Redside is So Much Better Designed
By
Acemace,
Posted on: 2009-05-29 08:27 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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What CoV suffers the most because of is its basic premise - it's a City of Villains. There's just no fun to be had being evil in a city where everyone is evil and everything is dirty. It's kind of like Dungeon Keeper without the Lord of the Realm. Not much fun.
[/ QUOTE ]That's how it felt for me. I won't go too much into detail because I'm sure it's been done to death but it'd be fairly easy to make minor changes and have it be much more villain-ish. Why am I reading a newspaper and then deciding to attack some CoT cave to steal a painting they stole? Why not have me rob a museum with security guards shooting at me and trying to beat me down with security batons? I don't need to murder babies or rob young ladies of their maidenhood but why not a mission with people as glowies where clicking on them is "shaking them down" and triggers an ambush of cops or a generic hero to save them or whatever? I'll admit I only played redside for 12 levels but in those 12 levels I did exactly two villainy seeming things: robbed a bank once and rounded up some homeless schlubs into a truck. The rest of the time, I could have been running missions out of Atlas Park except with more snakes and less clockworks.
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That's actually the symptom of a greater disease - CoV doesn't seem to have a point for the most part.
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To this I will agree. CoH doesn't need a point since you're being good for goodness' sake. CoV needed an additional element added to it to make you feel like you're a bad guy with a plan.
It actually comes back to what I've been saying about not expanding the core game for 5 years. Each redside zone you progress to should have some kind overall objective for you to pursue as a villain. Whether it's trying to carve out your own piece of territory or establishing a master plan against a known enemy hero. There should be some kind of mini-game or alternate goal that drives your villainous deeds. We got nothing.
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Plus, most arcs either advance the plot (Countess Crey has been arrested and convicted!) or reveal some crucial canon information (The Circle of Thorns are 14 000 years old, you say?). Villain-side... Not so much.
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You're just spewing anger here Sam. The Magus Mu Drahkan arc gives you a VERY detailed look at the origins of both the CoT and Mu as well as their relationship to each other. Maybe more than you even WANT to know and its a long set of missions. The Seer Marino arc gives you detailed insight into Ghost Widow's origin and Marshall Brass reveals Dr. Aeon's origins as well as leads you towards the Tarikoss TF...which gives you even more information.
Also to counter your argument, blueside will repeatedly bring you to the brink of knowledge and then leave you hanging. All the early missions about the Lost reveal NOTHING substantial. And none of the info you dig up about the relations of the small time gangs like Hellions, Thugs and Outcasts to larger gangs in other zones is ever really used. You just move onto something else.
The major problem with redside is that the dev team stopped really adding to it over the course of the following issues. Every addition has been tied to something on blueside. The excuse that more people play on blueside has also been the thing that's hampered redside's progression more so than just ugly(in your opinion) zones and missions that don't send you running to the ends of the earth and back. (And btw...you think that missions that send you all the way to the ends of Thorn Isle aren't enough travelling?)
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I've played redside almost exclusively for the past three years or so now. However, my server, Champion, is / was in desperate need of bubblers for Rikti mothership raids, so I gritted my teeth, and made a new Force Field / Dark Blast Defender.
I can't wait until Going Rogue. I started off in Galaxy City, 'cause lol, Atlas Park. My first contact pitted me against the evil forces of Vahzilok. A lone Force Field / Dark Blast Defender against Abominations, Reapers, and Mortificaters. Not a pretty sight.
Having managed to slog my way through that, I did some radio missions in Kings Row. Wow, they finally added stores there!
Then came the Positron Task Force. "Hey guys, come to Steel to meet me and start my TF!" "Okay, great, we're here in Steel." "Okay, good. Now, go to Skyway." Huff, huff, huff. "Okay, we're done in Skyway." "Great! Now come back to Steel!" Huff, huff, huff. "Okay, we're here." "Cool. Now go beat up these guys in Skyway!" "Again? Okay." Huff, huff, huff. "Vahzilok are terminated, sir." "Good job, guys. Now, head off to Perez Park." And so on, and so forth...
