Here's my whine. I've already got my cheese and crackers, thank you.
I've also found the base building options... how shall I say this... significantly less than could be desired. Originally I wasn't going to buy CoV -- I can't get behind the ideas on which the game is based -- but the base building options alone were tempting enough that I blew my money. After a couple of weeks steady play and a lot of "oo cool costume, why can't my hero have that?" , I came back to my original thought that I didn't wanna be a bad guy and PvP was SO MUCH not for me, and all I wanted was the bases.
Which should teach me to believe hype.
My SG is small but we work hard and have thrown a lot of time into building prestige because many of the base options appealed to us. We have no interest in raids. We wanted to enhance our gaming experience and help lower level members work with higher levels.
Of course, there's the immense expense for having a base. We are 4 weeks in and we've got the basics of what will one day (potentially) be a useful base, but I'm not holding out hope. Everything is geared toward Raiding and PVP, and even that looks horribly expensive. Salvage and building turned out to be just a kick in the teeth -- they are basically just unlocks for POTENTIAL to have particular items, which must still be purchased, and then must have add-ons opened and purchased (teleporters, I'm looking at you).
What did we want? Our own med center and teleporter so we could go to zones without having to cross other zones, or having to run forever to get back into a mission. We wanted some nifty items we could "use" (aka have animations to incorporate) and some space for those goofy moments when we wanted to (power gamers, don't read this) roleplay, since most of our characters are conceptual and comic-booky to an extreme. A place to hang trophies would be fun. A spot to dump influence/inspirations/enhancements for group use would be nice, too.
Somehow, while I realize this might be a lot in code and other mysterious stuff my little gamer brain can't comprehend, it doesn't SEEM like that much. Large portions of the base amenities are not only much too pricy, but they are a bait and switch -- you buy the ingredients and bake the cake, and then you STILL have to pay for the priveledge of having it.
The whole salvage issue was completely disheartening. There's no economy in CoH/CoV, no market for the exchange or sale of salvage, and no way to store or delete what you can't trade or use. Salvage doesn't really have much use, either. Considering the destructability of most things in a base (especially the penalized component made items), raiding is simply out of the question. Could the rewards really be that great?
Then there's the lack of any planning mechanism and the rules of room layout (if this is how missions are laid out, I now understand why most office building maps are constructed like rabbit warrens). The "fun" of unlocking new potential items is well and good, but having to deconstruct and reconstruct a base to utilize new things is incredibly tedious -- even with extensive pencil and grid paper planning.
I'm waiting to see what happens with the bases. I hold out hope that this was just a case of "dead line looming, must slap something together", and not the original intent of the developers (yeah, I still believe in Santa Clause, but only a little). We keep playing and experimenting and trying things out, but our return for effort has been pretty small. Ok, it's been nonexistant. I understand the idea of long haul, but in a game where players can go from 0 to 50 in 3 months of heavy playing, "long haul" is a relative term. With an SG of 12 players and alts, most of whom spend all their time in SG mode, I would really expect a somewhat faster return for effort ratio. instead, we have several small rooms empty of everything but the one piece of equipment allowed, none of which does anything to enhance gameplay.
It looks like it will take another 4-6 months for my SG to get something with a minimum of usefulness. We've thought about just decorating up some space, but to what end? Anything we could do in a base we could do standing on top of a tram station, and we wouldn't be sacrificing influence to do it. Perhaps I should have curbed my enthusiasm for CoV and held off for the 6-8 months it seems likely to take for changes and updates to be installed, but, then again, why have new stuff in the game that can't be played with?
My frustration with this aspect of the game seems only to increase as I learn more about it, so much that it's coloring everything else that, for the last year and a half, I've loved. I really feel like I was duped and I keep hoping that future developments will prove me wrong so I can find again what I so much enjoyed about CoH.
