This week we're asking what would you like to see in the design toolset for your hero base or villain lair?

ideally would love to see something akin to how Wildstar or Rifts does it where you select a backdrop/environment and then get a set of shapes and props that you can adjust and place how you wish.

CoH definitely left a lot to be desired when it came to designing. Firstly the "stacking glitch" basically any designer in the game had to learn just to get by with the limited resources we had was a given, I'd like something like this implemented into the game naturally because people often times want things floating or placed somewhere elsewhere without it snapping to the ground.

The rooms in the game were gigantic, made it difficult to have them used for specific purposes without some sort of partition or a lot of empty space, the themed furniture like the Steampunk/Scifi items were often underutilized and the regular furniture was usually assets from the Office Buildings being re-purposed and made the environment look cheap. I would like more functional pieces and accents and then maybe eventually add in the scifi and fantasy aspects for themed Super Hero bases and areas. Greenery and lighting was definitely important as well because without it bases often looked dreary and uninvited which was nice for Villains but not so much for Heroes.

FFXIV definitely does a pretty decent job when its comes to housing indoors not really placing many limits on what can be placed and clipping into other objects. Just regular platforms would be nice too, I can't remember how many desks I had to use as placeholders for flooring when building second stories in those rooms with incredibly high ceilings.

The teleporters were also incredibly large and cumbersome and broke the theme for a lot of different base concepts, if functional furniture were to be introduced like crafting stations I'd prefer that they were more neutral to appeal to more than one kind of base design.

Training area, customizable attendants (robot, android, spectral, were-animals, etc.) to give the place an "alive" feeling. Monitor rooms with live feeds. I guess many of the usual features of store room, labs, bedroom, kitchen, trophy room, outside areas, mini game rooms...

I never used bases. I just didn't understand them. I guess it makes sense to have them but whats the point? To make a hospital in a base rather than a zone? Or to have other things inside of a base rather than a zone? I was confused with the appeal. One or two guys being in charge of building a base for an entire supergroup of many, and have the many people inside that supergroup turning on supergroup mode in order to attain supergroup money... Explains why I never involved myself with supergroups and only relied on public groups. But hey don't let me distract you guys from brainstorming here...

they should be the resting place for when u go offline and then that the base/lair is spawned as a dungeon in the world.
so like the opposite team can fight with the base and get loot..
maybe also attacks from ai gangs/monsters?

I agree that the CoX base editor was pretty broken, and also the comment about the furniture being janky. Another problem, at least before issue 7 or 8 (can't remember which) was the insanely high cost of everything group-related. Even the rent was nearly impossible to afford for a small group. I agree with the idea of having smaller footprints for core functions as well as having a neutral aesthetic option.

I always wanted the ability to add environmental effects, like water features and fog. Having 3D placement out of the box is a must, without the need for a physical anchor. Also, flooring with a depth dimension; it was possible to emulate multi-story rooms in CoX using floor panels that had zero height, which looked odd. An option for an outdoor setting would be really, really cool, or better yet a mix of indoor and outdoor. (Same goes for underground, underwater, airborne, etc.)

It would be really great to have multiple save states (almost like an emulator), so you can prototype a couple of different things without a bunch of rework. This might be stupid, but I'd personally rather have something more like a wire frame option, so I can design by actually designing; in CoX you basically had to build the thing in order to design it.

A little sad to see this topic didn't get more responses

first up i didnt mind CoX bases once you got hang of them.
but something a bit more like CO/SWTOR base template options would be nice(and i wouldn't say no to more free-form placement options then cox), ideally with ability to move rooms around.
but if it saves a lot of coding and such then the templates with just placable furniture NPC's vendors crafting benches portals storage's extra on "hooks" like in SWTOR would work.

the biggest thing for me is having all the various facility's that are spaced about a city in one convenient place combined with a social space.
(ps.a teleport to team leader portal would be awesome)

Utility/convenient clan space is first priority customization and making it look personalized is second priority and base raids is third order priority for me

I really enjoyed having a crafting station, extra storage and the teleporters. What I didn't like was being given a grid and having to play Blokus where I'm losing the game because of what shapes I can afford. It would be nice if the layout could be more fluid with less limitations in placement.

