goldbricker

Bah, all I got was 96,338.

Pinnacle hasn't really changed my life, but it has been an interesting layer within it. The game gives me some space for some personal interests that most of the people I know don't otherwise share. I've made and lost various friends and enemies on the server, many of whom tend to fight with each other in ways I have barely any idea how to resolve. So basically it's not all that different from real life.

5 years of Pinnacle. And I don't even drink. Definitely a hard-earned experience you can't get anywhere else.

Short form: add a slider to the options that allows players to set their own maximum travel speed cap.

Long form: the other day I was invited onto a full team that included one kinetic hero. As we progressed through our missions he was speed boosting everyone diligently until someone complained that they couldn't handle the extra travel speed. So that member received none of the power bonus for the rest of the missions.

I can't imagine it would be too hard to add a slider option to the options menu to allow players to individually set their own travel speed caps (not greater than the game's global cap value). That way anyone uncomfortable with super high speed gameplay can slow themselves down to a comfortable level, without having to give up any other simultaneous effects from the boosting power.

To support this option it might also be useful for the game to tell the player when they're at their chosen travel cap. Perhaps by using the words 'Travel Cap' like it were a status effect like 'Held' or 'Immobilized'.

With this kind of an option, kinetic players would be free to speed boost without (or with less) fear of causing grief.

I tried ignoring all promotion and discussion of Star Wars Episode III before I saw it. By the end of the movie, reflecting over that choice, Vader stole my line before I could say it.

Very nice...

but...

The background seems assembled in a weird way. The shadow is nice, and the coh logo crop is nice, but the shadow suggests a light source from a certain direction yet the coh logo crop suggests light beams going in almost the opposite direction...

It's a pretty trivial thing. The art is quite good... and yet... it kinda still gets me a bit when I look at it.

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ok, so what are your favorate artists on deviantart?...


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Basically, anyone with the courage to break out of whatever personal shyness or hangups to get their best arts out into this forum is a favorite of mine.

Not every piece falls into my personal tastes of course. But I love that there is so much selection from a lot of otherwise-dispersed people trying to come together. Sometimes I get harsh with criticism, and I regret that, but really I'm very thankful for being able to share in everyone's talents.

Thanks again art forum!

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Remember when I said that we would never have high collars in the game because of limitations. Well I just found a creative solution to the problem and the result is what you see.


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I remember the devs saying we will never get customizable power color tinting in the game because of limitations. In fact, the devs tend to say we will never get a lot of things we want in the game because of limitations.

Anyway, the high collars look good. Love creativity in action.

Culturally, your timing isn't all that great.

Left 4 Dead, F.E.A.R. 2, and The Path, among others taught me not to assume little girls are helpless...

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I think his upper torso could be twisted a bit more into a profile though too, now that I look at it more.


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His current lack of torso twist does make him seem a bit relaxed for being about to angrily swipe down a destructive axe. But I'm not too concerned about it overall, it kinda works ok as it is in my opinion. Not all comic book styles feature super-extreme posing, some artists keep the action within narrow bounds, (a few even go to plain extremes by featuring page after page of just word-bubbling heads).

It seems if you can get some clarity of expression out of his face, supported by expressive hands, the rest of the torso doesn't need to do much else to sell it to the audience. Unless you want it to.

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I came up with a rough sketch of the Canuck getting ready to do a little 'long division.' I'm not too happy with his left arm, and the thumb on that hand seems... off as well, but I think I kinda like the rest. Is there anything else I could tweak, and how so?


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Yes I agree that the thumbs (on both hands) are off. I'd suggest you'd get good value out of practicing drawing thumbs for a while. Just take some time to observe your thumb on your hand (use a mirror even) in various poses. Compare to the poses you used in your doodle. The tweaks to your doodle should prove to be minor but should make a solid difference.

The next thing I would suggest to tweak is the general clutter in and around the face. There's so much tiny but intense linework all crammed together. It kind of unbalances the piece, especially how the elements of the piece below the collarbone generally have sparse lines. It's hard to figure out how that might be improved, but perhaps if you increase the size of the head a bit to give you more skin area within which to buffer the beard, hair, mask, mouth, teeth, tongue, and nose, (not to mention the pauldrons, axeblade, and right bicep that are right up on the face as well) you might relax some of the pressure.

