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What was bad about COX and how can it be made better?

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Bodai
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What was bad about COX and how can it be made better?

Hello,

There was a topic created in the Kickstarter section on "What was it that made CoX Special for you?".

However, I have been wanting to post about - what parts of CoX were bad / terrible / sucked, and how can they be made better or avoided in CoT? I think we who loved the game so much are the best one's to be it's critics. It was actually my first (and really only) MMO that I played, coming from games like Unreal Tournament. I eventually found things I really liked to do, but I often went for months-long breaks or hiatus because I got sick of it.

I am not really talking necessarily about hugely controversial things like ED, although it should be considered fair game. I am mostly talking about overall things that were part of the game from the start and often people just accepted as fixtures in the game.

I will start off with a few:

* The subway
This was famously lampooned in the PVP online comic, we did not have the bat mobile, invisible jets, or anything like that. Yes, us super heroes used.... public transportation! While I think this should be included in the new game for nostalgic reasons, it was both clever and silly in COX.

* Repetitive mission content
I think they did a good job on things like mission architect, task forces, and trials. And I will say that there were a few brilliant mission arcs with key contacts that were good enough to be worth replaying with oro. But overall, I would say about 80% of the content was sort of a dull and repetitive formula that got dry real fast. Especially if you were making a new character and had a long way to go before you reached or could easily do the high level content.

* Quirky travel powers
* Fly
It always bothered me how slow fly was. Watch the first superman movie, you should be able to fly FAST. I think even when you first take the power, you should be able to fly ridiculously fast, so much that it is hard to control, and the thing that progresses with level is the control. I think super speed was very well done, and went a long way to making fly look bad. Yes, people said that it needed that because fly was "easier" to use than super speed. Whatever... I think the travel powers should only be limited by what the game engine is capable of.
* Teleportation
If you played D&D, teleport in CoX was really dimension door, and it was only much later in the game that they made a version much closer to what actual teleport was. When you have teleport, you should be able to click on the map and go there. As you level, maybe you get things like how many people you can take with you, or change the interrupt time maybe. And I think something like dimension door should be a different power, although it could be something you take earlier in a teleportation set.

I will think it over and probably come up with how I would make these better. But I would like to hear from others what kinds of things always grated on you and especially things that broke immersion for you.

-Bodai

mrinku
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The way level scaling worked.

The way level scaling worked. Even as a beginner superhero, it should be possible to travel to any part of the city you like and fight normal hoods. I would love to see us step away from this and just have character level be used to regulate build. The powers and abilities gained as you progress are really all you need to provide difference between rookies and veterans. Conversely, it breaks immersion for me to come back and beat a mission easily because I've levelled up.

At all stages of the game and progression, it should be easy to take down minions, routine to fight lieutenants and challenging to fight bosses. Veteran characters have more tricks in the bag and will still have an easier time of it than a tyro, which is fine.

New game needs more super enemies and less agencies, too. Always hated that you spent 90% of your time fighting various grades of follower. Doesn't happen in the comics, unless you're Nick Fury.

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An idea to work on scaling is

An idea to work on scaling is to have every instanced enemy scale to your level.. adds challenge IMO.. Also, missions would give scaling XP as well, each one giving a certain percentage of XP to the next level. So finish all the missions in one starting area, you can go to another starting area and get ON LEVEL XP and enemies.

Also, what was bad was Dev interaction after a few years. The thing I loved was the Devs taking over their characters and roleplaying them... and that stopped pretty much when Jack Emmert left. ._. I also loved the wedding event, nothing like it besides the marriage of Lord and Lady British. How do you make it better? ADD MORE LIKE THAT! D:

Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...

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I guess they were changing

I guess they were changing this by the end but I felt a lot of the harder battles lacked in-depth tactics... Yeah sure there were some "Stand over here and here" missions or stuff like the eden trial with the special buffs, but over all not many battles were very dynamic. Really if you had decent buffs/heals you could theoretically bunker down your characters and just click till the fight was over in a lot of cases. I uh... I played a stone tank though so it was always "Oh look he finally did ten damage" or "Oh a psionic arch-aaand Im dead." but overall I would like some fights, even just some elite boss style missions to be more dynamic/involved and really make players think the battles through.

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While relatively minor in the

While relatively minor in the scheme of things, every time I encountered this it did bother me that even the largest and strongest superhero could by stymied by... a trash can. Or how Joe Average NPC could push my character out of the way as though he were a cardboard cutout.

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Oh so many things...I'm sure

Oh so many things...I'm sure some of you will recognize:

Lack of travel powers early. Vets used to say that 'having to run through the Hollows at early levels was an important exercise to learn how to avoid random mobs.' Really? I always thought it was the BEST evidence for Flight by level 2...

Trains to the fight. Yeah...felt really super there...

Cave missions. Never before in the history of gaming have so many dreaded the words Wedding Cake.

Torches along the walls. Got hung up on them all the time.

Utter lack of a Team Finder. Listening to other players screaming in desperation for a team in the Public chat was always fun and exciting...not. Neither was trying to find a team so my Emp Defender might be able to actually go up levels.

TFs that took longer to complete than it took to watch Gettysburg. Seriously...anyone who thinks that the Quartermain TF was a good idea needs medication. Fighting the same foes three missions in a row for an entire day?

Devs who kept telling us that the changes we wanted were 'impossible' only to implement them a few years later. Really people, most of us are grown-ups...just say 'not with our current code, maybe later' and move on.

Devs who never seemed to consider player opinion until they were battered with it. Really...it's OUR game. We paid to buy it, our subs supported it. I don't care if what the players want doesn't match your 'vision'. Maybe your vision needs adjusting. For years we asked for real numbers behind the game among other things and Jack said no. He leaves and suddenly life became MUCH happier for me. I would poll players quarterly to find out what THEY wanted.

No moon base. Really wanted that moon base.

No underwater stuff either.

Very few new maps. I wish they had slowed down the art department enough to do one new instanced map (office building, warehouse, whatever) per release. That would have been more than 30 by the time the game closed. Seeing the same maps over and over was terrible.

Lack of access. So...you have these cool new maps, cool new things and cool new enemies to fight but they're ONLY in a TF? Oh, they're only in a TF that many people don't like? Wow...way to properly use resources gang.

Too. Many. Types. Of. Currency!

Redside was born, then withered due to lack of attention. You can't ask us to support the game when you won't support IT.

Contacts that seemed reluctant to give me their phone number. Seriously?

I spent an hour determining what I look like...all gone the minute I toggle Granite. The one power that made it impossible to step over a shadow or use any travel power other than Teleport.

I'm sure there are more but these are the ones that bubble to the surface. The inclusion of any of these in CoT will cause the universe itself to weep in frustration.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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Quote:
Quote:

Devs who never seemed to consider player opinion until they were battered with it. Really...it's OUR game. We paid to buy it, our subs supported it. I don't care if what the players want doesn't match your 'vision'. Maybe your vision needs adjusting. For years we asked for real numbers behind the game among other things and Jack said no. He leaves and suddenly life became MUCH happier for me. I would poll players quarterly to find out what THEY wanted.

But if it wasn't for the developers in the first place, we wouldn't have a place to do this. Do you think that MWM will implement *all* the changes that have been suggested just because we give them money? Even if it goes against "their vision"? If it just boils down to "those who shout the loudest" or "those who pay the most"... then sorry, that *won't* be the best way to lead development...

That will just lead to elitism in the end... those who have the money, those who shout and stomp their feet will lead the route of development... and those who cannot get the voice or cash will just give up on the game if this form of development becomes obvious.

There is a line though that HAS to be drawn. Some, I can understand, and maybe it *does* take a change of leadership to change focus/perspective... but that is a problem of development full stop though...

And not all player suggestions are good ideas in the first place.

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I'd like to re-emphasize that

I'd like to re-emphasize that every player should have some sort of effective travel power at start -- my preference is flight. A lot of us simply love to team, and making the team move at the speed of the slowest member is needlessly hard on the fast team members, if the slowest member is walking/running to the mission...

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Really the only thing I have

Really the only thing I have to say here is that the missions from zone to zone got a bit samey and boring after doing them six times. Loved the writing, don't get me wrong, but the actual missions.. 'go here, kill this many, come back' seemed to be the largest number of missions. I -really- liked the dynamic questing system of GW2. Going into an area and having the quests grow and change depending on how far the set has progressed and how many people were in the area (sometimes leading to a boss fight), was fun. I could see something similar being pretty darn awesome for CoT. Not all the missions should be that way, but if there were dynamic mission hubs... /drool

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TSW makes me think on

TSW makes me think on missions, I have to actually read stuff
WAR and GW2 had evolving kill stuff little acts.. would be perfect in CoT setting

Were I to look at things to inspire my missions I would go all the way back to Myst. In Myst you dont kill anything... but you solve a lot of things that leads to the game ending and you figuring everything out.

I would love missions that made me think instead of just smack stuff (dont get me wrong i want both)
I also like the little things in the bioshock series where you have to unlock stuff or create paths, puzzle stuff.
Have super strength.... here is a mission to errect a support sturcture in a set amount of time because a building is going to fall down otherwise.
Are you a MM....Listen to an NPC's story and figure out what will convince them to do what you need them to do, unlocking some new story arch for you
Have flight? Go save everyone on a crashing plane
Are you a blaster... well crap some mad scientist is launching missles at downtown, target and destroy them before they land.

Now CoX was older than all of that... save Myst... Myst is epic. I tended to get bored of the repetitive nature of the missions... I don't think in all the years of play time I ever got to max lvl.... I got bored of the missions and went and rp'ed.

Supporting how I can, Starting up a DA group for art, stories, and concepts to be collected
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Please join up if you plan to make or collect CoT related art.

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For me the biggest failing of

For me the biggest failing of CoX was its age.

The graphics engine (even after being updated) was not really up to the industry standard. I hope that this game at kicks the ass of both DCUO and Champions in the graphics department.

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Hmmm.

Hmmm.

The train system. If it was the Sims or about playing normal human beings, ok Train system maybe. But being super powered and forced to ride public transportation like a broke bloke when supposedly I can fly, leap great distances, and run faster than any train can hope to get, it didn't make sense.

The enemy mobs a lot of the time were too skittish. They rather flee than fight.

Outside the team gated TF/SFs which required a team, the regular day to day content was very repetitive and got did. And sucks to be soloist or on low population because TF required team and or more people than willing to join at the time. Thus back to the grind. And too many CoT (Circle of thorn) missions. A few here and there ok. But from level 5- 50 dealing with them, by level 35 it because more of a hassle that something I looked forward too especially when there were so many under used enemy groups.

The graphics didn't age well. But after the game is made I guess that would have required a crazy amount of over haul.

Traveling across over sides map just to either talk to a contact for no reason or to do a simple task like to click on an object. And contacts that had missions every where except on the map they are located. If they are in Steel Canyon, then why are they so bothered with Skyway?

Redside in hindsight, should been there from the get go. First it came late, then it took a while before redside got 40-50 content, then by then most people left redside alone, then when they made transfer to side pretty simple, redside was all but dead. It should have been a bit more different with something exclusive besides a color palette swap and the lights turned dimmed.

The constant "it's impossible" at every idea. Then turn around a few years later and pop up with it. Never close the door on an idea because people tend to leave and when it do happen, they are not around to see it and thus it becomes moot. Not to mention it gives off a feeling of being lied to.

Really no new fighting tactics. Over all the tactics were the same as any of the thousands of fantasy games. Tank hold agro, healer heals, scrapper and blasters do DPS, with one added in the form of controllers. It's about time to blur the roles in the super hero genre as there are many super heroes that don't fit in the usual COX holy four DPS control Tank Heal circle. And have missions where different tactics are needed a bit with variety of bosses and how they operate even if they have same set of powers.

Players strict energy bar, enemies, seem to be energy is not a worry. If players have to, those that supposedly are supposed to be super have to manage endurance, then so should the mob. They shouldn't have energy bar 200-250 which is near impossible for a player to obtain on top of their great power cost bonus while the supposed super hero is weezing worse than a 600lb fat dude after going up two stairs.

Super hero that can shoot fire freeze opponents, throw rocks and punch enemies silly yet, have to jog every where. If anything travel powers should be one of the first thing to be chosen when entering the world. Not sure who idea at first was it to wait until level 14 to get travel power. Guess again like the power sets and roles, was taking another rule out of the fantasy mmo game rule book.

Overall feeling of being an errand boy. Contacts tell me where to go, what crimes to fight, the main NPC may give me pat on the back and "take it from Here". How about fighting crime on my own skill and actually being equal to the main ones instead of being subpar and doing missions they simply don't feel like doing.

The RNG thing kind of sucked. another thing from fantasy games. "I'm so super, now watch me whiff all day." Yeah, very super. If there is high percent of chance like 95% chance then there should hardly be any way a person is not even hitting 50%. At least 90% of the attacks should be hitting and misses should be far and well between aka 5% to miss. And there should be no way to miss objects like boxes and such.

Challenge in the big fights. Really though it seemed the definition of challenge of having a big bag of hit points and max stats. Over all all the AV fights were nearly the same besides the only variable being their powers. But they had the same resistance, the same buffs, nearly the same hp range and all could be taken down the exact same way. Although ITF did throw a little twist in there. But overall there was forgotten that there is more than one or to ways to make something challenging. Maybe something like what works with some high ranking enemy mob don't work so well for others. One that murk one AV, can cause you death if you do it with another AV. and so on. Variety of challenge is what COX lacked in the upper level fights.

