NJMorford

Posting options: there are definitely many forums I can't post in, yes. They won't even open the edit window, while this one did. The Development forum seemed to be the only one that would be suitable for the feedback I wanted to give, and I didn't see any thread explicitly for feedback. Given that this sub-forum is the "Gameplay/Technical issues and bugs", and most of what I wanted to post was about gameplay, it seemed appropriate.

Difficulty: I've mainly set it at +1 level, 2 heroes equivalent, no elite bosses, no arch villains. Any lower on the level and it just doesn't have any challenge. Any lower on the heroes equivalent and it just seems empty. Elite bosses, no hope. As it stands, I typically Confuse about half of a group, then use an AoE sleep/disorient on them before laying into them one at a time, accepting that I'll lose XP due to mobs doing half of my damage. Any that wake up get Confused or slept again. This tactic seems to work with groups of up to 6-8 minions at +1 level, including the occasional lieutenant.

On bosses I've tended to take the safest option, given that they won't fight back against a mind controlled mob. I confuse as many mobs as I can keep under until they've killed each other and brought the boss down a significant chunk. If I try any other method, my first attack gets me aggro from every mob, including the boss, and the boss wanders over and murders me in short order whether or not I've put the rest of the mobs to sleep. My only chance of survival at that point seems to require me to put the boss to sleep, and that's reliant on my sleep or confuse attack actually landing on a red-conning mob.

Serious question: I know I've chosen a support class, but does the design of this game mean that he's never supposed to be able to solo an instanced mission unless I reduce the difficulty to trivial levels? I didn't research my build, I just chose whatever looked useful, so I guess it's possible that I've lucked into a combination that's generally considered to be unable to solo stuff.


XP debt, hospitals, corpse running: when WoW launched, a lot of zones had too few graveyards, and I think at least one had no Alliance yard in it. Blizzard realised that this meant a lot of time running a long way to resurrect, and added more so that players could get back into the fun part of the game more quickly. Yes, it's appropriate to have penalties for dying, and given that you don't have gear to break in CoH, I guess that XP debt is probably the only way to do it. Paying a nominal fee to repair your broken gear feels a lot friendlier to me than a penalty that hinders your levelling for however long. Now that you mention it, I do remember debt being worse in the beta - I think I had several cases where a bad string of deaths put me in hock for more than a full level. It may be better now, but that doesn't mean it doesn't still feel like a slap in the face. Perhaps you could opt to pay it off at the hospital with influence? That's not a huge leap in a game where it can cost you 6.80 GBP just to respec, and it's more in keeping with the game universe.


LFG: I hadn't actually realise that I was so limited as a premium player instead of a VIP, but still: I have never seen an average wait time for either the sewers or the haunted house of anything other than 4 minutes when I first open the tool, regardless of whether it was peak time or not. I don't watch the thing the whole time it's open, but if it's not showing a representative number when I first open it, I don't think it's worth showing it at all.

As for the missions I may or may not be able to complete while waiting: I don't tend to fill my log with them, I usually just work on one at a time. It's not always obvious that they're going to send me into an instanced area (or maybe I've not read them fully...) so, again, it's frustrating to find that I can't get in. Yes, I could go search for a mission that doesn't lead to an instance, but as a newer player I have no idea where best to pick these up. I'd just be randomly hitting up contacts in the hope that I'm at just the right place in the chain.


Graphics: could be partly down to brightness/contrast/gamma settings. There was one instance I've done recently that was set underground: visibility was down to about 20 yards, until I turned a corner and was able to see about 60 yards. For about a second before the black fog came down again... Not really fog, though, as I could see the green fire from the Circle of Thorns mobs' flaming torches, though. That seems like a design decision. Same with the distance view being out of focus. My card's a Geforce 560Ti, BTW, about 4 months old and with up-to-date WHQL reference drivers, so I'm pretty sure it should be capable of anything this game can throw at it.


Locked animations: I don't know about anyone else, but if I was incanting some long spell and realised mid-way through that a piano was about to fall on my head, I'd shut up and run away. And given that a missed spell triggers the cooldown for that ability, and that there's probably a global cooldown preventing me from firing another ability immediately, then where's the harm in being able to move immediately? Which breaks the fourth wall first: not being able to stop doing something and running away, or running away after you've triggered an event that will come to the same conclusion regardless of where you're standing?

