Frankly, thats something that I pretty much think is a given. Thats one of the great strengths of CoX. No class is required for anything. You do require a certain mix of damage and damage mitigation (debuffs, buffs, controls, aggro management, etc), but there are multiple ways to get there.
One of the main reasons that this is possible in CoH, though, is that the game is just incredibly easy.
This. And the more you ramp up it's difficulty (higher level missions, doing them with fewer people, etc.), the more 'traditional' group composition seems to be a requirement.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I haven't been following the news on this game, and official forums for any game are anathema to me. People bitching about the smallest things, then people bitching about the bitching people in an eternal circle jerk of stupid bitching. Anyway, a question for someone who has the patience to plumb those depths.
Will Champions have a Side kick system?
It seems like it would being a superhero MMO, but the addition of actual stat boosting loot makes me wonder if it would be workable. SKing works in CoX because the loot that there is (enh) doesn't boost your abilities that much relative to other MMOs. I suppose it depends on how much of a boost the loot gives.
I haven't been following the news on this game, and official forums for any game are anathema to me. People bitching about the smallest things, then people bitching about the bitching people in an eternal circle jerk of stupid bitching. Anyway, a question for someone who has the patience to plumb those depths.
Will Champions have a Side kick system?
It seems like it would being a superhero MMO, but the addition of actual stat boosting loot makes me wonder if it would be workable. SKing works in CoX because the loot that there is (enh) doesn't boost your abilities that much relative to other MMOs. I suppose it depends on how much of a boost the loot gives.
Well the new popular thing to whine about is how the graphics make it look a cartoon. Does no one remember the good super hero cartoons of the 90 anymore? I guess you just need the color brown and grey to impress people now a days.
That said I think it looks awesome , hell its one of the things that makes it look different.
Frankly, thats something that I pretty much think is a given. Thats one of the great strengths of CoX. No class is required for anything. You do require a certain mix of damage and damage mitigation (debuffs, buffs, controls, aggro management, etc), but there are multiple ways to get there.
One of the main reasons that this is possible in CoH, though, is that the game is just incredibly easy.
This. And the more you ramp up it's difficulty (higher level missions, doing them with fewer people, etc.), the more 'traditional' group composition seems to be a requirement.
I don't really agree with that. Most of those definitions of the traditional group include a tank, and you can do almost every encounter in CoH without one if you have enough buffs or debuffs going around, for example. The same can be said for any other AT. Controllers can substitute for defenders, tanks for controllers, scrappers for tanks, etc. And, with enough Defenders of certain powersets, you don't need anyone else :P
Tanks and Controllers substitute for noone because they're useless at higher levels thanks to debuffs scaling up to a ridiculous degree. If they put in a single boss that you both couldn't debuff (Thorn Tree pre vine-clear) and couldn't simply avoid you'd see non-regular groups get stomped hard. A couple of years back we were doing the villain respec mission with a pure AoE-focused Corruptor group and we lacked the single target DPS to kill the vines fast enough before they respawned, which meant the tree wasn't debuffable and was one-shotting everyone that came into line of sight.
tl;dr: it works in CoX because the encounters are trivial
Glal on
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RingoHe/Hima distinct lack of substanceRegistered Userregular
edited March 2008
So you don't need a perfectly balanced min-max group to play CoX because there are no encounters that present the need for such a group. Encounters are, for the most part, designed to be beaten with any team composition imaginable. Hooray game balance.
The Holy Trinity complaint is directly linked to actually having unique classes in general. Either the encounter will need certain classes (ie, you'll actually need to be all that you can be) and group composition becomes an issue, or they can be done with everyone and they're consequently dumbed down to tasks every class can do (because shit, we can't require Mind Control if only Priests have that!).
So, pick- boring encounters, or class-requiring encounters. Or gimmick encounters where you're not using your class at all (pulling levers and shit I guess), but I'm not sure if anyone really wants those in any great amount. Unless you really expect the designers to make every encounter have multiple "solutions" so every single class has something to do and you simply need to complete the (party size)*number of tasks to win, but that sounds both time consuming and contrived.
