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Supergroup limitations

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Pleonast
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Supergroup limitations

Let's talk about supergroups (if there's a previous thread, please link to it).

Will supergroup names have to be unique? Is it even possible to have non-unique supergroup names?

What's the minimum size of a supergroup? Will supergroups get auto-deleted if they fall below the minimum size?

What's the maximum size of a supergroup?

Will there be a minimum level to create one? Or a cost? Maintenance fees?

Will supergroups be joined by character or by player?

Can a character be a member of more than one supergroup at the same time?

Can supergroups form alliances or declare "war" on other supergroups?

What communication and planning tools should supergroups have?

What else needs to be considered?

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Ezuka
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What if the classification of

What if the classification of your supergroup depended on its size? For example, a two person group could be a duo, and a twenty person group could be a league. There could be bonuses for larger groups. I do think names should be unique, and I think the maximum size should be quite high.

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Quote:
Quote:

Will supergroup names have to be unique? Is it even possible to have non-unique supergroup names?

The real question is why would you not want SG names to be unique? What purpose does it serve to have two or more identically named SGs and how would you tell them apart?

I think the real question here is will there be an easy way to RENAME a SG if necessary? I never read about anyone wanting identically named SGs back in the CoH forums but the desire to rename an existing SG came up every few weeks for years on that board.

Quote:

What's the minimum size of a supergroup? Will supergroups get auto-deleted if they fall below the minimum size?

Quote:

What's the maximum size of a supergroup?

At the end CoH allowed 150 members in a SG. I'd probably allow say 250 - any more than that and things would get too unwieldy. As to mininum size that should probably stay at one member. Many people used the SG system to have their own Personal Base in CoH and I see no reason to prevent that in CoT. Besides when you first create a SG it only has one member by default so that pretty much has to be allowable.

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Will there be a minimum level to create one? Or a cost? Maintenance fees?

I imagine they'll keep the level 10 minimum for creation and I assume there'll be some costs/fees for having one.

Quote:

Will supergroups be joined by character or by player?

Quote:

Can a character be a member of more than one supergroup at the same time?

These are actually very good questions. Many people used to like to create SGs simply as a means to collect all of their own characters into a single group so I'm sure "joining by account" would appeal to them. But while I have nothing against off-line invites (which would easily allow you to invite one of your other characters) I think SG invites ought to be keep on a per character basis. Many people like to play their chracters as "individuals" who want to belong to different SGs. I'd hate if I couldn't let my characters join separate SGs if they wanted to. By the end of CoH I had characters spread across a dozen or more different SGs.

As for a single character being a member of multiple SGs I don't have a problem with it but it might get messy depending on how things like Prestige are handled. My guess is that it wouldn't be allowed just for the sake of avoiding weird problems that might occur with that.

Quote:

Can supergroups form alliances or declare "war" on other supergroups?

Quote:

What communication and planning tools should supergroups have?

I imagine there will be things like SG and Coalition chat just like there was in CoH. As far as being able to declare "war" I suppose it depends on how much they wanted to link that kind of thing to PvP and/or base raiding. Frankly base raiding didn't really work out too well in CoH but maybe they'll have a way to fix it here.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

As for a single character being a member of multiple SGs I don't have a problem with it but it might get messy depending on how things like Prestige are handled. My guess is that it wouldn't be allowed just for the sake of avoiding weird problems that might occur with that.

Guild Wars 2 allows players to be members of up to 5 guilds for the whole account. This might seem limited, but ALL of your characters are members of all of those Guilds at the same time.

Now, when it comes to earning stuff, you choose which guild to represent, and everything that you can earn for that guild goes towards the guild you are representing.

This can be expanded though for CoT, so instead of the guild membership being "account limited", you can instead be a member of *several* SG's at the same time, although only the one that you are representing at that point in time gets any benefit of what you are doing.

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Pleonast
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Thanks for the comments,

Thanks for the comments, everyone.

Lothic wrote:

I think the real question here is will there be an easy way to RENAME a SG if necessary? I never read about anyone wanting identically named SGs back in the CoH forums but the desire to rename an existing SG came up every few weeks for years on that board.

That is an excellent point. Renaming a supergroup should not be difficult.

Lothic wrote:

At the end CoH allowed 150 members in a SG. I'd probably allow say 250 - any more than that and things would get too unwieldy. As to mininum size that should probably stay at one member. Many people used the SG system to have their own Personal Base in CoH and I see no reason to prevent that in CoT. Besides when you first create a SG it only has one member by default so that pretty much has to be allowable.

Some games require a team of a certain size to start a supergroup, or a petition to size, etc. I do prefer CoH one-person supergroup system. But we'll be getting personal "bases" as well as supergroup bases, so I see less of a need for one-person supergroups.

Lothic wrote:

These are actually very good questions. Many people used to like to create SGs simply as a means to collect all of their own characters into a single group so I'm sure "joining by account" would appeal to them. But while I have nothing against off-line invites (which would easily allow you to invite one of your other characters) I think SG invites ought to be keep on a per character basis. Many people like to play their chracters as "individuals" who want to belong to different SGs. I'd hate if I couldn't let my characters join separate SGs if they wanted to. By the end of CoH I had characters spread across a dozen or more different SGs.

As for a single character being a member of multiple SGs I don't have a problem with it but it might get messy depending on how things like Prestige are handled. My guess is that it wouldn't be allowed just for the sake of avoiding weird problems that might occur with that.

See Gangrel's explanation of GW2 system.

I like multiple supergroups per character (and supergroups per character rather than per player). Each character has their own identity, but may associate with several groups of people. For example, I may want a supergroup for role-playing, one for PvP, and one for running missions.

Lothic wrote:

I imagine there will be things like SG and Coalition chat just like there was in CoH. As far as being able to declare "war" I suppose it depends on how much they wanted to link that kind of thing to PvP and/or base raiding. Frankly base raiding didn't really work out too well in CoH but maybe they'll have a way to fix it here.

Personally, I'd love for supergroups to be able to declare war on each other. I'd be great for both RP and PvP. It'd have to be consensual. Imagine a villain supergroup "invites" a hero supergroup to war. Then whenever and wherever the supergroup members find each other, they can combat. Fun, consensual PvP, that's both RP-friendly and has that surprise we're ambushed adrenaline rush.

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chase
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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

Guild Wars 2 allows players to be members of up to 5 guilds for the whole account. This might seem limited, but ALL of your characters are members of all of those Guilds at the same time.

That would bug me. Part of the fun my wife and I had was coming up with little supergroups and having characters in them that were themed for that group. To have all my characters in all these groups would bug me.

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chase wrote:
chase wrote:

Gangrel wrote:
Guild Wars 2 allows players to be members of up to 5 guilds for the whole account. This might seem limited, but ALL of your characters are members of all of those Guilds at the same time.

That would bug me. Part of the fun my wife and I had was coming up with little supergroups and having characters in them that were themed for that group. To have all my characters in all these groups would bug me.

You also have to remember that *initially* you have just 5 character slots available for usage in Guild Wars 2. If you want any more, you have to pay for them.

But it is an idea that can and *should* be expanded upon

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1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
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chase
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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

chase wrote:
Gangrel wrote:
Guild Wars 2 allows players to be members of up to 5 guilds for the whole account. This might seem limited, but ALL of your characters are members of all of those Guilds at the same time.

That would bug me. Part of the fun my wife and I had was coming up with little supergroups and having characters in them that were themed for that group. To have all my characters in all these groups would bug me.

You also have to remember that *initially* you have just 5 character slots available for usage in Guild Wars 2. If you want any more, you have to pay for them.
But it is an idea that can and *should* be expanded upon

True

Assigning supergroups to the "global" rather than the character could help manage alts (and manage roles in the supergroup-- does it make sense that my main is supergroup leader buy my alts in the same group are just regular members?

