Terrified. Agonized. Adrenaline-charged. Fearful. Freaked out.
Just some of the emotions surging through me as I contemplate respec'ing the poor invul/fire tank ONE more time to accomodate ED.
Strangely enough, the theory as cooked up on CoH planner isn't hard to plan. I was perfectly ok tweaking stuff on that program. It was when I copied over to Test, and had to physically type /respec and start moving enhancements around, that the enormity of the change hit me. And I started breathing heavily, feeling my heart pounding, and head start to throb.
I think...the real problem is the paradigm shift.
Because once I bit the bullet and tested it out, it wasn't so bad. Granted, I was level 50, so my first few tests were on blues, greens and whites. Then I found some yellow lieutenants in PI, but singly. And if tanks can't withstand those, then something is seriously wrong. Going over to Rikti crash site and hunting out the groups of yellow, orange, red Rikti was tougher - I had to fire unstoppable to survive, but survive and kill 'em, I did. Once or twice, they killed me because my last resort power hadn't recharged yet.
I did the same thing on the not-yet-respec'ed Live build to see. And there wasn't much difference in survivabilty. Just less efficiency on end and DPS, because my attacks didn't have the recharge and end redux slotted. ED has indeed successfully capped us off to an upper limit.
So what really is wrong with ED? It still seems survivable, still seems doable, kinda. I tried the level 24 fire blaster and he was still ok, despite the doom and gloom posts on the boards. Granted, he's a fire blaster, not an AR blaster.
It's just the concept of having the 3/3 slotting change that is not very palatable, is all.
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Friday, October 28, 2005
The Morning After
Wooof. End of Beta was fun.
See, excitement and fun is what you make of it. I've read umpteen posts about people sulking because they found the event not-fun, and boring, and so-on. Now granted, if you were unable to log on, or had some kind of updater problem, or black-screened or blue-screened and so on - then I feel your pain, technical problems always suck.
But if you were online, same as me, then welp...
Caveat: A travel power always makes movement much easier in such events. Heck, it makes movement convenient at any time. Let's see, if you were in the beta before me, you most likely would have gotten a 10 level bump. I got my Brute to level 17, and only took my travel power at 16.
So if you weren't interested enough in CoV beta to play a character up to level 14 and a travel power, especially when you know there's an end-of-beta-event coming on, then imo, tough noogies.
Look, fun is what you make of it. I logged on early in the hope of avoiding the worse of the connection crowd, and it seemed to work. I had very little communication with the outside world, just a few SGmates who weren't communicating much on chat, think they were on TS and I was too lazy to go start it up.
Where would you logically think an end-of-beta event would start? A place with the maximum number of people, right? The Atlas Park of CoV, no? Heck, just try to zone and you would see like 10 zones of Mercy Island, so that would probably be the smartest place to be.
I'm boggled by people who thought that the event would come to them. You search for these things, morons. I guess they were all spoonfed, and have never done a telescan quest before. :P
I decided to stop and take up roots in MI8. It seemed far away enough from the first few instances, so that if the devs logically began in order from MI1, they would spend some time there before getting to MI8, and there would be enough time for me to be in the zone and hear the broadcasts.
Once the portals started going up, the word was put out all over broadcasts and it was hopping time to go fight 'em. So what if they were level 40-50 Longbow? One hit on 'em and you know they scale as giant monsters. Otherwise there would be more dead people all over the ground. If you were so wussy as to not even TRY hitting them, then well, yea, all you can do is whine.
We beat down portal after portal, and you got to start knowing the spawn points. North end of the island, just a little NE of darwin's landing point, and so on. People were shouting out /loc coordinates and landmark directions, given a little coaxing and teaching to do so. "HERE!" "WHERE's here? use /loc to tell us."
Then the Agents showed up. We got Agent Polpol in Fort Cerebus, and Agent Simpson was eluding us forever, before he went down.
And then the news went up that Statesman was here, so of course, all of us dogpiled over and beat him up but good. And then Manticore showed up, and Miss Liberty and Back Alley Brawler and unsoweiter.
Now the moment Manticore mapservered us, and we all logged back on, MI8 suddenly became really really quiet. No more hero sightings, no nothing. Some people went back to fighting portals. Well, sure, if you take joy in that, that's a way to have some fun.
Me, I wanted to go and look for more heroes. So what do you do? You switch zones, duh. Have some fucking intitiative. If your zone is quiet, go look for others and hope you randomly bump into something. I was using the base teleporters, which involve a lot of superjumping from the spawn point, to the points heroes were commonly sighted, to the base portal, to the SG teleporter, and repeating over and over.
If you didn't have a SG teleporter, as they said, you could have just camped the damn ferry or the chopper or whatever. There's a Port Oakes ferry. Easy enough to switch to PO and back again to different Mercys and just broadcast about any hero sightings? And/or to hop to the zone points to see.
I found Synapse that way, and had some real good fun with him. It's a shame I missed Positron, but oh well, you can't have everything. War Witch and Ravenstorm, I don't quite care not seeing. Would just have been nice to see Posi. :)
What I like about this event is that it is different, and yet personalized for each player. Everyone would have seen a slightly different view of the events, from their own perspective, and have shared memories of different heroes where a whole bunch of villains came together. Just like Natural Selection in a way.
Of course, having the freedom to do this, also means that a number of morons would just sit in a deserted quiet zone and whine that the mountain never came to Mohammed and that your event suckz0red the fux0red. Sheesh, grow up, people. Opportunities don't just come at you, unless you like, win the lottery in the billions to one chance, you gotta LOOK for the opportunities.
Now, it's the morning after, and I'm stuck on CoH Updater again. Rofl. I've been so carried away by CoV that I hadn't bothered to update CoH, and now Issue 6 has hit and nothing is working right. Connecting #285 and counting.
Ironically, my CoHTest folder is working perfectly and lets me log onto Test server fine.
I have copied what they said to copy, and deleted checksums, but it's just not working very well yet. Probably 100,000 other people are trying to do the same thing. *sigh*
The copy tool alas, is NOT working perfectly, and I can't copy my level 50 over to test out my planned ED respec. Which sucks.
So I have pretty much nothing to do CoH-related except read boards and type blogs until either my Live updater starts working, or the copy tool works.
Oh waitaminute, I just figured something out. I haven't disabled my fucking router, like I did for the CoV download, maybe that's the damn problem. My software firewall's down, but not that.
*crosses fingers* Let me try that now.
See, excitement and fun is what you make of it. I've read umpteen posts about people sulking because they found the event not-fun, and boring, and so-on. Now granted, if you were unable to log on, or had some kind of updater problem, or black-screened or blue-screened and so on - then I feel your pain, technical problems always suck.
But if you were online, same as me, then welp...
Caveat: A travel power always makes movement much easier in such events. Heck, it makes movement convenient at any time. Let's see, if you were in the beta before me, you most likely would have gotten a 10 level bump. I got my Brute to level 17, and only took my travel power at 16.
So if you weren't interested enough in CoV beta to play a character up to level 14 and a travel power, especially when you know there's an end-of-beta-event coming on, then imo, tough noogies.
Look, fun is what you make of it. I logged on early in the hope of avoiding the worse of the connection crowd, and it seemed to work. I had very little communication with the outside world, just a few SGmates who weren't communicating much on chat, think they were on TS and I was too lazy to go start it up.
Where would you logically think an end-of-beta event would start? A place with the maximum number of people, right? The Atlas Park of CoV, no? Heck, just try to zone and you would see like 10 zones of Mercy Island, so that would probably be the smartest place to be.
I'm boggled by people who thought that the event would come to them. You search for these things, morons. I guess they were all spoonfed, and have never done a telescan quest before. :P
I decided to stop and take up roots in MI8. It seemed far away enough from the first few instances, so that if the devs logically began in order from MI1, they would spend some time there before getting to MI8, and there would be enough time for me to be in the zone and hear the broadcasts.
Once the portals started going up, the word was put out all over broadcasts and it was hopping time to go fight 'em. So what if they were level 40-50 Longbow? One hit on 'em and you know they scale as giant monsters. Otherwise there would be more dead people all over the ground. If you were so wussy as to not even TRY hitting them, then well, yea, all you can do is whine.
We beat down portal after portal, and you got to start knowing the spawn points. North end of the island, just a little NE of darwin's landing point, and so on. People were shouting out /loc coordinates and landmark directions, given a little coaxing and teaching to do so. "HERE!" "WHERE's here? use /loc to tell us."
Then the Agents showed up. We got Agent Polpol in Fort Cerebus, and Agent Simpson was eluding us forever, before he went down.
And then the news went up that Statesman was here, so of course, all of us dogpiled over and beat him up but good. And then Manticore showed up, and Miss Liberty and Back Alley Brawler and unsoweiter.
Now the moment Manticore mapservered us, and we all logged back on, MI8 suddenly became really really quiet. No more hero sightings, no nothing. Some people went back to fighting portals. Well, sure, if you take joy in that, that's a way to have some fun.
Me, I wanted to go and look for more heroes. So what do you do? You switch zones, duh. Have some fucking intitiative. If your zone is quiet, go look for others and hope you randomly bump into something. I was using the base teleporters, which involve a lot of superjumping from the spawn point, to the points heroes were commonly sighted, to the base portal, to the SG teleporter, and repeating over and over.
If you didn't have a SG teleporter, as they said, you could have just camped the damn ferry or the chopper or whatever. There's a Port Oakes ferry. Easy enough to switch to PO and back again to different Mercys and just broadcast about any hero sightings? And/or to hop to the zone points to see.
I found Synapse that way, and had some real good fun with him. It's a shame I missed Positron, but oh well, you can't have everything. War Witch and Ravenstorm, I don't quite care not seeing. Would just have been nice to see Posi. :)
What I like about this event is that it is different, and yet personalized for each player. Everyone would have seen a slightly different view of the events, from their own perspective, and have shared memories of different heroes where a whole bunch of villains came together. Just like Natural Selection in a way.
Of course, having the freedom to do this, also means that a number of morons would just sit in a deserted quiet zone and whine that the mountain never came to Mohammed and that your event suckz0red the fux0red. Sheesh, grow up, people. Opportunities don't just come at you, unless you like, win the lottery in the billions to one chance, you gotta LOOK for the opportunities.
Now, it's the morning after, and I'm stuck on CoH Updater again. Rofl. I've been so carried away by CoV that I hadn't bothered to update CoH, and now Issue 6 has hit and nothing is working right. Connecting #285 and counting.
Ironically, my CoHTest folder is working perfectly and lets me log onto Test server fine.
I have copied what they said to copy, and deleted checksums, but it's just not working very well yet. Probably 100,000 other people are trying to do the same thing. *sigh*
The copy tool alas, is NOT working perfectly, and I can't copy my level 50 over to test out my planned ED respec. Which sucks.
So I have pretty much nothing to do CoH-related except read boards and type blogs until either my Live updater starts working, or the copy tool works.
Oh waitaminute, I just figured something out. I haven't disabled my fucking router, like I did for the CoV download, maybe that's the damn problem. My software firewall's down, but not that.
*crosses fingers* Let me try that now.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Heroes Can't Lose!
I played the first Siren's Call event as a villain, and we were generally on the losing side of things. Those in my instance figured out the ultimate PvP strategy, outnumbering people = winning, and we were winning in our little local fights, even if we ultimately lost the battle. The rest of those in other instances were just simply losing, but yet you didn't hear that much whining from the villain players about how PvP was unbalanced or whatever, just a sort of general relief that heroes could still hold their own.
Now what I find really IRONIC and AMUSING is in this second event, the tables turned on the heroes, and suddenly they were the ones outnumbered.
The heroes are now flaming the boards with whines and complains about PvP being unbalanced, unfair, getting ganked by stalkers, yadda yadda.
Could it be as Quason suggests:
"The really amusing thing is that, when the shoe was on the other foot in the Siren's event, those who were playing heroes were bragging about how they slaughtered the villains, and for the most part, those who played villains didn't whine about it. They pointed out the skewed numbers, but mostly left it at that.
*shrug* Must be a certain mindset of people that play heroes vs those who play villains. Not sure how else to explain it."
I had to miss this second PvP event cos I was working, but puh-lese, even if you ARE getting ganked in the hospital spawns and finding it unfair, complain about that part, the specific details - not about how villains are overpowered, and PvP is unbalanced, and other general complaints that the sky is falling because you suck and don't care to admit it. :P
And this is a beta, your characters are wiped, no debt, no nothing, nothing electronic left but memories. *boggle*
Me, I'd prefer the option for no xp debt to go in, then I would play like hell these PvP zones when I felt like it, because hey, it's just FOR FUN. So what if you die?
I was repeatedly ganked by heroes because I foolishly chose to run like an idiot into hotspots solo with no villain backup the first few times I got into Siren's Call. Is it the fault of the heroes? Because they are so UBER and omgz0rsl33t? Because dey r bullies for holding and chain-mezzing me in a helpless state with absolutely no break frees, and no stores to buy break frees cos villains started out on the losing side? And I was desperately trying to superspeed away, but the holds just caught me and stopped me cold and preserved me for the scrappers to serve me up like sashimi?
Er, no. If I was a moron who could not fault myself, then yea, I would lash out like that.
Thankfully, I'm not -that- stupid. I'm clever enough to realize where I -was- being stupid. Ie. running into an organized team of 8 hero players solo.
Naturally, I WOULD be held - that's what 'trollers do, right? And debuffed by defenders. And whacked on by blasters, tanks and scrappers, tho I think only the scrapper got a chance, the poor corruptor died too fast for the rest to reach.
People, it's PVP. The goal is to kill the other guy. It's not freaking personal if you are on the losing end and blown into itsy bitsy pieces again and again. Especially in a zone PvP event. If say, you were alone, trying to do a PvE mission, and this group repeatedly pwnz0rs you for fun and to hassle you with insults and all, then yes, something is wrong. But if you come for a PvP event, EXPECT TO DIE if you run stupidly into a group of organized opponents.
Doh.
And stop whining, yeesh.
My villain never whined. He just tried again and again. He got a random group of 8 together, which got demolished by a team of 8 heroes who were plainly in communication with each other. Repeatedly. This random group of 8 allowed themselves to be strung out and kited, so yea, finished.
Finally he found a big ass scuffle in the water with like 30-40 villains who off'ed the few dumbass scrappers who thought they could take on the army. Then smartly stuck with them and we steamrolled through sheer force of numbers in our mini-team.
Now what I find really IRONIC and AMUSING is in this second event, the tables turned on the heroes, and suddenly they were the ones outnumbered.
The heroes are now flaming the boards with whines and complains about PvP being unbalanced, unfair, getting ganked by stalkers, yadda yadda.
Could it be as Quason suggests:
"The really amusing thing is that, when the shoe was on the other foot in the Siren's event, those who were playing heroes were bragging about how they slaughtered the villains, and for the most part, those who played villains didn't whine about it. They pointed out the skewed numbers, but mostly left it at that.
