Is Skyway City ... superfluous?

I can see how an argument could be made about redundant zones. You're wrong, of course, but I could see how you would argue about it. But that the game below level 25 is superfluous? That's anathema to me, especially considering I spend more than half my time playing characters below level 25. If you're arguing that the DFB has caused the game to "start" at level 25, that's people's prerogative, but it's not a very engaging kind of game, doing the same damn thing over and over again. To suggest that the low-level game is superfluous is to suggest it doesn't need to exist, and that's just a bad idea. It exists not for the sake of "flavour," but for the sake of variety. I want to do more than just the same mission over and over again. I want to see more than just the same place with the same enemies over and over again. And I also want to see progress.

Yeah, progress - that's kind of the point of an RPG and especially in an MMO. I really rather enjoy starting out weak and powerless and watching how my abilities improve and I can handle problems that would have been impossible just 10 levels ago. This is never more pronounced in the 1-10 game, and progress thus never feels as rewarding and as dynamic than it does until about level 10 to 15. As a point of fact, I remade an old Blaster into a Stalker on... Tuesday? Today, she's level 17 or 18, and it's Saturday, and I can't say I regret anything I've done with her up until that point. Sure, I spent a lot of my time chatting with the Viking or with Nuclear Toast or fawning over costumes and character story, but that's part of the low-level game - figuring out WHO this character is, how she should behave, what she would seek to do and so forth. The faster-paced game in the lower levels makes this process much more dynamic as I can figure those out as the game evolves around me.

And let's go back to the redundancy of zones, for a moment. You argue that the overworld is obsolete, implying that the game would be better without it, possibly as some sort of older-style beat-em-up with a single hub and level-to-level progression. Trouble is, I want to see more than just the inside of the same warehouse and office building over and over again. I've played games that do this - Spiral Knights, Vindictus, Divine Souls, etc. - and I really, REALLY dislike the approach. It robs the game of a sense of size and a sense of persistence, feeling more like what passes for an outside world is just a collection of instanced random dungeons that play out like the levels in an old-style arcade fighter.

To my eyes, any game which tries to present a persistent world NEEDS a static overword that persists between people, where people can randomly meet while on unrelated tasks or while just out-and-about. Even if exploration is not a strong theme of a particular MMO, I still feel that a persistent world is necessary for the game to not feel like a budget title that has cut so many corners it now metaphorically resembles a sphere. And this is especially true of an MMO that already HAS an overworld, and a pretty dang good one, to boot. I could see if we were developing a brand new game and trying to see what we could get away with not putting in it, how we'd choose to skip adding an open overworld.

City of Heroes already has an overworld, and it makes no sense to me to suggest that it be cut out or cut down. Having redundant zones is a great thing, especially when my missions take me around them to see the sights, because it means I'm seeing something new every time, or at least close to it. To eliminate what's already there by tossing meteorites over it is the height of waste of resources and I really hope this doesn't happen. If certain zones are never visited at all, then they can be reused, revamped and have content added to them. And those revamps don't even need to be as massive as what happened to Atlas Park or Dark Astoria or ESPECIALLY Faultline. They can be as simple as what was done with the Rikti Crash Site.

Finally, there's a very important point that all this talk of what's "obsolete" that I need to address: Paragon Studios' reputation. Pretty much since I18 came out, our developers have developed for themselves a "Neuron reputation," which is to say the reputation of a studio that cuts corners, launches content unfinished, uses shortcuts and skinner boxes to keep people occupied while releasing as little content as is strictly necessary and never going back to improve their older creations. That's not always the case and I'm definitely not trying to insult the studio and the people who work there, but this is the reputation that they've developed. They do a LOT of work these days, but it seems this quantity increasingly comes at the expense of quality.

