Chris24601

These days I find Aid Other to be invaluable for all the higher level missions that insisted on adding suicidally aggressive allies (some of whom had to be kept alive to avoid mission failure). Not having to sit around for several minutes waiting for them to regenerate so they don’t die running into the next spawn is an absolute sanity saver. My only request is alternate animations because pulling out a green tricorder really doesn’t fit some concepts. I’d like a wand animation and a generic “two-handed gesture towards target/popping on a defensive toggle” for aid other/self.

The difference being that adding a ‘null’ set requires no alteration of coding beyond adding any other new costume option (and doesn’t require any new graphics). Fixing the three weapon issue requires digging into the spaghetti code. This isn’t to say it shouldn’t be fixed, just that the resources to add null options, should they decide to do so, are unlikely to be the same resources used to dig into the spaghetti code. When it comes to null options for weapons, I’d also appreciate one for claws, whose animations sans actual claws are just punches to which various existing costume pieces and auras could be stacked. In the alternative, I’d like to suggest a set of “pure energy” claws (think Psylocke’s psi-knives). The existing plasma blades are nice, but the large shiny metal emitters can clash with some designs. Regarding dual pistols, given the number of “wrist shooters” in the genre, I’d like to suggest not just the left pistol get the “null” option, but both. Any of the larger glove options could then have concealed weapons in them (and given how they can arc, it could even be variable payload micro-missiles). I would also like the option to replace the Tac Arrow animations with either a weaponless grenade throw or to use dual pistols animations; specifically because of the three weapon glitch with dual pistols. currently I justify the animations of the arrows and pose as me launching some sort or weird missiles, but having the option to make it use pistol animations (shot emerges from gun, end effect of net/ice/etc. still spawns on target) or tossed grenades would provide a lot more options. Heck, I’d like to suggest that even if the spaghetti code of invisible third weapons gets fixed.

Memory is a funny thing. I suspect you might be remembering an earlier point in Homecoming’s history (hard to believe, but it’s been almost five years now). My source is the old Paragon Wiki (https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Costumes); “The maximum number of costume slots was increased to ten (over the five standard slots) with City of Heroes Freedom/Issue 21; the five extra slots are available for 800 Paragon Points each on the Paragon Market. Purchased costume slots are account-wide, not character-specific. VEAT slots would continue to automatically occupy one of the ten slots available.” Issue 21 went live on September 27, 2011. Shutdown was November 30, 2012… so ten slots were actually only available for the last 14 months of Live.

That said, so long as the customization is optional, I think it’s a reasonable method to allow the customization to work. Even if each minion uses a different costume slot (instead of say, 1 slot per tier), that still leaves four open slots for the PC; which is as many as you had on Live prior to the Halloween Event. The extra 5 slots we get free now were only available on Live during the last year of operation and had to be bought for 800 Paragon Points each. The point is a whole lot of us on Live made due with 1-4 costume slots for virtually the entire life of the game. This method of getting customization to work would be no more onerous than what was the default play experience from 2004 to late 2011. Personally, I flip between maybe three costumes at most (hero w. mask, hero without mask, civies, maybe a short black dress for clubbing as a fourth if it’s a female toon) so I wouldn’t mind surrendering six slots for my pets to be customized at all. If there is a work around for customizing pets without using your costume slots, great! But don’t make the Perfect the enemy of the Good. If there is no readily apparent workaround in say [insert reasonable time frame here; I’d say 6-12 months] then don’t keep delaying a workable solution because a better method MIGHT someday be found. Offering it as an OPTION via costume slots (meaning you can use all your costume slots like now with the generic pets or devote up to six slots for custom minions) is still better than what we have now and it’s a trade at least some players would be willing to make.

I have a suggestion that’s one part feature, one part community contest. The feature would be adding an option to the base builder UI that will automatically set up and position the key base features and decor into a small base along, say, half-a-dozen themes (arcane, high-tech, cave, apartment, etc.) at the push of a button (with a WARNING screen that hitting confirm will undo any previous base design work). The community contest? Design one or more small bases to meet these themes. The winners’ bases get used as the presets with the name of their choice attached to it (ex. Stormfire’s Arcane Sanctum), immortalizing their efforts as a permanent part of the game.

Check out Piecemeal’s personal story (Redside). The Devs have already begun turning it into what is likely to be an Incarnate zone where normal folks are falling to ash, powered people feel weakened, gravity is misbehaving, and the Neo-Shivans are building some sort of portal or transmitter.

I’d use it for a supervillain in an AE arc. Just calling themselves that implies a sense of megalomaniacal villainy that’s hard to top.

