Dev Chat Highlights, September 1: Quick, distract them while the servers are down!
By
Aggelakis,
Posted on: 2011-09-01 13:19 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
So after reading some more of this thread, I wanted to comment on jet packs.
Dear devs, (or dev, as Arcanaville says only one dev MAY read this, and may or may not even remember it)
I would like to have some jet pack costume pieces for my numerous tech flying heroes. I understand there may be some art issues, clipping, etc. These issues do not bother me.
You see, since his creation in Issue 2, my scrapper has been magically conjuring this gigantic sword from behind his back to swing at bad guys. And I mean, this sword is freegin huge. I have even watched him from the back, to try to see where he is grabbing this monstrous blade from, but to no avail. It truly is a magical thing, to see him reach up behind his head, and unsheath this giant sword from thin air.
He does it all the time too. Starting a fight? Abracadabra! shing! Heal himself with reconstruction? Abracadabra! Shing! I have been tempted on numerous occasions to make his second costume slot that of a classic magician, top hat and tuxedo, such is my amazement at his slight of hand.
But wait, there is more! Sometimes he forgets to put his magic sword away. Like when I have him do that one jumping dance, and he holds it up and the blade is straight through the side of his head. Or when I have him do jumping jacks and he repeatedly stabs himself in the brain. He truly is a good entertainer, slight of hand second to none.
So, with that in mind, some singed legs or backpack/jetpack/flamethrower backpack/backpack full of napalm/jetpack with numerous pouches really doesnt feel like a big deal to me.
Also, more rocket boot options plz.
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So, so *very* much of this. |
Originally Posted by Eldagore
So after reading some more of this thread, I wanted to comment on jet packs.
Dear devs, (or dev, as Arcanaville says only one dev MAY read this, and may or may not even remember it) I would like to have some jet pack costume pieces for my numerous tech flying heroes. I understand there may be some art issues, clipping, etc. These issues do not bother me. You see, since his creation in Issue 2, my scrapper has been magically conjuring this gigantic sword from behind his back to swing at bad guys. And I mean, this sword is freegin huge. I have even watched him from the back, to try to see where he is grabbing this monstrous blade from, but to no avail. It truly is a magical thing, to see him reach up behind his head, and unsheath this giant sword from thin air. He does it all the time too. Starting a fight? Abracadabra! shing! Heal himself with reconstruction? Abracadabra! Shing! I have been tempted on numerous occasions to make his second costume slot that of a classic magician, top hat and tuxedo, such is my amazement at his slight of hand. But wait, there is more! Sometimes he forgets to put his magic sword away. Like when I have him do that one jumping dance, and he holds it up and the blade is straight through the side of his head. Or when I have him do jumping jacks and he repeatedly stabs himself in the brain. He truly is a good entertainer, slight of hand second to none. So, with that in mind, some singed legs or backpack/jetpack/flamethrower backpack/backpack full of napalm/jetpack with numerous pouches really doesnt feel like a big deal to me. Also, more rocket boot options plz. |
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Maybe they will re-release CoX on a Collector's DVD edition like CoV got.. |
Originally Posted by AzureSkyCiel
Have you guys ever considered consolidating this stuff with various lore bits and development notes into some kind of limited production City of bible?
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City of Heroes: Freedom Collector's Edition with limited edition David Nakayama concept art.. I'd buy that.
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Excellent, then I can praise the concept art team (plzgizzajob?) while hammering on the modelling team 'Y U no make CoT look as good as this?!' |
Originally Posted by Noble Savage
Thanks. This is actually a highly abridged version of the art. Will try to post a bunch of concept after Freedom launches, and you can check out the complete version then.
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In case it wasn't clear enough, I still think the new CoT need work and, indeed, fixing. The costume are too busy. Those concepts have plenty of blank, solid colour space which helps even them out. The new ones have repeated raised patterns with only two-tone colours and no gaps. This makes them INSANELY busy looking, and not very good, to put it frankly.
That, and they still look too WoW-like >_>
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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.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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I remember it was because of CoH forums and some random PvPer mass posting that I saw "Two Girls, One Cup".|
Originally Posted by Ms. Mesmer
The relative ease of some disaffected PvPer posting a porn link in every forum every couple of weeks? The forums were pretty toxic by the time that he took over.