*shrug* Must be a certain mindset of people that play heroes vs those who play villains. Not sure how else to explain it."
I had to miss this second PvP event cos I was working, but puh-lese, even if you ARE getting ganked in the hospital spawns and finding it unfair, complain about that part, the specific details - not about how villains are overpowered, and PvP is unbalanced, and other general complaints that the sky is falling because you suck and don't care to admit it. :P
And this is a beta, your characters are wiped, no debt, no nothing, nothing electronic left but memories. *boggle*
Me, I'd prefer the option for no xp debt to go in, then I would play like hell these PvP zones when I felt like it, because hey, it's just FOR FUN. So what if you die?
I was repeatedly ganked by heroes because I foolishly chose to run like an idiot into hotspots solo with no villain backup the first few times I got into Siren's Call. Is it the fault of the heroes? Because they are so UBER and omgz0rsl33t? Because dey r bullies for holding and chain-mezzing me in a helpless state with absolutely no break frees, and no stores to buy break frees cos villains started out on the losing side? And I was desperately trying to superspeed away, but the holds just caught me and stopped me cold and preserved me for the scrappers to serve me up like sashimi?
Er, no. If I was a moron who could not fault myself, then yea, I would lash out like that.
Thankfully, I'm not -that- stupid. I'm clever enough to realize where I -was- being stupid. Ie. running into an organized team of 8 hero players solo.
Naturally, I WOULD be held - that's what 'trollers do, right? And debuffed by defenders. And whacked on by blasters, tanks and scrappers, tho I think only the scrapper got a chance, the poor corruptor died too fast for the rest to reach.
People, it's PVP. The goal is to kill the other guy. It's not freaking personal if you are on the losing end and blown into itsy bitsy pieces again and again. Especially in a zone PvP event. If say, you were alone, trying to do a PvE mission, and this group repeatedly pwnz0rs you for fun and to hassle you with insults and all, then yes, something is wrong. But if you come for a PvP event, EXPECT TO DIE if you run stupidly into a group of organized opponents.
Doh.
And stop whining, yeesh.
My villain never whined. He just tried again and again. He got a random group of 8 together, which got demolished by a team of 8 heroes who were plainly in communication with each other. Repeatedly. This random group of 8 allowed themselves to be strung out and kited, so yea, finished.
Finally he found a big ass scuffle in the water with like 30-40 villains who off'ed the few dumbass scrappers who thought they could take on the army. Then smartly stuck with them and we steamrolled through sheer force of numbers in our mini-team.
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Sidetrek: WoW meets LoTR
This has to be the funniest thing evah since Kill Skuls. And heck, I don't even play World of Warcraft.
But I think it's scary just how much I understand and can decipher and can relate to. :)
MMORPGs, the worlds of scary people with bad engrish skillz.
Salvage - Oooh Shiny...
On a totally less-related note, I found a blog which gives all us female gamers (of whatever age) a real role model to strive towards. I'd like you to meet Old Grandma Hardcore .
I'm exceedingly tickled by this lil old lady with the foulest mouth ever. I wanna be like her when I grow up, er, grow old, anyway. Except I won't be much of a console gamer, I'm a PC freak till the day I die. And I'm less inclined to cursewords.
But hell yea, they'll take my dice and my mouse over my dead body, and I'll trash yo ass, young 'un, if you don't show some respect. :P
Now back to my current hopeless craze, CoV. Some really hate the darkness and the bleakness, all I can say is that the graphic artists for Cryptic really understood what moods color and lighting can create. CoH is super-shiney, four-colour brightness and goodness. CoV is ultra-gothic punk and what can I say, but I'm normally the more depressed and selfish type of person?
I must say that I find it really hard to team up in CoV. I just don't seem to have a mindset for tolerating the team, especially while playing a Brute who is better off chasing hundreds of low levels and soaking up the xp himself, rather than going after small numbers of high levels. I'm in a low-down selfish villain mood with an all-out-for-himself attitude. And this makes the concept of teaming - with everyone acting like a transplanted hero and trying to save me from dying and all - feel really weird.
Not to mention, the thing that freaks me out MOST. The "villains" who stand there near you while you're street hunting. And no, they're not even thinking whether they should kill steal. They're watching you in that "defendery"/"empath"/"healz0r" fashion, and trying to save you from yourself. I've been the target of a few piddling heals before. Like WTFZ0R? I understand this on heroes, but but...it's so...unvillainous. It reminds me and plonks me straight back into "GAME" mindset, where it's a bunch of do-gooder players who want to heal me so that they'll feel good. I may end up making a bind of some sort. "Hi, $target. I'm fine. Don't kill steal me. Don't heal or help me, what kind of villain are you anyway?"
:/ And these weird freaks who send me random polite tells to team up. Creep me out. It just...doesn't seem right in a roleplay-ish sense. I've always thought of villains as more selfish bastages. They might team up temporarily to get past something they can't do themselves, but why team up for fun? Hrm.
Anyway, on to my real love in CoV. Salvage and base construction. As I said, I happen to have joined a real old and established SG with still a passable no. of active people - 20 or so, offhand, imo, play on and off (yay, good foresight). So these old freaks have been on CoV beta since forever and got all the good perks for our SG, huge prestige giveout and the works.
So I have been enjoying the fruits of our leaders' building sprees. They set us up a hospital in the base, that I have been using like mad. Hee. And some worktables.
And these worktables make me addicted. I dunno, I figured how to work 'em real fast. Other members don't seem the type. Or the least bit interested. I guess they're not Bartle Explorers. Still, you benefit off them because they just tried, gave up, and plunked their salvage on the leader to handle.
I have been pushing things along by relentlessly hunting down lowbie bosses and lts. for salvage, crafting resources myself, and then building some base items with these.
My first try was a Basic Telepad. Of course, without base building permissions, I can't buy or link up beacons, so I just posted a note on the forums to chase a leader to go figure that part of it out. Eventually, one of them did come around and figure it out and connect it up.
I am especially proud of the fact that it was I who pointed out the correct clickable area / activation zone of the telepads - because it's really bugged and non-obvious. But I was so fascinated with the new thingy that I was clicking all over enthusiastically and found it for the guys. The rest gave up a bit too easily. :P
My second thing I set up was a Mission Computer. That was too cool. It went up and it was workable. And now we have the ability to start up a SG trial to the Cathedral of Pain. Ain't that WILD? (If only we'd make a trip there before beta. It sounds mind-bogglingly cool.)
The only thing rather sad about base construction is that only the big SGs will probably get anywhere, and that only limited no.s of people will actually get to play with this base building thing.
But imo, the concept of shared organization resources is ABOUT TIME in coming. I dreamed about this years ago. Figures I would find it coming into CoH or CoV, rather than RoD. As a casual gamer, it makes me feel important to contribute to my team by just going about my business in SG mode and earning valuable prestige. And when you consider big ticket items going for 75k and 30k and 100+k prestige, that is serious karma.
And salvage is too fun. So I am a loot maniac. I -will- stay up later than I planned to chase after random bosses and lieutenants to try and pop some salvage, so that I can craft some resource, so that I can make that base item I was eyeing.
Is this bad? Imo, not really, it's harmless fun, AS LONG AS the pop rates do NOT decrease, or the mobs become limited in number. Once you create a limited resource and huge demand, you get shit like spawn-camping, and massive raids, and things become NOT FUN in a hurry.
If I can just run around Port Oakes, pummeling Family and Mook boss/lts. into the ground, and get the same stuff, why not? I could be any level and just look for the mob group of my choice to make this stuff.
The one annoying thing I forsee happening. SUCH-SUCH-AND-SUCH SALVAGE FOR SALE! all over broadcast channel. *sigh* People will set up shop in their little SGs of one, and sell it off to middle-sized SGs hungry for more so that they can get enough infamy for their SOs. Is this really a bad thing? I guess not taken to extremes it will be ok. But I wouldn't put it past merchants to spring up. Buy it off small ones at bulk prices, and sell it to middle SGs willing to pay a premium. Large SGs may not bother because they'll have enough members churning it out already.
As long as the supply is endless, there may not really be too huge a problem. Then the limiting factor for SGs will be that they require sufficient prestige to use their salvage items. (Because getting the salvage is easy, one single Brute spending a night can churn out 4-5 materials/power if he wanted to.) Earning 75000 prestige to actually place the item though. Heh. Easy in beta now because of the prestige giveaway, but I don't think it'll be so easy in the real game.
I'm using the telepad as an example because it's the prestige number I remember. If you had 75 active members, that would mean each one needed to earn 1000 prestige. I earn roughly say 150-250 prestige on a good mission. That means each would have to run 4-5 missions in a night to get that amount.
Face it, which SG has 75 active members? How about if you had 25 active members?
That means 3 nights in a row, 15 missions in total. Or so.
Bringing it down to say...12 active members. Which is, imo, the size of our SG...
That means about a week's worth of casual playing and missioning...to earn ONE telepad.
The less active members might be able to play enough to offset the decoration costs, which are like about 100 prestige odd.
Yea, it's going to take months to earn enough for rooms, for decoration, for control and power points and so on.
I'm exceedingly tickled by this lil old lady with the foulest mouth ever. I wanna be like her when I grow up, er, grow old, anyway. Except I won't be much of a console gamer, I'm a PC freak till the day I die. And I'm less inclined to cursewords.
But hell yea, they'll take my dice and my mouse over my dead body, and I'll trash yo ass, young 'un, if you don't show some respect. :P
Now back to my current hopeless craze, CoV. Some really hate the darkness and the bleakness, all I can say is that the graphic artists for Cryptic really understood what moods color and lighting can create. CoH is super-shiney, four-colour brightness and goodness. CoV is ultra-gothic punk and what can I say, but I'm normally the more depressed and selfish type of person?
I must say that I find it really hard to team up in CoV. I just don't seem to have a mindset for tolerating the team, especially while playing a Brute who is better off chasing hundreds of low levels and soaking up the xp himself, rather than going after small numbers of high levels. I'm in a low-down selfish villain mood with an all-out-for-himself attitude. And this makes the concept of teaming - with everyone acting like a transplanted hero and trying to save me from dying and all - feel really weird.
Not to mention, the thing that freaks me out MOST. The "villains" who stand there near you while you're street hunting. And no, they're not even thinking whether they should kill steal. They're watching you in that "defendery"/"empath"/"healz0r" fashion, and trying to save you from yourself. I've been the target of a few piddling heals before. Like WTFZ0R? I understand this on heroes, but but...it's so...unvillainous. It reminds me and plonks me straight back into "GAME" mindset, where it's a bunch of do-gooder players who want to heal me so that they'll feel good. I may end up making a bind of some sort. "Hi, $target. I'm fine. Don't kill steal me. Don't heal or help me, what kind of villain are you anyway?"
:/ And these weird freaks who send me random polite tells to team up. Creep me out. It just...doesn't seem right in a roleplay-ish sense. I've always thought of villains as more selfish bastages. They might team up temporarily to get past something they can't do themselves, but why team up for fun? Hrm.
Anyway, on to my real love in CoV. Salvage and base construction. As I said, I happen to have joined a real old and established SG with still a passable no. of active people - 20 or so, offhand, imo, play on and off (yay, good foresight). So these old freaks have been on CoV beta since forever and got all the good perks for our SG, huge prestige giveout and the works.
So I have been enjoying the fruits of our leaders' building sprees. They set us up a hospital in the base, that I have been using like mad. Hee. And some worktables.
And these worktables make me addicted. I dunno, I figured how to work 'em real fast. Other members don't seem the type. Or the least bit interested. I guess they're not Bartle Explorers. Still, you benefit off them because they just tried, gave up, and plunked their salvage on the leader to handle.
I have been pushing things along by relentlessly hunting down lowbie bosses and lts. for salvage, crafting resources myself, and then building some base items with these.
My first try was a Basic Telepad. Of course, without base building permissions, I can't buy or link up beacons, so I just posted a note on the forums to chase a leader to go figure that part of it out. Eventually, one of them did come around and figure it out and connect it up.
I am especially proud of the fact that it was I who pointed out the correct clickable area / activation zone of the telepads - because it's really bugged and non-obvious. But I was so fascinated with the new thingy that I was clicking all over enthusiastically and found it for the guys. The rest gave up a bit too easily. :P
My second thing I set up was a Mission Computer. That was too cool. It went up and it was workable. And now we have the ability to start up a SG trial to the Cathedral of Pain. Ain't that WILD? (If only we'd make a trip there before beta. It sounds mind-bogglingly cool.)
The only thing rather sad about base construction is that only the big SGs will probably get anywhere, and that only limited no.s of people will actually get to play with this base building thing.
But imo, the concept of shared organization resources is ABOUT TIME in coming. I dreamed about this years ago. Figures I would find it coming into CoH or CoV, rather than RoD. As a casual gamer, it makes me feel important to contribute to my team by just going about my business in SG mode and earning valuable prestige. And when you consider big ticket items going for 75k and 30k and 100+k prestige, that is serious karma.
And salvage is too fun. So I am a loot maniac. I -will- stay up later than I planned to chase after random bosses and lieutenants to try and pop some salvage, so that I can craft some resource, so that I can make that base item I was eyeing.
Is this bad? Imo, not really, it's harmless fun, AS LONG AS the pop rates do NOT decrease, or the mobs become limited in number. Once you create a limited resource and huge demand, you get shit like spawn-camping, and massive raids, and things become NOT FUN in a hurry.
If I can just run around Port Oakes, pummeling Family and Mook boss/lts. into the ground, and get the same stuff, why not? I could be any level and just look for the mob group of my choice to make this stuff.
The one annoying thing I forsee happening. SUCH-SUCH-AND-SUCH SALVAGE FOR SALE! all over broadcast channel. *sigh* People will set up shop in their little SGs of one, and sell it off to middle-sized SGs hungry for more so that they can get enough infamy for their SOs. Is this really a bad thing? I guess not taken to extremes it will be ok. But I wouldn't put it past merchants to spring up. Buy it off small ones at bulk prices, and sell it to middle SGs willing to pay a premium. Large SGs may not bother because they'll have enough members churning it out already.
As long as the supply is endless, there may not really be too huge a problem. Then the limiting factor for SGs will be that they require sufficient prestige to use their salvage items. (Because getting the salvage is easy, one single Brute spending a night can churn out 4-5 materials/power if he wanted to.) Earning 75000 prestige to actually place the item though. Heh. Easy in beta now because of the prestige giveaway, but I don't think it'll be so easy in the real game.
I'm using the telepad as an example because it's the prestige number I remember. If you had 75 active members, that would mean each one needed to earn 1000 prestige. I earn roughly say 150-250 prestige on a good mission. That means each would have to run 4-5 missions in a night to get that amount.
Face it, which SG has 75 active members? How about if you had 25 active members?
That means 3 nights in a row, 15 missions in total. Or so.
Bringing it down to say...12 active members. Which is, imo, the size of our SG...
That means about a week's worth of casual playing and missioning...to earn ONE telepad.
