Starsman

And as a former number cruncher now finding himself a noob I got to say: darn the entire incarnate crafting system seems (for my rusty mind) convoluted!

I think I will stick still to the 1-50 game and ignore the incarnate stuff. I never been much of an end-gamer in this game anyways. In that game: I'll cheat with temps to avoid caltrops

Excessive ToHit buffs and attacks with no positional typing are keeping me from rolling a SR tank, though.

Ah. I barely touched those trails. Actually only ran one. Didn't even realized they would not allow temp powers. Lots of stuff still to catch up on...

My current dulled mind, in no condition to think of any consequences, wishes that critter ToHit buff cap was much much much lower.


Temp fly powers also can help quickly get out of those, at moderate endurance cost expense. Easy to get one these days, you still can buy them in the shadow shard, right?

Thanks for the welcome, always nice to know I'm remembered.


Been "back" for a few months now. Purchased Going Rogue 2 weeks before the Free 2 play announcement. Down the drain with 45 bucks because all I managed to do since the purchase to the day has been getting the exploration badges on Starsman.

Been lurking and barely playing due to being VERY busy with an iOS project.

Just started a new dayjob that has a LOT of idle hours so figured I may start posting. I may find myself with more posting time than playing time, but I think that was true before too.

Would rather they [writers] gave me a reason to want to do that.

I am not going to side with T_Immortalus but I have a hunch of where his line of thought is coming from. From their own minds, no one is evil. Same stands for Emperor Cole. At least the way the story is portrayed, the character is meant to believe he is doing something morally good, at least in his own little delusional mind. Evil has little to do with anything, though. He is an oppressor and only the ignorant can claim to love his dictatorship.

Mind you, you can pull similar effects with democracy. If played correctly you can make people think you are accepted and democratically designated by the masses. Its hard to pull off and even harder to sustain but you can make that show work out, for a while. I would say Georgia is waking up from such a "democratic dictatorship" right now but thats a story for another day.

I think it was goal at some point to make the player also buy into that, and compared to every other cartoon villain this game tosses at us, the character had much more depth. But for better or worse that illusion was skin deep and didn't make it past marketing and out of the Praetorian first ... 10 levels?

I think (and am not a mind reader so may be wrong) T_Immortalus has not played the content to see the actual in game representation of Emperor Cole. If you base yourself only on the marketing campaign for Going Rogue (and had it held up to the actual in game content) he would be right, after all. Marketing attempted to make him be appreciable as either, a tyrant or a savior.

That was my biggest disappointment with the expansion.

Cata seems to promises to entirely remove raids as WoW players know them and replace them with 25 man heroic dungeons, so to speak. They keep saying it's going to change from "raid content" to "play style for dungeon content"

From day one teaming up in WoW was centered around instanced dungeons. The over-world was focused towards solo play (with few exceptions that have been removed over time.)

WoW also had always a global LFG channel, and it also had a dungeon finder since very early, it just sucked due to it looking in the same server and you being forced to travel to some stone and stay near it to find a group. The recent upgraded dungeon finder allows you to be anywhere and do anything while you wait and it joins up people from different servers, reason for it's huge success and the abundance of "random groups".

My point is that little changed in the way of the game's design philosophy, despite the dungeons being mostly random groups. Dungeons are not any more causal now, they are more frequent but players are just as nit-picky as they used to be, if not more (specially at the endgame range where speed-runs are the cup of tea, not much different from speed run TFs for merits.)

Oh, and one thing I also forgot to note: although not always activly used, due to the fact that almost all bosses require specific strategies, the dungeon finder also has an additional roll to fill: Dungeon Guide. A role that is assigned to some one that is expected to tell everyone else how to do things. You can queue yourself with this secondary role or the game will pick a guide from the formed group (not sure if it uses criteria like how many times the player ran that dungeon.)

When was the last time you saw people do anything other than instances in this game? Ship Raids and Hammy you say? They have their rare spawns too, but a solo player or non raider will not be likely to be questing around those areas.


