Page 6 predictions!

[drbuzzard]

12 hours ago, Neogumbercules said:

*instant healing has been reverted to a toggle. 

     * Instant healing will now automatically kill you when toggled on. 

Now there's the regen treatment we know and love.

[Saikochoro]

9 hours ago, EmmySky said:

Staying on topic is for the Suggestions and Feedback forum....here in General Discussion we are more stream of consciousness...its like timsey wimsey travel stuffs but makes less sense.

 

😝

 

*runs away before I get the big thumbs down*

Stream of consciousness takes me back to reading Beloved in back in my school days. 

[Mezmera]

22 hours ago, Burnt Toast said:

I've grown tired of waiting. My SG/Discord groups have put CoH on hold and we are playing other games. We understand the team is small. We understand covid has affected the team's ability. What we don't understand is how it has been 6 months and no real information about anything in Page 6 has been shared. These clues and riddles are irritating to people who just want to know the basics of what to expect. I played from launch to sunset (beta tested from Issue 6 to 24)...and have never felt so frustrated at the lack of any information. I love CoH, but the dwindling population...and interest...from players is evident. It's a niche game... with a niche player base. Failing to keep the players interested...or informed... is putting a lot of players off of HC. I won't go to another server, but at this rate... I also won't be playing and definitely not donating until actual information is provided. 

 

Sorry if this seems "angry." but I am irritated that the game I love is dying again because the team refuses to keep people up to date with actual information. Our SGs and Discords are becoming ghost towns because people are moving on to other games; who frankly do a better job of engaging and keeping their players updated. 

 

Before you waste your breath replying to me.... just know I posted this for me. To help with my frustration. I'm not going to get into internet arguments over this. I'm not going to actually do anything further in this thread. Maybe someone will actually see this from HC and look at the numbers and see "oh yeah damn we are losing a lot of people" and maybe just maybe they will realize that while we are willing to wait 6-7-8-9-10 months for a Page... what people grow tired of is... being kept in the dark. 

 

I'll post again once real information on Page 6 is provided... otherwise... like almost all of my friends... I'll be off playing other games. 

I'm pretty much on board with what's being said here. 

 

I do get that it's a volunteer project but they do rake in quite the donation amount compared to the other servers that are just up and running with no real develop team supposedly in place to be adding on to this game.  There's obviously an appetite for the game to be back in an official capacity based on how fast and furious the donations come in.  In summation I think there's either comparatively a mismanagement in the funds from donations or there's a lack of foresight that people might actually want new stuff to be added on to with such a large pool of resources donated every month and to have info updated to them other than telling them the specs of their server costs and miscellaneous expenses.  

 

For the first few months if you need to keep things close to the vest fine but somewhere in the next 3-6 months you should enlighten and trust your player base.  It's a very off putting feeling seeing how there is testing and it's been going on for months on a secret "Elite" server with the same shades of how this game stayed so secret for 7 years. 

 

I think I've spent more time on the forums than I have actually in game for the past month so I stand with Mr. Toast.  

[Burnt Toast]

I said I wasn't going to reply to this thread...and this post is not aimed at anyone - these are just my thoughts after seeing the replies.

 

1. I am not mad at HC. I do not think they are swindling money or just not doing anything... absolutely nothing like that. 

2. I am 100% grateful for everything HC has done - especially Sentinels and Electrical Affinity.

3. I am tired of seeing my friends leave and their reasoning have all been about lack of communication from HC. They felt like the game is indefinitely stalled and that nothing of value is being added... probably because no one has actually discussed what is being added... Hmm. 

4. HC is not NCSoft... they do not have to worry about 50,000 paying players leaving because they said they were working on ABC and it didn't make it into the new issue/update. The people who play on HC (and I assume the other servers) are fans...die hards. If you tell me you are looking at porting Super Strength to scrappers (I have not heard that anywhere so don't quote me as that being something ever said) and then the new page gets released without the port. Here's what you do as a "company"... you stay open and honest with the players. If something you wanted to put in page 6 doesn't make it due to timing...rendering new animations.. whatever the reason... just tell us. We are all adults who love this game. Stop treating us like petulant children who hold the purse strings to a booming game making millions. 