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JayBezz wrote:
JayBezz wrote:

For me the biggest failing of CoX was its age.
The graphics engine (even after being updated) was not really up to the industry standard. I hope that this game at kicks the ass of both DCUO and Champions in the graphics department.

Champs I agree with.. but DCUO.. no. Any higher and you alienate a good amount of users who CAN'T afford the next gen tech for computers (Like Me)

IMO, I liked CoH's look as it wasn't over the top comic-book cartoony (CO) nor was it "OHMAGOD LOOK AT MAH CITAY AND HIGH REZ!" (DCUO).. it was a good appearance with special effects and animations that really made you feel and see the power behind attacks. Plus the ragdoll mechanics made for good lolz. CO Even had that until a year after launch because it was "Too silly for an MMO that's going to change lives"

Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...

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The multi level cave missions

The multi level cave missions were horrible. I got to the point where most of the time I just wouldn't do the mission.

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There are a lot of really

There are a lot of really good comments here. I'd also suggest that the factors that gave the game the nickname of "City of Traveling" be addressed early. No cross-zone missions until the characters have movement powers adequate to get there relatively quickly. All contacts immediately give you their cell number. Allow a large number of missions to be active so that you don't have to return to a contact until it's convenient (or at all, if you aren't actually delivering something).

As a personal aside, I'd like to see accuracy decrease with range, and less limitation on the maximum range of shots. This would limit the range based on how close you felt you needed to be in order to reliably hit the enemy instead of an arbitrary range cut-off.

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MythologicalBeast wrote:
MythologicalBeast wrote:

... I'd like to see accuracy decrease with range, ...

Yea, but any powers that have a longer cast time, like Snipe, which takes time to align the shot, shouldn't suffer from -Acc (or -ToHit , or whatever the status is called)

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Consultant wrote:
Consultant wrote:

I'd like to re-emphasize that every player should have some sort of effective travel power at start -- my preference is flight. A lot of us simply love to team, and making the team move at the speed of the slowest member is needlessly hard on the fast team members, if the slowest member is walking/running to the mission...

I agree. I'd like to see you get a travel power right off the bat. I also would like to see a system where you don't need to invest slots in the travel power - it just gets better automatically as you go up in level. I also like the idea of being able to choose to not move at top speed, if you want. Maybe I want to super speed through tunnels at 50% of my max.

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InOnePiece wrote:
InOnePiece wrote:

Maybe I want to super speed through tunnels at 50% of my max.

Emmm.. what if the superspeed power button had 4 consecutive states. Off by default, 25% on first click, 50% on second, 75% on third click, and 100% on fourth click?

Not sure how to visually indicate which state/percent its at though.
Perhaps like this?

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Yea, but any powers that have

Yea, but any powers that have a longer cast time, like Snipe, which takes time to align the shot, shouldn't suffer from -Acc (or -ToHit , or whatever the status is called)

These would still suffer from -Acc, but their base accuracy would be much higher. You would always be able to hit something 3x as far with the same accuracy, regardless of where you started.

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Redraw never worked the way I

Redraw never worked the way I wanted it to—smoothing that out would have been terrific.

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It seemed to me that in the

It seemed to me that in the later stages of the game all enemies seemed to acquire some damage resistance to Smashing/Lethal damage, and quite often Psi or Toxic damage as well. Which made certain sets a chore to play. I took Spines and Katana scrappers to 50 and around 35-40 my kill speed started slowing significantly.

I'd also like to state my dissatisfaction with the "old style" mission/task force designs. Now I'm sure that the MWM team has learned that time sinks for the sake of time sinks. Cross-zone travel for missions, not getting cell phone numbers until late in the mission line, obnoxiously long numbers of missions. I'm looking at you Crimson, and your World Wide Red, or whatever the heck it was. So I'm not worried that it will be there, I'd just like to give voice to it to assure that it won't.

Another minor annoyance was with certain aspects of the IO system, in that there were a lot of sets that weren't worth slotting. Just about everything that capped out at 25, aside from the uniques, was typically useless.

There was the clutter with Sniper recipes, and I tried to get an answer from various aspects of the CoH dev team, but no one seemed to know why the heck there 5 whole sets that dropped all the way up to level 50. Just useless recipes that clogged up the drop table.

Especially when Targeted AoE had three (with a 4th in I24), and all of them but Positron's Blast were useless. You could easily end up going over the 5 stack limit with some AT's, like my Crab Spider.

At lower levels, IO's weren't really worth going out of the way to craft them, and the low levels passed by so quickly that the few worthwhile things in that area (again, uniques) ended up being rather rare because of it.

Having IO's at every single level was kind of obnoxious as well, as all it seemed to do was increase the amount of time I would have to spend looking through auctions for something acceptable that I wanted.

And at higher levels? With the exception of the PvP and Purple sets, if you wanted to keep all your wonderful set bonuses and stuff, you had to have sets native to the level range you were playing. Want to play with my level 15 buddies with my 50? Oh, sorry, all the sets that were making you survivable have stopped working, and now I'm being chronically knocked on my butt 'cause my Knockback protection IO's have stopped working.

If I put work into developing my character in specific ways, I would like for the character to continue playing in the manner that I've outfitted and built her towards. Don't make me have to spend in game time and currency to make a character effective for when I'm playing with lower leveled friends in addition to my higher level play.

Oh, and the magic/tech salvage divide? Don't do that. Tech stuff was worthless and magic stuff sold at a premium because of it. But since we're not going to have an Origin system, I don't think that's going to be something I need to worry about.

Let's see... other gripes? I'd like to see enemies and objectives on the minimap. Adding it all up, I've probably lost the equivalent of a week of my life trying to play "Hunt the Glowie," or "Hide and Seek for the One Baddie I Need to Kill to Finish the Mission," and some way to deal with "Oops, we've got an enemy knocked out of the level geometry/hasn't spawned/will not trigger" aside from waiting for a GM to manually hop into a mission after a 45 minute wait. They would happen to me somewhat frequently, and the auto-complete mission allowance of once every few days were not enough to deal with them. I'm like a bug/glitch magnet.

Huge animation times also were something I wasn't fond of. My original badger was a blueside Spines/Regen scrapper. Good AoE, but all of her single target attacks took FOREVER. Combined with the aforementioned near-universal resistance to Lethal and Toxic at high levels, she took forever to down singular hard targets, whereas my later badger the SS/Fire/Mu Brute could on occasion down bosses without going through the entirety of her attack chain.

So maybe factoring in animation time a bit in determining damage? If it's going to take three seconds for me to fire off this attack, than the end result ought to be worth it, since with damage procs in quick-animating, low recharge powers I could've hit the guy two or three times in that span.

SS's big gun hits felt like that. I always knew when I'd land one on an later developed TF or Trial because the UI's numeric display of the AV's health would suddenly jump down by 2-4%.

Though CoH did get Real Numbers in time, I must stress the importance of having an easily understandable metric for measuring what something does. Binding of Isaac, for example, drives me absolutely nuts. You get damage ups, rate of fire ups, range ups, and speed ups, but you don't have much of a metric for how much something helps you out aside from trial and error, as well as some notoriously unreliable 'meters.' Thankfully there's a mod that will turn on damage numbers and give enemies health bars.

Similarly CoH had terms for its damage amounts, range amounts, and recharge amounts, and I never could remember what order they were in. Again, Real Numbers helped with that.

TL:DR:
1. Don't make me regret choosing a damage type by giving near-universal resistance to it at any point in the game.
2. Don't make time sinks that exist solely to be time sinks.
3. Make the gear/drops/boosts/enhancements/IO's worthwhile to use at all stages of the game, easy to manage, and for the love of Galactus, cut down on vendor trash.
4. If I'm going to be stuck doing a long animation, make the result of that animation worthwhile for me.
5. Don't obfuscate what something does. Make sure that what things do is clear and easily apparent.
6. I like big orange numbers and dislike small orange numbers.

Breviloquent wrote:

Redraw never worked the way I wanted it to—smoothing that out would have been terrific.

Oh hells yes. Redraw was crippling at times.

That Spines scrapper? I had two attack chains: Spines and Not-Spines. There were times where I ended up using her Epic attacks as my chain because there were more efficient than my native Spines attacks, since every time I used an Epic attack and then went back to Spines, she'd have to do "crouch and fart out more spines" animation.

Since the powers and animation engine is being built from the ground up, I would very much appreciate to be able to use my non-item based powers without having to trigger the redraw. The oft-maligned Spiny Sister would have been a bit more tolerable to play were I able to use the fast animating and relatively high damage Fire epic powers to cover places where her native primary was dragging.

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I can't say that every power

I can't say that every power shouldn't have a weakness somewhere in the game, but it seemed that some faced this much more often than others in CoX. This wouldn't necessarily unbalance anything and there should be times when certain powers do better than others. There should also be times when the enemy is susceptible to certain powers more than other. Does anyone remember reflex powers though? It didn't seem to work nearly as well late in the game as at lower levels and yet that was suppose to be a big damage mitigation power set and then the missions for 50's only started coming out and there were enemies that would hit 90 to 100 percent at times and if your big mitigation power was reflex then you were dead since you had not chance to avoid being hit. I remember that Plant/electricity DOMs were one of the FotM combos at one time and then major changes took place within the electricity power structure and suddenly no one was recommending Plant/elect DOMS to anyone ever, I sure didn't even though I spent a great deal of time and money trying to get that combo to work and "they" kept tinkering with it from on high and thwarting my efforts. :-/ I get that part of this was due to the game being sold and picked up by another company, but still there was a lot of time and effort and in game resources that I was paying for going down the drain. Suddenly I was being told how this would be better for all in the long run after having my toon wrecked. Please take time to get it right in the beginning to save us all time, money and grief in the long run. It seemed that at the end CoH was more worried about meeting deadlines than getting ideas fully implemented and other things right. Time and time again someone would say just fix what is wrong now for next issue instead of releasing more buggy content, and everyone would agree except the CoH higher up. My only other really big concern is not to get an us verses them attitude. I have experience MMOs where this has happened - please, PLEASE - don't lie to me about this and that and then ask for my money!!! Don't say one thing and do another and then claim you're not. Not everything can be spun one way or the other, there are black and white issues. We all want CoT to be a great success and we all know that some mistakes will be made and some wrong things will need to be fixed as some point in time.

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One thing that always bugged

One thing that always bugged me when playing my defenders....the powers I could use to buff my teammates I was unable to use on myself.

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Mendicant wrote:
Mendicant wrote:

One thing that always bugged me when playing my defenders....the powers I could use to buff my teammates I was unable to use on myself.

if at least they were self usable in solo play...
would make being a team healer less painful on nights you dont have your team

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CoX flaws... Well I know

CoX flaws... Well I know there were plenty... I can't agree more on a team search mechanism, that could be tenuous at times. I didn't always like not having a travel power right off the bat but there were those times I really enjoyed the difficulty of trudging through areas where not only was the battle going to be epic but even the journey. I think it would be cool to have travel powers available early on but like any novice they shouldn't necessarily work as expected without some practice.

Spammers were irritating. Many mishes got a bit old. A more dynamic mission system would be great!

Possibly the one biggest complaint I have is how the lighter handed classes had a very rough go of it in the thirties and forties. Here they are just starting to get decently powerful and then the targets get so much tougher that suddenly my Defender had to team to get enough xp to level up... I never got one def to level 50... Maybe that is just my shortcoming shining through but it always seemed that some classes just couldn't be soloed as successfully as others. I tend to solo only because when I play all different hours it's sometimes hard to find regulars. That said I think there should be some variance to the experience mechanism so that those characters who specialize in powers that aren't necessarily hack and slash should still gain experience through their power set abilities despite not having the attack to kill ratio of a blaster or scrapper.

I agree that taking the train always seemed a bit out of place too...

I don't need a ton of loot but make the loot that drops valuable not just ok maybe if I have an extra slot that isn't already using something more valuable.

Some mishes/TF's were fun and well balanced but some were dumb go fetch runs. I never like go fetch runs. Learning game lore or anything in game for that matter can and should be done with other mechanisms than the go talk to such and such... (I'm no ones messenger boy, I'm a delivery boy!)

I'm sure giving myself more time I can think of much more that was wrong with it but right now I'm missing it so much these things are hard to remember...

"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

syntaxerror37
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The inventory, especially how

The inventory, especially how salvage was handled. There should be no hard limit on salvage we can carry, just a maximum stack size for each piece.

The power tray, the way powers showed their recharge state. It was hard to judge by looking at it, especially for long recharge powers. I would have liked a "clock like" recharge display; perhaps with the option to display the time remaining in seconds.

Too many enemies with resistance to smashing/lethal damage. There should have been a balance between all the damage types, especially in the high levels. Also related, there should have been less smashing/lethal/energy damage dealt by enemies in the game and more of the other types, making the exotic resistances feel more useful.

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Over the course of 8+ years

Over the course of 8+ years of the live game, they never managed to create a fully poseable, fully animated, fully costumeable quadraped character model?!

Chest sliders which could make asymmetrical breasts bigger than a character's head and harder than Impervium, but they couldn't be bothered to create more realistic sizes than the 36C was at the *lowest* slider setting? I hope that CoT will give us the ability to not only make A/AA cups, but actually have a normal default chest *without* breasts for both females and males (and allow for a more respectable non-mammaried chest for non-Human characters).

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1) Mobs respawning on top of

1) Mobs respawning on top of you in Atlas after i21.