WoW dungeons still require a specific team structure. No random group goes ahead (can't, system wont allow it) without a Tank, a Healer and 3 DPS. Depending on your class, you can queue for multiple roles, too (a warrior could join in as DPS or Tank.)

The game still require specific type of builds and knowledge to succeed, specially if you are the tank. It does not take rocket science, though. Any one can see one or two fights and know how to tank it in the future.

Raids tend to still be horribly draconian and can't be joined randomly. That will change in Cataclysm, but simply because all dungeons will have "raid modes" where you just turn a normal dungeon into a 25 man raid.

Even in my most negative day I can't see the company so negatively. Topic for a different thread but the issues with Auto Assault and Tabula Rasa were all caused by the respective game's studios and designers.

There is a funny irony here is that you were one of the forum names that popped in my head when I tried to think of people that would be unhappy with limited content tied up to Pretoria. No clue why, since I don't know your posting pattern much, other than your art collector nature.

Never expected the extreme NCSoft bashing though, but I can easily tie that to frustration.

You are right, I managed to get to an old WayBack machine link to EBGames website (warning SLOOOOW) and it was listed for $49.95, the free month you got if you applied it to an existing account to treat it as an expansion would lower the actual price comparison to $34.95 vs GR $29.95.

If I was forced to wear my TinFoil hat and make the most absurd of conspiracy theories that still sounded at least plausible, I'd say Going Rogue and the Incarnate content, at minimum, were supposed to be part of the expansion box. Then they realized they were not going to make the deadline and opted to delay it, just add "a preview", and launch what could be ready. The imminent release of DCUO likely had a lot to do with it.


I still would like to know if Issue 19 or 20 plan to expand the lvl 20-50 Pretoria. That's all I cared for, to explore the full "universe of Pretoria."

I also consider it's more important than the end game content, as the new players that get bait in with the new box will have higher chances to see the end game if they don't have to lower the standard of content they got used to in the first 20 levels.

He pulled because he was not happy with the grindy feel of it. He wants it to be packaged with new content.

On the City of Villains argument of it being standalone or not, its a waste of breath because it was both. It was a stand alone game just like Guild Wars expansions were stand alone games, but the box also added value for existing players so it also was an expansion.

At the end of the day, you only have 3 things you can try to weight when comparing both expansions:

Time to develop
Size of staff
Price of expansion

From announcement to launch it took 15 months to release GR. I dont recall when was CoV announced but it was released 18 months after CoH launch.

The team, from what I understand, is larger for Going Rogue.

Finally, off course, is the price. Many insist on labeling CoV at 60 and GR at 30 but thats extremist. If you got CoV as an expansion, you got a free month applied to your account, that's a $15 discount taking the actual expansion price to $45, still higher than $30.

So more people, either the same time or less, and lesser price.

I guess It's fair to expect less from GR than from CoV. Things jump to how much less?

I will say the expansion was not enough for me (even if, irony dictates I would had paid more for separate features in the form of booster packs,) but I am likely just burned out on things and it's just my opinion.

I must have been unlucky in beta. I repeated quite a few missions in only one swap from hero to vigilante. Think at least 3 of the 10 missions I did were repeats.

I dont know if it changed, I know late in beta (almost two weeks from launch) I noted my concern on this to a community manager.

I searched up and down through the entire website, and the only place where I could find a reference to the level range of Pretoria was in the Dev Vid 2. The other reference I found I had to hunt in youtube for a Q&A. Both of these were passing through comments. I watched each Dev Vid 3 times to make sure I didnt miss anything (after realizing the second time I saw Vid 2 that there was one passing mention.)

It didn't help that every time Pretoria was mentioned in the site it came in two bullet points:

• Brand new starting experience
• Explore the Universe of Pretoria

Not sure you, but it was not until I experienced the universe of Pretoria in beta that I realized the universe is limited to 20 levels.

Now, I wont bash the expansion simply because it obviously is liked by a lot of people. That's good. However, I don't think the people that express their discontent deserve bashing either, at least not unless they start bashing and crying DOOOM, anyone that cries doom is too short-sighted.


