Is it possible to allow all or the vast majority of the NPC costume pieces in the game to be unlockable by the players? I know some things like the Sky Raider backpacks and stuff in CoX would have caused clipping, but frankly, I don't really care. My blasters hairdo clipped a little at times, it wasn't a huge problem for me. As long as the only problem there is the occasional bad visual of the clipping, then I say allow it. I would have preferred to have access to that stuff, even with clipping issues, than not to have it. And in a game where we'll be choosing our own animations a lot, we might be able to work around such problems with judicious choices of animations for powers.
If that will be the case, that we could somehow buy or unlock those costume pieces through play, like the Sky Raider jetpack, the Carnie Strong Man helmet, etc then how might that in-game unlock be accomplished? In CoX, the Vanguard costume pieces were unlocked by earning and spending Vanguard Merits. Should we do something like that, where the unlock is for that one character? Presumably the purchased-with-real-money (or Stars) unlock would be account wide, (depending on the pricetag).
Should individual costume parts drop as rare or very rare loot items from defeating enemies of that type? Like if I do missions against Carnies, I might on rare occasions get a lott item that drops, which when I activate it, it unlocks the Harlequin mask or jester cap piece? Should those type of things be for sale on the auction house? Should they be things you could swap out among the different toons on your account? Should they be character-bound on acquisition?
I'm not a huge costumer, per se, so I can't say I personally have a dog in this race, but I'm just wondering what other people think.
Also, I assume some unique items, like Thor's hammer, Captain America's shield, and Doctor Tyche's beard would be reserved for the NPCs only, I'm not saying we should get to use that stuff, but the majority of the rank and file NPC wear would be fair game, I hope. You could even make the rarity of the costume unlock items that drop be a function of the NPC rank. Minion parts would be common, lieutennants would be uncommon, and boss parts would be rare, assuming you could boil it down in such a way that the rare drop table didn't contain repeats of less-rare stuff. Like if the boss wears the same pants as the minions, then just make it common, whereas the boss's unique glasses or gun style might be a rare drop.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I think pretty much everything you suggested in this post sums up what most people always wanted from CoH.
Clearly the game could reserve a few unique costume items to specific single special boss NPCs but there's no real good reason why we shouldn't be able to wear all the standard issue uniforms/items from the standard "grunt" type MOBs. Also while I agree that some items might suffer from "clipping" issues I think it should mostly be up to the players if they want to deal with that. Let us be the judge of what "looks good" or not. I tend to think the CoH Devs were way too conservative when it came to "protecting" us from clipping.
As far as how you acquire these items I think it could be a mix of drops and store bought items. If you get a costume item as a drop it would be unlocked just for that character but if you buy items like this from the store it would be unlocked account wide. I wouldn't make every factional item in the game available in the store but maybe a good 50% of them should be there. Some of them could even be rotated in and out to encourage sales. Also drops like this should be relatively rare, and like you say more rare depending on the MOBs rank.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If you made the costume parts non-tradable on the auction house and character bound on acquire, you could also have a Badge (or an Accolade with buffs) for collecting all of the pieces of each set, including all the rare and very rare pieces.
Or maybe you could let people sell them and still do that, I don't know. Once you unlock the costume part though, the item that does the unlocking gets consumed in the process. A guy like me would look at that Accolade and say "Do I want the large pile of IGC they're going to pay me for this ultra rare costume piece, or do I want the accolade, eventually?" In my case I probably paid real money to unlock the costume piece itself, if that was an option and I actually cared about the costume part for its own sake. But it makes a min/maxer pause and try ro milk the item for the most utility they can get, which makes the costume parts drops more interesting to those of us that normally wouldn't really care.
You could also have maybe a thing whereby doing a TF against a given faction yields a completion reward that might include a drop of a randomized rare costume piece. Or maybe like in CoX, if you did the TF and got a new badge, like "The Hard Way" for that TF, you also get a randomized costume drop of high quality/rarity too. Like how the Incarnate Trials gave you a good loot drop when you did a new Badge successfully.
You could even drop a "pick the costume part you want" item, like it's a thing in inventory that when you double click it, it gives you a menu of costume parts and you get to pick any one you want from that faction, such that you could either fill out an existing rare set that way, or maybe save the item and use it when you get enough to complete the set, etc. GW2 has stuff that works like that. You can even double click the menu item just to look at the menu then choose "save it for later" and it restores the menu item back to it's original "please double click me to select a reward" state.
If these costume sets are arranged so as to be "collectable" in that sense, you could have one badge for getting all the Rook pieces, and another for a getting all the Aether Pirate pieces, and then have one for getting all the "Boss level" pieces, etc. Completing a collection could give a badge, accolade buff, maybe you get an IGC drop or a something, etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I don't have a problem with basic "collecting NPC costume items will get you badges" concept. But I'll stand firm against being able to "buy" anything with IGC (or cash store Stars) that leads directly towards getting a badge. We all know if there's any way you could gain a badge just by paying for it there will be badge collectors who'll just instantly spend whatever it costs to get it and it'll devolve into the "I paid real money for this badge" badge. There's a reason why the Devs of CoH never gave us a set of "earn this much IGC to get a IGC badge" badges.
I like many of your ideas in this thread... as long as they don't lead toward "instantly buyable" badges. Perhaps there could be some subset of costume items that are buyable/tradeable and a DIFFERENT subset that would lead towards earning badges. Keep those groups separated and things would be fine.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
In GW2, items that have a cool skin sell for a lot of gold as compared to items of the exact same stats that don't have that cool skin. This game is going to separate the Augment numbers from the aesthetics, so there's no reason to expect that type of behavior will occur, but you can still make some costume pieces tradable I think. And sure, I can see where being able to buy a badge by buying the items it requires would be bad. That said, CoX had badges for crafting, and that could be more easily done if you had a ton of INF and could buy up all the crafting components you needed faster right?
On a related note I just now thought of, what if there were costume pieces that could be crafted? Would we want to be able to sell those? Would we want them to be a thing that leads to a badge? Is "both" a valid answer, assuming you have to actually craft the costume pieces yourself to get the badge?
Also, "for sale" for IGC and "for sale" for real money are two different things, but you have to assume that people will be able to get IGC by spending real money somehow. Are badges that require IGC to be spent totally out? Because if so, that means zero crafting badges, right?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
My only concern was the ability to effectively "buy" badges with IGC/Stars. Trading purely cosmetic non-badge related costume items would probably be fine.
There's still a major fundamental difference with your example. While it's true that being able to buy a bunch of crafting components made earning the CoH crafting badges EASIER you still had to spend the time and effort in game to craft all the items to earn the badges. As I recall there were hours worth of crafting involved even if you could buy all the raw materials at once. The situation you're potentially talking about is being able to buy costume items you'd need to directly buy any "costume collection" badge(s). The key point is that badges should be something you earn by spending time in-game, not something you can just buy because you happen to have a bunch of real life money to spend.
If you stick to what I just said the game could easily allow you to craft certain costume items to sell and allow those "craftings" to count towards earning personal crafting badges. I still think it would be best to keep any costume item that you could collect for a "costume collection" badge to be uncraftable/unsellable. As I said before the game could easily maintain two types of costume items:
Group A would only be obtainable from rare MOB drops and these could count for costume collection badges. These would be uncraftable and unsellable.
Group B could be from less rare MOB drops, craftable and/or buyable (from either the market or cash store). These would never count for costume collection badges.
No as I said CoH allowed you to spend IGC to make earning the crafting badges easier but it did not let you bypass the time/effort you still had to spend to do all the craftings.
The key principle is pretty simple: Badges should require some in-game time/effort to earn, period. They should never be things you can directly buy instantaneously for IGC or Stars. This was the simple guideline that the Devs of CoH followed and there's no reason CoT should work any differently.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
While I like the idea of making NPC costume parts available by achievement, I would strongly caution against going any further down the path of making costumes available in the game that are not available in character creation.
This was brought up in this forum http://cityoftitans.com/forum/costumeavatar-creator-ui-elements
and Doctor Tyche's response was encouraging:
and
///BREAK///
On the subject of paying real money for something. I could definitely see a badge for people who paid to get the badge. The only condition being that it would not be needed for any other accomplishment feat or completion award. It would just be the "I paid to get this badge" badge. In fact, that could be an interesting fundraiser award, similar to how you see some games provide special mounts or costumes to people who place advance orders or beta testers.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Thank you for quoting Doc about the "no random costume drops" policy. I didn't know that. It would seem to put the kibosh on my idea of "hey let's make that a collectible, and put some Accolades on it to interest the min/max crowd" though, but whatever. As I said, I'm not terribly big on badge hunting or costuming for completionism.
I certainly think there should be costume pieces you can just buy, for money. I also agree that those parts should not be needed to unlock a badge.
I like doing content to unlock a badge and if that means getting a costume piece with it, great. I'd still like to see more Accolade type stuff st the end of the tunnel for some of that stuff though. You could even just add "get all the associated costume part unlock badges" to the list to sub-badges the accolade needs. So like in CoX, if the system I'm thinking about were in place, you would have needed to get all the Vanguard costume parts (and all the other stuff) in order to unlock the Vanguard Medallion Accolade.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
While I want my opinion recorded against offering costumes for money, there is one exception I would accept:
I think that an aftermarket of player-created costumes should exist. I see two ways to do this off the top of my head:
[list=1]
[*] do this via add-on mods like we've discussed in other threads such that it is only client-side, or
[*] via some sort of community costume contest run by MWM. The winning design(s) can be awarded to the winning designer(s) for free and offered to the rest of the player base for a small fee that basically just covers the cost of running the competition. This could be seasonal, a yearly anniversary competition, or any other special event for no reason whatsoever other than just because. Blade & Soul, TERA Online, Black Desert, Champions Online and Elsword have also held costume contests and some of the entries are amazing!
