Level 50 disenchanted - turbo levelling

Err... How do you figure that? It's like me saying there are a proportional number of people asleep and awake at night in Las Vegas. My saying it doesn't make it true.

Perhaps you may want to quite these supposed "facts?" I've seen about as many people complain they can't find a team as I've seen people say they're teaming just fine, and I don't recall an officially-released piece of information stating this. I'm glad you feel vindicated in questioning my honesty, though, because that speaks volumes about your own credibility. I trust my eyes and I trust my ears and I trust my experience. And my experience does not show me a problem. But I'm open to evidence. Got any?

Also, what exodus are you talking about? Yes, I've heard of people moving to Freedom and Virtue. I've also heard of people moving OFF Freedom and Virtue. You know, back in the days when they used to lock people out? Yes, there is the occasional poster who complains their server is a ghost town. There is the occasional reply from people who play on the same server who say it's nothing of the sort. I can't tell who to believe, but I do know that my own experience does not show me a meaningful population problem.

If this is your "evidence" that the developers favour farming, then I don't know whether to laugh or to cry, so I'll just go with *rollingfacedesk* What are you thinking, man? First of all, Architect enemies have never had boosted experience, and certainly never anything like four times normal. In fact, custom enemies are currently slated to only ever give out full experience if they are Extreme/Extreme with all their powers, and give rapidly diminishing rewards the less powers they have. That's enemies who are HARDER than normal foes, yet give less experience. Furthermore, patrol experience does not apply to the Architect AND putting in factions with missing classes penalises your experience further.

But, really, if you managed to miss the complete and utter gutting of the architect in response to the exact complaint you had, then I don't know what to, other than get your facts straight. And that's facts, not "facts."

Furthermore, on what planet is SSK better for powerlevelling. Have you any concept what powerlevelling even is? The easiest way to powerlevel is to have a high-level character killing things while a low-level character racks up disproportionate rewards. This is no longer possible with SSK, because lower-level characters are not allowed to remain unSKd. This is, in fact, a major disruption to powerlevelling, and not the first of its kind, either. Earlier they narrowed the gap of levels that allowed experience to be gained and changed redistribution of rewards on teams, and then further cropped it at 5 levels below the highest level team member before we got this.

Any time you start a sentence with "you probably," just think twice and don't. You are wrong. I don't make my own teams, in part because I don't have to, and in part because I don't need or want to. Keeping an 8-man team of strangers is indeed a lot of hard work. Too much work for me, so I don't. I join other people's teams or *gasp* solo. Yeah, you can do that in the game, too. The problems you cite are exactly why I do this. I play on teams when I can and feel like it, and I solo the rest of the time.

You have no idea who or what the community is made up of, and I can quite it as a fact that plenty of people have spoken up and expressed opinions very much like mine over the years. I won't go as far as to say "most" people, but enough to convince me, at any rate. Cheap shots at my credibility do little to help yours.

Then you need to put on your reading glasses. Everyone is free to play however they damn want. That was the point all along. If you want to shoot to the top, you can put your back into it and do just that. If you want to slow down and smell the roses, you're free to do that, too. If you want to play on teams all the time, that's an option, despite what alarmists would have you believe. If you want to solo all the time, then there's nothing stopping you. Options and control of your own experience are the order of the day, and what's the most baffling is that people are arguing AGAINST these options.

The original argument was that new players were being suckered into levelling too fast and getting burned out on the game. From what I've seen, this used to be true during the Architect fiasco, but after the castration of the Architect and the advent of SSK and the new difficulty settings, this is no longer the case. The need for fillers and padders and midders is gone, so there is no reasons for farmers and powerlevellers to NEED other players, which is where the problem used to lie. But if you'll update your info on Architect Entertainment, that is no longer the case, hence the problem that caused the concern was solved by I16.

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.

It has been.
Several times.
There were public announcements and everything.

Why don't you, I dunno....fire up your DS or something?

All of us will have more fun.

It's kind of funny how we had that one double exp event where Freedom and sometimes Virtue filled and they had to make the caps. And then people couldn't log on, and they complained. And then they upgraded the servers, and then people complain that nobody's online anymore.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

If you like, I won't cuss. I'll just ask where you got these facts. If you would, please, show us what evidence you have that this is undeniable fact.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

No, what I think is that there is a certain minority of people (yourself included) who love to cry doom at the drop of a hat, and in the pursuit of said doomcrying are more than happy to wildly exaggerate, speculate and offer opinions with very little basis in fact or reality. For every one post whining about the 'dead servers', there are 10 or 20 replies contradicting it.

Or, to paraphrase your own statement: "Gee ya think peoples are just posting 'server populations are fine' to mess with you? No they are posting it because this because it is true."