After all that running around, I decided to cool my heels and do some AE missions in Atlas Park. Yes, I know, I'm dirty.
Then, out of sheer and utter boredom, I decided to organize a Citadel TF. "Okay guys, I'm here in Talos, right next to the tram. Come to meet me for some great missions." "Okay, we're here." "Great, now go all the way to the southern end of Independence Port, and beat up some Council." Huff, huff, huff. Finished, and ran all 1.5 km back to Citadel. "Good job, guys! Now, go back and beat up some more Council!" "Wait, this is the same spot we were just at. You mean I have to run another 1.5 km back to where we just were?" "Yep." "$@*(!"
Last night, I ran a mission to unlock the Science Enhancement store in Brickstown, which is a frakking maze of a zone.
Why do people still play blueside again? 
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This why I stuck with my Villain and why I have so many heroes stuck at 8ish.
All that running around really irritates me.
I just went back to blueside and a few things struck me.
My new alt: Ran nothing but starting contact's missions until they ran out, and zero Merits. I could have sworn that Kalinda and Burke at least gave one or two merits. A quick trip to Paragonwiki shows me that the blueside contact is arranged as a loose sack of random missions, while Burke's missions are a story arc.
My low-forties Scrapper: Hunt 100 Crey mission. Seriously, ONE HUNDRED? What the.... I don't think that hunt missions should ever be more than 25.
Low 40s Scrapper?
Run a lap around Brickstown and arrest all the grey Crey. Piece of cake, dude 
There is no such thing as an "innocent bystander"
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Low 40s Scrapper?
Run a lap around Brickstown and arrest all the grey Crey. Piece of cake, dude
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Actually, I ran around Founder's and arrested grey Crey there. P.I. (or the RWZ) would have been level appropriate, but they are only a small portion of those zones' population, IIRC.
(Should have checked Eden, I suppose, since the contact may have mentioned it.)
Still, anything over twenty-five is a bit much for a hunt mission.
Too bad the AE doesn't allow street-sweeping outdoors as mission options. I could do a send-up of Coh contacts.
1) Hunt 100 Hellions, any zone except Perez.
2) Go to P.I. and hunt 250 Carnies.
3) Door mission in Perez, mid-maze or in Faultline, somewhere in a tunnel (mission marker to show 35 yards under a solid concrete slab)
4) Deliver my dry-cleaning to Azuria. (add Malta Ambush here)
5) Hunt 25 Contaminated in RV. (after this mission, you get contact's cell phone)
6) Hunt 100 DE in Founder's. Arc completed.
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You're just spewing anger here Sam. The Magus Mu Drahkan arc gives you a VERY detailed look at the origins of both the CoT and Mu as well as their relationship to each other. Maybe more than you even WANT to know and its a long set of missions. The Seer Marino arc gives you detailed insight into Ghost Widow's origin and Marshall Brass reveals Dr. Aeon's origins as well as leads you towards the Tarikoss TF...which gives you even more information.
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There are a few interesting stories, yes. The majority, though? Billy Heck has you take part in a gang war. Vince Dubrovsky has you sacrifice Scrapyarders to the CoT. Leo Vargas has you pull a few uninteresting jobs for Arachnos. Kirkland, uncharacteristically, actually has some meaning to his arc, but it isn't much. Then we move into Nerva. There NO-ONE has anything interesting at all. Darla has you take revenge by picking on a random hero that just happened to be in the neighbourhood when her mood struck, the misspelled Demitrovich (should be Dimitrovich) has you assemble and test a weapon and pretty much that's it, and the Shadowy Figure has rally nothing interesting to offer. Then we have Kelly Uqua, who I guess has the interesting element that she is a Rikti spy, though that is more obvious than it is part of the story, Psymon Omega who has literally NOTHING interesting other than a passing mention of Romulus the Warshade and Operative Ruthger who I don't even remember what he had. Something to go destroy yet another Longbow base, I think. And St. Martial is even worse. You go from hounding Longbow and taking on the Rikti to acting as a hired thug for a casino or having your chain yanked by a crazy broad with horrible shoes. Johnny Sonata is slightly more interesting, but Bassie Croupier and Jezebel Jones are pretty much just sources for more jobs. Then, of course, we have playing exterminator in the gutter, playing lab assistant to Aeon Corp and "punishing" Countess Crey.
