Goofy things you thought when you were new to the game.

CoH was my first MMO, and my first days went something like this:


I was really tired of running back out to the exit door, the way I'd come in, after a mission was over. I wondered how everyone got out so much faster than I did. I thought it would be a good idea if there was a way to get out easier. After a few missions, I noticed the "Exit" button.

And:


Team leader (in team chat): Welcome to the team.

Me (in Broadcast): Thanks!

Team leader (in team chat): Mission is set.

Me (Broadcast): Ok, on my way.

Team Leader (team chat): You really should switch to the team chat channel.

Me: (silence as I try to figure out what that means and how to get the channel to change).


Unfortunately, there are more...

Way back when, before I'd really got the hang of that whole colour-conning thing... shortly after I started playing the game, I was making my tentative way around Steel Canyon for the first time when I come out a door, go running around a corner, and see this... THING... running down the street toward me that I'd never seen before.

Over the broadcast I say, "Wow, I've never seen one of these before." Someone else asks, "What is it?"

As I click on it to find out what it is, I realize to my chagrin that I still have an attack autokeyed, and I promptly take a swing at it... and get smacked one inch from oblivion. As I do the belated but sensible thing and run like hell, screaming the entire way, I shout "WHAT THE HELL IS A COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER?!"

Just as I get blasted out of my shoes.

Lying facedown on the sidewalk, I realize that I, a lowly lvl 12 blaster, have just charged a lvl 42 Rikti Communications Officer (someone else's ambush), as gales of laughter fill the broadcast, and a sheepish message makes its way through the LOLs, "sorry, that was my ambush".

Michelle
aka
Samuraiko/Dark_Respite

Oh goodness...Here we go...

CoH was my first graphics heavy MMO. I came from a MUD game called Materia Magica (was once called 'moongate' too), a completely text based game, where some of the missions required you to interact with Player Characters that were online at the time.

Mind you, I came in around issue 4 or 5, quit for a while, then picked it back up around issue 7-ish.

---My very first 'oops' with CoH started in Outbreak. 'Rescue Flower Knight' I thought this 'Flower Knight' was a player character, and when I rescued her, and she talked to me, I definitely tried to hold a conversation with her.

---I too wanted to fly, and ended up taking Hover, and six slotting it (so I was faster in moving through the Hollows and getting from Cherry Hills to the OTHER SIDE of the map.), and later Fly, which was also six slotted (so I was REALLY REALLY fast in getting away from everything)

---It was months into the game, with all this base salvage dropping into my inventory, and me without a SG, and me having no idea what to do with any of it. I met my first friend in CoH, who took the time to teach me things, and one of the first things out of my mouth was 'I have like 500 pieces of this 'base salvage' but I have no idea what it is, or what to do with it'. Low and behold, I had a SG invite, and was directed to the nearest storage rack to unload my inventory.

---I was already a good year vet, when I finally got my computer up to speed of being able to handle Freedom and Virtue server loads (Protector is my original server), and when I went to Freedom, I made a fire/kin, because I always saw people with these fiery minions, and I wanted some. First question out of people's mouths, to me, was 'are you building a farmer?' My response, 'What's a farmer?'. I had never seen a farm before, and had no idea that Fire/Kin Controllers were the AT, at the time, for farming. -cough- or that Freedom was the 'farming server' -cough-

---Learning the lingo was definitely a learning curve for me. I understood the basics like 'brb', 'afk', 'lol' and what not. But 'bio' made me think they were really writing in their biography box and taking 10 years to do it. 'SB', Trans, FS, TF, ITF, LGTF, etc etc took me forever to understand what they wanted me to do, or what we were doing.

There's more....Oh my god there's more. I still have my moments where I'll do something utterly stupid and say 'well, I just stepped back about 4 years.' But we won't get into those, lol.

Great reading! As I am still new to the game I have quite a clear memory of quite a few of the above posts, and have also picked up some tips and info.

CoH was (and still mostly is) the first MMO i have ever played so the lingo took a while to pick up, but I have also:

Avoided traffic and water so that I wouldn't take damage
Not knowing about the right mouse click thing
Rolling my first alt Goldside, hitting Pocket D then panicking as I couldn't find my way back. For a good long while.
My 2nd toon was an MM and I didn't really understand the concept of drawing aggro. I annoyed quite a few teams.

Not really a goofy thing... but an observation:

No matter how well you think you know Perez Park... You don't know Perez Park.

Over the years I've gotten pretty good at getting the badge on that bridge in the middle of the forest without getting lost or turned around. Sadly, I cannot say the same for the NEW badge off in that alcove.

I once did the skyway-to-hollows thing once back in I4. Not even a few issues ago The Hollows didn't have a hospital, so if you hosped you'd go all the way back to the zone you started from. For some odd reason I had entered Hollows through Skyway and had gotten TP'd to Frostfire. So I died... went to Skyway, went back to the Hollows, then promptly tried to run the length of the map. After about 4 times of this the Leader, realizing I was swapping between Hollows and Skyway on a fairly regular basis, asked me what I was doing... and that's when I learned about what City you entering a Hazard zone from affected what City you would hosp to.

The train-station. I don't recall performing it myself. I did however pull it on a friend back in I6 who was over one night. Ry went to the train station, clicked the zone to load into, and got up for a quick bio. While Ry was gone I checked his contact list, then rezoned him back in AP, and parked him facing the exit door on the train. Ry came back, absolutely confused as to why he hadn't left AP yet. I told him that he probably couldn't use the train till he went and talked with David Wincott over in Hollows. Yes. He went all the way to Hollows.

