The Future of CoX. Ah the Memories...

This past weekend I was on an ITF with some friends and my Incarnate, IO-slotted Fire Blaster was raising heck like he always does. One of my teammates said "Hey remember when we thought this was hard?" We all Lol'd and played on.

What he said got me to thinking. I remember when only a non-squishy or a truly gifted veteran player could turn the Diff above the basic level. I remember when teams went into the STF and the LRSF knowing that their success rate was no where near 100%. I remember the feeling when you got on one of those really great PUGs or spec-built teams that just CLICKED and everything was mad fun for hours.

I remember the content too. I remember how bad I felt for Wretch and Ghost Widow doing their story arc Redside. I remember when I discovered that the Luddites were right and the orange pipes really WERE evil. I remember the rush of accomplishment when I was on my first MS Raid and the Rickti fell in droves.

Now players do Sewer runs until they're ghastly husks sitting at their computers. They run TFs solely for Merits and Badges and Accolades but never stop to read the content. At lvl 21 they grab a Performance Shifter Proc and watch their End issues melt away. At lvl 35 they slot up Kinetic Combats and suddenly they're nigh-invincible. Along the way they grab +Regen and +Rec Procs, farm with their friends and race towards Incarnate status where they form a different little club farming for Incarnate Salvage and IXPs.

So now for the big questions: Are we ever going to feel that rush of discovery again and where does the game go from here? I'm sure the Devs have people working on this...top people. I'm also sure they're just as worried as I am. They've set the bar so high that the older parts of the game seem drab and unused by comparison.

Should the Devs keep going as they are...pouring out new shiny? Should they devote some of their energy to the older content...spruce it up a bit? Posi is wildly popular after they revamped it after all. I see people running the ITF all the time just for fun...yet many of the older TFs are only run when someone needs the badge or they rotate into the WST slot.

I like this game. I'd like to see it keep flourishing and growing. But how do we (and by we I mean the players AND the Devs) keep it from becoming just a constant rush a new stuff? Where do we slow down and look at what we had before and bring it up to date?

1. The ability to circumvent the endurance crush tends to enhance enjoyment of the game.

2. I read all the new content completely -- the first time. That "rush of discovery" is great, but it only really works the first time through. Merits, badges, and accolades are important, because it gives incentive to run content more than once.

3. How many new players do you know? I know a couple, and they are experiencing all of this stuff for the first time, and it's all new to them. And it's great, and I love talking about the story with them (avoiding spoilers, natch).

4. In the last two issues they've added the following level 1-29 content:

Redside:
Operative Kuzmin
Fire Wire
Doctor Weber
Lt. Harris
Dr. Graves
Bane Spider Ruben
Brother Hammond

Blueside:
Matthew Habashy
Officer Fields
Sondra Costal
Aaron Thiery
Twinshot
Graham Easton
Laura Lockhart

Co-Op:
Nadia
Palantine
Noble Savage
Katie Douglas
Blind Makua
Cerulean
Master Midnight
Vanessa DeVore

Plus a new tutorial and two new low-level trials. All of this is better content than we ever got with endless "Hunt 10 Circle of Thorns in Perez Park" or "Investigate Warehouse for sign of Clockwork" missions. It's there if people want to play it. If people would rather sit in the AE PLing up or run endless iterations of the sewer trial, that's their call, but plenty of people are running new content for the storylines.

I'd love to see Posi-style revamps of the rest of the Synapse-->Numina TFs too, but you can't say the Devs haven't been devoting "some of their energy" to older content.

Personally, I am a much bigger fan of them "making new out of the old" rather than introducing completely new stuff. For the time being, the completely new stuff should be exclusive to the Incarnate System. I would much rather they continue to revisit and refine older zones and content, to make them more appealing.

I am glad that we now have so many options as to how to go about leveling. What upsets me is that some options are far more appealing than others.

Despite having run the arcs dozens of times, The Hollows remains one of my favorite string of story arcs. But now, if I ask if anyone would like to run missions in the Hollows, I am greeted with one of two responses: "Why not just run a DFB?" or "What's The Hollows?" And The Hollows do not need a revamp! There is a trainer in the zone now. There is a hospital in the zone now. And with the amount of inherent travel powers now available through the market, most people have the means with which to navigate the Hollows with ease. Yet, no one wants to run the arcs any more. Granted, some would say that's because they have run the arcs so many times already. To that I say: and how many times have you run the DFB trial?

To keep this short: I would prefer that they continue to make the older content more appealing, rather than continue to tack new things on. When content is going untouched, making it appealing again can be just as good as adding something new to the game.

There is still room for some improvements on older stuff Rosa..

