El D

Statesman gets more press due to being the official face of the game, but yeah, Sister Psyche not getting due recognition is irksome. Not quite as irksome as her exit, though. The most powerful psychic - sans Penny Yin at least - whose primary gimmick is 'can literally send her mind into other bodies at-will' just gets overwhelmed due to off-screen prep time and instantly killed from one arrow? No medi-porter, no 'sends her mind into someone else,' no Manticore having a countermeasure to nullify her powers and cause the classic 'Batman has contingencies' plot? Then immediately afterword, we establish afterword that there's a method of raising the dead that Ms. Liberty knows about... and she doesn't use it for Psyche or Statesman, but for Red Widow? There's a lot of conspiracy theories that float around the forums (and did so back on Live) that I don't buy into, but dang it if it doesn't seem like the writers at the time really wanted Jack's characters gone. At least Statesman's death got some kind of honor regarding his legacy. Psyche just got ganked and brushed aside.

The characters who are the sole reason he even is able to get in there and shank her are... side-lined? Jumping off of what @Rudra said, the entire arrangement for that trial is 'this needs to be stopped yesterday.' As soon as the incarnates done doing all the difficult stuff no one else is capable of, the Dream Doctor does the one major thing he can do to help eliminate the imminent threat. Having a Scooby-Doo 'everyone mug for the camera as we turn the bad guy over to the cops' ending undercuts the dire stakes of the trial and the need to stop Diabolique and Mot.

Signature NPCs have to do something to justify their presence in the narrative. Almost always that's 'abilities the player-facing mechanics don't allow the players to do' and 'narrative choices the story can't allow player characters to do.' The Incarnate arrangement already has to walk the fine line between 'your PC is super-ultra-mega powerful and destined to become the ultra-greatest-most-powerful character in the setting' and 'so will literally every other character you make and team up with.' Adding in the chaos of 'I killed Diabolique! No, I did!' is just extra nonsense that muddies progression, and that's not even getting into the players who'd opt not to kill her, or reform her, or whatever else. For large-scale MMO storylines like that, the NPCs - at least those on some semblance of equal footing as the player character - have to handle the decisive story beats because that's the only way to control the on-going narrative. Also, if the narrative required that Diabolique was always going to die, then there's no agency taken away from the players anyway. Agency requires the availability of choice. If the hardstop ending is 'Diabolique dies regardless of player desire or action' then there's not even a fake choice there like 'Stab Tielekku or Don't Stab Tielekku' at the end of the Dark Astoria arcs.

You know, that's a fair point. I'd buy that as Recluse effectively putting the rivalry to bed on his own terms (as much as he could, given the context). Jives with Libby's on-going attempts to get him to turn over a new leaf, too. Not necessarily in any way that'd make it more or less successful, but just plausible.

Facts. Not only would Emperor Cole not demean himself by doing that, Lord Recluse would absolutely not stand for it. Frankly, the fact that he hasn't managed to hunt down Darrin Wade for some extensive level of heinous torture by this point also feels iffy. Though that would make for a fun 'reunion gift' from Red Widow for their rekindled relationship... More on-topic to States himself, I'd rather have some fun Ouro arcs that explore Statesman's life prior to 2004. Similar to how the Top Cow comic arcs were put in as unique flashbacks. Whether these were presented as personal stories playing as Statesman, other Signature NPCs, or just the player temporally taking the place of a generic hero of the time, it's be fun to see the original Brass Monday (and possibly learn more about Nemesis), have more lore drops for the Nictus fighting against Requiem in WWII, and get more first-hand info about the whole arrangements (and secrets) of the First Rikti War.

If there's anything the internet at-large and the CoH forums in-particular have taught me, it's that users rarely understand what 'fairness' actually is. Or effective game design. To both points, they usually just reference what they personally want in any particular given moment. What are you going to do if they don't? 'The people who control my access to the forums, game, and accounts should let the entirety of their moderation decisions be fully assessed by the playerbase!' is a nonstarter. They have no incentive to even consider this. So where do you go from there?

Inf is already incredibly easy to earn, especially so at level 50. Leaving double inf in-place with no trade-off aside from badge progression - since all the rewards from missed vet levels could be earned a lot faster by regularly running Incarnate content - was just going to further exacerbate the core issue of this thread and the one it's playing off of.