At least he did his job and banned the trolls. Certain ones among his predecessors let certain people get away with way too much. |
Thanks for reminding me.
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The patterns on the models are the same as the ones in the concept art, and are in the same places on their clothing.
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Originally Posted by Techbot Alpha
Excellent, then I can praise the concept art team (plzgizzajob?) while hammering on the modelling team 'Y U no make CoT look as good as this?!'
In case it wasn't clear enough, I still think the new CoT need work and, indeed, fixing. The costume are too busy. Those concepts have plenty of blank, solid colour space which helps even them out. The new ones have repeated raised patterns with only two-tone colours and no gaps. This makes them INSANELY busy looking, and not very good, to put it frankly. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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That may be so but in the concept art the patterns are low saturation and, to me, look more indented than raised.
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
The patterns on the models are the same as the ones in the concept art, and are in the same places on their clothing.
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I disagree. I think this concept art, while nice, has the exact same problem as the stuff that maddened the forums recently: it doesn't look like CoT.|
Originally Posted by KAKTOS
that is the same thing that came to mind. These are great! what we got not so much.
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In my opinion, the key defining attributes of CoH minions are:
1. faceless.
2. glowing green eyes
3. baggy clothing/robes to hide their lack of musculature.
This concept art loses all of that.
Even when you're not talking about minions, they should always look like they use magic instead of muscles. Giving any of them this kind of musculature just feels totally wrong to me. I'm not talking about the demons, they can be muscle-bound hulks, but the humans should not look like they've dedicated their lives to getting their money's worth from their gym memberships. They should look like they've dedicated their lives to sitting quietly in a library reading books, mastering esoteric knowledge and plotting revenge on society.
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They probably have muscle magic.
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^ Amen to that.|
Originally Posted by peterpeter
I disagree. I think this concept art, while nice, has the exact same problem as the stuff that maddened the forums recently: it doesn't look like CoT.
In my opinion, the key defining attributes of CoH minions are: 1. faceless. 2. glowing green eyes 3. baggy clothing/robes to hide their lack of musculature. This concept art loses all of that. Even when you're not talking about minions, they should always look like they use magic instead of muscles. Giving any of them this kind of musculature just feels totally wrong to me. I'm not talking about the demons, they can be muscle-bound hulks, but the humans should not look like they've dedicated their lives to getting their money's worth from their gym memberships. They should look like they've dedicated their lives to sitting quietly in a library reading books, mastering esoteric knowledge and plotting revenge on society. |
The one exception I could see is the Thorn Wielders (who should really be a 30-54 mob), who I could see being clad in ancient, full Orenbegan Thorn Plate armour. Which, again, hide body mass and also is probably enchanted up the whazoo.
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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.
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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon
NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.
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I think I'm going to get off my past community rep soapbox. Obviously what happened during the course of this game has led to us having the dev and community teams we have now, which are pretty damn good at their job.
Now, let's celebrate the coming of full circle by figuring out a way to make the Disruptor badge easier to get.
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Used to get it by running a PvP mission (in Siren's?). |
Originally Posted by Friggin_Taser
Now, let's celebrate the coming of full circle by figuring out a way to make the Disruptor badge easier to get.
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Put the bug back in, run a door mission, get a badge.
Or tie it to villain kills in epic tasks and so on.
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You are disrupting their killstreak. Therefor you are a disruptor.
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Please tone down all the "hive-mind" nonsense and "the Devs don't have photographic memories" hyperbole. As I've already mentioned several times in these forums I've been a software engineer for nearly 20 years so I have a fairly good notion of the "fog of war" that goes on between the world that Devs live in versus the world that their players/users live in. I never once implied or assumed that ALL the Devs would know EVERY last detail of every post that's ever been made here. Cut me some slack for having a bit of relevant real-world experience in this area.|
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
This is assuming a Hive-mind again. There are no "the-devs." Each individual developer reads some percentage of the forums which is different for each dev, up to and including zero. Separate from that, each individual dev might only *remember* some segment of what they read, and that's factoring in the fact they work on this game every day and it might be harder for them to remember every single idea brought up on the forums when they themselves have to try to remember every single idea brought up *internally* that they might actually have to work on.