The less active members might be able to play enough to offset the decoration costs, which are like about 100 prestige odd.
Yea, it's going to take months to earn enough for rooms, for decoration, for control and power points and so on.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
CoV Perspective
After a week of fighting with my computer, I am happy to say that I have managed to get CoV running – just in time for the server to go up 24/7. This is a much happier scenario than me getting WoW up and running to walk around for 20 minutes before having to log off and watching beta shut down and the game go gold shortly after.
What can I say but wow? The graphics are even more gorgeous than Guild Wars. The ragdoll mobs are fun. The map tilesets are all glitzy new and purty. And I can’t wait to see what it’s like eventually with a better graphics processor and the Ageia physics card. It already looks good now, though my speed does crank down dramatically in labs with the heat haze thing going on.
Costume choices make me drool. All the dark darkity bits are there, spikey bits, skull-topped bits, leather and chains, and monstery fur and scale bits. *giggles insanely*
The missions are nice and new, and I do like the newspaper system, it gives a little more choice all around. I like that there are outdoor maps of SMALL size, rather than the endless square expanse of old.
I tried out the Brute AT first, of course. Have to give a nod to my roots, after all. I must say that it is an excellent solo AT, imo. And damn good at street-hunting. The spawns are very nicely placed in Mercy Island and Port Oakes, so to keep me amused between running to and fro from missions, I just started being the big werewolf bully and beating up random guys to show ‘em who’s the new badass in town.
Keeping your fury bar filled necessitates sprinting like a crazy SMASH addict from spawn to spawn pounding away constantly. Very fun. In about 5 hours, I had jumped 5 levels or so. Imo, this is a much faster leveling rate than CoH, possibly because the tank and scrapper has been blended together into an excellent solo AT, the missions are not dotted in nonsensical places too far away, and there is no “level 6” break to Wincott and the stupid Hollows to occupy your transit time.
Alas, the Brute AT may be just that, a good solo class at low levels. Why? I started building this brute the scrapper way, attacks first, and defence second, thought I’d follow primary and secondary theory first. So I do best on hundreds of little blue and white mobs, but not clumped up mobs, just 2-3 mobs per spawn. They can’t shoot me well enough to hurt me bad, but I can pound them into the dust to build my fury until I’m near one-shotting them.
To give myself a challenge during missions, I jacked up my difficulty to malicious, the CoV version of tenacious, and now I get about 5 white mobs to a spawn instead of 3. This is much more challenging for me pre-DOs, because my defence is near-nonexistent, and I tend to get very smashed up before I reach SMASH levels.
After 10 levels of soloing, I decided to go put my LFT flag up and join a team. Oh boy, my first team cheesed me off. And not because they were a BAD team, on the contrary, they were good. They were so good, that I was left feeling absolutely redundant.
Ok, see here, apparently Masterminds are our new alpha strike absorbers, right? They send out the pets. So they suck up alpha. (I hear a Brute can also do this, but this is post-DO and SO, I’m suspecting, because as is, I would get owned trying to take the alpha for a yellow + orange spawn meant for 7 people. Heck, I faceplanted anyhow because I walked up a little too near the frontline and got bashed up.)
Once pets are out there, the Dominators unleash their stuff and hold/confuse while the Corruptors (did I get that AT right?) bring out the buff/debuffs and start blasting away. The stalker is taking out bosses with Assassin Strike and placate by bringing them down to very low hp. Then the scourges start taking place, and before you know it, they are all dead. So where does the Brute come in? *boggle*
If I run in before the pets, I’m going to get very very mad for about 2 seconds before I drop and die. If I run in after, all I get is second pickings after the stalker and the corruptors are finished letting vent their wrath. And I don’t even get my fury half built before scourge has kill stolen me. :P
And to add insult to injury, they then pause to REST and heal up. Ah fuck. My preciously attained one-quarter fury bar (which is also apparently bugged) plunges to nothing while they rest.
I’m not sure if they have a pentad team going on here. I don’t think they do. Everyone and everything is doing damage, and this just makes me unable to build fury fast enough. And I’m still too young to absorb alpha. *sniffs*
I think I’m doomed to soloing. May not be such an unpleasant doom, but there you have it. A lowbie Brute’s not really much to a team. Solo, I understand myself enough that I take it easy on the first mobs. I touch of fear the lt. to take him out of commission, and then I brawl and first attack the minions till my fury climbs and they’re out, then I repeat on the lt, and so on. By the time I hit the inside of the mission and the big boss, I’m boiling over and one-shotting stuff that’s not the big boss.
I guess I need to wait until someone writes a guide on how to team with a Brute. Doesn’t help that different powersets are different. I’m DM/energy aura. So far, this means I build fury rather slowly, and my EA is only defences atm, haven’t picked up much resists yet.
What can I say but wow? The graphics are even more gorgeous than Guild Wars. The ragdoll mobs are fun. The map tilesets are all glitzy new and purty. And I can’t wait to see what it’s like eventually with a better graphics processor and the Ageia physics card. It already looks good now, though my speed does crank down dramatically in labs with the heat haze thing going on.
Costume choices make me drool. All the dark darkity bits are there, spikey bits, skull-topped bits, leather and chains, and monstery fur and scale bits. *giggles insanely*
The missions are nice and new, and I do like the newspaper system, it gives a little more choice all around. I like that there are outdoor maps of SMALL size, rather than the endless square expanse of old.
I tried out the Brute AT first, of course. Have to give a nod to my roots, after all. I must say that it is an excellent solo AT, imo. And damn good at street-hunting. The spawns are very nicely placed in Mercy Island and Port Oakes, so to keep me amused between running to and fro from missions, I just started being the big werewolf bully and beating up random guys to show ‘em who’s the new badass in town.
Keeping your fury bar filled necessitates sprinting like a crazy SMASH addict from spawn to spawn pounding away constantly. Very fun. In about 5 hours, I had jumped 5 levels or so. Imo, this is a much faster leveling rate than CoH, possibly because the tank and scrapper has been blended together into an excellent solo AT, the missions are not dotted in nonsensical places too far away, and there is no “level 6” break to Wincott and the stupid Hollows to occupy your transit time.
Alas, the Brute AT may be just that, a good solo class at low levels. Why? I started building this brute the scrapper way, attacks first, and defence second, thought I’d follow primary and secondary theory first. So I do best on hundreds of little blue and white mobs, but not clumped up mobs, just 2-3 mobs per spawn. They can’t shoot me well enough to hurt me bad, but I can pound them into the dust to build my fury until I’m near one-shotting them.
To give myself a challenge during missions, I jacked up my difficulty to malicious, the CoV version of tenacious, and now I get about 5 white mobs to a spawn instead of 3. This is much more challenging for me pre-DOs, because my defence is near-nonexistent, and I tend to get very smashed up before I reach SMASH levels.
After 10 levels of soloing, I decided to go put my LFT flag up and join a team. Oh boy, my first team cheesed me off. And not because they were a BAD team, on the contrary, they were good. They were so good, that I was left feeling absolutely redundant.
Ok, see here, apparently Masterminds are our new alpha strike absorbers, right? They send out the pets. So they suck up alpha. (I hear a Brute can also do this, but this is post-DO and SO, I’m suspecting, because as is, I would get owned trying to take the alpha for a yellow + orange spawn meant for 7 people. Heck, I faceplanted anyhow because I walked up a little too near the frontline and got bashed up.)
Once pets are out there, the Dominators unleash their stuff and hold/confuse while the Corruptors (did I get that AT right?) bring out the buff/debuffs and start blasting away. The stalker is taking out bosses with Assassin Strike and placate by bringing them down to very low hp. Then the scourges start taking place, and before you know it, they are all dead. So where does the Brute come in? *boggle*
If I run in before the pets, I’m going to get very very mad for about 2 seconds before I drop and die. If I run in after, all I get is second pickings after the stalker and the corruptors are finished letting vent their wrath. And I don’t even get my fury half built before scourge has kill stolen me. :P
And to add insult to injury, they then pause to REST and heal up. Ah fuck. My preciously attained one-quarter fury bar (which is also apparently bugged) plunges to nothing while they rest.
I’m not sure if they have a pentad team going on here. I don’t think they do. Everyone and everything is doing damage, and this just makes me unable to build fury fast enough. And I’m still too young to absorb alpha. *sniffs*
I think I’m doomed to soloing. May not be such an unpleasant doom, but there you have it. A lowbie Brute’s not really much to a team. Solo, I understand myself enough that I take it easy on the first mobs. I touch of fear the lt. to take him out of commission, and then I brawl and first attack the minions till my fury climbs and they’re out, then I repeat on the lt, and so on. By the time I hit the inside of the mission and the big boss, I’m boiling over and one-shotting stuff that’s not the big boss.
I guess I need to wait until someone writes a guide on how to team with a Brute. Doesn’t help that different powersets are different. I’m DM/energy aura. So far, this means I build fury rather slowly, and my EA is only defences atm, haven’t picked up much resists yet.
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Working with Teammates
Heh. After spending many sleepless hours trying to get the CoV beta client to download successfully (ain't working still, giving it one more try for the heck of it while I'm out), I decided to take a break and play some games instead.
Black and White 2 is kinda fun, though in my striving to be goody-goody (and because I and my pathetic villagers get owned in combat if I try to be evil and conquer things), it's turning into a 'build your city' sim. Lasted me about 6-8 hours though, before I got tired of it. Back to it another time.
Battlefield 2 looks visually very nice. If only I could find a server that doesn't ping 300-500ms. There was only one 30ms server, which was packed full for ages. Then I wiggled into one slot and played quite enjoyably for about half an hour, before Punkbuster proceeded to kick me out...for not being able to update it - either my firewall was being onery, or they were using an old version of PB. Could be latter, as it was an old version server. I want to patch up to 1.03, but I haven't been able to download the patch for it yet. Frickin' annoying.
Ended up playing DoD: Source for a bit more sense of teamwork, though I have pitifully little FPS skills left, aim is slow, instincts are off, and so on.
I do kinda sorta miss NS, but I don't like the graphics anymore. Can't wait for NS: Source eventually.
After that, I gave up with FPSes and decided to log back into CoH. I wanted to be helpful, I wanted to feel that sense of teammwork, so I decided to play my emp def. Well, bah, NO ONE wanted to pick up teh healz0r. WTF? Here I am, feeling all helpful and healsome, but noooo, no one wanted me. *sighs*
I did hear a broadcast about level 36 DE in Steel Canyon while desultorily shooting blue and white outcasts with my two single-slot attack powers feeling miserable.
So I decided, heck, I will be nice and log on Ragnarl and destroy the DE ambush.
The moment I logged, I had a total of one tell and one blind invite in under 5 seconds. Whoa. Damn but Stone is popular, huh. I decided to be nasty and quit the blind invite team (after saying, "sorry, wrong team," of course) and accept the one who sent me a tell instead.
Mistake, in retrospect. :/
(Oh, I got to the DE site only to find one pathetic Tree of Life remaining, another blaster had shown up and cleared the ambush.)
So why was this damn invite team a mistake?
Well, I wanted to be nice and explained that it had been a long time since I logged Raggy, so I was a bit rusty on his powers. Just to tell everyone what to expect, since I took a while to get there and was spending some time reshuffling powers and adding some new binds ala Invictus style.
(T for taunt rules. Unfortunately, I hit T before I bound it, and lost my Targeting window, and it took me a while to find the menu and mouse way of bringing it back.)
I'm not sure if telling them was a good thing or not, did it decrease their confidence in me? Or were they just a FUCKING SUCKY pickup team in the first place?! :P
1) Main criminal of our tale was a /DA scrapper named Dee. He had NO sense of positioning himself whatsoever. He would constantly rush up in front of me, the tank, and thus kept alerting and alarming the spawns in front. He successfully did TPK on one occassion in a big room of 3-4 CoTs, and had a bunch of near misses. This in a team of 2 empaths, one def, one troller.
2) Our secondary criminal was a Storm defender who had a level 50 stone/stone tank. Goddamn it. You'd think a tank player would understand that a stoner cannot move fast and the only way I can control shit is to keep it near/on my mudpots. Apparently, this fella had tank syndrome, he wanted to be primary tank.
So he would turn on his hurricane and run EVERYWHERE. Especially INTO the clump of CoT the stone tank was surrounded by. (After begging for CM incessantly, of course.) I swear he put knockback into his powers because stuff went flying in more directions than I could rotate my mouse. And he loved his pet Tornado. Out the moment it recharged, it would pick up random Death Mages that I had laboriously walked beside and was aggy holding with mallets, and toss them down the corridor, into secondary spawns, and so on.
You know, I don't deny that a stormer can be a good tank, and he was indeed a master of chaos, and this was a team loaded with seemingly everyone having an energy knockback blast.
So why on earth did you pick up a stone tank, then?
I think the thing that cheesed me off most was when Dee aggro'ed a spawn way up somewhere, the storm dumped everything and knocked everything off the tall stone tower in that high CoT room, I was chasing after everything madly out of breath, and they walked off to go aggy another spawn...While I found one last Death Mage on the ground. Except...this Death Mage still had a Snow Storm anchored on it. WTF.
I thought this was a standard lesson anchor defenders learned. Mob goes out of sight, you fucking TURN YOUR DAMN ANCHOR OFF. What excuse do you have for not knowing that your anchor is still toggled, and that you can't see a mob with a billowing snow storm nearby? At level 30 something?
So anyhow, I decide to stop this Death Mage before it ran off to aggy another spawn, and settled down to mallet it to death and screw the rest of the team because they sure weren't waiting or looking for the tank.
Sure enough, the stormer got himself mezzed and faceplanted, then a bunch of other skulls showed up, a smart emp'er had already found me and was supporting me, and then the scrapper comes dashing to me as if the hounds of hell were after him.
Which they were.
They proceeded to mez and massacre the shit out of the poor emp def before I could taunt 'em all, and then started to pound the crap out of me. +3 CoT is not very tankable, even for a stoner - especially one out of practice, and with dangerously yellow/red enhancements.
*sighs*
Fucking nightmare. They didn't know how to wait for a tank to pull either. They unleashed the second the first mob came around the corner. (I was actually forced into the WAIT HERE BEHIND CORNER, I WILL PULL INTO CORRIDOR role, because of said TPK earlier, we had 3 spawns clumped up together and about 8 Death Mages, and no one waited for the tank to grab aggy. Sighs.) At least my taunt and pull separated the clumps so that we got them in the end.
I dunno. I haven't played a Stormer. I want to, eventually, though. My lil baby Stormer is sitting at level 1, waiting for an Isolator team.
But it seems to me that a clever Stormer -could- work with an immobile tank by pushing mobs to the tank, as I heard in one forums anecdote. And not by making mobs fly all around, away from the tank, out of everyone's control range, only to come back later pissed to gills and ready to pound the stuffing of all the squishies.