The more dramatic of a proposed change, the more dramatic of a response it will provoke. Not to say all the dramatics are remotely justified or the levels said dramatics reach on these forums don't often get needlessly overblown, but that's a side effect of 'relatively small group of posters who have interacted with the same people they disagree with on a weekly or daily basis for X years' unfortunately.

Transferring Homecoming's economy to function around merits would grind it to a halt, unless the rate at which merits were earned was vastly increased. If the rate at which merits are earned is vastly increased so that players have enough of them to spend... then they've just taken out influence to kitbash its role onto what was a perfectly functional supplementary system. Said system now doesn't fulfill its original use anymore, so that would mean having to create another currency or kitbashing another system to do what merits used to do. That also means there's tons of players - the vast majority of Homecoming's user base - that now have mountains of a worthless currency. There is no degree of trade-ins, alterations, or transfers that will make that pill easy to swallow. Even the perception of making the game's primary currency worthless is Not A Good Idea. Branching off of that, why is the argument in-favor of 'new players' always the proposition that any 'problematic' system or mechanic must be dumbed down, minimized, and or outright removed 'because they don't know how to use it?' Of course they don't know how everything works when they first join, that's the whole point of the game and/or community providing room for them to learn. Also, to that point, the market is not gated. It's accessible to literally any player who has the inf to buy or sell the items they want, which is not remotely hard to reach. Inf is the easiest resource to gain in CoH, by a wide margin and by deliberate design because it's the primary currency. Yes, new players who just start out won't have the same resources as 5+ year old-timers, but that's how starting a new game works. I also don't get the whole 'tiny group of elite marketeers' thing, with them apparently being the sole true beneficiaries of Wentworths. In my experience, the max level characters with tons of inf are the ones who either hang out in Atlas and drop multiple thousands onto random new characters or run massive contests and give literal millions or billions of inf away. With that in-mind, if 'new players struggle when they start and can't catch up' is the core issue of this whole thing... why is the suggestion 'uproot/rewrite the game's entire economy and potentially piss off tons of the active playerbase' instead of 'give new accounts an investment bundle of inf when they start out?'

Yeah, the final Predator was effectively the co-protagonist in that movie with the sole survivor Ellen Ripley-esque human character. Predators and humans have had on-again-off-again team ups in the comics for a long time, especially in instances of 'well dang, now there's xenomorphs.'

So long as you aren't using the name of an actual band member from Black Sabbath anything just inspired by should be fine. War Pig, Paranoid (Perry Noid?), Child of the Grave... I wouldn't try to run around as Mozzy Mosbourne but song references should be okay. 'Child of the Grave' is actually a really good name for a Necromancy MM, come to think of it.

No we don't know the exact amount of time spent, but we do have a pretty solid record of what the devs have done and some semblance of the timeframe it was done in. With that in-mind, alternate animations are, relatively speaking, probably on the 'comparatively easy if still time consuming' side. Especially so compared to a suggestion like 'have the devs build an entirely new iron man/death-means-deletion version of the whole game then put up and maintain a new server for that entirely separate code base.' There are suggestions we can reasonably assume the devs can do within our limited understanding of their availability, mostly because those suggestions are variations of things they've already done before or build on time intensive things they've already implemented. It's the suggestions with seemingly no consideration of time required at all that'd take a fully staffed professional team working full time ages to do, which some posters still expect to be fully considered or debated, where the issue comes in. Sure, we can just suggest whatever, irrespective of difficulty or time investment, and leave it up to the devs to pick what they want. Ultimately the devs will do as they like anyways, as you said. However, that's not going to change the practical reality that given the devs' schedule and interest is limited, the suggestions that'd take excessive amounts of time and effort beyond the things we know they've done or might be willing to do probably aren't going to happen. It's the catch that's left us in the square of 'some players objecting because they feel their ideas are always ignored or shot down,' some players skipping over 'lots of people told them that specific idea was intensive and time consuming and probably wasn't going to happen and they kept going in spite of that because the players weren't devs.' Also, really, the framing of 'we don't know the exact amount of time/effort it'd take, so we should just ignore that part' - in-particular coming from the person who made the suggestion yet who isn't one of the people that'd be spending any time or effort implementing it - is, to me, a sign the suggester doesn't actually care about how much time or effort it'd take. If more posters considered how reasonable their suggestions were to implement rather than just demanding we debate an idea that is somehow both a pure hypothetical with no time constraints and also something they actually want to see happen at some point, we'd probably have less complaints. Edit - I got too wordy and @Bionic_Flea basically summarized my thesis on the prior page. 'Swhat I get for not being bionic, I guess. Or a flea.