I once made a suggestion on the forums and had Castle *respond* to it, only to have him tell me six months later he didn't remember it. The devs see and hear so many ideas about the game every day that it can be difficult to keep track of them all. For that matter, most players don't either: if "the forums" can continue to think the devs said power customization was "impossible" when no dev ever said that, ever, I think we can cut the devs a little slack for every single individual dev not reading and retaining all the information that gets kicked around on the forums. Its also possible, by the way, that a dev might hear an idea, think about it, decide its not worth pursuring, and then a year later hear the same idea again, and this time think it is worth pursuing, but not remember the first time they rejected it. Again: they are exposed to a lot of ideas, and separate from not remembering all of them they might not even remember passing one over in the past or precisely why. Having a photographic memory is not a prerequisite of working at Paragon Studios. One last thing: my memory is very good, but why do I remember all the times inherent stamina was discussed, all the debates about rooting, all the suggestions to change knockback, the I Love My Blaster threads, the 100 uses for MoG threads, the change from power rating to brawl rating to DPA - why do I remember all of those things going back seven years? Not just because I read them, but because I *participated* in those discussions. Its far easier for me to remember discussions I actually participated in, than ones I only read. That's just how memory works. Now consider the devs do not participate often in suggestion threads. |
Having said that I will continue to be amazed every time a Dev of this game publicly reveals just how relatively out of touch they ALL COLLECTIVELY appear to be. Don't get me wrong - I'm quite sure they do the best they can. But clearly the gulf between what players want and what the Devs think we want seems to remain quite large. On many of the projects I've worked we kept some kind of action item list readily available to all engineers which would keep track of user reports and inputs. While I don't expect the folks who work on this game to maintain/consult a comprehensive list with hundreds of detailed items on it (like I routinely do) I have to assume they do in fact keep SOME track of the most important bugs and issues that need attention at any given time.
I guess my point is that I'm left wondering how solid their engineering practices are when they (almost repeatedly) reveal that things which have been talked about regularly for YEARS still seem brand new to ANY of them and catch them off guard. Sure priorities change and new people come in and make new decisions but that's why it's vitally important for the Devs to (collectively) have an accurate "pulse" of their community via a constantly updated action item list. Using tools like this a development team can avoid letting things fall through the cracks and helps make everyone better aware of the big picture. I suppose it simply worries me that they seem to be playing it more "by ear" than I would feel comfortable with. *shrugs*
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Lothic, I'd stand firmly behind any of your post if the design and dev team (or even just the community reps) for this game have remained static for years. They haven't. Between leaving Cryptic, forming Paragon Studios, Recluse and others leaving after CoV coming out, other great devs unfortunately being let go/resigning, we've had a bit of a revolving door.
The only static members who have maintained any kind of forum presence, at least off the top of my head here, are Noble Savage, Positron, and WarWitch at times. And I think Posi and WW had a lot on their plate, so them not remember every suggestion made on these forums, no matter how great or how important any one of us thinks it was, would make sense. And Noble isn't part of the dev teams that would be used to do these things.
So that's why there is no Dev Hive Mind and also why we keep seeing comments like that pop up from rednames.
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Not even David Nakayama (Noble Savage) has been a static member. He left and came back and left and came back (possibly "and left and came back" again, I am not 100% sure). He hasn't been employed by Cryptic/Paragon/NCsoft this whole time.
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Originally Posted by Friggin_Taser
Lothic, I'd stand firmly behind any of your post if the design and dev team (or even just the community reps) for this game have remained static for years. They haven't. Between leaving Cryptic, forming Paragon Studios, Recluse and others leaving after CoV coming out, other great devs unfortunately being let go/resigning, we've had a bit of a revolving door.
The only static members who have maintained any kind of forum presence, at least off the top of my head here, are Noble Savage, Positron, and WarWitch at times. And I think Posi and WW had a lot on their plate, so them not remember every suggestion made on these forums, no matter how great or how important any one of us thinks it was, would make sense. And Noble isn't part of the dev teams that would be used to do these things. So that's why there is no Dev Hive Mind and also why we keep seeing comments like that pop up from rednames. |
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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.
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Actually let me correct you, |
Originally Posted by Friggin_Taser
Just want to correct you here: Lighthouse was fir... I mean resigned about a month before issue 13 hit the live servers.