[/list]
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Did you just say you think they shouldn't sell any costume pieces for money? If you can't sell that, what can you sell? Are you assuming the game will be by subscription only? Because the only way I could see NOT selling costume parts for money, which CoX certainly did, would be if the whole game were by subscription only, which would be a radical idea at this point.
I can see not wanting them to sell BADGE unlocks for money. We've been discussing that. But the costume pieces alone ought to be purchasable, to me. Like you can pay money to get the Hamburgler Mask you want to put it on your toon, but you'd still need to defeat the Hamburgler to get the "Mayor McCheese" Badge unlocked for badge hunting purposes. Costume parts are a big part of the micro-transaction market. You have to allow that. It's also something you have to spend development money on making, so you need to get paid for the end results.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Yes, you read me correctly. That is a slippery slope down which I don't want our developers to be tempted. As soon as the developers realize that players will pay for all the best costume pieces, they will stop offering them as part of the base character creation.
But your mention of Mayor McCheese did give me the idea for another revenue stream: Product (or actually, character) placement. I wonder what McDonalds, Inc. would pay to MWM to put the Mayor McCheese costume into CoT? What about some small-brand comic books trying to get people to read up on their flagship characters? Movie tie-ins? FPS or single player RPG crossovers? The sky is the limit.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Yo, did u know how can i download the game?
Champions online - Parallac's Lethiaphan
DC Universe online - Parallacs Lethiaphan
Well, the simplest way would be to travel forward in time about 2 or 3 years and download it from the website.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Unfortunately, unless you have a time machine or a biostsasis tube, travelling forward in time like that will take two or three years and patience. ^_^
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
.
Avatar courtesy of [s]Satellite9[/s] [url=https://www.instagram.com/irezoomie/]Irezoomie[/url]
I understand that this was a touchy subject back in CoH. To me the problem wasn't that "costume item X is not available in the costume creator" - the core problem was that you had a few items that initially required your characters to be a certain LEVEL to unlock. I actually have relatively little problem with having costume items linked to earning a badge or even random costume item drops from MOBs. Where I would draw the line is requiring any level thresholds for wearing costume items. If there were no level minimums then theoretically my main characters could transfer a random costume item drop they got from a MOB (or transfer a costume item they bought in the market) to a new character.
Level thresholds are my main hangup here. Even if my new level 1 character has to sneak a way to get a badge-based costume item that'd be fine... just don't make me wait until I'm level 20 before I can put it on.
While it might be "funny" (or even useful from a fundraising point of view) to have a badge that you literally had to buy one of the few commandments the CoH Devs stuck to is "thou shall not have to pay 'money' to earn a badge". Think about it this way: if you fancied yourself as an super-serious badge collector then to you having to pay for a badge would practically be a case of "pay-to-play". The game would be forcing you to pay extra money just to obtain something that to you may be more important than leveling up. This is why I hope whatever happens that the CoT Devs will avoid a scenario where a given badge specifically requires real world money to get.
Actually I tend to really SUPER HATE things like this. I hate any in-game items that are only available to "pre-orders" or "beta testers" that are never again available to normal players. If games want to wait like 6 months or a year before they make those offers available to the general playerbase then that'd be fine. TEMPORARY periods of exclusivity are fine. It's when things are PERMANENTLY exclusive that drives me loony-tunes.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I apologize in advance for the fact that this is turning into a monetization discussion, because we all know how much we all hate those discussions. That said, I'm going to go back to my original, at the time rhetorical question, which now bears actually answering. In regards to Huckleberry's most recent post concerning the sale of costume parts:
Assuming we're not charging for costume parts in the cash shop, how ARE we making money? What exactly are we charging money for, in your realistic (I hope) version of a monetization model? How does the revenue that this stuff brings in support more costumes being made?
The way I see it, if people are willing to buy new costume parts that get developed after the game is up and running, you can and should charge them for those items. You presumably have people whom you are paying money to develop those items, and that process therefore costs the company money. If the end result of that development budget spent is that you then have new costume parts, choosing NOT to sell them is really counter-productive.
The money that the newly developed costume parts bring in should be what pays the wages of the people developing them and thus pays for more costume parts to be made on a continuing basis. You have people whom you pay to make costume parts, they make them, you sell them, you make MORE money than it cost to create the costume pieces in the first place, and the company pays its costume-part-makers and then turns a profit on top of that. Charging money for costume parts is my intended reason for having new costume parts in the first place, really. I don't see any reason to devote development resources to a thing that you know you can't sell, or have no interest in selling.
And the idea that you could somehow trick the MWM executives into thinking that there's really no money in costumes, when in fact there is, and STILL have them okay the actual development of the new costumes DESPITE the fact that you've convinced them that you can't charge for them is really strange, to me. For one thing, people have heard of doing this. CoX did it. So it's not new, and it's known that people will pay for costume parts that they want. I did. I mean, I paid for V.I.P. on CoX and got a lot of stuff that way, but I also bought the single items I wanted here and there as needed for a few bucks. But leaving that aside, if you DID manage to convince anyone that they'll never be able to charge for costume parts, why would anyone actually make them then?
If your solution is to get Micky-Dee's to pay you for ads and then use the money to make costumes, my response is still going to be that such use of that money is a waste, in and of itself, if you can't or won't charge for the costumes you make. What you SHOULD do with the ad revenue that you manage to get, after making the ads themselves, is to pay for things that keep the servers up and running, the lights on, the janitor paid, etc. If you have any money left over after that, your best use of it would be to use it to develop some new content or thing that you ARE going to charge for, then charge for that thing and make more money.
Paying people to design and create new costume pieces in the game, and then not charging money for those things makes no sense to me. I could see having ONE special give-away item every once in a while to try to generate interest in the game among the current players. That's not the same as having a staff of costume designers working full time jobs and then NOT turning a profit off of that labor in some way.
If you're going to crowd-source it and let individual designers make costume items to submit and eventually sell, that doesn't mean you're not charging for costume parts. If charging money for costume parts is what you are opposed to, on the basis that you think all of those things ought to be provided to players for free, how does crowd-sourcing the design process change that? It doesn't. You're still, ultimately, charging the players at large for the costume parts, aren't you?
None of this makes any sense to me.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Unfortunately temporal exclusivity is a prominent selling tactic for a lot of companies. Take a look at the McRib. People love this crappy sandwich for a month or two out of the year but if it were available year round it's total sales would probably be lower than it's total sales for that short window. It's a fact that as time goes on sales drop. But if you cut off sales shortly after they start to decline you allow the demand to simmer and build such that when you release the item again sales are higher and will tolerate a higher price. Combine that with a customer turnover that you frequently see in MMOs and you've got a few people advertising a costume part that they bought when it was first launched that new comers don't have access too, when the part goes on sale again they "have to have it." It's unfortunate for people that play long term that they are unlikely to see that part go on sale for a lower price but a commercial operation like this is not in the business to be gentle on your pockets. And if they are they stand to not make as much money and go out of business.
I don't like it but I'm not going to be surprised when it happens.
As a middle ground, perhaps free players are subject to blackouts on certain parts while subbers could buy whatever whenever. Would probably give some people more reason to pay a sub rather than play for free and pay as/if they please.
Radiac ninja'd me. I am under the impression that the cash shops primary selling item is going to be costume pieces. Some of these may also be available in the game world but will require a decent amount of play or specific play to acquire. Anything earnable in the game world will likely also be available through the cash shop but no guarantees that there will be full parity in either direction.
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
Does it hurt your argument here to mention that the McDonalds in at least some parts of Germany sell the McRib year around as a permanent menu item? I don't know but I just tend to be a font of useless trivia regardless if needed or not. ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
German McDonald's also serves beer. And won-tons (steamed or fried!).
But the question that needs answering is not whether the German McDonald's has the McRib all year round, but whether or not it has special limited time offers like ours do. I did a quick internet search and found some kind of new South African Big Mac they had a picture of. I don't know if it was a limited time offer, but it sounds like the kind of thing that would be.
Take a look.
[img]http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Qlux5AplMI0/UIWQjeDcFCI/AAAAAAAAFlQ/R0jA1anQQoI/s1600/20121007_190424%25280%2529.jpg[/img]
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Apparently, according to Google Translate, "fern-schmecker wochen" means "Remote-tasting weeks". Sounds like a limited time offer to me...
Edit: I move that we call any limited time offer of costume parts in City of Titans "fern-schmecker wochen" now. :)
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I second that.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I think, and Lothic also stated, that Temporary Exclusivity/Temporal Exclusivity is fine. If I can at least look forward to being able to buy it when it cycles back around in the future, then I'm ok with that. It's the "Only ever available Valentines Day 2016, then never seen again, ever." that is completely not cool. In a digital distribution system, it's also nonsensical. The pertinent data obviously continues to exist, as so the distribution methods, only selling something for a single ultra-exclusive limited time frame just means that you're NOT making as much money on that item as you COULD be by recurring them.