To the outside world, if I was able to select the SG that displays with a specific character's name, it wouldn't matter that I was in alternate unrelated supergroups.

And if I'm in all supergroups, then I don't need to do things like make alliances between all the groups just so people on alts in the other SG's can see that the rest of us are online in the alt group.

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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

chase wrote:
Gangrel wrote:
Guild Wars 2 allows players to be members of up to 5 guilds for the whole account. This might seem limited, but ALL of your characters are members of all of those Guilds at the same time.

That would bug me. Part of the fun my wife and I had was coming up with little supergroups and having characters in them that were themed for that group. To have all my characters in all these groups would bug me.

You also have to remember that *initially* you have just 5 character slots available for usage in Guild Wars 2. If you want any more, you have to pay for them.
But it is an idea that can and *should* be expanded upon

I've never played GW2 so thanks for providing info on that.

For what it's worth I wouldn't mind the OPTION for any one of my CoT characters to belong to more than one SG. But I would NEVER like the idea of all my characters on my account automatically being linked to every one of those SG. Think of it this way - let's assume for the sake of argument I have a Superman clone and a Lex Luthur clone as two characters in my CoT account. Why on earth would it ever make sense for my Superman to automatically be a member of the Legion of Doom or my Lex to automatically be a member of the Justice League?

Having accounts fully linked to guilds might have made more sense in GW2 but it makes very little sense in a game like CoT. If you want to replicate GW2 we should have the option to manually link all your characters that way, but it shouldn't be the default.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Gangrel wrote:
chase wrote:
Gangrel wrote:
Guild Wars 2 allows players to be members of up to 5 guilds for the whole account. This might seem limited, but ALL of your characters are members of all of those Guilds at the same time.

That would bug me. Part of the fun my wife and I had was coming up with little supergroups and having characters in them that were themed for that group. To have all my characters in all these groups would bug me.

You also have to remember that *initially* you have just 5 character slots available for usage in Guild Wars 2. If you want any more, you have to pay for them.
But it is an idea that can and *should* be expanded upon

I've never played GW2 so thanks for providing info on that.
For what it's worth I wouldn't mind the OPTION for any one of my CoT characters to belong to more than one SG. But I would NEVER like the idea of all my characters on my account automatically being linked to every one of those SG. Think of it this way - let's assume for the sake of argument I have a Superman clone and a Lex Luthur clone as two characters in my CoT account. Why on earth would it ever make sense for my Superman to automatically be a member of the Legion of Doom or my Lex to automatically be a member of the Justice League?
Having accounts fully linked to guilds might have made more sense in GW2 but it makes very little sense in a game like CoT. If you want to replicate GW2 we should have the option to manually link all your characters that way, but it shouldn't be the default.

Oh agreed, I think that the Guild Wars 2 system would not be a perfect match for a game whose player base is liable to have high character to account ratio.

But I think that the ability to either invite an account (ie all characters) to an SG would be a nice option, as well as the ability for characters to be members of *several* SG's.

Hell, in Guild Wars 2, the guilds that you are a member of get rewarded (small influence points increase) for just representing them daily. It takes all of 5 seconds to change who you are representing, and you can do all 5 in under a minute.

Anyways... as i said, it is an option, and I wasn't trying to suggest that it should be the default. Hell, for all we know, it could possibly cut down on the number of alts that some people have (I know a few people who had alts of the *same* character, so that they could play in several SG's, unfortunately, this meant that they had to level up the same character several times).

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I'd really like to see a

I'd really like to see a guild/SG/VG system designed that did not include a character cap from the get-go. Far too often the number of alts + the number of players gets to that cap so fast whole coalitions were used JUST to manage the original SG family, which then requires added maintenance of material, ingame currency, activity, etc. that I found exhaustively prohibitive.

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summer-heat wrote:
summer-heat wrote:

I'd really like to see a guild/SG/VG system designed that did not include a character cap from the get-go. Far too often the number of alts + the number of players gets to that cap so fast whole coalitions were used JUST to manage the original SG family, which then requires added maintenance of material, ingame currency, activity, etc. that I found exhaustively prohibitive.

Good software engineering practice (especially in a MMO like this) tends to favor things that have definite caps. That's not to say it would be impossible to have an open-ended SG roster - I'm just suggesting that "wierdly unexpected" things would probably start to happen if you decided to cram say more than a few thousand members into such an in-game grouping.

I contend that a limit of around 500 members is really about as large as the Devs would probably allow just from the simple GUI managment point of view.

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This is where it could well

This is where it could well be "accounts in SG" capped, instead of "individual characters in SG" capped.

Sure, you might still end up at the cap with 300 different accounts in there (or however many), but you might well have 2000 characters in the SG overall (throwing numbers out of my rear).

Is there going to be an upper limit? Quite possibly, even if its so high to be "unreachable by normal means".

Hell, they also possibly have the ability for most stuff (ie giving rank, associated abilities with that, kicking players/characters) be on both the account level OR the character level (you choose which).

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1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
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Lothic
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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

This is where it could well be "accounts in SG" capped, instead of "individual characters in SG" capped.
Sure, you might still end up at the cap with 300 different accounts in there (or however many), but you might well have 2000 characters in the SG overall (throwing numbers out of my rear).
Is there going to be an upper limit? Quite possibly, even if its so high to be "unreachable by normal means".
Hell, they also possibly have the ability for most stuff (ie giving rank, associated abilities with that, kicking players/characters) be on both the account level OR the character level (you choose which).

Again as someone who would probably never "lump all of my characters into any one SG" I still don't think SGs should really be organized by accounts. I have no problem with some kind of option that would let a person auto-invite (even if they are offline) every character of an account with one action. But that shouldn't mean that all of those invited characters are automatically absorbed into the SG - it should be up to the account's owner which (if any) of the characters accepts the invite.

P.S. Just to make sure I'm being understood my suggestion would easily allow a person to invite ALL of his own characters (offline or not) into a single SG if they so desire. The pending invites would just be left hanging in the system until the next time the player logs in a particular character and chooses whether to accept it or not.

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That is why I would imagine

That is why I would imagine that you could invite via *account* OR via character... If a player wants just one character in an SG, invite the character. If a player would like *all* their characters in a single SG, invite the account.

It would be better then sending out multiple invites to the same person (and faster).

And if a character could be in *multiple* SG's, then if a mistake *does* happen, then you can just remove that character from the SG (instead of possibly pulling ALL your toons out... although that is an easy "one step option" as well.. instead of having to log multiple characters to just remove them).

The reason why I was thinking of keeping the upper limit on the SG being dictated by *account* and not character numbers, is that it can help general maintenance of the SG. A player pisses you off and needs kicking from the SG? Just kick the account, and *all* their toons are removed.

Need to remove one toon? Kick the toon.

Want to give *one* player the ability to invite people... give the *account* the ability to do it, so that no matter the toon that they are on, they can do it. Want it limited to just one character, give it to the character.

Although the limit on numbers in an SG should be account limited (possibly some variation of 20 characters per account, 400 accounts, so around a theoretical 8000 overall toon limit there... numbers pulled from rear end btw).

I am sure that there will be no one solution fits all (at least on paper), but giving people MORE tools available for them is a definite benefit.

