Dr_Mechano

Well actually now the groundwork has been laid it should (nobody but BAB can say for certain whether it is though) be easier to allow for such things and not take a mahoosive effort as the original Power Customisation did.

Which he seems like he'll be doing it again soon in CO .

The man just hates Regen...think it smacked him around when he was a young developer or something...

This is the wonder of not only City of Heroes but of any Superhero comic book based universe. You can make something, even as simple as a Barbarian warrior displaced in time and there are numerous backstories you can use...

Now that Barbarian warrior can be from between the age when the oceans sank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas, where there was an age undreamed of...and onto this came [character name]..

...or he can be from a post-apocalyptic future where mankind has destroyed itself an all that are left are primitive peoples fighting over what remains of that timelines awesome technology (laser swords etc.).

...or he can be from another post-apocalyptic future, the descendant of someone who left a vault, a place where people hide to survive the fallout, on a legendary journey to replace a vital but broken piece of technology, he was cast out but he lived among the people and his descendants need a wonderous device to turn the nuclear waste into a fertile Eden.

Obviously all these backstories are from a book/comic/movie, a TV series and a computer game but they all can be made to fit into City of Heroes because it is that kind of universe.

Bingo...that's the problem.

Merging the servers isn't just about copying character data across, it's also about having the account data copied across and the EU data protection laws aren't exactly too keen on having personal data being taken outside the EU by a company if I remember correctly.

So we'll file the "The Coming Storm" under the same things as the CoP trial, The City Vault, Blood of the Black Stream (which even has ingame hints), Incarnate EATs and the myraid of other things that the dev team worked on but then through bugs or just plain deciding against it at a later date, ditched...

...if they do that...sorry but that is really poor, you don't build something up for over two years and then just quietly ditch it unless you're the Fox Network.

Aye...Issue 4...the beginning of a bad mistake aka PvP (not saying that PvP is bad...just, well it IS kind of a waste in this game).

"Erm...what about if we introduce villains, won't most of these powers be completely unbalanced since we've only calculated for heroes fighting heroes, where everyone has access to things like Focused Accuracy, also what about things like defense in PvP, there's an awful lot of tohit buffs in the game and defense doesn't have any way of countering them...?"

"No...it'll be fine...I mean, when are we going to add villains, I mean, a seperate city for villains, that's a stupid idea...besides not everything is going to be good at PvP...I mean...some sets are just going to be bad at it anyway..."

"Yeah but for hypothertical sake lets say we do add villains anyway..."

"Well the villains can't have access to the same powers as heroes...we'll give them their own epic pools and make their powers really powerful but we'll keep them from respeccing out of them to balance it out..."

"Won't that just annoy a lot of people?"

"Nah...be fine..."

That's always the one idea that made me laugh...the whole reason villain epics couldn't be respecced for the longest time was the idea that they were more powerful than hero versions and that was the penalty attached to them (of course they got nerfed into oblivion and contained nothing like Focused Accuracy, Power boost, Conserve power, Personal Forcfield and so on...so they just couldn't match up to the hero APPs).

Head here and look at the various review threads

My own arc (info in my signature) has a currently review rating (out of two reviews) of 3.75. One review from Talen Lee who is quite a tough reviewer (his average review score is 3.50 I believe).

Most often those that complain that Regular content is repetative are veterans of anywhere from 6 months onwards.

The AE is repetative BUT is also offers better rewards, people are willing a certain amount of grind especially if it is seen as the lesser of two evils.

Repetative story content that you've already done once or really isn't any form of story content at all but a loosely slung together series of missions with a thin layer of story vaguely linking them all together.

Why do the same arcs you've already done, especially when you're not given the choice of going elsewhere (City of Villains, it will always go Bruke -> Creed or Kalinda -> Mongoose and there's no other story content on offer...you can go smack street mobs around to level if you have no interest in story however) or it's just plain not story content (most, apart from The Hollows, of City of Heroes levels 1-15, thankfully at 15 story arcs about the Tsoo, Trolls and Vahzilok come in with proper story to them).

Even if you do the good story content, you will only want to do it once unless you're feeling particularly nostalgic about it or something about it just clicks (The Freakylimpics for me) so if you manage to do as much of the decent story content arcs while levelling that just leaves the awful almost-not-story arcs left for a second trip though 1-50.

Everything pre-Issue 6 (I believe it was Issue 6 that was when CoV was released) in City of Heroes was designed under the same tedious philosphy as EQ and WoW were (in WoW it originally took the same amount of experience to go from 50-60 as it did to go from 1-49...making the last ten levels a complete chore where it seemed like almost every third quest leads into a dungeon or is group orientated).

Everything pre-Issue 6 needs an overhaul, plain and simple.

Devs, for once just put a hault on the train of "NEW AND SHINEY!" and actually sit down, look at the things you already have...and make them so much better, like we all know you can be. Yes "NEW AND SHINEY!" can lure in people but when they see such crappy content (with a few nuggets of story gold) it's not going to grasp them as much as a fully fleshed out world that's got amazing story driven content from the get-go.

I think this is the problem, we have CoV, Faultline and the RWZ to compare to vanilla content. Faultline and the RWZ have amazing overarching plots with decent to good writing and all the contacts in the zones have a personality (which sooooo many of the vanilla contacts lack, they might as well be post-it notes plastered to a mission noteboard).

For example:

When doing "The Evil Countess Crey," I ended up getting 3 "go hunt Crey in the Rikti Warzone" missions within a short time of each other (45 Crey for first mission, 45 crey for the second hunt mission and finally 100 Crey for the last hunt) with the thin excuse that you're "doing it to beat the info out of crey employees" or just generally cleaning up the RWZ of their presence (can't Vanguard do that?). It came across as artifical playtime lengthening of the worst kind, the kind people would notice...

I believe atleast one of those wasn't involved with the story at all but a random side mission, yet I had the misfortune of picking it because of having to make a fairly random choice as to which of the two missions on offer to pick since either looked like it could be a story mission.

It's jarring and completely breaks the flow of the story.

Soooo agreeing with this.

The one problem I have with the current direction of City of Heroes is that it seems to be a relentless march of "NEW SHINEY!" every single issue since Issue 13 with very little content.

The lack of will to revamp old zones in the favor of consistantly pump out new ones seems like a folly to me (Crey's or otherwise) there's a LOT of content that could do with being rejiggered. almost all pre-CoV story arcs in City of Heroes especially the low level ones (the low level ones really suck, especially sending a level 8 to Perez Park with its MASSIVE SPAWNS! which you're not quite able to deal with yet).

The Hazard zones all need a Faultline/RWZ style revamp.

If the devs must continue the relentless march of "NEW SHINEY" why not revamp one Hero Hazard zone and a new zone for villains which provides an alternate levelling path (you know...one that has sweet bugger all to do with being an Arachnos lackey...).

Also the comment that they want to focus on Taskforces since "You can do the story content with the AE and we want to do stuff you guys can't" (which is what Positron pretty much said on the EU Test server Q&A).

There has been a very distinct lack of decent story content over the last...what...two years (one year possibly, not sure). Normally I tend to disagree with Londoner (an EU poster) on many things but this thing right here is indeed a problem.

Yes we're getting a lot of content with Going Rogue but that doesn't change the fact a lot of the vanilla content, specifically in City of Heroes, sucks monkey nads. The Taskforce commander TFs, the Shadow Shard TFs to name but a few.