Samuel_Tow

Technological pyramids, yes. I LOVE the architecture of the Stitch race. Guns, rifles and traps, however, have themselves been overdone in Fantasy. I don't know if I want to blame Warcraft 3 or Age of Empires 2 or what have you, but black powder rifles are now stock Fantasy. Granted, that electric rifle? I admit, that was awesome. It's not like Guild Wars 2 doesn't have innovative theme elements. I thought the Stitch personal storyline was worthy of a sci-fi movie. It's just that, at its core, it's an "I'm in a forest!" fantasy, and those are a VERY hard sell for me.

I'm waiting for an MMO that isn't about that, and even the Secret World starts me off by sending me into the forest to shoot zombies. Ugh!

That's the impression I'm getting, yes. Less of a revolutionary setting - it's Fantasy - and more of a revolutionary "systems" game. Trouble is, I really am not moved by systems very much. I'll play a horrid game with a good story. I'll play a horrid game with awesome visual design. I won't play a horrid game with nothing but good gameplay. I'm driven by concepts and ideas, and "random overworld quests" is neither. It's a game mechanic for people who like games for their mechanics. That's why I have no interest in Guild Wars.

Frankly, I just don't like the visuals or the setting. Yes, the vistas are pretty, but they're forests and deserts. This doesn't inspire me to imagine and create, because pretty much everything that can be done with forests and deserts in a Fantasy setting has been done. "Nature" doesn't interest me, and magical nature only slightly so. Like I said - the only settings I actually like are the one of the little Stitch people, because theirs look more sci-fi and thus something I haven't seen in a Fantasy setting.

Damn! I was trying to pick between the two in my character map and I didn't pick right. Accursed rotten memory! So, at least now, can I brag about having my own version of the old Sentinel?

Look at it this way - we are a community that has frowned on trolls, hatemongering and personal insults for eight years and counting. We prided ourselves on that, after all. I firmly believe that even in our darkest hour, these are the virtues we should shoot for, because this is a large part of what made City of Heroes the experience people remember.

All I've ever preached is moderation and the presence of mind to direct our energy towards productive outlets, instead of sniping at each other.

Thank you In everything I do, I try (TRY!) to be reasonable in my passion and walk away feeling like I did... If not the "right" thing, then at least something I can be proud of. It's about the only thing we can do at this point, I think - walk away with our dignity intact.

Yeah, I pulled that date out of my ***. Complete guess But I agree with you - Terror from the Deep was as solid a game as the original Enemy Unknown, and indeed superior in many ways. Decent melee weapons, for one. Sadly, the theme shift is what put the game behind the original, because the bottom of the sea, no matter what you do to it, just wasn't as interesting as rural America. When Terror from the Deep was at its best was during City and Ship Terror scenarios, when the game most resembled the original's theme.

And I STILL wish our ship maps in City of Heroes were as awesome as the ones in X-Com: Terror from the Deep, and have suggested as much. The huge cavernous and relatively empty ship holds grew old pretty much instantly, but corridors with cabins, upper decks and crew quarters? I'd have paid money for that. I guess they wanted to avoid repeating the blue caves thing...

Apocalypse, Interceptor, Enforcer... Yeah, it's like someone sat down and thought "That UFO game was great, but you know what would make it better? Make it completely different! I know! Space shooter! No, wait! FPS!" Then there is the UFO AfterWord (Aftermath, Aftershock, Afterlight) which was only marginally decent and mostly just ugly and irritating, and Afterlight didn't work for me because my video card was apparently too good. Then there was the 1950s G-man style "X-Com" game - another shooter - which is what spawned the Spoony One's "Betrayal!" yell.

So... Yeah, the less said about those the better. It's also why the new one comes with fingers crossed so hard they tangle into a knot. From what I hear, they're emphasising the game's "difficulty" and how you could always lose, perpetuating some kind of "challenge" ideology which I never got because... Every time I lost a soldier in the original, I reloaded the in-mission save game I hope for the best, because that really looks both different and interesting.

