Free trial, had questions

Hi, I'm trying the game on the free trial, and I'm enjoying it so far, but I do have some questions and was wondering if anyone could answer them.

--I got a stalker up to level 14 and she stopped gaining XP. I checked through options and made sure I didn't have XP gains turned off. Is this a cap on the free trial, or am I missing something? I couldn't find any info on this on the free trial web page.

--I hardly ever see other players running around. Is Justice (I picked a server at random) a low population server, or are the low level zones not very populated, or is it something else?

--When I'm travelling, especially when I'm travelling fast, I get frequent loading lag - screen stops, hard drive light comes on, a second or three passes, then I can move again. Is this something that many people have trouble with, or is it just my computer?

On a side note, I've been very impressed with the general level of friendliness and helpfulness I've seen while browsing these forums. Thanks in advance if anyone can help with any of these questions!

first thing, trial accounts are very limited:

• trial account lvl cap is 14
• trial account inf cap is 50,000
• trial accounts cannot join super groups
• trial accounts can only talk in team and local chat

Trial account! I looked there, but I didn't think to search that phrase. Thanks for the quick help!

Welcome to the game and the forums, Crossclaw

Welcome! Something I'm going to mention: beyond first and second, population numbers don't mean much. Someone posted numbers a while back, I wish I remembered them more clearly, but either "Freedom and Virtue combined had more people playing than the rest of the servers, combined" or "Freedom and Virtue EACH had more people playing than the rest of the servers,combined."

The other servers move around a lot in the list, so you could have [making up the specifics] more people on Champion than Infinity at 6 PM, but more on Infinity at 10 PM. The only thing I can really guarantee is that you'll never see anything but Freedom or Virtue in the top 2 slots.

Here's me saying what everyone else said just for validation purposes.

1. Our trial isn't the coolest thing out there. Capping at 14 leaves out some wonderful powers. Capping at 50k is pointless, cap them at 2. Fifty-thousand is nothing in this game.

2. Justice is a wasteland compared to Freedom or Virtue. It's easy to find people in the wasteland, but you need to know how. As a Trial, you don't have the ability to find them. Go to Freedom. [see note below]

3. While it's fun to just blame your hardware for chop when you get near a group of people, due to it having to load all the capes and faces and whatnot, see how tight your virus stuff is. I've never had a problem with CoH that wasn't caused by security software. [Except my Nvidia makes the sinister shoulderpads 8 inches behind my gals.]

Welcome to CoH.

[Note re:Freedom and Trial.
One of the things unique about Freedom is the mental climate in Atlas Park. Virtue is getting as bad, or worse due to the RP, but the Broadcast Spamming is horrible there. No spam in the traditional sense, but people who love their own words will have chats with others or their ilk using the broadcast channel.

You can ingore these people, even give them bad ratings [stars that float over their heads], or, as I'd advise, get out of Atlas ASAP. Once you're at or near level ten, get into SC and get on a team.

But there's the problem. With Trial you can't use Find to find people on teams to see if there is room for you since that requires a tel. At the right time, you might be able to get onto a team by doing a broadcast "LFT", but even if you hear a team shouting "LFM PST" you cant' send that tel.

That said, the SC in Freedom has about 20x the people of the Atlas Park of Justice. And I got nothing against the small town servers, I got my 50 on Liberty. But, really, if you're doing a trial, I'd go for high populations due to the communication crippling. And for small town, I really recommend Champion or Triumph.]

Oh, and katana/wp ftw.

Everyone's already covered the big stuff, lemme just mention that as a new player you may not be aware what big player draws are *nearby* as you zoom around.

So if you're near a "market" area - Wentworth's or the Black Market, you may be lagging as it loads a bunch of players in the market. If you're near the Atlas statue in Atlas Park, you may be lagging as it loads players visiting City Hall, assembling for a Costume Contest, or just hangin' out under the statue.

Try to take note of what's nearby when you experience lag, that may clue you in on a cause, or at least eliminate one.

And for teaming - if you want to Team, make sure you add as your Search comment: "Trial Account, can't send Tells, please Blind Invite"

Good luck, welcome to the game and the forums.

Welcome to the game. Others may say Justice is lower population but I never have trouble finding teams. True you really need access to the global channels but when you pay to stay two big ones on justice are Justice United and JFA2010. Come say Hi on the Justice forums and there will probably be several people who offer to help you out getting started. You can PM me and I'll try to join ya sometime.

I find that most of the difficulty in finding teams comes not from how many people play a particular server, but from what time they play.

For example, if it's early morning you're not likely to get a lot of willing team members, as a lot of people are just on to get a bit of play time in before they need to leave for work, school, etc., and don't want to commit to a team they'll just have to ditch in 15 minutes. Or, if it's late at night you may not get many team members because people are about to log off to go to bed.

Then there's the whole pesky timezone thing that makes it even worse. Person A is getting ready to go to bed, person B is just on for a bit before work/school, and you're sitting there at 5pm with nothing to do. :P

I'd also like to welcome you to our game, hope you are having a great time!

Trial accounts are very limited unfortunately, but it's part of our aggressive stance on dealing with RMT.