As Comicsluvr mentioned a few of the older TFs could stand an upgrade like POSI got..

Synapse ..even with stealthing this still takes around 90 minutes in most cases.

Basically as you start out you are subjected to a kill all followed by a street hunt, three more straight kill alls, a PATROL and yet another kill all before finally getting an option to stealth ...and thats after a second PATROL.

suggestions.. change a few of those defeat alls to find leader and his minions... If players want to steam roll for the XP fine but at least give them the oprion not to so more people will view this as less of a punishment than a trial.

The lose one or both of the patrols. This was one of the first things that was chucked when they revamped the POSI. Patrols offer up absolutely no XP, INF or whatever. All they are is time wasters and before the outcry of "YOUR SEARCHING FOR CLUES..IT'S A PART OF THE STORY LINE" begin .. That same info could be easily obtained by changing the midless defeat alls the proceed both into defeat the leader and his minons and seek clue to ____________.

The trial almost seems like a candidate for the same treatment the POSI got.. Turn it into two shorter ones. The first half (the part that now has all those kill alls) could be us stopping the Clockwork's plans.. hench the current defeat all clcokwork in the station missions. The second part could begin with the current Defeat Bertha Mission and revolve around locating the Clockwork King and putting an end to him.

Sister Psyche.. Not nearly as bad as Synapse and most of the mission give players the option to stealth or steamroll

about the only suggestion I'd make here is lose the missions in the middle that suddenly shift the focus, though briefly, from Freakshow to Council. There is at least one of these where aside from a single mob you fight nothing but Council. We see three other TFS between 20-30 that revolve completely around Council.. Moonfire, Hess and Citadel... was it really necesary to throw them into Sister P as well? So let's give the poor tired facists a rest and revamp one or tow of those to focus totally on the FREAKSHOW and eliminate the other.

Now Moonfire and Hess are actually pretty good as is. No one seems to mind the early defeat alls in Moonfire since its a really quick and easy way to get the defeat badges required for the Atlas Medalion. Both are fairly short in length and aside from ONE talk to mission in Moonfire both never require the team to leave STRIGA. Over double Xp I did Citadel for the first time in a while and I realized how much shorter it is than in the old days.. It did get an overhaul a while ago.

Okay now here is MY suggestion.. individually none of these is bad but if you are using TF and trials to level your character, which I sometimes do, after Sister Psyshe you see nothing but Council, Council and more Council until level 30.[Note this did change recently with the addition of the Adm Sutter TF in IP that is available between 20-40 for XP] Now I have nothing against it but if we had to lose ANYTHING I'd suggest dropping Hess completely. WHY? Well #1) It's not required for any accolade like Citadel (TF Commander) #2) the villains defeated provide no defeat badges .. Moonfire lets you defeat Vampri and Warwolves for defeat abdegs and those defeat badges help with yet another accolade (as mention before). and #3) of the three its the only one that requires players to complete a story arc in order to even begin running it. That final battle inside the volcano is cool but the TF doesn't get nearly as much play time for all the reasons listed above.

Now I am not suggesting we just drop the TF.. Replace it and let us battle someone besides Council.. Tsoo or Family come to mind almost immediately and since defeating Tsoo Sorcerors earns a badge required for another accolade I'd go with them over the Family. They could always move Hess to Ouroborus like they did with the old Calvin Scott and the Old Positron TF so it would be available for anyone interested but this would give us a little variety in the 20-30 level range.

While there are some that would disagree I think Manticore is pretty good as is.. Not too long and most missions are stealthable. If we changed anything here.. get rid of the street hunt in Crey's Folly at the end. All this REALLY does is forces us to travel from KINGS ROW after we rescue the councilman to Crey's Foly and then .. back to someplace like Kings Row again or Atlas to battle Hopkins. Replace it with a defeat the leader/minions and seek clues since all we are SUPPOSEDLY doing is seeking out the location of Hopkin's hideout when we are street hunting in CF. [at this point can you tell i am not a fan of mindless street hunts or patrol missions?] lol

OK... now for my FAVORITE Task Force {please note sarcasm alert} Numina. Take away the mindless steet hunts scattered over almost every zone in the game and this entire TF is about 5 missions long. On top of that while the story revolves around the Devouring earth we barely see them at all until the final two mission. Its even gotten harder since the 5th column returned.. years ago you could send ONE player to Boomtown and quickly take out 20 Council. Now everyplace you even see council you also find the 5th and as soonas you enter an area .. the 5th column attack the council and its a race to see who can kill them faster. Half the time we lose! I don't know what Dev wrote up this mess but it seems like they were rushed so an easy out was .. "Let's just run them all over the place on a series of mindless hunt missions instead of actually THINKING of some door mission content" Except for the final two hunts Rikti in FF and DE/Nemessi in Eden none of the hunts even offer up XP for the defeats. AND the entire TF can grind to a halt if a zone event occurs while your trying to hunt in a particular one. On one Numina in particular (when it was the WST) we got to sit and wait for a zombie invasion to end before we could hunt Vahzilok in Faultline and then ended up waiting again for a Rikti invasion to end before we could defeat Warrior in Talos. REVAMP this thing and make it more interesting.. as is most players do it for the TF commander accolade or when its the WST and they can earn double merits.

