Please give us back our Freedom(tm) at lower levels

What Agent White and Samuel_Tow said. (“That's the point. I DON'T remember them.” was an especially enlightened comment. Bravo to you, sir!) Treating your character as new to the city left it open for almost any character backstory. Besides, given that any time I’m fighting alongside any of these characters I do about 70% of the arresting, it should be I calling them noobs. But the most egregious aspect of the way you are treated in the training missions is the goal of the first arc. With the old origin missions (which we all agree were not stellar, so there's no need to attempt to claim that somehow equates to their not being 5 paths we could choose) at least your goal was to help someone fight a crime, investigate a mystery, etc. What’s the goal of the 1st Twinshot arc? To grovel and be accepted by this bunch of losers. That’s not heroic at all.

Others in this thread have kindly suggested some alternatives that I can pursue in the future, and I thank you for those. But is this how we want new players to experience this game? You create a character using the best system in any MMO, run a quick tutorial where you fight a giant monster(!), prove yourself in the Habashy arcs, and then...get subjected to a supergroup hazing program by a bunch of poorly-written caricatures. Hardly the stuff of comic book greatness.

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Originally Posted by Mr. DJ Well, that's just like your opinion man. Also, Hamidon Raid Lag > iTrial lag Ever done a LRSF w/ stacked Vengeance with most of the team having Shivans, while bombarding the Freedom Phalanx w/ Chemical Burn Nukes? Yeah, that lag > iTrial lag.

Not only his. I think he makes a very good point. Those examples of other laggy high level content support his claim very effectively. :-)

There are a few reasons for the changes to the starting Atlas missions. First, after 7 years, a lot of the vets were tired of running the same missions and wanted something new.

Second, some datamining revealed that an astonishing large number of characters don't play past level 7..ever. Maybe someone is trying a power combo, doesn't like it, so they delete it and start over with a different AT or powerset selection.

They wanted to reduce the number of instanced maps generated for characters who were short term characters. Especially when throwing the F2P players into the mix, who may not stick around to play at all, they had concerns about the resource requirements for generating instanced maps for each and every character (or at least a vast majority of them). This is why almost none of the new content below level 7 is instanced. Most of it is all open world. Even some of the stuff that "looks" instanced isn't really instanced. There is one mission where you go into a Hellion warehouse, disguised as a Hellion. You won't see other players in there, but if you stand by the door, you can see it open and close as they come and go. You are not alone in there, you just can't see them.

As for the Twinshot arc, those are actually "ongoing training" missions. They are intended to teach new players about additional concepts of the game that weren't covered in the tutorial. At one point, they have you talk to trainer, to get more detailed information about trainers. They have you take a train, so that you get to see where the train stations are, and how they work. They have you run around Atlas Park to key locations that are good to know about, including City Hall, the Hospital, Wentworths, and the Architect Entertainment building. Later, in Steel Canyon, they add the University to that list. There's also a part that explains the benefits of using Enhancements in your powers. They teach new players all this without presenting them with long winded windows filled with text that new players are likely to find overwhelming if it is thrown at them all at once. I think that it meets that objective fairly well.

As someone else has already stated, if you don't want to run these missions, it's not a requirement. You can always go to Kings Row as soon as you hit level 5. Additionally, if you use the "Find Contact" button in your Contacts list, I believe the contact for The Hollows shows up around level 5 as well. The followup contacts after Hashaby should be more than sufficient to get you that far. If not, a single run through the DFB trial will definitely push above 5 if you run it after Hashaby.

As for the old contacts, they can be accessed through Ouroboros once you hit level 15, but you can't run their missions at low level. One reason for this, I suspect, is that a number of the missions direct you to go to Galaxy City, which no longer exists. If this is the case, it can be gotten around in the Ouroboros versions because, if you can access Ouroboros, you can go through the portal to the Echo of Galaxy City.

As you said yourself, when Issue 6 and CoV were released, the Villains had only a single contact path to use in Mercy Island. It wasn't until an issue or 2 later that they got a second contact, and they never got individual contacts based on origin. There's no reason to expect that a second choice won't be added in an issue or 2, just as it was done with City of Villains.

Right now is the first time in 7 years that the blue side and red side have a fairly equivalent starting experience. Both start with one mission chain, which splits off to two contacts, and then feeds back to a single contact. Both also have an "Ongoing Training Mission" chain they can follow, if they choose. Both have a version of the Death From Below Sewer Trial.

I admit that I was initially a little disappointed that Mercy Island didn't get some visual upgrade treatment, but in all fairness, Mercy Island is vastly larger than Atlas Park. Revamping it to the extent that Atlas Park was would likely have taken 3 or 4 times as long as the revamping of Atlas Park. It will come in time, I hope, but for now, at least the starting location is more convenient for accessing stuff like the market, the AE building, and the Ferry for moving on to other zones.

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Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

I tried visiting my legacy origin contact with a new toon and they wouldn't talk to me. Like the OP I really don't much like the newer content but it's entirely skippable with a few DFBs and the go do some good stuff.

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I'm apparently one of the few who actually -likes- Flambeaux. The intro mission for the Shining Stars, where if you hustle along to keep up with the timing of her rambling dialogue, is a thing of beauty.

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Originally Posted by G_Savior I don't understand how you can hate the SSAs when they have more personality than the entire phalanx combined. Twinshot talking down to you? Gee, it's not like she's a veteran from a secret military organization while your some fresh faced hero.

You want an NPC that talks down to you? Go play the Redside version fo Twinshot, the Graves arc in Mercy.

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Originally Posted by G_Savior They are definitely a step up from most characters blueside, I think most of the hate comes from the 'NCsoft didn't write the dialogue to fit my character! this arc is terrible!' folk

Given the option of the pre-Freedom generic nigh all encompassing responses that you had for most mission contacts, and the post-Freedom funny-yet-written-for-a-specific-character responses, I'd almost go with the former.

good luck D.B.B.

