Creole Ned

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A lot of the problems I noticed have been addressed: The insane leveling curve, the overly-zealous Debt mechanics, the lack Enhancements that don't decay with levels, the complete uselessness of Scrappers, and so forth. However, there are still big, huge problems that are keeping the average gamer away- the biggest being the entire Bridging/Doorsitting/PLing nonsense. Normal gamers won't play a game with those issues. But instead of fixing it, as it should have been fixed on Day One, the Devs ignore it.

[/ QUOTE ]Uh, have you played any other MMO, ever? Our "insane leveling curve" and "overly-zealous Debt mechanics" are a drop in the bucket compared to the grind and death penalty in most games, not to mention the fact that PLing and farming (or something with similar effect) will always happen, in any and every game, no matter what the developers do to try and prevent it.

Games are a time sink, MMOs doubly so.

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Which games are you referring to? The ones I consider direct competition to CoH/V are no worse and in some cases better than CoH/V in terms of "grind" or death penalty. CoH/V was a clear break from the "hardcore" style of the original EQ back in 2004 but really, I can't think of any big MMO that follows that old model now. Certainly every game I've tried has had a gentle leveling curve and minimal death penalty. These things are not exclusive to CoH/V anymore and haven't been for some time.

The leveling curve in nearly any MMO could still be considered a grind if you compare it to a single player RPG, though.

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Oh yeah, I forgot to add that they zones that have no billboards, or few of them, will be getting billboards and ads too. Source:The radio interview. So the first new things that will be added to the game is more advertisement space. Good use of the extra revenue. lol

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This, I think, is a legit concern, that the ads will result in an increase in the "visual pollution"* in the game. I don't want the game's zones to end up plastered with billboards and other ad spaces.

But it is a *very* effective way to insure that those who don't opt-out will see at least some of the ads, wherever they go in-game.

Someone want to do a count on the number of billboards in a given zone now? It'd be interesting to compare that number to when this goes live.

* the visual pollution applies whether the billboards are displaying fake or real ads. It's clutter either way.

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Of course, haven't read

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You might want to do that.

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Just tell us we have an option of choosing the standard or current sounds over the visual sounds.

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You have the option of being taken in or not taken in by an April Fool's joke.

The next issue of The City Scoop will have a feature article on how to control your toxic projectile vomiting at parties.

FREEM!

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With the Power Information...will there be a way to view this info outside of character creation or levelling up? Possibly more detailed information on your Enhancement Screen or with the hover over on your Powers tab?

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The detailed power info will be available in the power selection screen, level up screen, respec screens, enhancement screen, and as another tab on the info window for powers.

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Yoinks. That covers about all of it, then.

Some nice QoL stuff here. Eight thumbs up!

Here is an exclusive preview of part 2 of Gamezone's article:

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Dr. Brainstorm: I was conducting an experiment last night and a bolt of lightning struck my exposed brain. This not only necessitated more bandaging, it also completely wiped all memory of the forthcoming powersets being proliferated from my mind. Terribly sorry about that (muahaha). But don't worry, I have the list safely secured in a vault at a lab in Grandville. The vault has an elaborate lock but fear not, I still remember the combination to open it. The lock, however, also has a timer and won't actually open until three days after the combination has been entered. Come back on Monday for more information. Until then, get out of my lab! Muahaha!

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*fade to black*


Note: Change "Monday" to whatever is desired for maximum doomedness.

I've always really liked your avatar, Nightblade. I love the build-up to the shot of the head-stabbing.

A better solution (and QoL fix) for masterminds having to summon and buff their pets all the time:

Have pets persist between zones. Cross from Cap to Sharkhead, your pets go with you. Enter a mission, your pets go with you. Exit a mission, your pets come out with you.

I was actually surprised CoV shipped without this. It's the only MMO I've played where pets *didn't* persist across zones. Heck, most games the pets are still there even if you logout then log back in.

The "summon/buff all at once" suggestion is a lot more practical, though. They could probably rig up something to do that without too much trouble. Persistent pets would be a much bigger technical hurdle. One still worth pursuing, if possible.

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<QR>

I'm saddened but not surprised to see the Hollows get further emasculated. The zone was great in its first incarnation, before the Outcasts and Trolls had their superpowers yanked. There should be places people complain are too hard. They separate the players from the poseurs.

