Adventures in Pointless Time-Sinks

Enough of this insanity!

This has gone on long enough.

Doctor Trevor Seaborn, a brand new contact, decides that I need to go see Virginia Hoffman right off the bat. I go to see her. She decides that I must immediately go consult with the Bloody Bay contact at the extreme south end of Skyway.

Now, I have two options for this from Steel. I can either travel all the way to the north end of Steel and take the Green Line to the South End of Skyway, or I can take the Yellow Line from Steel and travel all the way to the south end of Skyway. Neither way is a pleasant choice.

But I make a choice and do it. Having made my decision, I talk to the Bloody Bay contact and take the Green Line from Skyway back to Steel, traverse the distance back to Virginia Hoffman from the north end of Steel to where she stands at the south end.

Virginia then decides that I must immediately go talk to Jim Temblor in FAULTLINE.

/em crushingfacepalm

She's not the only contact that does this. At some point, you will be given a contact that will give you this INSANE series of missions. Only after you've done them will she give you actual work to do. It's a mandatory time sink. And you'd better hope that that contact doesn't open a story arc.

These kinds of pointless time sinks are enormously frustrating. Another example of this is the mission to talk to a Hero Corps analyst, something I've likely already done, but which a contact feels I *must* do anyway--in King's Row--or they won't believe that I've done it to their satisfaction.

Can anyone really give me a compelling reason for leaving these types of things in the game?

Old content is old

and the former Lead Designer, Positron, would rather make new shinies as opposed to looking at anything done more than 5 minutes before


here's to hoping that War Witch doesn't follow the same protocol

Luckily, this sort of thing is rare redside. Not just for the lack of multiple zone of the same level, but because they learned what players like.
Players in this game stay not because time sinks keep the grind to the level cap long, but because they like the game.

I hope that they take the time to revamp the old content to streamline it and make it more fun. Sure, some story arcs have a darn good reason why you should traipse over to some other zone, but some do so for no good reason. It feels forced.

Yeah, this is easily some of the worst choices the game has to offer. I've redone the following tale several times now:

I'll get out of the Hollows at level 16, talk to a contact and I'll have to:

*Speak with the Bloody Bay representative in Skyway City
*Speak with Jim Temblor in Faultline
*Speak with the Hero Corps Field Analyst in Kings Row
*Speak with the Skyway City Security Chief

Before I can take any REAL missions. This needs to stop. It's stupid, inane design that has no reason to exist in the first place.

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.

To be fair, as BigFIsh said; this is old content. Very old. i2 for the Wincott/Hollows stuff.

It's damned frustrating, I totally agree, especially when you're doing it on the umpteenth alt.

The Dev logic to this is clear. They're probably going to get a more positive reaction from the larger number of players for new content as opposed to redesigning old stuff. You can't blame them for this approach, since you only have to read the boards here to see it's true.

Can you imagine the bile that a lot of players would spew if they thought that old content they can easily skip with Architect missions or a couple of sewer runs was being revamped rather than getting new shineys?

I completely agree with you that the lower level Hero side stuff suffers against newer content. That's not really surprising though since it's almost six years old now. The devs have come along way since the early days.

I would love for the first twenty levels of Hero game to be tightened up and given a bit of a face-lift. Sadly the devs see it as lower yield in terms of player reaction for dev hours invested. Until a vocal enough core of players make a case for it, I don't see it changing.

If I was in charge, I'd probably devote a team to removing over half of the hunt missions and patrols, reducing defeat-alls by 90%, removing all simultaneous glowy missions, reducing all pointless zone-changes by 90%, and giving out phone numbers after 1-3 missions in all instances. Always found it insane that they're wiling to entrust me with the most dangerous and risky missions of all time, but not give me their phone number (and are they all unlisted too?).

But there are also a lot of really goofy things I'd do if I was in charge, so maybe it's good I'm not.

Quote:

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

I don't see why you want hunt missions gone since you can always opt to not take them. In City of Heroes, you always have two choices for missions - instance or hunt. It's simple enough to just not take the hunt. In City of Villains, you almost always only have one mission to choose from, and even though that has fewer hunts and patrols, I still don't see that as a step up. Granted, excessive hunts inside story arcs IS annoying, especially when they really serve no purpose, and on that count I'll agree with you on removing them. But that's a small part of a larger effort in cleaning up old story arcs from useless junk, like searching through three dimensions when you can search through one, when all you'll end up finding is nothing anyway.

As for defeat-all, here we agree. As part of the above-mentioned effort, defeat-all missions would have to be drastically scaled down to only the select few instances when it is expressly needed for the story to progress. Killing everyone does not need to be a part of looking for information, not by objective mandate, at least.

Simu-click missions, I'm right there with you. They have no reason to exist, there was no reason to introduce them and I can't see a justifiable reason for them to not be simply removed from the game. I'd settle for just removing the missions wholesale. Not fixing them, not altering objectives, just kill the missions. They don't help, they're not cool and all they serve to do is block a contact.

Zone-changing I can't say I completely agree with. On the one hand, yes, it is annoying, but then on the other hand it does give the world a feeling of a larger, more organic city. City of Villains feels like a collection of iconically small Lemmings lands, like a child's playground where all the swings and jungle gyms are within the same small square on the ground. When crime happens in the city, it doesn't necessarily have to happen across the street from the police chief, and there's no reason the mob can't hold a warehouse in an area they don't have a lot of presence. That said, some more care with where missions spawn does need to be taken. Accounting and Laywer firms have no business holding offices in Perez Park or Boomtown, and a bit less travelling won't hurt anything. I still want to see us return to Kings Row and Atlas Park occasionally, but I'm not hell-bent on going there every frikkin' time, especially when I have to leg it back to Peregrine Island afterwards.

I don't necessarily feel very strongly about cell phone numbers, but I can't see it hurt anything, so why not. Let us have their phone numbers earlier, so legging it back to them so we can leg it back to a faraway mission will not be as annoying. A lot of the irritation comes when you cross the city one way to take a mission, only to be sent to a location close to where you started. Cell phones fix this, and I wouldn't be against giving them out earlier.

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.

Can't they just change these contacts to pop up a "someone wants to talk to you" new contact prompt when you hit a certain level?

This is one of the reasons why I play redside more,that and the story arcs seem better.

Sorry but when you have to go to point a,b,c,d,e to talk to every contact in 5 zones for one mish that lasts 10 minutes is alittle ridiculous.

I wouldn't mind traveling to the police station to get the safeguard IF the SWAT vans were at the police station! KR is the only place where the SWAT team is at the station. Heck, in Faultline they don't even have a van and you end up going to random doors in the zone. Talk about Immersion breaking - "You need to protect the Steel Canyon Bank! Quick - to the abandoned office building in Freakshow territory!"

And I've suggested it before but totally agree, all "Talk to contact" missions should be replaced with pop-up introductions. That was a great idea when introduced and needs to be expanded... then again, the Montague pop-up in the middle of the Officer Wincott finale caused a few problems for me this last time. No doubt that's what everyone would complain about if we actually did this.

doesn't really take too long - and once it's done it's done. This is mostly a pointless whinge and fixing it will take valuable Dev time for new shiny stuff.

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