New efforts!

[brothermutant]

Generally moving any resistance based powers in the pools to defense similar to scorp shield, though different obviously, and adjustments to various ancillery powers would be a smart idea.  Power build up/power boost could be adjusted some this way without screwing people over to much.  But it'd be something to tweak numerous times, not just changed once and then thrown live AKA CO.

Never really thought the ancillary sets needed another +Def power as Def was easy to come by with proper IO bonuses. I did hear that the future was to increase the +res/+res to mez bonuses from IO sets to be more helpful than the low increases they offered at closing. Would have been nice to see what that did for the squishies. I will admit that I was really looking forward to seeing the new power pools as they looked like they were designed to help fill the gaps a little more.

[darkgob]

You know, we've never really heard who is financially backing this project.   Wouldn't it be cool in a way if it wound up being PWE/Cryptic?

no. No. NO.  I would rather the game stay dead than have PWE stick its money-grubbing hands into it.

Remember those abominable Booster Packs we started getting, near the end?  Imagine those dropping as regular drops (commonly), but you have to purchase cash shop items in order to open them.

NO.

[Thunder Glove]

Never really thought the ancillary sets needed another +Def power as Def was easy to come by with proper IO bonuses. I did hear that the future was to increase the +res/+res to mez bonuses from IO sets to be more helpful than the low increases they offered at closing. Would have been nice to see what that did for the squishies. I will admit that I was really looking forward to seeing the new power pools as they looked like they were designed to help fill the gaps a little more.

This was going to be part of I24, yeah.  Set bonuses that gave specific Mez resists were going to be changed so that they granted resistances to all mezzes instead of just one type, and damage resistance on top of it (with the exact type of damage resistance depending on what kind of mezzes it used to protect against).

To give you an idea: my main Brute had 10% higher damage resistances on the I24 beta than he had on live, without otherwise changing anything about his build (which was far from optimal).

[brothermutant]

Nice. An extra 10% res without even trying would be epic. I never liked that my def-based toons (super reflexes or energy aura toons, which I LOVED their concepts) were so weak compared to EVERY OTHER Defense set. Even my Elec armor toon had a significant defense when slotted properly. That's just wrong.

[Risha]

COH tee shirts are available again (so I was notified and this is the link for the troller); http://teespring.com/wecontrol2

[Surelle]

COH tee shirts are available again (so I was notified and this is the link for the troller); http://teespring.com/wecontrol2

Can they legally sell these?!  I never even knew they existed!

The Atlas Park Revival team members should get the Atlas ones, hehe!

[Codewalker]

Can they legally sell these?!

Probably not. I know of a community member who was working on touching up the models and textures* in order to make figurines of NPCs and custom player avatars via 3D printing. Their Shapeways store (of which most of the cost went to printing, they weren't making much if anything off of it) recently got shut down because some busybody reported them.

* Using the normal maps to make a much more detailed mesh than was usually possible to extract from the game

[Sinistar]

Hmm... what about those builds that use the resistance based armor toggle to buff resistance, and already have high amounts of defense? Weren't the pools at least partially designed to help fill holes in builds? :P

They were but when only one pool had a defense power (scorpion shield),  well another pool having +def would have been nice.  But if they can at least release the customizations for the pool powers that would be good, never did like that purple aura it had.

[Arcana]

I might believe that if it were not for some of the private messages I shared with him on the official forums about other gameplay changes. It seems hard to swallow that the powers guy was "forced" only into making pvp changes when he made other huge power changes along the way with more coming in issue 24.

Castle left around Issue 19, and technically "the powers guy" from the end of 2010 to shutdown was actually Black Scorpion as far as I recall.  Black Scorpion was, in my opinion, more aggressive than Castle in implementing changes, although that's just a personal impression (see below).  And most of the blaster power changes coming in I24 were the brain child of Arbiter Hawk (I was discussing those with him very thoroughly right up until literally the day before the shutdown announcement).  Arbiter Hawk was even more aggressive in terms of being gung ho about making major changes.

