f13.net

The bonus disc for pre-orders should be shipping on August 15th or there abouts. 

The word "sequel" (rather than "expansion") has me totally confused and completely sold. I have to see exactly what it is.

I don't know how they're handling it, either.  Statesmen and his gang have said several things about it can be an expansion and/or a totally different game.  They're very cagey about how they plan to price it, too.  Either they have no idea what they're going to do yet or... umm... I think that's it, really.

Where's the best place to preorder in order to get this pre-order disc?

http://www.cityofvillains.com/pre-order/

Links at the bottom for your preferred retailer.

So -

You get the bonus disc. Catass as one of those summoner guys for the pre-release days and see if the grind is still mindnumbingly bad after level 10 and 48 hours. If it's not, you pick up the game. No offense to cryptic - much love - but less grind plz.

(http://www.friedmanarchives.com/China/Web/Chapter23/4%20Thumbs%20Up%204x6%2072%20dpi.jpg)

I have to pay for the full game?

What do you mean?

If you're asking if you have to pay for City of Heroes, then no. Supposedly CoV is standalone, as well as a compliment to CoH.

No, there's no preorder option at EBgames.com, just a pay 50 bucks for CoV thingy.

I have CoV pre-ordered from EB. 

Voila!

http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/product/243478.asp

Oh.....If you just get the bonus disc, the same thing I did for the MxO might work in this case. I canceled the preorder for that, but it did allow me to stay in beta until release day.

If you select the option 'pickup from store' and you decide you don't want it .. just don't go pick it up. (Though they still charge you $5 for the preorder - "to pay for shipping to the store").

What... the... fuck?

I know they are trying to position it as a separate game, but I sincerely hope they aren't trying to go the way of the double subscription/charge more for both scenario on CoV. I will rescind my "Not Being Cockmunch Developers" award if that's the case, because it's bullshit. They've positioned CoV as an expansion the entire time of release. Don't try to sell me it as a new, entirely separate game.

EDIT: Also, $50 is too much. Too fucking much. Don't give me the shit about "It's also a standalone game." It's a fucking expansion. It was written on a tweaked up version of the same goddamn engine as CoH. It's not an entirely new development. It's CoH 2006. Don't do that.

I really thought I'd be interested in starting back up again once CoV started poking its head out of the sand, but I'm not so sure now.  I still haven't seen anything that makes me believe that the game is fun past level 20-25.  In fact, it WAS fun up to 20-25, but to do it 2-3 more times just has no appeal to me.   Not even doing it as a villain gets me going either.

I'm guessing I'll wait for it to release, let you guys play it for awhile and then decide based off your hate filled posts here.  I just do not see the "hook" for me in all this.

Lower the leveling curve to WoW proportions and I'm there though.  I'm not betting they'll do that.  They've ignored that cry for too long to start listening now all of a sudden.

Like a year ago they said it would be a seperate thing. It was a Statesman interview with an inconsequential website. Like IGN or UGO or something.

Or he said that's how he was hoping it would be.

And he also said that he wanted one subscription to pay for both.

At a guess, and this is just a guess, it'll probably be a couple bucks extra for a subscription to both compared to a subscription to one.  $15 a month for one, maybe $17-$20 for two.  But kudos to them if it stays $15.

I won't pay an extra subscription for CoV. That'll be the only thing that will sour my good will with that dev team.

High Time they came up with a station access type situation for $22.

Auto Assult, COH, COV, guild wars expansions, linage II. Yea - that would be a good $22 a month for me.

Ya know, I might even play lineage II. I mean I'm playing Everquest II. Wait. No. Even Haem will confirm that EQII is godsend compared to Lineage. Ignore me. My brain it does not work.

Edited cause I misread.

I would doubt that Guild Wars expansions would be included in such a package.  Possible, though.

I've never played and never planned to play L2, but if it was included in that fictional station pass, I'd give it a shot once in awhile.  There is enough interest in the other products that I'd bite on that deal too.  That is even without the Guildwars expansions because I don't believe that would be included.  That business model is too dependant on expansion boxes.

Even if I didn't play any of the games nonstop, it would be nice to be able to bounce around amongst them for around $22/mo.

