SlickRiptide

Hey, BaBs, I've got a technical question about something I see a lot with my Ill/Rad hero.

Let me start by saying that I just re-read the first post in this thread and re-familiarized myself with why costume-based customization is insufficient as a path to full customization. Thanks for that, by the way. It was insightful and a damn sight more info than any other game's devs have ever given to their players in the games I've played.

Anyway, here's the thing I'm curious about - The animation for Radiation Infection and Enervating Field is a kind of upraised hand palm-down thing that summons a cloud of radiation onto the target. (A pretty good example of the distinction between FX on the hero and FX on the target.)

[edit]Now that I think about it, EF's animation is actually more of a "double-fist haymaker" move, which may mean that I'm mis-remembering some of the stuff I talk about below this paragraph and it's really just an artifact of EF combined with a visible Nemesis Staff. The wages of writing from work instead of having the game open in front of me.[/edit]

If I whip out my Nemesis Staff and then activate RI or EF, it doesn't "sheathe" my staff and then play the "radiation summoning" animation. Instead, it plays an animation where my hero swings the staff-head down towards the ground (as if he was trying hold it overhead with both hands and club something on the noggin with it) and then the cloud of radiation is summoned onto the target.

This is actually pretty neat looking and sometimes I'll do it on purpose just for giggles. Usually, it happens just because my attack chain happened to put the two powers in sequence.

Clearly, the Nemesis Staff isn't attached to my characters as a costume piece. Where is the animation coming from? Is my staff essentially treated as a temporary costume piece while it's visible? Are we in a kind of mid-way no-man's-land where it's trying to treat it as a customized weapon and so it lands on the default animation used by the NPC's that wield the staff? It's just a lucky coincidence that the attack animation happens to work alright with the target FX animation?

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Except the guard dogs, who maintain the unappreciated responsibility of trying to get the hopelessly apathetic sheep to realize that the shepherds are only interested in their skins and, all too often, the flesh off their bones.

Dasher

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Okay, I thought I was done with this thread but I actually laughed out loud when I read this.

Two words: Spare me. If I ever need your help to guard my sorry sheep [censored] from the scary predatory suits and devs at NCSoft then I'll be sure to send you a PM.

Here's the thing, Dasher - Your list of grievances conveniently ignores every bit of content and development work that HAS gone into the game. The fact that the work done on the game failed to meet your approval or the approval of some unquantifiable subset of player is simply tough smeg.

Numbers talk - the number of subscribers has remained mostly steady since launch. The churn-out is roughly equal to the churn-in, with the determining factor between the highs and lows mainly being analagous to the time-span between issues. If that's a game on the ropes because the devs are a pack of wolves flaying their subscribers alive, well, tell me where I can buy a few shares of the company so that I can get in on the bone-stripping action.

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Holy cow... this is... unbelievable...!



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Wow, axe to grind? And no, all those grins don't turn anger, frustration and contempt into something palatable.

Look, the devs have said that the Citadel of Pain was implemented by a guy who is no longer with the company, who botched it so thoroughly that it needs to be scrapped entirely and redone. I'd find the link for you but I personally don't care about it. You can find it yourself if you do a minor amount of searching.

Now, you can cry all you want about how the devs ignore you (pardon me, "the players" which apparently equals you) and anyone else who isn't disgusted is a fawning fan-boi willing to eat whatever smeg the red-names deign to feed them. If that's your thing, more power to you. Your belief in it doesn't, fortunately, make it true.

What I never understand about the people who post this sort of crap is why YOU are voting with your wallet for the very devs you supposedly abhor. If everyone who plays this game is not getting their money's worth, then why the smeg are you throwing away your hard-earned money? If you're playing a game that makes you so incredibly frustrated, then who's really the sheep here?

I've payed, played, and canceled more games than I can remember at this point. I was a correspondent in Star Wars Galaxies, which made me a liaison between the players and the devs. When I got fed up with the devs and their direction, I didn't cry about how awful they were and then say "But this is the only Star Wars MMO around and I have this position of responsibility so I'm going to keep on paying them for it regardless." I moved on to another game.