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Man, I remember when the Outcasts had their powers at level 5. They need to get them back now that we have solo spawns. I have to admit, I'll miss the old Hollows, but it's still for the good of the game not to have a newbie zone so hard.

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Yeah, I'm all for "ironman" challenges being in the game.

But not at level 5.

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Inspiration Conversion: Right click an inspiration to convert three of that kind into any one inspiration of another kind.

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I like this. This seems like a very powerful change to the game play. I can think of many ways how this will effect my powerpool choices. Maybe I can bypass Stamina now since I might be able to constantly maintain a tray full of tier 3 blues.


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The conversion will not give you tier 3 inspirations, just tier 1. This was confirmed by pohsyb. No "upgrading" occurs.

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Players will take the most expedient route if you let them and the devs have given them exactly that in short, repeatable missions. In CoV the problem doesn't seem as acute, perhaps because I both team less villainside and because the newspaper there is integrated into the contact system instead of being an adjunct to it as it is heroside.

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Actually, I just try to avoid the mission chains that send you from Zone A (where your contact is) then to Zone B, then back to the contact, then to Zone C, then back to the contact, then to Zone D... et cetera. If the contacts would allow you to call them after the first mission, and would predominantly give mission within the same zone that the contact is located in, then I'd be much much more willing to run through regular contacts.

That's why Faultline and Striga contacts tend to get a lot more patronage from heroes, and why villains tend to actually pay attention to their contacts instead of focusing on the newspaper. Inconvenience does not equal content, or challenge - it is just inconvenience.

There is no reason why, when you are willing to put yourself in harm's way at a contact's behest, they shouldn't answer their [expletive deleted] phone for you.

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I don't disagree that the "go here, go there, go everywhere and no, you can't have my cell number until you've done 90% of what I offer you" contacts contribute to players doing scanner missions that are always in the same zone and require little travel time. It will be interesting to see how this affects the regular Hollows contacts, since this will only be the second "story zone" after Faultline to offer repeatable missions. I may be concerned over nothing.

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Unless the repeatable missions are for the higher end of The Hollows (low to mid teens) and send you to the far corner of the map (away from the Atlas gate), I have to agree with Doc Scorpion. The Hollows' regular contacts of Wincott, Julius the Troll et al will be ditched in favor of running endless repeatable missions for the quick and easy payoff.


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But players can already do that with Radio mission in King's Row, Steel and Skyway. That is, if they realize they don't have to stay in the Hollows until level 15...

Some players will go for the easy route, as they do now, but others will still want to hang out with Frostfire, Atta and the rest.

If the Hollows spawn groups become reasonable, I might just head in there to check things out. Normally I avoid the Hollows with my lower level characters.

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Right, I'm just thinking most players will go for the easy route, not just some. Not a concern if you mostly solo, of course, but it's more problematic if you PuG.

XaoGarrent:
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Actually, you level faster doing good contact missions. Especially ones with AVs or huge [censored] maps. If I start a PuG I usually try to snag a contact or two before starting it, and just run the contact until it's dry. I find people stick with the team longer that way anyway.


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Even if that's accurate, it doesn't seem to be the perception on the teams I get invites to.

Unless the repeatable missions are for the higher end of The Hollows (low to mid teens) and send you to the far corner of the map (away from the Atlas gate), I have to agree with Doc Scorpion. The Hollows' regular contacts of Wincott, Julius the Troll et al will be ditched in favor of running endless repeatable missions for the quick and easy payoff.

It's funny, I was really looking forward to getting scanner missions in CoH but in hindsight I think they've actually diminished the play experience both because the missions themselves are short and utterly generic (save for foiling the bank/store robbery) and have all but replaced contact missions on virtually every PuG I get invited to.

Players will take the most expedient route if you let them and the devs have given them exactly that in short, repeatable missions. In CoV the problem doesn't seem as acute, perhaps because I both team less villainside and because the newspaper there is integrated into the contact system instead of being an adjunct to it as it is heroside.

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What in the Wide Wide World of Sports is going on here?!?!

A hearty welcome to our other new overlo... I mean, redname, Minx

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That was a very nice greeting, Obsydius.



