AmazingMOO

One of the development goals that's been stated for City of Heroes is that there will be a new Incarnate Trial every issue.

With the addition of costume pieces that are available ONLY through incarnate trials, the new incarnate system is starting to see more like PVP to me. It seems like a system that the marketing department desperately wants to sell and is attaching more and more goodies to try to make it more palatable to me.

I'm not disparaging the work done on the trials, nor am I saying that there aren't people who like them and enjoy them. However, I would prefer them to be very occasional content. I'd personally like to avoid them altogether, but the option for that is missing out on any +50 advancement.

I hate that it's nigh-impossible to BUILD a group below 50 any more unless the WTF happens to be sub-50 taskforce.

I hate that people want to stand around in Pocket D for an hour before doing 20 minutes of content.

I hate that you can't just grab a few friends to do the content with. You have to recruit a dozen players. Sorry, devs. The LFG queue tool still 'appears' broken. Until you convince players that going with the maximum-sized group is not better than joining the queue it'll probably continue to be.

I hate that new costume pieces are tied to 2, now 3 pieces of content that are designed to be farmed. That really sucks. That sucks hard. If you want these rewards, you WILL farm this content. Hey, that rainbow aura is just what the doctor ordered for fairy characters, unicorns, or the like, but you've got to have at least one 50 and farm some trials to get it!


But what I hate more than all this is the thought that this is the new status quo. The 'new itrial every issue' statement indicates that NCSoft intends to ride in this direction for at least a while.

How many more costume pieces are going to be hidden behind a trial grind?

How many more rewards are going to require farming the same trial over and over again?

How many more times am I going to hear 'Why won't you come BAF with us instead?' when I try to recruit for lowbie groups?


How about a new itrial every other issue? We've heard of strike teams that now make up the Paragon staff. How about you guys introduce us to the strike team that will introduce a new mid-level TF every issue, or the new mission writer strike team, or the strike team that will make new costumes that aren't hidden behind grinding trials? I'd really like to meet the strike team that is creating new incarnate content that's not tied to a trial.

I'm sick of trials. I've done BAF and Lambda more than I care to. The thought of farming Keyes is daunting. I don't want to do it.

It's making me not care about the rewards. The thought of not being able to share in the rewards with my groupmates who refuse to go on trials makes me want to never play my 50s.


Please. No more trials. I've had enough.

Since the full channel issue has apparently been resolved, Victory Badges 2009 has been retired. Please use '/chainjoin "Victory Badges"' to join Victory Badges instead.

Brief FAQs:

'What's the 'full channel issue'?' -- Before the /chantimeout command was implemented (and broken and refixed) Victory Badges had the maximum number of players join... including those who had inactive accounts and could not be removed from the channel. No new players could join unless someone left.

'Why Victory Badges 2009?' -- That's what a GM suggested. We had no clue at the time it would take so long to get the issue dealt with.

'Why close the channel at all?' -- We took an informal poll around the time the /chantimeout command was first implemented and about 2/3rds of both channels' population preferred to close VB09.

You should check in the tech threads, Cactus. I'm running Win7x64 with the latest drivers for my Nvidia video adapter and my performance is, if anything, quite a bit better than under WinXP32.

My suggestions:

Heroic: Love (Because you can't have Justice without 'Love and' before it.)

Villainous: Hatred

Rogue: Piracy (You know there'd be people lining up to be VIP Pirates!)

Vigilante: Persecution

Ironic: Capitalism

Funny: Goatee (Make it a favorite for Praetorians.)

Awesome: Revolution

Right now, I have 36 slots opened on my server of choice, Victory, and have several free extra slots that I haven't redeemed yet.

I'm certain that there's still a lot more clarification yet to be done on how the character transfers and extra slots are going to work.

One of the (but certainly not the only) reasons that my characters all live on Victory is because they all belong to the same Super Group, both in backstory and in the Super Group registration. About half of them are 50. I'm already transferring unplayed characters off of Victory in order to make new alts there.

With new power sets and new character slots being made available, I'm certainly going to go well over the 36 character limit. Again. Despite free transfers.

