Samuel_Tow

I'm fine with disagreeing, actually

What you describe as team play is pretty much the reason I don't team much, though. A large team "steam-rolling" over hordes of enemies both makes me feel superfluous to the accomplishment and tosses me into a maelstrom of confusing visuals with no clear "global" idea of what I'm trying to achieve. To me, this is counter-productive to reaching a state of flow because I'm not actually immersed in the game, i.e. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just pushing buttons with no knowledge or understanding, completely convinced that the end result will not change by much irrespective of which button I press. To avoid this, I prefer to solo, and on a difficulty not much higher than x2. That's just enough enemies to be a crowd, but not so many enemies that I lose reason to target individuals, and everything which happens is a direct result of something I did, thus I receive direct feeback from my actions, learning in the process.

When it comes to breaks, I don't actually disagree with you. I've been known to walk away from a half-finished mission to have dinner, watch TV, chat with friends or just take a nap, and many times I'll Alt-Tab out of the game to browse the 'net, searching for an answer to a question that popped into my head. However, when I take a break, I want this to be a break of MY choosing. IF I want it, WHEN I want it, HOW I want it. Having the game try to institute breaks for me when I really didn't want one at the time and making me read through a long, boring conversation that I've already read through five times before and then run five errands before I can kill stuff again just makes me want to get off the PC and go do something else. It kills the mood, essentially.

As for "searching" for the last glowie, that's never been a problem for me, but I might be a special case. I treat EVERY mission like a kill-all and like a scavenger hunt. I will always fill in the map in its entirety, walk into every little out-of-the-way nook, check behind every pillar, inside every room, inside every hole. As a result, I almost never miss any enemies nor any clickies, and so the times I've had to backtrack and search for things I've missed number less than a dozen in seven years. I actually really enjoy the "Rescue 21 Mystics from Oranbega" mission because it combines the two things I like to do best in this game - wipe out a large map of enemies and look in every hidden spot

The horrible, garish colours, the bloated, ugly menus, the over-large goofy buttons, the unnecessary gradients... Oh, where do I start?

Is that really what it would look like if I lost all sense of reason and swapped to the new teaming interface?

The double-blind system is one of the reasons I like the City of Heroes market, actually. Yes, it means it's inefficient for me, but it also means that it's inefficient for OTHER people, as well, and "other people" typically have a much stronger stomach for grinding resources than I do. What this means is people who want something are quickly conditioned to overpay for it, meaning that if I have something which is typically cheap, I can list it for a cheap price and STILL get a very high bid for it, because that's what people listed. This, in turn, means I have lots of resources with which I can then afford to be inefficient in my purchases and buy Alchemical Silver for 300 000 a piece and still make rent.

The double-blind system does mean that it takes much more research and work to understand the Market, but it also means that you can use the Market without understanding it in the slightest. All you need to do is find an item that's greatly sought after, as indicated by the high number of bids to the small number of lists. If the item is much sought after, it's going for far above its ordinary price. List it low, snag a high bid. It won't be as high a bid if you priced it high and waited, but it means you don't have to wait and it means you don't have to know how much you can get for it.

In essence, the double-blind system means I don't have to worry about how much an item is worth in the current economic state. All I have to worry about is how much an item is worth TO ME, and that's easy to decide. Most items I sell are worth to me what I'd sell them for at the vendor, so 250 for common salvage, 1000 for uncommon and 5000 for rare. If I can get more than that, it's a sale, even if it's just enough more to cover my listing fee. If I can't get at least that much, I dump them to the vendor, confident that either the lack of supply will drive prices up, or it won't and I'll never get more than that anyway.

The City of Heroes Market is complex if you want to play it, but it can be brain-dead simple if you just want to get rid of your stuff with the same ease as dumping it on an NPC vendor. It's a bit more tricky to buy things off of if you're not made of money, but even that's only a trivial inconvenience if you're not shooting for the rare stuff like I'm not.

See, the cool thing about City of Heroes is that while there IS rare elite super duper stuff... I've never felt like I've needed it. I've never felt like I've needed purples or expensive sets or min/maxed set bonuses. Sure, I might be able to solo huge difficulty settings if I had all that stuff... But I don't HAVE to up my difficulty, now do I?

That's if you run forced team content, though. If you're like me and rely solely on collecting Shards, the system is just complicated to use, but does not require any real planning. That's actually one of the things I like about City of Heroes prior to the zillion currencies of the Incarnate system - I have one pool of resources with which I can buy everything. I don't have to worry about who drops what how often, because EVERYTHING drops the one currency I care about, and all I care about is getting enough of that. I can make everything I need from just that one pool of currency.

I'm not sure how it is for post-Alpha slots (and I'll probably never know), but at least for Alpha, the system can be simple to gather for.

It might

Well, that's... Disappointing. Because, honestly, the game is a lot of fun on its own. It's only when you toss in the crafting and the grinding and the equipment quests that it really becomes a drag, because I have to spend more and more time not actually playing it.

Oh, and fishing. I completely forgot about fishing. See, I've always found fishing to be a dumb idea, because I'm just not a fan. But this game has us fish via high-powered harpoon crossbows, fling fish on the deck of a boat beat them to death with our fists and then collect them, and I can't help but thing this is awesome... If a little gruesome

But, of course, that was more fun than was allowed. The wiki says "Fish will spawn every 2 or 3 minutes." Sure enough every 4 or 5 minutes, a school of fish spawns, it passes under the boat in 10 seconds and then disappears again. Then you sit on your hands for another 5 minutes, or you toss barrels overboard and harpoon them back on deck, or you attack the main mast impotently until another school of fish shows up, then disappears 10 seconds later. Sooner or later it becomes clear that you're waiting 5 minutes for 10 seconds of fun, and you're not even guaranteed to catch anything in that time window. Thus, the novelty wears off horribly fast. And yet there's an achievement for spending AN HOUR on the boat, most of which will be spent sitting on your hands. Possibly literally.