5. If you have a community rep... I have no idea who they are. I remember every community rep from Cryptic/Paragon. This was the person who was told "Ok...now tease/talk about XYZ." They would engage the community AND keep the community informed. Months of silence with a silly riddle - that is not community management. It does however make me think you do not trust me. It does however make me feel like my voice is never heard. It does however make me feel like I am wasting my monthly donations. If you do not have a community rep... I suggest you find one. I have absolutely no doubt if you post for a community rep in the forums you will receive 1k+ applications of people who want this server to succeed. 

6. @Jimmy I appreciate your reply. I am glad you can see that there should be improvement in the communication from HC to the players. I appreciate you saying that as I truly expected nothing but angry replies and people telling me to "start my own server" etc... as tends to be the answer by some people on these forums whenever anyone says anything critical of HC. 

 

I think that sums up what I am thinking/feeling. I just want to know more and feel like I can be trusted with that information no matter what actually transpires. You don't have to say "We are working on XYZ power-set which will include Bam, Slam, Thwap, etc..." you could just say "We are working on a new ranged Powers that has all new animations!" Know your community. Inform your community. 

 

That's it. 

[FoulVileTerror]

I've been struggling to find a way to summarize my thoughts on this subject for a while, but @Burnt Toast has certainly hit a few nails on their heads, I think.

In the other thread(s), people come to the defense of the silence with statements along the lines of protecting the devs from criticism and protecting the players/fans from disappoint.  

Clearly that isn't the case.  Criticisms are still being levelled, and disappoint is still occurring.  

 

So . . . can we change gears a little?

Whichever Devs or core Team members want to address this:  What would it take from the community to make you feel comfortable raising the bar for communication and clarity when it comes to your design philosophies and plans?

How can we make this work?

[Neogumbercules]

I'm right there with you guys and burnt toast did a better job of explaining the kind of communication I was asking for too. 

 

They don't have to say specifics but maybe something like:

 

"hey guys were aiming to have 3 new story arcs, some more powerset proliferation, general balance across X, Y, Z ATs, and we're looking to fill out one of the unused Incarnate categories."

 

Then just some general updates, as generic as possible, until you start to figure out what is locked in for release. After that, open up and tell us what's planned. 

 

And if something doesn't make it to live, people will bitch about it, but it's really no big deal. Ultimately we all understand the situation. 

[Jimmy]

3 hours ago, Burnt Toast said:

6. @Jimmy I appreciate your reply.

Everything else aside - your posts are a very good example of level-headed criticism, so thank you for that.

 

We'll try to do better. Something that's probably important to point out is that a lot of the issues we're facing right now (2020 in general, NC talks being very time consuming, etc) are temporary ones, which is maybe something we could've done a better job at communicating.

[Latex]

Devil's Advocate,

 

This is a Private Server and as much as it's been attempted to make it an official operation it isn't, negotiations with NCSoft might make it that way (fingers crossed) but these talks have been happening long before Homecoming was a thing and didn't really gain any traction. Now that the code for literally anyone to run the game is out in the wild it might change their stance, or perhaps they're monitoring Homecoming and other servers populations to gauge popularity- remakes/relaunches are a growing trend these days and they're earning big bucks by reigniting previous passions.

 

Developers or GM's here owe people nothing, not even the server we enjoy and play on, if you donate you do so willingly it's not a subscription plan. My personal expectations with Private Servers are that they're here one day and gone the next, that can be the nature of the beast when it comes to this type of thing though from my experience there is typically advance warning especially for larger Private Servers. People like Jimmy or other Devs/GM's are hobbyists providing this to everyone, for free.

 

The ultimate success story for the Homecoming team would be exactly what the Nostalrius Team achieved. I think the HC team has proven to NCSoft that they can fully handle, maintain and patch the game reliably which were the exact same tenants how the Nost team ended up being absolutely pivitol to World of Warcraft: Classic and it's massive success and now work for Blizzard. I hope NCSoft sees this success and considers making the same move Blizzard did.