Except for pet projects you could do in your spare time or hook a few buddy developers into pitching in on during lunch, all major game updates were officially the responsibility of producers to run.  Everyone we thought of as a "dev" like Castle were fundamentally working for the producers.  Most didn't have red names or forum presence, so most players probably didn't even know they existed much less were running the place for most things.  So a lot of the time when the players were seeing game changes that traced back to a particular dev (or someone wearing a dev hat like Positron) they didn't know that while some of those decisions were being made by the dev, others might trace through them back to a producer that was overseeing them on that particular project or strike team.

Because I was never literally in the office at Paragon, what I know of the process comes from my limited contact with it and various conversations, but with that disclaimer, Castle couldn't, and wouldn't, even when he was the "powers guy" just wake up one morning and say "I think PvP needs travel suppression" and then do it.  Closer to the truth, if he actually wanted to do that, he'd first have to write up a design doc as a proposal to do that, including the what's and the why's of it.  Then he'd have to pitch the idea to someone, probably a producer or manager.  That idea would, because it would have major ramifications to the game and touch a lot of areas of development (probably require new code, updating design tools to accommodate the change, powers changes to implement, etc) this one would almost certainly go to committee, so to speak, and get discussed and approved by higher ups.  *If* it was approved a producer would probably be assigned to the task and then work with Castle to manage the process to get it done, including allocating the time and resources of other people.  Castle would, in effect, be working for someone else to implement his own idea.  And I'm skipping over the implementation docs and timelines and FTE estimates and integration with the release schedule and a ton of other little details.

In fact, being "the powers guy" didn't mean Castle just sat in the office making powers and occasionally passing powers wisdom on his minions in the hallways.  It actually meant Castle did a lot less powers design work, and a lot more paperwork just to feed this development process.  Although he still did powers work, Castle was more of a manager than a spreadsheet jockey by Issue 13. 

[Arcana]

I'm not saying CoH was without it's share of trolls.  I'm just saying CO's trolls have sunk to such lows that it's absolutely sickening.  They literally destroyed the game and really mislead the developers into doing the stupidest things.

You should have been there for beta.

[LaughingAlex]

You should have been there for beta.

For CoX or CO?  I do know the very, very first bait/switch was called on CO just on release, over the gigantic day-one release patch which was nothing but super sized nerfs that made 90% of the games powers useless.

Edit: Eh, then your speaking of CoH.  But tell me did the trolls deliberately try to cross that line into ruining peoples lives real life, or actively taunt people who lost real money speaking generally horrible things of others as if glad they lost all that money?  Or guarantee only one playstyle was viable?  Even earlier CoH I recall wasn't that brutally bad :).

[Dev7on]

COH tee shirts are available again (so I was notified and this is the link for the troller); http://teespring.com/wecontrol2

The Mastermind t-shirt is available too.

[Codewalker]

Castle left around Issue 19, and technically "the powers guy" from the end of 2010 to shutdown was actually Black Scorpion as far as I recall.

Black Scorpion moved on to more of a general systems development position, and maybe even to the "secret project" at some point, and wasn't working on powers any more as of 2011-ish I believe. At that point, Synapse (Phil) took over as the lead powers designer. Synapse and Arbiter Hawk(ward) were the primary drivers behind designing and implementing both the post-Freedom premium powersets as well as the I24 balance changes. I liked Hawk a lot, we exchanged PMs about mechanics and how stuff was implemented quite a bit.

Synapse didn't even work for Paragon (or NC NorCal as it was known at the time) when the I13 changes were being designed, and was only hired on in a low-level position sometime during the beta for it.

Given that Castle left in 2010... Well, I'll just say thank you for pointing out the flat out wrongness of that statement about the "powers guy", because you did it nicer than I was going to.

[Arcana]

Black Scorpion moved on to more of a general systems development position, and maybe even to the "secret project" at some point, and wasn't working on powers any more as of 2011-ish I believe. At that point, Synapse (Phil) took over as the lead powers designer. Synapse and Arbiter Hawk(ward) were the primary drivers behind designing and implementing both the post-Freedom premium powersets as well as the I24 balance changes. I liked Hawk a lot, we exchanged PMs about mechanics and how stuff was implemented quite a bit.

