Give us 'grindy' stuff (like vanguard) and costume unlocks back

[CrudeVileTerror]

Why wait, @Hero_of_Light?

/You/ can make that poll -right now!-

[Hero_of_Light]

3 minutes ago, galaxgal said:

Arguing majorities is pointless. Blind democracy is a hideously poor way to manage a game, and one forum thread isn't a meaningful sample to determine a plurality much less a majority.

 

I agree that existing content shouldn't be suddenly re-locked and re-walled behind their grinds.

It exists today and should continue to exist and doing a costume unlock chore on your 50th character isn't fun.

 

However, right now we have people sitting around at level 50, doped up on Incarnate powers, idling around going "what next?" until they eventually log off.

 

Incentives motivate play. How many people are doing teams for radios or even contact missions? Few, because AE farming gives better XP.

How many people are doing non-50 TF's? Few, unless it is the weekly, because there are better ways to get merits.

How many people are going to do the new story arcs more than two or three times? Not many, because it gives little reward.

 

Having long-term meaningful rewards (not badges, because many don't find them meaningful) is vital to the long-term health of the server.

I agree, and if the devs added new unlockable costume peices spread through out the content you just mentioned, you can be sure people would start to do the content.

[HelBlaiz]

I'm already disappointed that I have to argue the point to begin with.

I'm MORE disappointed that you think giving people free access to any future costume pieces is somehow exclusionary.

[galaxgal]

I, for one, am thrilled to see a totally unscientific straw poll brigaded by two vocal and partisan factions on a forum that's a tiny slice of the minimum 4,000 people who log in regularly.

 

This post is sarcasm.

Edited October 31, 2020 by galaxgal

[Hero_of_Light]

1 minute ago, CrudeVileTerror said:

Why wait, @Hero_of_Light?

/You/ can make that poll -right now!-

Yeah, because the whole player base is engaged with the fourms lol.

 

The average player doesn't use the fourms so the poll would only give significant numbers if the devs had an announcement in the launcher.

[Night]

2 minutes ago, Hero_of_Light said:

Yeah, because the whole player base is engaged with the fourms lol.

 

The average player doesn't use the fourms so the poll would only give significant numbers if the devs had an announcement in the launcher.

28 minutes ago, Hero_of_Light said:

About a third, with the second third not caring either way and the last third being against

'A third of the people in this thread want it, so this is grounds to do it', followed by, 'lol average player doesn't look at forums'

 

🙄

[Hero_of_Light]

7 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

I'm already disappointed that I have to argue the point to begin with.

I'm MORE disappointed that you think giving people free access to any future costume pieces is somehow exclusionary.

How is it not?

 

You're not wanting to consider having a few out of the hundreds of costume peices to be unlockable via gameplay, thereby excluding those that do since there is no option otherwise.

[galaxgal]

4 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

I'm already disappointed that I have to argue the point to begin with.

I'm MORE disappointed that you think giving people free access to any future costume pieces is somehow exclusionary.

 

The recurring theme of these discussions is basically a recurring conflict between two groups:

 

One group wants Homecoming to be a sandbox, total freedom, effects of game design on player behavior be damned.

One group wants Homecoming to be something akin to the best compromise for a 'live game' with its limited dev effort.

 

Gating things is essential for the latter's vision and anathema to the former's.

 

You can see this same conflict play out elsewhere, like discussions of Incarnate powers, or the recent travel changes.

 

A vocal group of players is deeply concerned with their individualistic wants in a game that is dependent on communal motivation.

[Hero_of_Light]

2 minutes ago, Night said:

'A third of the people in this thread want it, so this is grounds to do it', followed by, 'lol average player doesn't look at forums'

 

🙄

So you disagree that the average player doesn't use the fourms? 

 

Or do you think the other people here agreeing with me don't exist?

[Greycat]

3 minutes ago, Hero_of_Light said:

I agree, and if the devs added new unlockable costume peices spread through out the content you just mentioned, you can be sure people would start to do the content.

