BasiliskXVIII

I'm not telling Troo to leave because he failed a 'purity test.' I'm pointing out that what he's asking for, namely, a version of the game where he doesn't have to trust an external development team, is fundamentally incompatible with how shared, developer-managed games work. No one is forced to play Homecoming. At this point, you're not even forced to play Homecoming if you want to play City of Heroes, unlike, say, Diablo IV, where playing the game requires using Activision-Blizzard-King’s servers. Choosing to participate in this environment inherently means accepting that the devs have final say. That's the general idea behind that EULA you agree to every time you log in. That’s not gatekeeping. That’s just the structure of the game.

Ah, yes, of course...

The forums aren’t the only venue the devs use to gather feedback. They also take input from Discord, monitor in-game behavior through metrics, and apply their own judgement based on feasibility and available manpower. No single channel speaks for the entire player base, but each provides useful signals. Your own examples actually support this. During Open Beta, there was strong forum pushback against the Tanker changes, with many claiming it would ruin the archetype. The devs made adjustments but ultimately stood by the core of the update, and pushed it live. Tankers are still widely played. That suggests the devs considered broader data and were confident in their assessment. Take Kinetic Melee as another example. The forums have been vocal for years that it underperforms, and there's plenty of both anecdotal and numerical feedback to support that. Yet the devs haven’t made significant changes to it. That suggests they’ve either evaluated the feedback and concluded that the set is functioning acceptably as is, or they’ve chosen to prioritise other issues given limited development resources. In short, forum sentiment is only one piece of the puzzle. The devs know that, and their decision-making reflects it.

Certainly, we can't know every individual player's reasons for avoiding a powerset. But design decisions have to be made based on the information we do have, even if it isn't exhaustive. There's a reason consumer research relies on focus groups and representative feedback rather than polling every human on Earth. If a power or set is consistently avoided, rarely picked, and regularly mentioned in feedback from engaged players, that tells us something valuable. It may not capture every opinion, but it's still a better foundation for decisions than doing nothing for fear of being incomplete. At some point, a line has to be drawn. We can act on observable patterns, or we can wait forever for data that will never be perfect.

You appear to have misunderstood. I did not tell you to go play elsewhere, nor do I encourage it. I simply corrected your inaccurate claim that you are forced to trust the Homecoming developers. You are not. You choose to, as we all do by remaining here. That distinction may be semantic, but it is also factual and important.

Perhaps if you find a polite, neutral correction of your erroneous assertions unpleasant, you should consider avoiding erroneous assertions.

That is not entirely accurate. You are not required to trust the developers' decisions. Several alternative servers exist, and you also have the option of running a private server with rules and balance changes that reflect your own preferences. By choosing to play on Homecoming, however, you have implicitly accepted the authority of its development team to make design decisions, including those related to power balance. This is not a coercive arrangement. It is a voluntary association. If the terms become unacceptable, alternatives remain available. That is the nature of participating in any shared platform: we are all subject to its framework, whether or not we agree with every decision it produces.

You'll be happy to know I haven't been personally responsible for any changes to any power in the game. The devs haven't sent me a PM asking for my opinion, and I don't expect one. So no, I don't get to decide. The final call rests with the devs, who we as a community trust to make those decisions on our behalf. It is, functionally, a benevolent dictatorship. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don't. But the goal is that changes should be made with an eye toward consensus, so that the voices of a small number of players, whether for or against, do not block improvements that are broadly requested.

This is a false dichotomy. In a game like City of Heroes, where players are encouraged to make alts and experiment with different builds, the number of players who avoid an entire powerset because of one underperforming or frustrating power is likely to be much higher than the number of players who love that one specific power and use it regularly. Every power in the game is someone’s favourite, but that alone can’t justify never improving or replacing powers that most players skip or actively dislike. Take Black Hole as an example. Some players might genuinely enjoy the intangibility effect, and for them, the shift toward a trawl-style behavior may be disappointing. But that same change also introduces a useful, broadly applicable function that improves the power for a wider player base. At the same time, keeping the old intangibility effect around in a limited way doesn’t satisfy those who think it’s one of the worst effects in the game. So now we have a power that frustrates both groups, just in different ways. That’s not a win for anyone. The truth is that no change will ever make everyone happy. And making no changes at all will certainly make some people unhappy too. The only responsible way forward is to make changes that are, as much as possible, positive-sum; improvements that increase utility, enjoyment, or clarity for the largest number of players, even if they affect a few legacy use cases along the way. In cases where there’s strong division over a power's function, the Homecoming team has shown they can introduce mutually exclusive versions of powers. That’s probably the ideal path when it's feasible. But when it’s not, thoughtful reworks that improve the power’s utility and consistency should take priority over preserving mechanics that are broadly considered harmful or obsolete.

