You don't miss it until it's gone. (part 2)

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I don't understand the point of view many people have that they can afford to buy new games but can't afford to overlap subscriptions EVER. It is like they are being unfaithful to their wife or something.

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If it helps, from my perspective it just feels kinda wasteful to pay for subs to two games that have basically the same idiom. If I want to spend a few hours battling stuff with a single character from a third-person perspective in order to level up and gain power, I am basically going to be playing the same type of game whether it is Co*, EQ, WoW, SWG, or whatever. No, they're not the same game, and there are significant differences, but if I want that fix, I may as well just get it from my favorite of that game type.

I guess it just feels like buying tickets to two movies that are playing at the same time. If I get bored with the one movie, I can go into the other auditorium and watch the other one for a while, but why not just pick a movie and stick with it for half the price?

When I buy another MMO, it's because I'm getting bored with the first one and want to try something else for a while, or because a new game is released that looks like it might be better. If I like the new game, I will stick with it until I get bored there, then either go back to the old one if it sounds fun again or look for another new one. I did exactly that with WoW soon after it came out. Actually I stayed subbed to both for like a month before realizing that I just wasn't playing them both. Then I dropped Co* for a few months until WoW's shorcomings became clear and I realized how much more fun Co* was.

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Blacksmith: Hello, Some Guy. Why, yes, I do have a quest for you. I lost a shipment of special ore. See, it's special for some obscure reason that I don't think you care about.

Me: OK, gotcha. You lost a shipment of ore. I suppose thieves stole it and you want me to go kill them and get your ore back?

Blacksmith: Thieves? Oh, no! The caravan tipped over into the river and frogs ate my ore. You should go out by the river and start killing giant frogs. Some of them should have my ore.

Me: Say what now?!?

Blacksmith: I'm missing about 20 pieces of ore. Well, come on. Chop, chop! Those frogs won't kill themselves.



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Please make Sam an NPC and make some portion of this his quest. Trolls can be frogs and thieves! It'll be great!

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No joke! That was an actual mission. The blacksmith had lost a shipment of ore and frogs had eaten it, so I was supposed to kill frogs until I got 20 drops of ore.

Yeah, sure, the dialogue was all mine, but the mission is as-is

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Had that mission as well. Asked around if it was bugged and was told are you sure you are in the right swamp? For me that game was fun for a couple weeks and then the sameness was unbearable. "We don't want to actually show you where your missions are so you can enjoy looking at the country side" got really, really old.

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Half the reason I stopped playing that MMO was the lack of direction.

“Kill the pig east of location X”. ok, I trundle to location X and start walking east until I’m sure I must have missed it and head back and check the area as closely as I can wasting about two hours. Then a buddy in game tells me it’s so far east that it’s almost to the zone border. Not to mention that it’s surrounded my Mobs way too high level for me to currently deal with.

The other half was fishing. I am not spend time throwing a line in a lake to increase my fishing level so I can buy better lures to take up space in my pack. Then I get a quest to recover a certain number of scales from a certain fish in a certain lake. Since I hadn’t wasted sufficient time fishing up until then the lake (yes, THE LAKE) was too high level for me to even cast my line into.

/dashes back to CoH/V

Ah, level specific zones that give me a chance to fight anything and complete missions with out useless time sinks.

(BTW, that same friend once told me that I could go diving and some of the monsters in that same lake had the scales I needed – but by then it was way too late)

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Nin-Jak level 50! (Kat/Regen Scrapper)

Hank Venture:
"*sigh* Why must you be the screen door on my submarine Brock?"

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Heh, I played said game for a while as well. At first I was having a pretty decent amount of fun, and the game was, well, shiny. What stirred me back to reality was the first "Go kill this habitual troublemaker" mission. I journey for a few minutes, find what looks like the spot, to see 6 people standing in a line to nowhere. It's then that I realize, these people are waiting for said monster to spawn so they can have their turn to kill it. "Oh crap," I thought to myself, "this is just like another (IMO) overrated, massively populated MMO I once played. RUN AWAY!"

