Obligatory "Back in the Day" Rant in Honor of i18

With i18 and GR just around the corner, it is appropriate to remind the Young Heroes of Today just how easy they have it!

Back in my day:

*We had Debt at Level FIVE!

*we had to run... RUN! across Grendel's Gulch in the Hollows and then up the mountain past the banner that read "WELCOME ANNUAL +6 DEATH MAGE CONVENTION" to get to the blasted mission door! We didn't have fancy shmancy flightpacks, temp powers or anything but our FEET!

*Fortunately, there were Taxibots in the Hollows who would TP or rez the lowbie heroes who needed help, God Bless 'em!

*We didn't have Veteran Powers... we had to ACTUALLY USE Brawl! Which is like mowing your lawn with cuticle scissors!

*There were no Green Line stops in Skyway or Founders Falls... you wanted to get to there, you RAN!

*Our Oil Slicks failed to ignite more often than the warp drive on the Milennium Falcon! It wasn't our fault!

*Our heroes who look strange without a cape had to look strange until we could do a Cape Mission at level 20! No booster pack capes, no one-shoulder cape.

*You didn't have contacts in the zone, you didn't get inspirations when you needed them, period.

*Drop a mission?? No way! Keep running that maze in Perez Park until you reach that door!

And that is all I can remember right now! All I know is that we had it harder than YOU, you whippersnappers, but we were GRATEFUL for all of it!

Now get off my lawn!

when you exemped to do a Task force you didnt get no xp ...
and you had better PRAY you're lowbie had a rock solid connection or you'd get kicked the moment he DC'd even for a moment.
i remember when Temp powers were rare. like maybe 3 missions in the 30s rare.
we didnt have vet powers, origin specific temp powers.
we had brawl and we were grateful for it.

And we didn't have those fancy IO thingies.

And forget making both money for yourself and prestige for your SG at the same time. It was all or nothing.

And I know you all love the ability to have hundreds of billions of different costume combinations. Well back in the day we could only have hundreds of millions of different options.


Edit to add. I acutally still use brawl, just not slotted. Now that it is 0 endurance it comes in handy at the lower levels to put it on auto with your melee types.

Back in my day, Perez Park was empty...




... except for the whole map's worth of villains getting stuffed in a blazing dumpster.

6-slotted Hover was as good as Fly

There were no Etoile Islands for reclusive rogues to hang out in.

If you wanted to stop Paladin's Construction, you had to sit in KR and keep running between spawn points until you saw one start to get active. Then you had to pray some n00b didn't come along and screw it up.

PDP was a happening place

ED was something you talked to your doctor about out of game.

G, D and N in that particular order hadn't found their way into our abbreviated consciousness.

If you wanted to be a monkey wrangler, you went to Peregrine Island and had it out with the beastly devils until you carved out 10,000 notches in your Spankin' Stick.

now...


GET OFF MY LAWN!!

Hobbles out on walking stick and waves alternate walking stick at the kids on the lawn.

Ye ingrates! In my time...

• We didn't customize weapons. Whatever BackAlley Brawler thought a claw was... THAT'S what a claw was... and we'd go to court o'er it!
• Sonic Resonance gave people headaches, but they would bear through for the buffs!
• You wanted to fight Ghost Widow, you brought Radiation. End. Of. Story.
• Being a Villain meant knowing that your power pools sucked, you were underpowered in PvP, and you didn't deserve epic Archetypes. And you didn't anyway. *Gets in close to the reader's face* Because you wanted storyline!
• When you got to level 50, people would laugh at ya. They'd just laugh.
• Did you miss that badge? Then ya shouldn'a been flappin' yer gums when I was telling you to fight off 100 Infected.
• PvPers cared.
• Use'in ta be ya couldn't join a mission without sweet talkin' someone a higher level'an ya into taking on a Side-Kick. If'n you couldn't charm people inta side-kicking ya, ya didn't get on a mission. You got put back like the wallflower you were.
• Level 50 meant you were done, and there were'n finite number of server slots. If ya got eight people to level 50, you were done with that server. You went on to chat, and that was it.