I have, and... Ow! Ow, my head!

There's a psychological concept called flow, which is in essence the state of mind of a person who is fully immersed and engrossed in an activity, such that he excludes most outside stimuli and becomes focused on the activity as though it is a natural thing. This, ultimately, is what I want out of this game, and this is something it's very good at sustaining in a good, smooth run through a mission with no disruptions.

The newer game mechanics are deliberately designed to disrupt this state of mind, seeing it as detrimental to the game. While I can see the potential benefit in staving off boredom, they only serve to yank me out of the experience, kicking and screaming, force me to do something completely different, and then plunk me back in to kill some more stuff. Thing is, like having been woken up from a pleasant sleep, it's not that easy to go back into this state. And by the time I'm once more settling into that state of flow, BAM! Another long talky scene, mind-mission.

I can speak only purely for myself, but I prefer my "distractions" to be clumped together at the beginning and end of missions. When I have to do "other stuff," I'd rather do all of it at once, so that I can open up a larger window of time when I won't be disturbed. I want to sell, buy, trade and prepare so that none of these things come up during gameplay, so that I can settle into the experience. But when a dialogue, a gimmick boss or an unusually difficult encounter yanks me out of the experience, this causes me to have to work around an unpleasant obstacle. Obstacles are not pleasant. They are an irritant, something that my psyche regards as unwanted, an object to be removed. As long as I have to deal with them, I'm not at ease.

Maybe some play City of Heroes for this mythic adrenaline rush or as a puzzle to be solved, or maybe as some fight with the unknown. More power to them, but to me the game's greatest strength is that unlike almost any other MMO I've played, this is one where I actually CAN feel as though I'm "one with the game," pretentious as that may sound. When I can use my character without thinking about button presses, cursor position and power recharge (at least not consciously) is when I have the most fun. Anything which disrupts this disrupts my fun as a result.

You can, except on certain missions. When the contact who has given you the mission disappears when the mission is over, you lose all clues associated with it, as well. Tip contacts exist only until you finish the mission, then disappear entirely. Newspaper missions also do the same, as I believe they use some kind of "phantom contact" tech, as well. You'll notice that in neither case do you need to speak with the contact to finish the mission.

It is the same thing, actually. What went down to 50% was minion accuracy, and everything else had to-hit buffs beyond that, essentially the higher to-hit base that you see. The idea was that lieutenants, bosses and so forth are more accurate. Arcana and a few others argued that this essentially killed defence builds, and kept doing so until I7 or I8, when all critter to-hit was standardised to 50%, with lieutenants, bosses and so forth getting accuracy buffs, instead. These accuracy buffs, however, are not given in percentages, but rather in decimal fractions. Each +level adds an extra 0.1 on top of critter accuracy, and I believe each rank adds another 0.1. That a +1 lieutenant would have a 1.2 accuracy value, or 20% accuracy slotting in everything.

Arcana has the exact numbers in the Defence guide.

I apologise for the misunderstanding. I have the tendency to quote base to-hit and accuracy for +0 minions. +more +rank have always been higher, just higher in different ways.

*edit*
@Commander

Ouch! I was lucky to only ever see wrestling on television, where presumably such gaffs are edited out On the other hand, I have seen The Self Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior, so I can sympathise with your experience.

It wasn't always 50%. Base critter to-hit was 75% until the GDN. When the development team slashed character defence-boosting powers by a great deal, they also reduced critter to-hit down to 50%, giving a big boost of survivability to all "squishies" by proxy.

*edit*
Also, the Devouring Earth quartz eminator has a 100% to-hit buff on it, which is pretty hard to overcome, and is a big detriment to resistance-based sets, as well. Luckily, it's easy to kill. There are a small handful of "tricks" one needs to know even to this day (like Sappers), but most of them pre-date most of our start dates.

This is pretty much were I stand. City of Heroes is the game I fell in love with because it made me feel powerful by virtue of allowing me to take on 20 guys and still win.

I bash recent content (specifically, the AMBUSHES in recent content) because they increase the game's difficulty by too much at too early a level. Sure, ambush waves at level 50 when I have all my toys, bring them on. Ambush waves at level 5 that see through my Stalker's stealth? Pass. That, and the developer's storytelling tools are becoming more and more obtrusive, shoving story in my face at the expense of gameplay, instead of doing like they'd always done and leave the story to the contacts and the clues so that I can follow it if AND WHEN I want to.

My biggest gripe with the thread is I never saw City of Heroes as the tactical, skill-based game it's being presented as. I read all the tactics provided upstream, and I recall using pretty much none of them and still being just fine. Take status protection so you can ignore status effects, then attack whatever has the most hit points and rely on your defences to absorb the damage. I imagine things might have been more complex on a team, but since there was never any mandatory imperative to find one larger than about two or three people, I could never tell.

Word to the wise: A team of two people plays exactly like a "team" of one person, at least for those built to solo.

*edit*
I'm also disappointed we didn't discuss wrestling more.

The system has rules, which you want to break. Simple as that. A system can't encourage EVERYTHING, lest the choice you pine for so much become meaningless. Some things need to work better than others, and you'll be unsurprised to hear that intended character builds work better than unintended ones most of the time, at least now that most of the major holes have been patched up.