I'm here now because I like the game, I like the devs, and I love the level of communication between the devs and the players. If my standards don't measure up to yours, Dasher, then I can only shrug and say "too bad, so sad". My reasons for playing and voting with my wallet by paying the devs are my own. Fortunately for me, they don't depend one whit on whether some random person thinks I'm a sucker.

If you're calling us suckers and YOU'RE STILL PAYING, who's really the sucker?

No smilies here.

Well, thanks for all the feedback. Maybe I'll do something with the idea anyway, just to get practice writing if nothing else, and see if I CAN put an original twist on an old theme.

So, something in my subconscious was percolating yesterday and it spat out this story idea. It seemed really wonderful and epic, like you could build a whole story arc around it concerning what it means to have to commit an evil act in order to prevent a greater evil. Where's the line between heroism, what does that choice do to a person, etc... Great stuff, really. I was so taken with the idea that I bounced it off of Hero 1 and he replied with a courteous PM about it.

It wouldn't go away, though, and so I'm thinking "Maybe I'll write short story about it. This has so much potential!" and I'm driving home from work and as I'm considering different ways to approach this idea, this little voice in the back of my brain says "An Eye For An Eye".

"Oooo,that's good!", says I. Then I paused. And I thought "Waitaminute....." Then I realized. "@#$#! I'm composing a Paragon City version of Failsafe!"

For those who haven't read Failsafe (and shame on you, go read it!) it's a Cold War novel from 1962 that deals with the consequences when an American bomber with a nuclear payload is accidentally activated to attack Moscow, and Soviets and Americans alike prove unable to stop the plane. The ending is horrible, not because a nuclear war is triggered but because of the action ultimately taken to avert a nuclear war. Having grown up a Cold War Kid, as Billy Joel put it in his song _Viktor_, that novel has always held a particular resonance for me.

So, I'm speaking to my inner voice now, telling it "Okay, well, maybe it's just that doing a good act turns out to be the trigger for an immense evil, and so that good act has to be avoided despite the pain it cause a Hero to behave against his nature. Some kind of Oroborous story."

"Oh!", the Inner Voice says. "You mean like in The City On The Edge Of Forever?"

Now, if you need THAT reference explained then you don't have enough Geek Cred to be in this forum in the first place. At any rate, I threw up my figurative hands at that point and dumped the whole idea into the "reconsider" file.

It's still bugging me enough that I may go ahead and employ my paltry writing skills on a story just to get rid of it.

In the meantime, I have to ask - Are there really no new ideas? Is the old saw about there being seven plot ideas and otherwise nothing new under the sun except how many variations writers manage to make of them really true? I'm not any kind of "real" writer. How disappointing must it be for someone who considers themselves to be an "author" to be working on this great idea and suddenly realize "Oh no...."

While not intending to be necroposter here, I'm curious about something - What happens if you make a demorecording of a session at the tailor or facemaker?

So, with all of these lovely new configurable power trays, is this the first step towards a fully configurable and player moddable UI?

I suppose a Rikti Chimp would have been out of the question - hopefully any future pets will reflect not only player themes abut the previous pets' themes as well.

I like the new vet-pets. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that you'll see some non-vet pets showing up as recipes sometime in the next couple of issues, depending on how these are received by the general populace.

I'd be happiest if they dove-tailed a little better with the full set of non-combat pets. At a stretch, the fairies can sort of complement the demons, but there's really nothing to complement the Rikti monkey. The drone kinda-sorta, if you really stretch your imagination, but truthfully, IMO, the demon and monkey just don't fit with any of the buff pets.

So, who wants to speculate that the 60-month vet reward will be a melee combat pet; a themed lieutenant? I'll need a Cannon Knight to go with my Oscillator and mini-cog. *heh*

I got the email, I thought about whether it was really worth it, and I owned it ten minutes later.

Would I have preferred it to be a bit heavier on content? Sure. I bought it at least partly to encourage NCSoft to create more such packs. If the next special content pack is equally light for a similar price, then I may decide to take a pass. Hard to say.

As it is, the designs are gorgeous, and the stage magician and zombie bride that have kicked around my imagination at one time or another are now able to be fully realized.

