Rekindle your love for the game...

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Now, about Perez park...


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Perez is fine, is nice to get lost in the maze from time to time, i'd rather see Boomtown or Dark Astoria get some attention before Perez Park does

Actually my love for the game is blossoming again of late.

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Well, I guess this thread goes to show, you definitely can't please everyone all the time, eh?

WW

(But I do try.)

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Would you be open to increasing some spawn sizes in the hollows? Some of our fondest early days memories are trying to navigate through the hollows.

Also . . . . . we're coming soon to the multi forums near you!

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Yep, I miss the old Hollows. Of course there's always Perez for any new "Hmmm, I seem to have a ridiculous amount of AOEs at a very low level" characters I make to street sweep through.

Bit some of my fondest memories were legging it around vast swarms of +2s on the streets of the Hollows, across the bridge and bunny-hopping through the Hills of "Absurdly overpowered Wizzard types" to reach my level 8 mission. And then laughing at the others on the PuG who tried to go the direct route, right through the middle...

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One of the two most well-intentioned yet misguided Re-duxs in living memory for Paragon.
First the Hamidon Re-dux then The Hollows re-vamp. Sorry Warwitch, I know you worked hard to balance the zone and thin the mobs out - but the big mobs and frustration of nearly getting there and falling 100 yds from the Mission door was the sadistic appeal.

Keep the Med-camp but re-double the mobs and put the over-sized spawns back where they used to be in my opinion, the thrill was finding a way to the Mission entrance. Besides, Its not exactly that hard with all the flightpacks and temporary travel powers about.

# Sighs #; I miss the good ole days of being on-duty in The Hollows. I still patrol now and then but I have noticed the numbers have twindled from 20-30 Heroes in the Zone to less than a handful per night on average.

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I tend to agree with all of this but I think there's another point you've not covered:

When I started playing, the XP curve was much slower then, partly because I was a noob and also it simply was tougher back then, but there weren't many alternatives. The Hollows was THE PLACE for a budding hero to cut their teeth. It was that or street sweeping in Kings Row ad infinitum.

Now, there's almost too many alternatives and even with the Hollows revamp, many are easier. Farm in MA for 20 levels and you've spent an afternoon in the MA if that, and totally outlevelled the Hollows. Do a few police band missions for a Jet pack and a Jump pack and you're probably on the top edge of the Hollows. It goes so quick now; XP is easier to come by, debt is non-existent and the Hollows is now almost a distant memory to all but the seasoned campaigner.

Many of the new players don't realise there is a game outside of the MA. When I took my hiatus we finished up on Frostfire for a "last hurrah" and had a blast. I mentioned that on twitter and one of my followers then complained a few days later they couldn't find Frostfire in the MA mission lists.

Nuff said.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

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Well, I guess this thread goes to show, you definitely can't please everyone all the time, eh?

WW

(But I do try.)

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i like the hollows.
Also when did this thread turn into "Bitter old farts reminisce(sp?)?
I couldn't make it on monday will try tomorrow just yell if you need shields.
I'll join frostfires also but will probably leave the team at completion so i can slide around

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Well, I guess this thread goes to show, you definitely can't please everyone all the time, eh?

WW

(But I do try.)

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i like the hollows.
Also when did this thread turn into "Bitter old farts reminisce(sp?)?
I couldn't make it on monday will try tomorrow just yell if you need shields.
I'll join frostfires also but will probably leave the team at completion so i can slide around

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EVERY thread is a bitter old farts reminisce thread.

Now get off mah lawn you kids!

(worringly I have actually started making the local kids get off mah lawn in RL)

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the MA should NOT give inf/prestige, as it is a Holographic Training Simulator...

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Well, pilots get experience from flight simulators before they're allowed to fly the real things, so the MA is like a crime fighting simulator

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Golden Girl,
I said nothing about dropping Exp from MA only the Inf/Prestige,
As that is (technically) your own and your SG/VG's reputation in Paragon City/The Rogue Isles,

Based on your 'pilot' comment, a pilot landing a powerless plane in a river on a simulator gets less of a reputation than one that does it for real and saves the lives of the whole crew and passengers!

I recall this happening fairly recently and it was global news, although I can't remember if it was ever done in a simulator as that wouldn't really be news...

Actually I detest the Hollows, because its creation emptied out my favorite lowbie zone ever: Perez Park. Oh, how I miss the constant teams in that place. Such fun.

I really wish the Dev's would do something with Perez. Shame to see it go to waste.

My memories of the Hollows "back in the day" are only fond ones in retrospect. Hovering across the length and breadth of the zone to a mission door and back, having a massive mob spawn right on top of me and kill me when I was running back to the entrance....those kind of things were not really fun at the time.

I do like the new Hollows much better.

You know what I am gonna do it, I am going to the hollows, either as one of my mains or a lowbie alt. I rather enjoyed fighting in the Hollows (even running for my life from the lava people long before there were ever jet packs)

I think it should be fun and even if I am alone maybe I 'll do a few Ourboros missions

Not a bad idea OP, not bad at all

Heh, I remember the old Hollows. My very first time I teamed with a couple of people and we went through all the missions together, sprinting and hovering and combat jumping all the way. Nobody had teleport

And then Frostfire came. I sprinted(the ORIGINAL sprint, mind you) right into the big pit in the middle. I remember me yelling into teamchat about the evil living rocks that were trying to kill me. Then when i finally found my way out, we did Frostfire, and I finally met REAL purples.

