Euler

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So why'd you start with a hobbit? And why did you choose to do that quest?

It's all about perception and perspective.

Some people don't like to do Westin Phipp's missions. It isn't their idea of a good time. Too evil, too mean. "Oh noes, he is a regular contact, I must complete him, but I really hate what he asks me to do!" False thinking, isn't it? Nobody -has- to do Westin Phipps if they don't want to.

And I'm surely not justified in scorning the entire game of CoX just because I don't like one contact.

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Seriously, It's only a grind if you aren't having fun doing it. If you are having fun, how is it a grind?

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There you go. Applies to all games. Some people like some games, some people like others. Some people will never change their preferences, while others change like the breeze.

I wasn't having fun when I kept dying multiple times to AVs-turned-EBs on regular contacts on my dominator. Sure, I complained about it just to tell people I saw a problem with this. I got by via practical means. Second time around, I wasn't willing to face this again, so I did something most other people would consider a horrible grind. PvP Warburg missions over and over.

But I had fun doing it. Mission completes every six minutes or so was a lot more enjoyable to me than "crud, hospital again" every six minutes.

Tastes differ. And the one-sided rants on both sides are just being closeminded by not acknowledging that peoples' preferences can be different.

Some don't like LOTRO. We get it. Don't play it. Some are tired of CoX and think LOTRO is the coolest thing since sliced bread and cheese. We get it. Don't let the door hit ya too hard, can we have your CoX stuff?

I'd love to have someone say "I get what you're saying" to me, and I can stop hovering around this thread like a twitchy vulture.

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Ok... I get what you're saying.

One of the things I tried very hard to do is not call people who prefer other games "idiots" or anything derogatory. You are correct, tastes do differ so I can't speak for all gamers but I can speak for myself.

In the unnamed game, I love Bree. I love the whole Bree area and everything in it. But when the other lands bug me for some reason. Race H ends up doing endless pie quests and races D and E end up in this icy hell that I just hate hate hate hate hate! So... the game has limited value to me. By comparison, since I can only judge the game's first 15 levels, I love Galaxy City, Atlas Park, Perez Park, King's Row, Steel Canyon, Baumtown, Skyway City, Mercy Island, Port Oaks, and Cap au Diable. Plus I can tolerate East Gate (a.k.a. The Hollows). So my 1-15 game experience is just a bit different, don't you think?


Addendum:
To clarify, I like the first two quest chains in the hollows, but after I defeat Frostfire, I'm out of there.

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*YAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN*

Are we done yet, or do we need to go on? I enjoy CoH/CoV. I've come back to it so many times now. I may be back again, who knows? What I do know is a lot of you don't like this new MMO a.k.a. LotRO.

I'm sorry that the game just doesn't hold much fun for you all. Me, I'm having a blast. So for those of you staying, enjoy the grind to 50!!

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CoH has a grind? I must have missed it. (^_^)

Seriously, It's only a grind if you aren't having fun doing it. If you are having fun, how is it a grind? On my way to 50 I've done every story arc I could, participated in a few hami raids, helped SG mates with task/strike forces, roleplayed in Atlas / Port Oaks, caused a little mayhem, went badge hunting, owned and got owned in Siren's Call, and fussed endlessly about my various costumes at Icon. I was frankly too busy to notice any grind.

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.... the same can't be said for the other game, however. Delivering pies and being a mailman isn't my idea of a good time.

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Yet I never accused the unnamed game of having a grind. (^_^) Grind is, of course, a state of mind but it is greatly effected by game design. In old EverQuest, you had exactly two things to do: Grind for XP and Farm for Plat. Crafting was a useless waste of time and the quests were a joke, except for the epics. Everyone, well almost everyone, learned from that and has made quests more fun and varied and crafting worth some effort at least.

BTW, My problem with the pies etc. wasn't that I don't like Fed Ex quests. Fed-ex quests, find the landmark, defeat x mobs in new area quests are all fine in moderation. What annoyed me is the shear number of them in one area. Yea, it's lore correct, I'll give them that, but it's not particulary fun and therefor it becomes a grind. Opps... I did accuse the game of having a grind. Well, not by name. (^_^)

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*YAAAAAAAAAAAAAWN*

Are we done yet, or do we need to go on? I enjoy CoH/CoV. I've come back to it so many times now. I may be back again, who knows? What I do know is a lot of you don't like this new MMO a.k.a. LotRO.

I'm sorry that the game just doesn't hold much fun for you all. Me, I'm having a blast. So for those of you staying, enjoy the grind to 50!!