Or ignore the content and/or unlocks entirely. For instance, the old Vanguard pieces that needed a bunch of merits to unlock... piece... by....piece.  Not only did this preclude you from (a) making a Vanguard-themed character from the start or (b) using the appropriate pieces (energy blades) regardless of your character concept *Until  at least level 35,* but it was just flat out annoying. I'm sure I'm not the only one who just ignored the entire thing, given I can't recall a single player playing a Vanguard character. I played the content. Raided and did all the arcs. But totally ignored the unlockable costume bits.

 

Putting it another way, it's not "if you build it, they will come." If you "build" having to unlock costume pieces again, some of us will just flip you off and walk away.

 

Get badges if you want to grind for stuff. Leave the costuming alone. People *enjoy* being able to make the character they want from the start. 

[CrudeVileTerror]

@Hero_of_Light, you still haven't explained to a satisfactory degree why you have latched on to costumes to the exclusion of all the myriad compromises and other suggestions offered.

You can have your unlocks in all SORTS of different places, and people will support you.  People are just telling you to stay the hell away from their costumes.

[Hero_of_Light]

3 minutes ago, CrudeVileTerror said:

@Hero_of_Light, you still haven't explained to a satisfactory degree why you have latched on to costumes to the exclusion of all the myriad compromises and other suggestions offered.

You can have your unlocks in all SORTS of different places, and people will support you.  People are just telling you to stay the hell away from their costumes.

If all costumes were unlockables, but badges/powers/lvls we're free to everyone, would you suddenly not care about costumes since other things we're free?

[Hero_of_Light]

8 minutes ago, Greycat said:

 

Get badges if you want to grind for stuff. Leave the costuming alone. People *enjoy* being able to make the character they want from the start. 

People also enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when earning something they like.

 

If badges we're completely free for everyone but all costumes were unlockables, would you be happy because 'if you want something free, enjoy the badges'?

[galaxgal]

There is an overabundance of focus on costumes in this thread, probably because it was the first suggestion.

 

There are plenty of other things to put in that are not costumes and not badges.

(Sorry, they are boring, I don't care about proto-achievements. Accolades are the most I bother with.)

 

Incarnate toys or sidegrades, content that requires higher Incarnate levels to do, more stuff to buy with Merits, etc.

 

Costume parts are too situationally useful for people to bother doing things for them often anyway.

I do miss when capes and auras were special, but that was years and years ago, well before the game even shut down.

[HelBlaiz]

4 minutes ago, Hero_of_Light said:

How is it not?

 

You're not wanting to consider having a few out of the hundreds of costume peices to be unlockable via gameplay, thereby excluding those that do since there is no option otherwise.

Well, let's take a look at that shall we? What does it mean to be exclusive? What does it mean to be inclusive?

Exclusionary behavior denies people access based on some parameter. Women for most of American history were Excluded from the draft. Before the civil rights era, black people were Excluded from many businesses. Players in a game would be Excluded from using a costume piece if they haven't run a specific storyline.

Inclusive behavior allows people access, so long as they're Inclusive of others. Straight people are Included in any law that would protect people from prejudice based on sexual orientation. Men are Included in female dominated career fields and vice versa. Players are Included in playing on Homecoming, regardless of whether they want unlockable costume pieces or not, despite the fact that Homecoming has not costume pieces for them to unlock.

Sure you can't play your way in the sense that there's nothing to unlock, but that is because leaving things unlocked Includes people who, for whatever reason, have no interested in running a specific piece of content. Being Inclusive means giving up things that would be Exclusive.

[Greycat]

6 minutes ago, Hero_of_Light said:

People also enjoy the feeling of accomplishment when earning something they like.

 

If badges we're completely free for everyone but all costumes were unlockables, would you be happy because 'if you want something free, enjoy the badges'?

.<----------- the point.                                                                                                                  You (add 7, 912 miles) ----------------------------------------->

 

I can only conclude at this point you're being willfully ignorant if you can't see the difference between costumes and badges and how they're seen and used in this game.