There have been posts on this forum since I first started playing screaming & crying "the game is dying", "the servers are empty", "no one will play with me! wah, wah wah!"

You know what? I see no fewer players now, than I did 18 months ago, accounting for normal seasonal variations. Every time I pull up the team search screen, I look at the total number of players, and that number averages no more or less than it ever has, in my experience. There has never been a time when I have not been able to form a team or get involved in some type of activity when I wish to.

[Inigo Montoya] You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

I realize that I am a bit late to this and it is a few pages in (unless you increased the post amount per page like I did), but I am also very surprised to see this from you as well.

Okay, time to be blatantly obvious here.

You are not the arbiter of levelling speed. If someone wants to take days to level, that's their business.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Uh, actually I resorted to facts.
I realize its embarrassing for you to be so horribly wrong and uninformed in public, but that doesn't make it a personal attack.

You don't know anything about the population numbers.
So you aren't qualified to make declarative statements like that.

How can you see that? There hasn't been a fact in here yet.

Strange. I seem to have completely the opposite experience...

I have seventeen 50s (and counting), and yet I still get excited when I get a character to 50, because THEN is when the game "starts" for me. Then is when I can start mixing and matching in Mid's, testing, respec'ing (my fav part), testing some more, and then seeing how this "new" toon will play out on all my fav Task Forces--the lvl 45-50 ones...

Next up is my lvl 25 Ice/Storm 'troller.... ABSOLUTE HORROR to play at the lower levels, due to the most extreme endurance drain you can imagine, but I'm sure she'll be great once she hits 50, as have all the rest of my 50s...

To me, hitting 50 is like finally getting a character that can *properly* handle every situation--sort of like the characters you're given on just about any other sort of action game. Say, for example, Grand Theft Auto IV. You can immediately do pretty much whatever you want. There's consequences, and there are extreme difficulties, but once you pick up a few "enhancements" (guns) on your "already lvl 50 dude," you can handle pretty much any challenge thrown at you. And yet, that game is lauded for it's "replayability." Certainly not for the fact you have to "level up" your guy, which leads me to my next point:

I think City of Heroes has kept all these vets around (including myself) for this long, not because "we just LOVE leveling up our 18th toon to 50," but because there are sooooo many other things that have been added (and still being added) to the game to keep our attention. It's not JUST leveling from one to fifty. It's a plethora of other things that keep people's attentions too! I'm sure I don't have to name them all off.

I like a good challenge. And the BEST sort of challenge (IMO) is the difficult ones you have to face once you have ALL the "tools" in your arsenal...

Fighting the *challenge* of "will my endurance last me through this fight?" isn't really much of a challenge.

It's frustration.

On top of that, with Ouroboros, I can now experience all the game's content AFTER I hit 50, which completely obviates everyone's comments that "rushing" to 50 makes everyone miss the "good parts."

No, "rushing" to 50, allows you to better experience the "good parts"... A properly setted-out 50 can exemp down and solo story content, which is actually better for reading the content. If you're on a team, it's *almost* guaranteed the team leader is just going to click past everything as quickly as possible, OR you'll be kicked from the team for taking too much time to read everything yourself.

All that said, I know it's always "to each his own." I realize that not everyone likes the part of the game I like (Task Forces after lvl 50), and I probably won't like other parts of the game the others DO like.

"Alien"

Originally Posted by Infernus_Hades The way you play changes your IO slotting..

Not a fact. An observation. Possibly an erroneous one. The only people who can tell you, factually, that the population in-game is down are the people who work at/for Paragon.

Your observation as a single data point in a vacuum isn't very relevant because there are numerous ways to skew your perception on the matter.

Not a fact. A pointless query and answer.

Not a fact. An opinion.

Not a fact. A misspelling and a mistaken assumption that what you're typing are "facts".

You would do well to apply this in context to yourself as well.


Seriously. Just let it go and get back to playing the game. Or, if that's impossible, move on. I don't understand people who get their jollies by trying to discourage others who merely want to play the damn game.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

pure win!

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

While you are correct, that question is outdated, as shown by your choice of tense. DID it affect population? On a pure guess, yes, it most probably did. But that was then, this is now. DOES crazy rampant farming affect the player population NOW, after the Architect changes? In the words of the poet, that is the question. And in my opinion, no. It no longer does.

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.

Interesting... I think you just summed up how I feel about my characters at level 50 with that. Good job! I wouldn't have used GTA as an example (because... Ew!), but let's say... Devil May Cry. Yeah, you can upgrade Dante's weapons and skills, but right at the start of the game, he's an absolute badass dragged out of hell to basically be awesome. Or Metal Gear Solid, where Snake is a super skilled super agent dragged out of retirement because he's the only bad enough dude to save the president, so to speak. Or Halo's Master Chief, who's a veritable one-man killing machine just stepping out of the pod.