Finally, I think that a couple of your anatomical proportions are slightly off. For the most part the clothing being loose covers up the need for super-accurate anatomical proportion. But it seems to me the right hand is too small for the right bicep, and the head is too small for the left hand. I might suggest increasing the width and length of the axe shaft to give it more of a look of heft, increasing the size of the right hand to match it and line up better with the bicep, and increase the size of the head a little to match up with all of that. If it helps, you can try using your own hand to grab as much of your face as possible, to give yourself an idea of how the proportions between a hand and a head tend to come together.

But still it's a good effort. Keep it up.

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Partial Inks Complete

The partial inks are complete. The face was fine-tuned and the arm was fixed a little. Overall I'm happy with the progress but the foreshortening on the arm and the head's position still feels a bit off. Some say that's being nitpicky, but it's still a solid piece.

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I would disagree with the term nitpicky. I would more opine there's a significant and tragic flaw there.

The piece is indeed beautiful, but that poor foreshortening of the left bicep, unfortunately positioned right near the excellent and expressive face, is torturing the piece. I strongly suggest you back up to pencils and redo her left arm from scratch. I know that's a big pain, but this piece has the kind of high potential that deserves the right kind of patience, honesty, and dedication.

I know you can do it. And I know it'll look great.

Wow. That Starboy poster is exceptional Juggy, even for your normally high standards. It really looks like a cover for a real 70s-era sci-fi pulp novel. Very compelling image. You've found a connection between your own style and a separate style with that piece. Could possibly open up some new directions for you.

Heh! ENERGY BLASST ATAACK!

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Things like the Zombie Apocalypse or Rikti Invasion would be horrendously affected. Hammi raids might need to be redone again.


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Heh. Could we redo hami raids to be more like a zombie invasion?

I mean, instead of a massive amount of cyto's spawning in all at once, just have them spawn like a zombie spawn wave.

I mean, hami starts out by himself, but invulnerable. When you aggro him, he spawns a single wave of master cytos, each also invulnerable. About the same number and the same spacing as a standard hami cyto compliment. Each master cyto when aggroed causes zombie-event-like continuous spawns of standard cytos until enough are killed to make the master vulnerable. When all the masters are killed, Hami becomes vulnerable but starts spawning zombie-event-like continuing waves of regular cytos (and/or giant monsters even) at the same time.

I mean, the zombie events have pleasantly-balanced spawn structure. Hami is in very sore need for balanced spawning. The zombie events spawning structure makes it very feasible to keep a high population cap in zones where it occurs. Hami is in incredibly sore need for a higher population cap on the zone.

I mean, it just makes a lot of sense.

Aaa! They're all trying to attack me!

Placate is fine to take for a stalker build. Just be aware that in practice it doesn't give the kind of off-the-cuff combat value that most people assume at first glance. First of all, you're just too vulnerable to disruption in the post-Placate window of winding up your next action. And, in part because of that but also in part because it's perceived as too slow a combat tactic for coh-style combat, Placate barely gets any natural use at all.

Personally, I tend to find Assassin Strike too rarely used in natural combat. Sure once in a while you'll come up against a no-disruption, super-high-hp target (like the phalanx computer in the 3rd ITF mish) where you can expect to spam strikes to good effect. But usually you either don't need more dps than a reasonably-frequent out-of-hide vanilla critical, or you can't rely on Assassin Strike getting off without disruption no matter what you do.

If you take Placate, it's not a bad choice. It's better if you realize its weaknesses and work on your play skills to adapt. If you take AS, it's not a bad choice. Again, it needs specific play skills to get it to shine more than just a little. Most stalkers can get by without either.

Hide is the only true must-have stalker power in my humble opinion.

What's on the general calendar schedule? The five year anniversary is in April? So hypothetically with a month of testing i14 might make it to live in mid March? And then I guess it's spring for a while until i15 sets up for mid-summer?

UrDmiz - Introduction to a Hellion (probably requires google login)

Yeah I know I'm late in on this. Yeah I know technically it's something I started way before 2008, and yeah I know I never really got around to touching it throughout the whole year, but it's the only thing that was in the queue over the year. Yeah I know it's not finished and has a lot of problems. And to further disclaim via quote on the last post in which I threw up some art for the forum:

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Now I'm hyperhypersensitive on any criticism or even praise on my art. I pretty much know what level my skills are and where my weaknesses lie. If I blatantly ignore any comments made on it please don't take it personally. I just figure this is an apt forum to put up this art that others might enjoy.


