temnix

Characters can already swim (and those that deign to instead of flying and teleporting over the landscape do), but only on the surface. The basic physics are already in place, I'm sure. The developers would have to think about breathing and other aspects, but they are all quite within the scope of an early 2000s game. Morrowind had them. With underwater exploration many great opportunities would open up.

I agree completely. "Faculty," though, not "facility."

The current limit of 1025 characters, I think, is enough for a gist of who the character is, but anything longer or deeper is out of the question. My last character arrived to Paragon City via a story, and I at least wanted to summarize what happened, but my last few syllables are hanging over the invisible cliff. Should I replace "through" with "in"? And if there is one place where balance or consequences are not a consideration, it is here.

Those orgianizations are supposed to be very important, but all they do is give a few simple, early quests. Later there are a few reasons to come back to them, true, but by and large they are irrelevant. Well, I would rather use my powers for Uncle Sam in some intelligent and interesting work, like what those artifacts around MAGI tell about, than run around rescuing babies from the fire for the neighborhoods, figuratively speaking. Or smashing countless thugs. Where IS the police in Paragon City, anyway? Or special forces? Why does the world need me to disarm a bomb? To fly through the air, swim through acid or see into the ultraviolet when no goggles are around, to contact spirits, move at superspeed - that's a different story. Besides just more work from those people I would like to see quests that require specific powers or powers from specific sets to solve. For example, I might need fire to melt down a block of ice or stop time to freeze the countdown on a bomb. Players would need to find allies for this kind of work. Or there could be events happening high in the air. Right up in the clouds jetpack packing Nazis are conspiring, or witches are having a sabbath, and only flying heroes can break their partying. Or there could be a portal to close up there. Or to open, or to repair, for that matter.

The first point is simple, and the problem will be easy to correct. I wrote about it a little before. There is too much weight given when generating costumes to monster and beast heads, exposed brains and all that creepiness, and for that matter, to full helmets and everything else that obscures the face. Faceless characters should be uncommon, freak heads - rare. When you take away the face, even with the limited choices we've got, you erase the whole social front. But more than this, there is too much weight given to tails, wings, backpacks (I had five characters in a row appear with the same jet pack on the back last evening, like they were handing it down), and far too many people get auras. Auras are garish and should be used sparingly, especially full-body auras. I know I can adjust what I don't like in a random result, and I do, of course, but too many concepts are simply unworkable. What is the point of this abundance of costume options? To roll up the most outlandish mutants or to give players a foundation from which players they can develop a story? Or even something more or less human and likeable. Let those who want total freaks put in the effort, don't make it the default. By the way, there should be an option to keep the colors unlinked while generating. Most of the time this will produce clowns, but sometimes the combinations will be suggestive, and colors are not as obviously off-putting as shapes. But PC and NPC in this game also need more color choices. The ones in place are primitive. The skin tone line-up is right limited, and the gammas for clothes go from very dark and saturated on the left to bright and saturated, almost the basic RGB angles, followed by a light but pale color and then a couple of unsaturated dim ones. The result is that if the generator has fortunately given me a very variegated, very asymmetric and interesting costume and I want to multiply the colors even more and turn the big boot on the right leg blue, I have to choose between practically a 0,0,255 azure, a famished cerulean and a half-grey that looks like it's leaving the room. It's possible that the original developers wanted characters to wear these toneless basics, like comic-book superheroes (they thought), but this doesn't work for anyone who isn't imitating Superman. Or World of Warcraft. There has long been lots of talk about what a community-inculcating place City of Heroes is, but I'm not seeing it. I didn't see it when I played it in the old days either. I see crowds of people who run past each other, sometimes giving a little glance, who get a nice warm feeling from a big crowd around arbiters, but otherwise lead parallel lives. If they go to Pocket-D, they dance with people they know or just by themselves, they associate within supergroups or over missions. That is what this game does: it creates an illusion of being in a common world of exciting superheroes, while in reality we are stand-ins. The way the costume generator encourages mindless, alienating randomness in crude colors may not be the top reason for this. There are bigger reasons and others not so big too, for example, origin still doesn't matter. But this treatment of looks kills attempts at sophistication, and without sophistication there is no communication, because you can't even point out to someone that his costume doesn't make sense, or ask what sense it might make. I would be prepared to accept a joke, but there isn't even a joke. Half of the time those costumes are rolled off the conveyor belt and have no concept at all.

