Chase_Arcanum

5 stars. Dark Respite. Keep it up

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Will PlayNC be assessing the usefulness of this new avenue, ie checking for fraud, cost/benefits etc, and consider paypal for subs payments in the future ?

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Could you create 30 day 'time card codes' as one off purchases?

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The 30-day time card codes would be a good solution, I know auto-processing scheduled payments through paypal can be a little problematic (possible, IIRC, but problematic)

Looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with. This has piqued my interest but I'll likely be sticking with still images and leave the video production to the experts. Knock em dead!

Been meaning to post here for a while.

Great work on issue 1. Extraordinary, especially for a first issue.

Good overall design, good character selection, good camera work (the falling scene on pg 49-50 must have been hell to get, but looks great.), and excellent writing (you manage to punctuate some of the more serious scenes with well-balanced humor). I really would enjoy seeing more.

On specific topics brought up here:
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Others have mentioned the "dark" images. They didn't bother me in the least, but the laptop I'm on is ridiculously bright. Sometimes that's a challenge with different-brightness monitors (things are considerably brighter on my LCD than my CRT- one comic I did was initially unreadable on CRT).

If this concerns you... and If you have some image-manipulation software, something like this might help bring out the important techniques:
-- select the "main" characters, increase brightness on them,
-- invert the selection, reduce brightness on them
-- give a blue filter to the page to hint to low light.
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Regarding "PDF vs Online Viewer"

I prefer PDF's, but most hosting services like smaller incremental access. If a person sees a page-at-a-time you get many more advertising "hits" than if they get the whole book in one download, after all. The online 'flash' viewer you used is quite a step above the (apparently defunct) hypercomics viewer I once used.

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"FREEM"

You make much better us of Onomatopoeia than I ever did, but you may have missed the April Fools City of Heroes press release (available here) that said they were adding such "visual sounds" to the game (and removing all other sounds).

"Freem" has since taken a life of its own among many community members.

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Good job guys. Great way to get the 411 on content. And for things that was missed...there is always the "CoX Annual."

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I have this half-complete riddled-with-time-travel-movie-homages Issue 11 guide that's just daring me to salvage it for a supersized year-in-review comic.

Don't tempt me.

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Once again, you've outdone yourself Chase. You and Cinder did an excellent job of covering the majority of the new stuff in I12 without giving away any real spoilers.

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And a day after I sent it in I was swearing, "how the heck did I miss the "convert 3 glowies into the one of your choice" and "I Forgot to fit in FREEM! HOW COULD I FORGET FREEM!" "badges? I never got Imperius' Task Force completed! I missed badges!"

At that point, Cinder switched me to decaf.

thanks for the praise, everyone. I went a bit nuts getting the demorecords to work (don't ask how long the Rularuu shot took) or I'd have included even more of the casting call attendees.

Once I regain some sanity, I may have other uses for people that didn't fit into here.

Phew. I thought I'd messed up somewhere there.

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Open all zones to both sides.

Create a new PvE structure that allows people to "fight" (as in oppose by means other than combat) the other faction.

Example, Longbow creates bases in all Villain zones and gives sabotage and liberation missions to heroes. Arachnos creates similar bases in Paragon and gives villains an opportunity to do what they do best.

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sounds like Warburg without the PvP. Not bad.

I still like the idea of taking unused and oft complained about zones away from heroes and giving them to villains. Yes, I would take Crey's Folly, Boomtown, Terra Volta over nothing any day of the week.

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As BAB said, extra zones isn't always a good thing for a game. It dilutes the population, creates dead spaces, etc. It DOES give a new and refreshing look, but often just adding new tilesets (where we spend the most of our time) is far more effective there too.

I can't fault the devs for the "Hollows" revision. Many people doing the trial encounter that... and it was NOT a good new user experience.

I would prefer that any revised zones (particularly all the hazard zones) be made somehow open to both sides, as you have suggested. That gives the game easy-to-reuse tilesets while giving the players more areas to explore. It does still dilute the population, though.

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You also mentioned in another post the tearing down of 'false walls.' On principle, I agree with that. In practice, I've learned that many of those false walls are needed simply because the game doesn't have the kinds of "walls" that real life does to limit certain kinds of behaviors and interactions. Sometimes, to keep things more realistic, you need to insert rather artificial constructs.

5 stars

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The Midnighters hold a secret that could bring the alien assault to an end, but without the help of the Heroes of Paragon City™ it will remain Lost forever.