What you're asking for is, essentially, why you can't fire up Doom and complete the whole game by making friends with the monsters. You picked a class deliberately designed to lack defences in return for ranged damage and found that failing to rely on ranged damage and instead relying on defence made you weaker than a character who picked a class designed to emphasise defence. I don't see that as a problem.

No, you make stuff up as you go along. Kora Fruit was available as early as I2 and those who wanted it had it. People still traded before now, you know. And as far as "super-inspirations" go, I have never seen a single one, so they can't be THAT common. And while you could e-mail inspirations to yourself now, you're limited to a total of 20, which isn't all that much if, like many people, you wanted to use your e-mail as recipe storage, which the game still doesn't give you a facility for.

I have personally never found myself lacking inspirations. The most I've ever had to do was run back to my contact, wasting my time, but providing no extra challenge. You seem to see time sinks and proclaim them as "challenge" when all they do is tack minutes onto tasks, when a blind monkey could get to 50 - now as before - if he just kept at it. It just took time, not skill.

You are provably, factually wrong here. No, let me correct that. You have been proven wrong because the gains from the DFB do diminish greatly. You can get up to about 15-20 relatively fast, but beyond that your gains simply slow to a crawl. You could keep doing it, but you'll be wasting your time for little progress. People have made experiment on levelling up to 50 on just that, and the results are greatly discouraging. I have a feeling you don't actually know how "easy" the game has become and are going off assertions about how easy it looks like it might be.

Furthermore, yes, the sewers capped up at level 8. Beyond that, you had Perez Park. Beyond that, Boomtown and beyond that Terra Volta and Dark Astoria, and the other Hazard zones besides. Or you could do the sensible thing and run repeatable missions at max difficulty and level up that way. Why do you think people jumped on the bandwagon of grinding endless paper missions? DFB is just lots of killing stuff. This has never been at a premium in this game if that's what you actually wanted to do. Hell, if I were so inclined, I'd run the hollows and do the Frostfire and Atta missions and gain about 5 levels out of those just on my own.

As far as exemplaring for the DFB goes, this isn't a new thing. For years you've been able to exemplar down to the Positron TF and kill experience-boosted Vahzilok if that's what you wanted. Exemplaring has granted experience for a very long time now, though I guess that did happen with your dreaded "decline."

You pine for a myth, then, because it never, ever took strategy to win a mission. All it took was stats, and back then we had greater stats than we do now. You only needed strategy if your build sucked, and you can make your build suck now with little difficulty.

"Keep out of range of his heal" is on the same level of "puzzle" as "bring break frees." Nosferatu is a one trick pony, and his trick is pretty much very high stats.

Moreover, the much simpler tactic to beat Nosferatu, which I've been using since the days of old, is to buy two or four purples from your contact and then stay in melee range to your heart's content. His Dark Regeneration and Soul Drain will miss. That's pretty much the one-size-fits-all solution for how Blasters take out just about every elite boss. And when Lady Winter started debuffing my defence and resistance, I bout six and then eight purples and brute-forced her that way.

As long as we're going to measure whose "standards" are the norm - I'm still perfectly happy with the game and you don't like it. I'd say my standards fared much better than yours did.

And as far as those missions go, they're an attempt to hammer a square peg in a round hole. If you don't have the tools to beat them, you don't beat them, and if you happened to not pick an AT that even has access to those tools, then it sucks to be you. That's not difficulty or challenge, that's the game giving me the middle finger, and me giving it the finger right back by mission-dropping the offending mission.

And I couldn't be happier for it. Except, it was ALWAYS a click fest. As early as Launch, people were soloing +10 enemies (forcing the introduction of the Purple Patch) and breaking game balance over their knee. The only people who needed Tic Tacs were people who didn't know how to make a decent character, like I didn't until about 2005-2006. Because when your character sucks and you can't brute-force your way past opposition, you're forced to think of other ways to win. But while you're wasting your time pulling enemies one by one, spawn by spawn, that Burn Tanker over there is taking down five spawns at a time and levelling up at ten times the rate you are.

Every single time that you have to stop and "strategise" in this game, you are wasting time that other people are using to kill more stuff and gain more progress. This isn't new. This is how it's been since I first saw the game in 2004, back when people were spending day and night farming Hydra in Perez Park. You only "strategise" when your stats aren't enough, and at that point you've already failed.

The status effect system in City of Heroes is a complete mess, standardised or not. The Binary nature of status effects means that either your control classes have entire spawns permanently held, or they essentially lose their primary powerset. AVs got the "purple triangles of doom" expressly because Controllers were perma-holding them, reducing them into sterile punching bags. Now controllers fighting AVs are essentially gimped defenders. There's no gradual build-up of status, nor the ability to defeat an enemy through status alone.

And if you ask what game ever had that - Baldur's Gate did. If you turned an enemy to stone, he turned to stone forever, or until specifically disenchanted. If the Cowled Wizards used an imprison spell on your characters, they were GONE, and you had to remember where this took place, find a disenchantment scroll and re-enact it at the exact place. Hell, there was even a place where a Basilisk has turned a bunch of people to stone. When you save them, one of them offers to join your party.