Glal brings up good points. That's pretty much how I felt about CoX. I really like having a structure to my groups; a tank, a healer, a dps, a CC and an extra. I always thought that was one of CoX's flaws, was that nothing was challenging, you could just toss more guys in to a group, over buff your self to hell and back, and then steam roll right through most encounters.
Tanks and Controllers substitute for noone because they're useless at higher levels thanks to debuffs scaling up to a ridiculous degree. If they put in a single boss that you both couldn't debuff (Thorn Tree pre vine-clear) and couldn't simply avoid you'd see non-regular groups get stomped hard. A couple of years back we were doing the villain respec mission with a pure AoE-focused Corruptor group and we lacked the single target DPS to kill the vines fast enough before they respawned, which meant the tree wasn't debuffable and was one-shotting everyone that came into line of sight.
tl;dr: it works in CoX because the encounters are trivial
Try having a Scrapper (who's not totally IO'd out to the freakin' hilt) or a Kheld tank Lord Recluse in the Statesman TF without an Empath or a similarly healing-focused character popping away. Or try having a Mastermind tank any of the Freedom Phalanx in any given mission in the Lord Recluse SF. Go on, I'll wait.
I only know of one Scrapper who's done it, and she has nearly a billion inf in IOs on her Scrapper (DB/DA).
korodullin on
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Tanks and Controllers substitute for noone because they're useless at higher levels thanks to debuffs scaling up to a ridiculous degree. If they put in a single boss that you both couldn't debuff (Thorn Tree pre vine-clear) and couldn't simply avoid you'd see non-regular groups get stomped hard. A couple of years back we were doing the villain respec mission with a pure AoE-focused Corruptor group and we lacked the single target DPS to kill the vines fast enough before they respawned, which meant the tree wasn't debuffable and was one-shotting everyone that came into line of sight.
tl;dr: it works in CoX because the encounters are trivial
Do you understand how debuff resistance mechanics work, though?
I'm sitting at Panera right now, having lunch, and on my Mac, so I don't have access to actual numbers, so I'm going to make some up for the sake of illustration.
Say you have Tar Patch, and it confers a -30% resistance debuff. You use it on an AV that has 50% smash resistance. Resistance resists debuffs. In effect, you're only going to get 50% of that 30% applied against the AV's total resistance. Or, in other words, your -30% resistance Tar Patch takes that AV down to 35% smashing resistance, not the 20% you'd expect.
And most mobs have a litany of resistances that aren't obvious; they resist tohit debuffs, they resist defense debuffs, they resist basically anything you throw at them to some degree.
Debuffs look pretty ludicrous on paper, but in actual application, they're not quite so fantastic.
Now, add in the fact that controllers - at least at higher levels, and depending on APPs - can have superior damage output to defenders, as well as having access to virtually identical debuffs that are better employed in conjunction with crowd control, and the class that's really left out in the cold is the defender. If it wasn't for Dark Miasma being a defender exclusive, they'd be an utter waste of space on any team looking for optimization.
The game's semblance of balance is entirely off, though. Especially at high levels. Defense and survivability are so unimportant that tankers are largely rendered irrelevant, save for a few encounters. Instead, scrappers provide "good enough" defense with drastically better damage output. Likewise, blasters and warshades get obscene amounts of offense, and City of Heroes is definitely adherent to the notion that the best defense is to put your enemy in the ground.
I don't believe for a second that class distinctions and roles are at odds with difficulty of play, though. Maybe with CoH's craptacular engine and design; no interactive environments, classes that are utterly constrained by their skill sets, rather than shaped or defined by them, etc.
