Am I the only one who doesn't like boring missions
By
Acyl,
Posted on: 2009-05-26 08:00 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
I don't like boring missions, but I'm not very fond of people who make new topics about stuff they already said earlier either.
[ QUOTE ]
I don't like boring missions, but I'm not very fond of people who make new topics about stuff they already said earlier either.
[/ QUOTE ]
really? Why not?
Are there too many new, never discussed before topics that mine might bury them?
That sounds like the problems that some canon arcs have, with a lot of exposition at the beginning and end, and mostly filler in between. Task Forces have this as a major problem too, actually.
Well written arcs should have a plot that develops significantly every mission.
Well, doing good mission start and end text is easier than working the plot around scripted events and making interesting stuff happen.
The very best missions I've played, in my opinion, have both... killer writing and very creative objectives/spawns.
But that's harder to do.
@Acyl
VIRTUE
Blue: Realpolitik, Leading Lady, Glass Lass, Superball, Alec Kazam
Red: Battery Acid, Obsolete, Bugfix
I think the AE has a problem in that clues don't disappear when you finish the mission. By the end of an arc, they pile up. Architects may be trying to avoid that.
given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.
[ QUOTE ]
That sounds like the problems that some canon arcs have, with a lot of exposition at the beginning and end, and mostly filler in between. Task Forces have this as a major problem too, actually.
Well written arcs should have a plot that develops significantly every mission.
[/ QUOTE ]
Agreed. IMO, the Hess TF was the first step away from the normal TF grind. Activating robots, small missions to shut down radar stations, and the big climactic fight in the volcano lair for the finale. Even though most of the CoV SFs lack some of that flair, even they are better than the original 6 TFs in the game. I wish the devs would go through some of these TFs, cut out the fat, put in more flair (adding triggers, tilesets, etc.), and revitalize them. Sure, it would be some work, but it would go a long way for re-freshening "classic" CoH.
That goes for those "classic" missions too. Some have been revamped, like the Fortune Teller mish and the tutorial mish, but there are certainly quite a few other arcs that could benefit from such treatment, instead of leaving us with so much "defeat boss & crew," "defeat all," or "click on some glowies" vanilla filler. Add some triggers, interesting dialogue or clues, etc. Or at least throw a pie or something.
I agree that there should be more interesting missions (and not just mission text), but I don't exactly expect it given how rarely it happens in game.
I tried to make some in-mission funnies (and provide alternative means of winning than just "kill everything in the way" - none of the missions have a defeat requirement that's more than one spawn and most can simply be stealthed) with Wardrobe Malfunction, but when I played through it with a couple of teams nobody seemed to notice anything about the missions more than "ugh, KoA" or "Freakshow are fun!", and the only comments anyone has ever sent me on it were related to the bug that prevented the triggered boss spawn from happening in the second mission before I removed the trigger entirely because it simply wasn't working.
Heck, I even tried to do that in my "farm" mission (parody... I made it in response to Posi's first thread on MA abuse and already sent him a PM asking if it was "too close to a farm") Temporary Inspamity, with the Ebil Farmers villain group, RMT spamming mainframes, and mobs such as "Gratuitous Eye Candy".
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
|
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
|
[ QUOTE ]
given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.
[/ QUOTE ]
I agree. My missions have filler - boss spawns that have dialog, destructible objects for extra dialog and flavor, that sort of thing. I have not yet been able to come up with a mission that has real flow to it.
I've seen a few and they were sometimes great and sometimes not (re-searching a map for a new glowie that appears after you defeat the boss at the end is annoying).
I do seriously wonder though if people want complex missions. I play CoX over other games because the combat is so much better - but I get bored soloing through a mission if it is just standard spawns. I rarely get bored on a large team doing combat - so much more is going on.
If I just teamed - I would just want missions to have diverse maps and enemies. When I team I don't care about the story - the combat is good enough. And doing a complex mission with a team is more of a pain (click 3 blinkies simultaneously sort of thing).
yes, you're the only one who doesn't like boring missions.
/thread
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
I guess it depends on your idea of boring. Ive gone through a lot of missions of both types. And frankly either way I tend not to read them. I like the game play in cox I didnt really start playing in hopes of finding some literary genius whether it was a developer or a play who made a mish on the MA system. If I wanted a story that had a wonderfully dry and dark sense of humor or a telling story of love bitter betrayal and the worlds most awesome ham sandwich Id go pick up a book.
What I think many are going to have to accept is if you want to try and find a bit of Shakespeare or Spielberg in the ma system is that both these creative talents are if anything few and far between. And the medium that is the MA system is rather new and missing quite a few tools that would help in the story telling department. Maybe once the would be pantheons of greater MA story telling find their voices or better grasp of how to use the pen that is the MA to craft their tails of intrigue and adventure. Youll have a bit more to choose from.
