Mysterious_J

Now just tell me you'll eliminate the Security Level requirements on hazard zones, so that teams don't have to avoid arcs that send you into them because there are SKs present...

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... but killing hamidon mitochondria that can't fight back is fun again and again and again?

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And? I'm sure everybody realizes that there are levels of reward that can induce the players to do boring stuff. I'm sure there's a level of drops you could set that would cause players to jam themselves all into Perez, but so what? Even if you could revive Hydra farming, you shouldn't want to.

Getting players out of MA isn't (or shouldn't be) an end in itself. The better MA missions are as much fun to do as pretty much any mission in the game. The Devs did a great job of delivering all the stuff that you can do in a mission, but that removes any reason to do "official" missions...and there are lots of reasons not to put up with the hassles involved in non-MA content. Wouldn't it be better to remove those hassles and come up with new stuff that uses the zones to deliver an experience that the MA can't duplicate than to figure out how far you have to tilt the rewards 'til, like with Hamidon mitochondria, you can get a lot of players to do it despite it being a drag?

I'm not sure what, besides more events like the SupaTroll rave and the Steel Canyon fire, or like I said using the scaling code to get rid of zones of nothing but greys...but if travel is just a time-sink, people will skip it as much as possible. As the years have rolled by they've added more and more ways to do that, but the enthusiasm with which people greet each new short-cut should be telling them something about how much fun people are having slogging from place to place. Maybe now that they have factions that fight each other, and zone-event triggers, they can finally make it so that player action can temporarily change the power-balance in the zone, e.g. clearing enough Skulls out of the Boneyard triggers a Police raid invasion that helps clean up Perez for a while. Or smack enough Sky Raiders and there's a Family invasion.

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Though i think the teleporter would be pushing it, i think looking at some zones and maybe putting in a zone teleporter might not be a bad idea.

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Look at it this way: the MA system already allows you to just jump into mission after mission with no travel, and return from the hospital with no travel, selecting any mission you want. Even if you gave everybody perma-Mission TP (which would make perfect sense in-Lore even) regular missions would still be less convenient since you have the whole rigmarole with contacts, hunts, fedexes and the like. Mission TP, even if it is pushing it, would only push it back closer to balance.

It seem to me that talk of adjusting the rewards is beside the point. What MA has really done is shown that a lot of the game content isn't actually fun for the players, at least not after the first couple of times. Given the option to skip running around from contact to mission and back, getting sent to talk to this or that tutorial liason, having to run Fedexes, and just get into the missions, players are voting to spend their time doing actual content. A lot of the game was designed before anybody had any clear idea of how much fun the various parts would be, particularly when it came to replaying it over and over.

The way to restore parity isn't to bribe/threaten players to do the boring stuff of slogging around Paragon, trying to get the contacts to cough up the interesting missions. The Devs should concentrate first on making the boring stuff optional/skippable, and then to make it interesting. Since not everybody finds the same things interesting it's really important to not make any of it mandatory.

They could start by making all contacts give out cell-phones immediately, and get rid of the contact tree. Contacts could still suggest the next logical person to go to, but if you walk up to unfamiliar contacts they should just give you their missions. They should remove the limit on how many missions you can drop; if there's a reward/time issue, then make it you can drop 1 per 3 days for the reward, or as many as you like without any reward. If players don't want to arrest 30 Crey, making them do it to get an interesting mission just funnels them into Radios or AE. Sending everybody to Perez Park to arrest 10 CoT is just a reason to out-level all the early contacts to avoid that mission (or save your initial Drop Mission for the Perez Security Chief).

Next they could give everybody Mission Teleporters and make the recharge trivial. It should be a big red flag how happy people were to get those suckers and how frequently they use them. If you've got "content" that people are so eager to skip, you should let people skip it until you've found a way to make it entertaining. Otherwise they'll use MA to skip it instead. While they're at it, they could award everybody the Traveler Vet power, or at least let them buy Jet Packs in AP, so if they do take a mission that involves running around they can choose to do it at a reasonable pace. Again, the overwhelming popularity of skipping all the low-level content, e.g. by grinding the sewer, to get to KR and do the Rocket Pack mission should be read as an indicator that sprinting around is not fun and should be optional.

They should also remove all the security level restrictions on zones. It serves no purpose any more, and makes it a hassle when you have a mixed-level team actually trying to follow some of the arcs. If you stick to MA and radios, you never have that problem.

When players are finally able to concentrate on the content they actually want to do, the Devs can turn to figuring out why the boring content turns people off and what they can do about that. Zone Events are good, or at least attract people to the zones. Maybe they could add zone-specific events...big gang wars between the factions that normally inhabit the zone, say, or a Bank Robbery that actually takes place in the zone, with Arachnos fliers and troops versus Longbow. Right now the drawback to the Zone events is that it makes travel through the zone a hassle or even impossible for lowbies; if almost all the in-city travel became optional, though, that would be less of a consideration. Maybe they could use the Monster code for the Zombies and Rikti so that all the zone mobs scaled to level, so that no matter what zone you travel to there's stuff to interact with if you choose to.