I get into the first 5 levels below, but I wanted to note this especially just in case anyone who could change anything was watching. Please, please, please, I'll probably never run the 1-5 arc again I was so annoyed by it but I honestly wouldn't CARE if you'd just fix the 'find contact' window so it actually pointed you at a regular zone contact. I went through big chunks of the game where all it would offer me was David Wincott (didn't wanna do the hollows on that toon), Montague Castanella (even after I'd finished his arc), Jim Temblor (again, I wasn't looking for the hazard arc), and... that was pretty much it. It would be so nice if we could just start working with someone in KR (or steel, or sky, or talos, depending on how many times you run DFB) that WASN'T one of the special arcs or hazard arcs or what-have-you. I've saved Lou the mechanic SO MANY TIMES, but that's 'cause I kind of like doing it. Please let us go ahead and 'find' regular zone contacts!

Now for the first 5 levels: I miss the option of choosing who I wanted to start off with (which, admittedly, meant I used to have way fewer science toons than anything else, but any of my science concepts generally also matched tech or mutation, and skulls and council were fun.

I didn't find the new story arcs to be awful story-wise, but I will pretty much never play them again. I'd rather street-sweep, or run DFB once to get to 5. My general response to the new arcs was, dang, guys. This was so not the lesson I wanted you to learn from WoW. Low-damage toons have a lot of trouble with high respawn rates, especially at level 3: if you're playing a baby defender or a baby controller, by the time you get one group down, the previous one has respawned on top of you.

Lack of door missions might help server load (although if they were really worried they could have LEFT US GALAXY CITY no, sorry, being calm) but it makes it really hard on anyone who only has gale and 2 baby blasts, or a hold, an immob, and a heal, or (from the tank side) one shield and 2 punches. This was one of the most annoying things about WoW for me during the time I played, because there was never space you could declare as 'cleared', and mobs would spawn right on top of you. It was one of the big reasons I came back (okay, I never left, but I did wander a bit )

So yah--it would be nice to be able to choose the early mishes (door missions are tough on server load but a lot easier on my poor graphics card), but I'd be happy to settle for the 'find contact' button finding older contacts once you hit level 5.

(on a completely side note, We already lost Galaxy. Why are we losing Dark Astoria? That's such a great place to go and street-sweep for lvl 20-30 toons. Why couldn't we have a new zone to be the incarnate zone? Or heck, do something with Terra Volta, that place is a ghost town. <sigh> That's a legitimate question, BTW, not just grousing--if anyone knows why they're taking a moody and unique zone and essentially shutting it off for anyone sub-50, please let me know.)

Oh man, how could I be so remiss? The last few posters reveal that there was one more thing I forgot to complain about re: the new starting experience, and that is the non-instanced respawning. Aside from the tactical annoyance, nothing breaks my suspension of disbelief faster than either (a) having to wait for mobs to respawn cuz someone else just killed em off or, conversely, (b) having them respawn right on top of me. Sure, every game will have some quirks that can't help but feel gamey, but this is like shouting "THIS IS ONLY A GAME!!" in our faces.

You guys are absolutely right: there was a mechanic designed to prevent this, so why deliberately remove one of the best things about the game?

The old origin arcs were garbage and it's best that they are gone.

Frankly, I think a lot of the complaints of this thread as I understand them would be taken care of if, when one hits level 5, we received a message of unto-unlock for an origin-specific contact in King's Row, like we do with Twin Shots and the AE man.

That way there's an alternative that's tied to your origin, you don't have to do TS's arcs (but you keep the option), and you don't need to go through the Radio/3 mishs/Safeguard rigmarol to get a contact in KR.

Since many people’s memories of the old lowbie content (including mine) seem to be fuzzy, I did a quick check with the help of the magnificent Paragon Wiki and came up with some interesting numbers regarding the choices we used to have from levels 1-5.

First, a word (ok, quite a lot of words, actually :-) ) about mission quality and preference: I understand not everyone wants the same thing out of this game...

• Some hate the lower levels and want to use the sewer trial to get past them quickly. That’s cool. I don’t want to go that route, because for me levelling is too fast from 1-10 anyway. But although the trial is not “good” for me, I don’t claim it should be taken away.

• Some people like the new mechanics in the new lowbie arcs. I really appreciate some of that (aside from the generic-MMO-style non-instanced spawning), and I would be happy if I could choose to play those arcs, so naturally I don’t claim they should be taken away.

• Some people like to street sweep for the early levels. I want some story, so I don’t want to do that, but I don’t claim it should be taken away.

• Some people like AE missions. I’m one of them, and will probably start using them as suggested by others here, so naturally I don’t claim they should be taken away.

• (Not 1-5 content, but relative to the concept as discussed so far in this thread) As you have seen, I despise the Twinshot arcs with a passion, but I would never suggest they should be removed, because some people apparently like them. As long as I have a viable alternative, I can be happy. I’ll still criticise something that I feel is poor quality in the hopes that it will be improved -- especially because I don't want new players to be turned off -- but I won’t suggest it be deleted.

• Some people like to have a choice of dev-created stories from 1-5 so we can develop a concept of our character as we play those lower levels. We don’t want those levels to go by in the blink of an eye, nor do we want to be led by the nose through the same plot with every character. We want to be able to choose, and the missions we choose don’t have to be TF quality, because we are putting in our own ideas about our new characters as we go. Please respect our preferences as we do yours, and don’t claim that our missing early contacts “should” have been taken away.
  
  Allowing others their choice in no way impinges upon yours; please don’t post any more comments saying that these should have been removed because they didn’t suit your particular preference. That’s not helpful or constructive.