Steampunkette

If they set all travel powers to 'Free at level 1' they'd need to redesign the actual travel power pools themselves. They're all built around the idea of having the travel power be the central 'Thing' that they are. Cutting that out to give it to everyone at level 1 doesn't just require 'adding' to them, it means you need a reason to have them exist at all. I get the whole "Let's just replace the one removed power!" push, but it's no longer the "Flight" pool if "Flight" isn't a part of it, y'know? It also means you wouldn't be able to combine SS and SJ, since they'd both be torn out so you can get 1 of the 2 at level 1. Meanwhile Mystic Flight (And all the other Origin Pools) would either need to get removed or get seriously revamped to avoid being a 'wasted' power pick.

So.... I'm against it. Having a travel power at level 1 would be 'nice' and all, but it's really not pressing enough to destroy 4 power pools, gut 1 power pool, and either redesign them or simply remove them. But allow me to offer an alternative suggestion: P2W vendor purchaseable version of Teleport, Fly, Superspeed, and Super Jump for, say, 20 million influence that lasts for 4 hours of real time and does not function after level 20. That way people who really want a travel power at level 1 can mail their character some cash and go for it, but it won't allow high end built out characters to just snag a free travel power, or make Minmaxers feel like they need to respec out of the one travel power they did buy.

... You're not entirely wrong on the last point! In the beginning, the developers of CoH didn't have the specific coding experience to build an MMORPG game engine from scratch, so they bought the commercial license of a game engine that, at the time, was a bit... let's say 'Out of Date'. CoH was released in 2004, but the engine they were using was purchased back in 2000 when Dakan and Lewis founded Cryptic. And it had been built far enough before 2000 that the company that owned it was interested in selling... So you've got 3 former Atari employees working on an engine bought off an older company trying to build a game unlike anything they've ever worked on with Emmert telling them what to do/how to do it. Things were not... smooth. But in 2002 they convinced NCSoft to bankroll the venture and started hiring a bigger employee pool to work on expanding the Production Demo (what you show to production companies and investors) into a full game. So you've got an old-ass game engine, some Atari Pros doing it 'The Atari Way', and a bunch of new people joining the project after some of the work to kludge the game together has been done on an engine that was not -built- for what it was being asked to do... And Emmert asking the newblets to create a massive array of new functions for the game with a 2 year deadline for release. And those Newblets? Not trained in 'The Atari Way'. Some of them trained in the 'Blizzard way' or the 'Activision way' or the aforementioned 'Interplay way'. All trying to do their best to make the already old engine get up and go in new directions. Things were hectic. 2 years is not a lot of time to develop an MMORPG, regardless of what anyone claims. Wherever deadlines loomed, shortcuts were taken. Pseudopets became the main method of doing basically anything that wasn't as simple as "This player hits that NPC" and holy forking shirtballs is there a -lot- of that... And that's not even getting into any understanding of Outsourcing work, which basically every developer does to some degree or another. So yeah... Spaghetti Code. Each developer doing code that their experience informed them was 'The Right Way' while everyone else did it the wrong ways. There was some attempt to get things uniform from the directors and such, but with deadlines... you know how it is. TLDR: They weren't working in isolation from each other, but they were each working on the game with their own 'Language' and trying to get each one to work together.

It would mean every map in the arc would have to ask "If X, goto Y, if Y=Yes go to Z, If Y=No, go to X1" for -every- member of the generic villain list. That would probably be a fairly large resource cost increase.

What is the result of the effort, exactly? Opening up both sides to heroes and villains to what end? For hypothetical future content that only Heroes can do in the Rogue Isles (Rather than Vigilantes, Rogues, or Villains)? That's a big boulder to push based on what I've seen, for a potential future gain, but nothing in the interim. And yeah. I'm ot part of the Dev Team. Which means I'm just as likely to be lowballing the endeavor as highballing it. Except for one curveball neither of us have mentioned: The code is a plate of Spaghetti. So on top of all the stuff I've pointed out (Designing and implementing the systems, repairing the aggro issues, changing the way Contacts work, which is a -very- basic part of the game's engine might I add...) you've also got to dig through 7 years of layered code strung together and held together with hope and bailing wire. Even without being certain of the amount of time-investment required (Maybe I am overestimating the work involved) I'd -still- ask you to show me the expected rewards of changing the system before I engaged in changing anything. Heroes can already go Redside, as it is. There's already a revolving door. Tell me why we should tear down the wall around it... especially if that wall has any chance of being Load-Bearing.

