And this is why City of Heroes will always be unique

I know, i know, i might be weird (i should put that as my sig) but although i probably won't mind them using the sword deflection/blocking animation happen more often as an ip means of illustrating prolonged battles instead of just a visual queue that your defense stat works, i don't mind as much the armor they wear.

Probably need to explain that a bit.

In a blue side class quest, it shows you assembling your glowsword which clearly shows me that it's technology based. And being several thousand years before the movie timeline where this is common tech, especially being weapon technology, it's not too far-fetch to reason that there would also be tech to counter it.

For the crafting...yes, their crafting could've been made more mini-game like, such as in that sequel to that 13yr old fantasy mmo. That one really felt like you're making something. You don't just stand by a table, for one there are different types depending on the craft and animates as you craft, but it also brings up a mini-game interface you interact in real time as you craft.

But even without that in the glowsword game, i still find myself engaged in that activity. Unlike with CoX's crafting, if you can really call it that...i don't feel engrossed in it at all. Maybe it's too simple for my taste, but if one of the few non-combat things you can do in this game isn't that engaging, then that brings me back to focusing on combat. And that can help highlight the repetitive nature of these games.

I need breaks in the routine to distract or minimize the repetition. And although beneficial for a casual experience, is also detrimental the longer you play (not just per session but through your overall time spent in the game.

In the past several years here, my experience have devolved to get mish, go to door and wipe out mobs/click glowie...repeat. And i have settled to that routine somewhere along the line and can't seem to break it with the other things in-game that i tried.

"Cortosis weave."

NERD...Ack! Sorry, reflex....and also a joke

Yeah, the attempts to cram the invention system into the game's fiction were awkward and clumsy at best.

Crafting is usually meant to be part of the economy, although in some games it can often become tedious and expensive relative to the benefits it provides.

Well, it's the truth. I am a nerd. And a geek. But at least I'm a snappier dresser than the stereotype.

I can forigve a new MMO launching and lacking content that other games have.

Content comes in time.

I can forigve a new MMO launching and having bugs.

Fixes come in time.

I can't forgive a new MMO launching and not having basic functions and process that have become standard in MMO's.

I'm not waiting for them to re-invent the wheel. (Pro-tip the triangle ones don't work)

I think you have a valid argument for the most part...but from my experience in just the last couple of years, this is nothing new. The Distinguished Competition opened with a raft of grouping issues, the Millenium City game opened with virtually no grouping support at all. And our own game here had the LFG mechanic put in which promptly was rejected by the playerbase for its lack of functionality and resorted to older chat channels to form them whilst it was worked on.

I'm not forgiving the error made here, but what I am saying is that it isn't unique and we don't really have a right to point the finger when it's a much more widespread issue than just one game.

I personally am going to wait for them to reinvent the wheel, because I think the measure of any game is in its first six months to a year where all the unforseen bugs, the disabled or not implemented features and lessons happen. CoH would have never once grown or changed how it did things if people took the approach that 'this isn't the MMO standard, I'm leaving'. It plays back into that sense of entitlement that I think we as gamers have wrongly encouraged in ourselves.

When we say we expect things to be of an MMO standard, what we're actually saying is we want them to be not only working, but working to our expectations. Not the developers, not the QA guys, but ours. And if our own forums can be any measure, we have an often inflated and unrealistic view of what a standard is.

Is it then the functionality that we're buying when we purchase a sub to a game? I certainly hope not. I play here because it's the best superhero experience I can find out there, and I'm not afraid to say that my loyalty would go elsewhere if a game offered better. That's my own expectations and ideas of standard coming into play. I play the laser sword MMO because I grew up with it, I have friends I can regularly group with, and I even have a guild that I've joined, all in spite of the seeming limitations you've laid down. I've never once felt I was playing a single player game and I look forward to the times when I group, because unlike this game with its own limitations on sharing a group experience, this other game gives you an opportunity to shape the experience, even if that perception isn't a true one. I like the feeling that I'm involved and I'm encouraged to be.


S.

Interesting, but I thought it was the exact opposite. That this was much more common in CoX than in other games. I mean, sometimes it feels like a full half of all CoV story arcs ends in an EB fight that you may or may not be able to solo (*mutters about stupid Positron dealing 500 damage per hit with friggin' neutrino bolt*).

