je_saist

.. .wait. you respeced OUT of clear mind?

*faints*

***

edit: Okay, I just logged in a friends empath, and Clear Mind, as well as all other targeted buffs, do indeed root the player. However, this is consistent with other buff power-sets.
Thermal Radiation: Plasma Shield, Fire Shield, Forge, and Thaw all root the player
Storm: O2 Boost roots the player
Kinetics: Speed Boost and Increased Density root the player
Force Field: Deflection Shield and Insulation Shield root the player

***

Now, I can't tell you how to play. What I can tell you is that an empath without clear-mind is somewhere on the list of archtypes that I'll quit on TF's that are forming if the leader won't kick them and get somebody who has the power. You really need to respec back into clear mind.

Also, if you changed it just because one team-mate died, I'm gonna be honest, that's a horrible reason to respec out of a power. There's a reason Empath's get a rez power. Sometimes team-mates need to be rezzed. Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes the enemies do get the better of you. That's okay, it's part of playing the game.

if you mouse over the grey-rep button in the UserCP I think it says something like balanced rep. As best as I can make out the system, some people's rep power only balances out reputation that you've received, good or bad. This does appear to be tied to a poster's rep giving / taking power being related to their own reputation power. It does appear to be possible for several players with no, or little reputation, to balance out a single negative rep from somebody with a higher rep rating. Ergo, the system still seems to stack up and count the intent of the rep whether or not it's owner has enough rep power to warrant a green or red indicator.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=196483

The small female walk looks really wrong with enforcer boots... Doesn't look so bad on larger female bodies though. However, I think BaB's has said that animations aren't, and probably can't be tied to costume parts... without giving him, PhoysB, Castle, Positron, and everybody else who works on the code / design migraines the size of a former manager's ego.

So oh well, have to live with making sure I pick the high-heels for a walking costume.

aaaaugh. my BRAIN. you've HURT my BRAIN.

*pulls out the anvil launcher*

Back I say! Back into the pits of doom and raging fire from which you came!

Quick! Aim the Anvil Cannon at the Yankees!

This is in the same line of idea that the Squeaky Wheel Gets the Oil. It's applicable to cars, but not so applicable to MMO's, or video games in general.

For starters, most video games have a clear design vision and goal. When Nintendo makes a Zelda game they focus on elements that are very Zelda Like, such as the sword play and adventure. When Nintendo makes a Mario game they focus on elements that are very Mario Like, such as vertical puzzles requiring jumping. You wouldn't approach Nintendo asking them to incorporate a motorcycle into Zelda, and you wouldn't approach Nintendo to suggest that Mario with a machine gun would be a great idea. When you play a Video Game you automatically accept some of the limitations set in place by the developers, and accept how those limitations affect the world you play in.

When confining ourselves to looking at the MMO space we can see empirical evidence of what happens when a game loses a sense of what it is, and what it is going to be. The first example is Planetside. The game started out as a simulation of a genuine war, and playing the game involved learning skill sets that would be applicable in an actual war-time situation. Commanders needed to learn how to move supply trains (ANTS), run armor columns (MagRiders, Sunderers), organize protective squads (lightings, threshers), direct air support (Galaxy, Liberator), and manage air combat (reaver, skeeter). Taking a continent would require hours of raging war where people who didn't have FPS skills could still be very useful driving, flying, healing, repairing, or setting up defenses. At some point the developers lost the campaign vision and started to adjust Planetside to cater to the session based gameplay of Quake and Unreal Tournament. The Warp Gates were readjusted and the concept of having to take a set number of conts was done away with. The move away from the original gameplay decimated player population. Today Planetside only has one server, and survives almost solely on the profits of Everquest.

Then there was Star Wars Galaxies. Need I say more than NGE? Now, I didn't play SWG, so I'm not intimately familiar with how proceedings went down. What I do know is that the developers decided to target the WoW audience with a severe game modification, which caused one of the largest examples of nerdrage witnessed from legions of Star Trek Fans.