It's worth it to me, and it's clearly worth it to many others. If it's not worth it to you, then give it a pass. It's that simple. I spend anywhere from $6 to $8 on lunch every day. $10 for a totally cosmetic content pack is not a big deal to me. My only caveat is that the next one will need more content or else will need to be so compelling that I have to have it regardless of its light weight.

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perhaps Cryptic knows their MUO game is so killer, they knew CoX would not be able to compete and figured it may be a better idea to sell the healthy cow than have it die in their hands.

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I think it more likely that, aside from all of the player concerns voiced periodically on the forums, that the program managers at Marvel, Microsoft, and NCSoft were all telling Crytpic, "You've got a conflict of interests here. What are you doing about it?"

Selling the "City of" IP is a big gamble for Cryptic. They're sacrificing an established income stream for a cash payment and the potential that the Marvel brand name will help them establish a new income stream. Despite the players that moon around about how "of course a Marvel game will beat the pants off of CoH", history shows that gamers have not been kind to licensed properties in the past.

The Matrix was a miserable failure. (The guy who said it was a successful niche game at first was ignoring the fact that their peak of subscriptions was less than 70k and that a blockbuster property like The Matrix was expected to draw multiple hundreds of thousands, not a "niche" audience.) Galaxies was, and continues to be profitable, but it was never the success that the producers rightfully expected a Star Wars game to be, despite (or maybe because of) the involvement of LucasArts. DDO should have been a runaway success, yet it continues to struggle. LOTRO looks to be another Galaxies - profitable enough that it will probably live for several years, but no more successful than any of its competitors.

The only licensed property that has really succeeded (and succeeded wildly beyond anybody's expectations) is WoW. That is because it was developed and published by Blizzard, the creators of the IP in the first place, and it was based on a IP whose fans were already primed for a new kind of gaming experience involving that IP. Additionally, WoW (no matter what its detractors say) had depth at launch that hardly any other game has had thanks to the fact that it DOES have this huge IP history to build on. Is it formulaic? Sure, but it's formulaic in all the right ways and it manages to build from there.

The point being that MUO and DCO are not lining up to be runaway hits out of the starting gate just because they happen to based on DC and Marvel universes. Players are not going to be satisfied in the long term with playing with Superman and Spiderman if it isn't actually all that fun to play.

Ummm, I've gotten off the topic so I'll stop here. The main point is that this looks to me like it's a good thing for both NCSoft and for CoX and I've been watching the industry long enough to have a decent sense of these things. NCSoft would not have set things up in this fashion unless their intention is to try and insure that the status quo stays unchanged except for the better (like with more cash for projects and the ability to leverage resources from other divisions).

Hey, if this is the first step to a NCSoft Access Pass, so much the better. I know I'll be in line to buy one if that happens.

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I'm pleased that the doom and gloom has been (relatively) minimal after this announcement.

I think of myself as an old hand at the MMO genre. I've seen it all over the last ten years and I wanted to address the people who are fearfult of NCSoft turning into SOE.

It's true that in the past things generally took a turn for the worst if a publisher bought out a studio and took over. It's usually a case of efficiency. The publisher is interested in cutting costs and streamlining operations. This is part of what happened when SOE bought Verant and "streamlined" EQ. It's part of what's happened at SOE for every game they buy. That is, the dev team is either absorbed or fired outright and the SOE dev team takes over. There's a whole new command structure running the game with different goals, a different vision, and usually a greater interest on simplifying and economizing than on developing and expanding.

SOE isn't alone in this regard. You only have to look at EA and just about every MMO they've tried to publish to see how it works at other publishers. I still remember how EA bought out Westwood (Earth and Beyond) and within a couple of months Westwood had effectively ceased to exist and E&B was gone within the year. EA had no idea at all about how to run an MMO. I fear for WAR (but that's another topic).

The point being, that this situation is nothing like what's gone on before. The reason is two-fold.

Firstly, NCSoft has worked closely with Cryptic from the very beginning. They were truly partners in the development of the CoX franchise, to the point were we, the players, sometimes needed a scorecard to tell who was working for what company.

Secondly, NCSoft has retained the entire development team and set them up as a studio of their own. This isn't the typical buy them out and assimilate them deal. This is more like NCSoft spun the CoX team off from Cryptic as a wholly owned subsidiary. The people who provided the talent and the vision for CoX are providing the vision and talent under NCSoft. For all intents and purposes, the only thing that's changed is that there's a NCSoft suit sitting in the captain's chair instead of a Cryptic suit sitting in it. The people running the ship are all still at their stations.

