TonyV

We as a community need to support a fundamental shift in how teams are created. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate spamming channels and sending out tells to everyone looking for teams. We really need to make a concerted effort to use the queuing system how it was intended and get people used to teaming this way.

Maybe we can start holding queue-based events, or forming up groups dedicated to running multiple queue-recruited task forces per day or something. Honestly, I think that the only people don't use them more now is because of the shortcomings it has had that this issue resolves (for example, not being queueable in missions and such), but I'm a little worried that the simple inertia of people doing things the way they've always been done will be a hinderance to the queue system, which I think is brilliant, becoming widely accepted.

@The devs, next stop: Ouroboros arcs!

Not much has changed so far. Devs, get on the ball!

This is a sort-of quick reply; I've read the first page of posts.

I understand your frustration, I really, really do. It never boggles my mind how no matter how many times you tell someone not to do something, it's like they just can't resist being stupid.

However...

First of all, in my opinion, it's not cool calling people out on the forums like this. Yes, I know you didn't name names, but still, anyone who ran this trial with you probably knows who you're talking about, and what purpose does that serve? They already knew who it was because they were with you. However, if the guy who did whatever perceived grievance to you sees the post and had an actual legitimate reason for doing it (cat on keyboard, afk and his four-year-old started punching pretty buttons, he mis-aimed his mouse and accidentally hit the Ion Judgment key, he forgot that he re-bound I to be Ion Judgment instead of Info Window, etc.) and he reads this thread, he's going to feel like dirt, possibly even to the point of quitting the game. If, on the other hand, the guy is a griefer and did it purely to cause you anguish, well guess what? Job well done! Let's find another team to screw over and see if we can get them to post melodramatic rants on the forums! Congratulations, you're giving him the jollies he was seeking. In any event, you're not helping anything.

Second of all, I really get tired of people posting these rants as if someone single-handedly destroyed your life. This person wasted, what, fifteen or twenty minutes of your time? And really, not even that, since you were getting rewards up until the trial failed, so it's not like you came away completely empty-handed. How many trials have you failed in all, versus how many have been successful? If you're like me, one trial out of maybe 30 or so fails, and that's being generous. Sure, the number is a bit higher after a new trial is released and people are getting used to it, but all in all, I'm really tired of people complaining that something in the game is failable. You spend 99.99% of your time cutting through missions like a hot knife through butter because the game is so simple that there's a good chance that even the aforementioned four-year-old can be successful at it, but that 0.01% makes it all just a big, fat waste of time. Yeah, I don't buy it, and I don't have much sympathy.

Third of all, to those of you who are interpreting this anecdote as some sort of indication of a systemic design flaw of the trial or even the game, :epic eye roll:. If I set my mind to it, I could single-handedly make just about any experience in the game miserable for you. Sure, it would be griefing, and yeah, I might get a slap on the wrist or even banned, but if your standard of "playable" is defined by how little a dedicated griefer can screw you over, you might as well stop playing multiplayer games altogether. A better idea is to accept that griefers are out there, don't let them get to you, take sensible measures against them (that is, kicking them, one-starring them, petitioning them if necessary, etc.) and get on with your life.

Like I said, I understand your frustration. It's not like there haven't been moments when I yelled and gestured madly at my monitors because some putz has either intentionally or even unintentionally screwed me over and wasted a bit of time. But then I remember how much other people also make this game supremely enjoyable, that the threat of failure adds to the thrill of victory, and I realize that I wouldn't want it any other way. So to the OP: chill out, man. To everyone else: please stop feeding the negativity and trying to get the devs to make the game one giant "I win!" button. It's already too easy as it is.

I have been hammering on them to do this ever since I found out the right people to hammer on to get this done. I've even mentioned it a couple of times in person after flying thousands of miles to Mountain View, California specifically for game-related purposes.

The vibe I'm getting is that it is something they want to do, but they've been (and still are) so busy working on the CoH: Freedom launch that it just hasn't bubbled up as a priority yet.

They have acknowledged that they know that people want to be able to gift things. To be fair, it's not as simple as people probably think it is; it would take some dedicated hours from a lot of teams and would probably be a full-scale IT project to implement it in a secure manner. All of that costs money, and someone has to sell to someone else the notion that it will bring in more money than it will cost to do. I strongly suspect that the "someone" is Ross at Paragon Studios and the "someone else" are the powers-that-be at NCsoft in Austin. If Zwillinger sees this thread, maybe he'll point it out to give the "someone" more ammo. Or better yet, if I'm right that this is something that would have to come out of Austin and not Mountain View, perhaps someone could float the contact info of the NCsoft equivalent of Zwillinger (i.e. the NCsoft Community/Public Relations people) to us so that we could echo it one link closer?

Like everyone else, I'm really hoping that it comes to pass sometime in 2012, and sooner rather than later.

I hear you. If I have to read such a thing one more time, I will literally explode, and that would be SO ironic.

I remember when I first ran across a Sky Raiders shield generator. I had outleveled Kings Row, but hadn't gotten to be in any missions with the Sky Raiders yet. For some reason, I found myself in a remote corner of the zone, and I see this little contraption with a huge bubble around it. Someone had apparently defeated its accompanying spawn, so it was just sitting there, all by itself, not doing anything.