It'd seem to make sense at this point to remove one of two key limitations here:

a) Remove the 36 character per server limit so that players can choose to add more characters to the same server, including the new VIP server when it comes online

~ or ~

b) Allow supergroups to have members and/or coalitions across multiple servers

Thoughts?

I've been threatening to play a new fire blaster for some time. I've been carefully working on a backstory, name, and costume ideas. I went for it about a week and a half ago. She's now 22.

It's been a little while since I rolled a new character and have run into some problems that SEEM new to me.

All the Good Names are Taken - Haha. Yes, I know. Seriously, it took quite a while to come up with a name for my character. Most of my characters have 'Proper' names-- First Name Last Name. Getting the name I want is usually not difficult for me at all.

This time I decided I wanted a single word name for this character that started with a certain letter. After my first few choices turned out to be taken, I started going through the dictionary, picking nouns that started with the letter I wanted and sounded like they'd fit with my character's concept. I was stunned to see that choice after choice was unavailable.

Further (completely non-scientific) experiments show that random words from the dictionary under four syllables long tend to have about a 1 in 2 shot of being taken. For example, I started with 'To' and picked out a few random words:

Toady: In use
Toboggan: Available
Tocsin: In Use
Toehold: Available
Today: Available
Tomato: In use
Tombstone: Not available
Tomcat: In use
Toner: Available
Tonsil: Available
Tongue: In Use
Toothless: In Use

I didn't think a year ago that there was a 'Name Shortage'. Now, I'm not so sure. I've heard calls to run the culling script and I don't think that would be a bad idea. I think it's also time for the players of the game to reconsider what it would be like to live in an environment where your character could theoretically run into an identically named character from time to time. The devs seemed to have indicated in the past both willingness and that they could pull this off pretty easily.

Maybe we should let them.


Turn around and you're 50 - For the sake of simply seeing how the pace went, I kept track of what I did between 1 and 22 over about 8-9 real days. According to an 'M' npc, I've played 28 hours... just a little more than an average of 1 hour per level.

I did missions for Azuria until she quit giving them to me
17 radio missions and 6 safeguard missions.
'Bonefire'
'The Clockwork Captive' (aka 'Lou the Mechanic')
5 single missions for my contacts to get to the arcs.
New Positron TF part 1 and 2
5 Tip missions once I hit 20
and a small amount of random street-sweeping on my way to missions.

With the amount of content I've done, 22 doesn't SEEM terribly unreasonable. However, viewed as a whole, the pace does seem just a bit frenetic to me. I felt like I never had time to hunt for IOs or defeat badges. I felt like I couldn't take the time to wander around zones and fight enemies without outleveling my safeguards.

I also did a great deal of lollygagging-- like going AFK during solo missions to read-- which is inflating the amount of time in my average.

I generally think the leveling curve is too fast. The 'Disable Earning XP' button was made for me. However, I wish there were more options for adjusting the level curve... like an NPC who will exemplar you to a particular zone. You can't use Oro to kludge for that until you're 25.


Low Level Groups are Hard to Find - I don't really force myself to always build my own teams, but I do generally recruit for what I'm doing rather than wait around shouting 'LFT' and hoping someone else will invite me in their group.

However, this time around, if I had a team during my character's 1-22 trek, it was because I built it. I didn't get a single blind invite, let alone any nice tells asking me if I'd like to team. The largest team I managed to assemble was 7 people for the 2 Positron TFs.

No, this is not a 'Teh Game is Dyyyinggg!' screed. The players are there. They're just all level 50. Those who used to be sending out blind invites are now in Pocket D, shouting 'looking for trial' every 60 seconds. Most of my regular groupmates were busy with trials or weekly taskforces-- Apex and Dr. K these last two weeks, which just happen to be in the 45+ range.

I had moderate luck getting folks to join me for radio missions. The max size I managed to accumulate was 3 other teammates, all of whom were regular groupmates. The content I had the MOST difficulty getting people to join were the arc missions. I went through both of those solo, despite actively recruiting for them.

