brezeeger

Oh. Well then. I guess I will carry on. Thanks for letting me know. Although my two cents is to let prestige and/or salvage directly affect base building in some manner. I realize we live in a world needing instant self-gratification, but when given freely, it's not exactly gratifying. My suggestion is cut the cost of things for prestige down an order of magnitude if it has a functional purpose, provide a basic functional item for free, and have incremental costs. Totally a fan of not paying rent. That aspect annoyed me a lot. Examples: First beacon: Free, 2nd beacon: 1,000 prestige, 3rd beacon, 2,000 prestige, etc. Smallest generator: Free, 2nd: 1/10th the price, 3rd: 2/10th price Other generators: 1st: 1/10th the price, etc. Then for the rooms, just X prestige per square, so a 4x4 room would be 16k prestige (x=1k). Or X prestige per square squared, so if X=1k, a 2x2 room = (2x2)^2 * 1k = 16k... maybe not 1k if that route. 200 sounds much more appropriate. 2x2-->3.2k, 3x3-->16.2k, 4x4-->51.2k, 5x5-->125k, 8x8-->~820k. For comparison, most 2x2 rooms were 100k to place. I feel like that would be enough to get people off their feet right away, make decisions about what they care about, achieve a sense of accomplishment by unlocking additional benefits, but at the same time, not really turn it into a bore of endless grinding. Idea 2: have 2 classifications of super groups, and hope there's a spare bit in flags somewhere so the data structure need not change. 1 being as is, where everything is free. The other being where everything is not. Maybe not the old way. Maybe not my suggestion above. But certainly not reminiscent of minecraft creative mode. Idea 3 (best): Implement some form of up front costs that isn't a pain in the rear to grind. Upon supergroup creation, allow the user to select how much prestige they want to start with. They can effectively make everything free if desired by typing the integer max. They can start from scratch if that's what they want. They can ballpark what their original base cost in the past, and get pretty darn close if they want to pick up on past work with minimal effort. I think that this, combined with the reduced incremental costs, everybody comes out a winner and no riots. For existing super groups, assign them to -2,xxx,xxx,xxx prestige as a flag. If their prestige is within a million of said majorly negative number, then let them choose how much prestige they would like to continue playing with. They then have an option to continue in their preferred game play. I believe this could be pulled off without doing any fundamental changes to underlying data structures/databases, which I imagine is a huge win for implementation. There's some slight logic adjustments to calculating cost, but that should be minor. If this was true to object oriented programming, that ought to be a breeze to fix. After that, it sounds like just flipping a few server side flags. As my boss would say, "Easy, right? Just an hour's worth of work..." (but I understand the devil's in the details and it would not take an hour). I guess that was three cents.

I'm trying to figure out how everything works again, and I'm pretty sure the supergroup bases are broken in a massive way. I just created a new super group, and have 0 prestige. I could create many different rooms, and place down objects with no cost. Decorative items, such as generators, still produce energy and control. I could just place a fusion reactor, and everything was all solved and ready to go (I then took it out...). They are free and seem to have no upkeep. I vaguely remember rooms having costs associated with them as well. I also managed to place beacons to all the maps, and 4 teleporters, so I could teleport then to any map I desired. I'm assuming the reclaimator's also are completely functional. Haven't died yet since I formed the supergroup and jumped into my base. I just remember it being a crazy grind to get anything done with super group bases, and they made life easier with inventions/recipes/storage/making use of salvage from multiple origin types, etc. There was a sense of goals and accomplishments. Now everything seems to be given away freely, and I don't think it should be. The only cost I've come across is I've placed salvage racks and enhancement tables which had 100 prestige rents. I thought they were decorative, but they are very functional. I mostly wanted to try and dump some salvage, but because the building costs seem broken, that feels an awful lot like cheating and is a no go. That, and because I'm pointing this out, I halfway expect my base to get relatively obliterated in the near future and don't want to lose my stuff... Regardless, I am psyched that CoH is back alive, so thank you all very much for all the hard work you've put into it.