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Quote:My instant assumption is that no, they probably would -not- affirm your status as a hero/villain for the purposes of getting A-Merits. Look at it this way: for all the game knows you may have a character use these tokens that has never actually done Tips before - why would they both switch your alignment and affirm your status at the same time?Hm. Question regarding Alignment Change Tokens, do they affirm your status as a hero/villain, or do you have to go through the rigamaroll of doing the tips again even after using the token in order to be able to get A-Merits?
Obviously someone could simply experiment with this to prove it one way or another. I'm just saying I would not automatically assume they do both without proof. -
The game is supposed to be setup so that once you've download the first couple of stages you can start playing while it finishes downloading the rest of the game. This lets you start playing ASAP. The game has grown over the years and is now several gigabytes in size so if you have a slow connection it might take a while regardless.
Good luck and welcome to the game. -
As Aggelakis said there has never been a way to edit a .costume file to get it load a costume item option that the game itself can't support.
But as an historical FYI when the .costume files first came out people quickly started to figure out how to edit them to get different things. For instance people did figure out that you could tinker with the RGB values and get the game to display costume item colors that were not possible with the standard costume editor.
But within a few weeks the Devs patched the game up with file checking so that it became fairly impossible for any "edited" .costume file to be loaded back into the game. I understand why they did that because they didn't want anybody to do anything that might have broken the game somehow. But it's sad because it shows that the game could actually support colors of any RBG value, not just the few dozen or so the GUI editor limits us to. -
Quote:I have nothing against getting new content in general. But there's a good reason why the Origin idea has not been expanded upon.Since I1 you were able to just choose an Origin. Since then there hasn't been much done with it, except for enhancements. Possibly once Omega is Available, You have to do Origin based quests and Defeat the Giant Neo-Shivan on its Home planet. Each origin would get separate quests.
The main problem with the idea (that the Devs have come to embrace) is that what an Origin means to any given player differs widely. If the Devs ever started making more Origin-specific content then more people would be upset that it doesn't "fit" with their ideas of what that means to their characters.
This game also has a long history of allowing any character to run through any content they want. They even opened up the game so that heroes and villains can now crossover and experience any red/blue side content they want. The idea of making some content being restricted only to certain Origins would be completely counter to the freedom we have now. You'd have everyone upset that they could only play 1/5 of what's available not to mention having to force people to play with mono-Origin teams which would be a complete hassle.
Basically the only purpose Origins serve (and the only purpose they should ever serve from now on) is to help you establish the background of your character. The amount of in-game content that's restricted or limited by Origin should always be kept to an absolute minimum. -
The company 'Wizards of the Coast' has sold Collectible Card Games (CCGs) to everyone (including minors) for 20 years now. The mechanic behind CoH's Super Packs is virtually (no pun intended) identical to the classic CCG concept. I played WotC's Magic the Gathering pretty seriously for years and in all that time I never heard of anyone suing WotC for "promoting gambling". Perhaps they have in fact been sued for that somewhere along the line, but even if they have the amount of "public opinion damage" they suffered was minimal because I've never heard about it. *shrugs*
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Quote:To add salt to this wound I've seen the reverse of this scenario: one guy claimed he opened like 700+ packs on Beta before he got the Black Wolf then got it like in his 4th pack when they went live.I'm pretty much resigned to never getting the Black Wolf myself. I got it on the second pack over on the beta server which, of course, means it's just never going to happen with my luck.
Stupid RNG... -
Quote:He was blindfolded and probably semi-unconscious due to his wound and we already know the zombies don't walk as fast as a car. Somehow I don't think it would take 12+ hours to cover a few miles even by the most circuitous route anyone could imagine. Did they take a side-trip back to Atlanta in that time? Please apply a little bit of logic to things like this instead of defending an obvious continuity error like this. There are plenty of things to like about this show but silliness like this is not one of them.Time enough to stabilize the kid so that he doesn't bleed out in the truck, combined with the necessity to take a round-about route so that he would get confused combined with not wanting to lead the zombies directly back to the farm?
