concreteshift

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Sounds to me like Cryptic already has alot put into a new hero/villain game and noe that the Marvel MMO fell thru, they are gonna use it in SOME game. Enter champions. It's all about the character creation and level of uniqueness your characters can have for me...so I'll keep an eye on it....but I don't have my hopes to high.

As far as this "groovy" announcment, what a horrible PR guy. Who says things like groovy anyway? I have a feeling there are big plans for a CoX 2, which is good and bad. Good because they could get everything right this time, and bad because it means this game will suffer and the new one could end up sucking. Just keep your fingers crosses I suppose.

Also, this is a outtake of a response of a PT I sent Castle...

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5. With some confusing statements lately about groovy futres and what not....will this year be similair to last year? Should we expect issue 12-14?
Magic 8 Ball says, "Reply Hazy; ask again later."

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That struck me as odd, maybe I'm reading into it to much, but it seems like things are kinda up in the air right now. If not I think he would have responded with something like "yes, we will try to match last years content output, but it's not a garantee".

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I wouldn't read too much into it. Basically, a new competitor has just appeared like some ultra supervillain that everyone thought long gone in a swanky underground base. Hazy replys should be the norm as NCSoft and the devs have to map out a strategy, assess resources and make decisions. These things take time.

I do think that a massive upgrade to combat the CO features being touted needs to be done though. CoH 2 should be on the roadmap.

It would also help to give us some clues for the coming year. Some incentives for continuing the subscription should be warranted.

Your artwork is amazing.

I think this last work will generate a lot of commission interest for you. Good luck!

As a WP newbie (leveling my first Tanker ever as a WP/EM), why does everyone push back High Pain Tolerance all the way to the 40s? Is it not that essential?

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Because at the time NCSoft was only the publisher, and Cryptic was the developer. Had NCSoft devoted more resources to the game, they would have wanted an increased share of the profits. And that's essentially what they did. They negotiated for complete rights to the game, and now can devote more resources to the game, while reaping all the rewards of their investment.

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Only the publisher? In the games industry, the publisher wields complete power over the developer. You need to understand how intellectual property and publishing works. The developer is essentially a work for hire which contracts out to the publisher to develope "X" work. The publisher in turn provides funding to the developer and dictates marketing and support, oversees development decisions and when to publish. The publisher in turn gets to reap the profits of selling the units published, the profits from the subscription fees and almost all ancillary licenses. The developer in turn sometimes gets a percentage royalty after profitability is established at a certain level. And this royalty is certainly not at the level of which the publisher gets his slice of the revenue generated from unit sales and subscriptions.

The publisher typically wields all the cards. Look at EA, Activision and Take Two. The publisher is the one who is the most powerful. Do you think Irrational tells Take Two what to do or what their profit percentage is? That's why so many games are released buggy or early, it's because the publisher demanded it.

Again, it doesn't add up. NCSoft would be the immediate beneficiary of the increased funding for City of Heroes. Why wasn't this increased funding done before?

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I think I9, I10, and the soon-to-be-released I11 did add "huge features" to the game. The fact that they can now do even more just makes things that much better, but that doesn't take away from what they have already done.

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Not to the level that was promised with the planned paid expansion set that was announced, then withdrew. Our free Issues, while great, was not in the same scope as those plans that were announced. I seem to remember that CoH was going to be updated with all new powersets across ALL archetypes, not including additions through the standards issues. But...it wasn't done, due to the same excuse that is always given (which I'm sure is very true) of not enough resources. Heck, the Cathedral of Pain/Items of Power/Supergroup base raids feature is still not fixed. One of the single most hyped and marketed features for City of Villains.

Which again, begs the question, if NCSoft was 100% behind Cryptic after the acquisition of the MUO development, why wasn't this funding and resources given?

It's because NCSoft didn't want to fund a developer that is also developing for a rival publisher. Since Cryptic was developing for both NCSoft and Microsoft, some funds would definitely go generally Cryptic in general and you couldn't account for some dollars. Also there would still be staff that would share technology, resources and expertise between the two development teams. It's not like there was a chinese wall between the two teams. NCSoft, in the end, was hesitant to provide lots of money to a developer where that money might end up helping to develop a rival game. There was a serious conflict of interest and it's clear this buyout shows it.

