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Some food for thought on release timelines

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DeathSheepFromHell
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Some food for thought on release timelines

Disclaimer #1: This is written mostly as a way to offer some professional insight into something that is almost invariably a struggle (and certainly was for CoT prior to my retirement).
Disclaimer #2: I have no particular knowledge of the current state of affairs outside of what has been publicly announced. The project could be well ahead of, or far behind, the point I describe below.
Disclaimer #3: This is based on personal experience, albeit professional; mileage *will* vary, but the more information you have, the better you can (generally) predict what yours will look like.
Disclaimer #4: While I am speaking of professional experience, I am emphatically _not_ speaking on behalf of my employer in any way, shape, or form.

The website tells me that I was last on the site almost exactly one year ago, which inspired thinking about what I had done in that year -- and that, in turn, made me realize that there might be some knowledge related to that which MWM might find useful for their planning purposes.

For those not already aware, I am a software developer by profession, and a reasonably senior one. About a year ago I was asked to do some exploratory work for a potential new product offering. About six months ago management decided to green-light it, and that shifted to active (non-prototype) development work, as well as the team expanding. A couple of weeks ago various things caused the release date, scope of expected functionality, and team size to change, and we had to do some significant project planning to determine whether we could make it work, and if so what it was going to take.

I would assess the new scope as being roughly on a par with "a fully integrated chat system" (on a par with what the competition currently has, and what was planned, the last time I had any knowledge of it) plus "infrastructure and code required to handle authentication, server load balancing, and instance management" (spinning zone or mission instances up or down as demand warrants, automatically). *Maybe* one additional mid-complexity item such as automated "background" movement of NPCs around a city, or the basics of a not-ridiculously-trivial weather system (not counting assets).

For a team of five full-time people (one senior dev with deep familiarity, one fairly-senior dev with marginal familiarity, one semi-senior who has mostly been using a different language, and two devs newly hired within the past month), we are on track to hit the following deadlines:
* Feature-specific "spot tests" by stakeholders (roughly "friends and family alpha"): since the start of the year
* Preliminary integration testing (closed alpha) at the start of May (i.e. we just hit this)
* Feature complete / push to staging (closed beta) at the start of August
* Stable (open beta) at the start of October
* Release (opening day) at the start of November

I don't know what state the CoT engine is actually in right now, compared to what is expected for a minimum viable launch, but I would strongly suggest that lacking either of the two primary things mentioned above would qualify as "are you kidding? we can't launch without that" features -- one is a major supporting structure for the social aspect, and the other is required to be able to actually let people log in and have somewhere to play. So if MWM does not have those aspects already in a similar state *and* a similar level of resources to throw at developing them the rest of the way, I would be extremely dubious about launching any time this year.

If y'all *are* at that stage, then you are close enough that you should be able to reasonably give folks a heads-up on the next big milestone along this path and an approximate idea of when you expect to hit it; none of those things are more than a quarter away, and you should have a very concrete idea of about when you'll get there and how fast you're managing to go in practice, by now. And if you aren't, well, do with the information what you will -- hopefully it may prove useful.

[ Edit: Corrected past timeline slightly ]


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Insight is always good.

Insight is always good.

Why'd you leave again?

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Good read. Thank you for

Good read. Thank you for posting.

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I thought we did post the

I thought we did post the next big milestone - all sections of the character being integrated into Chargen.

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Doctor Tyche wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:

I thought we did post the next big milestone - all sections of the character being integrated into Chargen.

That was my understanding. I feel like I know what I'm waiting for, but in the meantime I really appreciate little driblets of info like the lore, hair and Augment stuff.

When I read DeathSheep's post it struck me as cogent, but not particularly relevant right now. Did I miss something?

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Just to build on Empyrean's

Just to build on Empyrean's relevancy point, I think we should keep in mind that what MWM is building here is a game, not a medical system or a traffic system or a military system. If delivery is delayed, we may be a bit sad, but no one will die. Personally I think MWM should take advantage of the fact that they don't have a publisher breathing down their collective neck trying to force them to release the game before it's ready. I say go with id's old mantra and say it will be done when it's done.

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I was under the impression

I was under the impression that what is slated for delivery later this year isn't a playable game WORLD, but rather a functional Avatar Builder application that would allow us to spend hundreds of hours creating costumes/characters with save files for later use once the game itself actually does ship ... at which point we take our character/costume files and upload them into the game so as to begin playing. My current understanding of all of that is that what has been getting called the "chargen" (for character generator) would be getting finished out and released so as to have enough time for the development team to finish up with the work of not just making the game world (terrain, environment, etc.) but also POPULATING it with NPCs made using the chargen that everyone is playing around with in the meantime.


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Considering that general

Considering that general estimates suggest that 40% of all playtime over the life of the game will be with the character creator, it just makes sense.

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Terwyn wrote:
Terwyn wrote:

Considering that general estimates suggest that 40% of all playtime over the life of the game will be with the character creator, it just makes sense.

Curious where you got the "40%" from - not disputing it, just wondering if that's your estimate or if there's some hard facts backing that up. I do know that some people probably barely spent an hour in CoH's character generator over 8.5 years while others basically never really played the game beyond creating costumes/characters and hanging out in Pocket D.

For my part I estimate I spent about 10-15% of my time creating costumes/characters in CoH. But considering that I likely spent around 20k total hours playing the game you can do the math on how much time I spent tinkering with costumes. ;)

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I feel like (no hard numbers

I feel like (no hard numbers to go on) I spent about a quarter of my time on concept stuff (CC dinkering/bio writing), a quarter on build research and planning (for myself and others), and the remaining 50% actually playing the game. Or that could have been more like even thirds for each--something like that.

I also was fairly casual and only played a few to several hours per week (over 8ish years) and probably only made less than 100 distinct characters with the vast majority of my time spent on a sequence of about 5 lvl 50 or later 50+ "mains" (my last main being Empyrean). I have no sense of how typical that may or may not have been.

But then, that's one of the great things about CoH. IF everyone else really was parked in the CC 40% of the time, that didn't mean I had to be. There was plenty of fun content to play and world/lore to explore, even at "end game." I know CoT's motto is "endgame IS alting," but that wasn't at all the case for me personally. I spent most of my time actually playing at level 50 or 50+ (or Exemplaring down) and having a ball.

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Empyrean wrote:
Empyrean wrote:

IF everyone else really was parked in the CC 40% of the time, that didn't mean I had to be.

For my part I don't really care how long anyone spends "tinkering" with character planning or costumes in games like this. To each their own.

It's just that for some reason the "40% of time spent in the CC" number does seem a bit high to me considering the entire playerbase of CoH. Again it's not a hyper-important statistic and if someone could show me some hard numbers to back that claim up I wouldn't bother to argue otherwise. Again just saying as a "SWAG" it seems a bit much. *shrugs*

Empyrean wrote:

I know CoT's motto is "endgame IS alting," but that wasn't at all the case for me personally. I spent most of my time actually playing at level 50 or 50+ (or Exemplaring down) and having a ball.

I know they claimed CoH was an "alting game" but I actually didn't create many alts relative to my overall time playing - I probably only had about 35-40 characters that I spent longer than a few hours each on. Instead I spent 80-90% of my actual playing time with 3 or 4 level 50s and much of that time was on badging efforts. For me badges kept me playing more that making hundreds of alts. Again to each their own. ;)

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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What I took away from Sheepy

What I took away from Sheepy's original post is this: you can make the essential working guts of a MMORPG game in like 6 months, not including the assets (buildings, trees, NPCs, etc), if you have a good team of like 5 persons working full time on it.