There are a few interesting arcs, I will freely admit, but the vast majority are not. Go there, beat up that guy, collect money. I will actually admit that the Hollows, Striga and Croatoa arcs are a lot like that, too. You do a lot of stuff and end up both without any sort of closure and without any sort of interesting result. You didn't learn much of anything and you didn't really achieve much. That's what really kills CoV-side. "Great job, kid! You beat up a bunch of workers and now I get to collect a big fat bonus! Here, let me pay you some scraps from it!" Bo-ring!
Honestly, CoV suffers from BAD DESIGN more than it suffers from anything else. There's just so little to do there that's actually interesting. Most of the arcs are glorified paper missions, sometimes not even that. CoH arcs may drag on, but at the end of the day they still feel epic. Almost all CoV arcs feel like a job.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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3. Carry clue back to contact, get phone number
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All contacts give out their phone number based on a certain percentage of their progress bars. CoH contacts just have about three times as many missions. Frankly, I'd sooner to a contact run a few more times than be stuck with the same 5 missions for the same 3 contacts for an entire level range.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I just went back to blueside and a few things struck me.
My new alt: Ran nothing but starting contact's missions until they ran out, and zero Merits. I could have sworn that Kalinda and Burke at least gave one or two merits. A quick trip to Paragonwiki shows me that the blueside contact is arranged as a loose sack of random missions, while Burke's missions are a story arc.
My low-forties Scrapper: Hunt 100 Crey mission. Seriously, ONE HUNDRED? What the.... I don't think that hunt missions should ever be more than 25.
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There are so many horrible hunt missions blue side. There is even a trio (or is it more?) where they keep upping the count.
The only one I can recall red side that I hate is when I get sent to the far end of Nerva for CoT.
As to lowbie merits, yes villains get them from Kalinda and Burke. The devs have stated villains start strong but get out meritted by heroes later and they are trying to adjust that.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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3. Carry clue back to contact, get phone number
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All contacts give out their phone number based on a certain percentage of their progress bars. CoH contacts just have about three times as many missions. Frankly, I'd sooner to a contact run a few more times than be stuck with the same 5 missions for the same 3 contacts for an entire level range.
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Why not improve both? Run a mission to prove your helpfulness and get the phone number like most new contacts and add more missions and arcs to those who have too few.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
redside: its got slums, drugs, criminals, violence, apathy, military bases, constant opression, corrupt politics, and an absolute lack of hope for happiness.
feels like home, hey wait... that IS my home!
Alot of mercy, looks alot like my hometown... feels like it too with all the police beating the crap out of random citizens.
I love redside, its so... real...
Makes me wonder If the devs actually visited my area and took notes.
another reason to love redside: Brutes.
Ignoring anyone is a mistake. You might miss something viral to your cause.
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Honestly, CoV suffers from BAD DESIGN more than it suffers from anything else.
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To be precise, it suffers from trying to cram the same design that works OK for CoH into a villainous setting. It was laziness on the part of the developers...or maybe they were scared that if villains got something truly unique, it would tick off their staunch hero players.
It actually demonstrates just how lacking BOTH games are. No one should feel great about having to do pointless hunt missions and getting sent to zones that sometimes make no sense to do missions for a contact in a different zone.
Where is the logic that you are going to rescue the members of a law firm and their office happens to be in Perez Park(you know...the zone that was abandoned)?