Of course, there is the then the "guild members information page" where it could be easier (see who is online, not necessarily via toon, but via account name etc etc)

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

That is why I would imagine that you could invite via *account* OR via character... If a player wants just one character in an SG, invite the character. If a player would like *all* their characters in a single SG, invite the account.
It would be better then sending out multiple invites to the same person (and faster).
And if a character could be in *multiple* SG's, then if a mistake *does* happen, then you can just remove that character from the SG (instead of possibly pulling ALL your toons out... although that is an easy "one step option" as well.. instead of having to log multiple characters to just remove them).
The reason why I was thinking of keeping the upper limit on the SG being dictated by *account* and not character numbers, is that it can help general maintenance of the SG. A player pisses you off and needs kicking from the SG? Just kick the account, and *all* their toons are removed.
Need to remove one toon? Kick the toon.
Want to give *one* player the ability to invite people... give the *account* the ability to do it, so that no matter the toon that they are on, they can do it. Want it limited to just one character, give it to the character.
Although the limit on numbers in an SG should be account limited (possibly some variation of 20 characters per account, 400 accounts, so around a theoretical 8000 overall toon limit there... numbers pulled from rear end btw).
I am sure that there will be no one solution fits all (at least on paper), but giving people MORE tools available for them is a definite benefit.
Of course, there is the then the "guild members information page" where it could be easier (see who is online, not necessarily via toon, but via account name etc etc)

Perhaps if (as you allude to) petty much anything you might want to do in a SG on a "per account" basis could also be acomplished "per character" then they might have the most chance to please the most people with this. I totally understand that some people would like to be able to manage their SG activities with actions that apply to a person's "entire account" but clearly other people probably want to handle things on a character-by-character basis. If SGs are designed well from the beginning I think both can be accomplished.

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I like the idea of having

I like the idea of having things able to be managed by account or by character; the problem is making it all able to work together. How will you set up a framework that allows SGs to have both accounts and individual characters a part of it? How will you be able to tell whether the offline name listed is a character or an account name? How will the system manage people who want three or four characters in an SG but not the other two? I feel as though there would be too many issues trying to integrate both systems into something workable, though I'd love for it to work.

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Oldenmw wrote:
Oldenmw wrote:

I like the idea of having things able to be managed by account or by character; the problem is making it all able to work together. How will you set up a framework that allows SGs to have both accounts and individual characters a part of it? How will you be able to tell whether the offline name listed is a character or an account name? How will the system manage people who want three or four characters in an SG but not the other two? I feel as though there would be too many issues trying to integrate both systems into something workable, though I'd love for it to work.

I would like to start off by saying that even if you add just a *character* to the SG, their global name information is still added to the SG list. Most of this can be solved with a UI that has the information already present and listed (ie character name, global name, level, AT, Online status). All of this should be able to be pulled from the server even if the character is offline. And if you make the columns sort-able ascending/descending, or even have a search facility in the SG window, then you can do your own filtering of the information, and make it more easily view-able by the SG leader/officers of the SG.

If people just want a *selection* of characters added, then you can just add those characters individually... OR if the person wanted, you could just add their account, which would add *all* of the characters (if only one SG per character) that were able to join (and then they manually remove the ones who shouldn't be there themselves).

If we allow "multiple SG's per character", then the same applies, you can do it both ways.

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1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

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I like the idea of handling

I like the idea of handling SGs on a global or per character basis although, if I understand the idea, if a person wants even one character in a different SG they cannot take advantage of the global invite feature. Especially taking into account the desire to have at least one hero or villain character, among a host of other reasons to want or need to have at least one character separate from the SG, I imagine that invites on a global level would be relatively rare.

A feature that allows for creating coalitions or supergroup groups, if you will, would be nice. Even something as simple as a default coalition chat channel and being able to check who is online in the other SGs, in a separate tab in the SG window, would be an improvement over what I've seen in other MMOs.

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I was part of The Justice

I was part of The Justice Brigade, which was run by a very outgoing and charismatic player. We maxed out our membership via recruitment and alts in the first 6 months. By year 2, we had created The Justice Brigadiers, which we moved all our alts too. Both groups maxed out again, so we made the Junior Justice Brigade, another Alt haven. The cap was raised not long after that and the three SGs ended up being more than enough ^_^

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Darth Fez wrote:
Darth Fez wrote:

I like the idea of handling SGs on a global or per character basis although, if I understand the idea, if a person wants even one character in a different SG they cannot take advantage of the global invite feature. Especially taking into account the desire to have at least one hero or villain character, among a host of other reasons to want or need to have at least one character separate from the SG, I imagine that invites on a global level would be relatively rare.

This is how I envision an "account invite" being done if we're going to assume that any major function of a SG could be handled on either a per account or per character basis:

When a member of a SG sends an account invite to a player that player would have an "invite request" message sent to every one of his/her characters (online or offline). That player would then have to eventually log into each of their characters and manually accept or decline each invite offer. This is how that player would select which subset of his/her characters they wanted in the SG.

For the SG inviter this would only be one action - multiple invites would be generated for all of the characters of the invitee player's account. The invitee would then have to log into each character in order to accept or reject each invite. While I understand that might be a little painful from the point of view of the invitee I don't see that as too much of a hassle because lumping all of your characters into one SG isn't going to be something you'd do very often and it's not something you must do all at once anyway because the individual "invite requests" would stay in the system until the next time you log in a particular character.

Obviously this kind of thing would work pretty much the same way if you just wanted to invite a single character instead of a whole account. You'd send out an invite request (regardless if that character is online or offline) and that character would accept or reject it the next time they were logged in.

Seems workable to me...

P.S. The only problem I see with "offline SG invites" is that it might be a potential source of griefing. A naughty person could try to send random people dozens of invites like spam. The simple solution to that is that the system would only keep one "offline invite" pending for a given character at a time. This way the naughty person could waste his time sending your characters hundreds of spam invites but by the next time you log in you'd only have to "accept or reject" the first (in this case) bogus invite you got. Maybe they could even put timestamps on each individual SG invite message so that it only exists in the system for say 48 hours. That way there wouldn't be too many "unanswered invites" lingering in the system too long. That should handle that potential problem fairly well.

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That approach could certainly

That approach could certainly work. Ideally they could devise a more elegant solution than requiring every character to accept or decline a global invitation (perhaps a pop-up interface that allows the player to select every character which they want included in the invite). I don't know if that would preclude Gangrel's thought on having SG privileges set at the account level, in particular since it gives rise to the possibility that someone might have such privileges set from more than one SG.

Since I mentioned a pop-up, I'll also toss in my vote for the kind of system that they use in SWTOR, which tosses everything into a little 'Pending' tab if you're otherwise occupied (e.g. in combat, especially).

Lothic wrote:

P.S. The only problem I see with "offline SG invites" is that it might be a potential source of griefing. A naughty person could try to send random people dozens of invites like spam. The simple solution to that is that the system would only keep one "offline invite" pending for a given character at a time. This way the naughty person could waste his time sending your characters hundreds of spam invites but by the next time you log in you'd only have to "accept or reject" the first (in this case) bogus invite you got. That should handle that potential problem.

Such a system would need to hide any declined invites so that people needn't be concerned over someone fishing for all their alts. By the same token, there ought to be an option to automatically decline all global invites (other than /ignore, that is).

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Darth Fez wrote:
I like the idea of handling SGs on a global or per character basis although, if I understand the idea, if a person wants even one character in a different SG they cannot take advantage of the global invite feature. Especially taking into account the desire to have at least one hero or villain character, among a host of other reasons to want or need to have at least one character separate from the SG, I imagine that invites on a global level would be relatively rare.

