Excitment... and FEAR.. about new "End Game" content..

Cant we all just agree to Hope that we will get all new content from 1 to 50. No matter how big of a fan you are of this game... the current content is old, and has been done by alot of people - to the point - that they dont want to do it again.

Most people I know, are currently thinking they will not be forced to do all the old content again, nor do they want to.

Their plans for the future not withstanding, this is what most people are hoping for in the circle I travel in. They are not trying to even hear that they will have an AWESOME new 1 to 20 expierience, and then be kicked out to the same carp we have now. They just do not want it.

Define content.

As long as I still get new costumes, powers, and animations, sure. I am all about some new story stuff. If story stuff is going to completely make the things I want go away, then nope we can't all agree.

I am sure the paid expansion will have all of the above. My concern is with the shift from stuff to all story, being in the free issues.

I have been plying non-stop for over 5 years. I have played many times w/o PLing. I didn't understand bridging till i8. I get where you are coming from PP, I just don't want to see the aesthetics take a huge hit for story content. If I wanted all story, I could play a MUD.

I hope people noted War Witch's post on Friday, where she showed a screenshot of a resistance member from GR. New costume options and a new map and map tileset, all shown in that little picture. There's obviously stuff in the works, and we only know so much about it all. That's all I'm arguing for- they have stuff in the works, and we have little peeks at it. No need to get overly rampant with the speculation from there (though I have to say again that little updates every week would keep people focused on what is coming for sure, rather than all of this speculating peole have been resorting to. Get cracking, marketing!).

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This is easy enough for me... if the new endgame content isn't either

1) Something that would directly or indirectly help me in PvP
2) Something that would allow me to stay ahead of the reward curve (i.e. another ITF, LGTF, STF)

I will probably run it once or twice and then not bother after that, kind of like the Barracuda SF.

I have 17 L50s and I'll be grateful for any new Dev-created content that gives me an excuse to play my favourite L50s again. I only play my L50s occasionally now - on new/holiday content, self-imposed challenges, weekend TFs/SFs, and the occasional raid if I'm in the mood - maybe 10% of my total playing time - for the most part I'd rather be levelling a new character, exploring a powerset combination I haven't played before.

The deal-breaker for me is whether the new endgame content will be more fun for me than levelling a new character - what I don't want is mass zerg drudgery-by-rote, punctuated by boring hang-time and the petty tantrums of armchair dictators, like the raiding endgames in most other MMOs.

As long as the endgame system doesn't take the fun and replayability out of the existing game then I have no reason to dread it. My main fear is that Paragon Studios may become so focused on endgame content that they end up spending most of their future Dev time on it - just like Blizzard have done in the past, even though only a small minority take part in WoW's endgame - the last thing you want is a Dev team spending over 90% of their time/resources on content for under 10% of the playerbase.

Ironically since EverQuest 1 (where I was a serious raider and eventually burned out on it) I've quit almost every endgame-focused MMO I've played within a few months of hitting the level cap. CoH is the first MMO I've played for longer than the 3 years I spent subscribed to EQ1, and until now it really hasn't had an endgame to speak of - which (on the whole) I've been fine with.

I wanted to respond to this as well:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain Cant we all just agree to Hope that we will get all new content from 1 to 50. No matter how big of a fan you are of this game... the current content is old, and has been done by alot of people - to the point - that they dont want to do it again. Most people I know, are currently thinking they will not be forced to do all the old content again, nor do they want to. Their plans for the future not withstanding, this is what most people are hoping for in the circle I travel in. They are not trying to even hear that they will have an AWESOME new 1 to 20 expierience, and then be kicked out to the same carp we have now. They just do not want it.

I can certainly agree to that - I really hope the information that GG keeps zealously parroting has changed since Herocon. I want new content at every level range - fresh high quality story content that I don't have to dredge through a browser in AE to find, set on new tilesets/maps that I don't automatically know all the spawn locations on, with new factions/enemies that I haven't been fighting since 2005, with stories/briefings that I don't know every word of.