It's not that it's great on blueside...it is more that the wrong stuff still fits in even though it is wrong. One of the major annoyances on blueside for me is that any contact can give you one of several story arcs. That only started to change with recent zone additions like the Hollows and Croatoa. You'd get the same dialogue from any of half a dozen contacts in a level range.
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There's just so little to do there that's actually interesting.
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That's mostly in your head. The scope of CoV missions isn't less than CoH missions. There are simply more CoH missions...which all are very much the same, not necessarily better. I actually enjoy some of the later COV missions...like where you assault a Longbow base to destroy their aircraft or assault a battleship. Not much of that on blueside.
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Most of the arcs are glorified paper missions, sometimes not even that.
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It's the same on blueside. The only difference is someone is telling you how great a job you did and how you managed to save the day in the nick of time.
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CoH arcs may drag on, but at the end of the day they still feel epic. Almost all CoV arcs feel like a job.
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Dragging on may bring a greater epic feel for you...but it doesn't for me. There are dozens of blueside arcs where I can sit back and count the number filler missions on BOTH of my hands. That's not superior design...that's timesink insertion. At the end of the day...you're still not the driving force behind pushing the story forward any more than you are in COV...someone is simply TELLING you that you are. Oh...and you ARE doing a job...CoV is from the perspective of a mercenary villain. I'm not saying that's perfect...but that is what the design is right now.
Villains don't get a pat on the back...but the problem is that they don't get anything else for their troubles either.
This goes back to what I've been saying about CoV missing an extra layer of gameplay that CoH may not need.
When Statesman killed the skill system and decided to not try to replace it with anything else, I think that left a serious void in the game as a whole that has never been filled. Inventions and Day Jobs didn't fill it. Our missions have not become deeper to compensate for it.
Of all the things I hope Going Rogue brings to the game...side switching is the least of it. Because if all it means is the same scope of missions...but just in different settings, then its still failed to address the underlying problems of this game. Playing a scrapper in the Rogue Isles won't broaden the scope of the game...neither will a mastermind in Paragon City. Its still going to be the same old same old. Something fundamental needs to change.
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All of the old TFs (pre-Striga) would be vastly improved just by cutting out 1/2 to 2/3 of the missions.
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As would many of the older story arcs. As it is there's way too many Defeat Alls and huge maps of not terribly interesting or challenging enemies - I almost fell asleep during my latest run through the 'Deliver Outbreak' map in McIntyre's arc.
The newer hero side content is often excellent - Faultline, the Hollows, the Midnighters - but the old stuff needs reworked.
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However, for the past several issues, the predominant whine has been that there's no new content -- revamping all of the old storylines doesn't do anything for the people who complain that there's nothing for their 50s to do, so the devs have been spending their time in building new content. Now, with the release of the Mission Architect, assuming that the devs come up with a satisfactory (for them) solution to the problem of the MA being overrun by people who see the ability to build their own missions as the ideal way for them to get access to lots of high-value, low-threat opponents for cheap XP (i.e., farm fodder), they can offload some of the 'no new content complaints to the player community, freeing up some of their time to go back and bring blueside story arcs in line with the ones from redside contacts. I don't know that it's going to happen, but I think that they'll have the opportunity to do it.
"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers
All of the villains I have rolled that have made it to 35 have tended to rocket fairly quickly to 50 --- because I no longer have to play redside at that point. They can all grind in Cimerora or (if not smashing/lethal) RWZ and run ITFs and Lady Greys until they hit 50.
My villains tend to stall in the early 20s. This is where redside forces you to Sharkhead, and I pretty much hate everything about that zone. I also strongly dislike Grandville, which is pretty much unplayable without stealth and fly. Way too much sniping with -travel there. Now that there are alternatives to Grandville, redside needs an alternative to Sharkhead as well.
The introduction of radio missions revived blueside. They are a convenient way to grind without being sent all over creation. The old fashioned contact missions are now mostly for solo grinding for the merits they give.
