I "main" Marvel Heroes now. Steam tells me I have just over 1200 hours in game. Sounds like a lot?
I've just been going through my screenshots folders having a bit of a spring clean, and I made screenshots post shutdown announcement of all my favourite toons speaking to the M-pedestrian that gave you hours on patrol.
Emp/Psi Defender : 1,021 hours on patrol
En/En Blaster : 821 hours on patrol (I just got my Kirby dots on the day of the announcement too!)
TA/A Defender : 737 hours on patrol (I really persevered with Longbow Archer)
Fire/Storm controller : 599 hours on patrol
Peacebringer : 442 hours on patrol
BS/Shield Scrapper : 367 hours on patrol
That's just over 4,000 hours with my top 6 characters. Didn't count my deleted Fire/Fire blaster or Ice/Ice tank who I played to death but could never quite get them where I wanted them. Or the myriad different ATs I never got round to fully fleshing out.
Putting it into context, that's 500 8 hour days. If you assume a week of bank holidays and 4 weeks leave, and a standard 5 day working week, that's like doing a full time job for 2 years!!
I guess I loved that game :)
(https://i.imgur.com/xybJWX3h.jpg) (http://imgur.com/xybJWX3)
Quote from: Harlequin565 on September 04, 2015, 09:57:51 AM
That's just over 4,000 hours with my top 6 characters. Didn't count my deleted Fire/Fire blaster or Ice/Ice tank who I played to death but could never quite get them where I wanted them. Or the myriad different ATs I never got round to fully fleshing out.
Putting it into context, that's 500 8 hour days. If you assume a week of bank holidays and 4 weeks leave, and a standard 5 day working week, that's like doing a full time job for 2 years!!
I guess I loved that game :)
At some point in (I think) 2008, I had been running my second account almost exclusively after buying a year of subscription time. When I got the renewal email, I checked my total and found that I had played 2400 hours in a year. Then I did the math and realized I had WORKED AT MY JOB for only 2000 hours over the same period. At that point I figured I was addicted and tried to quit cold turkey. I did, but came back about 9 months later. I vowed to never again check my totals :).
After 8 years I had 36 living characters (not counting the dozens I deleted over the years). They were all on Virtue. And since we couldn't always buy extra character slots in the early days; when the time came that we finally could I just let my altitus go crazy.
I relished each new character and I miss them all dearly. Hours played? I never checked. But whatever total value it is I'd have liked to have doubled it ;D
4000 hours with that wonky UI you've got going in that pic is pretty impressive :P
Quote from: chuckv3 on September 04, 2015, 02:18:55 PM
At some point in (I think) 2008, I had been running my second account almost exclusively after buying a year of subscription time. When I got the renewal email, I checked my total and found that I had played 2400 hours in a year. Then I did the math and realized I had WORKED AT MY JOB for only 2000 hours over the same period. At that point I figured I was addicted and tried to quit cold turkey. I did, but came back about 9 months later. I vowed to never again check my totals :).
I am not going to do that calculation. You scared me off.
Quote from: Vee on September 04, 2015, 04:26:11 PM
4000 hours with that wonky UI you've got going in that pic is pretty impressive :P
And the sad thing is, I can't remember what most of it was for. There was surely a method to the madness.
...I'm fairly certain Agge had close to or more than 2000 hours all on her own. And that's not counting the dozens of other toons still existing at shut-down and hundred(s?) deleted over seven years. Oh god. I had/have a problem.
Quote from: Vee on September 04, 2015, 04:26:11 PM
4000 hours with that wonky UI you've got going in that pic is pretty impressive :P
I always enjoyed seeing how other people had their screens set up.
I know with the monitor I had, there's no way I could have had a set up like that and still see my character.
Quote from: ukaserex on September 06, 2015, 12:45:35 PM
I always enjoyed seeing how other people had their screens set up.
I know with the monitor I had, there's no way I could have had a set up like that and still see my character.
Monitor resolution settings and the games UI scaling feature should allow you to do that even on an old CRT monitor.
Quote from: ukaserex on September 06, 2015, 12:45:35 PM
I always enjoyed seeing how other people had their screens set up.