I'll also be gutted if GR doesn't have at least as many missions/arcs as CoV had - Mission Architect was supposedly developed originally to let the Devs produce more content faster (before Posi decided to release it to the masses) so lets see some evidence of that in practice, please!

I'm not quite as dismissive of new L1-20 content - sure, we get through that level range quickly, but most of us have also experienced the existing L1-20 content more often than any other level range, just from all the characters we've deleted at low level or that haven't yet made it past low levels. Also the L1-20 content is arguably more important than any other level range because it is the content that new/trial players will see first and probably use to decide whether to buy/subscribe to the game (and in that respect I hope they force trial account players to start in Praetoria, because the existing CoH newbie hero content is not a good example of what this game can do).

Personally I don't dislike playing low level characters, but I've taken to using double xp weekends to rush several new characters to L20ish purely because I'm so tired of the existing low level content (though I still enjoy all the post-I2 blueside content at L15-35, and all redside content at L30+). So I'll be pleased enough if GR caters to L1-20 and then picks up again at mid-to-late-levels, but I'll be blissfully happy if things have changed so that we can now do levels 1-50 almost entirely in Praetoria without ever leaving.

I would have no problem if GR only had 1-20 missions. I would play them on new alts and on my old favorites to get any badges or for the fun of it. But I say that expecting that they would soon add additional content, say level 21-40 in I17 and 41-50 in I18.

If they did something like that, I would be satisfied.

My big, A-Number 1, top of my personal list hope for any end-game content they add is that is is solo-friendly. Note, that doesn't mean soloable in this case. It's my hope that they make it open enough that if you aren't part of some gigantic SG (or even in a SG at all) you still have a reasonable chance of being able to get in on the end-game content either via coalitions, pick-up teams or running it with friends. The level of difficulty doesn't matter (well, it does, but only to the point of a reasonable chance of success while being difficult enough to be a challenge) just how open the admittance is.

This was my same problem with the CoP. I was concerned that my small SGs and unaligned characters would have zero chance to run it. None of us had all that great an interest in IoPs (we wouldn't have turned one down, but had no active interest in havign one either) we just wanted to run the CoP for the enjoyment of doing it. In the case of the CoP this became a moot point with it being borked from before the start and lasting about 12 seconds on live, but it is a good example of what I (and others I am sure), personally, wouldn't want to see in end-game content, not that others would have a problem with it.

(Wishful thinking follows...)

Personally I'd like some of the new End Game content to be based around new zones - zones which would be to the current hazard zones what the hazard zones are to regular zones, only more so - active patrols, roaming EBs and GMs, zone events... anything that'll give some challenge to the purple'd out 50s that will go there.

The dark heart of Oranbega? A revamped Shadow Shard? The Rikti Home World? I'd go to zones like that just for the fun of pushing my 50s to their limits. Any further advancement would just be a bonus.

More level 50 content? Yay!
Making our characters more powerful? Yay with qualifications.

I play LOTRO. The game does several things very well, but where it falls short in my mind is the level and gear trap. Towards the end of the game and becoming more prevailant at end game is the requirement to have uber gear, and specialized gear for different raids.

I have really enjoyed LOTRO - right up until I hit my late 50s (the level cap is 65 now) and realized that it wasn't just my ability to play and level that determined if I could participate in a raid, it was if I had the right gear. Having to repetively complete one raid to get the gear, piece by piece, to be able to participate in another raid, ad nauseum. Yuck.

I lost interest in playing it when I hit 65 and was no longer progressing and had only gear, gear, and more gear to work on. Replayability, something this game does very well, was the problem.

I have 10 level 50s in COH/V. I expect that I will play my favorites of these through the new content and make them more powerful. What I don't want to see is the gear (enhancement) trap. I'm already getting burned out on IOs since the I13 change to IO drops. I had lots of fun IOing out my and SGmates toons when a recipe dropped for every tf. Not so much now. And purples... I really do not want to see end game content balanced around those.