SpittingTrashcan

I'm just going to take a moment to imagine how the process for electing a player representative group would go in the CoH community.

... oddly enough, the only mental image I can conjure up is a room full of wailing infants.

(I'm the cute one in the ducky hat - crying just as loud as the rest, of course. :P)

Me, personally? Very few. However, let's be honest here: when listing features that differentiate a MMO with the general public as your audience, the baseline is World of Warcraft. In the public consciousness, that's what MMO means. So when reaching out beyond your existing audience, it makes perfect sense to talk about the ways that you are different from World of Warcraft: in this case, a comic book superhero theme, highly customizable appearance, and a friendly community with good developer interaction.

I'm happy to have something to put in the hands of people who haven't seen the game.

Both of these are true in terms of differentiating CoH from the average MMO. CoH has more comic book in it than most MMOs, and the developers of CoH listen to and communicate with the players more than those of most MMOs. (And as a result, I'm pretty sure they have more desk-induced forehead bruises than the developers of most MMOs.)

If I'm reading this right, basically you're saying "give people the option to take a bad deal", that is, receive a recipe roll instead of merits equal to or greater than the price of that roll. I guess some people might take that option, but I'm not a big fan of systems deliberately designed to prey on the uninformed. I'd rather give people no choice than a fool's choice.

(Which is pretty much why I support forced random rolls - the mere existence of other options is harmful, although the harm it does is subtle and difficult to explain. Basically, taking the choice of a straight buy can be beneficial to an individual, but the lack in supply resulting from many individuals taking that choice is a harm shared by all the participants whether they take that choice or not - and indeed, when some take the choice to merit buy, the resulting supply lack encourages others to merit buy, compounding the problem. But good luck getting anyone to understand why letting them have nice things means that they have fewer nice things...)

Instead of X merits, give 'em an X-merit discount on their first roll on a character. Functionally equivalent under the present system, allows account-wide merit sharing, and if the select-roll-level system only allows you to roll at the rolling alt's level or below, creating a new alt just to roll cheap is only going to net you low-level recipes.

Hey, as a retarded rper I take derpity derp derp derp.

But seriously, if there's one suggestion that seems both popular and reasonable to implement it's being able to select your own roll level. The rest is nice, but as long as people don't roll their merits, there'll still be a lack of supply of pool C/D recipes. Switching over to 100% forced rolls is, well, let's call it unlikely due to pitchforks and torches and leave it at that - but some automatic generation of pool C/D recipes would be helpful.

See also: vet and temp powers during Rage crash.

Wait, mustn't talk about that. Forget I said anything. <.<

More complex from a user perspective, but perhaps less so from a developer perspective. Also, doesn't require the devs to discard or alter prior work, which they tend to be loath to do (and with good reason).

I may have mentioned before that I relish the freedom to propose changes which would end up doing exactly what they are intended to do, to the benefit of the majority of the players, but which would bring out frothy rage because they seem punitive. The developers don't have that freedom, the poor sods.

I think the difference here is quantitative. Hasten is useful, but it is not by any means necessary to saturate your attack chain. If we had fewer powers available, or their recharge times were longer by enough that without Hasten we would find ourselves frequently without powers to activate, it might be a closer analogy. But while it's not at all difficult to create a saturated (albeit suboptimal) attack chain, it's significantly harder to create an attack chain that does not drain endurance faster than it recovers. In other words, while endurance and recharge are both limits on performance, endurance is by far the nearer limit on activity, and it's more immediately frustrating to be able to do nothing than it is to be doing less than you could. At least now you can still brawl at 0 end, but as anyone will tell you, brawl is no substitute for doing something useful...

At any rate, it's clearly far too late in the life cycle of this game to remove endurance as a mechanic, but I expect that if the CoH developers were to start work on a different game, they would not retain the endurance mechanic as it is, but rather rework it as a limiter on performance rather than activity - in other words, set the baseline on performance and activity at zero endurance consumption, and reserve endurance for abilities that boost performance above this baseline.

Lastly: as tedious as this game may be, it's not half as tedious as endlessly rehashing design decisions that won't be revisited in the lifetime of this game.

