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Wot?

There’s still a process of unpacking how models in CoH work. They use a proprietary file type. If OuroDev, HC or even NCSoft manage to reveal how this works, I know I’ll be wanting to contribute 3D assets. I expect a quality check will be involved to keep things graphically consistent and the polys optimised, but that’d really open things up.

Yeah, that’s news to me too. Crazy I see group fly so rarely that it doesn’t even occur to me to see Null and switch it off. Group fly does need a stern talking to. https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/11600-lets-talk-about-group-fly/

You’re right, of course. Trouble is that the hopes here are diametrically opposed. As Steampunkette just demonstrated, we can throw the same arguments at each other from different perspectives. I don’t think we need to snipe over it. I’m just concerned that little reward for gameplay isn’t very sustainable.

Gotta back Steampunkette on that one. I impose a lot of challenges, but that’s to avoid my power tray being filled with OP ‘i win’ buttons rather than for any sense of reward. I don’t think you can just pretend to reward yourself.

Man, people have really chosen some strange hills to die on.

There’s one in the top left. huzzah!

Let me give an example of the sort of content-to-reward I imagine. Keeping in mind that progress towards this could be account-wide (if not at least shard-wide). Let’s say there’s three new hats: The Rogue’s hat can be unlocked by making all the different choices in the new Rogue arc across multiple playthroughs, whether on the same character or across different characters. The Vigilante’s hat is unlocked for the same reason, but for the new Vigilante arc. The Philosopher’s hat is for all possible choices made. It’s something to encourage us to try doing things differently and be uniquely rewarded for certain content, rather than just a counter. It would also encourage light roleplaying with use of alts, which is pretty core to the game. It’s also not hard and doesn’t require a lot of investment. You could do it in less time than it takes to run some taskforces. The original unlock method for the Cabal hat wasn’t far off this. It required the Ten Times the Victor badge, which (once upon a time) took some decent players and team coordination. It wasn’t a grind, it was a challenge. I feel that the game at the moment encourages grinding more than unlockables would, with most rewards being XP, inf and merits. Many players have found the few efficient bits of content for time/reward and run them repeatedly every day. That’s a grind to me. The fact that you have to make the decision to pick less effective ways to gain rewards isn’t great design.

I have a T3-only Demons/Storm MM (You'll find my build in Steampunkette's thread above, but Plainguy has done it better. Mine is just affordable). Works fine. Significantly more useful in teams than my Bots/FF MM, just gets exhausted quickly and lacks any mez protection.

If your shard has a good channel for socialising, invite folks that way I suppose. People wanna socialise in an MMO, that's normal, but CoH has no natural, intuitive way to do so. LFG and Help fill that role immediately, and it takes someone to point out how to access the social hubs for it to move into the right spots. Reunion is so quiet on those channels that a bit of chat there is welcome to me.

I'm extremely pro this idea. This would be such a nice mechanic to add a little bit of interest to GM and AV fights, and bring some more value to cc powers.

Yeah, I lose interest in a toon when there's nowhere else to climb. It all comes too soon as well. I hope it doesn't contribute to an overall loss of interest in the game, but it's having that effect on me.

This story follows the events of The Hollows, which should be done first. Contacts and characters will remember you from those events. Sam Wincott is missing again. Trolls Task Force, still led by Lt David Wincott, went on the offence against the trolls but vanished. The only person you can contact is Julius the Kindhearted Troll. ---- This is my first real stab at an AE arc. I've kept it simple for now to see what's up and wanted to do something no more or less complicated than a regular arc. I felt like the ending of the Hollows arc was a little incomplete, so I wanted to try my own take of what could happen next. I'm looking for feedback and am prepared to make some changes. I've been able to play through it on a generic IO build in the upper range of the levels. It might be difficult a little lower due to a few EBs. There are a few unfortunate compromises I needed to make, such as using the Bat'Zul level instead of the Cavern of Transcendence map.

I think that just comes from not understanding that this is an idea for the journey, not the destination. Some people like the creative freedom that having no unlockables grants. But I'd prefer to earn an expanded creative freedom. It feels a bit backwards to front-load reward like this to me, but others don't see it that way.

I don't think you're getting attacked here. It's just a difference in expectations about how folks like to play the game. I, at least, would like to see larger varieties of content have its own unique reward, rather than all the reward having been given before the content, and the benefit to playing either concentrated in a few places or standardised throughout the game.

Yeah, cat’s out of the bag with existing things. You wouldn’t even be able to get rid of Null the Gull, which subverts a whole gameplay feature, at this point. The culture has adapted with it. I’m also in favour of account-wide unlocks, where perhaps progress is shared between characters as well. I don’t see this at all as ego-stroking, as some have suggested. Thinking about the cabal hat from live, I never wore it but really enjoyed the process of unlocking it.

Even outside of the crimewave event idea, having cops regularly sweeping the streets themselves, moving from area to area and needing player assistance to progress their patrol would be great!

