UberGuy

The question in the OP is a wide open one, because it's wildly subjective what a "perfect" in-game market is. Is it one with the highest trade efficiency between players? Is it the one that provides the simplest interactions? Is it the one with the most facilities for traders or game economists? Is it the one that provides the most interesting interactions, creating a market mini-game? I'm sure that's not all the options.

Some of those possible targets for what a perfect market should be are in opposition to one another. Moving towards one tends to move away from one or more of the others. No one market will provide all those features.

What I think the CoH market does do is strike a surprisingly good balance between several of those features. I think it discards nearly all economist/trader facilities and some market efficiency in the interests of simplicity of interaction and the mini-game. While many people dislike the shield the market's anonymous transactions provide, that same anonymity also avoids finger-pointing and other personal drama originating from market interactions, which I personally feel is a worthwhile sacrifice in the name of community for a game that doesn't treat the market as a core element to progress.

So, no, I don't think our in-game market is perfect, but given all the competing things that it could try to do or be, it does a pretty good job of being a good fit for this CoH, given CoH's broader design, genre and community.

No.

There won't be a CoH 2.0. I don't mean there will never be a sequel. There might be, someday. What I mean is that it won't be this game, made shiny. It will be a different game with the "City of Heroes" name stamped on it.

I have never, ever played a sequel to any video game that was anything other than someone else's vision for what the first game should have been, but wasn't. Sometimes the sequel has been a fine game, but if I really liked the original game, I have never once been happy with the sequel, because it was missing things from the original game that were part of why I liked it so much.

To me, wishing for and then getting CoH 2.0 is likely to be a bit like fantasizing that your significant other could suddenly get the body of a supermodel or greek god, having it actually happen, and then discovering that their personality was changed by the process and the things you liked best about them were altered.

I'm sure to some people, this sounds like Chicken Little. After all, I can't know for sure what a CoH 2.0 will be, and whether or not I will like it. That's true, but here's what I do know, and why I think that kind of soul change is likely with any sequel to CoH.

The successes of CoH 1.0 were due to some of the strangest quirks of fate imaginable. The designers set out with fairly draconian visions of combat balance yet managed to create a min/maxer's Monty Haul wet dream that somehow also included no real "loot". They thought combat would proceed at a fairly slow pace, but created one of the most FPS-like MMOs that would exist for years. They thought we would slog our way from mission to mission street sweeping as we went, but gave us relatively early access (compared to competition) to glorious and fast travel powers.

CoH ended up being wildly entertaining almost because it's designers missed a bunch of the marks they were aiming for. A lot of things they did, like how buffs and debuffs stack, they did the way they did seemingly because they were both (actually) noobs at MMO design and kind of bad at math (or at least at mapping their math to gameplay).

Now, I'm sure there are a lot of lessons-learned about the "feel" of CoH that designers of version 2.0 would be likely to identify and try to preserve. The fast pace and scale of high-level combat are examples of things that I hope would be noticed and retained. But how they are achieved seem extremely likely to be approached with more careful, less noobish design. And that, in my opinion, is where the risk lies of them replacing the soul of this game with a new one. I am almost sure its "personality" will change.

I don't play other MMOs. I was exposed to them constantly before CoH, because I have many friends that play lots of different MMOs. I looked at those MMOs and was always tempted to play them to join my friends, but looked at what my friends were actually doing in most of them and felt "why would I pay monthly to do that?" CoH was the only one that made me go "ooh, I want to do that!" And outside of CoH, I still feel that way, even with the most very recent MMO alternatives. This makes me feel very confident that if CoH 2.0 feels much like a different game, I will be exceptionally unlikely to play it.

All this leads me to think that calls/wishes/demands for CoH 2.0 come from two broad categories of people:

• People who do play (or would be willing to play) different MMOs, and so would be happy playing an essentially different CoH game if it provided a few core elements they want, such as genre.
• People who are thinking that CoH 2.0 will be CoH 1.0, reskinned and tuned for better performance.

I think Keyes is much improved. I think Keyes had completely different issues. For what it's worth, I think the damage pulses were nerfed into meaninglessness. I wasn't a big fan of them, but I didn't hate them as much as most people seemed to. At their current damage levels, I'm not sure why they're there at all.

Keyes suffered from very different problems than what we're discussing, IMO. It suffered from tedious repetition (which I believe TPN also suffers from to an extent), and from effects which could kill you without recourse (which MoM suffers from to an extent in the Penelope room).