I'm also completely cool with selling costume parts for real money. ***PROVIDED*** that I can at least buy them piecemeal. I simply refuse to fork over $10 for a full costume set when all I want are the gloves. Sell me the gloves alone and I'll gladly give you money though. That doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see new pieces for free every now and then though.
That's how CoX did it, that's how TSW does part of their costume RMTs (they also have sets that you have to buy whole, which is why I have never bought one). I really feel like that's the best system.
The fact of the matter is that they've got to keep the lights on somehow.
This is a deal-breaker for me. If I don't have all the costume options available for free in the character creator (or through EARNED achievement in-game) then you've lost me. Period.
Selling costume parts can't be the only way that MWM can possibly make money.
If they want to include a whole slew of new costume parts when they dump a new DLC that they charge for that's okay too. Because in that case I view it as paying for the content and getting the new costumes for free along with it, ensuring the developers are paid for their effort in the process.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
OK so I can almost understand why having a costume item that's ONLY available via the cash store might be annoying to some players. But would having a costume item that you could either buy in the cash store OR earn as a random drop from a MOB really be at the same level of "annoying"? In that case you could either opt to have the item instantly OR choose to get it for free if you're willing to play the game for a random amount of time. There really is no rule that says we must be able to have free access to everything at character creation. If I'm playing D&D and I tell my DM I should be able to give my brand new character a suit of +5 platemail just because I know they "exist" in the game world I'd be rightly laughed at for being goofy or some such.
Again I understand there was a strong outcry in CoH against having a few items (and when you look back on it really was only like 5 or 10 items total) be level gated behind trials and such. The reflexive backlash to that was the desire to have ALL items be available in the character creator. Unfortunately there are players like me who don't really see the need to have EVERYTHING available in the character creator. As I said before my hot-button issue is LEVEL gating items. To me there should be no minimum levels to wear any item. But beyond that if the game decides to have a few items that are linked to badges or require some other mechanism to EARN them through the course of play I don't really have a problem with that. I think I can live with having 99.999% of all costume items in the game be available in the costume creator and have maybe 5 or 10 others be earnable through the course of play.
P.S. If it helps I might agree that there should always be a "basic/plain" version of all costume items in the costume creator. So for example maybe there's a trial where you can earn a super-fancy crown to wear. To be fair the costume creator should also have a basic crown available to everyone. That way you can always have a crown regardless but if you want a super-fancy one you'll have to earn it in the trial.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
On the one hand, MWM has said that anything that will be in the cash shop can be earned in-game.
On the other hand, anyone who has played CoH (especially before Freedom) knows that we had to pay to obtain certain costume sets and power sets. I expect that most people were accustomed to this idea and comfortable with it.
As Radiac has pointed out, MWM will need to be able to earn money somehow and they definitely intend to earn money. Selling new costume sets are a huge go-to for generating income, with this crowd. As are power sets. Given CoT's design, animation sets will also be in that category. Whether new zones / expansions will be a part of that remains to be seen (once the game is complete, obviously, since we know it'll launch without all the intended content available).
Short-short version: we know that we're going to have to pay for content.
That's not to say that we won't get new costume pieces, animations, and zones / missions for free. I'm not going to complain if MWM decides to gives us all costumes for free. However, I intend to be a subscriber so I have the expectation that the store will have enough content on which I can spend my Stars. If new costume sets are free that's a potentially large sink for my Stars that's not available.
The bottom line, really, is that no matter what MWM chooses to sell someone will be unhappy with the decision. I'd certainly not want to wait for expansions in order to be able to obtain new costumes, powers, etc.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Yea, I would be perfectly fine with either being able to buy it upfront or unlock it by playing the game. And the character creator was probably my favorite part of the game. If I really wanted a specific costume, it would be that much more awesome if I got it through playing the game. And for those who don't want to wait and just buy, that's a win-win for the player and MWM.
If they can go with the. everything that is in the cash shop can be obtained in game though, that will be pretty awesome!
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I think the one situation that truly sparked off this controversy in CoH was the [url=https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Roman_Costume_Set]Roman Costume Set[/url]. There was a period of time (before they started to sell in it the cash store a few years later) where the only way you could get anything that even remotely looked like "Roman armor" was by completing the Imperious Task Force which was level gated at level 35. This naturally pissed off some people who wanted to be able to wear Roman armor at character creation.
If they had removed the level -gating and provided for a "basic" set of Roman armor at character creation then I think most people would have been less upset about the whole thing. They could have still had an Imperious Task Force that awarded you a "super-fancy" set of Roman armor while letting everyone else have their basic version. This is the "lesson learned" that CoT should pay attention to.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
That would be impressive.
My interpretation is that this only applies to what's "in the box", i.e. included with the base price of the game. I wouldn't expect anything new that is added to the cash shop to be available by playing the game for one simple reason: it would require MWM to also create content through which those items can be obtained by playing the game. That's a large investment for every new cash shop item. After all, nobody would purchase those items if all we needed to do was find a particular badge or invest 15 minutes running through a mission. I'd be very disappointed if it ended up being something like the SSAs and we could pick one item from a costume set as a weekly reward.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I wasn't aware of this drama, at that point I had quite a few 50's so it didn't really affect me at all. I do understand the frustration of that though, especially for new players coming in. But if they decide to have exclusive cash/level/mission-gated costumes, I would hope that they would make basic free versions.
I don't think that would particularly be true, depending on how they implemented it. I was more meaning what Radiac and Lothic said. Having the items be a random drop. If that is the case you wouldn't be able to cheat the system by finding out what mission gives what item and so forth and so on. Also this way they can just tie the costume items to the random drop pool and maybe set up the rarity of drops to the items upon creation.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Yes I would not have a problem with having to buy items that were "newly added" to the game via new updates to the game. That would be especially true if they followed my suggestion of providing "basic/simple" versions of things for free in the costume creator while reserving the "super-fancy" versions of things for other methods. As another example let's say they decide to add wizard staves to the game (for the sake of discussion let's assume wizard staves did not exist at the launch of the game). I think it'd be perfectly fine if they added a basic/plain wooden staff in the costume creator for free but then chose to sell fancier versions of the staff in the cash store or make the fancier versions be rewards for completing a new trial or earning a new badge.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
To expand on my last point, I know it wouldn't make sense to get a Carnival costume by defeating a Tsoo enemy. So they can also attach the Top level tags that are currently being evaluated to attach to the costume pieces. This way they can tie the costume pieces to enemy groups. So you will get random drops that make sense with who you are fighting.
(Using CoX baddies to make it easier)
If you were fighting the Mafia, you would get Fedoras, suits, dress shoes, cigars etc
If you were fighting the P.P.D, you would get tactical gear, utility belts
If you fought the clockwork, you could get gears, steampunk stuff
Any new dlc costume pieces can just be tagged and fall into these categories and be available to get while fighting enemies. To go one step further they can be tagged for missions, task forces, raids. So some costume pieces can only be dropped during a specific type of event. The rarity of chance to get them might be tied to the difficulty of mission to obtain them. In other words, difficulty of missions can also be tagged meaning that you have to beat a mission on +5 in order to get the drop. This would be ALOT of descriptor work but it's doable if they are going to go that route.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Remember what DocT has already stated, as quoted in Huckleberry's [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/111447#comment-111447]post above[/url]. "No random drops for costume bits."
I think Lothic's suggestion makes for the best middle ground. Allowing people to have access to some basic version of each costume type would be great and could certainly help prompt people to buy costume sets.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
There are a number of reasons why I should not be able to create the character costume I want to create at the start of the game.
[list=1]
[*]the developers didn't think of or just haven't created that costume element yet.
[*]the developers are reserving that specific style as a reward for completing specific content
[*]the developers don't want me to have it unless I pay extra for it
[*]it is not available at character creation but can drop randomly through consuming content
[/list]
The biggest problem I had going to play DCUO after CoH closed down was that I could not make the character I wanted. Only the most basic styles were available at character creation and even though some of those styles were nice, players did not want to use them after character creation because using them makes you look like a noob.
I don't know about the rest of you, but most of the time, the whole concept for my characters didn't become final until after I was done tinkering with my look in the character creator. Hiding costumes behind barriers, making them unavailable at character creation should be unthinkable in the spiritual successor to CoH.
In the list above, only #4 violates this premise.
#1 is a fact of life and there is no way the developers will be able to create the infinite assets needed to fulfill every possible player fantasy.
#2 is acceptable because it has more to do with creative license and the intended direction of the immersive experience than it does with any arbitrary accounting decision.
#3 is where we get into a gray area.
So long as the costumes behind pay barriers are available at costume creator, I will not be put too far aback. For instance, I could see a small dollar figure on the character creation screen telling me how much that particular new character design will cost in real world money if I choose to accept it. I don't like it, but I could understand it and accept it. It would have the uninteded (or intended, depending on which side of the monetary exchange you sit) consequence of creating a community full of people who will judge you based upon your character's chosen costume items and how much money you paid to get them. I don't like that. At all.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Lothic would you be okay with level gated content if it was then unlocked for the whole account? IE You could complete the content on one character of appropriate level and then be able to turn around and role a new character with that unlocked content. Or apply it to an existing character of lower level. Would that be a reasonable middle ground?
edit spelling
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
I doubt that will be the case. Not that my experience is much of a measure. I was certainly not the most active person in the CoH community and jumped in on all of one costume contest.
