The Dead Zone and other unused or bad areas.

Peregrine Island really does need some help.

Poor Ghost Falcon is mobbed almost 24/7, and not only by players; there's nothing like loading up on a full set of new enhancements when you hit 42, only to be perpetually shoved from his side by pedestrians. Pushy critters, they are.

And then there's the Carnies. The original poster wasn't exaggerating the problem much: given that the Carnie arc has, if I remember, *three* "arrest 50" missions in it, and that there's only one very small area to arrest them in, competition is inevitably fierce. It was not uncommon, a few weeks ago, to see small lines of heroes forming around their spawn spots...

"Pardon me, are these yours?"
"No, no, you first."
"Carnies behind the shed, everyone!"
"No, I think you were here first..."

Don't get me wrong: I love PI. There's a lot of variety there, and Portal Corp remains one of my favourite sights in town. But an extra town zone somewhere with Carnies in residence, at least, would be a huge relief.

I must be crazy because I thoroughly enjoy all the supposed "bad" zones. Crash Site, Shadow Shard, etc, etc. I don't mind having to work to get to a fun place that isn't overloaded with people.

Couple of things...

We're fixing the DE spawns in Eden so no more 41's with 30's.

And we're making a few changes to make Shadow Shard and Crash Site more accessible. For instance - putting a teleporter in Peregrine Island so that player 40's can get to and from easily.

I think I liked a suggestion another poster made once.

How about, at 40, characters are allowed to use Firebase Zulu as a transportation hub to deploy to other parts of the city easier. A Portal Corp building in every trial/hazard zone accessible through the Shadow Shard. So, instead of going from Peregrine to Talos to Steel all the way down to the Yellow Line to Atlas, you can go from Peregrine to Zulu to (say) Perez to Atlas. Or Peregrine to Zulu to the Folly to Brickstown or the Crash Site.

I thought it was a pretty good idea.

One way to make the shadow shard more fun, is make it all very low gravity, akin to giving everybody supersuper leap. (obviously those with leap would have a really really big leap) then nix the geysers as you don't need them anymore.

or, if your feeling "silly":

superspeed: doesn't "fall" very much like wylie coytie, unless you stop
fly: really crank the speed up so your a bottle rocket.
leap: really really big leaps.
Teleport: make the range very silly.

Would keep the "weirdness" factor, but make the zone less painful to traverse.

And when you take a mission that is kill 50 at point "x" can we have a waypoint to point "x", that way we know where to head to?

they should set fire base zulu up as a transport hub, allowing the gate there to 'dial out' to different zones in our dimension.

It figures since firebase zula, is the alpha base for humans in other dimensions it would have links throughout earth.

firebase zulu ->
Perigrine
Ritki Crashsite
Hive
Founders
Atlas Park (capital)
Steel canyon (other transport hub)

other suggestions,

* Ferry terminal in Founders (perigrine to founders and back ... so many times) it already has a sea gate.
* Someone should burn a path through eden for superspeeders (make a story up about a firetanker or something)
* IP ferrry terminals (founders, perigrine, striga, talos)

I've never liked Boomtown. Lots of people dig it for low level hunting, but I'm not a hunter. It's too hard to get around when all you have is SS and Hurdle.

IP is another good hunting zone. But very poorly designed. It's too big. Some of the contacts are at the absolute extremes of the map.

KR, as said by another poster, has been outpaced by the Hollows.

I cringe every time I need to go to Skyway for something.

I *love* the Hollows. It took me a while to get into it, but the cop full of insps to buy near some pretty good hunting mobs makes it insanely easy to level from 5 or 6 to level 11 or 12. Load up on insps, take out a mob of guys, load up, etc. From 1 to 10 in a little over an hour.

Striga... best ever.

Oh, and the Shard is awesome. Wouldn't change a thing, really.

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Eden is another wasteland. Its a neat-looking zone. However, I almost never see anyone in there.