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The reason I got this up now is basically I got a (relatively antique) scanner finally set up in the last few days and got a number of sketches I've been holding onto scanned, (and albumed). Deviantart's account structure isn't really up my alley so I'm giving google's photo site a try instead.

Yeah I know all this disclaiming and explaining is annoying. Sorry bout that. Otherwise... Enjoy.

It's been a rare occurrence, but I still go through a sync problem now and then.

Usually it manifests itself as an inability to allow a continuation of gameplay after emerging from a door. More specifically, I emerge from a door, start to move on to my next goal, and then after 10 seconds, I rubberband back to the door, (rinse and repeat). I can still chat and I can see other characters doing stuff. I have difficulty activating powers, but I don't specifically recall if that's because my sync problem explicitly blocks my powers, or if I'm specifically trying to use target-requirement powers where the sync problem is blocking my targetting or thinking that if I'm still at the door my targets are out of range.

Usually a /sync command or two corrects my problem, once I catch on to what's going on. But I've let it go for a few minutes without /sync'ing (because it took me a while to realize it was a /sync problem) and the game failed to free me in that time.

I think this has happened to me once in the last couple of weeks, and I've been present on teams in two other instances in that time frame where a teammate reported a similar problem. Thus I feel it's pretty rare, but it still happens.

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We’re not out to screw you, we’re just trying to preserve the integrity of the game, and sometimes we can be a little overzealous when it comes to that.


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This is a fine point. I indeed want you to maintain the integrity of the game as much as you can.

The point that has yet to be addressed is this: The players are yet still getting screwed. What are the players supposed to do? As the party causing the screwing you arguably have an obligation to address that don't you? It seems like you're almost taking the tone that the burden of dealing with the problems the screwing is causing is wholly on the players and not on the devs, not even in any small way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that the magnitude of the current screwing is super-large, or that it's dominant over all aspects of the game. There's still a lot of fun game in CoH that isn't impacted by the current problems, and people are finding ways to get to those fun parts despite the problems.

I'm just saying there are certain significant problems impacting the players. The devs caused them and are choosing to be stealth about them. The players are thus left in a void and can do nothing but try to make up the difference through sheer random endurance. This is a bad thing.

Let's take your example for example:

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For example, if the Training Room patch notes had the following:

• Using the “/em newspaper” emote while talking to Ms. Liberty and putting an enhancement slot into Rest will no longer level your character to 50.

You can bet that on each and every Live server there would be 20 instances of Atlas Park with characters talking to Ms. Liberty that very night.


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'Betting' on the negative influences in your audience seems to be a practice that undermines the integrity of the game. Wouldn't you agree? If you're conducting your work assuming that your audience in some form are just itching to screw you how does that put you in a good position to nurture the growth of integrity in the game?

How about we take a much-closer-to-home example:

An ouro flashback arc was incorrectly assigned five times as many reward merits as was originally intended. As merits are basically high stakes to everyone's needs to play the game (unlike /em newspaper), and as merits are basically so hard to get the game to dispense, no one needs to 'bet' on what the players will do.

Should the devs disclose this information? The game has set players up into a position where they are desperate for a specific aspect of the results of this bug (merits have large positive impact on fundamental abilities to play the game, merits are dispensed at a relatively tiny rate by the game except by this bug). This bug is not hidden and is fact relatively exposed to the playerbase, (as soon as one player stumbles over it, it will not take long for the majority of players to learn of it).

The devs disclosing it will indeed increase the speed with which the majority of players will learn of the bug, and given how the game is significantly undermining the players' ability to improve their gameplay outside of this bug there's no need to place any bets as to what the future trends will be.

On the other hand the devs choosing not to disclose it will be an action that the players will significantly notice once they learn of the bug for themselves. The players are just as capable as the devs to project out the future trends of how the playerbase will react to knowledge of this bug. Once the players learn of the bug, and they realize the devs have said nothing about it, the players will know exactly why the devs have said nothing about it: the devs are indeed assuming that the players are bad in the disputable sense that the integrity of the game must be protected from the bad.

This is why stealth fixes harm the game. It is an expression of an insult the devs (probably only subconsciously) intend to the players. On some subtle but profound level, the devs unreasonably assume the players are bad and the game (and thus themselves) is good.

