Scarlet Shocker

Back in the day, when I first joined the game, there was a lot less content - that was back towards the end of I6. Back then it was almost "mandatory" to do the Hollows. The alternative was street sweeping in Kings Row - and if you ever remember that you'll know how painful that was. So it was Hobson's choice - Frostfire was your friend and again and again and again ad infinitum. Don't forget this was pre-the XP Curve smooth and Radio Missions and the (in)famous revamp. It literally was that or a very long painful solo slog until... well it's been so long I forget.

The Hollows was, and remains, great content. It actually outshone a lot of later content in terms of quality and continuity, but the problem was that because of its ubiquity, it became interminable. By the 15th time of David Wincott saying "just take care of those 10 Outcasts" you didn't want to play any more you wanted to punch him in the mouth. Let's not forget that the Hollows arc took real time in those days. This was long before someone could run from 1-12 in a few hours doing regular content. Even on big teams who knew their stuff there was still many hours to be played. But of course that was the same for everyone. And how we laughed when the Kheldians came and blitzed everything then cried like little girls at the first sign of a Void or Quantum.

The alternative was the Snakes of Mercy but that was a ghost town even then and it took a long time to get to good content red side.

It took a long time for the Devs to get that message, and a lot of good players died in the Hollows, moving on to pastures new, before getting to high level, because they didn't like the grind of Frostfire and Atta. When the Eastgate finally got a makeover, it was after the horse had bolted: Radio Missions had taken over and the world and its dog was scoping for jetpacks.

Doing the Hollows now is an active choice and it's a good, refreshing one, but it actually has to be made by the player and his/her friends and colleagues. In many ways the makeover signified the death-knell of the Hollows because it was too little too late. The entire zone was a curio from a bygone age, left to Trolls, Outcasts and the Igneous. If Meg Mason and Foreshadow were real people they'd want to do to the Devs what we wanted to do to Wincott when it was being played.

But the Hollows got forgotten, and people moved on as new content was doled out, and now the entire zone is mostly a graveyard. If it gets run now, it's mostly nostalgia, or badges.

Many of you reading this can see where I'm going already: But for those who can't it's very simple: The Hollows was excellent content and yet the mandatory grind, more than anything else killed it. For a long time it seems the Devs had taken heed of that lesson. But these trials, well I am being very subjective here of course and I freely admit it, but they aren't of the standard of the Hollows arcs, and yet they are more grindy.

Once there's an alternative they will be a wasteland.

I'd mostly agree wtih your summary, but I think you're missing a couple of points.

As many including myself have pointed out, the BAF and Lambda trials are pretty low quality which seems strange compared to the excellence of the two new 20-40s... I can only surmise that Sutter and Kal were told to be a story with a solid vision, whereas both the new incarnate trials have a feel of being designed by committee, where certain elements must be included and what we get is a pretty poor result.

The Incarnate system itself is frankly horrid. For such an important new feature in the game the interface is truly dreadful, and really not worthy of the "End Game." It's not even in the same bleedin' place ffs!

The League system is very meh. I can see what the Devs tried to achieve with it but it's pretty ugly and clunky too, and the fact you can have 24 people running around a small map seems to make it very laggy.

The Salvage system is pretty bad. I've commented on that at length in another thread but the Devs have clearly done an about face since they decided to get rid of Base Salvage, but what we get served up is a confusing dogs dinner of bits and pieces of salvage that mostly makes no sense.

But worst of all the story is just dire. The whole concept of Incarnates may have seemed exciting initially but this insane hole in the ground driving meta-humans mad and taking over others and pitting them against each other in some kind of social darwinism is so jarring and contrived and just rips any control the player has of his or her character away and gives you a one-eyed vision. This is how the Devs want my characters to be and so they will be it if I continue to play them.

Yeah it's fundamentally a borked story.

One of the big issues for me is that we used to have this "good guy vs bad guy" thing going on: Heroes vs Villains. Now you can barely get a fagpaper between them. They are just this morally grey mess that can switch sides at will and do whatever the hell they like with impunity. There's no consequence to going bad (or vice versa) and there was a perfect opportunity to restore that duality with Loyalists and Resistance: Loyalists could have remained Loyal to Cole and Resistance could have allied themselves to the Primals.

