New efforts!

[Teikiatsu]

what the what ???

Sorry, just seems like the reality to me.  Even in the pen and paper gamer community, more people are willing to go for Elves and Dwarves than supes in tights.  Every game store I go to, it's more about the Fantasy & Supernatural than the Four Colors and Supers.  I'm tripping over the players for Dungeons and Dragons, One Ring, Werewolf, even Legend of the Five Rings.  Hardly any Mutants and Masterminds, GURPS Supers, even Heroes Unlimited.

It just seems much easier to bring new players into a fantasy realm than superhero.  There seems to be less of a stigma. 

Granted, with the success of Marvel movies in the last four years that may be changing.

[Sinistar]

Given that Marvel and DC each have their own online games now, plus the old mysterious lawsuit settlement between CoH and Marvel, I can't see Marvel or DC advertising CoH.   Conflict of interest and all that.

Darkhorse, Image and IDW however....

[LaughingAlex]

Given that Marvel and DC each have their own online games now, plus the old mysterious lawsuit settlement between CoH and Marvel, I can't see Marvel or DC advertising CoH.   Conflict of interest and all that.

Darkhorse, Image and IDW however....

Not to mention they'd just nerf all the CoX characters if they did get it, then parade their own as better than everyone.  They do it in both DCUO, in that they kind of just rub it in your face that your a sidekick half of the time.  In marvel they just flat out say no one can make their own characters.  I get the feeling NCSoft might have even decided against either simply cause of that kind of attitude modern DC and Marvel have.

[Cobra Man]

Fun fact, back in the Pre-Cryptic sell off days, there was plenty of City of Heroes advertising in Marvel comics. A friend of mine just the other day while going through his comic collection showed me a bunch had full page spreads in them.

There WAS advertising for City of Heroes and Villains, but especially towards the end there, the budget was tiny. As in teeny tiny.

Very true.

The CoH ads in Marvel comics are how I found out about the game.

[Captain Electric]

I wouldn't mind seeing some more comics published too. That was Image/Top Cow that published the CoH comics last time (and Blue King Comics before that, but BKC seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur now; I could barely dig up proof that they had existed at all).

I realize, budget allocation and all that, whatever. But still, I always thought that a comic book ought to AT LEAST accompany every new issue release (remember, game updates were called issues). We didn't even get one with GR. Even if they were just a few pages long, like in the Galaxy City intro; and even if they were just PDFs. I bet David would have loved to work on them. They wanted to put more of those comic book panels before new arcs in the game anyway, but some of the players made a big stink about not wanting them in the game--even if they had an immediate "Enter" button to avoid reading them. Well, this would have been a perfect way to give comics to the fans who wanted them, without annoying that precious subset of players.

Toward the end of the game we started getting those little chronicles on the website. I read them but felt kind of sad about them. I know some of the guys on the team would have liked to give us some comic book content, but NCSoft put their foot down on anything that might advertise the game.

[Teikiatsu]

How much advertising was done in PCGamer, GamePro, etc?

[Ohioknight]

It just seems much easier to bring new players into a fantasy realm than superhero.  There seems to be less of a stigma. 

It's not less of a stigma, it's the mechanics of game play/reward.   

At it's base, D&D is go here, kill monsters, get treasure -- simple.  If you do good, you're rolling in imaginary gold and magical treasures.  It's much harder to build a simple, controlled Super-hero game with as compelling and straightforward reward.  The easiest way is a "Super Bounty Hunter" system, with the same imaginary monetary payoff, but that's not really hitting the genre, so to speak. 

MMORPG's are actually a better/easier sell for the Super-hero model.

[LaughingAlex]

It's not less of a stigma, it's the mechanics of game play/reward.   

At it's base, D&D is go here, kill monsters, get treasure -- simple.  If you do good, you're rolling in imaginary gold and magical treasures.  It's much harder to build a simple, controlled Super-hero game with as compelling and straightforward reward.  The easiest way is a "Super Bounty Hunter" system, with the same imaginary monetary payoff, but that's not really hitting the genre, so to speak. 

MMORPG's are actually a better/easier sell for the Super-hero model.

There is also the whole mentality of everyone having to play a game a certain way or it's not an mmorpg.  Which I think is rather annoying.  I'll be wholly honest, I think most mmorpg players don't know anything about true rpg kind of play.  Many of them never tried anything like deus ex(and refuse to out of fear of losing since they hate shooters, they generalize that it's a twitch fest, like they lack confidence whenever they cannot just press buttons and let dice roles do everything for them), or maybe even the original fallout games(I don't have them, but I do know just about any tactic can work thats non-combat as much as a combat tactic).

