konshu

I agree. But I have an answer for this one.

The devs have said that there's difficulty in matching up transition points to zone doors. So if a door has not been already established as a transition point, they don't extend themselves to enable a new one. They will select an existing door or put it on random, and a random setting is easier as they don't have to look up the address of a specific door.

When the devs talk about having difficulties with old coding and old methods, I think this is one of those things.

The game has had the ability to place missions at a specific door since the very beginning. The first mission in the Synapse TF, for example, is always the same door.

However, in the early days the devs assumed players would find it more fun if the doors were randomized, so they created a routine to randomize the doors. They also used to randomize the order of missions in an arc, but that practice has been somewhat abandoned.

Unique bosses, in my opinion, have always been needed. I just did an arc the other day, the "Crown of Glory," and it featured about a dozen named but otherwise identical Warrior bosses. My preference would be to have each boss have a unique look - and perhaps unique powers - as often as practical.

In my AE arcs, I customize all of my named bosses as a matter of course. It's normally not that big of a deal.

Mmmm ... I'm not really aiming at debate on this, just discussion. But I'll try to frame my viewpoint a bit better.

I think all the content released before 2007 has gone stale, especially the old CoH material. The content the villains got with CoV was fresh for a while, but I can't stand to play it any more after having been through it so many times. What I play these days are just the TFs, the occasional scanner, and some AE.

I'm sorry the devs don't want to renew their older material. I don't think they told the stories very well. When I play with other people, sometimes I quiz them on the backstory of the arc we're playing, or on the zone or whatever. Almost uniformly no one has any idea of what's going on. They're just pushing buttons.

I think that's sad, because what people keep telling me is that they'd like to know the stories, but the way the game is structured, you basically want to team, and when you're teaming you want to keep it rolling, so no one stops to read the contact text, let alone the clues.

I never had any idea of what was going on till I sat down and read through virtually everything, red and blue, on the various support sites.

Telling story through clues and contact info is about the worst way to do it. Telling it through cutscenes is a little better, in that you're actually SHOWING the story as opposed to giving an exposition, but people don't like the way cutscenes are placed and how you can't skip through a familiar one once it's started because of the multiplayer restriction on that sort of thing.

But showing the story is the key. I've been trying to draw attention to this from my first experiences with the game. In addition to showing the story, players need to get their information all at the same time, wherever possible. The narrative pop-ups we get upon mission entry and exit can help with this, but they're rarely used to tell story. Typically they just tell us a sewer smells like incense and peppermints because the Circle is there, or - as in a Croatoa mission I just played - we're in a sewer and they tell us we can smell the bad breath of the Tuatha. I guess it must be notable information if Tuatha breath is so bad it stands out when you're in a sewer (!), but the mission isn't about supplying Listerine to Tuatha who are desperately in need of it.

As for omissions, there's plenty, both in showing and in telling. Players in The Hollows don't necessarily realize they're in Eastgate. They don't realize that while doing some of the missions there they find a Coralax skull ... and we also don't know what role the Coralax were originally supposed to play in The Hollows. (The skull clue predates CoV.) They don't know that in the Peebles mission to rescue the Eastgate scientists, they're actually recovering a Coralax body (because they can't see the body, all they see is an anonymous crate). Likewise, players don't know that the ""Minions of Igneous" are literally minions of the EB/AV/GM or whatever known as "Igneous, the Magma Master." Igneous is tied into the story of the Cavern of Transcendence AND the Hollowing Event, but hardly anyone is aware of this because he never makes an appearance.

Players don't realize that the Marrow Drinker and Marrow Snap lieuts. they may meet (and defeat) in a Skulls arc are actually THE leaders of the Skulls. I guess part of the reason they're never identified is that they look and act just like any other Bone Daddy, and there's no consequence in the story for defeating either one - or both - of the leaders of the Skulls.

Players don't know that the Smuggler's Run is the association of the Warriors, Hellions, and Outcasts, and they don't know that this group is in opposition to the Superadine Connection, which is the Family, Skulls, and Trolls. I remember wandering through The Hollows back in 2005, wondering what the heck the Warriors and Family were doing there, and since no one could tell me I assumed they were just another bug. Who knew The Hollows was the epicenter of a "Gangland Fury?" It just looked like the area had been abandoned to the Outcasts, Trolls, and Circle.

I could go on, but perhaps this is enough to illustrate what I'm talking about?

I'm saying the storytelling is ineffective. There are stories the devs clearly meant to tell, but didn't. And the stories the devs did tell, most players didn't understand it, because the information was brought forth in a cumbersome and confusing way.

Furthermore, the devs have a lot of the tools you'd want to use to tell or show story as the players play, but they don't use them.

And when players ask the devs for a revamp of the old material, the devs say "but wouldn't you rather have new material?" as if : A) the devs can't do both new and revamped material in the same time frame, and B) as if the devs think the players want more stories told using their poor, unrevised techniques.