In thinking about it further, I also expect it has to do with the fact that most of the texture layers in question work differently between the male and female models. Specifically, the male models don’t have a separate “tops” and “tops with skin” category… all the skin textures are just under the “tight” category and the textures can overlay any of them. But it’s all the same texture maps whether male, female, or huge and so doing the fixes would actually require adding a different skin texture for every pattern to the male “tight” category with further pointers to keep the wrong pattern from being using with the wrong skin map. And when you’ve already got a base texture map, a specular map, a bump map, and potentially a transparency map and/or reflection map, all potentially interacting with two color filter maps… let’s just say plugging all that into different channels on the mesh, and the costume creator’s exclusions database (ex. how it will literally remove all other options for cape-physics from the options available if you’ve selected one) means there’s a LOT more going on behind the scenes and in a place where it’d be very easy to break something critical to how the game parses it’s graphics. There’s a reason the term “standard code rant” exists… when something you think would be easy action turns out to be far more complicated than it appears. I am certain this particular complaint isn’t the first time it’s come up in the game’s history and, if it were anything easy to fix, it would have been already. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, just that it’s likely not nearly easy as you think.

At issue is mainly that the models only have so many channels for colors/texture layers. In order for the skin texture to show up elsewhere on the top, bottom, etc. it has to be laid over the entire piece and then the color pattern dropped onto that. The only way to remove it would be to make an entirely separate skin pattern for each overlay. It’s theoretically doable, but very labor intensive.

It is, admittedly, hyperbole. But it does reflect one of the biggest problems Redside; the lack of agency for the players. Once you hit “mission accept” most missions lock you on a rail with no choice in how it turns out. Many Redside missions don’t include their atrocities in the pre-accept dialogue; you only find out after you’re locked onto that rail. So unless your villain concept is “complete irredeemable monster” your concept gets broken as soon as you touch one of those rails… and there no genuinely safe in-game way to avoid them. You have to metagame by pausing before each contact choice or that first mission accept to find a Wiki or similar resource to read through the entire storh arc just to make sure you’re not going to be committing some war crime (releasing bio-weapons, stopping people from curing people infected by bio-weapons, kidnapping people for experimentation, helping a stalker murder his victim, etc.). Then you slog through the content you’ve already read the story to. If the mechanics are good it can be fun, but there’s not going to be any surprises. That’s a lot of work to play a Redsider if you’re turned off by playing utter scum. Compare that to just rolling up a Bluesider you say is really a selfish rogur who’s only in it to enrich themselves by taking down bad guys and stealing their stuff. That’s 90% of the Rogue-friendly Redside mission content right there without worrying about getting locked to a track leading you over the moral cliff.

I’ve literally not seen the Mage-Killer Tatiana arc just because the contact’s title “Mage-Killer” and the arc title “Last Witch of Striga.” Hearing later that it’s to get her freaking WEDDING RING*, knowing the story from the heroic version just puts that one so far beyond the pale for me. Completing that mission makes your character lower than dog feces in my opinion. That one guy wanted Rogues punished with being mistrusted? Well, I’ll agree to that IF any character that finishes that mission gets switched immediately to villain, locked out of choosing the Rogue option for tip missions and even Null saying “Dude, I can do a lot, but I can’t wash away THAT!” I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate that there’s no “drop story arc” option in this game. It’s not so much an issue Blueside where even an unfun mission is still a story of your character saving someone or stopping a criminal. But on Redside, YOU are the calamity that could befall innocents and needing to essentially find a wiki and read every mission ahead of time to make sure you aren’t exposing innocents to lethal plagues, or collecting victims to be experimented on, or doing anything for Westin Phipps. That level of diligence to avoid all the moral event horizons makes it more like work than something you’re doing for fun. * the ring with the flavor text of “This ring contains the power of Stephanie Peebles’ love for her late husband, Stephen.”