No, but it is about mid-way between chauvinism and xenophobia. I wouldn't have believed it, myself, were it not for NCsoft's history and their recent actions. We've seen this kind of cultural xenophobia in reverse on these very forums, where people (like me) who suggest adding more anime- or fantasy-inspired costume pieces cause certain posters to respond with violent insults and insistence that this would somehow "ruin" the American super hero feel of the game. I have, at this point, not an inkling of a problem seeing a Korean publisher feeling the same regarding their image and their business. This is twice so when you consider that "Korean grindfest MMO" is actually a term at this point.

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All of that said, I think of all the games NCsoft shut down, I may miss Auto Assault the most. The world needs more vehicle-based, open-world MMOs.

The description of Strength on the wiki states that it increases melee damage, but suffers diminishing returns "with a target of 15%/30%." What does that mean? Is that when diminishing returns kick in? Is that when I can no longer go any higher? Is that some kind of statistical average?

Well, if the game doesn't EXPECT me to bunnyhop, then it wouldn't be as aggravating, I suppose. I'm just saying there's nothing worse than strafing and slashing because it just looks goofy. It looks like an FPS game with melee weapons, and FPS games aren't known for their awesome melee combat. That, and I worry about animation quality. I hope something was done to Martial Arts, because when I tried it in Beta, it made me laugh so hard I feared a coronary.

That said, I figured out how to change my forums name - Make a new account! Since I haven't put any money in Stardiver, I figure I'll just abandon it and start over. That ought to solve the naming issue.

Also, Re: Graphics. I don't dislike stylised artwork per se, but what Champions looks like isn't "stylised," it's cartoony, almost caricature. It's not that that style is good or bad, it's mostly that I just don't like it. Sure, City of Heroes wasn't exactly "realistic," but at least it shot for a faux-reality that could be taken seriously. The character designs in Champions Online strike me as intentionally self-parodying so as to reinforce the feel that I'm in a 3D cartoon, but all that does is remind me of playing Eartworm Jim 3D or Worms 3D. Or World of Warcraft, I guess, but with less complex textures.

I CAN look past it, but that's a huge chunk out of my enjoyment out the window. Consider that the only reason I even played Tera is I liked the look of the aman females. Sole reason.

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And here's something else: What does "with a target of" mean? I've seen this listed a few times by users and I just ran into it on the Champions Wiki. But what does that mean?

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And just to be clear - the only way I'd ever want to mess with Champions is with a custom AT, which means money, which means it'll only happen when the business with City of Heroes is resolved, provided it's resolved badly.

And I can support that. To me, why you do something is as important as what you do, and not supporting NCsoft for more or less the right reason seems justified. Some have said they worry about NCsoft closing Guild Wars 2 as suddenly as they did City of Heroes. Given their culture of mistrusting Western developers, this seems at the very least reasonable. Not wanting to support NCsoft because you dislike them as a company also seems reasonable, if it feels like a deal with the devil. Yes, it hurts ArenaNet, but we aren't beholden to them. If you want to make a statement and vote with your money, yeah, I can support that, as well.

Where I draw the line is when we start growing bitter and wanting to harm people, and not just the people we perceive as directly responsible. People mad at NCsoft I get. I even encourage it. People mad at NCsoft AND everyone affiliated with them? That's crossing the line. There's no such thing as guilt by association, and holding ArenaNet to task for "sleeping with the enemy" is ludicrous. Holding people who buy ArenaNet's game to task for being traitors is outright insane. To put it in City of Heroes terms, the former is what turns a Hero into a Vigilante. The latter is what turns a Vigilante into a straight-up Villain.

It may seem weird of me to say this, but I feel the best thing we can do right now is to turn our anger in a positive direction. And yes, that can be done. Let's do what we can to see about preserving the game, I'm with TonyV on this one. But if we can't do that, then I don't want to leave bitter and cursing the name of NCsoft, because that's not what I want to take away from all of this. What I want to take away is the cool development team we had, the awesome community we came together as, and the dreams that a mere game helped not just fulfil, but outright create. From where I'm sitting, to turn our anger into bitter hatred would be to waste what's left of City of Heroes.

