***Dave Does the Game
I swear Paragon City is perfect setting for a new weatherperson fresh out of weatherperson school…
“Today, it’ll be sunny, followed by more sun tomorrow, with a 100% chance of sun through the weekend. Except for Dark Astoria. You guys are screwed.’
From Heart_Breaker in this post.
More PC/A goodness last night, hunting Carnies in PI, clearing Rikti on alternate Earths, and facing down scary-looking-but-pretty-flimsy Praetorian clockwork.
The latter mish was with Puck Bunny, who’s also at 45. PB’s play was erratic as Player-of-PB was being inundated with tells viz The Great Schism. Then, mid-mission, I started getting tells from a fellow leader on the “Champions” global channel, which nearly floored me — haven’t conversed in that channel since, well, it was set up, esp. when Coalition Chat started up.
Anyway, long discussions ensued about what had happened, how things were going, how they could have/should have happened differently, how the future might look, etc. (and in so doing received confirmation of another Lurker here 🙂 ).
(Bottom line, to my mind, is that the principals involved (any or all, but in particular Stateswoman and the FP Leadership) need to make a public statement about the matter — not necessarily an open debate, but a straightforward “Here’s what happened, here’s why, here’s what we intended, here’s what went wrong, here’s where we’d like things to go.” Not defensive, I hope, but straightforward and honest. In absence of that, the only folks talking are either (a) ignorant, or (b) biased, which means that the majority of folks out there who are still rocked back on their heels by all this have only unreliable sources regarding what actually happened and why.)
(Yes, by the bye, I could also make a formal statement viz my own role in this as an SG leader. But I’m not going to put words into others mouths or second-guess motivations without statements to work from — and, honestly, my role here was secondary in key ways. Once the Official Word is given, I’m prepared to chime in as appropriate. If it never is … we’ll see.)
At any rate, after Margie headed to bed, I did a bit more chatting with a couple of leader types, and a player or two, then called it a night (so far as CoH stuff was concerned — I ended up staying up too late getting some other things cleaned up, but that’s a different matter).
Well, amidst the other brouhaha, a patch got downloaded last night, bringing over stuff that’s been on Test a while. The full notes are here (no, really, though you might need to F5 to dump the cache if you can’t see them). To my mind, the biggies:
Lessons learned:
“University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” — Henry Kissinger
I don’t know what it is that makes political infighting so nasty in social groups, except for how Dr. Kissinger puts it.
Regardless, nasty and vicious is what we ended up with in the big Alliance Schism of 2006.
I’m certainly pleased to see some folks out on their asses, don’t get me wrong. Other folks I’m sorry to see go, and some of the groups that were booted could have remained so far as I was concerned.
The whole thing was executed horribly (though, to be fair, I’m unsure what triggered the actual timing, unless it was Bill spilling the beans), and it could have been framed and spun a lot better (and, evidently, was intended to be). But, bottom line, “freedom of association” (as well as “he who pays the piper calls the tunes”) meant that if the Phalanx leadership wanted to get rid of some groups, that was their prerogative. And, on balance, I’d rather be with the ones left than the ones kicked out. There are exceptions, on both sides, but if the line is drawn, I know which side I want to be on..
Evil clique? Whatever. I’d expect a truly evil clique to be better organized. And spend less time agonizing over this stuff. And have cool t-shirts.
I’m not a confrontational kind of guy. I would likely never have taken a step like this, and would never, ever have done it as it was done. There are people I’ll miss, people I’m sorry have left, and others who, if I won’t exactly miss, I wouldn’t have minded if they were still around.
On the other hand, there are some folks whose nattering in CC will not be missed by me at all.
And all that said — I’m not going to lose a lot of sleep over it tonight.
Dinged 45 with Psi-clone and Amorpha (despite one irksome disco-induced face-plant). Yay!
Hard to believe we’re on the Final Five …
Margie called from the office. “I need to ask you some questions. I have the blaster menu here.”
Cool! I was thinking about throwing together an electrical blaster (Cracklepop? Prairie Storm? Sturmy Drang?), and was thinking about what powers they have. Never run one before, at least not for a long time, so I had a few questions if she could look them up for me …
At least, those were my thoughts, but … wait … could she access CoH from work? “What?”
“I have the last year menu here.”
Oh. She was talking about food planning for the party Saturday.
*sigh*
I think she was laughing at me, not with me, when I told her.
I’d not been aware that CoH was expanding to Asian markets (though it makes tremendous sense). Here’s an update on the new “big” heroes being rolled out with it — including a nice video.
Though … “City of Hero“? That sounds a bit … Engrish. (Note that the site renders pretty poorly in Firefox.)
With Kate and Aaron, two of our regular CoX co-players, visiting, it was no doubt inevitable that we would end up in some sort of mass CoX play session. And so we did, running around and bopping AVs after hours. We were over at the Testerfolks, and we had Kate, Jackie, Margie and myself out at the breakfast table, while Doyce, Stan and Aaron were in the office.