I couldn't find it in Options. Is it even there?

There is nothing more out-of-character and distracting than the exact count of seconds over power icons. I hate this change.

Thanks. But even if I find the money, I can't get these kinds of deals. They are probably mostly for Americans. I live in Russia, and I can't even wire money anywhere on account of sanctions. Here would take buying some weaker new computer... The page file is already big. Anyway, I don't really have the right to complain, playing on such a weak machine. But I hope the devs listen to my idea about letting people move characters betwen servers freely, for temporary trips. Like between parallel dimensions. That could distribute the load more evenly.

Gloom. The gray, drab, neverchanging weather over the Rogue Isles. Everywhere I go, anything I do, it's under that overcast sky. It works as an illustration of the oppression of tyranny, but it also oppresses players' senses. I feel both sleepy and irritated. And everything melds together up ahead - the villains, the streets... Arachnos troops stop looking cut and intimidating and become indifferent very quickly, for all the color red they belabor. I simply don't care about anything that happens here - and there is no sense that anything does happen. This was not a good decision on the part of Cryptic or Paragon. They should have made a city as vibrant as Paragon City, but, despite that, gripped in the iron fist of energetic villanous groups wringing their use from this enslaved energy. They should have been whipping up the economy and the culture, for their own advantage and for villanous vanity. Instead it's a lethargic place, even the Arena where gambling supposedly takes place. And it doesn't look like it is ruled by Lord Recluse, or why wouldn't he put street sweeps everywhere - in remote-controlled shock collars, if need be? Some master. And no powers I can pick can compensate for this feeling. I'm just not interested. So change that weather. Introduce enormous thunderstorms that rage overhead, pour rain and clear the skies for a short while, and the sun shines, before gloom closes in again. As an archipelago by the eastern coast of North America they should be getting plenty of precipitation. Flashing lightning is better than this pea soup.

"Today we are proud to report that after a long fight Paragon City has recovered an important part of its history - the famous red phone booths of yore. Only the oldest residents of our city will now remember that time, but once, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were no tailors, no Icon outlets. Heroes who maintained a double identity or simply wanted to adjust something in their tights away from prying eyes had to find places to change, and the phone booths were a natural choice. Wooden, solid, private if one blew on the glass, they were nothing like the flimsy, transparent sideshows that today humiliate residents still bereft of a cell phone. True, sometimes it took waiting in a line while that guy finished his call, for, come the Four Riders of the Apocalypse, no champion would throw out an American who put in an honest nickel - and those who did have long since been lost to darkness. But the march of technological progress is relentless. For over five decades now the once-indispensible boxes have lain in storage of the Paragon City Communications Authority, saved from mold and rust only by the loving hands of a company of enthusiasts. Ironically, the metallic, see-through booths that came in their stead and even their successors, the open calling stations, also appear destined for oblivion. On the other hand, the old red booths, phoenix-like, might be rising to a second chance in the sunlight. With city personnel shortened by the emergency in Galaxy City, arbiters will be freed of the misassigned and uncomfortable duty of arranging heroes' clothes and concentrate on their training. Instead - and instead of once again sending champions to distant, supercilious tailors in dangerous neighborhoods, all costume change and adjustment will be done inside the repainted, restored red phone booths that our readers will soon see appear, or rather, reappear, across Paragon City. Heroes too well-known to alter their image without a loss of influence will be able to simply drop a few coins into the machine. The city administration claims that distributing these booths will lighten the load in too-frequented spots like the steps of Atlas Park, severely taxing for what technicians figuratively call "weaker hardware," at least as far as the function of adjusting costumes is concerned. Heroes will spread around. Expect two-three booths per city district and, unlike in the past, there will be no wait lines. Transdimensional novelties of DATA embedded in doorknobs will send each entering hero into a separate microdimension to iron his leotard in so that any number of them might run in and out of the same booth. We are being assured that while changing the costume a hero will be completely safe from all harassment, indeed removed from the world, and, less believably, that all booths will be placed at well-considered points where the street is safe too. The press secretary was evasive about whether security bots will be provided to guard those locations. Our editorial opinion is, not likely, but at least a bested hero will be able to duck inside and wait there for a minute or two, until the villains chasing him give up and walk away. In conclusion, another curious feature is being attributed to the old - no, the perennial! - classic booths. Some of the cynical, jaded telephonists who studied the technology and connections of their dialing systems have converted to eager acolytes and sing praises to forgotten features and functions of the so-called "ground cable." This "analog" connectivity, they claim, is harmonized with the power of Earth and allows a hero on one "server" to send a message to a hero on another "server," even visit a friend there. He can temporarily transfer himself between these servers in what they have dubbed "Matrix mode." The dialing hero disappears in one booth and reappears in its counterpart in a parallel dimension without expending "character transfer tokens"! Although the techs expect this shift to last only from dawn to dusk or dusk to dawn and there is expected to be a limit of its own on such visits, heroes would, no doubt, find this a welcome opportunity to explore a reality that is slightly different, join a Supergroup, trade at the local auction or partake in a Task Force for which the cadre in the original world is not available. All well and good. But we at Paragon Times have a simpler hope: to use that lingo, our "hardware" is old, our "connection speed" is limited, and at "peak times" we dearly wish some of the heroes threatening to make this particular "server" burst at the seams would and could pour off to somewhere. Now, it seems, they can. Will they? Only time may tell."