2) Twinshot's missions. The characterisation was hackneyed and the plot itself was insulting -- not heroic at all. I still can't understand why some people said they liked these. Even if you don't care about decent writing, surely intro/tutorial arcs for a superhero should consist of something more than being strung along by a stronger hero in an elaborate lie.

Spurn all ye kindle.

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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

Quote:
Devs who never seemed to consider player opinion until they were battered with it. Really...it's OUR game. We paid to buy it, our subs supported it. I don't care if what the players want doesn't match your 'vision'. Maybe your vision needs adjusting. For years we asked for real numbers behind the game among other things and Jack said no. He leaves and suddenly life became MUCH happier for me. I would poll players quarterly to find out what THEY wanted.
But if it wasn't for the developers in the first place, we wouldn't have a place to do this. Do you think that MWM will implement *all* the changes that have been suggested just because we give them money? Even if it goes against "their vision"? If it just boils down to "those who shout the loudest" or "those who pay the most"... then sorry, that *won't* be the best way to lead development...
That will just lead to elitism in the end... those who have the money, those who shout and stomp their feet will lead the route of development... and those who cannot get the voice or cash will just give up on the game if this form of development becomes obvious.
There is a line though that HAS to be drawn. Some, I can understand, and maybe it *does* take a change of leadership to change focus/perspective... but that is a problem of development full stop though...
And not all player suggestions are good ideas in the first place.

I agree that you can't let the inmates run the asylum. However, let's say their 'vision' involves our characters not having any movement powers until level 15 for whatever reason. Or they want everyone to be teamed so there are NO solo missions at all. The players would scream bloody murder. Yes, there is a fine line in the middle somewhere but that line is important. The Devs have to have their vision in order to get started, yes...but they should be willing to defend their stance in the face of player pressure or be willing to alter their vision.

They're designing the game but they have to realize that they may be wrong.

I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...

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Cinnder wrote:
Cinnder wrote:

1) Mobs respawning on top of you in Atlas after i21.
2) Twinshot's missions. The characterisation was hackneyed and the plot itself was insulting -- not heroic at all. I still can't understand why some people said they liked these. Even if you don't care about decent writing, surely intro/tutorial arcs for a superhero should consist of something more than being strung along by a stronger hero in an elaborate lie.

Yeah, the strung along part seemed to be the bread and butter of most it not all of the COX missions. I think having the end part being based on a lie added a little flavor to the usual regular strung along, sometimes by stronger hero but usually civilians, mission that was present throughout the rest of the game. I wished the missions in COX didnt feel like being strung along at all. Wanted to do some actual classical heroics instead of having to be lead by the nose through every mission/contact.

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Events should never have

Events should never have villains and heroes working together, but battling or competing with each other. As a pvper, I hated those guys ;)

Don't fragment the hero or villain playerbases by design, coh's community was the best in the industry, very supportive of newbies and a pleasure to chat with (generally) but when u have one server for VIPs, another group off hunting components to attain incarnate power, alignment within alignment based this or that,some free players w/ ios, some w/o, limited access for all, it chips away at the sense of community. Remember we are united for justice(or injustice in the case of vills), we shouldn't then be divided into a virtual caste system after that.

Soloing an AV should not become commonplace. If it does, who needs teams?

Villains were OP. Period. I know NC Soft wanted to encourage more players to play vills but c'mon! Scrapper/tanks called brutes (they even got to skip jab!)? troller/blasters?Domination? Pet classes with 11 pets?All the money I spent to get perma phants and these guys get 11!?!?! Man, when I think of what Assassin Strike used to be like in PVP... and those darn Epic ATs! SERIOUSLY LIKE WTH!!

Don't nerf things, playtest longer. Coh lost me for a year after that energy melee nerf.

Group/aoe speed boost please.

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Bad => Not enough indoor map

Bad => Not enough indoor map variation.

Horrible => Mission arcs that took me all over the CoX universe (at any level range) even though the lore didn't demand it.

Gawd Awful => The actual power, enhancement and slotting steps of part of the respec process.

Abominable => Too many in-game currencies, reward systems and metrics.

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The Kitteh wrote:
The Kitteh wrote:

Bad => Not enough indoor map variation.
Horrible => Mission arcs that took me all over the CoX universe (at any level range) even though the lore didn't demand it.
Gawd Awful => The actual power, enhancement and slotting steps of part of the respec process.
Abominable => Too many in-game currencies, reward systems and metrics.

Good list, especially the last 2 points.

jag40
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Warsong wrote:
Warsong wrote:

Events should never have villains and heroes working together, but battling or competing with each other. As a pvper, I hated those guys ;)
Don't fragment the hero or villain playerbases by design, coh's community was the best in the industry, very supportive of newbies and a pleasure to chat with (generally) but when u have one server for VIPs, another group off hunting components to attain incarnate power, alignment within alignment based this or that,some free players w/ ios, some w/o, limited access for all, it chips away at the sense of community. Remember we are united for justice(or injustice in the case of vills), we shouldn't then be divided into a virtual caste system after that.
Soloing an AV should not become commonplace. If it does, who needs teams?
Villains were OP. Period. I know NC Soft wanted to encourage more players to play vills but c'mon! Scrapper/tanks called brutes (they even got to skip jab!)? troller/blasters?Domination? Pet classes with 11 pets?All the money I spent to get perma phants and these guys get 11!?!?! Man, when I think of what Assassin Strike used to be like in PVP... and those darn Epic ATs! SERIOUSLY LIKE WTH!!
Don't nerf things, playtest longer. Coh lost me for a year after that energy melee nerf.
Group/aoe speed boost please.

I thought MMs only got 5 pets. three cannon fodder, two decent ones and one sturdy one?

Did anyone actually play on the VIP server? I would have thought it was popping with all the complaint prior from vets talking about how tired they are of dealing with newbies and people below their skill level, people that don't know the game and stuff. I went over there and it was pretty...dead. Maybe I caught it at a bad time. Yeah I think the idea of a VIP server wasn't very good to begin with. Just another at least visible tool to reinforce and condone forming of cliques and viewing outsiders as beneath and not worth dealing with.

The AV soloing thing. Yeah, don't think AVs were meant to be taken solo in the game mechanics although I seen many claim to be able to solo giant monsters and AVs, but when you get them on the team, they mostly get smacked around. Guess they meant to say they can solo only DR. Vaz in AV mode. AKA-only seen very few that actually could indeed solo AVs...until purps came along and then it everybody and their momma was doing it. Of course I don't think there should be many situations where many people need a team. Nothing is more saddening than seeing some poor defender playing outside peak hours on the channels asking for help with stuff and no one answering and thus their game play is stopped due to lack of people hanging about. Of course I try and help if I can and not in the middle of a battle myself and I guess it's possible everyone else was busy too but the end result is the same. Those guys cant continue because no team.

But yeah definitely agree with the nerf thing. Best to even it out before hand because people get used toa build around it and then nerf happens and for some that throws their entire build out of whack. Especially when they farmed/played the market/saved up billions of influence to get it the way they like it.

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There were two things, in

There were two things, in particular, that tended to get under my skin when I played my robots mastermind. First, of course, was trying to ride herd on them. The second was that I had absolutely no control over their attacks. It was frustrating to see the assault bot fire its missiles at the last minion that needs finishing off and then being unable to do anything but hope that the robots would cut loose with their cone/AoE attacks when there were eight or more enemies coming at me.

- - - - -
Hail Beard!

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syntaxerror37
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Warsong]
Warsong wrote:

Don't nerf things, playtest longer. Coh lost me for a year after that energy melee nerf.

Sometimes mistakes happen and make it through to the final version of the game and need to be fixed. Other times evolution of the game over time makes a power broken (in either direction). No amount of play-testing can avoid these things from happening. No dev in any game ever wants to nerf a power, however a dev's got to do what a dev's got to do and sometimes that means a power gets nerfed. Of course that also means sometimes a power gets buffed but the player base never seams to care about that.

The Kitteh wrote:

Abominable => Too many in-game currencies, reward systems and metrics.

I've heard this complaint before about CoH, but *why* was this a bad thing? I liked having the different merits and the separate currencies for players vs. SGs.

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The hollows. >.> get

The hollows. >.> get mission on one corner of the map. Waypoint is on the other side of the map through the areas of mobs that are like 10 levels above me. And unless you have hover or TP i'm having to run a gauntlet and hope to make it to the end. Assuming I can find a way out of the giant hole.

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Justice Blues
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jag40 wrote:
jag40 wrote:

Warsong wrote:
Events should never have villains and heroes working together, but battling or competing with each other. As a pvper, I hated those guys ;)
Don't fragment the hero or villain playerbases by design, coh's community was the best in the industry, very supportive of newbies and a pleasure to chat with (generally) but when u have one server for VIPs, another group off hunting components to attain incarnate power, alignment within alignment based this or that,some free players w/ ios, some w/o, limited access for all, it chips away at the sense of community. Remember we are united for justice(or injustice in the case of vills), we shouldn't then be divided into a virtual caste system after that.
Soloing an AV should not become commonplace. If it does, who needs teams?
Villains were OP. Period. I know NC Soft wanted to encourage more players to play vills but c'mon! Scrapper/tanks called brutes (they even got to skip jab!)? troller/blasters?Domination? Pet classes with 11 pets?All the money I spent to get perma phants and these guys get 11!?!?! Man, when I think of what Assassin Strike used to be like in PVP... and those darn Epic ATs! SERIOUSLY LIKE WTH!!
Don't nerf things, playtest longer. Coh lost me for a year after that energy melee nerf.
Group/aoe speed boost please.

I thought MMs only got 5 pets. three cannon fodder, two decent ones and one sturdy one?
Did anyone actually play on the VIP server? I would have thought it was popping with all the complaint prior from vets talking about how tired they are of dealing with newbies and people below their skill level, people that don't know the game and stuff. I went over there and it was pretty...dead. Maybe I caught it at a bad time. Yeah I think the idea of a VIP server wasn't very good to begin with. Just another at least visible tool to reinforce and condone forming of cliques and viewing outsiders as beneath and not worth dealing with.
The AV soloing thing. Yeah, don't think AVs were meant to be taken solo in the game mechanics although I seen many claim to be able to solo giant monsters and AVs, but when you get them on the team, they mostly get smacked around. Guess they meant to say they can solo only DR. Vaz in AV mode. AKA-only seen very few that actually could indeed solo AVs...until purps came along and then it everybody and their momma was doing it. Of course I don't think there should be many situations where many people need a team. Nothing is more saddening than seeing some poor defender playing outside peak hours on the channels asking for help with stuff and no one answering and thus their game play is stopped due to lack of people hanging about. Of course I try and help if I can and not in the middle of a battle myself and I guess it's possible everyone else was busy too but the end result is the same. Those guys cant continue because no team.
But yeah definitely agree with the nerf thing. Best to even it out before hand because people get used toa build around it and then nerf happens and for some that throws their entire build out of whack. Especially when they farmed/played the market/saved up billions of influence to get it the way they like it.

Some of the secondary powersets for MMs included pets, so some of them could have a lot out at once.

Dr. Vahz was the only AV my main could solo as an AV. There were quite a few he could stand there and pound on for hours, but he just couldn't generate enough damage to overcome their regen. And if they used Smash/Lethal, they generally couldn't damage him fast enough to beat him. Although he was capable of defeating Adamastor solo.

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I'm trying to figure out what

I'm trying to figure out what MM managed to get 11 pets. /Storm has Lightning Storm and Tornado, which I suppose might be two on top of the six. But I don't know where you'd get the other three from, since barring obscene +Rech you can't perma Soul Extraction, Gang War, or Hell on Earth.

BIZZARO MEDIA FOLLOWER

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Justice Blues wrote:
Justice Blues wrote:

Soloing an AV

I recall having one or two AV's in the Ghost Widow etc.. Arcs, when i wend from Blue to the Red Side after level 41.
Most times i couldnt find anyone to join me, so i would Solo it. Depending on the Toon i had, It Was Difficult.

Ohh, i remember my Electrical Melee/Shield Defense scrapper went over to the red side to get the Epic pool. My GAWD!!! it took him FOREVER to take down the AV's/Elites.... AOE.. u Suck! Well, it doesnt.. its just that Electrical Melee powerset was Gimped, since it was lacking at LEAST ONE Superior Damage Attack.. Stupid Lightning Clap!

oh Mannnn! i miss my Fire/Kin corruptor right about now.. :(
HE was Soooo Ubber!

jag40
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Izzy wrote:
Izzy wrote:

Justice Blues wrote:
Soloing an AV
I recall having one or two AV's in the Ghost Widow etc.. Arcs, when i wend from Blue to the Red Side after level 41.
Most times i couldnt find anyone to join me, so i would Solo it. Depending on the Toon i had, It Was Difficult.

So sometimes being able to solo an AV was a requirement*. Hmmm. So maybe there are uses for being able to solo AVs. It would suck not being able to find a team and thus cannot progress due to it.

*-As in requirement to progress the arc when no team or takers to help are available.

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My CoX "pet peeves" if you

My CoX "pet peeves" if you will:
1. When my friends were all on the beta test server I would be all alone on the live server. I guess the remedy for that was supposed to be "so get on the Beta Test server, Radiac!" but somehow it was too much of a hassle to have to install it and whatever so I never did. Having the "everyone's on the same live server all the time" dealy should solve this even if I don't beta test CoT, which I probably will if allowed.