Be that as it may, I would welcome it if someone mentioned that they were judging me or my character based on how much money I'd spent on the costume. That way I'd know they belong on my ignore list.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
The idea that all costume items in the game should be VIEWABLE in costume designer (regardless if any one particular item is unlocked and available to be worn or not) is a relatively different suggestion that I'm not sure I've ever seen before at least in the context of CoT. I would not be opposed to the idea that ALL items be previewable like this. Whenever there was a particular item in view that you either had not paid for yet or had not earned in-game yet the GUI would indicate the reason why it was locked and obviously not let you use that item in a completed outfit.
Still if the CoT Devs adopted the mindset of always including a "basic/plain" version of any type of costume item in the costume creator then everyone could always have the outfit they wanted at least on a generic level. If a player wanted to eventually replace a plain version of an item with a fancier version later on then that would give them a goal to work towards.
For what it's worth it sounds like DCUO was geared far more towards the "restrict the best stuff to be pay-only" than CoH ever was. For the most part the vast majority of the "pay-for" stuff in CoH were just things that has previously been limited to older players or in-game trials (like the earlier Roman Armor set example). If I had to guess the Devs of CoT are not going to be in the "manipulate the players into always having to buy the best costume items" mode as other games are.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Not at all. The majority of costumes in DCUO are random drops from content. Only a few costume items are in the cash shop. For and for the most part, the cash shop items aren't even that desireable. Extept for the turbines, the turbines are pretty cool.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Actually quite the reverse. I'm one of those weird old school people who actually hate the concept of "one character doing something in-game which unlocks a reward for all characters on my account". To me it's like playing a D&D character who finds a +5 Sword of Sharpness and then somehow thinks every new character I roll up in the future should automatically start with their own identical +5 sword. To me that's absolute silliness.
Now if I buy something in the cash store with real money then I would generally expect that to be unlocked for all the characters of my account. Anything I buy or do as a PLAYER of a MMORPG that has nothing to do with a specific character's action in the game can be account-wide as far as I'm concerned. Where I draw the line is when I'm playing as a individual character in the game. Anything that individual character earns or unlocks should only be character specific unless you could give me a very super solid reason otherwise. Just to be clear one character earning a costume item is not a good enough reason to have that item be shared/unlocked with all my other characters.
P. S. My suggestion that no costume items should be level gated would actually open up new possibilities that would still be close to the "middle ground" you're talking about. For example if costume items in CoT were actually treated as physical inventory items then I'd have no problem at all with one of my level 50s earning a super costume item from a trial and then giving that physical item to another one of my new level 1 characters. In this case there would just be a single unique item involved - once the level 50 gave it to the level 1 the level 50 would not have it anymore. To use the D&D analogy again it'd be like one character giving another character the +5 sword. There's only one sword being traded - it's not like that sword would be magically duplicated amongst all my characters.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If that's the case then I really don't see what the problem would be with that. Having a cash store full of mostly things that you could get just by playing the game for "free" is basically what I was advocating for earlier. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you don't like about this possible scenario for CoT. *shrugs*
The fundamental difference between DCUO and (presumably) CoT is that 98% of all the costume items in the game are already in the costume creator. The other 2% could easily be drops/cash items and not really harm anyone's ability to create a new character the way they want.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Well if you are going to be able to get every costume in-game, then they will all be coming from badges? That is even worse for what you were saying about people knowing what mission gives clothing items. Then all you have to do is step on a badge and you can have all the costume pieces in a day. Unless the drops from the badges are *random*. Then that would make it a bit harder. Even still the same holds true with that path. You shouldn't get hellion gear in a clockwork territory. That's all I'm saying.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
People have to remember what I just said in my last post: Something like 98% of all the costume items in the game are going to be in the costume creator by default. Any extra ones that come from drops, come from the cash store and/or come from earning badges will only represent a relatively small handful of EVERYTHING else that'll be available to everyone at character creation. Does no one else remember how CoH worked in this regard?
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I definitely remember how CoX started out. But that changed quite a bit from how it was around the 2012 timeframe. There was a paywall on all wings, tails, and pretty much everything that wasn't basic. Luckily the veteran rewards were there for some of the things
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Then suffice it to say you remember it very differently than I did. For example a majority of the wing types available in the game were actually recipe based which could be found for free as MOB drops.
Sure you had to pay for some newer things like the items in the Booster Packs but I would still easily say that 98% of any costume items that the game EVER offered to players were still technically "free" up until the very last day.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
COH is a different case. There we paid a monthly subsciption each month and as a result they released new content and for us on a regular basis. When it went free to play there were fewer costume items that were available for free but most of the content was free. Which was also the same when the subscription was in place as well it's just you paid for it differently.
COT is starting free to play. Since you'll be getting a stipend of stars with your subscription the same could be said of COT. I'd expect a base group of costume parts at launch and very few costume parts for free afterwards.
From MWMs point of view releasing a free version of every costume piece is increasing the workload and devaluing their products. If they were to make a basic leather jacket and then make a specialty jacket with extra belts and a poppable collar and more "cool" there would be a lot of people who would say the special jacket is only a little different from the basic jacket and isn't worth 500 stars. Whereas if only the special jacket is available then it's totally worth it because its different from anything else in the game. Similarly they could release a basic jacket for 350 stars and the special jacket for 500 to encourage people to "splurge" on the special jacket.
As a consumer I'd love to have what you want but MWM isn't my enemy (yet) so I want the best for them and in this regard I respect however they decide to sell their stuff to ensure they can keep building a game that is worthwhile.
Remember you're not just buying a costume you're buying future content.
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
I mean, you may have just used Paragon Points awarded during each monthly subscription to buy the different items. But otherwise you would of had to buy the paragon points in order to obtain the costumes and what not, such as the steampunk pack.
https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Paragon_Points
One thing I actually used my Paragon Points for was to get the Carnival of Light mask and the bridal set, which you can see on my Avatar pic. Other than that I did not use them for much else
Don't take this as complaining, because to the very end I loved everything about the costumes and the costume creator. So I'm not entirely disagreeing with you Lothic. There were a ton of free costume options that you could use to make your character look unique. But the amount of costume pieces under the paywall was not little by any means.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Where did I say that MWM would have to create at least two versions of EVERYTHING? We all know that most things are going to be available in the costume creator by default regardless - that only requires ONE version of whatever.
When I used the examples of getting a super-fancy version of a crown or wizard staff as an award for earning a badge or completing a trial those types of things would easily be a tiny minority of the overall types/kinds of costume items available. Let's say, for the sake of argument, the CoT Devs decide to create 50 of these special reward versions. That's 50 out of the thousands of items (special or otherwise) that they're going to create for the general costume creator regardless. We're talking tiny fractions here.
So? The Devs of CoT are about offering choices, not "forcing" us to spend money.
You're assuming that the only type of "jacket" in the entire game will have to be a super-fancy cash store version. The chances of that happening (the Devs reserving an entire class of clothing JUST for a single cash store version) is extremely small.
When you talk about possible special versions of things in the cash store these are likely only going to be unique versions of existing items. Sure the super-fancy glitter cape that might be in the cash store will be fancy. But when you boil it down it'll just be a different texture used on the same cape they're already going to have dozens of versions of in the costume creator. Again still talking about a tiny minority of extra "special" things here.
There would be nothing wrong with this. Again it's all about choices. But remember there would likely still be an even "more basic" jacket available for free in some form or fashion.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If you have to grind certain content, like do a TF or defeat 1000 mooks to unlock the special costume part, that's fine with me, even if it amounts to level gating. For those who don't want to have to wait for that level or whatever, you could also make it available in the cash shop as an alternative to grinding for it. So it's not level gated, in the hard sense. Nor is it pay-walled, in the hard sense. It's your choice of the two.
If they do costumes only as part of every new expansion, like once a year you get a new zone, TFs to do, and costumes to unlock, then sure, package it with the expansion. I'd still see some utility in selling the actual costume parts for smaller dollar amounts too though. That's the whole point of microtransactions, that you don't have to shell out another $20 or whatever all at once. I think the factions that have costume pieces you might want should be unlockable somehow. I mean, those factions like the Aether Pirates etc would have some stuff they had to make just to be able to dress the AP up in it, right. You can either make it acceessable up-front as part of the game, or you can make people have to grind content to unlock it as a fun extra thing to do. I like that option better. Then you can offer those Aether Pirate parts in the cash shop for people who don't want to wait or grind for them. Then when you have new content, with new factions and new costume pieces, you can have costume unlocks in the new content to get you the new costume pieces (and badges) for successfully completing the new content. Or you can buy them off the cash shop to save time if you really want them now.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Pretty much "yes" to all of this. As long as nothing is STRICTLY level gated or STRICTLY pay walled then we'll be fine.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I completely agree Radiac, like I said before I'd be fine with either option. I plan to play the game quite a bit so if I can unlock special costume pieces by playing that would be my first priority, else I wouldn't mind paying microtransactions for pieces that I felt I really wanted.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Well - the devs have said that some/most/all(?) items in the cash shop you can unlock via gameplay. So I would be okay with something like (as I believe someone suggested previously) - unlocking via a specific character in-game limits the costume piece to that character, while buying in the cash shop unlocks it account-wide. Considering subs will be probably be getting a stipend for the cash shop, this might be a moot point for some people (and also a reason that devs should provide a variety of rewards for missions that offer one-time character swag like costume pieces - or at least a reason for the same character to run the same mission multiple times).