You wanna do this, fine. Why the fuck did you invite a tank to the team, then? Please go away and get your CM and tank for the team in your controlled chaos fashion. Leave me alone. *rolls eyes*
Black and White 2 is kinda fun, though in my striving to be goody-goody (and because I and my pathetic villagers get owned in combat if I try to be evil and conquer things), it's turning into a 'build your city' sim. Lasted me about 6-8 hours though, before I got tired of it. Back to it another time.
Battlefield 2 looks visually very nice. If only I could find a server that doesn't ping 300-500ms. There was only one 30ms server, which was packed full for ages. Then I wiggled into one slot and played quite enjoyably for about half an hour, before Punkbuster proceeded to kick me out...for not being able to update it - either my firewall was being onery, or they were using an old version of PB. Could be latter, as it was an old version server. I want to patch up to 1.03, but I haven't been able to download the patch for it yet. Frickin' annoying.
Ended up playing DoD: Source for a bit more sense of teamwork, though I have pitifully little FPS skills left, aim is slow, instincts are off, and so on.
I do kinda sorta miss NS, but I don't like the graphics anymore. Can't wait for NS: Source eventually.
After that, I gave up with FPSes and decided to log back into CoH. I wanted to be helpful, I wanted to feel that sense of teammwork, so I decided to play my emp def. Well, bah, NO ONE wanted to pick up teh healz0r. WTF? Here I am, feeling all helpful and healsome, but noooo, no one wanted me. *sighs*
I did hear a broadcast about level 36 DE in Steel Canyon while desultorily shooting blue and white outcasts with my two single-slot attack powers feeling miserable.
So I decided, heck, I will be nice and log on Ragnarl and destroy the DE ambush.
The moment I logged, I had a total of one tell and one blind invite in under 5 seconds. Whoa. Damn but Stone is popular, huh. I decided to be nasty and quit the blind invite team (after saying, "sorry, wrong team," of course) and accept the one who sent me a tell instead.
Mistake, in retrospect. :/
(Oh, I got to the DE site only to find one pathetic Tree of Life remaining, another blaster had shown up and cleared the ambush.)
So why was this damn invite team a mistake?
Well, I wanted to be nice and explained that it had been a long time since I logged Raggy, so I was a bit rusty on his powers. Just to tell everyone what to expect, since I took a while to get there and was spending some time reshuffling powers and adding some new binds ala Invictus style.
(T for taunt rules. Unfortunately, I hit T before I bound it, and lost my Targeting window, and it took me a while to find the menu and mouse way of bringing it back.)
I'm not sure if telling them was a good thing or not, did it decrease their confidence in me? Or were they just a FUCKING SUCKY pickup team in the first place?! :P
1) Main criminal of our tale was a /DA scrapper named Dee. He had NO sense of positioning himself whatsoever. He would constantly rush up in front of me, the tank, and thus kept alerting and alarming the spawns in front. He successfully did TPK on one occassion in a big room of 3-4 CoTs, and had a bunch of near misses. This in a team of 2 empaths, one def, one troller.
2) Our secondary criminal was a Storm defender who had a level 50 stone/stone tank. Goddamn it. You'd think a tank player would understand that a stoner cannot move fast and the only way I can control shit is to keep it near/on my mudpots. Apparently, this fella had tank syndrome, he wanted to be primary tank.
So he would turn on his hurricane and run EVERYWHERE. Especially INTO the clump of CoT the stone tank was surrounded by. (After begging for CM incessantly, of course.) I swear he put knockback into his powers because stuff went flying in more directions than I could rotate my mouse. And he loved his pet Tornado. Out the moment it recharged, it would pick up random Death Mages that I had laboriously walked beside and was aggy holding with mallets, and toss them down the corridor, into secondary spawns, and so on.
You know, I don't deny that a stormer can be a good tank, and he was indeed a master of chaos, and this was a team loaded with seemingly everyone having an energy knockback blast.
So why on earth did you pick up a stone tank, then?
I think the thing that cheesed me off most was when Dee aggro'ed a spawn way up somewhere, the storm dumped everything and knocked everything off the tall stone tower in that high CoT room, I was chasing after everything madly out of breath, and they walked off to go aggy another spawn...While I found one last Death Mage on the ground. Except...this Death Mage still had a Snow Storm anchored on it. WTF.
I thought this was a standard lesson anchor defenders learned. Mob goes out of sight, you fucking TURN YOUR DAMN ANCHOR OFF. What excuse do you have for not knowing that your anchor is still toggled, and that you can't see a mob with a billowing snow storm nearby? At level 30 something?
So anyhow, I decide to stop this Death Mage before it ran off to aggy another spawn, and settled down to mallet it to death and screw the rest of the team because they sure weren't waiting or looking for the tank.
Sure enough, the stormer got himself mezzed and faceplanted, then a bunch of other skulls showed up, a smart emp'er had already found me and was supporting me, and then the scrapper comes dashing to me as if the hounds of hell were after him.
Which they were.
They proceeded to mez and massacre the shit out of the poor emp def before I could taunt 'em all, and then started to pound the crap out of me. +3 CoT is not very tankable, even for a stoner - especially one out of practice, and with dangerously yellow/red enhancements.
*sighs*
Fucking nightmare. They didn't know how to wait for a tank to pull either. They unleashed the second the first mob came around the corner. (I was actually forced into the WAIT HERE BEHIND CORNER, I WILL PULL INTO CORRIDOR role, because of said TPK earlier, we had 3 spawns clumped up together and about 8 Death Mages, and no one waited for the tank to grab aggy. Sighs.) At least my taunt and pull separated the clumps so that we got them in the end.
I dunno. I haven't played a Stormer. I want to, eventually, though. My lil baby Stormer is sitting at level 1, waiting for an Isolator team.
But it seems to me that a clever Stormer -could- work with an immobile tank by pushing mobs to the tank, as I heard in one forums anecdote. And not by making mobs fly all around, away from the tank, out of everyone's control range, only to come back later pissed to gills and ready to pound the stuffing of all the squishies.
You wanna do this, fine. Why the fuck did you invite a tank to the team, then? Please go away and get your CM and tank for the team in your controlled chaos fashion. Leave me alone. *rolls eyes*
Friday, October 14, 2005
NDA Lifted
Woot. Now is a good time to write about the utter excited joy I had when I got a beta invite in the mail from the 6+ monther announcement. Knowing how many people there are out there 6 months and above, I was thinking I would never get hit by the thing (unless they decided to send it out to everyone). I just checked my mail for kicks, and wowz0rs, I had one, I had one!
Of course, the downer after that was realizing that the download was about 1.6 gigabytes, at a speed of 1.4 kb/sec. And that it would overwrite my CoH Test folder. Welp, second day, and I’m at 6 megabytes downloaded. Sighs. I think my reserved copy of CoV collector’s edition will get here first, somehow.
On the bright side, this allowed me access to boards.cityofvillains.com, which I have been reading voraciously and can now talk about. Muhahaha.
And on the second bright side, I went to Tec-Drome today and got a heapload of games. I bought Battlefield 2, Black and White 2, Max Payne 2 (still need to finish 1, heh, but the expansion was mind-blowingly cheap) and Dragonshard! Rowr.
I put in a reservation order for Dawn of War: Winter Assault. This was a game I really wanted, and I was kinda cheesed off to find out that everyone and his brother and his mother had already cleared the stock out. Oh well, just gotta wait for one week later, treat it as a reward after some incoming hard work…
Also reserved Indigo Prophecy. Supposedly a good adventure game with branching storylines. I like storylines. Good to go back to basics once in a while. And I have a gamepad, so no problems with the controller there. (I knew investing in a PC one would be worth it, woot.)
I saw a Logitech headset going for about $80. Looked damn nice for the price. Had a mike, and comfy earphones and all. The other competitor was about $175. Phew. Thing is, it’s USB, I don’t know if that’s going to work with my Soundblaster Extigy or not. (Someday, I do want to upgrade to an Audigy though, or maybe the up-and-coming X-Fi, which is drool-worthy, but I just can’t yet justify it to myself.) Someday, someday. I’ll continue to brood about it and if I still want it three months from now, mebbe then.
And yes, I reserved CoV collector’s edition. I think it will rawk. The ATs all sound pretty damn good. I am actually half-interested in the PvP aspect, and I just need to find yet ANOTHER SG who has some balls in this respect. Sighs. Am I a frackin’ curse or what? I wiggle my way into Top Ten, one of the famous SGs of Freedom, only to find it wallowing around in semi-death throes with people bored of CoH, and talking about moving to WoW. My only hope is that they are still interested in CoV, otherwise, I gotta pack up and move AGAIN. Perhaps the Conglomerate of Infinity will have a little more people. *mutters*
People still haven’t learned the Everquest and WoW and RoD lesson yet. I’m so boggled by this. But as I was talking with a family member last night, we concluded that a lot of people are inherently shallow. See, this family member was discussing with some colleagues that “Money isn’t everything. Happiness can be found elsewhere besides having lots of money.”
Well, the colleagues agreed to the first part…it isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing, they said. Given a free one million dollars (treat it theoretically as sufficient for thy entire family to live comfortably), would they still want TWO million dollars? YES YES OF COURSE, they said.
I dunno. Even if you come from a really poor family, I understand that one of your main concerns is having enough money to do stuff that you want to do. But what happens when you have enough, are you going to recognize that you have enough? Or are you going to join the rat race and chase for more more more cheese for forty years before having a mid-life crisis and realizing, wait, I don’t really like the taste of Cheddar or Gouda after all…
Do branded goods make you happy? A piece of clothing with a name scrawled on it that jacks up the price to $500? Why? Is it a bragging right? How different is this from say a piece of virtual equipment, some vital piece of armor you got from ye-awful-to-kill bigass Dragon of DOOM. And then after that, you find out that you are soooo attached to this piece of clothing that you don’t dare move around in it. You dress it on a dummy character to show it off, or hoard it and keep it to yourself, secure in the knowledge that HA, I HAVE IT. Been there, done that. *pokes the scads of renamed eq Juli used to wear and risk until the Shattering and a mistake on a quest spooked her out for good*
But a lot of people are still willing to rat race online. J Hence the popularity of Everquest and WoW and its clones.
CoV excites me because it’s a little like the realms system of competition that I was yakking about dunno how many years ago. It’s going to be competition between SGs, in a way. You earn salvage and prestige for your SG, ie. organization-based resources, that can be used to construct your base and unlock SG-only trials and missions and stuff. And of course, this opens up SG PvP. Player generated content via PvP, why the heck not…
Kicker is, you need a good SG. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily have to win all the time, but it has to be tight enough to make a good rivalry. Sorta like the olden days of Asc vs Inc vs DS. Face it, between the bigshots, RnF couldn’t compete, they would have to tussle with hem, Arcanes and such. :P
We’ll see. There’s still a certain amount of masochistic fun to be gained from making gimpy toons. I just ran around with “Nerfed Bug,” an ice/ss tanker, and it was kinda funny. And maybe they’ll get some lovin’ down the road.
Please…please…don’t ignore poor invul either. It’s been over-nerfed. :P
Of course, the downer after that was realizing that the download was about 1.6 gigabytes, at a speed of 1.4 kb/sec. And that it would overwrite my CoH Test folder. Welp, second day, and I’m at 6 megabytes downloaded. Sighs. I think my reserved copy of CoV collector’s edition will get here first, somehow.
On the bright side, this allowed me access to boards.cityofvillains.com, which I have been reading voraciously and can now talk about. Muhahaha.
And on the second bright side, I went to Tec-Drome today and got a heapload of games. I bought Battlefield 2, Black and White 2, Max Payne 2 (still need to finish 1, heh, but the expansion was mind-blowingly cheap) and Dragonshard! Rowr.
I put in a reservation order for Dawn of War: Winter Assault. This was a game I really wanted, and I was kinda cheesed off to find out that everyone and his brother and his mother had already cleared the stock out. Oh well, just gotta wait for one week later, treat it as a reward after some incoming hard work…
Also reserved Indigo Prophecy. Supposedly a good adventure game with branching storylines. I like storylines. Good to go back to basics once in a while. And I have a gamepad, so no problems with the controller there. (I knew investing in a PC one would be worth it, woot.)
I saw a Logitech headset going for about $80. Looked damn nice for the price. Had a mike, and comfy earphones and all. The other competitor was about $175. Phew. Thing is, it’s USB, I don’t know if that’s going to work with my Soundblaster Extigy or not. (Someday, I do want to upgrade to an Audigy though, or maybe the up-and-coming X-Fi, which is drool-worthy, but I just can’t yet justify it to myself.) Someday, someday. I’ll continue to brood about it and if I still want it three months from now, mebbe then.
And yes, I reserved CoV collector’s edition. I think it will rawk. The ATs all sound pretty damn good. I am actually half-interested in the PvP aspect, and I just need to find yet ANOTHER SG who has some balls in this respect. Sighs. Am I a frackin’ curse or what? I wiggle my way into Top Ten, one of the famous SGs of Freedom, only to find it wallowing around in semi-death throes with people bored of CoH, and talking about moving to WoW. My only hope is that they are still interested in CoV, otherwise, I gotta pack up and move AGAIN. Perhaps the Conglomerate of Infinity will have a little more people. *mutters*
People still haven’t learned the Everquest and WoW and RoD lesson yet. I’m so boggled by this. But as I was talking with a family member last night, we concluded that a lot of people are inherently shallow. See, this family member was discussing with some colleagues that “Money isn’t everything. Happiness can be found elsewhere besides having lots of money.”
Well, the colleagues agreed to the first part…it isn’t everything, it’s the ONLY thing, they said. Given a free one million dollars (treat it theoretically as sufficient for thy entire family to live comfortably), would they still want TWO million dollars? YES YES OF COURSE, they said.
I dunno. Even if you come from a really poor family, I understand that one of your main concerns is having enough money to do stuff that you want to do. But what happens when you have enough, are you going to recognize that you have enough? Or are you going to join the rat race and chase for more more more cheese for forty years before having a mid-life crisis and realizing, wait, I don’t really like the taste of Cheddar or Gouda after all…
Do branded goods make you happy? A piece of clothing with a name scrawled on it that jacks up the price to $500? Why? Is it a bragging right? How different is this from say a piece of virtual equipment, some vital piece of armor you got from ye-awful-to-kill bigass Dragon of DOOM. And then after that, you find out that you are soooo attached to this piece of clothing that you don’t dare move around in it. You dress it on a dummy character to show it off, or hoard it and keep it to yourself, secure in the knowledge that HA, I HAVE IT. Been there, done that. *pokes the scads of renamed eq Juli used to wear and risk until the Shattering and a mistake on a quest spooked her out for good*
But a lot of people are still willing to rat race online. J Hence the popularity of Everquest and WoW and its clones.