2. Getting disconnected from the mapserver. This seems like an obvious one, but as long as there's no connectivity problem on my side, I would want CoT to be at least as stable to run and stay connected to as CoX was, if not more so.

3. Leveling was actually too fast by the last 2 or so years of CoX. It was probably too slow in the first 2-3 years though. Admittedly this is another category where am alone in thinking this way, so take that with a grain of salt.

4. Prestige, base salvage, and the "Incarnate Shards" vs. "Incarnate threads" currency issues. You souldn't have to introduce a new currency every time you roll out something new, I think.

5. All the loopholes that allowed farming in all its forms. I'm not sure how any of that can be changed for the better, and again maybe some people would complain if it were, but it annoyed me.

6. Mission maps where just navigating the map was the hard part (the blue caves, and maybe to a lesser extent the 5th Column caves). Nuff said here already.

7. The fact that they made us wait what seemed like an eternity before we could get any sort of jetpack costume piece (I don't mean a temp power, I mean a back-mounted animated thingy that would animate when you were using "Fly" or any other similar power.)

8. While it's true that by the end, the outdoor maps were way too big and mostly empty, they still made the game world feel like a world. I would hate to see the world maps for this game be significantly smaller in terms of total area. I don't know how much work it is to make them and I'd be willing to wait for some areas to open up in later expansions if it meant that the common areas were large enough in general to not feel boxed-in when in them.

9. This might be another me-only thing, but by the end, some of the zone events were getting lame. The "invading" Nemesis didn't even have Mole Machines. I used to make comments on the chat channels announcing a Nemesis invasion that sounded like "Peregrine Island would appear to be getting invaded by Nemesis.... but it's probably just a frat prank, because they don't have mole Machines."

10. Getting lost in the bowels of Perez Park when I was a lowbie was never fun. That said, you could always just get your self killed and go to the hospital.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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Demons got you some kind of

Demons got you some kind of weird "long recharge" fire imp pet(s) that was in addition to the usual 6 as I recall. Also, there were always jellomen, the Paragon PD Hardsuit robocop recipe pet, the vet reward fairy or drone, and the non-combat "just for show" vet reward pet. OH! and the Incarnate Lore pets (at most 2 per power usually).

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

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Please embed torches into the

Please embed torches into the wall, not hang them from it.

Visual: Face the wall, punch a big hole in it that's 2 feet wide and 1 foot across, insert torch in hole.

(Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative)

syntaxerror37
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Catherine America wrote:
Catherine America wrote:

Please embed torches into the wall, not hang them from it.
Visual: Face the wall, punch a big hole in it that's 2 feet wide and 1 foot across, insert torch in hole.

Or at least don't have them sticking out into the hallway in such a way to catch players as they run back and forth. Otherwise I actually liked ornabega maps, put those torches leaning out from the base of the wall were damn annoying.

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I wan to see more

I wan to see more Destructable Walls, whe doing certain missions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz4irggABKw

Maybe a cutscene with the Rhino type character gets to the vault by rushing/smashing through the wall of the safe?

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syntaxerror37 wrote:
syntaxerror37 wrote:

Warsong wrote:
Don't nerf things, playtest longer. Coh lost me for a year after that energy melee nerf.

Sometimes mistakes happen and make it through to the final version of the game and need to be fixed. Other times evolution of the game over time makes a power broken (in either direction). No amount of play-testing can avoid these things from happening. No dev in any game ever wants to nerf a power, however a dev's got to do what a dev's got to do and sometimes that means a power gets nerfed. Of course that also means sometimes a power gets buffed but the player base never seams to care about that.
The Kitteh wrote:
Abominable => Too many in-game currencies, reward systems and metrics.

I've heard this complaint before about CoH, but *why* was this a bad thing? I liked having the different merits and the separate currencies for players vs. SGs.

Forward looking - Forum (public and private) and broadcast chat comments brought me to the conclusion that it was both challenging and annoying for new players to understand the differences and mentally map (even with pretty good in-game descriptions) content to rewards and rewards to acquirable goods.

Backward looking - They were a series of patchwork "solutions" to address multiple design shortcomings. The result was too much "mental math" for making what should have been rather simple value judgments. I used to markets and merit systems to great advantage, however, I did not enjoy the fact that I had to see NPC 1 to do "A", NPC 2 to do "B", etc, no matter how conveniently located each was. Also, the lore surrounding each currency subsystem was very disjointed IMO...it didn't flow with the game at all to me.

(Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative)

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jag40 wrote:
jag40 wrote:

*-As in requirement to progress the arc when no team or takers to help are available.

Although I'd quickly point out that if their plans to use servers for locations pan out, that would mean you won't suffer from being on a less populated server; you'd have potential access to any player rather than just the ones on the server you're playing on (or those on a different server willing to alt over).

I wonder if it would be possible to have an option in team search to limit it to just your friends list! :)

Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program

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Izzy wrote:
Izzy wrote:

I wan to see more Destructable Walls, whe doing certain missions.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz4irggABKw
Maybe a cutscene with the Rhino type character gets to the vault by rushing/smashing through the wall of the safe?

And if you can destroy the wall, you should be able to phase through it, teleport past it or tunnel under it, possibly even easier than destroying it.

--
"My attention span doesn't wander. It takes long trips to exotic locales where it meets strange women that leave it crying and broken in the hot, hot sun."
--me

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AmbiDreamer wrote:
AmbiDreamer wrote:

jag40 wrote:
*-As in requirement to progress the arc when no team or takers to help are available.

Although I'd quickly point out that if their plans to use servers for locations pan out, that would mean you won't suffer from being on a less populated server; you'd have potential access to any player rather than just the ones on the server you're playing on (or those on a different server willing to alt over).
I wonder if it would be possible to have an option in team search to limit it to just your friends list! :)

true but still even with one server, depending on population level at any given time, still may end up in dead zones as if there were separate servers and depending on the activity. Like even in CO one server but good luck finding teams sometimes after 10pm as even though there are many peopel on, many are too busy RPing or PvPing and not interested in taking down Moreu's lab. But good thing is, solo builds are pretty easy and regardless of team size outside alerts, can enter the mission. Now is it always a good idea to enter those lairs alone? Nope. But no point in team gating out the people that may be able to take it on. Still kind of sucks for those that cant but end up outside peak time with no takers on doing that particular task at that given time. Not quite sure how to fix that issue. Issue being used lightly. But may be major issue for some.

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John-Andre wrote:
John-Andre wrote:

...if you can destroy the wall, you should be able to phase through it, teleport past it or tunnel under it, possibly even easier than destroying it.

Im not sure if the others actions are easier, since UDK has a tool that makes destructable walls VERY Easy to make: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryjoJOB6Rio

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But someone always had a TP

But someone always had a TP Ally in one form or another.
Well, okay, not always, but often.
usually.
But I do get your point.

Doctor October

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But please, please, not TOO

But please, please, not TOO cartoony. I know the preference of art styles is highly personal and subjective, but although I liked a lot of the options and costume pieces in the Champions char generator, I found the overall cartoon style less attractive than CoX's attempts to be more... don't laugh at me for saying realistic, but I hope you follow me.

Doctor October

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Yes! Yes! This says it quite

Yes! Yes! This says it quite well, imho.

Doctor October

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syntaxerror37 wrote:
syntaxerror37 wrote:

Catherine America wrote:
Please embed torches into the wall, not hang them from it.
Visual: Face the wall, punch a big hole in it that's 2 feet wide and 1 foot across, insert torch in hole.

Or at least don't have them sticking out into the hallway in such a way to catch players as they run back and forth. Otherwise I actually liked ornabega maps, put those torches leaning out from the base of the wall were damn annoying.

Oh my God. I should have made a bind that said "Stuck on a post!" to keep my teams updated about my location. At times I was defeated because I could not get them out from behind potted plant art. That's right -- I have had superheroes defeated by a potted plant. That ain't right.

I don't know programming, but if there's a "box" defining the area a character takes up, would it be feasible to make that box "fuzzy" so that it resists being shoved too closely against the environment? A lot of times I'd think I was going to brush by a post or torch and I'd get snagged on it instead of glancing off.

Captain of Phoenix Rising

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My shortlist of things that

My shortlist of things that could be made better:

1) Getting around (part 1) The subway is a place to fight badguys, maybe, but a terrible way to get around when you've got superpowers. Having options for vehicles (maybe associated with HQs rather than player-specific) would go a long way towards fixing this.

2) Getting around (part 2) I can run across 95% of Kalimdor in WoW without "zoning". Having to go through a zone wall every eight blocks is obviously archaic in MMOs.

3) Absent power sets that are basic to the genre. Growth. Shrinking. Duplication. Site-to-site teleportation (as opposed to line-of-sight teleportation).

4) Too much City. We need more moonbases, satellites, undersea civilizations (and threatened beach areas), Mesozoic zones, haunted gothic villages... Champions broadened the horizons a bit, but CoT could do better.

5) Cliche NPC villains. Nazis, (Puking) Zombies, ugh. At least they didn't go in for overtly Lovecraftian horrors, thank the gods. Though Rikti monkeys show up in my nightmares from time to time, even now.

As a closing thought, especially after all the animal costume parts were made available, I thought they should have an all-Furry server. I'm not a huge Furry fan, but I dabble, and this would certainly have brought in a much larger customer base than CoX had at any point in it's history.

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Ed Infinitum wrote:
Ed Infinitum wrote:

4) Too much City. We need more moonbases, satellites, undersea civilizations (and threatened beach areas), Mesozoic zones, haunted gothic villages... Champions broadened the horizons a bit, but CoT could do better.

This reminds me that, conversely, there were not enough interiors. Offices and warehouses are well and good, but there was nothing with character or ambience. I'd love to see some rooftop (read: from rooftop to rooftop) battles, spooky attics, dripping and hissing basements, and factories.

- - - - -
Hail Beard!

Support trap clowns for CoT!

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Darth Fez wrote:
Darth Fez wrote:

Ed Infinitum wrote:
4) Too much City. We need more moonbases, satellites, undersea civilizations (and threatened beach areas), Mesozoic zones, haunted gothic villages... Champions broadened the horizons a bit, but CoT could do better.

This reminds me that, conversely, there were not enough interiors. Offices and warehouses are well and good, but there was nothing with character or ambience. I'd love to see some rooftop (read: from rooftop to rooftop) battles, spooky attics, dripping and hissing basements, and factories.

Oh, totally. Small business interiors would be great, too. As a villain, why hang out in a warehouse when you can knock over a Starbucks? How much fun would it be to have a super battle in a supermarket? Or even an outdoor seating area at a restaurant?

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Sailboat wrote:
Sailboat wrote:

syntaxerror37 wrote:
Catherine America wrote:
Please embed torches into the wall, not hang them from it.
Visual: Face the wall, punch a big hole in it that's 2 feet wide and 1 foot across, insert torch in hole.

Or at least don't have them sticking out into the hallway in such a way to catch players as they run back and forth. Otherwise I actually liked ornabega maps, put those torches leaning out from the base of the wall were damn annoying.

Oh my God. I should have made a bind that said "Stuck on a post!" to keep my teams updated about my location. At times I was defeated because I could not get them out from behind potted plant art. That's right -- I have had superheroes defeated by a potted plant. That ain't right.
I don't know programming, but if there's a "box" defining the area a character takes up, would it be feasible to make that box "fuzzy" so that it resists being shoved too closely against the environment? A lot of times I'd think I was going to brush by a post or torch and I'd get snagged on it instead of glancing off.

Then add teaming with a speed boost crazed Kinetic toon, man, getting stuck got real interesting.

Kin toon- Hey want to go fast?
Me-"Sure."
*Speed buffed.
Me- "hey I can go fast. weeeeeee. Oh dang it, stuck on a torch again. Give me a sec guys while I battle this torch to get loose and then I can grab the aggro."

*Buff wears off.

Kin toon- want to go fast?

Me- Nah, I'll walk. I'll get there faster.

*speed buffed*

Me- "Dang it!"

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CoH was the first MMO I

CoH was the first MMO I played and I've only dabble with Champions Online since, so I don't have a lot of experience outside of CoH to compare to, so, grain of salt.

-Mission maps were too monotonous. Oh good. Another office map. Not.
-Travel powers took forever to get and fly was lame. Whatever travel power I have, I want to be able to get to where I'm going without spending half of my play time traveling.
-TF length. I'm an adult. I have a job. I have household responsibilities. The last thing I want is to have to spend hours and hours completing a TF. Even if I was 15 and had nothing else to do with my life, my attention span is just not that long.
- No/not enough non-fighting stuff. I want puzzles to solve and quests to complete that make me think and learn about the lore of the game where I don't have to whup a single bad guy. "Go here, kill the mobs, bring back this thing you find" gets old.
- I've said this elsewhere, but I really want to be able to SOLO all the time, all the missions, all of the badges, all of the TFs, ALL of the game, unless I choose to team up. I like the community a LOT and I enjoy playing with friends. One thing that really frustrated me was, being new to MMOs, I really didn't know what I was doing, controlling my character in the game was sometimes confusing or awkward, etc. not because of the game, but because of my inexperience and awkwardness and sometimes slow learning curve. It frustrated me A LOT to team up with friends, not play well or respond fast enough or do something else dumb and get them killed. Or, team with friends who played so much that they knew missions so well they charged through them so fast I hardly had a chance to do anything but run from one bad guy to another killing them off. I even had times where a team I had not played with before logged off and left me in the middle of a huge fight because I made some stupid mistake and pissed them all off. *sigh* I want to play at my own pace, relish the scenery, take things as fast or as slow as I want to, and be able to do it with or without friends and not have limits on missions, TFs, etc that really required a team to complete.