Thing is they think almost exclusively in terms of "Use brute force, win and get the awesome reward that was the only reason to do things", which, to me, isn't really an rpg experience.  It's a combat experience, but not necessarily an rpg.  They mistake the "role" in role playing game as "role in a team" rather than "rolling with what you have" which is how I tend to see an rpg.

Granted, in city of heroes your only path is combat, at least fighting you have dozens of different strategies there to.  But rpgs that aren't mmorpgs alot of them let you go through with a lot of freedom.

I remember one playthrough through Vampire: Bloodlines in which I was playing a malkavian who never allowed her enemies to get a direct attack on her.  A good number of quests i'd just ghost it, go through without being detected at all, and other quests where I simply talked my way through everything.  I didn't do much fighting at all save the few moments I had to(which I used extra skill points from sneaking to get my combat abilities up).  It was alot funner then just waiting around for some healers, then having them keep the team alive, which was how guild wars always played for me most of the time.

MMORPG players, most of them just don't know what rpg really, truely means know?  Their definition honestly makes me think of team fortress rather than a real role playing game.

[gypsyav]

Many of us don't need or want a clean slate. We might not have a choice in the matter. I'm sure we'll take whatever they give us, of course. But since we're making small talk about it, it may help some of you to realize why, for some of us, we feel the way that we do. This is all about different views and preferences. Many of you kept logging into City of Heroes for the gameplay, and names and costumes didn't so much matter. But for many others, our characters and their amazing, fictional lives and friends were the reason we kept coming back. Saying to us, "Oh, you can just start over!"--while true and I suspect will be accurate--may come from a luxury that you have not to appreciate what that will mean for us.

This! It was never about the numbers for me, it was all about the personality. And while I can work a loss of power into a character's story I would much rather pick up where I left off.

I understand some people want to start with a clean slate but if they really want to start over they can by deleting their old characters. If the old character information is available (which at this point doesn't appear likely) than don't begrudge those of us who would prefer to have our characters back just as they were. For those RPer's among us it would be almost like learning of the death of an old friend you hadn't seen in a long time vs having that friend turn up at your door ready to pick up your friendship where it left off.

[Captain Electric]

Thing is they think almost exclusively in terms of "Use brute force, win and get the awesome reward that was the only reason to do things", which, to me, isn't really an rpg experience.  It's a combat experience, but not necessarily an rpg.  They mistake the "role" in role playing game as "role in a team" rather than "rolling with what you have" which is how I tend to see an rpg.

Just a nitpick, the "R" in roleplaying games stems from the roles that players took on and acted out as their characters. It was not simply the stats that they rolled with dice, or the gear or abilities they employed, or the languages they spoke, the personality quirks they possessed, the virtues or selfish ends they sought to further, but a confluence of all of those things. They all went on a character sheet and they all mattered to the GM. Developers have tried their hearts out to put more of the original meaning of the term into computer RPGs. But early systems lacked complexity (and requisite memory and harddrive space), and contemporary gamers often ignore them when they're there and complain about them when they get in the way of concentrating on objectively more calculable things, like ability and gear stats.

[LaughingAlex]

Just a nitpick, the "R" in roleplaying games stems from the roles that players took on and acted out as their characters. It was not simply the stats that they rolled with dice, or the gear or abilities they employed, or the languages they spoke, the personality quirks they possessed, the virtues or selfish ends they sought to further, but a confluence of all of those things. They all went on a character sheet and they all mattered to the GM. Developers have tried their hearts out to put more of the original meaning of the term into computer RPGs. But early systems lacked complexity (and requisite memory and harddrive space), and contemporary gamers often ignore them when they're there and complain about them when they get in the way of concentrating on objectively more calculable things, like ability and gear stats.

Well it's more I thought they were refering to role playing, in which your playing a role on an acting set.  Which is something actors do, they get into the character of the person they are portraying, hopefully getting everything right.  Like Heath Ledger playing the joker.  He was able to get into the tense, sadistic mindset of the joker, though he did miss the humor somewhat, he was able to act as the loony the joker was.  Before that, he played a homosexual in Brokeback Mountain.  Two completely different characters.

