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Yup, it would be good if we could be prevented from outleveling content through a use of the SSK / ex-xp coding.|
Originally Posted by Kelenar
Stuff like this is why I was excited when I thought that they said that the SSK system would make the entire team the level of the currently active mission. I could pick up an arc at level 14.5 without worrying about outlevelling it in five bubbles.
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Theoretically, we could have every game contact bring us to the level of their content, in just the same way it happens in AE.
I suppose it is possible this might be implemented with new content in any revamp that might occur.
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When you do the Synapse TF, you get the cellphone right after the 2nd mission "Defeat 30 Clockwork." It seems like you could become his crony or whatever a mission earlier, but getting it after second mission is not a huge disappointment.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Cell phones are given at first relationship upgrade (and suddenly I feel like I'm describing a dating sim...), which is pretty much a fact for almost all contacts. When you reach that first level isn't always static, because it's a percentage of completed objectives, and some contacts just have an assload of missions, so it takes longer.
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However, I recently joined a friend on a higher level arc and we went through a ton of missions before getting the cellphone, which we finally received just before the last mission.
I suppose it's possible that there's just no way to fix this. But I would be surprised if that's actually the case.
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See, the thing is... Some of the old content is WRETCHED. And not just low-level content. (...) A lot of the ways the old content needs to be redesigned don't involve new graphics, tilesets or enemy design. It involves cleaning up embarrassingly bad writing and purging utterly pointless missions that add nothing to the plot. (...) Some need shortening, some need spell-checking, some need an actual WRITER to look through them and set all the terrible exposition straight, and some just need their needlessly sinister objectives reviewed. And this needs to happen, because these missions and arcs honestly ARE a blight upon the game. |
I agree that more attention needs to be paid to the storytelling aspect of the game, including better use of storytelling tools.
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I see no problem with putting new missions into Atlas and Galaxy. It's where new players start. It wouldn't require a huge effort; one person could do it, and it should have been done years ago.|
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
1)Adding new content missions to the same old zones. If you were going to add new content with new tech that's easy for people to find, do you put it in a fresh area that also hilights emerging tech, art styles, and advancing storylines, where someone will find ONLY new stuff, or mix it in with the older stories, so someone has to sift through or play trial-and-error to find the new "good stuff?
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And no, you don't have to set it up so players must "sift through" the old material to find the new stuff. That would be terrible design.
Sure, when GR comes out the people who purchase that will probably start in Praetoria. And veteran players who don't purchase GR will know to continue avoiding all content in Atlas and Galaxy and the other sub-20 zones.
I'm a veteran player, and I'd have to say the devs have not sold me on GR yet. Am I supposed to buy it for the new level 1-20 content? You mean the stuff that was so unimportant they couldn't be bothered to fix it for years?
Or am I supposed to buy it so I can have my villain toons cross over to the hero side and do all the old content thre? Or have my hero toons cross over to the villain side to do all the content I've already been doing since 2005?
It's kind of crazy thinking to me. Not sure where the appeal is, except for the two new power sets. And out of that, all I really like is the whip.
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| 2) Contact "display phone number" early in the arc... If I'm not mistaken, the phone number used to be given at the SECOND relationship point but at around the time of CoV's release (which made you get them earlier) this was changed to the FIRST contact point, so they've already streamlined that once as a QOL issue. |
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| 3) I'm not entirely a naysayer to revising old content, I just think there are systemic issues that should be addressed- and that will probably be addressed BEST by a zone re-imagining (like Faultline) than wasting time tweaking existing arcs very much or slapping new arcs into the same aging instance. Heck, some of these issues are side effects of other game improvements that have changed some of the core assumptions that went into the zone design. |
I mean, how long would it take a single person to put 3-6 arcs in the zone? Not long.
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a) We level too fast. (...) We barely touch those (early) zones. New users that don't "know better" easily outlevel the first safeguard/mayhem and miss one of the better rewards. (...) Add more content to those zones? (...) |
Count me as one player who was seriously disappointed by the devs' decision to accelerate leveling at the start of the game as opposed to adding more content options.
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| b) We travel too easily. |
I actually enjoyed the challenge of Sprinting through The Hollows. What the devs did was add jetpacks and zero-g packs instead of correcting the "distant door" problem in the lower levels of the game.
It's a pattern they have. They tend to pick the wrong solution for the problems.
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| c) We have multiple starting zones, but many players have shown a determination to run the same pattern over and over again. They'd rather roll a new player through another Sewers powerleveling session than try new arc x or y. They're oblivious to changes that were done to other arcs because they've already mapped the "optimal" reward path (or, as I confessed earlier, see some things like mayhem/safeguard travel powers as "essential" and skip over other content to make sure they get it). Will new parallel content in a zone mean more options taken, or just mean another single path people take (and complain about) as the rest go underused? |
Other people prefer actual playing, and they play games like D&D or whatever not to level up, but because they enjoy playing.