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CoH has a grind? I must have missed it. (^_^)

Seriously, It's only a grind if you aren't having fun doing it. If you are having fun, how is it a grind? On my way to 50 I've done every story arc I could, participated in a few hami raids, helped SG mates with task/strike forces, roleplayed in Atlas / Port Oaks, caused a little mayhem, went badge hunting, owned and got owned in Siren's Call, and fussed endlessly about my various costumes at Icon. I was frankly too busy to notice any grind.

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Haven't they learned after all these years? Instancing works!

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This is one thing that gets me when game developers say, "Players don't like instancing! It ruins the immersion! They want wide open worlds!"

Wide open worlds are great, sure, but nothing kills immersion like being the 8th in line to acquire a supposed unique item from a mob that respawns every 15 minutes.

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You'd be surprised how many people actually LIKE that kind of thing.

There are people who demand everything that would drive most of us away from a game... They think it means something that they allowed themselves to sit through the frustration.
You can usually spot them fairly easily when they start talking about how "wonderful" EQ was.

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I think that's a gross misunderstanding on their part of what made EQ wonderful. What made EQ wonderful, the main feature that was new and exciting, was that it was multiplayer. Don't laugh, once upon a time that was new and exciting. So we were willing to put up with a lousy deku MUD with a graphical interface because it was multiplayer and massive in scope and that was a brand new combination to us. Of course now you can't get away with that. Everything seems to be multiplayer now, even stuff that probably shouldn't be, and so we now actually want to have a fun game along with the massive and multiplayer bits. Different time, different world.

BTW, if there was one game I'd like to bring back, it would be Ultima Online. Yea yea.. it still exists you say... well, no it doesn't. The game died when its creator, Lord British, left the company and EA drags around its zombie corpse as "The longest running MMO" or some such rubbish as if you could call its undead shuffle "running". But in that game, you could do anything. The down side, you could do anything. The power to do anything + anonymity = a bunch of people being real jerks to other because there are no consequences. If you wonder why we can manipulate items in instances, such as super bases, and not in the main map, it's because if people could create something as simple as a box, the first thing they'd do is spell out rude words with very large letters. Then they'd use them to block entrances and exits. And finally, if it wasn't for PvP flags, they'd then kill the people who are stuck. During my time in UO, I was killed this way more times than I could count and it's not fun yet there was a magic and mystery to being able to do anything that made UO a fantastic, if sometimes annoying, experience. But UO is not ever coming back in any real form. Lord British left Origin Systems, and Origin Systems is dead, eaten by that lumbering behemoth, Electronic Arts. Still, Lord British is now working for NcSoft and may still have a few surprises in him left. I'm looking forward to what he does next. ((and I've signed up for it's beta))

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*snip*

By the way, your Ganny is why I avoid Colorado Blvd.

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She's a terror, isn't she?

In a previous post, http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...088&page=0 , I extolled the virtues of CoH while slagging on several unnamed competing MMOs. Although I hate to admit it, the goal of the post was to convince myself not to leave CoH for a shiny new MMO that knew had more problems than a 2004 Diabold voting machine. Why would I considering leaving for a half finished MMO? Because it's new.. and shiny... and shiny new... and new shiny.. and because the folks marketing this magnificent monument to mediocrity managed to associate their game with the excellent books and academy award winning trilogy the game is based on and claim, by association, their game is of the same standard. To be fair, the game does get the lore correct, and the game isn't THAT bad, but leaving CoH for that game would be like turning down a free prime rib dinner for a McDonald's Happy Meal.

As it turned out, I actually needed very little convincing to stay with CoH. This unnamed unfinished game in question managed to convince me quite nicely. After carrying 12 pieces of mail, 13 bad pies, 2 baskets of eggs over hill over dale on and off various dusty trails I set myself defeating bears, pigs, and spiders (Oh My!) in order to finish even more quests only to discover a really bad day. Problem 1) I'm happily clearing my way though foraging bears to the bear den when a random elite suddenly spawns and kills me in 2 hits. Ok... no problem, I can handle this... I respawn and go back to the bear den. Problem 2) I make it in, avoiding the elite, and waste 30 minutes looking for a glowie that isn't there. I check the in game directions, I even check the forums, but it's just not there. Ok... no problem, I'll just do another quest. Problem 3) I head to the spider canyon and clear out spiders to go talk to a tree. Yep, a talking tree, this is a fantasy game after all. And before I can do it, and random dwarf player talks to the tree first and begins the escort quest. It takes this dwarf 30 minutes to take this tree out of the canyon, leaving me and a growing crowd of people waiting at the spawn point for our turn at the quest. This is very bad design, things like this should be in an instance. Fortunately, one of the guys hanging around quickly put together a team and we snagged the next spawn and got the quest finished. But I'm now seriously ticked. Problem 4) I have this old quest... it just turned green on me, go to x cave and defeat y whatevers. So I go down the pit and into the cave and there is a whatever.. and it cons green to me. I look around and double check... it's alone. I look above, I look below.. we're alone. So I pull out my sword and attack the whatever, and 5 more pop out of the walls and kill me before I can get my first self heal off. Now, I've had enough. I've reached the sliver frisbee stage, where my game disc is about to be tested for aerodynamics. Now this day is a combination of bad design, random bugs, and just plain old bad luck, but it irreparably tore the shine off the shiny new game. No longer can I be seduced by this game's slick marketing campaigns nor does the game's association with the epic books and movies have any hold on me. The game now stands as what it is. It's ok. The game is ok, and merely ok. One of the seemingly millions of merely ok fantasy games that populate the MMO genre. But most importantly, it's clearly dwarfed by polished goodness that is CoH. This game has no hold on me, and my focus has finally shifted from trying out this new formerly shiny game to getting my first villain to lv 50. (lv 44 corrupter, Jim Bowers, Justice Server, always looking for a team) I don't know if I'll make it to 50 before I9, but I'm game to try. (^_^)

