Judgement_Dave

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Is anyone able to get onto the Union server yet i still cant gain access

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No access to login server here...

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Sorry, but you're wrong. From my earlier post...


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Apparently the 63 month vet award is the ability to read the existing posts in a thread before repeating something that's already been shown to be wrong... Will probably be of greater use in the US boards and really ought to be a 1 month vet award, but past that I can't wait for it to become common.

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What's the build number, guys? Then we can see which patch notes it relates too...

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18.20081210.7T3

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Mine's downloaded and is curently applying the following (different) 80.4Mb patch:
18.20081105.13T6

EDIT: Ok - should have waited til it finished patching: build updated to 18.20081210.7T3

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Just the thought of taking teleport on any character chills me to the core. Such.. A horrid.. Power. No offense taken though, some people min/max while others don't. Also, nice to see you too.

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Teleport's quite fun when you get used to it (and can avoid DA). Has the benefits of being fast & not much will stop you teleporting (whereas there are enough -fly, -jump and slows about to adversely affect the other travel powers).

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And if they didn't then it's already been discussed at length in Suggestions (though it was a while ago, possibly 18+ months back).

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Heck, it was suggested before the rewards scheme was even introduced.

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I know it was.. thing is I can't remember exactly when vets came in and I couldn't really be bothered to check... The exact time wasn't crucial to the observation that they idea has been proposed before, and so devs should be aware of it even if they hadn't considered it independently.

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It's even more lovable when the entire spoiler gets quoted, so the OP can't edit it out of the thread on his own.

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Thanks for bringing that to my attention Standoff - was clumsy of me. It's now sorted.

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Pool system = good from the players POV, but very very bad from the devs POV.

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I disagree.

Your argument about the current system is entirely dependent on there being something in the future rewards that's good enough for the player to want but not so far away as to not be an incentive. Otherwise, there's no incentive. In practice, as the period covered gets longer it becomes impossible to do. It's bad from both the players' and the devs' POV.

Whereas with a pool system, so long as there is anything left in the pools a player wants, there's an incentive. What's more, with a pool system, a great reward could be added now without the problem of it being effectively unobtainable for new players, so it's much easier to ensure there's usually something people want. The number of rewards would also not necessarily be limited to how long the game has been around. Good for the players, easier for the devs to keep an incentive, so good for the devs too.

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If the vets rewards are to truly be an incentive then the pool system (with an extended pool of rewards to pick from) makes far more sense.

Let Sexy J run wild and create 20 new costume pieces/sets - not everyone need like each one, but the fashion pixies (who get incentivised by new clothing) can pick a new costume every 3 months...

What about the prestige sprints? Could a similar pack be done for other powers? Could they do packs of prestige flight/jump or even just prestige brawls? Nothing differently-powered, but a little gfx pizzazz for those that get incentivised by that...

Heck - do 6 different non-combat pets as 6 possible rewards (guessing that 6 out at once for a single character wouldn't strain clients more than a MMs henchmen).

Plenty of ideas you could do with little in-game effect, that I'd hope wouldn't take too much resource to do, but could act as incentives to different people depending upon their individual tastes.

That's the key - individual tastes mean that some people will look at their upcoming rewards and find nothing that appeals to them. That's why the scheme doesn't really work as an incentive scheme IMO, but also why I don't think it's really meant to.

If it's not meant to be an incentive/loyalty scheme to keep subscribers, then it's absolutely fine as is!

Whilst I mostly agree with your post, PRAF, a couple of comments:
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No, I'm sure the devs thought of it.

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And if they didn't then it's already been discussed at length in Suggestions (though it was a while ago, possibly 18+ months back). If we're to believe the mods then this idea, if deemed to have merit, would have been brought to the attention of the devs even if they hadn't thought of it independently.

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What the devs see, that a lot of the playerbase seem to miss, is if they don't keep filling up the pool with good rewards, then after players have the ones they want the VRs become effectively useless for keeping players subcribed.

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Not really certain that the vets rewards have ever really been about customer retention/loyalty. Prior to vets rewards it was known that CoX has an incredibly loyal base compared to most MMOs, with subscribers staying longer than average.

Nothing (like the vets rewards) really needed to be done to keep subscribers subscribing! Lets face it, if someone's been with game for 2 years and now decides that they want to leave they probably won't keep shelling out hard earned cash for any of the vets rewards.

I think, rather than customer loyalty scheme, the rewards are more like a few shiny, trinkets to say thanks. Heck - if they really were a proper customer loyalty scheme then I'd expect them to announce the rewards at least a year in advance of them being needed - i.e. we'd have heard about the 60 month reward early last year.