A good many team-wipes, a good many sliding-arounds, a good many laughs.

*sighs* MA has taken all the genuine fun out of the game for me. It's still fantastically fun, and I LOVE this game, but nothing seems to 'WHOA IN YOUR FACE' anymore. And I liked it that way.

Maybe I have just converted from seasoned newb to old geezer. Oh well, who knows.

For what it's worth, I still like the Hollows revamp. Oh, I think War Witch went overboard and crammed a few too many factions into it, but that's nitpicking. The last couple of heroes I created, I soloed my way from level 6 to 10 in the Hollows, off of the first two contacts plus Meg, including soloing Frostfire (now that I know how to solo EBs at that level, hard-won that knowledge was, although inspiration-tray tetris helps). One of them I came right back after my 2nd safeguard mission and soloed my way up the 3rd contact, and I'll probably finish out the storyline when I go back to that character.

And it's not completely empty, not on Virtue during prime time anyway. There are still people running around.

What has changed is the loss of all of the people whose preferred way of getting from level 6 to 14 was to find someone (level 8ish) with Frostfire, farm that mission until everybody's level 11 or above (by constantly upping the difficulty as people level), then find somebody else with Frostfire at level 10ish and farm that one to 13 or 14, then go on to the "real" game. I do not, not, not in a thousand years miss farming Frostfire. I was so bored with that mission, years ago, that I can still navigate that lair blindfolded. Those people are now in the AE building, and at least there, they occasionally run more than one mission.

If you're starting a new hero, and you don't want to grind AE, and you don't want to grind newspaper missions, if you actually want some story in your story?

• Level 2-3: Initial contact missions.
• Level 4: Grind street mobs in starter zone.
• Level 5-6: King's Row, 3 newspaper missions and the Atlas Park safeguard. Collect Raptor Pack.
• Level 6-9: The Hollows, 1st and 2nd contacts plus Meg.
• Level 10-12: Steel Canyon: 3 newspaper missions, King's Row safeguard (collect Jump Pack), inventions tutorial, intro to Midnighters.
• Level 12-15: The Hollows, 3rd and 4th contacts, plus Meg if needed.
• Level 15+: Faultline.
• After Faultline: Explore as suits you, because you're past the really sucky level 5-20 classic content, and all of your contacts now offer full-fledged story arcs.

I rekindled my love for this game by playing Aion for about 10 minutes.

We reminisce about the Hollows and how AE has stolen everyone from it. But I like to go back even further.

Remember when Perez Park was a great hunting grounds? People would get to level 8 or so, head to PP to form teams, and street sweep. When you look at it, it's a great zone to do that in. You can start from one of the entrances and just head down the street to the next one, wiping out huge spawns in between. There were always large numbers of heroes in PP, many teams, and lots of fun, exp, and levels to be had.

My first 50 hero spent levels 6 to 15 entirely in the Hollows. It's my favourite zone on the blue side (with Faultline in second place)

But then I love hazard zones, so much so that right now I have a level 8 blaster who needs to defeat 10 Circle of Thorns in Perez Park. Yes, I did take that mission on purpose

lol I still remember rushing into the park after finding the gate and to start looking for thorns. Only to immediately draw the attention of .....Clocks....seemed like hundres of them. Naturally I panicked and fled...only to discovers Vahz...

Wash rinse repeat substituting Vahz with Hellions...or skulls...before learning this team thing seems like a better idea more and more.

I still go to the park for badges and the kill X missions and I still get that old feeling of panic when I do it solo.

lol yeah, then run all the way back while your team waited patiently at a mission door smack bang in the middle of the almost unnavigable Hollows. It was a skill, but one I'm happy to have lost, the new Hollows is much more fun to find your way around and less punishing when you make the wrong turn...this I dont see as a minus. The only thing being knocked back to Atlas and having to sprint back to the mission door in the neighbouring zone taught me was that I hate Sprint.

So chalk me up as another one who loves the revamp......Boomtown next? :P

Aww, I wanna join, but I aint a Brit or Europe or whatever, I cant go to Union

Boo


JJ

The feeling you have for The Hollows, I have for Perez.

But I adapted and moved on.

Ah...I remember the old Hollows. Back when I was but a noob, playing alongside my noob friends. Where I learned to despise Trolls, and found out about the Igneous the hard way...

"Did that rock just move..? OH @#$%!!" *Combat erupts*

So many deaths, so many near-deaths. It was an adventure. Not many other places really gave me the feeling of being a superhero quite like the Hollows did.

I still think of the Hollows as the zone that killed Perez Park. I have fond memories of street sweeping around the perimeter of PP. Kings Row was revitalized with the temp travel powers being introduced. PP was left as a graveyard. I say its poetic justice to see the Hollows fall to the same fate.