New efforts!

[FloatingFatMan]

That's what personally irritated me, this notion that every single part of the game had to appeal to a player, or else the game was broken.  I would have loved it if AE gave no rewards, or if it gave rewards that were only worth something inside of AE.  Would the farmers and powerlevelers have played AE then? No. GOOD! AE was never intended to be a farming or powerleveling tool, it was meant for players to create and publish their own stories.

Exactly. The only rewards you should have gotten from the AE, are AE specific rewards. Like unlocking more map types or powerset combinations or costume pieces or NPC groups...  -Possibly- some badges depending on the number of plays a published mission gets...

[FloatingFatMan]

You see I thought AE at first was for PVP!

To be able to create missions and either helpers or foes to inhabit a PvP based scenario. When I saw what is was - I just thought oh, it's a farming system.

AE would have been -perfect- for roleplayers... If some dimwit hadn't decided to disable emoting in there... Seriously.. WHY!?!?!?

[Arcana]

I tried STO, and it lasted about an hour.  I had higher hopes that it would fill the CoH void, as I'd heard others share this sentiment before, but for me it was not to be.  Maybe if I'd given it more time.  I found the interface clunky, space combat irritatingly fiddly, and the general presentation of levelling a character very lacklustre. 

I find that STO has, at least for me and I think for many players, an odd interest curve.  In the beginning, like many MMOs its a pretty fun ride.  But then there's a significant tedium zone where the basics get boring and the advanced stuff is still too opaque to be interesting.  It gets better once you figure out what the heck all the various systems do and how they work and what's the best way to participate in them.  After that, like most MMOs (including CoH) it becomes whether you can find your own fun in the game.

[Arcana]

I wrote a long forum post back in the day expressing my view on the issue.  I believe one of the biggest issues is that XP rewards for critters were calculated independent of context.  That is to say, if mob A is worth a base 1000 xp, then it's worth that whether mob B is in the enemy group or not.  That made it trivial to have all enemies in a particular group vulnerable to the same kind of character.  In the classic example, if practically all damage done by an enemy group is fire, then having high fire resistance and defense is very effective at neutralizing them.  On the other hand, if a particular enemy does almost entirely fire damage, but is placed in a group of enemies with diverse damage types, then the contextual weakness of that particular enemy to fire resistance/defense is less significant.  To that end I would have liked an algorithm for measuring diversity in an enemy group with respect to various factors: damage types dealt, damage resistance/defense, protection against different controls, etc.  The key point being that lack of diversity in any one area creates an opportunity for the "right" character to exploit.

I wouldn't claim that as the silver bullet or anything, but I do believe it would have been a step in the right direction.

But for the fact that the devs didn't have the resources to implement it, the custom critter system would have addressed this weakness.  When I was working on it, I made a trivial silly mistake in the implementation that a QA person spotted: it was possible with my valuation formulas for players to make all-melee critters that were trivially exploitable for full XP.  So I recommended some fail safes to prevent that: on top of the fact that melee attacks were devalued, the lack of range forced a hard cap on the value of the critter.  It occurred to me then that a more advanced system would work to value critters and critter groups better: on top of valuation systems, there would be a few failsafe checks to make sure critters that had critical vulnerabilities were hardcapped on their valuation.  So a critter's value would be based on a combination of their offensive and defensive "strength" but offensive strength would be moderated if all the offense was too focused on one damage type; ditto defensive weaknesses.  In effect, a critter's strength would be based on the value of all of its strengths and capped by its most critical weaknesses.  That way you couldn't simply compensate for a critical weakness by piling on more strengths in other areas, leaving that weakness exploitable.

Even if I gave my time away for free (and I was perfectly willing to do that) there was no way I could have gotten that approved.  But I shelved the idea thinking maybe down the road it could have been revisited.  I thought Black Scorpion and Arbiter Hawk could have been persuaded to take a second look post I25-I26ish.

[Arcana]

AE would have been -perfect- for roleplayers... If some dimwit hadn't decided to disable emoting in there... Seriously.. WHY!?!?!?