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When I had to wait 18 real-life hours for a world spawn that someone may beat me to, to have to wait again, to possibly complete the extra-hard quest, just to get a cool epic weapon, that's when I left (MMO name withheld to avoid embarrassing it).

Thank you CoH, for not having a ton of instances, and not having my character's career hinge on world-based line-waiting spawn monotony

Euler, thanks for summarizing why I've stuck with this game for almost 3 years now

Edit: As an aside, I think it's funny that in CoV, you start your career killings "Snakes" and "Spiders"...

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Sam,

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Then I really don't think that quest is anything more than thinly-veiled hunting anyway.

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Isn't this the same reason you are planning to avoid the I9 stuff?

Lewis

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Random AT Generation!
"I remember... the Alamo." -- Pee-wee Herman
"Oh don't worry. I always leave things to the last moment." -- The Doctor
"Telescopes are time machines." -- Carl Sagan

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2b) Travel Powers: In CoH, after lv 14, I can get to any part to any other part in 5 minutes max. My average travel time from mission to mission is about a minute. I spend more time in game doing my missions than walking between them which is why it the slow plodding pace of the new unnamed MMO came as a horrific shock where suddenly I'm walking for 10 minutes to do a 2 minute quest. Not a real efficient use of my time.


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And they've continued to make small improvements (and one understandable but sucko design change).
With the addition of the jump packs for PvE purchasers and the temp travel powers from the Atlas and King's Row SG/Mayhem missions, the need to get your travel power right at 14 or maybe 16 has been substantially lessened. I have a level 21 fire/fire blaster that I started to experience Faultline that has no power pool travel powers and has not missed them. At some point in the future I know the temp powers will run out and I'll need to respec in one or more travel powers but until then I can enjoy having the option to pick other powers.

Z

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"I don't have an angel and a devil on my shoulder, I have Rocky and Bullwinkle." - Lore Sj�berg

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When we sat down to design CoH, we wrote on the white board: "fun." Seems obvious, but many games seemed to miss the mark. That's OK; some games don't need to be fun in order to be successful (I won't name them, but they're out there). We wanted to make a game that had fun moment to moment gameplay. Hard to quantify, but easy to identify when you find it.

Cool posts, BTW.

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Goddamnit. Please don't be so damned smug about that fun thing, when you've missed the mark in so many ways yourself. When you wrote that word up on the board you should have written 'caution: may be subjective' next to it, and used it to remind yourself not to judge your players for pursuing behaviors that you arbitrarily deem not to be fun. You put kill X tasks in the game, and then act surprised when people camp spawners.

UGh. I find it so frustrating when he trots out this 'we're so great' mentality. This game could have been the first *real* game MMO, instead it's become more canned, and more treadmill-like as time goes by.

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LOL. My thoughts exactly, although I wouldn't have said it quite like you did. A lot of the things I thought were 'fun' in this game are long gone. I've found other things to do that are fun, but for me (and maybe just me) some of the fun has been taken out by the funmaster...er...statesman...himself

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Was also in that Beta that had to do with certain magical rings. Lots of slow walking around and spawn camping were definite turnoffs. You forgot another one that really did it for me though. The lack of character options. There were only like 5 different "classes" and everyone of class X was an exact clone of each other. Not just in appearance, but in skill. You didn't even get to choose which skills as you leveled, they were all set for you. Zero choice. Say goodbye to having a bunch of alts, there would be no point. Alts are something I love about CoX.

It was quite a shock coming from a game like this where for example not only can one defender can be very different from another from having different primary/secondaries. But even defenders of the same primary/secondary can be pretty different in what skills they choose.

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When we sat down to design CoH, we wrote on the white board: "fun." Seems obvious, but many games seemed to miss the mark. That's OK; some games don't need to be fun in order to be successful (I won't name them, but they're out there). We wanted to make a game that had fun moment to moment gameplay. Hard to quantify, but easy to identify when you find it.

Cool posts, BTW.

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Please put game stability next to fun please.