While the devs did eventually create a toolset for players to make their own content, they've actually done very little since 2005 to help people enjoy playing. Most of their attention has been focused on adding rewards, such as the IO system, the xp smoothing, the day jobs, and so on.
It looks to me like the contact bars were designed as a measure of their total possible missions. As such, if a contact has 5 missions, like the ones in Kings Row, it gets full much quicker than if the contact has 20 or so missions, like the ones in Peregrine Island. It also seems to not be in equal amounts, hunt missions only tend to fill the bar half as much as door missions. Of course, there are a few that are a bit broken, even with this measure. The low-level hero contacts in Steel Canyon and Skyway City that don't have story arcs, for example, will not fill completely unless you make sure to get the Security Chief missions and the introduction missions that were added after the fact, like Hero Corps and PvP Zone reps, from them.
"I wish my life was a non-stop Hollywood movie show,
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes."
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As others have suggested, you appear to grossly underestimate the effort it takes to produce new content. The AE tools aren't the tools the devs had available to them, nor were they as refined until the AE tools were developed.|
Originally Posted by konshu
I see no problem with putting new missions into Atlas and Galaxy. It's where new players start. It wouldn't require a huge effort; one person could do it, and it should have been done years ago.
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| And no, you don't have to set it up so players must "sift through" the old material to find the new stuff. That would be terrible design. |
Give a new contact and make the other one... what? Unlockable? Buried? Removed? You either make it functionally inaccessible (and therefore might as well remove it) or you make the new user experience potentially divided between them...
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| ....(snip).... You mean the stuff that was so unimportant they couldn't be bothered to fix it for years? |
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(snip) Mmm ... not sure I'm understanding you here, but perhaps you are saying this issue has already been fixed? |
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Again, I wouldn't characterize a revamp effort as one aimed at tweaking existing content. Also, in my opinion the effort spent on redesigning Faultline was a waste. I'd have spent a fraction of the time just putting new missions in it, and I'd have done it in 2005. I mean, how long would it take a single person to put 3-6 arcs in the zone? Not long. |
It was inconvenient to play in... and that'd have been a thoroughly wasted 3-6 arcs.
As for how long it can take? More than you probably think. I've heard "industry estimates" from 60 to 300 hours of dev time per hour of player time, depending on various factors, including the quality of the tools involved. Given that I worked in generating online flash-based training for soldiers where the estimate was normally 300+ hours of dev time for 1 hour of learning time while taking advantage of rather "canned" code, I can believe that.
If you want to use AE as an example, remember that AE tools were better and more robust than anything and everything that started before. Then remember that, unlike a fan that "starts development" when he opens the editor, there's a whole range of Conceptualizing... of meetings to get approval for the concept... of scripting it out... of getting peer review and sign-off on the script.. of putting it in... of peer review... and revisions all along the way.
Then keep in mind that the time also includes the ideas that are tried, but end up on the cutting room floor when things just don't pan out at some review point along the way.
It happens... A LOT.
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| I think a player would play one arc in each starting zone. You mentioned Mercy; if we wanted to tweak existing content, I'd make Mongoose and Dr. Creed additional starting contacts, so their material could be played for variety's sake. There's no reason to play a second arc in Mercy, and that was the case even before all the XP smoothing, patrol XP, and debt reduction. |
Of course, that also increases the number of choices a player must make at the start, and contrary to what players say they want, new users are often very skittish about making the WRONG decision. Players faced with too many choices too early on are more likely to quit after their 30 days' trial.... as contrary as that may sound to some of us.
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(snip) Some people are more prone to reward addiction than others. If you were to set up an XP button in Atlas, they'd keep clicking it till they hit 50. If you added a purple IO button they'd click it till they were completely outfitted. And then what? lol Other people prefer actual playing, and they play games like D&D or whatever not to level up, but because they enjoy playing. |
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Two items of interest:|
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
And you would have failed miserably. The problem with faultline, as well-explained by the dev notes of its release, was inherent in the whole zone design. people would've avoided the zone- and your precious 3-6 arcs- just like they do with the shadow shard.
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1. You are aware that the Shadow Shard HAS no story arcs, right? It has four of the worst, most boring, most repetitive, most time consuming Task Forces known to man. Even if the whole zone was a flat-floored white room 10x10 big, there is NO POINT to go there, and what little there is to do is wretched. People keep claiming it's the zone that keeps them out, but if there were anything at all to draw them in, I'd bet my metal-tipped tail that you'd see a lot less of that complaint.