In probably the great majority of action games, you're put in control of a highly-skilled, very powerful, utterly competent hero who's pretty much the only one badass enough to survive the dangers and put a stop to the evil. Very rarely do you start out as the fledgling wimp who needs to train and improve unless you're in an RPG, because action games thrive on action, and depriving you of your skills for too long is counter-productive to that.

That's essentially how I feel about my 50s. They've served their time, they've had their adventures, they've completed their training. These are now the veterans, the elite, the guys and gals who are above and beyond the day-to-day trudge of holding back the waves of crime and evil and who essentially hang back and let the younger heroes take care of things, stepping in only when the crap REALLY hits the fan. They are, if you will, the cavalry, charging in to save the day when all others have failed. Getting a hero to that point is not the end. Even if I don't go for Inventions Sets and Hamidon enhancements, this is pretty much the BEGINNING of the hero where his story truly starts now that he's done with his training.

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.

You know, this is amusing to read from you. I wish I could quote some of your statements from VU2009 regarding "team-based" and "challenge-oriented" arcs not immediately soloable as being badly designed (and I'm not talking about arcs that are obviously cheese and not challenge), regardless of any of their other merits. Anyway.

The game's most basic philosophy of design (whether or not it's intended, which I don't believe it initially was but now appears to be) is that the player is completely capable of tailoring the experience to whatever they want to get out of the game.

Do you want to /em pushup and /em sitbench1 with cat girls and vampires in Pocket D? Go for it.
Do you want to run 2.5 hour ITFs that clear every last inch of the map with a slow and steady or risky team? Go for it.
Do you want to run a 24 minute +4 steamroller of destruction ITF? Go for it.
Do you want your Statesman run to take 30 minutes or 2 hours? You can prepare for either way.
Maybe you might be more privy to a SILGTF 90-100 minute marathon? Have fun!
How about raiding the Rikti Mothership? Do you want to do it the traditional way with 30+ people or do you want to do it with just 5 people? Well, you can shoot for that too (and succeed in the latter).
Or maybe you just want to solo on the default, or highest, difficulty level. It's up to you.

The game is extremely malleable and allows each player to get exactly what they want out of their time.

Not really that hard to figure out.
The game engine is dated and relatively lacking in straight-up gameplay options (choose target, shoot, choose another target, shoot, etc.), communication and teaming in the game needs a serious rehash because anyone not in a global channel community is sorely limited in their options (and the game and playerbase both do a fairly poor job of outlining how global channels work and getting those unacquainted involved), it has very little advertising outside of people already interested in the MMO genre, the genre itself is highly over-saturated right now with other options, and on top of that, it has to compete with the 1,000,000 kg gorilla in the room, of which the stupidity of this piece being that everyone seems to consider said gorilla the "baseline" for MMO success. A steady 150,000, which I believe has been the average for CoH for a long time, is actually very successful for an MMO, if you ignore the outlier which actually plays funny games with statistics to help its notoriety.

But because that average subscription is not so nearly as outlandish and the game's advertising doesn't get very far beyond the MMO genre borders, it basically boils down to Oscar Wilde still getting it right, "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."

I played from Day 4. Took a year off for personal reasons.

I play on Pinnacle, always have pretty much.

I can say with all honesty that it is no harder or easier now to find teams than it has ever been, with the exception of things like free re-ups, when one expects a larger active population.

This, like the other things you present as facts, is called "anecdotal evidence" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence.

When presented with the ONLY source of information that we have available that has any real chance of being a fact in the number of subscriptions, namely that the company running the game say subs are up (not to mention the fact they are investing a ton of cash into it, Posi mentioned a wheel-barrow full of money) you discount it on the basis of 'company's always lie', which to me shows clearly a level of paranoia about "them" and "the rest of us" that I always find quite amusing.

As to active server participants, as others have pointed out there are always ups and downs, for any number of reasons. School, summer time, new babies.

As for there being the huge drop in server pops from the beginning you (and your friends and others) claim, as others pointed out to you, for every one of the posters that cries doom, there are several that have anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

And finally, what you fail to see that those of us watching the forums have witnessed for years, is that from the beginning there have been doom criers yet we are still here and the company is going fine from the looks of the money being invested, therefore, we tire of the cries of doom from the uninformed.

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

This is the heart of the matter that the doomcryers just don't get. If I can GET a team, then even IF the population is lower than it used to be, so what?

That being said.... MPSCAPPY.... I challenge you.

Yeah, that's actually a pretty good counterpoint. Complain all you will about current experience speed, people. You KNOW what would happen if they slashed the speed back to what it used to be. Where's my Peter Venkman 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.