CoH Community Quiz: Matt Miller Answers Your Questions!

Roughly every month, we're working to gather together a 100% fan generated Q&A with a key member of the Cryptic Studios development team. Lead Designer Matt Miller kicked things off last month when he agreed to sit for questions from our community (see his intro here). Next month, Creative Director Jack Emmert will be our guest. Read on for the answers.

WarCry [LemonLass]: When will you add custom colors for powers? This is something alot of us have wanted since the game came out because I believe it is vital to a hero or villians uniqueness.

Matt Miller: As much as I would love to have a purple energy blast or green fire, I don't see it happening anytime soon. The problem stems from both the way the powers were made, and the sheer amount of powers we have, some of which are obviously un-colorable. We did some internal experimentation with power colorization back before City of Villains launched, and while pleased with the results, it in reality proved to us that undertaking the task of adding this to the game was going to be monumental. Time and money would simply be better spent making content for the game that actually meant something to the power of your character as opposed to something purely cosmetic.

You can read the Q&A by clicking below.

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Not one reference to PvP, base raids or bug fixing. :(

Nothing on badges either. What bout more content for 50's. We need more to do for a 50 character.

I think what strikes me most is the arrogant tone his answers seem to have. I was especially displeased with his rationale for not changing the poorly implemented Patron Powers for Villains (a game I stopped playing after Issue 7 launched even though I had 4 level 40s by that time because Grandville is a horrible zone and the missions are awful). In essence he said they know some of them are pretty crappy, but there is no way they are going to allow people to choose the 4 that are actually good, because they put to much effort into making them to let us players make our own choices and to say it adds to the RP aspect is a crock. Everyone knows there is 1 server that has even noticeable size group of RPers and that's Virtue. They don't want to waste time and money on EATs because only 10% of players have access to them, but it's ok to say Patron Powers need to stay the way they are because it adds a RP aspect that only 1% of the games base even care about??

With each issue it's becoming very clear that to them things like client stability, fixing memory leaks, and changing the hundreds of quality of life issues compiled and listed in their own Forums by us dedicated players are not top priorities. They seem to think that if they throw a couple dozen costume pieces, some new badges, and a redesigned zone at us that makes up for the fact that the game has serious core issues. It's so disheartening.

My wish: simple - that Issue 10 be named :The Core (because it's too late for issue 9) and it be nothing more than a ground up fix of all the things that are wrong in the game right now. Fixing the sound loop crash that was introduced with Issue 4, fixing all the mispelled, poorly written mission text, finding and plugging the memory leaks that make the game go from 500Mb of memory used at first start to 1.5 Gb of memory used 3 hours later, Fog of War appearing on City Zone maps after you've been playing for a while, people coming out of missions to be ghosted, special effect items in mission having volume but appearing invisible, getting kicked from bases, the Founders Falls Pocket D contact and Abandoned Sewer Plaque that are actualy inside the geometry now... the list goes on

As expected, Miller bypassed the hard-hitting questions and concentrated on the window dressing. Enhancement Diversification has apparently become an incurable cancer to COH, the nerfs are apparently here to stay, and dozens of disgruntled COHers will continue to flock to other MMORPG's daily, until the COH "team" decides there aren't enough players left to leave the servers on, the plug will be pulled, and that will be the end of Paragon City.

I give it at the MOST, two years from today. If I were to put chips on it, a year and a half.

It's really too bad. If they just set things back to the way they were at Issue 1, the servers would light up like a freakin' Christmas tree. (Can I still say Christmas? Or is it Holiday tree now?)