And the status protection system is even more of a mess. It's not so much a status protection system as it's a "let's write enemy status effects out of the game." I don't get knocked back to land on my feet for a faster recovery, just off the top of my head. If I have resistance - any resistance from almost any melee defence set - status effects simply don't exist for me. Against that backdrop, the few sets with pronounced holes - like Dark Armour - come off as more annoying than "challenging." And if you DON'T have complete and utter status immunity, then you're ******, because every damn minion has a status effect of some sort in the later levels, and usually stacked knockback on top of that. So you better hope that aggro system works and you have someone else for the enemies to aggro on... Which I never had.

As for aggro, Castle and Ghost Widow (at the time) had to work their butts off to backtrack the labyrinthine logic of aggro through the source code, and it turns out the "innovation" was a x100 multiplier of threat rating that Taunt constituted. That's it. Furthermore, aggro is and has been broken, though in subtle ways, for as long as I remember. Critters will still randomly attack invisible, inactive team-members who have done nothing to reveal themselves - thus screwing over Stalkers - and randomly swap target and even ignore taunt effects for a time. Enemies will also very often decide to turn tail and run irrespective of taunt and threat ratings, causing my Bots/Traps Mastermind to become unplayable as every spawn scattered to the four winds as soon as they saw me. I'm told it's because of Poison Gas Trap, but when elite bosses do the Benny Hill run, that's not a good aggro system.

And yet for all of that, people made FOTM characters pretty much until Enhancement Diversification, when the difference between FOTM and non-FOTM wasn't that big. In fact, the original enhancements system was so ungodly broken that it actually detracted from the overall quality of the game. TO THIS DAY I have never seen anyone slot an Intangibility Duration enhancement into anything, though I'm sure there's someone and I just missed him. The original intent for enhancements WAS that they would be gear, with SOs acting like that rare gear you had grind for, with Trainings and DOs being your whites and blues.

When the developers realised we were stocking up on SOs because someone vastly underestimated our Inf-earning potential, they found that their game had been severely broken. Bosses, if you remember, were supposed to be team content. Since before I1, my completely inept Scrapper, driven by my completely inept past self, was soloing bosses left and right. The enhancement system you so praise was meaningless before I6, because slotting anything BUT 1ACC/5DAM in your attacks was provably inferior. Endurance concerns? Take Stamina. Recharge concerns? Take perma-Hasten, which lacked an endurance crash and provided 5% defence to everything. Need more accuracy? Take Focused Accuracy, which was I think a 20% to-hit buff.

Yes, I'm sure you were a creative artist who found new and exciting ways to use the enhancement system that wasn't the FOTM and yet still not suck, but my point is there was never a need to do this. Standard slotting existed then as it does now. If anything, now it's much more varied and much more creative with Inventions sets and their bonuses.

Which was and is fun to travel in, but amounted to precisely dick, to quote J from Men in Black, in the actual game. You couldn't have aerial combat because no everyone could fly, you couldn't have chases because not everyone had Super Speed, and you couldn't even have unreachable places, because people had to get there. Just look at Terra Volta and all the vitriol people have spewed out over getting to the damn reactor. I found all the ways on my own, and all the ways are a platforming nightmare. It's something I can easily do, but people have universally derided.

You could MOVE in three dimensions at great speed. We still ended up fighting in the flat and in the open. Remember the old narrow blue cave maps? Yeah, that and Ornabega are universally reviled throughout the game. I like them, and I've done what I can to defend them, but the people have spoken, and now most new maps are much more open and with a very high ceiling.

What you call stagnation, I call perfection. City of Heroes in 2004 is the City of Heroes I liked - that is, get into a mission, flip out and kill stuff. Difficulty, challenge and even gameplay doesn't enter into it. The simpler and more straightforward the game is, the better. I'm glad complicated builds are no longer a necessity. I'm glad pulling isn't needed. I'm glad sets like Devices were recognised as the mistake they are. The less time I have to spend standing still and looking at my enemies, the better the game is for it. If I wanted to slow down, I can do this on my own initiative. I don't need the game killing me five times to remind me.

The gameplay doesn't "suck," it's just the same now as it always was. This is a click-n-kill action RPG. That's all it ever was. Remember all those cries of "CoH has no depth?" This isn't the right game to look for depth in. It never had it. You could pretend it had depth and hamstring yourself into doing things the hard way, but that doesn't make the game deeper. It just means you're good at making your own fun. But the game itself was always about "push button, receive bacon." And that's all it ever needed to be. With literally hundreds of over-complex, boring MMOs out there, the last thing I need is for the one single user-friendly one to be made harder, slower and less entertaining.

And, yeah, that's all the game ever was - an effects soup button masher. Think back to Romulus Augustulus. You could, if you were so inclined, try to pull him away from his Healing Nictus, try to scatter them, not summon henchmen and do all the other overcomplex tactics people came up with to defeat him. Or you could bring enough debuffs and damage and brute-force your way past him. I've seen it done via brute force almost every time I run it.

With the exception of Incarnate Trials, there isn't a single part of this game that couldn't be brute-forced by a half-way decent build and a half-way decent team. That's how it's always been. You can bring up all the Tic Tacs in the world, plan, plot, postulate, number-crunch and so forth, but at the end of the day, that's what you do when you can't brute-force your way past content, and I've yet to find content I can attempt on my own that isn't susceptible to this. And this isn't a new thing. It's always been like this. In fact, when the original difficulty "slider" came up, the first thing I did was up the difficulty of my namesake Scrapper because the game up to that point had been too easy and I wanted to fight more enemies at a time.