Now that that's over with, my original post mentioned all the ways that CoH is superior to nearly every other MMO out there. Since then, people have mentioned features that I have missed, so here is an addendum to my previous post.

1b) Sidekick / Exemplar / Lackey / Malefactor System: Mien Gott! How should I forget this when I assembled my original list. I first noticed this feature when it wasn't in a ridiculously popular fantasy MMO. When two of your friends have lv 40 whatevers on a server and you want to join them, not having a sk system makes for some very awkward grouping.

2b) Travel Powers: In CoH, after lv 14, I can get to any part to any other part in 5 minutes max. My average travel time from mission to mission is about a minute. I spend more time in game doing my missions than walking between them which is why it the slow plodding pace of the new unnamed MMO came as a horrific shock where suddenly I'm walking for 10 minutes to do a 2 minute quest. Not a real efficient use of my time.

Mounts.... Yea, mounts. Instead of travel powers, which are clearly a superhero thing, fantasy MMOs often give you temporary run buffs or mounts to ride in order to lessen travel time. Let me say now that just because you're now selling your limburger cheese at half price doesn't change the fact that it still smells. A plus +20% run buff doesn't impress me when my character's default speed is slower than my grandmother and her walker. ((Now when she's driving her brand new shiny red Super Stock Dodge, that's a different story. Keep away from Colorado Blvd.)) Mounts aren't much better either. Fixed route mounts are nice, but some games like to invent these byzantine route systems making it difficult and annoying to use. ((Kudos to Blizzard for having a straight forward system that gets me where I need to go)) But even at their best, they're simply the CoH trams, only slower. And personal mounts are the most helpful, but even then not as useful. Unless my mount can travel at super speed or fly, we're not talking about the same thing.

MMOs are getting the idea. Everquest didn't have mounts or teleporters until years after the game was released. As I complain about travel times of 10 minutes, it used to be as high as 30 minutes before you hit your camp site. So progress all around, but this is one item CoH got right and it got it right from the start. Thanks Cryptic.

3b) Camping: Speaking of camp sites, one thing that is nearly forgotten is when CoH was first released, the standard method of leveling in most games was camping. It worked like this: First you assemble your party. Gotta have a tank, 1 or 2 healers, a damage dealer or two, and a mezzer for crowd control. After you assemble your party, usually at some safe point, you walk to your camp site. This journey can take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes depending on where it is, how difficult a location it is, and whither or not you know a druid with Spirit of the Wolf. Then you sit there, unmoving, and fight the same monsters over and over and over and over again in a long, boring, tedious, and did I mention boring, battle where you gang up on one, and keep the others mezzed. One at a time, always one at a time. CoH was one of the first games to break this model. I can't think of a single modern game that does this, but when CoH was new, this was still the most common way to play. It was dull, it was lifeless, and we are thankful that we no longer have to suffer mere camping in order to level.

4b) Character Ownership: I should have mentioned this with the costume creator, but it amazing that such a simple thing could have such a profound effect. In CoH, when I create a character, I am that character. I'm not one of 7 basic body types based on my race or class, I am what I create. And I am as unique, or not, as I choose. If in CoH you see two people with the same costume, odds are it's not an accident. Either they're part of a SG with a uniform ( such as http://www.paragonpd.net ) or they're just good friends. For example, on Thursdays, my friends and I log on to the Champion Server play "The Dark Star Kids", teenagers who got super powers from a fallen meteor. We wear a school uniform. No one else looks like us. The look is uniquely ours, and we're proud of it. That's a feeling you don't get in many other games.

Well.... I think I've covered everything this time. But I'd like to reiterate that the number reason I play CoH is because it's fun. It's as simple as that. See you in The Hive....