Sure, we've had enough power creep over the years, that many of these fights are largely trivial today, but they were not designed or intended to be easily soloed. Don't get me started on Calystix the Shaper.

And this is not even counting the zone-wide story arcs that end in trials, like the Hollows, Croatoa and, as I understand it, even DA.

So hard to figure out what game you're talking about. EQ2?

Whenever anyone mentions crafting, it's immediately apparent whether or not they've ever played the old pre-NGE SWG, because that game which no longer exists had the most amazing crafting experience ever.

Every material used to create goods varied by source in intrinsic details. Metals that had a higher conductivity would be more valuable for some things than others, and the materials regularly changed.

My character, a bioengineer, would trek out to distant worlds, sample the DNA of extremely lethal creatures (and hopefully not die too much in the process, since I had no combat ability) and combine 5 samples into a new item whose values for various things would vary significantly based on which sample was put where.

Through trial and error on a scale that would intimidate anyone into avoiding the grind like crazy (except that it wasn't grindy while you were enjoying playing around with it) I managed to create a housecat-like creature that could spit acid from 30 yards away and tackle a fully-grown human to the ground.

Also take into account that everything everyone created, and I do mean EVERYTHING, had a use. there was no "grind 30 sprockets to increase your skill and then throw them away because nobody's going to buy them."

yup. Jaw-droppingly amazing stuff they had.

AND THEN THEY DELETED MY CLASS.
*cries in a corner*

Yes, that first one. Sorry, don't know anymore if mentioning the actual game name would get modded but i err on safety.

I picked that one because i was going for a mini-game crafting experience not too simple as here but also not too complex as in that second example of yours. That much complexity fits for that game but probably would be too much for the current one since part of the cool thing with theirs is that you can create things that will alter the actual game world...housing for one, but that cannot fit well in the new game.

But yes, that previous glowsword game had a lot of things i wish more mmos have.

[edit: Or actually, might be inaccurate to just put it all on developers...i should say, i wish more people would be into those things that the previous glowsword mmo had so more games today would have it.]

* Oh, and just fyi, my knowledge of that first game's crafting is several years old. I don't know if it's still that way.

This has got to be the most ignorant statement I have seen you make in a sea of ignorant comments you have made about this in this thread. You really are not doing yourself any good with this when the creator has given his approval in cannon so stop it please.

Yes, because we pay for them.

The original design was for many missions to require a team to beat. Bosses were not intended to be solo content. That's why they eventually changed it so that you can remove them from most solo content.

Likewise, CoH did and still does end many story arcs with an EB/AV fight. Whether that fight is soloable as an EB is in the eyes of the beholder. I took a lot of heat from other posters by declaring (and proving) that the Mender Ramiel quest could be soloed with any combo using SOs. Many folks, some polite, some less so took me to task in PMs and on the boards for suggesting that.

You should PM me how you managed it with a dark/dark defender with SOs, because I couldn't manage it after multiple tries.

On the day of rockening, SOE has much to answer for.

I had a chance to talk to an SOE developer a few times and he suggested that some things, like this, are "awesome features that players will never see again" because of the behind-the-scenes lessons learned from them.

Some of them were preventable:
1) people started making things, from buffs to weapons to armor, that was far above anything the devs expected possible. They (incorrectly) balanced the system so that the ingredient quality during any given time wouldn't make "uberitems" but they didn't expect people to hoard the best ingredients from previous cycles to mix with the best ingredients of future cycles. Remember the faction armor in the game? That was supposed to be some of the best possible armor in the game.

Craftable armor regularly exceeded that with double the resist and half the encumbrance. Not that encumberance mattered- similar issues with buffs meant that people had stat buffs that made any "balance" armor penalties useless. Heck, many of the game's most fundamental balance complaints that led to the "NGE" can be directly traced to how the game's mechanics didn't stand up to the realities of the items users were crafting.

The takeaway could have been "use different calculations to keep craftable stats within game-balance parameters" but instead it was mostly "use pre-defined item stats that can NEVER go above what will balance within the mechanics."


2) Reinforcing that takeway was the issue that custom items brought to game performance. In an MMO:
- the less data a server needs to calculate an activity, the more activity (users) that same server can support.
- database calls take time. The more you can do with data already cached on the server, the better your response rates will be.

If everyone logged in to the game uses "gun number 3" then the game only needs to cache the performance characteristics for "gun number 3" once and refer to it every time.

