New efforts!

[rebel 1812]

I agree, i'd like to see City of heroes issue 23 back up and running before that fear of mine about CO comes true and that game has to shut down.  Which I am very worried is going to be soon I mean the game appears to be a ghost town, nearly.  You only see three zones open in MC anymore and hey, holidays are over so there isn't any excuse.  When there used to be FIVE zones open just before the october nerf and the whole "Bait and switch transactions" or as it was renamed "Cash shop concerns thread" became especially prominent.

Edit: And whats on the horizon for them?  Another ugly bike no one will want to use after what happened October.  Pfft.

I play alot of CO and notice there aren't many people there any more.  It takes so long to queue up for alerts when it used to be very quick.  Alerts seem to be the only team up options anymore so the group up lairs like Destro's factory or Therakiel's Temple don't get played.  They also had a couple freeform sales (which I bought) which they shouldn't want to sell if the game is doing well.  The freeform option is the main benefit of subscription, the fact they sell freeform slots and have sales on them is a sign they need cash.

[Beltor]

As a point of reference, DOMO was announced bought and returning as of November, but it won't even be ready for beta until mid February. Since COH is bigger and more complex, i'm guessing that in the best case scenario (ex. aquired tomorrow) it would still be July before it's playable. I still plan on being there and rolling dice to see which alt to make and i'll have months of ideas to chose from.

[Surelle]

I play alot of CO and notice there aren't many people there any more.  It takes so long to queue up for alerts when it used to be very quick.  Alerts seem to be the only team up options anymore so the group up lairs like Destro's factory or Therakiel's Temple don't get played.  They also had a couple freeform sales (which I bought) which they shouldn't want to sell if the game is doing well.  The freeform option is the main benefit of subscription, the fact they sell freeform slots and have sales on them is a sign they need cash.

Don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud here, and if you or anyone else could possibly be offended by it then please pretend you didn't see this.   ;D

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?  I say this because CoX is, after all, Jack's baby (no matter what we think of him personally), and Positron works there too!  Who else is going to care much about preserving and continuing the IP, and rezzing CoX? 

PWE could just shut down Champions Online and be done with it, if they're treating it like it's as good as dead anyway like everyone claims.  If they're planning on shuttering CO, then CoX wouldn't even be competition, rather it would be getting back a lot of the customers they lost by surrendering CoX to NCSoft in the first place.

Sorry, this just occurred to me in passing....  I'm probably way off base, though.

[Prism Almidu]

Don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud here, and if you or anyone else could possibly be offended by it then please pretend you didn't see this.   ;D

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?  I say this because CoX is, after all, Jack's baby (no matter what we think of him personally), and Positron works there too!  Who else is going to care much about preserving and continuing the IP, and rezzing CoX? 

PWE could just shut down Champions Online and be done with it, if they're treating it like it's as good as dead anyway like everyone claims.  If they're planning on shuttering CO, then CoX wouldn't even be competition, rather it would be getting back a lot of the customers they lost by surrendering CoX to NCSoft in the first place.

Sorry, this just occurred to me in passing....  I'm probably way off base, though.

Not offended by your opinion, but I'd really rather it wasn't... every game I've played run by PWE has been poisoned to the point where I immediately pass on new games if I see their logo on it.

[LaughingAlex]

Don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud here, and if you or anyone else could possibly be offended by it then please pretend you didn't see this.   ;D

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?  I say this because CoX is, after all, Jack's baby (no matter what we think of him personally), and Positron works there too!  Who else is going to care much about preserving and continuing the IP, and rezzing CoX? 

PWE could just shut down Champions Online and be done with it, if they're treating it like it's as good as dead anyway like everyone claims.  If they're planning on shuttering CO, then CoX wouldn't even be competition, rather it would be getting back a lot of the customers they lost by surrendering CoX to NCSoft in the first place.

Sorry, this just occurred to me in passing....  I'm probably way off base, though.

Truthfully and no, I am not offended.  I would not want PWE to have anything to do with city of heroes at this point after everything that happened to CO.  But see it's because the things that happened to CO, not the game itself, is the main reason I got that conflicting belief that I believe the game should be shut down, even though I do not want to see CO shut down.  But see I think what happened to CO is alot of the most sensible people left sometime earlier, with the few remaining being to outnumbered by the less sensible people.  And it's developers try to please everyone, including the scrubs/shfgs who cry for changes that cater only to themselves.  This combined with a disconnect I talked about earlier that CO's devs have has proven to be an especially volatile combination.

But I wouldn't trust PWE with CoX, due to their policy about lockboxes and often extreme pay-to-win attitudes that I've seen with CO.  Especially when lockbox only items get nerfed after people had already paid good money for them and then they release some other OP Lock-box-only item.  Not to mention they made a few encounters into the HTG(holy trinity grindfest) that I came to hate.

