Inphiniti

I believe I understand the discrepancy: base chance to hit. But that's not mitigation, per se... so the math may be right, but just labeled misleadingly.

OK, I did that. I set DPS to 500, defense to 40% (which should not matter for this purpose), regen to 0 (this is the additional number, not the base), initial DR to 0, and initial regen to 45 hp/s. In the top left box, there should then be no defense, no damage resistance, and no other mitigation other than the base regen of 45 hp/s.

However, this box gives the mitigation as 295 hp/s. That's clearly wrong. Your math, and the resulting conclusion, is suspect.

I think this is great! But I have to echo the sentiments of many others... We really need freespecs to stack. Clearly you guys are doing this because you recognize the need to be fair to the players, but if you really want to be fair, I think it really is absolutely necessary to allow the freespecs to stack.

Why? Like I imagine most players, I have maybe a couple of dozen toons, and most of those have two builds. They're all going to need the respec... every last one of them. That's a lot of respecs to fit in, in just one week's time. Believe it or not, some of us do have lives outside CoH.

Tried it, more than once on more than one toon. He didn't.


Nope. They're telling me they are not my contact. What you're describing is contacts giving you actual missions to go to those places, which you have to complete in order to progress in their arc.


I'm well aware. Tedious, boring, and useless. I don't want to do them. That's another problem... I should be able to tell my contact, "no thanks, I already know about that, not interested." I don't ever want to talk to another Hero Corps recruiter ever again (especially since you usually have to go to another zone to chase them down). But you have to complete or use up your auto-complete to get the next mission. It detracts from the enjoyability of the game.

Yeah, that's what SHOULD happen, but it's NOT what's happening. Or actually, it is... The problem is by the time I completed Tremblor's last mission, I had already outleveled P. Yin. If you have outleveled a contact the first time you talk to them, they won't give you any misisons, and if you haven't done any missions for them, they won't give you a new contact. [Actually I have seen Azuria do it, which leads me to think that zone contacts behave differently than origin contacts, or that there's a phase-of-the-moon bug that makes the behavior vary.] If you don't believe me, TRY IT. Do the Faultline arc, get Tremblor to introduce you to Yin, and wait until you're lvl 20 to talk to her. She won't give you a mission, and she won't give you a contact. I promise. That, or a variation of it, happened to me at least a half a dozen times in the last 2 weeks with different arcs (had same problem in Hollows) and contacts.

Look, I'm not a n00b, I've been playing this game for 3 years, I have 7 lvl 50's, and I've done content in every zone in the game hero-side. I've done most of the task forces, gotten most of the accolades on more than one toon, etc. etc. I'm not clueless. I know how to get contacts, and I know what the options are. You're missing the point. Faster leveling without adjusting the levels of the contact's arcs causes outleveling the progression of contacts before you even get them, which in turn causes 3 annoying problems:

1. You have to chase down contacts a lot more often, because you outlevel the contacts in the zone you're in before you get them.
2. You are forced to miss content you like when it is level appropriate.
3. You still have to level your toons, which means you are forced to do content you *don't want to do* in order to make progress in the game.

The old origin content is, in most cases, vastly inferior to the content in the newer zones (blue caves, anyone?), and it's hard to find people that want to play it. Soloing is slow and tedious, especially if you like to play controllers or defenders. The best solution to all these problems is to relax or eliminate the level restrictions on zone content.

No offense taken (this time) -- but what you say above was exactly my point in making that comment. You accused me of trolling... I was reminding you what that looks like so you could see the difference. No part of my posts in this thread involved any trolling, save that facetious comment, which was made with humorous intent. No part of my posts involved nerd rage, insults, name calling of any sort... While I did express anger at NC's (mis)behavior with their pricing model, I did not display any anger. All I've done here is provided my opinion, along with a calmly thought out, logical rationale for having that opinion. But, as is often the case when someone posts a dissenting opinion in a forum, you called me a troll. Dissent is not the same as trolling; hence my remark. Ironblade's responses to my posts show that he has consistently misinterpreted or ignored my comments, and his responses were rather insulting, which is why I mostly ignored them.

Alright, I'm done with this thread. I've already canceled my game account, and none of you who've responded are able to do anything about my concerns with the game or NC's ludicrous pricing model, so there's nothing left for me to do here. My point was that I think NC's pricing model is morally wrong, and hopefully I've been able to persuade at least a few people that they don't deserve your hard-earned money for such minimal content add-ons, when you're already paying them a subscription fee. If not, then so be it. Enjoy!

It's not entirely subjective. It is largely subjective.

