Floating Coins

No new player, already familiar with others MMOs, has ever played COH in the last 7 years? Because out of all of the bajillion complaints I've read on these forums through the years, I have never once seen someone comment that they had a hard time finding their contacts.

I don't care if the Floating Coins stay, but I would very much like a way to turn them off. They are a garish, tacky distraction.

If it's not your argument then you didn't need to be the first member of the forum populace to bring it up, proliferating its message to this thread. The question wasn't "Why do we have floating coins?" but simply "Can we turn them off?"

There's a difference between finding contacts you've been introduced to, and spotting the coin over an NPC you never talked to before because you'd never been instructed to go speak with them.

Using the wiki, asking other players, browsing the contact list, that's all an active search for a different contact. Saying you've never heard someone complain about difficulty finding contacts is like saying you've never heard someone complain about difficulty finding Green River soda - if people aren't aware they're missing out on something then they don't know they have a problem. Now contacts advertise their existence without bringing up extra windows - I can run past them and go, "Oh! I don't remember talking to them before! I wonder what they've got?"

Now you're gonna be wondering what Green River is, and where you can find it. Pity those stores don't have coins floating over the door.

Except contacts already were advertising themselves. And that hasn't changed. Personally, I wouldn't mind the change to the coin system if it meant I didn't have someone bugging me to do the Invention/AE/Ouroboros/Vanguard intro from the moment I hit a certain level threshold or zone in to a certain area. But given that players are already given an alert to anyone they can get missions from, whether they're near that contact or not, means that there isn't a whole lot of use for them.

To continue your analogy, the coins are a system where any store that sells Green River is clearly labeled. But even before i21, we had a system where turning down a street where such a store existed would immediately result in the names and locations of those stores being beamed directly into my brain.

Do all available contacts do that? If so, that would explain why I clicked away a billion pop-ups when I logged in some of my older characters. My new characters still haven't passed level 10, so I don't think they've received many introductions. When an introduction happens in the middle of a mission you're kind of too busy to take note of who it is, anyways.

I prefer passive systems to active systems, too. Both the coins and the pop-ups should have the option to be disabled.

This feature has actually been in place for...several issues now. I want to say maybe as far back as i12 (definitely not before that, and possibly later, but it's been a while).

Any contact not introduced to you by another contact will pop up, yes. Ones that require introductions (as in, most of the standard contacts), don't get a pop-up, but you'll have another contact specifically refer you to them. Granted, there are a couple who you can speak to without introduction, and who don't get pop-ups (Stephanie Peebles, Seer Marino), however, you will also get a mandatory introduction mission for them.

What's annoying is that once they pop up, they're added to your list, meaning that if you want to keep said list nice and organized, you either have to do their arcs, or just wait to out-level them. The former is easy enough in some cases, but the AE Guide, and the Invention tutorial can't be out-leveled, and in the case of the latter, doing it once doesn't stop you from getting it added again if you change cities! AE might be the same, actually, not that I think about it.

So yeah, I'll take a ring that says "this person has something to do" over a "must do this!" pop-up. Though, on the other hand, I can see where, with new content like First Ward that has multiple alignments open to multiple other groups, apparently (haven't had a chance to hit those arcs yet), a small alert might be helpful, in ways the coin won't be anyway.

I'll also make one last note after all the rambling. Regardless of anything else, I do think using "it's how other MMOs do it" is a horrible justification for anything.

Edit for potential solution:
Keep the pop-ups, but add a prompt like "I'll look into it"/"No time now" or something similar, so you can choose whether or not to add the new contacts to your list. Maybe allow the latter option to add the person to your Inactive contacts, so that one can, at one's own discretion, change their mind later.

No, I didn't need to be, but I was. I feel there is absolutely no merit to be had in having these hideous coins in the game as I don't consider people to be half as stupid as they seem to be expected to be here on the forums, but if I say THAT, then someone will invariably come out and explain that, no, really, people ARE that stupid.

And if you're asking why I had to bring that up at all, the answer to this is "because." To simply comment on the option to turn the coins off is not possible, because there is no legitimate argument against it, and I don't believe petitions are permitted by the forum rules. Besides, saying /signed isn't my style, and I can't really let go of how unnecessary and ugly the coins are.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

An option to turn both of those off would be great, in my opinion. I wasn't a fan of the circles when those were introduced, and I like the coins even less. If I could, I'd turn both types of identifiers off, honestly. I, personally, don't need them and I don't think I ever have.

More broadly, City of Heroes is not like other games, in the sense that you're never expected to FIND your contacts, therefore having them marked at all is unnecessary. City of Heroes is a game of waypoints and menus. When you need a contact, you select said contact from a menu and follow the waypoint. When you need a mission, you select the mission from a menu and follow your waypoint. When you need to go anywhere, you open you map, select a destination and follow your waypoint.

At no point are you required or even expected to be randomly roaming around and just spot contacts standing around. Those who need to be introduced to you will be introduced to you and will expressly NOT speak with you until such an introduction happens. Those who don't need to be introduced to you will show up in your Contacts list via contact introduction pop-up. Furthermore, ALL contacts you can speak with directly and, from what I've seen, one contact you need to be introduced to who matches your origin, will be placed in your Find Contact window, where you can select a contact and follow your waypoint or outright teleport to said contact.

Identifying contacts from other NPCs is not necessary. Not to mention that it doesn't need floating coins - any NPC that's standing around IS a contact, you just can't always speak with all of them. Sure, some of them are vendors, some of them are only used for delivery missions and some of them - like Lady Albert - are bugged, but it's a pretty safe bet that any person standing around who isn't a player is a contact of some fashion.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.