 

The badge system already exists in this game to have things to "grind" for. You can even show them off by picking one and having them as a title, on top of a section in your info window that shows which and how many badges you have.  (In fact, I tended to argue *against* having those purchaseable when it had been suggested, feeling that went against the whole point of earning them - though I don't for the anniversary ones here, since people are remaking old characters and there's no way to have 'earned' them.)

Edited October 31, 2020 by Greycat

[Leogunner]

30 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

Metaphorical guns may not be dangerous, but they still hold sway over our thoughts and actions.

You know what else holds sway over our thoughts and actions?  The weather, food, our family, sickness, movies/media, our thoughts and actions...and yet I probably wouldn't say any of those are holding a gun to your head, even metaphorically.  It's just sensationalizing something to sound like your argument holds more weight.

 

32 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

There are a lot of things in our lives that could be metaphorical guns. The crux of the argument comes down to 'if you want X then you MUST Y.' As the game is set up right now, if I want to use a costume piece, I MUST use settings that allow for that costume piece (certain belts can't be used with Jackets for example) and that is basically the limit of restrictions I have to worry about. If a new costume piece were added, without need for a badge hunt, then the same restrictions I'm accustomed to would apply.

 

The devs have been slowly cutting away costuming restrictions in the form of decoupling path auras from regular ones and the various asymmetrical options they've provided. If they were suddenly to put new costume pieces behind in game achievements, they would not only be going against the precedent set by themselves by auto unlocking everything and they're efforts to create more freedom in costume creation, they would also be enforcing an entirely new, entirely arbitrary restriction on the players' ability of self expression. If we want [glowy eye skull mask] then we MUST [complete some arbitrary task, probably with some thematic link to the Skulls].

 

 None of that sounds as dire as you're trying to make it out to be.

 

So I want a dominator or mastermind that has capped defense to all, near capped recharge and it needs to be x/y powersets and it has to be in the top 10% of DPS of all players...but I'm a newb player with 0 in-game inf.  Am I being forced by an arbitrary restriction on my player ability of self expression because the game says I MUST do a, b and c to get any of that?  At some point, you need to start looking at things from a objective point of view rather than appealing to emotions because you're hardcore trying to make people think whole swaths of stuff will suddenly be locked behind arduous herculean tasks that will take weeks of focused farming to obtain.

 

39 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

As for how costume pieces are different from powers/merits/contacts/levels? Well one is a completely cosmetic form of self-expression with no connection to mechanical performance to the character wearing it, and the others are a direct progression of game play, use powers to defeat enemies to get xp/inf/merits to get stronger to defeat stronger enemies. That's the game play loop. That's character progression, that's literally why you run content, because the content is entertaining and lets you run more entertaining content. If that game play loop isn't satisfying, if the content isn't entertaining enough to run on its own merit, then locking costume pieces, things that have NOTHING to do with character progression or performance away behind the less than satisfyingly entertaining content isn't going to make the content worth running intrinsically, it'll just be a chore to do. A task to check off a list in order to access something that has nothing to do with the content in the first place outside of a shared theme, at best.

 

You've only described horizontal progression vs vertical progression.  One is more accepted than the other.  I'll let the masses describe which are which.

 

41 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

 

It also taints the costume piece with the 'haves and have nots' that currently don't exist in the costume creator. Everyone who advocates for unlockable costume pieces say they don't want them just to feel special, but you're not going to convince everyone of that even if it is 100% true. Because the truth of the matter is they DO make you feel special. They make you say 'I earned this' and it makes you proud to have it. It makes you want to show it off, to use it, and that is indistinguishable on the outside looking in from 'I have something you don't.' If the task to get it is super hard it carries the extra weight of 'get on my level' and if the task ISN'T super hard to get and just a matter of nose to grindstone, then what you're feeling isn't accomplishment. It's a sigh of relief that says 'glad THAT'S done' because you only did whatever it was because the costume piece was withheld from you in the first place. Or perhaps that's just me.
 