It's absolutely not irrelevant. It speaks directly to whether NC Soft is charging a fair price for this content. Just because you are willing to pay, doesn't mean the price is fair. You're right that value has a subjective component to it, so to establish whether the price is fair (within some margin of error), all you can really do is compare what's provided and its cost to other similar things. In this case, the content provided by the game is similar (in nature, not quantity). The amount of content you get per dollar is nowhere close to what you get when you buy the game, or any game. That is as close as you can get to an objective measure of the fairness of the price. And the result of that measure is, it's ridiculous, particularly in light of the fact that you also have to pay your subscription fee to actually use that content. So the cost isn't $10... it's actually much higher than that.
You obviously stopped reading at that point in the post. This comment is asinine and deserves no other response.

Geez, I even TOLD you that I was joking, and you still missed it... Sigh.

Right. You don't agree with me, but you have no rational rebuttals to any of my points, so you call me a troll. I'm sure that's very satisfying for you. But after all, we're on the city of heroes forums, so you can feel self-assured in your fanboyism.

Nope, got nothing else to say. You either agree or you're clueless... continuing would just be stale and droll. a lot like playing CoH has become.

Now THAT's trolling! (Get it? I was joking above...)

Look, there are lots of great ideas out there about how to make CoH better. I like the premise of this game, and I like a lot about the way it's implemented, but the content is stale, and I think you're all crazy for paying for marginal, minimalist content improvements when you're already paying for a subscription. If Paragon/NC stops with that nonsense, and implements some actual game play improvements like some of the great stuff being discussed in the thread about task force improvements, I'll be the first one back at the store renewing my subscription. I just don't think they have it in them.

You must not play much, or else you'd know that a lot of people are moving to freedom and virtue from other servers because they're dead. I hear it all the time. I moved there myself about a year ago, from guardian, because it was getting hard to get on (decent) teams. Freedom itself has started to suffer the same fate... a lot of the people I've played with are gone. It used to be easy to get on pug teams at any time of day... that's much less true than it was, even just a couple of months ago.

Sorry. They still did, after the server upgrades. Freedom still did, right up until the AE nerf.

Sorry Charlie. The game hasn't been NEW since April of 2004. But actually, you're making my point for me.

Entire game, with 100's of missions, hundreds of enemies, dozens of powers, emotes, costume pieces, etc.: $20
Booster pack, with a couple of emotes, costume pieces, and mostly useless (but interesting, I admit) powers: $10.

So, are you going to tell me that you honestly think the content in two booster packs (you can even choose which two!) is roughly equivalent in value to the entire original game? Not by a long shot. Let's say that the original price of the game was $60. Even then, do you seriously believe that 6 booster packs is equivalent in value to the entire original game? I really don't think so. So, what the devil are you paying for?!?!

Yeah, I confused the price, I paid $19.98, but that was the price for both, not each one. But it hardly matters... if they were $1 each, my point is still the same: The content you're paying for isn't worth the money, if you compare it to the price you paid for all the content that came with the original game. You'd need maybe like 10,000 booster packs for it to be comparable. Not to mention that I'm paying for a subscription to the game... So, shouldn't I be getting all this content as part of my subscription? THAT is why it makes me angry whenever they release a new booster pack (though, this really should have been clear from my previous post). There's a lot of old, crufty content (like almost all of the original boot costume pieces, a lot of the other costume pieces, all of the old CoT and Council cave maps, etc. etc.). I don't think I've ever been on a CoT or Council map without someone on the team complaining about how much they suck. They owe you newer, better content: you're already paying for it... 15 bucks a month. Some of you a lot more than that, for those who have 2 and 3 accounts. So, let me be clear: I'm not saying the booster packs are crap in fact they're quite good; I'm saying they're a total rip job that you should all already be getting with your subscription. That's the problem with the booster packs. Well, that, and the fact that the devs should probably be focusing their time on creating new, more interesting game play instead of emote animations and costume pieces. That's what will bring back the masses who have left the game. And to be perfectly honest, I don't see any way that the new expansion won't have the same problem, at any price.

Yeah, all I can say is, it seemed better than it actually was. Good marketing I guess. At least I realized that I was getting ripped off... a lot of you clearly still haven't.

The article is negative, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Anyone can disagree with anything... But I can't see you making a rational argument that any of the points are wrong. As far as I can see, his comments are dead on.

I guess you (and several other responders) missed the fact that the article was a PREVIEW: it was posted in May of 2009, before the MA nerf, and long before the new expansion was widely publicized. Besides which, the big problem with the game, the big point that you're missing, is that none of the new content is actually new at all. It's just a different skin on all the same old content. Clear the cave/office/warehouse/whatever, beat up the AV, and collect the same old boring money, XP, enhancements, etc. Rinse and repeat. There's nothing new about it.

The author's point is that, for a lot of people who've been playing for a while, the old content is quite stale, and the new content is nothing more than a repackaging of the old content. There are no new mission types. There are no new challenges. There are no new ways to make use of your powers, no new strategies or techniques to defeat particularly difficult enemies or arcs.