This is how I envision an "account invite" being done if we're going to assume that any major function of a SG could be handled on either a per account or per character basis:
When a member of a SG sends an account invite to a player that player would have an "invite request" message sent to every one of his/her characters (online or offline). That player would then have to eventually log into each of their characters and manually accept or decline each invite offer. This is how that player would select which subset of his/her characters they wanted in the SG.
For the SG inviter this would only be one action - multiple invites would be generated for all of the characters of the invitee player's account. The invitee would have to log into each character in order to accept or reject each invite. While I understand that might be a little painful from the point of view of the invitee I don't see that as too much of a hassle because lumping all of your characters into one SG isn't going to be something you'd do very often and it's not something you must do all at once anyway because the individual "invite reqests" would stay in the system until the next time you log in a particular character.
Obviously this kind of thing would work pretty much the same way if you just wanted to invite a single character instead of a whole account. You'd send out an invite request (regardless if that character is online or offline) and that character would accept or reject it the next time they were logged in.
Seems workable to me...

In my eyes, my version of the "account invite" would have just been one invite sent out at that point in time.

If the game only allows one SG per character, then just those who are *not* in an SG would get shifted over.

If multiple SG's are allowed per character, then ALL elegible (if there is a faction limitation on SG's/VG's) characters would be invited.

It wouldn't be a case of a separate invite sent out to each charater, although I can see your version being slightly better overall.

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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

If the game only allows one SG per character, then just those who are *not* in an SG would get shifted over.
If multiple SG's are allowed per character, then ALL elegible (if there is a faction limitation on SG's/VG's) characters would be invited.

If I'm not mistaken this again implies characters being automatically sucked into SGs without a player being able to pick-n-choose which characters are going in or staying out. I still feel this kind of thing would be a bad idea.

Gangrel wrote:

It wouldn't be a case of a separate invite sent out to each charater, although I can see your version being slightly better overall.

What I was trying to capture with my "each character then manually accepts or rejects each invite" was the overall idea of choice. This is how the invitee chooses which subset (one, some or all) of his/her characters would become members of the SG.

Of course if they (like Darth Fez mentioned) created a GUI that would pop up displaying all of your characters that let you flag them individually for "accept/deny" of the account invite then sure why not. I'm just thinking something extra-fancy like that might require a little too much effort from the Devs considering that this is the kind of situation that would only come up for a player probably once during their entire time playing the game. Again how often is a player going to need to shift their entire cast of characters in or out of a given SG?

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It all depends on the player

It all depends on the player to be fair.

One thing that annoyed me was that over the years, I ended up shifting my entire member list across numerous SG's as they died over time. I reckon over the years, I quite possibly shifted SG's about 10-15 times.

I was never one for joining themed SG's. All the ones that I was a member of were "groups of friends and a place for their characters to live". But as they left the game I went to find another group that was active. I guess the problem was that I met on my server, but I was not prepared to leave the server (and seeing as I was on the MOST populated EU server, it was only in the last year where I had the opportunity to shift over to the US servers (if i so desired). )

Edit: One thing that I was thinking that *Could* be done with the "account level" invite, is possibly having a default SG that all your newly created toons to automatically join.

Just an extra thought that I thought i would throw out there

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Darth Fez wrote:
Darth Fez wrote:

Such a system would need to hide any declined invites so that people needn't be concerned over someone fishing for all their alts. By the same token, there ought to be an option to automatically decline all global invites (other than /ignore, that is).

I think safeguards like these already existed in CoH for similar situations. I sort of assumed anything like this that already existed in CoH would be carried over into CoT.

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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

It all depends on the player to be fair.
One thing that annoyed me was that over the years, I ended up shifting my entire member list across numerous SG's as they died over time. I reckon over the years, I quite possibly shifted SG's about 10-15 times.
I was never one for joining themed SG's. All the ones that I was a member of were "groups of friends and a place for their characters to live". But as they left the game I went to find another group that was active. I guess the problem was that I met on my server, but I was not prepared to leave the server (and seeing as I was on the MOST populated EU server, it was only in the last year where I had the opportunity to shift over to the US servers (if i so desired). )
Edit: One thing that I was thinking that *Could* be done with the "account level" invite, is possibly having a default SG that all your newly created toons to automatically join.
Just an extra thought that I thought i would throw out there

Well in this case maybe Darth Fez's "character list pop-up" for SG invite acceptance/rejection would be practical and worthwhile. I wasn't against the idea - I was just trying to keep the overall concept as simple as possible and a new pop-up like that might be a "little less than simple" for the Devs to accomplish.

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The important question is:

The important question is: how much dev time is needed to implement the feature vs. how much player time is saved by such feature. Bear in mind that, even though they're volunteers, dev time is still far more valuable than player time.

I'm not convinced that a special "transfer some or all my alts between SGs in one step" UI is worth the effort because it rarely (compared to vanilla SG invites) happens. Further, SGs might not like it if you hauled in all your alts and hit the SG cap (if there is one). Offline invites bother me because of the aforementioned griefing potential, and borderline griefing caused by some players spamming invites to everyone they can find.

All you need is for the invite request dialog to go to whatever character is online on that account. The dialog would need to clearly state which character is being invited.

Then all you need to do for a mass invite is write up all the /sginvite commands in a text editor and copy&paste it into the command line.

So, for example, say I am logged in on the character Lin Chiao Feng, and want to join Phoenix Rising. I've got some alts I want to drag in, too: Hoshiko Fujieda and Ibarahime. I just have to get invited to Phoenix Rising, join, get invite privs, and then do something like:

/sginvite Hoshiko Fujieda$$/sginvite Ibarahime

say Yes to the two join dialogs (because they go to my account, not the particular character), and I'm done. Or, if I don't get invite privs but the SG is okay with adding my alts, I just email or PM the above to them and they run it.

Problem solved.

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One thing that I *think*

One thing that I *think* would be beneficial though, would be in the SG members list window, listing the global *associated* with the Character name would be handy as well.

To be fair, I can see "kicking all characters associated with a global account" would more likely be used than anything else (please note: Kicking in this case is *forced to leave*, instead of a person just willingly pulling all of their characters).

Oh, and in this case you *cannot* just use the code that you have typed. It has already been stated that character names WILL NOT be unique (global names however will be)

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2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

The important question is: how much dev time is needed to implement the feature vs. how much player time is saved by such feature. Bear in mind that, even though they're volunteers, dev time is still far more valuable than player time.
I'm not convinced that a special "transfer some or all my alts between SGs in one step" UI is worth the effort because it rarely (compared to vanilla SG invites) happens. Further, SGs might not like it if you hauled in all your alts and hit the SG cap (if there is one). Offline invites bother me because of the aforementioned griefing potential, and borderline griefing caused by some players spamming invites to everyone they can find.
All you need is for the invite request dialog to go to whatever character is online on that account. The dialog would need to clearly state which character is being invited.
Then all you need to do for a mass invite is write up all the /sginvite commands in a text editor and copy&paste it into the command line.
So, for example, say I am logged in on the character Lin Chiao Feng, and want to join Phoenix Rising. I've got some alts I want to drag in, too: Hoshiko Fujieda and Ibarahime. I just have to get invited to Phoenix Rising, join, get invite privs, and then do something like:
/sginvite Hoshiko Fujieda$$/sginvite Ibarahime
say Yes to the two join dialogs (because they go to my account, not the particular character), and I'm done. Or, if I don't get invite privs but the SG is okay with adding my alts, I just email or PM the above to them and they run it.
Problem solved.

The reason I included "offline SG invites" in my suggestions here was that it was a very common long-time request back in COH. There was probably a request for that in the CoH Forums every week for literally years.

Now of course there are some obvious drawbacks to that idea and potential for griefing has long been cited as one of the main reasons why it never happpend in CoH. But I think I have addressed the key concerns over this and feel that it could be accomplished as long as the Devs are mindful of the situation when they build their new SG system from the ground up.

For what it's worth the ability to "quickly invite all characters from a single account into a SG" was also a very old desire back from the CoH days and I feel my suggestions here are a workable compromise for allowing people to do that without stepping on a player's ability to specifically choose which characters they want in or out of any given SG.