2. Outside of Faultline, Terra Volta and possibly the Shadow Shard, which zones require a significant "change" to make them easier to navigate? Faultline required it, that much I will admit, even if I don't agree with the solution to the problem. Terra Volta is inexplicably designed without a decent route to the top level and without a decent exit out of the Gordon Trench (there are ways to reach both, but they require more dexterity than slapping your butt on the keyboard provides, hence why I point them out as problems), which would need to be added either via elevator or rams with railings. But beyond that? What in Boomtown is so disruptive that the zone MUST be completely redesigned or be nigh-on unplayable for many people? What, more specifically, that wasn't wrong with the Crash Site which wasn't changed when it became the War Zone?
I don't deny that certain things need to be added to these zones in a revamp. No question there. The question is whether these revamps can be done with a modicum of restraint, fixing things only where necessary, of we'll just ask them to scrap the zone and rebuild it from scratch, which is very much what they did with Faultline. I don't see the latter as the superior option as it replaces a lot of decent content with a lot of... Pretty much decent content, only slightly different. It's not a fair trade when it comes at the costs involved.
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| As for how long it can take? More than you probably think. I've heard "industry estimates" from 60 to 300 hours of dev time per hour of player time, depending on various factors, including the quality of the tools involved. Given that I worked in generating online flash-based training for soldiers where the estimate was normally 300+ hours of dev time for 1 hour of learning time while taking advantage of rather "canned" code, I can believe that. |
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| If you want to use AE as an example, remember that AE tools were better and more robust than anything and everything that started before. Then remember that, unlike a fan that "starts development" when he opens the editor, there's a whole range of Conceptualizing... of meetings to get approval for the concept... of scripting it out... of getting peer review and sign-off on the script.. of putting it in... of peer review... and revisions all along the way. |
Basically, it comes down to how important the written word is to the development team. If I have to be perfectly honest, it doesn't seem to be quite very. I've been a stout defender of adding new mechanics like the Architect (not so much) and power customization as adding value to the game, but sooner or later we'll have to start adding more missions and redoing the old missions. Excuses and explanations will only work for so long.
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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.
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I have my doubts on this as well. I don't anticipate a mass exodus for my toons on any side. The only times I really want to side switch are when my SG mates are playing blueside(as they play there more) and I want to play a villain. I don't have the desire to take a blaster redside and fight Longbow or the Legacy Chain.|
Originally Posted by konshu
I'm a veteran player, and I'd have to say the devs have not sold me on GR yet. Am I supposed to buy it for the new level 1-20 content? You mean the stuff that was so unimportant they couldn't be bothered to fix it for years?
Or am I supposed to buy it so I can have my villain toons cross over to the hero side and do all the old content thre? Or have my hero toons cross over to the villain side to do all the content I've already been doing since 2005? It's kind of crazy thinking to me. Not sure where the appeal is, except for the two new power sets. And out of that, all I really like is the whip. |
I'm going to give the devs the benefit of the doubt and assume that some really good stuff is coming that they have not announced.
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| Count me as one player who was seriously disappointed by the devs' decision to accelerate leveling at the start of the game as opposed to adding more content options. |
Wrong prescription for the problem there. Then they added Patrol XP on top of that. We didn't need that as well.
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I agree, but again, I wasn't consulted on that decision. I actually enjoyed the challenge of Sprinting through The Hollows. What the devs did was add jetpacks and zero-g packs instead of correcting the "distant door" problem in the lower levels of the game. It's a pattern they have. They tend to pick the wrong solution for the problems.
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| While the devs did eventually create a toolset for players to make their own content, they've actually done very little since 2005 to help people enjoy playing. Most of their attention has been focused on adding rewards, such as the IO system, the xp smoothing, the day jobs, and so on. |
That is, someone who was a past player of this game coming back and looking at someone playing MA stuff will not truly see anything different apart from custom enemies. And even those enemies won't have different powers than what we have in the game...just powers mixed from what we all know.
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I was answering Faultline specifically, and how slapping a few arcs in there are all it would take. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Two items of interest:
*Snip* 2. Outside of Faultline, Terra Volta and possibly the Shadow Shard, which zones require a significant "change" to make them easier to navigate? |
The other zones, particularly the starter zones (atlas, galaxy, kings, mercy, oakes) might do with a facelift or not, but their broader issues are graphics, but other systemic problems that would best be addressed first.... like the leveling overprogression I mentioned. That doesn't mean a complete overhaul, but it DOES mean making changes NOW that would otherwise affect the story you tell there.
I've been stressing the starter zones because it's most apparent there. Too many stories outleveled before you complete them. Too many contacts you visit just to be given another contact name. Too much waste.