Everybody is free to express his opinion, but I'm developing this idea for developers' eyes. I hope they pick this up, even with alterations, though I don't think that much needs to be changed about what I wrote so far. The last part to consider for me is how to involve players in reviewing others' costumes. They may be motivated to enter their own, but something needs to be done to get them into the role of critics. I think that can be done if they were required to vote on others' creations before being allowed to submit theirs, as follows. First, the interested player must have the starting entry fee, something fairly small, like 1000 Inf. If he has enough, he does not pay yet, but the system invites him to review 10 submitted costumes, drawn from the database of submissions so far. (For the eyes of the very first players coming in, a random selection can be rolled up and proceed to participate in the contest - Homecoming acting as "the house," so to speak. Being random without tweaks, they usually wouldn't be very good. With more player-made concepts coming in house concepts not yet voted on would drop out.) The costumes are then shown one by one, and the player may not leave the screen for 15 seconds. This is the minimum time to give even a cursory glance to a costume, distribute the points between the categories in the Grosso format and, if he feels like it, pick a mini-badge (tag) in the Petto format. I don't yet know how to motivate people to participate in Petto, except that they can only themselves win in Petto if they have given others these labels. The Petto titles are supposed to be chosen only if a costume is remarkable in some way and deserves to be called "Perfect Aquatic" or "I Have Seen This Before." Either way the player can proceed to the next costume and evaluate it too. Submissions are anonymous, naturally. Investing 150 straight seconds should be enough of a discouragement for would-be spammers and frauds. Only when the review is done does the player get to pay 1000 Inf and submit a costume - or, awed by others' submissions, or perhaps inspired by them, retreat and improve or scrap his concept. Players are allowed to submit more than one costume under the same rules, but every time the entrance fee doubles. This is still a small amount at first, but, as in that old Indian tale about the invention of chess, it grows quickly, so even billionaires won't get to buy this election. They are welcome to try, though, and their Inf will give them a little edge in visibility, but add much more to the winning pot. It is allowed to review concepts without submitting one's own as well, but not for free. Here we get to badges again. Winners would get some, but only by reviewing others' costume could one start working towards a Critic badge. Petto involvement would count towards this as well. There isn't already a Critic badge, is there? It would take judging many costumes - a form of peacenik grinding, so to speak. Make fad, not war. There could be two different Critic Badges for the two formats: for Petto the Petty Critic (I would like that over my character's name), and for Grosso I don't know, maybe something very long in German, from the vocabulary of aesthetics. Or just something very long. How about... Frühlingsgefühle This is a great word used to describe a feeling of excitement for nice weather during the Spring, just as the sun is coming out, the trees are green and the flowers blossom.

Badges are nice to have.

