Enhancing= A confusing system for Newbies?

Okay Yes all the relevant information to the Enhancement system is out where you can read in it Tutorial, In the books that come with the CD (If you didn't buy Digi Download) and there are various websites including mine that explain how to do Enhancements. The Biggest problem is... New People Don't Read Much!

Enless you are experianced in games that have tutorials about how to do something like our enhancement system, or have the Patients to read the stuff you are more likely to skip past it and bug the crap out of the first person you see because you don't understand the Enhance Menu you looked at or what the little Enhancement Icons are that are showing up in that bin. Get my Drift?

If they showed a cutscene for the more difficult things (That you could click skip) it would make it easier for the people who don't want to read, annoying for us who run through the Tutorial for the badges, but more help for the True Newb!

Though I am sure half of you will disagree on this, I think it would just make it that much easier (But more annoying to badge Hunters)

I don't know if this is still a problem because I've gotten so used to it... but I remember my first month was a mass of confusion about which enhancements in the store corresponded to the enhancements the power indicated it could accept. They didn't use the same words to say the same thing. I also had no real idea what some of them actually did so I didn't know if I should slot them and if so how many. The "Sets" list on each power was totally confusing too because I had no idea about inventions.

"But I want the Accurate Healing enhancement and I can't find it!"

I did read the tutorial closely but having absolutely no experience in the game (or any MMO) I was lost on multiple points. A lot of the jargon and acronyms I read or overheard in the game might as well been spoken in Greek for all the help it did.

"PBAOE? Gehsundheit."

Of course now I look at all of it and think it's fairly simple, but I do remember that I didn't think that once upon a time.

I played Star Wars Galaxies before this, so I was lost for a long while. While a Person from WoW is only lost for maybe an hour. Tells ya something about MMOs doesn't it lol.

The old /h was kinda funny...someone would pop in saying something like "enhancements"
and everyone would go "/h is a chat channel, not the help menu"..so it does make sense that they changed it to the more standard /h opens help menu. They just need to make it a bit less picky about how many arguments it can parse and just open the menu anytime it sees /h.

Of course enhancing is going to be confusing to some new players.

The questions are: why? And How to fix it?

In other MMOs, when gear drops, you can look at it and get some idea of where to put it. "Oh, I have gloves. Are these better than my old gloves?"

Or, if you have generic looking boosters like gems or what not, the bonuses they add are simple and intuitive: "+3 kill people." "+2 not die as much"

Maybe they should bury the more exact info down a bit, and when you first click on an Enhancement it just says (in large letters), "Boosts Accuracy (small)" and gives you a "would you like to know more?" button.

Of course, nothing but experience is going to help casual players realize that slotting Brawl for 6x damage might not eventually pay off.

I am a very old MMO player, i started and stoped playing this game in 2005 and it wanst even one of my first MMOs back then, now that i reactived my account the main problem is the lack of infos in the game itself, i didint looked really hard tho, but i didint find any place where it says that 3 of more of the same type enhance is not good, and the IO is still a little confusing, but the biggest problem with the guides is that 90% of them are outdated, idk about CoH because ive been playing for one week, but in WoW if i stoped playing for one patch alot of things changed and you had to relearn alot of stuff

After Looking back through the Tutorials in all the originalness, the CoV Tutorial Covered the same thing the CoH one did (Sept mentioning pets for MMs), the mistake there is after you leave Mercy Island you no longer have a Contact and are stuck to the paper. Even though the game mentions this when you get into lvl range of the Paper Contact it doesn't mention it in the fact that "This is your next and only contact to you successfully complete a Bank Robbery"

Also in both tutorials it still tells you that Enhancements are an Optional thing. If they were so optional then I could hit something at lvl 20 with no Enhances when in fact I only have a 1 in 5 chance of actually hitting what I have in target without the Enhances. Thats what isn't really explained besides the fact that the Enhancements after Trainning Lvl are confusing as hell (I learned Tech and Natural, I still have probs with the other groups and have been playing since CoV Started). I tend to stick with what I know which isn't a problem for me, but can be a HUGE problem for the new people.

Of course the problem is a new player isn't going to know any of that and the names of the DO's and SO's are terrible. Knowing they are in the same order doesn't help a lot when you can't figure out what the order is (I still have only a vague idea). The colors on the DO's and SO's are not as clear as the colors on the trainings because of the artwork so sometimes that doesn't help and that's assuming it dawns on you that the colors are the same. Then there is the problem of knowing what enhancement you are looking for (Enhance Endurance Cost vs Endurance Discount vs Endurance Reduction vs Endurance Modification, Disorient vs Stun, etc).

Thank goodness when I was brand new the mouse-over worked. I don't know what I would have done if the current bug was active (When IS that getting fixed?).

All of that was one reason I forced myself to learn the IO system (besides being broke from replacing everything every 5 levels) - I recognized the icons from the training enhancements and I didn't have to figure out the DO and SO enhancements.

But what really helped me was an awesome Widow villain-side who teamed up with my friend and I in the pre 10th level range and helped us slot up our characters by providing the cash and advice. After that I understood a lot more than what simple experience had taught me in the 20 or so levels I'd gained on my 2 heroes.

Put me in for a request to make all the enhancement names merely Accuracy, Damage, Flight etc... put the fancy nonintuitive names as the right click color text.

I hadn't made very many science origin characters... let's just say nothing says "Jump" like.... "Butadiene Exposure".

It's easy on the big 5 ...Acc,Dam,End,Hold,Heal... its all the other shades of tan and grey ones.

I'm pretty good at just going with the order, but my wife absolutely hates the current system depending on origin.

I didn't say it was impossible - I did learn after all and had figured out some before meeting the Widow. I was saying that it was confusing to me when I was new. I'm very familiar with the Info button but it is cumbersome when you have to look at every single enhancement in an attempt to find the one you want, especially if you aren't sure what you want.

I do know I bought multiple enhancements in the early days (even with a working mouse-over) that wouldn't slot because the names listed in the power didn't exactly match the names of the enhancements. I look at it now and wonder how the heck I could have been confused but the fact remains that I was. Sadly, the more familiar we become with the system the less help we are at coming up with ways to help new players learn unless you deal with a constant stream of new players.