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Oooh - don't change Eden! I soloed from 36 to 39 there. Tons of mobs to pick up, a lot of 'em easy Crey pickin's. And no one else to steal my stuff!

Just like Crash Site. It's like being the first person at Costco!

[ QUOTE ]
Couple of things...

We're fixing the DE spawns in Eden so no more 41's with 30's.

And we're making a few changes to make Shadow Shard and Crash Site more accessible. For instance - putting a teleporter in Peregrine Island so that player 40's can get to and from easily.

[/ QUOTE ]

Didn't Ravenstorm say a few months ago that the DE lvl41 in spawns was gonna be fixed but that never happened, same with Jurassik spawning in CF where you guys acknowledged the bug, said a fix was coming then it never happened.

And quick question, when can we expect these changes? Update 4 or sometime soon because those 2 changes are really needed for the 30/40 crowd.

Theres other reason other then distance why people dont want to hunt in the Shadow Shard. Like the minions there.

I don't think its fair that those giant eyeball have like 1000% percent accuracy. I can chomp on several Lucks and still get hit quite a bit by those eyeballs....

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Couple of things...

We're fixing the DE spawns in Eden so no more 41's with 30's.

And we're making a few changes to make Shadow Shard and Crash Site more accessible. For instance - putting a teleporter in Peregrine Island so that player 40's can get to and from easily.

[/ QUOTE ]

Didn't Ravenstorm say a few months ago that the DE lvl41 in spawns was gonna be fixed but that never happened, same with Jurassik spawning in CF where you guys acknowledged the bug, said a fix was coming then it never happened.

And quick question, when can we expect these changes? Update 4 or sometime soon because those 2 changes are really needed for the 30/40 crowd.

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Ravenstorm was commenting on another bug related to the spawns there, so they fixed 1 bug but still had another that made the mods unfightable.

Any mob that is more annoying or tougher to fight will inevitably be ignored by the majority of the players.

Well I am happy States responded to this, its good to know these zone issues are being looked at.

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Shadow Shard - Shadow Shard is probably one of the biggest areas I read complaints about, and it's sad to see such a creative area going to waste, especially since it makes up four hazard zones. The biggest complaint is probably how difficult it is to get around.

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I have a love/hate relationship with this zone. It looks great and the geysers are fun for a few minutes, BUT, if you have a mission all the way across the zone and no Flight or TP (my main has SJ for instance) it is a real hassle. The problem is, you can get 90% of the way across the zone, screw up, fall, and you are ALL the way back at the beginning. That might be funny the first time, but one night I literally spent 25 minutes trying (and failing) to get across the zone... not fighting anything, just trying to get across the zone... it was like some perverse, reverse-version of Asteriods (where you are trying to hit the rocks instead of avoid them). Some people may like this, but the devs need to allow for the possibility that a person may (a) not find all the geysering fun and (b) not have flight/TP. Why should everyone with SS or SJ be essentially punished? If people with Flight can get around the geysers, they EVERYONE should be able to get around them.

Personally I favor the following solution: give a setting (they can easily find a story reason behind it) of 2 options. Option 1 is 'when I fall teleport me back to the base'. Option 2 is 'when I fall teleport me to the last rock I jumped off of'. I wouldn't mind falling occasionally and having to do THAT jump over. But falling after 12 straight successful jumps out of 14, and having to start ALL over again (and then falling on jump 11... and then on 13... and then on 12 again... etc, etc) is just teeth-grindingly frustrating, at least for me.

After that awful 25 minutes in the zone of just going back to square one over and over again, I gave up and have never been back into the shard... and probably won't with the SJ-based character. My alt has flight... I'll let her do those mission I guess, unless they change how the zone works.

It's cute for the first 10 minutes, but IMO, if you get sick of all the geysering there should be a way to get around without it.

My suggestion for the Shadow Shard is this:

Why not have General Hammond issue a jet-pack to every hero. The jet-pack could be a temp power of flight usable until the player exists the shard.