Someone at NCSoft had the smarts to say "Why fix it if it ain't broke?" I'm sure that there were bean counters at NCSoft who were rubbing their hands with glee, saying "Wow! Look at all of the money we'll save now by merging the "City of" staff with our staff! We can lay half of them off and replace them with our people and really make the stockholders happy!" Whether it was Geko or someone else, I'd really like to shake the hand of whoever stood up and said "I think our current relationship and processes are working just fine and we should just keep things working like they do now." That person deserves a cookie.

Of course, this also suggests that NCSoft thinks the "City of" team has the potential to become a development house in their own right. I shouldn't be awfully surprised to find out that NCNorCal has a new game or two on the schedule next year.

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Did you know...

...this is the third iteration of this thread since CoH was released?

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No, it's still the original thread. Thanks to Statesman posting in it early on, it's never been pruned. It just pops up once in a while when somebody new discovers it and makes a contribution.

I'd recommend that the judges read the rules carefully this year. We shouldn't see a repeat of last year's questionable or outright non-conforming winners.

As far as designing a hero that looks like something from your closet, that'd be easy but it wouldn't be cheating. It also wouldn't win unless your closet is a lot more heroic than the average closet. The contest isn't just about accurately recreating your hero. It's about showing an obvious level of creativity and enthusiasm. Look at the past years' winners (particularly the first year) to see what it takes to be a winner.

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So... if we can only create a door to the Ouroboros Citadel after we've been exposed to time travel, and we can only time travel by going to the Ouroboros Citadel, how do we get exposed to time travel in the first place?

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Perhaps some of the time travelers who are already in our midst will have something to do with it.

Empire City is almost certainly New York City. New York is the "empire state", hence Empire State Building.

Now, why New York City became Empire City when Chicago apparently exists unchanged is an unanswered question. Feel free to speculate that that reason is that our heroes/villains will one day be able to travel there...

Occam's razor should be invoked here. There's no need to start imagining entire new histories for the alternate reality. Unless we're shown evidence to the contrary, history up to the point of the outbreak can be presumed to be identical.

I don't think that Dr. Miller can be the lynchpin in this case. There's no direct tie between him and the events of Breakout. The article makes it clear that Jenkins is the key figure in the failure of the breakout attempt. All of the events happen normally except that Jenkins is not rescued. I don't see any way to tie that into the plague without a lot of hand-waving. (Although I'm beginning to wonder how Jenkins could have "sung" without having been captured and interrogated before the breakout attempt was even made...)

The missing factor is the player herself. Something prevents the player from fulfilling his destiny.

The question is whether this is a time travel story or an alternate universe story. Are we supposed to undo the damage to the time stream or are we supposed to inspire our alternate selves to take up the mantle of Hero or Villain and set things back onto the "proper" path?

Well, this has to be one of the most teaseriffic teasers Arctic has given us.

Oh, and a big thumbs-up to Arctic on Warden McGoohan. That was the cherry on the sundae.

In any case, Warcabbit is correct. This is what a world without "you" looks like. It's a world in which Patient Zero infects the city. The Wheel of Destruction is assembled. The Faultline Dam is blown. Ubelmann succeeds. The fortune teller dies. The Troll Task Force fails. The MegaMech is launched. Sister Psyche does NOT separate from Aurora Borealis.

Thanks to the repetitive nature of the game mechanics, the players tend to lose sight of the fact that, from the perspective of the people of Paragon City, each of these story events happens only once. Ernesto Hess doesn't send his task force twenty times a day. He sends it once and YOUR HERO is the one who stops the Mega Mech. The story of Paragon City is YOUR story.

This is what happens when your story is terminated at chapter one.

I REALLY want to know who that Orouboros insignia belongs to.


I forsee a lot of old vet characters getting their isolator badges...

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So just because we don't work for cryptic...doesn't mean we cant help cryptic.


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Actually, it does.