When players ask for revamped content, I think they're asking for the original content to finally be done right. Getting "new" content that is still poorly done is not much of a help, if you ask me.

Well, I thought one of the devs made that very point in talking about Praetoria before. I don't recall if it was in one of the online interviews or from Herocon.

I thought they said "4 small zones" and "no war walls because there was no Rikti invasion." Perhaps that's not accurate, but it's the impression that formed in my mind over the last few months of dev-based teasers.

We'll see what it truly is when we get it.

Also, I'm not saying the things I'm saying to put GR down. I'm just trying to give a realistic portrayal of the impression I've received on it from all the info I've been given so far.

I think some people are expecting a lot more from it than I feel I've been led to expect.

As far as content goes, I'd be surprised if GR is giving us more than 4 small zones and 18 new arcs.

Well, preferably you have 5 stars plus a zillion plays. If you only have a few plays, 5 stars may not be enough to get you into a spot where players will be able to stumble upon your arc. Five stars with just a few plays is nearly as bad as four stars.

But yeah ... the search tool will hide your arc in the pile. In a manner that reminds me of how everyone used to get shunted to The Hollows back in the old days, the search tool will point players to Dev's Choice and Hall of Fame arcs, and everyone else who is in front of you. In that sense, it's broken.

If they would let me at the code, I'd make all contacts give you the cellphone number when they are first introduced. I see ZERO value in making players run over to some location to click and get their mission. It's pointless churn.

I would also remove all the silly hunt missions - from the lower arcs in particular. I would instead give the Security Chiefs hunt missions, and make them open contacts, so those who are actually looking for hunts can get a steady diet of them.

As for the errands you get sent on (to PvP zones, analyst, etc.), I'd make each one of those optional. So you can "go see Wincott in The Hollows" OR do a mission. Also, if you did "go see Wincott," you'd be able to cellphone the contact directly afterward, as opposed to being forced to trot all the way back. It is always annoying, for instance, to be sent to the Bloody Bay Liason, and then be sent to either Jim Temblor or Seer Marino ... basically retracing your steps, since you can't call at that point.

I would expect changing the cellphone policy and making errands optional to take about a day. Passing the hunts to the Security Chiefs in an orderly manner might take a couple of days, depending on how much alteration you decide to do.

All told, I don't see anything there that has to take a dev longer than a few days, tops.

It's dev policy, not a lack of time or personnel, that keeps these things from being done.

1-20 or 1-30 has always been my favorite range of play. Typically, I play on blueside right up to 30, then I start running out of gas and maybe barely make it through Numina and ITF. Then that's pretty much it for that toon.

I'm glad to hear I wasn't the only one annoyed by the decision by the devs to speed up passage through the lower levels as opposed to adding more new low level content, which would have been the proper solution.

I've been one of those asking for it since 2005, but I have my doubts about the new 1-20.

First, because despite what people say, it sounds like it pretty much IS a goatee CoH. That automatically turns me off.

Second, because they really need to revise their old material. That's what I want to play, not another round of "fresh" incompletely told stories.

I haven't really played much on redside since its heyday in 2006, but at the time I thought a good addition would be a fantasy type zone with adorable fairies and pure knights. Mainly because as a villain what would you rather squish?

I also think art support for the following standard time-travel-y missions would be great: wild west (cowboys, indians, Civil War costumes), dinosaur / primitive, pre-modern European fashions (1900s, 1800s, 1700s, 1300s, 900s), pilgrim suits (would go well with Croatoa scenery, I think), pirates, modern cities other than Paragon / RI, and probably a few more things.

Ah, well that's okay. Petitions are actually rather boring. I prefer my own secret methods of getting things done.

(Blows dust off of old wooden box, opens lid, extracts waxy NCsoft figure along with pins and candle.)

I agree about needing more content.

About the rest of it ... yes, people tend to get used to things once they have them, like better graphics. However, once you have had the improvement it is often painful to go back to not having it, so there may still be a value to things like costume items with physics, even after you've become used to them.

I think that if the devs were to introduce weather effects, then on at least some occasions, in some ways, it should affect gameplay. Presently we have relatively little effect from day / night, so it's not that important to us. But if, for example, street mobs only came out at night on blueside ... we'd tend to pay more attention to the day / night dynamic.

In fact, if they ever did bring villains to Paragon in some way, you could have the street mobs change from Longbow, PPD, and other security forces during the day to villainous street mobs at night.

Actually, I'd like to see new content be placed under the superfluous contacts.

When I look at CoH, my impression is that the original idea was to have branches of content based on origin. So a hero starts in Atlas or Galaxy, meets up with their first contact, and goes on from there.

However, I think the devs decided they needed to cut plans for content to get the game out on time, so they gave most of the contacts duplicate mission lists.

It seems to me that it is quite possible the CoH "bible" may actually contain notes for unique content for all of those contacts.

Call me a pessimist if you wish, but I expect that at this same time next year we'll be hoping for animated hair and a revamp of the old content.