Quote:Presuming that zombie was even capable of movement after being hit. -
Quote:Welcome to the game.I am open to more suggestions, I am directing this to the Dev's to look into this idea.
For what it's worth I'm sure the Devs of this game have been considering this issue for the last 8 years. Perhaps one of these day more games will follow CoH:Freedom in realizing that the mere "trick" of increasing a level number does not equal new content to play with.
To be clear the Incarnate system of this game is the "post 50" content you're looking for. No, it doesn't give you a number bigger than 50, but it accomplishes pretty much the same thing.
Have fun... -
Quote:The fundamental difference between the increase from 40 to 50 and any suggestion like this one to go above 50 is that the Devs had planned from the very beginning of the game for 50 to be the final max level cap. The Devs used the temporary level 40 cap to give them time to finish up the 40-50 content.This brings back memories of the early discussions of the impending increase cap from 40 --> 50. I forget the details of what had happened back then for this to occur, but from a logistical standpoint this would probably be a nightmare if it ever happened again (especially a 40% increase like that).
So you can't really compare that one-time launch situation to this. This game was always designed to stop at the 50 cap and not go past 50. -
Quote:Yes I would agree that SG name changes might allow a "SG thief" to do one more thing to further complicate his/her nefarious actions.While a cool down period might discourage a group of players from abusing SG name changing, I don't think it would bother the SG thiefs. You know the ones that somehow get promoted to Super Leader and then take the SG for themselves.
Considering how many players have multiple accounts it wouldn't be hard for someone who gets the SL rank to invite an alt on a second account into an SG, promote it up to SL, kick everyone from the SG including his original character in order to maintain the illusion of innocence, and change the SG name so no one would ever recognise it.
What about the cooldown period? Well if it takes "x" number of days to go into effect the thief simply does not log onto the secondary account until after cooldown expires and the name change goes into effect.
CS has already made it crystal clear that they will not get involved with these "thefts" because as far as their concerned the Super Leader is the defacto owner of an SG and everything in it.
But as you already pointed out the Super Leader rank was established in order to let CS distance themselves from any player shenanigans like this. In fact it almost seemed like the Super Leader rank was actually going to pave the way for SG renames to be possible than the multi-leader scenario we used to have. Ultimately I don't think SG name changes would make SG thievery any more or less problematic than it already is. -
Yep the inconsistencies about what seems to attract the zombies is definitely one bit of silliness this show seems to suffer from. But the time jumps in this last two episode were just borderline insanity.
First of all we see Glenn and Rick drive "a few miles" into town to find Hershel at the bar. They get to the bar where it's very obviously midday sunny outside, talk to Hershel for a few minutes, then the two other guys show up. Rick kills them then somehow at the start of the next episode suddenly time has jumped forward perhaps 6-8 hours so that it's totally dark outside.
OK, maybe somehow we can dismiss that obvious continuity mistake once we see some cool zombie action and leg impaling. But no, the show's not done being stupid because once again as soon as Rick and company rescue the Randal guy it somehow takes them like 12 more hours to drive "a few miles" back to the farm where it's now midday of the next day already. What?!?
I understand that dramatically speaking it was more scary for it to be dark when they were running around in the town with all the zombies walking around. But in order to get that setting they had to somehow hand-wave a huge amount of time TWICE just to get that scenario. For me it was totally mood-breaking having to accept that the writers don't seem to care about the logical passage of time. Even the Lori car crash was contrived because while it's certainly possible for someone in a crash to be knocked out for a number of hours it was way too convenient that the zombie she hit would -also- not get up and try to eat her for all those hours until she woke up.