He had to deal with the relative easy and nerf-free nature of issues 10, 11 and 12. Not exactly the war zone he made his tactful way of saying "my way or the highway" seem to be. |
He WAS HERE during the BETA period for I 13, and the era you mentioned was the straw that broke the camel's back. During the period you mentioned MANY folks thought that their favorite part of the game was getting ignored and were pulling jerks moves like the ones already mentioned. I13 just made them feel even more that the devs at the time weren't listening.
Lighthouse to this day is quoted by some misguided pvpers as being fired because "he told pvpers the truth about how the devs didn't care about old pvpers because the new version of pvp would bring in vast amounts of new ones." I'm paraphrasing. I don't agree or believe that point, but it's just an example of the idiocy on these forums at the time.
So yeah he was here during a pretty a#$hattery period on the forums.
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THIS. I don't think there are many members left who have been here from the begining. And from just my memory some of the old ones you mentioned WERE NOT always that involved in the forums. In fact there were periods of time were they didn't post ANYTHING.|
Originally Posted by Friggin_Taser
Lothic, I'd stand firmly behind any of your post if the design and dev team (or even just the community reps) for this game have remained static for years. They haven't. Between leaving Cryptic, forming Paragon Studios, Recluse and others leaving after CoV coming out, other great devs unfortunately being let go/resigning, we've had a bit of a revolving door.
The only static members who have maintained any kind of forum presence, at least off the top of my head here, are Noble Savage, Positron, and WarWitch at times. And I think Posi and WW had a lot on their plate, so them not remember every suggestion made on these forums, no matter how great or how important any one of us thinks it was, would make sense. And Noble isn't part of the dev teams that would be used to do these things. So that's why there is no Dev Hive Mind and also why we keep seeing comments like that pop up from rednames. |
The most prolific on the forums from my memory are two who, ironically enough, aren't here: Castle and BaB.
BaB at one point simply stopped posting and interacting with the forums that much for reasons not worth repeating here. Castle not so sure, but with the abuse that was heaped on him by pvpers for Issue 13, it wouldn't surprise me if he simply stopped bothering to look at the forums for periods of time.
The point, doesn't surprise me that a lot of suggestions made here (7 years of!) aren't remembered, when most of the team hasn't been completely around of 5 years, let alone the full 7, with the ones who are not having been involved in the forums all that much.
In fact I distinctly remember some redname introductions where said redname had already been with the team for a year+, but had ONLY just gotten a red name. Soooo, yeah.
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Positron and War Witch have been here since the beginning. They're the only ones that post on the boards.|
Originally Posted by Aura_Familia
THIS. I don't think there are many members left who have been here from the begining.
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Brian Clayton (executive producer) as well, though he doesn't have a redname and doesn't post on the forums. There are a few other non-redname people as well.
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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.
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Yeah, I never saw any issue with him... but then again, I believe that period of time was shortly after I started and I did more lurking than posting at that time (I started sometime after the launch of i9).
Agreed...some moderators will let minor infractions (silly things like simply saying the name of another game in passing) pass while others are very 'by the book' and will stamp out any mention of any game if they see it.
This has begun to lax off, since we can now mention NCsoft MMOs at the least, Wildstar and Guild Wars 2 namely, especially since the CoH team (devs and mods) have been heavily tweeting/promoting Wildstar and letting that topic slide for WEEKS. I tested the waters and made a thread about Guild Wars 2 (mentioning that if we're allowed to talk about Wildstar, well deleting a topic on a different NCsoft MMO would smack of double standards) and while it didn't get a lot of replies, it remained undeleted for several non-weekend based days.
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I have had only fairness in spite of at times taking things too far myself. I have had polite emails explaining why my post was deleted.
I recently violated the rules by posting about the dangers of microtransactions that another game had.
The Mod deleted the post and said in all fairness I was not discussing the other game but this game in light of possible future changes. He/She said it was being removed but it was a good positive converstion and I could repost without the offending name of the game and be quite alright.
Seemed pretty fair to me.
I for one was thoroughly bumbed that the new CoT makeover did not extend to all of the CoT. I was looking forward to new designs for the CoT demons, hordling lashers, and ghosts
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