Are we reading people's minds still?  Okay, well I think you just feel entitled to have whatever you want and think anything you don't enjoy is somehow horrible and should never see the light of day.  I think you've never experienced any sort of delayed gratification thus you have no experience following a fulfilling path therefore everything should just be put in console commands to put it in your hand.

 

Do you like that?  Having someone completely misinterpret and strawman your points to such levels that you have to have it explained to you?

 

46 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

Again, badges are tailor made to not only give you goals to achieve, but a mark of honor that you did. It gives everything a costume piece would without the arbitrary limitation on character creation. If a piece that was locked behind content on live no longer has that 'special' feel because it's unlocked in the first place, it's probably because there was never anything special about it. It's just like a diamond, it looks shiny and seems worth the high market price, but the only reason it's not cheap is because the endless supply of them is artificially throttled to keep prices high.

The original restriction on Capes and Auras, I remember were ultimately a lore decision to explain why things that needed new technology to work right weren't available at the beginning. Capes were a planned feature that couldn't get done in time, so they created the lore of earning the right to wear a cape. Hero side it was a sign of respect and living up to heroic expectation while villain side it was a sign of power you had to rip off the neck of a hero to count. I'll admit that's a cool bit of lore and world building, but I still think the game is better off for not restricting anything at creation, even capes and auras.

I don't care about badges.  I don't even really care about costume parts or auras being rewards for completion of certain tasks.  But I do see that having things to do in the game, both power, progression, prestige and cosmetics are ALL enjoyable so long as they are implemented in a way that is achievable on your own time rather than requiring a huge scheduled plan of tasks that you have to organize with a large guild of people.  Even if there are things requiring such levels of organization, I tend to have a realistic view of things that I know I want and things I know I can live without and thus skip.  You simply have an UNREALISTIC perspective...or disingenuous to make an argument...it could be either way, honestly.

 

40 minutes ago, AerialAssault said:

I mean, the options to unlock most of the costumes through the f2p store was one of the most popular purchases for a reason

Source?

 

 

[Hero_of_Light]

17 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

Well, let's take a look at that shall we? What does it mean to be exclusive? What does it mean to be inclusive?

Exclusionary behavior denies people access based on some parameter. Women for most of American history were Excluded from the draft. Before the civil rights era, black people were Excluded from many businesses. Players in a game would be Excluded from using a costume piece if they haven't run a specific storyline.

Inclusive behavior allows people access, so long as they're Inclusive of others. Straight people are Included in any law that would protect people from prejudice based on sexual orientation. Men are Included in female dominated career fields and vice versa. Players are Included in playing on Homecoming, regardless of whether they want unlockable costume pieces or not, despite the fact that Homecoming has not costume pieces for them to unlock.

Sure you can't play your way in the sense that there's nothing to unlock, but that is because leaving things unlocked Includes people who, for whatever reason, have no interested in running a specific piece of content. Being Inclusive means giving up things that would be Exclusive.

 

That argument works both ways, and  those example play to my argument, not yours. Women voting for example.

 

Which side wants no way for people (women) to unlock costume peices (vote) and which side wants there to be an option for people to have unlockable costumes prices everyone is allowed to get?

 

All players are included when having most costumes free, with a couple unlockables behind a story arc, because everyone is allowed and able to do the story arc.

 

It would only be exclusive if players weren't allowed to freely play those story arcs.

 

Thank you for providing examples to help me prove my point.

 

 

Edited October 31, 2020 by Hero_of_Light

[Leogunner]

22 minutes ago, Greycat said:

Or ignore the content and/or unlocks entirely. For instance, the old Vanguard pieces that needed a bunch of merits to unlock... piece... by....piece.  Not only did this preclude you from (a) making a Vanguard-themed character from the start or (b) using the appropriate pieces (energy blades) regardless of your character concept *Until  at least level 35,* but it was just flat out annoying. I'm sure I'm not the only one who just ignored the entire thing, given I can't recall a single player playing a Vanguard character. I played the content. Raided and did all the arcs. But totally ignored the unlockable costume bits.