Synapse didn't even work for Paragon (or NC NorCal as it was known at the time) when the I13 changes were being designed, and was only hired on in a low-level position sometime during the beta for it.

Given that Castle left in 2010... Well, I'll just say thank you for pointing out the flat out wrongness of that statement about the "powers guy", because you did it nicer than I was going to.

I remember at the end it was Synapse and Arbiter Hawk that were primarily involved with implementing actual powers type stuff, but I thought BS was still in the loop somewhere.  Although now that I think about it, I think BS handed my spreadsheets to Synapse, so that must have been when the switch took place.  That was around when I first got suspicious about the goings on at Paragon, vis-a-vis the people working in the "alpha site" but that was inside ball I couldn't even hint around at the time.

I liked AH as well.  He was crazy, but the good kind of crazy when it came to powers design.  He was the dev I thought was the most open to sticking his neck out and trying out of the box ideas that would have gotten him put in timeout next to the Mountain Dew machine in the old days, specifically in the area of powerset design.

[Arcana]

For CoX or CO?  I do know the very, very first bait/switch was called on CO just on release, over the gigantic day-one release patch which was nothing but super sized nerfs that made 90% of the games powers useless.

Edit: Eh, then your speaking of CoH.  But tell me did the trolls deliberately try to cross that line into ruining peoples lives real life, or actively taunt people who lost real money speaking generally horrible things of others as if glad they lost all that money?  Or guarantee only one playstyle was viable?  Even earlier CoH I recall wasn't that brutally bad :).

No, I was talking about CO.  The very first "bait and switch" in CO wasn't the just before release nerf.  You could argue CO already experienced three of them before the game even released.  First, CO was going to be an "open" powers system where you could pick any power.  I said that was stupid with a capital S, and of course the rabid forum whatevers shouted that down without even considering the arguments, chief among them was that Champions itself (the PnP game) was proof that was a bad idea: although you could technically do that in the HERO system, that came with huge disclaimers and caveats intended to be moderated by a human GM that could rewrite the rules at any time - which a computer MMO wouldn't be able to do.  Guess what happened when it occurred to people what would happen if someone decided to take enough defensive powers?

Then it was going to be frameworks.  Like power trees, sort of, but more flexible, also inspired by the HERO system.  Then we finally got the game that was released, which was *extremely* thin power trees (granted, there were a lot of them, but they were more power bonsai than power trees) and the passive slot, whereby you could only have one defense or one offensive power.  (The concept of Frameworks made their return when CO went F2P).

Technically, all those changes happened during beta and can't really be called "bait and switch" in the sense that beta participants are supposed to know that things can change at any time to any degree without warning: that's the purpose of beta.  But still, it shows the dramatic shifts in what the game was going to be that the devs see-sawed between.  You could say that the release-nerf was the *smallest* of the major shifts that occurred during the initial development process.

All throughout the process, the forum regulars were, if I'm being brutally honest, completely clueless as to what would make a functional game.  They were championing ideas that would have been dumb even by CoH suggestion forum standards, and making arguments that even the average CoH scrapper forum regular would recognize as quantitatively dubious.  But doing so with a lot of gusto.  I got the distinct impression, sometimes via direct statement, that the CO forum participants felt that CO was their chance to "get it right" as if the only problem with all the other MMOs (including CoH) was that *they* weren't in charge.  And anyone saying different was the enemy.  The sad part is not that I think they were wrong about the influence they had on Cryptic, but actually that I think they were somewhat right.  And that's tragic.

I'm not saying there isn't things to love in CO (I've started playing it again in small spurts as I have the time, just to see what's different, also lifetime sub) but I consider CO to be a priori proof that the people who said archetypes were a dumb idea in CoH and removing them would be a net plus were 100% wrong.  The decision to forgo archetypes in CO caused a cascade of problems that might not be intractable, but would require far more design acumen than Cryptic possessed at the time.  I can only imagine how much better CO would have been had it launched with the F2P frameworks, and delivered freeform as a downstream veteran reward.