Some of the comments I heard during this period were kinda harsh. One of my regular groupmates who usually runs at 50 commented that he just couldn't bring himself to do the lower-level content any more. After having run so many characters through it, when he makes a new character, he PLs to 50 immediately rather than deal with not having all the powers he wants.

I really enjoy playing blasters and have taken many, many of them through this content. However, I suspect that I'm in a shrinking minority. The rewards for arc missions suck compared to TFs. The end reward is only given to the arc owner. The missions frequently involve lots of travel that many players dislike. Depending on the arc, there's a LOT of repetition and street hunting. If you're running with fewer than a full team, which is usually the case below about 35 or so, the super-rare 'Gold' recipe drop off of Bosses is that much more infrequent.

In particular the reward system for these missions could REALLY use some revamping.

Additionally, we have this wonderful new queue technology that's only being used for a minute fraction of the game's content. It seems like there's a lot of work that needs to be done on it, but there's also a lot of opportunity being missed.

As happens in many older MMOs, CoH's players generally gravitate towards the 'end' of the level spectrum. With the addition of 'end game' content in the form of trials, much of the draw for replaying older content has evaporated. This has a pretty dire effect on those who do want to replay it. It also has a nasty effect on new players.

Despite the fact that I KNOW the game is thriving, I've also seen both genuine new players and returnees get in to the /help channel trying to figure out where to get any kind of teams for low-level content. They go away frustrated.

This has got to change or we won't be thriving for very much longer.

The not allowing people to make nude 'Barbie and Ken' dolls excuse is just that. An excuse. They're fibbin'.

If they really cared about it, then they'd fix the way the textures overlayed with the skin colors.

Case in point:




Even if you use something other than very pale skin, the white textures still blend with the skin underneath.




Now if players can already make 'Nude' characters so easily, why bother to use that as an excuse to not change the color picker to allow more color options?

When the costume save file feature was first introduced, players experimented with manually editing their save files to get colors that actually matched. Accordingly, we KNOW the game engine can support arbitrary colors.

Prove me wrong, Devs! Fix one or the other! Heck, fix 'em both! That'd be the best possible outcome!


Also,

At the very least, there should be new basic patterns for tights and 'with skin' options Every. Single. Issue.

EVERY. SINGLE. ISSUE. THERE. SHOULD. BE. MORE. PATTERNS.

I'm not talking detailed, bump-mapped armor. I'm talking simple patterns. They have in the past accepted player submissions for these... I think the Lock pattern is one of those made by a talented texture artist.

Why do we not have more of these? Why does a single issue go by without four or five of these in?

I've said before that the costume creator is NCSoft's pony. They must brush it and feed it every day. They must give it lots of love and attention or it will get sick and quit bringing in players to the game.

Tonight, within 15 minutes, from 3 different sources, I heard comments that reinforced this. (Names have been anonymized to protect the innocent) --

Convo 1:

- The way Destiny and Judgement work would be totally different. Controllers would get control effects. Tankers would get agro and damage control effects. Blasters would get damage effects, etc... Right now, there's terribly a lot of sameness between characters that should not have that kind of sameness due to the fact that everyone can blast, buff, and debuff.

- I wouldn't have focused entirely on Praetoria with the story part of the system. Praetoria would figure in largely, but I would have included content written around the other 'High End' content. If I'd done one of two launch trials in Praetoria, the other would be in another dimension, such as on Rikti Earth.

- I'd have allowed thread drops on all level 45+ taskforces, probably at a reduced rate. Right now, there's too much of the player base focused on a tiny part of the game's content. A lot of players who'd otherwise be able to group with those characters as they would on taskforces like ITF aren't currently able to do that.

- Trials would have roughly the same mechanisms, but they'd be limited to 8 players. I personally do not like for the league system, but there's also a technical issue here. The mapserver starts to perform worse and worse with more entities on the map, including players, pets, and enemies. During the 'Escaping Prisoners' phase of BAF, a full league can bring the mapserver to its knees. Nobody knows when their powers are recharged or if any of their non-damaging powers are having an effect.

But that's just me...