Overall this is true, but we do have a pretty solid record of the devs' pace when it comes to implementation and progression. Along with the devs themselves regularly emphasizing 'we are a volunteer team with full-time jobs/lives/families outside of this effort.' Heck, to that point Cobalt Arachne has a ton of posts that include 'when I have time' as a pretty thorough refrain. None of which is meant as any kind of dig against Cobalt or the dev team overall nor as any sort of mark against all they've accomplished, mind! The monotony of editing AE maps alone would make me tear my hair out, much less the migraine inducing dread of getting sheathed/holstered weapons functional, formatting entirely new modes of gameplay, building new zones, writing new story arcs, or worst of all, having to moderate all the chuckleheads here on the forums (myself included). It's just that the devs themselves make the practical constraints clear that their time is limited rather often and if anyone's been around here for long enough they ought to have some understanding of the pace at which suggestions or changes can be implemented. Especially when considering the scale of said suggestions and changes. There is absolutely a point where beyond a certain threshold, a proposed suggestion becomes more unfeasible than not.

I think there's definitely a route to make this work. Karl is plenty physically capable enough to do the 'retired action movie guy who is in shape, but comically out of his depth against real kombatants' shtick before he gets the Shadow Kick/Punch deity-cult upgrades. After that point, digitally slap his face onto a stunt double for the intense 'Johnny got his groove back' fight scenes and have Karl do what stunts he can along with reaction shots/framing. They've already got a CG Scorpion doing extreme ninja parkour nonsense in there, so why not splice stuff together to provide the full Cage experience too?

The reaction arose from that being actual mechanical impact of your suggestion. Re-framing it as 'no, the lock out was going apply to me' doesn't negate the base functionality being 'if one player uses a specific power, activating that same power is then denied to every other player they're teamed with.' Look at it this way. This judgement block is fully implemented and you're on a full team with seven other players. Upon arriving at a mob, one of those other players activates their judgement before you can use yours. The mob dies and you don't get to use your judgement. The team moves to the next mob, another player uses their judgement before you can hit the button, That mob dies and you still haven't used your judgement. The team moves to a third mob... See where I'm going with this? And that's just on a regular-sized team, that's not even getting into the issue of 'how does this work on full leagues?' If you're that concerned about wasting an activation of judgement, just wait a second or two when arriving at a mob. That's both enough time for a mob to actually clump around a tank and enough time that if someone else is going to queue up judgement, you'll see it activate.

Gotta say, it's really funny for a proponent of generative AI to demand that anyone else provide exact details, data, or sources for anything. Though, reading that post again... off-hand dismissal, demands for additional sources, shifting of goal posts, diatribes via personal opinion, ignoring legitimate criticisms... You sly dog, you asked chatgpt to write a superhero movie thread post didn't you?

@ZacKing I couldn't help but notice that in your 'get over it or leave' post, you didn't address the actual points I made. You got real hung up on dismissing my personal opinion over AI and the idea of criticism of AI in-general but seemed to have skipped the important 'and this is how it's current affecting Homecoming' bits in there. Regardless of anyone's personal stance on whether AI or 'good or bad,' Homecoming's official allowance of AI has had a direct impact on sustaining the community by negating outside interest in the game and is incredibly hypocritical considering the devs own efforts and how much work they put in to crafting content. Why should the playerbase fund the devs artistic views and personal creations for CoH when the largest part of our art community showcases a blatant disregard for that same respect being given to players? It also runs counter to Homecoming's 'you want to help and make decisions? Volunteer yourself. Put in effort on Beta and apply to join the dev team' approach. The devs either had to learn the skills they use to manage the game's code, write engaging content, and craft costume pieces and powersets or already possessed them and have refined them through working on Homecoming. Generative AI doesn't do that. It doesn't teach anything or hone any skill sets. There is no 'generate a new dev' button. The skills that our devs utilize are only gained by work and maintained through practice. CoH's art community though? Their skills and earnest efforts can be ignored if you want to use generative AI. Homecoming will even make special channels for it. A constant reminder that many of the folks here readily push the 'don't hire an artist or learn how to draw/paint/demo edit, just get the end result' button while the devs require that anyone who wants to work with them actually be able to show their work. Of course, all that becomes a moot point if the devs do actually use generative AI to make content. Personally I don't think they do or ever have but hey, I'm not on the dev team so I can't know for sure. All I and anyone else thinking about playing on Homecoming have to go off of is what we can see, which is 'wow, they sure have a lot of AI art. They must really like their players using it.'