I'd expect if they did get their hands on it, CoX would be within a year seeing massive nerfs to all buffs/debuffs and crowd control and an extreme catering towards the holy trinity.  Plus lockboxes with items that are OP that are doomed to be nerfed preceeding other OP lockbox only items.  CoX would meet the same fate CO has which I didn't want for CO and certainly don't want for CoX.

Edit: I was actually talking on CO earlier today about the start of it's more recent problems.  The general power creep and the nerfing of enemies.  I'm sure CoX under PWE would also see all enemies nerfed so even really bad players win easy and I fall asleep during gameplay as often as I do playing CO these days.

[LaughingAlex]

I play alot of CO and notice there aren't many people there any more.  It takes so long to queue up for alerts when it used to be very quick.  Alerts seem to be the only team up options anymore so the group up lairs like Destro's factory or Therakiel's Temple don't get played.  They also had a couple freeform sales (which I bought) which they shouldn't want to sell if the game is doing well.  The freeform option is the main benefit of subscription, the fact they sell freeform slots and have sales on them is a sign they need cash.

Those are my general thoughts as well.  The fact they had a very large discount on lifetimes combined with the severe drop in population, plus the extremely long queue times for rampages and certainly longer queue times for alerts kind of confirms my worries as well.  They wouldn't have offered such massive discounts to freeform slots or lifetime subscriptions if they were doing well, I wouldn't think.  They are desperate to survive and I think that general desperation also contributes to some of the more dangerous and very likely fatal mistakes they've recently made.

Edit: It's also because I don't want some of the more corrupt and underhanded CO players coming to CoX.  These people have proven far lower than most trolls I've ever met, from generally slandering anyone who is a roleplayer in CO or even just screwing people over.  I wouldn't be surprised if these same people really rubbed salt in the wound over the vehicle nerf that lead people to believe Cryptic North to be baiting and switching(which I think is unintentional).  I was honestly more angry at the trolls than at Cryptic North, in fact, since I knew Cryptic North were just being incompetent.  But these trolls go as far as wanting people to suffer IRL, which is far, far out of line.

Of course, then again Cryptic North's desperation makes it easy for these trolls to take advantage of that and then the bad things that happen, happen for it.

[Sinistar]

I shut down my CO account last January and deleted from my system. I felt game development was stagnant and the environment was getting way too toxic from the trolls.

[LaughingAlex]

I shut down my CO account last January and deleted from my system. I felt game development was stagnant and the environment was getting way too toxic from the trolls.

I just want City of heroes to come back at this point.  I just, also don't want the trolls to come over, which I'm sure some will even if CO is running but egh, I wouldn't want the worst to come over.

[ivanhedgehog]

negotiate !! negotiate!! who do we appreciate!!

[MM3squints]

While KB was common in PvE, KU was far less common.  What I meant by looking at the KB/KU split was to consider, given the fact that KU was a less interesting effect in PvE, to repurpose KU for PvP in a way that allowed the devs to add knock effects in PvP without the need to completely strip away KB protection from players (this was before the PvP flag made that less relevant).

Personally I liked KU over KB in PvE (I'm sure I'm not the only one :P) people would rather have a water spout out that did the same job as a tornado except it didn't fling adds everywhere or ice patch/ice slick over Earthquake where ice slick was a KU and Earthquake was a KB. Off the top of my head I only can think of 2 single target KU/KN and the rest are AoEs and they are used by actual players and few NPCs use KU ability like Carnie Strongman Mallet (I think that KU, can't remember),but I guess they can disable them from using the attacks that KU.

I didn't say melee archetypes couldn't compete in PvP.  I said the melee archetype design concept was incompatible with PvP.  The reason was straight-forward: melee archetypes by concept were explicitly intended to be more survivable than the other archetypes.  Whether that was universally true or not is irrelevant: that idea permeated how the devs thought about the archetypes in PvE, and it lingered in PvP.  It so infused their thinking that when they finally decided to abandon that design rule they whiplashed the whole idea of mitigation in I13 with archetype-wide resistances and then later overbuffing Elusivity.

The answer I gave wasn't about completing in PvP it was melees were compatible with PvP. I did list the defenses that survive the best in PvP, there the reason those defense build were FoTM with the combination of the Attack power that was FoTM. Melees can take the hit and win by attrition. They can do more DPS than the opponent can do to them. They are compatible with PvP, just need to know how to move melee. Anyone can click a number and fire off a range attack, but like Maximum's Stalker, you need a pretty good hand eye coordination to hit a target with a move in a split second. If you're not playing stalker, just tank and spank and know when to pop insp and self-heals. As long you know what you are doing that DPS should not be able to kill you in PvP

Which is another way of saying the traditional tanker role in PvE didn't work under the damage conditions that existed in PvP.

