Samuel_Tow

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In this game, at least, skill is more important than slotting.

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I wouldn't call that so much skill as knowledge. Knowing what your powers do, how they act, how enemies react to them, when to use them and what to expect... That's what one needs to apply his or her powers effectively. Of course, that's likely a semantics argument, as what I just described as knowledge can probably be described as skill, depending on how you view things, but I generally regard skill as being closer to manual dexterity than encyclopaedic knowledge.

Beyond that, I completely agree - you can pick up just about any random combination and make it work (on a team). Even if it's not entirely too optimal, it WILL play.

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But Makos Hold - its just like Jaws comes up and grab the target...

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Otherwise know as Fish Mastery

Though I have to give a lot of credit to the Land Sharks from Armed and Dangerous

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In that case, what is the difference (if any) between Blaster EPP Hibernate and Ice Tank Hibernate? Honest question, I actually don't know the answer to that one.

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Without having tried either, off Red Tomax:

Tanker Hibernate recharges in 120 seconds and costs 0.13 endurance points (not sure for what length of time, though), whereas Blaster Hibernate recharges in 240 seconds (twice as long) and takes 0.16 endurance points (negligibly more). Not sure if that's fair, but for a power like that, it seems significant.

I really need to checked out this Force of Nature some time. My only Blaster high enough HAS to have Munitions Master. How can AR/Dev have ANYTHING else?

Plus I always laugh about the old Foce of Nature

That said, that's exactly why I find Patron pools so uninspiring. Hero-side I get to look forward to all these cool powers, thinking "Awrait(sic)! If I take this power, my character will be pretty dang close to how I imagined him!" Villain-side, I look at Patron powers and think "I don't want pastel darkness, a mace or the power of being a fish. I'd like red lightning, but it doesn't really fit. Wonder how I can better replicate the powers my character's supposed to have..."

Patron powers are all well and good, but they're not "mine."

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As for story wise, they could just as easily be stolen/copied from the patrons.

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Yes, but I'd rather like to see powers with which to further my own powersets and my own concepts, such that I haven't stolen from anyone. CoH-side Epics are just basically "more powers," be they mine or taken from someone else, whereas CoV-side Patrons are pretty specific. I'd like a more generic option that I can work into a concept that has nothing to do with Arachnos.

Believe me when I say this - anything that has NOTHING to do with Arachnos is, at this point, a boon to CoV

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And lets not forget that outside of PvP, the Patron Pools are actually liked by some.

Myself being one of them, and a few SG mates are even bigger advocates that I am.

That voice is consitently shouted down in threads discussing it. Much as folks who thought ED may of had merit where shouted down in the threads pre-I6.

Discussion on Patron pools have become very one sided because of this.



I actively prefer the Patron Power Pools to the APP's on the hero side. I really wish I could ditch the APP's and get either the patron powers or something similar on the hero side.

So no not everyone hates/loathes/detests etc. the patron power pools, just some.

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While I wouldn't go as far as to say I like Patron pools better than Epics, I will note that Patron pools aren't BAD in and of themselves. Not from where I'm standing, anyway. Yeah, sure, they lack Focused Accuracy and Conserve Power, but then I never considered Epics to be game-shaping, either. Truth be told, Patron pools are good, but NOT at the exception of Epics.

Where the Patron powerpools fail for me is in the fact that they are so conceptually restricted. No matter what your powers are and which Patron you take, the powers they give are always obviously given to you by them. No-body gave my Scrapper Caltrops, say, but even on my Necro/Dark Mastermind, Ghost Widow's pastel "dark" blasts are obviously foreign, given to me by an in-game NPC. It really does restrict all my concepts into following the railroading storyline - if I'm not a lackey to Arachnos, then at least I'm working for them so heavily as to have part of my powers be theirs in origin.

I received an official response in my thread on the subject to the effect of "Well, you don't have to take them." And I agree, but it's just a bit irritating to get NO new powers to choose from post 40 and to have to scour the regular pools for powers that even remotely fit my concept.

And that's before we even consider that the Patron powers are visually unique, meaning there's no way to pretend they're somehow powers that are naturally yours. With Epics, you can pretty much claim that you suddenly learned to shoot fire out of your hands, and if you picked a Fire powerset to begin with, that looks perfectly natural. It's not quite as easy to claim you suddenly sprouted an Arachnos issue black mace that shoots Wolf Spider signature ammunition. "Then say you stole it" was a sentiment I've heard a lot of, but it's still a workaround to what is visibly an esoteric ability to just about any character short of an Electric Brute with Mu Mastery.

