Discussion: City of Heroes 6 Year Anniversary Celebration!

This event was atrocious. I was able to participate in last year's event, and there was not only WAY less lag than this year's, I was able to get the AV defeat badges. This year, I decided to play on my main Brute, and not only was the lag so horrible I had to wait 10 seconds just to move, I wasn't able to get even 1 Hero defeat badge despite spamming as many attack buttons as I could. Heck, I dunno if I was even hitting the enemies, since there were so many people in the zone, getting close to one was like fighting a bunch of parents for the last shipment of Tickle-Me-Elmos.

I'm not trying to sound entitled, but I had very high expectations of this event, especially because I now have a high-end computer, and I am extremely disappointed. I hope an explanation and apology goes out for why the game wasn't prepared for the masses of players it was trying to gather in the first place.

Just got finished up on Liberty, and it was a blast. I was in Talos (because it was a bit less laggy than Atlas) and walked away with all the RV AV badges, plus the ones for Kraken, Adamastor, and Babbage as well as around 300 Merits (and about 400,000 in XP debt, but who cares?). It was laggy as heck, but it was still fun.

And major props to American Valor for trying to direct a very large mob of heroes and succeding for the most part.

I should have set my graphics to horus, Liberty AP was lagging quite a bit. I hope Freedom can handle this event.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nights_Dawn Hazy is right

Got the gold title on my namesake character on Justice in Talos. Got 3 villain AV badges which was cool but as time went on the lag got worse and after 3 crashes I called it quits. So I went over to Protector to play.

Got 6 of 7 FP badges (Numina only apparently showed once), finally nailed Caleb, and walked off with a full tray of EoE and about 150 merits... despite the disco ball lag.

Nice idea, but pretty pathetic in practice. The lag on Virtue was atrocious and makes me wonder how things will be when everyone is starting in Praetoria in GR. They seriously need to work on server performance when there are large amounts of players/mobs in open areas. Even with graphics at a minimum it was worse than a slide show.

Oh yeah, I was totally thinking how much worse the next one will be with Ultra Mode!

Graphically, the game was moving smoothly for me. I would click a power and it would go off, then I'd hit the next power in my attack chain and it would take awhile as the game allowed other characters' attacks to go off before coming back around to me. All the while the game would be running smoothly graphically, though. Definitely a lag in communication.

You know, a little more warning would be nice. I've been playing since i7 and I have yet to be able to participate in even one of these events. I am told 'it was on the forums so shut up'. Well it wasn't bloody well on the forums for very long, and certainly not long enough to make arraignments to be logged in.

Shafted, excluded, left out and resentful.

I played the event last night in Union heroes... as soon as the event was opened to more maps, lag started to decrease, as it was almost unbearable at the beginning. I earned nearly 80 Reward Merits and 11 badges (Frozen Fury and Iron Warrior, Hallow Spirit, plus the 4 Recluse's Victory AVs and Justiciar, and a few more)) in less than 2 hours; then, although the event was still ongoing, I retired and soloed a story arc through Ouroboros.

Now I do have to check my Defiant characters and decide what I'm using tonight!

Despite what has been said, I found this year's anniversary event much more manageable then last year's. Last year, it was chaotic enough that all I was capable of doing after I logged in was (a) Stand Around, and (b) Die. I was forced to log off after the third time of being unable to do anything until I got the window for teleporting to the hospital.

In fact, IIRC, someone tried to rez me two of those times, and I never even got the chance to accept the rez.

This year... well, I map servered twice, and the game crashed once, but ultimately, I made it through all three hours. From a rewards standpoint, I did excellent: All the Zombie Apocalypse badges, all the RV Hero badges, Caleb, Deathsurge, the Winter Lord, Jack in Irons and Eochai, and I more than doubled my Merits.

For a toon that isn't even 30 yet, this is very good.

On the other hand, I have to chip in that this isn't a really balanced event. The Giant Monsters and the Zombies were okay to fight. But the AVs and DE Monsters? If you weren't 49 or 50, you might as well have been blowing smoke at them. Same for when the level 54 Rikti started showing up. With the rate people were disconnecting, Team makeup and leads were changing all the time, and having a 50 in charge wasn't always possible.

Overall, it was an experience. And one I'm glad only comes once a year, for the shear havoc it wreaks on my computer.

I played lagfest on virtue and I was utterly disappointed. I have a high end computer with a liquid cooling system, quad core, GTX 260 vid card, 2gb ram, etc... I could barely move. The only relief was when the devs decided to announce that FP were showing up in multiple zones. I decided to go to Grandville and there were so few people there we had to ask for help on global channels. Unfortunately, this only happened once. It would have been much better if the entire event was spread out over multiple zones so that we wouldn't have had to deal with all of that lag. I crashed at least 5 times. When I wasn't crashing I was busy waiting 10 minutes for my powers to go off. If this is the face of things to come then maybe it's time to think about moving on. I am sorely disappointed.