You're talking about difficulty and innovation which you faced, but all of that stuff is still there. You're merely better at the game now, and you refuse to go back to the old ways to find the same old challenges. The fact of the matter is, however, that City of Heroes has ALWAYS been easy. Geko vastly underestimated what players would do to gain power, so we started out the game overpowered to ridiculous degrees. We have, ironically enough, only gotten weaker over time, because player characters have never been stronger than they were back in the Hamidon farming craze. Characters have never powerlevelled faster than they did with Winter Lords, where a 5-munute fight could grant you 15 levels all at once. And people have not complained that City of Heroes lacks depth more than before I9 and Inventions.

The simple fact is the game you remember never existed. You made your own experience like it was, and you're fully capable of doing it now, but for your refusal to do so.

No, what I want is Inventions (and while we're at it, Raids) out of the game permanently. Since we're stuck with them, we may as well make the best of them by... Pretending they don't exist.

Um... Not in the slightest. One of the most entertaining games I've ever played was MegaMan X4 for the PC, specifically with Zero. That game gives you just about zero choice, because you always build the same character by the end (unless you miss something valuable), and yet it's still a tremendous amount of fun because it looks amazing at least by arcade emulator standards, and because it's just fun to play. That game gives you no choices and provides you with no consequences. The worst that can happen is you have to replay a stage, with none of the stages being particularly hard or long once you know what you're doing (and have read a guide showing you all the hidden items).

If you're talking about the mythical "replay value," then I personally prefer to be able to replicate exactly the same experience over and over again because that's the experience I like. Alternate paths have no real meaning beyond that, because if I didn't pick them, then I didn't want to pick them.

For example, I don't need Tankers and Defenders and Controllers and Dominators and Corruptors to enjoy the game, because I'm never going to play any of these classes. They offer no replay value to me, because I simply don't like them. And no, I'm never going to be convinced otherwise.

Yes, and people at the time still managed to solo them with everything.

It was either Evil Geko or Zombie Man who soled that entire arc, Hero 1 included, with team-centric AT/powerset characters, on SOs with only small inspirations. I forget what the specifics were, but an entire thread existed in I19 Beta specifically to record those precise results.

Nothing is impossible to solo. Nothing ever was. Some things are simply not fun to solo.

No, I don't see those often for the same reason I never saw them often - because they suck and people don't want to team with them. I'm happy for you if you want to gimp yourself - and that's all it ever was - and face challenge that way, but you're as free to do this now as you were then. By all means, go ahead and make a horrible build that's counter to your AT's strengths and you, too, can have challenge.

Just realise that others who do play to their AT's strengths will be stronger than you, now as before. Granted, now the gulf is greater, but a gulf it always was. I've seen petless Masterminds, and they didn't inspire envy or respect in me. They inspired pity and compassion for the poor soul who wanted to have guns but not Thugs.

That's self-made challenge that you can always make for yourself, as long as your idea of challenge isn't competing with everybody else.

You could always buy them from contacts, you could always buy them from vendors and, failing that, you could always farm for Kora fruit back when that dropped large inspiratiosn. You exaggerate.

As for hoarding and e-mailing, you could always do this even before, you just needed help. Like a second account that you pay an extra $15 for to hold all your stuff. Only now you can have storage for the price of one subscription, yet somehow you read this as more paying to win because it's more convenient?

Wasting three of my power choices on Stamina was easily the worst part of character building. If it's mandatory, give it to me. If it's mandatory that I lose three power picks, simply give me three power picks less. Don't pretend to give me choice and then leave me with only a single option.

And no, adding other powers is not a solution. This was never a choice between picking Stamina or picking a different power. It was a choice between picking Stamina or NOT picking Stamina, where not picking Stamina was the wrong choice. Endurance is this game's greatest equaliser. Everyone needs it for everything, and when it runs out, you run out of options. The only thing you can replace Stamina with and not be wrong is Stamina by another name, at which point that's not a choice at all.

Either the game needed to be redesigned to stop needing endurance so much (fat change), Stamina needed to be taken out of the game entirely (fat chance) or the need for Stamina satiated in another way that's not just making more endurance recovery/reduction powers. The development team chose that last one, by simply eliminating the problem at its source, granting Stamina to everyone and making endurance as a whole not much of a balancing factor in the long run. While this made things easier on the one hand, it also made them a lot less irritating on the other, and it let me have many of the powers I wanted, but could never support the cost of.

First of all, you have a very... Wrong idea of what "powerlevelling" is. Secondly, let's see how long it lasts. That's been in the game for all of a few weeks. How long did it take Matt Miller to start threatening Architect abusers? Finally, how exactly is Death From Below functionally different from gathering a bunch of people and diving into the sewers the old way? Death From Below doesn't have some kind of magical super-experience reward, it's mostly just killing stuff. Yes, it does have those convenient SOs, but that's not even remotely related to power levelling.

Yes, I'm sure you look forward to the old days of dumpster diving and wolf farms and constant bridge requests. I'm sure you pine for the old days of the Winter Lords and the Egg farms and the Portal farms. I'm sure you miss the good old days of Architect exploits. "The game" was never vibrant and exciting because people have been taking the easy road to 50 since before I joined in in May of 2004. You name a period in the game's history and I'm pretty sure I can name at least one way in which the game was broken to provide an easy way to 50 to the masses.

The game is only as "vibrant and exciting" as you want to make it, and this is as true now as it ever was. You merely refuse to do so by your own choice. I, by contrast, found its gameplay to be "vibrant and exciting" for about two weeks to a month, then I dragged my feet until September when my second two-month game card ran out and I left, intending to never look back. Then I was back in December that year, vying to never be slave to gameplay again. Lo and behold, I'm here seven years later, happy as punch while you drag your feet, lamenting how good the game used to be.

