Cleaning Up Old COH Contacts

I have no idea how complicated this idea might be to actually implement but recent updates to the game have suggested an idea about how to kill two birds with one stone when it comes to the old contacts in the original CoH game. I've tried to keep this short but there is a summary below.

Current Situation: When the original game was developed there were only two options for leveling. You could do contact missions or you could street hunt. As such, the original contacts were extremely heavily loaded with random "one shot" missions. Many of those one shot mission are simple street hunt but some are quite interesting if you can actually sift through the extra stuff.

But those extra "filler" missions stopped being necessary. City of Villains and Going Rogue along with modern CoH contacts are much more streamlined. Instead they have one major storyarc and maybe one or two really interesting one shot missions. Other stuff is offered through the newspaper and tips missions. This makes the contacts far more meaningful and interesting to work for. Additionally, the XP curve has been smoothed a lot, so now it's easy to out level an old CoH contact without even ever seeing the storyarc that they would offer.

Possible Solution: Part one of this suggestion is to go through the old contacts and weed out filler missions that don't really contribute to the individual contact's goal. Those old contacts would thus be revitalized and it would be easier to actually hit their story arcs before we outlevel them. A particularly important target would be generic "kill X" missions which really just existed to help fill the run to the next contact level in the old game.

Part two involves the old content. It is wasteful to throw it out, especially since many of the missions are perfectly good; the only problem is the volume of missions on a given contact. It might be viable to rework many of the missions into police scanner or tips missions. This way, the excellent writing from one shot old missions isn't lost, but instead they help enrich the modern random mission supply systems. Even the "kill X" mission might be able to find a home in a new system as long as there is some way to make sure three of them aren't offered at once.

Summary:

1: Clear out excess missions on the old CoH contacts to make the storyarcs more accessible. In particularly, the generic one shot "kill X" street sweeping missions should go as they have become obsolete and one shot door missions that aren't strongly associated with the contact.

2: Rework some or all of the remaining missions into tips or police scanner missions rather than discarding old material. It could even be a tip or police call from the original contact to pay homage to the old source.

3: It might even be possible to add street sweeping missions to the police scanner/newspaper. I would recommend that if this is done, ensure that the scanner can only offer one of these at a time.

Anyhow, that's all from me. I'll be interested to hear what you all think about this idea.

Yes yes dear god yes. And while we're at it, how about we make some of these contacts a little more interesting besides "random Joe Schmuck on the street"? If you read the bios you see that some of them are former superheroes but you'd never know it otherwise.

Let's aim higher:

Make all the legacy arcs exactly like the zone-arcs of the new zones (CoV, Striga, Faultline, etc...).

Chose one and only one contact (instead of 3 or 4) who can give out that arc, clean it up and limit it to that zone and one adjacent hazard zone.

Then move all the one-offs to another contact to be the zone's perpetual-mission machine.

Do I even need to comment on this?
I'll keep it simples, ok?

YES!!

The old content is utter dross. It took me a day and a bit to make the arc in my sig which would do away with Azuria's 'Not actually a connected arc' missions. And thats just using the AE, not the proper Dev tools.

Revamp > Oh look its SHINY derp da derp!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

yes please!

it's sad because at this point i've had to give up on old CoH contacts because i don't want to waste my time on those old filler missions and trying to figure out how navigate the Contact tree labyrinth in order to hit the Story Arc i want.

i've tried to just use Ouroborus for those old missions, but that's a bit, i dunno, immersion breaking.

i'd really like to be able to do those arcs at the appropriate time in the life of the character. please clean it up and bring it up to the standards you've established with CoV and GR.

thanks!

Yes. Streamline the contacts, spruce up the character models, and remake the arcs to be more in line with newer content.

Especially do this for the higher level arcs from way back when arcs were filled with tons of filler because that's all that you had to do at that point.

If you take a level 1 Praetorian arc and compare it to one of the level 1 arcs in Atlas....the comparison is not very favorable to the 6 year old content.

Frankly, I challenge anyone to come up with one GOOD reason why any of the old Pre-Paragon Studios dross should remain in game outside of Ouroborous, and then only maybe.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Because Sturgeon's Law notwithstanding, there's quite a few quality missions among the dross?

Because the Flashback system is needlessly restrictive and if it remains as is, relocating anything to it would mean condemnation to obscurity?

Because pre-Paragon arcs aren't inherently better than the unconnected missions? {Banefire, Tsoo takeover...}

That said, there is some crud that needs to be cleaned out - FedExes to PvP zones or Hollows/Striga/Croatoa can be replaced with "You have been contacted by..." notifications.

Some of the street missions also give out temp powers that can't be obtained otherwise.

Also, if you're fishing for the arc starter mission, use the Abandon Mission option. Once you accept the first mission in the arc, the book icon will pop up and the arc will start.

An open letter to NCsoft