Every reward system, including the one we had before merits, "tells people how to play the game." Or don't we talk about KHTF/Speeden?

Merits were specifically created with the intent of lessening the reward system's influence on play choices. Needless to say, it hasn't been an unmitigated success, but the intent was pretty clear.

We can brachiate too, but only well enough to make apes point and laugh. :P

As to how a humanoid bipedal digitigrade would move, well. District 9 did a pretty good job of it, given that the "prawns" were CGI-rendered on top of human actors. In terms of crouching, digitigrade ankles tend to have a greater forward swing and a lesser rearward swing than human ankles. So where humans kneel by tucking their feet under their buttocks, a digitigrade would instead fold their feet forward to lie under their shins. This also has the advantage of allowing you to pop straight up into standing.

In fact, a lot of the variations humans have on sitting are essentially workarounds to the fact that we can't just comfortably fold up our feet directly under our legs, because our thighs and shins are freakishly long compared to our metatarsals, and our hips are twisted in order to put our thighs vertical. The entire human body shows evidence of having been pulled from a more bendy arrangement into a vertical alignment, because of course this is precisely what happened.

So the question may not be how a digitigrade would sit, crouch, and so on, because it simply wouldn't do those things. The hard question is how a digitigrade would stand straight - because, generally speaking, it wouldn't. Digitigrades tend to fall into two categories: quadrupeds, and creatures with a horizontal posture, either bending forward their thighs to place their shins and metatarsals underneath their center of mass, or possessing a hefty tail to counterbalance their torsos. Basically, it'd be hard to make a bipedal, erect-posture digitigrade not look somewhat bizarre.

Well, yes, but mind that we're talking about directly copying animations designed for non-digitigrade legs to a digitigrade rig. The current rig basically fixes the digitigrade ankle joint firm and has the knee and toe joints do the work of the knee and ankle joints in the non-digitigrade rig. What Sam proposed was to fix the knee joint instead and have the ankle do the work of the non-digitigrade knee - which wouldn't work with the current animations for the reason I described.

Given infinite time and budget, the ideal thing to do would be to make both knee and ankle joint functional and re-animate all poses using that rig, but in the absence of that, the current solution of locking the ankle is probably the least weird-looking compromise available.

Also, I think Zombie Man was trying to point out that if digitigrades are anything walking on the balls of their feet, then anyone wearing high heels qualifies. Of course, as anyone who wears high heels for any significant length of time can tell you, the human leg is not adapted for digitigrade locomotion. Note that the distinguishing feature of a high heel is the high heel, basically a prop to keep the heel up...

I was going to ask about the EU, but as this is a promotion uniquely negotiated with a prominent US retailer, and you have no other preorder bonuses in the works, then logically in specific you have no preorder bonuses negotiated with EU retailers. Which is unfortunate for EU players, to be sure, but apparently it is not the sole decision of Paragon Studios to engage in these promotions - it takes two to tango. We have to take your word on how vigorously you pursued a dancing partner, of course.

Speaking as a US player, I wouldn't call it out of line to give EU players some kind of general loyalty reward. They've missed out on a lot of stuff over the years.

As for the rest, it certainly seems like you attempted to negotiate a fine line between pursuing promotional opportunities and disgruntling your existing customers. I'm happy to see that you were at least aware of the potential issues and tried to work around them.

Why, so they are. And yet it cannot be undone, apparently.

I'm trying to think of a way of conveying the information that the percentage indicator is intended to convey in a way that is more intuitive and less likely to be misread as a performance/threat value. Much though it runs counter to the prevailing sentiment concerning "real numbers", perhaps in this case a less precise indicator would be more evocative. A "reward value" bar that fills as you add powers, maybe. I'm laying out in my mind a list of the additive powers ordered from greatest to least contribution, with an accumulated contribution bar laid out next to each entry split into color-coded sections. Multiplier powers attach to the list at the point where their multiplier-limit indicates and have their own version of the accumulated bar with each additive power extended in length by the multiplier factor...

This could get hairy, and I haven't read nearly enough Tufte. I hope pohsyb has.

Pleasantly.