Read all about it! It definitely carries across into this discussion, especially if the invasions were kept to Hazard Zones (partly so they don't troll with places like Atlas and PI where folks might be minding their own business, and that it'd add a hazard to hazard zones.) I managed to get a few levels out of Crey's folly recently and enjoyed exploring the place. You don't get the same kind of verticality and environmental variety in missions. It was a shame I could only do that for five levels or so before I outlevelled the place. Powerlevelling, it was not, but it was fun.

I've seen a few conversations turn to either the lack of population throughout the zones or the lack of reward for using them, and we often talk about looking at Streetsweeping for solutions. I wanted to consolidate some ideas in one place and have one topic for talking more specifically about this. Streetsweeping (going around the streets beating up mobs) is a very high-risk, low-reward activity as it stands. You get unpredictable enemies, level ranges that could go from blue one mob to purple the next, debt for death is higher, travel to find level-appropriate zones is higher, and by and large it rewards nothing you wouldn't find better elsewhere. There's an opportunity to make Streetsweeping a valid way to get 1-50, fill some of those blank levels, or farm for their own rewards. A few ideas have included - Unlevelled mobs in hazard zones. - A new merit of similar conversion value to vanguard merits, with their own rewards as well. - Taking control of zones and neighbourhoods in some fashion. - Co-op hazard zones. - Zone events that are initiated by streetsweeping. (Redside GMs already do this) - PvPlite, where players don't engage players but focuses on winning against street groups instead. I'd certainly like to see Hazard Zones become Hazardous and Rewarding enough to be interesting to spend time in. I think some of the ideas above could displace a little bit of farming into Hazard Zones, which I don't see as a bad thing. With leagues, more people can join in and with unlevelled mobs more people can contribute for efficient earning. Unlike AE, of course, there's no control over damage type so there's still some degree of limitation preventing a decked-out farming toon for a single purpose. One stretch thought that comes up now and again is for hazard zones to each have their own zone event, with similar complexity and reward value of an MSR raid. What could each zone have for a event? Looking at the more emptier, 'blank canvas' neighbourhoods and zones: - Grendel's Gulch in The Hollows - Boomtown (Something about reclaiming neighbourhoods, or war between the Council and the 5th Column?) - Crey's Folly (Freakshow Thunderdome?) - Eden Note, This is purely just for the sake of thought exercise in designing CoH gameplay, I'm not demanding any new features here. Just blue sky talk about what could be.

I’d like some grindy rewards to reappear as well. I don’t have much time in my life to commit to the game either, but I’d like to feel like I have more than just veteran levels to work towards.

🖕

I’ve not had weird experiences like these since live. Bad communication is always a killer. Even if the language isn’t shared, something as simple as an emoji would help.

(FWIW, I just wanted to add that the reason we saw new vigilante/rogue arc content was because HC was trying out branching stories with moral choices. It’s obviously easier to give distinct moral choices to the two intermittent alignments than to heroes or villains.) It would be a huge undertaking, absolutely. Something like this could transform redside and set it apart properly from blue. In my head I’m imagining a copy-paste of the alignment UI, with each fill being a milestone with one group. A paper mission adds 1, a relevant arc adds 2 and a mayhem mission adds 3 (or something). Rival factions get their alignment reversed in this way. Milestones each develop the plot: 1 - destabilise the faction’s leadership 2 - rise to power 3 - establish a powerbase 4 - doomsday! (or something) Each level adds perks you can do with the group, like a long cooldown summon at lower levels, or some way you can start a Paragon City invasion at higher levels. Over time, tonnes of things could happen. Spawns of your faction versus rival factions could sometimes appear near you in some zones. Entire gang wars and controlling territories could gradually be built off this system. There would need to be enough to do in the process to level the lion’s share of 1-50, with existing arcs as filler, in order to have an effect on the character as an antagonist so sheer quantity would take a lot of work. The character still needs to be a destined one, so their power level can’t exceed Recluse in the pecking order. The doomsday schemes can’t outshine project destiny. It’s about balance. One thing that would create work is having too many factions. One for each existing villain group would be huge. Would one per origin be too few? (Who do you pick for natural, for instance? Family or Knives of Artemis? They share origin but are nothing alike.) Or could the framework be designed such that adding a new faction isn’t too labour intensive after the core mechanisms are in place?

I agree that’d be coolest, but the issue was then avoiding how existing arcs place you at odds with those factions. Some complex stories and task forces could become a bit strange. Establishing sub-factions, splinters, rebel groups, etc, of the existing villain groups would be an easy fix. Plus those subgroups could have a narrative power vacuum just waiting to be filled, whereas existing groups already have established and sometimes complex hierarchies. And it would give Vahz minions the potential for a presence on the rogue isles.

There might be a little bit of dissonance as you align yourself with existing groups, say Hellions, and then find yourself in an arc that requires you to hunt Hellions. Maybe there’s a way around that though. One might be to introduce new factions with a few generic themes and clear rivalries. Villains would encounter them almost exclusively in paper and mayhem missions and heroes if a villain prompts an invasion with their group. (The group could also be a sub faction or splinter of an existing villain group to avoid adding to the villain soup) If normal defeat badges are associated with the factions, this might create an interesting out-of-character meta coop where hero badge hunters need villains to invade.