hm. I think these are valid points...except I Kinda zoned out on part 5. It's kind of long...
Open Archetype Suggestion thread!, Kirsten's Epic Weapon Pools, Feudal Japan, Etc., Alignment specific Rularuu iTrials!
If Masterminds didn't suck, they'd be the most powerful AT in the game.
Wait wait...there are stories?
I've decided to write up a general post wherein I, given my exalted position as Some New Guy You Probably Hate Already, tell you all how to fix the game. It should be remembered that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and it should also be remembered that the old joke where you immediately follow that statement up with an arrogant quip about your opinion always being the right one is just that: An old joke.
Anyways.
1) Rewrite ALL the things!
The new Galaxy City tutorial is actually really cool. It throws you right into the action, in a desperate situation that serves to provide a nice Act One sort of feeling (having acts one and two be covered completely in the opening cut scene is a big problem with video games in general). The new level 1-7 content in Atlas Park is similarly very well done (haven't tried the Mercy Island bit yet, haven't logged into the Blind Girl for close to a week now, should probably show her some love sometime). Icedrone or whoever from the Skulls mission had an interesting arc concerning taking matters into your own hands versus complaining to government suits to take care of things, Matthew Hashawhoever was an interesting character even if he was kind of short-sighted, and the mole at the end actually presented a very interesting moral dilemma.
Twinshot and friends aren't quite as compelling, but they're still of roughly the same caliber. They're distinct characters, many of them have a specific arc, and there's the whole "who's the traitor" bit going on with it (I haven't done the level 15 mission for them yet, but Twinshot's an obvious red herring and Flamebeaux's "too stupid for treachery" shtick is obviously a front, I'll be very surprised if I'm proven wrong), as well as introducing us to Manticore in such a way that feels appropriate to such an early point in my hero's career without making me feel completely insignificant.
And then I got to the Hollows and did the Flux and Julius(?) missions. These were fun to play for the most part, in that this is the bit where the game started actually getting tricky, and trading blows with elemental super villains felt right. The characters of Flux and Julius both had a lot of potential...Which was never really explored. These storylines don't really have any theme or statement to them the way the others did, and that really needs to change. Even if you don't want to rewrite the actual missions (and I wouldn't necessarily recommend you do so, either, because they're fun in terms of actual gameplay already), I would definitely recommend rewriting the dialogue. Take Julius' arc. Why do the Trolls want to dam the Red River? What exactly are they using their slaves for? What kind of overarcing theme can you attach to this?
Here's something that could probably be easily worked into the Julius arc that would give it some real punch. Back in high school, life just really wasn't treating Julius right. His home was broken and poor, his teachers had pidgeonholed him as a troublemaker, and thanks to that his efforts to revitalize his grades and actually graduate were pretty much stillborn. On top of all this, his girl-next-door love interest (let's call her Julia for now) eventually shunned him because of his pariah status, even though they'd been friends since they were kids.
His only friends now were the druggies, and being shunned by the rest of society, he joined the worst of them in doing harder and harder drugs. Eventually, he juiced up on Superadine and mutated, and thus began his life as a Troll, eventually moving into the Hollows. Julia,meanwhile, had come to regret the way she'd treated Julius as one of her stupid high school mistakes, and now was looking to reconcile. She'd heard he was in the Hollows, so she took a day off work to try and find him. She eventually ends up in the Trolls' clutches, and gets shipped off to do slave labor in the same cave Julius is hanging out in. Julia can't even recognize him anymore, but he recognizes her, and speaks with her, and she tells him why she came to the Hollows and begs him to let her go so she can find her old friend. Julius realizes that he's become a monster and tries to break Julia out, but he fails and barely escapes with his life.
This backstory is revealed over the course of the first 2-3 missions, wherein the Trolls are trying to dam the Red River in order to flood a cavern full of Igneous, which is still full of their former human slaves and even a bunch of abandoned Trolls. Julius asks the player to stop them from damming the river, clear out the Igneous, and finally to rescue the slaves, including Julia.