All good things must come to an end, but nothing really "ends" in the gaming industry. It just stays away for many years. As the industry moves forward and starts "getting" what people want, old classics start coming back, reimagined and renewed. Hell, even as we speak, I'm looking forward to the remake of X-Com, even though the last decent game in the series came out in... What, 1994? Even if we lose City of Heroes, our impact on the MMO world has been made, at least in part. Because look at it realistically - the MMOs of today are not the pointless grind-fest time sinks of yesteryear. Soloing is possible, progression is faster, story is important and engaging the player with innovation key.

Companies are finally getting it, and I put no small amount of the contribution to that on City of Heroes, the little game that just wouldn't die. Because when you have an absolute underdog that people preached would die tomorrow for eight years straight, and which finally went down not because of its own failure, but because of corporate politics... People take notice of that. Just what the devil is that niche game doing right that massive corporate titles with the bank backing them up aren't doing? Even if they don't admit it, I know people took notice, and if that's all I walk away with, then I walk away a richer, happier man.

That's really my whole point - what are we walking away with? It is our choice. We can walk away with the pain and anger of a sudden loss, or we can walk away with eight years of fun, imagination and innovation. I will choose the latter every time.

Yes. Valve has an industry-wide reputation as a friendly, progressive and overall cool company, and pretty much anything that comes out of their offices is nothing but positive, very similar to how it was in Paragon Studios. Gabe Newall has also admitted that the company has no real hierarchy and people are trusted to volunteer to lead or follow as they judge their skills and inclination. That's why, despite being an industry titan and a corporation, you'll just about never see anyone badmouth Valve unless you run into one of the anti-Steam Luddites.

Ya rly. Nuclear Toast works for Microsoft, and I haven't heard anything from him but positive anecdotes. He'd have to comment more in-depth on his own just because I don't want to put words in his mouth, but the company treats its employees well.

Yup. Read the reviews, read what arguments people have made and judge for yourself. It's useful if you care to make use of it.

Yeah, about that. Can melee powers be used on the move? I know people will want my head for saying this, but I feel "rooting" is one of the best parts of City of Heroes, as it allows for animations to involve the whole body instead of having to restrict animations to waist-up only. It's what tends to make "fighting" games feel perpelxingly MORE responsive when I'm restricted by not being able to interrupt attacks with movement. It's what bugs me about Guild Wars 2 to a large extent - I'm always strafing around and flailing like a man possessed, which makes the game feel like a miasma of "stuff happening."

Speaking of which, I also like our slower attacks here. Sure, it sucks to be stuck in a 2-second attack animation, but that longer window means the actual animation can look considerably smoother. Wow and its ilk look really spastic in this regard, especially when moving.

Good to hear. Not quite the tradeoff I wanted to see, but it's a tradeoff that's easy to make, conceptually speaking. Plus, I believe I can take de-facto Super Jump as a second travel power, right?

I think we're talking about different terms. Status resistance reduces the duration of status effects. Status protection stops status effects from taking effect to begin with by opposing their magnitude directly. Consider the difference in, say, Rooted between PvE and PvP here. In PvE, you never get held (almost). In PvP, you always get held, just for a shorter amount of time.

Are there status protection (protection specifically) powers, or does Ego do this? Or does anything at all do this, aside from blocking?

That apparently doesn't stop you from wanting to punch me

Yeah, I've been known to invade people's countries and stealing their nice things so I can hoard them and then not doing anything with them. In my spare time, I'm a dragon. It's why I dislike Fantasy so much. Sick and tired of "heroes" trying to kill me for my nice things.

A bit more seriously, I take very poorly to people demanding I join their "revolution" or be branded an enemy and suffer the consequences. Because, really, the people who suffer the most in these kinds of fights are the innocents who want nothing to do with the fight in the first place. Hackers hack the PSN to protest Sony's whatever, but the ones who pay the price are the regular players who had their credit card info stolen. But that's OK. These players were implicit for buying into Sony's product. "Guilt by association" is something I will never support, even when the person parading it is otherwise ostensibly right.