 

Putting it another way, it's not "if you build it, they will come." If you "build" having to unlock costume pieces again, some of us will just flip you off and walk away.

 

Get badges if you want to grind for stuff. Leave the costuming alone. People *enjoy* being able to make the character they want from the start. 

It can go various way, tbh.

 

I was actually one of those people who ended up unlocking those Vanguard pieces for a MA/Shield character I created, a super intelligent mutant monkey that worked mostly with Longbow and Manticore.  His specialty was teleportation, taking hints from ol' manti to influence his martial arts (I envisioned his Shield Charge was an actual teleporting attack since it mechanically is one).  I wanted the Vanguard Shield but as I played the content, I added to the character's backstory and created a sort of "Iron Man" suit using the large frame (because he was actually a small diminutive monkey) that used the Vanguard parts and amended to his overall concept as his story developed.  In his base form, he now had a bionic spine/tail lost during some of the harsh battles and used his Vanguard suit when the going got rough.

 

While I can certainly understand why someone could feel annoyed and discard content as you described, it's only a fraction of the possibilities and undermines a lot of intent behind making certain features the way they are.  Yes, people enjoy making characters the way they are but people also like to eat fast food and have sex with whoever they want but we shouldn't always get the things we want with no limits or structure behind them.

[GM ColdSpark]

There's a lot of drifting from the topic and general mud-flinging at one another going on here folks. Get it back on track please. No personal attacks, respect one another's views even if they differ from yours. Thanks.

[Hero_of_Light]

Also, if people didn't want to play a story arc and get costume peices, that's them excluding themselves, not being excluded.

[Hero_of_Light]

Okay, back to topic. More things to play towards and feel accomplished after.

 

For me, that's a few of any new costume peices be global unlockables and be earned during gameplay that's available to everyone.

 

It's one of the only things not achievable in the game currently and would help some keep engaged.

Edited October 31, 2020 by Hero_of_Light

[GM ColdSpark]

I'm hiding posts that are off topic or not being respectful to one another folks. Warnings will follow if it continues. Thanks.

[HelBlaiz]

The women's suffrage comparison makes no sense. Voting is an aspect of being recognized as a person with autonomy. Unlockable content is a matter of access to resources. A more apt comparison would be one based on resources as well.

 

It's hard to come up with a GOOD analogy, because we'd need something that's freely available to everyone, regardless of time investment or wealth status. Right now we have full access to all available costume pieces. Whatever we compare to would need to be just as widely available. Like breathing, but breathing is a terrible example, because what would the equivalent of unlockable content be? The right to breathe tobacco smoke? Kind of a nonstarter.

 

Could go really archaic and use something like common grazing land, but even that doesn't work because grazing land was made available with the understanding that people would use it sparingly to leave some for other farmers' cattle.

 

We can just go with 'access to resources' in general? Everyone technically has access to any resource they want, they just have to put in the time and effort to get it, through money or mining/gathering it themselves. That sort of works? At least in simulating what you're looking for. Yes, technically anyone can run a piece of content (earn enough money to buy something) but those people with more time (money) can get it rather quickly while those without much time would need to do it over a longer period of time ('save up') or wait until they have the time free (wait for a tax return or a bonus). But even THAT isn't a good a good comparison because the devs could literally just give it to everyone free with zero cost and avoid the class divide entirely. It'd be like the government waving a magic wand and giving everyone a sub sandwich in real life, where magic doesn't exist.

[Leogunner]

10 minutes ago, HelBlaiz said:

Unlockable content is a matter of access to resources. A more apt comparison would be one based on resources as well.

 

Costumes aren't a resource though.  That'd be like saying clean clothes is a resource unlocked by the activity of doing laundry...it's merely an activity you partake in among various other activities that you do every day.  You can be a completionist and unlock all the clean clothes resources every time by mining that laundry task the moment a dirty sock appears, or you can be the type that only bothers to unlock the clean clothes resources when you really need them and do your laundry in boxers.

 

Ultimately, it's trying to elevate the importance of a very simple task that you likely already do.

Edited October 31, 2020 by Leogunner