• There were no radio missions, everyone had to do the long storyarcs if they wanted missions.
• We used to street sweep in Hazard zones for good Xp, gradually working our way around the zone as we leveled up.
• No one knew how to fight Tsoo Sorcerers and almost every group would wipe at least once against Mr. Po.
• Debt was HUGE, you could easily have half your level in debt if you died a handful of times.
• Debt would not decline while you logged off, and you didn't get any silly Xp bonuses!
• Trolls, Outcasts and Warriors were just Hellions and Skulls but different colours.
• The Terra Volta trial was the only way to change your powers if you didn't want to delete and reroll, and it was VERY HARD
• If you wanted enhancements after 30 you had to find your origins contact and do a mission before they would sell you anything.
• There was no train to Founder's Falls, you had to run - BOTH WAYS!
• Level 40 was the cap and there weren't any APP's.
• Capes and Wings didn't exist.
• No one knew about Stamina until it was too late.
• Each person had to be individually sidekicked and you always had a few people at 4 levels below the leader who wanted to leech.
• If you exemplered you earned no Xp.
• There was no such thing as Ouroboros for travelling.
• Everybody shunned you if you were Kinetics because you were, well duh, Kinetics!
• People didn't know what Speed Boost was but thanked the Empath anyway.
• Kinetic's heal would scale with the level of the enemy, if they were +5, it would heal for hardly anything, if they were -10 it would heal you 5 times over.
• Wormhole only had a CHANCE to stun enemies, a chance!
• There was no such thing as containment damage for Controllers. You either teamed, or you waited. Or you took Air Superiority.

Back in the day . . . .

• Everybody took flurry. Yes it was that good and if you took hasten over flurry . . . . . . you sucked!
• You could run Frostfire 10 times in a single day and still get people inviting you to do it.
• Global channels didnt exist
• Heroes and villains traded differently. It's true! They actually had seperate markets i tell ya!
• You would get kicked for clicking on the team leaders glowie . . . .
• We didnt have the jade spider
• Supergroups didnt have bases

You only had ONE costume that you COULD NOT CHANGE. There were NO CAPES. It was possible to have SO MUCH DEBT that you were better off deleting characters than working it off.

• You got a team invitation practically as soon as you zoned into Perez Park.
• It was not uncommon to have multiple team wipes trying to get to a mission door in the middle of the maze at Perez Park. And if you had to go to the Hospital, you probably wouldn't be able to rejoin your team because the maze had respawned between you and them.
• High level players would offer millions of Inf to anyone who could help them find their way to their mission in the maze at Perez Park. Their pleads on broadcast were pitiful.
• If you gave an unneeded SO to someone, they were so grateful, they would have kissed you through the Internet if it was possible.
• You'd find moderately high level players still going back to Atlas Park to buy TOs because they didn't know there were other stores at the higher zones.
• There would be players who only made Mutant Origin characters because the Mutant DO store at Steel Canyon was the first store they came across and could remember to find again.

Jack would post his vision for us when we lost his way.

In my early days (late i3),

- There was no "cooperative mission" completion. If you had the same mission as someone else on the team, the team did it twice.
- There were no villains, no PvP zones, no arenas, no universities, no markets, no Day Jobs, and no flashback system.
- There was a difficulty system, but it had many fewer options than what exists now, all with names that you had to learn like a code.
- Because of the sidekicking rules explained above, it was easy to get stuck in situations where you were routinely fighting +6's, often with suboptimal enhancements. I vividly remember the second Task Force I ever ran, where every single thing on the Task Force was purple, and I did a grand total of 10 damage (as a level 28ish tank) to minions with a fully-slotted attack, the two or three times I managed to connect.
- The i0 task forces, Moonfire, and Hess were the only ones available, aside from the Trials. No one had them memorized, as most people seem to today, making not just today's "speed runs" but even "moderately paced runs" impossible. My first TF ever (Synapse) took six and a half straight hours to complete.
- There was no combining of inspirations, which made the death runs through the Hollows and Perez Park even worse. I remember trying to get one level 6 character to a door in Four Seasons and dying ten times over before giving up.
- Debt seriously and significantly slowed down leveling, especially at high levels. Debt was not halved for dying inside a mission, and there was no such thing as patrol xp.
- Kheldians took extra damage from most attacks. They were supposed to make up for this by teaming. Playing one was considered prestigious (though people still complained about them the way they do today). They didn't have their own story arcs. Those were added in i4 with no fanfare whatsoever.
- Faultline was a hazard zone with DEEP chasms. Some could not be escaped without flight, teleport, or superjumping. The area behind the dam was blocked off but visible; people used to periodically get under the map to try to look at it.
- Arachnos was directly mentioned in only one place in the game (Maestro's bio) and was called SPIDER.
- Supergroup bases (and prestige) didn't exist.
- Some Rikti didn't wear clothes.
- The Council was new. (The Fifth Column had been written out of the game at the beginning of i3.)
- All player character weapons and powers looked the same.
- There were no friendly combat NPC's in missions. (This may be viewed as a positive if you're thinking of Fusionette or Lady Jane.)
- Enemy spawns of mixed factions couldn't fight each other (except in the Council/5th Column "war" that began i3). The most they could do was the "punch each other" emote. (Hostile factions were added in i5, in Croatoa.)
- Moving to i4, once the Global Defense Reduction (yes, they actually called it that) was announced, everyone was certain the game would be either instantly emptied or become unplayably difficult.
- Geko, rather than Castle, ran the devs' Powers team. Geko did not post on the forums, read PM's, or consider player opinions as anything more than the ravings of depraved ape-creatures.
- In fact, I believe Positron, Geko, Archon Voss, and Jack "Statesman" Emmert were the only devs with rednames on the fora at the time.
- Some people still liked Statesman and would praise his ideas.
- Fly gave you a large Accuracy debuff.