<《 New Colchis / Guides / Mission Architect 》>
"At what point do we say, 'You're mucking with our myths'?" - Harlan Ellison
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All of the villains I have rolled that have made it to 35 have tended to rocket fairly quickly to 50 --- because I no longer have to play redside at that point. They can all grind in Cimerora or (if not smashing/lethal) RWZ and run ITFs and Lady Greys until they hit 50.
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It's odd...I tend to think that redside becomes MORE interesting after 35 because the villain content gets better. There is St. Martial and I don't mind Grandville all that much.
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My villains tend to stall in the early 20s. This is where redside forces you to Sharkhead, and I pretty much hate everything about that zone.
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Sharkhead isn't my favorite redside zone...but I can't say that it's any worse than any other villain zone. I'm guessing your hatred of it is aesthetic in nature.
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I also strongly dislike Grandville, which is pretty much unplayable without stealth and fly.
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Ok...you can stop with the hyperbole. My redside 50 is a thugs/poison MM and I had teleport. I teleported pretty much all over Grandville on my way to missions and contacts. It's not the easiest zone in the world to negotiate but you do NOT need fly or stealth to get around in it.
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The introduction of radio missions revived blueside.
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They haven't for me...which may explain why I spend so much time redside.
I absolutely HATE the contact system blueside. I play mainly blueside because the archetypes and atmosphere redside doesn't interest me much, but the contact system blueside is just HORRIBLE. I hate it from a player's perspective and I hate it from a design perspective. Why on earth are all the contacts blueside so freakin' afraid to actually go visit the zones they're so concerned about!?.
Every single original contact seems to concentrate their missions on any zone except the one they're in. I find that just unbelievable. It's like having a community representative for Philadelphia based in New York City.
When you work your way through a zone and finally level up enough to graduate to the next one, you don't want to be sent back to where you just came from. Not only that, but just from a realism perspective, it fails horribly. I get sent on missions to AP to defeat Sky Raiders or such, and they're not even in that zone!
If there's to BIG QoL features I'd like to see implemented that are heavy enough to warrant their own issue, it would be a revamp of the contact system heroside, and also to finally have a respec system. Our current respec system is as difficult as it could possibly be without intentionally being coded for extra difficulty.
Sorry, I started ranting. It must be a sore spot with me. 
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
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What CoV suffers the most because of is its basic premise - it's a City of Villains. There's just no fun to be had being evil in a city where everyone is evil and everything is dirty.
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As a faction in a larger game it can work.
As a "stand alone expansion", or whatever marketing gobbedygook they were calling it at release, I agree it was destined to fail.
There's a reason the overwhelming majority of comics, movies, books, etc have heroes as protagonists.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
Hmm.. people say they can't tell the difference between redside zones? I'll list the blueside zones I've been to:
Atlas Park
Galaxy City
Steel Canyon
Skyway City
Striga Isle
Independence Port
Talos Island
Of those, as long as I'm not over water, I can't tell which zone I'm in, with the exception of Skyway City. All the rest? Sterile repeated environments. If I am over water, then it just reduces the mystery of which boring zone I'm in to three choices, Striga, Talos, or Independence port. It doesn't leave much room for excitement for the other zones I have to get to.
Also, the contacts? If I were to create another hero, I wouldn't know which contact I'd like to repeat, because I already forgot their faces, names, and missions. Talk about dull story telling. Sure, CoV may lack choices, but at least it has choices I find *memorable*. I can be sure that Dmitriv Krylov and Peter Themari won't give me the same missions and that to me, is a very good thing. Compared to say, Dr. Cheng and Laura Brunetti who both give out the following missions:
Defeat Circle in Talos island
Defeat the Circle in Independence Port
Defeat the Pantheon in Independence Port
Defeat the Circle in Dark Astoria
Defeat the Pantheon in Dark Astoria
Sure some people may see that as 10 different missions because different contacts give them out, but to me, it's 5 different missions at most. I'd say it's more like 2, with a change of scenery.
