Lines

You have made an enemy this day.

I'm also in the camp of 'definitely keep him dead'. Death is so rarely revered or even permanent in superhero fiction that it's refreshing to have an impact here. I'd like to see the plot develop so that Emperor Cole takes the mantle and takes the place in the LRSF, but that process should happen organically. Though I agree Miss Liberty may as well be involved in that final fight. Why did someone dump her unconscious body there anyway? Maybe Hero 1 could stand in as well?

Just throwing in that I know for a fact that there are OuroDev folk who play on Homecoming, with zero baggage. It's not nearly as cut-throat as very few individuals make it look, and I'm always game for seeing how different developers of different calibres and styles morph the game in different ways. What an amazing position we're in, when we can see that happening. I can't wait for more tools to develop for even more people to be brought into the fold. I may explore the others soon.

*leaves this thread and doesn't return*

This is fabulous - sounds excellent. Thanks so much!

I really like Malta. I mean, story-wise. I like how it considers the global political impact of having superheroes around and the paranoia-fuelled hypocracy. It's a really cool take on the setting. I don't love the well of furies. Or rather, I don't love being ushered down quite a singular character development path. I guess it's kept fairly vague, but it does detract from the player agency in the rest of the game.

Done. I reacted to them with the confused face. Now there's an air of doubt.

I'm all for giving prestige a new function, maybe within bases, maybe beyond. Hard to know what exactly that might be. But it certainly was never a particularly elegant or enjoyable system to begin with.

You didn't deserve my laughter.

I'm liking the thread that's talking about the scrapper confront. That's one power that could go full cottage. Other than that, I really can't think of any that I'd put against the firing line. Sakura is right that the cottage rule doesn't shackle the ideas down, as long as the identity of the power is intact.

I tried my best to give an explanation why the progress stopped there, but I ended up creating more questions for myself, got a bit dizzy, took a short lie down and take back to admit that I really have no clue. I've seen games handle textures in drastically different ways, I really wouldn't have a guess how CoH deals with them.

I've been trying to keep my ear to the ground in terms of 3D assets, since that's my jam. As far as I know, they're still a bit of a mystery to the community as a whole. CoH uses a proprietary 3D model file format. OuroDev/Portal Corps had mentioned that a 3DS Max plugin is in the pipeline (Though i can't find where I saw this now). I don't know exactly what that entails, but if it's at least an import/export function then suddenly all this stuff will become a lot more workable. Bubblewrap has managed to do... something. I don't know what any of this means though, so I guess the process isn't Linesproof yet. I don't even know what there, if anything, is referencing a 3D file.

I'd hazard a guess that it's more how legitimacy is shaping the operation. I imagine the team is currently under NDAs right now, so adding more people into that fold carries risks. Possibly costly ones.

Done all this for the first time apiece in Homecoming! All stuff I never thought I'd ever get to try a year ago. Never have I ever got a controller past level 20.

To my knowledge, those scalars don't actually exist in the game as a variable in of themselves. The individual power values are just set according to them.

Correct. You'll notice that warwolves will appear during the day.

This vibe resonated with me a bit too much. I remember feeling the exact same way.

I'm all for brevity, but I can't help but feel like these threads of yours are losing their quality and discussive value, Doug.

Nerf satire.

While I don't think it's appropriate to point fingers, even into an amorphous crowd, it's a significant point that CoH did once have a lot more challenge to it and that that challenge seems to have vanished. Nostalgia is a big driver for why we're playing and it's going to cause issues when the game doesn't mesh with our memories of it. I do miss struggling through some parts of the game. However, I like the IO stuff (And it's only really on Homecoming that I got into it. Heck, it's only here I could even afford to get into it). Maybe it's off-balance, sure, but that level of customisation is wonderful. The incarnate character progression doesn't gel well with me, but that's more because I don't love the limited themes and funnelled storytelling, I think the interface and method for progression is clumsy and not very immersive and I've never been a big fan of cosmically powerful superheroes anyway - but at least it adds more potential for customisation. This stuff is in line with the concept of the game. I say that begrudgingly but it is true. But like I said in the other thread, I do not believe we need to go backwards in order to create challenge. The game is a pretty open field for how it develops. Let's get inventive. I also want to set in stone, as gospel truth in this discussion, that difficulty and challenge does not equate to grind. Grind is only slow. Nobody wants to be forced to do the same thing but slower. That isn't difficulty, just annoying. That said, I also don't think we particularly need to accelerate the game at this point, but that's just me. An old challenge, for instance, was the hazardousness of hazard zones. They were challenging once because you could expect to take a few days or weeks to level past them, Perez and the Hollows took place before you had travel powers, you could get stuck. Nowadays we can outlevel them within a couple of hours and can fly over them without even noticing that they are there. Would it really work to slow down levelling and suppress travel in those zones? Absolutely not. So what could we do to make hazard zones feel hazardous in the new context of the game? How could we incentivise spending time in them in ways that helps players feel like their character is meaningfully progressing? Can hazard zones be given their own sense of story and identity through zone events - some sort of villain group pushback - that takes coordinated team efforts to respond to? Think like how the Halloween banners events needs some team structure to work. How, then, is that rewarded to be a sustainable event? These are the ideas really worth fleshing out and exploring, seeing what people like and don't like. Dreaming big, the game could benefit from new tech that was never there before, like smarter AI. The need to respond to enemies who are responding to you opens up so many opportunities for challenge. The AI has always loved huddling into a nice, cosy AoE-magnet cluster. What if a few of them notice that AoEs are happening and spread out a bit? A tank could need to bring them back in, controllers and blasters could need to lock them down, you could even justify knocking them back into the pile. The game could really do with a pass over how it rewards players, and not even for the sake of difficulty. I think most of the game does feel under rewarding as it is. The game doesn't seem to value its own arcs very much. EXP and Influence are peanuts nowadays. They're measly old carrots. I'd like it if a reward revamp takes difficulty into account, but honestly I'd take anything that makes every aspect of the game feel valuable, rather than a few examples of content.