I did try other mmorg. Did it after the first great nerfing, killed my fun.
Tried world of wonder (cough, cough). Nice game stability. character options (costumes) were very limited. joined the game and .... holy clones batman!!! who am I in this crowd again?
After wiping out enough bats and rats to open a burger shop, I quit. Not heroic. No individuality. was bored.

Tried again. Got sick of the coh crashes (maybe once per session, lag, dc, etc). Tried lord of the ringu (double cough). minor character customization, but tolerable. first mission was great. go to a town. crash. log back in. crash 15 min later. run off kill wolves and some scouts (at least I feel more heroic than before in world). come to town. crash. Figured it out. whenever there is many people in one spot, I crash.

In hindsight. The occasional DC from a hami raid is much much more tolerable after that.

In cox I get:
Character customization
Hero (why Im here, not into generic fantasy, wish it was mores uper hero, but its better than rats/bats)
mentor system
travel powers!
much greater power customization
(tank AT has ONLY 4 primaries, but the others are stuck on 1).
AT flavor

bad:
some bad lag
some crashes -

compared to the lord of the ringu crash, cox comes out MUCH better.

Like the topic said, you dont know what you have until you miss it.

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50 Tanks: Invul/ss, Fire/ice/fire, Ice/em, Stone/fire
WP/Stone, dark/dark, shld/mace

50 Other: WS, SS/dark/sc brute, BS/Regen/WM scrpr, fire/fire/force blaster, rad/kin corr, mind/rad ctrl, ill/storm cntrl

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Half the reason I stopped playing that MMO was the lack of direction.

“Kill the pig east of location X”. ok, I trundle to location X and start walking east until I’m sure I must have missed it and head back and check the area as closely as I can wasting about two hours. Then a buddy in game tells me it’s so far east that it’s almost to the zone border. Not to mention that it’s surrounded my Mobs way too high level for me to currently deal with.

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I had my fill of that in Gothic 3. "You should go to Okara, which is somewhere North of right where I'm standing. Oh, and I should mention that because it's a rebel camp, it's so well camouflage that you won't actually see it until you accidentally step on the net strung over the cave. But do go North and blunder around like an idiot, get killed by Trolls, Ripperbeasts, Shadow Beasts, Brags (now we're just making up names), or eaten by wolves or wild boars."

But luckily, I met this guy who knew where it was. I could escort him there, but apparently the path ran straight through the living space of over a dozen packs of hungry wild wolves, and because OBVIOUSLY the best way to kill a wolf is with a sword (or so the guy thought) rather than, you know, with a bow that does 10 times the damage at range, he'd get eaten every time. The solution? Start blundering north and wiping the forest clear of all life, saving, then letting him run until he found more wolves to be killed by. Reload, kill more wolves, walk the guy again until he's eaten by boars and try again. That took me a day, but I finally found the damn rebel camp. What does the rebel leader tell me? "Oh, go free the town. Why, no, I don't know how. Figure it out." I found a guide. It said, and I'm not joking: "Just start killing Orcs in town." Yeah, that settles that...

Or like Jack and the Bilge Rats that were supposed to be North by the shore. Well, NO. They were north up on the cliffs, NOT down on the shore. And I was expecting rats, but the Bilge Rats were, in fact, bandits. It boggles the mind. Or the bandit cave that someone mentioned. Where do I find it? "I don't know, but come speak to me when you find it." Yeah, thanks a lot! I ended up killing that guy when I liberated the city, anyway. The cave turned out to be somewhat to the North, over a hill, up into the forest, down a path beside the road, then in the face of a cliff, in a section of the landscape I had no business being in.

And the funniest part is, after you're done with the first few major objectives, the game kind of assumes a "Go out and do stuff!" approach where you have to randomly stumble upon Orc-held cities and then look around for ways to liberate them. Or, you know, just kill trols. Sorry, kill orcs. That also works.

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The other half was fishing. I am not spend time throwing a line in a lake to increase my fishing level so I can buy better lures to take up space in my pack. Then I get a quest to recover a certain number of scales from a certain fish in a certain lake. Since I hadn’t wasted sufficient time fishing up until then the lake (yes, THE LAKE) was too high level for me to even cast my line into.