The third example comes from NCSoft and Destination Games, and it's Tabula Rasa. Through it's beta Richard Garriot promoted and developed TR as a Team based game very similar to City of Heroes. However, after the game launched and Mr. Garriot left for his trip into space, the developers decided to change the fundamentals of the game from a PvE combat system to a system that catered to PvP. Much like our game, CoH, the engine for Tabula Rasa had never been designed for PvP play. The world that Mr. Garriot had created simply didn't support PvP combat, and PvP play was often dismissed pre-launch because it just didn't fit the game. The result of the developers giving into that squeaky wheel was a financial disaster for NCSoft, costing the company millions of dollars.

That event also has had repercussions on other NCSoft games. As the primary financial backer of City of Heroes, to say that NCSoft is gun-shy about funding any PvP development is an understatement. From NCSoft's perspective, they'd rather have PvP-oriented players go to AION, which was designed from the ground-up with PvP combat in mind, and using an engine that was built to handle PvP encounters (CryEngine).

The point from these examples is that games that lose their vision, their goal of what they are, go under, very fast, and generally wind up with somebody loosing a chunk of money. Well, except for Planetside. The dev team was so small and the development was so little, I suspect if it had been killed off 2 years ago SOE would have come out ahead from subscriptions and box sales.

***

Now, from my personal opinion, PvP play is dead in City of Heroes. PvPer's don't just have to convince Castle, Positron, or PhosyB that something has to be done with the PvP system. PvPer's will also have to convince NCSoft that there is actually a large enough market that PvP development will be able to pay-back on profits. Squeaking the wheel at the devs alone won't actually do any good if you also have to convince the people holding the pocket-book as well.

***

There's also another aspect I wanted to address, which is the squeaky wheel / push hard enough and something happens idea. Very few people stop to think that squeaking the wheel too much can also result in a public backlash.

The case in point here is PetitionOnline. PetitionOnline has been abused so much that several years ago, almost every IDSA (Interactive Digital Software Association) / ESA (Entertainment Software Association) member had a strict policy that anything brought up for petition on PetitionOnline was to be automatically ignored. So, if you made the mistake of putting a suggestion on PetitionOnline, you'd actually guarantee that the petitioned event would NEVER HAPPEN.

In the same way, some suggestions that are brought up over and over, and over, and over, are automatically ignored. Server Merges and Vehicle Additions stand as two examples probably on the developers list of threads to not read.

In these cases, squeaking the wheel or pushing again and again and again is more likely to cause the developers to clamp down and not do ANYTHING, than it is to accomplish any desired goal.

okay. My mistake. I probably should have clarified here.

What I see, as a general trend, on the forums is people wanting everything now that the game offers, and it's really starting to get on my nerves. From what I see on the forums a small minority of players don't understand the concept of a game. They don't understand the concept of playing for a reward. They don't want to be punished for getting something wrong, or for doing something stupid. This attitude just grates me like a Cheese Grater saying hi to some Mozzarella. It also grates me even more how players respond when told that they are being a thick-headed... I can't say that without being insulting can I... Well, maybe you know what I mean.

So, maybe I am in the wrong for having let my aggravation show through on a costume topic. Yes, I feel the... um... pain for some character concepts. I get the points out about the Roman Armors.

I really do like the idea Lord Mayhem put forth though, to have basic outfits at level one... like a generic Cimeroran Soldier outfit, and then the Roman Armor that Mimics Imperious / Romulus at 35 when you can actually do the TF.

That does sound like a better way to handle keeping in-game rewards for playing, while still giving concept freedom to people with new characters.

... That'd be a bit like letting Con Kolivas have access to Andrews Development tree. Just a BAD idea all around...

*whaps the Fedor with a Stunning Carrot +2 Stun, then drags the sackperson behind a tree, then pushes him out again with bunny ears and a puffy tail*

IT'S THE WABBIT! GET HIM! GET HIM!

*points at Fedor and activates various neon Arrow signs all with WABBIT printed in the middle all pointing at Fedor*

... ya know... I had a proper rant ready to go about how animation effects and powers have very little to do with bug fixes in the code... then you have to go be all polite about it and ruin my rant...

question. If the devs gave everything to the players straight off... what would be the point of actually playing the game itself? Or have just that many players forgotten that City of Heroes is a GAME?

