How does the Citadel TF exist?

Sorry folks, I'd still rather do either of these than Numina's huntfest.

Moonfire is a TF that you could almost see being designed for the sole purpose of helping mid-20s teams power through the Slayer and the Silver Bullet defeat badges for the Atlas Medallion.

Even if the devs had more tricks they could play during Citadel TF, the story itself is suitable for a single mission: the Council (or 5th) have stolen Citadel's design and are planning to upgrade their robots.

This is not visualized at all during the arc, and there are more and bigger robots in Hess.

If the devs are going to tell a story of umpteen missions, there should be some sort of buildup / suspense, a sense of progress during the TF, and a sense of resolution at the end.

If this was a scanner mission, you'd just stealth to the back, click the computer glowie to erase the plans from the Council's (5th's) network and be done with it.

If it's a TF, you'd probably have to locate and destroy the robot making complex (like what you'd see on Hess maps), and either put the big bad in jail or blow him up along with his facility.

So, in a way, Hess IS the revamped Citadel.

Yeah I find Synapse faaaaar worse than Citadel. Citadel is annoying but Synapse is the height of tedium. I'd rather keep Citadel if it meant Synapse got revamped. Ideally, I'd revamp both.

Honestly Numina's isn't that bad in comparison. Part of it just requires knowing what zones to have someone head to. If you can do that you can speed through it really really fast.

As for the Synapse TF ... it has always bothered me that you get this TF from Synapse, when he has no real connection to the foe. A primary rule of storytelling is to "make it personal," and there's no personal connection here.

Then there's the long and unnecessary grinding through map after map of Clockwork. If the devs wanted a quick way of improving this TF, it would be to remove the redundant defeat all missions at the front of it. There's nothing cool about those missions; even players looking for defeat badges will get it from the rest of the TF.

My 2nd to last point here is more of a "shaking my head" at the current state of the story on the Clockwork King and Penny Yin. I don't know what the devs are angling for with this story any more, or what the timeline is supposed to be. The original story was confusing enough, before the Faultline revamp / RWZ revamp came along. Like, why is CK robbing robotics places when his guys are psionically animated bundles of scrap?

At least in the original telling it was somewhat humorous and ironic that the cheesy bubble-brained low level villain became the eventual ruler of a dimension in a later arc. Now, however, it seems like the joke has become the story ...

Finally ... on redside there's Clockwork in Cap that are animated by the Demon? What is up with that? To me, you either ax it or you explain it, you don't just do goofy stuff.

Pro tip: Synapse goes much much faster if the team gets Shivans first and then takes turns spawning them in missions, especially against the bosses. You'll even be able to take out the GM without begging the server to help.

Or you know..bring aoes. Heaps pro tip that one. Shivans move quite slow unless SBd and often get lost. Without sb, the time wasted trying to get them to fights..
Regardless, even IF shivans speed SYn up a lot, it is STILL boring and the missions are to similar.

I should say, I never said that Citadel was the worst of the original TFs to play. Old Posi was pretty soul-sucking when I did it years back, and I've never done Synapse but as far as I know it's just Clockwork in warehouses except for around the middle here you fight Clockwork in other maps.

What I am saying is that of the old TFs, it's the one most inexplicable in terms of answering the question of 'why would people play this'.

Old Positron is long and tedious and has no payoff, but it's a decent enough small-scale story and it has a lot of variety in villain groups and map types. It's about on par with some of the better contact story arcs of the time, and the only issue was that it sucked to do it in one shot.

Synapse I again haven't played, and from what I can tell it has similar problems to Citadel, being very similar missions all throughout. But it does at least put some token effort in by sending Babbage at you, and at least trying some slightly different maps. It really only ends up 'worse' than Citadel because it's lower-level and people have less to use against it. Story-wise it's an appropriate ending to a villain group that's been a significant presence until then and had some good build-up to it, so that's cool.

Sister Psyche I don't really remember, but I recall it being a fairly nicely varied arc that had a number of different map types, that was mostly against Freakshow but not entirely. It wasn't the best, but as a story arc it doesn't sound too bad, and still holds up when Penelope Yin does it with higher production values.

Manticore I also haven't played, but from my gatherings it's like Synapse only against a more tolerable enemy group, at a level you can handle it better at. The story isn't all that influential in the greater Crey story arc, but it's big enough for you to feel big doing it.

Numina was basically the endgame of that era, and I guess the hunt mission had the intention of making it feel big and city-wide, and remember, they didn't know big tedious hunt missions were bad yet. It's probably aged the best of all the old TFs beside it, but that's not really saying much.

And then you have Citadel. I don't care what era you were designing in, ten missions of the same enemies in the same maps repeatedly doesn't work. And like others have said, as a story it makes terrible use of the resources at its disposal, telling a story that really would take about two missions if it were written anywhere after about I3.

The other TFs at least have enjoyable parts about them, when describing them they sound like fairly low-budget but decent ideas, with different kinds of appeal to them that still sound worth doing. No part of Citadel sounds fun on any level. Yes, the development team has changed, the MMO landscape has changed, the game engine has changed, all of that. None of that excuses all of Citadel being in the same maps against the same enemies, making miniscule progress until you stop the bad guy.

Then all the other original TFs falter, we can point at the developers not having a handle on the game yet (not knowing how vital Stamina would turn out/how painful end drain was, not having the grounding to know hunts weren't popular, not knowing people would prefer doing TFs in one sitting instead of multiple). Citadel looks bad by any standard.