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I've said it before and I'll

I've said it before and I'll repeat myself again. I don't like that a non-active dev with no recent contact with the development team (or even recent contact with the forums!) still has a dev badge. It sends a mixed message. It's great that you guys want to play nice with everyone, but you need to draw some lines in the sand before something bad happens. Your general lack of hierarchy and organization has bit you before. Grey out the badge, give him a unique "family friend" badge, DO SOMETHING! But don't allow him speaking rights as a dev if he is not. Frankly, I don't understand why DSFH hasn't given up that right on his own, or created a new account from which to post. So that he isn't using that privileged badge and speaking position.

On the point of progress. I agree with less than 7 months to the first beta I would like to see a lot more progress. But frankly I know this team. I don't expect them to hit deadlines or goals. Not because they can't but because they aren't like any other development team that I am aware. Volunteer organizations are only capable of doing as much as their volunteers are willing. Meaning a comparatively glacial development cycle. I give MWM statements the same value as Elon Musk about his numerous business ventures. It will probably happen...eventually. So long as they are open about it... whatever.

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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

I've said it before and I'll repeat myself again. I don't like that a non-active dev with no recent contact with the development team (or even recent contact with the forums!) still has a dev badge. It sends a mixed message. It's great that you guys want to play nice with everyone, but you need to draw some lines in the sand before something bad happens. Your general lack of hierarchy and organization has bit you before. Grey out the badge, give him a unique "family friend" badge, DO SOMETHING! But don't allow him speaking rights as a dev if he is not. Frankly, I don't understand why DSFH hasn't given up that right on his own, or created a new account from which to post. So that he isn't using that privileged badge and speaking position.

On the point of progress. I agree with less than 7 months to the first beta I would like to see a lot more progress. But frankly I know this team. I don't expect them to hit deadlines or goals. Not because they can't but because they aren't like any other development team that I am aware. Volunteer organizations are only capable of doing as much as their volunteers are willing. Meaning a comparatively glacial development cycle. I give MWM statements the same value as Elon Musk about his numerous business ventures. It will probably happen...eventually. So long as they are open about it... whatever.

This is basically how I feel on all points. Well said.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

What I took away from Sheepy's original post is this: you can make the essential working guts of a MMORPG game in like 6 months, not including the assets (buildings, trees, NPCs, etc), if you have a good team of like 5 persons working full time on it.

Far from it. An MMO could have 5 dedicated software engineers, each would then have a team for each department they were in charge of. And you still wouldn’t have enough people for a standard mmo.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:
Radiac wrote:

What I took away from Sheepy's original post is this: you can make the essential working guts of a MMORPG game in like 6 months, not including the assets (buildings, trees, NPCs, etc), if you have a good team of like 5 persons working full time on it.

Far from it. An MMO could have 5 dedicated software engineers, each would then have a team for each department they were in charge of. And you still wouldn’t have enough people for a standard mmo.

DSFH was stating that he and his full time team (which expanded) is developing a chat system (of some kind, which has also has expanded in scope) in a little over a year.

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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

I was under the impression that what is slated for delivery later this year isn't a playable game WORLD, but rather a functional Avatar Builder application that would allow us to spend hundreds of hours creating costumes/characters with save files for later use once the game itself actually does ship ... at which point we take our character/costume files and upload them into the game so as to begin playing. My current understanding of all of that is that what has been getting called the "chargen" (for character generator) would be getting finished out and released so as to have enough time for the development team to finish up with the work of not just making the game world (terrain, environment, etc.) but also POPULATING it with NPCs made using the chargen that everyone is playing around with in the meantime.

That's depressing. I was under the assumption the chargen was going to release 2 or 3 months before the WORLD part of the game, but that the WORLD part of the game was still going to release at the end of this year?

That's too bad.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

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jtpaull wrote:
jtpaull wrote:

That's depressing. I was under the assumption the chargen was going to release 2 or 3 months before the WORLD part of the game, but that the WORLD part of the game was still going to release at the end of this year?

That's too bad.

I don't believe they've ever made bones about that, to be honest. I recall that over a year back they told us they'd be releasing the character creator well in advance of the world part of the game.

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Halae wrote:
Halae wrote:
jtpaull wrote:

That's depressing. I was under the assumption the chargen was going to release 2 or 3 months before the WORLD part of the game, but that the WORLD part of the game was still going to release at the end of this year?

That's too bad.

I don't believe they've ever made bones about that, to be honest. I recall that over a year back they told us they'd be releasing the character creator well in advance of the world part of the game.

This was my understanding as well, and I’m totally cool about that (although lord knows I really want to play the game world too!!). I’m trying to remember was it indicated whether the chargen would include power selection and customization? I’m wracking my brains and can’t remember!

I would love the avatar builder, but imo it wouldn’t feel “complete” without power selection and customization :)

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Doctor Tyche did hint that

Doctor Tyche did hint that the CharGen we will be testing later this year will be more than just a static room. We will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our cjaracters.

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Once we get the character

Once we get the character generator these forums will be flooded with like "Look at my cool hero" threads. Someone should remember when the time comes to make a thread just for those so the forums don't get over run.

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Project_Hero wrote:
Project_Hero wrote:

Once we get the character generator these forums will be flooded with like "Look at my cool hero" threads. Someone should remember when the time comes to make a thread just for those so the forums don't get over run.

Yeah this is a good point. I'm sure there will be a bunch of dedicated character creator threads ranging from the "Look at my cool hero" threads to ones concerning issues with testing/bugs/suggestions and so on.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

I've said it before and I'll repeat myself again. I don't like that a non-active dev with no recent contact with the development team (or even recent contact with the forums!) still has a dev badge. It sends a mixed message. It's great that you guys want to play nice with everyone, but you need to draw some lines in the sand before something bad happens. Your general lack of hierarchy and organization has bit you before. Grey out the badge, give him a unique "family friend" badge, DO SOMETHING! But don't allow him speaking rights as a dev if he is not. Frankly, I don't understand why DSFH hasn't given up that right on his own, or created a new account from which to post. So that he isn't using that privileged badge and speaking position.

Just wanted to chime in and agree with this.

Gives the wrong impression to people visiting the forums when a former dev appears to be speaking from a position of authority.

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StellarAgent wrote:
StellarAgent wrote:

Doctor Tyche did hint that the CharGen we will be testing later this year will be more than just a static room. We will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our cjaracters.

Doctor Tyche never said we will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our characters. At best he's made cryptic remarks to keep us interested and satiate our impatience as much as he can. If I remember right, his response was to someone saying we'd be in a 'room with no doors' and his response was 'who said there wouldn't be doors?', or something to that effect. People might have inferred that from his remark, but he never said we'd get to run around in a sandbox.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

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jtpaull wrote:
jtpaull wrote:
StellarAgent wrote:

Doctor Tyche did hint that the CharGen we will be testing later this year will be more than just a static room. We will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our cjaracters.

Doctor Tyche never said we will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our characters. At best he's made cryptic remarks to keep us interested and satiate our impatience as much as he can. If I remember right, his response was to someone saying we'd be in a 'room with no doors' and his response was 'who said there wouldn't be doors?', or something to that effect. People might have inferred that from his remark, but he never said we'd get to run around in a sandbox.

Right, but then again how hard would it be to let player characters run around in a version of the city that had practically no functionality other that simply existing? I imagine that the Devs could generate a test character and have it run around in their "work in progess" city zones today.