I know with the monitor I had, there's no way I could have had a set up like that and still see my character.
Did you notice the camera angle?
I usally ran the camera right behind the character, like when you press the 'B' key.
I noticed the lack of the nav window. that would have made it difficult for me to find things, like the mission door and the exit button.
The long chat window makes a lot of sense, but I don't understand 2 team search windows.
I also had a team window. And when running a healing defender, I would put the team window down front for easy access to the team members for targetted healing.
Something else I did, I would put the target window under the menu/health bars. That way it was easier for me to keep an eye on his and mine at the same time.
Also, it is interesting detaching the inspirations like that, that way you have to open them back-up after looking at powers or enhancements or such.
Someone should come out with an UI arrangement tips guiude.
Yeah, they could call it:
"Super Fire Dragon's Helpful Hints to a Better City of Heroes User Interface"
I didn't relocate the team window on my defender, since I used hotkeys to target teammates and had a small enough screen. I agree with keeping a nav-map open though, that stuff was critical.
My favorite UI trick was having a 4th power tray right next to the inspiration tray with the juicy temp powers. You can see my UI in this vid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVW9ld08uHw) (yes, shameless plug).
OK, so I'm now dealing with UI setup anxiety.
I'd probably be feeling worse if I hadn't just looked at my own screenshot and thought - "Where's my nav window?"
I also used numpad binds for AB/CM/HO and various other single target buffs on other characters.
I have no clue why there are 2 search windows. Must be a logical reason for that.
There are some very effective new medications for people who have the map at the bottom of the screen.
I won't post a screenie of my Kerbal Space Program + Kerbal Engineer setup then.
It's not pleasant.
I would probably have that amount of time as well....CoH was amazing.
Come on, peoples.
Post your UI so that we might tear it apart.
I've spent most of my time sitting in front of a computer for years due to medical reasons. I've been afraid to look at my /played time in games for quite a while now. I've still probably spent more time playing CoH than any other game online since I first played LotRD over 2 decades ago. I know at least my crab spider had over 1200 hours at one point, and he wasn't even my 'main'. :-[
No real idea how many hours total I logged in CoH, but I played for more than 8 years, as many hours as I could get away with and still claim to have a RL! :) So much, in fact, that my teenaged daughter seriously considered an 'intervention', ha!
I loved every minute, met many wonderful people through the game, and would do it all again. WILL do it all again, whenever a team manages to finally purchase the game and IP rights. Oh, so very yes.
As a comparison UI layout to tear apart, this is my 3rd from last screen, showing my UI as per shutdown. And yes, I was evicted from Paragon City (Union) while stood on top of the Atlas globe as my original toon, with friends.
(https://i.imgur.com/oaXdnV5.jpg)
(full image resolution is 1920x1200, I could still see fine :) )
The biggest thing about the UI that I don'tlike, and it's your UI so feel free, is having the enhancement tray opened all the time. That seems like a distraction. And the combat attributes, I liked to have mine above the main menu, yes I would drag down the main menu. I would also put the target window underneath the main menu, so I could compare who was dying faster, me of him. I think that it is clever what you did with the extra chat tabs. I would have a tray for macros. Like I had this one macro where my character would say "looking for team ..." and do the binoculars emote.
Quote from: Paragon Avenger on September 19, 2015, 08:47:26 PM
The biggest thing about the UI that I don'tlike, and it's your UI so feel free, is having the enhancement tray opened all the time. That seems like a distraction. And the combat attributes, I liked to have mine above the main menu, yes I would drag down the main menu. I would also put the target window underneath the main menu, so I could compare who was dying faster, me of him. I think that it is clever what you did with the extra chat tabs. I would have a tray for macros. Like I had this one macro where my character would say "looking for team ..." and do the binoculars emote.
Why would I object to reading your thoughts on my UI when that's the entire reason I posted it?
That said, here's some of the reasoning behind it, even if a lot of it boils down to 'That's what I was used to'.
The Enhancement tray was kept open so I could see when it was time to go sell stuff off. Old habit from I3 days, and a useful source of inf (not that I needed it, to be honest, given my net liquid worth at the end...)