With that said, nuking ANOTHER zone that more than a few people like and reducing variety and progression paths further, all with the excuse of "We didn't want to bother updating two zones when we could update just one." would not fly very well. It is as Yahtzee says - there was a time when a sequel having more stuff than the original was something we took for granted. And an Issue expansion that ends up with me having FEWER zones to play in than I did the Issue before runs exactly this kind of danger. I get that the studio's schedule is heavy and hectic, but that shouldn't remove things I like from the game just because some other player has no use for them. Can't upgrade Skyway City and only have resources to do Steel Canyon? So don't upgrade it, but keep it in the game. It's the same thing we fought with David tooth and nail - just because YOU think a costume piece looks bad and YOU think a new version looks better doesn't mean I agree, so just keep the old piece for me to use.

Even if just as a matter of principle, I will never agree with removing large chunks of the game solely because someone thinks they're "obsolete." If we were taking out obsolete things out of the game, why not start with bases and PvP and see how well that comes across with players?

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.

A "reboot" would pretty much kill the game dead on the spot. Sure, there are inconsistencies NOW, but a lot of the old content still holds up. Doing a reboot will just wipe out said old content that I'm pretty much mostly sticking to these days and I don't trust our writers to replace it with anything better.

The game can still keep its level-based timeline consistent if only our writers actually tried. Even if you need to ret-con things, then at least make sure to ret-con then completely, not just shove a new contradicting story in. If you have to, use Ouroboros as an excuse.

"We saw a timeline where Angus McQueen's efforts prevented the second Rikti Invasion, but now someone has tampered with the timeline and it happened anyway. Angus is now working with heroes to try and stem the tide, instead. The old timeline still exists as an echo, however. I have seen it in the crystal of ice and flame."

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.

Bravo, my friend! I could not say all those things any better than you did.

I think the truly evil alternate dimension -- worse than Praetoria -- is one where CoH is just a menu of missions and there is no city. :-(

Personally it was always a boring map, and sharing the same level range with more interesting Steel Canyon equates to useless "diversity".

'Oh, it connects to an empty pvp zone' is an underwhelming selling point.

Although clearly not in favor of any story rebooting, to a huge chunk of players narrative continuity matters far less then knowing where the best spots are to get through various level ranges.

Altogether a different case in the make up on the boards of course, but in that silly hypothetical if upgrades came (world, system, content) at the expense of story continuity, there would be far fewer irrevocably turned off by a jumbled narrative over those satisfied with the new shiny.


It doesn't dismiss your point, there have always simply been a minority of players who actually read the story though, present company excluded naturally. ;]

Then doing a story ret-con for those people would be a complete waste. As a point of fact, doing a story ret-con of Atlas Park by removing the completely serviceable Origin missions was a complete waste. I get adding new ones in Matthew Habshy, but losing the old ones still bugs me. I know it's to reduce the load on instancing in the areas where Free players are the most likely to drop the game after a quick glance, but it just make the game feel so, so small when it didn't use to.

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.

And then leaving all those contacts in place, it would seem? I came on board just before Freedom launched but after the Shivans flattened Galaxy. I found all those guys in City Hall's basement, and grokked fairly quickly, without any actual explanation in-game, that those five agencies were connected to the five origins, but I was baffled as to why none of them would talk to me (except to blow me off). To this day, Azuria is still the only one I've had any real contact with.

Because anyone that made a new character prior to the change will have them as contacts.

The contacts still exist and still have missions, but they no longer give them out. The only way to have them is if you had them on a character before the change to the new tutorial. And so those people that have them can still clear them instead of being stuck with open missions that have no contacts anymore.

The main reason the change was made is because the origin contacts used instancing, which can be taxing on the servers at sufficient usage. Because people are very prone to rolling new characters and then never taking them beyond mid level. they get abandoned or deleted and new characters get made. That's why most of the Atlas arcs, Hashaby etc, take place outside of instanced missions, it's all zone phasing using areas built into the zone (example: you can always go into the Hellion Cave. There's simply no reason to except for the Hashaby mission). It cuts down on load because any new characters running through Atlas stuff are just using resources in Atlas instead of spawning separate instances for everything.