As for costumes that gameplay-unlock only at certain times - I can get behind that for VERY select and thematic items. Like Santa and Jolly Elf bits during the Xmas/Winter event. Spooky costume stuff for Halloween. Pilgrim hat for Thanksgiving. and so forth. Off-season unlocks via the cash store could be a good idea here as well just in case someone REALLY wants those Easter Bunny ears.
Having some things take a significant amount of game play (either by being very rare or requiring a lot of work to do all of it) is a good way to make the game more long-term playable, for me. When CoX got shut down I was soloing my MM a lot just to roll up INF and Purple drops.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I'd just like to highlight the fact that CoH did have #4 as well. The Rocket boots and most styles of Wings were crafted items using random drop recipes, it was relatively limited compared to the total number of costume pieces available, but it did exist.
As to the current line of discussion, I agree that having both a Pay and an Earn-Trough-Gameplay option would probably work best.
[Radiac impersonation]: In Guild Wars 2... =P
You can use IGC to purchase Gems (RM currency) via a player exchange so that you can buy cash shop items without spending actual money (just whatever time you invested to gather the IGC). Something like that could also work, depending on how CoT handles its IGC system.
In the movie Rambo, after Co-Bao dies (spoiler), John Rambo puts her necklace on and that becomes a part his character. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9dINReBCPI
I would hope our mission designers give us a mission with a scrappy kid who's always wearing his ballcap backwards or something very identifiable like that. And through the mission arc he proves himself to be maybe not the hoodlum we thought he was. But he sacrifices himself to save our character, and we get the ballcap as a potential costume item in memorium. It would be the only way to get it. No cash shop. No badge tokens. Just through blood and tears.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Dammit! Rambo was finally just coming up on my Netflix queue... now you ruined it. ;)
As to your suggestion here I like it. Anything to provide new/interesting ways to earn costume unlocks would be cool like that.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
So you don't want to PAY for a costume part, but you're more than willing to KILL an innocent teenaged NPC to get one? :)
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Well, everyone's got to have standards... ;)
P.S. To be clear I never had a problem with paying for specific costume items in the cash store. I just think there ought to generally be other (free via play) methods to get MOST if not ALL of those items offered in the cash store and I would be strongly against the cash store offering any type of costume item that didn't exist anywhere else. For example let's say the cash store offers a necklace for sale. That'd be fine as long as it wasn't the only necklace available to wear in the entire game. This should all be mostly common sense stuff. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
What about this:
When you do the content and get the badge, you also unlock the costume part. Other people can BUY that costume part, but not the badge. The people who grinded for the badge also get a color option for the part that the buyers don't get, so that there's still an incentive, beyond getting the badge (which you might not care about) for doing the content, eventually.
Do you think people buying costume pieces would complain that they don't get like ALL the colors with it? I could see some of these being really narrow color limitations. Like you can't buy the BLACK cowboy hat, you can make it navy blue or dark brown, or any other color, but not BLACK (or perhaps a given area of the color palette is off limits for that hat). Then when you defeat Black Bart, the Cattle Rustler in the wild west TF, you unlock black as an option, finally.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Lothic. I understand you are passionate about getting all but the smallest fraction of the AB for free. I'd like that too. But it's not practical in a free to play setting, there's not much else that they can charge for. Story arcs? zone access? emotes?
You ask, where you say MWM needs to create 2 versions of everything, you say so in the last line of your rebuttal to my post. "But remember there would likely still be an even "more basic" jacket (than the basic jacket for 350 stars) available for free in some form or fashion."
I don't recall them specifying what proportion of items are going to be in the cash shop or as fancy game achievement awards. I doubt that fraction has even been considered as of yet as they are still trying to get the AB to a point where we can use it alone.
The COT devs are not forcing you to spend any money. It's free to play, and from what they've said so far you can play dress up with anything in the game, and you can save that design to a file. However, You can't take all that into the game world unless you own all of it. Or own the game world (private server).
The single jacket rebuttal you are making is hyperbolic in the extreme. You must have a pretty low opinion of me to assume I would declare that there would only be one jacket in the entire game.
Considering that, I think I've made some valid points and you've made your position very clear. I'm not going to spend any more time on it with you.
Second Chance: https://store.missingworldsmedia.com/CityOfTitans/SecondChance/
Dev Tracker: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/fixing-dev-digest
Dev Comments: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-comments
I actually didn't even realize we were arguing THAT seriously about this and it's not a question of "passion" but of simple fact. CoH provided probably 98% or 99% of all costume items they ever had in the game for free in its costume creator. That's a fact. Unless you have hidden Dev info that suggests that will NOT be the case for CoT I see no reason to assume otherwise at this point. Obviously the CoT cash store will have some costume items for sale but I'll reserve any speculation that it'll be a sizable percentage of the overall total available.
I have no desire to upset anyone over this issue (I don't intend ANYTHING in forums like these to be taken personally one way or the other) but the idea that CoT would earn most of its operating income by selling like 50% or 75% of all the costume items in the game as unlocks just seems unfathomable to me. If anything it would go against the "spiritual successor" vibe of having CoT in the first place.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
If they ever link a costume item to a badge it'll likely just be a specialized version of an existing type of costume item (i.e. it would be a unique hat despite the fact there might be dozens of other hats already in the costume creator). Because of this I doubt they'd ever let you buy the specific costume item that's linked to the award of that badge. Think of it this way: Why link that costume item to the badge if you could just buy it outright? Again it's just common sense here.
As far as the color restriction thing goes... yes people would complain about that. I get that you're just trying to come up with a way to make distinctions but if I had costume item X unlocked I'd want to be able to make it any color I wanted. If you want REAL distinctions go with the following:
[img=500x400]http://www.indianvillagemall.com/hats/stylescrown.jpg[/img]
and limit the badge hat to one of these TYPES of hat. Limiting via color just seems too "picky" somehow.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
My ideal situation:
For people who are paying for subscription you can get the costume parts by playing the game or by paying IGC, Stars, anything that's not real money. I don't really want to pay for a subscription and then have to pay micro-transactions on top of that for the tens to hundreds of costume pieces available. I will happily play the game to get them though. I like how GTA 5 has actual clothing stores where you spend IGC to get everything. You have the option to pay real money for Shark cards, but you can just play the game to get the IGC.
If that is not a possibility though, it was okay how CoX set it up where if you subscribed you got a stipend of points where you could use it for what you liked. This gave you the ability to spend those points on a few costume pieces but not enough where you could buy them all, making you want to keep subscribed to get more points to spend on more items. It was a bit of a pay wall but it was a much better situation than everything being micro transactions.
For the free to play route I could see costume pieces or sets being sold in micro transactions (or possibly grinding in the game). This could entice free to play people to switch over to subscription, as it would be much cheaper to pay for a monthly subscription than to buy all the costume sets individually.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I agree with this. Limiting specific colors would be really weird. Perhaps it could be limited to a basic color set. And then if you get the badge it would allow you to choose from the full color spectrum. That might make more sense.
The TYPE of hat thing is pretty smart too and it goes inline with what others were saying. If you beat black Bart and get the badge then you get HIS hat. Maybe you could get or buy a basic hat that closely resembles black Bart's hat, but only if you defeat him will you get the one hat to rule them all.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
My understanding is that this will be the approach used by MWM. You could purchase more stars, naturally, but you wouldn't need to (unless you're low and absolutely want to buy that item right now).
I also agree that a badge, or the like, should provide a unique version of an item that already exists in the game.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
This is so important. You'd think it was a given that developers would get this, but so many don't. I think the free-to-play with subscription option is working well with other games and so long as the publishing company doesn't get greedy, really is the best compromise.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
That depends entirely on your definition of getting greedy, doesn't it?
And if you're giving everything away already, nobody has any reason to buy anything, and you make no money at all. If you start with "Pay us $50 to buy this game." and then you roll out new things that were not included in that purchase (like costume pieces), is it "greedy" to try to sell people that new stuff? Frankly, those of us on the player side of that transaction will have a tendency to always want more for less, to the extreme of getting everything for free. We, the customers, therefore cannot be trusted with the pricetag gun. MWM needs to control that themselves. And they're going to have to make decisions some of us won't like, such as charging money for one individual thing that some group of players might think should have been free. But they have to charge for something somewhere for the purpose of trying to get people to give them money so that they can use it to produce and maintain a game for us. The whole player base, taken as one entity, clearly don't agree with each other on what should be free and what should cost money. So you can't satisfy all of the people all of the time on this one. If they listened to everyone who tried to make this thing or that thing a sacred cow and "off limits" to the dreaded fate of being for sale, they'd have to give away the whole game, the costumes, the new content, the furniture, the servers, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the lava lamp on the desk, and their own shirts to make everyone happy. People, especially gamers, are great at taking. They will take and take and take, until the thing they're taking from keels over and dies from all the taking, and then they'll say "Not my fault..." and walk away without remorse or any thought that they were not 100% deserving of getting everything for nothing the whole time.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Radiac,
You make great points, but you completely missed the word "subscription". Or maybe you don't know what a subscription business model is. In that case, a subscription business model is one in which you pay a regularly recurring fee to play the game and all the content available. In a F2P with Subscription Option business model, it is a free to play game, but you have the option of subscribing and getting certain things included in your subscription that F2P would have to pay for. Typically this includes things like DLC, access to all the powers and costumes, etc. One thing that SHOULD NOT be included in any subscription option, or available in the cash shop is anything that gives a competitive advantage in the game, thus making it Pay to Win.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I know what a sub is, and I understand what pay to win is.