It really wouldn't take much for their "test room" to literally be a city zone (or several) in whatever "work in progress" state it's in at the moment. If the folks running Paragon Chat can basically do that now with the carcass of CoH why couldn't the CoT Devs do the equivalent with their own zones? *shrugs*

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Safehouse wrote:
Safehouse wrote:
Halae wrote:
jtpaull wrote:

That's depressing. I was under the assumption the chargen was going to release 2 or 3 months before the WORLD part of the game, but that the WORLD part of the game was still going to release at the end of this year?

That's too bad.

I don't believe they've ever made bones about that, to be honest. I recall that over a year back they told us they'd be releasing the character creator well in advance of the world part of the game.

This was my understanding as well, and I’m totally cool about that (although lord knows I really want to play the game world too!!). I’m trying to remember was it indicated whether the chargen would include power selection and customization? I’m wracking my brains and can’t remember!

I would love the avatar builder, but imo it wouldn’t feel “complete” without power selection and customization :)

From what I recall Doc saying: Props - Yes. Powers - No.

Edit: Fixed weird quotes.

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MeSoSollyWan wrote:
Safehouse wrote:
Halae wrote:
jtpaull wrote:

That's depressing. I was under the assumption the chargen was going to release 2 or 3 months before the WORLD part of the game, but that the WORLD part of the game was still going to release at the end of this year?

That's too bad.

I don't believe they've ever made bones about that, to be honest. I recall that over a year back they told us they'd be releasing the character creator well in advance of the world part of the game.

From what I recall Doc saying: Props - Yes. Powers - No.
This was my understanding as well, and I’m totally cool about that (although lord knows I really want to play the game world too!!). I’m trying to remember was it indicated whether the chargen would include power selection and customization? I’m wracking my brains and can’t remember!

I would love the avatar builder, but imo it wouldn’t feel “complete” without power selection and customization :)

Why couldn't you choose power selection and customization for a character when the char gen is released but simply not have those powers be "active" at first when you're running around in the "test room" (that again could easily be a non-functioning no-combat city zone).

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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I guess I can understand that

I guess I can understand that but I sorta sucks as I would be nice to start getting a better feel for power customization if we could play around with just those first two basic power selections. This makes me wonder how the first few power abilities are managed for a new character. I would think you would have them coming out of the gate like in COH...

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Safehouse wrote:
Halae wrote:
jtpaull wrote:

That's depressing. I was under the assumption the chargen was going to release 2 or 3 months before the WORLD part of the game, but that the WORLD part of the game was still going to release at the end of this year?

That's too bad.

I don't believe they've ever made bones about that, to be honest. I recall that over a year back they told us they'd be releasing the character creator well in advance of the world part of the game.

From what I recall Doc saying: Props - Yes. Powers - No.
This was my understanding as well, and I’m totally cool about that (although lord knows I really want to play the game world too!!). I’m trying to remember was it indicated whether the chargen would include power selection and customization? I’m wracking my brains and can’t remember!

I would love the avatar builder, but imo it wouldn’t feel “complete” without power selection and customization :)

Why couldn't you choose power selection and customization for a character when the char gen is released but simply not have those powers be "active" at first when you're running around in the "test room" (that again could easily be a non-functioning no-combat city zone).

My first guess is they are still developing those aesthetics. Not saying they couldn’t give us a taste and then update it later but I understand not wanting to have major changes after people have already started developing ideas from those first couple power customizations.

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rookslide wrote:
rookslide wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Safehouse wrote:
Halae wrote:
jtpaull wrote:

That's depressing. I was under the assumption the chargen was going to release 2 or 3 months before the WORLD part of the game, but that the WORLD part of the game was still going to release at the end of this year?

That's too bad.

I don't believe they've ever made bones about that, to be honest. I recall that over a year back they told us they'd be releasing the character creator well in advance of the world part of the game.

From what I recall Doc saying: Props - Yes. Powers - No.
This was my understanding as well, and I’m totally cool about that (although lord knows I really want to play the game world too!!). I’m trying to remember was it indicated whether the chargen would include power selection and customization? I’m wracking my brains and can’t remember!

I would love the avatar builder, but imo it wouldn’t feel “complete” without power selection and customization :)

Why couldn't you choose power selection and customization for a character when the char gen is released but simply not have those powers be "active" at first when you're running around in the "test room" (that again could easily be a non-functioning no-combat city zone).

My first guess is they are still developing those aesthetics. Not saying they couldn’t give us a taste and then update it later but I understand not wanting to have major changes after people have already started developing ideas from those first couple power customizations.

Save off your costumes and body sliders and then recreate the character? Being able to do stuff that like should be fairly trivial assuming the char gen ends up being as capable as promised by the Devs.

Remember we won't have the full game to worry about when initially creating characters regardless.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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I agree! But I’m trying not

I agree! But I’m trying not to second guess their wisdom. They’ve gotten so close...and frankly I trust not to hope. I’m too experienced for that sort of blind faith.

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rookslide wrote:
rookslide wrote:

I agree! But I’m trying not to second guess their wisdom. They’ve gotten so close...and frankly I trust not to hope. I’m too experienced for that sort of blind faith.

There's probably little harm in selecting powersets X, Y or Z for a character and then not have those "power selections" actually do anything in-game until future beta testing enables them.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
rookslide wrote:

I agree! But I’m trying not to second guess their wisdom. They’ve gotten so close...and frankly I trust not to hope. I’m too experienced for that sort of blind faith.

There's probably little harm in selecting powersets X, Y or Z for a character and then not have those "power selections" actually do anything in-game until future beta testing enables them.

Z?

Oh that’s right we get traveling right outta the gate. I forgot...

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Well yes we are getting a

Well yes we are getting a travel power for free at char gen. But when I said "X, Y or Z" I was just saying we ought to be able to choose "whichever" primary/secondary powersets we want and have them simply be inactive until future beta testing turns them on.

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Travel powers are not at char

Travel powers are not at char gen. They are earned in game.

Power selection is part of the Power Designer system we use to make powers and power sets which is in a separate project from the costume designer. It will be integrated once it is ready.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Travel powers are not at char gen. They are earned in game.

Power selection is part of the Power Designer system we use to make powers and power sets which is in a separate project from the costume designer. It will be integrated once it is ready.

Right but once the full game is complete we still get a travel power during power selection at level 1 before we even get to play the game right? That was the intention of the statement.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Travel powers are not at char gen. They are earned in game.

Power selection is part of the Power Designer system we use to make powers and power sets which is in a separate project from the costume designer. It will be integrated once it is ready.

Right but once the full game is complete we still get travel power during power selection at level 1 before we even get to play the game right? That was the intention of the statement.

According to the Dev-approved FAQ, what Tannim said is accurate. First Travel Power is not technically at CharGen, it's at the end of Tutorial:

Quote:

The tutorial mission: Set in TitanFirst bank in the aftermath of a heist. Witnesses describe the event, giving players an opportunity to describe their character’s appearance, powers, role and choices in the heist (alignment). The tutorial will also teach you how to use reserves and enhancements. You finally select your travel power by determining how you exit the bank. At the end a newspaper headline will describe what happened.

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MeSoSollyWan wrote:
MeSoSollyWan wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Travel powers are not at char gen. They are earned in game.

Power selection is part of the Power Designer system we use to make powers and power sets which is in a separate project from the costume designer. It will be integrated once it is ready.

Right but once the full game is complete we still get travel power during power selection at level 1 before we even get to play the game right? That was the intention of the statement.