Now personally, I don't dislike the devs, or think that they're less than good, even great, people in general, (there certainly are players who think in those terms though). I consider them cool and skilled, and I willingly defer to their authority over CoH. But I don't believe they're in any way infallible. And I don't believe they're really acting in the best interests of me as a player, as they tend to impose their interests in their vision of game integrity over my interests. But I concede that CoH is their game and not mine, and it would be unreasonable for me to insist they forego their interests just to cater to me.

Where that leaves me is to balance my life between enduring these and other problems I'm having in engaging CoH, and choosing to spend my endurance in other endeavors. As CoH is still providing me fun in various ways (I was fortunate to get in on a zombie invasion team last night and had lots of fun spamming Dragon's Tail everywhere ) it seems like I'll still be trying often to endure the problems.

But I'm not going to accept that 'integrity of the game' actions is a logical substitute for 'helping the players overcome problems' actions. It simply isn't. Players using exploits may cause harm, but being stealth about exploits is causing harm too. Devs have shown much more interest in addressing the former than the latter. Players don't have to agree that that's correct. Devs don't have to capitulate to players on that point.

That right there is the state of the game.

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...unless you're a producer here, you cannot know which things are getting addressed in lieu of other things.
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The known issues list is kind of in unknown territory.
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It can't ever be the "Here are all of the bugs we know about" list because our bug tracking database literally has tens of thousands of 'known issues'.
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There's no reasonable way anyone could parse through our bug database and condense it into a list on a regular basis.
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Trust me, it's just as frustrating for us as it is for you guys. But we'll get through it and things will smooth out.


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Heh. Where's Sabercat when you need someone to parse through tens of thousands of individual pages of data to distill out a certain thread of desired narrative?

(Sabercat (if I remember the name correctly) was the guy who created a bot to troll all the forum threads looking for redname posts to collate them all into a single thread, which forced the devs to originally create the dev digest forum to do the same thing but at much less forum performance expense as the bot was pretty heavy on forcing the forum server to do things.)

But it really just seems like you need to do two relatively small things. 1) put a disclaimer on the known issues list stating that it isn't being maintained diligently and thus should not be considered a complete source of information at any time, and 2) hire a contractor with database expertise to over a couple of months whip up some nice filters on your bugs database to distill out a reasonably good set of current issues as an automated process. Then decide how best to expose that set in all or in part to the outside playerbase.

In any case, just keep up the good work. We'll get there.

Whoa. Is it just me or did your skill just jump one atomic excitation level?

Your dynamic lighting/shading work is elevating the pieces, towards a more photorealistic feel. Especially with Trickshooter. In fact it seems that the comic-style linework (especially around the knees) is fighting against the shading and ultimately hurting the piece.

I would strongly suggest you start experimenting with minimizing your comic-style lines, to the point of chucking them altogether, and maximizing your reliance on lighting and shading to define your shapes and forms. This effort would probably also require you to dive into some color palette theory.

Now your work probably isn't ever going to be photorealistic, but all you need is to get enough hints of photorealism that your audience finds it easy to suspend their disbelief the rest of the way. You got a lot closer than expected with these two.

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Brutes
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[*]Removed flags which allowed Brute Rise to the Challenge to not be detoggled by status effects. It now works the same as the Tanker and Scrapper versions.[/list]

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It might just be interesting to see if the devs can hold their resolve with the RttC vs. PvP situation. RttC is an offensive defense toggle that is excessively key to Willpower toon survivability in high-pressure combat such as solid PvP. Willpower is a well-liked set in no small part due to RttC.

This sets up a situation where players invested in both RttC and PvP conclude with good reason that they cannot have both and must abandon one. The danger in that situation is that the player will choose RttC over PvP. The danger is amplified by there being a lot of players who like Willpower more than PvP.

The risk is pretty high that the devs' policy of suppressing offensive toggles across the board is going to hurt PvP by making it too reasonable for players to exclude the significant amount of Willpower toons in the game from PvP.

A temptingly-easy response to this situation would be to special-case RttC, possibly by creating some sort of partial suppression in PvP that still preserves some factor of needed combat defense for the powerset. But the devs would have to give up their resolve (assuming they intended to have any) to maintain strict guidelines on their PvP rules.

Yes, I will be interested to see what happens with this.

So, let's think about this semi-tactically, (which means thinking in terms of impact over an entire build within which the coolness of having lowbie travel powers has little value except for rare ouro situations).

Early Fly only improves a build if Hover is weak for the build and Air Superiority is pointless.