There certainly wouldnt be balance issues with level 40-50 temporarily using flight.

originally I pictured the Shard being a little more dense, so you could leap around from rock to rock JUST using superleap...which sounded cool.

I really don't mind the gysers, except for a couple that seem to consistently land you off-target, and a couple that are a bit tricky to get to.

handing out jetpacks that let you fly at the door would be kinda sucky for people who do have fly....they suffer for their slowness in other zones, I don't begrudge them their superiority in the Shard.

letting people buy jetpacks with hover capability, otoh, would be useful and handy without stepping on the toes of flyers. If you missed your rock, you could flip it on and hover back up- a minor annoyance in place of the major one of getting bumped back to the start.

[ QUOTE ]
Couple of things...
And we're making a few changes to make Shadow Shard and Crash Site more accessible. For instance - putting a teleporter in Peregrine Island so that player 40's can get to and from easily.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes! Finally! Would you mind spreading those teleporters around a bit more so that our 40+ heroes could get to Peregrine from somewhere other than Talos?
Such as Founder's Falls, which has a number of the lvl 40-45 contacts which means having to go PI->Talos->FF/FF->Talos->PI very, very often. And on that note, if the teleports were spread around more than perhaps it would also be easier to get to FF as well

PI needs to have the threshold for creation of a second instance dropped significantly, and I think alot of the lag in Talos would drop if the devs would give us a ferry between Founders Falls and PI. Or heck, an undersea tunnel full of hydra or something. The FF-Talos-PI run in the 40s is just so annoying.

Also, Perez Park is empty since the Hollows came out. Lesson here is, unmapped (at least officialy) mazes full of badguys arent fun.

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Theres other reason other then distance why people dont want to hunt in the Shadow Shard. Like the minions there.

I don't think its fair that those giant eyeball have like 1000% percent accuracy. I can chomp on several Lucks and still get hit quite a bit by those eyeballs....

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I gotta say that I love the Shard, but you're right, rularuu eyeballs just suck rocks. I've never been missed by them yet and the secondary effect of their hits is not plesant.

I love the shard, the gravity fountains, a place for me to really revel in my flight. A place where the 5th column lives on.

I met Faathom the kind the other day. Absolutely awesome but a pain to get to.

faultline imo is worse than fbz for 1 reason. you fall in a trench, youll never get out (superspeed) fbz you fall off, at least you go back to start.

[ QUOTE ]
I think I liked a suggestion another poster made once.

How about, at 40, characters are allowed to use Firebase Zulu as a transportation hub to deploy to other parts of the city easier. A Portal Corp building in every trial/hazard zone accessible through the Shadow Shard. So, instead of going from Peregrine to Talos to Steel all the way down to the Yellow Line to Atlas, you can go from Peregrine to Zulu to (say) Perez to Atlas. Or Peregrine to Zulu to the Folly to Brickstown or the Crash Site.

I thought it was a pretty good idea.

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Yeah that's an awesome idea.

I mean what the hell are we paying hard earned taxes to fund the Grants for these Portal Corp egghead's if all they're doing is giving us portals to other dimensions? How about THIS DIMENSION? Even if it costs money each trip, I don't see why they couldn't just Port us to the other side of Paragon when we really need it.

No way, Faultline can't compare to Shard because the Shard is about 8 miles long. Now just FBZ, maybe, but its not fair to consider FBZ without its brethren (Chantry, cascades, storm palace), because some wackadoo will send you there for a mish.

But I could write for days on why the Shard is a terrible zone. It is highly, highly frustrating to travel. Its cryptic and the jump geysers are very unpredictable. Lots of them don't work properly with SJ on, and many of them don't work with SJ off. Assuming you can get around, you often see clouds of enemies way above you. Not only are the mobs very, very challenging, but their position and mobility makes it a tactical nightmare to engage them for all but a few AT's (scrappers and tanks get the shaft, my fire troller can't hurt them either). The sq footage of the 4 zones is like 100 sq miles, but it adds up to about 1 zone worth of real estate to work with. Traveling blindly through gargantuan zones to get to mission objectives is nobody's idea of fun. I realize that my $15/mo doesn't allow me to delete that zone off servers, but if I had any say, I couldn't imagine designing this huge additional zone + content that excludes so many toons for so many reasons (don't get me started again on that hamidon fellow).