Welcome, Blue Steel and Mynx!

A lot of people talk about how The Hollows is great at teaching aggro ranges but that always struck me as very odd. If it's taking someone five levels of play and hazard-sized spawns before they learn that getting close to an enemy means it will attack you, well, I dunno what to say. It's a dead-simple concept to pick up and it's utterly binary. I picked up on it in the Outbreak tutorial where the enemies are often placed close enough to cause accidental aggro if you're not paying attention.

But maybe I was just especially observant or something.

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Hollows got a revamp? Hollows? Thats makes no sense. Hollows is a relatively new zone. lol. When does perez park get a revamp? Or Boomtown?

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The Hollows were added in September 2004, less than five months after the game went live, so "relatively new" may be overstating it a wee bit.

I have no doubt other zones will get spruced up in time. The Hollows were probably picked because it's got so many players going through it. May as well make the experience a little more pleasant. I'm curious to see what they've done. If my level 6 lowbie no longer gets missions that are 1.5 miles away from the Atlas Park gate I will declare the revamp a huge success.

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I don't so much "believe" it will happen as "expect and require" it to happen, as should every other poster, lurker and fanboy, and all those customers who have never even set keystroke in these Forums.

Because we pay the bills, folks.

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Oh that's nothing. Before the Good vs Evil Edition came out my first CoH/V purchase was a City of Villains box. On the back of the box it specifically mentioned the Cathedral of Pain Trial. Read that last sentence again. Yes, the CoP was a promised feature on the box that I purchased.

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This has been debunked before. The Cathedral of Pain is NOT advertised on the box for City of Villains. I have both Collectors and regular editions and will scan both in their entirety if you don't believe me. The CoP trial is not even vaguely hinted at, much less advertised on the box.

I don't think that's quite the way Chase means it (though I'll let him clarify). To me, it would mean a Hellion or Skull could still be a threat to a level 50, but not a serious one, unlike now where they become little more than bugs to be squashed. The game could also tag enemies to not aggro on higher level characters just as they do now, the player would just learn that a Hellion won't aggro on his level 50, rather than having a hard rule that "any critter five levels lower than the player character will never aggro on the player".

That's the way I'd see it working, anyhoo.

I posted a link to the EQ2 vet reward page earlier in this thread.

EDIT: Direct link to EQ2 vet rewards

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Chase, first impressions count for a lot. Unless you're actively opposed to having the mission doors for level 1 and 2 characters moved out of the red zones, I'm not sure what your point is. If you think things are fine the way they are now, just say so. I think moving a few of the mission doors would be a nice QoL feature for new players. If you disagree, so be it.

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To be fair, my preferred solution would be revamp the whole leveling system to function more like it does with giant monsters & rikti. I'd like the game a whole lot more if the foes didn't grey out so fast and if some encounters always held some risk. Even wolverine found the occasional common thug a good brawling challenge on occasion...

Do that and there wouldn't be the huge difficulty difference in the redzones, just a reasonably more challenging one.

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I'd really like to see a "traditional" MMO try this. It would be a fascinating experiment, if nothing else.

As InfamousBrad said, if you've not gotten a door in the red zone on a lowbie, especially in Atlas, you might want to buy a few lottery tickets, because the odds are in your favor.

I've created three lowbie heroes in the last few weeks and all three got missions in the red zone at level 2 -- par for the course for me.

I think it's a good enough fix to warrant being a priority. You may be right about changing mission doors not being as simple as it might seem, though. This is the dev team that managed in one patch to remove *all* doors from the tower in Grandville, after all.

As for EQ2, the game has changed a lot, so if you haven't been through the tutorial islands in recent months, I've little doubt it's different now. I've never been sent to the higher level parts early on with any of my many alts. The dev team there has done a considerable amount of work in making that game more streamlined and newbie-friendly -- sometimes to the consternation of the grizzled vets who've been there since launch and leveled their characters both ways uphill in the snow.

The fact that we've not seen much of the same grumbling about such changes here (XP smoothing, etc.) would seem to suggest moving those mission doors might be a good thing.

It's not a dealbreaker for me, but then again, I used to level my characters uphill both ways in the snow, too.