Given that, for people like me who have grown bored with that, there is little in the game that is interesting. One of the things, as you point out, is to play with the invention system to improve your toon to its maximum potential. Can you see the problem here? Guess what you have to do in order to do that: play boring missions. Essentially, farm.

So when AE was released, yes, it was popular... because yes, people want to level their toons fast, and they do want to IO them out with sets, and if you have nothing else to do but play stale, boring missions to get there, it takes too damn long. So AE was fantastic! For a couple of months, anyway. Then it got nerfed, and it was just like all the rest of the stale content. Not so, you say? Well, then maybe you can explain why NO ONE USES IT ANYMORE. Well, OK, not noone, but before the nerf there was barely room for you to stand in the main room... now, if you go in there, you'll be lucky to see more than a handful of people there. It's dead. The joke is, AE = Always Empty. Broadcast that you want an AE team... people will laugh at you.

Which matters not one bit, if it's all the same as all the other content you're already bored with.

Done those, dozens of times. They were definitely cool, the first couple of times. Now, not so much. I haven't done all of the task forces, but I've done most of them, and I don't really feel like I'm missing out on anything. They're still a bunch of missions that pretty much fit the same dull pattern.

Oh, and you mentioned PvP. Most people will agree, PvP sucks in CoH. Actually I do PvP, and it is (for me) one of the only things that's still fun about CoH. But only if I'm playing one of my melee toons... I greatly prefer to play controllers, which in PvP is teh suck. If you bring a controller, and display any skill at all (or, well, if you don't), expect to die early and often. That, simply put, just ain't fun.

Here's what I think's going on. You're hitting on it with this comment, without realizing it. The game play is stale, the missions are dull, and just about the only thing left to do that really is fun is work on your toon. That's why farming is popular, and that's exactly why the booster packs are "interesting": they give you new options to customize your toon. Since this is one of the only remaining fun things in the game, the booster packs give the illusion that they're valuable. I'm not saying they're crap... quite the opposite: when you compare what you get to similar things that came with the game, they're better. I'm just saying that the value isn't there.

What you're essentially saying is that the devs should stop making things that people want, and focus on the stuff that you think the game needs regardless of whether it would make anyone (besides you) happy.[/quote]

It's hardly just me... If you think it's not, ask yourself why, a year ago, freedom at peak gaming times was nearly full all the time, and actually impossible to get on during events, and now never has more than one green dot on the server list screen. Ask yourself why at 9:30 PM Cimerora (some of that wonderful new content you keep raving about) has exactly 6 people in zone. Where did all the people go?

I can't say for sure, but I assume they left, looking for something interesting to do.

It's not that what actually comes in the booster packs is poor quality... it's usually at least as good as similar content that came with the game, and often better (let's face it, pretty much all of the original boots models were complete crap, for example). The problem is how little you actually get, and the price you pay for it. The entire game, NEW, cost what, $60? That included hundreds of missions, dozens of families of critters, a bunch of arch types for the players to play, etc. etc. Now, for about 1/3 of the price, you get a couple of emotes, a handful of costume pieces, and a few gimmick powers that mostly don't affect the GAME PLAY one iota. How is that equitable? Can't you see the disparity?

I bought both of the Magic pack and the Cyborg pack at the same time... and regretted it within the hour. I played with the costume change emotes for a few minutes, (FINALLY) gave some of my magic and tech origin toons costumes that looked the part, and then thought, "$40 bucks for this? SERIOUSLY?!?!?" I really can't understand how you guys keep eating this stuff up. It makes me ANGRY every time they release a new booster pack.

Right: like the fact that this pittance of new content was not handed out to everyone who's already paying $15/mo. to play this game?

There are a lot of REAL ideas floating around the forums about how to improve the game, but as I read them, they're mostly the same ideas that people have been tossing around since I started playing. Here's a clue: the dev's aren't listening. Creating REAL content is costly and requires creativity, and NC Soft seems unwilling to expend either. They're happy to keep selling you the almost nothing that comes in these booster packs, since the players seem happy to continue forking over money for it. It's a giant snow job.

This article about i13 highlights everything that was, and remains, wrong with the game:

http://www.brighthub.com/video-games...cles/5691.aspx

It's on the money, and nothing has really changed in years. Time to unsub I guess, which saddens me because this game was a great idea that gets so much right, but in the end suffers from a lack of anything fun to DO. I had hopes that the new expansion will improve things enough to make it worth hanging on, but it turns out I can't wait that long. Another $15/mo to clear the same warehouses as my new toons continue to run the same boring mishes I was doing 2 years ago? None for me, thanks. Fix THAT, and maybe that's worth $20.