Samuel_Tow

Do a character database wipe and see how well that argument holds up. Yes, some of us have played other games. I have a hard time imagining those of us who've been here for eight years and sunk thousands upon thousands of hours being willing to start over in a new game full time, however.

That's good enough for me. Thank you kindly I mean, I can see why it might look strange to have the fur wrapped around bare arms, but I've always seen that as sort of like a mink scarf as much as like a coat's fur trim. But do what you can. I'm just happy to have been heard

Isn't that line supposed to come from your character, though?

Speaking of which, I honestly wish the template for player-to-NPC conversations for future content should be that of the Avatar of Britania. Not necessarily Name/Job/Bye, obviously, but I want "my" responses to be generic and descriptive so that I can fill in the words I'm speaking or the means in which I answer, rather than being forced to sound like a stereotypical Jamaican.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, and this brings up the concept of "consistency." A good fictional story breaks the laws of our reality, but is nevertheless governed by its own internal laws and its own internal logic such that the audience can "get" the setting and be able to reason out actions, reactions and consequences. A key part in making your audience care about your story is letting them understand what's happening and why is it happening, and in so doing empower them to hypothesise. "If this happened, then very likely that would happen as a result." Grounding people into a fictional universe is of paramount importance, and it's where a lot of I18-I20 storylines fail by being too vague and too "sequence of random events" -ish.

The real curiosity here is that the more you ground a story and the stronger its internal laws, the more powerful plot twists become. A twist is only a twist if it's both surprising and logical, and the only way to achieve this is to educate the audience in the internal rules of your fictional setting. This way, you teach them to anticipate events before they happen, thus setting themselves up for the surprise, and you teach them to understand events, thus setting them up for comprehending where their expectations were wrong. I personally find a plot twist I didn't see, but which makes me of "Doh! Of course!" as soon as it happens to be one of the most satisfying parts of a story.

So, does that mean we can have the Jackets Bolero Fur shoulder piece for Sleeveless Jackets, too? Pretty please?

That's part of the problem, yes. I don't deny that Confront and especially Taunt have their uses and I'll be the first to admit they really are worth the price of admission... The all of no slots, one power pic, no endurance cost, auto-hit effect. But the thing is that however well the power may be balanced within its own stats, it still costs me a power pick that it ought to be worth. Again, I concede that for tanking, Taunt does can be argued to be worth it. I've never tanked so I don't know. However, when a Scrapper can usually achieve the same thing with an attack as with Taunt, I do think Confront can use a once-over.

The one that likes to throw multiple elite bosses and many bosses at you at the same time? Single-target shock damage is not to be underestimated.

That said, I don't disagree with you. I wouldn't be opposed to raising the radius of Whirling Hands, giving Stun damage or making Energy Transfer into a Headsplitter cone. I'm not against changing Energy Melee and I don't insist it's "just fine," I merely want to see it remain at the speed it has now and see fixes in other directions. City of Heroes is one of the only MMOs I've seen with decent combat animations, and a key reason for that is our powers have time to animate in non-spastic ways.

Thank you This is kind of that case where pieces haven't propagated to all categories. Just making sure they exist in all places where they should exist would probably be enough of a fix.

I mistyped, and I clearly didn't proof-read my post.

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Here's something more I wanted to point out. I've mentioned before that a lot of I18-I20 content is intentionally over-dark and over-edgy and over-depressing, but this has less to do with the themes said content explores than it does with how it explores them. I remember discussing this with friends over the weekend, but you can't really create drama by just saying something is dramatic and making a plotline which has lots of downers in it. A plot doesn't become dramatic because it has a lot of death and torture in it, it becomes so when we care about the people involved in it and fear that they may be hurt. Why bring it up? Here's what Vanessa DeVore just told me:

Why First Ward's drama fails is because it's delivered through lines like that. Beating me over the head with repeated statements that everything is dark and depressing and gritty is missing the point, because it's touting the payoff without going through the setup of it. If you recall, "all payoff, no setup" was the running problem of SSA1 all throughout. Furthermore, when you have characters throw around death, despair and sacrifice so casually, you end up turning your audience into cynics who then regard these dramatic elements with the same kind of disconnect.

Oh, no, I'm sending Noble Savage to his death. Please, no, don't make me do this. I care about him so much. He is such a well-developed character, what with him losing all character progression and personality between Neutropolis and First Ward and his contribution consisting of bipolar flipping between all-caps frothing rage and self-doubt. Oh, and what's this? All these other people whom I've never met, seen or even heard of who are going with him will also die? Oh, no, such tragedy.

Here's a mental exercise: Take any great story whatsoever, sum up the final climax in a couple of sentences, then retell those sentences to someone who doesn't know the story. See if you get any reaction out of this person. Because that's essentially what we're seeing here - a story which is too focused on ramming it into our heads that it's edgy and gritty by plain-text telling us it is that it has no room to set up the scene and imply this. And that's a problem, because a good story doesn't hinge on a good idea so much as it hinges on good execution. You can take a HORRIBLE idea and turn it into a good story if your execution is good enough. Hell, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a concept intentionally made to be a parody of over-gritty action comics - they're intended to an obviously horrible idea - and yet they work because of how their stories have been told in comic, cartoon and film.

