How "Alive" is the game's population on here anyway?

For the superhero genre, it's more logical that heroes appear to be be fairly rare on the street during an average day. How special would we be if we outnumbered the civilians and the villains? In a fantasy game any number of adventurers can seem reasonable in a town. But how much sense would it make for 20 heroes to be standing around waiting outside a bank for robbers to come out? Instancing resolves this problem and many others.

There are places where you can find congregations of other players, however. The markets (Wentworths in Atlas Park, Kings Row, Steel Canyon, and Talos Island, and the Black Market in Mercy, Port Oakes, Cap au Diable, Sharkhead and St. Martial) often have many people standing around. There are occasionally people to be found inside the Aeon Entertainment building between missions. Depending on the server, there are sometimes people gathered in the Portal Corp courtyard in Peregrine Island.

You can get a rough idea of the number of people on the server by using the search window to do a blank search. It will tell you how many matches there were, and cut the number displayed down to somewhere around 50. That won't include anyone who is hidden or members of the opposite faction (villains/heroes).

Finally, one huge advantage that City of Heroes has is Supersidekicking. Level doesn't really matter much anymore. When you're on a mission, everyone is raised to one level less than the mission holder, or lowered to the mission holder's level. Everyone still gets XP. Once you get a travel power (which can be as early as level four or five), you can go almost anywhere in the world (except PvP zones), and team with anyone of your faction of any level. You can even team with the opposing faction in certain zones. Some specific missions (task forces/strike forces) are still limited by level, however.

It's sometimes hard for level 5 characters to keep up with level 50s, but once you hit level 20 or 25 you can pull your own weight on most any team.

And now (for a short time, anyway), the transfer is free of charge!

Roger that. You have to be pro-active. Use /search to form teams. Don't be bashful about sending tells to join or form a team...just make sure you're polite.

Ironically the game used to be buzzing with outside baddie hunting, but that was way way back when the game came out. The bonus rewards on mission completion were so low and combined with travel time made door missions unattractive. They dramatically increased the completion bonuses, nerfed the level-50-PLing-level-1-using-outside-hunts exploits and viola door missions increased and the outside huntin activity descreased.

Dear $deity, you have no idea how much I happen to love this game JUST for that, too.

When I tried CO? "Rescue whatsisface the speedster!" OK. I'll join the line of people also rescuing him. Both boring and immersion breaking.

Aion? "Defeat so-and-so who's guarding the vortex!" OK. I just have to wait for him to respawn, since that Gladiator just defeated him... It really breaks me out of a game world to have to wait on a timer to get "the one" big bad guy... again... after watching another line of people do the same thing.

See my Guides and Tutorials

One of us! One of us!

Also, if you tell us which server you're on, a number of vets may be willing to join you and show you some awesome stuff.

@SpaceNut - My 50s, AE arcs and current projects at ParagonWiki

...I forgot what experience means.

I play almost exclusively on Virtue and it is highly populated(usually 1st or 2nd in terms of pop)... as pointed out though with the game being so instance heavy you may notice that it appears empty, it's not. Once you get comfortable with where to look for teams and channels etc. you should be ok. If you're looking for a team make sure you set that as your status under the "team" option in your chatbox. You don't even have to do that. I get random invites on a regular basis and those are usually (thank god) preceded with a /t asking instead of just being blindly invited.

LOL, there's a thread like this every week or so from someone who's join date is the current month. It's a lot to do with the fact that most of the missions are contained in instances, there really aren't many outdoor mishs, but we're all here! Try Freedom or Virtue dude!

Buy CoH - that's an order

EDIT: There's also an awesome new expansion coming out in about 5-6 months too - so the game's going to get even better.

Definitely try teaming. Once you settle on a server (nothing wrong with Virtue), check out that server's part of the forums and ask about global channels for server events, team finding, etc. These are your best way to find teams. Looking for a team in broadcast (the default way) just isn't that effective any more because most people don't loiter in the open zones.

The real benefit of teaming with people is that it helps you find and hopefully identify people who share your interests in playing this game. If you add them as friends (per character, no permission needed) or global friends (know when they're on with any character, permission required), you can grow a support network of people who share your interests.

You can play solo many character types very well in this game, but some fun content is intended for teams, some rewards are most efficiently gained by teams, and generally, at least chatting with people while you play (teamed or not) is a whole lot more interesting. Take it from me... I solo a lot.

To kinda add to this... always remember what the 2nd M in MMO stands for. This and all MMOs are designed to be played with other people. You can solo any AT (some more effectively than others) but it will never be as fun as running around with a group destroying everything you see.

Also, as someone else already pointed out... go ahead and buy the game... for $20 you get full access and the first month free so you can really dig in and find out if it's for you or not. Most $60 console games don't give you that and even if they do the amount of replay value is crap relatively speaking... you've got some people that have been playing this game for 5 years and I'm sure still log in daily lol.

<_<


>_>


I dont know what you mean...


To the OP, a belated welcome to the game.

Let's see, the matinée in the theater closest to me is about $8.00 and the normal price is $10 That's on the cheap end of things.

For my favorite movies I will do midnight shows with assigned seating so that's going to cost me from $12-14 bucks and that's at The Bridge then if you want to go to Arclight, well that's about 14-16 bucks. I saw Watchmen at the Arclight, awesome experience.

http://www.thebridgecinema.com
http://www.arclightcinemas.com

I haven't seen those prices you both have for a few years.

To be fair, there are quite a few players who enjoy soloing as their main gameplay experience, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm sure they have every bit as much fun as others who team regularly. To each their own.

And there's the occasional force divider like a Fire/? blaster I teamed with a while back... he was kind of like a ferret on a sugar high with "ooo, shiny bad guys!" "Ooo, MORE shiny bad guys!" "Hey, here's another group!" "I found a nice shiny Paragon Protector over in this room, he's nice and purple, he and his buddies are coming to meet us, I think they want an autograph"

All kidding aside those players really are few and far between; that's why they're so memorable. In the case above the rest of us were actually starting to get a kick out of seeing just what kind of trouble Sir Blastsalot would bring next; we were generally perfectly capable of handling his, um, exuberance.