According to the Dev-approved FAQ, what Tannim said is accurate. First Travel Power is not technically at CharGen, it's at the end of Tutorial:

Quote:

The tutorial mission: Set in TitanFirst bank in the aftermath of a heist. Witnesses describe the event, giving players an opportunity to describe their character’s appearance, powers, role and choices in the heist (alignment). The tutorial will also teach you how to use reserves and enhancements. You finally select your travel power by determining how you exit the bank. At the end a newspaper headline will describe what happened.

So that leads to the next question: Will we always be forced to do the tutorial even if we've done it 50 times already? At the very least if they allow us to skip the tutorial then the selection of travel power would come practically at the same time as a character is "created".

I realize the CoT Devs are apparently being hyper picky to separate the "initial character costume/slider" phase from the "power selection" phase but there's really no need to be pedantic about it.

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:
Radiac wrote:

What I took away from Sheepy's original post is this: you can make the essential working guts of a MMORPG game in like 6 months, not including the assets (buildings, trees, NPCs, etc), if you have a good team of like 5 persons working full time on it.

Far from it. An MMO could have 5 dedicated software engineers, each would then have a team for each department they were in charge of. And you still wouldn’t have enough people for a standard mmo.

Are you disagreeing with my interpretation of DSFH's post, or with the post itself? Because I read the following (apologies for not quoting it properly):

in the original post, DSFH said:

"About six months ago management decided to green-light it, and that shifted to active (non-prototype) development work, as well as the team expanding. A couple of weeks ago various things caused the release date, scope of expected functionality, and team size to change, and we had to do some significant project planning to determine whether we could make it work, and if so what it was going to take."

Followed afterward by:

"For a team of five full-time people (one senior dev with deep familiarity, one fairly-senior dev with marginal familiarity, one semi-senior who has mostly been using a different language, and two devs newly hired within the past month), we are on track to hit the following deadlines:
* Feature-specific "spot tests" by stakeholders (roughly "friends and family alpha"): since the start of the year
* Preliminary integration testing (closed alpha) at the start of May (i.e. we just hit this)
* Feature complete / push to staging (closed beta) at the start of August
* Stable (open beta) at the start of October
* Release (opening day) at the start of November"

According to the above, management decided to green light it 6 months ago, they hit their closed alpha just recently. That's 6 months. If you want to call closed beta the benchmark, then 9 months, okay. Whatever this project is, it's looking at November for a release date. And he specified that it was a team of 5 full timers, including himself, not that this was just the upper level bosses and there were an army of full timers beneath them that we're ignoring. Five full timers. Including DSFH himself. That's how I read that.

Maybe whatever project DSFH is working on doesn't really compare to a full-featured MMORPG in the way DSFH thinks it does based on his comparison in the original post. I've certainly never heard of such a game coming together in like a year or so as DSFH claims his project is, but he's making the claim. From what he claims above, I infer that a team of 5 can make code for stuff that is (and I'm quoting the OP again here):

"roughly on a par with "a fully integrated chat system" (on a par with what the competition currently has, and what was planned, the last time I had any knowledge of it) plus "infrastructure and code required to handle authentication, server load balancing, and instance management" (spinning zone or mission instances up or down as demand warrants, automatically). *Maybe* one additional mid-complexity item such as automated "background" movement of NPCs around a city, or the basics of a not-ridiculously-trivial weather system (not counting assets)."

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You will not be forced to go

You will not be forced to go through the tutorial but you also don’t pick travel powers at char gen.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

You will not be forced to go through the tutorial but you also don’t pick travel powers at char gen.

Thanks for the clarification, Tannim!

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

You will not be forced to go through the tutorial but you also don’t pick travel powers at char gen.

Right you made that abundantly clear despite the obvious point I was making about it in general. If you don't go through the tutorial (which most alters won't do eventually) then effectively you select your travel power "before the character even plays the game".

I know I'm just splitting hairs but you sort of started it in this case. ;)

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No, you don’t select a travel

No, you don’t select a travel power before you play the game. If you skip the tutorial you enter the game world. Getting a travel power is then done through the game.


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Thanks for the info Tannim. I

Thanks for the info Tannim. I know you guys don’t want to give out too many spoilers. This does make more sense to me now, thx!

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

No, you don’t select a travel power before you play the game. If you skip the tutorial you enter the game world. Getting a travel power is then done through the game.

*sigh* Why can't you be this annoyingly picky about subjects where that quality would actually be appreciated. In the greater scheme of this discussion your "preciseness" on this point is effectively moot.

At least thanks for re-affirming that you're going to allow us to skip the tutorial if desired.

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Sorry been in the ER all day.

Sorry been in the ER all day. Answering the forums to keep my mind off my sick wife.


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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Sorry been in the ER all day. Answering the forums to keep my mind off my sick wife.

Uh oh! Hope everything goes ok.

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Sorry been in the ER all day. Answering the forums to keep my mind off my sick wife.

Well I can't think of a better way to prove that I can be a complete ass at times...

Of course I had no way to know of your current personal situation. For the record nothing is intended as "personal" about what I post here regardless.

But obviously now that I'm aware of your personal circumstances I will wish you and your wife the best.

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Thanks. I didn’t take

Thanks. I didn’t take anything personally. I wanted to offer an aipoligy with with honesty and didn’t want to cause anyone to feel guilty about how they posted either.


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I feel like you guys

I feel like you guys explained char gen but the term is alien to me.

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I know this type of thing is

I know this type of thing is tough. I hope good things for you and your wife.

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

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All that stuff about the ER

All that stuff about the ER popped up when I submitted my noob question. Hope she gets better Tannim!

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Wolfgang8565 wrote:
Wolfgang8565 wrote:

I feel like you guys explained char gen but the term is alien to me.

Character Generator, the character creator. Like picking costumes, accessories, etc. Also called Avatar Builder sometimes.

Tannim, hope everything goes well with the wife!

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Thanks we are home now.

Thanks we are home now. Thanks for the well wishes. The community is awesome. My wife has a double bout of lung inflammation and pneumonia.

Char-gen is the Character Generation process - the stuff you do to make your character. The actual costume portion is the Avatar Creator.


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MeSoSollyWan wrote:
MeSoSollyWan wrote:
Wolfgang8565 wrote:

I feel like you guys explained char gen but the term is alien to me.

Character Generator, the character creator. Like picking costumes, accessories, etc. Also called Avatar Builder sometimes.

Ohhhh thanks!

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Tannim222 wrote:
Tannim222 wrote:

Thanks we are home now. Thanks for the well wishes. The community is awesome. My wife has a double bout of lung inflammation and pneumonia.

Char-gen is the Character Generation process - the stuff you do to make your character. The actual costume portion is the Avatar Creator.

Good to hear you are home now. Make sure she gets lots of rest! And thanks for the clarification, im surprised I forgot that lol

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I seem to recall, by the KS

I seem to recall, by the KS the game was supposed to be released by now. Once that got totally thrown out the window, I have to ask, what's the point of a time frame now? :p

Give us hope so it can be shot down? :p

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
jtpaull wrote:
StellarAgent wrote:

Doctor Tyche did hint that the CharGen we will be testing later this year will be more than just a static room. We will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our cjaracters.

Doctor Tyche never said we will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our characters. At best he's made cryptic remarks to keep us interested and satiate our impatience as much as he can. If I remember right, his response was to someone saying we'd be in a 'room with no doors' and his response was 'who said there wouldn't be doors?', or something to that effect. People might have inferred that from his remark, but he never said we'd get to run around in a sandbox.