Early Superspeed only improves a build if Hasten is unneeded. (Remarkably, there are indeed some builds where Hasten is unneeded.) As an aside, Flurry is always weak for every build.

Early Teleport only improves a build if Recall Friend is undesirable and Teleport Foe is weak and/or undesirable.

Early Superleap only improves a build if Combat Jumping is weak, which is pretty unlikely since CJ is often quite valuable.

One question that I haven't seen answered yet is whether lowering the prereqs on the tier 3 powers of these travel pools also means the prereqs on their tier 4 powers will also be lowered.

Acrobatics is the preeminent power to consider of the tier 4s. Is level 20 still a prereq? Does it still require 2 selections from the first 3 tiers as a prereq?

I'm not so concerned about the level 20 prereq. But as for the 2 of 3 tiers prereq, if Acrobatics can be selected with only Superleap as a prereq, then many vet builds may switch Combat Jumping for Acrobatics. Or switch Hover for Group Fly. Or switch Recall Friend for Group Teleport. Or switch Flurry with Whirlwind, hehe.

Actually, I suppose the most common impact will be for players to trend towards having both Superspeed and Superleap in their builds, skipping Combat Jumping usually, (but usually not skipping Hasten).

If I were to digress towards a tangent, I might suggest the Invisibility pool should also be considered a travel pool, in that it aids uneventful progression from point A to point B. Stealth applies a travel speed adjustment. And It would be just as much the same value to the player to choose Invisibility over Stealth early as it is to choose Fly over Hover early.

As others have alluded, primarily you seem to be struggling with anatomical proportions between multiple parts of the same body. Not that you're off by that much on any body part as compared to any other part. In your pieces you seem to be randomly enlarging the head or the eyes or the thighs or randomly shrinking the forearms or the lips or the thighs.

But! You would be getting off on the wrong foot to start thinking you're being bad in your current style. I would strongly suggest you begin any approach to improvement by building confidence in your ability by reminding yourself how strong your vision seems to be. You're realizing some very nice posework and staging, good penwork, some excellent details (for example with the flowing hair), getting a nice balance between softness and strength in the curves of your women, etc. You've got a good thing going there, and you shouldn't get too distracted and/or discouraged over any bits that aren't quite as practiced yet.

To improve your skills in anatomical proportions, I would suggest setting aside your art for now, and clear your mind as much as possible. I would suggest that you need to come from a fresh mindspace to learn this subject, as it's basically a medium of subtleties that your preconceptions built from your own experience will end up getting overrun.

I would suggest you seek out books, commonly comic book drawing books, that talk about how to space out an average human body in terms of head lengths. My vague recollection of books I've read is that for comic book males the head is one head high, then the neck from the chin to the collarbone is a partial head, then the collarbone to the base of the pecs is one head high, from there to the belly button is another head, from there to the base of the groin is another head, another two heads to the knees and another two heads to the ankles. Or something like that.

Facial details are also spaced by various elements, like across the eyes the width of the head should be roughly five eyewidths, with one eyewidth between the two eyes and one eyewidth on either side. Hm, I should probably go back and review all that myself.

Once you get some good reference in this way, start practicing with just vanilla standing poses. Draw a page full of stances. Draw a couple pages. Ignore visions of great drawings for now, just work through dumb uninteresting drawings for a bit.

Next there should be some discussion in those books about how to set up dynamic poses with the faintest of initial skeletons. These skeletons should be of good assistance to you because it allows you to set and lock in good initial proportions right at the start, before you get caught up in the fun detailing of the bodies. You just place your head circle first, then a simple sweeping line or two depicting the general flow of the body for the pose, add in a line for the shoulder-to-shoulder cross, some lines for the arms, some circles for the hands, a line for the pelvic cross, some lines for the legs, all proportioned out to roughly the correct head lengths.

You can get a lot of value at that point. You can often tell whether or not you like the pose and do alterations when the amount of detail already committed to is low.

You might also want to consider that if you do jump into a lot of research like this, you'll be in a good position to start looking at drawing other kinds of subjects like animals or trees or buildings or cars or whatevers. How to draw spheres and cubes and cylinders and then how to approximate world objects with combinations of those elements, whereby all that would remain is a pass of simple detail filling.

This kind of research could take a while, and you'd probably be shut out of the fun part of your art for that time, but I have to believe you could find yourself very much improved after it all. On the other hand, this is just one approach, and there are many others that can work just as well if not better.