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Sprint's Dirt-trail. Awful

Sprint's Dirt-trail. Awful awful awful.

Too many times, I would Leap or Fly away from the ground; dirt crumbling off my feet as I was no where near its source.

No dirt, please. Sometimes less is more.

(Honestly, I can say the same for the ''Super Speed disc'. I was so going to remove it in i24)

The plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces are called Aglets; their true purpose is sinister.

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Tonwen wrote:
Tonwen wrote:

- I've said this elsewhere, but I really want to be able to SOLO all the time, all the missions, all of the badges, all of the TFs, ALL of the game, unless I choose to team up. I like the community a LOT and I enjoy playing with friends. p>

I said this too somewhere.

I would like that.

Especially new or after a long break stint or after the long friends exit the game and move on, friends just don't drop from the sky and every PuG have good chemistry.

Seen a lot of new people, some I never seen in game again, get the business simply for making mistakes that new people tend to make. Especially in TFs. Some new to COX but veterans of the mmo world and simply trying to get used to the mechanics of COX, others just simply new to the MMO world. But unfortunately not everyone is understanding. Some been playing for 5-6 years and expect everyone to be on that level of skill off the bat and sure to let them know in the worse way they can if they don't live up to their standard of the "right" way to play, which is usually their way of playing. But that is not COX exclusive.

Even in CO, first it was complaints about new people in smash alerts and how they should go play grabs. NOW it's complaining about newbies in grab alerts and how they should go play smash alerts.

Sometimes the best way to teach a newbie the ropes is to Kindly, keyword there : kindly and with understanding, and in a way the average person on the street would liked to be talked to, aka- not talking down to or in a condescending manner which in RL would probably get many skull dragged if they tried it. Or better yet, the COX definition of kindly and multiply it by three and that should be on the level or normal kindly. But of course not many people will do that or seem to have the time or patience or combination of the three. Thus maybe making it so new players especially can learn the ropes at their own pace would be nice and when they ran a TF a few times, they don't have to worry about being berated for asking what to do next when they do team for it.

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I want my Personal Superhero

I want my Personal Superhero Lair to have a door leading to a backyard, and it could be the Penthouse, top of a skyscraper even... and a small plot for a garden.

But I want mine to look a bit more like this:

Well, this can work since we could create an Instanced version as soon as you enter your Base/Leir (whatever), and just block the player from jumping off the building, have a Barrier. CoH had it in one of the low level Praetoria mishes, i forget the name now. And, if people REALLY want to return to the Zone they entered from, PLEASE JUMP OFF! and after 2 seconds, you will be on ground floor, after a loading screen, of course! ;)

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Thinking about it this

Thinking about it this morning, I realized that I found the two MM upgrade powers to be a bit monotonous. They always felt like speed bumps, something the MM had to put up with to slow them down that no other AT had to put up with.

They eventually got made AoE, but at the beginning you had to summon 6 pets via three powers, and then hit each of those 6 pets with 2 upgrades. You had to hit 15 powers in order to get started.

And even then if a pet died? You had to summon/upgrade it again.

I posted a dedicated thread on the matter here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/mastersoperatorsmasterminds-and-upgrade-powers

Building the Pets/ primaries from the ground up. upgrade powers might no longer be needed, simply having minions have new powers unlock as your character levels.

Or having them serve additional function beside upgrading pets.

Or make a newly summoned pet inherit the highest upgrade level amongst your currently active pets to limit the downtime spent when the AV two shots your minions.

Or having the upgrades also serve doubl duty as some sort of buff/debuff/heal powers in addition to being an upgrade, maybe like they did with the Heal pool powers and the extra functionality they got.

BIZZARO MEDIA FOLLOWER

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jag40 wrote:
jag40 wrote:

Seen a lot of new people, some I never seen in game again, get the business simply for making mistakes that new people tend to make. Especially in TFs. Some new to COX but veterans of the mmo world and simply trying to get used to the mechanics of COX, others just simply new to the MMO world. But unfortunately not everyone is understanding. Some been playing for 5-6 years and expect everyone to be on that level of skill off the bat and sure to let them know in the worse way they can if they don't live up to their standard of the "right" way to play, which is usually their way of playing. But that is not COX exclusive.
Even in CO, first it was complaints about new people in smash alerts and how they should go play grabs. NOW it's complaining about newbies in grab alerts and how they should go play smash alerts.
Sometimes the best way to teach a newbie the ropes is to Kindly, keyword there : kindly and with understanding, and in a way the average person on the street would liked to be talked to, aka- not talking down to or in a condescending manner which in RL would probably get many skull dragged if they tried it. Or better yet, the COX definition of kindly and multiply it by three and that should be on the level or normal kindly. But of course not many people will do that or seem to have the time or patience or combination of the three. Thus maybe making it so new players especially can learn the ropes at their own pace would be nice and when they ran a TF a few times, they don't have to worry about being berated for asking what to do next when they do team for it.

I should add that I did run into helpful, understanding, experienced players both inside and outside of my supergroup, who helped me figure out what I was doing (mostly) or give me tips to play more efficiently. I can understand other players getting upset when I accidentally run off a rooftop or charge a mob because I hit the wrong key and panicked before I figured out how to stop myself or got lost in a building during a TF. Those sorts of things frustrated ME. I can understand why someone else would be annoyed too. However, the amount of grief I was given about it was way out of proportion to the situation, and it made me feel very self-conscious about playing. I really liked CoH but spent months not playing because I was always nervous about goofing something up for someone else.

I hope I will be better at playing City of Titans, but at any rate, I want to be able to play the game however I want to, solo or teamed, for 30 minutes or three days with no sleep, and I want everyone else to be able to do the same.

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Lord Nightmare wrote:
Lord Nightmare wrote:

An idea to work on scaling is to have every instanced enemy scale to your level.. adds challenge IMO.. Also, missions would give scaling XP as well, each one giving a certain percentage of XP to the next level. So finish all the missions in one starting area, you can go to another starting area and get ON LEVEL XP and enemies.

This makes character design much nastier, because of the interaction between your character and certain types of end-mission mobs; I don't remember how many times I had to take a mission I'd gotten on a Blaster, Controller, or Defender and put it aside while I got a couple levels before I could defeat the Elite Boss that was the Big Bad in the mission -- Nosferatu was probably the best example of this; I don't think any of my non-Tanker/Scrapper characters were ever able to beat him at even-level, even with him spawning as just an EB.

On the other hand, making "Scale instanced missions to my current level on entry" an option in the mission-difficulty adjustment would be a good additional choice for people to customize the degree of opposition they face.

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Tonwen wrote:
Tonwen wrote:

jag40 wrote:
Seen a lot of new people, some I never seen in game again, get the business simply for making mistakes that new people tend to make. Especially in TFs. Some new to COX but veterans of the mmo world and simply trying to get used to the mechanics of COX, others just simply new to the MMO world. But unfortunately not everyone is understanding. Some been playing for 5-6 years and expect everyone to be on that level of skill off the bat and sure to let them know in the worse way they can if they don't live up to their standard of the "right" way to play, which is usually their way of playing. But that is not COX exclusive.
Even in CO, first it was complaints about new people in smash alerts and how they should go play grabs. NOW it's complaining about newbies in grab alerts and how they should go play smash alerts.
Sometimes the best way to teach a newbie the ropes is to Kindly, keyword there : kindly and with understanding, and in a way the average person on the street would liked to be talked to, aka- not talking down to or in a condescending manner which in RL would probably get many skull dragged if they tried it. Or better yet, the COX definition of kindly and multiply it by three and that should be on the level or normal kindly. But of course not many people will do that or seem to have the time or patience or combination of the three. Thus maybe making it so new players especially can learn the ropes at their own pace would be nice and when they ran a TF a few times, they don't have to worry about being berated for asking what to do next when they do team for it.

I should add that I did run into helpful, understanding, experienced players both inside and outside of my supergroup, who helped me figure out what I was doing (mostly) or give me tips to play more efficiently. I can understand other players getting upset when I accidentally run off a rooftop or charge a mob because I hit the wrong key and panicked before I figured out how to stop myself or got lost in a building during a TF. Those sorts of things frustrated ME. I can understand why someone else would be annoyed too. However, the amount of grief I was given about it was way out of proportion to the situation, and it made me feel very self-conscious about playing. I really liked CoH but spent months not playing because I was always nervous about goofing something up for someone else.
I hope I will be better at playing City of Titans, but at any rate, I want to be able to play the game however I want to, solo or teamed, for 30 minutes or three days with no sleep, and I want everyone else to be able to do the same.

Indeed.

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Tonwen wrote:
Tonwen wrote:

... got lost in a building during a TF. Those sorts of things frustrated ME. I can understand why someone else would be annoyed too....

I got it! :D
Have pathing as an Option. :)

Just right click on a Players name, and choose "Auto Run to...". Better have a word like Auto(matically) somewhere in there. ;)

Its like Follow, but on STEROIDS! ;)

Searching online i came across some pathfinding pages: http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000152.html

They talk about using planes to handle pathfinding, but i think i saw Unreal Development Kit use point based pathfinding. I'm still checking out alternate ways to do this, hoping that i come across Volumetric Cube based pathfinding, since we can have our toons fly, and If you enable AutoPathing with Fly on, it would be nice to have a shortcut to get to the 8th floor, instead of having to go up each staircase, like a superspeed character might.

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Character progression.

Character progression.

I'm gonna say this up-front: It was better than equipment-based progression like every other goddamn MMO has. But enhancements were broken and stupid and one of the very few things in that game that, to me, existed because it was an MMO and not because having them was a good idea.

You could have replaced the enhancement system with the following flat restrictions, and nothing would be different:

-give all player characters flat bonuses to all of their statistics at levels 12 and 22, with an additional small buff to everything around level 40
-push back the level at which you get each power 2-3 levels

No power was ever balanced around anything other than what its capabilities were once you had multiple SO-level enhancements in its primary functions, and almost no powers were useful at the level at which you got them. This wasn't universally true - a lot of support and buff powers were pretty decent - anything that didn't require a tohit roll was somewhat useable before you got it enhanced - but there was no point to using an attack power that didn't have at least some accuracy and damage slotted into it, or a control power that didn't have some accuracy and duration. I leave out the IO system because all it really did was make characters lower-maintenance at the low end and stupidly overpowered at the high end, and I don't think anything like it should exist in any reasonable game.

I remain very curious as to what kind of system MWM plans to use for character progression.

I know when I am now.

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KaosKitteh wrote:
KaosKitteh wrote:

Really the only thing I have to say here is that the missions from zone to zone got a bit samey and boring after doing them six times. Loved the writing, don't get me wrong, but the actual missions.. 'go here, kill this many, come back' seemed to be the largest number of missions.

Not just those, but the "My feet are nailed to the ground, and I don't know how to make a phone call" missions, where you'd get sent off to do something, finish that mission, call your contact, and they'd send you to meet someone else... who was a contact across the street from them. Or when you got sent to a contact whose cellphone number you already had, but they could somehow know that, this time, you weren't calling about something they wanted you to do, and wouldn't answer their phone, so while you could call them to get another mission, you had to schlep over to them to talk to them about the clues you'd gotten.

jag40 wrote:

Really no new fighting tactics. Over all the tactics were the same as any of the thousands of fantasy games. Tank hold agro, healer heals, scrapper and blasters do DPS, with one added in the form of controllers. It's about time to blur the roles in the super hero genre as there are many super heroes that don't fit in the usual COX holy four DPS control Tank Heal circle. And have missions where different tactics are needed a bit with variety of bosses and how they operate even if they have same set of powers.

If that's what you saw CoH as, then you missed out on the play that made CoH what it was -- that you didn't need to have someone in each of these roles to have a successful team. I've forgotten how many TFs I was on where the team was utterly lopsided -- no healers, no tanks, all tanks, all Scrappers, all Blasters, all Masterminds, etc.; each of them played differently, but none of them failed because we were missing one or more of this 'holy four'.

Von Krieger wrote:

TL:DR:
1. Don't make me regret choosing a damage type by giving near-universal resistance to it at any point in the game.

Bullets, knives and other bladed weapons, and clubs and other blunt instruments are easy to obtain, and the protective gear resistant to these are also easy to obtain. Some damage types are going to be more common, and will be more commonly resisted. If you're in a story arc fighting mobs whose theme is that they're preternaturally cold, and do damage through various cold-based attacks, they're likely to be themselves extremely resistant to cold-based attacks. Being put in a situation where your abilities are less effective than normal is a staple of superhero comics, as is having to come up with a solution and win anyway; it is going to happen, no matter how much you dislike it. If it honks you off that much, abandon the missions and go do something else.

syntaxerror37
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srmalloy wrote:
srmalloy wrote:

Von Krieger wrote:
TL:DR:
1. Don't make me regret choosing a damage type by giving near-universal resistance to it at any point in the game.
Bullets, knives and other bladed weapons, and clubs and other blunt instruments are easy to obtain, and the protective gear resistant to these are also easy to obtain. Some damage types are going to be more common, and will be more commonly resisted. If you're in a story arc fighting mobs whose theme is that they're preternaturally cold, and do damage through various cold-based attacks, they're likely to be themselves extremely resistant to cold-based attacks. Being put in a situation where your abilities are less effective than normal is a staple of superhero comics, as is having to come up with a solution and win anyway; it is going to happen, no matter how much you dislike it. If it honks you off that much, abandon the missions and go do something else.