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Yeah, I watched a friend of mine fish for a while. It was... The most ridiculous things I've ever seen in an RPG. I mean, Sonic Adventure had fishing, as Big had to fish Froggy out to finish each level and it was a boring hassle even in that game, let alone in an MMO. I had proof of my friend's sanity, however, as he got bored of it and went to kill some stuff, instead.

Though I have to admit I busted a gut laughing at one of his fishing stories. So he gets a bite and it's a big one. He pulls and pulls and the thing just keeps on fighting. Finally, he gets it out of the water and... It's a high-level monster that attacks him! He killed the thing, just barely, but it put a 10 minute "debuff" on him that made his head bloat to a size bigger than the rest of his body. His ultimate goal was fish in some magical lake in some magical mountain where the fish he caught would yield very expensive resources. Forgive me, but fishing in a lake in a mountain seems like a worthy objective for Deer Hunter: Scope to Da MAX! not of Lineage II.

Last I spoke to my friend, the game had finally broken his will. He told me he had spent hours, if not days grinding out the same monsters and he was just not making any noteworthy progress. That's after losing everything he owned a dozen times over and getting sent back a few levels. He has a high tolerance for grinding, boring gameplay, I know him well enough. But this was too much even for him.

Still trying to convert him over to CoH, but he doesn't actually own a computer and no internet cafes back home have CoH installed. I'm bringing my laptop back home with me, so that should fix things

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Sam,
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Then I really don't think that quest is anything more than thinly-veiled hunting anyway.

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Isn't this the same reason you are planning to avoid the I9 stuff?
Lewis

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Actually, yeah, it is now that I think about it. An excuse for just going out and killing a bunch of villains is not my idea of engaging content. I want the story to give me a reason, not the game mechanics to simply throw down a reward for my doing so. I was really disappointed that Lineage II was basically all hunting. Even their quests were to go. hunt. kill frogs. Kind of like our Defeat # of <enemy group> in <location>. At least our locations are clearly marked and easily found. There's nothing I hate more than looking for stuff without any sort of direction or means to recognise it.

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While I don't necessarily agree with everything you mentioned, I certainly agree with the character ownership. This keeps me coming back to this game and creating new characters, coming up with new backstories and costumes. I love it!

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Actually, NC Soft has property rights to everything we create here.

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Together we entered a city of strangers, we made it a city of friends, and we leave it a City of Heroes. - Sweet_Sarah
BOYCOTT NCSoft (on Facebook)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/517513781597443/
Governments have fallen to the power of social media. Gaming companies can too.

I like that shiny new mmo. It's fun and has an epic feel. That's the one thing CoH doesn't have for me anymore. The epic feel. AVs aren't so imposing after 3 years and I never really feel like I'm saving Paragon City, just a few of it's citizens at time.

Now if the zone events had some kind of impact, like say the shops close because everyone locks their doors. Or maybe Lusca could attack citizens and you had to rescue them. Or maybe you had to run inside those burning buildings and rescue someone. That would be epic.

I love CoH but the problem with it is that they simply put a comic book wrapper around some of the same old standards. The character system is the best out there, but mobs are still just mobs and it's usually just a matter of getting the numbers to beat anything that comes along. They do the rank and file mobs very well, but the epic mobs and events just don't feel that epic.

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While I don't necessarily agree with everything you mentioned, I certainly agree with the character ownership. This keeps me coming back to this game and creating new characters, coming up with new backstories and costumes. I love it!

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Actually, NC Soft has property rights to everything we create here.

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Which is a safeguard for if they choose to use our characters in their comic book or in their game. Nothing is stopping me from wiping out all of them off the servers, thus removing all trace of them from anything NCsoft-owned.

But all of that is besides the point. Character ownership is a sense that the characters you make are your own as a concept, and something you made and came up with, not that you hold the copyrights to it. Unlike in just about any other game, here you don't play with somebody else's characters, you play with characters that you make yourself from the ground up.

