Pathetic.

I got bored in the first few words of your post and stopped reading it.

I just wanted to tell you that my 6 year old neighbor could have written a more entertaining complaint.

Serious response time:

Here's the reason many of the old arcs are so frustrating with all those kill-alls and multiple street sweeps: To get you to 50. And even then, you might be level 43 and exhausted all your 41-45 contacts or level 48 and exhausted all your 46-50 contacts.

This was before radio missions, short high-level TFs, debt reductions, XP-curves, resting XP bonuses, zone invasions, alternate high-level zones such as RWZ and Cimerora, and now, XP-while-exemplared.

All we had were the IP arcs and the dreaded Shard TFs. So, lots of kill-alls.

At HeroCon, Hero 1 promised a lot less kill-alls.

And, as mentioned above, many of the mission 'tricks' such as chained-tasks wasn't available to mission writers at the time.

So, why don't they 'fix' them? Because every minute a content designer uses to fix an old mission means they are not spending that minute writing new content.

But, who knows, they've hired a bunch of new content writers and maybe once they get all their Going Rogue work done and are waiting for QA and beta feedback, they just might use that time to revamp old missions. But, I'd imagine certain TFs are higher on the list for fixing than boring arcs.

Thats... a really good explanation. Especially for those that didn't play pre-newspapers.

I hear you SoulTouch.

When I decided to Acco out on another server, I essentially mission dropped all the missions in that Tina Arc until I got to the one containing Neuron and Anti-Matter, saved it and ran my alts through it.

Portal Jockey is a great accolade but that Tina arc is a bear...

The game hasn't been out for a billion hours yet.

People with the badge must be exploiters!

Making rant posts about rediscovering the suck of five-year-old content is one thing. It deserves it. Acting like a belligerent jerk, especially to people who respond, that we can do without. If you want to rant, rant away, but have the decency to take feedback in your stride without breaking into a little hissy fit.

Old content sucks. WE KNOW! Expect that response and plan accordingly.

But boy does it suck. And you guys seem to have forgotten how little we had back then. Even the old timers are lumping the Shadow Shard in with the old PI missions, despite PI coming in I1 and the Shard coming in I2. At the time of I1, we got two things - Peregrine Island with 5 arcs 40-45 and 5 arcs 45-50, and the Rikti Crash Site with... Pretty much nothing to do in it but hunt. Typical Hazard Zone. Back then a mission completed at level 34 would grant me right around 800 experience (I have that very much memorised from five years ago) which was actually LESS than a boss would, and that's when bosses gave much less experience. Right now, a lieutenant gives around twice what a minion gives and a boss gives around twice what a lieutenant does. This wasn't always the case.

Back in the day, the difference was rather smaller. Back then, if ANY enemies had increased experience rewards, they were few and far in-between. Before the experience changes, the enemies needed to level up were significantly more, and doing some amazing flips in how they increased. Debt was much greater, the debt cap was twice what it is now and debt was never reduced anywhere at any time. In short, experience gains were much, much smaller, so the arcs were made much, much longer.

That, and by admission, Jack (back then) and Matt sat down and calculated that if it takes 200 hours to get from 1 to 40, it ought to take another 200 hours to get from 40 to 50. Typical MMO end game where everything slows to a crawl, enemies become too epic to battle alone an every task transforms into a boring, lengthy marathon of difficult, repetitive frustration. That's why you have Unai Kemen give you a mission to scan dimensions, which consists of "Scan dimension 1" then "Scan dimension 2" then "Scan dimension 3" and why the Upon the Psychic Plain arc has mission after mission of going onto huge outdoor maps in the psychic plain to extract a single memory over and over again when it could all have been done on the same mission.

The old 40-50 content is terrible because it was designed in a very *** backwards way, copying probably the WORST parts of traditional MMO design and letting storytelling suffer because of it. Stories are dragged on with pointless "Your princess is in another castle!" filler and aimless missions where you have to defeat all enemies in a map and discover that you discovered absolutely nothing. Unai's arc, in particular, is best described by a Linkara quote on Countdown: "I'm sorry, but your Ray Palmer is in another Dimension." Very much this screen, indeed.

The older CoH content is pretty bad and stuffed full of defeat all missions for no discernible justification. It certainly needs an overhaul eventually, but demanding that it be done right now or else seems a bit unrealistic. There's just so much to go through.

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.

This is the internet. Everyone knows about everything that sucks, to the point where everyone already agrees that it sucks and additional complaining is considered annoying and redundant. If you hate it, post the 4005th thread in Suggestions about it.

Your whole post had a great "back in mah day!" vibe going there, Sam.

Which bring me back to why I play mostly red side. Less people and less teams wnich is a shame but the stories are SO much better. On the red side, I actually bother to play arcs again an again.

Time consuming or not, I really would like them to purge and replace every single mission of the first issues.

Re : "It's silly to complain about a 5 years old arc."

Writing, or even game design standards haven't suddenly improved from 2004 to 2009. The story itself is bad, horribly bad even for a video game ; the missions are repetitive - you can't say it was because of a lack of tools either, "defeat boss and his guards" rather than "defeat all" is an option since launch.

You can say the devs themselves improved (or some new devs were added to the team, most likely), and that's certainly true, but that doesn't make the original work any less crappy.

I like the arc because I enjoy mindlessly beating up AVs, but objectively as a story arc it's terrible.

The (admitedly flawed) analogy I would throw out there.
I look at my Doctoral Thesis from time to time, and honestly I wonder how I ever passed. By my standards today it is a terribly written piece of work, with more than a little stretching of points.

These days my technical wirting is orders of magnitude better, and I draw out the salient points in an easy to understand way (so my reveiws say anyway).

The Thesis was written in word, graphs were plotted in excel. The same basic tools as I use today.

I as a person have got better at doing the writing and analysis. The 'state of the art' of technical writing hasn't really changed in the last 10 or so years, but I have.

Thats how I see it with the older arcs. The people writing them have grown in their own skills, and competance. They have leanrt some lessons about fun arcs and twists, and about Epic doesn't mean long.

In addition the tools they have available have chnaged.

Those intial arcs were written in Wordpad. Later additions migrated to Excel with some macros. Now the Devs have an 'internal' MA style creation tool.

I would rather the content Devs spend time writing new arcs, than revisiting old ones ecept in the most basic way. I do think every arc deserves a special map of some sort. Not necessarily unique, but something to make each one a little bit more memorable.

(Think Lou's Garage or the Freakolypics Finale)

lolBadgers

...and their often times irrational anger.

I guess I'm the only person who doesn't think Tina's arc sucks?

Now, Indigo's arc, on the other hand...