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You're making is sound as if Cryptic was barely keeping City Of alive, and NCSoft swooped in, buying out Cryptic's share of City Of on the cheap, breaking apart the development team in the process, and leaving us with a skeleton crew of developers serving only to prolong the inevitable demise of the franchise. I guess I'm just not seeing it that way. All indications seem, to me at least, to show that NCSoft saw something that was good, but could be made even better.

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That's not what I'm saying. I was just criticizing the marketing b.s. that's was drolled out to calm the masses when the MUO announcement was made. There was a clear conflict of interest and contrary to what everyone was saying that one developer could develop for two competing rival publishers in the same genre that clearly is not the case. I just think that the people who raised concerns about the funding and development of CoH by Cryptic after the MUO announcement were proven right. I'm not criticizing the change, I'm just criticizing the propaganda that was played and how some players who brought up this issue were hung out to dry that our concerns were baseless.

I have high hopes for the new NCSoft branch and I think its a decent move. I believe in this iteration of the team better than the one run by Statesman.

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I dont want CoX to be on the way out. I dont want NCSoft to TREAT it like its on the way out. Id have been just fine with this announcement if it HADNT included gifts to valued customers.

But it did include gifts, and those gifts are aimed at just about everyone else who plays CoX. And then I go back and look at my Auto Assault gifts, and my Tabula Rasa gifts, and I shudder.

In the end, I really dont want gifts from NCSoft on a game I love. It just doesnt bode well.

Im happy to be proven wrong.

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We'll be happy to prove you wrong. I'd like to reiterate the statement, found in a couple places in the announcements: "We are now in a position to make a major reinvestment in the City of Heroes product line.

We're aren't staffing up to sit around and do nothing

Everyone here is very excited with the prospects and plans for the future!

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Ok, then it begs the question: Then why wasn't this re-investment done earlier??

When Cryptic announced the MUO I seem to remember a very positive State of Game Address by the head designer which made some very extreme promises to add huge features to the game only for such to be retracted and given the usual "not enough resources" reasoning. In addition, all the marketing copy was stating that NCSoft was still 100% behind Cryptic despite landing the MUO assignment and will greatly support expansion of the CoH.

Now we're told this acquisition had to be done for the real re-investment. Why weren't those resources given then, when presumably Cryptic was at its strongest, with the all the legacy developers and the new hires. When there would be a sharing of expertise and skills. Now half of Cryptic has left to form a new studio under NCSoft. It just doesn't add up, sorry.

Thank you. It's very informative and direct. Now I don't have to wander around with random contacts hoping they will eventually send the Fortune Teller my way.

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As it is, things have been fluid and flexible and right up until the end things have been going through some pretty fundamental changes that overall make the whole endeavor better. The fact that intimate details of the system haven't been pinned down gave me more faith in the entire testing process. So trying to nail them to the wall for not having it all documented and publishing full guides is pretty weak behavior in my mind.

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And I never stated that Cryptic's fault is that they do not have full guides ready. I fully well understand that details have not been finalized for final release and changes will likely to occur.

I did state that it is wrong to argue that we will not have documentation because it is presented as a Hobbsian dilemma where we as players should choose between documentation or content and that it is implicit for the players to provide such documentation without the underlying data. My criticism stands.

I played around on Test too. There are a ton of issues that need to be explained to the player. To this day, I still have a damage/recharge IO that I can't slot into Nova and there is absolutely no reason given in the management screen. Looking at how many questions have been generated by players going through the tutorial and playing on Test, it is not casual friendly. Looking at all the exceptions that come into play with IO sets, bonuses, exemplaring, etc., none of which are in the in-game documentation and have to be footnoted by a developer post in the forums, casual understanding of Inventions is not there.

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I suppose the qualifying factor is this!

Resource allocation.