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What I love about this game is the sheer ammount of choice you have on everything. For instance, take our generic (yet sucessful) fantasy MMO. Every orc warrior looks roughly the same, wears the same silly looking top raid teir gear, and any chance to make that character "yours" really isn't there.


COH/COV is so much beyond that. For instance, when I was running my brute a while back (a SS/electrical armor), I ran into another SS/Electrical armor brute. This other brute had something of a resemblence to Dick Dastardly, while my brute was was more heavily inspired by Devil May Cry's Vergil. Both were roughly the same AT/primary/secondary choices, but were completely different characters. You compare that to say "Generic-Quest" where you would have the same looking characters both looking like Power Ranger monster rejects in their teir 5 gear and you realize just how good customization is. Sure, those Teir 5s can do 500 dps and may have some sexy awesome trinkets, but can they do it in STYLE?

So, while your vision is generally good (let's not talk about I4/I5 though...), its the fact that you let us play around with our visions that really makes this game shine, Statesman.

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The truth is the solution from an equation of lies. ~Maileah Kirel

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Walk over to the MUO design whiteboard, and under "Fun" erase whatever is written and write "balanced" and "mathematically sane."



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No I think those should perhaps be priority two and three. But priority one should always be fun. And more Fun should always or almost always trump the others. After you have considered the Fun aspect then you can worry about balanced and mathematically sane.

See to many times I've seen balanced and mathematically sane used to kill all fun from a potentially good game.

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That's why I said "under." Entertaining should be the primary goal.

But just because its the most important goal doesn't necessarily mean its always the most important task. I enjoy the living room of my house more than the foundation blocks, but its a very bad idea to rush the foundation of a house just to get to the "good parts."

Good game mechanics are not 100% necessary to make a fun game, but bad game mechanics unnecessarily eliminate so many possibilities to make one.

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[Guide to Defense] [Scrapper Secondaries Comparison] [Archetype Popularity Analysis]

In one little corner of the universe, there's nothing more irritating than a misfile...
(Please support the best webcomic about a cosmic universal realignment by impaired angelic interference resulting in identity crisis angst. Or I release the pigmy water thieves.)

Missed the under, yes I agree those are important considerations in game design.

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But it's MY sadistic mechanical monster and I'm here to make sure it knows it. - Girl Genius

List of Invention Guides

CoX isn't perfect, but what is? I don't actually get any crashes anymore after changing my NVidia card to a Radeon. I've crashed possibly once while playing CoX since, and that was my computer more than the game, which probably mirrors other people's experiences.

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I like that shiny new mmo. It's fun and has an epic feel. That's the one thing CoH doesn't have for me anymore. The epic feel. AVs aren't so imposing after 3 years and I never really feel like I'm saving Paragon City, just a few of it's citizens at time.

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So it just means you're getting tired of the game after so long. Maybe it's time for you to move on, but the reason that the newer game feels epic is because... it's new. For the majority of people I know, after the newness wore off, they went back to CoX.

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I love CoH but the problem with it is that they simply put a comic book wrapper around some of the same old standards.

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Really? Have you even played some of the old "standards" games? Camping spawns is not my idea of fun, and we don't do that here.

When my stalker defeated Sstheno a little bit ago, I got excited-- I just killed an incarnate goddess of snakes. Further back, I defeated an alternate dimension's Lord Recluse, lord of Arachnos. I practicly bragged about soloing him on Relentless. Further back, I defeated various heroes time and time again. The 10th time you fight Manticore can never be as good as the 1st. The 20th time you defeat Verandi and Marcone just isn't the same. Though they could do some things to rectify the situation, it's not entirelly at the fault of the devs, but moreso at the fault of fickle tastes and the amount of time you spend in the game.

I got burnt out after spending 14 hours a day on CoX every weekend for several weeks straight. I took a break, then came back and CoH was fun again. Eventually, I'll just get bored and go somewhere else. That CoX has lasted you three years says volumes compared to other games-- especially console games, which promise usually ~40 hours of gameplay, with some replayability that just doesn't match CoX-- it definitely says good things about the game. And with MMOs, given the amount of alternatives and competition, especially from bigger companies like Blizz and Sony, CoX is doing a phenomenal job.