Okay, that's all for now.

...stores didn't have map markers. You had to remember where to go.

Of all the QoL improvements, this ranks second only to Super Side-kicking in my book

I remember Geko, he posted a few things occasionally. There was a big thread about invuln, burn and tankers being literally immune to damage. Like Castle he spent too long on the melee forums. Us poor 'trollers, atleast we got containment when they took away our 12 Fire Imps/4 Singularities etc

What happened to Geko anyway? I don't remember Geko leaving and Castle arriving, maybe I wasn't playing at that time.

Back in the day when the wife and I started:

- There was no debt cap. I had Blasters that had multiple bars of debt.
- Blasters were damage machines. AR/Dev was a beast.
- No one made Regen scrappers. No one knew how they worked.
- Smoke Grenade hadn't been nerfed (in fact nothing had, yet). Then they discovered that there was a "decimal error" in SG's debuff code.
- People argued in Broadcast in Perez Park over other groups "kill-stealing" their Hydra packs. (Yes, we fought over who was going to get to kill them!)
- There was no place called the Hollows.
- I once watched a Fire Tank herd up the entire floor of the Sewer Trial, and single-handedly proceed to use Burn to destroy all the Rikti Bosses. The rest of us (all dead) eventually rez'd because if you were dead when it ended, well, no reward for you.
- You didn't get inspirations during a TF. Period.
- Getting the SO at the end of a TF was a BIG DEAL. You had to remember to empty a spot in your tray while fighting the last battle, or sorry Charlie, no SO for you. Got a Range SO and you are melee? Sorry!
- Ranged powers and Cone/AoE powers used different range extender enhancements.
- No capes. No tailors. Didn't like the way you looked? Reroll, pal.
- No respecs. Don't like that last power pick? Reroll there too.
- 40 was the level cap at the beginning.

I haven't played for months or posted in many more months, but I'm back because the GR side-switching thing looks to good to resist. My wife is back online too. Look for us on Freedom!

Heh.

We used to "defeat" Sally 11 times or something crazy, and there were a bunch of rabid environmentalists with a "Save Sally" campaign. I saved her alright...for dinner with a nice teriyaki and garlic marinade, yum yum.

And it took 10,000 Rikti monkeys for the badge, not to mention farming Mary MacComber for Single Origin enhancers because we were all dirt poor.

Who can forget walking around fields of angry Pumicites to get to your mission door in the Hollows, only to hospital back to Atlas Park?

Back then Hami wasn't some immobile slug (well, it was immobile) it got angry at you and shot a zillion yellow beach balls if you didn't pay proper homage.
LRSF? They offered a year sub to a team that could beat that thing!

Don't get me started on the giant monsters plaguing Paragon City, we used to form teams to fight Lusca and we liked it! We loved the debt too! I remember getting a good 5-6 bars of debt and being stalled at level 26 forever, until some Fire/Fire Tanker took me to Peregrine Island and told me to bubble him so he could herd Freakshow for hours.

Hydra Trial? Pfft. More like a Hydra picnic with level 50s having everything be grey to them, farming that thing for recipes. Of course, that was AFTER Kraken stopped giving good experience rewards. Oh, the good old days of Kraken farming.

Ouroboros? Heh. I remember when you had to pay to get the Fortune Teller mission, it was that easy to level past it. Not to mention origin powers and Containment...man what a slog it was back in the day not having that extra kick of damage.

Defiance? Pffffffffft. The good old days had Blasters falling from flight ceiling in Siren's Call then exploding villains left and right, when they weren't teleported into game geometry.

Heh, kids these days with their brand new starting zone. We had to beg the Devs for Galaxy City and jetpacks at level 6? Are you kidding me? We WALKED to the train, WALKED to Kings Row then WALKED to the end of Kings Row to talk to Paula Dempsey then WALKED back to the Hollows to talk to David Wincott then WALKED back to Paula. We were FIT heroes back then. And no one complained, no one was talking about AE either. We rescued homeless people from the Lost and LIKED IT. Then we shut down a gang war between the Skulls and Hellions and LIKED IT.