It makes no difference what you chose to do then, because the same things you chose to do, you can choose to do now. You chastise the game for being easy, but when I cite how it used to be EASIER, you swerve by saying you didn't do that. Well, if you managed to find challenge in a game infested with farmers and powerlevellers, you can find challenge now. You're simply not looking hard enough.

I have one better. I remember facing Nosferatu, circa I7, on my own and kicking his ***. I'll take that experience over wasting an hour of my life beating my head against a brick wall. As Yahtzee once said, I suppose succeeding in breaking down the wall with my head would have given me a great sense of achievement, which is just as well as I'd have lost all my other senses by then. What you describe strikes me as a HORRIBLE experience that I would have abandoned at the 15 minute mark, as that's about the amount of patience I have for fake difficulty.

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the pre-GR Diabolique, who was both famous and infamous for her propensity to turn on Personal Forcefield and take off into the sunsent. I've fought Black Swan both before and after the AV-to-EB change, as well as before and after Going Rogue, and at no point has she run. I've fought Diabolique under the same circumstances, and she has run every time, multiple times.

And every time it pisses me off to no end because running enemies are one of my biggest irritants in this game. Chasing after a fleeing Agent Crimson is not my idea of fun, nor is stopping 30 Fir Bolg. It's actually the polar opposite of fun, come to think of it. It's painful and nauseating and it makes me hate both the game and the people who make it. I drop both of these missions like a hot potato every time they show up in my queue in the vague hope that someone in QA might notice.

Yes, I too remember the "thrill" of running... Ever so slowly... Back from the hospital, seeing half my team drop, making the mission impossible to finish, urging the remaining few people in a valiant attempt to salvage that mess, team-wiping again about five more times because we don't have enough people and all going our separate ways bitter and defeated. I don't miss that.

Nor have I, but until you mentioned it, I was lucky enough to not remember having to "use tactics," as was one-size-fits-all solution to everything that arrogant ponces used to toss at every player who complained about power balance. I remember how bored out of my skull I was while the Blaster would slooooowly drag all the enemies around the corner, one by one, so that we can take fifteen minutes to take down one spawn. I remember dying a lot, too. I remember not having a hell of a lot of fun.

A while ago, I sat down and reflected on the game, how it once was and all the things that had changed. I realised one thing: The Launch game really, really sucked for power balance and the kind of player power I really wanted - that is, the ability to solo my own missions without dying all the time - was only achievable through min-maxing. Well, now it's available to the masses, and whether or not it is an achievement no longer interests me. I care to get it, not HOW I get it. So, no, I don't miss having to pull, which is about the sum total that "use Tic Tacs" always seemed to come down to.

And I'm saying that they never did that. I don't know what greater depth you ever saw in City of Heroes (that isn't there now), but I always saw City of Heroes for the click-and-kill fighter that it is, not much different from Diablo 2 or Dungeon Siege (which is essentially Diablo 2 anyway). You pick your powers, then click on things to die. The only difference is you don't have an auto-attack, and must instead rely on recharge-bound skills, instead.

City of Heroes is not and has never been a complex system worthy of gaming it. It was never designed to be one. This isn't D&D or Champions (the PNP system). This is a game which revolves solely around delivering enough damage and surviving enough damage, and there isn't all that much planning necessary to achieve this. There never was. Especially since "Bring a Defender or two" has always solved any problems a team might have. Back in I3, I ran a Bastion TF with 6 Scrappers and a Bubble Defender, and we walked over absolutely everything in our path. That's before I started running numbers, and this was done with a pick-up TF group and it was still dead easy.

This was never a complicated, deep, engaging game. It was a studio's first project, and it shows. It started off rife with bad programming, shoddy design, poor balance and limited interactivity, and Cryptic then NCNC then Paragon Studios have spent much of their time just fixing the inexperience of the original team. Hell, I'm sure Geko was under tremendous pressure to crank out a huge amount of powersets in a short amount of time, which is why he made so many of them so broken (Elude didn't let you attack, Moment of Glory didn't let you heal up, Rooted literally rooted you, Blasters had crappy ranged AND melee damage AND Controller hit points, etc.), and that's just one thing.

People flocked to City of Heroes partly for the comic books, but also partly because it WAS broken in a way that made us overpowered. Tired of having to fight single critters with a full team and fearing for their lives, people flocked to this game where you could take 20 goons out on your own. And you didn't start out fighting rats. Well, and because the game had no loot and raiding, but that's besides the point.

There IS no innovative gameplay and unique gaming experiences. There never were such things, that's what I'm saying. At least, there never were any which no longer exist. City of Heroes brought a lot of innovations to MMOs, but none of them are gameplay-related. They are, for the most part, convenience innovations. Sidekicking is one big one, but all that meant was you could play with more people, but the actual playing was still the same simplistic button-mashing system. Every time they tried to innovate, they produced a flop like simu-click objectives, running bosses or Dr. Graves. Every time they tried to experiment with powersets, they produced another Trick Arrow.

The core game is still here, pretty much unchanged since 2004. It's not much more complex, it's not much less difficult, it's not all that different. Scrappers are still awesome, Blasters are still sad, Defenders still insist they're not Healers and so on, only now we have more ATs to be condescending towards, but the game remains the same. What worked before still works now, just maybe better. What didn't work before hasn't gotten any better, it just sucks a little less.

