Steampunkette

... 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.

"Buy more" isn't so much a respec as it is a side-grind... but yeah. It's something you can do, already. But a straight "I have this one, I want that one, let me respec this one to that one" doesn't work without the 'Trade in' option because it's essentially a vendor. Which is what you mention in the second line of your post after quoting it from my post. ... You're just using a lot more words to express what I previously expressed and implying I'm wrong about it... I don't understand your intention, here?

I don't think there is a reasonable way to set up an "Incarnate Respec"... You're basically buying those powers from an invisible vendor, with the "Price" of some powers being other powers. Maybe they could set up a "Trade" option, by tier and type, on a real-world 'Incarnate Vendor'... but it seems iffy.

I googled "CoH Source Code" You'll get a hit right out of the gate. Takes 10 seconds or less.

*shrugs!* Maybe it had something to do with how the AI Control was defered to the player? Maybe it had to do with the way the 'Follow' code was integrated into the Henchmen so they followed the player when they weren't commanded to stop or attack a given enemy resulting in them trying to 'follow' enemies they were set to attack? Maybe it had to do with the overall complexity of the AI and the one dude who truly understood it getting shitcanned early on in the process with other people reaching over to try and patch up what looked like his mistakes? Maybe it has to do with the fact that every NPC in the Henchmen pools is already a baked-together entity and you can't yank their AI out without rebuilding the whole NPC essentially from scratch and how much insane work that would be for 23 different entities, at least 4 of which have at least 3-6 different variations that would also have to be torn apart. resulting in the recreation of around 40 different NPCs whole-cloth. Who's to say?

That's not the point of the post which you quoted, so it's a bit of a strawman. The post that you quoted was me expressing how "Fix this thing break that thing" is a function of working with spaghetti code, which has nothing to do with your point. I've got no idea why they didn't 'Just copy-paste' the AI to work for all ranged Henchmen the same way. Maybe the engine's AI system had explicit limits on how many NPCs -could- just sit at range and they picked the ones that they felt needed it most. Maybe there's some kind of big resource-drain in the system that keeps that "Ranged AI" configuration from being spread to too many pets. Maybe magical fairies waved their wands and cursed the game to have most of it's ranged Henchmen run into melee for no apparent reason. The why is up in the air and the amount of 'Shrug' in my soul would launch my shoulders to Neptune. I'm not going to be digging into that code anytime soon to try and figure out why the AI works like it does. But. I trust Castle. If it was some kind of "Easy Fix" then it would've been done, whether by him or one of the other dozen designers and producers who worked with the code and read all of the same 'easy fixes' that people posted on the CoH live forums.

No. I'm not quite done on this point: Castle started working for Interplay in 1993. That's the same year Ezra Miller, The DC Cinematic Universe's Flash, was born. You know when he left Interplay? 1999. The same year Cameron Bicondova, Gotham's Selena Kyle, was born. The Dude's career at Interplay is -bookended- by Comic Book Superhero Actor births, fuckin' Baller. 1999? That's 2 years after Fallout was released. Not Fallout 2. Fucking FALLOUT. And before he worked for Interplay the dude was a Quality Control Tester for Blizzard working on the goddamned Lost Vikings game. After it he joined Quicksilver, then Cryptic, then Paragon, then Zenimax working on Elder Scrolls Online. There are over 55 million people in the United States (Roughly 1/6th of the Population) who were born AFTER he started working in game development. So excuse the fuck out of me for thinking he actually understands the game he spent half a decade of his life hammering away at day in and day out with enough spreadsheets to make all of EVE Online -blush-.

"Shilling" Sure. I'm shilling. Or, y'know, just talking about a friend who I trust to do his job. Sometimes a fix in one place breaks something else. That's just how it goes. Maybe not in carpentry or financial work, but when it comes to incredibly complex programming (Read: Spaghetti Code) it's always a possibility you have to deal with. AI is a complex matter. And thanks to the game's engine being, what, almost 20 years old at this point? It was built on top of outmoded design for 2004, much less 2019. Shoring it up over the years to shoehorn in various functions it wasn't designed to have in the first place, like player-controlled AI dictating attack priorities, or indeed whether the AI attacked at all, was always going to be a hackjob. Forcing the engine to accept whole new commands and command structures that it wasn't designed for. But it's easier to throw off little remarks about how 'you don't break things to fix things' or whatever. Fuck's sake, the man has been in game design since 1993 when he started working at Interplay. But nah. Dude doesn't know what he's doing, right? He only spent 6 and a half years working on City of Heroes. What the fuck does -he- know that you don't, right? Shilling my ass. I ain't getting paid for this shit, and no amount would be worth it.