Right, but then again how hard would it be to let player characters run around in a version of the city that had practically no functionality other that simply existing? I imagine that the Devs could generate a test character and have it run around in their "work in progess" city zones today.

It really wouldn't take much for their "test room" to literally be a city zone (or several) in whatever "work in progress" state it's in at the moment. If the folks running Paragon Chat can basically do that now with the carcass of CoH why couldn't the CoT Devs do the equivalent with their own zones? *shrugs*

Oh I'm not arguing that they couldn't do that, I'm sure they could and I hope they do. I'm just saying they didn't actually tell us that is what is going to happen.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

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Well. That certainly exploded

Well. That certainly exploded far more than I would have anticipated.

To try to reply to things in (*very*) roughly the order they appeared, with one expection:

  1. I specifically wasn't assuming that I was up to date on the details of the next big milestone. Nor was I asserting that MWM "should be at" any given point on the release timeline. And if the anticipated release late this year is solely an alpha-release chargen, then I have no particular way to estimate the actual scope. Simply based on what I've seen published, the scope has changed sufficiently from anything I had involvement in that I have nowhere near enough context to do so, at this point.
  2. The intent was, in fact, to be cogent but relevant only in a loose sense: not relevant to the specific moment at hand, today, but relevant to the overall process and progression.
  3. 40% does seem somewhat high, but I can see a variety of ways that it might be plausible. That said, _some_ of those ways (but by no means all) would make me think that it might not be the best number to work from. However, I can definitely say that the visual flexibility is one of the defining aspects of the "superhero" sub-genre of MMOs. So whatever the percentage of time is, it is pretty important that it work well. It is also the first impression that pretty much everyone will get of the game, and if done poorly it could easily also be the *last* impression they get.
  4. Six months is not enough to put together an MMO framework with half a dozen people, even full time. The comparable scope would be "the chat system", "the 'guts' that manage the back-end far enough to let someone actually log in and appear in a world instance", and maybe "basic NPC movement around the city" (cars on roads, NPC joggers, and so on -- not reactive, just "moving around the city in a semi-reasonable fashion"). That's only a small portion of what actually gets built in an MMO -- they just happen to be particular sub-systems that I had direct knowledge of in the context of CoT, because I did research work on them for the game.
  5. I post as this account because this is my account. If I were to have two, this would be my *player* account (or I would be very disappointed), since it is the same moniker I use in several other places, including other superhero MMOs. What MWM intends to do in the long term about "rednames" and/or "emeritus" devs is not something I can speak to; my best guess would be that it simply hasn't been a priority because there are so few (I don't know if I'm still the only one, but to the best of my knowledge I was at the time of my "retirement"). However, I try to make a point of being careful about wording, specifically in order to avoid giving the impression that I am speaking as an active dev. There are some things where the fact that I was one in the past are relevant, and a lot of things where it isn't.
  6. My team at work are not involved in anything MMO-related in the least. I work for a company that provides software and services to government entities (mostly city and county level); the most detail I can go into about the specific project is that it involves optical character recognition (OCR) and electronic document markup. The only things that can be translated across are the ones I specified in the original post: the number and approximate skill level of the people involved, and the equivalent scope. The latter is something I can only lay out because I have actually done significant work in all of the things involved, and have enough professional experience in the specific job involved (coming up on two decades) that I feel comfortable opening my mouth about it.
  7. A descriptive maturity level for each of the stages I discussed, in the context of a chat system or login/instance manager. In each case the description is the state things are at when that stage is *entered*:
    • Exploratory: "How the heck are we even going to make this work?" (proof of concept)
    • Spot testing: "A dev from another team can hand-code a user database and use a bare-bones client and get it to spin up a single instance of a trivial world" / "Able to use debugging mode to send a chat message from a client to a server and see it get posted to a channel" (no GUI, just the underlying code)
    • Preliminary / closed alpha: "Game client has an actual login UI and can be used by multiple people at once, authentication is handled properly, still manually-maintained database" / "Client has basic chat functionality on a single game-wide channel"
    • Closed beta: "Login works reliably, back-end code is able to spin instances up and down reasonably, all backed by 'real' data" / "Client has support for channels and all basic client-side UI" (theoretically feature-complete)
    • Open beta: "Fixed the infinite loop that tried to keep spinning up servers forever, made sure that hitting the maximum count doesn't roll over to -1 and cause it to spin the instance down" / "Added in personal mute lists and channel bans after Bob made such an eloquent demonstration of the necessity"
    • Full open: "We've stress-tested the login server and instance spinner up to 20x the expected opening-day hit, without it falling over, and up to 5x the expected with reasonably graceful degradation" (wouldn't you love it if a game actually did this? In a lot of other industries it is a standard...) / "We spent the past month making sure that the chat system is capable of both handling the expected loads (same criteria as login server) and ensuring that it is hardened as much as is feasible against client-side denial of service attempts"
  8. Tannim: glad things are okay!

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jtpaull wrote:
jtpaull wrote:
Lothic wrote:
jtpaull wrote:
StellarAgent wrote:

Doctor Tyche did hint that the CharGen we will be testing later this year will be more than just a static room. We will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our cjaracters.

Doctor Tyche never said we will be able to take our creations into the world to test the look and feel of our characters. At best he's made cryptic remarks to keep us interested and satiate our impatience as much as he can. If I remember right, his response was to someone saying we'd be in a 'room with no doors' and his response was 'who said there wouldn't be doors?', or something to that effect. People might have inferred that from his remark, but he never said we'd get to run around in a sandbox.

Right, but then again how hard would it be to let player characters run around in a version of the city that had practically no functionality other that simply existing? I imagine that the Devs could generate a test character and have it run around in their "work in progess" city zones today.

It really wouldn't take much for their "test room" to literally be a city zone (or several) in whatever "work in progress" state it's in at the moment. If the folks running Paragon Chat can basically do that now with the carcass of CoH why couldn't the CoT Devs do the equivalent with their own zones? *shrugs*

Oh I'm not arguing that they couldn't do that, I'm sure they could and I hope they do. I'm just saying they didn't actually tell us that is what is going to happen.

Again what you're saying is strictly completely correct and to be honest is probably the "safest" way to interpret what we've been told to minimize any amount of "excessive expectations".

On the other hand Doctor Tyche did manage to do a whole lot of the ol' *nudge nudge wink wink* during that discussion. Perhaps even if they don't manage to connect the backend of the char gen directly to an actual city zone at the very least I strongly suspect they'll hook us up to some kind of isolated "Pocket D" type zone so that if nothing else we can take a look at our costumes in a "pseudo outdoor" setting and begin the initial testing of a centralized server we can all congregate in.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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The "one exception" mentioned

The "one exception" mentioned in my previous post:

I retired for a variety of reasons, which probably isn't that surprising given that I work a variety of hats. I would call it about a 70/30 split between "unrelated to the project other than the project taking time and energy" (70%) and "disagreements or frustrations with the project" (30%). I know that it is traditional to cite something silly like "spending more time with the family", but I much prefer to call a spade a spade.

Please note something very important, however: that the fact that I disagreed with the project about whatever things (and I'm not going to go into them) does not mean that I was right about those things. Only that *I* thought that I was. Most of those things are still "outstanding", in the sense that there is not yet any empirical basis on which to judge who (if anyone) was actually correct.

