UberGuy

As an old timer who's been on Beta, this is news to me.

What? Why are you making this assumption? That's not how it's ever worked here, and there's no indication that they're changing it with CoH:F.

The only thing that ever got eaten if you unsubbed for an extended period was stuff left on the market. I'm not even sure that's still the case, but even if it is, that's the only thing that unsubscribing risks you losing.

I'm guessing you realize this, but that outlook is extraordinarily rare in CoH in particular, if not other MMOs, especially among long-term subscribers. I don't know anyone who has a lot of long-standing characters, a large SG base, etc, who wouldn't be extremely pissed if the game reset on them.

The ability to accumulate achievements (inf, IOs, levels, SG bases, badges, costumes, etc.) is, in many ways, the point of a persistent world. If there are no achievements to attain (and retain) then there is little value in persistence. Asteroids is not a persistent game, outside perhaps of the short list of High Scores. CoH is persistent, and the expectation of the vast majority of players is that their achievements (in whatever form) will be retained.

Related to this, running lots of iTrials for their actual completion salvage table rewards looking for rare and very rare drops, while not spending Astrals to create the many commons you get (since common and uncommon drops are abundant) leaves you able to create a lot of recipes in addition to making Incarnate progress. I am simultaneously making Incarnate progress and creating a huge bank of stuff for my next few characters. My last few characters put through the iTrials have earned about 900 Astrals which were not spent on incarnate salvage. (I stopped spending Astrals on salvage after we got the ability to downgrade uncommons, and around the same time we were told what else we would be able to spend them on.)

Seriously? You think this will get them to do anything they aren't already doing, or, more cynically, will move them to action if they are currently doing nothing?

I think that's silly.

Those comments were specific to the Praetorean context, where regime change and government toppling are the express, core goals of the Resistance. They were in answer to your response to my comments about great victories in Praetorian storylines.

I think it's because, as the discussions drill into more detail, you get more expansive in your explanation of what you dislike about villains, until it sounds like you're saying the entire system is flawed to the core. (You wouldn't be the only person saying that, so it's not a strange thing to infer from the right statements.)

I agree (and always have) that the fundamental "lackey to Arachnos" feel is poor. I'm sure i could have been done better, even keeping Arachnos in the picture. I'm sure Arachnos itself could have been depicted in a better, less disfunctional way, even while keeping with its Darwinist philosophy. IMO, too many people in the Rogue Isles are depicted as flat-out morons, as if someone conflated the overall grunge of the Isles with the idea that it should be populated with underachievers.

Improving on things like that hasn't sounded like what you've been looking for in the last few posts.

They don't lead to regime change. There's no culminating mission where the Resistance takes down Cole, or even turns the general population against him. These actions should be major dents in the status quo, but they don't actually change it. So, no, there's no massive victory.

In Praetorea, a massive Resistance victory largely assumes that we either convert society to rise up against Cole, or at least free it from him to do its own thing. A villain has pretty different motives. If the narrative assumes we're so powerful that we can smack Recluse (and his entire organization) around, why aren't we in charge of the RI, or some other place all our own? Are our villains just that lackadaisical that we're willing to leave the status quo in place despite having the power to destroy or take over it? The fact that this is a persistent world means that is nigh impossible to implement. Instead, it's a lot easier to present that we can't overcome the status quo.

Is that the only way they could have presented it? I don't think so. I also think that even given a storyline assumption that we can't overcome the status quo, we could have been given a better presentation on where we fit within it. But I think I understand why they gave us the overall place in the picture that they did. Part of it I put down to not "getting" what people would want a villain to be - I do think CoV's creators were too hero-centric in their views. But part of it was down to creating something that made sense as a status quo in a place crawling with super-powered miscreants.

Your functional, game mechanical level of power and the level of power the story assumes you have rarely support one another well under scrutiny in any game I have played. The story very frequently assumes you have limits that you don't actually have in practice, or when those limits exist, they are enforced not so much by your powers, but rather by fiat - you can't go out and take over the world because the zone borders won't let you out, for example.

On top of that, welcome to episodic storylines written by multiple, disparate authors. I'm not defending this, but wild variations in what it's assumed protagonists can do are common in a lot of episodic media. My classic example is Star Trek: TNG, where the ability of the Enterprise C to absorb or dish out damage often varied wildly as served the plot. That happens in our in-game stories, too, except it's just a fluctuation in what the mission narrative assumes about us, not a change in our actual mechanical capabilities.