I don't even want to start on the Shard TFs LOL Let's just say in over 6 and ahalf years I have done Doc Q twice and its enough to last me a lifetime. lol Thankfully at 35 we now have the ITF and it gave players between 34-45 something to do besides the long, long LONG ordeal in the Shadow Shard.. Love the zone HATE that task force!

How do you bring old story up to date? It's game lore, you can't just change history. While some of the mission mechanics are irritating (hunt 65 carnies in PI... thanks Harvey), they are what they are. Removing or changing some of that stuff changes the lore and isn't really worth the effort as there are a lot of tie ins that may break once it is changed. It's there for posterity and if you wanna run it, you can, but folks who are done running low level content just look for the most efficient way to get to the stuff they want to run. If that means running DFB until you're 15, then running synapse, then DiB until you're 25, then citadel and hess, then Croatoa to Katie Hannon, then numina, midniters arc to ITF, then STF and Unai Kemen... you get it. You can do whatever suits your fancy and that is the strength of this game. The paths are high on the permutations, and even more so with leveling while examping... missed the posi cause you levelled to quick to 15, no worries, you can still run it AND get exp.

It's only old to someone who has played it umpteen times.

I still have great fun running some of those TFs!

ITF? Almost always on at least +1 or +2, and when I can get the people into it, love to go +4!

Same with STF!

My love of trying to solo AVs (as it just makes me truely feel the character is on par with my favorite comic book superheroes) also gives me lots of fun! And mind you, that's stuff I try to do without the incarnate abilities outside of possibly the alpha slot (difficulty can be bumped up to have the AV match or beat your level shift, so I worry less about that one).

Finally soloing Silver Mantis, soloing the ITF, to me those were some of the great moments, not to mention the all Scrapper Apex and Tin Mages on Beta with fellow players from the forums!

True, soloing the AVs usually comes down to smashing buttons in order with builds built to do such things, but then all that is what I loved about playing Diablo 2!

Could quite possibly be why I'm one of those vets that still loves to play the game after all these years.

As for updating older content, I'm for it! But then I'm also up for consolodating/removing a few of the blueside maps too!

I'd rather see a much bigger Talos Island that incorporates, Independence Port and Terra Volta, than have the added maps, just so it has less empty maps.

This is the one thing I LOVE about redside. Less maps! I hear some full time redsiders (I admit to being mostly blueside, but that's more of because my love of playing the hero over the villain) complain about less maps, and personally I think it's a PLUS+!

Just the past weekend I ran loads of highbie TFs with teams of non-50s, most of them not even IOed as they were progressing so quickly. Old content can easily be as difficult as it ever was when you don't have a team of level 51s crushing each spawn before it can blink. One STF was frustratingly down-to-the-wire but at the same time it brought up a truckload of olden-dayes nostalgia. It can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be if you're the leader, and if you think people won't join challenge TFs I suggest that you haven't tried it lately.

The main difference, in my opinion, is less the fact that players are stronger now, which they are, and more the fact that we've done this stuff before and we know the tricks at this point. If we were to imagine a STF race, I'd put money on a team of level 50 STF veterans with no inventions and no incarnate powers over a team of decked out 53s who had never run it before. In fact I could see the latter team failing to complete it.

the simple answer is:
1. don't use IO sets
2. don't play level 45+ teams (that have incarnate powers)

the game is still fun, exciting, and challenging in the 5-32 range
why people play the farming game of the upper levels I don't understand

Im up for more revamps instead completely new content/zones.
There's too many zones in the game, and too many looking alike and without purpose.
Revamped content is new content too.

I want to thank everyone for the rapid replies. After thinking on it I realized several things:

1) Many of the people I started the game with, RL friends I knew before CoH, are gone now. I know many people on-line but the connection is not as tangible as with the real people I know that used to play.

2) I don't lead much. I play, solo and team, but I don't lead much for some reason. I'm not sure why...I have no particular aversion to it. Perhaps I need to LEAD some TFs and teams to be able to slow the pace down a tad and smell the roses as it were.