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Sick because they are so evil or sick because if this was Fallout 3 you would have murdered most of your contacts for giving you lip?
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The latter.
Personally, I can't wait for Going Rogue. I'll be sending all my villains hero side and can't wait to say goodbye to CoV.
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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I absolutely HATE the contact system blueside. I play mainly blueside because the archetypes and atmosphere redside doesn't interest me much, but the contact system blueside is just HORRIBLE. I hate it from a player's perspective and I hate it from a design perspective. Why on earth are all the contacts blueside so freakin' afraid to actually go visit the zones they're so concerned about!?.
Every single original contact seems to concentrate their missions on any zone except the one they're in. I find that just unbelievable. It's like having a community representative for Philadelphia based in New York City.
When you work your way through a zone and finally level up enough to graduate to the next one, you don't want to be sent back to where you just came from. Not only that, but just from a realism perspective, it fails horribly. I get sent on missions to AP to defeat Sky Raiders or such, and they're not even in that zone!
If there's to BIG QoL features I'd like to see implemented that are heavy enough to warrant their own issue, it would be a revamp of the contact system heroside, and also to finally have a respec system. Our current respec system is as difficult as it could possibly be without intentionally being coded for extra difficulty.
Sorry, I started ranting. It must be a sore spot with me.
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Here's the problem I've always had with this. It's meta thinking.
Paragon City is Paragon City. The zones are just neighborhoods of a larger whole. People are thinking of them as separate entities where they really are part of a larger whole. It would be silly in the extreme to my mind to be stuck in one zone for every mission, unless it made sense with the story like Faultline or Croatoa.
If a contact sends you to Atlas Park that's because they usually want to send you to City Hall. I see no problem with having folks of all levels all over the game. I absolutely hate that villain side traps you for the most part in one zone. Sure it's a pain in the butt sometimes to have to travel across the game, but really in this game you can get anywhere inside about 2 minutes.
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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Sure it's a pain in the butt sometimes to have to travel across the game, but really in this game you can get anywhere inside about 2 minutes.
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Valid reasons to hate arcs that send you all over the place:
1: Low level
It's just dumb making people jog all over the place when they don't have a travel power. The mayhem/safeguard temp travel powers are a big help with this one.
2: Slow computer
I had an old machine that took so long to zone I never had to 'officially' go AFK, I just waited until we had to zone and then wandered off for a while.
The hamsters would still be grinding away when I got back.
3: Stupid game design.
I used to HATE Founders because it was a dead-end zone. Now, with the train station, it doesn't bug me.
Also, we've got it pretty easy these days even without a pimped out SG base- Pocket D teleporter, market teleporter, Oroboros portal, temp travel powers.....it's very rare these days that a mission location annoys me.
The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.
My City Was Gone
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I absolutely HATE the contact system blueside. I play mainly blueside because the archetypes and atmosphere redside doesn't interest me much, but the contact system blueside is just HORRIBLE. I hate it from a player's perspective and I hate it from a design perspective. Why on earth are all the contacts blueside so freakin' afraid to actually go visit the zones they're so concerned about!?.
Every single original contact seems to concentrate their missions on any zone except the one they're in. I find that just unbelievable. It's like having a community representative for Philadelphia based in New York City.
When you work your way through a zone and finally level up enough to graduate to the next one, you don't want to be sent back to where you just came from. Not only that, but just from a realism perspective, it fails horribly. I get sent on missions to AP to defeat Sky Raiders or such, and they're not even in that zone!
If there's to BIG QoL features I'd like to see implemented that are heavy enough to warrant their own issue, it would be a revamp of the contact system heroside, and also to finally have a respec system. Our current respec system is as difficult as it could possibly be without intentionally being coded for extra difficulty.
Sorry, I started ranting. It must be a sore spot with me.
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Here's the problem I've always had with this. It's meta thinking.