Debuffs are like AM; a single one might as well not be there. Stack them up and they become godly and far better than just their sum would lead you to beliefe. For a while we had a group of Corruptors running around, and they destroyed everything; we didn't need a tank, because nothing ever hit us. If it did, it did no damage. We killed Ghost of Scrapyard when he was 6 levels above us (before they changed how Giant Monsters scale), and that's with all his flunkies spamming us with dynamite.
And no, that's not a typical group, but it shows what debuff stacking can do. Your typical group would not have so many effects going, but on the other hand your typical group would actually be able to take a hit AND do single target damage worth a damn, so they wouldn't need all of that to start with.
On January 14, 2008, Perpetual Entertainment announced that it is no longer developing Star Trek Online. The license for the game and all of its assets except for the code have been transferred to an undisclosed Bay Area development studio. [2][3]. On January 18th, all STO developers were laid off by P2 Entertainment.
On December 12, 2007, Perpetual's former public relations firm Kohnke Communications launched a lawsuit against the company, including allegations of fraud. Allegedly, 'Perpetual canceled Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising mostly because of over $280,000 in incentives that would be owed to Kohnke upon the launch of the game and the subsequent financial impact on the development of Star Trek Online'.
Dammit. G&H seemed almost tolerable, and killing it sure didn't help STO.
“Moving forward, we're shifting our collective focus, resources and development efforts to Perpetual's Platform Services division and Star Trek Online, thereby ensuring that the game lives up to the high level of expectation set by the dedicated Star Trek fan base.â€
Recent events though suggest that it looks as though the “dedicated Star Trek fan base†will never see Perpetual’s vision of the Star Trek Universe as Warcry’s Dana Massey reported yesterday that, according to “multiple [unnamed] inside sourcesâ€, P2 (known previously as Perpetual Entertainment) had “ceased development on Star Trek Onlineâ€.
Massey’s article went on to assert that the license, along with the game’s content, minus the code, would be moving into the hands of another development studio in the San Francisco area.
Later last night, a site called Woot Studios announced that the San Francisco area studio in question is none other than Cryptic Studios. When reached for comment, Cryptic’s Online Community Manager Victor Wachter told MMORPG.com:
“What we are doing with P2 is interviewing a number of their former employees for positions here at Cryptic for our projects currently under development.â€
Glal brings up good points. That's pretty much how I felt about CoX. I really like having a structure to my groups; a tank, a healer, a dps, a CC and an extra. I always thought that was one of CoX's flaws, was that nothing was challenging, you could just toss more guys in to a group, over buff your self to hell and back, and then steam roll right through most encounters.
How in the Hell is going "GOD DAMMIT NO TANKS ARE ON WE'LL HAVE TO CALL IT OFF" after standing around for an hour and a half fun in any way at all?
Part of the problem was the idiotic way they carve up servers.
First, CoH was a low-population game to begin with. They had not very many people spread across too many servers, even though their server architecture was clearly designed to handle heavier loads. Then, CoV came out, and it really didn't bring any new players into the fray. Their subscriber base stayed about the same, but in effect, the expansion cut the population in half. So you had just as many people playing, but now had a wall that prevented half of them from interacting with the other half.
If you had a small number of servers with high populations, you'd have a much larger grouping pool. Better yet, get rid of the server concept, and put everyone on the same one. There was really no excuse for CoX to not allow cross-server grouping, given how ridiculously over-instanced it was. And that would've hugely diminished what little bit of the need-class-X gameplay that existed.
Hopefully, Champions will address this. Finding someone of class X only becomes a problem when there are too many artificial barriers to play (e.g. levels, servers) or very poor balancing has rendered some class not worth playing. It's all highly correctable.
hey didn't cryptic also get their grubby little mitts on the star trek online title as well?
At the "Future of MMO's" panel at GDC this year, the guys at Virgin Worlds pointed out that Jack Emmert was wearing a Star Trek shirt and kept smiling when someone asked if there was a future for Sci-Fi MMO's.