And I do care about the community and the game. But I'm also willing to let it go if it comes to that. Maybe I'm just heartless, maybe I'm not "devoted enough," I don't know. But the way some people are acting? No, not even City of Heroes is worth that, and quite frankly, it detracts from what the game "means" to us all to stoop to that. As my version of Commander Shepard said to Earth high command when explaining why not causing genocide to the Krogan cost them the Salarian fleet: "The price was simply too high."

As I sit here trying to support what's left of City of Heroes, I ask myself... What, exactly, is it that I'm sticking out for? An intellectual property? A business? Vengeance? And the truth is that... No. None of the above. I stand for people losing their jobs with no warning, that's something worth being upset over, but that we can't really change, not at this point. But when it comes to City of Heroes as a "thing," what is it that we're fighting for, really?

All I know is what I want out of it more than anything else. I want my imagination back. Games come and go, but City of Heroes represented an idea and an ideology. To me, the message that Paragon Studios left us with is one of creativity, one of communication, and one of chasing our dreams. Despite all the fighting and the villainy and the world-destroying, I never logged on because I wanted to kill stuff. No, I logged into City of Heroes because a group of very cool people put in their blood, sweat and tears to let me live out my dream, and then kick me on the *** and force me to think up a better dream.

City of Heroes is where dreams are born, and I feel those dreams will live on far beyond the game itself. Even if we fail to save City of Heroes - and we probably will - I want to cherish those dreams and those experiences as they were. To start insulting people and ruining business is, to me, to trample what the game meant to us. Paragon Studios left us with a legacy of creation. Just what is it that we're saving if all we care about is making NCsoft pay? That's not what City of Heroes is about.

I mean there's a higher percentage of "stats" vs. visually distinct and meaningful powers as compared to City of Heroes. I remember making level 12 in Champions Online and having... Crap, I think something like four powers. Four or five, I might have simply ignored one of them. By level 12 in City of Heroes, I have... Two at level 1, one at level 2, then one at 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12... Eight. And it keeps going higher.

Basically, it sounds like I'm playing a very off-hand mostly-passives build, because so much of what I had to pick is stats, gear, buffs and so forth. It felt like playing... Say, an Invulnerability character where most of my "powers" just alter my stats. I'm more of a "stuff to do" type of player, in that I want to shoot pistols or throw fire or jump real high...

Speaking of which, is there any kind of jumping animation that's applicable to non-fatass characters who don't land with a thunderous crash, denting the world as they come down? It made sense for Xanta when I tried it, but Sam is sort of a "super ninja" and it would really only make sense for him to land softly. That would actually be a pretty big thing, especially since I don't like the flailing limbs animation.

Again, though - just stats aren't bad enough on their own as long as they don't keep me from enjoying the game. I'm not after ZOMGAWESOME!!! "Enough" will do.

I probably won't be using an archetype. I looked through the selection of them and, frankly... It's a fighting game character selection at that point. I want to make characters, not pick through someone's pre-made list of 15. But what you describe seems simple enough, and I guess I can always ask for more help. Only trouble is I won't be posting as Sam Tow any more. Thanks to Perfect World's corporate interests, I'll be posting as Stardiver. Well, at least Star is a cool character in her own right

Yeah, I can simply not pick up heavy stuff if it doesn't make sense... But what I mean is I don't like the idea of "packaging" such dissimilar concepts under the same monolithic stat. To me, it's a little like being forced to fly if you pick Sorcery as your power because... Well, most sorcerers fly, right? And most people who are good melee fighters are strong and strong super heroes can throw cars, right? I've always been a fan of picking stats separately from each other on a more micro level. It may be harder to figure out (Arcana and I never seem to see eye-to-eye on the subject), but at least it wouldn't make me feel like I'm paying for benefits I don't want to have.

Speaking of which, does Champions have such comprehensive status protection as we do here?

