Growth Powers (aka That Dead Horse Still Has Some Whinnie)

[KidKourage]

There was truly only one question I ever had concerning the game that I desperately wanted to ask: Did the dev teams ever understand that they were working at cross purposes concern Growth powers?  And unfortunately, this is a powers question, not a lore question; making it inappropriate to ask in the years of Loregasms.
What do I mean by cross purposes?  The powers team's singular comment on the entire topic was "no".  When the player base pressed for more details, we got "...as in 'will never happen'".  Meanwhile the content team carried on making gigantic statues (to visually remind us), histories of characters such as Atlas (to confirm that growth powers existed), and content involving giant monsters (to reinforce the first two points).
Now I get that for video games in general, boss fights are most imposing when the foe is two to five times bigger than the team of players, and having Growth powers would take a lot of wind out of that sail.  Conversely, having a team of 8 house sized villains all battling a tiny hero such as Minx might make the players a bit ambivalent about the whole thing too. 
I always had the impression that it was a technical thing; based mostly on the power team's vehement denials with no explanation.  Like maybe a really big model covers more space than the 5 foot melee attack range, making it impossible for an enemy to get close enough to attack.  Or some of the older costumes looked terrible when stretched beyond the 8' limit.  Obviously, indoor battles were never going to work well.
But with all this said, why were Shrinking powers not permitted either?  Was the thinking "better to give the mice no cookie at all rather than half"?
Speculations anyone?

[doc7924]

First off I don't think giant statues mean the heroes had giant powers - they just like to make large statues.

Using the ICON thing to get into the city, if you edit a saved costume file and change the height settings you can make a very large, or very small hero.

I tried making a giant hero and its kind of fun to see a huge hero and look down but the movement is extremely sluggish and there is the scale problem as soon as you hit say the entrance to WW, your hero will just go inside like its normal size.

That being said it is kind of fun to be eye level with some billboards or big statues.

A tiny hero too also acts slow - must be the game cant process it well. But I am sure if they added it to the game they could have fixed that.

[KidKourage]

Oh, I totally agree the statues were not to scale.  But they still played a role in the visual experience of the game - monkey see, monkey know.  After all, those statues could easily be models, just like our toons, just like the costume dummies in the Icon stores or the targeting dummies in the Vanguard base.  The power team made it clear that it was not possible and people needed to stop asking.  The content team was NOT helping by reinforcing the exact opposite, both visually and with references (yes - they do exist). 

[doc7924]

The giant stuff is good for things not moving.

But like I said, I tried a giant toon in ICON and its not very viable, and this is only you, in an empty city.

If they had tried this in the live game, with like 50 or more giant toons going around I think the servers would have exploded.

[Castegyre]

In EQ2 it's possible to have a character so small that it effectively comes up to an elf's ankle. It's also possible to have a character so large you can tower over even some of the larger races while NPCs can disappear inside your avatar. You can do this with any race if you happen to have all of the right items and abilities though it's easier with some than others. And, no matter what race you do it with or what items and abilities you use, they will all hit the same min or max height. Apparently there are many reasons for these size restrictions ranging from limitations of the engine, character world interaction, item scaling, and even what other players have to render on their screen. There's still a broader range of sizes characters can reach in EQ2 than in CoH, but I think it's interesting that the limits are there in a game that is only a few months younger than CoH and likely built on a similar generation of tech. I'd assume, in the long run, it was either not possible or was so resource intensive as to not be considered a good use of dev time for CoH to implement that sort of thing.


Back in the day when I was running and playing HERO superhero games a lot I loved characters with growth and density increase. I played a lot of bricks and often made guys who might wreck a building if they fully powered up inside of it just from their sheer weight. I'd enjoy playing something like that in a multiplayer game online, but I don't expect there are enough other players interested in that sort of thing that a dev team is going to cater to what I like.

[KidKourage]

What exactly do you mean by 'giant'?  Back in 2008, I made a forum suggestion to make a Growth and a Shrinking pool.  I suggested that all these powers be toggles, with each active growth toggle giving you +1 H (height ranks) and each active shrinking toggle giving you -1 H.  These pools do not need visual clues that they are active because the size of your toon IS that visual clue.  Players would NOT get to choose.  If H = 0, you are your normal height.  If H > 0, then your height is 8 + (2 x H) feet tall.  If H < 0 then your height is 6 / (1 + H) feet tall.  The net value of H also factored into your reach, speed, defense, to hit, accuracy, and resistance values.  And each toggle also slotted one additional size related ability. 
My proposal meant a maximum height of 16' tall to a minimum of 14 ½".  So anywhere from about Paladin size down to a Bee Swarm.  Scrapyard, Deathsurge, Red Caps, Rikti Monkies, and a few others all fit within this range.  Being 12' or less would be workable in many (but not all) indoor maps.  Being 16' tall puts you at eye level with a one story roof line.  Certainly not gigantic, but these are pool powers where you are only going to get a 2 to 5 percent shift in ratings.  But just to have that would have made so many players happy.

[MyriVerse]

From playing Champions Online, I've realized that larger than normal PCs do only one thing: irritate players. CoH allows you to be 3-9', which is more than generous.

And the power of growth isn't very practical. Either be super strong or not. The growth/shrink power is actually just the ability to change height, not what results from the change. Shrinking is probably even less practical than growing.

[Paragon Avenger]

It's kind of weird, no matter how tall you are, the shelves, doors, and other obstacles seem to scale to you.