Yeah alot of gamers tend to be only concerned with winning, only looking at stats when it benefits them.  These days when gamers only use a very narrow strategy, at least tv tropes calls it complacent gaming syndrome.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ComplacentGamingSyndrome

Basically, most gamers only play with winning strategies that others already found, rather than trying to find things out for themselves.  Or get in a mindset of "this is the only way to win".  It's one of the reasons I say "Dead money" for new vegas for example, which is in reality very rigid(they give way to little energy weapon ammo, and limit you almost exclusively to melee and guns while forcing you into lots and lots of escort missions with escorts who have no sneak skill), is considered a good dlc, when in reality, its very bad for roleplaying.

Edit: And then just after posting this I get a random number god moment in new vegas just now....very stupid one to.

Another Edit: I actually hate dead money, yet some people say it's good, basically, even though it has a lot of "only one way to make it" problems.

[Captain Electric]

Yeah you get the idea, but it's hard to give that to players (by way of actual systems with challenges and rewards involved) who don't want it. They also complain about it when it's there at all, even as an optional feature, because of the belief that it takes development time away from features they find desirable. Ultima Online, the first mainstream MMORPG, had somewhere around 60 skills right at the start if I'm not mistaken. Some of them, like cooking, camping, and begging, were never widely used by players. UO's Virtue system was started in the early 2000s and designed as a nod toward gameplay in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, where your character succeeded by solving mysteries and becoming enlightened, instead of just killing things. It remains unfinished. More players began to pick it up when becoming enlightened (which includes showing monsters mercy instead of killing them) granted buffs that can be used in PvP. As a roleplayer I liked City of Heroes because the developers gave us more straight-up roleplaying features than most MMORPGs.

Also LOL at that Tropes link. That page also links to a page about Altitis: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AltItis

"More people complain of this disease from City of Heroes than any other game. Some would argue it's the Trope Namer." Go us!

[LaughingAlex]

Yeah you get the idea, but it's hard to give that to players (by way of actual systems with challenges and rewards involved) who don't want it. They also complain about it when it's there at all, even as an optional feature, because of the belief that it takes development time away from features they find desirable. Ultima Online, the first mainstream MMORPG, had somewhere around 60 skills right at the start if I'm not mistaken. Some of them, like cooking, camping, and begging, were never widely used by players. UO's Virtue system was started in the early 2000s and designed as a nod toward gameplay in Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, where your character succeeded by solving mysteries and becoming enlightened, instead of just killing things. It remains unfinished. More players began to pick it up when becoming enlightened (which includes showing monsters mercy instead of killing them) granted buffs that can be used in PvP. As a roleplayer I liked City of Heroes because the developers gave us more straight-up roleplaying features than most MMORPGs.

Also LOL at that Tropes link. That page also links to a page about Altitis: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AltItis

"More people complain of this disease from City of Heroes than any other game. Some would argue it's the Trope Namer." Go us!

Hehehe, yupe! Totally true about CoH and altitus.  With regards to the above, I just honestly feel mmorpg are just narrow minded as a whole at times.  When they do finally open their minds and begin trying out of the box things, they begin to look back and ponder how narrow the genre can be currently.  Alot of game genres suffer from the "only one way to do things" problem these days, though.  I mean one can look at any shooter and see how railroaded they are.  Even fallout 3 suffered from extreme railroading at points, (like little lamplight but even before little lamplight it had some moderate railroading).  It's probably a good thing there are developers who are catching on to the problem(indeed, new vegas is actually fallout 3 done right, save for dead money which is a survival horror wannabe).

The "They also complain about it when it's there at all, even as an optional feature, because of the belief that it takes development time away from features they find desirable." annoys me the most perhaps, though, because those types are basically saying there should be only one or two ways of playing any game.  They just don't get what the term fun means, at times, and these are the types that often simultaniously complain about balance.  It's that attitude that results in games like the typical mms(modern military shooter).

[Sinistar]

Here's a question for you all: if you could get 2 powers or AT's changed/upgraded/modified which would you choose?

Here's mine:

1. Mastermind pets gain the power to merge into a gestalt.   2 Malta Herc titans could fuse into a Zeus Titan, so adapt that to mastermind pets.  Of course the MM must have all pet powers, all pets summoned and fully equipped before they can merge.  Also time limits on the fusion and recharge time for the fusion power itself.

2. Kheldians: I believe it was a game lore thing about Warshades evolving in heavy gravity worlds hence they can't fly but can teleport, well game lore is fine and all but evolving a bit wouldn't hurt thus my changes to the Khelds would be:

a. PB and WS when first created can choose to either have energy flight, or teleport for travel power. Can't have both, can only be changed via respec. Or else use build #2 to have the alternate travel power.

b. PB's would have knockback stripped from most if not all their powers. It never made sense to me that ALL their powers had to have KB, and while I know how to mitigate KB it just seems absurd that all their powers have it.

c. power customization for Khelds.

