-burner is of course customization for pool powers and power proliferation, but I'm fairly sure they're going to get working on that at some point)

Cut out my tongue, sew my mouth shut, cut off my fingers and lobotomise me. Until then my voice as a player is how I choose to talk to the devs and game staff, whether on the forums or through other channels.

I, and I would imagine a lot of people, pay for this game because we love it. We love the freedom involved and the ability to create that exists far above any other game on the market. The fact that I continue to pay for this game has nothing to do with gated gear, especially not gated gear that does NOTHING. I'm not going to raise a huge fuss about this because, frankly, it isn't worth it. I'm also not going out of my way to try and use it. Honestly, bar the immediate surge we will see in what will probably be the first couple of weeks I would be interested to see how many characters will earn and subsequently ignore this armour.

If they want to keep people for any length of time the best way is to make genuinely interesting content, whether story arcs, trials or power sets. Gated, non-functional fluff is fine in a micro-transaction model but for a lot of people not in a monthly payment model.

It's not even as if most posts I've seen are asking for instant access with no work, many would prefer an account wide unlock, hell even the voucher system for the auras would work. For this to actually add ANY real amount of play-time to a persons account it would have to be so expensive to unlock as to shame the Incarnate powers.

But that's just my opinion. Take it or leave it.

"Tricking"? Where's the deceit?

Issue 19 had a little variety. Issue 20 was all Incarnate stuff. And maybe some other team-required stuff that I didn't notice. Oh, wait, Issue 20 also added some black helicopters. Whee.

I'm pretty sure I teamed with some sub-50s on the Sutter TF

Here's the thing - City of Heroes is not your typical MMO. I remember in the days of old when we used to pat ourselves on the back how we're here as much because we like THIS game as because we don't like OTHER games. Now that City of Heroes has competition, a lot of why people come here is exactly what sets it apart - the customization. That's a large reason why I find that stuffing customization behind gates is a bad idea. The broader the tool kit players have to work with, the more powerful the customization.

Personally, I don't think competing with conventional MMOs in conventional ways is a good idea. City of Heroes simply isn't competitive, not against the more popular MMOs out there. If I wanted raid grind or costume drops and greater challenge, I would not have come to City of Heroes. I'm here because this is the only game which allows me to eat my cake and have it, too.

I've been accused of being selfish when I say this whole thing is moving the game in a bad direction for everybody, accused that I'm saying it because only I don't like it. But I feel that Paragon Studios aren't playing to the game's strengths, and haven't for a very long time. They're trying to invent brand new strengths for the game, and for a seven year old game, I honestly don't see that having nearly enough of an impact to justify the immense cost of development.

These costumes are a prime example. Yes, they look... Decent. But how many people are actually going to use them? Now how many CAN - lots of people have 50s. But how many WILL? Matt Miller seems to regard these costume pieces as somehow objectively "better," and as such worthy of being a level 50 unlock. In this, Matt Miller is provably wrong, because there exists no such thing as a costume piece which is "better" without the context of the rest of the costume it exists in, the theme of the character using it and the aesthetic preference of the player behind the wheel.

Not a single costume piece is objectively "better" than any other piece. Even the low-res, low-poly junk left over from CoH launch still has uses that far surpass those of newer costume pieces. For all the new fancy helmet designs, for instance, the old medieval "bucket helms" are still far superior at what they are - medieval helmets. I don't care how marvellous a tech-looking helmet gets added, if I want a medieval knight, I'll use one of those. I still use one of those, as a point of fact, and have no plans to change it.

Costumes are exactly the WRONG thing to gate. Anything else I can see gating behind anything else, but not this.

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.

ar·bi·trar·y/ˈärbiˌtrerē/Adjective
1. Based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.

The choice to make an 'Incarnates only' costume set available for Incarnates only is hardly 'arbitrary'. Positron gave very good reasons as to why the set has limited availability, none of which are based on random chance or personal whim.

Of course it is.

The thing is, genuinely interesting content takes work, and time, and money. They're trying, but the meantime they're putting out these small little incentives, they're not expecting them to do much on their own, but with a lot of them they might...

They can't get by on just doing genuinely good stuff (because then we'd get an update every two years and half of the players would quite in-between) and that's assuming they're capable of pushing it out: There's just not enough resources.

So they have to rely on all these litle gimmicks to keep people playing. And sometimes they work and sometimes they don't, and it's different for everyone what does and doesen't work.

Issue 18 had Praetoria, Issue 19 had two story arcs, I20 didn't have much, true, but I21 will have a new zone.

Well, that's just the rub - what I want more than anything else is power customization and powerset proliferation. More realistically, I want COSTUMES. At character creation, more specifically, so I can be inspired to make more, newer characters. I find that the game has more than enough content 1-50, personally, even for a solo player. I'll never refuse more, but I'm not really all that much a content person. I care about my characters, less so about the world around them.

That is to say, I'm not a content person provide enough content exists, which it doesn't in the case of the Incarnate system, but I'm pretty sure "enough" will never exist for it as it does for the rest of the game.

Personally, I want more ways to customize my characters. More custom animations, more custom effects, more colour option on existing effects (Curse you, Ice powers!), more costumes as broadly available as possible, more mounting points on our characters, a more extensive character editor which allows for greater asymmetrical design. I want muscular women, I want bubble face helmets, I want jet packs, I want back packs, I want wraparound cloaks, I want butt capes, I want skirt robes and long skirts, I want better long hair for men, I want a greater selection of non-robotic options for Robotic Arms, I want more types of Monster legs, I want better animal faces with selectable muzzles as face details, I want more faces with higher-resolution textures.

I could replay this entire game, as is, a thousand times over counting from now and never get bored if I had enough freedom to replay it with a truly different character every time, a character that matched what's in my head as perfectly as possible. I don't need new things to DO, I need new things to BE, and a decent game to be those things in will suffice.

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.