As they stand they are already effectively useless for keeping players subcribed.

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There is a reason developers are developers, and that is not because they are to stupid to be players.

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Too many players seem to believe the opposite, yet enjoy the game... odd how people can be smart enough to design and implement a good game but obviously dumb as hell past that!

Love it when spoilers come up.

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I agree, you'd have thought they would have figured out by now who the Honoree is...right?
Ergo, hes not dead, ERGO no need for the tradition.

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Maybe more need for the tradition to honor them. In sacrificing themselves to save us the Omega team met with a fate that they would have found worse than death.

EDIT: spoiler-protected the quoted spoiler...

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Also I've never really seen the point as Hero 1's sacrifice is only relevant to the heroes of paragon (and maybe the rest of the US and the UK)

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Maybe the UK? Maybe??!!!

Where was Hero-1 from?

Gratz - Have a good 'un!

They'll be waiting 'til this afternoon to announce an extension in honour of President Obama in an effort to drag him from WoW.

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Do the published arcs give full rewards?

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Not as far as I know... Or do you mean the ones promoted to the Hall of Fame? I believe I read somewhere than any promoted to that would probably get full rewards, as they'd become canon.

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IIRC early dev-released info re: MA stated that MA missions would probably have no rewards, but ones upgraded to dev choice/Hall of Fame would have rewards.

Can't recall them stating that they'd have full rewards - though given that these have been looked at by some form of dev/mod it seems reasonable to assume full rewards.

Certainly can't recall them saying that they'd become canon - although it was assumed that canon-breaking missions would never make it to promotion.

All this may have changed since the plan is now to grant rewards for MA missions - just not full rewards. Though my personal guess would be that promoted missions would see full rewards.

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Personally I don't think they have gone far enough with the whole 'player created content' thing yet. Maybe they will expand it in future though.

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Some people will have a great idea but it can't be fully realised as they imagine it in the initial MA. Sure that some of these will create good arcs as scaled back versions of their wunderarc and some will be so good that they get promoted to devs choice/Hall of Fame.

Bound to be some mild distress/weeping/wailing/gnashing of teeth when a later extension of MA allows new features and the originally imagined wunderarc can be created, but the already promoted arcs are found to be unchangeable.

Inevitable if the MA is to progress past it's initial launch version - but I can imagine the odd 'miffed designer' thread coming up after each update to MA...

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The problem with creating mobs is that as soon as it hits live, there will be a mass cry to be able to save the enemy group you just created for future missions.
For now im going to be more than happy using the existing mobs

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I agree with being happy with the current enemy factions Damz for other reasons too.

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I'll be happy with them, but think it's a mild shame as if and when I try out the MA I'd have liked to make my own faction to guarantee not stepping on any CoX canon that I wasn't aware of!

i.e. if I made my own villainous faction - even if they were just renamed/reskinned Hellions - then I know I can do pretty much anything with their background/story.

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-Cinematics (When they can make one that isnt worthy of Satan )

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It's beyond unlikely that they ever will. Neverwinter Nights (1 & 2) allowed you much greater flexibility in editing, and you could, indeed, build cutscenes. However, doing so required a degree in computing and a very thorough understanding of C coding and 3D geometry.


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And hurrah for that! Presumably the C and 3D graphics requirements cuts down on the number of people trying to do a cutscene featuring nothing but genitalia and perverted sexual acts!

It's well known that anyone with a good knowledge of C and 3D graphics has no idea what anyone's genitals but their own look like, and is far too busy reading tech manuals to know anything about perversion!



EDIT: before any computer geeks get upset at this stereotype let me state that I am a computer geek with knowledge of C and 3D graphics - the above is firmly tongue in cheek

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Why should a new player, even if they're on a trial account, be restricted from taking part in the forum community just because one or two morons are making waves?


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Which is why my OP suggests a system that would allow all posts with an automatically applied ban if enough other posters are finding their posts objectionable enough to notify the moderators about it.

I had another thread suggesting account restrictions - though that has been removed by the mods.

Assuming that you want to stop the one or two morons and their kind, the ideal situation is that idiots don't post - so no moderation is neccesary. Next up is permanently mod-staffed forums 24 hrs a day.. but I imagine that that costs too much else we'd have it.

An automatic system could address the problem and falls as an initially higher outlay, but presumed lower running costs - making the total cost of implementation lower in the long run. Hence suggesting an automatic-ban system.

Maybe slightly messy, but still fun - and it was worth the wait to level 32 to finally get my CJ!