I don't dislike the Cottage Rule as a general principle. It's a good idea to avoid radically changing powers, especially when players have built characters and playstyles around them. But in practice, the way it's applied often ends up protecting mechanics that no longer make sense or that actively hold powers back from becoming better. The real issue is that "core functionality" is such a vague concept that a power can be completely changed in feel and value without technically breaking the rule. For example, if Build Up were changed tomorrow so that instead of granting +100% damage and +20% ToHit, it gave +1% damage and +0.2% ToHit, it would still "function" the same way. But it would also be a useless power, and I would be just as upset as if it built a small cottage at my location. It would be just as disruptive as a rework, and arguably worse, because it pretends to preserve the original power while stripping it of all utility. In other cases, powers have been renamed and redesigned outright, like what happened with /Regen. I don't have an option to hold on to Resurrect as it was, I get Second Wind instead. Likewise, Dull Pain is now Ailment Resistance. Even if the reworked regen is generally improved, the practical result is the same. I still have to rebuild my character from the ground up to accomodate the changes. So what's actually being preserved? A good example of the problem is Black Hole. Originally, it made a group of enemies intangible, removing them from combat. This was often more harmful than helpful. It has since been changed so that it now pulls enemies into a central area, giving it a much more useful function. However, for enemies that resist the pull effect (mostly AVs and EBs) it still applies the old intangibility effect. So you now have a power that mostly works as a mob gatherer, but still retains a piece of its old design just often enough to cause serious problems. You can accidentally, or deliberately, phase out a major target and force your team to wait around doing nothing until it reappears. And because you cannot cancel the effect, it can easily stall a fight and give bosses time to regenerate or use healing powers. This is a case where the Cottage Rule is preventing a usable power from being a good one. The power has already changed in function, but because a piece of the old behavior is still technically present, it can't be properly cleaned up without violating the letter of the rule. That is not preserving the spirit of the game. It is preserving a design legacy for its own sake. I understand the desire to avoid disrupting players who return after long breaks, only to find their favorite powers completely unrecognizable. But there has to be room for thoughtful, targeted reworks when powers are broadly disliked, rarely used, or designed for a game that only ever existed in the launch devs' theorycrafting. Used wisely, the Cottage Rule is a helpful guideline. Applied rigidly, it becomes an excuse not to fix things that clearly need fixing.

Well, of course. I remember the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, for instance, but I don't think that that is an aspirational target for difficulty. Soulslikes just happen to be very prominent in gaming culture, and a really good example of difficulty moderated by skill. They also tend to be an example of what players who are looking for a "hard mode" typically bring up. One could even bring SimCity(2013) or Daikatana into the picture, which were hard to play for a variety of reasons utterly unrelated to gameplay, but they don't exactly make the point. It's like if someone was looking for an example of a large aquatic mammal, people will tend to gravitate towards the blue whale. Even though others exist, that's the example that will tend to spring to mind.

I will grant you that, I meant it more in the sense of mastery as a function of active play, rather than build-side. No matter what your build is, a hit is always a hit. The game runs an RNG, and if it decides an attack hits you, you can run through the map with the projectile homing behind you until it lands. There's no dodging or blocking, the best you have is attack chain optimization and potentially timing. It's possible for someone playing a Soulslike to get good to the point where they can run through the game without ever getting hit. In CoH you're beholden to the will of the RNG. To your 801s example, there's not going to be a "Let Me Solo Her"-type character who can run that mission unleveled and unslotted, relying on their proficiency alone. Because of that, there isn't that kind of incrementalism that is the reward for soulslikes. If the condition for winning is "don't roll three ones on a die in close succession" there's no way to improve your skill at that on the fly. The best you can do is either throw yourself against that challenge again and again until the RNG plays nicely with what you want (which isn't mastery, it's obstinacy), or pull out, rework your build and restart, which is an extremely long work loop that I don't think is actually appealing to a significant number of players, particularly in light of how godawful the respec tool is.

