""A Dynamic City Suggestion: Rivisited!""

Here's a suggestion cause frankly, City of Heroes doesn't make any sense.

Perplexed by the notion that City of Heroes is filled with Gangs and Crime at every turn when there are tons of heroes afoot, it simply is an absurdity.

So after having a good discussion with my fellow gamers came up with a suggestion that could make City of Heroes really interesting and alive.

Break up each zone into quadrants or blocks. Heroes from Atlas to Peregrine or any other zones must maintain to arrest all criminals, even if theyre' way below theyre level, for if a certain mob count persist for a certain amount of time, depending on the mobs that inhabit, i.e. Hellions, Crey, blah blah blah, these blocks will suddenly evolve to meet and express the character of such particular mobs.

Meaning, if it were the simpleton mobs like Skulls, Grafitti will become more apparent, kind of like stages, if each stage stands unabated by the culling of said mobs, more changes will come, even Bosses will start to become more prominent, then the levels of the mob will increase beyond the level of that zone or block, buildings with doors will suddenly become active to house territory bosses. Bosses that must be taken out to cull the decay of that block.

Likewise for another example, if Crey is left to its own devices due to all the other distraction, Crey starts to post their private militia, and set up in one of the buildings, Crey signs will takeover a mock company building, etc etc,.

This way at least these mobs that all these superheroes that have gone beyond the level of the mobs in a particular zone will have consequences, for these mobs can grow in power to potentially halt the leveling of low levels Noobs..lol

now that would really be something..

Now, talk amongst yourselves. Go on go on, discuss.

TheHermit hath spoken!

Agree with above poster. Locking folks out of content in CITY ZONES is a bad idea. I can see something like this for HAZARD ZONES.

Nothing is really getting locked out., Safe zones still exist via a concentric threshold from a Trainer hero, or City Halls, these areas represents a high authority area, within these vicinity, even AE buildings, mobs will be auto suppressed since it would make sense that such building have security, so mobs around such areas will be scarce.

Even around trainers, of course such hero trainers represent some sort of danger to these thugs, even though they don't go off and fight them, but the npc thugs know to keep clear of such an area well, because theres a bonafied superhero there..

This will give the city zones more depth.

Hmm, in fact, wouldnt it be good idea that these hero trainer if a mob gets pulled at a certain distance to them, will act out and do their hero thing. Pulled like taunted. but pulled with regular aggro like proximity, the mob as they get closer to the Hero's area will lose aggro, only Taunted aggro could pull a mob to a hero.

Buut, if they want to keep the hero trainer static which it is now, then there's just a field that makes mobs lose aggro, specially if their just measley gangs like hellions or skulls.

Well along that line of thought.

So, no, no content is effectively getting locked out.

TheHermit

It's a cool idea, but at its core, this is still a game. Forcing people to do things they find unfun (kill grey-con mobs to keep the villain population down), or making things too difficult (Atlas City Hall surrounded by lv5-7 Hellions, including spawns with Damned), is just going to make people lose interest.

Changing the geography of the zone, great.
More spawns of a certain faction, great.
Even adding a boss here and there where there were none before is good, if done sparingly.

Your doing it wrong. "Dynamic Content" (tm) was suggested often (by me), where crimes are committed randomly throughout the city by gangs and costumed villains. Missions can radomly spawn from clues left behind after a crime or a random tip from someone on the street. The point would be the gangs would actually be doing somthing worth stopping other than loitering or jaywalking. Areas of the city controlled by certain groups would reflect their influence and there would be constant conflicts between two adjacent gangs vying for more territory. If heroes cleared out one area, it could either become pristine or slowly be taken over by a neighboring gang until the zone reset.

All of the stores, resteurants, hotels, and markets could be sources of new missions and would be fleshed out story-wise. It would not just be street-level crimes, every so often a new Giant monster (not just recycled DA) would tear through the streets causing real damage for as long as he is spawned. Evil Super Villains would unleash terrors of the city that require multiple teams to stop. Heroes wouldn't fight alone, depending on the level of threats, there would be responses from regular street cops to PPD to FC to even the Military!