The lack of adequate time management of this show is starting to get fairly annoying to say the least. -
Quote:As I implied the only reason they would charge $30 for this service is to dissuade people from doing it whimsically and/or every 5 minutes. Despite what they've told you we are only talking about maybe 5 minutes worth of GM effort to accomplish. It's not "hard" they just don't want everyone asking for it all the time.I dont really disagree. However the idea of a 30$ SG name change token still seems more like to breed discontent with players towards the marketing dept then anything else.
Do keep in mind though when they do change an SG name due to violation they do only give a window of 3 days to submit your 3 alternate choices. -
Quote:As a Software Engineer with nearly 20 years of professional experience that kind of answer (claiming something like this would take an arbitrary "5x" the amount of effort a character name change takes) sounds like classic customer service hand-waving malarkey to me. Yes, I'm sure it's not absolutely trivial to access the system and type in the command-line commands to do it. But the only thing that actually makes it "hard" to do is their fear that they'll suddenly be swamped with hundreds of requests to get SG name changes applied.I once contacted in game support asking if a purchase similar to a name change for an SG could be possible. The answer I got roughly was a SG name change was about 5 times more work then a character name change and would therefore need to cost 5 times more. A name change token isnt exactly cheap, and I could see them not wanting to risk negative feedback by offering services that would be limited to players with much higher amounts of disposable income.
As long as something like this requires any kind of manual effort on the part of the GMs they will always come up with various excuses in order to disuade people from requesting it.
Quote:Further I have seen in MMOs where they do give options to change guild names, it allows entire guilds to partake in exploits when they crop up, and then just do a group name change to help avoid any social stigma such actions typically gain.
A solution like this is relatively straightforward but it would take some effort for the Devs to establish this kind of feature. I suspect they've just decided that it would take more effort than it's worth - despite being a very long time player desire. -
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Along with these there are still several emotes that are currently only available to characters in the AE system that I'd love to be able to use in the main game on my own characters. They wouldn't even have to make NEW emotes for that - just allow existing ones to be unlocked. I'm still holding out hope that they'll slip them out to the Paragon Market at some point.
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Well maybe if he farms them as kill-alls with his difficulty setting cranked up to like +0/8 then I could see getting a purple out of that a few times a week. I doubt he gets a purple -every- time like that though. I'd pretty much have to see pics to believe that.
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Heh, I don't think I was ever the "target audience" for the 2XP weekends. The only thing I ever seriously used them for was for power-farming for the top 'Leader' Influence badges back when you had to earn 2 billion INF to get them. I always hated to "gold farm" but the idea of getting double-credit for it made it worthwhile for those short periods.
Ever since I finished those badges several years ago I don't really use the weekends at all. I've never really been one for wanting to rush though leveling up characters. To each their own I guess. *shrugs* -
Quote:Yes it could be said that CO shot itself in the foot from Day One. But like you said it did serve its purpose: We finally got our Ninja Run and purchasable costume slots out of the deal.For my part, I hoped it would spur competition (and it did).
But as for the result of Champions, being down and patched as much as it was in the first weeks, having a gameplay too much like the ten ton gorilla and too little like CoH, being released at least a year too early and then being nerfed so hard that the content barely got you to level cap probably helped a lot determining its outcome.
I think any new MMO will tend to peal away some customers from any preexisting MMOs so I don't really begrudge people who want to go play in a galaxy far, far away. Despite that reality this game has been around and steadily improving for almost eight years now. I'm fairly confident that it has a few more years left to it regardless. -
Quote:To be fair this game has survived existential threats from other MMOs for years. For example there were many people claiming with absolute certainty that Champions Online was going to drive this game instantly out-of-business. Still waiting for that to happen...That may be the case, I grant you that.
But I'm not sure that the audience is that captive. Granted, this is just anecdotes, but I see a bit too many supergroup mates migrating to the other game with glowing sticks that go bzhuum-whuuum to be really comfortable with the situation.
Quote:Well, the thing that worries me is that I don't remember any controversy about the earlier packs at all.
Here, we have a 22 page long thread three days after the release, plus moaning in other threads, plus a lot of discussion about it on the beta boards.