Later last night, a site called Woot Studios announced that the San Francisco area studio in question is none other than Cryptic Studios. When reached for comment, Cryptic’s Online Community Manager Victor Wachter told MMORPG.com:
“What we are doing with P2 is interviewing a number of their former employees for positions here at Cryptic for our projects currently under development.”
Huh, I never realized that Victor Wachter (aka Sporkfire) and Alex Von Minden (aka SamHayne aka Lighthouse) had crossed paths again at Cryptic/NCSoft. They both used to work at SOE on Planetside. At that time Wachter was a community rep and von Minden was the producer of Planetside. Von Minden is now a community rep for NCSoft.
It stands to reason, I suppose. For all it seems like there's a million MMOs out there, there probably aren't that many dev and support staff positions in the entire industry.
HarshLanguage on
> turn on light Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Part of the problem was the idiotic way they carve up servers.
First, CoH was a low-population game to begin with. They had not very many people spread across too many servers, even though their server architecture was clearly designed to handle heavier loads. Then, CoV came out, and it really didn't bring any new players into the fray. Their subscriber base stayed about the same, but in effect, the expansion cut the population in half. So you had just as many people playing, but now had a wall that prevented half of them from interacting with the other half.
If you had a small number of servers with high populations, you'd have a much larger grouping pool. Better yet, get rid of the server concept, and put everyone on the same one. There was really no excuse for CoX to not allow cross-server grouping, given how ridiculously over-instanced it was. And that would've hugely diminished what little bit of the need-class-X gameplay that existed.
Hopefully, Champions will address this. Finding someone of class X only becomes a problem when there are too many artificial barriers to play (e.g. levels, servers) or very poor balancing has rendered some class not worth playing. It's all highly correctable.
CoH's server capacity's have been increased multiple times since launch. Anyone around right at launch should remember that they actually added another server a couple of days after launch because their existing servers weren't handling the load properly.
Also, its simply not accurate to say CoV didn't increase the subscriber numbers. Subscriber numbers went up by 60,000 people after CoV launched. Not the return on the investment they would have hoped for, but you can't write off a 60K increase as "not bringing any new players into the fray". They did a shitty job of retaining those players, and the numbers may have been better if they didn't couple launching their expansion with a massive game rebalancing, but thats another matter.
And I doubt Champions is going to touch the Holy Trinity type of design with its "any class can take any power" system.
I was referring to long-term population numbers, not the burst right after the CoV launch that vanished within a couple months. That happens with virtually every game, and it means absolutely nothing to the overall population of the game. Why on Earth would I be talking about the oh-so-brief launch population spike? That doesn't even make sense.
Additionally, a large part of the server architecture was a problem from the start. The game was designed to handle multiple instances of each zone, but the hardware couldn't handle the number of players they had. They needed to add hardware, and chose to add servers instead of improving the hardware on existing servers. And understandable decision to make with a launch title - people would be pissed if their new game wasn't playable - but still not very wise long-term. It never is. Population will go down over time, and to not account for that is just poor foresight.
CoX is in very, very bad need of a server merge these days because of it, and they don't have the systems in place to do it. Which is probably costing them even more customers over time.
Later last night, a site called Woot Studios announced that the San Francisco area studio in question is none other than Cryptic Studios. When reached for comment, Cryptic’s Online Community Manager Victor Wachter told MMORPG.com:
“What we are doing with P2 is interviewing a number of their former employees for positions here at Cryptic for our projects currently under development.â€
Huh, I never realized that Victor Wachter (aka Sporkfire) and Alex Von Minden (aka SamHayne aka Lighthouse) had crossed paths again at Cryptic/NCSoft. They both used to work at SOE on Planetside. At that time Wachter was a community rep and von Minden was the producer of Planetside. Von Minden is now a community rep for NCSoft.
It stands to reason, I suppose. For all it seems like there's a million MMOs out there, there probably aren't that many dev and support staff positions in the entire industry.
Wow, I'm surprised I missed that. I remember Spork from PlanetSide, good times.