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I notice that "Lost" is capitalized... I think that they are a very underused part of this game, and I hope this means we will be exploring their ties to the Rikti more fully!

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Thank you for noticing that, I saw it right away and read through all bazillion pages of general i12 chatter and so no mention of it, I thought I was going insane. Good to know I'm not alone, in seeing it and in thinking that the Lost need to be re-found.

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I missed that until now. I'd wager on intentional clue.

Remember: the Midnight Squad's HQ was nuked by the Rikti because they were such a threat. They were rather vulnerable to magic, as they had very little native magic (if any). They would have been very interested in "shifting" magic-sensitive people to the Rikti.

IIRC, there are a few stories heroside that address exactly that objective.

So, maybe... a solution to the war- a fallen Midnight Squad member that's fallen under the early stages of the shift (and thus now a member of the "Lost") that you must try to rescue and recover...

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To be fair, my preferred solution would be revamp the whole leveling system to function more like it does with giant monsters & rikti.

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After trying to do an Invasion on a level 14 last night, I'm kinda having my own personal little doubts about how well designed that system is. In my experience, it's fairly likely that said level 14 tanker is going to get dead to a solo minion long, long before he does even 25% health, and that's assuming he's hitting fairly consistently with his attacks.

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In the case of the Invasion, the baddies are level 30 baseline as far as build goes (what powers they have, etc) and the most common problem a pre-level 20 character has is with the huge amount of mezz protection from the crowds and the fact that a level 30 drone has higher defense modifiers than you'd find in most pre-25 enemies.

One dev once explained the "giant monster scaling" as essentially turning OFF other parts. The damage multiplier (higher levels do more damage for the same base attack), the accuracy multiplier(higher levels hit lower ones easier. lower levels get -acc), and even the hp multiplier, I'm told, are actually "added on" to the baseline system. Giant Monsters and Rikti essentially just turn off these features so (barring powers) you take proportionate damage and accuracy across all the levels.

Thus, your attack's damage and accuracy may be mitigated a bit by the powerset of a foe, your 'baseline' attack values are equivalent to a foe of your level.

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Chase, first impressions count for a lot. Unless you're actively opposed to having the mission doors for level 1 and 2 characters moved out of the red zones, I'm not sure what your point is. If you think things are fine the way they are now, just say so. I think moving a few of the mission doors would be a nice QoL feature for new players. If you disagree, so be it.

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To be fair, my preferred solution would be revamp the whole leveling system to function more like it does with giant monsters & rikti. I'd like the game a whole lot more if the foes didn't grey out so fast and if some encounters always held some risk. Even wolverine found the occasional common thug a good brawling challenge on occasion...

Do that and there wouldn't be the huge difficulty difference in the redzones, just a reasonably more challenging one.

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Chase, first impressions count for a lot. Unless you're actively opposed to having the mission doors for level 1 and 2 characters moved out of the red zones, I'm not sure what your point is. If you think things are fine the way they are now, just say so. I think moving a few of the mission doors would be a nice QoL feature for new players. If you disagree, so be it.


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It would be nice if it could be supported. I was noting that it really doesn't happen all that often. By the time you get a redzone door, you're usually level 3-4, in my experience.

Also, this might not be an *easy thing.* I recall some dev comment that the missions usually map to a specific door type, then randomly pick among those types.

It'd be nice, but a rare occurrence that isn't an easy thing to fix would be lower on my roster of priorities.

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I've done the island tutorial many times for EQ2, both for the good and evil sides. There's no graveyard on either island, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there.


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When'd they change it?

Go back to where the big treehouse is... behind that is the cave... facing the cave with your back to the treehouse, go right. Far back corner of the map.

Used to be that a priestess way back in the much easier area would send you there- deep in the hardest area- rather early on in my leveling.

Maybe they learned something.

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Second, the linked mobs you encounter are specifically mentioned in the tutorial pop-up tooltips the first time a player targets them, so not knowing what to expect there only happens to the willfully ignorant. Third, the linked mobs are weaker versions of the solo mobs -- this is something that is nearly universal throughout the game. Fourth, if you follow the quest progression on the starter islands you'll never find your character near +3 mobs. Just killing a few mobs along the way will often result in you being +1 to your current quest targets.

Finally, you can leave the island at any time, even level 1 -- and if you do, the city zone you go to has appropriate-level quests you can tackle that will easily get you into range for the first zones outside the cities like Oakmyst or The Caves. And this only applies to the two original starting cities. The other three all give you level 1 quests right from the start, eschewing the tutorial zones altogether.