Something that makes it more frustrating for me is when you've queued up your next attack and even though you're trying to run away at the conclusion of the last one, the fact that you're still in range of the target means that the second attack will fire off regardless, locking you in place for even longer.


Group combat: yes, it is a preference on my part. When I solo the bosses I'm capable of killing (bosses scaled more for solo players, based on the difficulty set when I enter the instance alone), I accept that I need to use tactics rather than button mashing. When I enter an instance with 7 other players, I'd rather see something that requires a little more coordination than what I've seen.

Mechanics: given the two group fights I seem to have access to (sewers and halloween), I've seen a pair of mechanics in action. In the sewers, you run away from the bubbles (assuming you're not stuck in an animation before they burst and do you a load of damage. I know how not to stand in a fire. Last time I did this fight I died twice, partly due to my own stupidity and partly cos I couldn't move, mid animation. The other fight was at the end of the halloween event. The boss does a couple of emotes, one about his hands and one about his feet. I can't pretend that I was paying full attention, but I guess I should have run away from at least one of those (I was hovering about 30 feet up, so I thought I'd be immune to the stomping foot). Even though I didn't run, and most of the time I don't think anyone else did either), there were no real consequences. I did it wrong and didn't die, or come particularly close to dying, and we killed the mob anyway.

If there isn't something interesting or challenging about an encounter, and you can get away with just spamming stuff at the target, then it's just a loot pinata: hit mob, pick up shinies, leave. I don't find that fun, do you?

Someone please tell me: at level 50, are the fights still like this? Does it still not matter if you don't have a tank or healer? My controller's alt spec is more healy right now, but it sounds like it's irrelevant.

First some background, so you can see where I'm coming from and relate that to my comments: I first played CoH in the open EU beta in the last couple of weeks before it went live. I enjoyed it at the time, though my MMO experience was limited to the CoH and another game's beta so I didn't have much to compare it to. Of the two games, I chose the other game mainly because I would be playing it with an existing online games community I'd been part of for a couple of years. Had that not been the case, I could easily have played CoH instead.

I've played WoW with that same group since release, with the occasional period of abstention (I've been unsubbed for the last four months, mainly due to no longer feeling the attraction of the game). During that six-year stretch, I've spent time in several other MMOs, ranging from a couple of weeks to the better part of a year. When CoH expanded to include CoV, I bought the game and played it for a couple of months, then occasionally popped back in for a taster.

When the game went F2P, I reactivated my account and recovered my existing toons. I've been playing a fair bit since then (my highest two toons are L28 and L15), long enough to come up with a list of things that I've decided are enough to stop me from playing much more, even as a free player. I'm going to list them here but please don't think that this is just a list of complaints: I think that most, if not all, of them are justified, rather than whinging. I mostly play CoH solo, so a lot of these comments should be read with that in mind.

Games should be fun. They can still be hard, or even frustrating sometimes while still being fun. This game has several features which I think rob me of my enjoyment while playing it:

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XP debt. It's not uncommon for me to be soloing a mission and die to a boss or a pair of mobs repeatedly. It's probably my fault for biting off more than I can chew, or not really using the right tactics. XP debt feels like a slap in the face, taking such a significant portion of my XP away from me. I've mainly been playing a mind controller who's very fragile. His only hope of beating a boss in 1-on-1 combat requires me to render the boss impotent. If I fail, the boss typically kills me in 3-4 hits while I have virtually no recourse. It may take me three or four attempts to whittle him down, all the while earning significant XP debt that may take me fifty further mobs to wipe out. That's no fun.

Miss rate: I know that this game, like most other MMOs, has a lot of RNG underpinning it, and I know that a miss is entirely governed by that RNG. I know that there are enhancements and abilities to improve my chances of hitting, but this game seems to take misses to an uncomfortable extreme. I've had many cases where I've thrown 6-8 attacks at a similar level mob and seen as few as two of them land. This is immensely frustrating and frequently results in my death. It can include attacks made against a mob that's incapacitated, too. If my toon is supposed to be trained to physical perfection, or armed with the latest fool-proof technology, and he can miss an incapcitated target with three attacks in a row at melee range, it just feels wrong, and I feel like it happens far, far too often. It feels like the RNG is weighted too much toward misses, rather than me getting a few bad rolls.

