All Trainers will be Tailors

Agreed. I never thought the trainers were immersive in the first place. I"m being trained by one person standing completely still and talking to 50+ other people AT THE SAME FREAKING TIME.

Yeahhhh real immersive there. Not seeing the issue here.

Immersion isn't simply canonical fidelity - it's about the state of play.

For example, if the virtual environment conforms less to the game's settings and more to the computer's interface, then immersion will decrease. Having extra clicks or extraneous options on a menu is classic immersion-breaking. (The Holy Grail of game design is, incidentally, an interface that nobody notices while playing.)

Or in another example, minor ambient annoyances, such as not being able to get to an NPC easily because of other players crowding around the area or being distracted by them spamming powers, break immersion.

Or indirectly discouraging exploration by concentrating options/resources in a single spot. What's the point of creating a virtual world if players have fewer reasons to travel through it?

These aren't game-killing shortcomings, of course. Plenty of players say they hardly notice or don't care about them. That's a perfectly valid personal point of view, particularly since such things are hard to quantify. But for those players for whom this does matter, and those are players who are most likely to be attracted to RPGs in particular, this is an unnecessary irritant, a shortcut by the devs that will have unintended consequences. The more such immersion-breaking features are introduced for the sake of convenience or corner-cutting, the more likely CoH Freedom will alienate a portion of the dedicated player community, and once a feedback loop like that begins, it's hard to stop.

That this thread wouldn't even exist if the devs had simply creating extra tailor NPCs on the map or Icon stores for each zone is a discouraging indicator for CoH Freedom as it approaches launch.

You mean how they do for the trainers currently?

Right.

Quite right. You're beginning to see another perspective on this issue, and that's great.

This thread isn't dedicated to naming examples of how CoH's current design falls short, though goodness knows that even for a seven-year-old game, there are more than enough of those.

The issue at hand here is a small change being made in trainers, one that will have unintended consequences for something tentatively introduced as a QoL shortcut (and to promote the Paragon Market).

Girls' Night Out in Paragon City...

Mynx: So this guy runs up to me and starts taking off his clothes!
Ms. Liberty: *Rolleyes* God!
Praetor Duncan: I told the last one that I'd have him lobotomized and emasculated if I ever saw him again.
Valkyrie: The ones that grin while they're doing it offend the most.
Battle Maiden: The last is still in the hospital. And if he gets out I'll administer another beating!
War Witch (Croatoa): I asked one what he thought was going to happen with an incorporeal woman.
Nightstar: I'm going to grind the next one who does it into paste.
Luminary: Well I dunno.
Swan: Eww Luminary!
War Witch (Pocket D): Or the drunk ones.
Belladonna Vetrano: So I offered to trim him down there with a hail of bullets.
Aurora Borealis: Oy vey!
Mirror Spirit: It is most disconcerting!
Vanessa DeVore: So I wiped his mind and left the suggestion that he was a little girl.

Over at another table...

Back Alley Brawler: How come we don't ever see these goofballs?
Blue Steel, Castle, Infernal, Foreshadow, Ravenstorm, RWZ Trainer, several Arbiters and Odysseus: *SHRUG*

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

The new starting contacts red and blueside, plus the Twinshot and Dr Graves arcs, plus the disappearing npcs have done more to make this world seem immersive and alive then anything the devs have done before. Your hypothetical question over looks all the work the devs have done to make Atlas and Mercy seem fresh and new.

Changing one menu vs editing every map that has a trainer in it? Which of these two options require more work?

I know that's not what you meant, but you just reminded me of another very good example: Switching costumes. Back in the day, the only way we could switch costumes was basically /cc 1, and your character sort of blinks into a new costume. I made the best use of this that I could, but I always had to look away from the screen when I did this because the sudden unexplained transformation bugged me, and I always tried to do it out of sight of my team-mates. It was just ugly.

Flash forward a few years and all of a sudden we have costume change emotes, and good ones. These days, I will never, ever, EVER do a costume change without an emote attached. In fact, I have shift+1 to shift+5 bound to, costume changes, say /bind shift+1 "cce 0 ccenergymorhp" and I use that every time I swap. A friend of mine recently complimented me on having this woman transform into this monster via a fiery evil laugh. Costume change emotes took what was a pretty immersion-breaking, out-of-character concept and made it much more immersive and in-character. In fact, these days I take it as a little mini-game to pick just the right kind of costume chance emote with which to swap costumes. My energy beings use Energy Morph, my super soldiers use Super Serum, my Slime Girl uses the Rapid Boil and so on. It's a lot more fun.

How this would reflect on Trainers... I honestly don't know. I suppose if I had the option to go to an ACTUAL training facility or, better yet, one of FIVE training facilities that match my origin, I so would. You know what would be cool? Have the basemen of City Hall still maintain the five origin locations, but instead of them housing contacts, have them house "trainers." Like, the MAGI place would have a large library in the front and I'd have access to the vault with the artefacts in the back, while the DATA place could have a automated robot factory on one end and a large calculation server farm on the other, while the GIFT place could an army obstacle course, a shooting range, a gym and a boxing ring.

Even if all the other "trainers" still worked as trainers, I would SO make the extra trip to City Hall every time I levelled up, because it would make sense why I'd go there to improve my powers. Your power armour scientist needs to level up? You go to the lab, make new parts, craft better code and, if you really feel like it, you just go over to the other Origin's shooting range and practice there. I would SO love seeing that. And if that were to happen, I wouldn't mind trainers being tailors since I wouldn't actually USE the existing trainers ever again.

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.

Hyperstrike WINS!

FATALITY (from an uncontrollable fit of laughing)

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

The amount of laziness in this reply is depressing. God forbid your pointer finger has to move more.

You think that's funny, notice how the guys SPECIFICALLY don't mention a "Crying Game" scenario.

Guys
In
Real
Life

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

God forbid people have to run 10 seconds to the Atlas Icon from Miss Liberty to edit their costume.

Eco.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

Omg, this made me laugh out loud (actually laugh out loud). Hilarious!

Explain to me why that bore repeating... *counts* five times in a row?

Six.

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

1. It's a mouse click. There's no reason to ***** about it.
2. It's ONE mouse click. ONE.
3. The need to repeat over six posts the "hassle" of ONE (I repeat, ONE, yes ONE) mouse click is absurd.

It takes two clicks to post on this forum, three if you use Preview Post after Quick Reply. One more mouse click isn't going to ******* kill you, and NO ONE should be acting like it will.

Now, that all depends on what that mouse click is programmed to operate!!


One wrong click of the mouse...

And there goes the neighborhood!!

You gotta be careful!!

The Electric-Knight ______ Malfaz _____ Zox'Oculox

@Zethustra

"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan

www.pauldamonthomas.com - Original Music

Fixed that for you.

Lol I don't think one mouseclick is too onerous either, but i'm not everyone, and Neither are you. Ranting off with Capslock declarative statements is wrong.

In my opinion.

Eco

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

My opinion pertains to the last 9 words of my post.