This turned out to be longer than I had planned, but there's so much that could and should be done so that the players can concentrate on the content that they actually find worth doing, without the cruft of left-over design decisions from five years back when it seemed like a good idea to force every character to go talk to Lt Wincott...

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Are you playing in Super Group mode? You may have to adjust the setting as bows are listed under the colorable SG options.

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Aha! That was it, thanks!

So I guess there may actually still be a bug, in that the SG colors can become temporarily unset during a mission you're running in SG-mode (I'm pretty sure I wasn't fiddling with SG setting at the time it happened), but that's much more minor.

Despite Jay's sexiness, the laser-sight color in the Compound Bow w/Laser sight doesn't persist from the costume editor into the game. (It appears white in-game, regardless of color chosen.) Oddly enough, it did flip to the color I chose briefly in one mission, but reverted to white as soon as I had to redraw the bow...

I like the new tram stops and the KR stores. I don't object to the salvage and inventions, I just have no interest. I haven't done the tutorial, and I'm not sure if I will. I will say that I have a couple of low-level toons that have made out like bandits selling salvage, which is nice.

Split-Tail of Trenchcoat is completely unobscured by the visual effect of Prestige Sprint Dash, appearing sort of as if it were belted around the clouds. Contrast this with the ordinary tail Trenchcoat which is mostly obscured, with occassional flashes of a fold sticking out as it ripples.

What makes anyone think they'll be able to enhance this? None of the other powers that are dependent on current Health (self or team) are enhanceable as far as I know...

I don't even get what you're saying this does. Is there a difference between Critters See you and All Enemies See you? Is it that Critters means only PVE, and All means PVP as well?

I'm not too worried about losing half the defense buff, since with the new defense numbers half of approximately nothing is still nothing, but I am worried about how losing the Stealth will work. In the New World Order, it will be more important than ever to avoid extra aggro (and I even approve of that), but it seems like the tools that used to help do that (Steamy Mist/Shadow Fall/Group Invis) are having that stripped from them. I used Shadow Fall much more for the ability to take on one group of enemies at a time than the minor Def buff it provided. Now it seems like in combat, the Stealth part is going to be completely irrelevant until 10 seconds after the battle ends.



P.S. It's "lose" not "loose". I hate that.

Isn't it kind of pointless to allow players to slot enhancements that make no measurable difference? I can't believe it's actually a plot to trick them into wasting slots and influence... I'd strongly suggest that if 3% DEF is the absolute limit of how powerful you can allow Wet Ice to be without unbalancing Ice Tankers, you just make it 3% and not take Def enhancements. Ditto for EA.

My biggest concern as far as the changes is that by balancing everything to how much Def and Res a fully-tricked-out 6-slot SO++ toon can get, it makes it so you need a calculator to tell if many of the unslotted powers are making any difference at all. One of the real strenghts of CoH, IMO, is that for the low-level characters every two levels you get a new super power and feel that much more super. I don't need to be tearing up 20 guys to feel super (or when I get in that mood, I go annihilate greys), but I DO want each power to make a noticable difference. One of the things I hated about WoW was how picking new skills was a non-event; I couldn't tell the difference with another +2% crit chance when backstabbing. With the changes on test all of the Invulnerability passives for Tankers, and almost all of the Inv powers for Scrappers fall into the "is this thing on?" range. At low levels (which is where I spend almost all of my time--I've got literally dozens of chars, but only a handful of 20-somethings, and only one 33) I really hate the idea that so many powers will have invisible effects until you hit ten or fifteen levels later and can fully slot them with SOs. If having more than 20% res to energy or fire is really unbalancing (don't see how that could be, since DA and Fire Tanks can easily exceed it, but suppose it were true and the sets that exceed it are going to get reduced too), then I would FAR rather have it be 20% from the git-go and unenhanceable. Even then, it might not be worth taking, but at least the player who did take it would be able to tell the power was doing something.

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Purely Graphical it may be, but it still keeps them from doing poo for a good 3-5 seconds So, let's make that purely graphical side-effect of all elec powers. It makes sense.

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I don't think that's true. They will shake, but if their attack recycles during the middle of that they will stop shaking immediately to launch it. It's not any kind of a hold, it's just something that the animation does while waiting for attacks to cycle....

I must be doing something wrong, because I'm having more fun than ever. Made a brand-new Inv/SS Tanker, which I had given up on pre-Issue 2 as being completely UN-fun, and leveled up to 11. 1-10 was a blast.

Look, Statesman has said over and over that there was NO intent to increase the difficulty overall, but that certain mistakes combined to make it more difficult, and those are being changed. The biggest two are a bug in removing the front-loaded missions made missions that were +1 all the way through, and a design error in giving minions various powers with a stun component. The fixed mission levels and stun being taken away from the minions is already being tested by the Devs.

Sorry, but starting the umpteenth thread about issues that have already been acknowledged and are being fixed (which a cursory check of the DEV digest would have revealed) is NOT helpful.