Nor should it be read as "Sheep thinks the project is doomed" in any way, shape, or form -- for the significant majority of the disagreements, the worst outcome of "Sheep proved to be right" would be a delay or having to shelve a feature (temporarily or permanently). About the only way any of them would plausibly doom the project is as a contributing factor to something larger, such as "running out of money" because too many things were delayed by too much. And since I have absolutely _zero_ information about the state of the project's finances, I have no information on which to base an opinion, in that regard.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

40% does seem somewhat high, but I can see a variety of ways that it might be plausible. That said, _some_ of those ways (but by no means all) would make me think that it might not be the best number to work from. However, I can definitely say that the visual flexibility is one of the defining aspects of the "superhero" sub-genre of MMOs. So whatever the percentage of time is, it is pretty important that it work well. It is also the first impression that pretty much everyone will get of the game, and if done poorly it could easily also be the *last* impression they get.

Oh I don't deny that the costume generator of CoT will be a central pillar of the entire game and that many people will likely spend many hours tinkering with all the options (myself included). I also don't deny there will be some people who likely spend far more than 40% of their time with costuming.

I'm just not sure the overall average of the entire playerbase will be quite that high.

Again discovering what the actual percentage turns out to be might be an interesting bit of trivia but ultimately I'm not sure it would be that critical one way or the other. I suppose if we learned that practically everyone was spending 95% or more of their time creating new costumes then maybe the MWM business model could just drop the "game" part of the game and market CoT as the "superhero costume app" but I doubt things will ever skew that far in that direction. ;)

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

On the other hand Doctor Tyche did manage to do a whole lot of the ol' *nudge nudge wink wink* during that discussion. Perhaps even if they don't manage to connect the backend of the char gen directly to an actual city zone at the very least I strongly suspect they'll hook us up to some kind of isolated "Pocket D" type zone so that if nothing else we can take a look at our costumes in a "pseudo outdoor" setting and begin the initial testing of a centralized server we can all congregate in.

Technically, in order to present you a visible chargen they have to connect you to *some* sort of zone, since that's a fundamental aspect of the engine. That said, it may or may not be a terribly interesting zone, even if you could move around in it (the approach we used to build the demo UI for the KS was to build a trivially simple "black box" zone and use a non-standard input controller so that there were no inputs mapped in a way that let you 'walk', only turn in place).

The big / obvious requirements of being able to run around a zone actually have relatively little to do with those related to chargen; one is multi-player and requires things like logins and centralized map instances, the other is pretty much single-player and can be run local to the client. Although there is a compromise between the two, as well: while it wouldn't allow multiple players, once they have a basic "real world" (non-chargen) control/UI setup and at least one map interesting enough to bother with defined, it is fairly straightforward to spawn a map instance locally (they already have to have this for chargen, by definition, pretty much).


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Lothic wrote:

On the other hand Doctor Tyche did manage to do a whole lot of the ol' *nudge nudge wink wink* during that discussion. Perhaps even if they don't manage to connect the backend of the char gen directly to an actual city zone at the very least I strongly suspect they'll hook us up to some kind of isolated "Pocket D" type zone so that if nothing else we can take a look at our costumes in a "pseudo outdoor" setting and begin the initial testing of a centralized server we can all congregate in.

Technically, in order to present you a visible chargen they have to connect you to *some* sort of zone, since that's a fundamental aspect of the engine. That said, it may or may not be a terribly interesting zone, even if you could move around in it (the approach we used to build the demo UI for the KS was to build a trivially simple "black box" zone and use a non-standard input controller so that there were no inputs mapped in a way that let you 'walk', only turn in place).

The big / obvious requirements of being able to run around a zone actually have relatively little to do with those related to chargen; one is multi-player and requires things like logins and centralized map instances, the other is pretty much single-player and can be run local to the client. Although there is a compromise between the two, as well: while it wouldn't allow multiple players, once they have a basic "real world" (non-chargen) control/UI setup and at least one map interesting enough to bother with defined, it is fairly straightforward to spawn a map instance locally (they already have to have this for chargen, by definition, pretty much).

Doctor Tyche practically said everything but "yes" when I proposed the MWM equivalent of Paragon Chat. If those folks can take "non-combat, non-powered" versions of the old CoH zones and hook them up to a XMPP chat server it really doesn't seem improbable that MWM couldn't effectively do the same thing with their own city zones and the char gen.

This scenario would seem to be the perfect "beta test version 1.0" with which to start any future beta testing of the actual game.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Lothic]DeathSheepFromHell
Lothic wrote:

Doctor Tyche practically said everything but "yes" when I proposed the MWM equivalent of Paragon Chat. If those folks can take "non-combat, non-powered" versions of the old CoH zones and hook them up to a XMPP chat server it really doesn't seem improbable that MWM couldn't effectively do the same thing with their own city zones and the char gen.

This scenario would seem to be the perfect "beta test version 1.0" with which to start any future beta testing of the actual game.

All I can say is that the chat system concept I had in mind during this discussion was pretty much precisely "an XMPP chat server with a properly integrated library and UI from the client". A significant portion of the work is actually client-side stuff, just standing up an XMPP server is more or less the easy part (well, until you want to worry about tying it into some sort of centralized authentication, anyway).

There is, in fact, a reason we were looking at those sorts of things that far back (and thus a reason they were readily to hand for use in an example). Whether that reason has any relevance whatsoever, today, is a question I can't speak to. Plus the fact that estimates for "the code" are more or less completely orthogonal to the world assets (they're also normally worked on by different groups).


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I'll freely admit that the 40

I'll freely admit that the 40% estimate is likely high, but that's because I based it on a few hypotheses which can't yet be tested.

It's not exactly possible to test the rate of alting, which is a substantial factor in the amount of time people will spend in the creator, but it seemed reasonable to me that a slight majority of players would prefer to eventually have at least one character of each possible configuration (by this I mean our form of archetype). Aesthetic Decoupling is absolutely likely to increase the amount of time people spend tweaking their costumes and characters, so that was something that I accounted for, as well.

I would say 40% is a good estimate for testing purposes, but the real number is probably going to be somewhere between 20-30%. I do strongly expect that there will be substantial outliers like myself that skew the numbers (I will fully admit that for a three month period after the launch of Going Rogue, 80% of my playtime was tweaking my character's costumes or making various alts for me to get to at a later time - and we're talking about 2-3 hours a day).

Hope that clears things up. I do look forward to having more reliable metrics and thus more accurate numbers, but saying 40% was the best way to establish that I easily see it being the most popular aspect and thus having the plurality of player activity - even if only slightly so. It's one of the areas where I am inclined to have an overestimate. Underestimating the amount of time players are likely to spend in the character creator means the risk of not assigning it the priority and value that it actually deserves, harming the end result.

Since I was talking about this being a percentage over the lifetime of the game, it also naturally accounts for characters which are created for the gag purposes and/or never actually played (or those that never finished, for that matter. I know I've aborted creating new characters half-way through the process, so I can't think I was the only one). Clearly, the vast majority of game-time would be spent playing the game, but it would only take a couple thousand people never completing the tutorial to skew the numbers. I mean, if it takes ten minutes to complete the tutorial, and you spend twenty minutes on your character, that's a fairly heavy skew to account for.

I will freely state that this is merely my position and opinion, and that I will more than happily admit that I am wrong once sufficient evidence comes to light. After all, a good designer is always a wee bit conservative, at least on paper (Thank you, James Doohan).

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Terwyn wrote:
Terwyn wrote:

I will freely state that this is merely my position and opinion, and that I will more than happily admit that I am wrong once sufficient evidence comes to light.

