Re-populating Praetoria.

I think i have an idea to make Praetoria come back to life.

Praetoria is nice looking, has some great story lines, was very popular when it just came out. However, when the shininess faded, and several flaws behind it surfaced, more and more people began to avoid it.
I made 1 Praetorian, the 1st day GR went live, she made it to Primal Earth and is to date the only Praetorian i made.

I know the Devs have spent a lot of time, resources, blood, sweat and tears in the whole Going Rogue content including a gorgeous new world, and i am sure they have not expected that it would be as empty as it is now.
Less than two years after launch, i'm spending 30 minutes here, and i see nobody. People on my server admit that they like the content, but the draw of it is gone, and only a handful make new toons there.
So i started thinking of ways to re-populate Praetoria.

When making a new toon, people who are VIP can go to Praetoria, but can not do missions there, so why not change that?
Have two new contacts, one contact to let you become a member of the Resistance, and one to join the Power Division.
these contacts will give a new mission so you can join the fight of their cause, much like the way we can now switch alignments.
this would also benefit the older toons, since they can now join the Praetorian story line too. However, i think it would be smart to scale the mission level to either the level of the toon, or scale the level of the toon a little lower. My thought have them go 20 levels lower while doing Nova Praetoria arcs, 10 levels lower while doing Imperial City Arcs, and natural level while in Neutropolis. Have the level also scale up the deeper you go into the story arc, much like leveling up a new toon would.

Since we are now doing Resistance and Loyalists arc, we should also be able to make the choices the toons have who started in Praetoria, their version of Alignment switching. This so the 'Resistance Member', 'Loyalist' and 'On Moral High ground' will become available for toons that started in Primal Earth.

Additionally, this would also tie in the addition to Praetorian zone Beacons for use in Primal Earth SGs and VGs. Making it also one step closer to adding Villain zone beacons to Hero SGs and vice versa.
This all would eliminate a lot of uneccecasry travel from zone to zone. SG/VG bases should be brought back to the transportation hub it was, and this would be a solid reason as to why the 'other side's' beacons are added to each base.

Thank you for your time reading this, and i love to hear feedback and ideas.

I have taken about 10 toons through Praetoria at this point. I agree with you..the zones there look great, feel great, have some excellent arcs and missions and I can see how much work it would have been to create.

But, like you say..it IS almost dead. I see a couple of common reasons for this.

Firstly, it lags. Perhaps not if you have a super computer, but speaking as someone with an average PC who can run the rest of the game almost constantly fun, it lags. Not a lot, but it does, and on almost every single team I have joined there, at least one person will be dying of lag. Dont get me wrong, I love how prea looks, and pushes the limits of the game engine. Sadly, I can't really think of a 'fix' for this.

Secondly, mob difficulty. I hear this mentioned in almost every discussion of the zone. End drain, - regen, exotic damage types, huge ambushes, destroyers with like 32489430912 points of mez prot AND rage. Perhaps the reason is that the mobs there A(apart from..ghouls, syn, destroyers?) are versions of mobs that scale all the way to 50, while the 1-20 red and blue zones have there own mobs. The mobs there are generally harder then normal zones, and it 'seems' to take longer to hit 20 there than outside. Opinion of course.

Thirdly, the devs vastly underestimate how greedy and level hungry people are. When the zone first came along, it was a good way to make a 'hero' (or vill) AT, get to 20, then swap sides right away. Now of course, we can just make any AT, anywhere. With the added bonus of it being in a non laggy, non OP baddie populated area, usually with an AE building handy.

Oh and also. The utterly idiotic way that going from Prea to redside screws you out of 3 badges needed for an accolade..with NO way to flashback them. (also for the blue safeguards I guess, but less important)

Let people have someway to get those badges, as well as normal flashbacks of the arcs there, including the Morality Missions. I would also personally love if we got to keep the Prea alignment icon (the gold ppd one, blue resist one) after we left. Perhaps make it a half and half with your hero/vill/vigi/rogue icon.

As for the mobs there..maybe tone them done a little? Lower the size of ambushes? Speaking from experience, trying to kill nobel savage and then maelstrom on a solo troller was not fun in any way.

On another note..LET us earn teh Moral High Ground badge from normal, primal earth alignment missions...since they are, you know..MORALity missions.

Repopulating praetoria would require the zone extending itself to level 50. There is no other way. The emptiness of low level zones is not praetoria specific. The majority of pre 50 zones are relatively barren, much of which is in part due to the sheer number of them.

However extending the zone to level 50 would require a massive amount of time and resources from the development team, in short: don't expect that any time soon, or all at once, ala first ward.

The biggest problem with Preatoria is that is has a wealth of content spread over an alarmingly thin level range. Most people who where playing Preatoria approached is like they did the rest of the game, that is, leveling very quickly in a group. Thing is, lv1-20 is kind of a bad place to have this epic story unfold because level 1-20 goes by almost instantaneously in a group. The only 'good' way to approach preatoria content while retaining any comprehension of the story is solo, and that's not everyone's cup of tea.

I, with my full powers of hindsight, would have stretched the current content out over 30 levels, rather than 20, with the bulk of the stories occurring *after* level 20.

Edit: That's not really very helpful to repopulating Preatoria, mind, but it's my analysis on why I think it died so fast.

There are relatively easy ways to make Praetoria far more appealing;

-Cut out about 3/4 of the stupid ambushes. Seriously. Not EVERY damn mission needs ambushes!
-Throttle back mob difficulty. Compared to Primal starter mobs, Praet mobs feel like (and usually are) level 50 mobs scaled down...badly.

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 love Praetoria. I rolled 5 toons through when it came out to see all the paths.