By the limitation of the current system, ya. But that wasn't the question that was asked. The question was:

Consider how much time the devs spent ultimately fruitlessly trying to figure out what the tanker "role" was in PvP.  Remember their statements about "PvP is balanced for teams?"  To this day, I'm not even sure if any two devs would agree on what that statement even means.

And I gave an answer that would possibly be an answer. This is not a new idea. It was in that big old list of "How to Make PvP Viable" in the PvP Fourm, where the PvP Community proposed, but never was taken into account. The full extent was the taunt would act like a mez mag of 3 of for each time the target is taunted. It builds up like how the old mez system works. Once the threshold is broken, the target will have a special confuse where the tank can be attack, but also be buffed by the target that is being taunted. If this was implemented, it would have been a great game changer and tanks/scrappers would be in high demand in team PvP. Don't know if it was cause of the limitation of the game or they didn't care, but that was one solution to actually balance melees that have access to taunt to be on teams.

I never liked the "PvP rules" idea not because I didn't like the concept itself, but because as you reference the game engine didn't fully support dual mecchanics in all ways, some of them critical to how PvP worked.  Cast times, for example, are one area where you can't have two versions (although Titan Weapons plays a trick I mentioned way way back where you could set the cast time to something small and vary power times by changing rooted animations; that would get complex if used in PvP).

That always bothered me, because they did introduce new animation and allowed players to use new animations. Heck one of the foot stomp animation wasn't even a foot stomp, it was you punching the ground. I don't see why they just didn't give say higher end Projectile powers to have the same cast time as BiB or Blaze

Everyone means something different (if they mean anything specific at all) by "game breaking" but in this case I mean it would allow players to do things that the devs generally have hard and fast rules to disallow in PvE.  For example, the devs would have considered it game-breaking in I13 to allow a blaster to have two Novas, but in PvP that's not nearly as big a deal (particularly with Nova's cast time) since there's not the same AoE concern.  Overlapping Elude would be game-breaking (in terms of PvE design rules) in PvE, but in PvP its only a concern if tohit buffs are not in plentiful enough supply to penetrate Elude (and they are).

Tier 9s we actually viable in PvP. Normally they were used to get that last bit before the timer (which if an unfortunate target is in the blast radius of 4-5 Novas they will die.) Actually there is an extremely funny video (well the people who got Novaed probably didn't think it was) in the first PvPEC Pentad where a team on Labs basically huddled up together and buffed waited. Unfortunately for them the team they were fighting against was a Pentad team with people from JAL, a top tier PvP team. Once the team was spotted, all the DPS went and just killed all with novas. After that since all the buff cycles were off, it just became 6 minutes of free farming. Actually I did find it

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

Someone similar happened to my team at the Pentad too. In the finals we also got Lab and match just started, and we were getting initial buffs out. A DPS from the other team came in (I assume he was 2x Forted) and got off a nuke taking out 3. We rebounded, got composed and went on to fight. Even with a 3 point deficit at the start we won the Pentad because of the team make up. We were lucky to get Labs and we had a Storm/Psi

The only things you'd have to worry about are PvP-breaking things, like if hurricane made combat itself impossible, or if certain stacked debuffs were so strong they could completely neutralize the best offense.  Then you'd have to step in and level the playing field.

For every debuff there is a buff to counter in team PvP. In duels you just need to adapt and learn how to play with the cards given.  If there is a debuff you know there is a debuff, you need to hit and run.

I still think my best PvP idea was the Architect version of PvP, where the Arenas were designed to allow players to customize the very rules of PvP.  Players by agreement could turn on or off travel suppression, change the way taunt worked, increase or decrease everyone's regeneration mods.  Basically a monster expansion of the limited arena switches that exist.  Heck, you could decide to switch gravity to that of the moon, or fight underwater, or make the ground into lava that induced a continuous DoT.  I think that could have given CoH a singularly unique PvP experience where the players decided how PvP should work, and if a large enough group of players didn't like those rules they could just go off and make up their own within their own community of PvPers.  Let the players fight it out to decide how PvP should work.  You could even make meta-games out of that where PvPers actually fought each other for the right to set the rules in certain public areas.  But the bottom line would be that anyone could PvP with any set of rules whatsoever, as long as they could find enough other players that agreed to those rules.

You know how much more happier people would have been if this idea was developed instead of what i13 is :P

[silvers1]

Don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud here, and if you or anyone else could possibly be offended by it then please pretend you didn't see this.   ;D

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?  I say this because CoX is, after all, Jack's baby (no matter what we think of him personally), and Positron works there too!  Who else is going to care much about preserving and continuing the IP, and rezzing CoX? 

