CoX had something neat going, at least started, with secret identities. I forget exactly how it worked, but I think if you continually logged off in certain places like the PPD, or University campus in Steel Canyon, you would get badges or something related to mundane jobs associated with those locations... I thought that was a nice aspect of possibly roleplaying a secret identity beyond just using another costume slot to make a plain clothes suit.
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May the wings of freedom never lose a feather!
I thought that was genius, it still didn't make me worry too much about where I logged out, but when I logged in and saw that I had a bonus for pretending I had a life outside CoH, I got excited =D
I would love to see something like that implemented again =)
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[color=#FF0000]Recording Engineer/Foley Artist[/color]
I liked the concept but I would have liked it to mean more than a badge and a logout position. Like when you logged out in the hospital and got a small buff to healing or whatever. Even if the buff is small it felt like something meaningful.
Some ad copy for the award would be nice too...like the newsies calling out your name as you go by. "Extra! Extra! Hero donates time to hospital ward!"
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Well - if you had the badges and accolades you [I]did[/I] get buffs and temporary powers, like various grenades, self rez, ally heal, faster END recovery, faster HP recovery outside combat, etc.
I liked the concept too. However, I had two issues with it. First, I don't like the idea of a game that rewards you for not playing. It just seems like a way to make each player have lots of characters to play then leave each one somewhere for extended periods to reach some badge achievement and bonus. Secondly, if I am going to be rewarded for leaving the character somewhere for a secret identity purpose then I would like to see significant involvement of that aspect incorporated into routine play somehow. Short of the role play aspect which is largely internal this seems difficult to make tangible in game play. And I think Interdictor pretty much summed up all the best bonuses of this mechanic in COH.
I definitely like the idea of adding role playing scope through logging out in particular areas but not necessarily the way it was implemented in COH. Thirty days of parking your toon at the same location in a game with numerous zones was cumbersome if not downright difficult when at lower levels. As I recall this was the typical number of days you had to log out at a particular location to reap the reward.
Now, if this included more lore for your character and influenced the story arcs in some way it seems to me like it would feel more meaningful and all the better. More immersion is always good!
"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space." ~ Thomas Carlyle
I agree with this point.
The approach taking in CoH may not have been the best but it was simple and straightforward. I believe any similar system will have to retain that focus on being simple and straightforward. Giving any kind of real weight to the secret identity aspect will fly in the face of the game's raison d'etre: being a superhero. Certainly, secret identities are, to varying degrees, important to superheroes. However, I suspect that trying to put any kind of spotlight on this aspect will quickly begin to feel like The Sims is being shoehorned into the game.
Besides, unlike in most comic book settings, in these kinds of games superheroes are pervasive. I can well imagine that for many, if not most, superheroes in TPP being a hero (or villain) is their life and job. A secret identity is less about a double life than about being able to go out and have a burger without people constantly asking for autographs.
([i]"They had it good, back in the old days. They could go out, save a few orphans, and most people wouldn't know about it until they read the newspaper the next day. Today, you show up at Burger Sprout and someone will jump on Babbler and babble that 'Captain Major is at Burger Sprout on 5th Street'. By the time you can pick up your order, you've got thirty fans sitting at your table. Before you're even done with lunch, there'll be a video up of you chewing on a french fry.[/i]
[i]... Awesome."[/i])
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
On the first point, I don't see it as rewarding you for not playing, but rather allowing you to continue to play while logged off.
On the second point, most of the players of CoH already had lots of characters to play when it launched. This was a game that encouraged you to play multiple characters.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
What about an aspect of where you"sign in" at the places instead of logging out? This way you got time towards the "job" badge WHILE you were online, instead of time offline. For example, you "sign in" at the hospital and you play for 4 hours. This four hours counts as time served towards a badge or title, and once your time is done, you get a permanent boost to your healing. A small one one, mind you, but just enough to be worthwhile. Then once that's done, you can "sign out", go somewhere else, like the police station, "sign in", and start it all over.
Lemme get this straight... You sign in at the hospital, then go out and drum up some business for them?
Hmmm..... at least it makes sense for the police dept.
;)
Steve
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"Listen, and understand. City of Titans is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely [i]will not stop, ever,[/i] until we are live!"
Warcabbit
Perhaps this is thinking a bit too big, but if you're going to have something like civilian identities, why not go all the way with them, so to speak, and make them a more interesting part of the game than some sort of "Rest XP" mode where you get some sort of bonus?
Rather than having it be a side-feature, perhaps it would be interesting to have it be something more noticeable and interesting to the player-base. What I think an interesting application of the Civilian Identities system would be would be to make them into side-quests, or maybe even daily-quests. While heroes are running around in costume doing the bigger, more complicated and important plots, when they're out of costume, they get little mini-missions that, upon completion, could offer them some sort of buff or bonus or what-have-you.