 

I don't expect anything from future updates but those things are a welcome bonus. The fact the game is actually running and is now permanently available to anyone, anywhere, even if every single server shut down tomorrow is relief enough that City of Heroes and communities that spring up around it will never be going away again.

Edited September 18, 2020 by Latex

[Saikochoro]

6 hours ago, Mezmera said:

I'm pretty much on board with what's being said here. 

 

I do get that it's a volunteer project but they do rake in quite the donation amount compared to the other servers that are just up and running with no real develop team supposedly in place to be adding on to this game.  There's obviously an appetite for the game to be back in an official capacity based on how fast and furious the donations come in.  In summation I think there's either comparatively a mismanagement in the funds from donations or there's a lack of foresight that people might actually want new stuff to be added on to with such a large pool of resources donated every month and to have info updated to them other than telling them the specs of their server costs and miscellaneous expenses.  

 

For the first few months if you need to keep things close to the vest fine but somewhere in the next 3-6 months you should enlighten and trust your player base.  It's a very off putting feeling seeing how there is testing and it's been going on for months on a secret "Elite" server with the same shades of how this game stayed so secret for 7 years. 

 

I think I've spent more time on the forums than I have actually in game for the past month so I stand with Mr. Toast.  

There is no mismanagement of funds. They have them accounted for to the penny and display how all are being used. They cut off donations to not go over the expected costs to run the servers. 
 

All donations are costs to run the servers. None of it is salary to hire additional developers or to pay themselves for the time spent developing and managing the game.  They have been completely transparent with finances and donations and people know exactly what they are donating to cover. 

Edited September 18, 2020 by Saikochoro

[Myrmidon]

On 9/16/2020 at 11:27 PM, MTeague said:

 

TL;DR   You Do You, I'm here for the duration.

This sums it up perfectly for me.

[JnEricsonx]

On 9/16/2020 at 4:23 PM, Burnt Toast said:

I've grown tired of waiting. My SG/Discord groups have put CoH on hold and we are playing other games. We understand the team is small. We understand covid has affected the team's ability. What we don't understand is how it has been 6 months and no real information about anything in Page 6 has been shared. These clues and riddles are irritating to people who just want to know the basics of what to expect. I played from launch to sunset (beta tested from Issue 6 to 24)...and have never felt so frustrated at the lack of any information. I love CoH, but the dwindling population...and interest...from players is evident. It's a niche game... with a niche player base. Failing to keep the players interested...or informed... is putting a lot of players off of HC. I won't go to another server, but at this rate... I also won't be playing and definitely not donating until actual information is provided. 

 

Sorry if this seems "angry." but I am irritated that the game I love is dying again because the team refuses to keep people up to date with actual information. Our SGs and Discords are becoming ghost towns because people are moving on to other games; who frankly do a better job of engaging and keeping their players updated. 

 

Before you waste your breath replying to me.... just know I posted this for me. To help with my frustration. I'm not going to get into internet arguments over this. I'm not going to actually do anything further in this thread. Maybe someone will actually see this from HC and look at the numbers and see "oh yeah damn we are losing a lot of people" and maybe just maybe they will realize that while we are willing to wait 6-7-8-9-10 months for a Page... what people grow tired of is... being kept in the dark. 

 

I'll post again once real information on Page 6 is provided... otherwise... like almost all of my friends... I'll be off playing other games. 

I would say no offense, but in this case, no, offense is intended.   A game a lot of us love is BACK.   Yeah, I stopped playing for a bit, and after a few months, guess what, I started back again.  My god what the hell is wrong with people?  I damn near CRIED when I loaded this game up for the first time to play proper in nearly a decade.  So it's slow going, it's also being worked on by people who LITERALLY ARE NOT GETTING PAID to do this, that's what's called a labor of love.   Take a break or something if you must-god knows I was doing that from 2007-2009 with all the games coming out then, but save the anger/irritation for better targets then the unpaid staff of a game that was brought back like Lazarus.   Frelling entitled.....

[Mezmera]

6 hours ago, Saikochoro said:

There is no mismanagement of funds. They have them accounted for to the penny and display how all are being used. They cut off donations to not go over the expected costs to run the servers. 
 