I will say a few words on Patron pools being all the same in terms of stats and mechanics. The developers decided to award these in such a way that the system didn't allow us to switch them. Can't give up badges is the last explanation I heard, but whatever the real explanation may be, the net result is we can't switch between them. With that in mind, if they were made different, people would inevitably perceive some as stronger than others. And if people find out about it after they've picked one, then believe you me, they will be pretty pissed off. It's one thing to pick a pool that ends up sucking - that you can respec out of eventually. It's quite another to pick a Patron pool you can't respec out of, because you are stuck with it quite literally forever and ever. You cannot change Patrons once you choose, so to avert disaster, all the Patron pools HAD to be made as close to identical as they could be. That way people don't feel cheated, or AS cheated, in the end. All the other Patrons are the same, practically, so as long as you have one that works for your concept, you should be good.

In my opinion, and I've said this many times, the developers dug themselves into a hole. By putting Patron powers in before they had the tech to change them, they had to make them all the same. Now that they've made them all the same, if they ever DO add tech to respec out of your Patron, then they can't add new Patron pools that are different, because you'd have four identical ones and one different. I sincerely hope it's been a lesson of doing things right even if they have to be delayed. Doing things now and wrong tends to produce not just flawed content right now, but also interfere with content added in the future, as the problems only grow in magnitude.

As a matter of fact, I suspect that may be a part of why any villain Epic ATs are taking so long - better to make an AT that's going to work right and give us as much mileage as it can, than to slap something together and then spend the next two years brainstorming ways to clear up the mess.

In general, I don't dislike the Patron pools, or the idea itself, that of taking powers from a fictional patron. What I do dislike, however, is Patrons at the expense of Epics. I'd really have liked to be able to give Fossilize and Stalagmites to my Stone/Stone Brute, or a Mek Man energy blast to my Energy/Energy Brute, but I can't. And that bugs me.

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Sorry Sam, I might have missed it. I stand corrected, but you're one of a very few.

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No sweat. That was said in a moment of weakness, as I really should be going to bed.

I just feel that any addition to the game on any side is good for the game as a whole. Granted, further additions to heroes when they already have enough to have almost two fully distinct paths is a bit redundant, considering villains don't even have enough for one. But in the end, whichever side gets it, it's still good in my book.

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I still stand by the fact that if one truly believes this is one game then there is no reason at all to begrudge an issue devoted to one side or the other. I've yet to see those that state it's one game also say they'd have no problem with that.

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The only logical conclusion I can draw from that is that you have me on ignore, then. I wish the forum software would tell me.

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Villains should probably have been integrated into the existing game world, not shunted off into their own. The additions and changes since CoV shipped indicate the devs realize they kind of goofed so we see co-op zones (RWZ), co-op missions (save Baby New Year) or parallel versions of the (mostly) same content (Orouboros).
Anyhoo, my two cents on it.

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And mine as well, especially on this point.

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I would have to agree with this. Maybe then we would have ended up with a more believable, realistic world, rather than Mad Max meets Darth Vader. Plus, PvP aside, it would make sense. Not quite sure how it would work technically, though.

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If it's one game with 2 factions, then an issue devoted to either side (including the red side) shouldn't cause a stir on the forums. But it did, and it would again if the devs did that.
So please, those of you that aren't for one side or the other, that know that this is one game, please tell me why that is.

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Why? People whined and complained when we got a double experience weekend, myself among them. People complained when we got wings and when we got capes, myself among them. People complained when we got Kheldians, myself not among them for a change. I wonder why that is.

The simple, and frankly unflattering answer is that people will complain about anything. If your measure of acceptance is the shitstorm that happens on the forums, then your outlook on anything should be pretty dang grim. Everything is complained about, no matter what it is. It's silly to claim nobody is for it over that.

If an Issue is devoted entirely to CoV, I won't bat an eye any more than I did over I7. It's all the same game. Believe it or not, I'm not alone in this.

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If CoV and CoH really are just one in the same to some of you, then why are you fighitng so hard against more CoV specific features?

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Go back and read my posts again. I have the sneaking suspicion you'll find numerous admittances that CoV needs content pretty badly, that it's not well-designed and needs to be improved and that I wouldn't bat an eye if an Issue were all villain-centric. I don't mean that as an insult, but I said these things several times. I would have expected you read them if you're quoting posts that contained them.

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It has an alternative executable for those who wish start out with a different skin on the start menu

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Same executable. Same code base. Same game.

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The client installed from the CoV disks comes with a CityofVillains.exe and a CovUpdater.exe and the client installed from the CoH disks comes with a CityofHeroes.exe and a CohUpdater.exe. I think there were people running around with a CohBeta.exe until a while ago. Different installations call their executables differently and fire up a different skin, but you are correct in practice - they are the same files for all intents and purposes.