I think the fundamental problem here is that you're treating games as a monolith. You can make Poker harder by not letting players see what cards they have and making them play blindfolded. This doesn't make it a better game or more fun (beyond perhaps the novelty factor) because it undermines the core game loop. Games derive their enjoyment from very different kinds of reward loops. Some games are built around mastery: Dark Souls, for example, is about reading animation tells, managing stamina, learning boss patterns, and steadily refining your execution. There, difficulty creates tension and satisfaction because you can directly express skill moment-to-moment and improve through repetition. The problem is that at it heart there is no mastery of City of Heroes. It is at it heart more akin to Stardew Valley or Factorio than it is to Ghost of Tsushima or Shadows of the Colossus. The core appeal isn't moment-to-moment execution, but long-term progression, build experimentation, and sandbox expression. You refine your build, experiment with power choices, and enjoy the power fantasy of becoming stronger rather than the adrenaline of narrowly winning a fight through pure mechanical precision. More crucially, every attack rolls a die. Streakbreakers exist in the game to ensure that even if you succeed win the roll (or lose it), if you've done so too often, the attack hits or misses anyways to ensure statistical stability and specifically to prevent the kind of mastery-based gameplay that some people want. You can fine-tune mitigation, optimise defense and resistance layers, prioritise targets smartly. But once you're actually engaged in combat, you’ve mostly made your meaningful decisions already. The moment-to-moment fighting is a controlled math problem, not a reactive skill test. That’s why tuning City of Heroes to create high-stakes, high-failure-rate combat simply doesn’t work. You can absolutely make the numbers harsher (give enemies bigger attacks, more mez, more health, etc...) but that doesn't deepen the gameplay. It just moves you closer to the coin flip zone, where an encounter becomes "you either survive the alpha or you don't," and where failure is often just a reflection of build mismatches rather than execution errors. Dark Souls/Shadow of the Colossus/Ghost of Tsushima works because you lose because YOU failed: your dodge was mistimed, you misread a tell. City of Heroes doesn’t give you that same lever. In CoH, you lose because the numbers no longer favour you. That's not mastery, that's rolling a die. The game isn't broken because it's not punishing. It's built around accessibility, progression, and casual empowerment. And those are legitimate game design values, just as much as the deliberate punishment loops of Soulslikes are legitimate. One design isn’t automatically superior to the other just because it happens to align with current taste in certain circles.

As you pointed out, whole overhauls of content are non-trivial. Adjusting text is simple. I do think they should take a good look at the legacy content to at least bring it to the standard of CoV, but that's a project that would need a whole commitment to take on. It's triage... Save the guy you can save with stitches rather than the one who needs open heart surgery.

Ok, but that's several orders of magnitude more that what I'm asking for. All I want is for the contact dialogue not to outright lie to you, saying "this mission will be harder than most, you may want a team" when there's nothing about that mission that is more challenging. A good example of this is the "Take the Shadow Seed from the Council" mission, which warns "I'd really recommend gathering as many allies as you can before you enter this one." in that exact text colour, and the only reason I can think of is because it features two named bosses (not in the same group), which do downscale appropriately to LTs if that setting is enabled. The following mission does exactly the same thing. I recently did 1-50 on a character solo and ran into a handful of these. Some make sense, while others don't. Along this same token, cleaning up the missions that say you need a teammate to activate multiple glowies at the same time should also be tidied up. The flipside of this is the newer content, which is deliberately tuned to be a bit harder and a little more unforgiving. And it's just handed out blithely as one contact among many. Sure, some legacy missions will be more difficult because it comes from before standardization, but when the intention is "this contact will offer more challenge than average", adding a little warning doesn't seem unreasonable. I do think that as a long-term goal, cleaning up the mission text and clarifying the actual objectives should be added onto the to-do list, and again, that's something that could be done 1-2 missions at a time as they come up. But just cleaning up the up-front text is low-hanging fruit that should be reasonably easy to fix in short order, it just needs the will to do so.