When using the button to go to the previous random costume, the colors of the next one are used. The Ninja power... Ninja Reflexes? A starting one. Maybe not that one, but one of the early Ninja defense powers. Customizing, there is an option there for no FX, but on the screen a flash still happens. Probably in the game too. I noticed this for other power sets, that effects are not always properly suppressed. The request is to allow combinations of details that are currently locked away in different categories. For example, Full Masks, which look fairly indistinguishable from no masks at all, have crowns in one of the detail menus, but no hair. They have something like a few varieties of hair in a different menu, not very convincing, including a plain low mohawk. If I want a more impressive mohawk, I can go to Normal instead, but there crowns are missing. Some other details are available to both. I ask that you combine these additions. They don't take up the same places on the model, and in any case, if there ends up to be clipping, it's our problem. Weapons already clip with capes. It is the same with many other body parts. Inexplicably not all coloring and patterns are available everywhere (e. g. if you put a skirt with tights on a woman, the tights are limited to a single color). While I'm at it: there needs to be a None option for Ears. Also a version of the Banished Pantheon aura that fumes overhead instead of around the character. I thought this aura would be interesting to walk around in, but I can't see a thing from inside. FINALLY, PLEASE ADD AN UNDO BUTTON!!!

I'm surpised and amused. What is it with you people and badges? You tremble over them as if they are the golden goose from the castle in the sky. Getting them, failing to get them... Who cares? There are plenty to go around. And if not everybody can get all of them, well, something like this is an opportunity for a few to get them. Try, and you may be in their number. Subjective judgments? Sure, but that's true for any competition, especially in fashion, and they are not completely arbitrary. If people admire your character, there is a reason, and if they shrug or roll eyes, that's for a reason too. And as you can see from my details, this is not a "most liked costume overall, putting down all others" contest. There would be many concurrent categories, a couple even mutually exclusive, in addition to the Petto tallies. If your costume gathers few points in Complexity, as far as its look goes (if you used patterns and small pieces much, they may not stand out, but there should be a zoom button), you may win in Simplicity. The points have to go somewhere in this system. And if people do crave badges so, then it's an excellent bait to catch them with. Here is another possible reward: NPC in Pocket-D will be serving customers wearing hologram versions of the winning costume. Even better, have tailors offer all players a free power that lets them try on the current top costumes in every category. Wear them, imitate them. Taut Couture. P. S. The other Italian name should be Grosso, not Largo. My bad.

I might have just never run into this feature, but is there some system that lets players display their characters' costumes and others judge them and rate them? In the game world, I mean. I'll assume that there isn't, and then tailors could handle it. It might work this way. A player submits a costume for view, on a rotating dais as usual, for a certain fee in Inf. This saves a snapshot of the costume - the player can still change it as he likes. Other players using the system get only so many approval points to distribute between several categories such as Originality (clever use of details, unusual combinations and meanings from their use), Appeal (sexiness, awesomeness, cuteness, seriousness...), Theme (how devoted the costume is on expressing something), Elegance (the ineffable harmony of a suit done just right), Humor (high, low, weird), Immersiveness (whether in the setting of CoH or some other setting, profession or occupation represented), Simplicity (the fewest or apparently the fewest number of elements used for a good result) and Complication (the greatest or apparently the greatest agglomeration of every damn addition- for a good result). The limit on the number of approval points would be to avoid situation of "five stars all-around" ratings that don't mean anything, and there would be no Best Costume overall. Instead players would assign, for example, 4 points to Elegance and 3 to Originality to prop up the costume, give it a chance to compete in both rosters, or perhaps all 7 to Originality to underscore how uniquely bright the idea is. There would then be lists of top raters. All points would indicate a strength, and there would be no way to downvote a costume (if you don't like it, scroll to one you do or leave). Besides points there would be special qualities that players could pick for a costume, little mini-badge-like claims to tag and make about it such as "Very Lifelike," "Totally CoH," "This Is the Robot," "Aquatic Perfection," "Convincing Ordinary Guy/Gal," "Pocket-D Dancefloor," "Color Triangle Defeated," "Effective Accessories," "I Have Seen This Before," "Variation On an NPC", "Much Too Sexy," "Definitely Random" and so on. Some of these, as you can see, would represent critical opinions, but there would be competitions in all of these categories as well. A costume could win in the "Much Too Sexy" category, for instance, and puritans would rest satisfied they have denounced vice, but the winner might feel differently. Noble, Ignoble... Some victories could be unexpected and instructive for the author of the costume. Getting "I Have Seen This Before" might make one think. At winning all of the mini-badges would be converted into actual badges with similar titles, optional, of course, like all badges, while victories in the point categories would carry a full enormous glorious perpetual title - meaning until the next competition, and more modest font afterwards. Spacing out the event would give players more time to elaborate on their submissions. Precautions to avoid duplicate entries and so on are obvious, I won't expand on them. And, since gambling makes better everything worth engaging in to begin with, there would be prizes in Inf - the pooled totals of entry fees of all losers in a category. A player would be able to submit a costume either as a prize runner or for glamour display. In the former case the entry fee would go to the winner, in the latter - refunded. Tighter competition would mean higher potential rewards, especially if Homecoming multiplies all bets by 1.25 or 1.5 for the prize pot. There could be bonus prizes from Homecoming too, naturally, a shower of freebies, but in my experience that sort of thing is an artificial booster that never feels true. Let people become involved themselves for real. Chances for fame would be better. For example, the current winners in the point categories (let's call them Largo and the mini-badges Petto; the Syndicate runs this outfit, capiche?) could appear on hologram screens, projectors and pages of newspapers being read by NPC across Paragon City, the Rogue Isles and Praetoria - on the back page, granted, but it is still something. There could even be some sort of grand prize like dressing Longbow in the costume of a winner in two or more categories for a week.

