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Ssieth

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Everything posted by Ssieth

  1. This is the impression I got from a casual conversation with someone who worked for NCSoft Brighton who IIRC pointed the fingers at Wildstar - but no idea how much they actually knew. It is also worth keeping in mind that it's a lot easier to break even when you don't have to pay any staff, office costs, marketing etc etc A community-based project can run on a lot tighter budget than a commercial one.
  2. Ssieth

    (Re)Union!

    Hey there - finally checking in :) I was Kitten on Union :)
  3. I think I'm probably echoing other people here when I say that CO always felt like it was designed around a F2P/P2W framework. Even when it was pay-to-play it felt like every design decision had been structured to allow it to go free-to-play at the first sign of any reason to prompt that. And in that vein, it felt like it was a MMO created by grabbing the trope-filled building blocks of MMOs of the time and shoving them together into something that never really felt like anything other than a Frankenstein's monster of a thing. And I think that's why it felt soulless to me. It didn't have an identity of its own, or a reason to play _it_ rather than something else. I did play it, and for a good while. I was in that sort of malaise you get when you play something for a long time and then want a taste of something different. I gave it a good long go, pushed a few characters to the end of game content zone, had my best shot and learning to love it. And then I went back to CoH. When CoH closed, I looked back at CO and pondered a bit before deciding that it wasn't going to fill that hole. Instead I flipped to something entirely different and played EVE-Online for a good while. If I were to point to specific things that were key I'd have a hard time because it was more death-by-a-thousand-irritations than any key set of things but maybe the grouping and the crafting were the two biggest things. Grouping was too difficult and crafting was too integral.
  4. It does rather sound like everyone is arguing this point from a perspective of this new policy being some cast-in-stone notion that will never change. I read it more as a first pass, utilising very simple and easily available metrics to try and limit a behaviour that most recognise as generally harmful to the community. That doesn't seem like a terrible thing. Could it be refined? Yes - Zolgar's suggestion is a good step in that direction. I believe I also read a suggestion of some mechanism to hold things down for those people who know they are going to be unable to access the game for a while. Sorry not to credit you but also an excellent idea. What we have to face, though, is with each improvement added (and I'm sure there are more than the two above) - there is an added burden on those people coding up the back end. I have a great deal of trust in them wanting to improve things and in their capability to do so but we have to recognize that their time is not a bottomless well that we can draw upon. In that light, I really like the idea of a quick-and-simple fix now (as proposed in the original policy) along with something more nuanced and complex later on. The advantage is that those later enhancements to the policy can be conceived of with experience of the limitations of a more simplistic and immediate one. In the short term, it is unlikely that many people will be inconvenienced to any significant degree (no one in the first 30 days) and even for those who would have character names at risk after those first 30 days, they are at risk and not necessarily immediate threat of loss unless there just happens to be someone lined up and desperate to grab that name right now. That seems statistically unlikely, to say the least. Worst case scenario? You have to change a name on a character. That might be a bit of a pain but it's hardly the world falling in. I know it can be frustrating to not be able to use the name you want. The name I used way back in the day for my main was taken by the time I got to Homecoming and it was a bit of a blow. However, it's not the end of the world, no matter how it comes about. At the end of the day: Will this policy cause a positive outcome for a significant number of players by freeing up names locked out by abandoned characters? Probably. Will this policy cause a negative outcome for a significant number of players who are totally not using placeholders to hoard names? Probably not. Can the policy be improved upon with more work by the dev team? Almost certainly Is the policy set in stone for all time? What I have read suggests not What the above suggests is that the policy is probably a good first step (and almost certainly not a final one) in balancing the community's needs regarding character names. It's not going to meet everyone's needs but, on balance, there's more good than bad to it. If it can evolve over time (and I see no reason why not) then we're likely to find an even more comfortable compromise as we go forwards.
  5. Another voice in favour of the naming policy. I understand that it doesn't support everyone's style of play perfectly and I understand that it would be better if we had a Champions style CharaterName@AccountName style thing going on under the hood. I also understand that could potentially be a hell of a lot of work. Changing any authentication and identification system is a pain at the best of time, one that's built to work across multiple shards, pulling together single-instance and multi-shard comms? Yeah - that's not going to be a walk in the park at the best of times. Trust me - been there, done that, worn the beaten-down expression you only get from some obscure bug that manifests itself only when a member of a character in a group inside an instanced mission teamed with someone in the group with the same name tries direct-message someone else on another shard with the same character name..... And the currently proposed solution? It seems reasonable. As has already been stated - getting into the 90 day zone takes maybe an hour or two of gameplay, even at a fairly sensible pace. I know that some people like to take things at a relaxed pace and fair enough. I'm one of them. I don't enjoy power-levelling on the whole and would much rather remember the arcs my characters take to get to the heady heights of power. But level 6? I'd say I average _maybe_ a couple of hours for that. Maybe 3-4 at an outside if I happen to be distracted. I mean, you exit the tutorial at level 2. So yeah... 90 days. I kind of feel if you can't log a character in for 90 days or can't put a couple of hours effort into it then you've probably not earned the right to reserve their name indefinitely. And let's be clear. The name doesn't get taken when those 90 days are elapsed. It just becomes available. That really isn't the same thing. And getting to 20? Well - that's a commitment for someone who works full time (like I do) and has a family (like I do) who don't also want to play City of Heroes (who can guess why?). But really - it feels like the privilege of blocking out a name for 365 days of completely ignoring that character (to the point of not even logging in) is due some sort of commitment.
  6. Sooooo.... presuming I've levelled past 40, is there an easy way to go back and do the Armitage mission?
  7. I tend to play in windowed mode and I don't often have problems with maps not loading but it does occasionally happen for me. It had never occurred to me that it might be windowed mode behind it. For me it's maybe one map transition in 50 or so and it tends to happen when transitioning from zone maps to mission maps. I can't remember the last time it happened for zone->zone transfer and as far as I remember it has never happened for zone->base or base->zone. Sorry - I don't have anything more useful to add but maybe some extra data about the experiences of players who use windowed mode might help zero in on your issue.
  8. Ooh - many thanks :) This'll help me reorient :)
  9. OK - it's been a long while since I played and my brain-fuzz is clouding out any memory of quite how to build one of these, other than - "Need Moar Endurance!" So - I went looking for inspiration and threw myself into the arms of [insert favourite search engine here]... what I came up with is this: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/pc/536558-city-of-heroes/faqs/34875 It seems pretty plausible as a basis but also it's pretty old, even for original CoH. Can anyone shed any light on how good the advice there is, baring in mind the numerous updates?
  10. I've had two MMOs in my life that stuck with me and they are pretty much polar opposites - CoH and EVE-Online. That CoH is back is quite amazing and I feel a sense of being 'home' when i am back in-game. There are so many memories, even ones I didn't realise I had. That sound of a glowy just around the corner, the sensation you get when a character first gets a travel power, venturing into a new zone for the 'first time', spending far too long working on a costume. ::sigh:: I'm deeply grateful for a second chance at CoH no matter how long it lasts. Thank you, ~~ Ssieth
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