P.S. The Wedding Pack was one of the first costume packs this game ever sold. At the time there was a big controversy over whether it was "fair" for the game to sell us costume items. Like most Doom-filled scenarios the angst over it eventually died down, much like the angst over these new Super Packs will too. -
Quote:I still believe you are overthinking/overhyping this issue a bit too much by applying open market thinking to what amounts to a bonus optional extra in a closed captive-audience system that has hundreds of other optional things to buy as well.The job of marketing is essentially to know us, the customers, better than we do ourselves, and to sell us the product that we didn't knew we needed.
Super pack 1 may be a success ("short term profit") but if they don't know why, they may very well make a mistake when releasing super pack 2. And conversely, if they know why super pack 1 was a success, they may improve on the concept to super pack 2. It's not just a matter of repeating the previous formula.
The expansions of the ten ton gorilla is one example. The first was immensely successful, so the producers thought it was a nice idea to make more. The second, not so successful. The third, less so. The fourth... well, it's already a controversy and it hasn't been released yet.
Remember that there are brands and products. The terms I mentioned earlier are used to describe your brands in order to decide on what products to market. City of Heroes is a brand, Super Packs is the product. The release of the wrong product may weaken the brand, even after an initial success - as was the case of New Coke back in the 80s.
Also, there is competition - not about super packs, but the CoH brand as a whole is basically competing about our time (and money) with a lot of other products out there. Most of them are not even superhero games or even MMOs.
The point is that a lot of others and WotC themselves tried to repeat the success using nearly identical formulas, but very few managed to survive. Just being a CCG is not enough to be a commercial success. On the contrary, most CCGs weren't.
You have to build on it and create a market of it (i.e. "marketing") - and to do that successfully, you must know your market or be extremely lucky.
The overall success of City of Heroes is not got to rise or fall based on this one thing alone. Heck this game survived the twin Armageddons of the failures of base raiding PvP and ED and is still all the better for it. As far as your worries about grabs for "short term profits" go one could easily make that argument about every Pack this game has ever sold for the last EIGHT YEARS.
The proof of course will come on whether or not we ever see a Super Pack #2 regardless of the form it'll take. If Super Pack #2 turns out to be radically different or never happens at all then I'll be willing to lend your position on this more credence. -
Quote:Well at least you realize you're probably spitting into the wind with this.I'm aware of the game's history, and I know that the Devs have made decisions based on player desires that damaged their bottom line, and decisions based on their bottom line that angered their playerbase.
They've made decisions based on payer feedback and decisions ignoring player feedback. But the only way they can or will make decisions based on player feedback is for players to provide intelligent, opinionated feedback. That's what I'm trying to do here.
I understand it's an outside chance that they'll change their decision based on what I'm posting here. Even if I manage to convince a decent number of players that I'm right.
That, unlike the Super Packs, is a gamble I'm willing to take.
I did like how you nicely worded that was the "gamble" you were willing to take.
For what its worth I can at least sympathize with your cause here, hopeless or not. On Tuesday I bought 96 Super Packs and was admittedly hoping to get the Black Wolf but alas I didn't get it. On the upside I got the entire Elemental costume set within the first 17 packs (I actually got almost all of the eleven items within the first 7 packs) and I got so many extra ATOs that I made several billion Influence selling them for my trouble so I really have very few grounds to complain.
Do I hope or wish there will be another way to get the Black Wolf in the future? Of course I do. But I think the difference between you and me is that I don't see it as an "outrage" that the Devs chose to offer it this way. I'll live whether I get it or not. *shrugs* -
Quote:Clearly you don't recall the history of this game. The Devs here have made a number of decisions that have probably hurt their bottom line profit-wise simply because they they didn't want to do something regardless.Yes - and wouldn't it be a stupid decision if they could have both pleased a greater percentage of their playerbase and made more money by doing it a different way?