Although the idea that smashing /lethal resistance would be more common makes logical sense, that does not mean putting it into the game is good game design. Fighting enemies that are strong verses your damage type is fine, having a significant portion of enemies with resistance to your damage, while other damage types do not is bad game design. There should be no over all advantage/disadvantage a player gets because of their chosen damage type. On the other side, there should have been more damage flying at us that was not smashing, lethal, or energy. Maybe we can not get it perfectly equal, but if we can get the differences in single digits it would do a lot for game balance.

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Warsong wrote:
Warsong wrote:

Events should never have villains and heroes working together, but battling or competing with each other. As a pvper, I hated those guys ;)

No; there should be events where the situation is sweepingly-enough dire that the heroes and villains recognize that it's necessary for them to cooperate -- "If we do not hang together, then we shall assuredly hang separately" -- no matter how distasteful the prospect is. However, there needs to be a compelling-enough reason as part of the background for the event to explain why the heroes and villains would be cooperating -- something that was never sufficiently done for the Incarnate content, for example. You had Ouroboros exhorting you to acquire more power to resist the Coming Storm, but that didn't explain why you were teaming up with the other side for the Praetorian trials; it always seemed to me that heroes and villains would have different goals for striking against Praetoria -- heroes to destroy the tools the Praetorians would use to invade Primal Earth, villains to seize those tools and bring them back to increase their own power -- that the trials themselves didn't reflect; everyone was working for the common goal of foiliing the Praetorians' plans, with no real explanation as to why the heroes and villains were cooperating.

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srmalloy wrote:
srmalloy wrote:

... there should be events where the situation is sweepingly-enough dire that the heroes and villains recognize that it's necessary for them to cooperate...

Easy... Something to do with the collapse of the Finacial Structure.
Heroes dont want Chaos to ensue.
Villains dont want their Assets to Vaporize!

Now... if it was something to do with Millions of lives hanging in the balance, Villains wouldnt really be motivated as much! ;D

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Izzy wrote:
Izzy wrote:

srmalloy wrote:
... there should be events where the situation is sweepingly-enough dire that the heroes and villains recognize that it's necessary for them to cooperate...
Easy... Something to do with the collapse of the Finacial Structure.
Heroes dont want Chaos to ensue.
Villains dont want their Assets to Vaporize!
Now... if it was something to do with Millions of lives hanging in the balance, Villains wouldnt really be motivated as much! ;D

They would be if their lives are in the millions. Are aliens invading earth and wiping out every man, woman, robot, animal, plant, etc? I can see why most villains would be pragmatic enough to defeat the aliens then get back to taking over the world.

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Re the 11 pet thing, it was a

Re the 11 pet thing, it was a robot MM. I'm not familiar with red side but while lying on the ground in RV and somewhere in between swearing bloody revenge and plucking my teeth out of the concrete, I started counting how many pets my assailant had, there appeared to be 11. Justice Blues seems to have the answer...
"Some of the secondary powersets for MMs included pets, so some of them could have a lot out at once."
-Justice Blues

srmalloy wrote:

Warsong wrote:
Events should never have villains and heroes working together, but battling or competing with each other. As a pvper, I hated those guys ;)
No; there should be events where the situation is sweepingly-enough dire that the heroes and villains recognize that it's necessary for them to cooperate -- "If we do not hang together, then we shall assuredly hang separately" -- no matter how distasteful the prospect is. However, there needs to be a compelling-enough reason as part of the background for the event to explain why the heroes and villains would be cooperating -- something that was never sufficiently done for the Incarnate content, for example. You had Ouroboros exhorting you to acquire more power to resist the Coming Storm, but that didn't explain why you were teaming up with the other side for the Praetorian trials; it always seemed to me that heroes and villains would have different goals for striking against Praetoria -- heroes to destroy the tools the Praetorians would use to invade Primal Earth, villains to seize those tools and bring them back to increase their own power -- that the trials themselves didn't reflect; everyone was working for the common goal of foiliing the Praetorians' plans, with no real explanation as to why the heroes and villains were cooperating.

That would be akin to the competition option I was talking about, i.e. "we each want the macguffin for ourselves and our own purposes"... So you jointly battle the shreeking hordes of whatever at each stage, competing to be the first to capture the respective item/component necessary to access the main prize for your team. The difference for me is that the two sides would still remain true enemies i.e. 2 full seperate teams of 8 and in all likelihood enemy fire would be activated towards the other team (but nerfed until final conflict) or OFF UNTIL the final conflict where, upon the defeat of the final boss, they duke it out for the other team's pieces, which drop when the carrier is defeated. Little tweaks can be made to make things work like defeated enemies in the Boss room are teleported to a jail. Much more compelling and true to form to each side's identity IMO. Imagine the buildup as you see the other side perform through each stage and wonder if you can beat them knowing this has to all come to a head, because in the end, the stakes are just too high to let "them" have the macguffin! Imagine the secret strategizing going on in each team as the boss falls and the unseen clock counting the seconds until this inevitable final battle... winds down...to... zero...

Thoughts?

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/Storm has two pets, /Traps

/Storm has two pets, /Traps has a lot of place-able stuff, but those aren't pets. /Dark has a pet.

That's it.

Everything else is stuff that everybody can get, be they temp powers that summon critters, or the Incarnate pets. Shivans, Vanguard heavies, Lore slot, etc.

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Darth Fez wrote:
Darth Fez wrote:

While relatively minor in the scheme of things, every time I encountered this it did bother me that even the largest and strongest superhero could by stymied by... a trash can. Or how Joe Average NPC could push my character out of the way as though he were a cardboard cutout.

Although I think the official in-game explanation (actually offhand joke comments by devs and/ or players) seemed to be real heroes don't litter and step aside when a civilian passes. And the reason the villains do it is the arbitrators say so.

It was nice when the civilians were able to walk around you though. The thing I am curious about the trash can- once we push it aside, who puts it back up where it belongs?

Ohh, a garbage man who looks slightly like Stan Lee maybe.

Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
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Von Krieger wrote:
Von Krieger wrote:

/Storm has two pets, /Traps has a lot of place-able stuff, but those aren't pets. /Dark has a pet.
That's it.
Everything else is stuff that everybody can get, be they temp powers that summon critters, or the Incarnate pets. Shivans, Vanguard heavies, Lore slot, etc.

Yeah musta been traps if that has robots, because there were placeable items.

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ENHANCEMENT DYSFUNCTION

ENHANCEMENT DYSFUNCTION

In 2008, when Tabula Rasa held their War College (and I got to attend), CuppaJo and Critters were two of the Community Managers for the event, and I got to level the Enhancement Dysfunction ... memory ... in front of CuppaJo. Now, understand that CuppaJo is something of a "feisty" personality type who is really good at her job, and not exactly all that shy (like Critters can be) when you're talking to her. She can be "blunt" in a way that is both helpful and refreshing, and isn't someone who is easily knocked off her game.

So when I had the opportunity to launch into a RANT about how Enhancement Dysfunction was one of the most crippling mistakes that Cryptic Studios ever made, which produced so much traffic on the CoH Forums that the forum software practically melted down and crashed FOR THREE DAYS while the Community Team tried to dig themselves out from under the avalanche of THOUSANDS of posts in under 24 hours, more than 90% of them NEGATIVE about the changes (which, of course, got pushed LIVE) ... I have to say it was rather gratifying to see CuppaJo visibly blanch and appear shaken enough to need to sit down (she had been standing up until this point). To her credit, CuppaJo didn't even TRY to defend the whole Enhancement Dysfunction system, which of course we were stuck with until NC$oft shut the game down years later. Suffice it to say, that although she didn't come right out and "say it" ... it was plenty obvious to the rest of us that the entire launch of Enhancement Dysfunction was something that CuppaJo *NEVER* wanted to be on the receiving end of ever again!

The unfortunate thing is, that the objectives and goals of what became Enhancement Dysfunction were actually a good idea ... but the implementation used was about as bad as it could possibly get. I say that because rather than building on a diminishing returns CURVE, Cryptic opted to go for a diminishing returns CLIFF so as to better cudgel the playerbase into playing the game they "wanted" the game to be played, rather than the way the game actually WAS being played. This then produced all kinds of weird and wacky math that people just couldn't get their heads around easily without resorting to what became Mids' Hero Planner (which was later expanded upon to cover Inventions that only compounded the math problems). Even worse yet, Enhancement Dysfunction was introduced to "fix" a problem (6-slotting powers) and was supposed to go hand in glove with another system (inventions) that didn't roll out until TWO YEARS LATER after an extremely substantial portion of the playerbase simply quit and left in disgust. Some of those people came back when Inventions were introduced ... but not all of them ... and that basically "ruined" the game for a huge swath of gamers.

Of course, once you got Inventions into the mix, you simply HAD TO PLAN your build from 1 to 50, and that meant Mids' Hero Planner ... because there was no comparable functionality built into the game, anywhere. There was no opportunity to "Try Before You Buy" built INTO the game at all, when it came to creating your build ... and if you made even one mistake along the way, you had to tear it all apart and start over from the beginning. Any build that involved "no planning" was pretty much, by definition, a "gimp" build ... and there were A LOT of potential "gimp" builds out there!

I agree with the sentiment that the Invention System was weighed down with a lot of trash and garbage. It seemed like for every 1 useful set there needed to be at least 3 (if not more) completely useless sets, where if you used them for anything other than salvaged pieces of a Frankenslotter build, you were gimping yourself.

And Mein Gott Und Himmel(!) ... the Super Reflexes powerset! Talk about a defensive scheme that simply COULDN'T mature until reaching the Endgame, at which point ... it wasn't consistent enough to be able to stand up to an AV or GM without being constantly at risk from the Random Number Generator (which was throwing LOTS of dice!). Thanks to the All Or Nothing nature of how Defense worked (or didn't), it was really only meaningfully useful as a protection scheme when pushed all the way to the hardcap. This powerset desperately needed to have its power progression rearranged (it finally was, kinda sorta, for Villains) so as to front load the defensive bonuses.

Remember when the way that everyone thought about CoH as being the game where "Life begins at 20" because of Stamina? And needing to get 2 other powers from the Fitness pool by 18 so as to be ready for Stamina at 20? And how you ALSO "had to" spend 2 MORE power slots on your Travel Power by 14 ... meaning that you "had to" spend 2 power slots between 6-12 on pool powers (Fitness plus Travel), and 2 power slots between 14-18 on two MORE powers from those same Pools, all so you could get your Travel Power by 14 and Stamina by 20? By the time you got done with all those "mandatory" powers taken for structural reasons, you only had the 2, 4, 10, 12 and 18 power slots left to choose from before hitting Stamina at 20, and finally not having a new Tier power come available at 22. Level 20 was when EVERY build stopped gasping for Endurance and started becoming sustainable, and of course Single Origins were just right around the corner at 22!

Then, later on, this morphed into becoming "Life begins at 50" thanks to the Incarnate system.

At the last Player Summit in 2012, I managed to snag a seat at the table with Arbiter Hawk and Black Scorpion (since they were the Game Balance guys) during dinner and pulled them into a discussion about how "Damage Is King" and how AoE "wears the crown."

My argument rested on the very simple model of what happened with Single Origin Enhancements with regards to Damage, Endurance Reduction and Recharge Reduction when calculating for Time Spent and Endurance Spent to achieve the same results. If an attack needs 4 hits to defeat a Foe, then slotting 1 SO worth of these three Enhancement types leads to somewhat different results:
1 Damage SO ... defeat of Foe requires 3 attacks instead of 4, meaning 3 attacks of time spent and 3 attacks of endurance cost
1 Endurance SO ... defeat of Foe requires 4 attacks, meaning 4 attacks of time spent but only 3 attacks worth of endurance cost
1 Recharge SO ... defeat of Foe requires 4 attacks, meaning 3 attacks of time spent but requiring 4 attacks worth of endurance cost

In other words ... in terms of time and endurance costs, 1 Damage SO equaled 1 Endurance SO *plus* 1 Recharge SO ... a 2-for-1 ratio of efficiency. I then argued that because Damage Enhancements were valued on Schedule A for both Single Target AND AoE attacks that the AoE attacks benefited "unfairly" from this multiplier effect that skewed the greatest value towards Damage Enhancements, particularly in AoE powers. My argument then was that Damage Enhancements really ought to have been put on Schedule B, rather than Schedule A, in order to "deflate" the overwhelming power of AoE attacks in the game, and thereby give a bit more "separation" from single target attack powers.

Interestingly enough, Black Scorpion became very thoughtful, and it was kind of clear that he hadn't ever really seen this particular issue illuminated in this fashion. Arbiter Hawk immediately pointed out (and quite rightly!) that the playerbase would NEVER stand for a nerfing of the Damage Enhancements from Schedule A back to Schedule B, so there was "no way" they'd ever do that. But then Black Scorpion said something very interesting ... because he said that having the problem explained to him the way that I did, that there might be a way to finangle the code into yielding a Schedule A in Single Target attacks, while the exact same enhancements would yield a Schedule B in AoE attacks. In other words, it would be possible to nerf AoE attacks somewhat (so as to challenge AoE's undisputed ownership of the Damage "crown") while leaving single target attacks (relatively) untouched. The way he talked about it made it sound like he'd have to do some pretty fancy dancing in order to make that kind of differential of outcomes happen ... but it was theoretically possible to do, and he had a really good idea of how he'd go about doing it (if he had to).