I honestly thought it was something special that was supposed to be there. It wasn't attacking me or anything, so I hypothesized that maybe because there were high-level enemies (relative to most spawns in Kings Row) around, it was some sort of force field set up to help protect the players. I drew in some enemies to try to fight them within the bubble, and they got bubbles around them! I think I actually contemplated that maybe it was bugged, but I didn't file a report or anything.

Eventually, I noticed that it was targetable, so with a bit of trepidation, I tried attacking it. *whiff! I tried again. *whiff! More. *whiff, whiff, whiff! Nothing. It was very purple to me.

It was probably at least a couple of weeks or so later that I finally encountered the things within a Sky Raiders mission. OH!!! THAT'S what that thing in Kings Row was!!!

I don't even know if those high-level missions still spawn like they used to. I also remember wandering around Kings Row as a tiny little level 10 or so and running across this wrinkly, shriveled up thing on a fire escape while I was trying to get to the top of a building to clear out some Thorns. I had just enough time to target it, notice it was a level 50 something called "Rikti," and letting out a brief gasp of surprise before being thorougly faceplanted with one shot.

*pew! ...And now I'm dead. Meanwhile, he went right on about his business as if I were just a squashed bug not even worth throwing into the trash.

Ooh, another. It took me a few days to realize that you can steer by holding down your right mouse button. Until then, I had been using Q and E to turn left or right.

In fact, I had a little mini-game where I would run on top of fences as far as I could without falling off. It was quite challenging, trying to get lined up just perfectly using the course grain keyboard controls... Until I found out about the right mouse button functionality. All of a sudden, my little game became trivially easy.

Whenever I see a topic like this, I'm reminded of something that you real old-timers will undoubtedly remember.

There used to not be an Exit button on the nav window when you completed a mission. Instead, you had to click on the little "i" icon that brings up information for the mission. (Yes, this means that after you completed a mission, you couldn't get the information for it any more; clicking on the i icon would exit the mission.)

I think that buried in the bowels of the tutorial during the mission to rescue Flower Knight this fact was mentioned, but I missed it. So for a couple of weeks, I exited missions the only way I knew how--by running all the way back to the door in from which I came when I entered the mission.

Finally, I was working on missions with some teammates one night and noticed that after each mission, everyone was simply vanishing into thin air. For the first couple of missions or so, I just chalked it up to some glitch or weirdity. After noticing it happening with consistency, though, I finally asked, "Hey guys, how are you all getting outside so quickly?" Someone told me about clicking on the nav window to exit.

Ohhhhhhh!

Of course, now there's a button explicitly labeled "Exit" that's pretty hard to miss. You kids have it so easy these days.

Heh, good one, Zombie. Looks like you had some people going for a minute there.

It's not that bad. Just defeat the guys up front, then deliberately jump all the way down to the bottom. Defeat those guys down there, and work your way up by going around the perimeter counter-clockwise. There are ramps and such that will take you from the bottom all the way to the top in a rational manner--ramps that pets and other helpers will use to follow you. If you work your way from the bottom up, you don't have to worry so much about falling. Since you've already cleared the stuff below you out, there are no surprises waiting to plant you in the ground.

As you work your way up, keep your ears open for glowie humming.

Here's a video of Belle doing it. (The ski slope, not the bobsled one.) Her trick is to use Inertial Reduction and Inertial Reduction only. If she gets hit by Speed Boost or is otherwise run-accelerated, it totally throws her off.

Here we go! I knew I had some pictures of the old old "Death Star" globe somewhere. Apologies in advance for blowing the width of the forum; I don't really have time right this second to make thumbnails/links. Still, here they are:



Crotch shot warning!...




There's also just a few frames of it visible at 1:19 in the old old promotional video (from the very first demo in 2001; the one that contains the old old GUI) that I archived at the link below. The wireframe globe had replaced it by Jack Emmert's 2002 E3 presentation.

CLICK IMAGE FOR VIDEO

I think there's this misguided notion that the folks at Paragon Studios hate all other games. It's simply not true. They are gamers just like a lot of us are. I'm almost certain that most of them will be spending some time in a place "far, far away," as you put it.

In fact, I'd even go so far as to say that they don't really want this to be the only game you play. I think it is for a lot of people, and they tend to get jaded with City of Heroes. Sometimes you really have to go check out the grass on the other side of the fence to convince yourself that it's really not that much greener, and you actually have it pretty good. Also, it gives the player base a much broader knowledge and experience of the gaming industry as a whole, so they can do things like make more intelligent and relevant suggestions and bug reports.

Obviously, they want you playing City of Heroes a lot, and since they have to pay for the resources (disk space, bandwidth, etc.) and don't necessarily want to help other companies with advertising, they don't want you discussing competitors here. But the Winter Event isn't meant to hold your attention to the exclusion of all else. If nothing else, there are probably going to be a lot of people like me who are about to go out of town on a family vacation, so I'm going to be away several says in a place far, far away (well, a few hours north) that has nothing to do with gaming.