1. In a game that's primarily based on PvE, like CoX, letting people pay money to get better Augments and so forth amounts basically to letting them help you more when you're teamed up with them. When one player pays to win, everyone else they play with wins more too. I don't see that as a problem. And all PvP, in my opinion, ought to be done in such a way as to try to level the playing field as much as possible, if that means limiting the number of Very Rare items that each participant can have, or whatever, I'm fine with that. Boxing has weight classes, PvP should sort participants to try to create some sense of evenly matched sides in temrs of level, Augments, etc everything. And then have unlimited matches where anything goes, if people want to have that too. Forewarned is forearmed. That way, if you think you'd be outgunned in PvP because everyone else bought up the best items, then don't play in those fights, play in the ones that limit Very Rares, etc.
2. Assuming there's a subscription option, there's always the ability to let one's sub lapse. Should we lose all of our free costume items after our sub lapses? People have said this is tantamount to taking away our toys. If you're committed to NOT doing that, you have to give people their costume items permanently or not at all, so then you have to make them pay a fee to unlock them, or make them an in-game grind to unlock (or offer both options). Thus, you might give people a sub with a stipend of Stars or something and then require them to spend their Stars on the costume unlocks, or else grind to unlock them in the game. Either way though, the sub is a monetary cost, and the Stars spent are spent for good. The sub, at that point, could be looked at as a regular monthly purchase of Stars, and you'd have to give people something to spend those Stars on, thus costumes in the cash shop will be a thing. And you'd likely let people buy Stars for real money and then just spend them as they want, no sub required. Assuming they allow that too, and why not, then you're selling costume items for Stars, which amounts to selling them for money, basically.
So even in a subscription model you might need to charge for costume pieces, or at least offer them as a purchasable thing as an alternative to unlocking them the hard way, which some players might not want to have to do. I'm not against that. For the record, I'm not going to draw a line in the sand and try to tell MWM what I will and will not accept in terms of cash shop purchases, subscriptions, etc. I used to try to do that, anymore I've resigned myself to the idea that whatever they try to monetize, I will likely buy, just to support the game itself. I'm FOR the idea of MWM making money for all of their work. I do not begrudge them the money they need to keep a game I love up and running for me. They can sell exclusive cash shop only costume pieces, or Augments, or power sets or zones, etc and I will not complain. I paid for VIP in CoX to be able to do Incarnate Trials, I'd do that again.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Huckleberry made a good point. My original point was assuming you have already bought the game and that money is long gone.
What you just said is basically buying a TV at a discount if you sign up for a cable plan, then letting the cable plan expire and then the cable company wants to get the discount refunded back to them. If both parties satisfied the terms of agreement then that wouldn't or shouldn't happen, period.
First off if the costumes are free, why would they need to take them away? I'm assuming you mean that if they come free "with the subscription" than the idea of purchasing the subscription at that moment in time is ideally purchasing those "free" costumes that are available at the time of subscription, and should be yours whether you lapse or not, but if you do lapse, then anything that comes out after the lapse you would need to purchase or subscribe again. This does not affect costumes that wouldn't be free with subscription though, I will touch on that subject next
If you are paying for a subscription and they end up going with the Stipend system, if you have purchased costumes, then it is yours. Why would they want to or need to take them away from you?? You already gave them money one way or another to get them, why would you get punished for that?? If you buy costumes with stars(or whatever it will be), and then decide to let your subscription lapse, the punishment for this is that you will then not be able to have Stars to purchase NEW costume items, or ones that you haven't purchased that were out already. At this point you would have to either buy the costume pieces with micro transactions or start your subscription back up.
(Still subscription based)Even if they went with how GTA is where you use IGC to buy costumes, this is the same thing. You payed money to get the subscription and then grinded the game to get the IGC, so again all the costumes you bought you deserve to have and keep.
Basically what I am saying is that if you lapse nothing should be taken away from you, you just shouldn't be able to move on the same way.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
You buy the game in, say, 2018 for $50. At that time there is no such costume as "Mecha Armor". They create and release a Mecha Armor set in 2020 (having paid employees to make it) and make it available for purchase in the cash shop (in order to be able to pay those employees to make the next set they want to make). If you've been paying a sub, you might use saved-up Stars to purchase this set, or you might choose not to, up to you. If you've been playing on the non-sub plan, you might want to sink some money into the game to buy the costume set, your choice. Either way, you're paying a one-time fee to unlock a costume set.
Now, if your solution is to give the Mecha Armor set to everyone for nothing, then that item makes the game company no money and they should not have devoted resources to making it in the first place. If you only give the costume to people who have a subscription at the time it is released, then you get people paying a sub for like ONE month just to get the costume, the letting it drop for the other 11 months of the year. I don't think that's a good marketing plan to employ, as it encourages people to only sub for a month here and there when they want something out of it. At that point it might just be cheaper and easier for everyone to drop subscriptions all together and just sell the costumes etc off the rack anyway, quite possibly for lower prices than a month's sub would cost in the first place. If you force people to sub for a certain period of time to roll up veteran rewards tokens with which to vest their "free" costume set, isn't that basically the same as charging three or four months worth of sub fees for a costume set? I think I'd rather just have it now and pay once to unlock it.
If Mecha Armor is an in-game unlock , it should be unlocked in some new content that you had to buy the expansion pack or whatever to get, in my opinion. Other stuff that the game had when it was released could be put in as unlockable in the game by grinding content, or as a possible purchase in the store too.
Monetization is a divisive, touchy subject, and it has come up a lot, and every time it does, the thread usually gets locked by the devs, eventually. Even Doctor Tyche's monetization thread in the Dev Digest forum never got unlocked for replies, and it spawned a lot of vitriol in other threads.
All I'm saying, really, is let's let the MWM people figure out the money problem without issuing ultimatums at this point. I think if those of us on these forums were programmers and game designers trying to make a living, we'd have a totally different perspective on this. It's very easy for the teenager in the local comicbook store to whine about how expensive the Magic card they want for their deck is on the aftermarket. The store owner has to pay rent too, you know.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I have no doubt that MWM will gear this game so that they can make as much as they think is reasonably possible from selling costume items in their cash store.
But one thing you have to remember is that not every future player of CoT is going to be a clothes whore. There was always a sizable percentage of the CoH playerbase who never bothered to create more than one costume per character and who probably only spent like 2 or 3 minutes creating that one costume per character. Yes it's true folks... amazingly enough there are people out there who actually don't care about creating (much less buying) costumes. Amazing isn't it?
The point I'm trying to make is a simple one: The folks at MWM can plan all they want how to maximize the profit they can make from selling costume items but they better not fool themselves into thinking that's going to be their core revenue stream by any stretch of the imagination. Sure it might end up representing 20% or 30% of their total sales but if it's much more than that then we've ALL got a problem because no game like this is realistically going to succeed primarily on costume item sales alone.
Selling costume items might be a bigger "thing" in CoT than it ever was in CoH. But if they ever go so far as to sell anything approaching a majority of all the possible in-game items in the store then this whole thing is likely to collapse like a house of cards.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I'd like to point out a couple of errors in the logic of your argument.
This is a poor assumption. A good business would have budgets set aside for their resources. If one of those budgeted tasks was for their creative team to create X many new costumes a month and their existing budget was set up to support that, then there is no misappropriated resources as you mention. Perhaps MWM would see it as making money the indirect way, by providing value to the gaming experience for their players who want to continue paying for the game some other way and to make it more valuable for new players to buy in.
Now I think you are getting the hang of the F2P with Subscription Option. If someone wants to sub for one month in order to get some costumes for free, I think MWM would gladly take it. If you've ever taken a look at the subscription fees of games that follow this model, you will find that single month fees are about $15 US, Three month fees are more reasonable and so on, to where one-year subscriptions cost about $12 US per month. There are exceptions obviously, but this is the price point that the market has shown to be most acceptable.
In-game purchases range from $1 to $10 with most somewhere in between. So it would not make sense for a player to subscribe for one month to get something that would be cheaper in the cash shop. But as soon as there are two or more things the player wants, then a subscription option starts to look attractive. Add in the other perks that come with a subscription and it becomes even more attractive.
As you say it is a sticky issue. I understand that as a kickstarter, you expect to have a certain amount of say in how the business will be run. Since I am not a kickstarter, I have no similar expectations; but I think it is fair to say that the business manager and executive producer of MWM will be the ones making the decision of what is and is not worth putting their resources into.
Rather. I expect these forums would be our vehicle to express what we want, and let the producers figure out how to get the value out of it. All of us poo-pooing each others ideas and using the business case as our justification for doing so are doing us all a disservice and obstructing the best and most creative ideas from being expressed.