Also and this is more a personnel pet peeve then anything else on my part youre not paying the player base in cox to entertain you. Their creating their own mission and stories in their own way because they find It fun for them to do. Not because it makes anyone else happy. Trying to read though a paragraph of dialog milliseconds before the baddy and friends starts to try and bash the groups heads in or while developing a strategy to prevent this isnt really what some consider fun. Some would even go as far as to say its downright destructive to the pacing of their game play. We all have a different idea of what fun and boring are and if youre finding that the greater majority of players dont seem to like the same missions you do Id take that as a hint of how to better refine my searching for missions. Check to see who published the missions you tend to like or the description of them rather than the star rating system. If the star rating system was any indication of what everybody wanted all wed have was farms of Rikiti and a kaleidoscope of colored cat people with dual swords that couldnt hit the broad side of a barn.
Sorry about that list bit its off topic and a rather nasty can of worms to be prying open but some of us just want to find a group and play the game while some times quickly chatting in the lull between the combat. MMO are ongoing processes of updates and plugging hole created by those updates. Its nothing really new or unsurprising.
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.
[/ QUOTE ]
I agree. My missions have filler - boss spawns that have dialog, destructible objects for extra dialog and flavor, that sort of thing. I have not yet been able to come up with a mission that has real flow to it.
I've seen a few and they were sometimes great and sometimes not (re-searching a map for a new glowie that appears after you defeat the boss at the end is annoying).
I do seriously wonder though if people want complex missions. I play CoX over other games because the combat is so much better - but I get bored soloing through a mission if it is just standard spawns. I rarely get bored on a large team doing combat - so much more is going on.
If I just teamed - I would just want missions to have diverse maps and enemies. When I team I don't care about the story - the combat is good enough. And doing a complex mission with a team is more of a pain (click 3 blinkies simultaneously sort of thing).
[/ QUOTE ]
This pretty much sums up how I feel about CoX in general. Just about all missions are simple grinds. It's great for teams because it makes grinding fun. In fact, sometimes there isn't enough chaos. But solo, or even duo, it's boring. Sure I'll do a new arc solo once, but other then that it's what is the fastest way to move to the next mish.
i tend to add jokes and make the char's in the mission funny or at least funny to me.
i try to make it all interesting.
evoL Love, -Pretty Hate Machine, Taelus, Lie-Taelus, evoL II Love, Maerd dreaM, King of Hate, Cie-Taelus, Vie-Taelus, Ifand Orbuts, Candi L. Stien, Hell's Dreaming, Hell's Freezing, ecIce, Phillis Sy, the Last Splash, S. Wayland, Crimson King?, Dream Ghost, Gusher, Dawn of the Red and the Moment After
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.
[/ QUOTE ]
I agree. My missions have filler - boss spawns that have dialog, destructible objects for extra dialog and flavor, that sort of thing. I have not yet been able to come up with a mission that has real flow to it.
I've seen a few and they were sometimes great and sometimes not (re-searching a map for a new glowie that appears after you defeat the boss at the end is annoying).
I do seriously wonder though if people want complex missions. I play CoX over other games because the combat is so much better - but I get bored soloing through a mission if it is just standard spawns. I rarely get bored on a large team doing combat - so much more is going on.
If I just teamed - I would just want missions to have diverse maps and enemies. When I team I don't care about the story - the combat is good enough. And doing a complex mission with a team is more of a pain (click 3 blinkies simultaneously sort of thing).
[/ QUOTE ]
This pretty much sums up how I feel about CoX in general. Just about all missions are simple grinds. It's great for teams because it makes grinding fun. In fact, sometimes there isn't enough chaos. But solo, or even duo, it's boring. Sure I'll do a new arc solo once, but other then that it's what is the fastest way to move to the next mish.
[/ QUOTE ]yeah, but thats the issue of mmo's in general, latency, inability to meaningfully affect the game world, team dynamics, enforced slow leveling for non farm non insane players, and general entrenched design ideas make all of them become a grind. you either cope, or abandon the genre, because thats not going away.
now dont get me wrong, i WANT things to get better, but lets face it, we have played this game how many hours? Even my absolute favorite games, like the original legend of zelda or morrowind dont approach one tenth the hours i have put in this game, so its no surprise, you just cant keep things fresh when you are playing for over a thousand hours. Chase and i have had long, insomnia curing discussions on how to combat grind and reshape mmo design, and almost any idea that we have come up with that would remove grind would also change design quite a lot, and with "world of entrenched gaming conventions" currently reminding publishers that change is bad, good luck getting something ground breaking out there.
(QR)
"Boring" is a subjective term. Your question is then ill-formed and insinuates a certain level of self-centeredness.
If you are finding the game too rote and predictable, you have probably played it too much and are now expecting more from it than it was ever able to provide. You likely just need a break from it!
After just recently slogging through The Terra Conspiracy for the first time I can see your point. It starts well, with the really cool wrecked office, but after that there's an awful lot of Save 5 Techs then Defeat All before the story really gets moving. It didn't help that, personally, I find DE quite boring opponents.