I didn't find it all that hard either, running solo Blasters, MM's, Brutes. Solo is probably the keyword there, as this was before the diff. slider was added, meaning no bosses sadly.

I went back when Freedom launched to show a returning friend around. This was Virtue at 7pm central and checking a /whoall in all 3 zones showed us to be the only souls present...

Sadness. As I'd love to continue using the zone.

I'm afraid to say, repopulating Praetoria simply isn't going to happen. We'd need upwards of 100,000 new subscribers. We'd have to see an influx of so many players, they have no where else to spread out to.

That won't happen.

I gotta say that Mob difficulty is what keeps me from going back there. I LOVE the story-lines there. They're great. But a lot of the enemy groups there are highly annoying for low-level characters, including (IMO):

1) The Clockwork: if you're melee, these guys don't bunch up well, so you can't utilize any low-level AoEs you get, and need to chase each individual mob down. Then there's the whole -regen thing on their attacks, which nullifies a whole secondary set at those levels, and it's not like our Regen is that great at level 2 anyways.

2) Zombies: they heal each other when they die. Really? A lot of low-level frustration comes from not having enough endurance on a lot of characters, so having to spend even MORE attacks per spawn doesn't exactly make me want to fight these guys.

3) Enemy groups doing mostly Energy damage well before I can even get Energy Resistance/Defense. Primal enemy groups were designed around how most powersets go (or possibly, the other way around), with few groups having more "exotic" damage types until the slightly higher levels (15-20ish). Praetorian enemy groups are loaded with enemies doing these types of damage from level 1 on.


If it's a starting area, make it starter-friendly.

I have roughly four or five toons in the 20-22 range parked in Praetoria waiting for expanded content and three more in the mid 30s in First Ward. I haven't exhausted First Ward yet, but it can be difficult to scratch up teams and many of those missions are very difficult solo. Hopefully we will see a second level 30 zone and eventually level 40 & 50 zones added.

I have taken another dozen or so to Primal to keep playing them, but I really like the idea of keeping some of them purely Praetorian.

Personally, I'd also like to see the chance to be a spy for Primal Earth in Praetoria, sorta like Apex.

I was making tons of new characters in Praetoria, but I've pretty much lost interest, at this point. There's simply not enough potential variety for me, the story is more or less a single track, and it ends at 20, with no real option to continue playing as a Praetorian after that. No, First Ward doesn't even count in my mind. It's fun, don't get me wrong there, but it barely ties in at all to the story, and is really only a continuation of at best one of the original four paths.

Hence, there's little inspiration to create new Praetorians, especially when it means they miss access to things they might otherwise want at the appropriate level ranges (in some cases, like Mayhem Missions, lost more or less forever). So if they're going to have to be Primals anyway, it's easier to make them Primals from the start.

Praetoria's not really salvageable at this point, sadly, without really making into a full-fledged "city" of its own, and that's never going to happen.

If I could start my character in primal, and then take her to Praetoria and do all those missions as either a resistance member or loyalist (undercover or as a turncoat who will obviosuly have to about face back to siding with primal...which im okay with) I'd rerun those arcs and likely avoid the DFB Trial.

One of the things that killed Praetoria, was allowing any AT to become a hero/villain.

If time has shown us anything, it's that most players will go the path of least resistance.

Fastest time to the next level? Any AT? That's what the majority of players want.

Now, I'd start my character in Praetoria and not need a way to go to Praetoria from Primal with a new hero, except, I want it known my character is Primal through the badges. I want my character to go through those same starting arcs, I don't need new ones, I just want to more easily say "Primal hero making these choices."

As for First Ward, still don't think my main would make some of those choices.

What does it for me is that without full level 1-50 content Praetoria kind of feels like an extended tutorial that you can do before you start playing the "real" game back on Primal Earth. I think if Praetoria ever got fleshed out to be a complete 1-50 area then it would feel more significant. I'd love to be able to have Praetorian native characters that never have to leave Praetoria in order to reasonably advance up to 50.

Yeah, the lack of 1-50 Praetoria does kinda suck. Especially when you then get treated like Primal from 20 onward. It...kinda ruins the immersion. And the potential cool things they could have done.

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 always found it rather odd that repeatable missions were included considering I'm constantly outlevelling content just running story-arcs.. Perhaps the level ranges could be extended, so instead of having to leave at 20 it just opens up the possibility of leaving then.

As it is I think the level ranges are 1-10, 8-15, 15-20.. Maybe they could be opened up (extending the ranges of enemy groups as required) to 1-15, 8-23, 15-30, or thereabouts. Add a Praetorian side to the First Ward content (if you haven't crossed over into Primal Earth yet) and you have a very solid first 30 levels of content to build on..

As for addressing the difficulty, maybe take a leaf from DFB and do away with TOs and DOs in Praetoria - they could have Praetorian Origin enhancements that are basically just SOs without being tied to an origin. Add DFB-esque temporary powers as story-arcs rewards as well and it should go a long way to easing the difficulty without making it too trivial (you're still limited by available slots etc.)

Most of the replies have the statement "Too hard for low levels"
Ambushes, enemy groups that are over powering and such, and thats why i think that my idea could work, not being level 1-20 while doing missions there.
As a level 50 you'd start off as 20 levels lower while in Nova Praetoria and full Incarnate 50 while in Neutropolis, here is a break down.
You're level 30-40 in Nova Praetorian Missions, not 1-10. In Imperial City you're level 40-50, instead of 5-15. And Neutropolis you'll fight at you native level 50+. This would open up more powers, making it easier to deal with the enemy groups.

I think it'd be nice if I, as a non-praetorian, could open up the find team list and see who was currently chilling in Praetoria. Instead I just assume it's a barren wasteland.