I need to apologise

I second (third? more?) that emotion.

ditto, i was happy to see that this seemed to be where dave and crew snuck in the more muscular option( as best he could without adding polygons which would have made it a much more complicated affair)

glad to hear things are better, now on to seeing titan weapons. I may seem to never get mad at the devs, but I just tend to view it in the context of the whole of gaming i have dealt with. Stuff will be good or bad, and if you beat yourself up over that little bit that doesnt fit, it only drives you nuts. it hurt my enjoyment of an unnamed bethesda game because they didnt have pole-arms, and it cost me enjoyment that's not going to come back, ever. you can affect some decisions, but the majority are going to be already made and have significant money and time resources into making stuff, stuff that jsut cant be changed. I had to quit investing myself in every battle or i'd lose all enjoyment of gaming. still want new alt anims for martial arts though, collin, i'm lookin at you.

The servers are back up. I still haven't decided what to with Brutticus, if anything, but here's what I made of her quick-like:



It's not very muscular (sadly), but it does display muscles in texture and bump map, and that's more than I can say for the smooth, flat skin of the base model.

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.

Wow, that's pretty sweet! I know what costume piece I'll be using when I make my first Titanic Weapons character.

Welcome to pretty much every MMO endgame system.

I would be shocked if it were any other way. That seems to be pretty standard procedure for most places.

Me too...


But I'm a bit confused...upset about the game, where it's going and all that....but everything is all fine and awesome now that you have a costume piece or two?

Will wonders never cease.

Since we were discussing it just the other day, I thought I would point you to something to think about when it comes to thinking about what you like (and don't like) about City of Heroes. I thought of you when reading it:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2011/09...couldve-made/6

I'm not specifically endorsing everything in it (it still a pet peeve of mine people bemoan "balance" while clearly having zero understanding of what balance even is in a game), but I thought it was an interesting coincidence coming on the heels of discussing the general pace of combat in City of Heroes. People do complain about the very things the article writer complains about in City of Heroes as well, but we sometimes forget just how powerful CoH allows us to be compared to *most* combat situations. Three on one is usually a big deal in most MMOs, where as three on one is the norm in CoH, and seventeen on one means you hit the aggro limit and can't go any higher.

I specifically noted this passage:

City of Heroes, it should be pointed out, is designed around the three hit kill on average; our "DPS classes" can generally two-shot even minions often. Stalker assassin's strikes can one-shot both minions and Lts, and the only reason that's not looked upon favorably in CoH is because AoE can get you a dozen kills in just two or three shots: in a manner of speaking a one quarter of one hit kill.

An MMO made the attempt: the author just apparently hasn't found it yet. I suspect if you put a light saber into the hands of a Katana scrapper you'd have something rather like the Jedi he envisions.


Of course, the author also says the most mathematically illiterate thing I've read in a long long time:

But still, its an interesting read nonetheless when compared to how combat works, and sometimes doesn't work, in City of Heroes.

I was kind of hoping Paragon Studios would do it better pretty much on sheer faith in the development team. They didn't, and THAT was a stark disappointment. I haven't gotten over it, I've simply chosen to ignore the thing wholesale. When it no longer sucks for me, then we'll see, but that's likely years away.

I hate the Incarnate system, but I should not have insulted the people who make up the development team for it. It's the system and the values it exhibits I despise, but they don't necessarily have to mirror the values of the people responsible for it, as subsequent additions have proven. I wanted to apologise for condemning the whole game and its creators just because only one part of it was some of the worst gaming I've ever had the sad misfortune to be part of. There's still a great game behind my subscription and that is a testament to the great people who make and maintain it.

Playing a furred character who is also dressed in the fur of dead animals seems a bit... Odd, truth be told

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.

Neat article and I would tend to agree with him in some ways.

I'd like to see a MMO that had some sort of FPS fight system for battles instead of 'dice rolls'.