Yesterday I wrote here about the difficulty of targeting, and especially how it is a problem for melee characters that they can't run up to the chosen enemy, perform the selected attack and let go. In combination with the hectic (hexed) camera I can't calmly and confidenly select enemies it would make the best sense to target at the moment, and the situation can change any second when surrounded by a mob. This, by the way, can happen even with best planning - Hellions were popping out of thin air in Atlas Park today in the same spot with an abnormal speed, all around my scrapper. A different situation is when ranged-attack characters hover or find themselves standing in some other strange position and can't see enemies below them while those shoot upwards at leisure. The variety of responses I got shows what an underdeveloped feature this really is: some suggested pushing F, others wrote that they have special macros written for approaching and attacking and more. Well, F isn't it, I don't want to stay glued to the enemy or unfollow him specially. And if you say that somehow or other people have managed to target their enemies for years all the same, I'll reply that they don't do it with ease, and getting by is not good enough. I have three suggestions: 1) work on the camera already. I don't believe there is nothing that can be done about that crazy camera, and I don't see any news about improvements on camera behavior; one option: automatically zoom out to mid-range view when an enemy is in direct contact, because it's very confusing when they are pressing on you; another option to do the same after running into a wall; 2) there should be automated settings for targeting such as always selecting the most powerful enemy, the least powerful, melee attackers first, ranged attackers first and so on; plus an optional setting for all-around targeting, i. e. without having to turn the camera in the direction of enemies, so that they get selected even if directly behind the character; this should be useful in some clunky situations, though it could be too easy as a constant setting; 3) approaching within range of the current attack power and executing the attack should be a toggle. My scrapper is an extra foot away from a Hellion, and I can't approach and hit him without a ballerina dance with controls! She takes off, she runs forward, she gracefully decelerates... Plus, work on giving some intimation of powers' range. If technically possible, make it so that when an enemy is selected, passing the mouse over the icon of a power for which that enemy is out of range changes the color - better, shape - of the targeting brackets. Unless I am hovering and looking at the scene in top-down view, I can't know if the extra 6 feet of range by which I enhanced my Dark Blast will be enough to shoot at that villain ahead from where I am standing. It takes false starts, "Out of Range," inching forward, gracefully decelerating... In real life there would be clues from the environment to gauge range, I would know which of my tools reach where, but here there is a lot less to go by. So yes, I still end up shooting somehow, but the room for improvement echoes. If this suggestion is impossible, then how about the white circle-red circle for a power, the same as for summoning pets, when the attack is clicked and an enemy is not selected?