Right off the bat we are fighting gangsters. Then evil mages and indless robots. Alien invaders and supervillains from alternate dimensions. Secret organizations and ultra-skilled mercenaries. Mutants, and scientific experiments.

Sure, they can improve how it's done, but they have to worry about improving in ways that don't make the game unfun for alot of people. The game is relatively stable, the servers are EXTREMELY stable, the ATs are relatively balanced, the concept is fun, and et cetera. And all the changes they make have a chance to ruin what they've already accomplished, no matter how well-intentioned.

And there's my rant. I should stop typing these things when I'm tired :P

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In the place where you were, flowers have been falling. Ice that had collected is thawing

That time, you were finishing my training. I was to tell no one, and let it remain thousand times a secret

The sound of a faraway drum invites the winter that is the ancient rhythm of sadness

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1b) Sidekick / Exemplar / Lackey / Malefactor System: Mien Gott! How should I forget this when I assembled my original list. I first noticed this feature when it wasn't in a ridiculously popular fantasy MMO. When two of your friends have lv 40 whatevers on a server and you want to join them, not having a sk system makes for some very awkward grouping.


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I love the Exemplar/Malefactor, but honestly to me, SK/Lackey feels like cheating. I like to earn my way into the game. It annoys me a bit to play on a team with a level 20 going to fight Tyrant. That mission was once the pinnacle of the game. IMO it cheapens it to have that experience at low levels.

The social aspect would be covered by Exemplar/Malefactor.

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2b) Travel Powers: In CoH, after lv 14, I can get to any part to any other part in 5 minutes max. My average travel time from mission to mission is about a minute. I spend more time in game doing my missions than walking between them which is why it the slow plodding pace of the new unnamed MMO came as a horrific shock where suddenly I'm walking for 10 minutes to do a 2 minute quest. Not a real efficient use of my time.


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I'm of two minds about this. It's great in CoH/V because there really isn't much to explore in this game. But in other games, I certainly don't mind exploring. I hate pure timesink travel, but I don't consider most travel to be so.

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I love CoH very much, but I like other games too. I don't think this game is appreciably better than some of the major games that came out the same year as it did, some of which I play as well.

I think at times over the years that 'fun' has been sacrificed on the altar of Statesman's vision of 'fun'.

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The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.

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The only problem with that snippet is that he must have been walking from one end of a zone to the other end. I've timed it before. I can run from a certain Bridge between talk folks and halflings to the main Tall Folk town and do so in under 10 minutes. That's one of the longest paths in the unnamed MMO and he's grossly exaggerating how slow it is.

Then again, he also didn't mention that you have fast travel (basically travel that is faster than using the Pocket D teleporter) available between major cities and a somewhat slower mount travel from town to town.

I also suppose he failed to mention that other forms of teleportation ARE available, just not at the level restricted section the unnamed MMO is at right now until it goes Live.


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Hmm, the fast travel costs 10 silver and at low levels that is to much. probably not an issue at higher levels but at lower ones it is very much an issue.

And I certainly got tired of the trudging back across the zone. It went something like this, go out and wend my way 3 - 8 minutes away from town hunt for awhile then either go back to see the quest giver to turn in the quest back to town or try and get one or two more done in the area. Then 3 - 8 minutes back to town. If I need to just sell and restock I might be in luck and a general sub town center might be nearby but if I need to level off across the zone I go. I swear I spent more time trudging back to the one side of any zone that it got tiresome.

I do want to like the game more than I do. I think the thing that kills it for me isn't the travel times. They are long but not as bad as a certain other game starting with V. What does it in for me is the elite mobs you have to fight to finish a number of quests, or special sub quests. Rather than being instanced having to que up in a line is not fun and frankly ruins my sense of immersion every time.

It is like if you needed to go fight a specific EB to finish a mission and had to get in line to do so.