Before adding MORE to the zone, you should be defining things better- do the level ranges of particular baddies need expanded? Should, for example, everything in KR go from level 7 through 14 instead of 6 through 9? What's the estimated reward from the arc and where does that put the player in the zone progression? Is it going to be like faultline, where you have to leave between contacts because you don't level fast enough to take the story all in one solid sweep?
CLEAN THAT UP. Make those underlying changes that are necessary, and until then, focus the content development on the expansion, so the new praetorian zones can be full of fresh, solid content that'll attract new and old players to give an old game another chance.
Otherwise, you'll just be revising all that new content again when you finally DO get around to the systemic issues.
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No story arcs in the Shard?|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
You are aware that the Shadow Shard HAS no story arcs, right? It has four of the worst, most boring, most repetitive, most time consuming Task Forces known to man. Even if the whole zone was a flat-floored white room 10x10 big, there is NO POINT to go there, and what little there is to do is wretched. People keep claiming it's the zone that keeps them out, but if there were anything at all to draw them in, I'd bet my metal-tipped tail that you'd see a lot less of that complaint.
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I'm not sure how you're breaking it down, but the game has the following contacts for missions at Firebase Zulu and Cascade Archipelago:
General Hammond
Dr. Boyd
Lt. Volkov
Dr. Huxley
Lt. Col. Flynn
Granted, the stories on these arcs are very thin, so maybe you were judging against them for that.
If those count as story arcs, so do newspaper and scanner missions. They are the same sort of Mad Libs-style infinite mission generators.
Edit: I take that back. Newspaper and scanner missions come in several different types, with multiple possible enemy types for most of those types. Shard contacts have exactly one door mission type, and are either solely against Rularuu, solely against Nemesis, or some combination of both, depending on the contact.
Edit 2: Looking at Red Tomax, they actually list the mission types for the Shard contacts, and have a little more diversity than I recalled. I had forgotten the CoT doors from one of them, for instance. They're still less diverse than newspapers and scanners, and you really only get any story from the missions where one of them sends you off to meet the next in the series.
"I wish my life was a non-stop Hollywood movie show,
A fantasy world of celluloid villains and heroes."
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At one point, less than a year ago, one of the devs (Synapse?) said that content was the easiest thing they could do. If all we wanted was content, they'd have no problem churning it out, but they believed players had enough content and desired other things.|
Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
As others have suggested, you appear to grossly underestimate the effort it takes to produce new content. The AE tools aren't the tools the devs had available to them, nor were they as refined until the AE tools were developed.
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Right... so what IS your design for dumping new content into a zone that already has the old content... and already has starter contacts that spoon-feed you that old content... and already has you leveling past existing content too often...without actually removing that old content? Give a new contact and make the other one... what? Unlockable? Buried? Removed? You either make it functionally inaccessible (and therefore might as well remove it) or you make the new user experience potentially divided between them... |
My assumption is that some veteran players will like parts of the old content and reject change. So I'd try to give both the old and the new content side by side and let people choose.
Conceptually, there are a few approaches that somewhat resemble each other. I'll address them with the idea of putting new starting material in Atlas Park, but it's really about the same for any zone.
One method would involve inserting optional material into an existing contact. You could take Azuria's mission list, go to the top of it, and insert an optional mission using coding that's been in the game since day 1.
The player would see something equivalent to:
Rise of the Shadows: The street gang known as "The Shadows" is attempting to gain a foothold in Atlas Park with the aid of a mysterious magical device. MAGI wants this device recovered or destroyed, and the Shadows dispersed.When the player clicks on one of these it starts either the new arc ("Rise of the Shadows") or the old arc (which we can title "The Merchants of Magic" if we lack an already existing title).
----- OR ----
The Merchants of Magic: The Hellions have been on a tear lately, and are rumored to be running an illegal market for magic items. MAGI needs a hero to take the Hellions down a peg and return the stolen magic items to their rightful owners.
That method could be used to add one arc for each origin in Atlas, and I think it would be the easiest one to implement.
Another method would involve intercepting players entering Atlas for the first time. The existing mechanism points the player to their origin contact. You could change this pointer and send them to one or more different contact which could offer players new content, in addition to opening up the traditional starting contact. In that way the new content is offered and the old content is still available if it is what the player prefers.
Yet another method could involve using a glowie or unique encounter spawn in the zone to unlock a new contact / arc. This method could give new arcs that would be used primarily by veteran players, and you'd let them know it was available simply by telling them on the forum and letting word spread. It would be an easter egg type thing.
Any of those methods should allow for new content to exist in the game alongside the older content.