OP's point is more that the second Judgement doesn't accomplish anything if the mob it would have hit is already dead. Which does kinda suck, but isn't remotely the kind of thing that calls for instituting a mechanic that allows players to deliberately lock others out of using their own powers, even on the basis of 'it only lasts a few seconds.' If another player is using judgement too often or in a fashion that impedes the enjoyment of the game, everyone can already control how often the offending player uses judgement by exercising some of their own and choosing not team up with that person. Alternately, run content where mobs can survive more than one use of judgement. If you've got access to incarnate powers, chances are you can run that tier of endgame content.

That players can subvert the intended, canon progression of the story isn't indicative of any story extension in Praetoria beyond what exists, it's indicative of the devs allowing the small handful of 'perma-Goldside' characters some path to participate in endgame content rather than have those characters entirely locked out of a large amount of level 50 content. The jump to Primal Earth was the hard stop 'this goes no further' point for Praetoria for a reason and the overall story of the game has long since moved past that. The ability for perma-Goldsiders to participate in iTrials is for player convenience. It has no bearing on narrative.

I'm saying all of this as someone who enjoyed Goldside and its arcs... it was a complete ghost town back on Live too, after the initial Going Rogue boom. It had absolutely no legs outside of Incarnate content and even that made the pivot away from being Praetorian-based when it grew stale with the playerbase. Or at least, it was starting to before shutdown. It's possible an arc about fighting back against Praetorian Hamidon could renew broad player interest, but that's a very specific narrative path versus the much more open-ended story arc continuations Homecoming has been focusing on thus far. Also there is merit to be had in bespoke time travel content, but only if it tells story beats not available in the game's on-going timeline. Like the Cyrus Thompson stuff or the Phalanx fighting the Jade Spider. I have doubts any of that could be found for Preatoria much less curry any strong amount of dev and/or player interest, but I can't say it's impossible. If anything though, I'd expect any future Preatorian-involved content to be firmly based on Primal Earth, involving the surviving Preators, the New Praetorians supergroup, and what's to be done with the captured, de-powered Emperor Cole. Kallisti Wharf certainly leans that way, given the involvement of post-iTrial Praetorian mobs.

Given the gold name reply to my initial post, I think they're already well aware. Also, I never said AI was evil. I said that using generative AI as a replacement for creative efforts is feckless, dishonest, and without talent or skill. AI itself is a machine. A very sophisticated one, but still a machine. It possesses no morality. It can only do what it's made to do or is utilized for. In this instance, said use is 'bloating what was once an earnest art community with hundreds upon hundreds of unlicensed 3rd party regurgitations of NCSoft's IP.' Speaking as a current user and as someone who was active in the art community on Live, that's a really bad look. A game about the imagination of building your own superhero can't manage to support an art community without AI? Case in point. FFXIV's art community alone is larger than Homecoming's total active population. That's a lot of prospective players being turned away. It's not like Homecoming doesn't host tons of contests, both dev and player run, showcasing the creativity of its community between costumes, bases, bios, etc. What happens when people who hear about Homecoming and the possibilities allowed by the game show up to look around? They're going to see that the largest, most popular areas of Homecoming's art community are just generative AI. Really it just feels like a game with such a focus on genuine creative efforts can do so much better than pervasively permitting AI. I can't imagine the Homecoming devs would support having their own contributions eclipsed by generative models. They know how difficult the code of the game is to work with, how much time and effort they've spent on crafting new story arcs, forming enemy groups, building zones and mission maps - but none of that would exist as it is without them. Without their perspective and point of view, their interests and particular creative flairs. Could a generative AI have written storylines for the Kallisti Wharf revamp, the Dr. Aeon Strike Force, or expanded Cimerora? Maybe, but it didn't. I imagine the devs who wrote that content would be horribly insulted if anyone implied AI had even been involved (and rightfully so!). However, if that's the standard that the staff sets for themselves, why then does Homecoming permit our artistic community - what should be an institution celebrating that same creativity and path of outreach for our playerbase to emphasize what CoH is about - to be actively displaced and disrupted by AI they themselves wouldn't use?