If the presence of continuity breakdowns like this deeply mar your experience, you're going to be disappointed a lot, and not just in video games. (Heck, for all I know, that's already the case.) If you want to ensure that the game canon holds continuity with the fact that in some TF you once defeated a god, then either everything from that point on needs to assume you only ever face threats on that par, or it needs to never let you defeat a threat at that level to start with. I prefer to have the story variety, and I will mentally gloss over the inconsistency on my own. I'm here to beat stuff up, not to read a grand novel. It's a good thing if the narrative that accompanies that doesn't suck, but it doesn't set boundaries on my enjoyment.

And yet they do so by being cautious, sometimes hiding a lot, or not being terribly overt in most actions, even if they are somewhat overt in their position. And notably, none of them has managed to overthrow Cole's regime. Surviving just fine is not the same as massive victory.

I don't disagree that some or all of those might be welcome story changes, but I certainly don't feel they qualify as being required to "fix" the villain side. There are many things that dissuade players from playing villains, and story is only one part of it. Honestly, the forums are the only place I ever see anyone gripe so intensely about that aspect of the over-arching villain-side story. I have heard plenty of people mention they wish it was different (and I wouldn't mind, myself), but it isn't a deeply pervasive reason people avoid villain side.

Don't take this wrong, but given the above, it seems to me that you really may not have a very useful perspective, then, to judge whether CoH's end game ended up hard, slow or boring. The reason is because you would dislike any possible thing it could have been if indeed it was an endgame.

Unlike you, I do not seek or even want closure for my characters. In the old days, I used to avoid hitting level 50, because I did see it as "the end", and I did not want my characters to be done. I don't get to 50 with something I don't love playing. If I love playing something, I don't want to stop playing it just because I reach some milestone with it, but with no goals to pursue, I flounder. I9's Invention system let me breathe new life into my high level characters, giving me long-term progress goals for them that literally added years to my playtime with them. Incarnate progress, while my ways to achieve it are depressingly more narrow at this time, provides more new goals in that same vein.

Is that a serious question? If it is, the answer is "yes". If I hadn't, why would I be playing the game? If they never resolve it, it's not going to bother me. I mean, sure, I'm curious where they are going with it, but why would them not wrapping it up make me not enjoy what else they have done meanwhile? (Not that I've enjoyed everything, but I've enjoyed it or not on its own merits, not based on whether or not it clearly furthered the "coming storm." Or really, whether or not it wrapped up any existing story line.)

It is?

Edit: Well, you did say "IMO". But other than via this post, how would the devs know your opinion on this?

Eh. This is opinion which will vary from person to person. I don't find it difficult or slow. I've "finished"* 10 characters now through the system, and I think the "hardest" part of it is getting people to listen and cooperate, not the content itself.

Boring I don't agree with personally, per se, but I wouldn't disagree with anyone that said the available trial content wasn't sufficiently varied. It has only two trials that people run consistently, and one that enough people dislike that it isn't run much at all. The design of the system inherently promotes running the available content many times. In order to obtain the components require to "finish" 10 characters I have run over 500 trials. Adding things that the iTrial merit currencies can buy other than just Incarnate progress only heightens the number people may be compelled to run. Given all that, providing significantly more than two (popular) trails to run should be a high priority, IMO. We need both quantity and quality here, because given the critical mass of "average" players needed for successful trials, players will aggregate into the trials that are easiest to form and complete, and harder and/or less enjoyed trials will be less traveled.

* By "finished" I mean I have Very Rare powers in Alpha, Judgement, Interface and Destiny, and at least a Rare ability in Lore. Some of my characters have Very Rare Lore and/or additional Rare powers , usually in Destiny.

I don't want this to be the explanation, because that would be spectacularly stupid. That's not the way you introduce new players who just bought your nice new boxed set to the game.

I don't see this as a downside for redside.

Hazard zones, while nice for flavor and backstory, are ghost towns. They have been so basically forever, except for periods when some of them were popular for street sweeping. The devs almost certainly took their que from that observation when they neglected to give villain side similar zones.

The argument about "normal" zones has some merit, but I can see it from two sizes. On one side, more zones is more diversity and therefore more depth. On the other, more zones is just more space that people don't really congregate in anyway in a game so heavily oriented towards instanced content.

I like the structure of the open zones in the Rogue Isles. It's basically one zone per level range, with some overlap in the higher level zones. The only two that really compete significantly for the same level ranges are Nerva and St. Martial.

Notably, CoH is reducing its number of non-hazard zones by one in I21. Galaxy city going away, discounting the echo we'll retain for badge purposes.