Things CoH didn't have that I would like to see here are placing floating objects, get new missions from within base possibly unique ones only found when you obtain a base, defend base from PvE mobs that is possibly tied to certain story lines or how much I beat up on a particular group that they want revenge, earn trophies to place in base, a monitor that can show hotspots out in the persistent world so I can either get an alert or simply watch others beat up on a giant monster and possibly have or craft 'helper monkeys'(think Superman's robots in Fortress of Solitude) to help grind rare crafting, rare materials or just as window dressing that shows the base has automated maintenance.

I have no idea what is practical or possible so just throwing stuff out there.

I kind of like tech-y looking bases. But I know a lot of people would like magic, or a more organic type base setting. I guess the base construction, and look should appeal to a few different design aesthetics.

I liked how you could make teleporters, and that the different zones could all be unlocked via exploration badges etc. That was a neat touch.

I generally used my personal bases for travel, and storage. So of course, I would like to be able to do so in VO.

It was cool being able to visit someone else's base, also.

I liked how in CoH the SG leaders could designate varying levels of access to the other members.

I think something should be in-game to prevent a leader(s) going inactive for a year, and having members suffer due to a lack of control during those times. Just thinking off the top of my head... Maybe something like if the person who actually founds the supergroup gets a special founder title. If he goes inactive for a certain amount of time, control of the guild goes to the next highest ranking member, and continues down the line. But when the Founder does indeed come back, he retains his founder title, and control reverts to him. I just think it's important to protect the person who founds the group, and also the members in these circumstances. I just think that if you played for 3 years, and made a super awesome base, and then maybe you couldn't play for three months, and you re-login finally, it would suck if the base would never be yours again, cuz the new leaders didn't want to relinquish control.

That's all I can think of for now.

Well, the main thing I play superhero MMOs for is the ability to build characters around specific themes (ranging from ancient weapons, immortal vampires, fantasy races/classes, gods, aliens, alien gods, robots, (literal) Deus ex Machine, mercs.. You get the idea.

Thus it stands to reason that strongholds strongly hold onto the ability to suit just about everything above, and everything betwixt the above.

That's what made me hate vehicles in Champions Online; they're all essentially tech, or at BEST magitek, but at the same time, that's what I liked about their hideouts is that there were multiple "skins" of each, to better fit Batmen, ancient witches, and that one supernerd who could probably take over a sovereign nation, but won't move out of their mother's basement.

I don't know what EXACTLY I want to see, but mostly I just want variety.

Tech bases would be my first choice, though an organic base would be pretty cool.
I think upgrades to power and control should need larger rooms.
Adjustable Walls and dividers would be nice to put up anywhere in a room.
Teleporters were nice to have back when they were faster to use than trams.
The ceilings don't have to be 50 feet high.

Player housing/hideouts would also be nice to have, as long as they are useful, ex. having a small amount of storage.

I would love to see a hero's lair.

Test

Please give us the ability to interact with the items in our base. (sit on furniture, make food, feed our pets, etc.)

Honestely my idea of a perfect base system would be a mix between ESO and SWTOR The freedom to individually place objects such as ESO does it with the easy access UI to items for draggin and dropping purposes that SWTOR had

So I'm easy to please, or at least I like to say I am. City of Heroes' base development system was fickle, but if you had someone in your crew that knew what they were doing they could create some amazing layouts.
You could go the route of ESO and SWTOR and do the static zone layout with placement ability, and that would be fine...maybe a choice of themes of layout...Highrise, underground lab, hidden lair, volcano (?), airship...There's a lot of tropes you can take from in terms of a hero or villains domicile.

i waould suggest not going the way Swotor with placement hooks for objects. I have been playing Swotor for a long time and noticed that some of their base items do not mesh well with curtain bases. I'd like to see something like CoH where you can place any object you want anywhere in the plot.

Hideouts also with special quests and regular visitors such as popular heroes (if you are a hero) and deadly villains (if you are a villain) to give the house a more functional activity and a PVP function for the ones who like that like two villains trying to steal something from a hero an he tries to defend himself with traps. Also aplplied for sneaking into a villain hideout.

hey
can we get like a dungeon creator base style so every players base is liek a dungeon and other players can like raid it etc
that you have to like defend it with minions etc?

grtz