Other than just to give Rogues something unique, there is zero reason for an arc that includes both heroic, rogue and villain options at several points and is REALLY GOOD to be alignment locked to Rogue. Not to mention if you can’t have contacts as a Rogue as the other guy wanted, both that mission and the excellent Bobby Curtin arc wouldn’t be accessible to anyone despite being built FOR the Rogue alignment exclusively (non-Rogue Redsiders can’t even reach Houston to talk to him). Similarly the Rogue arc of Sgt. Schorr shows off the flexibility Red-Side missions could have in terms of approach and goals via in-mission triggers. The rewrite of the ending of the one Crosscut mission to allow you to NOT be a complete monster doesn’t even require any change of mechanics (you don’t turn the Skull over until the very end) and would make that entire arc more playable for a much wider range of players. Another metric I’d be interested in would be what percentage of players voluntarily fail the Marshal Brass mission to take out Amanda Vine’s broadcast despite the fact its not even difficult to complete and requires you to go faff about for an hour and a half waiting for the timer to run down before you can finish the arc (not a huge deal if you catch it in the level band, but kinda annoying if you’re getting it via Oroboros). More ability to choose your path; be it a broader array of Newspaper missions, more Tip missions, and/or more story arcs where you get a choice of approach; is probably the most resource-friendly approach for strengthening Redside.* I also contend that an option to betray the 5th Column and Mage-Killer contacts on Striga would be a good thing. The middle three arcs are sufficiently grey they’re good for either Villains or Rogues; but even big-time villains in comics have drawn the line at working with Neo-Nazis, while beating up an old widow to steal her wedding ring is just so petty that they may as well add a mission about kicking puppies… it’s so far over the moral event horizon you can’t see a character coming back from that to be anything other than pure villain (the most lame and boring kind from my perspective).

The biggest thing holding Indom back is it’s rep as the unofficial PVP server. As has been found with virtually every MMO across genre, PVP is a <10% demographic. The fact that, given it’s reputation, it has roughly 10% of the players on it is about what you’d expect. The best way to improve Indom’s numbers would be to stop pushing it as where to go for PVP. Maybe make it the TF/I-trial server by upping those rewards over there.

XP/inf penalties to teams that include rogues? Give villains a chance to be more evil? You really want Redside to be a deserted wasteland don’t you? All this suggestion would do is encourage most players roll heroes with a “I used to be a villain” and “I’m doing this for the money” in their background info because for most people engaging in pretend evil isn’t all that engaging and exiting Redside numbers already show that. The main reason opening up the ATs happened was because even exclusive access to those ATs wasn’t enough to keep people playing Redside. They merged the markets because there weren’t enough players Redside to sustain it… whole categories of recipes and salvage; much less crafted IOs; were just empty. No amount of influence can buy what’s not there. Redside isn’t popular because being an outright villain isn’t popular. Honestly, I’m curious what the metrics of the new Striga arcs looks like. What percentage are taking the “Work for the 5th Column” and “Beat/Kill an old lady for her magic wedding ring” arcs? How many of those who have are going on to play it more than once (on the same or different PCs)? Particulary in relation to the Rogue-aligned Curtin and Houston arcs (which anacdotally I go out of my way to play with every rogue I roll). I stand by my prior conclusion; you can either make Redside into a more populated Rogue Isles (i.e. focus on more Roguish content… or at least content where Rogue options are possible) or maintain it as a largely empty City of Villains (i.e. focus on content that is exclusively villainous), but a more populated City of Villains just isn’t possible given human nature.

I know that’s what the plan turned into, but the development of lore was ongoing throughout the original run. Ex. Statesman and Recluse weren’t Incarnates until the concept of incarnates was invented. The concept of Incarnates grew out of a need to develop monetizable endgame grinding. One thing I’m admittedly a bit concerned about is taking the LiveDevs post-shutdown statements about future plans as gospel truth for the future. It’s not. It’s a snapshot in time of their future plans that would have to be adjusted due to scheduling, budgets, manpower and programming limitations, demands from above, etc. This bit added in Issue 19 was another snapshot; a foreshadowing of plans at the stage Incarnates were first introduced. Do you think it was an accident the initial adversaries trying to keep you from finding the Well in Ramiels arc are Reflections identical to those you find in the Shadow Shard. Now, plans change. All the time. But that’s actually part of my point. Those LiveDev plans got changed radically. They were made literally impossible by the shutdown. Even if they HAD gone forward, at its prior pace we have no idea how much of those future plans would still apply by the time they actually reached live several YEARS* down the line. People have better ideas and change direction all the time. I would like decisions for the future to be based on what Homecoming’s Devs can reasonably produce and what they think makes sense, not slavish devotion to a roadmap that was largely based on finding ways to monetize the game to keep ahead of the shutdown beast. For example; given the current resources, perhaps scaling back The Battalion and making the Oncoming Storm into a cascade of theats piling up all at once (i.e. Battalion + Praetorian Hamidon + Rularuu + … you know, one threat per power origin would be cool) instead of a singular ever power scale escalating Crisis (followed by an even BIGGER Crisis) would be healthier for City of Heroes now that it is no longer beholden to the abusive demon of monetization. It’s something to think about anyway. * Other than Issue 23, it was roughly 6 months between Issues once Incarnate content came online. With four Incarnate slots left to be released after Issue 24 and added at the typical one per issue… the end of the original Incarnate advancements would have been at least two years out past when it was shutdown.