I've played a *lot* of EQ2 and what you describe doesn't match my experience at all, really, not even from the time I took my first character through a year and a half ago.

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Heh... I played it at launch and about the last time I went back was about a year and a half ago, tops. That was on the Fey trial side, and I still found a number of occasions where I was fighting one mob for my mission and literally backing into mobs quite a few higher right next to me.

I was an alt-aholic. Must've gone through two dozen alts... constantly deleting them... before I got my first past level 15. I loved how the quests were level-encoded, but I can recall quite a few arcs where I suddenly found myself slipping past mobs quite a few levels past me to get to the destination locations.

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But I think the major issue you had with CoH's starting missions was in the map design. Apparently you had the bad luck to get a randomly picked mission door in the boondocks with red and purple enemies, and felt compelled to fight every single enemy on the way there. CoV's missions aren't so random, and some even appear hardcoded to various spots (snake pit by cobra badge comes to mind.)

Still, it should have been a learning experience as to what con-color actually meant though. It's a standard MMO trope. Don't fight or even go near stuff that's too high level for you. Or you die. Horribly. Maybe a hard pill to swallow, given you're supposed to be a hero, but it's something any MMO player has to figure out sooner or later.

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I've played a decent number of MMOs. CoH is the *only* one that regularly sends a new player to a mission/quest where they must run a gauntlet of enemies that are much higher level than the player's character. I don't think that's good design, I think it's bad design and can turn off people just trying the game out. The converse -- having players go to missions where they can reasonably tackle any foes they meet along the way -- is not likely to have any negative effects.

I reckon most players don't want "hard pills to swallow" when first trying a new game. They're playing to have fun, not to prove their manhood or something. There's plenty of time for hard challenges. Throwing them at the newbie is not good design.

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Worst case scenario should be a level 2 getting a door near level 6 stuff, IIRC. 6 is the highest in Atlas or Galaxy, and if a new player skips the tutorial entirely, then he/she has already shown some poor judgement. That's a 4-level difference... which IS a bit of a challenge.

I may have been lucky, but I've never had my *first* round of missions from my first contacts go to the red zones. Worst I've encountered is the orange areas (level 3-4) for my first 3 missions which is reasonable, but could be pure luck. By the time 3 missions are done, you're level 3, borderline 4. There, the level 5-6 isn't THAT unreasonable.

Also remember that levels mean different things in different games. In Everquest 2, just 1 or 2 levels different made a SUBSTANTIAL difference in difficulty last I played it. In City of Heroes, even at level 2 I can take on a single red-conned minion (3 levels higher) with a reasonable chance of success.

And look at EQ2:

Not many "door" missions, but the "trial of the isle" and similar tutorial zones are levels 1-6... with many of the level6 mobs "group" sized. It's also not too uncommon to get a task at level 3 that takes you to the graveyard near the largest level 6 mobs.

Leave the tutorial isle at level 5-6 and you're next adventure zones are 6-10. Again, a good chance of finding things 4 levels higher in a game where level differences are a MUCH more notable difference in difficulty.

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Yes, the point ChaseArcanum makes is huge. Being able to choose from a pool like this would be huge relief for me, personally. It would still allow the Veteran Rewards program to exist and grow, keeping an incentive for existing players. And in turn, newer players have options to make the most out of their gaming/character experience, and it makes the current "4-year gap" (which will only continue to grow) far less intimidating.

Would having an option like this be such a bad thing?

[/ QUOTE ]i suggested it pages ago and no, the idea wouldnt be bad at all, it MAY be a significant investement of manpower programming wise though, dont know, some reports were that the vet system was what held issue 8 up, and changing that may add even more stress on a already full schedual for the devs. So it would be definitly good, a work of genius even , just might not be practical.

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They listen to me because your icon is too fancy. It distracts them from what you say :P

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gee, maybe they could introduce a system based on a vet token, that way you can pick the one you want(with certain gated exceptions like the staves and axe.) wonder why nobody ever suggested that before...in this thread even...


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Right, but people don't read threads, they tack on to whatever's at the end, so it's important to re-state the core good idea every now and then.

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SWG vet rewards.


I played MUDs that didn't have vet rewards but they did have preferred membership where those that paid more each month got access to more in game. I'd rather have vet rewards.