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| The issue WAS worse before, then was "fixed" as well as they could with the tools they had. Some contacts were missed because, as I've said, you've grossly underestimated the ease of such changes and errors are made. Some may have been missed because something in the arc's design would have required redesign for it to work. |
I think it was a bad feature. We should just get cellphones from the start and not have to physically visit contacts. Or if we do visit them, it should be at the end of the arc for the reward, or for some purpose other than the same sort of communication we can have with them via cellphone.
Personally, I'm okay with getting missions from a radio, a computer, or someone who isn't standing in a zone all the time.
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And you would have failed miserably. The problem with faultline, as well-explained by the dev notes of its release, was inherent in the whole zone design. people would've avoided the zone- and your precious 3-6 arcs- just like they do with the shadow shard. It was inconvenient to play in... and that'd have been a thoroughly wasted 3-6 arcs. |
I entered the zone a few other times after that, but since I'm not a street hunter type of player, I didn't really find much to do there.
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| As for how long it can take? More than you probably think. |
Writing 3-6 arcs for Faultline wouldn't be that big of a project, unless you started asking for all kinds of new art assets, special effects, animations, and so on.
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| That's my thinking: and there are other second-tier contacts like that in Atlas, Galaxy (grossly underused zone there) . Port Oakes, and Kings' Row. Before writing new ones, they should be redefining these to be first-tier contacts, then perhaps look at the quality of the stories & tweak what we see. That might be the simplest way to increase variety for altaholics in the time-being. |
I think possibly the original idea was probably to give each of them unique origin-specific content, but that notion got scaled back in order to meet the game's deadline for publication.
If there was a desire to do so, each of these contacts could receive unique alternative content. But that sort of thing would obviously be around the lowest priority, coming after new entry level content and new hazard zone content.
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Those are not story arcs. Those are a grand total of less than 10 missions repeated infinitely, which makes them a much more scattered, much more limited, crappier version of the newspaper/scanner. Which... Is a scary thought, come to think of it. And, seriously, outside of the now-defunct Kora farms, when have you ever heard anyone express the desire to go grind Rularuu in all of one infinitely looping mission? At least Volkov has Nemesis mixed in there...
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Originally Posted by konshu
No story arcs in the Shard?
I'm not sure how you're breaking it down, but the game has the following contacts for missions at Firebase Zulu and Cascade Archipelago: General Hammond Dr. Boyd Lt. Volkov Dr. Huxley Lt. Col. Flynn Granted, the stories on these arcs are very thin, so maybe you were judging against them for that. |
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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.
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What's wrong with outlevelled content? The whole design principle of the game was to create more content than anyone could do on a single playthrough, so as to foster replayability. There WAS no such thing in the old days, because you ran through all the contacts and you STILL ran out. This is no longer the case, and I feel that's a GOOD thing. Granted, contacts or content that you can never even GET to, such as the second Family arc in Port Oaks (I've never seen it, myself) is a problem, but it's hardly the fault of levelling OR the fault of tight level ranges. Granted, I wouldn't mind contacts being given wider berth in levels, but that can't be all we're talking about.
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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
I've been stressing the starter zones because it's most apparent there. Too many stories outleveled before you complete them. Too many contacts you visit just to be given another contact name. Too much waste.
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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.
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You musta' been reading different forums from me, then, because where I was I kept seeing thread after thread about the boring grind and slow levelling and how it sucked. Experience increases were done by player request, and I dare say as a result of player research, displaying analysis of the scope of experience increase with levels that could best be described as "schizophrenic." We got a levelling boost not a few months after this was posted.|
Originally Posted by Slashman
Count me in on that as well. When we, the players, were pointing out content gaps in the leveling process, we really only wanted more content to fill those gaps. There was no public outcry of slow leveling. Power levelers will always find ways to do it faster.
Wrong prescription for the problem there. Then they added Patrol XP on top of that. We didn't need that as well. |
And, really, they gave you the option to turn off your experience if you level up too fast. Far as I'm concerned, levelling in the 40s is still too boring slow. Not impenetrable like it used to be, mind you, but then I don't expect a character to last me a year like it was back when I had to burn myself out three times over just to get to the damn end. I am not prepared to be convinced that a levelling speed is too fast. If I miss contacts, I'll pick them up next time around. Or in Ouro. Or I'll disable my experience.
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| That's exactly what happened. Travel powers used to be something you looked forward to at 14. And while I am just as guilty as the next guy of using the temp powers, I can't help but feel that something got lost along the way. Making zones a bit easier to navigate and putting fun things to see and do along the way would just have made for a better solution. |
Additionally, asking for "fun things to see" to be put into the zones is... Kind of missing the forest for the trees. There ARE plenty of fun things to see in the zones already, and people who've taken the time to explore can give you a full list. Suffice it to say that even the inside of Perez Park, despite being essentially a generic jungle, still has plenty of interesting things to see in it.