What you're looking for, you can still achieve. Up your difficulty, mix up your builds, take chances, that sort of thing. I say the game is easy, but even I face hard fights a lot of the time. That's for the simple fact that I don't care to min-max, thus I'm operating more or less at pre-I9 levels of performance.

Sure, if you WANT to min/max AND have a difficult game, then I will have to politely ask you to please find another game. Because any game where I have to try hard and STILL have a hard time is a game I do not want to play. I get having a hard time if I'm lazy, I get putting in a lot of work to make the game easy, but to bust my *** and still be fighting for my life? No. Every other MMO on the Market does this, and there's a reason I'm not playing any of them.

I'm really not sure how you come to that conclusion when City of Heroes is still the only MMO which offers a decent super hero experience for those who aren't necessarily comic book fans, it's still the only MMO on the market that's relatively easy all the way through and it's still one of the VERY few MMOs where you can solo relatively well. Compound that with the fact that it's one of the few who technically have an open world but are still largely instance-based AND has 7 years worth of costume creator and that's a very tough act to beat.

It is precisely because City of Heroes is "MMO-lite" that I'm here. I recall back in 2004 and 2005 how many people we had who admitted that City of Heroes was not only their first MMO, but their first computer game ever, as well. If you're looking for an MMO classic, you came to the wrong place, because City of Heroes is not a classic MMO, nor should it be. If I wanted WoW in tights, I can always play Champions Online. As I'm posting here on the VIP-only forums, that's probably not the case.

I've tried other MMOs. In fact, just last night a friend of mine asked me to try Vindictus. You know what my first experience with it was? Mailbox, crafting, auction house, gear degradation, mining, materials, armour dyes, loot enhancement that has a chance to break your weapon. Essentially, "MMO stuff," none of which is interesting to me.

The stats and skulls and the gear and the trading and the dying isn't why I'm here. The reason I'm here is because when I was younger, I sat down and wrote the story of a character whom I gave the ****** name of "Samuel Tow," whom I really, really liked. So when I heard about a game where I could probably make Sam and play him for real, I jumped at the chance. Sam was always overpowered the way I wrote him, and he's only gotten worse with time. Being overpowered in the game is exactly up his alley. And it is in Sam's image that my entire cadre of probably 60 characters at this point spawned, and ideally, I want them all to be as awesome as him. All the numbers and the loot and the "challenge" do is get in the way.

Which does jack **** since the difficulty settings can't turn off elite bosses.

If they were, you'd think they'd spend more effort on it. Something else must be going on, lest they're making a house out of hundred dollar bills.

Yes, and we've seen how that went. Both our competitors were praised for their superior gameplay and both of our competitors are in a most unenviable position at the moment. One would think that recent history would be evidence enough to stem cries of doom like this.

Slower, not more difficult.

They were not. As early as Issue 4, you've been able to purchase inspirations from Arenas, and as early as Launch, you've been able to purchase inspirations from your contacts. Inspiration drops rates have not changed, and in fact we LOST the Strength of Will inspirations which, while they wouldn't wake you up from being held, provided status protection for a significantly longer period of time.

Only if there was an Archvillain in them, because "back then" elite bosses didn't exist, save for Frostfire and Atta. Regular missions did not vary in mission difficulty because static spawn sizes are consistent between all enemy groups and without the gimmicks of constant ambushes and special spawns, you always fought the same number of enemies.

No, it isn't. It's significantly harder now that every mission expects you to fight multiple spawns at the same time regardless of your difficulty settings.

"The player" has never been able to do that. The legacy Heroic difficulty and its I6 Villainous counterparts were duplicates of the existing spawn mechanics. What the developers offered with difficulty changing was the ability to have harder missions, not to have easier ones. It wasn't until the I16 difficulty changes that we could choose our missions to spawn at -1. With the old system, all you could do was go +0x1, +0x2, +1x1, +1x2 or +2x1.

There are a number of people who have historically insisted and consistently proven that no solo-startable task in the game is impossible for any character of any AT and Powerset combination, on SOs, when built and played competently. The Evil Geko, I believe, went out of his way to solo Trapdoor with a number of Defenders and Controllers.

This isn't even remotely true. From Launch until I18, I took Stamina a grand total of one time, and when I did it it was on a respec with a character who'd gotten to 50 without it. I insisted then and I insist now that life without Stamina is not impossible. Not now, not ever. All it took was a little forethought. That's not a "challenge" even if you consider character building to be part of the game's challenge that requires skill. You know, as opposed to grabbing someone's Mids' dump off the AT forums.

This is provably false.

No, they aren't.

Which mostly goes up.

Yes, and pretty much everyone saw that as a problem. Having a single power that everyone irrespective of AT or powerset choice was better off having than not having is one of those "adorable" early game mistakes of development that may have seemed good on paper, but were tragic in practice. Like the belief that people would only use a few SOs and slot DOs and Trainings all the way up to 50.

Which works exactly the same way for character builds concerning powers, slots and regular enhancements, yet you pronounce those as "challenging." Remember the term "FOTM?" It existed for a reason. Remember City of Blasters? That existed for a reason, too.

Let's see... They institutued an "experience range" of 300 yards so people couldn't be powerlevelled while they stood at the station, they instituted multiple changes to team experience distribution to make it impossibel to gain level if you were too far below, and finally they institutued the SSK system which eliminated bridging entirely. They banned people over powerlevelling in the Architect, put in place tremendous restrictions to its rewards and abilities, put timers on a dozen missions and probably other things I can't remember, and from this you infer that the developers condone powerlevelling? If they did, they'd have just dropped a bunch of the old style Winter Lords on us and called it a day.

