Old Complaints ~or~ 'A More Perfect Superhero Simulator'

City of Heroes is, in my opinion, the best superhero simulator game available. There are other games that let you play in the superhero genre, but none that let you so fully enter the character of your own superhero. The game has generally gotten better since its inception despite occasional backtracks.

My vet reward badges tell me I've been playing for four and a half years. (I started playing regularly during i3). I also played a bit during beta. In that time, I've bought just about every pack and expansion that has come out, most of them twice.

In that same time, I've also built up some lingering, long-standing complaints -- problems that have been around since previous issues or even since launch. Addressing these complaints would, in my opinion, make the game even stronger and better at being a Superhero Simulator.

Color Picker Inadequacies and Mismatched Costume Pieces

My oldest complaint with the game is that the color picker sucks. (Both of them.) 16-odd MILLION colors in RGB space, and we get 170 choices for costume colors. Not only does this limit player creativity, it causes problems. For example, please look at the color change between 'Bottoms with Skin' and 'Tights' pieces. One is blended with the skin tone while the other is solid. This kind of mismatch is common between different costume pieces, especially with the newer costume pieces that include more detailed textures. With a better color picker, one not so restrictive, players could fix this issue with careful tweaking.

Players could also re-purpose more costume pieces. For example, it'd be very easy to recolor the various 'tights' pieces to appear sheer.

The real kicker for this problem is that we know from experimentation with the demo editor and with the costume save feature that the COH game engine supports any RGB color you throw at it. The limitations on color are imposed after the fact.

There are lots of ways to fix this-- everything from adding a new color picker, to merely changing the way validation works on the costume save feature. Rather than limiting color selection to the 170 or so 'acceptable' colors in any given picker menu, they could reject colors that were outside an acceptable range, such as colors that are too close to a skin tone, or in shades that make power effects invisible.

I continue to be infuriated by this, and will likely continue to refresh my irritation every time I try to match a textured top to an untextured bottom or vice-versa.


Flight orientation and physics

Many players consider that the most 'super' power in CoH is Flight. (For me, it's Knockback, but Flight is right up there.) Sadly, the orientations in which you can fly, and the camera to view those orientations are somewhat limited. You can't fly on your back, for example. Nor can you loop-de-loop.

You can also fall much faster than you can fly straight down, which has always bugged me. It'd be really nice to see Flight adjusted in the future to be more free from limitation.


UI Inconsistencies

The game UI is not terribly consistent. What works one place frequently does not work in others. For example, when mouse-based cut-and-paste was added to the client, it was NOT added to the various market windows. You can't paste a recipe name into the search window to look up its most recent bids.

Additionally, you can change the colors of player-created chat channels, but can't change the color of any of the other channels. The 'Enter' key doesn't work the same way in any two given windows. Many of the options that appear when you click on a character don't appear when you click on their name, or vice versa. Personal salvage storage doesn't work the same way base salvage storage does. There are lots more. God forbid I go into the AE interface.

As the game grows more complex and more features are added, these issues become more and more nagging. They take away from the flow of the game in a small, irritating, but entirely cumulative way. For a lot of players, they are individual straws on the camel's back.

The two biggest inconsistencies, however, lie in the...


Modality of the Costume and Enhancement Screens

While editing your costume or enhancements, you can't do anything else. You can't see chat. You can't tell if someone is attacking you (yet player powers still tend to 'leak' into the interface with screen shakes and the like). You can't activate or deactivate powers.

Many players feel like they 'miss out' when editing a costume and will tell everyone who can hear them via chat that they will be 'afk to edit a costume'.

This is a real shame. In my opinion, the costume editor is the crown feature of the game. It's what hooks the most players and what keeps them. When players don't access it because they're afraid they'll miss the rest of the game, there's something wrong.

Most of the other aspects of the game aside from these two allow the player to view the rest of their interface. Even the base editor will allow you to bring up your various interface windows.

It'd be very nice to be able to have the costume and enhancement screens come up windowed, like every other interface in the game.


IP Issues Confuse and Divide Players

A long time ago, I wrote a post that was entitled 'I Grouped with Supergirl'. It was about problems I saw with the way that copyright and trademark problems acted to the detriment of the game and its players. I feel like these problems have only grown worse with time. Even today, some players feel like they HAVE to police the rest of the game's populace for IP infringements lest bogeymen lawyers descend upon the game and shut it down.

The root of this issue is that there is no clear statement of NCSoft's policies for judging wether or not a player has crossed infringement lines, nor what the remedies for crossing those lines are.

