SlickRiptide

I am a gold name again. I don't mention this "out loud" because I think any players will care. I mention it because I make positive votes with my wallet as well as negative ones. I want our friend Detective Freitag to know that his restraint in respect to allowing the thread to live had a material effect on the company's bottom line. An earth-shattering effect? No. But it was a material effect nonetheless.

I guess this means that a new Darkness Controller is probably going to be showing up in Atlas Park today, heh.

Hmmm, a glitch in the Matrix. I guess the powers that be have spoken.

In regards to ease of teaming, it's something of a puzzle to me that the LFG queue, which makes teaming for certain things about as easy as it could possibly get, seems to get so little use. I even see people recruiting for Death From Below in Help channel, when I've sat in the queue for upwards of ten minutes without getting assigned to team.

It's as if the idea of a PuG is too much for many people to desire or handle, even if the team they ultimately organize themselves turns out to be pretty much just a PuG.

Heh. I've tried that whole "discuss the state of gaming, not the games" schtick before and had it fly like a Led Zeppelin.

ObTeaming - I would agree that one of this game's strengths is that it was usually relatively easy to join up with a team, and it has only become easier as time has passed. (Anyone remember in the original CoH beta when the tram literally stopped at every station on its particular line? If you were three stations away, you got on and off three times.)

Then again, I am still mystified as to why "sidekicking" has never really caught on in other games yet. I like to think it's because the whole concept of "levels" is slowly beginning to become obsolete, but we're a long way from that still, I suppose.

See, here's the thing - The "dial it down and then dial it up little by little" philosophy applies to a lot more than just things like damage stats from new powers.

When things are hard, people equate the effort with quality. "Look how much hard work I'm putting into this, it must be really valuable to spend my time this way."

They come to associate the pain with the reward. Typically, if there's a problem it's not that the pain exists, it's that the reward is too small. Snobs even complain about the easing of the pain as "dumbing down" of the game.

Travel is one of those measures of the pain, or of challenge if you prefer. Removing the "challenge" of travel and teaming is, in the minds of a certain breed of player, a reduction in the value of the game and in the value of the player's overall investment in the game.

The question really comes down to how influential your hard-core players are versus those who are simply annoyed by obstacles to travel and/or teaming. In City of Heroes, we don't bat an eye at base teleporters or Assemble The Team powers because they fit the genre of the game. In a science fiction game, a teleport to your teammates ability breaks immersion. It becomes a case of game mechanics intruding upon game experience, even though the mechanics in question ostensibly promote game experience of a different kind.

I don't think there's any one-size-fits-all answer. I DO think that people who assume the attitude that "all would be well if we just had more forced grouping" are people who have a particular idea of what the MM in MMORPG actually stands for. A lot of them are the old school raid crew and a lot of them are simply of the mind that anything you can accomplish alone is not really anything of value. If only you forced encounters to require groups, you'd be automatically adding value to the game without making any other adjustments!

I agree that it's a silly concept but that's how they think. A $20 bottle of wine is clearly better than a $8 bottle of wine regardless of the year, the grapes, the locale that produced it, the winery, or any of a myriad of other factors that might make that less expensive bottle a good value. Bigger is better to these people, and it happens that a lot of "these people" are either MMO developers themselves or they have convinced the developers that they are the largest audience that exists for a proposed game.

The only thing that will change the perceptions of these people is for new games to launch that succeed despite failing to cater to their preconceptions.

Statesman is one of the dead people!

That's sort of a zen spoiler when you think about it...

It sounds like the flying disc power is conceptually a variation on the big red ball.

Does that make you happy or does it make you want an actual big red ball that much more?

I have to wait until friday to buy the paragon points and try it out first hand.

Excellent work, Michelle. I may end up converting back to a gold name for a month now just to see some of that stuff.

I was REALLY impressed with the music. If that guy sells CD's then you probably sold one for him once I get the time to look at his website.

In the final analysis, the cutting of ties to Jack can only be symbolic. His vision permeates the foundation of the game, and that is a good thing, frankly. His liberal arts mythology background gave the game a backdrop that is grounded in both classical and modern myth and legend and this makes it unique as a setting. It's one of the reasons that City of Heroes turned into something more than just a generic multi-player version of Freedom Force.

Yes, he could be abrasive and he almost single-handedly killed the game when he back-burnered it after only two years in order to focus on new projects. The reason we have the extensive world to play in now is that the game was purchased and taken away from him and given the attention it really required. To that extent, Jack earned the enmity that so many feel towards him.