[LaughingAlex]

No, I was talking about CO.  The very first "bait and switch" in CO wasn't the just before release nerf.  You could argue CO already experienced three of them before the game even released.  First, CO was going to be an "open" powers system where you could pick any power.  I said that was stupid with a capital S, and of course the rabid forum whatevers shouted that down without even considering the arguments, chief among them was that Champions itself (the PnP game) was proof that was a bad idea: although you could technically do that in the HERO system, that came with huge disclaimers and caveats intended to be moderated by a human GM that could rewrite the rules at any time - which a computer MMO wouldn't be able to do.  Guess what happened when it occurred to people what would happen if someone decided to take enough defensive powers?

Then it was going to be frameworks.  Like power trees, sort of, but more flexible, also inspired by the HERO system.  Then we finally got the game that was released, which was *extremely* thin power trees (granted, there were a lot of them, but they were more power bonsai than power trees) and the passive slot, whereby you could only have one defense or one offensive power.  (The concept of Frameworks made their return when CO went F2P).

Technically, all those changes happened during beta and can't really be called "bait and switch" in the sense that beta participants are supposed to know that things can change at any time to any degree without warning: that's the purpose of beta.  But still, it shows the dramatic shifts in what the game was going to be that the devs see-sawed between.  You could say that the release-nerf was the *smallest* of the major shifts that occurred during the initial development process.

All throughout the process, the forum regulars were, if I'm being brutally honest, completely clueless as to what would make a functional game.  They were championing ideas that would have been dumb even by CoH suggestion forum standards, and making arguments that even the average CoH scrapper forum regular would recognize as quantitatively dubious.  But doing so with a lot of gusto.  I got the distinct impression, sometimes via direct statement, that the CO forum participants felt that CO was their chance to "get it right" as if the only problem with all the other MMOs (including CoH) was that *they* weren't in charge.  And anyone saying different was the enemy.  The sad part is not that I think they were wrong about the influence they had on Cryptic, but actually that I think they were somewhat right.  And that's tragic.

I'm not saying there isn't things to love in CO (I've started playing it again in small spurts as I have the time, just to see what's different, also lifetime sub) but I consider CO to be a priori proof that the people who said archetypes were a dumb idea in CoH and removing them would be a net plus were 100% wrong.  The decision to forgo archetypes in CO caused a cascade of problems that might not be intractable, but would require far more design acumen than Cryptic possessed at the time.  I can only imagine how much better CO would have been had it launched with the F2P frameworks, and delivered freeform as a downstream veteran reward.

Given what Silverspar told me one time, I could believe you there.  It seems they try to hard to please everyone, but never come up with a scope on what should be done and what shouldn't be done.  And I am not surprised at how people behaved.

And yeah I feel they missed the scope with CO early on, that much is very evident.

REcently though I'd noticed another trend, spying in CO.  Anti-rp trolls now send spies into rp sgs to try and sabotage their image, they hit an sg I belong to recently.  We now find ourselves rather paranoid, avoidin club caprice much of the time.

And I think CO-only CoH-hating spies had infiltrated the CoX channel in CO.  From people who know nothing about CoX to people who down talk any speaking of these efforts and general trolling others.  One guy goaded himself into calling himself a scrub, indirectly(answered in a way a scrub normally would to a question I asked, which I did after I had detected a level of dislike towards other playstyles).  But the guy spoke of a level of distaste towards these efforts already.  I was left suspecting him as some kind of spy.

It's actually somewhat routine to meet someone who never, ever played city of heroes.  Or even say very false things about it.  Such as controllers and boss rank enemies, the guy said only a dominator could hold them period.  Well, many stepped in to prove him wrong, he wouldn't budge, extremely stubborn.  I was left suspicious.  Deeply suspicious.  But the guy I mentioned earlier?  Yeah, total traitor, at least, thats how I felt.

Edit: It's hard to even impossible to trust anyone in CO anymore given all the recent events.

[Arcana]

It's actually somewhat routine to meet someone who never, ever played city of heroes.  Or even say very false things about it.  Such as controllers and boss rank enemies, the guy said only a dominator could hold them period.  Well, many stepped in to prove him wrong, he wouldn't budge, extremely stubborn.