Would the subscribing consumer base prefer NCsoft/Cryptic to allocate resources to publications that are often outdated due to upgrades within a very short time period.

Or would they rather have new content, bug fixes, game features.

That's the deciding factor.

Ex

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I'm sorry but that is an outright fallacy. You are presenting the the issue as an either/or and any liberal arts major knows the fallacy of a strict dichotomy.

All you have to do is look at World of Warcraft to see how they do it. Yes, the competition includes straight out, a talent calculator that provides all the information on a power you need to plan:

link

If Cryptic states that it is too busy to provide decent documentation then they need to release all the underlying numbers and information to Enhancements and Powers. That is the third choice available.

The past arguments made by Statesman and Positron on how they wished to keep CoX casual now has gone out the window with the Pandora's Box of Inventions. Slotting and set bonuses are now so complicated, I can't plan out a build on the fly.

As someone said much earlier, the players should not be reverse engineers. Give us the numbers and we will draft the guides.

It's hypocritical that you discourage PIGG diving but then encourage us to provide documentation on gameplay that can't be done without it.

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...eloquently showing that an MMORPG can be successful by breaking the norm and thinking outside the box.

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Now how is introducing loot and PvP thinking outside the box again considering WoW and Lineage had it prior?

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The point I would like the Devs to get is: how bad we all want spines to get a new look.

Later,
Zyph

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Pretty much. Spines looks so ridiculous.

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You're all missing the point! The point is, _Castle_ has a completely doofy character concept - samurai armor and spines?!? Really?

*grin*

What a luser

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At least a Spines Samurai kinda makes sense. Better than a samurai that has wind powers whose name is.... Samurai

Ahh Superfriends, the memories.

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Ill bet Castle is wishing he had never said anything on this post at all.

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Not at all!

Samurai: It was a player, not an NPC. I know, since I was playing him! He is a Spines/Regen scrapper.

The power: What you are seeing is actually a graphics bug created by the demo-record/playback process we use to take screenshots.

And now you know!

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And now we know...The mystery was so much better.

So how is it all the other spines aren't showing? Another graphics glitch?

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He already said. They demorecorded the battle and used the demo to take the screenshots. There's a glitch that doesn't show the body spines in the demorecord. I assume its similar to the Kheldian form glitch that happens when you do the same thing.

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Maybe I misunderstood. I thought what he meant by "what you are seeing" is referencing the spear like blade extending from the player's hand.

I guess the graphics bug:

1) Creates a spear like blade, and

2) Removes all other spine accoutrements?

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Ill bet Castle is wishing he had never said anything on this post at all.

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Not at all!

Samurai: It was a player, not an NPC. I know, since I was playing him! He is a Spines/Regen scrapper.

The power: What you are seeing is actually a graphics bug created by the demo-record/playback process we use to take screenshots.

And now you know!

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And now we know...The mystery was so much better.

So how is it all the other spines aren't showing? Another graphics glitch?

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Now I hear you guys... you all seem to dislike the Story Arc aspect of this system. I've had some discussions with the team yesterday about what we could do instead, and still keep the flavor of the four pool system, because having the extra three pools allows us to not only reward risk/reward, but time/reward as well. Takes longer to do a Task Force? Here's a nice bonus you can't get anywhere else. Finish the Respec trial, but already have all your Respecs? Here's a nice reward that carries with it some good inherent value.


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WHY STORY ARC EXCLUSIVES ARE BROKEN:

Because they are the ONLY thing you can't repeat. The only. Think about everything else on the list posted by Dr. Brainstorm:

TF - Any character 12+ can do Positron's TF (if a hero, obviously) ANY TIME THEY WANT.
Trials - Any one 24+ can do a respec trial ANY TIME THEY WANT.
Killing mobs of all levels - With exemplar you can do this ANY TIME YOU WANT.

You might need a team, that's OK. But story arcs can only be done once. Fix that or no recipes be available only from story arcs. All you're going to accomplish is creating:

ULTRA RARE LOOT

Which goes against everything you said you wanted to accomplish. It will make the game more hardcore than WoW or Everquest II.