Remove the trainers and bring them into the fight! I would add new training centers that would free up Statesman and Co. to occationally drop in and fight along side heroes depending on the threat level. With all the new fighting, there will be heroes that stand above the rest, so every week the Hero of the Week will have his characters image on electronic billboards around the city with a list of his/her achivements! All of these ideas could be done with the current game engine with little or no tweeking. Once we can get the outside more interesting, would could see about making the inside more so as well.

All MMO's, and in fact, most RPG's are based on the concept that when you first start out, your character can't do much. With time, spent in-game defeating enemies and thwarting evil plans, the characters advance in powers, gain levels and are gradually pushed out of their beginner zones into the bigger game-world.

If a character at Lv10 can street-hunt by itself at 5pm, but is repeatedly defeated at 5:30pm because all the enemies in the neighbourhood have all of a sudden become mighty Lv15's, then the game loses an element that most games require to be enjoyable by most people which is: Relative Predictability.

Your suggestion, Hermit, will eventually lead to some people becoming disappointed with the game because they cannot by themselves stop the growth of "crime", and cannot raise enough Heroes to join them in the effort of defeating the crimewave, and since their characters would be low-level Heroes, eventually they will not have any zones to migrate to and continue playing there.

Your suggestion may be suitable and seems to function in games that are designed with the GameWorld concept from square one, but CoX was designed with mission-instances at heart and so street-hunting as a concept is not as integral to the game as you may hope.

I'd also like to add that the concept of Superheroes going out and dishing their own brand of justice in the streets isn't something you see in most comic books or movies apart from sporadic scenes, usually in the beginning of the piece. Superheroes eventually progress beyond the common thieves, bankrobbers and purse-snatchers and move on to global threats the government didn't even know existed.

As you've summed it up quite potently:

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheHermit ...for these mobs can grow in power to potentially halt the leveling of low levels Noobs...

You make your suggestion sound like an Evil Plant of an Evil Genius... well Sir, I see your suggestion as a regression, so still /unsigned.

Well LordXenite, I have already acknowledged that the advancement of mobs are no longer feasable as all others have pointed out already what you pointed out again.

No increase in levels of mobs, although an increase in rank.

I have been on enough sewer Team in Atlas from level 3 to level 10 fighting mobs that are no more than 3 levels above us. And even sometimes ventured down the sewers solo until I hit a mob that my particular AT and Level Power can no longer surmount.

Of course the latter is no longer an issue since I have long acknowledged that most players really need their "safe zone". Where all you fight is "white" colored mobs relative to one's power "level".

If that is the majority of the players, It is then again acknowledged that advancing mobs to even the prior suggestion of max 3 levels higher than the default block level cannot and will not be implemented by the Devs, thats their decision.

I have already pointed out that the whole need not be taken, it can be taken apart, even to the point that the only thing interacting will only be at the cosmetic level of the map.

And as I have said before, I would still like to see a door becoming active to house a boss or elite boss that can be taken down to reduce the mobs to thug(minion) level etc.. now the elite boss need not be any higher than the current level for those panzies that can't even take an orange colored thug or find help to beat the thug.

Now the elite boss, isn't walking around outside the streets or a parking lot like the minions or some boss are, he or she is inside, where no noob can bump into him unless he foolishly went into the active door which should be surrounded by the default leveled mob that inhabits that area.

TheHermit

Not a reply to anyone in particular, but there's one small bit of wisdom you have to remember when suggesting any new type of "event." Never design your events with the notion that people will come to participate in them. People will not. As such, never design your events with penalties for not taking part in them. People won't take part, then suffer the consequeces and become dissatisfied with the game.

No-one likes being forced upkeep and maintenance and no-one likes being punished for not taking part in something he doesn't like. Design your events with consequnces that are either entirely cosmetic or entirely based on rewards If players succeed, reward them. If players fail, do nothing. Under no circumstances should you punish them.

Quote:

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.

Im going to say now that frankly I didnt read all the posts so if I repeat something already said please inform me. (Please keep in mind that my following ideas are just ideas, so what Im saying is, please someone dont go off on a rant and say how ignorant I am or something like that.)