Again I don't know how critically important knowing what the exact percentage might be - I suspect it would be interesting just from a purely "useless trivia" point of view.

Also the "overall percentage" a person spends on costuming is obviously relative to the total hours they actually spend in the game. Like I said earlier I guesstimate I only spent 10-15% of my time costuming in CoH but considering I easily spent 20,000+ hours on the game over the course of 8.5 years that small percentage still represents thousands of hours. ;)

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Terwyn wrote:

I will freely state that this is merely my position and opinion, and that I will more than happily admit that I am wrong once sufficient evidence comes to light.

Again I don't know how critically important knowing what the exact percentage might be - I suspect it would be interesting just from a purely "useless trivia" point of view.

Also the "overall percentage" a person spends on costuming is obviously relative to the total hours they actually spend in the game. Like I said earlier I guesstimate I only spent 10-15% of my time costuming in CoH but considering I easily spent 20,000+ hours on the game over the course of 8.5 years that small percentage still represents thousands of hours. ;)

About 11 000 hours spent costuming out of a total of 90 000 over the course of seven years was the estimate for one of the super groups I was a part of on Pinnacle, but since that was divided among more than thirty people, it really actually boiled down to about ten hours a week per person with about an hour and a half spent costuming. I was the biggest outlier.

At this point it's essentially "useless trivia" but for us to have an accurate sense of how people are most likely going to play the game, it's important to at least have an accurate estimate. We're starting high so that we don't have wildly inaccurate core assumptions on that.

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In the effort of clarifying

In the effort of clarifying data metrics, 50% of my time in the costume creator was spent shouting obscenities at the name selection screen.

"WHADDAYA )#$%^&*(*&^%$# MEAN IT'S )#$%^&*(*&^%$# TAKEN. I JUST DELETED THAT )#$%^&*(*&^%$# CHARACTER 5 MIN AGO TO REROLL HIM. )#$%^&*(*&^%$# HOW IS IT TAKEN?)#$%^&*(*&^%$#!"

"But... but )#$%^&*(*&^%$# that was the perfect )#$%^&*(*&^%$# name! It matched the )#$%^&*(*&^%$# style, added )#$%^&*(*&^%$# nuance and multiple )#$%^&*(*&^%$# meanings to the biography. It )#$%^&*(*&^%$# made )#$%^&*(*&^%$# sense. )#$%^&*(*&^%$#.

I hear I won't have that timesink with CoT's planned naming convention.

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chase wrote:
chase wrote:

In the effort of clarifying data metrics, 50% of my time in the costume creator was spent shouting obscenities at the name selection screen.

"WHADDAYA )#$%^&*(*&^%$# MEAN IT'S )#$%^&*(*&^%$# TAKEN. I JUST DELETED THAT )#$%^&*(*&^%$# CHARACTER 5 MIN AGO TO REROLL HIM. )#$%^&*(*&^%$# HOW IS IT TAKEN?)#$%^&*(*&^%$#!"

"But... but )#$%^&*(*&^%$# that was the perfect )#$%^&*(*&^%$# name! It matched the )#$%^&*(*&^%$# style, added )#$%^&*(*&^%$# nuance and multiple )#$%^&*(*&^%$# meanings to the biography. It )#$%^&*(*&^%$# made )#$%^&*(*&^%$# sense. )#$%^&*(*&^%$#.

I hear I won't have that timesink with CoT's planned naming convention.

Owie, my poor ears... LOL

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chase wrote:
chase wrote:

I hear I won't have that timesink with CoT's planned naming convention.

With CoT's global naming system there's no longer going to be a "one per server" limitation. In effect you'll be able to name your characters anything you want (within reason of the likely naming filter that'll probably still prevent you from using names like "Superman" or "F***face").

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Awww, I was really looking

Awww, I was really looking forward to make 'Captain F***face' upon the game's release. :P

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Glitch404 wrote:
Glitch404 wrote:

Awww, I was really looking forward to make 'Captain F***face' upon the game's release. :P

He’s been promoted since the CoH shutdown. When he returns to CoT he will expect to be properly addressed as “Admiral F***face.”

Name: Safehouse
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Primary: Force Blast
Secondary: Atrophic Aura
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Travel Power: Parkour
Status: Traveling. Following rumors of a huge city in Massachusetts that is teeming with supers.

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I feel your pain, chase. My

I feel your pain, chase. My very first character was Megaton (rad/rad Offender). Well, Doctor Megaton, actually, because of course Megaton was taken (and he was already a doctor in his bio).

About two years later I was playing on Doctor Megaton, and there I saw him--at the Talos tram, if memory serves--Megaton! (My character looked way better, btw :P.)

So, I went up to him and in local chat said, "hey, do you know why my name is Doctor Megaton?" To which he answered, "No..." To which I answered, "BECAUSE I COULDN'T FREAKING GET MEGATON!!!

No offense was taken (none was intended), LOL's all around at the tram.

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

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Interesting... not that he

Interesting... not that he would care necessarily or anything but the first mention of a Megaton character I ever heard of was in a podcast on Escape Pod of a short story in the Union Dues storyline by Jeffrey R DeRego in 2005. Not sure how old the story was then or if perhaps one of you is that very gentleman but... the name is of a published literary work.

Again I don’t care myself nor would I go telling on anyone. I simply hadn’t heard the name anywhere since then... I do like the name and the story was a good one.

"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space." ~ Thomas Carlyle

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Oh, I'm sure the name Megaton

Oh, I'm sure the name Megaton has been used many times going way back. But I wasn't trying to be fresh or clever with the concept. I just wanted to play a hero named Megaton and shoot freaking radiation out of my eyes :D!

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Nice! :-)

Nice! :-)

"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space." ~ Thomas Carlyle

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City of Titans concept art:

City of Titans concept art:

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Heeeeey. I remember seeing

Heeeeey. I remember seeing that. I'd forgotten. Ok, HE looks better than Doc did :P.

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Terwyn wrote:
Terwyn wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Terwyn wrote:

I will freely state that this is merely my position and opinion, and that I will more than happily admit that I am wrong once sufficient evidence comes to light.

Again I don't know how critically important knowing what the exact percentage might be - I suspect it would be interesting just from a purely "useless trivia" point of view.

Also the "overall percentage" a person spends on costuming is obviously relative to the total hours they actually spend in the game. Like I said earlier I guesstimate I only spent 10-15% of my time costuming in CoH but considering I easily spent 20,000+ hours on the game over the course of 8.5 years that small percentage still represents thousands of hours. ;)

About 11 000 hours spent costuming out of a total of 90 000 over the course of seven years was the estimate for one of the super groups I was a part of on Pinnacle, but since that was divided among more than thirty people, it really actually boiled down to about ten hours a week per person with about an hour and a half spent costuming. I was the biggest outlier.

At this point it's essentially "useless trivia" but for us to have an accurate sense of how people are most likely going to play the game, it's important to at least have an accurate estimate. We're starting high so that we don't have wildly inaccurate core assumptions on that.

Frankly, given the outside weight of impact it has on acquisition and retention, I'm all for over-weighting it. :)

One of the key metrics for any system that customers interact with is "where do you lose them, and how fast?" Because it doesn't matter how nice step 92 is, if you're losing 50% each at steps 5 to 12.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Terwyn wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Terwyn wrote:

I will freely state that this is merely my position and opinion, and that I will more than happily admit that I am wrong once sufficient evidence comes to light.