I feel that my suggestions are flexible enough to allow a SG inviter to perform either an "account invite" or single "character invite" without the explict need for overly-fancy GUIs. The inclusion of such GUIs would simply be "icing on the cake" that the Devs could provide when/if they could.

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LCF's post in the 'Event

LCF's post in the 'Event Databases and Smartphones' thread reminded me of another nice (and obvious) feature for SG coalitions: a shared calendar for events and the like.

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Actually, one thing that I

Actually, one thing that I *would* like is that if they allow multple SG's per character, to have *all* of the characters that I make (even after the formation of the SG) automatically be members of my own "personal SG", so that no matter which character I am on, I will always have the choice to earn stuff for my own personal SG base.

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2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

Actually, one thing that I *would* like is that if they allow multple SG's per character, to have *all* of the characters that I make (even after the formation of the SG) automatically be members of my own "personal SG", so that no matter which character I am on, I will always have the choice to earn stuff for my own personal SG base.

I'm not sure they would/could automatically create "default SGs" based on the members of a player's account.

There'd be weird little issues such as "Which character would be considered the 'founder' member?" Would you want that to be the very first character you ever create or would you want some control over that? Also what if you have characters (like both heroes and villains) who for whatever reasons aren't going to be allowed to coexist in a single SG in the first place? And maybe I just might want a certain character to remain completely 100% SG-less for whatever reason. Then of course there's the issue with how you'd name the SG - would it have a default name forced on you or could you choose it?

I have nothing against a player having their own private SG for their own characters - I just don't think it makes much sense for that to be an automatic default thing. Let something like that remain an "optional" thing that a given player can manually create on their own.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Gangrel wrote:
Actually, one thing that I *would* like is that if they allow multple SG's per character, to have *all* of the characters that I make (even after the formation of the SG) automatically be members of my own "personal SG", so that no matter which character I am on, I will always have the choice to earn stuff for my own personal SG base.

I'm not sure they would/could automatically create "default SGs" based on the members of a player's account.
There'd be weird little issues such as "Which character would be considered the 'founder' member?" Would you want that to be the very first character you ever create or would you want some control over that? Also what if you have characters (like both heroes and villains) who for whatever reasons aren't going to be allowed to coexist in a single SG in the first place? And maybe I just might want a certain character to remain completely 100% SG-less for whatever reason
I have nothing against a player having their own private SG for their own characters - I just don't think it makes much sense for that to be an automatic default thing. Let something like that remain an "optional" thing that a given player can manually create on their own.

The founder would be the 1st character that made it.

For example, in Guild Wars 2, I actually created the guild on my *2nd* character, and then as a result, all of the characters that I have on the account (even after the creation date) have the option to represent that guild.

The founder of the guild was the character that made it, although this is something that I would feel is more "meta" than actually being *in* the game world.

But as I said, this is because they do the guild membership on the *account* level and not on the character level.

I just feel that there are ways to work around it. Hell, part of it could well be done in the character creation screen (advanced options route), if so desired.

ie:

If you have set up a "personal" SG (ie one you set up for yourself), you could check a box (or choose from a drop down box), which SG they were going to "drop into".

The same could work for those who have the "account is a member of X sg", and choose from the various SG's that they are a member of ,if they wanted that character to be in that SG.

*edit* The DEFAULT setting though is "none of the above" so those who just click all the way through, dont get forced into an SG.

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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Gangrel wrote:
Actually, one thing that I *would* like is that if they allow multple SG's per character, to have *all* of the characters that I make (even after the formation of the SG) automatically be members of my own "personal SG", so that no matter which character I am on, I will always have the choice to earn stuff for my own personal SG base.

I'm not sure they would/could automatically create "default SGs" based on the members of a player's account.
There'd be weird little issues such as "Which character would be considered the 'founder' member?" Would you want that to be the very first character you ever create or would you want some control over that? Also what if you have characters (like both heroes and villains) who for whatever reasons aren't going to be allowed to coexist in a single SG in the first place? And maybe I just might want a certain character to remain completely 100% SG-less for whatever reason
I have nothing against a player having their own private SG for their own characters - I just don't think it makes much sense for that to be an automatic default thing. Let something like that remain an "optional" thing that a given player can manually create on their own.

The founder would be the 1st character that made it.
For example, in Guild Wars 2, I actually created the guild on my *2nd* character, and then as a result, all of the characters that I have on the account (even after the creation date) have the option to represent that guild.
The founder of the guild was the character that made it, although this is something that I would feel is more "meta" than actually being *in* the game world.
But as I said, this is because they do the guild membership on the *account* level and not on the character level.
I just feel that there are ways to work around it. Hell, part of it could well be done in the character creation screen (advanced options route), if so desired.
ie:
If you have set up a "personal" SG (ie one you set up for yourself), you could check a box (or choose from a drop down box), which SG they were going to "drop into".
The same could work for those who have the "account is a member of X sg", and choose from the various SG's that they are a member of ,if they wanted that character to be in that SG.
*edit* The DEFAULT setting though is "none of the above" so those who just click all the way through, dont get forced into an SG.

Again I'll stress I have nothing against people having personal SGs that are made up of only the characters from a single player account. There were probably literally hundreds of these made back in CoH.

I'll only nit-pick your idea to the point of mentioning that you are suggesting a lot of little "extra" things to make sure this is a possibility. Sure adding a few extra checkboxes to a character creation GUI isn't all that huge a deal. But I'll still contend you need absolutely none of that extra stuff if you just use the standard mechanisms for creating a generic SG for this. The question of “who’s the Founder” becomes moot this way because it's the character you choose to create the SG with.

I understand you come from a GW2 mindset where doing things via account was the norm and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. The thing here is that CoH (and presumably CoT) are games which are probably far more character-centric than you may be used to. As I said before I'm not opposed to adding more account-centric features to the SG system but I doubt I'll ever be in favor of any suggestion that takes away any "sovereignty" from doing exactly what you want to do with any single individual character. For instance depending on an individual character's concept they may be totally against joining any SG because they had an older brother who was betrayed by a SG leader and therefore chooses to be a strict "loner". Just saying that forcing characters to do or join ANYTHING in this game by default kind of cuts against the grain of the superhero genre.

P.S. For what it's worth CoH had a restriction where you had to have a character at level 10 or higher to create a SG. Not sure if that restriction will remain in CoT but it would come into direct odds to your "default SG" idea.

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Gangrel wrote:
Gangrel wrote:

One thing that I *think* would be beneficial though, would be in the SG members list window, listing the global *associated* with the Character name would be handy as well.

Basically, add a column for "Global". So you can sort by it independently, too.

Gangrel wrote:

To be fair, I can see "kicking all characters associated with a global account" would more likely be used than anything else (please note: Kicking in this case is *forced to leave*, instead of a person just willingly pulling all of their characters).

If you need something like that, you probably want a kickban, which removes all characters for an account and then puts the account on the SG ban list so someone else can't reinvite them.

Gangrel wrote:

Oh, and in this case you *cannot* just use the code that you have typed. It has already been stated that character names WILL NOT be unique (global names however will be)

Yeah, I realized that halfway to work. The corrected code would be:
/sginvite Hoshiko Fujieda@ChiaoFeng$$sginvite Ibarahime@ChiaoFeng

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Now of course there are some obvious drawbacks to that idea and potential for griefing has long been cited as one of the main reasons why it never happpend in CoH. But I think I have addressed the key concerns over this and feel that it could be accomplished as long as the Devs are mindful of the situation when they build their new SG system from the ground up.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think it's addressable; I was just proposing a more "path of least resistance" option that didn't require a new UI.