The suggestion would be a kludge to create in the first place. And you could simply make the badges mutually exclusive. Get one and you're stuck with it, forever. With this suggestion there would be no way to get rid of or choose your nemesis. You'd be stuck with them, forever. But only within the context of the storyarcs that are designed for it.

Maybe. *shrugs* We'd have to ask the current Devs if it'll work.

Connecting the doors? Easy! But in Hero Zones, the PPD Drones one-shot Villains. They won't shoot Rogues or Vigilantes. But Villains? Ganked. So there's tagging issues to take into consideration for the players themselves. Those Tags have also been tied to a Reward Scheme in the form of Tip Missions and the four Alignment Powers. You could flip someone's flag the second they jumped on the Port Oakes Ferry and stepped out into Skyway City... But that means they lose their power or progress towards that power or any tips toward alignment change. They also can't contact any of their Redside Contacts 'cause they're tagged as Heroes, so progress on those arcs would be paused and all. And they wouldn't be able to abandon those missions 'cause they couldn't speak to their contact about it. Also they'd show to everyone else as "Heroes" when highlighted, even in contested zones or co-op zones, and would need to transition back to redside -then- go to the co-op/contested zones to be flagged as a Villain, again. Either a secondary contextual tag would need to be made for "Gray" alignments, or else everyone would be H/V no exceptions the second they passed through the tram/boat. Alternatively you could rewrite all the "Hero/Villain" barriers to transport, inside NPC AI, and then change the settings for them as regards to PvP and Targeting in different zones, and then hem and haw over whether you want to lock them out of missions 'cause they're Heroes who shouldn't be working for Arachnos or Villains who shouldn't be protecting Faultline Dam from Vahzilok. Point is, you're misrepresenting a lot of work as something really simple and small.

At this point I play with my CoH Volume at 8 while the rest of my computer is at 100. Though part of that is CoH is -shockingly- loud. Like... I'm -stunned- at how loud it is in relation to other programs. This suggestion isn't a bad idea, on it's face, but it might be easier just to flatly reduce the volume of some of the louder sounds in the game... Particularly Shotguns and Teleport. Also most of Gravity is surprisingly up there.

Not... exactly. The Ranged/Melee preference was implemented, but it still 'Broke' when people slotted their pets for recharge and Brawl would cycle faster than any other power, forcing ranged pets right into melee and a 'Brawl Centric' low-damage attack cycle. To offset that, he changed the recharge time of the Pet Brawl to 16 seconds and made the pets immune to recharge rate modifiers so that you couldn't get them into a Brawl Recharge Loop even if you wanted to try and break it. He tried to remove Brawl altogether, but it broke the AI for Moon Logic reasons (The AI was ridiculously complex and spaghettified so he couldn't remove Brawl and find all the interdependencies it had to truly fix it). As it is, after they Brawl once you can move them away, and 16 seconds later (plus the animation times of any recharged higher priority attack) he'll run back over to do it, again. ... Wow. That's amazing! Nice to know!

I don't think I can properly convey the amount of 'Meh' I hold in my heart for your position... The melee pets who wouldn't get into melee were so broken that those pet sets were basically nonfunctional. Most of their damage was tied up in the melee-damage that wasn't getting done. Meanwhile "Suicidal Pets" still survive in melee, if you take care of them. And still dish out their respective damage at appropriate levels. Castle created an annoyance in other pets to fix something so broken it made certain powersets nearly unplayable. The Rob Bird analogy is still off. Try to imagine it this way: You have 7 total planes including Rob Bird. For a specific mission, you -absolutely- need to get all seven planes up in the air, including Rob Bird. They don't have to be perfect, but they need to function. So you take parts from each of the other 6 planes to make all the planes fly. Not perfectly, but well enough for the mission to be completed. That's what Castle did. Of course, the fact of the matter is he was working with 7 Rob Birds and trying to get them all to fly with half the pages in the repair manual burned out of the book. Each bird having it's own foibles so that "Removing Brawl breaks everything" So, y'know... Shit happens.