There: Exact same mission structure, but with a far more compelling set of characters who're on par with the new 1-7 content. Rewrites like this for all the old storylines would obviously be a lot of work, but I think it'd be well worth it.
2) Stop Putting Words In My Mouth!
As a general rule, giving my hero or villain a specific response to an NPC railroads their personality. In particular, I'm thinking of my main, Samael. He's terse and laconic and sometimes dips into the realm of the anti-heroic. The dialogue written for him often doesn't mesh well at all. Examples (paraphrased):
Aaron Thiery: Would you have become a hero if it weren't for the disaster at Galaxy City?
Mandatory Response: I would have become a hero regardless!
Response Appropriate to Samael: Yes.
Ice Super: While the government does nothing, I'm out here with the people!
Mandatory Response: I understand your frustration, but we all have to do what we can to help.
Response Appropriate to Samael: The people suffer and die while you waste your powers.
And so on and so forth. It'd be nice if, instead of a forced response, there was just a "continue" button, and we can fill in the blanks as to what exactly we said for ourselves. Otherwise, make it very vague. For example, with the one Ice Super in the Sondra Costel arc, have the options be "chide him for his irresponsibility" and "encourage him to help in spite of government negligence." Or whatever.
I realize I just spent about five hundred words telling you to rewrite the old plots because they sucked, but they were actually much better about giving generic responses that made it easier to fill in my own character's dialogue. You can have awesome customization for costumes and powers, but we don't have anywhere near the technology to customize human interaction, so just abstract it and let your players imaginations fill in the blanks.
3) Gameplay And Story Segregation
This has come up a lot in the forums lately. At level 3 or so, the Blind Girl is chewing through Longbow forces like they're nothing. At level 7, Samael breezed straight through an Arachnos horde. Also, rock-throwing citizens. One of the biggest pulls of the RPG genre is the steady advancement from weak baddies up to overwhelmingly strong ones. Longbow and Arachnos are both supposed to be trained, credible threats, and they shouldn't be put on the same level as Atlas Park Hellions. At the very least, drop an explanation as to why these ones are such insignificant threats compared to, say, Malta Operatives, who should be basically the same thing. "Longbow will accept anyone on the ground level these days. Bet they just pulled these volunteers off the street, gave them a gun and a uniform, and then shipped them off to Mercy Island to die. How very heroic."
Alternatively, you could excise the statistical increase from levels altogether. If the only major difference between a level 5 and a level 50 is the powers, inspiration slots, an enhancements, then it doesn't grate so much to be taking on trained soldiers from the word go. Yes, they couldn't really stand up to, say, the Outcasts, simply because of the Outcasts superior ability sets, but the fight would be close and the Outcasts have freakin' super powers, so that makes perfect sense anyways.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that excising half the level system is easier said then done, however.
4) I'm Too Heroic To Protect The Weak And Innocent
This is basically gameplay and story segregation part II, but with a different gameplay mechanic. I've been talking about the Aaron Thiery plot a lot, because I just barely did that one through Ouroboros since I accidentally outleveled him back when I was actually doing Atlas Park. This is because I feel bad about leaving mugging victims to their fates when passing through, even if the thugs con blue or green or even grey. Since there is an absurd number of muggings in Paragon City, I end up going out of my way to fight a lot of unnecessary mobs and leveling much faster than normal, and then that locks me out of interesting content. Content wherein Aaron Thiery berates other heroes for being lazy. Well of course they just run right past crimes in progress while on the way to Pocket D, if they didn't, they'd out-level their missions, their contacts would stop talking to them, and the really important stuff would never get done!
You should either be allowed to talk to any contact regardless of your level or, more preferably, you should be able to level yourself down at will, as if you'd been Exemplar'd or Ouroboros'd. This mechanic already exists, and allowing players more ready access to it should hopefully not be too difficult. It would make one of Ouroboros' purposes a little bit redundant, but it still covers the "ultra-stupid hard versions of old storylines" niche, as well as the "replaying old favorites" niche. Particularly since Ouroboros isn't something most players are even going to know about until much later in their super's career, whereas I obsessively crawl wiki's for information whenever I get bored of the game.