And again: This is where recent writing has improved dramatically. Take Dark Astoria, for example. It has a similar theme of death, despair and pain, yet it handles those themes in a much more restrained way. Crucially, it never pulls me aside to tell me "Hey, you're sending people to their deaths. Would you please be a sport feel guilty about it?" For all the horror that zone exudes, it ultimately gives a story about COPING with despair, as well as the ways in which it affects the others who, too, struggle to cope with it. Some, like Madame Bellarose, clearly fail, but others, like Scirocco, pretty much succeed. By giving "the people" a name and a face, Dark Astoria's story becomes grounded in concepts we can sympathise with, making us both care about the story and feel for its plot twists. First Ward, by contrast, mostly relies on what must be my favourite line from Spy Dogs: Things are happening in places all over the world! This just in - my arm fell off.

A lot of I18-I20 stories have this nasty habit of relying on vague causes and having vague effects. Master Midnight just finished telling me how people tell myths of the Furies to make people be nice to people and have people make laws for people and people people people. Also, people. What people? When? Give me examples, give me hypothetical situations, give me some grounding in fictional reality so I know this isn't just general "it's bad because it's bad" talk. Any plot point becomes better when it's clear who has done what to whom for what reason. It makes it easier for us to care when we can put a face and a name to said plot. Abstract stories are just hard to follow and hard to take seriously, and for the most part they feel like the writer is just stalling for text size.

"Specifics" is one of the things I've been very happy to see in newer content, and I'll be looking for it in stories going forward.

And I'd agree with it. I think it was the Techbot who asked for this uptread - just porting whatever pieces would fit the monster heads and repositioning them to line up with the head.

Honestly, I think the Animal Pack made a huge mistake by making the various animal heads so different from each other that they're incompatible. If they were more similar like the old CoV Monster Heads, they could be standardised and ornaments could have been created for them that would transfer from head to head. I know a cat head isn't the same as a dog head isn't the same as a cow head, but again - this is where having a "base" head to which you add snouts, ears, manes and so forth would be such a boon. It might not have looked as picture-perfect to the actual animal, but it would have allowed for a lot more customization.

I doubt it. It's been happening for so long I doubt it's ever going to get looked at. But, hey, if I24 is "fix everything," then fixing a few of those irritating bugs would be nice. I already had an arc of mine kill Viking by spawning a Malta ambush on top of him, when you'd think ambushes should try to spawn away from players. Especially since I can't really control where the ambush spawns.

This isn't one of those instances, though. In this case, that's just how the script was written. The lines came one after the other with Serene gesturing, they just didn't linger on-screen for more than half a second. It felt like trying to read chat during a Ustream with fifty people talking over each other.

That's part of what I'm getting at. New sets are coming out and almost everything about them is "different," even the stock Build Up. Both Combat Readiness and Build Momentum play off their set's mechanics and offer a different type of gameplay use, yet all of those sets have "just Taunt." It's as if whoever's making these sets makes eight new powers and just tosses Taunt in there because it has to exist and no other reason whatsoever. It feels like Taunt/Confront isn't even considered to be a "thing," since there's nothing interesting or unique about it. It's just there while we try to pretend it doesn't exist.

Now, of course, you can say the same about Hide, Placate and Assassin's Strike being uniform and samey, and I would agree to an extent. However, at least Assassin's Strike and Hide look unique and match the set they appear in. Placate... Yeah, I could argue the same thing about Placate, but at least Placate has very powerful uses in multiple directions so there's solid reason to take it. Confront, though? Yeah, I take it on my Scrappers to deal with runners, but I'd honestly like to have a reason to use that power above and beyond JUST aggro control.

I remember that story, yes, and I do feel bad for the guy who made this and what he went though. However, at the same time, you really can't write for an established franchise without being at least moderately familiar with it, or otherwise having immediate access to someone who is so you can ask questions in real time. Again, that's why this is a professional job and not fanfiction - because you actually have the responsibility of maintaining a believable fictional universe. That's the product you're selling, in large part, so you can't just slap-dash random unaware ideas into it.

This is one of my big problems with the writing for this game - the writers seem to either be unaware of much of their own canon, or otherwise choose to simply ignore it. They create situations which contradict established characterisation and then simply ret-con existing characters into fitting them. They create situations where existing concepts would have been the logical fit, but instead create brand new ones and act like the old ones never existed. Why was SAM necessary, for instance, when they do the job of the FBSA, in practice? Or when I heard that someone was supplying the Hellions with magical artefacts, my first instinct was to yell "It's the Outcasts!" Because that's who's selling artefacts to the Hellions, as passed down from the Warriors. Turns out actually knowing the game's canon was a liability, because nope! It's Arachnos. I thought this was foreshadowing for the game's later revalations, but it turns out it was an on-the-spot plot point to "foreshadow" something fifteen minutes later in the plot.