I love the idea of dynamic content. I've been thinking about it and I would love it if the things you do in the game will actually make a difference. Not just like Recluses Victory, where no matter the outcome, nothing changes. Like(this may sound drastic but its only an example)if there is no one that protects a zone from a rikti raid then that zone will become like faultline, and be damaged. Something like this would just be awesome and make the game feel less like,"Ok the goal was to get to 50 and I got to 50...now what?" It would give the game an overall goal that would be, tohelp things change for the best.

Yea, I agree with your point Samuel. I just want something where the actions we do actually amount to something.

Hey,

I posted a suggestion very similar to this in reply to a question on the EU forums about a sense of achievement in the game:

http://uk.boards.cityofheroes.com/sh...5&postcount=37

great minds and fools etc..

anyway, I honestly think it would work, and work quite well. Players could get custom bosses/EBs/AVs and really feel like they've helped out. For those saying that the mobs would be too high a level for lowbies, they wouldnt be if you restricted them to +1 or +2 the Zone max (and having the mission locations make sense would help too!).

anyway, have a read and i hope it helps you level a bump or two in your own thinking and maybe findd a solution to the contra arguments. The basic idea is linked above and it gets fleshed out a bit more as argumetns are made for and against it in the rest of the thread (only 2 pages).

I've thought about something similar to this for quite a while. The way to handle it would be to make the changes in city zones transparent to the casual player. Someone up thread made the comparison to RV, and that's a real good one.

What I'd suggest is that hero's efforts to "clean up the streets" simply create a power vacuum, and other groups OF THE SAME DIFFICULTY LEVEL move in to capitalize on the situation. They have the technology already on hand to do some fairly sophisticated things in that regard.

We already know they track total defeats of the various groups. We also know from the invasions that they can switch out what groups appear on the maps, though that of course is considerably different from changing the "default" spawn of a city neighborhood. Still, it shows that the notion is possible.

The notion of tracking the TOTAL defeats by all heroes of a given villain group since, say, the last server reset, and using that to determine how common they are at a given point, would make the city zones a lot more dynamic. If, say, Skulls took over if Hellions became rare, most of the objections I've seen would be somewhat alleviated. You definitely don't want to change the difficulty levels of the zones, but you could do something along those lines without changing the balance much.

If you REALLY wanted to be neat about it, you could have the appropriate contacts able to give you information about who is strong in each neighborhood, or zone. And maybe the police stations could have a situation room similar to the map in RV, as I believe someone has already suggested. Would help give a feel for heroes in touch with the streets. (grin)

It would also be very cool to have red-side missions to affect the strength of the various groups. If you wanted to be really subtle, you could just have existing red-side missions reinforce blue-side villains, and vice versa as appropriate. If you wanted to get really fancy you could have dialog added to the groups to indicate WHICH hero/villain helped them out. Or cut them down to size, for that matter, we already see citizens reacting to mission outcomes, it might be possible to make villains do something similar.

All in all, some sort of system like this would vastly increase immersion. You could have various villain groups bitterly complaining about the inroads made on their turf and business by some hero, or the great help rendered their cause by some villain. (Reverse as appropriate.) The actions of players would noticeably change things, without affecting the overall game world situation that much. You'd have to be careful to make the minimum presence of each group large enough to not make hunts diffcult, but that would not be so tough.

I like the basic idea, it could be a nice change for streetsweeping and such. How about having different tiers for the changes though.

tier 1 - enemies have a 50% chance of spawning 1 level higher
tier 2 - enemies in this area have a 75% chance of spawning one level higher or a 50% chance of spawning one rank higher
tier 3 - enemies in this area always spawn 1 level higher but have a 25% chance of two levels higher or 75% chance of 1 rank increase
(these are just some quickly, and poorly, made examples for tiers just to get the basic idea across)

basically it would take a certain amount of time for each progression, and you could also cap the highest tier based upon the zone. For instance Atlas could only go up to tier 1.

And to give us the rewards that samuel suggested how about a zone security specialist for each zone that would keep track of the enemies you defeat in zone and assign points based on your level, the enemies level, the tier of the area, etc. You could then trade in the points that he has on record for you for enhancements, small amounts of merits, inspirations, etc.