Without challenge, possibly, on base difficulty. So what else is new? Hollow and neglected? Not in the slightest.

Nor should it. I didn't come to this game because I didn't have enough hardship in my life. I came to it because it allows me to punch Nazi in the face.

It was never "vibrant and exciting." What you remember is a hollow illusion. Everything City of Heroes was from the onset of Day 1 was players vastly stronger than the game intended for them to be, with the developers scrambling and failing to do anything about it. Since day one, players have been breaking the game and making it beyond easy. There was City of Blasters, there was dumpster diving, there were Dreck and Wolf farms and so on and so forth. You claim the game used to have challenge when Tankers could reach 99% damage resistance and scrappers could hit 90% and when Combat Jumping gave 5% defence to everything? You claim the game was challenging when all it took to tank the Hamidon was a single controller in outer space dropping Phantom Army? You claim the game was challenging when a single Tanker could hit all of his caps, aggro 50 enemies then walk away to have lunch and return to full health?

Either your memory is full of holes, or you're looking for reasons to dis people who don't share your point of view. I half expect you to start tossing around the "noob" and "carebear" arguments.

And you know what? Since the very beginning, the reason so many people kept coming back here was because this WASN'T like all the other MMOs where you have to live in constant fear for your life and work your *** off for a stupid percentage. This was a game where you could sit down, grab a Scrapper and go kill 20 people at the same time. I've been doing this since before I1, and very little has changed in the fundamental way the game plays. About the only thing that changed was Jack left and took his "1 hero = 3 white minions" nonsense with him and his successors finally accepted that we enjoyed our easy game exactly because it WAS easy.

From time to time, I hear people reminisce about old times. You know what I hear them reminisce about the most often? How they could herd 50 wolves into a dumpster and have a Blaster nuke them all to hell. That, and Regeneration before Instant Healing was a click power.

Unless you remember from pre-Beta, I can tell you for a fact that I've been playing this game with half my brain shut down since May of 2004, and I've always done just fine. Well, except when I tried Blasters, but that's fixed now.

I'd play a game like that. If there were a sufficient storyline justification for it, I certainly would. I'd probably enjoy it a hell of a lot more than most of the newer City of Heroes content, too. Put it this way: I'm not here seven years later because I find Protean's Power Syphon that amazingly astounding. I'm sure as hell not here for the running enemies and the escorts.

And that's precisely what I liked about it, and that's precisely what I want. And when given a choice, that's precisely what I'll choose. Rescuing 21 mystics from Oranbega is still one of my favourite missions because it's quite literally one giant map full of objectives to accomplish. It helps that I'm thorough so I've never missed any. Seven years ago, I said something: All I want out of this game is more 5th Column to kill. Seven years later, this has not changed in the slightest, and now the 5th Column is back so I can stop correcting myself.

Dean McArthur is one of my favourite contacts and an example of good villain writing, but not because I can have dialogues with him or because Ajax can't die or because Protean has a Power Syphon. In fact, if it weren't so easy, the Protean fight would be a giant pain in the ***, but his Syphon was slowed down enough to where I can avoid it if I think fast. I like it because it depicts our villains working for themselves, but the conversations in them really start to drag on me after about the 20th time I've run through them.

City of Heroes is a game of repetition and alts, and when given the choice, I'll pick the stories that are easiest to replay, which is to say those with the fewest gimmicks in them. More specifically, I'm referring to those missions that, if I already know the plot, I don't miss anything by not reading any of the text. Gimmicks are only good to shake things up a bit from time to time, but the very POINT of gimmicks is to force people out of their comfort and "zone" and force them to think around an eccentric situation. Appropriate for once in a long while, but if you yank me out of my flow too often, then it just ruins the entire experience.

Gimmicks, to me, are like watching an atmospheric movie and trying to become engrossed with the experience, but having someone constantly call you to the other room to help open a can, or tune the TV or figure out why the PC crashed or to see what the stray cats are doing. I live with people who, some days, think of something to bug me about quite literally every five minutes on the dot. If I'm trying to write, read or watch something, I'm about ready to punch people right around the third time.

Did I die and go to an alternate plane of existence where this sort of expectation makes any sort of sense? There is so much wrong with it that I have trouble wrapping my head around it, let alone deciding where to start...

Arcana, you're arguing semantics. I want to feel more powerful fighting the enemies I'm naturally pitted against by the game as I level up. This works up until level 50, but if I want to go beyond that, the game starts pitting me against enemies I CANNOT win, because I'm expected to be one of 20 people. I don't care what "level up" means in a strict sense. All I care about is what happens to the threats the game keeps putting me up against, and post level 50, these threats skyrocket intentionally so I can't oppose them. I don't like this.

Here's the thing - once I gain godlike power, I move into fighting enemies who have ten times my godlike power. That's progress in only the most pedantic sense. This isn't the real world. My powers have no application other than to play the game and progress and gather more. THAT is what I have to measure up against, and if I gain more power yet am able to do less against my "current" enemies, then that's not progression. That's regression.

With your weight-lifting analogy, that's like me going from being bale to lift 100 pounds and being the champion of my strength class, then training to lift 200 pounds but being moved into a higher strength category where I have to live at least 300 pounds in order to not be laughed at. I've gone from champion to loser. I might be stronger and have other use of it in my real life, but it doesn't change the fact that I've become a loser. And since my characters' strength in City of Heroes has no use in their real lives because they DON'T have real lives. About the only non-progression-specific benefit levelling up gives me is making Steel Canyon fires easier.