I don't mind those special heads popping up every so often in combinations the costume generator serves me, but they appear much too frequently. It feels like every fifth character is from the Kingdom of Eagles or the Cranium Collective. (Here is an idea for a supergroup: all members have to have brains for heads.) I think I know why: they are treated as a category of equal weight together with Normal Heads, Hoods and the others. But how many comic book characters sport heads like that? And whenever a monster head or a sphere appears above the collar, it rules out every other detail there - no face, no expression, no cybernetic lines, no glowing eyes... Push them into the back row.

Unless something like that already exists and I haven't noticed it, I would like to see a power set about setting up and throwing things that go boom. Crazy Ivan. Grenades and traps, a damage-oriented mix based around arsony. There are already grenades and traps spread around different sets, even a Traps set, but nothing focused on engineering Kablooey. Timed activation and remote activation (by a big red push lever) could be a hallmark feature of some or all of the powers. One power could be to attach a stack of dynamite to an enemy, more useful if the character is hidden. Permit this power to be used on friendly Mastermind minions, too. Exploding robots charge! It would probably be a Control type set because of the cleverness required.

@Marine X Thanks for the link. Why doesn't Homecoming make its files available to the OuroDev people, though? The game is free and, as far as I can see, kept up by donations.

I could follow the instructions, but where are they? Also don't those updates apply to the server files? I don't expect live updates, but I don't want a game from twenty years ago either. Also any idea how much disk space that would require?

I have been told that there is a way to play City of Heroes in single-player mode. What do I need and how do I get that?

How do I do that?

Costumes are made in the launcher, they are only updated later through NPC, so this is where my suggestions belong. 1) An Undo button. This is the most obvious: costume creation needs an Undo button. Currently there are buttons all over the screen for resetting parts of costumes - certainly to be avoided, because if you have been matching patterns and colors on the upper torso for the last six hours, you won't want to reset it to Tight. The reset button for reverting to the previous random costume is even more dangerous, because there is no button for moving to the NEXT costume in queue. Hit that by accident, and all your work evaporates in a cloud of smoke. As a result the screen is a minefield, and I have to be much too careful clicking around it. 2) Pattern and fashion choices in alphabetical order. It doesn't take cutting cloth for long in the costume editor to learn what the different options stand for: what the Overguard pieces are, what the Imperial Dynasty, what the Psych, Magic, Alpha patterns look like. But it takes a hell of a memory to remember in what order they stand. The patterns are always the same, thank goodness, and it's alphabetical, but the elements are either in the order of appearing in different game updates and expansion or simply at random. I remember I liked Goldbricker, where is it? The old sequence doesn't matter: all of the options are available to all players now, nothing is locked away or premium. So arrange this in a simple manner. 3) Looking at gloves makes flickers appear. When I scroll through glove options and maybe some of the other smaller body pieces, often glowing balls float up from the bottom, as if an aura were on. But it's off. They obscure the view. 4) Costume edting at login for existing characters. When I select a character to proceed to the server, show a button for customization here by the by. Rearranging a costume is free in-game, all it takes is talking to the right NPC. Why not show a shortcut here?

The situation: my character has just emerged from Galaxy City under Shivan attack. She is standing in Atlas park, on the steps, and up ahead there may be ten-twelve other characters. They all have something on: auras, floating discs, whatever. It's quite tasteless to have so much sparkle on. Well, they crash my client at once. The game becomes unresponsive within seconds, and when I look at Windows Task Manager, before I shut the client down from there, it shows a gigantic memory uptake. No wonder the client crashes. And yes, this is a weak computer. But it was able to run the original City of Heroes. In fact, a large portion of the game's appeal comes from system requirements I can handle. What am I supposed to do? This character is stuck there, because there is always going to be this unbearably gaudy crowd around the trainers in Atlas Park. Come to think of it, I would rather not see the other players at all. I have never cared for team play, for groups, and most of their concepts don't impress me. I am in the game for what the designers have put in - interesting plots, beautiful art, scary monsters. For other heroes and villains I have NPC. I wouldn't mind other players flickering by, but not if they are going to make my game unplayable. Is there some way to play this universe in single player mode?