what in the game mechanically/content has gotten worse in the past 2 years?

Everything is terrible and the entire city is DOOOOOOOOMED!

Back in my day, everyone ran either fire/kin farms or some variation of Willpower, and we liked it! Villains were Villains, except when they were patsies for Arachnos or misunderstood Heroes, and Heroes were Heroes because nobody played Villains!

We had story arcs stuffed with filler repeative defeat alls and glowie hunts on massive outdoor maps! None of this "interesting chained objectives in order to tell a story and involve the player in it." claptrap! We talked to the contact who gave us some excuse to kill all of the warwolves in the cake factory disguised as a warehouse and that was it! And we'd do that with every cake factory disguised as a warehouse in the city, of which there's 20!

There was none of this "releasing a new and interesting powerset at least once a month along with regular story arcs, that also include generally good and interesting writing, except for that one time with Manticore." or any of this "making it easier to travel from place to place and keeping story arcs within the same zone." Or any of these regular costume updates! Or finally giving an endgame and a form of advancement past level 50, which absolutely nobody at all ever asked for repeatedly. Ever.

No, this game has gone from repetitive, tedious, and infrequently updated to new and constantly evolving, and I won't have it! Therefore the game is DOOOOOOOOOMED!

/crazyoldhoboguyrant

Subjectively speaking (and none of this really bothers me very much, if at all... just throwing them out there for the sake of conversation)...

I agree with those who feel like the new starter missions are worse.
This is a matter of opinion, of course, and it really doesn't matter if Nethergoat agrees with it or not.

I know I'm not the only one (no idea about majority or minority, of course) that feels like the new tutorial is worse than the older two.

I really don't like how the new starter tutorial content and new starter story arcs introduce new players with game mechanics and styles that just don't represent the rest of the game (thankfully... And I certainly hope it is no one's desire to change the rest of the game to match the new starter content).
The main aspects being: the unreality - game-mechanics-wise of fighting in the tutorial, the go and defeat THIS specific NPC where there are several of them all re-spawning at ludicrous speeds... that just does not match the cool way that the rest of the game's world behaves (and, again, the way the rest of it behaves is part of the appeal this game has always had, as opposed to other options out there), while the transitions using the new tech for cleaning up the neighborhood and/or rescuing a contact's loved-one adds a cool feel to things, the tech also creates some whacky oddities that, again, can really throw off new players and their introduction to what this game is like.
The new introductory content just seems a bit buggy and less smooth than what we used to have (that was arguably less dynamic).

Anyway, this entire post was not anything I felt the need to vent or complain about, so I have typed enough about some minor negatives that I honestly don't have any agenda or motive to have altered to be more towards my liking...

""can't think of anything.
No powersets nerfed to useless""

clearly you havent played much then have you? theres a few powersets we used to call Ice, Kinetic Melee, Assault Rifle. roll some new toons once in a while.

Some things that come to mind from a technical standpoint:

- the aforementioned ragdoll physics. It seems to be a bit better currently but enemies still twitch and twirl in ways they never used to after being defeated.
- NPC dialog that is spoken by an offscreen character. There are times where I've been unable to ascertain who is even speaking thanks to this:

[CAPTION]: Hey there, $playername, you'll find that secret lock of Manticore's hair in his shrine room.

And any new player that runs Death From Below or the Mathew Habashy starting arc will see [CAPTION] almost immediately and repeatedly. I can't believe QA hasn't reported the bug and don't understand why it hasn't been fixed yet. It may be small but it's right in your face, mission after mission and it diminishes the experience (unless every CAPTION is secretly Nemesis. I would accept this as a Nemesis plot).
- jagged, low poly rocks in caves. This is an old bug that has been fixed before but it got bugged again. In any cave mission look at the rocks (exception: rocks that are specifically placed for a particular mission, like SSA 1.2) along the ground and you'll notice that they are all very low-poly -- because a lot of the polys that *should* be there aren't. Again, not a critical, game-affecting bug but it looks sloppy.

And not so technical:

- reducing the number of options when starting the game. You get one path or Death From Below and that's it.
- the bog standard end game system of raids to get slightly better powers (effectively, gear) in order to do more raids to get more slightly better powers. I was hoping that CoH would do something different but the design philosophy has hewed extremely closely to the established EQ/WoW formula.
- the new insta-spawns that materialize in front of you. CoH used to always hide this, unlike other MMOs. It helped immersion and made for a less annoying experience. This, along with tethering and phasing are examples of the game failing to innovate and instead simply following the lead of other games.

(I see Electric-Knight shares my dislike on a few of these things. EK, you don't need to practically apologize for not liking some aspects of the game. They're not going to send a GM to personally slap each of your characters in the face!)

No more German and French servers

@Redcap

QR without reading the rest;

Knockback. Or, rather, the ragdoll physics as a result of knockback. As in, it's still broken. Which might be nice when certain enemies effectively get perma-held because the broken ragdoll means they cannot physically stand up and resume hitting you, but it's hard to take things seriously when mobs are basically imploding in on their own skeleton. It's also REALLY annoying when it happens to your mastermind pets.

Which brings me neatly onto; A.I. Pet and rescue A.I. was never good, but it seems to get worse, better and then worse again in stages. We seem to be in a down curve section at the moment. Which sucks.

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.

Hmmm find this interesting.. since the game has become "More" damage orientated. Take SR for example..Dusted mine off the other day to see the changes since alpha came out,dissapointing. There is alot of debuff going on now. Scrappers can practically Tank almost everything in the game, so can stalkers. Brutes have been given even Higher damage output. Poor tanks got resist buff , like they needed this before ? Guys Tanks are becomming obsolete hello...after lvl 35ish do you really need a tank ? . Try running master runs its harder to find tactical players in a world of speed everything

The thing truly broken is the fact that the program now and then kills my internet connection. Forcing me to unplug everythionjg, reboot the computer etc bedore being able to move on. Very annoying.

I'm sorry that it's come to this, but I have to agree with Golden Girl. The game's quality has been improving as of late. Dark Astoria, the Praetorian War, Low-level arcs...A general improvement of the old "Collect 20 bear behinds and pimp slap a boss" formula. I will admit that Redside tends to get shafted as far as content, and they really should have taken Goldside further than level 30...But overall, my decision stands. I like newer content.

They didn't intend this problem, but in the AE, soon as you step onto a map any kidnapped NPC spouts out their dialogue. The line they're supposed to say when you get near, the line they say when you show up, the line they say when you've beaten up their guards (iirc, I haven't set foot in there in a bit, even though I have one arc about 80% near completion).

This pretty much ruins any kind of story flow an author had planned. Being it's the AE, I seriously doubt they've even taken one look at fixing it or will. But hey we all know it's only used for farming anyways, right?

Old Task Forces. (Synapse, Shadow Shard TF's, etc.) Some or most of them need revamps or just need to shortened.