I recently ran afoul of this myself. I created a character who bore a similar color scheme and appearance to a relatively obscure copyrighted character. Neither the name nor powers were the same. When a few players in game let me know that I looked like this other character, I had to do a Google image search to compare the two.

I looked once again for rules regarding 'Genericing' of characters, and couldnt' find anything other than the vague legalese in the various EULA documents. And these are VERY vague. They don't describe how NCSoft judges the characters, nor what you can do once you've been judged.

I eventually had to contact one of the board GMs for a judgment call. Even then, the GM didn't give me anything firmer than 'You'd probably be genericed if someone reported you.'

These policies needed to be accessible to players from day 1. Keeping them secret five years into the game's life is pretty darn inexcusable.


Teaming on flashbacks

Oroboros was a wonderful addition to the game. It allows players to extend the lives of their characters by allowing them to go back and experience content that was missed.

However, there's a pretty serious problem with the implementation. Oroboros forces you into 'Taskforce Mode' so that you cannot invite or group with other characters while you're doing content.

That's pretty darn annoying on taskforces, but it's excruciating on long story arcs. There's pretty much no way to complete the longer arcs other than solo or with a VERY dedicated friend.

From the AE teaming system, we know that there's an alternative. Is there no way to apply the solution from problem b to problem a to ease this burden?


Taskforces and Merit Sharing on Story Arcs

Speaking of task forces, it still continues to amaze me that a tiny fraction of the game's content is responsible for the vast majority of its rewards. This is the most serious problem facing the game, and the one that burns out the most players. I've heard more than one high-level player complain that there's 'nothing to do but ITF, LGTF, or solo'. This perception is a direct threat to the game's longevity.

Sadly, most of the taskforces are not terribly compelling. This is most true of the task forces that award the most rewards. People don't do Positron or Dr. Q because they like the story. They do them out of the sake of completeness, or because they award a huge number of merits. The challenge is not in completing a difficult fight, or for finishing a complicated trial, but for slogging lengthwise through completely forgettable missions. Most players speed through the repetitive chores in these taskforces as rapidly as possible simply for the reward at the end.

Meanwhile, the other story arcs in the game languish due to the fact that only one player can receive merits on any given arc. The only way to bypass that is to arrange a situation where multiple players can do the arc at the same time and share mission completion. It's just as difficult to try to find a group for anything but the shortest Oroboros arcs.

Any players invited along the way, however, still miss out on those 'Final' rewards, even if they complete most of the arc. This discourages normal teaming and causes more players to participate in 'aberrant' play, as our devs like to use, by doing something that's more boring for better rewards. Even if a player doesn't rely on taskforces to level, most will grind out newspaper missions or radio missions rather than bother trying to assemble groups for arc missions.

There are a few different ways this could be addressed. The most obvious solution of spending dev time on revamping those super-boring taskforces has been repeatedly countered against spending that same time developing new content. However, there are reward-based solutions that would work.

The most simple from the player's point of view is to award partial merit awards when an arc is completed by a player they grouped with. It's probably not nearly so simple on the development end, and would require quite a bit of new code to deal with keeping track of group history and the like.

A more simple option from the dev's end would be to award AE tickets to players who completed an arc mission they didn't own.

Either way, just about any change in the way players are rewarded for arc missions would be positive.


What are your oldest and most pressing complaints about the game?

unrelated...

I was mad for like 10 minutes that CO didn't turn out to be as awesome as CoX is/was/future.

I just thought I would add that since is a complaint thread.

Another hair-splitting thread, IMPO.

Generally I have fewer complaints than most people seem to. I don't know much about software design, but I do know something about the dynamics of a large, diverse message board dedicated to gaming, and how hard it is to keep everyone happy.

I also have about a decade's experience game-mastering a superhero RPG. The superhero genre has unique issues other genres do not. Challenging superheroes, without either making them feel un-super and weak OR meaninglessly overpowered is very tricky.

In the spirit of the OP, I guess I do have a simple complaint about the interface. Why is there no command or keystroke to level the view? You can tilt your character's viewpoint, or the camera looking at your character, up or down -- but once you've moved it off of level, you can only approximate leveling it again by fiddling with it and trying to persuade yourself you're dead-level.

Yet if you log out and back in, the camera starts perfectly level. Obviously there IS a way to level the camera somehow -- why can't I have it??? Why must my fliers do a drunkard's walk, progressively correcting up and down a little, trying to find level flight to avoid scraping the road or gradually drifting up to the altitude cap?