[Super Firebug]

Two particular powers that I seldom employed as they are:

I've wanted this change for years. I'd like Devices' Time Bomb, which is singularly useless in its present form (in my experience), changed to a triggered bomb. Click it once to set it; click it again to detonate it.

Also, make Super Speed more versatile by making speedsters able to run up sheer surfaces, like buildings, the way The Flash can. I took SS once, because the character's theme called for it. But the lack of vertical mobility in places like Skyway City had me avoiding SS after that.

[amrobinson]

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.idx360.com%2Fwarlockinc%2Fgir.gifEep!  Is this better?

I'd like to see the Irken Empire added for the next group of bad guys in CoH!

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=www.idx360.com%2Fwarlockinc%2Finvaderzim3.jpg

What other bad guy groups would people like to see?

[Illusionss]

Its never: "Look what they're saying on Titan!"

This actually happens quite often on various Facebook groups; in fact every time Ironwolf makes a new announcement or something contentious happens, such as Massively's tip-off. Again, I'm not trying to be rude. But, how would you know, since as you mentioned above, you don't use any social media?

Simple. I would know about it, because it would be mentioned here. If Titan was being blamed for something on FB, there would probably be an entire thread devoted to that here.

But people tend not to make crazy accusations here; they do it on FB. [I know THAT because literally everyone I know is on FB, and I hear all about it. I don't even need to be there to know this stuff.]

Keep in mind, my position isn't bullheaded. I don't have the wherewithal nor the gall to forbid topics of discussion. But you can't be convinced in any case, because your position is that tact is synonymous with censorship

...and whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat? *laughs* I said that exactly where? let me make myself very clear: my supposition is that discussion of  ideas relating to the possible resurrection of the game is much more safely done here, than on any other platform I can think of. Would you prefer these issues be discussed, say, in the comment section on Massively.com? Maybe on Kotaku? I sure wouldn't.

Please do not say that I am saying anything other than what I am actually typing. You claim to NOT be trying to forbid topics of conversation. From where I sit it seems very much like you are trying hard to shut me down - and I'm not even saying anything controversial. I'm not your enemy, but you are acting as if I am.

[Captain Electric]

Okay.

[Waffles]

LOOK INTO MY EYES WHILE I STARE AT YOU!


Sorry, got too dramatic.

[LaughingAlex]

Here's a question for you all: if you could get 2 powers or AT's changed/upgraded/modified which would you choose?

Here's mine:

1. Mastermind pets gain the power to merge into a gestalt.   2 Malta Herc titans could fuse into a Zeus Titan, so adapt that to mastermind pets.  Of course the MM must have all pet powers, all pets summoned and fully equipped before they can merge.  Also time limits on the fusion and recharge time for the fusion power itself.

2. Kheldians: I believe it was a game lore thing about Warshades evolving in heavy gravity worlds hence they can't fly but can teleport, well game lore is fine and all but evolving a bit wouldn't hurt thus my changes to the Khelds would be:

a. PB and WS when first created can choose to either have energy flight, or teleport for travel power. Can't have both, can only be changed via respec. Or else use build #2 to have the alternate travel power.

b. PB's would have knockback stripped from most if not all their powers. It never made sense to me that ALL their powers had to have KB, and while I know how to mitigate KB it just seems absurd that all their powers have it.

c. power customization for Khelds.

Ranged AT's and epic/patron pools:

1: I know, to many powers but, i'd say every defense/resistance power that wasn't scorpion shield in the ranged AT's epics needed to be brought in line with scorpion shield.  Everyone would only pick scorpion shield, for a reason, defense was more useful than resistance as defense could apply to a wider variety of attacks.  I'd have made every one of them defense.

2: Power build up or power boost but only if the above change was implemented.  It was to easy to get beyond defense cap with it.  Thing was, I wouldn't want this power toned down without the above change, as it'd make power mastery/force mastery near useless and meaningless in the face of scorpion shield just being better by a landslide over the other epic pool shields.  The epic pool shields AND scorpion shield should have been in line with each other.  Power build up/power boost were the sole reason people would take force/power mastery, and it was to make certain powers they had super good.

In other words, the only good epic/patron pools either A: gave you defense directly or B: allowed you to increase the potency of some buff tremendously.  The others couldn't compete with those pools even remotely close.  I'd know, as I got over 50% defense using power build up and farsight(under time manipulation) on a defender.  And I could see why people loved to over focus on s/l/e defense from scorpion shield.