My personal feeling is that if I can't make the character I want at initial character creation because all the costume items I want to use are behind barriers, then I will not approve. If the barrier is simply a monthly subscription, then I will understand and accept.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I think we can agree that we have different viewpoints on some of this and that such is expected. I just think that if a company is releasing a game, and they charge you $50 for the up-front purchase (which probably gets you some subscription time as a packge deal), that doesn't necessarily include everything that they will ever roll out after that. And even then, some of the stuff they might have built into the game from the start, like NPC faction costume pieces, might have to be unlocked by grinding for it and/or paying for it.
It would have been fine with me if CoX let you do a series of missions, TFs, etc to get an Accolade that unlocked the Sky Raider Jetpack. No need to make it free for everyone from the get-go, as it adds more fun and replay-ability to the game, for me, to be able to unlock it through play. And as I said I'm never really against offering things for money, if MWM in their better judgement decides to do that.
That said, I can see where there are some items for sale that raise an eyebrow. In GW2 you can pay money to unlock colors. Like if you want "Midnight Green" as a color option, you have to either buy it with IGC (which I did, as it is the official color of my Philadelphia Eagles), or you can buy it with real money. The darkest shade of black in that game is a very rare dye drop that costs either 300Gold or some amount of real money to unlock, for example. It's not like it takes that long to get 300gold, but still. Give me a break already. Colors for sale? What is the world coming to?
And I agree with Lothic that this can't be the only revenue stream, or even the main revenue stream for the game to actually be financially viable.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
As long as any costume parts, regardless of how they're earned, are unlocked account-wide and I have LOTS of character slots to experiment with, I'll be happy. That unusual fashion statement piece might not work for any of my existing characters, but it could be just the thing to spark a new idea!
Be Well!
Fireheart
I've got to agree with you there.
By virtue of it existing costume pieces can inspire new characters and new concepts, but if you can't use it on a new alt until you unlock it on THAT character, then you're essentially forced to play a different character for XXX levels before you can actually creature the one you wanted. (This is excepting the idea that there are other similar pieces readily available.)
That's not cool.
I totally agree with everything you just said Huckleberry! In regards to what you said Radiac, if people want to pay for a one month subscription to get a few costumes: A) They are probably paying more than what the costumes are worth(Cash Store Value-wise) and B) That gets one more person subscribing to MWM, which is a win-win. And we are in such a narrow field of vision with this. Because as Lothic said and you agreed, there is going to be so much more to this game. So by letting their sub lapse and getting to keep their costume does not mean that they aren't losing a ton of other options else where in the game. They might not get into any future TF's, or be able to gain any new contacts. Or whatever the case may be. My whole point is I don't think you should be stripped of anything you have already payed for, especially your clothes.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I don't get all the drama surrounding costume piece unlocks. They're not costing you money, and they add more reasons to actually go out and do content, so I see them as a good thing. I like making my character's costumes look perfect too, but I'm willing to concede that that might become part of the overall build process. I mean, after all, there are going to be levels. You don't get all of the powers you want at level 1, and you certainly don't get the Augments you might need to make them as good as you envision them as being at level 1. Having to go out and earn that cape, or set of wings doesn't bother me, and frankly it would add more replayability to the game contnet to make it per-character unlocks and not account wide. Then certain content which unlocks desired things becomes a rite of passage and everyone is doing it a lot of the time.
And besides, how long does it take to get a toon to the level cap? In CoX by the last year you could do that in like a week or two, right? Why is is so onerous to have to wait a few days to unlock the cape or whatever just to complete the toon's look?
If there had been a TF the length of the Terra Volta respec thing that unlocked the Cape and then later the Auras, and if it had to be done once on each toon to unlock those things, it would have been a thing that got ran more than like any of the more lucrative Katie Hannons and Imperious TFs just because people wanted to unlock that on every toon they had.
I disagree with the demand for all costume pieces for free with no unlocks or even account wide unlocks, personally. That's just my opinion. I like to PLAY the game, and this gives me more reasons to do that. A lot of people play for rewards, and I'm one of them. When the toon is finally totally finished, those of us that are playing for rewards stop playing that toon unless some ultra hard badge run or something calls for it. We finish a toon and them move one to the next one. Making it more "work" to finish a toon thus gives a player like me more fun to be had in the completion process. I have no problems with making costuming part of that, as long as it's only a portion of the costumes available and not like EVERYTHING.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
I also like to play the game, but I like to play the game however my (or my character's) whims see me going. Not "having" to do this specific arc to earn that specific piece.
If (for instance) I'm playing on one character, blasting my way through Council goons and for my troubles get rewarded with a piece of Council specific costuming which makes no sense for my character to use, wouldn't it be nice if I was still able to use it for something else? Maybe I've got a Council sympathizer character who would love to have that item, but it just wouldn't make any sense at all for him to run a story arc where he's busting up the organization that he feels supportive of. Having -some- way to unlock that items for that second character would be nice. I'm even fine with the SWTOR style collections tab (on a piece by piece basic, rather than the full costume set).*
In your example, yes. That Terra Volta length TF would have been replayed a lot. But how many of those people would are now actually enjoying it? For many, possibly most, it would quickly move from being a reward, to being a chore.
*For those not familiar with SWTOR, whenever you collect a weapon/color crystal/set of gear/etc that's available from the real money store (whether by buying it from the store, or buying it off the player market) that item becomes available in your collections tab. The character you collected the item on can claim new copies of it should something happen to their other one, but you can now also unlock that items for use on your other characters. You pay a smallish fee to unlock it using cartel coins (real money store currency/stars/gems/whatever the various games call it), and from that point on any of your characters can claim that item from your collections tab.
Honestly I think this could be a adapted for use for the game. Havign costume items as a reward for game content means that you'd have to earn costume pieces through gameplay, but if you wanted to you could then unlock those items for your alts using real money (yay monetization). If you didn't want to, you could simply run that arc again on that alt and unlock it for them cash free.
That's a nice suggestion. Unlocking something for the other characters on your account for a small fee does make sense. I've paid for this service in SWTOR. I suppose if a company can make money off of something, someone will eventually figure out how.
DCUO has something similar, but kind of just the opposite. In DCUO, if one of your characters unlocks an achievement, like collecting all the seasonal costume items, you can unlock the achievement for all other characters for a fee, but not the items themselves. The other characters still have to collect the costume items if they want to wear them. In this case the advantage to the other characters is not the costume items but the skill points they get from the achievements. So it is essentially Pay-to-twink. I suppose you have to know your audience and what they seek from the content in order to know what they are willing to pay for.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I suppose I'll never understand the mindset that just because I, the player, manage to unlock something on one of my characters that it should automagically be available to ALL of my characters. I call it a "console mentality" where you get lazy enough to think that all of your "characters" are just different skins you as a player wear without thinking that each of your characters are actually unique people who may (or critically may NOT) actually know each other in the game world.
For instance let's say I play two different characters. One is a teenaged tech-wiz nerd-girl who creates gadgets to fire electrical blasts at bad guys. The other is a 5,000 year old demi-god demon who's trapped on this planet and vows revenge for that by killing as many people as possible. Now if I'm playing the game and one of those characters manages to unlock a purple-plaid scarf from a mission what's the realistic chance that either one of those characters are actually going to SHARE that scarf with the other? I'd say maybe 0.000001% give or take.
I'm sorry but I just grew up playing far too many table top RPGs where characters never "shared" things between each other unless I literally RP'd that one character was the other character's sister or some-such. I probably wouldn't avoid playing CoT if it truly becomes an "account-based" game like you guys are suggesting here. But frankly I will continue to hope that CoT (like CoH before it) will remain as much of a "character-based" game as possible.
P.S. To be completely clear (since people never seem to be able to tell the simple difference) if I were to buy a costume item from the game store then naturally I'd expect that to be unlocked account-wide because that's something I'm buying as THE PLAYER, not while playing as an individual character in-game. If you really can't see the vast difference between those two things then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this subject. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Then you're ignoring an important factor. Costume equals Identity among supers.
One Might 'develop' the identity by changing the costume over time - I often made small tweaks to a character's look, or developed an alternate costume, but most of the time my characters went through the entire lifespan of CoH with the same basic look. For me, a new costume piece is more likely to fit a new character than it is to 'perfect' an existing character. It does not make sense to me, for my character to obsessively beat on a particular faction, just so That Character can find a jacket (for instance) that fits.
I'm not interested in 'working' to 'complete' a character's identity. In my mind, the character is 'complete' the moment they step out of the costume shop and take up their destiny in the city. The only 'completion' I'm interested in, is completing the character's powers... actually, completing the character's Story, their rise to greatness.
Therefore, I would like all costume pieces to be available from the beginning. If there are pieces that must be unlocked, then why should I have to change a character's story, just so that That character can have access to a look? If it's a look I really like, your scheme means I have to play the same content over and over, just to unlock the 'really fancy boots', or whatever for each character. In that case, I may as well Buy the unlock, rather than 'earning' it.
Be Well!
Fireheart
You said that better than I could.
I think there is a time and a place for costume unlocks in-game. I think that as long as the lore can support the unlock, I'll be okay with it. But in these cases, I think the unlock becomes part of the character's story and Lothic did a good job of convincing me that character story unlocks should not be shared with other characters.