5) And You Thought Detroit Was Bad
Paragon City has astronomical crime rates and there's nothing you can do to stop them. This actually kind of takes the edge off of Super Heroing. It no longer feels like you're making much of a difference, because there's always a dozen-odd muggings going on within spitting distance of your trainers, the monorail, or other typical haunts.
DCUO actually has about 80-90% of their game world as non-war zones. There's no criminals mugging people, or shooting it out with the cops, or super villains running around wreaking havoc. It still grates that when you leave an instance having beaten a super villain, his minions are still running amok outside even as you leave, making it impossible to ignore, but at least you can get from point A to point B without feeling very non-heroic for ignoring all the crimes happening around you. Decreasing mob frequency would, at least, help with the feeling that criminals are infinite.
Guild Wars 2, while not yet released, has been talking up their system for observing how many players are currently participating in a fight and adjusting the number and strength of monsters to compensate, such that the exact same open-world mission will be of roughly appropriate difficulty whether you're soloing or brought enough friends to lag the server. If a system like this could be incorporated into CoX, it would be a huge improvement. In this case, however, the "right number" of enemies may well be "none at all" if you've already outleveled the area and you have no relevant missions.
For example, let's say that Samael is running through The Gish in all his level 16 glory. It's a slow day, and he's the only one in the neighborhood. The game sees that he's the only one there, and since the max level on The Gish's range is 8 and Samael has no "kill ten rats" missions active, so it doesn't count him as a hero at all. Since the game sees no heroes in The Gish, it spawns no criminals, and instead citizens will talk about how crime rates have been way down lately, and they don't feel unsafe walking the streets anymore. Alternatively, if it's a redside area that's been cleared like this, the place isn't cleaned up, it's taken over, and people will instead talk about how Subject Name Here is the new person in charge, and must be the terror of Subject Hometown Here.
Moving back to The Gish, let's say that Captain Awesome enters. He's level 10, but he has a mission active to defeat 10 Skulls, who normally spawn in The Gish (I think?). The Gish sees that Captain Awesome has an appropriate mission, so it counts him as a hero even though he's outleveled the area, and spawns roughly enough criminals to satisfy just Captain Awesome. If Samael encounters these criminals (and there won't be very many, since the game is only making enough to satisfy a single hero), they'll run away, abandoning whatever crime they were committing (i.e. mugging, assault, vandalism, loitering, whatever).
Then Star On Chest arrives. He's only level 4, which is actually below The Gish's range, but it hardly makes sense for the place to be all cleaned up for him already, and besides which taking on an extreme challenge can be satisfying in a way that muscling through endless legions of helpless foes generally isn't. The game counts him and Captain Awesome both (at least until Captain Awesome finishes his mission or leaves the neighborhood) and spawns enough baddies for two heroes.
The current density of criminals in any given neighborhood is enough to satisfy something like ten or fifteen heroes, no problem, so typically speaking the number of criminals in an area would decrease dramatically. In addition to raw numbers of mobs spawned, spawn rates should also be taken into account. With fifteen active heroes in the same neighborhood, you need a new mob to spawn and replace a lost one within five seconds just to keep up. With just the one hero, however, you can easily afford to wait 2-3 minutes before the replacement spawns.
I've tried to make this system such that it's immune to glitching heroes out of quests by refusing to spawn mobs they need and immune to griefers as much as possible, since the worst they can do is make the city the way it already is now, covered in criminals committing crimes. This is obviously a lot of coding work (I especially imagine finding a way to flag heroes as having an appropriate mission could be a huge workload), but I really wouldn't underestimate the difference it could make for game quality. You also might have a toggle that always counts your super for purposes of determining spawn rates, regardless of what level you are.
tl;dr It's kind of hard to summarize a five-point list into a single sentence, actually.