P.S. I had planned on getting a 2nd account next week. Now I'm rethinking that decision.

Not bad. Of course, lag was interminable off and on, but for a while, I was actually able to string a chain of attacks (which unfortunately led to being killed FASTER by a GM/Hero).
Got some AV badges, some GM badges, a lotta DEBT and some rewards.

Fun for awhile despite the lag. Maybe they could have tonight's on all servers instead of sticking to the previous plan?

Rich

So for those who participated last year - it was pretty much the same event? No new badges, right?

I went on vacation on the 21st and got home last night, so I completely missed the announcement and the event on Virtue, but if it was the same as last year with no new badges, I don't mind.

It does sound like the way this was run this year was worse than the way it was run last year. IIRC, last year it ran from like noon to 10 PM ET on ALL servers simultaneously. That probably spread people out more than the way it was run this year leading to all the lag folks are complaining about.

Last year I played on Virtue during the somewhat less crowded afternoon hours and Guardian in the evening, and I didn't experience any rage-inducing lag on either server.

The Giant Monster Invasion last night was indeed epic in nature. I did enjoy myself, rolling to 5 different servers to cover my mains on those servers to get in on the fights being done there. Pros and Cons of the event:

PROs-
1. Great opportunity to team with folks I haven't seen in years, fighting side by side against Giant Monsters, Arachnos and Devouring Earth creatures. Epic battling!

2. Obtained many badges I haven't had the chance to get for one reason or the other; earned fantastic merits for my characters too!

3. Event lasted for the full three hours on each of the servers I was on (from what I gather), where last year we waited around for a dev/GameMaster to show up and drop the Giant Monster mob in a spot in a zone for about 1/2 hour or so and then bail to another hero/villain zone without us knowing where to go or even what server to try and jump to. The solid 3-hours effort on each listed server was VERY appreciated!! :-)

4. Villains and heroes both fought for the duration of the event; not one mob of GMs at a time for only a short time heroside, then sequentially to dropping GMs villainside, and then leaving.

5. Was able to log into any of the servers on the event day's list during the designated times and be able to jump right into a fight.

6. Opportunity to et some awesome screenshots.

7. Team captains did a fantastic job of keeping the team size to a full 8 people as a rolling PUG as people jumped off/got tired of the lagfest. Team size maintenance and team member effort was fantastic; I didn't see any of my teamates on any of the servers I gamed on last night 'sitting on the sidelines'; they all participated.

CONs -

1. Lag, as usual, was immense. Took me several minutes to die (courtesy on a one-shot blast from Lord Recluse), transport to the hospital, and get out of the lobby of the hospital.

2. Lag, massive attack overload, and inability to toggle/fire off powers led to inability to obtain some RV badges against the Arachnos mob. On some of the servers, I was able to get the defeat badges, but on the high volume ones, none, even though I was fighting them from the second they popped up :-(

3. The foums post mentioned to be in Atlas or Talos for heroes, Cap for villains; GM battles were dropped all over the zones: KR, Galaxy City, Steel, Mercy, Port Oakes, etc. The initial message should have said "we'll START in zones x, y and z, but will branch out from there as we deem necessary after the first 1/2 hr/hour/2 hours"

4. Gold titles were very difficult to obtain. If you weren't there in the zone for that 1 or 2 minutes at the start of a GM mob drop, you didn't get a title. Many did, most didn't. To me, I don't personally care; my teamates, on the other hand, were sad pandas.

5. Only Virtue server (to my knowledge) has red text alerts telling the players on the server where the next GM mob attack was occuring; other servers, you had to hunt, or there wasn't any red text info on the attacks.

6. I hadn't realized (or quite possibly understood) that the server attacks were NOT going to be random sequentials like last year, instead, this year it was simulteaneous on all servers, (red and blue sides simultaneously as well) list for that day. After fighting for over an hour on one toon, I was told there were simulteanous battles on other servers. If I'd known that in advance, I would've budgeted my time on each server to get my mains of those servers a little face time with the GMs/RV characaters/Devouring Earth. This isn't a big issue per se; lessons learned I guess; I'll be ready for today's event now, and budget my times across my mains on the servers.

Overall, I enjoyed the event. I'm looking forward to today's blast of lagfest and fighting!

I'd like to thank Chaz, the admin that was spawning poor, defenseless monsters and AVs on Victory last night. We had a great time with him, and he did some pretty fun things. My favorite...concept...was the haunted City Hall. Basically, he filled it with ghosts, and Ghost Widows. Five of them. Played my tank the entire night, and had 3 of them on me for most of a fight, the ONLY way I survived it was because they were taking turns Black Holing me, and as soon as I got out of it I had time to taunt a couple times before another put me in it.

My friends and I definately enjoyed it, though were a little dissappointed that for some reason Chaz didn't have access to the Kronus titan, which we saw an awful lot of last year.