Combat attributes were put there deliberately as a significant portion of my attention was in that area of the screen anyway, watching power recharge timers.
The main menu was left where it was when I learnt the game. That's where my reflexes knew to look for that info.
Macros/emotes were all bound to keys, except on my MM's, where I had 4 set up on alt+2-4 for basic minion commands (Defensive/Follow, Passive/Follow, Goto/Aggressive. Aggressive/follow was merely a consequence of me hitting the forward button on the side of my mouse, which was keybound to 'Kill that target over there'. Hit that button with nothing targeted and bingo, the bots were in aggressive follow. Or shooting things to ribbons, either was good, usually...).
*ALL* of my pet using characters had one identical keybind though - the SCRAM button : "/bind add release_pets". Slap the + key on the numpad when the pets are about to do something stoooopid and they all go away, before they've done the stoooopid if you're paying good enough attention. Bound to the numpad + key so if I really had to, I could just slap the general area of the right hand end of the keyboard and the pets would go away. After enough Controllering/Masterminding/pet wrangling, you got good at spotting incipient pet idiocy. <grin>
This is my Cov Main's UI (Magic origin Robotics/Traps/Paranoid Moron<ahem> Black Scorpion MM)
(https://i.imgur.com/2M3qdt2.jpg)
(the bio and salvage screens were open because I took that as one of the memento mori screens of all my alts, showing what they had by way of shiny stuff at the end.)
I pretty much had the UI layout standardised, with similar (for a given definition of similar) powers positioned in similar tray slots, so that my tiny little mind didn't have to do too much work when I was alting around. Powers were postioned in trays 1-3 for ease of use with the number keys, ctrl and alt to minimise the amount of stretching for key combinations. I saw video of people playing by clicking all powers with the mouse... It looked like insanity to me... I used the mouse for view control and target selection when tab, t and y weren't enough (nearest, previous and next target)
And I should probably shut up now and go to sleep. :)
I'll show off my UI set up too. This is my Ice/Kinetic Controller, but this is the final configuration for all of my characters:
(https://i1168.photobucket.com/albums/r500/serialbeggar/COH/Buinel%20-%20stf_zpsfweghslj.png)
Not shown is the Team window which is positioned in the bottom-middle, between the power trays. I'm a mouser for power activations, so I need the Team window close to the power trays to minimize cursor travel when buffing. Every character, regardless of archetype, has the Pets window out too. Although I keep the Pets window for Masterminds to the left of the Team window since it's big.
I also had a problem lol. I racked up so many hours when I was really young, I didn't even realize it. It's amazing how much fun I had, you don't even realize how much time passed.
7029 hours on a toon that I created when I was 9 years old (11 years ago). RIP : O
(https://images.weserv.nl/?url=puu.sh%2FklvLc%2F1d00ad41c0.jpg)
Quote from: Paragon Avenger on September 07, 2015, 04:11:40 AM
Come on, peoples.
Post your UI so that we might tear it apart.
This almost made me laugh. I did grin, however. For me, that's like a normal person's standing ovation.
Quote from: Noyjitat on September 06, 2015, 01:35:27 PM
Monitor resolution settings and the games UI scaling feature should allow you to do that even on an old CRT monitor.
Quite true, Noy. But - for whatever reason, I never got reading glasses until about 2 years ago - I just couldn't see the words when the resolution was set so I could fit everything in with so-called "good visibility". Now that I've gotten over my ego and just gotten some reading glasses, I could indeed do that.
Quote from: ukaserex on September 23, 2015, 06:59:21 PM
This almost made me laugh. I did grin, however. For me, that's like a normal person's standing ovation.
Thank you.
Quote from: Rigo42 on September 23, 2015, 05:18:17 PM
I also had a problem lol. I racked up so many hours when I was really young, I didn't even realize it. It's amazing how much fun I had, you don't even realize how much time passed.
7029 hours on a toon that I created when I was 9 years old (11 years ago). RIP : O
>7,000 hours on one character.
Oh my!
Quote from: Harlequin565 on September 24, 2015, 09:49:07 AM
>7,000 hours on one character.
Oh my!
Either a very very good build, or a very very bad one and you're stubborn.