Redside is So Much Better Designed

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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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That has been my BIGGEST problem with the complain right there. We're perfectly free to traverse the city sections like we own the place, and the tunnels that link them are completely unguarded. There's no reason to believe that villains don't travel between zones, especially since so many of them can pass for having legitimate business.

For instance, The Eternal Nemesis is not a problem of Founders' Falls, even though Maxwell Christopher seems to have had his shoes nailed to that plaza there. It's a city-wide problem. Most pragmatically, Nemesis Army soldiers can be found in Founders' Falls, Eden, Crey's Folly and Peregrine Island. Plot-wise, he has hidden bases all over the place, with COUNTLESS more sock puppet companies staffed with lifelike automatons. For a villain like this, it makes NO SENSE that there would be any zone dependence whatsoever. As a matter of fact, given how far and wide we go to look for information, I would EXPECT the missions to be scattered all over town.

Unless a mission has a good reason for always being in a particular zone - say it has something to do with the Zig, then it would have to be in Brickstown - I don't see it as a failing for it to not be in the same zone. Yeah, sure, it's annoying, and I wouldn't be opposed to ensuring that at least a large part of a contact's missions don't send you too far, I would HATE to be land-locked within the same frikkin' zone for all of a contact's missions. Frankly, I find the fact that Montague gives all his missions in Steel Canyon to be absurd, though that is in keeping with the embarrassingly low quality of his writing in general.

Actually, I really like it when CoV sends me cross zone. For the most part, it makes sense. Aeon Corp is in Cap Au Diable, Circle of Thorns business happens over at Primeva or Thorn Island, Devouring Earth business is over at St. Martial Island and the Snakes are still on Mercy, even when you're level 50.

The funny thing, though, is that I hate travelling a LOT more when I play CoV than when I play CoH. I'm not sure why that is, but when I play a villain and I see I need to change a zone, it REALLY bugs me. We're talking real anger here. CoH-side, though, I never bat an eye. Contact in Founders' Falls sends me to King's Row? Sure. I'll take the Green Line to Skyway City and go to the King's Row gate from there. 2 minutes, tops. It bugs me a little if I'm using Teleport, say, but overall... Meh. It's how the game goes, and I don't mind it in the slightest.

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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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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.

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Mega-QFT!

And what [not nice word] had the bright idea to have unlockable contacts in a game with a dearth of content in the first place?

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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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At least on the Redside most Hunt missions will count the enemies that you fight inside door missions as long as they didn't specify a zone to fight them in. I regularly knock out two missions at once that way.

Blueside? Nope, pretty much never works. Really annoyed the last hero that I leveled to 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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Agreed. Conversely 35 is where my heroes tend to stall out.

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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.

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Mega-QFT!
And what [not nice word] had the bright idea to have unlockable contacts in a game with a dearth of content in the first place?

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Ugh! Don't remind me! The damn game has barely enough content to carry you through once, and they have so many UNLOCKABLE contacts? If "adding insult to injury" were appropriate anywhere, it would be here. I'd say it's high time we dispatched with this stupidity and returned all unlockable CoV contacts back into the regular contacts chain. The game is starving for content, and that would be at least SOME stopgap to helping with that.

To me, the decision to make a game that already had no more than a third of the contacts of City of Heroes AND lock a good third of THOSE is one of the worst decisions made by the development team since the I3 boss buffs.

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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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To me, the decision to make a game that already had no more than a third of the contacts of City of Heroes AND lock a good third of THOSE is one of the worst decisions made by the development team since the I3 boss buffs.

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It's a snowscreen. It's precisely because they only have a third of the real content that blue-side does that they do this, it ensures that a character never runs out of contacts before they roll-over into the next quintet of levels.

Of course, I couldn't give two poops about that, all I know is that it's an annoyance and an impediment to the game. I'm fairly certain that's the reason why it is, but quite frankly as far as I'm concerned knowing the answer (probably, I don't know for sure, for sure) doesnt' make it any less irritating or disruptive.

I only have one character in Villains, a level 31 Brute, and I never play him because I can't bring myself to do four more of those [censored] newspaper missions, so there he'll stay unused and morose until Rogue comes out, then over to Paragon he goes.

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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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At least on the Redside most Hunt missions will count the enemies that you fight inside door missions as long as they didn't specify a zone to fight them in. I regularly knock out two missions at once that way.

Blueside? Nope, pretty much never works. Really annoyed the last hero that I leveled to 50.

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It almost always works for me unless they specify a zone. Can you give an example of a place where this doesn't work? *Shrug*

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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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At least on the Redside most Hunt missions will count the enemies that you fight inside door missions as long as they didn't specify a zone to fight them in. I regularly knock out two missions at once that way.

Blueside? Nope, pretty much never works. Really annoyed the last hero that I leveled to 50.

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It almost always works for me unless they specify a zone. Can you give an example of a place where this doesn't work? *Shrug*

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It's always worked for me too. The only time that's not the case is when they actually specify a place you're supposed to do it, but if it's just "Kill x number of mob y" and they don't specify a region of a zone you can do it anywhere and in any mission.

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To me, the decision to make a game that already had no more than a third of the contacts of City of Heroes AND lock a good third of THOSE is one of the worst decisions made by the development team since the I3 boss buffs.