All donations are costs to run the servers. None of it is salary to hire additional developers or to pay themselves for the time spent developing and managing the game.  They have been completely transparent with finances and donations and people know exactly what they are donating to cover. 

Well.  There's other servers that have already many more powersets and fresh new toys to play with.  What seems like a lot more innovation.  I can only surmise this was already implemented when everybody in the Sekrit broke off.  Take for instance the Origin pools.  All of them are already coded and working on all the other offshoot servers, why then is it taking years for them to be implemented here?  Seems like a carrot on a stick to me.  

 

Some of those servers seem to make the player so OP it's not even fun and then some seem very grindy.  This one seems to have a decent balance and quite the large player base, albeit dwindling.  I prefer some of the things they do on this server namely the dom revamp that's new all around.  

 

These other servers run their donations for a few hundred bucks which is the cost of hosting the servers and that is it.  They have quite a bit more stuff implemented although they have their problems which'd easily be ironed out with dropping a few OP improvements that were added.  So you're telling me 5k+ for less stuff implemented in the game is better than the cost of a few hundred bucks and if they had 5 running servers it'd still be way cheaper.  So that leaves one to ask where's the beef?

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with the intention of the donation model and capping it to their needs but when comparing apples to apples you gotta ask how come one has way more stuff at far lower the maintenance fees.  I'm also okay with that donation amount going to actually clarifying that they have people designated as developers to push the game forward.  Like I said this is my favorite iteration and want to see it succeed, what I don't want to see is more of what took place for those secretive 7 years.  

Edited September 18, 2020 by Mezmera

[Lines]

If folks are frustrated, it's ok to vent. Odd choice of a thread to do it in though. I don't think it needs to become an argument.

 

I go on the assumption that HC is running at full speed and at full clarity that they're comfortable with. Both of those capacities can change dramatically due to circumstances. And this was 2020, the year of circumstances.

 

I'm sure players will react differently as things change.

[Neogumbercules]

Time for another prediction! My next prediction is.... Knockback!

 

I predict some addressing of the great Knockback debate that has raged since.... Forever. 

[Hexquisite]

On 9/16/2020 at 9:50 AM, Coyotedancer said:

Clown-summoning Mastermind set... 

 

 

No. . . no no no, please no!

 

[Luminara]

44 minutes ago, Hexquisite said:

 

 

No. . . no no no, please no!

 

 

No, it'd be perfect.  Reskinned Gang War with a 3 minute cast time and an animation of the clowns driving up in a tiny car, getting out and tripping all over themselves for the full duration.  The recharge time could be set to 1 second, just to throw the clown players a bone.  All of the powers could work in strange ways, like the lead clown accidentally hitting minion clowns and defeating them, and the mastermind's attacks could all be making different kinds of balloon animals... none of the clown mastermind powers or pets would actually do anything, no damage, no debuffs... but every power would have a mag 50 Placate with a special "stare in disbelief" or "scratch head and look around in confusion" animation forced onto every critter and player within 100 yards.

 

And then the entire zone aggros onto the mastermind and beats him/her to bloody giblets.  Twice.

 

See?  Perfect!  🙂

[Jimmy]

5 hours ago, Mezmera said:

These other servers run their donations for a few hundred bucks which is the cost of hosting the servers and that is it.  They have quite a bit more stuff implemented although they have their problems which'd easily be ironed out with dropping a few OP improvements that were added.  So you're telling me 5k+ for less stuff implemented in the game is better than the cost of a few hundred bucks and if they had 5 running servers it'd still be way cheaper.  So that leaves one to ask where's the beef?

I think you're getting a bit confused here. Let me try to explain.

 

The number of player-facing shards (or servers) isn't actually that big of a deal when it comes to costs. Each one requires a database, but (up to a limit) those can share hardware. The thing that actually costs more is the mapservers, those are the physical boxes you're actually playing on. Those directly scale with the number of players, which is why our costs are dramatically higher than the budgets of other groups. In the nicest possible way - their player counts are dwarfed by ours. They are able to host everything on one or two boxes. And that's fine for them, but obviously isn't practical for us.