I want to say the Dungeon & Dragons game had something like that...but can't remember if that was true or not.

Sure people who aren't twitchy or good with FPS' wouldn't like it but...then again there are people who hate other MMOs...so *shrugs*

I really liked Hellgate: London to be honest with you (and so did my best friend). It was kind of like a FPS mixed with a MMO....too bad there were way too many bugs and...well yeah....I guess everyone knows the story.

It's a question of game direction and the mentality of the people making it. At one point, after about the 12th month of hearing about nothing but still more Incarnates, I was beginning to get the feeling that this is all we were ever going to get. Not literally "only ever more raids," but what could be described in broader terms as "no-fun time sinks," which is to say game systems designed to keep us docile and addicted without having to spend inordinate amounts of time or money to make enough content to achieve this. I complain at times that there isn't enough Incarnate content PERIOD, let alone enough that I specifically like, but there isn't much room for accusation here - it's a whole new level range that content must be made for from scratch. It's only natural that a complete experience CAN'T be made right out the gate or even any time soon, if ever at all.

More than anything, it was the Neuron approach of giving us the bare minimum tolerable before moving on to the next gimmick, as though trying to keep us distracted by the shiny just long enough for the next shiny to pop up, ideally so we never have enough time to stop and look at what we're actually doing and how sad everything has become. That's how I saw things - Paragon Studios aren't interested in entertaining me, they're interested in swindling me out of my cash.

Yes, it's a few costume pieces. Yes, it's the promise of a large sword. Yes, it's shiny baubles. But there's more to it than that. It's an ideal, a promise, a very real hope. These are things that, in themselves, can't really make us addicted, can't keep us repeating the same content a zillion times over, can't keep subscribed for another seven years making half a percent progress per lunar month. These are, at their core, toys. Giving me barbarians and cowboys and street fighters and more gives me hope, because it tells me that these guys really do care about making a good game, about making a game people actually play because they enjoy it, rather than because they're compelled to play it through their addiction. It told me the studio still has a soul, and this counts for more than most people realise.

Today it's a girl abs. Tomorrow it will be a buster sword. The day after that... Who knows? But I'm sure it will be something else cool and fun and exciting. And that's really all I'm asking for - something cool, even if it's not statistically guaranteed to get another 750 hours of gameplay per character out of me. These guys are good at making cool stuff, and I'm happy to believe that they're willing to do it now that they've gotten enough iStuff to hold the system together. It's a vote of trust and a vote of confidence that I expect good things, rather than the exploitation I expected before.

Now, a cynic might call me naive, and I probably am. The reality is very likely to be that the studio is no longer looking to make money off endless subscriptions through time sinks as it is looking to make money off toys through ill-advised microtransactions, instead. In other words, the reality may well be that there's no more of a soul now than before and it's just a different way for them to reach into my pocket. I, personally, choose to believe this isn't the case and that these guys really do want to make a great game. But what keeps me safe in my naivete is that even if this were the case, even if this were a plot to get me to spend more, I'm happy to oblige. Because, honestly - that sort of awesome is worth the extra money (which I haven't even had to pay yet). To some, it may be just another kind of ripoff. To me, it's not a ripoff if the price is right for the service.

MMOs are, by their very nature, evil, horrible and treat their players like cattle. They have to, in order to keep us around. Maybe City of Heroes: Freedom will make money more through seduction than through addiction now - and that's a good thing - or maybe now that iStuff is rounded out, there will be more time for other stuff. Either way, if things keep going as they're going now, then I see nothing but good times ahead of us. Short of utter poverty on my end, I no longer see any reason for me to leave the game within the foreseeable future. And that's not something I could have said even as recently as a month ago.

It may not sound like much - and it probably isn't much - but to me, this is a very big vote of confidence that I don't tend to give out lightly. I21 has made me believe in the game 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.

No...DDO had dice rolls...it tried to emulate the PnP ruleset as closely as possible.