They do, currently, so should if you immobilized them rather than the enemy.

I've been around, JB! Still on Skype and Discord. The reason I say it could be difficult is because Villains exist in Paragon as hostile entities. That's why the people who during the alpha/beta went to AP by glitch got zapped by the drones. That sort of divide is coded into the basics of the character, something Cryptic felt strongly enough about to make a real 'Thing' rather than just letting all player characters be 'Player Characters' and the Villain/Hero tag only determine where they started, which doors they could open, and what hospital they rezzed to in cross-faction and PvP zones. Honestly, that would've been -way- easier than building in the faction mechanics they eventually developed! It kind of makes me wonder whether or not the Devs initially intended for open world PvP to just be a thing that happened, where heroes and villains ran the same streets and killed each other pell-mell unless there was a security drone on hand to end the fight instantly.

I'm just confused as to how this does anything "Dynamic" or has to do with content development... I'm not -against- it. And I even have thoughts toward content development, myself, which would be bolstered by this change. It just seems like a fairly large expenditure of development resources to not a lot of result. They'd have to reconfigure all the 'Alignment Logic' that exists in the game to just ignore players in general, outside of PvP zones, create a method of agnostic quest delivery (Which would have Heroes doing Villain content) or re-write the content on both sides of the line to fit each side and create an alignment split in how NPC contacts deliver missions to the players that talk to them... All in all, retrofitting this concept would be a fairly massive undertaking unless the team went for a "Door you pass through determines your alignment" mechanic, which would be a 'simple' kludge that would erase your alignment progress every time you side-swapped (Resetting your hero/villain timer) with only Vigilantes and Rogues -possible- traversing the path between the two without losing their alignment... Ultimately I think it would be better to leave the divide as it is and instead focus on the creation of new content that appeals to heroes in the Rogue Isles and villains in Paragon City, so that people more often use the 'Interim' alignments.

Create a series of missions which involve villains engaging in criminal activity. Each of those missions has a Boss-Ambush before it's over. The Boss Ambush contains a random "Generic Hero" or perhaps "Shining Stars" member. When you complete the mission, you get a badge for defeating THAT hero. Create a system where the Badge ID can be checked by the Mapserver in future maps. Use the Badge ID to override the "Random Boss" spawn in future missions in the storyarcs, meaning the same hero boss comes after you each time. Expand the system to heroes and a generic villain (Excluding Bad Penny. No one deserves that)

The easiest analogy I can think of is: Weapon models are Disney Pixar Movies. 3d models moving around. Power FX are Disney Animated Movies. Hand drawn frame by frame.

Captain Powerhouse stated that the Inherent, Opportunity, is going out the window whole-cloth. There will be no Opportunity power in any way, shape, or form. There will be a baseline damage increase. There will not be a target-cap change. And the inherent will have something to do with being a Spotter/Lookout. Ways to be a spotter/lookout include things like increasing ToHit and Perception. But also things like inherent debuffs akin to Surveillance from the Bane Spider EAT, where you point out weaknesses in enemy defenses to increase your group's damage. Or Stealth-Based mechanics which allow you to get into position to garner information you can then communicate.

No... it's not a "Dynamic Weapon". There's no weapon model involved. It's as much a 'weapon' as Radiant Infection's green and red cloud of debuff aura on enemies is a 'weapon'. Or Rain of Fire's Flaming Rain is a weapon. It doesn't exist as a model within the game engine. There's no Geoset that could be put into a display case in your base. You can't "Equip it" and carry it around. It exists as one step down from Particle Physics. We can't "Reskin" it. We'd be making new version of it, from scratch. The only thing we'd be taking from the current Whip Powers is the player model animations. Reskinning only works if there's an object present that you're changing the skin of, swapping one for another. This is more like Dark Blast vs Soul Noir. Different FX, not Different Models.

There is no whip. The whip isn't a weapon whose model we can swap in or out. It's a Power FX. Like the arrows you shoot from a bow, or energy blasts from your hands. Any whip set the team creates would be using an entirely new art asset. Like how Stone Armor has the Crystal option. And it would take a lot of time. But hey. At least the animations are done, right?