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But it's MY sadistic mechanical monster and I'm here to make sure it knows it. - Girl Genius

List of Invention Guides

[ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
I like that shiny new mmo. It's fun and has an epic feel. That's the one thing CoH doesn't have for me anymore. The epic feel. AVs aren't so imposing after 3 years and I never really feel like I'm saving Paragon City, just a few of it's citizens at time.

[/ QUOTE ]

So it just means you're getting tired of the game after so long. Maybe it's time for you to move on, but the reason that the newer game feels epic is because... it's new. For the majority of people I know, after the newness wore off, they went back to CoX.



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for me, it's not that the newness has worn off, now to me, it's like well... Paragon City is almost like a home now. I know, that sounds really weird being that it doesn't really exist. Things that are done to it and changes are almost like watching changes in my own home town.

I would feel lost if anything at all if the game just say shut down tomorrow.

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1b) Sidekick / Exemplar / Lackey / Malefactor System: Mien Gott! How should I forget this when I assembled my original list. I first noticed this feature when it wasn't in a ridiculously popular fantasy MMO. When two of your friends have lv 40 whatevers on a server and you want to join them, not having a sk system makes for some very awkward grouping.


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I love the Exemplar/Malefactor, but honestly to me, SK/Lackey feels like cheating. I like to earn my way into the game. It annoys me a bit to play on a team with a level 20 going to fight Tyrant. That mission was once the pinnacle of the game. IMO it cheapens it to have that experience at low levels.

The social aspect would be covered by Exemplar/Malefactor.



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Only if they let one person Exemplar/Malefactor multiple people. The way it stands, if one has a lower level character and wants to play with friends (more than one) who have higher level character being sidekicked/lackied up is the only option. My guess is that they made it go both ways to accommodate single people who don't match the group they want to play with. And, while it may be a view at game content you wouldn't otherwise get at your native level, I'm not sure how it feels like cheating to you...if anything it's more difficult for a sidekick or lackey than their mentors as they don't have the number of powers they will when they do get to that level.

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Only if they let one person Exemplar/Malefactor multiple people.

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I think that would be peachy.

Think Yoda and the younglings.

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The City of Heroes Community is a special one and I will always look fondly on my times arguing, discussing and playing with you all. Thanks and thanks to the developers for a special experience.

Speaking as someone who currently plays both CoH and WoW, I'd like to add another feature of CoH that I love:

Waypoints

I just spent the last 10 minutes riding around the Badlands, looking for the NPC for a quest that was shared with me a month ago. I finally finished the quest, today, and had a devil of a time finding the NPC I needed to turn it in to. I yearned for a waypoint to him.

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While I don't necessarily agree with everything you mentioned, I certainly agree with the character ownership. This keeps me coming back to this game and creating new characters, coming up with new backstories and costumes. I love it!

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Actually, NC Soft has property rights to everything we create here.

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Not an intellectual property lawyer, but actually, not really. What they have is a non-exclusive perpetual license to what I create. They can't grant themselves exclusive rights (meaning, they can't own it) to what I create because I'm implicitly granted copyright the moment I author anything, and the only way I can implicitly give that away is if I'm a work-for-hire employee. Even if I click OK to an agreement that says "you agree to sign your rights away" that's not enough to blanket lose copyright, because exclusive transfers must be done in writing, and explicitly. But NCsoft can ask for non-exclusive rights to anything I create.

Of course, I don't necessarily have totally clear rights to everything I create either: if I incorporate parts of their content, they can exercise their exclusive rights on them. I can write whatever backstory I want, but they could prevent me from publishing it if it mentioned the Crey, for example. Meanwhile, they could publish it themselves, because while they don't own my backstory, they do have an essentially unlimited right to use it themselves. They don't really have property rights, they have usage rights, and that's really all they need anyway.

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I like that shiny new mmo. It's fun and has an epic feel. That's the one thing CoH doesn't have for me anymore. The epic feel. AVs aren't so imposing after 3 years and I never really feel like I'm saving Paragon City, just a few of it's citizens at time.

