SpittingTrashcan

More and more, content is content, less and less limited in how it can be experienced. CoH and CoV have never, in practical terms, been two games. The lines that were drawn to make them appear that way are being erased one by one, and with them the rationalizations for viewing some types of content as distinct from others. It is already true that by rolling two characters you have full access to all the content in the game; come July, you won't even need to switch characters.

That said: having more diverse content is better. A lack of villainous content is not a content exclusion issue, but a content diversity issue - it's not that people are mechanically barred from playing heroic content, it's that some don't want to. I expect GR, in addition to further tearing down content exclusion, will also supply a significant amount of content diversity, being built as it is around settings and characters that are neither saintly nor irredeemable.

Teal Deer: There's a difference between content you didn't get and content you don't like.

Making information about your product accessible from more devices is just good marketing. Depending on the level of effort involved, this might be worth looking into.

Very shortly, there will be no "villain game" and no "villain content". A lack of content redside is going to be a lack of content, period. If sufficient numbers of people go vigilante, investing in redside will start looking like a better use of time and resources.

So as it turns out, I actually don't have anything more interesting to do than talk to fenceposts.

Ah, the City Vault. How many times has that been just about to happen?

There is a faction in this game where every member uses a longbow.

It is not the faction called Longbow. Longbow don't use longbows. Wyvern use longbows.

Also, the more times you say "longbow" the less it seems like a real word.

I don't believe the difficulty goes lower than x1/-1/no/no. On that level of difficulty, there are (sane!) builds that, especially at certain level ranges, will use up half or more of their endurance and/or health on a single spawn. Teaming is not always possible, and more to the point, it is explicitly a design requirement that all sane builds be capable of soloing at a rate above a certain minimum. A zero-recharge rest has no effect on people who already exceed this minimum; it merely brings up the rewards for the absolute lowest tier of performance. Considering how many orders of magnitude greater than this lowest tier we can elevate our performance without it being considered unbalanced, there's really no rewards balance reason not to throw the absolute worst performers a bone.

In fact, the recharge need not even be zero: for the absolute worst performers in terms of DPS/DPE, it may take as long as a minute to defeat a single spawn, so a 60 second recharge would achieve the same goal of making Rest available whenever it's needed.

Of course, I may as well be talking to a post for all the good it will do.

You know, I could argue the point - but when serious comparisons are being made between feature requests in a game and the campaign for civil rights, the discussion is more emotionally fraught than I am comfortable with. I am not a troll, and while it would be easy to needle people with that level of investment into wild emotional outbursts, I'm just not cruel enough to consider that entertaining. I don't think the expectations being expressed in this thread are realistic, but fortunately for me it is not part of my job to determine that.

I wish you all the best.

So that's 3 votes for plan 1 then.

Note: None of these objections are my objections, and I won't be defending them. They're not reasonable. Neither are players.

I may be alone in this, but I'd rather be at risk of dying than at risk of losing aggro. A Granite that loses aggro is a Granite that I can't use on teams, and a Granite I can't use on teams is a Granite I can't use at all. If I wanted temporary invulnerability and aggro loss from my tier 9, I would have rolled Ice Armor.

Frowny face, etcetera.

You know, when it's considered a bad change to make a thing more closely resemble the thing it's supposed to resemble, because people have been using that thing as a kludge to represent a whole bunch of other things it's not really intended to resemble... there are problems. Big problems.

When the current bases are so heavily reliant on completely unintended side effects of the original design, it becomes difficult to even tell when you're going to break something. All the bugs are now undocumented features. At this point, you have three options:

1) Never ever touch it again.
2) Go through a great deal of work every time you do touch it to make sure you don't break things you never intended in the first place.
3) Set it on fire and start over.

If you're a company with limited resources and a large installed user base who will jump ship at the first sign of trouble, you do number 1. If you're a big company, and you need to keep pushing updates to feed your product cycle but you also need to keep existing client software working even though it relies on dirty hacks into undocumented features of your API, you do number 2. And if your installed userbase is small, your application is crap, and you see the opportunity to gain a much wider audience by jettisoning the crud and starting fresh, you do number 3.

Right now, with respect to bases, PS has been sticking with number 1. In other cases, they've tried number 3, with mixed results. With respect to the game overall, they're pretty much sticking with number 2, whilst probably dreaming of the day they can start work on CoH2 and put plan number 3 into full effect. With respect to bases, it is up to (the tiny minority of) base builders to either convince the devs that if plan 2 can't work, plan 1 with tiny incremental improvements is better than plan 3, OR to leap with both feet and without the slightest complaint onto whatever new plan for bases emerges, accept that the old system is dead, dead, dead, and try to get as many of the features they want into the new system.

Of course, what is more likely to happen if prior experience is any indication is that the tiny minority who use the current system will pitch a fit, ragequit without testing the new system, and the rest of us will be left with an equally unwieldy if not worse new base system and no one to use it.

Dog with a sword you say?

But seriously: probably not in this game.

No, I'm saying that the changes made to the Market UI do not make me excited about prospective changes to the AE UI. I would love to see changes made to the AE UI, and backend, but I sincerely hope they are more thoroughly considered and vetted than the changes to the market UI.

In the developers' defense, it is hard to get a proper test of the market UI in beta - because the test server basically does not have a functional economy. It does, however, have a functional AE, so any potential AE change will be tested a lot more thoroughly and the volume of feedback (both in the sense of amount and in the sense of force) will be considerably greater.

It took me a while to realize you're talking about the Ouroboros Portal.

I would be inclined to agree if the Ouroboros Portal were a power inherent to your character, but it's not. It's an ability that is granted to you by the Menders of Ouroboros, and presumably they don't bother to customize it for each character who receives it. Like it or not, if you want to open an Ouroboros Portal, you must poke the buttons on your Honorary Ouroboros Mender Invisible Wristwatch.

Also it would require a bunch of developer time to implement, not least in creating an entirely new mechanism for you to pick the type of animation for your Ouroboros portal when you receive the power. That time might be better spent on other things. Do you really want this more than you'd want anything else the developers could use that time to give you? Even if you do, how many other people would agree?

Just from a mechanical perspective, I'd hate to be the guy tasked with designing the Incarnate system and content.

If it's easily soloable, it's "anticlimactic" and "a letdown" and "lol endgame".
If it's soloable but difficult, it's "powergamey" and "requires the supposedly optional IO system" and "excludes archetypes and builds" and is "stealth forced teaming".
If it requires you to assemble a team, it's "forced teaming" and "raiding content" and "exclusionary".
If it requires many characters working in concert and is based in common zones, it is "lol zone events" and "can't get enough people together" and "lags my machine" and "never happens when I'm online".
If it requires many characters working in concert and is based in population-capped instances, it is "just like hami" and "raiding" and "exclusionary" and "elitist" as well as everything above.
If it is cooperative, it is "why is my villain helping save the world"
If it is separate for each side, it is "there aren't enough people playing redside so I can't do it".

And if it requires PvP, it will be death, the destroyer of worlds.