I firmly believe that anyone - ANYONE - who wants to write for City of Heroes needs at least two of the following three things:

1. An intimate and intricate knowledge of at least most of the canon that's in the actual game good enough to quote plot points off memory.

2. Access to someone who's infinitely familiar with game canon at least up to the present day. ParagonWiki can suffice here, but only if referenced extensively.

3. The presence of mine to accept corrections from others regardless of their knowledge of content, or at the very least to verify corrections with either other more knowledgeable people or a static resource, again like ParagonWiki.

Obviously, talent is important, as is an editor *winkwinknudgenudge* but I'm talking purely in terms of making stories that fit with existing canon. Furthermore, there's no need to constantly invent new factions and characters when there are plenty of old ones that can be used, and that SHOULD be used. We really need to avoid this Neuron approach to writing where so many things are left unresolved by means of new writer abandoning old stories to tell his own. Working within an established fictional universe requires that you work WITH the established fictional universe, at least when you're trying to expand it.

Non-bare monster feet would be nice, in general. Letting us put patterns on them to simulate clothing is a good idea, but we ought to go farther than that and look into options for armour on monster feet, letting us put boots over them or some king of non-bilogical ornament would be nice. I mean, "Bare Feet" is just one of zillions of options for human feet, but it's the only option for monstrous feet.

So I'm behind times, apparently. That progression is a little better since it offers a taunt for people without one or a placate for people with a taunt. Not a bad choice, though I wonder what'll happen to the characters I already have with Challenge on them. Respec? Still, it's less of a useless pick, I admit.

But yes, Unrelenting is... Weird. This is what I mean when I say having to take powers that have nothing to do with the power you want. It seems to me like the powers team are trying to cram as much regeneration and recovery into everything these days. Blasters get them in every set and now every new addition or change to pool powers comes with regeneration and recovery. Why? I can see that in the Medicine pool, but in Presence? What does hitting harder have to do with "presence?" Presence as a concept is the ability of a person to command the attention and control the reactions of people around him through sheer force of personality or physique. This is a "me acting upon you" type of pool where a self buff just doesn't belong.

The mask is a pattern over the base head texture, which is brown-tinted because it's skin, whereas almost all other pieces in the game have a greyscale texture. All "with skin" body parts are actually naked body parts with the tights being just a pattern over the skin, and all "with skin" pieces are brown-tinted. Because they're brown-tinted, when you make them white, what you see is the base texture that's in the files, because white doesn't alter that at all. This is why I went so far out of my way to bug David to look into some kind of tech which would allow us to stack textures on top of each other.

Failing that, just making all skin textures greyscale would work equally as well. I've done that myself via illegal means - I swapped skin textures for women with the tights textures for men to make this. Frankly, I like that kind of skin better, because it takes skin colour more directly, produces less washed-out skins and just overall looks better.

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On the subject of gloves, can we please enable Monstrous Gloves at all with Robotic Arm 3 for women? You know, the single robotic right arm? The left glove doesn't have the option for Monstrous gloves, so Akili here has to make do with a regular human glove.

Also, could we please enable the Magic Bolero shoulder fur for Sleeveless Jackets? It already exists for sleeved jackets, but not for sleeveless ones. For instance, Lady Isabella here would love to exchange her poofy sleeves for longer Witch floves, but this requires going with a Sleeveless Jacket, which doesn't have the Bolero fur, without which she simply wouldn't work.

"The game industry" isn't, so much as the MMO market is. What's happening is pretty much what I warned about years ago - MMO makers have taken the two formulas most proven to work (Lineage 2 and WoW) and barfed out a bewildering number of cloned ripoff MMOs to the point where the market is beyond saturated and any new game coming out has to either be VERY cheap to run or otherwise have something VERY unique to draw players from other MMOs. There was once a time where millions of people were discovering they liked MMOs and never knew about it, but that time is gone. Sure, there are still potential fans out there, but these days if you want your MMO to succeed, you more or less have to poach players from your competition.

Think about it: When City of Heroes came out, what established MMOs were there? EQ, UO, SWG and... What, Lineage 2 that seems to have launched on the same day according to Wikipedia? There was no WoW, there wasn't a glut of F2P MMOs, there weren't zillions of WoW clones and Lineage 2 clones and sidescroller MMOs and chibi MMOs and Korean grindfest MMOs and action arcade MMOs and so forth. Back then, the MMO market was untapped. These days we're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel for the last few remaining hardliners who haven't given multiplayer games a chance, but the majority of a new MMO's playerbase these day more or less has to come out of existing MMOs. It's why new ones either launch as F2P, or otherwise launch BIG, with fanfare and advertising up the wazoo. Tera, the game made by jump-ship Lineage designers, has been spending years touting how great the graphics were and how awesome the combat system was and how much this wasn't like existing MMOs while The Old Republic has been guilt-tripping Star Wars fans and BioWare fans alike into not missing this unique experience, curiously avoiding talking about the actual GAME side of this game.

Basically, it's a lot harder for a new MMO to succeed today than it was eight years ago, and the numerous ones that shut down or went F2P or got sold to Perfect World is a testament to that.