CoV excites me because it’s a little like the realms system of competition that I was yakking about dunno how many years ago. It’s going to be competition between SGs, in a way. You earn salvage and prestige for your SG, ie. organization-based resources, that can be used to construct your base and unlock SG-only trials and missions and stuff. And of course, this opens up SG PvP. Player generated content via PvP, why the heck not…
Kicker is, you need a good SG. Of course, it doesn’t necessarily have to win all the time, but it has to be tight enough to make a good rivalry. Sorta like the olden days of Asc vs Inc vs DS. Face it, between the bigshots, RnF couldn’t compete, they would have to tussle with hem, Arcanes and such. :P
We’ll see. There’s still a certain amount of masochistic fun to be gained from making gimpy toons. I just ran around with “Nerfed Bug,” an ice/ss tanker, and it was kinda funny. And maybe they’ll get some lovin’ down the road.
Please…please…don’t ignore poor invul either. It’s been over-nerfed. :P
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
The Design Zen of ED
A Starcraft/Diablo designer once said on Gamasutra, and I paraphrase, it’s important not to over-tweak. We learned a very valuable lesson on game balance. Changing one small factor, say, siege tank damage from 15 to 13, was enough to drastically swing balance from Terrans always winning to always losing. The correct number should have been to increment it one step to 14 and watch.
Apparently, CoH’s designers have not read Gamasutra, or not taken such advice to heart, or know very well and are choosing to do a global combat-affecting enhancement overhaul anyway. You may read this design decision in however light you wish – misguidely benevolent and well intentioned (road to hell, remember), arrogantly uncaring, purposefully malevolent, or the paranoid conspiracy theorist’s favorite, out to get my l33t pwning and Pling ass in specific.
Me, I’m an optimist, armoured by a layer of jaded cynicism, forever striving for Zen perspective.
I see it like this: the designers have better things to do with their time than purposefully piss a bunch of no-life gamers off, or fix something that doesn’t need fixing. Of course, the conflict arrives when they try to fix something the gamers feel DOESN’T need fixing. Who is right? The eternal question: Do the devs or the players themselves know best?
Since everyone is in reality a self-centered egoistic little shit, the eternal answer is, very understandably, themselves!
Therein lies the crux of the matter. And why such things are never going to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
[If you want to be lazy, here is my main summary: Players playing one game. Devs planning and playing another game. Devs have reasons for game to play that way. Devs make old game into new game that plays dev way. Players can either quit cos they don’t like new game and find it not fun, or adapt to new game and find it fun.
You can stop reading now. The rest is for me to work out the dev’s possible reasons, and calculate future trajectories of possibility.]
Each iteration of a MMORPG is like a new singleplayer game coming out. The players will have to make a choice on whether they still like the game, or whether they’re going to throw it aside for another game. That’s the lifecycle of a computer game for you. Unfortunately, players want their mmorpgs to act like a bought single-player game, never changing…ain’t happening, alas. Heck, even some multiplayer strategy games change and piss people off between balance patches.
As I said, I’m an optimist, I do believe that the devs are changing things so that the game itself is going to benefit in the long term. I am going to do my best to try and adapt to the new world. Some days, we all can’t avoid The Shattering and have to make do.
However, I can agree with the philosophy and disagree with the method or treatment. I know a lot of people are howling about the devs, and Statesman in particular, being an arrogant snob and so on – but face it, a) as a chief game designer, do you really think Jack Emmert has endless time to cater to a forums fanbase, who regularly villifies him for a whole of reasons, some justified and most not, no matter how vocal it is? b) That he’s going to bother to couch things in diplomatic language – CuppaJo is PR, not States. And c) that he doesn’t have a big ego being the big kahuuna designer? You gotta have one if you want to convince the bigshots with the money that you know anything at all.
None of which EXCUSES bad behavior, of course. Go ahead and comment on it. I am, I don’t mind reading about it. Sure, it would be an ideal world if we ever got a game designer who knows how to behave towards his players, but until you find me that game (I am SO there, giving this dream designer my money), you’ll forgive me if I find it in my heart to forgive people for being only human.
I do think that by making such a overall arching change, they are going to change the scope of the game in ways that they haven’t calculated for, and have to spend the next few issues course correcting heavily…
It reminds me of the classic biology textbook example on wolves and deer. A natural equilibrium has already sprung up to balance the populations. Same in CoH, except this is a relationship between players and xp gain – this factor lumps together con of minions, player-chosen difficulty of fights, and speed of leveling and so on. Now unfortunately for the devs, this equilibrium has settled at a place not intended – players are regularly fighting +2 to +3 minions, they find it gives them the optimal xp rate.
I have this strong feeling that the devs want to shift this equilibrium back to the planned position. This will allow all their future plans for expansion to work from the correct stage of theory – remember all this stuff ain’t built in a day, they are often working 6 months before to get an issue out. They are living in essentially geologic time for a game.
Things like PvP, CoV, elite ATs, bonus temp powers, items of power that will work as significant lures (a SO’ed and HO’ed out character wouldn’t give a shit, would he? And evidently that’s the top peak of what the devs want us to reach. Anything more would just cripplingly unbalance the game. I am envisioning Hayama here, bugging out the MUD with warning: 2000+ damage on every backstab to a lowbie gnome mob), the super-secret skills and all, are relying very heavily on the equilibrium rebalancing itself to players commonly fighting even-con ‘heroic’ level mobs, and going up in scale only when they get the cool ‘optional’ lewt.
When you’re having all these long term goals in mind, as you very well should, as a game designer, they become really pressing reasons for shifting that equilibrium back to where it’s supposed to effing well-be in the first place – if not for those…bleeping! players.
Whoops. The game devs have just encountered Murphy’s Law of Game Design: No game survives in its original planned state after contact with the game players.
Fact: The planned equilibrium of player vs xp gain is off-balance. It’s been off-balance since the beginning of the game and all the various changes have been just knocking it off-balance in different directions, especially when you keep rattling issue changes around like candy.
Also Fact: This is proven in biology. When you make changes to a system, you can get unforeseen effects because stuff affects each other. OMG, the poor deer, they are all dying because the wolves are predating on them. We see the trend, they’ve been decreasing each year. So let us help balance it by opening hunting season on the wolves…Suddenly the next year, the wolves are nearly endangered species, and the deer are eating all the leaves off trees and generally fuxx0ring with the ecosytem.
Same with this enhancement diversification and other such huge fixes. Blizzard designers for Starcraft and Diablo solved this problem by avoiding huge fixes, and tinkering with very tiny number changes to slowly attain as balanced a game as possible. But that’s because their game is built from the ground up for this sort of thing, tweaks of small numbers, and hundreds and thousands of games played over and over to calculate overall win ratios.
The CoH designers are probably looking at a Catch-22 here. They can go the Everquest and RoD and other various MUDs (Discworld, I’m looking at you, and some other MUDs I can’t remember their names offhand) route and cater to their existing players and just make more and more harder content to suck players into more and more loot. Eventually at some point, people will give up the rabbit chase when they realize their real lives are taking a serious hit, the content will either develop to an extent that it’s too intimidating for a new player to learn and/or not develop quickly enough for the hardcore who will get bored, and they will be living off an established pool of people with no lives who will very very slowly thin out due to attrition through various factors. Ie. the game provides short term hope, but wears out in the long term.
Or they can do their overhaul in the hope that the long term benefits will provide enough interesting gimmicks to constantly renew a pool of random subscribers, while severely pissing off the established gamerbase, many of which might go bellyup and quit on them while verbally sabotaging the game to every internet site worth anything. Ie. the game might die in the short term before you even hit the long term payoff.
Life being what it is, there may be no optimum solution, but it looks like the CoH devs are going for the second option.
Whether this will be a wise choice, or the ultimate straw on the camel’s back for many gamers, I’ll have to resort to a cliché and say “Only time will tell.”
P.S. I did my tri-monthly spontaneous relog of Khelf into RoD. While the ‘who’ of RoD has been looking sorrier and sorrier, I saw 3 new news which truly made me laugh. It seemed like a case of trying to shut the gate and redecorate the manger when the sheep have already left. The imms, have, in their infinite wisdom decided to up the xp gain at high levels, as the mobs haven’t been returning enough xp. Say at around level 40’s or so. Gee, I coulda told you that. About oh…12 months ago? 24? 36? :P How many people have been only xp’ing at the Tree of Life since then? And that new max lvl 49 place Kinux built?
I guess the number of characters (notice I don’t say PEOPLE) reaching avhood has finally dried up significantly for Mr. Edmond to take some notice and be convinced that they long ago gimped leveling rate with the war on power-leveling.
Ah well. Imms and devs live in geologic time.
I may not be a super-gamer or have time to play 20 games in 4 weeks, but where the heck did I put those old, untouched singleplayer games again?
Apparently, CoH’s designers have not read Gamasutra, or not taken such advice to heart, or know very well and are choosing to do a global combat-affecting enhancement overhaul anyway. You may read this design decision in however light you wish – misguidely benevolent and well intentioned (road to hell, remember), arrogantly uncaring, purposefully malevolent, or the paranoid conspiracy theorist’s favorite, out to get my l33t pwning and Pling ass in specific.
Me, I’m an optimist, armoured by a layer of jaded cynicism, forever striving for Zen perspective.
I see it like this: the designers have better things to do with their time than purposefully piss a bunch of no-life gamers off, or fix something that doesn’t need fixing. Of course, the conflict arrives when they try to fix something the gamers feel DOESN’T need fixing. Who is right? The eternal question: Do the devs or the players themselves know best?
Since everyone is in reality a self-centered egoistic little shit, the eternal answer is, very understandably, themselves!
Therein lies the crux of the matter. And why such things are never going to be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
[If you want to be lazy, here is my main summary: Players playing one game. Devs planning and playing another game. Devs have reasons for game to play that way. Devs make old game into new game that plays dev way. Players can either quit cos they don’t like new game and find it not fun, or adapt to new game and find it fun.
You can stop reading now. The rest is for me to work out the dev’s possible reasons, and calculate future trajectories of possibility.]
Each iteration of a MMORPG is like a new singleplayer game coming out. The players will have to make a choice on whether they still like the game, or whether they’re going to throw it aside for another game. That’s the lifecycle of a computer game for you. Unfortunately, players want their mmorpgs to act like a bought single-player game, never changing…ain’t happening, alas. Heck, even some multiplayer strategy games change and piss people off between balance patches.
As I said, I’m an optimist, I do believe that the devs are changing things so that the game itself is going to benefit in the long term. I am going to do my best to try and adapt to the new world. Some days, we all can’t avoid The Shattering and have to make do.
However, I can agree with the philosophy and disagree with the method or treatment. I know a lot of people are howling about the devs, and Statesman in particular, being an arrogant snob and so on – but face it, a) as a chief game designer, do you really think Jack Emmert has endless time to cater to a forums fanbase, who regularly villifies him for a whole of reasons, some justified and most not, no matter how vocal it is? b) That he’s going to bother to couch things in diplomatic language – CuppaJo is PR, not States. And c) that he doesn’t have a big ego being the big kahuuna designer? You gotta have one if you want to convince the bigshots with the money that you know anything at all.
None of which EXCUSES bad behavior, of course. Go ahead and comment on it. I am, I don’t mind reading about it. Sure, it would be an ideal world if we ever got a game designer who knows how to behave towards his players, but until you find me that game (I am SO there, giving this dream designer my money), you’ll forgive me if I find it in my heart to forgive people for being only human.
I do think that by making such a overall arching change, they are going to change the scope of the game in ways that they haven’t calculated for, and have to spend the next few issues course correcting heavily…
It reminds me of the classic biology textbook example on wolves and deer. A natural equilibrium has already sprung up to balance the populations. Same in CoH, except this is a relationship between players and xp gain – this factor lumps together con of minions, player-chosen difficulty of fights, and speed of leveling and so on. Now unfortunately for the devs, this equilibrium has settled at a place not intended – players are regularly fighting +2 to +3 minions, they find it gives them the optimal xp rate.
I have this strong feeling that the devs want to shift this equilibrium back to the planned position. This will allow all their future plans for expansion to work from the correct stage of theory – remember all this stuff ain’t built in a day, they are often working 6 months before to get an issue out. They are living in essentially geologic time for a game.
Things like PvP, CoV, elite ATs, bonus temp powers, items of power that will work as significant lures (a SO’ed and HO’ed out character wouldn’t give a shit, would he? And evidently that’s the top peak of what the devs want us to reach. Anything more would just cripplingly unbalance the game. I am envisioning Hayama here, bugging out the MUD with warning: 2000+ damage on every backstab to a lowbie gnome mob), the super-secret skills and all, are relying very heavily on the equilibrium rebalancing itself to players commonly fighting even-con ‘heroic’ level mobs, and going up in scale only when they get the cool ‘optional’ lewt.
When you’re having all these long term goals in mind, as you very well should, as a game designer, they become really pressing reasons for shifting that equilibrium back to where it’s supposed to effing well-be in the first place – if not for those…bleeping! players.
Whoops. The game devs have just encountered Murphy’s Law of Game Design: No game survives in its original planned state after contact with the game players.
Fact: The planned equilibrium of player vs xp gain is off-balance. It’s been off-balance since the beginning of the game and all the various changes have been just knocking it off-balance in different directions, especially when you keep rattling issue changes around like candy.
Also Fact: This is proven in biology. When you make changes to a system, you can get unforeseen effects because stuff affects each other. OMG, the poor deer, they are all dying because the wolves are predating on them. We see the trend, they’ve been decreasing each year. So let us help balance it by opening hunting season on the wolves…Suddenly the next year, the wolves are nearly endangered species, and the deer are eating all the leaves off trees and generally fuxx0ring with the ecosytem.
Same with this enhancement diversification and other such huge fixes. Blizzard designers for Starcraft and Diablo solved this problem by avoiding huge fixes, and tinkering with very tiny number changes to slowly attain as balanced a game as possible. But that’s because their game is built from the ground up for this sort of thing, tweaks of small numbers, and hundreds and thousands of games played over and over to calculate overall win ratios.
The CoH designers are probably looking at a Catch-22 here. They can go the Everquest and RoD and other various MUDs (Discworld, I’m looking at you, and some other MUDs I can’t remember their names offhand) route and cater to their existing players and just make more and more harder content to suck players into more and more loot. Eventually at some point, people will give up the rabbit chase when they realize their real lives are taking a serious hit, the content will either develop to an extent that it’s too intimidating for a new player to learn and/or not develop quickly enough for the hardcore who will get bored, and they will be living off an established pool of people with no lives who will very very slowly thin out due to attrition through various factors. Ie. the game provides short term hope, but wears out in the long term.
Or they can do their overhaul in the hope that the long term benefits will provide enough interesting gimmicks to constantly renew a pool of random subscribers, while severely pissing off the established gamerbase, many of which might go bellyup and quit on them while verbally sabotaging the game to every internet site worth anything. Ie. the game might die in the short term before you even hit the long term payoff.
Life being what it is, there may be no optimum solution, but it looks like the CoH devs are going for the second option.
Whether this will be a wise choice, or the ultimate straw on the camel’s back for many gamers, I’ll have to resort to a cliché and say “Only time will tell.”