Thanks for helping us out again, Smurfnof.

Just hope everything is well and good for AE.

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Please can you not find another subject to doom and gloom about we get this every weekend and it has now become very boring.So come on you doomsayers use your imagination and come up with an original subject.

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Don't worry - I'm prophesising it won't be done next weekend.


Oh - and can we ban that bloody Khorak?

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less unbalance between heroes and villains market prices and items availability


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You're plain wrong on this one.

The consignment house (WW and BM) is, iirc, housed on it's own server. Certainly it is shared between all live (non-training room) servers, both in the EU and US.

The only split is between WW for CoH and BM for CoV.

So, a hero putting an item for sale at WW can have it bought by any hero on any server anywhere. Likewise, a villain selling an item on BM can have it bought by any villain on any server anywhere.

So any form of server merge would not affect the CH market prices and availability.

The notify moderator button at the bottom of posts should be altered to keep track of the moderator notifications, both who is notifying and who posted the offending post, and should be altered to:

* Automatically prevent users from posting when they hit a set number of notifications against them in a 24 hour period, e.g. 50

* Stop users from notifying the moderator more than a set number of times in a 24 hr period, e.g. 10

Obviously the automatic ban could be lifted by the mods when they have chance to review the notifications, but in the event of imbecilic posters spamming the forums I'd hope that enough people would notify the mods to automatically stop any more scatalogical outbursts.

Placing limits upon the number of notifications that can be performed by a user, and making the number of these less than the number needed to autoban a user, could easily be used to prevent a single user (or small group) from using autobanning to grief another poster. I'd also assume that spurious notification for no good reason, or to grief, would result in mod action against the notifier.


No idea if this is supported on either the software currently used, nor on the board software that we're meant to be moving to at some point. If not supported, it may be worth finding someone to modify it.

As it is, the mods presumably look at every notification anyway - all this would do is hopefully stop the more juvenile posters from posting quite as much drivel.

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Problem there is that people will simply use it to farm Family or Freaks, ad infinatum, or use them to get certain badges really easily, totally negating the point of the thing. They either need to dissalow that, which they say will be so, or spend an unrealistic ammount of time moderating each and every mission that goes up there.

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Not true.

If MA can be used to create farms as you describe then I have no problem with people doing that for their own use, as long as there's a way to identify and avoid these for people who don't want farm maps.

Some people will always farm. It doesn't really affect anyone who doesn't want to farm, so why stop them if that's what they want to do for their idea of fun?

The simple fact that you object means, I presume, that you wouldn't use MA this way. Neither would I. Nor would many others. So the system won't be 'abused' (if indeed it is an abuse) by everyone.

The best bet, as I say above, is to have a good MA tagging and search interface - so that if you want farms you can find them easily and if you don't want farms you can avoid them just as easily.

Tbh if it takes a dev 2 weeks to create a good indexing/tagging/search system for MA then that could be the best possible 2 weeks development for the future of MA. i.e. if people can't search easily and just get semi-random missions then MA could fall in to relative disuse compared to how it could be used with a good search.

Think of it like trying to use the web with no search functionality - so no google et al, no wikis... A good search engine could easily make or break MA.

I know - you know - a lot know.

You also can't have a 20-part arc afaik (seem to recall a 5 mission limit or somesuch).

But it won't stop some people coming up with ideas that they plan to make which are impossible in the MA, such as a 20-part arc using unique maps and new AI.

Personally I'm amazed that anyone has been planning any missions/arcs (past a very basic concept) when we know so little about the MAs capabilities. When the darn thing hits beta then that's the time to start fleshing out ideas for missions...

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I'm starting to come to the depressing conclusion that MA will be a big flop.

Why?

Because it can't possibly meet all the expectations people are heaping on it.

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Don't worry - I'm guessing that the only people with expectations that you know about are those who post on the forums.

Going off what we;ve been told before, we forum posters are easily in the minority of players. But when MA lands I'd guess that all players will become aware of it through the loader screen if nothing else.

i.e. I'd guess that there are lots of people who will dabble with MA who haven't really thought about it yet. They'll probably be quite pleased with whatever you can do... the main ones upset will be the forumites who've heard a bit about it months ago and have spent time since then designing their 20-part arc involving unique maps and AI!

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I'm looking to recruit a selection of high functioning adults from all walks of life. So I figured the CoH boards may be a good place to try, given the variety of people I meet in game.


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High functioning adults... Posting on the forums on a Friday..?

Kudos on the overly optimistic approach.

I'll have a peek for you - if nothing else just to see if the forums is the wrong place to get the sample from!