The core thought behind the comparison was 'overly popular tunnel vision fast tracks to their respective end goals.' AE is the quickest, most efficient way to reach high amounts of XP/inf and hit the level cap, so it's what a bunch of people do. Doesn't require engagement with the community or any other game content. Fast, easy, can even be done without actually playing the game. Similarly, AI is the quickest, most efficient way to produce images, so its what a bunch of people do. Doesn't require any initiative or actual creation, just 'I want a picture as fast as possible with the minimum of personal cost and time investment.' Fast, easy, no artistic skills or talent required. Though, overall that might be giving AE too much flack. Even with the prevalence of farming, AE at least requires some level of human interaction when it comes to testing, playing, and writing the non-farming content. Generative AI just copies things that neither the users nor the AI companies had any hand in making at all (or, often, have any ownership of). Bit jarring to just throw in at the end of the prior post, I'll admit, but the prevalent methods of how both were used only struck me in that moment. Train of thought writing and all that. Pretty much the same. I look at the AI posts like this one and think back to the Stan and Lou shorts or the Dance Gun Word Up video from the ole days and it's just depressing. Back to OP's post, while AI voices as a creative replacement would be abhorrent, implementing a limited text-to-speech accessibility option wouldn't be a bad idea. Some folks have already suggested that in other threads. I'm not really all that sure how much use it would get given MMOs in-general are very text heavy and CoH is at the deep end of that spectrum, though. Combined with how fast players move through maps, any use of voices - AI or text-to-speech - seems like it'd just become a huge jumbled wall of sound. But hey, if text-to-speech would earnestly benefit someone and the devs have interest/time to make it work, why not?

It's the only measure that's relevant. If you don't support something, you don't allow it to be used under your name or promoted through your venues. Homecoming has no problem removing or prohibiting content they don't approve of, as they clearly state in their own code of conduct/terms of service and have clearly shown through on-going moderation of the forums/discord. If a user does something Homecoming's staff do not support users doing, the unsupported content is removed (and so is the user, depending on the nature of the unsupported content). In this instance, said thing being actively permitted by the Homecoming staff is 'hosting hundreds upon hundreds of AI images made by 3rd party companies utilizing NCSoft's IP without a license.' Now, maybe NCSoft doesn't care about their IP being freely used by outside AI companies and recreated at-will. A lot of Korean businesses are embracing AI nowadays. Maybe some amount of the Homecoming staff see no issues - practical, ethical, or otherwise - with using generative AI in that fashion either. Hell, maybe some of the Homecoming staff use generative AI themselves. Free art is free art after all. However, strictly from the view of Homecoming being official, licensed stewards of the CoH IP - an IP that NCSoft has historically been very tightfisted over - actively permitting their users to post unlicensed 3rd party recreations multiple hundreds of times and encourage other users to help AI companies make more (and do so more accurately) on their watch and via the official site seems really dumb. Or maybe AI art is just the modern replacement for all the fan art, commissions, and demo record videos we had back on Live. Outside of the 'post your best costume here' thread, AI generated content comprises the biggest art thread on the forums by a wide margin and is the largest art channel on the discord. This is, apparently, what the majority of Homecoming's art community is now. An unlicensed copy of a real comic book cover someone else actually drew that manages to infringe on two companies at once. It's quick, it's easy, it doesn't require a commission fee, and it has totally eclipsed any other form of community-made art in both usage and views. Reminds me an awful lot of how AE has functioned in-game, come to think of it.

I looked around the forums before making the post, but it seems my search fu was too weak. Not surprised other folks have had the same idea though. Or that Champions Online already has that sort of costume functionality. Their character creator does a lot of things I wish were available in CoH.

Certainly not opposed to fully separate chest emblems if they could make them into 3D elements, I just figured using scaled down shield models would be an easier path to 'belt buckle with logo' on it since shields are already made with bearing emblems in-mind. Though, the option to just slap a smaller chest emblem in the same space sans belt could also work. Similar to how Minx has the pointy M logo at her hips (though that is actually its own unique piece).