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I keep saying that the Mission Architect came at the wrong time. We didn't need player created content, because that content is limited by the scope of all the dev created content in the game. It can't exceed it in any way aside from story content. It can only tell a different story. The core game needed upgrading first and foremost before you attempt to let people show off what they made. Because unless you look very closely, you're going to see the exact same thing you've been seeing for the past 5 years, story aside. That is, someone who was a past player of this game coming back and looking at someone playing MA stuff will not truly see anything different apart from custom enemies. And even those enemies won't have different powers than what we have in the game...just powers mixed from what we all know. |
If anything, some of the best arcs I've played have proven that you don't need fancy game mechanics to do it. They've shown this by avoiding any of the "eccentric" and annoying objectives like manual escorts, running bosses and needless kill-alls.
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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.
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And the devs applied an XP increase once. Then again, plus more level smoothing. And THEN they dumped Patrol XP on top of all that.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
You musta' been reading different forums from me, then, because where I was I kept seeing thread after thread about the boring grind and slow levelling and how it sucked. Experience increases were done by player request, and I dare say as a result of player research, displaying analysis of the scope of experience increase with levels that could best be described as "schizophrenic." We got a levelling boost not a few months after this was posted.
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| And, really, they gave you the option to turn off your experience if you level up too fast. Far as I'm concerned, levelling in the 40s is still too boring slow. Not impenetrable like it used to be, mind you, but then I don't expect a character to last me a year like it was back when I had to burn myself out three times over just to get to the damn end. I am not prepared to be convinced that a levelling speed is too fast. If I miss contacts, I'll pick them up next time around. Or in Ouro. Or I'll disable my experience. |
It's about Port Oakes only lasting for about 2 levels. Why make a zone and fill it with contacts and have people handily outlevel them almost before they leave the previous zone? That's essentially taking options away. I honestly don't expect a toon to hit every contact in every level range on their way through to 50...but why should my contact list be filled with inactives who have only referred me to another contact...which might also be invalid for my level range?
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| I don't know if that's nostalgia speaking, but as far as I remember, there was never a time when people enjoyed jogging through the Hollows and exposited about how much fun it was to not have a travel power. I don't remember anyone ever looking forward to a travel power with glee (outside of genuinely new players) so much as looking forward to a travel power with a grunt and a snark about how much it sucks to not have one. Even I, who enjoy running around the place, will only go as far as to say that "it's not so bad." I will stop just short of trying to claim it's good, because spastic enemy level fluctuations from useless grey to impossible purple makes such treks increasingly pointless as you level up. |
That's what I'm talking about where you apply one solution but you would have been better served by fixing the core of the problem in the first place.
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| Additionally, asking for "fun things to see" to be put into the zones is... Kind of missing the forest for the trees. There ARE plenty of fun things to see in the zones already, and people who've taken the time to explore can give you a full list. Suffice it to say that even the inside of Perez Park, despite being essentially a generic jungle, still has plenty of interesting things to see in it. |
I'm talking about adding things to zones like missions from NPCs in passing. Where taking down mobs leads to clues that can give you mini arcs to pursue. I'm talking about where going through a zone gives you something to do besides fight random mobs for LESS XP than you would get if you were in an instanced mission.
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The point of the Architect was to let people tell their own stories. And unless you are incapable of writing or reading, the current system does nothing to stop you from doing just that. And if you are a good enough writer (and many are), there's nothing stopping you from outdoing the developer content which, quite frankly, does not seem to have been written by a professional in the majority of cases. That's the beauty of the Architect - it gives you the ability to outdo the developers in the one aspect that has no practical entry cost - writing. And I happen to think that good writing and good scripting is what makes an arc or a mission good, not custom enemies or annoying game mechanics. If anything, some of the best arcs I've played have proven that you don't need fancy game mechanics to do it. They've shown this by avoiding any of the "eccentric" and annoying objectives like manual escorts, running bosses and needless kill-alls. |
I'm pretty much with Sam on this. I absolutely love how quickly you level in this game. I love how they just hand you levels in the early-game with a flower bouquet and a card that says "I hope you feel welcome!" It's one of the reasons I'm playing this MMO, and not any other, especially older ones where grinding is required to progress.
Outlevelling contacts may have been a concern, but frankly, we already have Ouroboros and we're able to turn our XP off. You're not forced to carefuly calculate what to do to do it all, you've got sufficient options to do it all in your time.