Sadly that opportunity was missed and the story we got was incredibly poor - which is at odds with much recent content. It's simply a fait accomplis: We're offering you the choice of paths but there's only one outcome. Thus is becomes pointless.

Thanks to everyone for making our first auction such a great event! Congrats too, to everyone who made successful bids for EERC members, Players and especially the Red Names! Not to mention the MA Code

I'm very pleased to say we've made a lot of inf which we are now very keen to dish out in various events so keep your eyes peeled!

If you didn't get to take part this time, don't worry, we're going to run them again across the remaining three EU servers, and plenty of other events besides so keep your eyes peeled and feel free to hit us up in the Events thread for suggestions too!

Scarlet Shocker

There are two problems as I see it:

There are 2 trials that need to be repeated and the specific issues are

They aren't very good. They aren't very long.

Thus the content doesn't capture the imagination, and then it's all over and an interminable rinse and repeat.

Is there any news about Forum lagging and pages refusing to load Zwil?

Let's face it

If all the women in City of Heroes were laid end to end....


nobody'd be at all surprised

Ok good peoples,

Here's the list so far. I think we've a couple of other peeps wanting to join, but it's not too late to add your name to this list.

It's all happening tonight in Pocket D, so be there or be an equilateral rhomboid!

Scarlet Shocker
Mrs ?
Super Ready
Mr ?
Mereman
Beastyle*
Avatea*
Master Zaprobo
Tri'Angel
SynergyX

double post not my fault

it's a small blue lemming I call Horace

woe betide any upon whom I unleash him

If we try and give the Devs the benefit of the doubt, you could argue that this is the huge Giant Robot invasion that requires all the superteams to combine. Kind of like the comicbook epics where the Avengers, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Defenders et al join forces to fight the biggest threat mankind has ever known (which is why the Avengers formed in the first place)

The principle is sound, but to make it worthwhile, the enemy has to be worth getting a team that big for. And there's the problem: The mechanics of doing that are pretty borked. The whole group thing just doesn't work properly.

What bugs me about this is that the Rikti & Zombie invasions provided a perfectly sound model for that kind of activity; just dive in, shout for a team invite and kill stuff. That could easily have been done here (probably far simpler than what we have, both from a programming and gameplay perspective.) What we actually get is ok conceptually but it's execution is pretty sub-par.

I think the fundamental issue here is not that it's impossible per se - I've done it on 2 toons quite successfully. It's just not very good.

The philosophy of making a trial/tf more challenging has always been make it bigger and tougher. That is a mantra we've seen going back to when GMs were given insane regen and no reward, thus rendering them pointless when they could have been a central tenet of the game.

ITF also showed a lot of that, with the fluffies boosting Romulus and it took a while to work out the strategy.

Reichsman in his resurrected form just got stupid, especially red side. Stupidly high regen (plus insane ambushes and that stupidly hateful "fist of doom" cutscene that makes the entire game pointless) and yet with a few tweaks Dr Kahn TF is easily one of my favourites.

We see a bit of this in Lady Grey and Statesman but none of them are insurmountable and they at least have a good story.

I guess on one way we should be grateful that the Devs are at least exploring alternatives to the "stupidly hard enemy", but in anything remotely Praetorian they fail; Apex is a dogpile for 2 reasons - Battle Maiden just runs at 50% health regardless of what a team of PCs do. She can have like Mag 462 holds on her but no she can run away, and then we get the stupid blue circles to contend with. They are difficult but mostly they are annoying as hell and just make you go WTF? cuz there's no obvious logic to them. Run from 1-50 and then Apex goes "oh we decided to try this"

Tin Mage isn't much better, except that Director 11 is a pita. But he's only a pita cuz he's got these magic trick mines (and at lvl 54 probably a few incarnate powers himself) but once you suss out that he can get ganked (just like Romulus) he's less of an issue than Rommy.

Seems to me the guns are just more of the same only bigger. It's recycling stuff, in the same way the Lady Grey Hamidon is recycled from the sewer trial. Lacking in imagination and once the novelty I bet it'll be back to runs of ITF (which actually IS a very good TF despite lag hill.)

BAF = Bugger All Fun