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It's a snowscreen. It's precisely because they only have a third of the real content that blue-side does that they do this, it ensures that a character never runs out of contacts before they roll-over into the next quintet of levels.
Of course, I couldn't give two poops about that, all I know is that it's an annoyance and an impediment to the game. I'm fairly certain that's the reason why it is, but quite frankly as far as I'm concerned knowing the answer (probably, I don't know for sure, for sure) doesnt' make it any less irritating or disruptive.
I only have one character in Villains, a level 31 Brute, and I never play him because I can't bring myself to do four more of those [censored] newspaper missions, so there he'll stay unused and morose until Rogue comes out, then over to Paragon he goes.

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I meant unlockable contacts like Veluta Lunata and Agent Viridian, but what you're saying is also true. Having to do five Paper missions and a Mayhem missions just to get ONE contact is a major PITA, in my opinion, and it's a stupid way to blow up content with repeated fill-in-the-blanks missions. Far as I'm concerned, if CoV contacts started introducing each other tomorrow, I wouldn't bat an eye. In fact, I'd be overjoyed because I won't have to do any more filler before I got to the real content.

I haven't done a Scanner or Safeguard mission CoH-side in months, and there is a very good reason for this - they SUCK. Sure, one safeguard every now and then, maybe, but I got too burned on CoV's stupid setup to ever want to go near a scanner mission unless I absolutely had to. That I absolutely have to CoV-side keeps me away from them, as well. And people talk about better design. At least CoH-side I don't have to spend two hours to get ANY contacts in my current 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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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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At least on the Redside most Hunt missions will count the enemies that you fight inside door missions as long as they didn't specify a zone to fight them in. I regularly knock out two missions at once that way.
Blueside? Nope, pretty much never works. Really annoyed the last hero that I leveled to 50.

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It almost always works for me unless they specify a zone. Can you give an example of a place where this doesn't work? *Shrug*

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A lot of CoH hunt missions are "Hunt these guys in that zone." which is where I assume the problem is. Typically, every level range has a Security Chief with a zone-specific hunt and five contacts, each with two zone-specific hunts and a city-wide hunt. Beyond that, hunts that appear as parts of story arcs typically don't include a location.

CoV is actually worse in that regard, as a LOT of what hunt missions it has are restricted not just to a specific zone, but to a specific are in that zone, and a LOT of the time that zone is 4 or 5 levels higher than the lowest level you can get the mission at. Scrapyarders in the Pit, Circle of Thorns in Potter's Field, Circle of Thorns in St. Martial and so on are just a few of the examples. Following the stupid "Striga model," CoV has a lot of the same silly oversights that shouldn't have been put into the game in the first place, let along written down as good ideas. One only hopes that Faultline's model of doing things will replace the backwards thinking that gave birth to a lot of these nuisances.

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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 haven't done a Scanner or Safeguard mission CoH-side in months, and there is a very good reason for this - they SUCK. Sure, one safeguard every now and then, maybe, but I got too burned on CoV's stupid setup to ever want to go near a scanner mission unless I absolutely had to. That I absolutely have to CoV-side keeps me away from them, as well. And people talk about better design. At least CoH-side I don't have to spend two hours to get ANY contacts in my current level range.

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And, y'know, it's a shame... it really is. They're a great idea, but the problem is that there are only three missions in the pool. Escort/Kidnap, steal/recover and "Kill Duder and his buddies". That's it.

If they're going to insist that you do five missions before you safeguard/rob the bank, then maybe they can spice it up a little, maybe they can do something like have it be a little mini-arc or something. I don't know, just... something.

I agree. Paper/Scanner missions aren't actually BAD. In fact, when I haven't done one in a long time, I must admit they're actually pretty cool. They are, however, EXTREMELY grating. The insert_name_here replacements are always obvious ("The Arachnos," anyone?) and the plots they involve really are as simplistic as they get - beat someone up, steal something, kidnap someone. I guess the developers expected that bad jokes would make up for it, but the fact remains that the uniformity of them all grows really old, really fast.

The old bank robbery missions are a very good example of what could be done better, though they are so rare. Rather than just "go into instance, beat stuff up, go out of instance" that most Paper missions smack of, having a variety of both settings and setups could have helped make them that much less irritating.

It doesn't help that most of the stuff posted in the Architect is glorified paper missions made by people who seem to think putting a single objective on a huge map to grind through is good design.

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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.

The newspaper/radio system really needs to go.

I've heard that CO is introducing a system where basic street sweeping will generate missions. The idea is that you save some people and they have a chance of asking you for help with a problem. I think I'd much prefer that kind of thing. As long as the missions aren't randomly thrown-together keywords, I'd be happy.

It could work for villains too. As you run around town 'getting into trouble', you pick up some info that you can take advantage of to come up with a scheme to further your goals.

I don't mind if you have to eventually do a mayhem at the end(I rather like them). Its the in-between newspaper missions that are annoying...especially if you get 3 choices that are all the same enemy...or all in the same cave.

They could actually add to the missions as time went on.

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The old bank robbery missions are a very good example of what could be done better, though they are so rare. Rather than just "go into instance, beat stuff up, go out of instance" that most Paper missions smack of, having a variety of both settings and setups could have helped make them that much less irritating.


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When I can remember, I check the scanner/newspaper just to see if you get one of the rare rob/foil bank robbery missions.

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When I can remember, I check the scanner/newspaper just to see if you get one of the rare rob/foil bank robbery missions.

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I like these missions as well. They have a sense of urgency to them that makes them fun to do.

I have always thought that newspaper/scanner missions should be different from regular missions...of course that means some new mission designs.

Again, I'm hoping for good things from Going Rogue.