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As it has been brought up many times, the devs do not see CoV has a full game. They see it as an expansion. This only proves the point of the red side players who want more content.

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Except that's not exactly what's been brought up. From all I've seen, the developers don't treat CoV as an expansion to CoH, but as an expansion to the City of franchise. City of heroes was the first expansion to the franchise, City of Villains is the second.

Then again, my claim is just as anecdotal.

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Meanwhile, to support the SEPARATED GAMES idea, the devs themselves have continued to keep CoV characters from unlocking the Hero ATs.

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As they have kept hero characters from using the CoV ATs. Kheldians are just one more AT CoH-side, and not a very good one, at that. Why they weren't just cloned over and called Nictus I'll never know.

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Finally, as for the straw man that blue siders as so font of bringing up - that they don't want to see a full CoV dedicated issue.. NOBODY HAS BEEN SUGGESTING IT. Nobody wants to see heroes be completely slighted. They need SOMETHING added every issue as well. They need new content just like anyone else.

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This is false on face value, as evidenced by this very thread. Several people have suggested a villain-only Issue, myself among them. Several other people have said they're perfectly OK with it. There may have been a few people who said CoH should still get SOME content, I don't remember. That's hardly as one-sided a standpoint as you make it out to be.

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City of Villains still has it's own .exe. It still has it's own title screen. it still has it's own characters, it's own content, it's own game. We are not just another update you damn heroes got for your game.

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Semantics, but... No, City of Villains does not have its own executable. It has an alternative executable for those who wish start out with a different skin on the start menu, which is just as easily achieved by logging in a villain and logging out. Furthermore, CoV doesn't have its own characters. Both heroes and villains are dumped in the same common pool of characters, differentiated only by AT which, as we've seen before, is only a technical limitation. By far the biggest difference is where a character is in terms of zones and what /cov value their client is using at the time.

Which also brings me to why they are not two separate games. The single meaningful difference between City of Heroes and City of Villains is that City of Heroes uses /cov 0 and City of Villains uses /cov 1. Everything else is tied to that and distributed thematically. The only reason hero-only content is hero-only is because the developers have forbidden villains from entering and the only reason villain-only content is villain-only is because heroes have been prevented from entering. Claiming otherwise is clinging to semantics. It is the same single game. "Damn heroes" have nothing to do with it.

I sincerely hope that this notion of two games doesn't hold for long. It's the relic of a strange decision made by the development team. If City of Villains were sold as a bundle with City of Heroes at launch, such that even when you bought "just one game" you got both sides anyway, this argument would never have existed. It's one game with two factions who are forbidden from visiting each other's zones, with content developed for it as a game, not a collection of small parts.

Yes, villains have less content currently, there is no denying that. I just fail to see it as some great injustice. It's just a pocket shot to the developers as some of the concepts the game supports are put into a world that's in need of more content. But there is no more "unfairness" to the current content issues than there was to Tankers and Scrapper having only 4 primaries/secondaries (respectively). And I don't think it would have been fair to claim that City of Melee has been neglected for a straight-up three years.

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Personally, I don't see it as one game. I play both, but I don't see it as one game. However, I'm glad you and others do. That way if there is an issue devoted to the red side no one should have any complaints. Since it's one game, and it's an update to that one game, and no one should limit themselves to one side, it's all good. Yay!

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People WILL complain. That's a given. Just take not that they will most probably not be the same people as the ones insisting it's one game now.

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And I'm not sure I could ever see CoH and CoV as two different games. They're sold as one, billed as one, have one development team, one set of boards, use the same engine, the same software, house the a single unit of game data and use the same game rules. I cannot perceive the choice between playing a hero or a villain to be any different from whether to play Human, Zerg or Protoss.

I mean no offence, I quite physically cannot understand that.

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Issue 12 heroes will get some cool content and fixes. Villains will get Double XP weekend. Can't Wait.

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And you wonder why people can't take you seriously?

Try as I might, "Cry me a river" is the only response I can think of for this.

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Often the person saying "this issue is trivial, I can't believe you're inflating this...." in response to a "the devs hate us" thread or some such was a full-game player - they'd even say so in their first post to establish their motivation.

But if they were on a villain thread, they became a "blue sider" and if it was on a hero thread they became a "red sider". *Poof* just like magic.

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Oh, why does it have to be so hard to quote smilies?

