Thoughts on the Lowbie Game

I've been threatening to play a new fire blaster for some time. I've been carefully working on a backstory, name, and costume ideas. I went for it about a week and a half ago. She's now 22.

It's been a little while since I rolled a new character and have run into some problems that SEEM new to me.

All the Good Names are Taken - Haha. Yes, I know. Seriously, it took quite a while to come up with a name for my character. Most of my characters have 'Proper' names-- First Name Last Name. Getting the name I want is usually not difficult for me at all.

This time I decided I wanted a single word name for this character that started with a certain letter. After my first few choices turned out to be taken, I started going through the dictionary, picking nouns that started with the letter I wanted and sounded like they'd fit with my character's concept. I was stunned to see that choice after choice was unavailable.

Further (completely non-scientific) experiments show that random words from the dictionary under four syllables long tend to have about a 1 in 2 shot of being taken. For example, I started with 'To' and picked out a few random words:

Toady: In use
Toboggan: Available
Tocsin: In Use
Toehold: Available
Today: Available
Tomato: In use
Tombstone: Not available
Tomcat: In use
Toner: Available
Tonsil: Available
Tongue: In Use
Toothless: In Use

I didn't think a year ago that there was a 'Name Shortage'. Now, I'm not so sure. I've heard calls to run the culling script and I don't think that would be a bad idea. I think it's also time for the players of the game to reconsider what it would be like to live in an environment where your character could theoretically run into an identically named character from time to time. The devs seemed to have indicated in the past both willingness and that they could pull this off pretty easily.

Maybe we should let them.


Turn around and you're 50 - For the sake of simply seeing how the pace went, I kept track of what I did between 1 and 22 over about 8-9 real days. According to an 'M' npc, I've played 28 hours... just a little more than an average of 1 hour per level.

I did missions for Azuria until she quit giving them to me
17 radio missions and 6 safeguard missions.
'Bonefire'
'The Clockwork Captive' (aka 'Lou the Mechanic')
5 single missions for my contacts to get to the arcs.
New Positron TF part 1 and 2
5 Tip missions once I hit 20
and a small amount of random street-sweeping on my way to missions.

With the amount of content I've done, 22 doesn't SEEM terribly unreasonable. However, viewed as a whole, the pace does seem just a bit frenetic to me. I felt like I never had time to hunt for IOs or defeat badges. I felt like I couldn't take the time to wander around zones and fight enemies without outleveling my safeguards.

I also did a great deal of lollygagging-- like going AFK during solo missions to read-- which is inflating the amount of time in my average.

I generally think the leveling curve is too fast. The 'Disable Earning XP' button was made for me. However, I wish there were more options for adjusting the level curve... like an NPC who will exemplar you to a particular zone. You can't use Oro to kludge for that until you're 25.


Low Level Groups are Hard to Find - I don't really force myself to always build my own teams, but I do generally recruit for what I'm doing rather than wait around shouting 'LFT' and hoping someone else will invite me in their group.

However, this time around, if I had a team during my character's 1-22 trek, it was because I built it. I didn't get a single blind invite, let alone any nice tells asking me if I'd like to team. The largest team I managed to assemble was 7 people for the 2 Positron TFs.

No, this is not a 'Teh Game is Dyyyinggg!' screed. The players are there. They're just all level 50. Those who used to be sending out blind invites are now in Pocket D, shouting 'looking for trial' every 60 seconds. Most of my regular groupmates were busy with trials or weekly taskforces-- Apex and Dr. K these last two weeks, which just happen to be in the 45+ range.

I had moderate luck getting folks to join me for radio missions. The max size I managed to accumulate was 3 other teammates, all of whom were regular groupmates. The content I had the MOST difficulty getting people to join were the arc missions. I went through both of those solo, despite actively recruiting for them.

Some of the comments I heard during this period were kinda harsh. One of my regular groupmates who usually runs at 50 commented that he just couldn't bring himself to do the lower-level content any more. After having run so many characters through it, when he makes a new character, he PLs to 50 immediately rather than deal with not having all the powers he wants.

I really enjoy playing blasters and have taken many, many of them through this content. However, I suspect that I'm in a shrinking minority. The rewards for arc missions suck compared to TFs. The end reward is only given to the arc owner. The missions frequently involve lots of travel that many players dislike. Depending on the arc, there's a LOT of repetition and street hunting. If you're running with fewer than a full team, which is usually the case below about 35 or so, the super-rare 'Gold' recipe drop off of Bosses is that much more infrequent.

In particular the reward system for these missions could REALLY use some revamping.