Disclaimer: I'm not able to keep up with everything here, so I miss stuff. I don't know if there will be a membership cap on SGs; last I heard it was "devs haven't decided."

(Kind of wish we had a CoT Wiki to collect and organize the public stuff Devs have said. I spent a lot of time on the old ParagonWiki, and even wrote the templates for the invention enhancement pages and the "IOs which enchance ___" pages. But I digress.)

To allow offline invites, you have to resolve a few things I don't think I've seen addressed in this thread:

  • If there's a user cap, then each offline invite must count against that cap or the invite could fail. This could allow a person with invite privs to grief the SG by packing up the list with invites of characters known to be offline.
  • The server has to keep track of who sent the invite, and if their invite status is revoked (left the SG, demoted, permissions-by-rank changed, whatever) then it needs to revoke the invites as well.
  • You need a "pending invitations" UI somewhere listing the character & global invited, character & global who sent the invite, when sent and/or when the invite expires, and allows SG leaders with sufficient privileges to revoke invites.

And probably a few things I forgot.

This could all be via slash commands instead of a UI, too. But people are going to want to interactively manage invitations.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

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If I was in a SG and wanted

If I was in a SG and wanted to leave, and had a few alts in it as well, I could see a "Remove All Characters Associated with Account" option as well as a "Remove This Character" option working. This would let you completely leave or just take one of your characters out in case you wanted them to be a villain or some other reason.

I like these ideas, I just wonder how it would work on the back end, and if it would be difficult for the programmers to actually implement.

UI options are always better than having to look up or memorize slash commands. It's much easier to work with, and more user-friendly.

I see a lot of people talking about pending invites and a pending tab, both in this thread and in others. As others have said, SWTOR handed this very well, with a Pending tab that handled almost everything that could be queued up, whether it was mission rewards, invites, or requests. I would love to see CoT have something similar to this, as it was something that made life much simpler.

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Gangrel wrote:
One thing that I *think* would be beneficial though, would be in the SG members list window, listing the global *associated* with the Character name would be handy as well.

Basically, add a column for "Global". So you can sort by it independently, too.

That's probably somthing that would've been in the CoH Supergroup GUI had the game's use of globals been finalized before much of the SG mechanic evolved. You have to remember that the way CoH treated globals by the end of the game (late 2012) wasn't the same way the concept was first handled when the game launched. One would assume CoT's use of Globals will be more well established by the time it launches.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Gangrel wrote:
To be fair, I can see "kicking all characters associated with a global account" would more likely be used than anything else (please note: Kicking in this case is *forced to leave*, instead of a person just willingly pulling all of their characters).

If you need something like that, you probably want a kickban, which removes all characters for an account and then puts the account on the SG ban list so someone else can't reinvite them.

CoH had no equivalent to a "kickban" as you describe. My guess is putting the ability to prevent a player from joining another SG directly in the hands of another player is probably a degree of power that the Devs of CoT will not allow. There was no precedent to something like that in CoH. Those kinds of things can be handled by player petitions and GM review for possible game supensions.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Gangrel wrote:
Oh, and in this case you *cannot* just use the code that you have typed. It has already been stated that character names WILL NOT be unique (global names however will be)

Yeah, I realized that halfway to work. The corrected code would be:/sginvite Hoshiko Fujieda@ChiaoFeng$$sginvite Ibarahime@ChiaoFeng

While it's proable we'll be able to use various command-line methods like this I'd hate to have to rely on that with people who had several dozen characters. It was quite common for many people to have that many alts to deal with. I'd rather rely on workable GUI commands as much as possible to simplify this.

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Lothic: I guess I wasn't

Lothic: I guess I wasn't clear; I wasn't claiming any of that was in CoH. Given that CoT will use the name@global identification system, I figured it would work more like CO/STO which uses the same system. (Though I don't recall those games having any account-wide invite or kick commands.)

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Now of course there are some obvious drawbacks to that idea and potential for griefing has long been cited as one of the main reasons why it never happpend in CoH. But I think I have addressed the key concerns over this and feel that it could be accomplished as long as the Devs are mindful of the situation when they build their new SG system from the ground up.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I think it's addressable; I was just proposing a more "path of least resistance" option that didn't require a new UI.

Sorry if it wasn't clear to you but I've actually been stressing the idea of avoiding the need for "new" GUIs for this myself. I think most of these things can be accomplished via the existing CoH right-click menus. I have merely suggested that new dedicated GUIs for this would be "nice, but not required".

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Disclaimer: I'm not able to keep up with everything here, so I miss stuff. I don't know if there will be a membership cap on SGs; last I heard it was "devs haven't decided."

CoH had a limit 150 characters for a SG. People have proposed making the limit based on "number of accounts" instead of "number of characters" but since CoH was always geared toward things being as character-oriented as possible it's hard to say if they'll go that route.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

To allow offline invites, you have to resolve a few things I don't think I've seen addressed in this thread:
If there's a user cap, then each offline invite must count against that cap or the invite could fail. This could allow a person with invite privs to grief the SG by packing up the list with invites of characters known to be offline.

I already mentioned a "timeout" could be imposed on invite request messages that would mitigate and/or prevent this.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

The server has to keep track of who sent the invite, and if their invite status is revoked (left the SG, demoted, permissions-by-rank changed, whatever) then it needs to revoke the invites as well.

I'll grant you more credit with this novel concern. I imagine the system could be set up to "reverify" the authority of the inviter at the time a player is choosing to accept an invite and respond accordingly.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

You need a "pending invitations" UI somewhere listing the character & global invited, character & global who sent the invite, when sent and/or when the invite expires, and allows SG leaders with sufficient privileges to revoke invites.

While such a GUI might be nice I don't think it would be strictly necessary in practice.

As long as the SG membership cap (assuming there even will be one) is sufficently high enough I don't think your "edge" cases of trying to allocate the last open member slots on people who chose to grief the SG by not responding until the invites timeout will really be critical enough to worry about. If someone within the SG chose to exploit this scenario a SG leader can always revoke the invite authority of the troublemaker to resolve the issue.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

This could all be via slash commands instead of a UI, too. But people are going to want to interactively manage invitations.

Virtually anything you could do with GUI/menu commands in CoH could also be accomplished with command line equivalents. I know of no reason why CoT would be different in that regard.

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Oldenmw wrote:
Oldenmw wrote:

If I was in a SG and wanted to leave, and had a few alts in it as well, I could see a "Remove All Characters Associated with Account" option as well as a "Remove This Character" option working. This would let you completely leave or just take one of your characters out in case you wanted them to be a villain or some other reason.
I like these ideas, I just wonder how it would work on the back end, and if it would be difficult for the programmers to actually implement.

I'm sure it would not be trivial; otherwise most of this probably would've been in CoH years ago. But the advantage CoT has that CoH didn't was all the lessons learned from 8.5 years of gameplay. Hopefully whatever form CoT's SG system takes it will at least be more integrated and less "hodge-podge".

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

I'm sure it would not be trivial; otherwise most of this probably would've been in CoH years ago. But the advantage CoT has that CoH didn't was all the lessons learned from 8.5 years of gameplay. Hopefully whatever form CoT's SG system takes it will at least be more integrated and less "hodge-podge".

That's very true, and if SGs are designed intelligently and integrated well, then the devs should be able to add more complexity and functionality without it seeming tacked on or it not fitting.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Sorry if it wasn't clear to you but I've actually been stressing the idea of avoiding the need for "new" GUIs for this myself. I think most of these things can be accomplished via the existing CoH right-click menus. I have merely suggested that new dedicated GUIs for this would be "nice, but not required".