I think you may be referring to Celestial Wings? They'd be under back detail > Wings. A middlish orange is convincingly fiery. Edit: Or maybe you're referring to the straight up Phoenix Wings that I totally just blinded a little further down the wings list.

We could debate this point (though I'm catching myself umming and erring over how much I do and don't agree. I'm landing somewhere in the realm of 'agree'.), but that's not quite what I was trying to say. More trying to suggest that the kinds of responses folks might get in these discussions may not be doing anything to deflate the issues that they are having with the game.

I was on an LGTF a couple of months ago where the leader set it to +0 with no indication beforehand that would be the case. We were steamrolling the first mission, so someone asked if we could increase the difficulty. The team was in agreement, but the leader refused to. Not even with a reason, that's just the way it was going to be. It got prickly. Two people left the TF. I stayed in because I never leave TFs, but I really do regret that I didn't. It was boring, the encounter between players hung in the air and nobody was talking to each other. That was a totally unique encounter, though, but it stuck with me for how uncomfortable the whole rest of the taskforce was. I think we can all agree that proper etiquette would have been to at least acknowledge what the team was saying, be open to discussing it and be fair with the expectations of the people you're playing with.

To those who want more challenge: I hear you. But there are good, well meaning suggestions coming from folks on how you might spend your game time. Please do discuss them, explore them, reason with what might and might not mesh with you. Give serious time to the ideas around how you could challenge yourself in the current circumstances of the game and try it. It will not be the path of least resistance and you will be in opposition with the nature of the game, but that's kind of the point. There are examples of challenge within the game. Challenge and Difficulty are nebulous subjects and are hard to put into words, but take the time to reflect on whether your feelings are well communicated. I personally make each character fund themselves (Except for a small loan of 1 million influence), buy only recipes and salvage or use merits to extend the progression of characters for longer. I try not to repeat content on one character, so I make sure it counts when I do. These things do work to help you sustain your interest, but it often means ignoring conventional wisdom and staying away from the status quo. To others: Please assume that those suggesting that there be more challenge are coming from somewhere well-meaning. Difficulty of the game is an impossibly intricate and incomprehensible topic to understand in its entirety, so please do not take the ways it might affect you personally. It may well be that the ease of the game is unsustainable to maintain a playerbase, as suggested. Or possibly not: we don't have the kind of data to conclude this. But nonetheless, it's a perspective, coming from peoples' experience that is worth taking seriously. Imagine the tables were turned for a moment and CoH was a ubiquitously difficult game (it shouldn't be - but bear with me). You ask on the forums how you can have a more casual time to suit you, but you are just told that it isn't that sort of game, to get good and that if you want a casual experience, run synapse - that's nice and easy. That kind of answer will do very little to nourish you. Surely there are other players like you who would benefit from more casual content. The game should aim to appeal to a wide range of tastes. Please don't assume the motivations of others in this subject. It may come from wanting a sense of superiority, sure. Maybe. But I doubt it. Rock climbers don't train hard to climb impossible cliffs to feel like they're better than people. Nobody plays tough cryptic crosswords or sudoku puzzles to feel like they're better than other people. And certainly few people play goddamn MMOs to feel superior to other people. That's not what challenge and difficulty is about, it comes from somewhere much more intrapersonal and much more humane than that. Games are somewhere we often expect to find challenge and difficulty, so surely it is understandable to get discontent when a game doesn't apparently deliver. I think it's far more likely that it comes from the experience of levelling, progressing and outfitting a character only to find that there is very little to do of value for the character. At least that's what I found and it is a disappointing discovery. I mostly play 1-35ish and I fantasise about what the game could do to make me want to bother progressing onward. If that experience is endemic to many players (again, no data to prove nor disprove this), then it could be something worth developing.