Additionally, we have this wonderful new queue technology that's only being used for a minute fraction of the game's content. It seems like there's a lot of work that needs to be done on it, but there's also a lot of opportunity being missed.

As happens in many older MMOs, CoH's players generally gravitate towards the 'end' of the level spectrum. With the addition of 'end game' content in the form of trials, much of the draw for replaying older content has evaporated. This has a pretty dire effect on those who do want to replay it. It also has a nasty effect on new players.

Despite the fact that I KNOW the game is thriving, I've also seen both genuine new players and returnees get in to the /help channel trying to figure out where to get any kind of teams for low-level content. They go away frustrated.

This has got to change or we won't be thriving for very much longer.

It's too bad you weren't on Liberty. I spent a good chunk of this last weekend running around on my lowbie MA scrap... He could have used some blasty back-up with those darn vahz.

As I said recently in another thread about the situation red-side, I seem to cross paths with a fair few people when I'm doing the lowbie-thing... But nine times out of ten it seems like both they and I are going about our business solo. There are people out there on non-50 characters, they're just not actively looking for teams.

There is no 'draw' to play old stuff, especially not blueside because, except for the more recent stuff, the overwhelming majority of it is seven year old dross. Stuff that Jack built. And thats NOT a good thing.

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.

First of all, your experience with teams on lower levels matches up with a lot of people's these days including my own. I started on Victory, but moved to see what it was like on "the big server" only to make a full switch. I eventually came back and it's frustrating to say the least to do teams even though some of my favorite builds are on that server. I almost feel like I have to solo to 10-12 so I can start the TF train that is the best way I can level up to 50. I have even used one of the non-badge channels to say I was running missions only to get one taker.

While I do play on Freedom and Virtue, they still have these kinds of issues, but you have a better chance of a tips mission team running around at least. Content teams essentially don't exist unless it's done with friends. I am stunned when I get on a team and it's from an arc. Not to say it's the perfect solution, or the only one I would add, but I think there needs to be two sets of WTFs every week and I don't just mean red side and blue side. Pick one set of the Incarnate related ones, and one set that lets lower level characters be played. Having a month long run of end game Incarnate based TFs means anything below level 35/45 almost sits for a month.

Second, you found 5 names within a decent naming restriction. I would consider that pretty decent. I actually got Warning Label on Victory within the last 6 months. One of my better "How in the world did I get that name?" moments.

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Originally Posted by AmazingMOO I wonder how many of those are soloing because arc merits are only given to mission arc owners?

My guess people are doing tip missions and those are more about getting them done quickly and then moving on. Why waste time getting a team involved for at best 5 missions? I actually had one person quit my duo because they didn't want to do hero tips yet.

The fact that half of the single-word potential names from a very small representative sample out of the dictionary are taken as character names doesn't indicate even half of a damn thing. There are plenty of creative names available if you look in the right spot. Song titles/lyrics, fragments of famous quotes, fragments of not-so-famous-but-still-eloquent quotes. Animal species names, scientific principles, technologies, and portmanteaus of all of the above. And if you think freeing up names will somehow magically free up a lot of single-word names, well, that's a nice fantasy world but I doubt it will solve the predicament you placed yourself in. Running the name-release script sounds like a good idea, until you start to look at all the people who have been returning to the game after 3, 4, even 5-6 year absences lately. Who's going to be inclined to stay renewed when half of their characters have been genericed in the interim?

And no, I don't want to run into another Qubit on Pinnacle. Nor do I want some idiot who's decided he doesn't like me to also name a character Qubit, copy my costume and start imitating me. Why should we enable griefers?

I've noticed that 9 times out of 10 if I roll a new character on Virtue and start him in Praetoria, he is going to be on a full team of 8 until he gets to level 20. It does cool of a bit at that point for me most of the time, but I spend this phase of leveling doing the Midnighter arc, Keith Nance, and Roy Cooling arcs until I see teams advertising that they're doing tips or low level TF's, which is pretty common.

I don't notice a real slowdown until the 30's because that's when you've finished the more fun arcs, tips start to feel like a grind, and exp seems slow. There's always Oroboros and Cimerora but I've never come across (or actively looked for, to be fair) a level 30-ish team in those zones.

Level 35 means a trip to RWZ, and I'm usually able to get teams together for at least part of those arcs. Then you can accompany the level 50 teams doing Borea missions for shards, except you'll be doing it for vanguard merits, drops, and XP. (Not to mention, you'll have a team! Yay!)


The 40's get kind of slow for me, too, but usually by then you can team with people of any level pretty comfortably and you have more content available to you... All in all, it's not that bad, but there are those slow points where I've stopped playing characters because they're no fun to solo and I just couldn't find anything going on.