Sure, I'd pay around $20 for all the NCSoft sub games PLUS a discount on Guild Wars expansions that I directly downloaded.

But another sub just for CoV? No, not happening.

That's crazytalk. It's ok, unleash the Lineage 2 Hate. That's what you were really saying.

"Sure, I'd pay around $20 for all the NCSoft sub games MINUS Lineage II PLUS a discount on the Guildwars expansions that I directly download."

Rite?

I might try Lineage 2 again, if I didn't have to pay for the box, it was already included in my multi-sub price...






And I was really drunk and pr0n was removed from the Internet and my TV had exploded and all my books had spontaneously caught on fire.

I'm quite certain that can be arranged. Or at least the fun bits of that last sentence can be...

There's a place on the internet with no porn?



What a sad sad place that must be.

That taskforce last night pretty much killed whatever curiousity and interest I had left.

I think I'll just go back to "Fuck Cryptic" mode for now.

Way to find the least fun thing to do in the entire game, and then complain about how the experience sucked.  From the other thread... it was even the Positron TF, well known to be the longest, least interesting of the many TFs Cryptic's written.

And here I thought Haemish was our resident glutton for punishment.

Alkiera

That's not the point. It's about deducing just how warped these dudes really are. I can't really trust a dev team who make something like that. Not only was it boring, but I killed mobs in at least 10 back-to-back missions for 5 hours straight: Blue, White, Yellow, Orange, and Red. And in their thinking, they thought it'd make sense that I shouldn't get any experience points from it.

I have plenty to bitch about, but that's just the last straw. I knew the grind was bad, but any game that even allows me to catass for 5 hours without reward or effect is the worst of all. Even Daoc or EQ would at the very least given me a pair of shitty boots and some xp....Or something. But nothing? That's retarded.

Isn't exemplaring down able to burn off XP debt?

I might have tolerated it if that was the case. So I tested it earlier and killed myself.

I'm in debt.

Despite ghost-catassing 3 lvls.

[edit] I could have sworn that debt burn off points can still be reserved when you're not in debt, but still exemplared. Could be wrong though....Either way, it was a pointless waste of time. It was worst than catassing.

Exemplaring burns debt, all the experience you would gain for killing a mob of equal con to you goes towards burning the debt.  (So you're a level 29 character, and you kill a white minion and it's worth 500 experience.  Exemplar down to level 16, kill a level 16 minion and you'll burn 500 debt.)

If you have no debt, the experience is converted to influence on a 1 for 1 basis.  So in the above example, you'd get 500 influence on top of what you'd normally get (which is determined the same as the experience award).

Ah, so it's influence then. Well, at the end of that, I ended up gaining a little over 20,000. Which, at first look, put a smile on my face...Until I realized it was only worth about 4 DO's.

EDIT: For the value that I would consider what 5 hours is worth to me, I think IGE would give me more :D

So wait, there's items in this one?

There were items in CoH.

Enhancers.

TOs which boost some aspect of a power by 8%, DOs which boost some aspect of a power by 16%, SOs which boost some aspect of a power by 33%, and HOs which boost 2 aspects of a power by 33% (recently nerfed from 50%).

An aspect is something like accuracy, damage, range etc.

You can fit 60-odd of these things on your hero by level 50, up to 8 on any 1 power.

You can usually afford as many SOs as you need at each level with pocket change though.

Up to 6.

Inspirations and whatnot still don't feel like "items" or "Loot" to me. It just feels like at certain levels I'm upping statistic points (as seen in Atelier Iris, Digital Devil Saga, and many other RPGs for the past.....15 years).

Loot is good.
Random loot is good.
Non-random high level loot is bad.
I don't like everyone looking the same.

Ok, I've completely rambled off now. Basically Inspirations and Enchantments just seem like the natural progression of a power or character, not loot and items. Or to put it another way, if you can't base an interesting player economy and market off of the "loot" in a game, it may as well not exist.

Also, they need to cut the exp curve in half - or introduce a massive rested state/vitality thing. And then cut the exp curve by a quarter.

Well, counting is hard.

Agreed.