For the most part it isn't about hoarding them but because I don't use them. They get slid off to a different tray, and basically forgotten. Every now and again I'll go "oh, I have that thing" and use one, but they basically just get in the way.

Is it really, though? We're literally talking about finding and editing text strings. It's always at the end of the mission dialogue, almost always in a mission arc or badge mission, and for the most part should be findable with search. I'm not sure how contact dialogue trees work, but if multiple contacts are referencing the same dialogue sheet, then changing one should change them all. Sure, it's not *no* work, but I doubt it's nearly the amount of work that writing a story arc is. It seems like it should be at least feasible. In theory, it shouldn't even be necessary to get rid of all of the warnings all at once, just sneak changes to a few missions into each release as you find them. Maybe throw together a thread on the suggestions board asking players to submit missions with unnecessary warnings. And honestly, if bringing in new players is part of the intended goal of this server, then filing down pain points to getting them enjoying the game should be a fairly high priority.

This is one of the things I think Homecoming could improve on. A lot of the post-HC content is notably more difficult than default, and doesn't come with any particular warning that engaging with these arcs means a more difficult experience which may require you to have a cleaner build or a team to play with. This combined with the fact that legacy content still occasionally adds warnings like "This mission will be tougher than usual, you may want to bring a team" and is otherwise trivially easy by modern standards means that signalling is an absolute mess. It would be nice to see an effort to clean these warnings up and communicate the expected challenge of a mission better.

The rule is, in essence, that powers shouldn't have their core functionality changed, and instead their strength or additional effects should be changed. The name comes from the example given: How would you like it if tomorrow you logged in and, say, Build Up now built a small cottage at your chosen location, instead of adding to your damage? It's a silly example, admittedly, but it's to prevent such wholesale changes from happening. I *could* overturn it, in specific cases, if it were truly needed, but in the case being discussed here, it is not truly needed. Personally, I think it's a decent rule of thumb, but it was adhered to too strictly, and frankly this was probably in no small part due to the fact that there was no money for Cryptic in fixing old powers when new ones could be sold. The result being that powers which were created with a different model of the game in mind were retained as irrelevant fossils when they probably should have been revamped into something less bad.

Have you tried using GIMP at all? It's got the ability to open and export to both .psd and .dds files natively. I know it's a bit of a ballache to need to open a separate program just to save to the format you need, but it might at least give you a workaround you can use for now until your plug-in gets fixed.

Plus, since the game doesn't handle duplicate names per server, consolidating means that of the people who share names between the servers, one or the other is going to lose it. Somehow I doubt that'll go over well.

I'm starting to think you're just trying to get a rise out of us.

I think there's an argument to be made that if a change has been made which has upset you to the point that you feel motivated to leave, a post which outlines what you don't like before you leave is at least giving the devs a data point that they don't get from simply not logging in ever again. "This update went live and active player count is dropping" is arguably less of an actionable feedback than "This update went live and player count is dropping and we've had ten people post on the forums about leaving because they hate what happened to their tanks," or whatever. (I'm not saying this as a doom and gloom about P2, I think it's generally fine, this is meant only as example) However, OP also didn't give any such feedback at all. "Not what I used to know" is hardly something that can be fixed.

I would say that it isn't uncommon in comics that an enemy is suddenly significantly more powerful, but especially if there is a justification on the way I think it would be more true to the setting to add atmospheric dialogue (or *more* atmospheric dialogue) from NPCs such as in the street fights or some mention in missions about where someone goes "WHY ARE THEY SO POWERFUL, THEY'RE JUST SKULLS?!" This would give context to the fact that yes, this is a change, and yes, it is a departure from the status quo. These aren't intended to be the same group of thugs that you ran into at low levels.

That's not what enshittified means. Enshittification is a specific process which happens when a service starts with good, user-focused design to entice users to adopt the service, then focuses their attention on business customers at the expense of regular users, and then finally gradually degrades their user experience for everyone by adding features intended to provide value for shareholders in the form of increased advertising, restricting features previously available to all users behind subscriptions, or adding low quality "bells and whistles" to a product to justify major price hikes. Homecoming doesn't have business customers, and doesn't do paid subscriptions. This isn't systemic decay due to capitalist exploitation, this is is an update you don't like.