I'm quite the reverse. That screenshot is almost enough to change my mind about giving the game another shot. Ye gads that cop is fugly, and I'm not even looking at the hero on-screen.

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On point - thank you for the stats breakdown. Truth be told, "stats" tend to be where RPGs make or break for me. I ignore them for a long time, and as soon as I start HAVING to mess with them, I tend to find another game. If it's as simple as picking the stats I need the most and sticking to them, then sure, I can go with that. It should make things easier.

I still have to say, though - I'm not a big fan of variable critical change percentages. That always seemed like the most "gamey" of RPG meta-game stats, and for what it's worth, I'm glad we can't do that in City of Heroes... Or I can't, don't know about Inventions procs. So is "critical chance" what's supposed to up ranged damage? Isn't there a stat that straight up increases ranged damage directly?

I don't think that's a good position to take. I've already been vocal about dismissing the militant "Boycott NCsoft! Tank ArenaNet for their affiliation!" positions, but that doesn't mean I support sucking up to NCsoft. Yes, we need them, but we need to appeal to their sense of good business and love of money. I'm more than convinced there's nothing we can do to appeal to their kindness and generosity. Even if I believed corporations were capable of that, that kind of went out the window with the foreclosure.

I don't support trying to ruin NCsoft as a business because all attacking a publisher financially does is hurt the legitimate developers that rely on that publisher. But if said publisher treats employees badly, then I'm not going to look the other way and try to be nice. NCsoft pull the strings, and so we need to be diplomatic if we want anything to come out of this. But "diplomatic" is not the same as "timid."

That too. I have a lot of characters who were of only a SLIGHTLY wrong AT/Powerset combo and too high a level for me to fix, mostly from before GR when I had to stick to the ATs each side provided. Some I rerolled when the change was big, but going from, say, a Sword/Shield Brute to a Sword/Shield Scrapper probably isn't worth rerolling a level 50 character. Starting from scratch will let me "fix" all of the ones I wouldn't have messed with otherwise.

And consider something else. In the days before the notice of foreclosure, we discussed the notion of Range/Armour ATs. A lot of my old Blasters that I made were designed to be this, but I have since rerolled them as other ATs. Were such an AT to come out (if the game were still alive), I'd be very unlikely to reroll them AGAIN. If my character list were wiped, though... Yeah, I'd start them in the "right" AT. Of course I would.

Starting from scratch isn't a bad thing. Character levels can be regained, plus I think it would shed new light on progress speed now that everyone isn't sitting on a dozen 50s. The only thing I care about is stuff not related to characters, like badges and costume pieces.

Yeah, and the real truth of the matter is that's never how missions in City of Heroes were presented. Even when "Defeat Boss" and "Click Glowie" were the only objectives the game supported, you were never really sent to just "cull their population" or "gather ingredients." It was always that the 5th Column have invaded an office building and are brainwashing the people there, or the Skulls have picked a war with the Hellions and it threatens to spill over in the streets, or the forces of Vahzilok were planning to poison the city's water supply. Even if the mission came down to "defeat all," it was still presented as a story.

Missions in other MMOs - and I include most in Guild Wars 2 aside from "personal story" ones - tend to be menial tasks. Goblins are causing someone problems, so you go cull their number. Someone's ore transport cart turned over into the creek and giant frogs ate it. Go kill giant frogs. Someone has a contract to hunt kobolds, so go hunt kobolds and he'll help you. There's no story behind it, it's just busywork because an NPC needs you to do it. There's no story-relevant revelation, no plot advancement and above all else - nothing interesting. It's just work.

I'll be the first to admit the over-booked nature of SSA1 and its contemporary content didn't sit well with me. Too much hand-holding and too intrusive of a storyline that put the actual game second. But even that got better as we gave feedback on it, and even that wasn't as bad as no story at all. When a game is reduced down to just pushing buttons and punching dudes for no reason, I stop caring relatively fast. Pretty much once I run out of visuals that interest me, which I've yet to find in a Fantasy MMO anyway.