The fact that you really think this, and you that you don't actually get the arguments and points being made... actually scares me.

*wonders if JanusFrs is part ferret...*

anyways, to directly answer your question, the developers don't often talk about why they give powersets to one archtype or another, and by the same token, don't often talk about why they DO NOT give certain power-sets to one side or another. I didn't find any obvious red-named posts specifically on this subject with the search function.

I can, however, hazard a guess from a design perspective. One of the problems... and it's not really a problem, is that the Force-Field set only has one debuff type... which is knockback. Outside of knocking enemies down or away, Force Field does not deploy any other debuffs.

In CoH you have one strong debuff / buff type, the defender, and one weak type, the controller. In CoV there isn't actually a strong debuff / buff type. The buff / debuffs on Corruptors and Masterminds are secondary sets. Going through and looking at the sets that were originally available that were common across both, you'd find that Corruptors were mostly using the Controller secondary values for their buffs / debuffs, say like on Radiation Emission, and that Masterminds generally had even weaker values, say comparing Dark Miasma to the Corruptor and Defender variants.

Because of these design limitations almost all of the Corruptor sets contained enemy debuffs. Thermal Radiation, the original answer to empath for example, got Melt Armor and Heat Exhaustion in addition to it's mix of player resist buffs and strong heals. When Pain Domination was introduced as an inverse empath set, it also got an enemy debuff, Anguishing Cry.

From a design standpoint, only one Corruptor set actually lacks a -resist debuff and -defense debuff, which is the Kinetics Set. However, the Kin still functions as a strong buff / debuff type as a kin can kill endurance and regeneration values.

***

Since ForceField doesn't fit the observed design requirements for a Corruptor secondary, that's probably why it hasn't, and probably won't be, ported over to the Archtype.

... yeah... That'd do it too.

The developers actually have a stated policy about patching during special events. They don't do it.

Case in point can be seen on the Veteran Reactivations which shortly follow new issues. Despite some show-stopping bugs in the code, the developers didn't actually patch some of the bugs until after the special event was over.

The basic problem is that many of the special events (Halloween Event, Christmas Event, Valentines Event) require special coding and often have their own branch in the system development. As we've seen, scripting problems with one segment of the game, such as the interaction with the auction house window, can have an impact on the rest of the game, such as the chat colors, that wasn't ever intended.

It's really a case of the demon you know versus the devil you don't know.

Yes, some of the bugs introduced are annoying... but as long as the game client is loading and operational for the majority of users, the devs aren't going to go messing about under the hood.

As an example, I'll point at Champions Online... which is going through a lot of this. If you check out the patch notes page : http://champions-online.com/patch_notes : you'll find a /chunk/ of patches going up. This is because the CO developers are still mucking about under the hood and changing how the system works, which keeps causing problems for people playing the game.

Now, you seem to think that the bugs in the most recent patch for our game are show-stoppers. That they are just so bad the developers shouldn't have published. However, before that, the developers had a massive amount of feedback coming in about how some things were broken: http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/patch_notes/

So they made the best changes they could to make the game playable for the most amount of people possible.

It is a judgment call on whether or not to release and updated patch that might have a couple of known issues. Given the timing and the content of the two patches though, it's very likely that the developers only made changes in a couple of scripts, the incremental updates that shouldn't have affected anything else.

Only... that didn't work.

Which means there are larger underlying issues. But since the game is mostly working, the developers will simply have to let those issues wait until after the event is over, rather than risk screwing things up further.

You've never actually... played.. .with him... have you?

***

Anyways, if you really want negative rep, just state that Windows 7 is a crossgrade, state that the only upgrade is to go a *nix type system (doesn't matter which one, Linux, Mac, BSD), and the Windows Fanatics will POUR out of the woodwork to hell-rep you. Just trust me on this. You think that the Mac Fanatics and Linux Zealots are bad? You haven't seen the sheer steaming hatred that can flow from the Windows Fanatics. It's like wandering through a green-screened BBS back in the days when modems were measured in bit per second. I've been to knife fights between Macintosh and DOS users that were more pleasant. So if you really want neg-rep, that's the way to go.