To be fair, there were people like that in City of Heroes itself, which is to say that somehow even while playing the game they had completely false notions about the very game they were playing.  They were just not as vocal on the CoH forums because of course they would get laughed off of them.  But now that the game is gone and people have nothing but their memories to go on, and no one can trivially prove in public that the game worked in a particular way, those people have found a voice.

I was pugging in CoH in 2005ish, early in the game but still substantially after release, when a player on my team tried to convince the team that he should tank for the team with his blaster because, and I quote "I have stealth so they can't see me so they can't shoot me."  I tried to explain that's not how stealth worked, but he was adamant and so the team decided to just let him try.  Needless to say, we let him take alpha after alpha and die over and over again, but even after being vaporized by several spawns he insisted those mobs had to be bugged, because he said it worked before.

Also, he thought we should stay far back from him when he engaged, because he said "the sound of our footsteps could alert the enemies to his presence."  After that mission was over, we all decided it would be best if we moved at least two zones back from him.

I'm guessing that one day on a team he was bubbled or something but convinced himself it was stealth that was making him unhittable rather than the force fields, or something similar, but the ability for players to convince themselves of strange things that were not true was sometimes mind boggling.  I specifically made this video because I got into a forum argument with someone who claimed Regen was worthless against bosses because most CoH bosses could one-shot a regen scrapper.  How you could play the game for years and think any standard non-AV critter could one-shot a scrapper is something I still can't figure out, because its not that most can't, its that *none* can.  Which means its an event you couldn't have witnessed even once, much less think it was commonplace.

The notion that controllers couldn't hold bosses is a little weird, but I can imagine someone reading articles about CoH, getting the details all screwed up, and ending up there.  Maybe they got confused about AV purple triangles, or Elite boss mag protection, or maybe they read complaints controllers made about the effectiveness of holds relative to dominators and assumed that must have been because controller holds were totally ineffective.  Its very easy to google search yourself into a knowledge base that is very brittle, and also amazingly wrong.

There was a phase I went through where most of my posts were CoH myth-busting, between about Issue 4 and Issue 9ish.  I would see someone posting something about how the game worked that didn't sound right to me, I would then test it, and then post a counter.  I can recall responding to people saying the tohit rand was streaky, that insights could make tohit wrap around to zero, that interrupt enhancements sped up attacks, that without stamina you couldn't run toggles and attack at the same time, that if you attacked a critter that was part of a group you'd automatically aggro the entire group, that knockback made pulling impossible, that SR defenses worked against all psionic attacks, that Dull Pain didn't have a heal.

The post that put me on the path to being, well, Arcanaville, was itself a mythbuster post: someone claimed that all blaster sniper attacks were just as fast, even though I could see they were not.  The kicker: the devs initially backed up that other poster.  That forced me to figure out how to prove that was false, and that lead to using demorecords to calculate how fast an attack activated, and that led me to talking to some of the Q&A people, and the next thing you know I wake up and I'm an authority on defense and power mechanics.

I was just here to fly around and shoot stuff.  I didn't think I would be playing the game for more than a couple of months.

[LaughingAlex]

Yeah I certainly notice that.  It's much harder to defend city of heroes or to speak of it's positives regarding support cause no one ever saw how good support in a game really works.  Which is sad and funny, because many non mmo rpgs actually have a wider variety of support, including earlier ones.  And sadly the "noobs" as I call them(the classic definition, player who never learns how to play even after many years of playing), they have certainly proved more annoying for it.  They have the mentality of being right but now course they can say whatever as no one can prove them wrong as you say.

I remember a number of funny cases myself in city of heroes.  Alot of misconceptions about crowd control namely, as some people thought holds and stuns ended the moment anything hit them, when course only sleep behaved that way.  Even fear course re-activated frequently.  I think the most common annoying player to me was in fact the person who truely thought healing was the only effective support.