We didn't have a train going to Founders' Falls either. We didn't have the fancy schmancy Faultline. Faultline was a cesspool of Vahzilok that you were sent to in order to test your mettle. Donut shop? You were lucky to get out of there alive! You were a changed woman/man/alien being after a few days in Faultline.

Don't even get me started on your precious little Willpower and Shield Tankers. Back then you went Granite or Invuln or you went home. Fire Tankers? Fire SCRAPPERS is what they were called and they were Veng bait. We slotted Veng with Membranes we got after a long slog against Hamidon and we had Taunt because we knew it was a design decision to give us the damned power. Aggro caps? Pfffffffft. we herded rooms to corners then had that dangnabbit Energy Blaster Nova and we moved to the next spawn.

You think PvP is bad now? Try spending almost an entire match inside a Sonic Cage or Detention Field. Yeah, you spent so much time in a cage you had newspaper lining the bottom of your field of vision. Of course, back then Stalkers killed people solo. Ice Tankers had Hibernate and Phase and EM did something beside locking you in animation for hours. Heh. Kinetics Speed Boost and IR made you move better and faster too.

You kids these days with your AE, your Rikti War Zone and your Pocket D. We had Paragon Dance Party and we didn't tell you where it was. We had the Crash Site and used it for respecs and farming. We told stories and RPd our own adventure through syncing story arcs. Those were the days. We couldn't drop missions either, so we had to PLAY THE CONTENT. Dangnabbit I remember the first Positron I joined, no one knew what they were doing and it took seven hours. You call the new Positron a Task Force? Heh. Back then teams were made at the Rollister mission; THAT tested a hero's mettle.

Don't even get me started on influence. We traded 9,999 at a time then 99,999 at a time then...AND WE LIKED IT. We were careful with our influence and spent it parsimoniously. We farmed for excess inf to buy Hamis. None of this newfangled Market where you can sell your drops. We were happy when we got a level 23 Nectanobo's Stone, that was valuable! Kids these days have no sense of value, vendoring training origins, heh.

World's gone straight to hell and I'm not talking the Abyss zone or even Abyss the contact, wherever she is. I'm talking knee-deep in debt because they nerfed Fire Imps to produce only THREE imps and they made MY Forcefield bubbles so weak I'm only invited because people pity me or like me. Then they gave those newfangled Sonic shields out, don't get me started on perma-domination or even those sneaky Stalker guys stealthing newspaper missions.

Newspaper missions? We never even had those. We stalled around level 35 or so and liked it! It let us see the scenery, like Crey's Folly and Eden and the Abandoned Sewers a bit later. Oh, we didn't have quick escape powers like an Ouroboros Portal or base transporter either. WE GORRAM WALKED OUT OF THE SEWERS. KNEE DEEP IN HYDRA SPAWN AND RIKTI SONNY!

You think you have nice costumes now? We were happy to have the basic model with color tinting and a cape at level 20. We had to fight to get those capes too, and not Rikti but the playerbase and RPers and realists and easymoders...lucky to have capes at all.

Booster packs? You kids might as well call them booster SEATS for how much easier they've made the game for you. Back in the day we sidekicked to our Fire Tanker or Spine Regen friends and hoped to goodness we made it alive from the boat in PI to Portal Corp, seeing you could break sidekick range.

Tips? Here's a tip for ya sonny!

Play the gorram game for once in your life and stop bellyaching because your catgirl can't get pompoms for her cheerleading outfit. Be grateful you even have tails available at all. I remember back in the day we talked in broadcast because global channels didn't exist. Now you have TEN global channels. That's like having TEN TELEPHONES. Back in my day we had our global friend list and it had 20 spots on it. AND IT MADE US BETTER PLAYERS.

You kids and your Praetoria. When we wanted to make a villain we just made our next costume black with a blackity black aura. And when we mischose powers we slogged through wave after wave of lethal Sky Raiders and Freakshow and Rikti. Freespecs? The Devs hated us and we were lucky to get inspiration drops. Speaking of inspirations, we saved up all out tier 3s for big fights. We didn't just spend excess Merits on them.

Don't get me started on Kins, Fulcrum Shift was garbage back then, you were laughed at if you weren't a Fire/Fire Tanker or a Spine/Regen or a Spine/Dark or a...you get the point.

Heh.
You kids don't know how good you have it here.