One Thing I've Always Hated About This Game
Yeah, to some extent.
![](http://i778.photobucket.com/albums/yy70/KojiroJames/neversurrendersig.jpg)
One of the reasons all of my videogaming in the last few years has been in the city is the wonderful costume generation possibilities. Could they be better? Yes.
We all have our pet gripes. One of my old ones is robot thighs. There are really no good pure mechanical robot thigh options in the game. Some almost could be cool but they are sculpted to look like a body builders thighs covered in metal. Helmets used to be a pet peeve, but they have made (some) progress in that are with recent options that help.
Also, not a good idea to start a post with "I've Always Hated About This Game"
![](http://emotibot.net/pix/6338.png)
Meh, maybe hate was a strong word, but it does bug the hell out of me. If we ever have a City of Heroes 2, that's what I'd want most, costume wise. That, and a 3 color system.
Shadowblaze - Lvl 50 Dark/Thermal Cor, Alexander Kalsoa - Lvl 50 BS/Regen Scrapper, and a whole bunch of other Alts. Global is @Shadowblaze.
It'd probably just be a lot of slow, tedious gruntwork to upgrade all the costume pieces in the costume creator and the costume devs are busy on making costume packs for the paragon store to keep CoH showing a profit to NCSoft.
It'd probably just be a lot of slow, tedious gruntwork to upgrade all the costume pieces in the costume creator and the costume devs are busy on making costume packs for the paragon store to keep CoH showing a profit to NCSoft. |
(in English: rather than sending something that looks like "chest=34,color1=23,color2=12;chestdetail=1,color1 =11,color2=12) it would more likely be sending "342312011112" (in binary, of course) ... with the client code knowing "the first 2 characters indicate chest, next 2 are color 1, next 2 are color 2, etc." That keeps the data packet as lean as possible- only sending the minimally-needed traffic.
It sounds trivial in the days of broadband, but when you think of how much traffic must enter and leave those central servers, reducing every bit possible saves the devs money (they don't have the luxury of a "unlimited bandwidth" data plan) and lets them keep the costs of hosting the game down.
It does mean, though, that you've got to find EVERY place that parses and handles that data packet and update it correctly if you add more info (like color 3 and color 4) into it. These are some of the oldest (and usually the least-document) parts of a system with any change having a great deal of potential to generate all sorts of unintended consequences. The rule in most games is to do as much as possible within the existing data structure and avoid changing it if at all possible. THOSE "lessons learned" are better left for the sequel.
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Back to the OP: As others have said, I have my pet peeves with the system, but it IS remarkable that almost 8 years after its release, no game has really come along with options that offer more diversity and more customization that what we've found here- even when those games have double, triple, or even (reportedly) 10x the original budget of this game.
The devs did good here. There's always room for better, but the competition has shown that when the bar is set as high as CoH, "better" isn't easy to attain.
![](https://sites.google.com/site/chasyork/_/rsrc/1286288783877/home/chasebanner.jpg)
It's an unfortunate necessity. I've learned to forgive it.
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slightly annoying when I want to do a face paint character
@Johnstone & @Johnstone 2
ediblePoly.com
All my characters
One thing that has always bugged me is that you can only use one color on any option 'with skin'. I guess the skin color counts as the second color, but man, I've always thought that that limitation really hurts what could be some cool looking costumes. Has this ever bothered anyone else?
Shadowblaze - Lvl 50 Dark/Thermal Cor, Alexander Kalsoa - Lvl 50 BS/Regen Scrapper, and a whole bunch of other Alts. Global is @Shadowblaze.