I complain about it, but I get why they did it. When City of Heroes went into Freedom, they did a LOT of things to lighten the load on the servers since they were expecting a lot more people to come play the game, but never stick around to generate any revenue. That's why Free accounts are so limited yet why so many of those limitations go away with ANY purchase whatsoever.

To help with the load that instances put on the server, the new Atlas Park missions took place almost exclusively outside. I get that. I just wish the old contacts weren't completely inert. They were part of the game's story, history and setting, and they gave you at least some idea of what the FBSA is. Again, I get the technical reasons for taking them out, but can't they be re-enabled for Premium or VIP players? I know it's counter-intuitive to enable "inferior" content for paying customers, but even if it's inferior, it adds variety just the same.

One of the big things that makes this game feel like a grind to me is doing the exact same missions in the exact same places over and over again. I really need variety in my tasks, so that I don't feel compelled to skip mission briefings I've read a dozen times in a row. Even if that variety gives me options that aren't all that good, it's still better than nothing.

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.

Hey, I like that idea. The paying customers would be allowed a bit of extra server load. We don't need to look at it as inferior content, just as more content, because--as this thread alone shows--the idea of what is "good" content varies widely across the player base.

Besides, it seems this is right in line with a lot of the weekly stuff on offer on the market: things that are already earnable in-game, but for which many players will apparently pay real life cash. I'd rather pay for something like extra instance server load that can't be earned for free in the game.

Illusion of choice, man. They were all the equivalent of paper missions and offered nothing to the game. No real story, no real choice, just "Go to X, defeat Y." The game really is better off without those missions. And I thought a lot of the complaints about old Mercy, at least, were about fighting nothing but Snakes. That's literally all you'd fight, were Snakes.

Illusion of choice is a situation where any option selected produces the same result. These missions still provided choice of enemy groups, and very few players will say that at low levels there is no difference between Vahzilok and the other enemies you may fight at low level. Samuel and I have already explained that these missions are still of value to us, and Sam was quite eloquent in describing the reasons why, so they clearly offer something to the game. I'm not interested in PvP, but that doesn't mean it offers nothing to the game if some people like it. Hmmm..wait, that may be a bad example... Do people like PvP in this game? :-)

The point we are trying to make is that we want to have choices and not have to run through the same starting experience with every new character. Personally, I think even "Go to X, defeat Y" missions are a better hook to convince free players to subscribe than the excruciating Twinshot arcs (which come later, I know -- but are still in the early experience) that have embarrassing caricatures talking down to you and that play you for a fool the whole time.

You are astoundingly wrong here.

Not simply that I enjoyed the arc (and the Graves mirror arc villain side), but anecdotally the Twinshot arc (& Dillo in particular) is the most often complimented bit of game content I see in chat, buy a large margin.

Last night I ran some stuff in Striga, just because. It was all "go to x, defeat y" style content, and it was complete garbage compared to what they've added over the past year or so. Even the streamlined, institutionalized PL'ing of DFB/DIB runs is more involving and fun.

Twinshot isn't something that holds up well to multiple plays, but the first time through it is a terrific hook for players who're new to the game.

Sam's one of my favorite forumgoers, but I think even he'd admit his very particular, specific attitudes about certain aspects of gameplay are way out on the fringes of general opinion.

Hmmm...if I go with your form of hyperbole, then you are also "astoundingly wrong", because by far the majority of feedback I have heard about the Twinshot arcs agrees with my statement, assessing the characters as laughable caricatures who talk down to you the entire time, and the payoff of the story is not that you rescued or helped anyone, but simply that you've been duped all along by a powerful "friend". How is this supposed to make new players feel like a superhero? At least the old "go X kill Y" arcs treated you like a hero, with normal people asking you for help because you had special powers.

I think what you meant to say was, "The opinions of most people I have spoken to disagree with yours."

Nope, I said what I meant.
The idea that generic 'go hunt kill skuls' gameplay is a better seller than a modern story arc is ridiculous.

I haven't spoken to them per se, that's just from auditing various chat channels.
Which while far from scientific, does provide a more diverse sample than my friends list.