Before this turns into an argument, however, I think Radiac brought up a good point that there are different styles and types or play and motivations for different players. What may be your or my reason for playing may not be anyone else's. I think the best we can hope for here is to understand how we each feel, because how we feel is not wrong. It would be a shame if we ended up trying to convince each other that we are wrong to feel the way we do. Maybe there is a way for MWM to give us all what we want out of this discussion. ...or maybe they just make a command decision and we will let them know how we feel about it.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Questions:
1. If they take like 3 years to actually roll out a given costume piece that you want for one of your toons, are you going to let that stop you from making and playing that toon?
2. If there are multiple styles of scarf and then they roll out a new, distinctive, different scarf, is it a deal-breaker that you have to unlock the new scarf on a given toon if you want THAT scarf?
3. Do you have different costumes for the same toon at all? Does EVERY version of that toon have to have the new scarf? Can you just wear the non-scarf costume until you unlock the new scarf?
I know I'm not going to use the full palette of costume pieces on any one toon. I don't need a space helmet for my gunslinger or a jetpack for my winged fire blaster. I just don't think per-character unlocks are a problem.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
1) The three-year scarf does not exist until it is published. The scarf-wearing character for whom this scarf is 'perfect' may or may not exist in my collection of characters before the 'perfect scarf' exists. There are simply more variables involved, than the mere presence of 'the scarf'.
2) No, it's not. However, once I've collected 'the scarf', if I decide that I want to completely rebuild the character, from scratch, I'll want that 'perfect scarf' to be available in my collection, so that the reborn character can wear it.
3) Some of my characters do have 'civilian' costumes. Usually, those costumes have nothing in common with the character's 'super' costume. A couple of my characters have alternate uniforms, based on a Super-Group theme, and those alternates May share one or two items with the base costume. If 'the scarf' is part of my character's personal theme, then I would want it on every variant costume. If a scarf is the character's theme, then they would have to wear SOME scarf, even if it's not 'the scarf'.
4) Well, but what if your newly created gunslinger is lusting after 'the gun', which is dropped by some NPC gunslingers? And your 'winged fire-blaster' has been fighting that faction for a while, earning 'the gun' drop several times over, but a gun is as anti-thematic for that character as the jetpack would have been? The drop is locked to the wrong character and your gunslinger is gonna have to make do with a substandard gun, until he's earned 30 levels and can start fighting the faction with 'the gun'.
I don't find that scenario pleasing. If one of my characters has unlocked the costume piece, then I think it should be available to any of my characters that wants it. Because the costume drop that is useless to the character that earns it is useless and pointless and of no value at all.
Be Well!
Fireheart
For what it's worth I understand your point that if character A unlocks a costume item that would be better suited for character B that it would "be nice" if the game let you automagically have that be unlocked account-wide. But just because it would "be nice" doesn't make things right or logical.
I still maintain it sounds too much like my D&D character XYZ finding a +5 Holy Avenger and then getting to say that every other character I just happen to have created on an arbitrary account that has nothing to do with what I do in the game automatically claim to have their own +5 Holy Avengers. Unless you can convince me that getting to have unearned things on characters who don't deserve them is actually justified I will stick to my character-centric mindset that practically every RPG has been based on for decades. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I don't think there is anything stopping you from mailing that suplus costume piece to your other character. This of course depends on how 'the gun' fit into the lore. If the game designers decided to just have certain drops randomly from certain enemies, and those drops weren't unique plot-specific items (which is what I think your mental model suggests) then I don't see why you wouldn't want to put the extra ones on the market place or send them to your other characters so they can use them. But if the drop was a unique plot-specific item that was earned by the first character, then I would want to think it would be limited to that character only.
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
To the best of my knowledge, the only example we've had from MWM with regards to purchasing costume parts is that if, for example, you complete a mission that awards a badge and a cape, that character obtains the badge and the cape. If you decide to purchase that cape, it will unlock for the account but none of the characters will obtain the badge. So if the badge is important for you, you'll still need to complete the mission.
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I'm actually of the opinion that costume unlocks, if they're not going to drop at random from defeats of mobs, etc (which as been mentioned by devs, I'm told) than they ought to just make them things you unlock for each character with no ability to trade the unlock to another person, or even to another character on your account. So they should, in my view, work mechanically like the cape unlock in CoX did, basically.
That said, the cape and aura unlocks are a bad example, because that was an entire CLASS of costume pieceS (plural) being unlocked. I'm talking about unlocking ONE version of a gun here and sword there, and probably the version that the NPC faction you had to interact with uses. So like, the Carnie jester hat, or the Malta Sapper gun, etc. I mean you could have the entire carnie harlequin outfit as separate unlockable pieces, and have OTHER harlequin-esque costume pieces in the costume editor already, etc.
And really, we're not arguing about whether or not the tech exists to accomplish anything we're all asking for, just that the rules be in place the way we want them, and we disagree over those. That's fine, everyone's is entitled to their opinion. I just think it add value to the game to make things unlockable and thus give some players a reason to go do that content, or at least to reward people with those sorts of things as rewards. Just giving people everything they want up front makes no sense. The game is more fun when you have to go earn stuff.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
This is a completely different scenario, though. A "+5 Holy Avenger" is a weapon that's enchanted to the nines to be the bestest thing available as a weapon for a paladin. Meanwhile, we're talking about costume pieces, which have no intrinsic value beyond cosmetic. A scarf or a gun skin that come out are not the same thing, because it's not a boost the character - it'll make them look better, sure, but that's it. There's no mechanical upgrade due to aesthetic decoupling.
I could understand a mechanical boost being restricted - you have to work for that stuff. But cosmetics? That just feels bad. Even games with a pretty heavy focus on gear (Such as WoW and GW2) are stepping away from that and into the free wardrobe system.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
Okay, but in the flavor/immersion of the game, if Toon X works hard on Carnie content to unlock the jester cap, then that toon has earned that. They've gotten enough cred from the faction that the NPC gives them the right to wear the cap, or they've fought against that faction so much that they've taken the cap as a trophy from all of their fighting against them. It makes no logical sense to let some other toon, on the same account or a different account have that unlock which that toon did NOT do the grinding for. From a purely immersion standpoint, the toon that DID the content ought to be the one that get's the unlock, based on the faction's attitude toward the toon in question. THAT, to me, makes sense. I can see a player WANTING that unlock on other toons, and I can see them wanting to sell the unlock they don't care about on the auction house. But from an immersion standpoint, I can't see why that should be how that actually works.
In GW2 they have some unlocks that are account wide and some that are per-character, and much of that makes no sense to me in this context. You have to go open up the world map on a per-character basis to be able ot use the waypoints to get around quickly. Any dyes (colors) or skins (costume pieces) you unlock on any toon apply the unlock to every toon on the account. There's this glider thing you get at level 80, which is unlocked by earning Mastery Points which require you to go places and do content to unlock the use of the glider. THAT for some weird reason is global, not per-character. So I unlock the Glider skill on my level 80 Elementalist and then presto, my level 2 Thief can glide now? What?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Halae, you just said something that brought an idea to my mind.
In this thread, we've been discussing costume pieces. But there's more to aesthetics than costumes. When you mention aesthetic decoupling, you also include fighting styles, different themes like fire and ice and acid and nature, etc., and different origin points of powers. So, what if different aesthetic packages were treated like different costumes?
Hmmm?
Could you go to a dojo and learn (unlock) a new special style of martial arts you can apply? Could you go to a mad doctor's lab and get an experimental genetic modification that gives you (unlocks) morphing powers? Could you do a mission that ends with being inside a supercollider that grants (unlocks) an atomic theme after successful completion. What if you run a mission in which you save a dragon egg and at the end the dragonling hatches and enables you to use the dragon as an origin point for some powers?
Would we want this?
Edit: Would you pay for access to mission arcs that gave these additional aesthetic options?
[hr]I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
I get where you're coming from, and to some degree I agree with you. On the other hand, there's a few things you're overlooking in the pursuit of greater immersion.
First, account unlocks are less meant to be something your character earned, and more something [i]you[/i] have earned. That's the point behind the wardrobe and mastery systems in GW2; they're not going to force you to get those 70 armor skins again because that's just not [i]fun[/i] when you've already gone through the slog to get a rare item once. and, at the end of the day, the game should be more focused on actual fun than on how immersive it is. This is a thing called [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AcceptableBreaksFromReality?from=Main.AcceptableBreakFromReality]Acceptable Breaks From Reality[/url] (Warning; TV Tropes link). It's the reason why in GW2, or skyrim, or several other games, you can swim in arctic waters without a specially prepared wetsuit and not freeze to death in moments. It's why your RPG characters never have to eat or poop.
On top of that, Immersion is important to a very many players, and I get that, but what constitutes "what should happen" assumes a baseline, and if there's any genre that completely defies baselines, it's superheroes. For instance, some special gun skin was mentioned a bit ago. Maybe it's a cool looking laser cannon, right? In a typical "there's a baseline situation" setup, I can understand you needing to go and get that thing for all your characters, since they're all starting off as baseline soldiers, or regular dudes, or whatever. but in superheroes, a special skin for a laser cannon might be a gift from an alien entity. It might be something you built. It might even be constructed from your own body because you produce liquid metal you can shape into solid objects rather than sweat. Creative freedom in superheroes is absolutely [i]bananas[/i], and needing everybody to unlock everything could even be called counter to the immersion of another player.
I would totally go for this. It sounds both thematic and fun.
An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".
Pages