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Absolutely agreed. And this thread still really hasn't answered that question.

If there's no Flashback system, there's going to be many, many (composed of CoH's huge pool of veteran/experienced/long-standing supporters) who will be locked out. No question of this.

Not a good path to go down on with the Introduction of Inventions. And the answer should not be roll another alt.

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<QR>

Does the nuke from En/En Nova leave the blaster disoriented? I ask because I have never had this happen after I fire off Nova, I pop a few blues and finish off whoever is left. I am also running CJ and Accrobatics so that maybe why I am not getting disoriented. My blaster is only lvl 32 so I don't know if it will disorient my blaster as she gets higher in lvl's and in power.

Thanx for the info.

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There's no disorient in Nova.

So what happened to Lord Recluse? Anyone know? Just curious. This is not a rant.

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Probably the best way to answer this is to refer to comics -- When The Human Torch 'goes nova' he puts everything he has into it and pretty much knocks himself out. That's the 'feel' these powers are meant to reflect.

As for MoG, no comment at this time.

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Yea but when the Human Torch goes nova, he can melt Ultron to slag.

When I go nova, there's still two remaining Devouring Earth bosses that chuckle and then proceed to introduce my hero's face to a radical pummeling and an opportunity to use my HMO copay on the teleport to the hospital.

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heh, heh.

Should have went Ice. I'm usually running the other way by the time the mobs realize who hit them with Blizzard.

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Believe me, I would've went Ice if I'd known how this crazy game is actually played. Energy/Energy was my very first character. I was a newb and this is my very first MMO.

Energy looked cool. It had powers like Power Burst and Nova. It conjured up visions of Captain Atom, Starfire, Nova and Silver Surfer.

The only reference I had for Ice was a character that quit the X-men, got routinely shot down for a date by Firestar and played second banana to Spiderman.

Boy was I wrong.

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Probably the best way to answer this is to refer to comics -- When The Human Torch 'goes nova' he puts everything he has into it and pretty much knocks himself out. That's the 'feel' these powers are meant to reflect.

As for MoG, no comment at this time.

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Yea but when the Human Torch goes nova, he can melt Ultron to slag.

When I go nova, there's still two remaining Devouring Earth bosses that chuckle and then proceed to introduce my hero's face to a radical pummeling and an opportunity to use my HMO copay on the teleport to the hospital.

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I know I haven't been around the forums long enough to experinece the repeated dissapointment some have, but I say, "Let's get excited about this." Castle has posted in our forum three times last I heard, and he's posted twice in this thread. What may have happened is that they have worked their way through the long laundry list of other things, and the squeaky wheel is finally getting some grease. I, personally, am going to hold out and hope that we're going to get the changes that some of you have been waiting so long for.

I don't care what changes they are making to blasters, as long as they are positive ones. It means we're getting some attention.

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I'll believe it when I see it. We've seen dev posts before talking about how they are really going to look at Blaster issues before and that the secondaries will be adjusted to address so many inconsistencies in implementation. So far I've seen nada and zip, which adds to zero.

We are so far down the priority ladder for changes we'll see silk fluff frocks and pink umbrellas for costume options before we'll see Blaster changes. It's not that I think anyone is being untruthful, it's just that I understand the inevitable black hole that bureaucracy induces on projects like Blaster secondaries. It's labor intensive, fraught with universal gameplay issues for a minority of players. I'm not holding my breath because I'll die of asphyxiation.

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Yeah, and now you're bantering semantics. There's a pretty big gap between jibbering nonsense to mean something and something as similar as "devices" and "gadgets". That's like not getting that by "Cold Blast" they meant "Ice blast."

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"Gadgets" could have just as easily refered to the CoV power set /Traps as it could have the CoH power set /Devices. I really don't know why they think they need to call a power set by one name internally and another name externally. Its not exactly something that facilitates communication.

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/Agreed.