I did always find this strange and inexplicable, myself, as I was caught by the same phenomenon every time I tried. It didn't matter that I have as many villains and that my playtime has been neatly divided between the two games since CoV came out, if I wasn't a villain-ONLY player and held villain-only content in higher regard than hero-only or shared content, I was unwelcome and shouted away as an antagonist.

I do agree that unifying the forums (one-sided as it may have been done) helped with that a great deal. We're all posting in the "game's forums," rather than in either side's forums, so pegging someone as a "hero" or a "villain" is no longer as easy as seeing where the bulk of their posts were. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Then again, you're probably right - the less distinction there officially made between the two games, the less there is for people to cling to in this "us vs. them" debate.

I mean, there's no question that City of Villains needs more content, and such better suited for villains, but this has nothing to do with who the developers hate or how many play each side or how loud who whines. It should be a decision based on net content and past update history most of all, and I don't particularly enjoy seeing it turned into a war of egos. It obscures the actual good points being raised on the subject.

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Threads like this that are coming up more and more often are why it was a horrid idea to combine the two boards. I am hesitant to post in another of these threads because I have been told that no matter what I say it is condescending, or rude, or a combination of the two, this is an attempt to not be either.

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Combining the forums actually decreased the number of such threads for some reason. Used to be the CoV forum was only ever used for people to complain about the injustice and little else.

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CoV isn't villainous enough, and attempts to make it so end up in ghastly unpleasant stories, such as Peter Thermai and Westin Phipps.

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What on earth is wrong with Peter and Westin? I love those arcs.

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Nothing is wrong with the arcs themselves. What I find wrong about them is that they are an extreme fringe attempt to counterbalance the blandness of the bulk of the rest of the game, and as such come off, to me at least, as strongly overdone. It's like the game was was all teddy bears and stuffed ponies, so they threw in a couple bloody chain flails to sort of balance thins out.

I don't do Thermai or Phipps as a playstyle choice, and for the most part the game has enough content to let me. However, I do recognise the need the game has for such storylines at the same time. But they and more like them aren't the way to make the game feel more villainous, because they too are just one aspect of what it means to be a villain. Overdoing them too much will make them as bland as the current mercenary crap that the game is overflowing with.

Off the top of my head, self-serving missions are all but non-existent in the game, short of maybe playing Tavish Bell for a fool, stealing his stuff and blaming other people for it. Which is good, we just need more of it. Come to think of it, Newspaper missions were probably made to do that, but they are SO small-time it's not even funny. "Arachnos has been cracking down on the Sky Raiders lately. Smashing some of their could earn you some brownie points with the spiders." Sign me up!

Actual self-serving story arcs would be good. Where's my Igor contact? Well, maybe Willy Wheeler counts, I suppose...

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Well, if it's content that doesn't really fit the story line very well then it's not just a matter of "not liking it personally." If the red side needs more help, it should get it. Period.

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Well, while I'll admit to the existence of that particular problem, it's actually little more than the symptom of a larger problem to behold CoV-side - the story sucks. The overarching story of the game just isn't all that good, things considered. Yes, it's a good story in and of itself, but not good enough to define an actual world for players to take part in. CoV isn't villainous enough, and attempts to make it so end up in ghastly unpleasant stories, such as Peter Thermai and Westin Phipps.

As compared to City of Heroes, the world of City of Villains is much, much more rigidly defined, to the point where almost no new content is really enough to "make sense." Yes, helping save the world isn't the most villainous thing in the world, but it is a staple of villainy when the need arises, and is as such perfectly acceptable. But in a game that doesn't give us the ability to "Rul ze vorld!" that content is just out of place.

If we had the option to build our own doomsday device, build our own evil empire and launch invasion strikes on the world's largest cities, take part in open warfare in the city streets and so on and so forth, then hey, a little good will won't kill us, right? Instead the bulk of the game is just one big mercenary job, with little hints of everything else tucked away in out-of-the-way places. Mayhems offer some destruction, Bases offer some empire-building, PvP zones offer a feeling of open warfare, but by and large the game just isn't very villainous.

If I were looking to make the game more villainous, however, the one thing I'd not try to fix is make it more evil. CoV is plenty evil enough, but evil is not the same as villainous. Our villains are basically relegated to being angsty, obnoxious grown men who live in their parent's basement and after they're done painting skulls and listening to death metal, we're sent to clean up the garage and mow the lawn.