... I think I might need to start writing Storyarcs for the AE that touch on this. Villains in Paragon City. Maybe if I write enough of them, and submit them to the dev team, they could eventually be incorporated into CoH for villainous characters in Paragon. And then do the same thing for heroes in the Rogue Isles. ... I wonder if I can't create a writing project group on Homecoming of like-minded writers to create a "Dev Team" of our own, just cranking out new stories en-masse with the explicit, express, goal of creating a new "Expansion Pack" worth of Cross-Faction content..?

It's what villains do in comic books, Mistyr. They get short term victories and then lose the bigger battle down the line. *shrugs!* As for the Redside content being "I work for whoever" it's shitty, but it was the only way to keep the narrative even marginally coherent. The biggest problem with supervillains is their goals. Heroes all want the same thing: Justice. How they're motivated to that justice is far less relevant than the way they -get- that justice. Which is where the Hero/Vigilante thing comes in. But for Villains? Every villain has different goals and different reasons to -seek- those goals. Whether they're aiming to take over the world or just rob some banks and retire. And it was viewed as 'essentially impossible' to include all those different goals and motivations within the context of a voiceless player character. Because of the way the game was structured, that is to say player goes to contacts to get missions, a portion of the narrative was always going to be cut off. The most important part, in the case of villainy. The Contacts themselves should've been Gated behind a dialogue window in which you decided what sort of Villain you wanted to be, and all of their dialogue written as subservient, defiant, or otherwise -beneath- the Player Character rather than often on equal terms. Then when you picked storyarcs you could have chosen the arc where your character seeks to conquer Port Oakes or rob the bank in Atlas Park, or whatever else. Then you could've actually had some villainous stories... not that you'd ever "Win" in them, since the status quo of the world remains the same as it is no matter how many 'World Conquerors' reach level 50 and do a "Take over the World" arc or whatever. As to Redside being for villains... It never should have been. And it was a terrible 'Let's do things the way they've always been done!" split-the-playerbase conceit. They should've added a shitload of Villainous Content to City of Heroes, then built up the Rogue Isles as a place of Contest with both heroic and villainous content. Heroes trying to displace Arachnos and defeat Recluse and other major villains. Villains taking advantage of the Chaos to make money or make deals or promote their own agendas. They could've themed different zones of Paragon for villainy like working -with- the Skulls in King's Row to eventually displace the Petrovich brothers and control the drug trade in the slums. Then with the 'Druglord' badge moving from them to the Family in Independence Port in a gated continuing storyline to get into a big drug war to try and control the flow of the drugs. And from them to going after Crey when they start slowing down the supply of needed chemicals and stuff, then use the Paragon Protectors to try and expose you as a Drug Kingpin and frame themselves as the Heroes for PR. All of it with various "Local Heroes" coming out of the woodwork to try and stop you, or Cops raiding your drug labs or cash stores... Storylines like that would've completely changed the tenor of how villains work, and created a more nuanced picture than "Everyone in the Isles is evil or at least corrupt and you work for them all" Yeah, the Rogue Isles is being invaded by heroes. There's at least 2 "Villains of Paragon City" supergroups that I know of, too. My hope is to expose people who might never, otherwise, play Redside to the content, there. Because the more people that exist in the Rogue Isles the more likely it is other people will play there. I'd rather have Heroes go Purple than see Redside go Dead.

CoH Pets in a nutshell:

The NDA always kept him from describing specifics. And would keep him from discussing specifics, even now. He couldn't tell me what the code was, or walk me through different problems it had, but he could describe very loose ideas or share stories about working on the game from a personal standpoint rather than a professional one, if that makes sense.

It cannot be done, currently. The Account Server (The @Globalname managing Server) is separate from the Mapserver, which is where you exist in the game world and interact with people. Once you've logged in, the game is Globalname Agnostic unless some specific call -makes- it check your global name (Like when someone sends a Tell to your account, or uses the /getglobalname function). For it to be changed to check the account server every time you sent a message into any chat, it would drastically increase the number of operations per second as thousands of people queried the account server every time the global, help, or LFG chat got bombed with messages.

Programmers -typically- make comments as they go, often, in case they have to come back or someone else has to work on the given piece of code. Stuff so they understand how it integrates with other code, which pieces are required to make it work, what variables are applicable. I'd put money on it that there -are- comments like that in the pet code. And all over rest of the code, too.