Obviously, that never happened, because Paragon Studios never even managed another Issue release after that Summit ... but still, the point stands, particularly in regards to a "start from scratch" effort like City of Titans. So a recommendation that I have for the Powers and Balance Team working on City of Titans is to put Damage Enhancement for Single Target attacks on a different curve progression than that of AoE attacks (ie. Schedule A vs Schedule B).


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From a writing perspective,

From a writing perspective, one of the major "mistakes" that CoH made was ... Azuria and the M.A.G.I. "Vault" ... that was about as secure as a lemon pie on a windowsill (in a city with villains). Even as a running gag, all it did is tell you that the NPCs responsible for the Vault were simply incompetent fools (to put it mildly). This made it very difficult to respect these NPCs, since almost anything you gave them got stolen again almost immediately.

Which leads to the "Evil will always triumph, because Good IS DUMB!" meme that tended to run through CoH on occasion ... and was especially strong in the Who Will Die arc. I mean, Darren Wade ... a "nobody" villain ... pops up out of practically nowhere and runs rings around the signature Heroes of your franchise so as to KILL some of them? This was over the top BAD in the case of (bat)Manticore and Sister Psyche, which completely RAILROADED Manticore into KILLING HIS WIFE all because he was The Man Without A Plan. I mean ... walking into ENEMY territory (ie. Circle of Thorns) without a backup plan for safety in case something goes wrong with the MAGIC ALTAR you're wanting to use? At that point, you're pretty much Too Stupid™ to be worthy of being a Hero! Good grief! You could have at least rigged some explosive charges to that altar to "ruin" it (without killing Sister Psyche) just in case something goes wrong in a place that (one) ISN'T YOURS, and (two) hasn't been secured and verified as being "safe and clear." I mean, if you can't even be bothered to take such MINIMAL PRECAUTIONS before doing something inherently risky like that, you really need to hang up your cape! At that point, the writing is just a choo choo twain steaming full speed for the gorge (and oh, by the way, it doesn't fly). Kinda hard to have any respect for characters after they've been THAT DUMB.

On the subject of Public Transportation ... it was World of Warcraft, of all things, that made me learn the value of transportation networks that weren't simply Instant Zone Teleports, in part because they moved you THROUGH the world, rather than PAST it (if the distinction makes sense), allowing you to appreciate just how LARGE the world was, instead of just zone popping you to your destination (even when traveling by ship to another continent). Imagine what it would have been like to actually RIDE the tram system to get to other zones? Yeah, at that crawling rate of speed those yellow and green line trams moved at, it would have been Get Up And Go And Make A Sandwich time whenever you got on the tram! The mere fact that you could *Sprint* faster than the trams rolled down their tracks (let alone when using Travel Powers) was rather immersion breaking.

Bus stops all over the place ... in a city with no city bus service.

Cars driving around on city streets ... that had no gas stations.

A city in New England that had roads and a public monorail system ... but no Train Tracks anywhere, even as an historic legacy of what the city was like before the War Walls went up. And yet, Titan Weapons got a railroad crossing signal as one of its weapons ... for a city which had no level crossings for trains ANYWHERE!

And oh my sidekick ... the WASTE of potential that the Shadow Shard represented! Introduced in Issue 1 ... and pretty much never developed for ever again for the rest of the game's history. One of the most beautiful locations in all of City of Heroes, and it was practically abandoned once it got made ... because it was just "too big" of a setting to develop for, even if doing such development piecemeal. Talk about zones that should have been made co-op since the start of City of Villains!


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Not going to quote redlynne's

Not going to quote redlynne's whole post, but would add these comments:

Quote:

My argument rested on the very simple model of what happened with Single Origin Enhancements with regards to Damage, Endurance Reduction and Recharge Reduction when calculating for Time Spent and Endurance Spent to achieve the same results. If an attack needs 4 hits to defeat a Foe, then slotting 1 SO worth of these three Enhancement types leads to somewhat different results:
1 Damage SO ... defeat of Foe requires 3 attacks instead of 4, meaning 3 attacks of time spent and 3 attacks of endurance cost
1 Endurance SO ... defeat of Foe requires 4 attacks, meaning 4 attacks of time spent but only 3 attacks worth of endurance cost
1 Recharge SO ... defeat of Foe requires 4 attacks, meaning 3 attacks of time spent but requiring 4 attacks worth of endurance cost

In other words ... in terms of time and endurance costs, 1 Damage SO equaled 1 Endurance SO *plus* 1 Recharge SO ... a 2-for-1 ratio of efficiency. I then argued that because Damage Enhancements were valued on Schedule A for both Single Target AND AoE attacks that the AoE attacks benefited "unfairly" from this multiplier effect that skewed the greatest value towards Damage Enhancements, particularly in AoE powers. My argument then was that Damage Enhancements really ought to have been put on Schedule B, rather than Schedule A, in order to "deflate" the overwhelming power of AoE attacks in the game, and thereby give a bit more "separation" from single target attack powers.

Now add accuracy into this discussion. I could equally slot an accuracy instead of a damage or rech or end. Simplifying slightly and ignoring the 95% to-hit chance cap:

If I slot for damage, I still need 4 attacks a fair bit of the time, as on average only 3 of those will hit
If I slot accuracy, I need 4 attacks, all of which should hit
If I slot rech or end I will need 4 hits which will take 5ish attacks and the relationship to damage is the same as in redlynne's example

So until you have sufficient accuracy, accuracy is very nearly as good as damage, are you proposing to nerf that too for AoE (as happened in CoH on some of the control powers but that was done on the power not the enh) ?

I don't agree with your comments on /SR either, mine (including my stalker) almost never died in non incarnate content beyond level 36 other than to very heavy non positional psi damage.

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Minotaur wrote:
Minotaur wrote:

So until you have sufficient accuracy, accuracy is very nearly as good as damage, are you proposing to nerf that too for AoE (as happened in CoH on some of the control powers but that was done on the power not the enh) ?

Actually, I was only pointing out the disparities in value on the Damage end of the enhancement scale, so I wasn't looking at Accuracy at all. And you're (obviously) correct that until hitting the hardcap, Accuracy was "just as valuable" as Damage was in this regard, but the difference was that you pretty quickly ran out of "room" for Accuracy to have value, simply because Accuracy WAS hardcapped, whereas Damage wasn't (at least, not until ED came along).

So although I wasn't directly invoking a desire to nerf Accuracy along with Damage for AoE, depending on the tools available inside the game engine such a thing might be possible to do in ways that are desirable for game balance. Specifically I'm thinking in terms of concentric rings of AoE effect stacking on top of each other, for example, so that you get an "intensity" decay as you move out from the center.

Say for example you want to do an AoE "blast radius" kind of effect (think hand grenade and the like). You could have something like 3 stacked AoE spheres for doing that, with the outer sphere having the lowest damage and accuracy, while the inner sphere has higher damage and accuracy, and that when stacking these spheres together you wind up with a very intense blast in the center, but a much lower intensity blast effect around the fringes of the AoE. That way, the power isn't just "uniformly even" in terms of its effects (including accuracy and damage) at all locations within its AoE. This then produces a performance where your attack is most accurate and damaging in the center, but less accurate and damaging towards the "edges" of the AoE. Needless to say, this is a level of complexity that CoH never really aspired to, in part because it probably would have required spawning Pseudo-pets in order to implement it properly in the legacy system (and those were always problematic) due to the way that Powers got defined in CoH.

I toss this out simply as an example of where the thought process leads in terms of Game Design and opportunities for same, rather than as a "demand" of any sort. This is more a matter of me just "sandboxing" the notion to see where it goes, rather than placing a marker that this is where things would "have to" go.

Minotaur wrote:

I don't agree with your comments on /SR either, mine (including my stalker) almost never died in non incarnate content beyond level 36 other than to very heavy non positional psi damage.

Oh have no illusions ... once SR got to 35 (well, 37 really in order to slot Evasion properly) the set FINALLY *started* to mature ... but by that point you'd practically played through half the game's content already. My point being that the Evasion toggle for AoE Defense was placed too "late" in the rotation of Power Tiers for it to be "balanced" through earlier content. Indeed, if I'd been designing Super Reflexes, I would have reorganized it like so:

1 Focused Fighting (toggle melee defense)
2 Dodge (passive melee defense)
3 Focused Senses (toggle ranged defense)
4 Practiced Brawler (click mez protection)
5 Agile (passive ranged defense)
6 Evasion (toggle AoE defense)
7 Lucky (passive AoE defense)
8 Quickness (passive recharge reduction and movement speed buff)
9 Evasion (click defense)

That way, for Scrappers, the set would have "matured" into being full protection by 28-30 instead of having to wait until 35-37 to reach defensive maturity (assuming you dedicated slots to your secondary immediately after getting those secondary powers). It also sets the pattern for being toggle first, passive immediately after, with the exception of Practiced Brawler, needed where it was for Mez Protection. Given the way that the Exemplar system eventually worked (the Level +5 rule) this meant that there was more than one Task Force where the content was capped at Level 29 ... which of course meant that Evasion wasn't operative in that content, opening a huge hole in your survival scheme while playing that content.

And while I agree with you that Super Reflexes was fantastic against everything short of an Elite Boss/Arch Villain/Giant Monster ... ie. against "crunchies" and flunkies ... the set tended to exhibit its flaws as a protection scheme when it needed to perform "perfectly" for long, extended periods of time under constant threat, simply because of the Russian Roulette nature of how the set interacted with the random number generator. Because when your Defense failed to protect you, it REALLY FAILED, and getting hit twice in a row in quick succession wasn't entirely out of the question when being hit with dozens and dozens and dozens of attacks over the course of minutes. It wasn't a question of IF you were going to roll snake eyes ... it was more a question of WHEN your number would come up, and then you were out of luck, and rarely with any time to recover. It meant that Defense was really only "viable" as a protection scheme while living at the Softcap, turning Defense into something of an All Or Nothing kind of deal ... which of course then needed Healing for survival past the hits that would inevitably "leak through" those Defenses.

To be clear, Redlynne, my signature Hero (who you can see in my avatar pic) was a MA/SR scrapper created during Issue 2 and who truly was my "main" character throughout my career (and who later became a MA/SR/Soul Mastery scrapper Hero) ... so I have plenty of "history" of knowing how effective Super Reflexes was, and against which Foes it wasn't that strong.


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One thing I hated about CoX

One thing I hated about CoX and actually love about CO...is the energy builder attack. Every powerset has a basic power, usable/scalable though the whole game which builds power...or maybe just which uses no power...its your bread and butter which you can always use...its an instant, no cooldown.

I hated sitting in CoX twiddling my thumbs waiting for even the basic powers to recharge, or sitting exhausted unable to do anything.

I even advise the following....every powerset should have the following: a powercost 0, instant, no re-charge basic power (per the core goal of the power set); a powercost 0, instant, no recharge power builder (restores power/endurance) (again flavored to the core of the power set). These would be your most basic attacks, heals, hold and so on. Then you can fill the rest of the power set with consumers.

This way no matter what you can always fall back on the basics to participate.

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JayBezz wrote:
JayBezz wrote:

For me the biggest failing of CoX was its age.
The graphics engine (even after being updated) was not really up to the industry standard. I hope that this game at kicks the ass of both DCUO and Champions in the graphics department.

I tested with my dev friends.. I conclude that it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to make an "ugly" game in Unreal 3 (And I got an extra 30 min using Unreal 4!!!) I tend to think this game is going to kick the ass off CoX in the graphics department. It does reveal some reservations about Unreal's ability to do other things, (like stretching character polygons) but the game is pretty much guaranteed to look beautiful.

- -

I did really LOVE CoX's team size (8 or die!). I hope ALL mission content is based around 8-10 man teams.

But I did not enjoy the sheer number of minions used in missions. I would rather fight a team of 3-5 enemies than 10 to 15 at a time (unless I am teamed).

I hope there's a plan for team scaling to keep team size big but making each individual enemy feel like they have the potential to harm my character.

- -

I also agree with someone said about "waiting for cool downs". I don't know what the "energy system" will look like in City of Titans, but I do not want to wait "time" to cast. Cooldowns are great for balancing TYPES of powers but I hate waiting to do something. I hope that each set gets a choice between a strike, charge attack, Damage over time etc that is always available in combat.

Turn based combat is .. old. I'm not saying that cool downs shouldn't exist (they should and should be relevant) I am saying that the cool down should depend on the TYPE of power used (Mez, Heals, Buffs, and Debuffs all need a standard cooldown IMHO). Attacks and movement should be up to the players otherwise I feel like I should be playing Pokemon (Did he just diss pokemon?!.. yes .. yes I did)

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One item I'd love to see in

One item I'd love to see in CoT is a functionality akin to what Altoholic provides in WoW.

I would have loved to have had it in CoH to see which character had which recipes/salvage (in their inventory as well as storage/bank) without needing to constantly log from one to the other.

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captkurt wrote:
captkurt wrote:

I even advise the following....every powerset should have the following: a powercost 0, instant, no re-charge basic power (per the core goal of the power set); a powercost 0, instant, no recharge power builder (restores power/endurance) (again flavored to the core of the power set). These would be your most basic attacks, heals, hold and so on. Then you can fill the rest of the power set with consumers.
This way no matter what you can always fall back on the basics to participate.