P.S. I did my tri-monthly spontaneous relog of Khelf into RoD. While the ‘who’ of RoD has been looking sorrier and sorrier, I saw 3 new news which truly made me laugh. It seemed like a case of trying to shut the gate and redecorate the manger when the sheep have already left. The imms, have, in their infinite wisdom decided to up the xp gain at high levels, as the mobs haven’t been returning enough xp. Say at around level 40’s or so. Gee, I coulda told you that. About oh…12 months ago? 24? 36? :P How many people have been only xp’ing at the Tree of Life since then? And that new max lvl 49 place Kinux built?
I guess the number of characters (notice I don’t say PEOPLE) reaching avhood has finally dried up significantly for Mr. Edmond to take some notice and be convinced that they long ago gimped leveling rate with the war on power-leveling.
Ah well. Imms and devs live in geologic time.
I may not be a super-gamer or have time to play 20 games in 4 weeks, but where the heck did I put those old, untouched singleplayer games again?
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Bombshell Drama
You know, I'm actually just kinda numb about this whole enhancement diversification thing. Of course, I don't like the idea of the change, and I'm happy to see the thread explode with indignation so that the devs will at least spend some time reconsidering, or at least, CuppaJo will spend some time compiling feedback for devs to ignore. :)
But I've stopped being affected by such changes. Does it matter if my characters are made more or less powerful? *blink* It's just text. It's just bytes. It's the same as if I ran the RoD Geandakin into the whirlpool DT on purpose or by accident. Once I would have been so deeply hurt that I might have commited seppuku because nooooooo, my precious equipment just went up in smoke... Nearer the end of my disillusionment time, I would have mourned the loss, but I wouldn't beat myself up over it.
Now, it's like, heh, I actually gave (sold for a brief moment's satisfaction and a good memory) my treasured renamed goroggles away, and let the umpteen seth sets and other valuable stuff (3 Kade subversions, anyone? umpteen merlin, underworld and the works) ROT and auto-delete. Not to mention, my 124 RoD characters and 50+ lvl 50 AVs. Do I miss them? Of course I do, from time to time. You cannot play a game so deeply without being deeply affected. Sometimes, I still think, hey, this would be a good area building technique, or get funky dreams about various characters and their names.
But after much suffering and soul-agonizing, I finally found it in me to let them rest, and to let the RoD game go. I don't know how else to describe it. I have, in me, an awful streak of possessiveness and collector-obsession, I GOTTA catch them all. It was truly a physically painful prospect to even think about losing my precious stable of RoD characters. The ironic thing was, because I couldn't let them go, even though I grew to hate the RoD game so intensely that I couldn't even be bothered to try out the new barbarian class - I had to spend hours every 3 months trying to log them all, to preserve my 'collection' of antiques, of collectibles, of rare lizardmen and rarer items.
I was losing hours of life, hours of sleep, to keeping a collection of bytes that I, and only I, chose to give meaning to. Tell me, who else would care that I had the largest collection of RoD lizardmen with coolass reptilian names, and the lizardman with 500+ glory, and other such esoteric things I took pride in?
My point? You can look at this new enhancement diversification in the same light.
Yes, it SUCKS to have your precious characters weakened. It's kinda like the imms saying, whoops, Seth is too easy, let us up him and make him a PITA to get to, and a PITA to kill.
I don't deny that eventually, someone who really gives a shit about this game will find that he or she has hit the limit of what the imms/devs can do, and say, fuck it, I'm not wasting my time any longer with your stupid game. It's the same way I took one look at Seth, and the 9+ hours and multiple level 50s it took to slowly nickle and dime him for the oh so precious seth sets and pops - and said, no way jose am I playing this moronic 'I need a seth set' game.
I'm not looking forward to seeing just how much Invictus Est has become Not-so-invincible-after-all Est. After all, tankers just ate a specific nerf to invul, a general nerf to defence and resist, and now they're gonna get another enhancement power nerf. Granted, I can still presently herd 3 spawns of Freaks, but I guess that's going to change even more, and I'm going to lose permahaste, perma-dull pain (which went a LONG way to mitigating the I5 nerf, lemme tell you), 6-slot health and stamina.
But well, I'm glad I got to 50 while I could still solo. :) Now whatever is done, Invictus is not gonna feel it much because he's effectively retired. Anything that reduces my ability to herd and my ability to PL will only mean I get a bit more tellspam peace. Obviously, I still find it mind-boggling how I am expected to diversify slots in things such as my passive resists and so on, but who cares, really? I never took much of them in the first place.
I am finding it rather ironic that in the light of this, Kheldians may actually turn out significantly more powerful after all. Because offhand, every time I try and slot a Kheldian, I can NEVER find enough slots to six-slot anything, I have to keep settling for 3-4 slots. Which, in this new enhancement world, may end up being teh uber after all.
The devs can rest assured that whatever the new 'max' is, the min-maxers will find it.
I actually like the concept of the numbers being made transparent - as that will ensure a fairer playing field all around. There are actually a mind-boggling number of people playing CoH who have never ever SEEN the CoH forums at all.
Once, I joined a fire team in Steel, and a level 50 asked my then level 48 where I got the Freedom Phalanx Accolade from - and whether I could help him to get it. I was so stunned I was floored. What? You mean, you want me to bring you to dunno-how-many exploration badge locations and help you kill dunno-how-many villains for such-and-such badge and so on? Can there really be such lazy pricks around? This brings 'PL MEH PLZ' to a new low. But then, I thought, maybe this level 50 guy is a NOOB. Maybe he really has no clue just how tedious accolades are to get...
So I sidestepped the whole 'help' issue, and told him that I could give him a website where he could download a complete badge list with instructions for getting it. And he was very grateful, he was like, cool, where? Offhand, I couldn't remember any of the more esoteric websites like Coldfront or RJCyberware, but I had Stalemate's Guide to Badges printed out in my hand, so I told him, ok, you can look up such and such [name of guide] in the forums.
The kicker? He asked...What's the address of the forums?
After I scrambled to pick my jaw up from seven stories below through roiling inferno, spraying extinguisher madly, I gave him the boards.cityofheroes.com addy.
Like wow. I hope he discovered the treasure of valuable info there before it degenerated into massive whining and flames and mass-moaning and commiseration.
So yea, numbers transparent are a good thing. I don't -really- like to plan slots out with CoH planner. Powers, certainly, slots math makes me puke.
As for fairness, and balance, let's not make me laugh. Stuff has never been so misbalanced. You know shit is wrong and way off base when you have a 4 tanker pvp match like I had today, and it was just a really boring fight to brawl each other's toggles off, and the biggest thing was, even after you got a toggle off, held a tanker, he could just break free and recover and begin the pain again...and even after a tanker's unstoppable DROPPED, the two of us were after his ass trying to drop him, and his teammate's taunt saved him for like 3-4 minutes until the match ended. He was running around with 10% hp, and he STILL didn't die.
Is enhancement diversification going to fix this issue? I doubt it. I go by the theory that you CANNOT make a game PvP without building it into the design from the ground up. The really successful competitive games are things like Starcraft and Guild Wars - and they were RIGOROUSLY tested by umpteen opponents, and they still had to undergo minor tweaks for optimum balance. GW, I'm sure, is undergoing more than minor tweaks in the name of balance, and that game allows for MUCH more flexibility in builds and the hope that you can come up with a counter-build to counter the current FOTM arena owning build.
There will be people who will master the builds as you currently have 'em, and create an arena-owning build. Fact of life. If you want to devote the time to it, you will achieve it.
There will be people who will master the builds as you currently have 'em, and create a new PvE FOTM AT and build. Fact of life again.
Fact of life for me is that I'm going to tweak my characters so that they play as well as they can. Suited to my playstyle. Whatever the new maximum cap is.
I'm finding it very ironic that by all these recent changes, they are shoehorning us even more into certain builds to be effective, but what the hey, they are all-knowing, aren't they? *snickers*
Nevermind, we've lived with delusional imms who couldn't give a shit before. Perhaps it is just me, but I kinda like that there are always a few constant changes to the game, it at least makes me feel like the game is not ignored and left to rot ala RoD with the only significant change being MORE SOCIALS. DOH! Perhaps that is dysfunctional, like a child who tolerates abusive parents because having the attention is better than parents who don't even acknowledge his existence. :)
Of course, the ideal would be that the devs -try- to act like responsible people and share the news in a fair way, Geko and Positron are pretty good at that, really. States, imo, has become just a little jaded. But imo, the devs are human too, and no one wanted to become a voodoo clay effigy for a hundred thousand CoH subscribers by being the redname to break the news - so poor CuppaJo got the job. :) Cos this way, at least SOME people wouldn't shoot the messenger, and the hate gets spread out. :P
For now, I'm waiting to see what it looks like on Test, and I'm just going to adapt my characters to whatever they make now. I just managed to get about 3-4 of my characters well-funded, influence oozing out the ass, and so far, I haven't fixated on any one of 'em. The dark def is kinda fun. The ill/rad is kinda fun. The warshade is also damn fun, if very hilariously squishy. We'll see if they remain fun in the issue to come.
And I STILL want to play a stalker. :P Backstabbackstabity. *twitches*
When yer tired of the game, when the game is no longer fun, when one obsesses that the devs/imms are ignorant asses who don't give a shit about your enjoyment, that they have an OBLIGATION to deliver fun/new areas/zones to you 24/7 (Translation and Reminder: Devs are human too)... Stop playing.
If you're not, then go ahead and play some more. *shrugs*
I'm not going to fuel the forums flaming by adding my voice. But I don't mind watching the firestorm from the sidelines to see how it all develops. :)
But I've stopped being affected by such changes. Does it matter if my characters are made more or less powerful? *blink* It's just text. It's just bytes. It's the same as if I ran the RoD Geandakin into the whirlpool DT on purpose or by accident. Once I would have been so deeply hurt that I might have commited seppuku because nooooooo, my precious equipment just went up in smoke... Nearer the end of my disillusionment time, I would have mourned the loss, but I wouldn't beat myself up over it.
Now, it's like, heh, I actually gave (sold for a brief moment's satisfaction and a good memory) my treasured renamed goroggles away, and let the umpteen seth sets and other valuable stuff (3 Kade subversions, anyone? umpteen merlin, underworld and the works) ROT and auto-delete. Not to mention, my 124 RoD characters and 50+ lvl 50 AVs. Do I miss them? Of course I do, from time to time. You cannot play a game so deeply without being deeply affected. Sometimes, I still think, hey, this would be a good area building technique, or get funky dreams about various characters and their names.
But after much suffering and soul-agonizing, I finally found it in me to let them rest, and to let the RoD game go. I don't know how else to describe it. I have, in me, an awful streak of possessiveness and collector-obsession, I GOTTA catch them all. It was truly a physically painful prospect to even think about losing my precious stable of RoD characters. The ironic thing was, because I couldn't let them go, even though I grew to hate the RoD game so intensely that I couldn't even be bothered to try out the new barbarian class - I had to spend hours every 3 months trying to log them all, to preserve my 'collection' of antiques, of collectibles, of rare lizardmen and rarer items.
I was losing hours of life, hours of sleep, to keeping a collection of bytes that I, and only I, chose to give meaning to. Tell me, who else would care that I had the largest collection of RoD lizardmen with coolass reptilian names, and the lizardman with 500+ glory, and other such esoteric things I took pride in?
My point? You can look at this new enhancement diversification in the same light.
Yes, it SUCKS to have your precious characters weakened. It's kinda like the imms saying, whoops, Seth is too easy, let us up him and make him a PITA to get to, and a PITA to kill.
I don't deny that eventually, someone who really gives a shit about this game will find that he or she has hit the limit of what the imms/devs can do, and say, fuck it, I'm not wasting my time any longer with your stupid game. It's the same way I took one look at Seth, and the 9+ hours and multiple level 50s it took to slowly nickle and dime him for the oh so precious seth sets and pops - and said, no way jose am I playing this moronic 'I need a seth set' game.
I'm not looking forward to seeing just how much Invictus Est has become Not-so-invincible-after-all Est. After all, tankers just ate a specific nerf to invul, a general nerf to defence and resist, and now they're gonna get another enhancement power nerf. Granted, I can still presently herd 3 spawns of Freaks, but I guess that's going to change even more, and I'm going to lose permahaste, perma-dull pain (which went a LONG way to mitigating the I5 nerf, lemme tell you), 6-slot health and stamina.
But well, I'm glad I got to 50 while I could still solo. :) Now whatever is done, Invictus is not gonna feel it much because he's effectively retired. Anything that reduces my ability to herd and my ability to PL will only mean I get a bit more tellspam peace. Obviously, I still find it mind-boggling how I am expected to diversify slots in things such as my passive resists and so on, but who cares, really? I never took much of them in the first place.
I am finding it rather ironic that in the light of this, Kheldians may actually turn out significantly more powerful after all. Because offhand, every time I try and slot a Kheldian, I can NEVER find enough slots to six-slot anything, I have to keep settling for 3-4 slots. Which, in this new enhancement world, may end up being teh uber after all.
The devs can rest assured that whatever the new 'max' is, the min-maxers will find it.
I actually like the concept of the numbers being made transparent - as that will ensure a fairer playing field all around. There are actually a mind-boggling number of people playing CoH who have never ever SEEN the CoH forums at all.
Once, I joined a fire team in Steel, and a level 50 asked my then level 48 where I got the Freedom Phalanx Accolade from - and whether I could help him to get it. I was so stunned I was floored. What? You mean, you want me to bring you to dunno-how-many exploration badge locations and help you kill dunno-how-many villains for such-and-such badge and so on? Can there really be such lazy pricks around? This brings 'PL MEH PLZ' to a new low. But then, I thought, maybe this level 50 guy is a NOOB. Maybe he really has no clue just how tedious accolades are to get...
So I sidestepped the whole 'help' issue, and told him that I could give him a website where he could download a complete badge list with instructions for getting it. And he was very grateful, he was like, cool, where? Offhand, I couldn't remember any of the more esoteric websites like Coldfront or RJCyberware, but I had Stalemate's Guide to Badges printed out in my hand, so I told him, ok, you can look up such and such [name of guide] in the forums.
The kicker? He asked...What's the address of the forums?
After I scrambled to pick my jaw up from seven stories below through roiling inferno, spraying extinguisher madly, I gave him the boards.cityofheroes.com addy.
Like wow. I hope he discovered the treasure of valuable info there before it degenerated into massive whining and flames and mass-moaning and commiseration.
So yea, numbers transparent are a good thing. I don't -really- like to plan slots out with CoH planner. Powers, certainly, slots math makes me puke.
As for fairness, and balance, let's not make me laugh. Stuff has never been so misbalanced. You know shit is wrong and way off base when you have a 4 tanker pvp match like I had today, and it was just a really boring fight to brawl each other's toggles off, and the biggest thing was, even after you got a toggle off, held a tanker, he could just break free and recover and begin the pain again...and even after a tanker's unstoppable DROPPED, the two of us were after his ass trying to drop him, and his teammate's taunt saved him for like 3-4 minutes until the match ended. He was running around with 10% hp, and he STILL didn't die.