The problem is that we armchair designers don't actually know anything about the architecture of the CoH game engine. It's easy to look at the externals and make assumptions about what the internals look like. Unfortunately, assumptions is all they are. Without detailed knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the game engine, none of us forumites are in any position to make any useful suggestions to Cryptic; never mind whether the people making the suggestions have the qualifications to be making them.

Imagine that your brother tells you about his new car and how it's great, but the performance is not quite up to par. You look at the symptoms, and you say "Well, I'll bet we can just tune up the fuel injection system and rebuild the piston rings and we'll have it purring pretty in no time."

So, you send it to the mechanic and the mechanic says "Sorry, no can do." When you ask "Why? It sounds simple enough." he responds "It's a rotary engine. It doesn't have fuel injectors or pistons."

I think it's time we all just accepted the idea that the failure to implement power customization after more than three years probably indicates that the game engine "doesn't have pistons", no matter how much it looks like a standard combustion engine from the outside.

There may eventually be a clever person who figures out how to do it within the limitations of the game engine, but that person will be a Cryptic developer (or maybe an intern who was never told that it's "impossible", *heh*) who understands the client/server and the underlying architecture. We armchair designers may be amusing ourselves or making ourselves feel better about our unrequited wish fulfillment by "helping" but the fact is that we're not really telling Cryptic anything they don't already know.

Nice backgrounder, Arctic. Now, can you get the zone designers to change Talos so that the Warriors are winning at least a few of their confrontations? If we go strictly by what we see on the streets, the Warriors are a bunch of pansies and it's the Freaks and Tsoo that own Talos Island.

Yeah, there are also the police band missions in which you rescue Lois Watson and Peter Kent respectively. Someone needs to introduce those two!

Gabriel's Hammer, the inventable sledgehammer power, is named for Peter Gabriel, the musician who recorded the song _Sledgehammer_.

Personally, I think the proposed schedule of one weekday and one weekend day per week to be a good permanent schedule for the invasion

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The people who are insisting that the level 1-5 range is too small because of the insignificant amount of work to achieve level 6 appear, to me, to be missing the point; which is that the insignificance of the characters in that level range is what makes them viable targets for name recovery. A player who comes back to the game and finds out that Mr. Tamborine Man (security level 3) has lost his name is going to experience a minor irritation and go on about his business. A player who put days, weeks or months into a character is much more likely to be annoyed enough to quit again.

As for the viability of an old player returning - it happens all the time. Players return when new issues are published. They return at holiday events. They return when the player has grown bored of his current game and experiences nostalgia. They return when NCSoft runs a "give us another chance" free account reactivation.

Not to mention that if NCSoft ever decides to create an "all access" pass along the lines of SOE's access pass, you're going to see a lot of really old-timers returning for the perceived value.

In any case, it makes the most sense to start "small" and expand from there. You can always add more levels to the "recovery" range, but you can't take them back if you go full-bore at the beginning.

In reviewing some info on the Did You Know? thread, I've discovered that the Statesman's Statements thread looks to have been pruned away, probably in a forum re-org, rendering the links to that thread inoperable.

I've taken the liberty of re-posting the message, only this time I'm linking to the original Statesman's Statements articles that are stored in the Wayback Machine (i.e., The Internet Archive).

While the following explanation will seem obvious to some, I want to make sure there's no confusion about what these links lead to. The following links point to copies of the pre-release City of Heroes website from the end of the year 2002 and early 2003. This is the period in which the game was still being conceived and, later, re-conceived. While the pages may look like real forum pages, they are just "snapshots". Clicking the links on the archived page may or may not take you to something interesting from the same time period, but you won't be able to reply to any of the posts in the forum thread being displayed, and some of the pictures on the pages may not all be displayable.

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Did you know... Statesman's Statements

City of Heroes had a forum operating for close to two years before the game went to beta test. In the winter of 2002/2003, Statesman posted a series of articles talking about his views on comics, comics history, and the future of the genre.

Of the seven published articles, four are still available and have been re-posted on the current forum for the edification of the current batch of players.

Statesman's Statements #1 - Top Ten Trade Paperbacks

Statesman's Statements #2 - Top Ten Villains

Statesman's Statements #6 - Comic Book Camp

Statesman's Statements #7 - Comics and Heroes

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