SageGaspar

Sorry but he posted this in his mission thread that I searched out because I was sort of interested in seeing this glorious arc:

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Shameless bump...

Lots of very positive feedback on this arc so far. Had all 5 star ratings until someone decided to grief me.

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So, whatever. People like this are the reason I don't leave comments with low scores. I don't really want you up in my grill playing twenty questions about why I gave you the score I did. Four stars is a solid average and even ignoring the overwhelming bias of running people through your own mission, there's always going to be people that legitimately don't like whatever you do. Use any work of creativity ever made as a testament to that fact.

Honestly the only way I use the market is I dump stuff on priced to sell immediately and when I went to buy something I jack it up by ten or twenty thousand just to get it back immediately. And this is only based on the last five bids or whatever.

It's play money and I have millions of it by the time I need it, don't particularly care about getting the super duper IO sets, I'd wager most people that play the game don't really pay attention to their existence. In that sense it doesn't work much like a "real" market. I would love if my villains could get common IOs easier though.

I would use this feature like crazy if it was adapted to let higher levels use it. If you're worried about abuse it seems pretty simple to me to adapt something in the formula when it transfers the EXP to knock it down by a percent for the level gap. I'm guessing the EXP is autogenerated off a curve anyway.

In its current form with the level restriction I don't think I will ever get the opportunity to use it.

I'm a newb here too, but:

1. Main problem I've found so far is the action is a bit fast-paced and the downtime a little... non-existent... to really RP during missions unless you have a team that's going to wait up for the RP. You can use macros to emote out stuff during battle, but that takes a lot of planning. It has the potential to be a lot of fun, but I think you gotta mostly be with people you know beforehand that like that sorta playstyle. It helps a lot if you're not running missions on crazy extreme +20 difficulty all the time so you have breathing room and the ability to bowl over minions like, say, a superhero would.

I see a lot of posts talking about "running missions" and "participating in RP plots" as if they're two different things, optimally they happen simultaneously. Best RP I've had in other games centered around actually playing the game; sitting around and shooting the bull can be fun, but it's much more interesting when you find out someone's character through them actually reacting to something in the game environment.

2. Story arcs and missions are tough -- it is superheroes, but how many times is Dr. Vahz going to go down before the RP begins to stretch the fabric of even comic book believability? My guy has certain feelings towards different villain groups that change as he finds out more about them and he picks missions based on that, but even then... it's not terribly often that I get a decent RP group, and in a group setting I can't really control what missions we do without being overbearing in OOC or simply quitting.

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So, you're telling Manticore he shouldn't be a Natural, and instead should have been Technology... Solely because he was given access to the hospital grid teleportation, even though the rest of him is 100% Natural Archery?

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I was actually thinking about this, and aren't Trick Arrows sorta tech? He uses some very expensive gadget arrows in the comics as I recall.

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I just wonder about this, as I seem to find a lot more of this behaviour here in CoH/V than I did in EQ2. Granted EQ2 lends itself more directly to serious, realistic RP, or at least, I saw it there a whole lot more than I have here.

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As a returning newb coming over from EQ2, I can say I agree a bit, and it's tough to find my bearings.

A lot of it is the normal RP kinda [censored] -- the community has been around a while, and CoH makes it even easier to identify when your friends are on alts with the global account, so you get a fair amount of cliqueishness. There's also the usual kinds of conventions to get used to: what is Team chat, how does everyone know where your missions are, etc. Plus there's the longtime crowd having been through every mission three times that just doesn't get a thrill out of lowbie adventure anymore ("Holy crap, what's that giant zombie thing attacking us?" "*yawn* been killing him for three years now." ).

Apart from that, CoH has a very low threshhold for RP, since it's in modern times. You can come up with a character that's literally you sitting at the computer controlling your in-game hero by remote (holy mother of meta, batman). A character bio and theme is almost expected from a superhero genre. So it's less of an "elitist" enterprise.

Additionally, the action is so frenetic and everything is fast-paced enough that people don't want to really stand around chatting a lot of times. I notice a lot of people sneaking in their entire life story while waiting at a mission door and then basically one-liners the rest of the time. Which is fine, actually, as I barely have enough time to type up something coherent, I almost need to apologize to the teams I'm on for the lack of RP because I'm so engaged in the mechanics hehe.

One final thing that makes it tough for me in particular is Pocket D being the hangout spot. Don't get me wrong, it's cool as hell, but I can't imagine most of my characters going there more than once in a blue moon.

To be fair, I ran into enough annoying RP in EQ2 that it helped to motivate my switch over. There was a lot more "serious" RP, true, but a lot of that "more" part came from the relationship-hopping cyber crew that I could do without. I guess there might be a similar thread in CoH, but it'd seem sorta ludicrous with the engine.

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Filling up an otherwise useful guide with pointless banter is a good way for the guide to lose credibility.

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The internets are serious business!!!!!!

I think the main thing is that the cities are way easier than the hazard zones and, in general, much safer. I don't think adding in more door missions are the answer, because all that means is more groups en route to missions, while we're looking for more groups to actually populate the zone.

One neat thing would be to dolly all the hazards up like The Hollows, in the sense of having a big story arc that culminates in a trial, maybe even an instanced version of the zone. I recognize how they set up Trial and Hazard zones, but I don't think there really needs to be a clear division, and The Hollows is one of the neatest self-contained arcs available.

Also, if they do plan on adding some sort of underwater aspect in the future, either a partially flooded Faultline or the lake behind it would be neat areas to explore.

Finally, a neat thing would be to make hazard zones the buffers between "villain areas" and "hero areas" in City of Villains, or at least contested zones in some way.