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So it just means you're getting tired of the game after so long. Maybe it's time for you to move on, but the reason that the newer game feels epic is because... it's new. For the majority of people I know, after the newness wore off, they went back to CoX.

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It's not the newness, I've played plenty of new games that had no epic feel. This particular game does have an epic feel as it interwines the main story into your story. It's the content that makes it epic. Not the mechanics. That other big mmo that has been out a few years, the one who's abbreviated name is an exclamation of excitement, that one has zero epic feel. CoH lacks an epic feel because there seems to be no apparent impact on the game world by the players, other than a few pvp games.

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I love CoH but the problem with it is that they simply put a comic book wrapper around some of the same old standards.

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Really? Have you even played some of the old "standards" games? Camping spawns is not my idea of fun, and we don't do that here.

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Yes I've played many an old camping game in their day, I've been around the bend and then some. And yes, CoX eliminated a lot of bad ideas from mmos of the past, however some things didn't change. Tough mobs are tough because they simply pile on stats, just like every other mmo out there. I'm still waiting for a developer to spend as much time developing new AI as they do on graphics. That will truly innovate games.

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When my stalker defeated Sstheno a little bit ago, I got excited-- I just killed an incarnate goddess of snakes. Further back, I defeated an alternate dimension's Lord Recluse, lord of Arachnos. I practicly bragged about soloing him on Relentless. Further back, I defeated various heroes time and time again. The 10th time you fight Manticore can never be as good as the 1st. The 20th time you defeat Verandi and Marcone just isn't the same. Though they could do some things to rectify the situation, it's not entirelly at the fault of the devs, but moreso at the fault of fickle tastes and the amount of time you spend in the game.

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I got my 50 a long time ago and killing the same mob again on every other character looses it's appeal. I have played all the content on the hero side except for task forces. I was really dissappointed to get to my high 30s in CoV and discover the exact same story lines I had already done on the hero side. I felt cheated out of a villainous career at that point and stopped playing the character.

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I got burnt out after spending 14 hours a day on CoX every weekend for several weeks straight. I took a break, then came back and CoH was fun again. Eventually, I'll just get bored and go somewhere else. That CoX has lasted you three years says volumes compared to other games-- especially console games, which promise usually ~40 hours of gameplay, with some replayability that just doesn't match CoX-- it definitely says good things about the game. And with MMOs, given the amount of alternatives and competition, especially from bigger companies like Blizz and Sony, CoX is doing a phenomenal job.

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I agree completely. They have done a wonderful job and no other mmo has kept me subscribing for more than 6 months at a time. This is huge. The problem is that CoH didn't get any new content (except pvp zones) while CoV was being developed and then expanded to 50 levels. That was a year and a half without significant content additions until the new Faultline came out. Content is king for me, and I've played almost all of the content they have to offer. I'm just not big and replaying content.

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Right off the bat we are fighting gangsters. Then evil mages and indless robots. Alien invaders and supervillains from alternate dimensions. Secret organizations and ultra-skilled mercenaries. Mutants, and scientific experiments.

Sure, they can improve how it's done, but they have to worry about improving in ways that don't make the game unfun for alot of people. The game is relatively stable, the servers are EXTREMELY stable, the ATs are relatively balanced, the concept is fun, and et cetera. And all the changes they make have a chance to ruin what they've already accomplished, no matter how well-intentioned.

And there's my rant. I should stop typing these things when I'm tired :P

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I agree, it's a great design but I would love to seem them introduce some more innovation. Things they've already thought of or suggested but don't have the budget for. My fear is that Marvel Online will become an idea drain on CoH. I'd hate to see all the cool ideas end up there.

I love CoH and have been playing since beta 3. I have never cancelled my main subscription although recently I did cancel me second account after 2 years. I want to see more of the world of Paragon City, there just isn't any left for me to see. I'm hanging on for I9 and inventions which I expect to add a lot of cool new features. What I am really looking forward to is I10 and the begining of the 3 issue story arc. Yes I am playing that fancy new mmo based on a piece of jewelry. But then again I like to have a second game to play when I need a break.

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