Don't mistake my arguments against you as blind acceptance of everything about the iTrials as wonderful. Each of the UGT, TPN and MoM have things I'd like to see changed or improved. For me, they are all relatively small changes that I think would greatly improve the overall experience.

Here's an example. In the UGT, nothing in the trial tells players that being Targeted means they should move away from other players. Nothing tells them how to avoid being targeted in the first place. Nothing tells them what is about to happen when the Avatar channels the Will of the Earth, or how to avoid it. That's bad design. It's doubly bad because it does tell you how to avoid some other effects. "Get behind the avatar." "Get near Desdemona." But this effect? Nah, figure it out on your own.

Notice though that I don't particularly want the devs to remove those mechanics - I want them to make the mechanics less mysterious, because you still have to play well to avoid them even if you know what to do. Today, the only way to know what to do is to find out from players who learned it in beta, or people they passed it on to, or to go outside the formal community. Do you know how I figured out how to avoid "Targeted"? I looked at (off-forums) posts of data showing the War Walkers' powers. I would probably never have figured out how it worked just by running trials. And that's just not cool.

Oh, trust me, I feel the LFG queue itself has awful problems. Here's me pointing out some reasons why I think the LFG queue sucks.

You must have been on a high population server. People did form LW events on Justice, but it was rare. Frankly, I felt like more people ran it when it was through the WL spawns + present portal. There were things wrong with that method (people often missed the timer), but there seemed to be more willingness to dive in when it had that exclusive window element about it.

I might like it to be behind the LFG queue more if I didn't think the queue's functionality was extremely limited. You can't tell if anyone is waiting in it, who they are or what AT they're on, you can't tell what's already running, you can't be in mission instances while you wait (supposedly coming later), and the wait times displayed are utter tripe. If you actually believe the number it was showing, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell.

Oh, and as an aside, the league size minimum was crap, but that was covered in a much earlier thread.

I don't have a problem with suggestions that the devs revisit some of the more useless set bonuses, already mentioned. I wouldn't have a problem with them making snipes less damn common. I am sick to death of Rare snipe set drops off of mobs.

None of that is what came to mind then I saw a suggestion to "revamp" the sets. Nor, personally, would any of that make the market more interesting to me. Sure, it would liven up what's interesting, and force people to re-evaluate niches and such.

That's not "interesting" to me. To me, what was interesting about the market was figuring out how it worked at a basic level, and debating that with posters here. We pretty much long ago stopped finding those topics controversial. While I'm sure there are still people who don't agree about how the market works, most of the old guard have settled on explanations that they find sufficiently functional for how they use it. Introducing new supply/demand shocks into the existing market isn't going to change how the market works, and isn't likely to introduce any new controversy about the same. (It may reawaken some old controversy, but that's not really the same, IMO.)

The only thing that would make the market interesting again for me would be if they changed the way the market actually functioned. But frankly, I don't want them to do that, because the market works for me. As much fun as the market provided me at one point, it was always a means to an end - making characters who could punch face better. Disrupting how it works would disrupt my ability to use it for that, while risking that I might not actually enjoy the modified market itself. I'd rather they kept change elsewhere.

Most of the cameras seem to congregate near the TPN buildings. I have found that focusing on the IDF deployed around the outside perimeter means you probably won't hit cameras even with AoEs, and if you do, it'll only be 1-2. Another related option is to pull the IDF towards the area the league enters the trial at. The cameras don't follow.

I don't really have a main. My gig is that I only get characters to 50 who I really do enjoy playing. I don't stop enjoying playing them when they get to 50, so I tend to keep playing them, which leaves less time to create and level new characters.

Before I9 and inventions, I was not this way. We had much less repeatable content back then, and there were no long-term goals to shoot for, so even though I still enjoyed my characters I played most, playing them at 50 was too listless. As a result, I tended to stop just shy of 50 with them and only break them out for special stuff. I created alts instead.

By the time enough content and goals existed to motivate me to play characters at 50, I had already created a decent stable of alts. I have hit 50 on most of the ones I really enjoy, with a couple left who I have trouble getting to from playing the 10 that have already hit 50.

Most of my time is spent playing one of those 10 50s.

In addition to GG's images, I also found where the devs posted the 50-54 info here on the forums.

I'm still looking for the post I think I remember saying we get to be fully +3 in the open zone.

Edit: Found it. It wasn't a redname post, so it's second-hand info.