If everyone is using a unique gun with a unique serial number and its own stats, then either we have to allocate a LOT more memory on the server for tracking all these items OR we need to track the serial number and look up each record in the database every time its needed (requiring more time).

You can sometimes address these issues by throwing more money at the servers, but you reach a point of diminishing returns not to mention that increased monthly operations costs mean leaner profits from monthly subscriptions.

It didn't help that the game was drowning on its database issues. One rather candid statement from said developer was that their database didn't scale to even 1/10 of the transactions the vendor said it would... and that lack of scalability didn't get detected until launch.

---

So, yeah, obviously the game had issues, but while the crafting system was awesome, it was also a HUGE contributor to the problems that plagued the game in general.

Many aspiring MMO developers look at this and declare "... but these issues can be contained. they can be managed. You can learn off those failures and MAKE IT WORK" (insert mad scientist laugh here).

Veteran MMO devs that have suffered through a launch or two are more reluctant. "Things are insane enough leading up to launch, imagine what it'd be like if something THIS complex had issues on top of it all..." Then, despite the Post Launch Stress Disorder, they think about how awesome it'd be if it DIDN'T have issues... and they can't stifle a nervous mad scientist laugh as they start to scribble down their ideas....


Someday it'll be done again. It'll be glorious. It'll be spectacular. It'll be Awe-inspiring...

...and even if it blows up, it'll be spectacularly glorious awe-inspiring explosion that'll leave yet another generation of developers laughing like mad scientists.

*hugs and commiserates*

I'm not going to say anything else about all that...

Although... there is still a bit of hope in the long ongoing attempt to develop the emulator.

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

The Maker approves of licensing fanfiction set in his universe - he doesn't treat it as canon

Indeed, there are plenty of quotes from Mr. Lucas about his distinction of canon and the differing mediums that Star Wars stories are told.
Basically, he sees them as different universes. He recognizes that people love his universe so much that they have stories and ideas that they'd love to tell, so he lets them, but they are separate from his Star Wars universe.

Some of us love Lucas's universe and... don't really enjoy the other one(s).

Anyway, get off Golden Girl's back about calling it "fake Star wars".
In a way, she is correct.
Regardless, it's said in a humorous way... what is wrong with you people? Why so serious?

It's like someone talking about Britney Spears and saying it is NOT music. Are we going to get into a hissy fit because someone calls Britney Spears "fake music"?


AND...
Beyond the slightly humorous insult in Golden Girl's synopsis, I don't think the title is only about the expanded universe... it's about shoe-horning the existing material into pre-fab mmorpg conventions and mechanics.
Thus... regardless of what universe of Star Wars it may be... it may be "fake Star Wars" because it really doesn't hold true to enough of the realities of Star Wars... it doesn't hold the integrity that some fans demand.

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

I wish somewhere, someday, the industry learned the lesson that just as you need programmers to write code and artists to design the content and writers to script the story, mechanics and systems is an engineering task.

I believe there is no game mechanical problem that doesn't have an engineering-based solution, and all game mechanical infrastructure is really just a set of engineering edifices. I believe that a good engineer with no knowledge of gaming would make a far better mechanical infrastructure than a good game designer with no knowledge of engineering. Someone that is good at both will outperform either by a quantum leap of quality.

A game designer with no experience programming will never *code* a good game engine, while a programmer with no knowledge of gaming can still implement a good game engine. An artist with no knowledge of gaming can still make good gaming artwork, but a game designer that can't draw, use animation tools, or compose music is not the best person to be doing any of those things. No one needs to be told this. But saying that systems is an engineering thing, perhaps you should get an engineer to do that (and preferrable not a brain dead one: there's lots of those) is a radical idea.

Every time I hear someone say that, for example, "game balance is impossible" because games are more than math, or the even more pernicious "game balance is not even a good idea because it makes games boring" I realize that game design isn't merely living in the stone age, its living in the time before fire.

I've seen glimmers. CCE has had some spectacular design failures or incidents in the past, but the way they at least sometimes *analyze* those failures suggests a level of self-awareness about the complexity of their game design that I don't usually see elsewhere. But I have yet to play an MMO whose internal systems and mechanics make sense to me from an engineering perspective, completely separate from whether I like them or not. And that always creates problems that were completely avoidable, but MMO dev teams seem to think are inevitable.

You are correct.