Whatever your weird vendetta against Twinshot, as incentives to sub up go a story arc with an actual story & gameplay that goes beyond "go here, kill that" repeated ad nasuem is a major improvement over pretty much all the legacy content.

Erg, Striga. First character I took there, I tried to play beyond getting the Wedding Band, and got some ways into the storyline involving that big Council base, but I gave up in frustration because I simply could never figure out where I was supposed to go. Too many non-instanced missions in underground tunnels, and I couldn't find the tunnel entrances (no instance means no waypoint). Or I'd find one, and then couldn't find it again because the parts of the Council base all started to look the same. And the instanced mission doors still had to be accessed by first entering those tunnels. Not to mention the game sent me to those contacts too early (IMO), so all those non-instanced mobs were higher level and I kept getting my butt kicked six ways to Sunday...

I was doing the 'find contact' thing & Stephanie Peebles popped up. As I've been trying out a wide range of stuff since my return I thought "why not?"

I think I didn't remember how awful Striga is because one, there's that really fun task force (Hess?) with the giant robot map, and two, when it first came out it was actually an improvement on what we had. Striga was like the rough draft for CoV and as crummy as it seems now at the time it was a Great Leap Forward.

But yeah, it's just horrible.
I'll stick around for the wedding band since I'm already there, but then I'm GONE.

Well, they kind of failed there as Dillo is one of the most beloved characters in the game.

*hoorb*

I wouldn't go quite so far as that. In fact, of the people I know, quite a few of them care nothing for story and get irritated when the game asks them to do anything BUT go and kill a bunch of stuff. I have a friend who more or less twisted my arm to go and play a Tera trial with him, and while I'm off reading the story and trying to figure out why I'm going out to "slay" 10 Piglings, he's already on the moore slaying Piglings, having clicked through the briefing without even reading a word of it but the highlighted name of what he's supposed to kill.

I don't know who the game's most beloved character is (I'd say Nemesis, but I might secretly BE the Nemesis so I may be biassed), but I do know that the forums are disproportionately interested in the game's story as compared to the game's population at large. If we're going to be bringing up popularity of content, then we need to bring up Winter Lords and the Architect and the DFB. If we go by what's being talked about the most in chat and what people most often fight, I'd have to conclude that the most popular character in the game is the Hydra Head.

In general, I find "what's popular" arguments to be unfair, especially when they're used to disprove another's argument. I'm usually not one of those "Pics or it didn't happen!" type of people, but I really find it's not safe to assume what's popular without actual statistics to back that up. I've not seen a person so much as mention Dillo or "hoorb" on the Global channels I'm part of but maybe once. Most of what I see discussed in them, when it's not TFs and iTrials, is generally either builds or out-of-game themes. The only times story discussions come up is when I start them, more or less. And that's actual moderated global channels. On the actual server-wide channels like Help and LFG, the discussions tend to be even less story-focused.

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All of that aside, I want to make a very firm statement: I CANNOT accept the argument that the game is better without the Launch origin missions. I don't care how bad someone thinks they are, the game is never better off for removing choice. The pretty thing about "choice" is those that don't like a particular set of content are more than free to not do it at all if it's in the game. If it's not in the game, however, those of us that do like it don't have the same choice. And, no, running the missions through Ouro doesn't cut it. They're 1-5 and Ouro doesn't open until 15. This does nothing to help break me away from Matthew Habshy.

Here's a very simple lesson I learned a few years ago - you can't design story arcs and only care about the player's experience the first time through. The way City of Heroes is built, we're expected to run through content over and over and over again. The arcs I praise as best aren't the ones I fell in love with on the first run. They're the ones I wasn't completely sick of by the tenth run. The older, simpler arcs that budgeted their narrative in briefings and clues are much easier to replay now, since they consist primarily of action. The newer arcs which consist of mostly speaking, though, just have no replay value. Twinshot and Graves are the worst about this. Even if I loved those arcs - LOOOVED them - I still wouldn't want to replay them because they include so much heedless busywork it's not even funny. Once I know the story, all I'm left with is the gameplay, and when the story ensures the gameplay grinds to a halt more often than not, then the arc isn't worth replaying.