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Thanks, when I tested SWG years ago they didn't have such a thing

[/ QUOTE ]you know, i was surprised to find that that one mmo dosent have vet rewards, but apparently it causes some consternation on their forums even, but ultima online, tabula rasa, star wars galaxies, guild wars, and eq2 all have vet rewards. so yeah as i have been saying, it is a thing in the industry.

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To be fair, HOW you do the vet rewards can have some weight. In SWG, IIRC, you qualified to select from a "pool" of veteran rewards for every X months. That makes the "uber awesome ultra vet reward" feel much less far off.

To put it in context. Imagine if every 3 months, you got a freespec and costume change, every 6 month veteran reward was a "costume token" you could redeem for ANY of the costumes (wings, boxer, chest emblems, etc) in the veteran reward pool. Every 12 month one was a "power token" and you could select from ANY of the powers available in the pool (call pet, blackwand, sands of mu, etc).

When you do this, that ultrauber vet reward doesn't seem so far off. You don't have to wait FOUR YEARS to get it, just one. You just have to be selective in what you take.

O_O

Busy? BUSY!

My GOD, Kinetic Kitten, when do you SLEEP?!?!

Have you shared these over at Hypercomics? I haven't been very active over there lately, but it might help add some visibility. Also, consider coordinating with the CoH writer's guild. They included "battlefields" in their announcements for me.

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Trying to guess just how Posi goes poddy....


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LOL! Now that really sounds like a smart question.. Considering he never takes off his armor... Can just picture him standing there in Steel with Valk grumbling.. Valk asking "What's wrong??" and posi responding "I knew I shouldn't have had that Super Big Gulp between Server updates this morning!"

[/ QUOTE ]In his defense, he was a being of energy for a long time... bodily functions are tough to get used to!

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Thus the quote - when Posi takes a leak, he levels a city block.

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And the one that says "He should have slotted for hold duration."

Chase, if you read this, you should make a comic starring Sister Flame, Hero 2, and Positot.

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hmmm... there are some possibilities here....

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It's there. It was also just linked by mmorpg.com.

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I don't see it. Could it be a browser thing? I'm running firefox on my imac.

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try this . If it doesn't work, PM me.

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You did great, Chase!
Grats to everyone that made it into the comic, which causes me to ask... what "showing" was the one that you got into?

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As someone had mentioned a "dress rehearsal of the event elsewhere, I'll admit that I had access to demofiles from that. To be honest, I avoided the public event because I didn't want to take up a slot that others could use. That, and I was dead tired after doing this.

Ideally, I would've tried to get demorecords from each of the runs-through and included participants from all of them. Schedule-wise, that wasn't possible.

The comic had the working title "How I spent Double XP Weekend" but that would have been misleading... this took far longer than that one weekend.

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JAY IS LAZY!

So I go off to the little gurls room, and when I returned back to my office someone had hijacked my chair.

I know I'm not crazy, or at least not entirely so, but this was really weird.

I go into the break room/game room, and there is Jay playing a video game, SITTING ON MY CHAIR!

"Oh" he says, "I thought you went home."

So what if I did?

JAY IS LAZY! SEXY but lazy.

Ex

(sitting on Lighthouse's chair, posting from headquarters.)

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Honestly...
...I love our devs.

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Technically, Ex Libris is not a Dev, but is instead a Community Co-ordinator.

Which means she is essentially the corporate version of a Kindergarden teacher.

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Oh I know, I'm just too lazy to clarify, and use the blanket term "dev" for everyone at NCNC now ;P

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Actually the best analogy I have thought of is that Lighthouse is "Julie the Cruise Director," and I'm Gopher!

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Mental Note for the next comic.

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I now hang my head in shame. Looking through my notes, I cut the requisite vague reference to something Hickman. No reference to a Jamaican Coffeehouse... no Community center... no disturbing grandma (thank GOD)...

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I like when the usher says, "Sorry, I don't PuG."

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That wasn't the usher...the usher is a blonde guy in a black tux...the "I don't PUG" guy had brown hair and was wearing a blue jacket. The funny is that she was trying to find a "last minute date" with someone in line who had an invite so she could sneak past the usher to get into the wedding.

BTW Chase, I'm totally digging how you portrayed Marcian and Ex Libris! I've had the pleasure of meeting them both in person and can totally see them saying the stuff they did in the comic.

P.S. Thanks for making Frigid Glitch famous!

P.P.S. Boy, I'm just a graemlin junkie this morning!

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The "date" was CuppaJester1: The only hero visiting the usher when I went there to test my scene plan.