Again I don't know how critically important knowing what the exact percentage might be - I suspect it would be interesting just from a purely "useless trivia" point of view.

Also the "overall percentage" a person spends on costuming is obviously relative to the total hours they actually spend in the game. Like I said earlier I guesstimate I only spent 10-15% of my time costuming in CoH but considering I easily spent 20,000+ hours on the game over the course of 8.5 years that small percentage still represents thousands of hours. ;)

About 11 000 hours spent costuming out of a total of 90 000 over the course of seven years was the estimate for one of the super groups I was a part of on Pinnacle, but since that was divided among more than thirty people, it really actually boiled down to about ten hours a week per person with about an hour and a half spent costuming. I was the biggest outlier.

At this point it's essentially "useless trivia" but for us to have an accurate sense of how people are most likely going to play the game, it's important to at least have an accurate estimate. We're starting high so that we don't have wildly inaccurate core assumptions on that.

Frankly, given the outside weight of impact it has on acquisition and retention, I'm all for over-weighting it. :)

One of the key metrics for any system that customers interact with is "where do you lose them, and how fast?" Because it doesn't matter how nice step 92 is, if you're losing 50% each at steps 5 to 12.

Exactly the reasoning given when I had that conversation 4+ years ago with Doc, in almost the precise wording. Kind of unsettling, but impressive never the less.

I think it's safe to say that the character creator has the strongest weight of any impact on retention.

It is only when we stand up, with all our failings and sufferings, and try to support others rather than withdraw into ourselves, that we can fully live the life of community.

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Terwyn wrote:
Terwyn wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Terwyn wrote:
Lothic wrote:
Terwyn wrote:

I will freely state that this is merely my position and opinion, and that I will more than happily admit that I am wrong once sufficient evidence comes to light.

Again I don't know how critically important knowing what the exact percentage might be - I suspect it would be interesting just from a purely "useless trivia" point of view.

Also the "overall percentage" a person spends on costuming is obviously relative to the total hours they actually spend in the game. Like I said earlier I guesstimate I only spent 10-15% of my time costuming in CoH but considering I easily spent 20,000+ hours on the game over the course of 8.5 years that small percentage still represents thousands of hours. ;)

About 11 000 hours spent costuming out of a total of 90 000 over the course of seven years was the estimate for one of the super groups I was a part of on Pinnacle, but since that was divided among more than thirty people, it really actually boiled down to about ten hours a week per person with about an hour and a half spent costuming. I was the biggest outlier.

At this point it's essentially "useless trivia" but for us to have an accurate sense of how people are most likely going to play the game, it's important to at least have an accurate estimate. We're starting high so that we don't have wildly inaccurate core assumptions on that.

Frankly, given the outside weight of impact it has on acquisition and retention, I'm all for over-weighting it. :)

One of the key metrics for any system that customers interact with is "where do you lose them, and how fast?" Because it doesn't matter how nice step 92 is, if you're losing 50% each at steps 5 to 12.

Exactly the reasoning given when I had that conversation 4+ years ago with Doc, in almost the precise wording. Kind of unsettling, but impressive never the less.

I think it's safe to say that the character creator has the strongest weight of any impact on retention.

Not to sound too 80’s but, Totally!

"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space." ~ Thomas Carlyle

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I don't know. WoW's sucks

I don't know. WoW's sucks and it retains quite well. :p

Plenty of MMOs have great creators and don't retain as well.

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I escaped WoW because the

I escaped WoW because the content went in a direction that I didn't enjoy. I'm playing GW2 because I have friends there.

Be Well!
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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Terwyn wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

Frankly, given the outside weight of impact it has on acquisition and retention, I'm all for over-weighting it. :)

One of the key metrics for any system that customers interact with is "where do you lose them, and how fast?" Because it doesn't matter how nice step 92 is, if you're losing 50% each at steps 5 to 12.

Exactly the reasoning given when I had that conversation 4+ years ago with Doc, in almost the precise wording. Kind of unsettling, but impressive never the less.

I think it's safe to say that the character creator has the strongest weight of any impact on retention.

I'd be the first to agree with you that one of the few things that seriously set CoH appart from most other MMOs was its semi-revolutionary (at least for 2004) costume creator. And I'll again be the first to tell you that I know there were some people who basically spent 100% of their time either creating characters/costumes or hanging out in Pocket D - those people basically never actually "played" the game in the traditional sense of engaging in combat and/or earning XP.

But despite all that I'm not so sure MWM can rely so completely on tossing out the CoT char gen before launching the main part of the game and assume that'll be enough to keep everyone "hooked" forever. Some people are actually going to be interested in playing a good game as well as being able to create a fancy outfit for their characters. I'm simply pointing out that we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves in thinking that the char gen is the -only- important part of CoT.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Obviously it's never going to

Obviously it's never going to be the only hook. We'd be foolish to not realize that. All I'm accounting for is that it's the first and most notable hook people will encounter.

It is only when we stand up, with all our failings and sufferings, and try to support others rather than withdraw into ourselves, that we can fully live the life of community.

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Safehouse wrote:
Safehouse wrote:
Glitch404 wrote:

Awww, I was really looking forward to make 'Captain F***face' upon the game's release. :P

He’s been promoted since the CoH shutdown. When he returns to CoT he will expect to be properly addressed as “Admiral F***face.”

Now I think I’d love to make a supergroup named The F-Stars.

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On the subject of the Chargen

On the subject of the Chargen, my question in not "when?" but rather "how much?" That is, will CoT's Chargen, at rollout, have as many or more actual costume options as CoH had at rollout? That, to me, is the bigger question. Also, can we expect more stuff to be added to the Chargen while we wait for the game to be completed?

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Atama wrote:
Atama wrote:
Safehouse wrote:
Glitch404 wrote:

Awww, I was really looking forward to make 'Captain F***face' upon the game's release. :P

He’s been promoted since the CoH shutdown. When he returns to CoT he will expect to be properly addressed as “Admiral F***face.”

Now I think I’d love to make a supergroup named The F-Stars.

They should wear pale yellow-white stars on their uniforms, preferably brightly glowing. Those who perceive an extended visual spectrum might note extra UV.

"The spectral classification. What did you think we meant?"

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

On the subject of the Chargen, my question in not "when?" but rather "how much?" That is, will CoT's Chargen, at rollout, have as many or more actual costume options as CoH had at rollout? That, to me, is the bigger question. Also, can we expect more stuff to be added to the Chargen while we wait for the game to be completed?

It's an interesting question and just as a completely honest answer I would actually expect that the "very first" time the char gen is released to "the public" it will likely have FEWER options than CoH did when it first launched.

I don't say that to be pessimistic or to cast doubt on MWM in general. I say that more as a matter of realistic practicality and maintaining reasonable expectations.

Think about it: CoH had to launch with pretty much a "full load" of costume options on Day One. Since MWM is still planning to release the char gen BEFORE the actual game is ready there is no overwhelming need for the char gen to have millions of options ready to go JUST YET. Sure in the greater scheme of things I'd like to see as many options as possible as soon as possible. But by going with the plan of releasing the char gen early it actually gives the Devs the reasonable "excuse" to give them more time to produce more items in-between the time the char gen is released and the time the game itself is launched.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

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Another question is, will we

Another question is, will we get buggy costume options because it’s pre-release and we’re testing it for them and they want feedback, or will those be withdrawn until they’re “ready” because they know they won’t look right?

An example would be a collar that intersects with a face/shoulder during certain animations, or a cape that doesn’t move around in a realistic way due to its unusual shape.

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