Suggestion: STOP ADDING AMBUSHES TO EVERY DAMN MISSION

I'm sick of clicking a glowie, having a clue drop, and immediately a frikking ambush teleports in and kills me. Some of us want to take the game at our own pace, it's why we loved this game way back before the devs turned into 'reading is for squares' types who only seem to want to cater to the 'waargh moar xp pls!' crowd.

I've just fought my way thru a zillion seers in the Infiltrate the Asylum mission in FW, cleared all, here's the payoff for all my hard work, a nice bit of narrative, please. Click the ciomputer and im immediately faceplanted by a teleporting ambush. So now I'vegot to go to the hospital and run all the damn way back thru the mission map. Instead of 'woah, cool mission!' I'm wanting to pucnh a dev in the face. Awful.

Eco

EDIT: And goimng to the hospital and back to the 'mission door' makes no sense thematically, since the mission door is clicking on Katie, who then gives mea ll the mission briefing text over again as though i haven't been in there once already. It's utterly stupid.

Another EDIT: And upon entering said mission again, my objective is 'Mission Completed. Find mission exit' - way to ruin the flow of a story, Devs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

It's not the ambushes that are the problem per se, it's the inconsistent way in which they're triggered.

Sometimes it's when you click a glowie or rescue a hostage
Sometimes it's when you finish reading/talking to someone
Sometimes it's halfway through reading/talking to someone
Sometimes it's seemingly unrelated to anything you've done
In one case it's because you ran through a huge room on the opposite side of the person who supposedly saw you, while stealthed.

It's the latter three that could really do with fixing. If you give us walls of text to read, at least have the decency to let us read them.

Yeah, they've overdone it with the ambushes lately. The ones I hate/despise/loath are the cascading ambushes where you're continually hit for the duration of the mission. I can take it with a melee type, but playing with a squishy - it just doesnt work.

I've /bugged it, complained about it on the forums, but the devs us usual turn a deaf ear. I think their mindset is "everyone else calls this game too easy, we gotta make it hard like all the other MMORPGs." That's supposed to be what the difficulty slider is for, but they seem to have forgotten that.

Agreed.

As The_Spad_EU listed them pretty much as they occur.

The first two I don't mind.

The last three are indicators of broken mission design or parameters.

If I'm supposed to talk to someone, and you REALLY want me to read the dialog, DON'T DROP AMBUSHES ON MY ****ING HEAD!

It's annoying in some places in the game. But a lot of the new First Ward stuff is EGREGIOUSLY bad about this.

I'd like to add one more.

The Endless Ambush.

The graveyard mission from Blind Makwa is a an example of this one. Basically the ambushes keep coming and coming and coming.

These are people in their low to mid 20's here guys! While most will now have Stamina slotted well and decent use of EndRed in attacks, some of these missions have ZERO time to rest.

So now we are getting missions where it's ideal to simply eat some purples and sprint through the mission and boss-kill at the end (like several of the Roy Cooling missions).

Fail.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

I think the Devs data mined AE and saw how popular ambush missions were....











(not being serious btw)

It seems that our mission designers treat ambushes as the one-size-fits-all solution to every problem, where anything as simple as "the player spent five minutes not reading a paragraph of text" can count as a problem. I remember the old days when you could enter a large instance and just get into a zone carving a path through it, but these days mission designers are afraid to let us spend too much time without someone jumping us or someone chatting us up.

It's getting to the point where I miss the old "Rescue 21 mystics from Oranbega" mission because it didn't panic that I'd fallen asleep every five minutes and felt it needed to throw something to hold my short attention span. Because that's what many of the new missions feel like - like the game is ashamed of its basic gameplay and worried we might get distracted by thoughts of leprechauns, so something has to always be happening.

So, I agree. Stop using ambushes, please. In fact, I'd like to see a new arc made in full from beginning to end without spawning a SINGLE ambush. I'm not sure if the mission designers can do that any more. It's like asking an FPS game designer to make an FPS without using the colour brown.

Quote:

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.

I vote we find who deigned to put in this many ambushes, and find where they live.

See if they appreciate them so much then ¬¬

Yes, /signed. From time to time WHEN THEY MAKE SENSE, sure. I can deal with that. But I get sick of the damn things when they are near constant.

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.

I just write a fairly long post starting with 'If I ever do the First Ward content again after I've done it once to see the story (doubtful), ...', explaining what my approach will be, but then I realised that no, I can't see why I'd want to do it again at all.

So: less ambushes in future content please.

Eco

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

I'll be the odd man out here and say that I love ambushes. Yes I faceplant a lot but I also like the rush of seeing if my blaster who is already half dead and low on inspirations can somehow survive.

That being said whenever I'm not in the mood for something like that I make sure to visit the market before hand and purchase two or three large lucks.

But even though I myself love those ambushes I'll have to say they should be changed because it's obvious that so many people hate them.

I, for one, do not support this. I, in fact, support MORE ambushes. Like maybe, oh, you're coming out of the Wentworths or Black Market... BOOM RANDOM BUSHWHACKING!

Or maybe, you got out of the mission, and outta nowhere... KABLAM SPANISH INQUISITION! ('cause, y'know, nobody expects one.) (But you know it'd be just the BOMB if it were to happen, right? You'd not mind that one bit. )

Frivolity aside, I have never, ever had a problem with any and all ambushes, including over and over. It's more bugs to kill. And I'm good at dealin' with it, usually, no matter the character.

Except maybe Total Dependent. She's built to not be offensive, she needs the team to do that, she buff/debuffs only. So if it was on her, yeah, that'd get old.

Funny how people get upset at ambushes but aren't the least bit bothered by being able to lay the smack down on some baddies within plain sight of other bad guys and they never sound an alarm.

I definitely think they're a bit overused in newer content. It's to the point where players flat out anticipate it when clicking an objective. The missions where the mobs start out "friendly" and then turn on you are even worse. Everyone is thinking "gee, that's not suspicious AT ALL", because they know exactly what is going to happen.

Overall, ambushes in general don't bother me if they make sense. What bugs the hell out of me, though, is that half the ambushes now seem to spawn in plain sight, or worse, right on top of you.

Not only is it immersion-breaking, it just reminds the player that yes, the computer cheats, and leaves a bad taste in their mouth. Please, unless the story calls for a teleport-capable group to ambush you, add some code to make sure that ambushes try to spawn out of sight of all players on the map. Bonus points if they come out of a door.