That's the Samuel I know! A huge long reply (with no "TL;DR" version! ) to a smart-alec response/question


The last paragraph you wrote is kind of funny though to me....i21 gives you hope but to me, I wouldn't say it doesn't give me hope or takes away hope but...I don't know...*shrugs* I don't know how to write what I feel...

I'm just glad for more powersets and the possibility of more people to play with!

Yeah! Next we'll have furless characters dressing in furless skins. Like humans in leather jackets and pants and stuff. Totally weird, yo.

Anyway, glad to hear you're enjoying the new issue. Don't ever stop criticizing the stuff you don't like and praising the stuff you do.

The more different games I play, the more I realise what kind of cosmic collision of chance City of Heroes is. The game started off unintentionally prone to being broken, we snapped it over a knee and then the developers had to scramble to fix it while at the same time not making it any less broken. It's interesting how our unintentionally overpowered characters proved to be the forbidden fruit of MMOs, something all players seem to instinctively like, but also something players really shouldn't have if a game's combat system is to be easily predictable and controllable.

I was riding shotgun with that column until about the mid-point, where it took a turn down 5th and Bananas and started talking about how the abstract term of "balance" was holding MMOs back and how making MMOs unbalanced and consequently broken would make MMOs more like real combat. However, before the author stepped into the Twilight Zone, there were a few very good points, as Arcana points out, and as we do kind of have covered here.

MMO combat in general is quite boring because it's slow, long, uneventful and a bit too reminiscent of mining for silver in the nasal cavities of your enemies. Ours isn't like that at all. I imagine at one point it was intended to be, but most of our "damage dealers" are capable of ending fights mere seconds after they started. In fact, one of the peak draws of Build Up type powers despite their statistically low contribution is that they make fights that much faster and our characters, by comparison, appear that much more powerful.

The article speaks of Jedi and how they should be these instantly lethal super badasses. And I agree with it to a very large extent. But that's pretty much what our Scrappers already are. Brutes are this to a lower extent since they need time to get going and can't just get up from the conference table when the ambassador turns out to be an assassin, but even they qualify. MMO combat CAN be fun, and not necessarily by making it twitch-based. City of Heroes proves that without a shadow of a doubt. Sure, there are a lot of things that City of Heroes does wrong - I agree with Arcana's take on the folly of AoE - but these are things that are fixable on their own without ripping the guts out of the entire system and sending us back to the stone age fighting one orc for half an hour at a time.

City of Heroes is the freak misfit of MMOs, and it was also my first MMO ever. Back in the day, I was convinced that all MMOs were evil, horrible and treated their players like cattle. I played City of Heroes and became convinced that I was wrong, for here was a game which was fun and treated me like a champ. It turns out I was completely right all along, it was just that City of Heroes was not, for all intents and purposes, an MMO, but rather something which kind of works and sometimes plays like an MMO but is an entity all its own. We've seen competition try to emulate it multiple times now, but those competitors are MMOs through and through, even the one which kind of isn't. As Arcana has said before - City of Heroes is unique because in order for it to work as it does, it needs to be broken in several ways that no developer with a sense of self-preservation would ever repeat. Not only was the fate of how the game turned out a collision of chance, but its existence ensures that it won't happen again. If anything has ever served to keep me here, it's that there is no game like City of Heroes in the world and chances are there never will be.

Now, I don't believe that what problems City of Heroes have can't be rectified in a spiritual sequel without killing the spirit of the game. I just don't think any developer will have the guts to NOT make a WoW clone AoE with a super hero skin in the future. City of Heroes was Rick Dakan's baby and Geko's handywork. It was an experiment that took a life of its own. I don't think we'll see that again any time soon.

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.

I was just fooling around, really That was a pretty cool costume, as well. I'm trying to justify using that "tube dress" design, myself, but we'll see how that goes. The belt kind of bugs me in that it dips right over the crack of the butt for reasons that aren't entirely clear from its design. I know that's to match up to the top and the skirt, but it looks odd from behind.