The pug story makes me laugh.  I remember a few people like that, who had silly misconceptions about enemy abilities.  Some guys I encountered literally refused to believe defense worked in the game.  These guys insisted on healing being the be-all and end all.  What was even sillier is they'd make stupider mistakes, such as skipping mind over body on a willpower tanker(yes, you read that right), or ignoring the value of build up and aim on blasters.  Occasionally they'd pick up on something, but honestly they were as bad as klackons in a master of orion game when it came to learning the game(slow to learn and uncreative, just as klackons in the 4x games were).  Often very uncreative.  Thankfully not all of this group were like that and a couple did understand the game well enough.

I think the knockback misconceptions were the most annoying though.  See my post about pvpers who thought knockback distance was a time-based mechanic.

Edit: Clarified what the misconception was.

[brothermutant]

I try to remember the time I was sure of a game mechanic and was so incredibly wrong it was ridiculous. The team (multiple people) did their best to educate me, and I must admit they did so politely (I was adamant I was correct but alas was soooooo wrong). Every time I see someone saying something wrong, I do my best to patiently show them where they can find the correct info or how to "test" their point themselves. I even offer to help test (sometimes a test dummy comes in super handy).

That is one of the reasons I miss CoX so much...the community. The community, I found, was extremely friendly and helpful. Sure, there are always bad apples but by and large CoX was awesome. Even the creepy guys/gals some game chats seem to promote were not abundant in CoX (at least not on any of the servers I was on).

[rebel 1812]

No, I was talking about CO.  The very first "bait and switch" in CO wasn't the just before release nerf.  You could argue CO already experienced three of them before the game even released.  First, CO was going to be an "open" powers system where you could pick any power.  I said that was stupid with a capital S, and of course the rabid forum whatevers shouted that down without even considering the arguments, chief among them was that Champions itself (the PnP game) was proof that was a bad idea: although you could technically do that in the HERO system, that came with huge disclaimers and caveats intended to be moderated by a human GM that could rewrite the rules at any time - which a computer MMO wouldn't be able to do.  Guess what happened when it occurred to people what would happen if someone decided to take enough defensive powers?

Then it was going to be frameworks.  Like power trees, sort of, but more flexible, also inspired by the HERO system.  Then we finally got the game that was released, which was *extremely* thin power trees (granted, there were a lot of them, but they were more power bonsai than power trees) and the passive slot, whereby you could only have one defense or one offensive power.  (The concept of Frameworks made their return when CO went F2P).

Technically, all those changes happened during beta and can't really be called "bait and switch" in the sense that beta participants are supposed to know that things can change at any time to any degree without warning: that's the purpose of beta.  But still, it shows the dramatic shifts in what the game was going to be that the devs see-sawed between.  You could say that the release-nerf was the *smallest* of the major shifts that occurred during the initial development process.

All throughout the process, the forum regulars were, if I'm being brutally honest, completely clueless as to what would make a functional game.  They were championing ideas that would have been dumb even by CoH suggestion forum standards, and making arguments that even the average CoH scrapper forum regular would recognize as quantitatively dubious.  But doing so with a lot of gusto.  I got the distinct impression, sometimes via direct statement, that the CO forum participants felt that CO was their chance to "get it right" as if the only problem with all the other MMOs (including CoH) was that *they* weren't in charge.  And anyone saying different was the enemy.  The sad part is not that I think they were wrong about the influence they had on Cryptic, but actually that I think they were somewhat right.  And that's tragic.

I'm not saying there isn't things to love in CO (I've started playing it again in small spurts as I have the time, just to see what's different, also lifetime sub) but I consider CO to be a priori proof that the people who said archetypes were a dumb idea in CoH and removing them would be a net plus were 100% wrong.  The decision to forgo archetypes in CO caused a cascade of problems that might not be intractable, but would require far more design acumen than Cryptic possessed at the time.  I can only imagine how much better CO would have been had it launched with the F2P frameworks, and delivered freeform as a downstream veteran reward.

I don't think thats why freeform fail.  It failed because there wasn't much synergy from different powersets.  I tried to build a fire and heavy weapons toon, because there was some minor fire effects on some of the heavy weapons powers.  But it didn't work well and the char is gimped.  You really need to stay within the archtype or that powerset to build a powerful toon.