I'm not sure how much "reuse existing CoH menus" counts for since the CoH codebase is dead and gone and the CoT devs will need to write all this anyway.

Lothic wrote:

CoH had a limit 150 characters for a SG. People have proposed making the limit based on "number of accounts" instead of "number of characters" but since CoH was always geared toward things being as character-oriented as possible it's hard to say if they'll go that route.

Also IIRC DSFH isn't particularly fond of arbitrary caps on things, and I doubt the other devs are either.

Lothic wrote:

I already mentioned a "timeout" could be imposed on invite request messages that would mitigate and/or prevent this.

Only if you also limited the reate at which someone could send out invites, which would make the "invite all on account" path harder.

And I'm assuming that there would be a timeout; no point in having months-old invites.

Lothic wrote:

I'll grant you more credit with this novel concern. I imagine the system could be set up to "reverify" the authority of the inviter at the time a player is choosing to accept an invite and respond accordingly.

While that could be done, the invite is still using a "slot" (again, if SGs have limits). And it's kind of mean for the system to say, "Oh, wait, your invite was invalid. Neener neener." when the player clicks "Join". Better to revoke the invites and free the slots immediately.

Lothic wrote:

While such a GUI might be nice I don't think it would be strictly necessary in practice.
As long as the SG membership cap (assuming there even will be one) is sufficently high enough I don't think your "edge" cases of trying to allocate the last open member slots on people who chose to grief the SG by not responding until the invites timeout will really be critical enough to worry about. If someone within the SG chose to exploit this scenario a SG leader can always revoke the invite authority of the troublemaker to resolve the issue.

I see it playing out like this:

  1. SG leader finds out nobody can invite because all open SG slots are full of pending invites.
  2. SG leader says "OK, who did this?" on SG channel.
  3. Crickets.
  4. SG leader says, "I wish there were a way to get a list of these invites and who did them so I know who to go after."
  5. SG leader gives up and runs /sg_revoke_all_invites (or clicks an equivalent GUI button).
  6. Non-griefers who had pending invites are annoyed.
Lothic wrote:

Virtually anything you could do with GUI/menu commands in CoH could also be accomplished with command line equivalents. I know of no reason why CoT would be different in that regard.

And IIRC the reverse was not true. If it were my call, I'd prioritize the slash commands over any GUI. It sounds like you'd agree.

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Virtually anything you could do with GUI/menu commands in CoH could also be accomplished with command line equivalents. I know of no reason why CoT would be different in that regard.

And IIRC the reverse was not true. If it were my call, I'd prioritize the slash commands over any GUI. It sounds like you'd agree.

I disagree here. I know from a programming perspective it makes much more sense to prioritize slash commands, but most of our players aren't programmers or people familiar with it. They don't want to have to memorize or have to look up the slash command every time they want to do something. It's much easier to just navigate to a menu or click and choose an option.

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Sorry if it wasn't clear to you but I've actually been stressing the idea of avoiding the need for "new" GUIs for this myself. I think most of these things can be accomplished via the existing CoH right-click menus. I have merely suggested that new dedicated GUIs for this would be "nice, but not required".
I'm not sure how much "reuse existing CoH menus" counts for since the CoH codebase is dead and gone and the CoT devs will need to write all this anyway.

Obviously I didn't literally mean to reuse actual CoH code here. I thought it was very clear from the context that CoT could "reuse/borrow" the same mechanic of right click menus that worked rather successfully in CoH.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
CoH had a limit 150 characters for a SG. People have proposed making the limit based on "number of accounts" instead of "number of characters" but since CoH was always geared toward things being as character-oriented as possible it's hard to say if they'll go that route.

Also IIRC DSFH isn't particularly fond of arbitrary caps on things, and I doubt the other devs are either.

Actually I'd be very surprised if they left SG membership uncapped. But I also accept that if they do decide/manage to have uncapped SGs that almost every "concern" you have about offine SG invite suggestions disappears instantly.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
I already mentioned a "timeout" could be imposed on invite request messages that would mitigate and/or prevent this.
Only if you also limited the reate at which someone could send out invites, which would make the "invite all on account" path harder.
And I'm assuming that there would be a timeout; no point in having months-old invites.

I suggested 48 hours eariler. Obviously that value could be set as the Devs see fit. I also suggested a means (on the recevier end) to mitigate the spam issue by allowing only one pending SG invite per character to exist at any given time.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
I'll grant you more credit with this novel concern. I imagine the system could be set up to "reverify" the authority of the inviter at the time a player is choosing to accept an invite and respond accordingly.

While that could be done, the invite is still using a "slot" (again, if SGs have limits). And it's kind of mean for the system to say, "Oh, wait, your invite was invalid. Neener neener." when the player clicks "Join". Better to revoke the invites and free the slots immediately.

Again if the cap is sufficently high (or non-existant) then this would be relatively rare as a worse-case.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
While such a GUI might be nice I don't think it would be strictly necessary in practice.
As long as the SG membership cap (assuming there even will be one) is sufficently high enough I don't think your "edge" cases of trying to allocate the last open member slots on people who chose to grief the SG by not responding until the invites timeout will really be critical enough to worry about. If someone within the SG chose to exploit this scenario a SG leader can always revoke the invite authority of the troublemaker to resolve the issue.

I see it playing out like this:
SG leader finds out nobody can invite because all open SG slots are full of pending invites.
SG leader says "OK, who did this?" on SG channel.
Crickets.
SG leader says, "I wish there were a way to get a list of these invites and who did them so I know who to go after."
SG leader gives up and runs /sg_revoke_all_invites (or clicks an equivalent GUI button).
Non-griefers who had pending invites are annoyed.

Again while your scenario might be possible I contend there will be enough related safeguards to this to make it very rare at best. The Devs should bulletproof code as much as reasonably possible but you know as well as I do that just about anything like this can be overwhelmed if the right multiple "IFs" happen all at the same time. Again as a worse-case scenario this is a temporary problem that can self-correct itself.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Virtually anything you could do with GUI/menu commands in CoH could also be accomplished with command line equivalents. I know of no reason why CoT would be different in that regard.

And IIRC the reverse was not true. If it were my call, I'd prioritize the slash commands over any GUI. It sounds like you'd agree.

I'm always in favor of plenty of command-line commands. But I also don't mind if a game is well enough put together that the NEED for those commands are virtually non-existant.

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

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Oldenmw wrote:
Oldenmw wrote:

I disagree here. I know from a programming perspective it makes much more sense to prioritize slash commands, but most of our players aren't programmers or people familiar with it. They don't want to have to memorize or have to look up the slash command every time they want to do something. It's much easier to just navigate to a menu or click and choose an option.

I'm only saying that because this is for something that will be used very rarely. I'd rather the devs focus on the features used more often. Like, at this point, just about everything else in the game.

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Oldenmw wrote:
Oldenmw wrote:

I disagree here. I know from a programming perspective it makes much more sense to prioritize slash commands, but most of our players aren't programmers or people familiar with it. They don't want to have to memorize or have to look up the slash command every time they want to do something. It's much easier to just navigate to a menu or click and choose an option.

I may be stating the obvious, but wouldn't the best setup be that you can right-click on names in chat windows and/or player avatars and get a list of options, such as group/team/SG/chat invites AND have the slash-command options that work whether the person is in range or on chat or not? (And as long as you have the slash-commands available, why not have them work for offline invitations?)

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I'm only saying that because this is for something that will be used very rarely. I'd rather the devs focus on the features used more often. Like, at this point, just about everything else in the game.

I agree with you here, I was just concerned about people who didn't know slash commands all that well.

I was trying to describe something similar with the right click and options menu, I just didn't explain it all that well.