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.

DCUO has such a system, but like Arcana eluded too, it's still under the hood based around a lot of chance. But you can basically fight constantly. The game was broken as all heck at launch, but it's getting better.

I've said that within the context of AoEs (and actually, I include super-stacking AoE buffs and debuffs in there with damage) but I think the single target combat in CoH is perfectly fine. It should be the germ of a model for better MMO combat in general, I think. If I were designing an MMO combat system from scratch, there are a lot of ideas I would steal from CoH, that few if any MMOs give half a glance to.

Cryptic's legacy (which includes Paragon Studios to a degree) is, I think, going to be that because Cryptic had no idea what they were doing when they made CoH (you could argue the same for CO and STO to a lesser degree) they were willing to take chances others wouldn't take in doing things others wouldn't do. If there were no City of Heroes, I could say global cooldowns were an unnecessary drag on the pace of combat and I would be patted on the head like a child. But because City of Heroes actually exists, we can see the result of that experiment. And I can say CoH is basically right, and everyone else is basically wrong. Or rather, everyone else took the easy way out. CoH didn't actually get global cooldown right either because they did nothing to control combat once it was removed, but they prove the point removing it can be done.

Its interesting to me that for all Cryptic gets wrong, my idea of a pretty good starting point for an MMO is Champions Online's mechanics, City of Heroes powers and combat system, and Star Trek Online's reward system. In other words, rationalized non-accelerating base mechanics, diversified archetypes and activation-based combat, and task-skewed rewards. The two ways to pull the teeth out of AoE overkill are to depower AoE which can make AoE less fun, or reduce the reward for singular kills and increase the reward for completing missions separate from kills, which allows you to kill whatever you want as only the means to an end, not the end itself. The guy who kills eight things and finishes the mission doesn't end up too far behind the guy who kills eighty things and finishes the mission.

Of course, that is an extreme oversimplfication, but its still surprising to me nonetheless. Cryptic has problems making the whole enchilada work correctly, but its amusing to me that Cryptic has implemented more good original design ideas by accident than I think most MMO dev teams have come up with deliberately.

Please tell me you would allow actual dodging in this hypothetical hybrid, right? Right?

That was the thing that I found most upsetting about CO. I wasn't allowed to actually dodge anything ever.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

If it was up to me, the concept of evasion - causing an attack to completely miss its target - would exist. However, I recognize that causes the potential problem that players can miss (allowing only critters to miss and not players violates my cardinal design rule that PvP should work the same way as PvE from the beginning rather than ad hocing PvP into weird exception rules for balance purposes). I would probably be fighting uphill convincing an entire dev team to allow for missing.

Creating a way to miss in a way that minimizes the potential frustration of players is one of those open ended problems I find most interesting from a design perspective, but also most difficult to resolve.


And yes, between melee attacks being borderline retarded to take and (super) reflexes being anything but, except until extreme circumstances, it took no time at all for me to be completely turned off to melee-anything in that other game.


I do find the basic idea of blocking to be attractive, though. I think that was basically a good idea, albeit with some issues.

A FPS-type game would be more reliant on fast-twitch muscles and who has the best controller, and those two things seem to be the antithesis to what an MMO that's trying to be somewhat balanced between the classes should aim for. The complaining about the ski runs and subsequent badges should be enough to point to to say that people don't want City Of Heroes to be that type of game.

A game that tries to be all things to all people isn't going to be much of anything. I like that this game sticks to what it knows, and lets the other guys learn those harsh lessons.

I'm also inclined to believe that if games haven't solved the "endgame grind" problem by now, it may not be possible to do so. Much like how Hollywood continues to churn out the same sequels/explosion-rama schlock, game developers will stick to a script that works because their customers prove to them through their money that they want grinds. Making money trumps being original and daring.