RESKIN'D COH LAWL! /sarcasm
I love how expresive the characters are. I wonder if you can set the kind of expressions they use... Like, if you want to make a guy who's always up beet, you could make it so he smiles more then frowns, or make a guy look vary serious most of the time.
RESKIN'D COH LAWL! /sarcasm
I love how expresive the characters are. I wonder if you can set the kind of expressions they use... Like, if you want to make a guy who's always up beet, you could make it so he smiles more then frowns, or make a guy look vary serious most of the time.
Is this being built on the Unreal 3 engine?
Hmm, I wonder if expressions are reactive, like, you smile when something good happens (level up, item drop, etc) or grimace when you get hit, etc.
As for the engine, Cryptic created a new engine after CoH. Not sure if thats based on something else.
Personally I hope we can make characters who aren't muscular, or characters who are actually fat. What about a "The Blob" style character. Or Obesia Celulita, queen of mystical island of Corpulentia!
I just hope I'll be able to log on fast enough to reserve some goddamn decent names. For the first ten minutes of release nobody's even going to be playing this game, it'll just be a race to gobble up as many names as possible.
I just hope I'll be able to log on fast enough to reserve some goddamn decent names. For the first ten minutes of release nobody's even going to be playing this game, it'll just be a race to gobble up as many names as possible.
They need non-unique names. Or at least non-unique visible names.
Just prefix the global ID to each name, and then hide it from view. So you've got jackass.Wolverine and lamer.Wolverine, but all you see is Wolverine and Wolverine, but you've still got a unique identifier that is character-specific for your friends list and chat purposes.
I just hope I'll be able to log on fast enough to reserve some goddamn decent names. For the first ten minutes of release nobody's even going to be playing this game, it'll just be a race to gobble up as many names as possible.
Before City of Heroes went live, Cryptic had a name reservation system. You basically signed up for names you wanted on the CoH website, and when the game went live, on one of the ten servers there was a premade character with the name you reserved, so you had first dibs. I think the limit was three names maximum, I'm not to sure. Upon clicking on the character, you were taken to the customization screen and all that jazz.
I have no doubt they'll do that again with CO, since it worked very well. It'll also allow them to preemptively keep people from trying to choose copyrighted names this time 'round. It was a "first come, first serve" process as well, so everyone will probably be racing to reserve their names as soon as the option comes up.
I just hope I'll be able to log on fast enough to reserve some goddamn decent names. For the first ten minutes of release nobody's even going to be playing this game, it'll just be a race to gobble up as many names as possible.
Before City of Heroes went live, Cryptic had a name reservation system. You basically signed up for names you wanted on the CoH website, and when the game went live, on one of the ten servers there was a premade character with the name you reserved, so you had first dibs. I think the limit was three names maximum, I'm not to sure. Upon clicking on the character, you were taken to the customization screen and all that jazz.
I have no doubt they'll do that again with CO, since it worked very well. It'll also allow them to preemptively keep people from trying to choose copyrighted names this time 'round. It was a "first come, first serve" process as well, so everyone will probably be racing to reserve their names as soon as the option comes up.
There was also some fiasco where they changed the name reservation system about a week before launch as I recall. I imagine thats one they'll avoid this time out.
Posts
This. And the more you ramp up it's difficulty (higher level missions, doing them with fewer people, etc.), the more 'traditional' group composition seems to be a requirement.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Will Champions have a Side kick system?
It seems like it would being a superhero MMO, but the addition of actual stat boosting loot makes me wonder if it would be workable. SKing works in CoX because the loot that there is (enh) doesn't boost your abilities that much relative to other MMOs. I suppose it depends on how much of a boost the loot gives.
Answer: Sidekicking?
The site http://www.champions-online.info/ looks like a decent source for info (but site itself looks like crap though).
Well the new popular thing to whine about is how the graphics make it look a cartoon. Does no one remember the good super hero cartoons of the 90 anymore? I guess you just need the color brown and grey to impress people now a days.