As it stands, nobody knows (I suspect) if that would have been the case. I don't blame Paragon for being willing to select income over player desires - that's fine, they're a corperation and have to make the rent. I just think that they might want to at least see if they can have their cake and eat it too.
For instance Positron has firmly established that he considers Super Groups to be "group content" and that he doesn't want to make it any easier for people to be able to perform offline invites despite constant promises by the players that they'd even be willing to pay for such a feature. The Devs have also said they would not be willing to offer "powerset respecs" again despite people being so desperate for that that they'd be willing to pay money for it.
Sometimes the Devs arbitrarily decide on the vision of their game even if those decisions might run contrary to their profit margins. I have great respect for them in those cases, even if i don't agree with them on particular individual issues. The Devs WANT exclusive things in this game and they'll likely continue to sneak them in despite us. -
Quote:Your points might make more sense if we were taking about having actual competition amongst competing brands of Super Packs that all would apply to this game.Actually, marketing is a lot more than the hit-or-miss tactic that you are describing. Terms like Insight, Competitive Framework, Target Audience, Key Brand Associations, Rational Benefit, Emotional Benefit, Performance Discriminator and Personality Discriminator are regularly used to decide the direction of marketing of a brand.
If Marketing know their stuff, the reason why the consumers buy their products matters a lot, because that determines the direction they will market the brand into the future. In the very least, one of the things you do not want as marketing is alienating your customers, to make them feel that they can't identify with the brand anymore. That happens very easily if you go for short term profit, and it can very easily lead to long term loss.
In this case all Marketing has to care about is whether they've produced a product that the players of this game are buying. If what they are selling is selling at or above their expectations what motivation would they have to change that formula when they release Super Packs #2, #3 and so on?
Quote:Possibly. Because it also didn't work for Wizards of the Coast. It worked on that brand (you know which), but not on a whole bunch of other brands. And they were not the only ones. The majority of the trading card games were quietly dropped after at most a year. A few survived. -
Quote:You're right in one respect: they might not know exactly which element of their multi-featured Super Packs was more important to their overall sales than another. I simply contend that that kind of elemental information might not really be as important as you think it is.Because the company might want to know what will happen the next time they introduce a Super Pack. The distinction is important to the Devs, because they would be well-served by knowing if they must include a much-sought-after exclsuive costume set in every Super Pack offering to get them to sell. Right now, they don't know that.
Paragon doesn't know if people are buying them with a smile or a scowl... which wouldn't make any difference if they weren't planning on doing it again. If you don't know the reason behind your success, it's hard to replicate.
I'm not questioning if they will make more money off of Super Packs versus direct sales. I'm questioning if they will make more money off of Super Packs versus Super Packs and direct sales. I don't know the answer to that question, and I don't honestly think you do either. I suspect Paragon doesn't, either.
If we drop the 'quaint' assumption that Paragon cares about pleasing their customers, this is still a matter of income efficency. The question is: are the Super Packs competitive with our currently-in-place method of delivering content? In the interest of maximizing future profits, how much content should we release this way? All of it? Half? None?
Without an apples-to-apples comparison, I'm not sure they can intelligently answer these questions.
The Devs are going to look at the overall sales of these Packs as an indicator as to what will come in Super Packs set #2, #3 and so on. If they determine that this first Super Pack set is a failure they will obviously go back to the drawing board and try some other formulation. But if they determine that this Super Pack was a success (by whatever criteria they measure that by) then you can rest easy that the next Super Packs will once again incorporate both exclusive and non exclusive features.
Ultimately I think your only chance to convince them that putting an exclusive costume set in these Super Packs was a mistake will be if the the Devs conclude that the overall sales of the the Packs were dismally below their expectations. Unfortunately for you I simply don't see that happening. -
Wizards of the Coast has been selling Collectible Card Games (CCGs) to people (including minors) for 20+ years. The Super Packs in this game are far more analogous to CCGs than to slot machines. Perhaps you should consider the differences between the two before you try to make the leap trying to equate Super Packs with some form of pure gambling.