Lemur Lad

The problem with Base Raids has nothing to do with the problems of the Cathedral of Pain. Part of the reason CoP never got scheduled to get fixed is/was because base raiding was extremely unstable in a lot of cases.

Bases essentially need to be rebuilt nearly from the ground up to fix the stability issues and make raiding with anything more than small numbers viable.

If my memories of seeing Arcana arrive in Beta Testers Channel are accurate, I'm fairly certain I made it into at least one beta before Arcana, but that may just have been her personal schedule not allowing her to login until after I'd been on. So yeah, the requirements aren't always what you'd expect.

They've never comprehensively listed what their full criteria for beta invites are in each wave(s), and they never will because they change from Issue to Issue and test to test. Don't for a moment think that those waves will be the only waves. They have already clarified there will be more (I think in the Hero Con video).

And yet you spend the time to post in the first place? No, that doesn't work. You're either involved enough to QUIT THE GAME, because you didn't get what you want, or you don't care enough about petitioning to the people who can actually do something about it, and can't be bothered to play or post and attempt to have a discussion.

Sorry, I see a disconnect here.

Because some of us paid attention to what was said at Hero Con. Whether it's Global Enhancements or something similar but different, who knows or cares? It's pretty certain it's coming though.

My machine tends to suck, and accessing the Market isn't easy without a disconnect or three. So I use the Vault more often than the Market. I access the market extensively every few days once I'm loaded down beyond the Vault can hold, otherwise things get sold to vendors.

Not really. Just because most EBs can be soloed, and all AVs can be downgraded, doesn't mean the EB rank was specifically designed for to be soloed. It's meant to be more challenging than a boss, less challenging than an AV. Whether or not it can be soloed is dependent on the powers tactics and skills of the player at the keyboard, not a design goal of the mob.

Saying stuff in caps makes it more true? Sorry, no. Nosferatu is probably the toughest to solo, but he is by no means even close to the toughest ingame.

It was announced among the many things at Hero Con, but there was nothing specific to indicate it would be GR before we saw it. We just know it's coming.

Personally what I'm hoping is that they revamp normal stores and contact stores such that, while you get less selection at the contact, you pay less as your relationship improves.

The boots look great, I use them a lot. The shorts, while a little shiny for my taste still get used on my main in at least 2 slots, because they're the only shorts male's get that don't look like fetish wear, spray paint, or shrink wrapped.

Prove that statement.

I cannot wait to see what this breaks. Any bets on a repeat of /e doombox ?

[I kid, I kid]

PvP was redesigned specifically so someone with SOs could hope to compete against someone with IOs. It's just that the system is radically different than PvE, so black is white and left is right. It takes some learning.

The ITF is loaded with Cimerorans. If you did enough RWZ content before you left to run into the Rogue Vanguard, you saw that they were specifically designed to shred melee. In many ways, so are the Cimerorans. It takes a bit of planning and thought if your team doesn't have a goodly amount of buffs and debuffs, but it most definitely doesn't require godly IO loadouts.

Do they help? Yes. Are they necessary? No, and anyone who has told you so is wrong.

Overreacting the opposite way is not the best way to cope with an overreaction on your part.

Rule #1 of the forums is Don't Post Angry, but close behind it is Rule #2 Don't take it personally.

There's really no reason to stop reading, posting, and enjoying the forums and the community. No one is trying to drive you out.

We're just trying to avoid unnecessary Sturm und Drang

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...65#post2383865

read BaB's post, but be sure to follow the link to the Massively article in the quoted section too. If you're going to keep discussing this with others, you should have possession of the same facts most of us are operating on.

Now I'm really out. Laters.

It did have it's own Vision video, it was called CoV. That still didn't help it when WoW launched. Please stop revising history. A significant portion of the playerbase was playing this game until WoW launched, and we all knew it. There's no way you can expect they'd keep their Year One levels when you account for that fact.

You know, prior to reading the whole thread and your responses, I was willing to take your word on this. However I decided to go look at the article you linked, and also followed it further back to the gamasutra piece on which it was based. I have two things to say to you:

1) don't mistake what the author says for what the PR guy said. There's nothing in his direct quotes that states or even implies NC never looked at it before Aion.

2) the gamasutra piece specifically notes that NC has looked at this before, however the prior relationship stalled, and Aion is currently their strongest contender.