Is enhancement diversification going to fix this issue? I doubt it. I go by the theory that you CANNOT make a game PvP without building it into the design from the ground up. The really successful competitive games are things like Starcraft and Guild Wars - and they were RIGOROUSLY tested by umpteen opponents, and they still had to undergo minor tweaks for optimum balance. GW, I'm sure, is undergoing more than minor tweaks in the name of balance, and that game allows for MUCH more flexibility in builds and the hope that you can come up with a counter-build to counter the current FOTM arena owning build.
There will be people who will master the builds as you currently have 'em, and create an arena-owning build. Fact of life. If you want to devote the time to it, you will achieve it.
There will be people who will master the builds as you currently have 'em, and create a new PvE FOTM AT and build. Fact of life again.
Fact of life for me is that I'm going to tweak my characters so that they play as well as they can. Suited to my playstyle. Whatever the new maximum cap is.
I'm finding it very ironic that by all these recent changes, they are shoehorning us even more into certain builds to be effective, but what the hey, they are all-knowing, aren't they? *snickers*
Nevermind, we've lived with delusional imms who couldn't give a shit before. Perhaps it is just me, but I kinda like that there are always a few constant changes to the game, it at least makes me feel like the game is not ignored and left to rot ala RoD with the only significant change being MORE SOCIALS. DOH! Perhaps that is dysfunctional, like a child who tolerates abusive parents because having the attention is better than parents who don't even acknowledge his existence. :)
Of course, the ideal would be that the devs -try- to act like responsible people and share the news in a fair way, Geko and Positron are pretty good at that, really. States, imo, has become just a little jaded. But imo, the devs are human too, and no one wanted to become a voodoo clay effigy for a hundred thousand CoH subscribers by being the redname to break the news - so poor CuppaJo got the job. :) Cos this way, at least SOME people wouldn't shoot the messenger, and the hate gets spread out. :P
For now, I'm waiting to see what it looks like on Test, and I'm just going to adapt my characters to whatever they make now. I just managed to get about 3-4 of my characters well-funded, influence oozing out the ass, and so far, I haven't fixated on any one of 'em. The dark def is kinda fun. The ill/rad is kinda fun. The warshade is also damn fun, if very hilariously squishy. We'll see if they remain fun in the issue to come.
And I STILL want to play a stalker. :P Backstabbackstabity. *twitches*
When yer tired of the game, when the game is no longer fun, when one obsesses that the devs/imms are ignorant asses who don't give a shit about your enjoyment, that they have an OBLIGATION to deliver fun/new areas/zones to you 24/7 (Translation and Reminder: Devs are human too)... Stop playing.
If you're not, then go ahead and play some more. *shrugs*
I'm not going to fuel the forums flaming by adding my voice. But I don't mind watching the firestorm from the sidelines to see how it all develops. :)
Friday, October 07, 2005
Multiple Woots
Boy, CoH has been a string of Wootz0rs for me these few days...
Last time I posted here, I was 49 and 7 bars to go, I had my first Hami Raid pass completely uneventfully, thanks to a very kind SGmate who took pity on a poor applicant and walked and talked me through the whole ordeal.
I was estimating a conservative 1 bar a day, which would mean I would hit 50 in a week. If I pushed it, I thought I would be able to get 2 bars a day, and hit 50 by about Sat or Sun, just before Tanker Night/Day on Test.
Well, I got an invite into one of -those- groups. Nope, not a farm or PL group, just one of those incredible synergy groups. We had a fire/kin who was really pushing the dial past 10, not just to 11, but to about 13 or 14 with his speed boosts and fulcrum shifts, not to mention his mad monkeys. We had an ill/rad, damn common class on Freedom, I dunno why - who was giving us AM luvin' and pets. We had a DM scrapper, and you know what kind of damage they can wreck. But boy, the scrapper was clearing up dregs and doing only significant damage to AVs, because we had two /fire tanks. Me and a fire tank. You have never seen spawns drop -fast- until you see two /fire tanks run in, combust, fire sword circle and boosted by sb and fulcrum.
I can about wreck them by my lonesome to about 3/4 hp, minions and lts. Ditto the other /fire, I'm sure. Combine us together and it was brutal burnination without Burn. :P
We cleaned up the level 50 scrapper's Praetorian AV missions, 6-7 in like 2 hours, I think. And I mean CLEAN, all spawns wiped dry. AV pwned.
Was getting almost one bar per mish, almost, so yea, by the end of it, I was 1 bar to 50, and it was barely getting on 3 hours.
Then people got tired and had to go, and I also decided to go take a break, get some food and such. After that, I came back to solo my way to 50.
Place of choice? Firebase Zulu. I'm a freak, I really like the geysers. And since I have fly, if I miss, it's no biggy. And I have Hammond on cell phone, so I spent my time clearing out Rularuu infestation and rescuing lost patrols. 4 missions later, I hit my goal.
WOOTZ0RS!
Some day I will need to respec to fix my slots, but Invictus is still workable for now, even if he has a few wasted into Scorch and such.
I couldn't wait to roll up a new character. A KHELDIAN. *evil cackle*
Having spent the last few days dreaming up spare names, I got Autumn Tempest going really quickly, did a random costume that I could live with the look, switched the costume colors to dark blue and purple, and amusingly ended up looking like the short, huge, male version of Shadowstar, the galaxy warshade contact. I must make another warshade with a Shadow(something) name. That's if I can find any that aren't already taken.
I'm confident I screwed up his slotting from the beginning by choosing the first two powers and slotting them. Who cares. I can delete him and begin again, I just wanted to become a squid. I ended up practically leeching off a team (hey, they invited me) by being lowest around and just staying reaaaaally far back and shooting off my two single-target blasts. (This is how a tank overreacts to being squishy.)
It was hilarious. There was another pb on the team, and both of us were getting antsy waiting for the others who were taking their sweet time, so we ran into the mission to own greens and blues. Then we ran into a quantum, and you could see the two of us just REVERSE and run around the corner. The PB was more tanky, I was the wuss. But even then, he did a screeching u-turn too.
Surprisingly at that level, or maybe it was human-form, not sure, I must read up more on kheldians now, the quantum didn't exactly do thaaat much damage. About 14/4 hp and stunned me, but nothing as frightening as some kheldians I've seen get whacked. So together the two of us owned him.
After much ordeal, I hit level 6, and I CHOOSE YOU, DARK NOVA! *giggles insanely* Ok, I think I just like being a shapeshifter. I was soooo tickled by Ragnarl turning into the granite golem. And I was soooo thrilled to turn into Dark Kosh.
Of course, I'm eventually going to have to get binds down to switch trays. It was really inconvenient to move stuff around, but I must say, squid form is a BLAST. It really is like a mobile cannon turret (breakable, of course.) And just putzing around with it, I can really see that skill can do so much if you know how to string out the AI.
Even totally unskilled at this, I had a few lucky breaks where I pounded the AoE blast on them, then slid down to the ground and drew out trolls in a string, and whacked them ALL with the cone blast. That was soooo pretty. And I like flicking out stuff from my tail. :P I'm twisted, yes.
WOOTZ0RS!
I got my second def up. I wanted to try a stormie. I killed my arrow def on Freedom, he wasn't very cool, I can make another elsewhere. I have a vague character background and cool name for him (Stormscar) and I'm half thinking of RPing him somewhat. Or at least putting him up on Crey Industries. Still fun, anyhow. I'm so happy to be free of the grind and back to altholic roots.
WOOTZ0RS!
Oh, and besides having a lot of fun with the folks in the SG I'm apping to, we also got the news of the CoH/CoV pricing scheme.
I must say that I'm a little surprised that everyone is reacting with such surprise. I was guessing at the intention ever since that Statesman post about people might be pleasantly surprised. They are probably counting on one subscription fee, and 2 games to make sure EVERYONE buys their two games eventually. Think about it, the subscription fee is per customer, and you want to make sure they are retained...
If you raise fee prices, you will turn off the casuals and only retain the hardcore, who as we all know, are audiences who are damn hard to please. Long term, you might lose a lot of subscribers once they get tired of the hardcore play and cannot justify the expense.
You keep prices the same, people don't blink because this is already established market value for an MMORPG. They buy one of your games, be it CoH or CoV. They play it. They go, wow, this is fun. (CoH and CoV, I am sure, have the same attractive allure because of the system. CoV is prolly even more of a glue, because it's an improved CoH.) Then they go, hrm, wouldn't it be fun to try the other side and get their unique coolstuff? Expense? Cost of the boxed game. Right on, justifiable. And people will buy both games and keep subscribing because now they have 12 x dunno how many server slots to make both villains and hero alts.
Anyhow, despite it being very predictable, it is still VERY pleasant news. So...
WOOTZ0RS!
And can I say I am very happy about the news of the digital comic... That means I can actually read the damn comic for once. (Yay, international customers. We exist too, y'know! Go NCsoft, now make some contests that are open to non-US residents...)
WOOTZ0RS!
Not to mention, now I have the time and opportunity to cut back on CoH gaming like a madman, and go do some writing and brainstorming in preparation for Nanowrimo. And clean up my house, paint minis and other such mundane stuff.
DOUBLE WOOTZ0RS!
Last time I posted here, I was 49 and 7 bars to go, I had my first Hami Raid pass completely uneventfully, thanks to a very kind SGmate who took pity on a poor applicant and walked and talked me through the whole ordeal.
I was estimating a conservative 1 bar a day, which would mean I would hit 50 in a week. If I pushed it, I thought I would be able to get 2 bars a day, and hit 50 by about Sat or Sun, just before Tanker Night/Day on Test.
Well, I got an invite into one of -those- groups. Nope, not a farm or PL group, just one of those incredible synergy groups. We had a fire/kin who was really pushing the dial past 10, not just to 11, but to about 13 or 14 with his speed boosts and fulcrum shifts, not to mention his mad monkeys. We had an ill/rad, damn common class on Freedom, I dunno why - who was giving us AM luvin' and pets. We had a DM scrapper, and you know what kind of damage they can wreck. But boy, the scrapper was clearing up dregs and doing only significant damage to AVs, because we had two /fire tanks. Me and a fire tank. You have never seen spawns drop -fast- until you see two /fire tanks run in, combust, fire sword circle and boosted by sb and fulcrum.
I can about wreck them by my lonesome to about 3/4 hp, minions and lts. Ditto the other /fire, I'm sure. Combine us together and it was brutal burnination without Burn. :P
We cleaned up the level 50 scrapper's Praetorian AV missions, 6-7 in like 2 hours, I think. And I mean CLEAN, all spawns wiped dry. AV pwned.
Was getting almost one bar per mish, almost, so yea, by the end of it, I was 1 bar to 50, and it was barely getting on 3 hours.
Then people got tired and had to go, and I also decided to go take a break, get some food and such. After that, I came back to solo my way to 50.
Place of choice? Firebase Zulu. I'm a freak, I really like the geysers. And since I have fly, if I miss, it's no biggy. And I have Hammond on cell phone, so I spent my time clearing out Rularuu infestation and rescuing lost patrols. 4 missions later, I hit my goal.
Some day I will need to respec to fix my slots, but Invictus is still workable for now, even if he has a few wasted into Scorch and such.
I couldn't wait to roll up a new character. A KHELDIAN. *evil cackle*
Having spent the last few days dreaming up spare names, I got Autumn Tempest going really quickly, did a random costume that I could live with the look, switched the costume colors to dark blue and purple, and amusingly ended up looking like the short, huge, male version of Shadowstar, the galaxy warshade contact. I must make another warshade with a Shadow(something) name. That's if I can find any that aren't already taken.
I'm confident I screwed up his slotting from the beginning by choosing the first two powers and slotting them. Who cares. I can delete him and begin again, I just wanted to become a squid. I ended up practically leeching off a team (hey, they invited me) by being lowest around and just staying reaaaaally far back and shooting off my two single-target blasts. (This is how a tank overreacts to being squishy.)
It was hilarious. There was another pb on the team, and both of us were getting antsy waiting for the others who were taking their sweet time, so we ran into the mission to own greens and blues. Then we ran into a quantum, and you could see the two of us just REVERSE and run around the corner. The PB was more tanky, I was the wuss. But even then, he did a screeching u-turn too.
Surprisingly at that level, or maybe it was human-form, not sure, I must read up more on kheldians now, the quantum didn't exactly do thaaat much damage. About 14/4 hp and stunned me, but nothing as frightening as some kheldians I've seen get whacked. So together the two of us owned him.
After much ordeal, I hit level 6, and I CHOOSE YOU, DARK NOVA! *giggles insanely* Ok, I think I just like being a shapeshifter. I was soooo tickled by Ragnarl turning into the granite golem. And I was soooo thrilled to turn into Dark Kosh.
Of course, I'm eventually going to have to get binds down to switch trays. It was really inconvenient to move stuff around, but I must say, squid form is a BLAST. It really is like a mobile cannon turret (breakable, of course.) And just putzing around with it, I can really see that skill can do so much if you know how to string out the AI.
Even totally unskilled at this, I had a few lucky breaks where I pounded the AoE blast on them, then slid down to the ground and drew out trolls in a string, and whacked them ALL with the cone blast. That was soooo pretty. And I like flicking out stuff from my tail. :P I'm twisted, yes.
I got my second def up. I wanted to try a stormie. I killed my arrow def on Freedom, he wasn't very cool, I can make another elsewhere. I have a vague character background and cool name for him (Stormscar) and I'm half thinking of RPing him somewhat. Or at least putting him up on Crey Industries. Still fun, anyhow. I'm so happy to be free of the grind and back to altholic roots.
Oh, and besides having a lot of fun with the folks in the SG I'm apping to, we also got the news of the CoH/CoV pricing scheme.
I must say that I'm a little surprised that everyone is reacting with such surprise. I was guessing at the intention ever since that Statesman post about people might be pleasantly surprised. They are probably counting on one subscription fee, and 2 games to make sure EVERYONE buys their two games eventually. Think about it, the subscription fee is per customer, and you want to make sure they are retained...
If you raise fee prices, you will turn off the casuals and only retain the hardcore, who as we all know, are audiences who are damn hard to please. Long term, you might lose a lot of subscribers once they get tired of the hardcore play and cannot justify the expense.
You keep prices the same, people don't blink because this is already established market value for an MMORPG. They buy one of your games, be it CoH or CoV. They play it. They go, wow, this is fun. (CoH and CoV, I am sure, have the same attractive allure because of the system. CoV is prolly even more of a glue, because it's an improved CoH.) Then they go, hrm, wouldn't it be fun to try the other side and get their unique coolstuff? Expense? Cost of the boxed game. Right on, justifiable. And people will buy both games and keep subscribing because now they have 12 x dunno how many server slots to make both villains and hero alts.
Anyhow, despite it being very predictable, it is still VERY pleasant news. So...
And can I say I am very happy about the news of the digital comic... That means I can actually read the damn comic for once. (Yay, international customers. We exist too, y'know! Go NCsoft, now make some contests that are open to non-US residents...)