It's one of the reasons I'm still preferring villain side. The arcs tend to be shorter and sharper, with less filler missions.
Still, often even the most routine mission can be livened up by some good combat, and luckily there's a lot of that in this game. I remember one perfectly routine mission that put my Claws/SR scrapper against some Tsoo in a warehouse. Since /SR seems to make you virtually immune to siphon speed and caltrops I was bouncing around all over that warehouse, fighting super fast Tsoo and chasing down the sorcerors in a running battle where each spawn just blended into the next. I ended up doing almost the entire mission in a single adrenalin fuelled rush. Good times 
I am always interested in interesting things.
That blue thing running around saying "Cookies are sometimes food" is Praetorian Cookie Monster!
Shoot on sight, please.
Am I the only one who thinks that the 15 minutes of playing the mission should be more interesting? And I don't mean clicking on 8 blinkies instead of 1. I mean having dialog inside them, or a series of steps to accomplish a goal?
The problem with bad ideas is they sound like good ideas until you think about them.
What you're asking for here is basically chained objectives. The primary effect of chained objectives is to make the player run all over hell's half acre to try to find where the new target has spawned. This loses its appeal very quickly, as in usually the first time you see it. If we could position objectives or at least get them to spawn in the right freaking regions this might not be so bad. That would, of course, depend on Architects to actually place the new objectives in such a way as to preserve some kind of narrative flow and not deliberately make the player run over the map four times, which some twits would do anyway.
I don't know if you've played my missions (they're on the page linked in my sig) but I do try to provide an ample amount of text and story. This gets complaints too, from people who don't want to have to read anything.
A lot of things people ask for are things that might work great in a dedicated adventure game but would rapidly lose their appeal in an MMO. Making the player solve a mini-game logic puzzle to get a Clue sounds like a great idea until the 20th time you have to do it. Then you're going to want to put your fist through the monitor every time you see one.
In short, things are the way they are for reasons, even if those reasons aren't immediately apparent, and if you're not enjoying the game it may simply be time for you to move on.
Current Blog Post: "Why I am an Atheist..."
"And I say now these kittens, they do not get trained/As we did in the days when Victoria reigned!" -- T. S. Eliot, "Gus, the Theatre Cat"
[ QUOTE ]
Am I the only one who thinks that the 15 minutes of playing the mission should be more interesting? And I don't mean clicking on 8 blinkies instead of 1. I mean having dialog inside them, or a series of steps to accomplish a goal?
The problem with bad ideas is they sound like good ideas until you think about them.
What you're asking for here is basically chained objectives. The primary effect of chained objectives is to make the player run all over hell's half acre to try to find where the new target has spawned. This loses its appeal very quickly, as in usually the first time you see it. If we could position objectives or at least get them to spawn in the right freaking regions this might not be so bad. That would, of course, depend on Architects to actually place the new objectives in such a way as to preserve some kind of narrative flow and not deliberately make the player run over the map four times, which some twits would do anyway.
I don't know if you've played my missions (they're on the page linked in my sig) but I do try to provide an ample amount of text and story. This gets complaints too, from people who don't want to have to read anything.
A lot of things people ask for are things that might work great in a dedicated adventure game but would rapidly lose their appeal in an MMO. Making the player solve a mini-game logic puzzle to get a Clue sounds like a great idea until the 20th time you have to do it. Then you're going to want to put your fist through the monitor every time you see one.
In short, things are the way they are for reasons, even if those reasons aren't immediately apparent, and if you're not enjoying the game it may simply be time for you to move on.
[/ QUOTE ]
I have played Asheron's Call - an MMO. And it had puzzles in the missions. From finding keys and levers, to answering questions, to mazes, and all sorts of things. It can and has been done and done well.
I agree that running back and forth on a map looking for a blinkie can be bad - especially if that blinkie did not exist before.
This is an MMO - emphasis on massive. There are players who like farming - killing the same demons on the same map over and over. There are roleplayers who stand in a park in game and roleplay. There are all sorts of players.
Given that MA has thousands of mission arcs written by thousands of players, claiming any sort of monolithic reason for content being a certain way is a bit silly.
There are farming arcs, challenge arcs, story focused arcs - it seems reasonable to think that out of a hundred thousand people playing the game, there would be interest in other varieties as well.
I play MA and see arcs with 5 stars, or do Freakalympics which gets rave reviews from players - and they are dull and tedious.
They are what I call bookend missions. Someone writes a nice intro and a nice conclusion - and in between you grind through standard spawns until you reach the boss/rescue/glowie and then end the mission. You get 2 minutes of nice text to read between every 15 minutes of pure grindfest.
Am I the only one who thinks that the 15 minutes of playing the mission should be more interesting? And I don't mean clicking on 8 blinkies instead of 1. I mean having dialog inside them, or a series of steps to accomplish a goal?
I like combat in CoX, but grinding through 20 spawns that have no flavor or purpose other than to be a bump in the road is not my idea of a good mission - No matter how amazing the text I read at the start was.