I think CoV ended up with an over-abundance of "Go do that for me, bub!" missions. They sort of work for CoH, because reacting to threats is a very large part of what heroes do, but for CoV it just ends up like lots of busywork for a lowbrow mercenary. Villainous, yes, but not by much. "I answer to no-one!" missions would have been really great, but the very setting of the game makes this improbable. Where heroes exist in a city where they can do pretty much anything they want without having to constantly kowtow to, say, City Hall, or at least not do so in an obtrusive way, villains are constantly reminded that they're living in Lord Recluse's back yard, doing his dirty work and looking up to be his chosen. Blarg!

So, yeah, the new content is the latest in a long line of content that doesn't fit the villain theme. So what else is new? What the side needs more than "just new content," is content that actually contributes to the environment and the settings. Sooner or later the developers will figure out that writing missions briefings to sound like we're working for ourselves, rather than for the one big bad, is an easy step that would improve things tremendously.

And I agree completely, hence my above lament on why people who try to reason are drowned out by pie, cake and ponies - because that's not a topic that CAN be argued through reason and logic.

It's just a shame the people cracking jokes got tired of the novelty of the thread. It was fun while it lasted

The idea is that the content was added to the game, but does not match the theme of the game and so feels out of place. The problem with that is that it ignores what the context of City of Villains is - classic villains that rob banks and want to rule the world, rather than darkity-dark post-apocalyptic land of murder and torture. The islands may look the part, but the bulk of the narrative does not, within which context the new shared content fits, if not necessarily perfectly.

Honestly, this was a lot more fun when it was silly exaggeration. Debating the semantics of "added to" vs "added for" is boring.

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I can play CoV w/o touching any hero side content. I can avoid PvP zones, I can avoid RWZ, I can skip Pocket D, and play NOTHING but CoV.

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And I can play in Atlas Park, the Hollows, Faultline, Striga, Croatoa and the Rikti War Zone without touching any of the other zones. Does that mean City of Heroes is actually two separate games? City of Old vs. City of New, maybe? I can play the entire game entirely with Scrappers and never touch or interact with another AT. Matter of fact, I pretty much do. Does that mean that City of Heroes is actually two games - City of Melee and City of Everything Else?

Just because you can play the game and ignore certain parts of it does not mean what you've chosen to play is a separate game. And while City of Villains should, in theory, be an equal part of the game as City of Heroes, City of Villains is not equal to City of Heroes + Co-op + PvP + core engine mechanics. If we HAVE to divide the game into two sections, those two sections would overlap a LOT. If you want to examine a section without that overlap, then you're looking at a lot less than half the game, be that practically or in theory.

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I am aware this is meant as a joke post, but sad to say I see more than a few shreds of truth to it.

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It wouldn't be half as... Funny, let's call it if I were pulling it out of thin air. I don't consider a thread titled "Why do the devs hate CoV?" to merit a measured response, however, so I threw about all I could think of in one giant mess for others to sort through.

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We recently had a thread with people actually saying that they wanted CoV to get more attention.... as long as that didn't mean that even one issue wasn't swung 98% heroes/2% villains, because i7 was a nightmare to them that they still were not really over! [or words to that effect]. GEEZ, wt*-ever.

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I believe I was one of the people asking for more Villain content because the side quite simply doesn't have enough. It never has. The developers pinched their pennies and peddled their "improved" zone design, which ended up leaving the game with a grand total of 7 zones and barely enough (more like not enough, period) content to get from 1-50 once, forget about replay value. It was a mistake then, and it continues to be a mistake.

As far as "but not all CoV so we don't hurt hero players," I, personally, don't care either way. I paid for "both games" and play both heroes AND villains, so whichever side gets more content, I still win. Yes, I realise this is a very kind and considerate standpoint to take and doesn't in any way make me an insolent hypocrite. No sir-ree! But I've never considered CoH and CoV to be two separate games to begin with.

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There's this thing called Stamina....

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After much research and many experiments, I have concluded that... There is no such thing as Stamina. It's only a myth to scare little children.

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If the devs had given any thought to there being TWO games, instead of just assuming it's one...

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That's just it, though. I don't think they ARE two games. I don't think it was ever any other way. The "two games" may have been sold separately, but there's a reason we coined the term "expansionalone" - it was an expansion that you could play as a standalone. You'll note, though, that CoV never actually had enough content to BE a separate game. It was and remains to this day, "the evil version of CoH."

I'm not quite sure what the developers were thinking when they made the game a standalone. I suspect it was our (mine included) complaints about making us buy the game over again, rather than waiting on free expansions. Remember, one of CoH's perks always was the fact that you didn't have to rebuy the game every few months. So this "expansionalone" satisfied both those who wanted it and those who didn't by being completely separate.

I've felt I was wrong in asking for this, however, as we still suffer from the legacy of "the two games" where in fact two games never existed. It was always just one game.