And I have to disagree that even the old one-offs are somehow bad storytelling. People seem to regard them like you're literally told to go to a warehouse and defeat a boss and nothing else, but that's not the case. What I like about these missions is the "why" of it all, as well as the clues they give to future content. Why did the Skulls take the staff of a building hostage and put bombs down to demolish it? They gain nothing from this, so clearly they're working for someone else. At its core, it's a simple "click glowies, defeat boss" mission, but I still care about the story. And at the same time, I can get that story without having to look at the same cutscene for the seventeenth time and have to fight through the same scripted sequence that stopped being exciting the third time and is now just irritating, instead.

To the writers' credit, they seem to have finally grasped this simple notion and the newest of missions do have a sizable portion of what the game does best - fighting - without complicated scripts intruding on the flow. It's what makes SSA2.1 so fun, why the I22 low-level contacts are so fun to run and rerun and why Dark Astoria has garnered so few complaints. When the game is designed as a game, as opposed to a machinema, it works just fine, and for as bare-bones as their narrative may be, all of the Launch and I1 missions do just that. The game benefits nothing from removing them. Adding alternatives to them? Of course. Removing them outright? Who benefits from that?

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.

And that's the problem with them. You never find out the why. In a real story arc, that mission would usually be the first one in the arc. The rest would explore the actual why, but since you never do, it's kind of... well... "I stopped them from doing bad, but what now?"

There was an amusing series of missions in the 800lb Gorilla mmo that played off the propensity of most gamers to ignore everything about a mission other than what you had to kill/gather to move on to the next stage.

You'd have hated it. =P

I'm not making an argument about the popularity of Twinshot compared to other methods of leveling, I'm saying that people love the characters from that storyline, Dillo in particular, and aren't shy about expressing their affection in chat.

If I'd know my comment about what seems a simple statement of fact would arouse such confused disagreement, I'd have taken screens- I'll grab a few next time if I remember.

The comments tend to arise from "what should I run after XXXX?". someone will mention Twinshot, followed by some shout outs to people's favorite bits. I've seen Dillo's dialog quoted more often than any other in-game reference I can recall.

When the "choice" is between something of modern vintage- anything of modern vintage, incorporating the past 8 years of institutional experience in what makes good content, or the sort of absolutely tedious, embarrassing garbage exemplified by the legacy early game....that's not really a choice.

Or rather, it's a choice in the same way as the freedom to watch Nolan's The Dark Knight or an industrial training film on the proper method of sharpening pencils.

Technically a choice, and there's probably someone out there who REALLY loves sharpening pencils and REALLY hates Batman, but let's be honest.

We're never going to reach any accord here- garbage is garbage, and the game is better off without it. It gives a bad account of itself and reflects badly on CoH. It would be a terrible thing for a brand new player to download the game, have a great time making a character, then log in and run ANY of the junk I ran way back in 2004.

I'd die of embarrassment from the false impression that poor newbie got running Paco Sanchez's ridiculous collection of fedex's, generic kill alls & street sweeps.

If it's a choice at all, it's a bad one- for the player and the game as a whole.

If you're tired of the mission content, hop on the DIB/DFB bullet train- that's what it's there for.

This I agree with- neither Twinshot nor Graves have high replayablity.
But again, DIB/DFB. Plus radios/newspapers, alignment missions, etc etc.
If there's a choice between story arcs you're tired of and something more generic, the game provides a wealth of infinitely repeatable modern content on tap, as it were.


You make my argument for me Sam- yes, the creatives have learned a TON over the years. That's why the old content doesn't reflect well on the game and should be either paved over or routed around.

As with the Skyway zone itself, I don't think anything needs to be eliminated as long as players are consciously steered onto the modern, fun expressway that soars over the disreputable shantytown of legacy content.

I disagree completely. Superjumpers and teleporters can do perfectly fine in Skyway.