Paragon City is Paragon City. The zones are just neighborhoods of a larger whole. People are thinking of them as separate entities where they really are part of a larger whole. It would be silly in the extreme to my mind to be stuck in one zone for every mission, unless it made sense with the story like Faultline or Croatoa.
If a contact sends you to Atlas Park that's because they usually want to send you to City Hall. I see no problem with having folks of all levels all over the game. I absolutely hate that villain side traps you for the most part in one zone. Sure it's a pain in the butt sometimes to have to travel across the game, but really in this game you can get anywhere inside about 2 minutes.
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I can see sending you to different zones for some missions, but when most of the missions are in a different zone, it just doesn't make sense. You run around Atlas Park, street sweeping and running small missions here and there, and the moment you leave it to get to Kings Row, what does he do? Send you back to AP. Repeatedly.
It starts to strike home that each of these contacts seems to have very little knowledge of the area that they're actually in. Get a contact in Independence Port that deals primarily with the council and it makes sense. They're all over the place. But what does the contact do? Send you to Talos or some other zone where you never see them at all.
It fails on multiple levels. It doesn't make sense to be running missions for a particular villain group in a zone that doesn't even have that group. It doesn't make sense that the villain groups don't really have much more than a street presence in the zone you are working from (their door missions are usually in other zones). And from a player/design perspective, it doesn't make sense that when someone reaches a high enough level to now "graduate" to a new zone, you keep sending him out of that zone back into the one that he's spent the last few days working in and is tired of.
Yeah, mix it up a little bit and send me to other zones. But let me feel that when I do hit 20 and move on to IP, I'll actually be able to enjoy some of the content there instead of having to level through my 20's by running missions in Steel Canyon.
Even the radio missions have a sense of flawed design to them. You can run 20 radio missions in Kings Row, but that bank never gets robbed until you're no longer in that zone. There's also that little thing about being told that a detective wants to see you immediately, and you trudge over to him to find that:
1) The bank in some other area is being robbed (what, there's no heroes there? I've been there. I've seen heroes there.)
2) They'll bring you there, but you have to travel across town to the car. At least Kings Row did it right by having the actual police vehicle right there at the police station. 
Arc ID#30821, A Clean Break
The only problem with defeating the Tsoo is that an hour later, you want to defeat them again!
"Life is just better boosted!" -- LadyMage
"I'm a big believer in Personal Force Field on a blaster. ... It's your happy place." -- Fulmens
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I absolutely HATE the contact system blueside. I play mainly blueside because the archetypes and atmosphere redside doesn't interest me much, but the contact system blueside is just HORRIBLE. I hate it from a player's perspective and I hate it from a design perspective. Why on earth are all the contacts blueside so freakin' afraid to actually go visit the zones they're so concerned about!?.
Every single original contact seems to concentrate their missions on any zone except the one they're in. I find that just unbelievable. It's like having a community representative for Philadelphia based in New York City.
When you work your way through a zone and finally level up enough to graduate to the next one, you don't want to be sent back to where you just came from. Not only that, but just from a realism perspective, it fails horribly. I get sent on missions to AP to defeat Sky Raiders or such, and they're not even in that zone!
If there's to BIG QoL features I'd like to see implemented that are heavy enough to warrant their own issue, it would be a revamp of the contact system heroside, and also to finally have a respec system. Our current respec system is as difficult as it could possibly be without intentionally being coded for extra difficulty.
Sorry, I started ranting. It must be a sore spot with me.
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If you want to complain about missions, how about the whole thign where you have all kinds of busy work before you actually get to do any of the real content?
That whole "do five newspaper missions, then rob a bank before we give you a contact to do any of the actual content" drives me insane. It's a stupid busy-work timesink, I hate it. It's one of the primary reasons I don't play red-side.
Lemme play the game, stop putting road-blocks up.
Brother of Markus
The Lord of Fire and Pain
The Legendary Living Hellfire
Fight my brute!
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It actually demonstrates just how lacking BOTH games are. No one should feel great about having to do pointless hunt missions and getting sent to zones that sometimes make no sense to do missions for a contact in a different zone.