That said I think it looks awesome , hell its one of the things that makes it look different.
I don't really agree with that. Most of those definitions of the traditional group include a tank, and you can do almost every encounter in CoH without one if you have enough buffs or debuffs going around, for example. The same can be said for any other AT. Controllers can substitute for defenders, tanks for controllers, scrappers for tanks, etc. And, with enough Defenders of certain powersets, you don't need anyone else :P
tl;dr: it works in CoX because the encounters are trivial
So, pick- boring encounters, or class-requiring encounters. Or gimmick encounters where you're not using your class at all (pulling levers and shit I guess), but I'm not sure if anyone really wants those in any great amount. Unless you really expect the designers to make every encounter have multiple "solutions" so every single class has something to do and you simply need to complete the (party size)*number of tasks to win, but that sounds both time consuming and contrived.
Try having a Scrapper (who's not totally IO'd out to the freakin' hilt) or a Kheld tank Lord Recluse in the Statesman TF without an Empath or a similarly healing-focused character popping away. Or try having a Mastermind tank any of the Freedom Phalanx in any given mission in the Lord Recluse SF. Go on, I'll wait.
I only know of one Scrapper who's done it, and she has nearly a billion inf in IOs on her Scrapper (DB/DA).
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
I'm sitting at Panera right now, having lunch, and on my Mac, so I don't have access to actual numbers, so I'm going to make some up for the sake of illustration.
Say you have Tar Patch, and it confers a -30% resistance debuff. You use it on an AV that has 50% smash resistance. Resistance resists debuffs. In effect, you're only going to get 50% of that 30% applied against the AV's total resistance. Or, in other words, your -30% resistance Tar Patch takes that AV down to 35% smashing resistance, not the 20% you'd expect.
And most mobs have a litany of resistances that aren't obvious; they resist tohit debuffs, they resist defense debuffs, they resist basically anything you throw at them to some degree.
Debuffs look pretty ludicrous on paper, but in actual application, they're not quite so fantastic.
Now, add in the fact that controllers - at least at higher levels, and depending on APPs - can have superior damage output to defenders, as well as having access to virtually identical debuffs that are better employed in conjunction with crowd control, and the class that's really left out in the cold is the defender. If it wasn't for Dark Miasma being a defender exclusive, they'd be an utter waste of space on any team looking for optimization.
The game's semblance of balance is entirely off, though. Especially at high levels. Defense and survivability are so unimportant that tankers are largely rendered irrelevant, save for a few encounters. Instead, scrappers provide "good enough" defense with drastically better damage output. Likewise, blasters and warshades get obscene amounts of offense, and City of Heroes is definitely adherent to the notion that the best defense is to put your enemy in the ground.
I don't believe for a second that class distinctions and roles are at odds with difficulty of play, though. Maybe with CoH's craptacular engine and design; no interactive environments, classes that are utterly constrained by their skill sets, rather than shaped or defined by them, etc.
And no, that's not a typical group, but it shows what debuff stacking can do. Your typical group would not have so many effects going, but on the other hand your typical group would actually be able to take a hit AND do single target damage worth a damn, so they wouldn't need all of that to start with.
The forums have a dev tracker now.
Edit:
Dammit. G&H seemed almost tolerable, and killing it sure didn't help STO.
not totally official apparently
How in the Hell is going "GOD DAMMIT NO TANKS ARE ON WE'LL HAVE TO CALL IT OFF" after standing around for an hour and a half fun in any way at all?
First, CoH was a low-population game to begin with. They had not very many people spread across too many servers, even though their server architecture was clearly designed to handle heavier loads. Then, CoV came out, and it really didn't bring any new players into the fray. Their subscriber base stayed about the same, but in effect, the expansion cut the population in half. So you had just as many people playing, but now had a wall that prevented half of them from interacting with the other half.