Hospital runs: they make sense within the narrative of the game. But why not have a few more hospitals? If I'm locked in a death spiral, teleported back repeatedly to the only hospital in the zone, only to have to travel a mile and a half back to the mission spot, then run all the way back through the instance to the boss, it does nothing for my good mood. Even worse is the Dam region in southern Faultline, where the hospital is effectively in a different zone to the instance, meaning I have to fly back, transition through a door, navigate needlessly twisty corridors, then transition another door, then fly back to the mission, transition another door/loading screen, then run back to the boss and die again because of misses. I'm sure you can appreciate my frustration.

The UI: within my gaming community, I'm well known for and teased about the number of UI mods I run. I love being able to tailor the UI to suit me, increasing or suppressing the information available to me, tweaking the layout or the elements visible to me or taking out the drudgery of certain operations (most hated WoW activity is probably milling herbs or prospecting ore - one click every three seconds until you run out of materials 20 minutes later. Guaranteed repetetive strain injury). CoH's UI has some glaring omissions, in my opinion, like the inability to resize the text in a name plate, or the lack of any indication whatsoever that you're out of range for your ability, other than a sound and a message on screen *after* you've tried it. Not to mention that the message text may not be anywhere near where I'm looking, so I may miss it entirely, and the notification sound may well be drowned out by the noise of battle. If we're not allowed to use third-party mods to make the UI work the way *we* want, then there should at least be a greater amount of flexibility in the stock UI than I believe CoH has.

Graphics: why is everything so dark? Why can't I focus on anything at long range? Why, when I have all of the settings at their highest quality, do so many objects pop into existence only when I'm almost on top of them? I appreciate that it's no trivial task to upgrade the graphics engine after the game's release, but boulders the size of the average house should not be semi-transparent when they're only a hundred yards away, and I should still be able to see skyscrapers in focus when they're a quarter of a mile off.

Running/autorunning: this may be a bug, I don't know, but when I'm running using the forward key, I often want to change to running using the two mouse buttons held down together. However, when I press the two buttons, then release the key, I stop running. This can be bad.

Being locked into an animation: I hate to think of the number of times I've died because I couldn't run away, purely because I was stuck in a long animation that I couldn't override. So I get killed, and get un-fun XP debt because the game won't let me run away just at the time I most need to.

The LFG queue: "average wait time 4 minutes". Not in my experience. It's rarely been less than ten, often more than 20. Obviously it's entirely dependent on there being enough people in the queue, and I'm guessing that it's a much better experience at the level cap than it is while levelling, but please, just put a more accurate, recalculated time on there. This issue makes my next point much harder to stomach:

Missioning while LFG: Most missions require you to go into a building/sewer/cave system. You "don't dare" enter one of these instances while waiting in a queue. I'm guessing that there's a technical reason behind this, but given how much of the content of this game is instanced in one way or another (much more so than any other MMO I've tried), this limitation is utterly infuriating. I know I'll be in the LFG queue for ten minutes (if I'm lucky), but I can't do anything more worthwhile than picking on random groups of mobs out in the open world. Not fun.

Group combat: Again, I've not reached the level cap and have no experience of groups at high level, but at low level, this is unsatisfying. Every group scenario I have been in (excepting the one last night where most of the group quit immediately, leaving us with two people to face content scaled for 6) has turned into an anarchic free-for-all where everyone just mashes buttons at the nearest mob. I've never noticed anyone tanking, rarely noticed anyone specifically healing, and frequently been unable to see a reason why either a tank or a healer would be necessary. There are no tactics, no roles, no mechanics to learn or adapt to, no repercussions when you get it wrong. It's just a zerg to the boss and a pile of XP. If the encounters for L50 players require anything more complex than a zerg, then the previous 49 levels don't seem to have prepared you for them. Group combat just feels empty.

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I could go on, but I'll leave it there. Many of my other point are merely niggles, or just things I don't like because I'm fossilised by years of doing it a different way, but the points I've raised above, particularly the last one, are really just so big that I can't see any way around them. They take away any desire I have to subscribe to this game and unlock the features I have no access to already, whether cosmetic (more costume parts), mechanic (inventions so that I have something to do with all the salvage I keep finding) or fundamental (more archetypes and power sets).

Going right back to one of my first comments: games should be fun. For me, there are too many things taking the fun out of the game for me to want to spend more time in it. Even if you could tell me that all of these issues are addressed by becoming a VIP player, the game experience so far has already been spoiled so much that I don't think I'd want to come back.