With one keystroke, I can reset my view to the default "camera right behind me a short distance" position, but that does not affect the up/down angle.

In most software, it's possible to return to a default state fairly simply. Why is that not true of our camera angle?

I agree with Fleeting Whisper regarding generic-ing policies.

Regarding your comments on Flashbacking, I agree with you it would be extremely nice to be able to change teams mid-flashback (even if it would make no sense story wise ). However I see two problems: levels and merits. Currently flashbacks are level restricted so inviting new members is problematic. The second is that flashbacks award merits to the entire team and it's obviously not fair for someone who joins a flashback mid way to get as many merits as someone who joins for the whole thing.

My solution to this would be to radically change how flashbacks work. Currently it puts you into TF mode where you only have a single contact available. Instead I propose that when you start a flashback you don't get level locked but instead get given a "flashback contact". These function exactly like normal contacts with three differences:
1. They only give you the missions for the badge or story arc and once you've completed it they are removed from your list
2. The missions are at the maximum level for the contact rather than your level and you automatically get exemplared down when it's your active mission
3. You can only have one "flashback contact" at a time but can drop them (and the current mission from them) at any time for no penalty (or reward).

This would make it much easier for people to join and leave flashback teams with the understanding that as with regular story arcs one person "owns" the mission and if they quit the team you can't continue. Regarding merits as with regular story arcs only the mission holder would get them (and the arc XP bonus) but you can use the auto-complete feature to allow everyone to follow along with the mission progression and get the final reward if you do have a team that sticks around for the entire arc. As another advantage if you're playing through a flashback and your frineds log on and ask you to do something else (say a TF) with them you don't have to quit your flashback, you keep your progress while doing other missions.

I would like more colors as well. Granted, the list we have is okay, and we can't possibly have a million additional colors.......but what about 100 more? 200?

MNP made some sheer leggings for me as a texture swap for fishnets.

The generic rules are quite bad, in some cases...

I have a friend whose character name was "Mako Kino".

Unfortunately, she didn't know that "Makoto Kino" was the name of Sailor Jupiter's secret identity...

The only thing that "Mako Kino" and Sailor Jupiter had in common was the name. They didn't have anything to do with each other. It was a random fluke.


A Sailor Moon fan reported her and now she's stuck with this horrible generic name...

It's so bad that I'm actually -afraid- to report people for IP now, because I don't want to be the jerk who did that to them. Even when it's obvious that I probably should...

*shrug*

I don't report people for names or costumes. They made it for a reason, I don't want to get involved in what they're doing, and I prefer the same courtesy extended to me. Heck, half the time I laugh at it. Maybe I'm immature, but I'll take that any day over upsetting a potential new player (report character, character gets generic'd, player is confused and frustrated and leaves the game).

As for my pet peeves:

* The current implementation of PvP is pretty terrible, but I participate in it because as a powergamer PvE has become mind-numbingly boring and I like a bit of unpredictability. Returning to the old system and going from there would quite honestly be the easiest way to fix the *********** PvP's turned into (I don't even want to think about what base raids will be like if they're added under the current mechanics).
* The market interface in general needs an overhaul, badly. Trying to load the entire database when you click on the market contact has made me mapserve or crash entirely more than a few times, and I'm not exactly on a bad connection or old machine either. Despite efforts to fix some nagging issues, there are IOs with different names between the recipe and crafted varieties which can cause confusion and makes it harder to search. The search feature at the market could be expanded and more utility added - for example, when I click on a recipe to see what it's selling for, I could have another pane showing me what the crafted enhancement is selling for and what the salvage required to make it is selling for (and whether I have any of that salvage on-hand).

Is there any reason why all players found in violation of the naming policy can't be given a temporary generic name and then a token for a free name change?

This seems so reasonable to me I'd assume it was already the case. But ... maybe it's not.

I generally concur with the sentiments in this thread. I agree that stating the letter of the rules would open up a whole can of worms, so best left alone.

My major pet-peeve is that we get costume options removed or simply nod added in for 'Clipping reasons'
...
Worst. BS. Ever. There are a multiplex of multitudinous pieces that all clip in some way or another. The...joke that was the issue of wings and Magic bolero, for instance. Generally that needs to be sorted out. Before I write a long, bilious post on how Jay should do multiple horrible things to himself (the little...). Again.

Still. Good post.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I agree with what MOO said about 50's complaining that there's nothing left to do. There's not too much high-end content for 50's to do (although, I find running AE on my Scrapper a perfect solution or Ouro on my Corrupter), but we need more EPIC content that makes 50's feel super.