Besides, one effect of being able to level up so fast, and having many character slots, is that it encourages making more characters. So what if you only get to do one contact in the 5-10 range? One week of playing, you've got five characters that will have done all five contacts.
I respect that people come into this game preferring one style of playing over another. I don't want to levelling slowed down, though. You could say that in that regard the game caters to my interests more than to yours, but you CAN slow down your levelling speed. If instead the 'default' levelling speed was slowed down to satisfy your preferences, well, I doubt I would have any option then to increase the speed to do something I like. The way it is, people who prefer levelling slower and people who prefer levelling faster could feasibly be sastisfied both, the other way, one group would be neglected completely in favour of another.
I do agree, though, that having inactive contacts clutter your contact list can get rather annoying, and if the devs could get a way for inactive contacts to remove themselves right away without you requiring to visit them first, I would welcome that.
On the topic of getting travel powers too early, well, I can't really agree that that is the case. The thing with MMOs, they always wow you with their sheer size the first time you play it. Play for a month or two, though, and the huge world you saw will warp into a merely empty one. You already saw most of it, and you just get tired of traversing the same desolate wasteland or forest with nigh-identical trees at the slight chance there might be a pretty-looking texture somewhere. Having fun things to see is nice, but once you already saw them? I'm afraid MMO graphics cannot come close to the feeling of watching a sunset or visiting a museum. You only want to see that stuff once, and then you just wanna do your quests.
I also sincerely doubt that putting travel powers to a later level 20 or hell, even 30 would do more harm than good. It would not encourage street-sweeping again because, as already mentioned, the XP just isn't worth it. Instead, it'll just be tedious to navigate through dangerous places to get somewhere where you will get worthwhile XP.
If you want people to street-sweep, you need to give them a reason to do that, not force them to do it. To my understanding, being beaten in a zone gives you more debt than being beaten in an instance already, so it'd only make sense that you increase the amount of XP that zone mobs give you, risk vs reward and all. Slashman's idea also has merit. In the end, if you want people to do one aspect of the game, you need to give them a reason to do so. Exploration is only fun until you're done exploring and saw it all, so tweaking zone mob XP so that it's a feasible alternative to mission arcs, or creating unlockable mini-arcs like Slashman mentioned might result in less people just being instance-shut-ins.
0.02€
To be clear, I'm not advocating that they again slow the leveling speed or remove the level curve smoothing that's already in place. I'm trying to illustrate that many times, the initial response to a problem does not address the core cause.
And further, that once you put some things in place, you can't simply remove those things because of player outcry. Even when you may have realized that you made an error in your implementation.
COV's contact progression meshed better with a slower leveling curve(at least early on). I never ran out of contacts in COV. The problem was the number of contacts that areas presented and the lack of alternate choices to them. Like how you pretty much have to do Diviner Maros after a certain level in Sharkhead. Things will just point to him. That's annoying, not because of leveling speed, but because of lack of choices for alternate contact paths.
When you push increased leveling speed into those sorts of situations, you still haven't presented more content to the player. You've just made it so that the content he has gets him leveled faster. To me, that's not always the ideal solution. Sometimes all you needed was more content in a given place. Another starting contact or two, an alternative to Marshall Brass and Seer Marino etc etc.
I'm sorry, but I find it annoying when I'm on the Marshall Brass arc and I outlevel it right smack in the middle. Maybe if his level range was extended into the lower 20s it would be fine, but right now you pretty much get that every single time. Dmitri Krylov(is that spelled right?) is also a contact that I find myself outleveling in the middle of his stuff very easily.
It's not that I'm hung up on leveling speeds, but I care about my toons finishing what they started while still getting decent XP for it. Sure there may be a time when I turn off XP so I can get in a whole arc that I may otherwise have not gotten, but to have to have to do it in the normal course of gameplay grinds my gears.
In terms of travel powers. This game has faster travel than just about ANY MMO out there(I don't know Champions well enough to include it). People coming into this game from other MMOs will hardly be able to judge that they need a flight pack so they can safely get to their mission zones as soon as possible.
What will stand out, is how annoying it is to get from one place to another. How difficult it is to negotiate terrain etc. The Hollows is showcase for bad zone design in terms of door distance from contacts and mob placement. It was just flat out annoying. Giving people early flight packs and Zero-g packs didn't make it less annoying...hence the mini-revamp.
I personally don't believe that bad zone design should be countered with temp travel powers. If people want to entirely avoid being in your zone apart from going to the doors there, then that's an issue with the design of your zone. Fix that first. Applying a blanket fix of temp travel powers will also mean that people may also end up missing stuff that you want them to experience in other zones as well.