We also have incredibly high standards when it comes to redundancy, security and backups, which obviously aren't free to adhere to. It's why we were able to quickly adapt to the datacenter outages we faced a few months back, and why we've never had any issues with rollbacks, etc. Stability is very important to us.

 

The amount donated has nothing to do with development capacity. Developers aren't paid anything (in fact, nobody at Homecoming is - we only have external costs like hosting, legal fees, etc). The only impact I suppose it has is making some hardware available for developers for testing, but that's all using shared capacity so the real cost there is minimal.

 

There's a few reasons why our development is slower, but it generally comes down to limited time and a high quality bar. Most of the explanation in this post still applies. I'd also encourage you to read this highly informative post from Telephone regarding some of our infrastructure.

[0th Power]

On 9/16/2020 at 11:46 AM, Jimmy said:

The word cartographer appears once.

New badge for making maps?

 

Custom maps in AE confirmed

[Twisted Toon]

2 hours ago, Jimmy said:

There's a few reasons why our development is slower, but it generally comes down to limited time and a high quality bar.

This is what I was going to point out.

 

You have three two options: Quality, Quickness, and low cost.

Problem is, you can only choose two one of the options.

 

I'm fairly sure that the Devs for HC, are working other jobs to make a living and doing this on their down time.

And, they seem to value quality over quantity.

[Chris24601]

10 hours ago, Mezmera said:

Well.  There's other servers that have already many more powersets and fresh new toys to play with.  What seems like a lot more innovation.

And, to be frank, all that innovations dies the moment Windows 11 comes out and follows Apple's lead of dropping the ability to run archaic 32-bit clients on it.

 

Then all those "rush the shinies" servers are stuck with a limited playerbase of people who maintain older operating systems because they were more interested in bling than in shoring up the system's foundations.

 

It's not as obviously new bling, but in terms of importance to maintaining the game for years to come, the development of a 64-bit client for City of Heroes is Homecoming's greatest legacy (HC's 64-bit client is also currently the ONLY way to play on an Apple machine running the latest OS... new shinies on 32-bit client systems are worthless to them).

 

Another important part of that 64-bit client is that Homecoming can run at maximum graphic settings even on mediocre systems because 64-bit processing is exponentially faster than 32-bit and the old client could only use the 32-bit limits; fewer threads, less RAM, etc. regardless of the power of the processor and graphics cards used.

 

As a practical example, I'm running Homecoming (64-bit) on the same machine I used to play on Live (32-bit). On live I could only handle limited Ultra settings without slowing my frame rate to a crawl because of the limits of the 32-bit architecture in relation to my system specs. Homecoming runs smooth as butter at the maximum graphics settings on the exact same system.

 

That's the power of taking the time to fix the underlying architecture instead of just focusing on bling. I may be imagining it, but I seem to recall another BTS project being actually untangling the spaghetti code into something much easier to work with and update. THAT too is something that will pay dividends for years down the line as with the code cleaned up and/or at least documented adding future updates, theoretically including actual new graphics and models, gets a LOT easier to do.

[Xanatos]

22 hours ago, Burnt Toast said:

It does however make me feel like I am wasting my monthly donations.

 

What a horrible thing to say.

 

Donations are for those who support that the game should be back. They don't exist for people to dictate how.

[fitzsimmons]

The reinstatement of double influence if no XP is gained.  Or the introduction of emp merit rewards past vet level 99.

 

I would prefer the former but will accept the latter.

 

Regards,

Dave

[Mezmera]

6 hours ago, Jimmy said:

I think you're getting a bit confused here. Let me try to explain.

 

The number of player-facing shards (or servers) isn't actually that big of a deal when it comes to costs. Each one requires a database, but (up to a limit) those can share hardware. The thing that actually costs more is the mapservers, those are the physical boxes you're actually playing on. Those directly scale with the number of players, which is why our costs are dramatically higher than the budgets of other groups. In the nicest possible way - their player counts are dwarfed by ours. They are able to host everything on one or two boxes. And that's fine for them, but obviously isn't practical for us.

We also have incredibly high standards when it comes to redundancy, security and backups, which obviously aren't free to adhere to. It's why we were able to quickly adapt to the datacenter outages we faced a few months back, and why we've never had any issues with rollbacks, etc. Stability is very important to us.