I'd like to reiterate some of the things mentioned above, including joining global channels if you decide to be a full subscriber. It's a great way to start to get to know people, and Justice (and all the other servers except Triumph, those people scare me) has a lot of good people to know. Given the instanced nature of a lot of our content and the ability for players to hide from searches things are usually much busier than they appear.

Regardless, welcome to CoH and I hope you enjoy your stay. I'd be very interested if at some point you'd like to let me know what your first impressions of our game are, as it's valuable feedback that really helps us improve.

Thanks,

Nice. OP got a redname post. :P

Due to the Trial limitations, I'd echo the idea of posting on the Server Forum to try and hook up with something to do. (We appreciate the limitations since they are in place to block out a lot of annoying RMT spamming and such, but it does hinder your ability to check out the game)

If you find Role-Playing or, at least, players that tend to stay in-character and/or come up with interesting character concepts, then Virtue may be more for you than Freedom.
Don't get me wrong... These things can all be found on any server (Including Freedom), but Virtue is the unofficial role-playing server and has a bit of a higher concentration of that atmosphere.
I only say this because of the Free Trial limitations making it best to play on a high population server.
If you are more into the fun of the things I mentioned, then Freedom could turn you off a bit.

Nothing against anyone or any style of play... Just thought I'd mention this, as a few steered you towards Freedom.

And, once you have an actual account without limitations... Any of the servers are wonderful to play on, no matter your playstyle and interests.

Good luck! And welcome!


EDIT: Oh, and Golden Girl... Nice attempt!

Wow, glad I checked back in on this!

I've gone ahead and gotten a full account, at least for a month or three, and my little claws/regen stalker is now up to her low twenties. (I know, I know. I promise she's neither a Wolverine ripoff nor a catgirl.)

Impressions: When I saw that CoX had a free trial, I initially just picked it up to play with the character creator for a week or two. At some point I actually tried playing some of the characters I'd made, and was really amazed at the depth of the low-level game. It's very unusual, in my experience, for a game to let you have interesting choices and interesting combinations of powers in the early levels - my energy/energy blaster, for example, while probably a horrible horrible choice for teaming with, is a -ton- of fun for soloing, just because I get the giggles every time enemies try to run up and get bowled over for the third time in a row, by yet another power. The heavily instanced content has its good sides and bad sides - the storylines are quite interesting, but as people have said, it can make it hard to find other players to just hang out with. Obviously I can't really judge the mid-level or high-level game yet, but it seems like it should stay reasonably fun to just play the characters, and there's always levelling an alt if it doesn't. Also - character creator? Still fun to just poke around in even if I'm not intending to make the character.

Hair: I'm a child of the 80s and it shows in my characters. What is this 'overly hairsprayed' concept?

Server: Thanks for the suggestions, but I think I'll stay on Justice for now. Sure, it's only taken me a week or so to build my characters up to where they are, but that's still a week I'd have to spend rebuilding them somewhere else. I tend toward light/casual roleplay - my characters have a backstory and a personality that affects how I react to things when playing them and what missions I pick for them, and mostly stay in character apart from explicitly OOC channels, but I don't tend to get involved in ongoing RP plots or stories.

Thanks again for the help and the warm welcome, this is definitely one of the best MMO communities I've run into.

ETA: It'd be really nice if people on trial accounts could at least reply to tells sent to them - I can totally understand restricting the initiation of tells to cut down on moneysellers, but it bothered me that I couldn't respond to a couple of people who asked me to team just as I was about to log off, so that they might think I was ignoring them or being rude. If not that, then at least an autoresponder or something to let them know they just sent a tell to a trial account player and won't be getting a response back.

Yay!
Welcome aboard, Crossclaw!
From my experiences, Justice is an excellent server with a really cool community.
Nothing against other servers, but hey, the Justice community has left an impression on me! (Even though I play on Virtue)

I love what you said here about the early game offering a lot of fun options and powers... and about the rest of the game being fun as you can simply just enjoy playing your character. This is what I find to be true, so you should enjoy the rest of the game (Plus, there is definitely more).

The powers are fun. So many different powersets are just as fun (To me, at least).

Knockback, and just the overall physics add an aspect of fun that I find makes me smile and, often times, laugh like I am playing this game for the first time throughout all my sessions.

Seeing enemies hanging on railings after knocking them over them, tumbling and crumpling down stairways, against walls, off of ledges... It just never gets old to me.

One other possibly helpful advice... The knockbacks in your Energy/Energy powers are not a bad thing once you gain a bit of understanding and strategy behind it on a team. Using them to keep enemies pinned against a wall, in a corner, send a runner flying back into the crowd... If you fly/hover, you can aim the knockback down and simply send them into the ground.
*Just be mindful and your teammates won't mind at all.

* - Well, you may encounter the rare player that despises all tings knockback... but they are truly rare. Seriously. Wild knockbacks with reckless abandon from some past experience can taint it for some limited-minded people... But, on the whole, that is not a common mindset.
Most of us know just how fun it is and that it can also be very beneficial, never mind not-harmful.

Anyways, enough rambling from me.

Glad you liked it enough to stick around!

Hope you continue to love it!

If I'm not mistaken, the issue is getting the system allow only replies to sent tells. Currently that doesn't work right.