It was kind of interesting being able to just chit-chat en masse during play, to give verbal “Gather for Invis” commands to the team, and, of course, to see how folks play “in person.” Not much RP, but …
Gameplay-wise, it was not all that much of a challenge, a couple of rote face plants aside. With the players spread from 44 to 50, we could SK/RSK as fit the person whose mish it was, and we basically rolled through the missions — Hype doing his juggernaut imitation, Amorpha and Kin doing massive damage, Puck and Noelle and PC locking them down, and Shock keeping us alive. Good times.
Of the not-yet-50 crowd, Amorpha‘s about half a pip from 45, and Psi-clone‘s around 2 pips, with similar proximity for Puck Bunny to 46 and slightly more for Hyperthermian to 50. And, since I expect we’ll see at least one more repeat over the weekend, I suspect we’ll get a good chance to all ding by then.
I7 will have some sort of magical fix for SR and Ice Tanks that lets Defense scale appropriately against higher level mobs. Yay.
I don’t actually have anyone that fits that at the moment, mind you, but …
Actually, it goes further than that, affecting all Defensive powers (inspirations, buffs), and ToHit Debuffs. Interesting.
Basically, Level advantage in PvE, Lts, Bosses, AV’s, and Monsters had To Hit bonuses. This made Defense not scale properly. We changed them so that instead of To Hit bonuses, they have Accuracy bonuses. What that means is, Defense is applied before their bonus, rather than after. Since Accuracy is a multiplier, it is multiplying a small base value than before.
For instance, an AV had a base To Hit of 75%. If a player had 25% Defense, the AV would have had a 50% chance to hit. Under the new system, the AV’s has a base 50% chance to hit. The Defense is applied, reducing his To Hit to 25%. The Accuracy is then applied, giving a final To Hit of 37.5% — a 12.5% improvement over the old system.
And, interestingly, it seems some powers are actually, behind the scenes, pets. E.g., Caltrops or Blizzards. New tech will let the devs pass on buffs that are on the caster to those kind of powers, too, if it seems appropriate (e.g., doing a Build-Up and having it affect the damage of Blizzard). More info here.
And server transfer is still coming … slowly …
First…I confirm that we’re working on right now (as in pohsyb in the next room) to add CoV costume parts into CoH if you own both games….
Huzzah! And … nice touch (a la bases) to encourage both games. (There’s a further thought there I need to write more about soon.)
I’ve been holding off doing more costume stuff with some characters (PC, VJ) who are eligible, just waiting for this. (Yes, wait until you see Psi-clone in his new barbed-wire-encrusted skull armor!)
Then we repeal the hated stealth nerf. The reason why: many well reasoned posts. It’s that simple. You guys pointed out the problems.
Though the basic motivation behind it still seems to be something that sticks in States’ craw.
AND now…we’re changing the way Archvillains spawn. A ton of forum goers disliked adding so many AV’s into missions a while back…so we’ve come up with a solution. If the team size and mission difficulty are ABOVE a certain level, an Archvillain spawns. Below that, players will face only an Elite Boss. If the mission is set on the first two levels of difficulty, it takes 4 heroes or more to spawn an Arch Villain. On the third level, 3 heroes or more. On the fourth level, 2 heroes. On the highest (Invincible), a solo hero will spawn an AV. Note this works in BOTH City of Heroes and Villains.
In order to incentivize larger teams, Positron is going to add a bonus to AV rewards!
Interesting. And, on first glance, a fine idea. Won’t change life for PC/A (since we’re on Invincible), but it will make life easier for some of our other folks.
It’s always interesting when I play CoH with Margie while on a business trip. We lose the “bandwidth” of immediate verbal communication, but we’ve done this stuff with these character for so long, we know the drill, and a few quick keybinds (“Gather for Invis …” + “Ready!” + “Hey, look at that &target!”) fill in a lot of the gaps. We know our tactics, we know each other’s powers and so forth, so easy-peasy. Sure, it’s more difficult to type “HELP!” than to shout it across the room when something goes south, but the team status bar shows that, too.
Nevertheless, it’s still a lot more fun with Margie in the same room.
Issue 7 – Tentative plan for releasing the “Feature Update” to the website is mid February – so you might as well settle in for about a month of waiting unless a dev decides to drop some hints.
Of course you already know I7 includes 40-50 content for CoV, and as with every update more art updates, missions, and quality of life features. The other items in I7 will be revealed when we get the Feature Update.
For “Phalanx Prestige Day,” Velvet and P-Siren joined a half-dozen others to do the final story arc for Croatoa. Which was a lot of fun — no horrific risk/danger (vs, say, fighting a god), but still a goodly chunck of XP and influence and prestige.
(Velvet really needs to do her level — she’s halfway through 30 and hasn’t done the formal level-up from 29. Since it’s just Resist Elements on the docket, it’s not critical, but it’s getting personally irksome.)