My memory is a bit hazy on that; do you mean player emotes or NPC scripted emotes?  NPC scripted emotes has a weird technical history I know some of.  Player emotes I honestly didn't look at too much in the AE.

[LaughingAlex]

Custom NPC farms in AE were much like the numerous anime mods on the nexus network, while AE had some potentially great stories they were totally obscured.  You saw the same problem with the nexus network, you see to many otakus posting anime mod after anime mod after anime mod that people actually associate the entire modding community as nothing but a bunch of otakus.

It's kind of shameful because again, so many awesome mods out there that do amazing things.  I've been playing with a mod called "Tale of Two Wastelands", it basically merges fallout 3 into new vegas.  So you can play both games in the same game(New vegas).  While it has it's faults, and certainly doesn't help the poor story behind fallout 3, it is a nice effort that you just don't often see due to all the anime mods obscuring everything.  It's a mod that i'll certainly remember.

Which is certainly not true, there is a huge amount of amazing mods out there that have nothing to do with making women into disproportionate, badly animated naked anime chicks.  Such mods are unremarkable and highly forgettable.  Not to mention you also have alot of "Godly overpowered anime weapon" mods to designed for the ultimate god mode sue fantasy.
And so to are the farms in AE, who remembers the plot behind every AE farm?  I bet it'll only be maybe one plot and even then it's probably as good as a generic porno story; made only to justify why your destroying so many harmless enemies.  Because lets face it, every farm was made deliberately so some melee player could curb-stomp them with zero risk to themselves.  Fire aura?  Fight all fire blasting enemies.  Electrical armor?  Fight all electrical armor users ect.  Enemies that just can't really kill you.  Just like the above in many ways, heck some of the AE farms were even anime themed in the mob design.

It's a shame.

I'm going to post something on youtube, for a mod I remember being made for Myth 1.  I remade it for Myth 2 with some, um, physics adjustments to make it work.

[Sinistar]

I find that STO has, at least for me and I think for many players, an odd interest curve.  In the beginning, like many MMOs its a pretty fun ride.  But then there's a significant tedium zone where the basics get boring and the advanced stuff is still too opaque to be interesting.  It gets better once you figure out what the heck all the various systems do and how they work and what's the best way to participate in them.  After that, like most MMOs (including CoH) it becomes whether you can find your own fun in the game.

Last star trek game I liked was Star Fleet Academy

[FloatingFatMan]

My memory is a bit hazy on that; do you mean player emotes or NPC scripted emotes?  NPC scripted emotes has a weird technical history I know some of.  Player emotes I honestly didn't look at too much in the AE.

Player emoting. the "/me does something" that you could do literally anywhere else, EXCEPT inside the AE... :(

Mind you, by that point, most of us RPers were totally convinced that if the devs had 2 equal choices of doing something, they would deliberately choose the one that was unfriendly to RP, so really.. Them disabling player emoting in the AE was just another kick to the balls that we judged as "effing typical"...

Another great example of that was Walk.  Years and years of asking for the simple ability to walk. .And what do they do when they finally give it to us? TURN OFF ALL OUR OTHER EFFING POWERS!?!?!?!?

[LaughingAlex]

Here is a video I made of perhaps one of the oldest Myth The Fallen Lords modding tricks in action.  It's not my idea, but more I simply made the adjustments necessary for Myth 2 Soulblighter.  The original creator of the mod deserves the credit, though it's been so long ago that it's especially difficult to find the original posts and whatnot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owigyMLC9PI

The chain reaction begins shortly after a dwarf gives his little laughs.

[Kriiden]

Not trying to derail the topic or anything...

...but 800 pages? :o

Here's hoping we see the game back before page 1600.

[FloatingFatMan]

Here is a video I made of perhaps one of the oldest Myth The Fallen Lords modding tricks in action.  It's not my idea, but more I simply made the adjustments necessary for Myth 2 Soulblighter.  The original creator of the mod deserves the credit, though it's been so long ago that it's especially difficult to find the original posts and whatnot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owigyMLC9PI

The chain reaction begins shortly after a dwarf gives his little laughs.