There could be some variance in the sense that depending on the job that you have, different gameplay-types or plots could unfold. For example, say your teen hero is some sort of reporter intern in their spare time. They could get an assignment in their civvie identity to go check out some corporate expo for a page in the papers, and when they get there, find out that there's some sort of shady dealings going on in the area. However, since they're surrounded by various people and want to keep their identities secret, they'll have to figure things out on their own without help from their powers (which may be locked for gameplay reasons). Tough Brick Guy could be a sewer worker in their spare time, and could be down there repairing a pipe-line or something when they find out that there are robot alligators in the sewers or something. They might know that they can take out the enemies easily with their super brickiness, but the hard part would be doing it in a way so that their co-workers don't figure out. Maybe they fake a tunnel collapse, or run the risk of discovery and rescue their comrades first before heading back in. Either way, they'll have to be careful, or they might just punch the tunnels down instead. Gadget Gal could be some sort of researcher at Company X, building prototype devices or doing Science things. Maybe a prototype could go missing, prompting a mix of puzzle-solving and traversing the facility/city with a set of strange devices in order to get their stuff back. Ninja Vigilante Man could have a day-job as a Detective of the TCPD, roaming around in their little squad car solving crimes. Maybe they get called up to investigate some criminal activity at a co-op on the bad side of town, which quickly spirals out of control as they realize that they've gotten more than they bargained for. Not only do they have to solve the case, but they also have to protect themselves without alerting the cops to their true skills.
Just examples of course, and it might not even be worth it in the long run, but one interesting thing that could be done as far as this goes is that since they're more or less just one-shots, they could be cycled every so often, not only giving people things to do, but also possibly giving the developers insight into what works and what doesn't. Maybe that sewer mission was a total flop and all the players thought that those alligator sewer robots looked stupid, but thought the latest detective plotline was genius. Then maybe that could spin off into some sort of greater mission arc that ends up being something entirely new.
[color=#ff0000]Composition Team[/color]
D-Pad, I like your take on secret identities. It is a different perspective that I haven't considered but sounds very do-able. I hope the devs give your ideas some thought. I love to roleplay and can see myself investing some time on my toons civilian job.
May the wings of freedom never lose a feather!
D-Pad, that'd be great. Perhaps for us millionaire playboys, there'd be a nice club to go on missions in... and by missions I mean picking up exotic supermodels and crashing expensive cars because we can. :P
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
[img]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg[/img]
I can hardly wait for the time I see an 8' lizard guy in a trench coat and hat casually buying a newspaper from a street vendor, then suddenly throwing off the hat and coat, and people screaming; "Oh My God!, it's...it's... King Lizard!!!"
Steve
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"Listen, and understand. City of Titans is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely [i]will not stop, ever,[/i] until we are live!"
Warcabbit
A glorious idea, sir. Personally, I'd take it a little further, with everyone having a Civilian costume set that had items unlocked in it based on what your Secret Identity was. When you're wearing the Civilian identity, you're classed as neither a Hero nor a Villain, and your character name is replaced with "Civilian" or whatever. Possibly disable any power designated as showy or obvious or somehting. If you make it unable to engage in PvP unless attacked by a Villain, this opens up a whole 'nother option for inter-vilain conflict, for which this is not the thread, but would make for a very interesting type of PvP.
I AM NOT A TECH I PROMISE NOTHING
The current intent is to have a more robust 'secret identity system' than any other current hero MMO.
Noises have been made about trade offs between a minor ability granted by your 'normal job' and an xp bonus based on time offline.
The possibility of having multiple possible 'display names' so that you can mingle incognito with players of various alignments has also been floated.
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IANAL, IMHO, WYSIWYG, YMMV, IIRC, AFAIK, ETC
[color=#ff0000]Composition Assistant Director, Composition Team[/color]
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
What about handling Secret Identities somewhat similar to crafting based on employment/lifestyle?
Whatever the non heroic daily duties the Secret ID has, they can receive some sort of credit for it?
Newspaperman - grinding at the printing press
Scientist - Potion creation
Sewer worker - ewwww!
WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!
[IMG]http://i687.photobucket.com/albums/vv238/Caliber357/CoTSimian002a.jpg[/IMG]
Ok, probably not at launch, but maybe there could be a mobile app for messing around with your Secret Civilian Identity. What if it was a kind of puzzle solving/clue finding game that gave you a buff or opened up new mission arcs?
This is just pie in the sky stuff, but could be taken on by a whole different dev team. There doesn't seem to be a lack of volunteers around. :)
I'd suggest (maybe as a small part to the overall Secret Identity System) allowing us to have a default Secret Identity costume slot for every character. This would be a free extra costume slot that every character could use at level one. There'd be no requirement to actually use it if you didn't want to, but this would give every starting character at least two costume slots so they could have as a minimum a "superhero" outfit and a civilian outfit from the very beginning. You could link the civilian display name idea to the usage of this Secret ID costume slot.