When I first got to the Shard, I thought it was amazing looking, and would be a great place to explore. Now that I've run all over and done a bunch of missions there, I'm rather disappionted at how dang repetative it ended up being. Its much worse than any city zone, and the Rularuu, Lanaruu were all but unkillable for both of my toons who can get there.

What we really really need is a city zone that is near the "meat" of Paragon City (i.e. has a tram that'll take us to SC or talos), with enemies up to lvl 53, with all the amenities of a city zone (trainer, missions, contacts, stores), but inaccessible to lower lvl toons. There are enough opportunities for low and high lvl players to interract, but high lvl toons need a place to hunt and adventure without constant plvl requests and the raging competition for mobs that is Peregrine Island.

What are we talking about again? I'll stop whining...

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I think a solution to Rikti Crash Site and Peregrine Island (not enough and too much) would be to place another city zone (not hazard zone) inbetween the Crash Site and Indy Port (there's plenty of room).

Make it 35-44 or 40-50, and have it include Carnies and Malta (another place to hunt each). It would also include another entrance to the Crash Site (further north of the current one), which could have its own DMZ.

In addtion to this, put another Ferry in Indy Port near the entrance to this new city zone (which could be around the Tech store (across the water from Bricks), so that there would be another way to Peregrine Island that doesn't involve Talos (and it would be near this other high level zone... plus Bricks, if the new zone contains 35+ enemies).


Perhaps in the future...

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Hopefully something like this is in the works for I4. They just filled the gaps for 20-30 content with Striga. Now would be a good time to fill the gaps for 35-45 or so. Especially the late 30s. Sure, people farm the sewer trial for good xp. But they also farm it because story arcs and Numina TF are all done at 38 and you have to do something for 2 levels to get more.

I would suggest that at about leve 40 or so, players get the option to take a mission that lets them teleport to any zone in the game, excluding, maybe, the Shadow Shard.

As for the shard... I'd suggest more teleporty thingies instead of the gravity wells. They're fun (Especially to watch characters flail as they fall), but impractical Also, REVEAL THE WHOLE FREAKIN' MAP. It's too confusing to navigate blind if you can't go "as the bird flies"

[ QUOTE ]
they should set fire base zulu up as a transport hub, allowing the gate there to 'dial out' to different zones in our dimension.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd prefer to see a more "mundane" solution to mass transport issues - seeing as we're living in a modern-day city, how about a modern-day city approach to mass transport?

There's all these bus stops littered around the city, but the PTA (paragon transport authority) seems to have forgotten to provide us with any buses...

So, I'd like to see the addition of bus transport, for a nominal amount of influence per journey so the monorail remains as a free method of travel around the city. (I originally thought of taxis, but the bus stops are already there)

Talos Island to Atlas Park? Certainly. That'll be 1500 influence, hop aboard.

Founders Falls to King's Row? 3000 influence, etc

(run up to a bus stop, click the stop sign, chose from a tram-style menu & off you go - buses dropping you off at a specific location in the target zone, so travel powers are still useful - like, say, outside the police station in King's Row or infront of City Hall in Atlas Park, etc.)

Also, causes the least amount of hassle for the zone building department as it'd be extensable to new zone without having to build new monorail lines (which I'd guess is the main reason why we'd not see a "blue line" appear in Paragon City)

(I'm going to gloss-over and ignore the somewhat amusing notion of bumping into Captain Fantabulous riding the bus to work in the morning, urging the driver to go faster as there's hostages in peril on the other side of town )