In the end, there's nothing wrong with them wanting to enter new territory (for them) with the stronger horse. CoH failed in Korea. Aion seems to be getting good response on both sides of the ocean. That's a much more potent incentive for them to invest in their new game and push it into a new space. Not to mention that they're more directly up against WoW, and that means they NEED to do something that differentiates.

Besides, if you seriously feel that they need to invest in CoH2, you should be in favor of them going to consoles with Aion first. The development houses not being linked, means the budgets aren't tied together. However as others said, it would take Years to build CoH2 the right way. Why not let all the problems and issues shake themselves out on Aion in the meantime, and the CoH team and NCSoft can learn from those successes and failures.

I kno! Froots are better.

That still doesn't mean they look at the big book of all NC MMOs and their development history before they make a PR statement. You say because we suggested it and our devs looked at it, we were first. They're saying because they went ahead and built the game to do it, they were first. Semantics differences, and one is a lot more concrete than the other, so guess who I'm more willing to believe?

A) because NC Korea and NC America are two wholly separate subsidiaries. Their PR teams don't meet and confer and compare notes.

B) because "looking at" and "going forward with" are two wholly different things. I'd be willing to bet that every MMO since consoles became comparable in computing to desktops has considered going cross platform, and since the XBox was Windows based, some even considered rather heavily. However that's not the same thing as putting it in your Design Docs and allocating resources and schedule for it.

Short answer: what you call revisionist history, I call semantic differences.

You're kind of bending the meme quite a lot by looking at comments from our devs in the most favorable possible way to make it sound like we were going see cross platform, yet at the same moment being very very literal when it comes to what the Aion guys said. You can't have it both ways, if you're going to take one with a grain of salt, you have to take both.

Edited to add:

There are actually probably some very specific reasons we haven't seen more traction on some of the things you're asking about, so let's lay down some logic.

1) porting to a console is a lot harder than porting to another Operating System. I'm sure our devs used their usual incremental approach and that led them to try the simpler option first and see how it went. Thus we have the Macintosh version of the game. So in a broad sense, you've gotten what you asked for. This game IS cross platform. Since we've been told they didn't have the skillbase in house to do that conversion, it's fairly safe to say that even with the expanded staff they don't have the skillbase to do a much more complicated console conversion. So that leaves them with two big hurdles: the internal determination of whether the Mac version and that conversion was successful, and finding another company that could handle a console conversion. Actually I'm wrong, there is a third hurdle. They then have to spend a lot of capital on a new distribution track and service platform that handles the console integration. None of that is "easy" especially in a 5 year old game. Thus you see a new game like Aion designed from square one to at least potentially handle that kind of integration someday.

2) player apartments. No question these are in demand. However since you're so interested in making sure there isn't revisionist history, I beg you to recall just how long our base system has been languishing. There's a reason for that. It's been borderline unstable for a long time, and the only way to make it more robust would be to very nearly start from scratch. In order to create Player Apartments with the level of customization we'd demand, they'd be basing it on the base system, and that opens a whole can of worms. Again, this becomes something highly demanded but very intensive on both the engineering and the art departments. Considering all that, I'm reasonably safe in saying that I think when given the choice between 8 months of work on a new expansion, or 8 months of work on the base/apartment systems, they chose the one that was more likely to expand the game. Does that mean we'll never see it? No, but like anything it's a question of priorities.

However you're wrong in thinking that it's the guys at the very top that set those priorities. It has a lot more to do with our own dev team and our own community team and what they suss out when they mash together what we want with what they feel like they can do well.

Based on my experiences in Star Wars Galaxies, where their strategy was to handle revamps on a Class by Class basis, then yes, I can definitely say the game's bottom line can be hurt by that kind of strategy. It divides the playerbase into armed camps, and leads to wild swings in balance and popularity as previously bad classes become too good to be true. Then the moment a revamp goes bad, and the devs revisit that wounded class instead of continuing with the planned schedule, there's serious allegations of favoritism.

Now just dealing with issues of redraw may not seem like anything near the same scale, and I know that. However anything that makes it seem like the dev's "love" is focused (unfairly or not) just leads to division (and eventually quitting). It's a climate this game has largely managed to avoid, and I would prefer to err on the side of caution and keep it that way.