In addition you might be able to associate several player selectable "modes" with the Secret Identity costume slot so that when you're using it you can "pretend" to be a different alignment in exchange for reduced power. This could let people as you say mingle incognito as a normal citizen or even let say a villain go places only a hero could go (or vice-versa) in exchange for being semi-powerless or some other appropriate disadvantage. This could allow players to do low profile "spy" missions where they don't necessarily want to openly present themselves as the city famous hero or vile infamous villain.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
In many ways, the "offline rewards" system (rewarding you for not being online) goes back to the ideas of the "power hour" days with early MMO's like Ultima
The problem they were trying to solve was that of people with different amounts of play time. People that had very little play time often logged in to find that their friends had far outleveled them. The original "power hour" concept was that you earned more xp in (roughly) the first hour you played than in the subsequent ones... giving the less-frequent player an opportunity to catch up to his peers (and giving his peers an incentive to log out and log in an alt after an hour, also slowing down leveling.) Later games started doing similar things- giving you "bonus xp" pools that fill up slowly over time (so intermittent players never really empty it and always get the bonus, but excessive players burn through it and then only get "baseline" xp. Some tied it to logging out in taverns to encourage people to use central locations to start their play (helping them find others to team with in those locations).
When CoH developed their "Jobs" system, they had some obvious advantages-- sidekicking and exemplaring made the problem of outleveling your friend a lot less of an issue, and the ability to solo so much of the game (combined with relatively easy travel) made central start locations unimportant. "Patrol XP" was still a subtle equalizer, but with XP being only a minor bonus, they could play with the location-based aspect to give different rewards for different logout locations. A healing temp power for logging out in the hospital, for example. It gave people the chance to choose the bonus they get. It gave relatively minor non-game-breaking advantages that still gave players a sense of customization and ownership that would otherwise be missing.
Now, some games DO have a system in place where, if you log out in these locations your character can appear in-game actually working those locations. In Age of WuShu, if you log out in the martial arts hall, you'll appear as an NPC guarding that hall and gain bonuses tied to training. If you log out in the marketplace, you appear in the marketplace and earn gold. before anyone thinks how awesome this is- its also tied to their PvP system. Someone can go in, try to "Kidnap" an offline player, and then (with a sack over your shoulder slowing you down and a big icon flagging you as a kidnapper, you try to find an NPC to sell that player to. The kidnapper then gets the cash reward you earn at that new location. People can defeat the kidnapper and free his prey or become the new kidnapper. It's supposed to encourage guilds building tight alliances, patrols protecting your offline guildies etc, but for the most part, it means that if you tried to use the offline leveling system, you log in to find you've been working in a brothel for the past few days....
So, why would the devs want to reward offline (non)players?
1) they don't want the casual player to get so discouraged they'd quit becuase they can't keep up with the hardcore player.
2) the casual player is actually a better economic target for the subscription games. if I'm online for 1/4 of the time you are, then I'm using 1/4 the bandwidth and burning through the content 1/4 as fast, but paying the same fee as you. That's a nice cost incentive, so a good reason to give toss a bone or two to those loyal friends
Seeing mention of it in a post, hopefully CoT doesn't follow CoH's lead in having a newsie spouting everything you did and all the new things they've added to the game.
I was about to say that seeing random NPCs on the street saying things about your character's latest exploits was one of the "Epic" things about City of Heroes. It gave you a sense that what you were doing had an [i]influence[/i] on the game world (even if nothing you did ever changed anything REALLY). But it was a way to show a CHANGE in the world such that it wasn't *totally* static and unchanging, where the Civilians on the street neither knew (nor cared) what you ever did for (or to) them, collectively.
The only jarring thing about the implementation of this feature was that there was no delay in how fast word got around that you'd done something inside an instance or on a Task Force. So you could exit a mission door onto the street, and there'd be a Civilian walking be ALREADY talking about what you'd just finished doing! If there had been a 1 minute delay after completing an Instance before the NPCs started talking about it, that would be suited just perfectly, so as to represent the Speed Of Gossip (or "news" if you prefer).
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Doesn't sound appealing, but what if your powerset was Toxic based. But what if having a CoT-equivalent "day job" in the sewers over time could add a buff or further augment your enhancements/boosts for all related powers? That would be a nice benefit.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/26pBVBG.png[/img]
([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
D-Pad's idea plus this = pure win!
I have thought about this and secret Identities really should be in the game. It helps with socialization and if you think about it, you really could run two character lives off of one character slot.
What I thought about was when you create your character there is a place for a Secret Identity name. The code is programed that you can have your secret Id displayed instead of your superhero. If they decided to implement a secret chat type system, as most games do.... It works off of the hero name. . Secret Ids would not be locked, no reason you can't have 4 john smiths on a server, since they are not really the point of the game.
If you are in secret identity you would not be attacked, or at least very low chance of being attacked by any of the street thugs hanging around the streets for example...You would have no "level" so the old system where gray ignored you etc would be suspended. I can think of several other things that could be added to a secret Identity system. (Places you could not go in secret Id and places you could not go in costume for example)
I just like the idea of being able to explore the entire comicbook and not just the costumed part.