Boomtastic!

[Surelle]

Not trying to derail the topic or anything...

...but 800 pages? :o

Here's hoping we see the game back before page 1600.

This is just a giant chat log from Pocket D whilst we relax and wait for the announcement thread, should it ever come.  Sign up for Codewalker's "wake me when it happens" email alert.  The thread is stickied at the top of this very sub-forum.

[Minotaur]

Exactly. The only rewards you should have gotten from the AE, are AE specific rewards. Like unlocking more map types or powerset combinations or costume pieces or NPC groups...  -Possibly- some badges depending on the number of plays a published mission gets...

It would have been a ghost town and not worth developing. For quite a few years, I used to take some of my characters through there at levels 1-10 just as a change from the AP/GC arcs I'd done hundreds of times. I didn't want a farm, just something that earned me XP at the normal rate.

[Arcana]

Player emoting. the "/me does something" that you could do literally anywhere else, EXCEPT inside the AE... :(

Mind you, by that point, most of us RPers were totally convinced that if the devs had 2 equal choices of doing something, they would deliberately choose the one that was unfriendly to RP, so really.. Them disabling player emoting in the AE was just another kick to the balls that we judged as "effing typical"...

I don't recall why that was done.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of a specific reason why that would be necessary.

Another great example of that was Walk.  Years and years of asking for the simple ability to walk. .And what do they do when they finally give it to us? TURN OFF ALL OUR OTHER EFFING POWERS!?!?!?!?

I have my suspicions on that one, but you probably wouldn't like the logic for that one.

[MegaWatt]

I think the issue was Roleplayers are generally less then vocal minority in the community. on a whole content to hang out in our bases or run stuff while RPing.......but i could be wrong my experience was limited to my guild on Virtue as far as that goes. I for one was happy with walk - if i'm walking then i'm RPing and its likely i'm not ripping people to pieces with claws or guning them down with assault rifles (outside of emote combat and that was rare once AE came in and we all learned how to use it to build story arcs)

[Abraxus]

Not trying to derail the topic or anything...

...but 800 pages? :o

Here's hoping we see the game back before page 1600.

I have been with it almost from the start.  Perhaps that has not been a good thing, as at times, it drove my expectations perhaps higher than they should have been.  Nobody in particular responsible for that, other than me, but that did not make it any easier to deal with reality.

[Tubbius]

What I would love to know is this. . . .

Did anyone else submit any AE arcs the last night of the game?  I put up the final PENGUIN arc at about 8 or 9 p.m. Eastern time that night and have always wondered if it was the last one to go live.

[Blackgrue]

I have my suspicions on that one, but you probably wouldn't like the logic for that one.

I recall the day walk was put in, Pocket-D was loaded with people doing it just for the awesome of it.

I also recall being slightly annoyed I couldn't do it with Electric Aura on.

[Codewalker]

Player emoting. the "/me does something" that you could do literally anywhere else, EXCEPT inside the AE... :(

Erm, what? In AE missions, or inside the building?

Not only do I not have any recollection of anything like that, I'm not even sure restricting chat on a specific channel by location is possible.

[Pyromantic]

I have to say that I would not play anything that gave no rewards given the choice. not necessarily xp, merits, ho's etc counted. but if a mob type gave nothing, I did my best to avoid it and ignore it. we heard the "risk vs rewards" BS all the time. yet they had no problem removing the reward and leaving the risk. not much of a rule when you  only want to follow it when its convenient.

0 rewards, fair enough.  Hard to argue with someone not wanting to do something with no rewards.  I just wanted to point out however that it can be quite subjective.  The Freak Tank mish I was talking about was certainly not done for inf or tickets.  It was just fun to see if the build would hold up.

And I never felt that "risk vs. reward" was a particularly good metric for an MMO like CoH.  Challenge vs. reward or time vs. reward make a lot more sense to me.