In the evening, Psi-clone and Amorpha wrapped the Countess Crey story arc (quote of the evening, “Oh! She’s an AV”), which was quite satisfying.
Off on business again for three nights, so CoH-play may be a bit limited, damn the luck.
Nice get-together — 5:30p to 1:00a or so — for the Sara Moore TF. It was my introduction to the Shadow Shards and all the wackiness there.
Solid group — Psi-clone, Amorpha, Hyperthermian, Kinetica, Zepher-Storm, Puck Bunny, Shock.Therapy, and Li Nakamura. Had run with all of them previously except Li, and everyone was on their game. It was a Controller/Defender-heavy group (and a couple of the Controllers were Empathy secondary), so lots of buffs and heals, which worked out well. Indeed, only one Scrapper and one Tank.
Died twice, I think, and narrowly dodged the bullet (so to speak) several other times. Most folks took at least one face plant — Amorpha had three or four, I think — just due to the heavy firepower of Nemesis and Rularuishy things. But no chronic problems or intrinsic flaws in the group. Like I said, solid.
For myself, I thought I was able to serve quite well as a healer (including a number of Rezzes), while also getting my holds and pets into play. Plenty of excitement for everyone; we were all contributing members of the team.
And, for the record, the final mish was a lot spookier than I would have thought, and actually ended a lot more quickly than I’d expected once the AV was engaged.
Wow. Just in time for my birthday …
And so it goes.
Word has it that the next patch set will include a nerf such that glowies cannot be clicked on while stealthed or phased.
Hrm.
From a gameplay standpoint, that really screws up a lot of strategies (which seems to be the point, of course, making unfair to (everyone say it together) “get XP without risk.” (Never mind the number of higher level villains that see right through stealth.)
From a “reality” standpoint, it makes limited sense. The “I’m going to stand in the middle of all these guys and rifle this file cabinet and they don’t bat an eyelash” sort of scenario never made sense …
Though it also can depend on how one envisions the power sets as working. Is Stealth actually some sort of visual obscuring power (e.g., Steaming Cloud — though why at least the bad guys wouldn’t say, “Hey, what’s that cloud doing in the middle of the hallway?” is beyond me), or is it an abstraction of “I’m really sneaky/ninja-like”? Or, heck, “I’m actually a master of disguise and have made myself up to look like these bad guys so that they don’t notice me unless I get too close”? Something to make up for the fact that there’s no game mechanism to throw a rock over to the other side of the room and get everyone’s attention focused over there.
E.g. Honeygun didn’t really have a stealth cloak. She was just really good at sneaking around, like a trained sniper. Her ability to sneak up should be a bit different and have different parameters than other interpretations of the power.
From a “reality” standpoint, each of those different interpretatoins of Stealth should play differently.
On the other hand, since we can’t actually play those differences, the abstraction seems to work. And, really, the ability to Stealth through a mission only helps so much. It’s often more of a convenience (turning a given TF from 8 hours to 6 hours or something like that) than a must-have.
As for Phasing — well, that makes a measure of sense (though often there’s a sort of “I make my hands solid enough to be able to pick the safe” out in the comics).
I also haven’t heard how this is going to impact Invis. Given that, unlike Stealth, Group Invis is not a toggle, if I’m using GI does that means I have to wait until it wears off to click the glowie?
As with most nerfs, it’s workable around, with a bit of effort and a bit of (yes) extra risk. People get through missions without stealth powers all the time. But it’s another case of fixing a “problem” that I don’t agree exists. Unless the only way one can have a legitimate super-hero adventure is to duke things out all the time, being part of the (e.g.) Legion Espionage Squad should be as good a way to adventure in Paragon as any other. And I say that as someone whose Main uses Group Invis extensively, but who has a whole series of other heroes who wouldn’t dream of it.
Answers to the Ask Statesman! thread. Many follow-ups. Excellent.
And, as an early birthday gift, PC hit 43. Yay!
Since we’re actual houseguests this time of year, our CoX play is pretty constrained due to social graces — and the business and otherworldliness of the schedule out in Faerie is such that we don’t reliably get onto the system at normal times or for normal durations.
Add to that Margie’s use of the family laptop, whose graphics capability is, um, a bit limited (pretty much out of play for CoV, and marginal for CoH), and our heroics are more than a bit hampered.
That said, we managed to get on briefly over the past few days. Margie more than me, doing stuff with Blue Point, while I did some here-and-there activities with Lynne. We managed some teaming with Fazenda and Araware, which was fun, some Al McGordo and Christmas Present (taking advantage of the travel powers), and actually did some arc work with Psi-clone and Amorpha last night, finishing off (literally as well as figuratively) the Envoy of Shadows (and with the least pain to date).
After which we discovered that the suggestion we bring along a friend or two to deal with a Carnie bomb-planting plot was well-advised, as different bombs required simultaneous deactivation. Fortunately, Captain Atomyc was at loose ends and could (literally) lend a hand.