How does the Citadel TF exist?

Most of the original TF's were written by people that had never written a TF before.

It was a fairly new concept at the time for them, and they really didn't have anything to look at in other games to base it on.

From what I've been told over the years by various Devs, many of those TF's had a very simple outline as far as plot with basically a very broad premise, one or two "bullet points" to make during the story and a vaguely wording ending scenario. Sometimes they were even told an approximate number of missions to include.

Positron told us at one of the HeroCon's that the Positron Task Force was one of the first things he wrote for the game. I spoke to Posi and Hero 1 after one of the panels and asked that they please rewrite it. The answer I was given was that they preferred to do new content and not re-do existing content.

I think this was a stock answer they had ready since they had either already done the rewrite or had it planned to do. When the new 2 part Posi hit Beta I fumed a bit but realized they really couldn't have said anything at that time.

But that is likely one of the reasons they aren't going back and rewriting some of the old TF's like Citadel. They'd prefer to only rework it when they have something new to introduce in it, like when they changed Sister Psyche's TF to the Penny Yin TF due to Sister's death.

Changes to the Clockwork King due to adding Penny to the Phalanx could be the impetus in the future to rewrite the Synapse TF. I'm not sure what it would take to get a rewrite of Citadel.

Synapse's TF needs a do-over just because Yin and the Clockwork King have changed. Yanking out the redundant do this mission in triplicate would be a wonderful side-change.

I think Citadel's TF would be a good place to introduce the Columnists and Council fighting each other instead of just an endless string of council missions. They could tie it into how maybe Primal Earth has had design docs pertaining to the Imperial War Walkers leaked to them at the cost of a dozen praetorian rebels' lives and Citadel is analyzing them for structural weaknesses. Naturally the Council and Column are both intensely interested in those documents seeing as how they also have a penchant for building giant robots.

OOOOooooooo Forbidden times..

Citadel is an absolute dinosaur in terms of game development. It's REALLY old. Pre-Issue 1 old. We'll never see it's like born again and we don't really want to, but it's also a bit of a history lesson. I dislike it as much as anyone, but I can see how it was created in the first place.

The original TF designers weren't nefarious villains out to make us miserable. They were doing their best they could under two very big handicaps compared to modern content writers. They didn't have the tools they have today and they didn't have years of experience to teach them what we do and don't like.

Keep in mind that back when the original TFs were written, the devs had fewer mechanics at their disposal than the average AE designer has today.

NPC Allies?
Hostages to lead out?
Prison maps?
Outdoor maps?
Wandering patrols?
Mid-mission ambushes?

Nope. They had none of these. They were still fighting just to get the TF system itself working right. (It wasn't pretty at first) Missions in general were really generic and TFs had little that really could set them apart from story arcs except for length, so that's what they went with.

There were no inventions, no merits, no badges, really no reward for TFs at all at first. Some XP, an SO, and a souvenir clue was about all you got for your hours of playtime. TFs were largely the domain of hardcore players who wanted to sit and play for hours on end anyway, so it may not have been immediately obvious that there was a fundamental problem with the way TFs were designed until they started drawing in a larger portion of the player base with more exclusive rewards.

If you trace TFs in the order of their creation, you see a slow progression from the hideous timesinks of the earliest days to sleeker, more fun and engaging experiences. They aren't all everyone's favorite, but I think it's safe to say that as time has moved forward, generally the TFs that have emerged are more and more popular than those before it.

So yes, Citadel is awful, but they had to start somewhere. Hopefully someday it and the remaining original TFs get a facelift reflecting everything the devs have learned in the years since.

Complaining about Citadel? You've never done the original Posi I take it?

I prefer most of the new content because it's shorter than the old stuff. New TFs being ~1 hour long most of the time actually allows me to do them during the week and on the whim instead of including them in a schedule.

That said, I wouldn't mind doing longer TFs if they were varied as long as they weren't longer than 2.5* hours on average. Long end-game raids are the reason I don't really play the traditional MMOs, there is just pretty much no way for me to justify playing 4-5 hours worth of one raid in a row.




*based on no actual evidence or research, but 2.5 hours sounds like a window I could devote to a TF on a weekend

Well...

When it comes to Legacy content, we've seen Atlas redone as well as Posi TF.

Now, they've moved onto Kings Row in the next issue (I24). I'm a little disappointed that the legacy arcs weren't removed (or thrown into the police scanner bin). They are as bad as the oldest TFs. Also, they're given out by different contacts depending on origin which interferes with co-op mission completion.

Those arcs should have been replaced with a new "intro to the villain groups of level 5-15" arc given by one contact.

Anyway, it seems the Devs are revamping legacy content from the ground up, which is the logical thing to do so that you can build on a overarching arc.

This means we can only hope that a Skyway update and a revamp of Synapse TF will come out in I25 (or even I24.5!).

A revamped Citadel TF to reflect the Council-5th Column war players will already have encountered in Independence Port would be good.

My favorite poke-in-the-eye from the Citadel TF is in Mission Four where the entry text pop-up reads "This layout of this facility mimics the other three exactly."

Yes, thank you for making the monotony extend beyond the fourth wall.

I think Synapse is the worst. I would rather do Citadel multiple times. Apart from the need for TFC I would skip Synapse.

I enjoy Synapse more than either Manticore or Citadel. Now, I'm not saying that all 3 don't need to be redone. They do. All of the legacy TF's need to be redone with the new design philosophy and tech.

Maybe we'll see them each get redone once every few issues.

You guys have it all wrong, the Citadel TF was a test to see if in the future (er, now our past?) they could get everyone in the game to repeat 1 mission (say DFB for instance....) and therefore use up a lot less resources while still keeping everyone (moderately) happy. Now, the question is, did we pass the test or fail it?

Having run one of these awful wastes of time recently in pursuit of the accolade, I officially <3 this thread title.