If you had a small number of servers with high populations, you'd have a much larger grouping pool. Better yet, get rid of the server concept, and put everyone on the same one. There was really no excuse for CoX to not allow cross-server grouping, given how ridiculously over-instanced it was. And that would've hugely diminished what little bit of the need-class-X gameplay that existed.
Hopefully, Champions will address this. Finding someone of class X only becomes a problem when there are too many artificial barriers to play (e.g. levels, servers) or very poor balancing has rendered some class not worth playing. It's all highly correctable.
At the "Future of MMO's" panel at GDC this year, the guys at Virgin Worlds pointed out that Jack Emmert was wearing a Star Trek shirt and kept smiling when someone asked if there was a future for Sci-Fi MMO's.
So, take that for what it is
Huh, I never realized that Victor Wachter (aka Sporkfire) and Alex Von Minden (aka SamHayne aka Lighthouse) had crossed paths again at Cryptic/NCSoft. They both used to work at SOE on Planetside. At that time Wachter was a community rep and von Minden was the producer of Planetside. Von Minden is now a community rep for NCSoft.
It stands to reason, I suppose. For all it seems like there's a million MMOs out there, there probably aren't that many dev and support staff positions in the entire industry.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
CoH's server capacity's have been increased multiple times since launch. Anyone around right at launch should remember that they actually added another server a couple of days after launch because their existing servers weren't handling the load properly.
Also, its simply not accurate to say CoV didn't increase the subscriber numbers. Subscriber numbers went up by 60,000 people after CoV launched. Not the return on the investment they would have hoped for, but you can't write off a 60K increase as "not bringing any new players into the fray". They did a shitty job of retaining those players, and the numbers may have been better if they didn't couple launching their expansion with a massive game rebalancing, but thats another matter.
And I doubt Champions is going to touch the Holy Trinity type of design with its "any class can take any power" system.
Additionally, a large part of the server architecture was a problem from the start. The game was designed to handle multiple instances of each zone, but the hardware couldn't handle the number of players they had. They needed to add hardware, and chose to add servers instead of improving the hardware on existing servers. And understandable decision to make with a launch title - people would be pissed if their new game wasn't playable - but still not very wise long-term. It never is. Population will go down over time, and to not account for that is just poor foresight.
CoX is in very, very bad need of a server merge these days because of it, and they don't have the systems in place to do it. Which is probably costing them even more customers over time.
Steam (Ansatz) || GW2 officer (Ansatz.6498)
I love how expresive the characters are. I wonder if you can set the kind of expressions they use... Like, if you want to make a guy who's always up beet, you could make it so he smiles more then frowns, or make a guy look vary serious most of the time.
Is this being built on the Unreal 3 engine?
Hmm, I wonder if expressions are reactive, like, you smile when something good happens (level up, item drop, etc) or grimace when you get hit, etc.
As for the engine, Cryptic created a new engine after CoH. Not sure if thats based on something else.
I'm glad they're pulling a Superman Returns and making some of the silk-screen chest emblems 3D
Just prefix the global ID to each name, and then hide it from view. So you've got jackass.Wolverine and lamer.Wolverine, but all you see is Wolverine and Wolverine, but you've still got a unique identifier that is character-specific for your friends list and chat purposes.
Captain Homestar Runner?
psn: lankyplonker
Before City of Heroes went live, Cryptic had a name reservation system. You basically signed up for names you wanted on the CoH website, and when the game went live, on one of the ten servers there was a premade character with the name you reserved, so you had first dibs. I think the limit was three names maximum, I'm not to sure. Upon clicking on the character, you were taken to the customization screen and all that jazz.
I have no doubt they'll do that again with CO, since it worked very well. It'll also allow them to preemptively keep people from trying to choose copyrighted names this time 'round. It was a "first come, first serve" process as well, so everyone will probably be racing to reserve their names as soon as the option comes up.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
There was also some fiasco where they changed the name reservation system about a week before launch as I recall. I imagine thats one they'll avoid this time out.