Look, the real issue is not that "gadgets" vs. "devices" had two completely different connotations; it's that the the whole point of the Patch Notes is to inform the playerbase. Therefore, when the devs refer to a powerset change using a completely new term, how is the player base supposed to understand what is being stated? This then relates to the distinct deduction that the devs really haven't been paying attention to Blaster issues when they unequivocally nerf a powerset and then can't even refer to its proper name.

Sorry, these are clues even Scooby Doo can deduct from and the conclusion is that Blasters are the so irrelevant to the CoX game as to not even be worthy of proper annotation.

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Not to thread steal or go off on a rant, but the devs generic response "Its Working As Intended" sounds like something parents say to kids when they dont have a answer or dont care.

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I don't think Castle is saying it's working as intended. I think he's put forth the argument that because (according to the dev's numbers) Stalkers are the most dominant PvP archetype, an acknowledged bug has absolutely low priority, regardless of the fact that said "bug" renders almost absolutely useless one of the defining powers of being a Stalker.

It's a little misleading because Stalker dominance so far may be the result of skewed statistics. If we count all kills across PvP levels, if the majority of kills are in Bloody Bay it doesn't alleviate or make up for the fact that Level 40-50 Stalkers need to placate in situations outside of utilizing Assassin's Strike.

This is right up there with Fury not working in PvP for Brutes. I mean the whole reason Placate is given to Stalkers is ameliorate the consequences of losing Hide. It's to give tactical options to a Stalker instead of just "Hit, Run...return to the battle 15 seconds later..." Now Placate is just rendered pointless and this is coming from a guy who gets repeatedly ganked by Stalkers ALL the time in Warburg on my squishy.

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People keep saying we were promised two development teams, one for CoH and one for CoV but keep overlooking a major point -- this only applied while CoV was in development. Cryptic apparently had no plan to maintain separate teams after CoV had launched. While they may have not made this particular policy clear from the outset to the playerbase, Statesman did admit this was the way they had operated in a post to this forum sometime within the last few months or so.

So, really, the "we were promised two dev teams forever and ever" argument ought to be quietly buried.

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That's not the argument. The argument is that there was never ever a separate development team. Geko and Statesman were all over the place in the CoV development and what little bulk up in staffing that occurred, after the financial stuffing that NCSoft took when City of Villains didn't sell enough, a number of developers were quietly let go.

It happens, it's unfortunate and I had wished that CoV had sold better. It's just that we heard this line before. That's all, I'm not cancelling my subscription. I've got too many friends in the community. That doesn't mean I don't see the writing on the wall.

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Here is something all you base designers may want to keep in mind:

The Cathedral of Pain is expected to be released prior to Issue 8, and it will be a little different than originally planned. It will be PvE oriented and the trial will remain active for 7 days. During this time you can earn one or more Items of Power for your Supergroup base. Then it will be off for 21 days, after which you will lose the Items of Power and this cycle repeats. Previously, it was scheduled to run only every 5 days, with 25 days off. Scheduled Base Raids are currently non-functional, but we wanted you to at least participate in the Cathedral of Pain and Item of Power portions while we address the Raid functionality internally.

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Will there be a shiny badge for completion by the participants?

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Submissions can be made by emailing your screenshots (details below) from FRIDAY JULY 21st until 12:00 AM (CST) FRIDAY JULY 28th.

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You're kidding, right?

I've been playing the game for over two years, and I still haven't even SEEN half of the ones on that list. And that's including time spent JUST LOOKING FOR THEM.

Kraken, Jurassik, Babbage (boomtown version)

I've only seen Eochai, Jack-in-Irons, and Adamastor ONCE.

And we're supposed to get good screenshots in ONE WEEK?

Please tell me you're going to have them up the spawn frequency on those by a factor of 10. Please.

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It is possible, not easy but possible. I've managed to have pictures and encounters with all 10 on various alts and I'm not even close to hardcore as some other players. I play alot but not everyday over one year and half subscription.

Wait, only 1 screenshot out of 10 Giant Monsters? There's going to be a disproportionate number of screenshots of the more frequent spawning monsters such as Lusca.

I've got pictures of all the monsters. It was like Pokemon for me in the game, gotta catch em all!!