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I remember the back during CoV Beta that's pretty much the conclusion we reached. CoV is about as villainous as CoH is heroic. In other words, not much.
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It's the same on blueside. The only difference is someone is telling you how great a job you did and how you managed to save the day in the nick of time.
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Dragging on may bring a greater epic feel for you...but it doesn't for me. There are dozens of blueside arcs where I can sit back and count the number filler missions on BOTH of my hands. That's not superior design...that's timesink insertion. At the end of the day...you're still not the driving force behind pushing the story forward any more than you are in COV...someone is simply TELLING you that you are. Oh...and you ARE doing a job...CoV is from the perspective of a mercenary villain. I'm not saying that's perfect...but that is what the design is right now.
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Point of fact: someone telling me I'm the driving force behind events IS enough. It's that little bit of extra immersion that helps me forget I'm playing a numbers game and makes me feel a little bit better about sinking time into a game that I could have spent doing something productive. Stripping that away exposes the game for what it is - a huge grind. Frankly, every game is a grind when you remove the presentation, and CoV SUCKS at presentation. The texts are well-written, but they are HORRIBLY designed to work with the underlying architecture, rubbing it in your face that this is just a game and nothing you ever do matters.
If CoH is an ego-stroker, then CoV is a reality check. But last time I checked, I played this game to get AWAY from reality, and a little (or a lot) ego stroking is just what the doctor ordered. CoV is the complete opposite. Not only is it not nice and inspiring, it's actually ugly and repulsive and punishing. Where I can play CoH for a while and feel good about accomplishing something, when I play CoV for a while I feel terribly about not just accomplishing NOTHING, but being reminded that I CAN'T accomplish anything ever.
That is where design fails. Whether or not the stories are good, THE GAME is depressing and demoralising and, frankly, I don't play games for that. There are plenty of other ways to be the bad guy that inspire people to WANT to be bad, rather than making them feel rotten for playing, which is the effect CoV has for me.
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Of all the things I hope Going Rogue brings to the game...side switching is the least of it. Because if all it means is the same scope of missions...but just in different settings, then its still failed to address the underlying problems of this game. Playing a scrapper in the Rogue Isles won't broaden the scope of the game...neither will a mastermind in Paragon City. Its still going to be the same old same old. Something fundamental needs to change.
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I honestly don't care much for new mechanics. What I care about is an interesting, inspiring setting, which the Arachnos outdoor toilet that are the Rogue Isles simply... Doesn't deliver. I don't want to be a faceless goo in a faceless game. I want to play a villain with class. That ain't possible in CoV, and not because of technical limitations. It's because the ENTIRE GAME lacks class almost completely. It sure as hell tries to make up for it in garbage, though.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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[u]Blueside arcs:[u]
1. Meet contact
2. Streetsweep 30 to 50 enemies
3. Carry clue back to your contact, maybe get phone number, otherwise repeat step 3 after steps 4-6
4. Travel across 2 to 4 zones, defeat all
5. Travel across another 2 to 4 zones, defeat all
6. Carry clue to a different contact 2 zones away, even though you've done missions for them already and have their phone number...
7. Travel across yet another 2 to 4 zones... at least this mission has a specific objective, not a defeat all
8. Another mission, hunting glowies in a cave
9. Repeat any or all of the above until done
Note: Insert "Talk to Azuria" at any point in this sequence, especially if there is more than 2 zones of travel time between your current location and Atlas Park.
[u]Redside arcs:[u]
1. Meet contact who has an actual personality
2. Go to a mission in the same zone with a specific objective
3. Carry clue back to contact, get phone number
4. Go to another mission in the same zone with another specific objective
5. Repeat step 4, with the objective being an annoying glowie hunt on very rare occasions, 1-3 more times until done
Note: For almost all contacts, bypass streetsweeping and defeat alls.
I know which one sounds less boring.
"Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty."
"Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man."
- Thomas Jefferson