I played D&D with Castle for literal years and had a fun friendly relationship with him the whole time literally spending hours on Skype or Discord shooting the shit, talking about game design, and stuff on the -daily-. The dude wasn't lying that removing brawl breaks shit. If it was that easy he'd have just done it. It's not like he never thought of it, or never heard people suggest it on the forum. If he said it broke things, it broke things. And a lot of the time, Castle didn't really discuss how things were broken behind the scenes with us as players. Both because it was pointless and it would cause a whole bunch of fatalistic "Game's Broken, let's all leave" ridiculousness. So if Castle said 'Removing Brawl Breaks It' he freaking -meant- it. It means that it was such a big problem that was so often recommended that he had no choice to discuss the matter with the playerbase... Like his involvement in PvP discussion threads and the like and we all remember how those things were massive tire fire trainwrecks. Castle was a hard worker, diligent and brilliant and often hampered by a bunch of people above him who didn't understand the game's inner workings issuing orders on what they wanted done that couldn't be done or -shouldn't- be done demanding he do it, somehow, regardless. (But that's basically how it ALWAYS works, regardless of what studio you're working for)

We see that the Lich and Protector Bots don't have melee attacks. But we don't see what's different in the Lich or Protector Bots AI that causes them to function like they do. But we can infer that it's either incompatible with other pets (for some reason or another), else Castle or one of the other powers team members would've "Just fixed it". However we know that pulling brawl "Breaks" the AI. Why? How? Fucked if I know. But apparently it does. I don't think "Removing Smash" is going to be any different.

It's worth considering... But it's been said that 'just removing brawl' breaks the AI. I'm not sure 'just remove Smash' is going to be any different, in the end.

Oh! No! Not immunity. Every NPC in the game has at least 1 ranged attack and a lot of control effects are also ranged, no doubt! Just some absolute damage mitigation vis a vis Melee attacks. Unless you fly too low. Or the enemy (ARACHNOS) has -fly effects.

Not all. Just the vast majority. And even 'ranged centric' NPCs typically have a few really vicious melee attacks because otherwise they wouldn't hug the Tanker even with a taunt. Nemesis probably has the most 'Almost entirely Ranged' units and even they run in to stab you with their bayonets before standing gormlessly 3ft away, sticking their gun-barrel through your torso, and lining up shots for .75 seconds before pulling the trigger. I wish the AI had better 'escape from melee' functions but the game would become nearly unplayable to the people whose idea of tanking is "Taunt everything then PBAoE 'til it's all dead"

The also keep giving out permanent pets at level 1. Which is just... BWUH? Their design philosophy very much seems to be "This would probably be OP and use a bunch of limited system resources, but that doesn't matter!" They took Illusion Control, put Phantasm at tier 1, and made it a DOMINATOR SECONDARY. So if you're a Water/Illusion Dominator you can start out with 2 pets. Or Wind/Illusion. Also I hate them, forever, for stealing the PB Attacks to make them a Defender Secondary that provides Healing and/or Damage with every single attack.

For the record: I'd rather have an Infernal Assault powerset than a Whip Pool. I feel like the whip is niche enough that there shouldn't be a pool centered around it. Now a 'Sports Equipment' powerset for some Casey Jones action? I'd kill for that.

ERPvP Love it.

It never quite got off the ground. We got a fairly large number of players interested, but because it was everyone's alts no one was ever really 'around' at the same time. Crimson Jackal is working on a base to base our next go 'round on to try and help give people a more concrete sense of identity, but until that's done the whole thing is kind of on the back burner.

Could work, definitely. But it feels less 'Inherent'. By anchoring it in the world with a target click it feels more... I dunno... It just doesn't feel as -personal-. As -inherent-. What if it was a PBAoE mechanic? You put down your 'Protection Radius' pseudopet right where you're standing (Or flying) and get buffed while you're in it's area. Call it "Hold the Line" and have it 'trigger' both Offensive and Defensive Opportunity (Just let it trigger the secondary mechanics tied to the attack powers that are already in place), maybe add a Taunt Buff to increase the aggro generated by attacks while you're in the area. If it debuffs enemies in the area I think it should only slow their movement and recharge. Sort of a battlefield control ability that gives others time to reposition.

Good old ID:10t error!