Not to mention, now I have the time and opportunity to cut back on CoH gaming like a madman, and go do some writing and brainstorming in preparation for Nanowrimo. And clean up my house, paint minis and other such mundane stuff.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
One Size Don't Fit All
Call me crazy, but Eden didn't really impress me. It was something about the boatload of DE that was ultimately dangerous and fatal to me in such quantity that did it. Granted, the map is unique and very cool with all the crazy holes, but it seems rather tedious as a 'quest'...Quarry x 2, one wall, bridge to farm ambrosias, nother wall, release chambers, big ass one-shotting titan. Let's not forget having to force-herd the whole damn titan's room. *sighs*
On the other hand, I attended my first hami raid today. I'm trying to wiggle my way into a SG as usual, and since I'm on leave, I took advantage of the morning to get to know all the SG people. We did some missions, had some PvP (I got owned in the level 37 one, I lost my hold and big attacks to exemp - but did pretty ok in the 50 one.) And a kind fellow didn't mind holding my hand and explaining to me in excruciating detail what was happening at a hami raid. So that was pretty fun.
I can see how a noob without a SG or a mentor to show them the ropes can really not appreciate Hami, but to have someone there, telling me what to do and what not to do, it turned out quite fun. And of course, as a level 48, I draw absolutely zero aggro once my invinc aura is turned off.
Those swarms are really something though. -fly, -tp, -recharge...and last forever. I hear these suckers exist on the ceilings of the Eden trial too. *shudders*
And the last thing that I really find fun. The Shadow Shard. I must be NUTS, right? I dunno. It's a damn nice place to solo in. The missions are unending, you don't have to deal with millions of AVs, and as you find each contact and crack it, you unlock the Kora fruit missions. Which, I must say, I am a guilty ADDICT of.
Solo, it's a small cave, the Rularuu come in groups of 3, which is totally survivable and killable, and you get funky HUGE inspirations as a reward...AND on top of that, the mission ends fast and you get your 48k xp bonus. *swoons* What's not to like? And apparently you can get the mission again and again and again. It's not farming if it's a different random cave everytime. :P It's just like playing Angband.
I can't wait for when I can call Huxley. At least, I hope I can call her. But it's a nifty place. Can't understand why people no like it.
On the other hand, I attended my first hami raid today. I'm trying to wiggle my way into a SG as usual, and since I'm on leave, I took advantage of the morning to get to know all the SG people. We did some missions, had some PvP (I got owned in the level 37 one, I lost my hold and big attacks to exemp - but did pretty ok in the 50 one.) And a kind fellow didn't mind holding my hand and explaining to me in excruciating detail what was happening at a hami raid. So that was pretty fun.
I can see how a noob without a SG or a mentor to show them the ropes can really not appreciate Hami, but to have someone there, telling me what to do and what not to do, it turned out quite fun. And of course, as a level 48, I draw absolutely zero aggro once my invinc aura is turned off.
Those swarms are really something though. -fly, -tp, -recharge...and last forever. I hear these suckers exist on the ceilings of the Eden trial too. *shudders*
And the last thing that I really find fun. The Shadow Shard. I must be NUTS, right? I dunno. It's a damn nice place to solo in. The missions are unending, you don't have to deal with millions of AVs, and as you find each contact and crack it, you unlock the Kora fruit missions. Which, I must say, I am a guilty ADDICT of.
Solo, it's a small cave, the Rularuu come in groups of 3, which is totally survivable and killable, and you get funky HUGE inspirations as a reward...AND on top of that, the mission ends fast and you get your 48k xp bonus. *swoons* What's not to like? And apparently you can get the mission again and again and again. It's not farming if it's a different random cave everytime. :P It's just like playing Angband.
I can't wait for when I can call Huxley. At least, I hope I can call her. But it's a nifty place. Can't understand why people no like it.
Sunday, October 02, 2005
Putzing
Rofl.
Invictus is now level 48. And it was getting kinda tiring to keep pushing at such a high quality-sort of speed. I was all-itchy and scratching to go play a lowbie alt. So now I'm test-running some defenders, and decided to try Papa Umbra, my dark/dark darkity. :)
I started putting together a pretty random team. I picked up this cute little level 1 kin/psy def, because he was hovering around me, killing stuff in galaxy city. Then from there, I got carried away and started sending myriad tells to who? Level 5s, all of whom seemed to be defs and controllers, who didn't have a team already.
So we ended up with this rad, dark, ff, sonic mix and so on. I was hoping that they would be impressed with the power of multiple defenders, but apparently, Freedom's residents are not quite used to it - or just not tolerant of chaos or pushing things. :P
The level 1 dropped off after a while, so I started recruiting 4-6s... We picked up a pb who was damn happy at the def buffed team, though he was pretty gosh-darned full of himself, level 50 and all, y'know. :) But I thought he was funny.
Our grav/rad controller Ka'on was, alas, a little uptight. :) He kept going on and on about his anchor and taking it as a personal affront that it was getting shot to pieces. Of course it didn't help that he was stupid enough (ok, kinder word, inexperienced) to put the anchor as the "first" mob to target. So the pb shot his anchor to hell. The scrapper tore his anchor to bits. And *blush* the blind tank turned dark def also ripped his anchor apart multiple times.
I'm betting there's going to be this bitchy rant on the defender forums soon, about the pathetic dark defender who can't even be bothered to respect a rad def's anchor and keeps shooting it to bits. :P
I did feel bad, and I kept apologizing, but he kept getting soooo uptight about it. It was really funny. So I have hair-trigger reflexes, and when you only have one blast, you kinda stamp on it first, THEN just hit 'next target'. So how come my next target was always his damn anchor? :P
I dunno. I'm an anchorman too, now, y'know. And when I pick a darknest night anchor, I hit 'next target' MULTIPLE times, and I cycle through to nearly the last damn person at the back. And I tend to dump it on a minion even.
Strangely enough, my dark anchor lasts (as judged by my toggle still running), even though you can't fragging tell it apart from all the dark patches on a tar patch'ed spawn's feets anyhow.
Moral of the story? It takes two to make a quarrel. I understand the anchor thing. But really, sometimes (ok, a LOT of times) in the heat of battle, people tend not to even think and just react, so it also behooves a defender to try and sneakily put his anchor on the last person the crazy drooling pickup hordes will think to target. It's like a fun mini-game. And don't take it like you just got kicked in the 'nads if your precious anchor falls off before the last mob drops. :/
I had like this stream of loose people quitting through our missions, I think they were having a heart attack from the chaos. :P I was tar patching, then darknest nighting as an opener, and the pb was in nova form letting loose with his knockback, the emp was running around aura'ing, and so on. I guess they might have prefered a more 'sedate' single-pull.
S' too bad we never got a stormie, that might have been even more hilarious, if not quite safe. I had to gently 'oi, not off the tar patch please' a kin controller who was playing with repel. It actually looked quite interesting, the mobs literally yo-yo'ed off him and into the wall. Unfortunately he chose to do it on my neatly double-debuffed mobs and thus we lost both debuffs. :P
But did I mind? Not really. These are the low-level stages. People are still experimenting and feeling out their powers. Chaos is inherent. Especially in a pickup team.
And we had a noobie on board. Another def, kin/psy, who was, as usual, being a blaster and consistently opened the attack if I didn't beat him first. :) We had to teach him to exit with the blue button, where hollows was, the works. But well, part of the fun of the game.
I must say though...Mission Accomplished.
From being level 3, I hit level 7 or 8 in about two hours, I think. I doubt the Uptights who need their teams just right or else they'll solo...can do the same. :P
And more importantly, I got relaxed. :) It was a wild and crazy blast. I missed this sort of easy-going fun, with stuff shooting everywhere and xp out the wazoo and people leveling left and right with a small mission - rather than having to urgh, herd the whole map for a pittance. :P
Invictus is now level 48. And it was getting kinda tiring to keep pushing at such a high quality-sort of speed. I was all-itchy and scratching to go play a lowbie alt. So now I'm test-running some defenders, and decided to try Papa Umbra, my dark/dark darkity. :)
I started putting together a pretty random team. I picked up this cute little level 1 kin/psy def, because he was hovering around me, killing stuff in galaxy city. Then from there, I got carried away and started sending myriad tells to who? Level 5s, all of whom seemed to be defs and controllers, who didn't have a team already.
So we ended up with this rad, dark, ff, sonic mix and so on. I was hoping that they would be impressed with the power of multiple defenders, but apparently, Freedom's residents are not quite used to it - or just not tolerant of chaos or pushing things. :P
The level 1 dropped off after a while, so I started recruiting 4-6s... We picked up a pb who was damn happy at the def buffed team, though he was pretty gosh-darned full of himself, level 50 and all, y'know. :) But I thought he was funny.
Our grav/rad controller Ka'on was, alas, a little uptight. :) He kept going on and on about his anchor and taking it as a personal affront that it was getting shot to pieces. Of course it didn't help that he was stupid enough (ok, kinder word, inexperienced) to put the anchor as the "first" mob to target. So the pb shot his anchor to hell. The scrapper tore his anchor to bits. And *blush* the blind tank turned dark def also ripped his anchor apart multiple times.
I'm betting there's going to be this bitchy rant on the defender forums soon, about the pathetic dark defender who can't even be bothered to respect a rad def's anchor and keeps shooting it to bits. :P
I did feel bad, and I kept apologizing, but he kept getting soooo uptight about it. It was really funny. So I have hair-trigger reflexes, and when you only have one blast, you kinda stamp on it first, THEN just hit 'next target'. So how come my next target was always his damn anchor? :P
I dunno. I'm an anchorman too, now, y'know. And when I pick a darknest night anchor, I hit 'next target' MULTIPLE times, and I cycle through to nearly the last damn person at the back. And I tend to dump it on a minion even.
Strangely enough, my dark anchor lasts (as judged by my toggle still running), even though you can't fragging tell it apart from all the dark patches on a tar patch'ed spawn's feets anyhow.
Moral of the story? It takes two to make a quarrel. I understand the anchor thing. But really, sometimes (ok, a LOT of times) in the heat of battle, people tend not to even think and just react, so it also behooves a defender to try and sneakily put his anchor on the last person the crazy drooling pickup hordes will think to target. It's like a fun mini-game. And don't take it like you just got kicked in the 'nads if your precious anchor falls off before the last mob drops. :/
I had like this stream of loose people quitting through our missions, I think they were having a heart attack from the chaos. :P I was tar patching, then darknest nighting as an opener, and the pb was in nova form letting loose with his knockback, the emp was running around aura'ing, and so on. I guess they might have prefered a more 'sedate' single-pull.
S' too bad we never got a stormie, that might have been even more hilarious, if not quite safe. I had to gently 'oi, not off the tar patch please' a kin controller who was playing with repel. It actually looked quite interesting, the mobs literally yo-yo'ed off him and into the wall. Unfortunately he chose to do it on my neatly double-debuffed mobs and thus we lost both debuffs. :P
But did I mind? Not really. These are the low-level stages. People are still experimenting and feeling out their powers. Chaos is inherent. Especially in a pickup team.
And we had a noobie on board. Another def, kin/psy, who was, as usual, being a blaster and consistently opened the attack if I didn't beat him first. :) We had to teach him to exit with the blue button, where hollows was, the works. But well, part of the fun of the game.
I must say though...Mission Accomplished.
From being level 3, I hit level 7 or 8 in about two hours, I think. I doubt the Uptights who need their teams just right or else they'll solo...can do the same. :P
And more importantly, I got relaxed. :) It was a wild and crazy blast. I missed this sort of easy-going fun, with stuff shooting everywhere and xp out the wazoo and people leveling left and right with a small mission - rather than having to urgh, herd the whole map for a pittance. :P
Hrm. Eden.
Ok, I just got myself invited into an Eden Trial, and while it went pretty smoothly on the whole, and we got our badge, all I can say was...it wasn't really fun.
How come? Because the size of the thing was so big, the only solution that most teams would want, is to herd. Luckily for this team, they had a fire tank along. Because these days, invul does not cut it in herding. DE, at any rate. DE, with a boatload of quartz eminators. = Pwn'ed Invul.
I was only semi-functional herder at best, relying heavily on unstoppable, and my timing of it isn't perfect yet, I kept misjudging how long before the crash and getting doubly pwned as a result.
Follow that with a Crystal Titan, and a not-very-competent timer, and I kept wiping, along with the SR scrapper. I'm still trying to decide whether I missed eating an ambrosia...or whether the Crystal Titan's footstomp thingy just one-shotted me through my pathetic def and resist in the first place. Three times I got stepped on and died. The fire tanker waltzed right through it.
Oh, and when we were tanking Quarry. His footstomp hit me for 300ish, he hit the fire tanker for 100, and the scrapper for like 600.
I dunno. Granted, my TI isn't quite superbuff'ed, but will 3 slotting it more get me on par with that fire's resists? Who knows.
I suppose I have to accept the fact that fire runs around with superior resists most of the time, and that the only time invul will outdo fire is for a 3 min unstoppable period, with all the drawbacks after that.
But I'm still not very cool about this herding deal. But if we don't herd, would any team really want to do a group by group thing through Eden Trial? Seriously? I don't know. The only thing that might do is, is to add a damage resist debuff eminator. :P That will also then dissuade fire and stone from herding.
Oh well. Been there, done that. Not terribly impressed with Eden Trial. I prefered Hess, more story to it. One day I must see if the Croatoa TF is as good.
How come? Because the size of the thing was so big, the only solution that most teams would want, is to herd. Luckily for this team, they had a fire tank along. Because these days, invul does not cut it in herding. DE, at any rate. DE, with a boatload of quartz eminators. = Pwn'ed Invul.
I was only semi-functional herder at best, relying heavily on unstoppable, and my timing of it isn't perfect yet, I kept misjudging how long before the crash and getting doubly pwned as a result.
Follow that with a Crystal Titan, and a not-very-competent timer, and I kept wiping, along with the SR scrapper. I'm still trying to decide whether I missed eating an ambrosia...or whether the Crystal Titan's footstomp thingy just one-shotted me through my pathetic def and resist in the first place. Three times I got stepped on and died. The fire tanker waltzed right through it.
Oh, and when we were tanking Quarry. His footstomp hit me for 300ish, he hit the fire tanker for 100, and the scrapper for like 600.
I dunno. Granted, my TI isn't quite superbuff'ed, but will 3 slotting it more get me on par with that fire's resists? Who knows.
I suppose I have to accept the fact that fire runs around with superior resists most of the time, and that the only time invul will outdo fire is for a 3 min unstoppable period, with all the drawbacks after that.
But I'm still not very cool about this herding deal. But if we don't herd, would any team really want to do a group by group thing through Eden Trial? Seriously? I don't know. The only thing that might do is, is to add a damage resist debuff eminator. :P That will also then dissuade fire and stone from herding.
Oh well. Been there, done that. Not terribly impressed with Eden Trial. I prefered Hess, more story to it. One day I must see if the Croatoa TF is as good.