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I think Chase is suggesting that level ranges be increased for the low level zones and foes as a relatively easy way of ensuring that players don't outlevel an arc while they are playing it.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
What's wrong with outlevelled content? The whole design principle of the game was to create more content than anyone could do on a single playthrough, so as to foster replayability. There WAS no such thing in the old days, because you ran through all the contacts and you STILL ran out. This is no longer the case, and I feel that's a GOOD thing. Granted, contacts or content that you can never even GET to, such as the second Family arc in Port Oaks (I've never seen it, myself) is a problem, but it's hardly the fault of levelling OR the fault of tight level ranges. Granted, I wouldn't mind contacts being given wider berth in levels, but that can't be all we're talking about.
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I believe part of the problem is that some of the blueside arcs are coded with an upper limit that reflects the intended range of the arc / contact, and not the actual upper limit of the enemy group. Thus if you expand the range to the upper limit of the enemy group, you've extended the range at which the arc can be played.
It's also my belief that this level limit would be contained in a single cell of a spreadsheet or a single line of text - in one spot for each mission - and these could be located and changed by someone.
Likewise, zone encounters could be given higher level ranges, if desired, and the lists for mission doors could be reorganized (ala The Hollows) to better concentrate missions in areas with appropriate zone encounters.
Personally, I'd also like to see the range levels of enemy groups increased wherever possible. For instance, I can think of no reason for the Skulls group to have their level range end at 14. Also, I can think of no reason for groups like Trolls, Outcasts, Tsoo, or Wyvern to start at 5, when it seems they could start at 1, just like Longbow, Hellions, and Skulls.
This applies to certain bosses as well. Frostfire is level bound to 15 while the group he leads goes up to level 20.
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Ignoring the bosses, though, Skulls/Hellions are about as weak as enemies in this game come. Extending them past 14 and having them still provide a challenge of any sort, even to characters only 5-10 levels higher, would probably require them to have new enemy types.
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Originally Posted by konshu
Personally, I'd also like to see the range levels of enemy groups increased wherever possible. For instance, I can think of no reason for the Skulls group to have their level range end at 14.
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Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.
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Right, I'm not concerned about doing EVERY contact- I enjoy it that I have the variety. I'm more concerned with two things that happen all-too-frequently before level 15:|
Originally Posted by konshu
I think Chase is suggesting that level ranges be increased for the low level zones and foes as a relatively easy way of ensuring that players don't outlevel an arc while they are playing it.
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1) I level so fast that I outlevel a contact before I complete its arc... and am stuck facing lower-level goons that are no challenge.
You can't eliminate this entirely, but you do anticipate a reasonable naturally-paced progression range. A contact should be introduced in a way that has a reasonable likelihood that the contact is still relevant to the player and has arcs that can be completed before they lose relevance. Right now, before level 15, you get second-tier zone contacts that often have nothing to say to you... or if you bother to start their stories, you outlevel them before completing them. That is bad pacing.... and a waste of resources.
They aren't even an alternate story path for another character- i won't get them on THAT character either without the same thing happening... unless I really REALLY play the system.
2) I'm barely in a zone before I move on. Again, it isn't like my alt is going to uncover more of the zone, because she'll likely breeze through just as quickly. That's a waste of good resources- and unnecessary.
If you made all the contacts available for selection at the first tier, you'd have some more variety (particularly heroside).
If you expanded the level range of a map a bit, like taking Kings Row up to level 15, then perhaps people will get to a second-tier contact, making the 'dry spell' of missing missions in higher levels less notable.
And... maybe by spending more time in places like Kings' Row... they'll eventually spend less in one of the places they've grown bored of at the higher levels.
In my imaginary bubble...
I think foes should be your level. Period.
If I am lvl 33 and in Atlas and decide to kill a Hellion, he should turn to me, laugh in my face, pop some sort of pill/suringe and turn into a lvl 33 Hellion. And then he should kick my @$$... and laugh at me.
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Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain
In my imaginary bubble...
I think foes should be your level. Period. If I am lvl 33 and in Atlas and decide to kill a Hellion, he should turn to me, laugh in my face, pop some sort of pill/suringe and turn into a lvl 33 Hellion. And then he should kick my @$$... and laugh at me. |
I think then we'd all laugh at you...
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PP, you and I are in agreement there, but I fear we'd be in the minority.|
Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain
In my imaginary bubble...
I think foes should be your level. Period. If I am lvl 33 and in Atlas and decide to kill a Hellion, he should turn to me, laugh in my face, pop some sort of pill/suringe and turn into a lvl 33 Hellion. And then he should kick my @$$... and laugh at me. |
I say let's apply the "giant monster code" to all baddies in in the "public" zones
Having Vengeance and Fallout slotted for recharge means never having to say you're sorry.