PWE could just shut down Champions Online and be done with it, if they're treating it like it's as good as dead anyway like everyone claims.  If they're planning on shuttering CO, then CoX wouldn't even be competition, rather it would be getting back a lot of the customers they lost by surrendering CoX to NCSoft in the first place.

Sorry, this just occurred to me in passing....  I'm probably way off base, though.

I sincerely hope PWE doesn't get CoH - I cant imagine a worse outcome.   From playing Neverwinter the last few months,  PWE is solidly into PAY2WIN...     Imagine if every IO enhancement had to be purchased through their cash shop.  That's the kind of thing I could see them doing.
Or instead of regular drops, you had to open lockboxes, which of course require keys purchased through the cash shop.   No thanks.

[Sinistar]

I just want City of heroes to come back at this point.  I just, also don't want the trolls to come over, which I'm sure some will even if CO is running but egh, I wouldn't want the worst to come over.

Show me an MMO without trolls and I will show you a MMO that doesn't exist.

CoH had its share of Trolls long before shutdown.......Granted CO and WoW have an overabundance....

[rebel 1812]

Those are my general thoughts as well.  The fact they had a very large discount on lifetimes combined with the severe drop in population, plus the extremely long queue times for rampages and certainly longer queue times for alerts kind of confirms my worries as well.  They wouldn't have offered such massive discounts to freeform slots or lifetime subscriptions if they were doing well, I wouldn't think.  They are desperate to survive and I think that general desperation also contributes to some of the more dangerous and very likely fatal mistakes they've recently made.

Edit: It's also because I don't want some of the more corrupt and underhanded CO players coming to CoX.  These people have proven far lower than most trolls I've ever met, from generally slandering anyone who is a roleplayer in CO or even just screwing people over.  I wouldn't be surprised if these same people really rubbed salt in the wound over the vehicle nerf that lead people to believe Cryptic North to be baiting and switching(which I think is unintentional).  I was honestly more angry at the trolls than at Cryptic North, in fact, since I knew Cryptic North were just being incompetent.  But these trolls go as far as wanting people to suffer IRL, which is far, far out of line.

Of course, then again Cryptic North's desperation makes it easy for these trolls to take advantage of that and then the bad things that happen, happen for it.

Yeah I forgot about that.  There was a sale on lifetime subscriptions.  Once you buy that you are pretty much stuck with them.  Which means they get to advertise to you about buying lockboxes forever.

[LaughingAlex]

Show me an MMO without trolls and I will show you a MMO that doesn't exist.

CoH had its share of Trolls long before shutdown.......Granted CO and WoW have an overabundance....

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.

[Sinistar]

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.

Oh I agree with you totally about how CO has been ravaged by the trolls.  I suspect that the potential new owners of CoH and the revival team will thoroughly research and investigate any ideas that are submitted to them before implementation.   In fact, we wouldn't have to worry about trolls getting CoH wrecked since it is stated that when it returns it is a disc image and cannot be patched/edited, etc.

[Burnt Toast]

I think that says WAY more about the devs than the trolls....

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.

[LaughingAlex]

I think that says WAY more about the devs than the trolls....

Hehehe, agreed there.  I just logged into CO at jsut before 2am and now theres three zones.  One with 60 people, two with less than 10.  Thats, a little depleted even for 2am I think.  Earlier today though there was less than 200 in MC.

I frequently say it, the devs are displaying a lot of desperation I think.

[LaughingAlex]

I sincerely hope PWE doesn't get CoH - I cant imagine a worse outcome.   From playing Neverwinter the last few months,  PWE is solidly into PAY2WIN...     Imagine if every IO enhancement had to be purchased through their cash shop.  That's the kind of thing I could see them doing.
Or instead of regular drops, you had to open lockboxes, which of course require keys purchased through the cash shop.   No thanks.

Also imagine nerfs to existing after and more powerful IO's coming out to replace them.  That are also more expensive.  Then imagine many enemies being trivialized and general removal of character freedom creation and more grind-heavy repeatable missions that are very boring.

Then imagine little "nerf heads" who after the nerfs hit rub salt in the wound every time just to piss everyone off, especially if they suggested them.

[LaughingAlex]

Oh I agree with you totally about how CO has been ravaged by the trolls.  I suspect that the potential new owners of CoH and the revival team will thoroughly research and investigate any ideas that are submitted to them before implementation.   In fact, we wouldn't have to worry about trolls getting CoH wrecked since it is stated that when it returns it is a disc image and cannot be patched/edited, etc.

Aye, I'd even be happy to help out with that on testing and whatnot.  I have ideas myself, particularly ancillery powers, on how to make the overall sets more desirable.  With only minimal nerfing.

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.

[Prism Almidu]

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. 

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