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But I think the major issue you had with CoH's starting missions was in the map design. Apparently you had the bad luck to get a randomly picked mission door in the boondocks with red and purple enemies, and felt compelled to fight every single enemy on the way there. CoV's missions aren't so random, and some even appear hardcoded to various spots (snake pit by cobra badge comes to mind.)

Still, it should have been a learning experience as to what con-color actually meant though. It's a standard MMO trope. Don't fight or even go near stuff that's too high level for you. Or you die. Horribly. Maybe a hard pill to swallow, given you're supposed to be a hero, but it's something any MMO player has to figure out sooner or later.

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I've played a decent number of MMOs. CoH is the *only* one that regularly sends a new player to a mission/quest where they must run a gauntlet of enemies that are much higher level than the player's character. I don't think that's good design, I think it's bad design and can turn off people just trying the game out. The converse -- having players go to missions where they can reasonably tackle any foes they meet along the way -- is not likely to have any negative effects.

I reckon most players don't want "hard pills to swallow" when first trying a new game. They're playing to have fun, not to prove their manhood or something. There's plenty of time for hard challenges. Throwing them at the newbie is not good design.

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Worst case scenario should be a level 2 getting a door near level 6 stuff, IIRC. 6 is the highest in Atlas or Galaxy, and if a new player skips the tutorial entirely, then he/she has already shown some poor judgement. That's a 4-level difference... which IS a bit of a challenge.

I may have been lucky, but I've never had my *first* round of missions from my first contacts go to the red zones. Worst I've encountered is the orange areas (level 3-4) for my first 3 missions which is reasonable, but could be pure luck. By the time 3 missions are done, you're level 3, borderline 4. There, the level 5-6 isn't THAT unreasonable.

Also remember that levels mean different things in different games. In Everquest 2, just 1 or 2 levels different made a SUBSTANTIAL difference in difficulty last I played it. In City of Heroes, even at level 2 I can take on a single red-conned minion (3 levels higher) with a reasonable chance of success.

And look at EQ2:

Not many "door" missions, but the "trial of the isle" and similar tutorial zones are levels 1-6... with many of the level6 mobs "group" sized. It's also not too uncommon to get a task at level 3 that takes you to the graveyard near the largest level 6 mobs.

Leave the tutorial isle at level 5-6 and you're next adventure zones are 6-10. Again, a good chance of finding things 4 levels higher in a game where level differences are a MUCH more notable difference in difficulty.

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Chase, first impressions count for a lot. Unless you're actively opposed to having the mission doors for level 1 and 2 characters moved out of the red zones, I'm not sure what your point is. If you think things are fine the way they are now, just say so. I think moving a few of the mission doors would be a nice QoL feature for new players. If you disagree, so be it.

I've done the island tutorial many times for EQ2, both for the good and evil sides. There's no graveyard on either island, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there. Second, the linked mobs you encounter are specifically mentioned in the tutorial pop-up tooltips the first time a player targets them, so not knowing what to expect there only happens to the willfully ignorant. Third, the linked mobs are weaker versions of the solo mobs -- this is something that is nearly universal throughout the game. Fourth, if you follow the quest progression on the starter islands you'll never find your character near +3 mobs. Just killing a few mobs along the way will often result in you being +1 to your current quest targets.

Finally, you can leave the island at any time, even level 1 -- and if you do, the city zone you go to has appropriate-level quests you can tackle that will easily get you into range for the first zones outside the cities like Oakmyst or The Caves. And this only applies to the two original starting cities. The other three all give you level 1 quests right from the start, eschewing the tutorial zones altogether.

I've played a *lot* of EQ2 and what you describe doesn't match my experience at all, really, not even from the time I took my first character through a year and a half ago.

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Sometimes if you make the newbie experience too easy, they're not going to expect the ramping up of difficulty later on. And then you've just done a deceptive 'bait and switch' on them.

And sometimes, a harder newbie experience might just encourage grouping up, socializing and making allies. Maybe it's the Hollows who encourages newbie heroes to start teams early... who knows?

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I don't think mission doors in level-appropriate areas would be considered "too easy". Asking for level 1 and 2 characters to get mission doors that do not force them to run around spawns of level 5s and 6s seems reasonable to me, and that's all I'm requesting here.