I have no beef with an always-available, low value power. Good idea.

But for the love of GOD let's not have the bizarre "builder/consumer" mechanic in a superhero game. One of the best things about COH combat was the ability to activate your powers in any order (except for a few later sets that veered dangerously toward builder/consumer, but were novelties).

Darth Fez wrote:

I would have loved to have had it in CoH to see which character had which recipes/salvage (in their inventory as well as storage/bank) without needing to constantly log from one to the other.

Hell yes. Exactly the sort of functionality best accomplished by using some sort of difference engine or mechanical computing device, if only we could build such a thing!

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Darth Fez wrote:
Darth Fez wrote:

One item I'd love to see in CoT is a functionality akin to what Altoholic provides in WoW.
I would have loved to have had it in CoH to see which character had which recipes/salvage (in their inventory as well as storage/bank) without needing to constantly log from one to the other.

Dear Gawd, yes!

(Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative)

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Major failing of City of

Major failing of City of Heroes that should not be replicated (in its entirety) in City of Titans? THE MEZ SYSTEM

In City of Heroes, the Mez System was essentially a "boolean" function for Confuse, Fear, Hold, Immobilize, Knockback(!), Sleep, and Stun ... where the status effect either "happened" or it didn't. This was a function of how the Magnitude System worked. Granted, it worked well for its day when it was created, but it was also basically an All Or Nothing kind of deal. A glaring flaw in this system was the fact that for Arch Villains and Giant Monsters (and Rikti Spaceships) the Devs essentially had to put in a "stupid level" of Mag Protection in order to PREVENT any of these status effects from applying to their Boss Encounters.

Add in then the FACT that melee archetypes got a "useful" level of Mez Protection as one of their early powers, while everyone else "didn't" (except for maybe the occasional power in a particular powerset), and you've basically built a system of HAVES vs HAVE NOTS. Needless to say, this situation got so bad that eventually the Devs needed to come up with a way to allow Blasters to "play the game" through all the Mez that was getting thrown around everywhere in the late game like they were party favors with an expiration date on them.

MY stance on this entire game mechanical system is that it fall down on one extremely crucial aspect of how Mez "ought to" work in a (super)heroic setting. The CoH system had no "middle ground" for a state of IMPAIRMENT that wasn't a Total Shutdown. This was because there was no room in the system for being affected by Mez Effects that resulted in a Partial Shutdown instead of a Total Shutdown.

If you start with a "clean piece of paper" when it comes to designing a Mez System for City of Titans ... one of the first things I'd be looking at doing is opening up a "middle ground" between No Effect and Total Effect. Ah, but what would that middle ground look like? What SHOULD it look like? Best way to tackle this is to start laying the building blocks (LEGO style) and then see what sort of an edifice you can build out of that.

So the Mez Types of CoH to replicate are ... Confuse, Fear, Hold, Immobilize, Knockback, Sleep, and Stun. We already "know" how these status effects ought to behave when a character totally succumbs to them, but what should they be like when they merely IMPAIR a character because these status effects aren't strong enough (yet) to completely shut a character down? Well ...

Confuse: partial confusion grants a scaling chance to deselect Target, forcing player input to re-select Target "manually"
Fear: partial fear grants a moderate scaling debuff to Accuracy due to "shaky hands" syndrome and a small scaling imposition of Interrupt Time on use of all powers
Hold: partial hold grants a large scaling imposition of Interrupt Time on use of all powers, making them take longer to activate and animate than normal
Immobilize: partial Immobilize grants a moderate scaling debuff to movement speeds and a small scaling imposition of Interrupt Time on use of all powers
Knockback: partial knockback grants a scaling chance to cause a Knockdown
Sleep: partial sleep applies a large Recharge Debuff that makes powers take longer to cooldown
Stun: partial stun applies a small scaling imposition of Interrupt Time on use of all powers and a moderate Recharge Debuff that makes powers take longer to cooldown

Scaling factors for these are small = 1, moderate = 2, large = 3 (for simplicity). The whole matrix above thus chooses its partial effects in an "add up to 3" kind of way. Confuse and Knockback can't follow the system EXACTLY, but the principles can be extended to work in a similar fashion for them too.

The next thing that you do is take a look at the Mag System that CoH used and figure out how to "widen" it in order to make a "middle ground" possible within it. The old system was that everyone started at a default state of Mag -1, and that when status effects reached Mag 0 then the Status Effect would take effect. Lieutenants got an additional -1 Mag Protection, while Bosses had an additional -2 Protection, and so on. Melee Archetypes got a Mag -10(ish) Protection against status effects. Practical upshot then was that all "squishies" were rated at "Minion Level" for their level of Mag Protection, which ... let's be honest ... was fundamentally unfair. I'm sure that when the system got laid down pre-launch doing that made more sense, but as the number of Foes with Mez attacks just kept increasing as the game went on, it simply became indefensible (cue Blasters screaming). The old system was SIMPLE, but it also wasn't exactly FAIR ... nor did it really allow for a "variety" of outcomes, due to the granularity level of the metrics chosen for it.

So the first thing I'd want to do in any reconstruction of this kind of a system would be to multiply all of the Mag numbers by x10, just to give "room" in the system for more varieties of outcomes, and so we don't have to deal with more decimal points than absolutely necessary. So instead of a Sleep attack being a Mag 3 like in CoH, in City of Titans it would be Mag 30.

The next thing that I'd do is specify that a character's default Mag Protection level is their character level below zero. So any Level 20 character has -20 Mag Protection. This means that Mag Protection "improves" over time and with experience and levels, rather than being "stuck" at some arbitrary level with no room for movement.

The third thing I'd do is "convert" the way that Melee Mag Protection and Minion/Lieutenant/Boss Mag Protection worked in City of Heroes so as to run it on a "multiplier" basis rather than on an "additive" (or in this case, subtractive) basis. So in the CoH system, a Melee Archetype could routinely get something like -11 or -12 Mag Protection against Status Effects (roughly speaking) ... and in the system I'm proposing here, that would be the equivalent of a -110 to -120 Mag Protection level (because of the x10 multiplier at the beginning of the process). If you then set up Mag Protection on characters (PC and NPC) to run on a Level Basis (so Level 30 grants -30 Mag Protection), you can then set things up such that a Melee Archetype gets a +300% Mag Protection bonus from their Status Effect Protection Power, granting them ... -120 Mag Protection as a result (at Level 30, for example). You can then use other bonus grants (+50% to +100% say) for Lieutenants and Bosses so as to cover how this would work for NPCs.

You then turn around and assign +Mag values to the Status Effect Powers which can also scale with Level just like the Protection system does, and apply a straight up multiplier to that base number to figure how much +Mag a particular Power has. So a Sleep power for a Level 20 character does +20 Mag (base), because the character is Level 20, and then you apply a multiplier (say, x3 for simplicity) due to the type of power it is ... so that Sleep power is a Mag 60 attack when done by a Level 20 character using THAT (specific) power (by that specific Archetype).

If you do all of THAT as your basic foundation for the Mez System, you've already laid down the necessary components to make a lot of the grey/blue/green/white/yellow/orange/red/purple adjustments for level differentials less important than they were in City of Heroes. "Normalization" between different level ranges is basically built into the system in a different way than it was in City of Heroes.

Okay ... that's nice (I hear you say) ... but where's this "middle ground" that I was talking about earlier?

Glad you asked... ^_~

The interesting thing out setting up a variable Mag Protection Scheme like I've got here, where everyone gets a protection level that is their Level in Mag below zero ... is that you could then define the exact same range ABOVE zero as being the "Partial Mez Effects" range. So a Level 20 character has a default Mez Protection level of -20 Mag. This means that between -20 and 0 Mag, the character remains "unaffected" by Mez Effects. The Mez (if it hits) still applies, but doesn't have any "effects" on the character's performance for the duration of the effect. At the 0 to +20 Mag range however, the character would start suffering the effects of IMPAIRMENT due to Partial Mez, as opposed to Total Mez. This would be represented by a chance to proc a particular effect or debuff (such as loss of Target Lock from a Confuse, for example) or represent a scaling degree of impairment caused by the Partial Mez Effect, where the scaling is just a straight fraction of the "distance" above zero to the Total Mez Effect threshold.

So, for example, if a Level 20 character with a -20 Mez Protection is hit with a +30 Hold, that would put their Hold State at +10 Mag ... which would be between 0 and +20. Hold Powers impose a large scaling Interrupt Time increase, which could be defined as being +0% to +100% of a power's Activation Time within the Partial Mez range of effects. Thus, a Power that normally takes 2 seconds to animate would add a 1 second Interrupt Time prior to the Activation of that Power, because at +10 Mag State is 50% of the way through the +0 to +20 Mag State that defines a region of Partial Mez for a Level 20 character (without other modifiers).

Now, admitedly, I'm currently taking a very simplistic overview of how to adapt and modify the legacy CoH Mez System so as to make it less "boolean" in nature for City of Titans, and I'm sure that there is PLENTY of room for additional refinement of the underlying idea beyond what I've presented here, but the point that I'm trying to make is that I think the whole architecture of Mez Effects can be put on a firmer (and fairer!) foundation than City of Heroes managed to do. In part that's because by setting up an "under zero/over zero/above over zero" system like I've been outlining in broad strokes up above, you can actually create a more level playing field between the archetypes, such that Melee Archetypes aren't "10 times as protected" as the Squishies are from Mez. So instead of a Level 20 Melee being a -1 Mag base with a -10 Mag bonus to their Mez Protection (so they "never" get Mezzed) like you had in CoH ... in City of Titans, you could wind up with a Level 20 Melee having a -20 Mag base protection level with an additional "x2" bonus to that for a -40 Mag Protection level, which then becomes a Partial Mez range of +0 to +40 Mag, and that you have to stack more than +40 Mag (total) onto them in order to achieve a Total Mez Effect on them ... such as a Hold or a Stun, or whatever. So while a "Squishy" would have only a -20 to +20 Mag range before reaching Total Mez, the Melee Archetype would have a -40 to +40 Mag range before reaching Total Mez. At the same time, the Partial Mez range is larger for the Melee Archetype, meaning that the "effects" of a Partial Mez of the same absolute Mag will have less effect on the Melee Archetype than it would on the "Squishy" (simply because their "range" for Partial Mez is that much larger) ... but the Melee Archetype would still be Partially Mezzed and therefore feel some impairment as a result of the Mez Attack. Thus, you can create a system where there is "room" for Partial Mez to occur within it and not have to hand out "immunity" level Mez Protections to everyone BUT the "Squishy" Archetypes (who then just get to suffer while their cries for "justice" fall on deaf ears).

Also note that a Level 30 (x2) basis for Mag Protection for Melee Archetypes would result in a -60 Mag to +60 Mag differential before reaching Total Mez status at over +60 ... which is actually broadly similar to having a -11.4 Mag Protection in CoH and needing a +12 Mag Mez Stack in order to Mez a Melee Archetype. So broadly speaking, similar results but with added outcomes and implications by reaching the same end state through an alternative means and system.

Furthermore, as a character increases in Levels, the "value" of those level disparities will gradually "fade" over time, simply because 32 vs 30 is not as severe a disadvantage as 12 vs 10 ... as opposed to be a "multiplier" system like the old grey/blue/green/white/yellow/orange/red/purple system used to apply when dealing with level disparities.

At any rate, it's just a notion for how to improve upon a legacy system in a way that keeps the "spirit" of that legacy system and carries it into the future.


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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

Major failing of City of Heroes that should not be replicated (in its entirety) in City of Titans? THE MEZ SYSTEM

Great post, I'd comment but it deserves it's own thread.

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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

A glaring flaw in this system was the fact that for Arch Villains and Giant Monsters (and Rikti Spaceships) the Devs essentially had to put in a "stupid level" of Mag Protection in order to PREVENT any of these status effects from applying to their Boss Encounters.

It would certainly toss a bone to the buffers if they could affect the Big Bads, as well. Even if the effects were limited to what would count as a partial mez on anything else, it's at least something to see that the AV is attacking a little slower, missing a little more, or not hitting quite as hard.

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syntaxerror37 wrote:
syntaxerror37 wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
Major failing of City of Heroes that should not be replicated (in its entirety) in City of Titans? THE MEZ SYSTEM

Great post, I'd comment but it deserves it's own thread.

No doubt it does, but I wanted to broach the (admittedly weighty) subject here first before launching into a thread discussion of this issue elsewhere, if only for the visibility that this particular thread offers.

Darth Fez wrote:

Redlynne wrote:
A glaring flaw in this system was the fact that for Arch Villains and Giant Monsters (and Rikti Spaceships) the Devs essentially had to put in a "stupid level" of Mag Protection in order to PREVENT any of these status effects from applying to their Boss Encounters.

It would certainly toss a bone to the buffers if they could affect the Big Bads, as well. Even if the effects were limited to what would count as a partial mez on anything else, it's at least something to see that the AV is attacking a little slower, missing a little more, or not hitting quite as hard.

You know, I hadn't actually been thinking explicitly in quite those terms while typing all that up, but upon reflection, you're absolutely right! Even if you set the Total Mez threshold as being "properly" out of reach somehow, you'd still have the entire Partial Mez mechanics working and that could be something which would make the Mez and Debuff Powers feel less "wasted" on an otherwise "immune" Arch Villain or Giant Monster. As I mentioned previously, it would be "fairer" to include an Impairment State prior to reaching Total Mez Effect.


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