I love this thread! I joined CoH during the Spring Fling during Issue 11. I did many of the things that everyone has already talked about, but the ones that stick out for me are:

On a level 4 toon, I accidentally clicked the Pocket D transporter and decided to see what happened. I ended up in Pocket D (of course), but couldn't figure out the map. I wandered around, finally ended up behind the elevator doors, and accidentally entered Faultline. I was amazed and looked around a little bit, then couldn't figure out how to get back to Pocket D. I finally just deleted the character. Poor guy!

On my Gravity/FF controller, I would always open with Crushing Field because it was an AoE. It took me forever to figure out why I died so often. I can only imagine what my teammates thought.

This last one really embarrasses me because I'd been playing for a few months. After Issue 12 hit, I decided to get a villain to level 50 so I could make a crab. I picked my highest level villain (a level 30 corruptor!) and just played him all the time. Hitting a double xp weekend was great! When I hit 40, I was so excited to go see Captain Mako so I could get patron powers. His first mission is timed, and I was really struggling. With about 10 minutes left (and after about 5 deaths), I realized that I had set my difficulty too high. I quickly changed it, reset the mission, and reentered. I was absolutely panicked because... I thought that if I failed the first mission I could never get patron powers.

Needless to say, I did fail. I was greatly relieved to discover that everything was okay and Mako would give me the next mission. I'm proud to say that that corruptor has become my main.

Count me in as another 'why isn't the train leaving?' victim....

I remember starting off heroside and of course immediately seeing poor innocent citizens being harassed by nasty gangers and so I rush to the rescue with my terribly cliche SS/Inv tanker (surely that's the only thing you'd be! he foolishly reasoned) and rescue the citizen. I get the obligatory 'thank you' text and....

...they run off!

I decide at that moment for some reason the mission has now become 'escort the citizen to safety', not having realized they are invulnerable to damage, but apparently have the common sense of a housebrick. I chase them across the road to where they enter a door building....and I try to follow.

It's locked! What the?

It wasn't until I saw someone else do it and the citizen run unharmed through mobs to another door that I twigged that this wasn't your average open world game where everything that moved was targetable.

To quote Robin Williams: Oh idiot moi.



S.

Holy ^&$! You can move by right clicking the mouse? I've been using the arrow keys for 4 years!

Also, I have done the train thing.

I did the "Why isn't the train leaving?" thing a month ago.

I've been playing over a year now.

My big goof as a newb, though, was consistently running back to Ms. Liberty. I thought she was the only trainer. *cough*

Oh, and six slotting fast healing. That was fun.

It took me a long time after getting the hover power to realize that space bar would go up. I was using S to move backwards over the Hollows in order to gain altitude then W toward the mission door to go down.

When a helpful player finally explained the altitude keys I was then annoyed that I was constantly losing altitude while flying forward.

I'm not sure when I finally realized the camera angle has everything to do with which direction you are going during flight.

It took me over a month to correlate which enhancements the powers SAID they used with the names the stores actually used for those enhancements. Every purchase was a gamble with the precious influence I had very little of. I still think that is one of the biggies for new users to get used to. They should all use the exact same terms.

The player lingo was the hardest thing for me to get used to. People were talking but it wasn't English. It didn't help that I had no clue how the channels worked and was afraid to talk for fear I would spam the whole server with my inane questions.

Ahhhh.. yess... the Blip! Annoying thing. I tried it too... and I read somewhere that even Positron tried to stand on it.

I remember playing an earth/storm controller and when I would be running down the street and came across some other hero fighting a group and one of the villains trying to run away I thought I was helping by holding him in place with stone prison holding everything in that area and then getting nasty messages about kill stealing and a broadcast message going out that no one should team with my character.

I was probably the biggest kill thief in the game and had no clue.

I remember thinking that only person could have the same name, even across servers. I had known and played with an Extra Ordinary Man on Guardian, and we constantly turned up on each others teams. A year or two later, I see Extra Ordinary Man on Infinity and start trying to talk to him, thinking it was the same person. It wasn't.

I remember thinking a time where high level ambushes were more common, and the coolest thing ever was to see a high level in a low level zone. I thought the DE were amazing because I saw an eminator placed in Steel Canyon, and at the time it was the highest level character I had ever seen. I spent half an hour trying to kill the +20 fungus, hoping it would level a few times.

I had an AR/Dev Blaster, and I thought that I would miss with snipe unless a played in first person viewpoint, and tried to click on their head. Imagine my surprise when I learned you don't actually aim it.

I was introduced to this game by a friend who had recently rolled a Kinetics Defender. He explained that the critical power in Kinetics was Repel and in order to use it you run into every enemy you can.

This player was also enamored of The Hollows. He took me there at level 5 or 6 and our first mission was waaaay on the other side. After LOTS of dying trying to reach the door, I somehow got a level. So I took Hover, and Hovered all the way from one end of the zone to the other, all the while saying how stupid this game was. ;P

I also used to think Hasten was a "situational" power and skipped it on all of my Controller builds. Builds, by the way, that were Earth and Ice Control with no damage at all slotted in the holds. Later on the Ice character got trapped in a holding cell and had to log out of the game because he couldn't do enough damage to break out.