3) Sometimes you can't go back. No, I didn't enjoy running out of End either. I also remember how difficult some foes were the first time I ran into them. With experience comes familiarity and I now know who to take out in the mob first. This can't be un-learned and is something I can only counter with new foes or old foes at higher levels.

4) We have scores of new powersets available so I think I'll take some new toons through the same old content with fresh eyes and see how that feels.

Thanks for all the tips and advice.

One of the reasons why I moved all of my toons over to virtue was the farming issue. On virtue you can team and do story content with other players. Everywhere else I went it was always DFB > DIB runs over and over again, or AE farms where you have to pay to join them. On less populated servers it was silence... basically I was stuck soloing or duoing at most.

A second reason why I moved over all my toons was the speed run issue. I, myself, like to actually play the game. You know, fight enemies in front of you, gain experience in ways that aren't explicitly farms, learn to play new sets and ATs as I go along, chat with players about random goofy stuff and make jokes. Generally "play" stuff. Even as I make more characters I am hesitant to move away from virtue because I get the feeling that I am going to end up in a crowd that doesn't like to have fun. And no, "grinding" isn't fun. It is a conditioned behavior shaped to continually force you to play the game for aspirations that you'll have fun later. However I digress.


I still do find challenge in a lot of the higher level TFs/SFs. DXP was a bit of an exception since the combined n00bishness along with rapidly advancing sets that weren't updated gave everyone competence issues, but during this weekend I saw many failed TFs and trials. Outside of DXP weekend I still do see that on occasion. Teams that fail the ITF at +0/x1 difficulty, teams that get stomped royally by the LRSF, and even teams that can't complete the Ice Mistral SF due to the ambushes that spawn. The challenge is still there; you just need bad team makeup and a certain level of incompetence to get it.

If you don't get those, then what I do is crank the difficulty until I get challenge. Generally I run groups at +2 by default, only lowering the difficulty if I see a problem with how the team handles it. This comes rarer and rarer, though, since as I get better with my characters and their builds they become much more capable at carrying the team by themselves. My stronger toons can solo +2/X8, which is nice should the situation arise. If the team I am on does well, then I slowly creep it up to +3 and then +4. It is rare to find a team that isn't challenged by +4 old content, especially at low levels.

As for the discovery aspect, I still do get that sensation of newness from them. My favorite stuff is currently Praetoria 1-20. I have to solo it, but the storylines are interesting and involving. I can't wait to see what happens next in the arcs that I have yet to play, let alone what happens when I start side-switching.


The argument about min/maxing perplexes me. I guess this is just a holdover from PnP days and players who generally weren't fun to play with, but I NEVER saw IOs like that. At all. When I first started playing, I started giving my toons (note, my very first character) IOs at 35 since I thought the natural progression was to go from training > dual > single >generic IO / IO sets. It never occurred to me to stop and limit myself at a particular level for... storyline reasons? I don't know. I didn't even consider doing it to try and work an exploit to maximize a character. I figured "Hey, why not put in IO sets to enhance everything and get some nice perks, too?". As I rebuild my characters sets toward certain goals to make the toons better, I don't see that as min/maxing, either. I see it as part of the natural character progression. Whether they are just changing tactics for storyline reasons, or they are just getting better at what they are doing, the refining of sets isn't a sacrifice, and my toons aren't losing any of the personality. They're just getting better. As I like to say: Character growth doesn't stop at 50. Far from it.

Well... it was more relevant before incarnate stuff was released. But you know what I mean.

1. You don't really run out of END at low levels these days. The AT's that didn't do enough damage got fixed so they can win a fight before running out of END. Plus everyone starts with Stamina. So it just isn't the issue it used to be.

2. Terra Volta is much bigger than the space on IP. You cannot merge the two, you would have to cut TV down to a fraction of its size (which may not be a problem).

3. I also moved to Virtue for the "better" players. I was on Freedom where teams are easy to find - but there is a ton of farming spam and DFB. Virtue seems to have almost know farming spam and the teams are just a bit more interested in the missions than just the XP. It is not a cure all, but it is more immersive and less gamey.

I feel similar to how Sam does; I like being powerful enough that I smash back waves of ambushes one after another, and can defeat the Big Bad at the end without the Constant Rush-In-Fight-Retreat-Heal-Repeat pattern.

But there are plenty of ways to challenge yourself in the manner the OP describes. I'm currently taking my demigod-powerful brute thru all the Ouroborous missions to get every Ouro Badge possible. Some of those settings require you to not use Inspirations, or (talk about challenging) make it so *none* of your Enhancements have any effect. Yet, that sure feels old school. My +8/+4 AV settings is currently +0/+0 no AV until this is done, and I still have some trouble on Arcs where I'm not using Enhancements.