Aside from Hamidon Enhancements and other special enhancements of that sort (the titan shard, etc) you can buy any of these enhancements from an NPC.  There's really no time when someone will say "Nice! I just got a really good drop!"  99% of the time, the best you'll hear is "Oh neat, I can actually use this Enhance."

I don't include Hamidon or other special enhancements because there are what, 4 places to get those in the entire game?  It's not really enough to start calling it an item-based game.

Yes.  Yes.  Yes, oh sweet Cthulhu YES.

Too bad it won't ever happen.  Too many people think its perfect for Cryptic to ever touch it, regardless of the lessons WoW has taught us all.

Fuck debt, fuck catass grinds.  If a game like CoH is fun I will make alts.  Don't worry about someone making it to 50 quickly when most people love character creation more than anything else. 

Oh yeah, and give everyone all of the Fitness skills at level 1 please. 

I'll try to find the direct quote later, but basically Statesman said that they need to charge another sub for CoV because it has it's own team working on updates.  The pricing hasn't been worked out yet as far as people who sub to both games.

I call bullshit on that. I just don't buy it. CoV has been labeled from the beginning as an expansion. It's not even a new engine, it's an existing engine with tweaks. It's Madden 2006. I swear if they try to charge an extra sub for it, I won't play it.

They've been calling it standalone for a while now.  CoV only expands CoH by adding HQ's and the PVP zones.  All the other content added is usable only by villain characters.  Last I heard many months back, what they're talking about is the normal subcription fee if you play either game, or adding 3 - 5 dollars onto your subscription fee if you play both.  CoH will keep getting new "issues" like it is now, and CoV will get it's own issues which is what they say the additional fee is for.  If you play both, you'll be getting twice the content updates that you are now.  If it works out that way, with double the content updates, than I think the added cost is acceptable (not that I played CoH enough to even get through even half of that content).

I'm gonna give them a chance. Screw it. If only because Recluse (David Zeb?) will be running that side of things (and yes, I know, the CoH team and Statesman will be handling it in some capacity as well). I'm not all that interested in playing a villian, but one look at that guy's RPG resume (http://www.pen-paper.net/rpgdb.php?op=showcreator&creatorid=502), and it's hard to see how he could go wrong.

To be honest though, a lot of the stuff David Cook had a hand in ranged from dull to crap.

But, you can have fancy hats!

Oh  :|

I don't know about tabletop much....But I figured that since he's indirectly responsible for one of the best computer rpg's ever, then CoV would shape up really well..

Indirectly being the key word.  He was actually indirectly responsible for two of the best crpgs ever.  As one of the creators Planescape, he's indirectly responsible for Torment, and as one of the writers of the module "Ruins of Adventure", he was partly responsible for Pool of Radiance (which is based on Ruins).  Oriental Adventures is also a book I have fond memories of.

Still, looking through that list of stuff he's done, about 90% of it was filler that helped bloat the AD&D line full of useless, overpriced sourcebooks.  Besides that, I'd be happier with someone who understands comics rather than Fantasy RPGs.  That's the kind of mindset I'd like MMO's to move away from.

Definitely. Though I do believe Emmert is that (I think that some of the team had a hand in Marvel/DC RPG's and the comic book world as well).....And for some reason it isn't helping any longer. There's still a core game there that entices me, but since it launched, CoH has slowly gone down the path of every other MMO. Issue 5 is just another example: While it may be good for my controller's solobility (even though they've been nerfed in other ways), it's probably going to kill the game for some people. It's about to get less "Super".

Back to CoV and RPG's. Another interesting thing that I just read up on is that the lead writer of CoV is Shane Hensley. Wow. Like I said, I don't know much about tabletop, but that's a name that I do recognize. He's the creator of Deadlands (i.e. the coolest RPG idea ever, in my opinion). I think it's almost guaranteed now that the missions/storylines are going to blow away whatever Statesman's team has done thus far (and anyone else, for that matter)....Lack of comic book expertise or not. 

I'm quickly losing my faith that whatever they come up with will be equitable. They seem to flatly refuse to state exactly what their plans on this extra sub price are, despite the fact that they have to know this already in order to price the thing accordingly. Just let me know so I can vent my hatred and decide now if I should even get excited or not.