 

The amount donated has nothing to do with development capacity. Developers aren't paid anything (in fact, nobody at Homecoming is - we only have external costs like hosting, legal fees, etc). The only impact I suppose it has is making some hardware available for developers for testing, but that's all using shared capacity so the real cost there is minimal.

 

There's a few reasons why our development is slower, but it generally comes down to limited time and a high quality bar. Most of the explanation in this post still applies. I'd also encourage you to read this highly informative post from Telephone regarding some of our infrastructure.

I'm pretty familiar with that power.  I'm not sure how confused I am yet, I may need another application before I notice the effect.  Hopefully valid critiques aren't being brushed aside as "confusion", typically confusion is born out of secrecy. 

 

If these other servers had 5 shards and a test server it'd amount to lets say $1500.  You're telling me redundancies and other QoL features would rack up to be 3-4x the cost of running the thing?  Look I think you all deserve to get monies for your work, or at least a ham sandwich.  I'd actually advocate for bumping up the donation amount and officially classify Stars and a few other hard workers on this thing as an actual dev team.  I get there's responsibility that would come with that acknowledgement but so be it there's already some more expectation on this project than the others.  

 

As an outsider learning about what had went on prior to HC it's pretty upsetting but honestly it's water under the bridge.  Going forward is where I'm more apt to hold for more accountability.  Hence why I don't like the idea of secret servers where I hear already top tier Fire powers are getting buffs and no one but the old guard has a say.  I'm hoping the new blood can get mixed in a bit with the old gatekeepers to get more creative discussions. 

 

Again:

13 hours ago, Mezmera said:

Like I said this is my favorite iteration and want to see it succeed, what I don't want to see is more of what took place for those secretive 7 years.  

 

[Luminara]

32 minutes ago, Mezmera said:

If these other servers had 5 shards and a test server it'd amount to lets say $1500.  You're telling me redundancies and other QoL features would rack up to be 3-4x the cost of running the thing?

 

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/59-finances-donations/

 

They aren't hiding anything from anyone, they aren't taking money and laundering it through some obscure off-shore bank, they aren't doing anything shady.  They set a hard limit on the amount which they'll take in donations, cut it off the instant the goal is reached, and tell everyone exactly what they spent the money on every month.  They very clearly lay out where the money goes, breaking it down by different expenses, explain why something might change from the previous month, they even point out any overages in donations and apply it directly to the next month.  They not only list where the money goes, they say why it went there, why spending it there was better than spending it elsewhere, what we're all getting out of that expenditure, etc.

 

They're open and honest about the finances coming in or going out, in every way possible.

[Mezmera]

1 hour ago, Luminara said:

 

https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/59-finances-donations/

 

They aren't hiding anything from anyone, they aren't taking money and laundering it through some obscure off-shore bank, they aren't doing anything shady.  They set a hard limit on the amount which they'll take in donations, cut it off the instant the goal is reached, and tell everyone exactly what they spent the money on every month.  They very clearly lay out where the money goes, breaking it down by different expenses, explain why something might change from the previous month, they even point out any overages in donations and apply it directly to the next month.  They not only list where the money goes, they say why it went there, why spending it there was better than spending it elsewhere, what we're all getting out of that expenditure, etc.

 

They're open and honest about the finances coming in or going out, in every way possible.

Are you even comprehending what your're quoting me of?  The cost of running just one shard no backups or redundancies is about $150 as illustrated on some of these other offshoots.  Assuming a better host I'm giving them the benefit of $250 a shard.  So backups and redundancies total out to be triple the cost of what it would take to run the whole thing?  Mkay. 

 

You're telling me car repair services don't include the cost of labor in their repairs?  They can list their expenses with certain costs maybe built in and I'm hoping they get some of the money for doing this and want them to add cost of labor to their donation tabulation and up the donation amount.  Or don't even bother with listing that, up their donation amount still, and be more transparent with what's cooking as far as what affects us all in the game.  I could care less about what they list out for donations so long as they get what they need plus some for their work on the game we all care for.  

 

Don't be naive.  

 

Edited September 18, 2020 by Mezmera