Frankly, though, that was so long ago at this point that I'd expect that we would all have moved past it by now. Statesman is a fictional character, and he's no more tied to Jack directly than Positron to Matt or Manticore to Sean Fish. They're all just characters in a game.

Maybe now we can all just move on. I'll tell you this, though: I wouldn't complain about someone at Paragon Studios looking at the totality of the game and seeing what he did RIGHT and sending some more of that down the pipeline.

Whitenames can't post in that thread.

What does a producer do, anyway? What's the job description?

Given that I generally approve of Melissa's work as a world builder, I probably am happy that she's been promoted to a high-ranking position. At least it's promising to have someone move up through the rank and file to achieve that elevation.

Good luck to you, Melissa!

I wonder how Mr. and Mrs. Sean Fish feel about SSA 1-6?

(Manticore is Sean Fish's creation; he was the original "story guy". Mrs. Fish played the role of Shalice during the big Wedding Event a few years back, having, as I recall, just recently married Sean or gotten engaged to him at least, giving the proceedings a certain real life poignancy.)

Considering that Shalice apparently came close to destroying the human race (or at least mass murdering everyone in Paragon City) I think that we need to be proactive and put Penny down now before she gets a chance to be put into a similar position.

Really, if I was running the FBSA I'd be corralling all of the known psychics and fixing neutralization collars onto them.

So, it seems that the players who guessed Sister Psyche should also have had a share in the prize pool...

I'll tell you what - Next time I login I'm going to send each of the Sister Psyche guesses 5mil inf as a consolation prize. If my math works right, then if each Statesman guesser did the same (which I'm not saying anyone should or should not) then it would work out to be more or less what the division would have been if it had been distributed evenly to all of the Statesman and Psyche guesses combined.

I hope there aren't any more suprise deaths in chapter seven. It's turning more into "Who won't die?"

I realize it's not the the sort of sash that everyone wants, but the Elemental Order belt seems like it could serve as a substitute in a pinch.

PC Gamer - City of Heroes Dev Diary: Balancing story and combat in Bloody Bay

This sounds like it could be a promising new experience. The buff rewards sound almost over-powered, really, but I suppose it depends on just what they are.

I'm trying to find a dignified, calm and collected way to say "OMG OMG OMG OMG MUST HAVE NOW!"

This will have to suffice:



I also hope that the rings will be available for both genders, but regardless these designs rock so hard that the house's foundation is shaking.

For the record, I'll just say here that I do appreciate how easy it is to be an armchair quarterback about these things. I've made a few Architect missions and learned from the experience just how difficult it is to introduce any kind of subtlety into a medium that is mostly a point-and-click environment. My initial comment on the story was that they probably did the best they could within their constraints and I still think that's true, assuming that one of those constraints was time.

They basically rushed this thing out the door in order to give the Freedom launch a big-ticket marquee to draw people in with. "Hey! Look! We're going free to play and we're killing our signature character! You don't want to miss that!"

In an ideal world, the first SSA would have been a setup for THIS story, and this story would be wrapping up with the launch of I-23 when Statesman gets removed from the game environment. In fact, the events of I-22 would have served as a credible distraction that itself could help explain why the Phalanx is failing so epically. What better time to launch your own bid to conquer the universe than when the defenders have their hands full trying to deal with some other joker who's attempting the same thing?

One of the hallmarks of Paragon Studios has always been that the company policy was "If it's a choice between do it fast or do it right, then do it right." I feel like someone in authority chose the former course this time instead of the latter.

We'll see how chapter seven falls out a few weeks from now. I just can't see how this is going to turn into some eleventh hour success for the heroes that also happens to be a satisfying ending to the story.

As for Darrin Wade, I'll echo Khellendrosiic. Wade has achieved all of his primary objectives without any significant complications. Even saying that our PC hero is the one fly in the ointment isn't saying all that much, when he was able to plan far enough ahead to constantly distract our hero away from the true action. That's why Tyrka, for instance, doesn't really count as a failure for Wade. Her goal is to distract the PC hero, which she accomplishes. That's all Wade really cares about.

The details of whether she retains control of her current body or whether Faux Aurora gets obliterated or not are of no concern to him. The outcome of that encounter is not a setback for him because the encounter itself is all that he cared about. Just as he distracted our hero into wasting time shuffling through his hideout while he was busy luring Statesman into his trap. He may not quite know how to disable our hero but he knows how to keep us occupied and out of the way, which is all he needs. If anything, that makes the Xanatos/Nemesis comparison all the more apt, IMO.