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Oldenmw wrote:
Oldenmw wrote:

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
I'm only saying that because this is for something that will be used very rarely. I'd rather the devs focus on the features used more often. Like, at this point, just about everything else in the game.

I agree with you here, I was just concerned about people who didn't know slash commands all that well.
I was trying to describe something similar with the right click and options menu, I just didn't explain it all that well.

I'd be really surprised if there weren't a right-click options menu. That said, I'd be really surprised to se an "Invite all my alts to SG" item in it. it's something a player might do, what, 2-3 times a year maximum, and most likely 0 times a year? Which is why a buried esoteric command seems appropriate, or better, an extension to an existing command.

But it's so early this is all guesswork anyway.

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I'm only saying that because this is for something that will be used very rarely. I'd rather the devs focus on the features used more often. Like, at this point, just about everything else in the game.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

I'd be really surprised if there weren't a right-click options menu. That said, I'd be really surprised to se an "Invite all my alts to SG" item in it. it's something a player might do, what, 2-3 times a year maximum, and most likely 0 times a year? Which is why a buried esoteric command seems appropriate, or better, an extension to an existing command.
But it's so early this is all guesswork anyway.

Yes I think we can agree on the Right-Click menus. As I mentioned they existed in CoH and worked fairly well for these kinds of things. I would be surprised to not see their equivalents in CoT.

And for what it's worth I don't think an "Invite all the alts of Player X to SG (online or offline)" button would be used by each individual player all that often either. That's exactly why I never stressed the need for any new GUIs for this kind of thing. The only reason I've been brainstorming how it could work here is that out of all the wants and desires talked about back in the CoH forums this was easily the NUMBER ONE most desired SG feature that people ever seemed to talk about constantly for literally years.

To put it into perspective without offline invites the only way a single player could get more of his/her own characters into a personal SG in CoH was to either have multiple accounts or trust another player to help them. This unfortunate situation drove many people nuts. Likewise when you were trying to invite all the alts of another player into your SG you had to sit there and wait for that person to log in each of their characters one at a time - a process that could take an hour or more if you were talking dozens of alts. So even though each individual player may only use this kind of thing once or twice a year it probably would be used hundreds if not thousands of times thoughout the life of the game by at least that many different players.

Do I expect the CoT Devs to be able to offer us something like this? I'm not really sure. But I will guarantee you that if they don't provide some method to do this then it will likely once again become the NUMBER ONE suggestion to pop up about SGs in the CoT forums. Perhaps this would be the right time for some clever Dev to finally put this issue to rest.

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

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Yes I think we can agree on the Right-Click menus. As I mentioned they existed in CoH and worked fairly well for these kinds of things. I would be surprised to not see their equivalents in CoT.

I somehow occasionally invited people to SG by accident when I was fumbling around after something else that was nearby in the menu when things were a bit hectic. I wouldn't mind if they added some kind of confirmation, but I am probably an outlier when it comes to menu competence (among other things, sadly). >_>

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Wanders wrote:
Wanders wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Yes I think we can agree on the Right-Click menus. As I mentioned they existed in CoH and worked fairly well for these kinds of things. I would be surprised to not see their equivalents in CoT.

I somehow occasionally invited people to SG by accident when I was fumbling around after something else that was nearby in the menu when things were a bit hectic. I wouldn't mind if they added some kind of confirmation, but I am probably an outlier when it comes to menu competence (among other things, sadly). >_>

I understand the potential for mis-clicking things in a MMO during combat. But there's a line of thought that suggests getting unexpected pop-up confirmations for things during combat would be equally annoying.

Maybe a compromise (especially for any single SG command that might have the potential to fire off a large number of offline invites) would be to grey out the multiple SG invite options unless you are sitting inside your SG base. Yes that would force you to be safely in your base while using some SG oriented commands, but at least the chance of mis-clicking those options during combat would be greatly reduced.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Wanders wrote:
I somehow occasionally invited people to SG by accident when I was fumbling around after something else that was nearby in the menu when things were a bit hectic. I wouldn't mind if they added some kind of confirmation, but I am probably an outlier when it comes to menu competence (among other things, sadly). >_>

I understand the potential for mis-clicking things in a MMO during combat. But there's a line of thought that suggests getting unexpected pop-up confirmations for things during combat would be equally annoying.

I think popups initiated by the actions of other folks, or popups that result from an action of yours that you are expected to be performing in a busy situation, should definitely be avoided. This case is more of a gray area, since the busier you are, the more likely it is the invite was a boo-boo. A popup due to someone else inviting me is more likely to be a problem (as we saw in CoH, which is why, iirc, they added an option to autodecline). Anyway, whatever they decide on that is likely to be fine by me.

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I wouldn't mind if they

I wouldn't mind if they figure out how to have popups come up in a thumbnail menu on the right or left side of the screen, maybe causing your compass to light up indicating you have a popup to review. Then you have to actually click on the thumbnail to see what the popup is, rather than it interfering with whatever action you're in the middle of.

Also, in conjunction with this, I'l like to see a minimum of one minute to respond to any popup request.

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Ebon_Justice wrote:
Ebon_Justice wrote:

I wouldn't mind if they figure out how to have popups come up in a thumbnail menu on the right or left side of the screen, maybe causing your compass to light up indicating you have a popup to review. Then you have to actually click on the thumbnail to see what the popup is, rather than it interfering with whatever action you're in the middle of.

Yeah, having ways to keep them from grabbing your focus seems like a good approach. They should still be stingy about what they pop up about (or it would get like those 'help things' (I forget what they were called) that CoH had added that popped up so frequently that it was kind of noisy), but that combined with a less in-your-face display would be nice.

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Ebon_Justice wrote:
Ebon_Justice wrote:

I wouldn't mind if they figure out how to have popups come up in a thumbnail menu on the right or left side of the screen, maybe causing your compass to light up indicating you have a popup to review. Then you have to actually click on the thumbnail to see what the popup is, rather than it interfering with whatever action you're in the middle of.

SWTOR has a nicely-done version of this; the pop-up windows for reward notifications (i.e., completion of a companion mission assignment, end-mission rewards) will, if you're in combat or otherwise involved in a response-intensive activity, appear only as a glowing indicator in the top right of your screen that says 'PENDING" (with the number of pending notifications if there are more than one); when you click on the indicator, you get the notification windows, one at a time, until you empty the queue. You also have the ability to close one of these notification windows to put it back into the 'pending' list to clear your screen (i.e., if you get ambushed and need to go back into combat). Something similar could be done for CoT.

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srmalloy wrote:
srmalloy wrote:

Ebon_Justice wrote:
I wouldn't mind if they figure out how to have popups come up in a thumbnail menu on the right or left side of the screen, maybe causing your compass to light up indicating you have a popup to review. Then you have to actually click on the thumbnail to see what the popup is, rather than it interfering with whatever action you're in the middle of.
SWTOR has a nicely-done version of this; the pop-up windows for reward notifications (i.e., completion of a companion mission assignment, end-mission rewards) will, if you're in combat or otherwise involved in a response-intensive activity, appear only as a glowing indicator in the top right of your screen that says 'PENDING" (with the number of pending notifications if there are more than one); when you click on the indicator, you get the notification windows, one at a time, until you empty the queue. You also have the ability to close one of these notification windows to put it back into the 'pending' list to clear your screen (i.e., if you get ambushed and need to go back into combat). Something similar could be done for CoT.

Forgot about that ... yea, that's not a bad system. I do like the idea of being able to chose to have all pop-up notifications default to a notification rather than only not popping up if your engaged in something (not including NPC contact interaction of course)

BTW, for anyone that does like this idea, I set up a new, slightly-more-detailed post in the "talk to the devs" section.

http://cityoftitans.com/forum/suggestion-handling-popup-requests