On a side note, many ask this:
Why do you want more endgame content?

It depends on the player, to be honest, but from what i have observed in many games, many players need a subconcious motivation of progress to really feel a pull towards playing. I should have a conversation with a psychologist friend of mine on this topic because I bet there got to be some real life parallels to it.

If they feel they are just playing for the sake of playing, they quickly loose motivation. They end up starting over or quitting. It's a good thing this game has a lot of replay value that it accommodates nicely leveling alts.

The progress does not have to mean much. It's just like XBox Live gamer score. You can see people grinding the heck out of games just to get a higher score and often keep playing a game until they get all the achievements the game has to offer, not for the sake of achievement but for the sake of the points.

Anyways, sure, these players can just progress on alts, but there is also an attachment to your "main". I think everyone has one "main", that character that they feel truly consider their in game persona. For these players it can be a bit frustrating that they can not advance THAT character.

Many of these players subconscious would be perfectly happy if you somehow made a game without levelcaps. That has it's own inherent set of issues, though.

As for me? Call me crazy, but I don't want endgame. I wanted more dev-designed content to take my characters from 1-50 through new zones in a world where not everything is about being good or evil. There is where my disappointment stands.

IF they are working on a cross-platform console release then it could be done in OpenGL as well as DirectX. Other than rumors though, I never heard of NCSoft doing any console development.

At that point, though, it would still just be a console game and be unlikely to hit the Mac or PC.

NCSoft in-house games, Lineage and Aion are both DirectX games. I'd figure any new project they jump on will be DirectX.

That sort of marries you to Microsoft platforms.

Character porting didn't even dent the enthusiasm people had in the game.

EverQuest 2 had other interesting bumps. For one, they never tried to be a migration, but they did market it as a form of upgrade. For a long time players of EQ1 asked for a complete graphic overhaul, and the response was it would take as much work as making a new game, and if they were going to invest that amount of time, they may as well make a new game instead of just sugar-coat the old game (over the years that mentality changed, they have revamped a lot of the old EQ world, albeit it looks like an odd expressionist piece of art where you see 1998 polygonal art to your left, 2005 nice art to your right while fighting a 2009 high res monster.)

So EQ2's team ventured to do something entirely different, attempting to capitalize in the lore. I'd say EQ2 made 3 big mistakes:

1) They called it EverQuest 2
2) They marketed it to existing EverQuest players
3) They dished aside too much lore making the lore nearly unrecognizable.

So marketing directly and indirectly created expectations on the old EQ player-base that they were not intending to meet, and the ones that just loved the lore found the new Tabula Rasa nearly unrecognizable.

Over time they realized the way to make EQ2 live up to it's name was to dip back into the old lore, bathe itself in the atmospheric essence of the original EverQuest. That worked wonders. EverQuest resurrected classic zones like Kelethin, Neriak, the Desert of Ro and Kunark, between others, and they even made sure to make it all recognizable. It did give the game new live and made it an appealing world for those that grew tired of the aging mechanics of EQ1.

Asheron's Call 2 made the same mistake, only to the 10th power. Where at least EQ1 kept city names (if not looks) and every race that was popular in the original EQ, Asheron's Call 2 entirely rewrote everything to the point it only made sense to be picked up by some one entirely new to the game, yet many of these players would not pick the game simply because they thought they where jumping in the middle of something (2 denotes you missed in on the first game.)

Lineage 2 is a different beast. It's reason to success in the east is unknown to me, but here in the west it had much more to do with the fact that no one knew Lineage 1.

That aside: If its true that NCSoft is working on a new City of Heroes franchise game, I do hope they are doing so for other mediums (Consoles) and as entirely new systems. I fear if one company still think they can pull the sequel thing, it will be NCSoft, due to their success with Lineage.

I would LOVE to see that demo record! No control powers, just his defense, brawl and boxing vs the wall of cimerorans!!! That would certainly be epic!!!