King_Moloch

Excellent answer, sounds interesting enough to build one and try it out

I actually got into total team support with this toon for the first time in a long time. It was fun. So much of this game is about making a toon as utterly self sufficient and independent as possible, I have overlooked this entire style for a long time. It's been easier for me to GET teams than it's been in a long time recently, and I am seriously loving it. I want to try something more control oriented next I think. Heh, actually I'll probably just keep playing her.

You know, I might have to take another look at Khelds. With Incarnate powers shoring them up, they might a lot fun. As far as my def goes, I think my playstyle has changed quite a lot since I made that first toon. Hell, the whole game has changed. I think I'm going to make a few defenders with different sets here and there. I kind of want to bring back this old sonic/kin I had laying around for years.

lulz

Yeah.. time for you to step away from the keyboard, probably... Being condescending and deliberately obtuse on top of belittling and belligerent isn't going to accomplish anything. It's pretty obvious that your viewpoint is understood, just not agreed with. There are so many flaws in the thinking here that if you hadn't blown yourself out of the water with the CAPSLOCK in the first sentence of accusation flinging, the rest of the post would have taken care of it for you.

On to other things.

I have to agree with Sam and Co here. There is no rational or objective reason that there isn't a solo path to the Incarnate rewards aside from 'it just hasn't been implemented yet'. I could believe it will take a good deal of time and effort to design and field an entire arc for each reward, since you have to incorporate a different or differently scaling reward system for it. Doling out the merit rewards in the same shameful and miserly fashion that vanguard merits was mishandled isn't really an option either, since that just leads to forcing the player to participate in the raidlocked content all over again. We need to find a way to remind the existing playerbase as well as the developers that a great deal of their players are mostly casual soloers, and since that is the market they've been dealing with for seven years, it's probably not wise to alienate them at this late stage in the game's development.

It would also be worth reiterating that the people calling for a viable alternate path to this paid for content are not your enemy. They are not trying to take anything from you, they are not going to set fire to your house at night because you enjoy grinding and this new design philosophy the development team has embraced.

Yeah, it was always a huge red mark against the development team the way the utterly failed with Redside. Leaving it hanging like that for all these years, never expanding the plotline, never really... anything. I know there are apologists and fanatics around that will leap to the defense of those decisions, but really the 'people don't like playing bad characters' perspective is really, really off. At least to me. Like some others have mentioned, it seems like the basis of redside was pretty clever, and cool for a starting point, but they failed to ever move it along... at all.. in any way... ever.... And now redside may as well be shut down so there is less load on the servers. On the other hand, the additions and changes to blueside have been remarkable!


Oh wait... not a fan of Incarnate content... at all... Unfortunately, no other game offers me a playable metahuman character scheme in a manner that is acceptable, so until Marvel's MMO finishes here in the next year or two, I'm still stuck here. F2P can't come soon enough

Wow, this post turned out a lot more negatively that I really intended it to, but after years, and years of waiting for redside to be brought up to speed and then finally accepted that the devs really do intend to just let it twist in the wind forever, and the hell with the people that bought the game for it, didn't leave me with a good feeling.

Now I have all this raid oriented lockedstep forced advancement that the apologists are pretending isn't a painfully obvious gimmick and it's making me more and more negative the more I think about it. There needs to be another reasonable way too progress with that. This 'OMGRAIDZORD' craze their murdering the game's canon and seven years of operating procedure with is an excellent indication that what the developers want, these other players want, and what I want, are not at all compatible. I don't want to raid. Ever. I am on deployment in 'Ghan. I don't have internet reliable enough to have eight billion other people on the screen with me for one, and I started playing this game BECAUSE it didn't have locked rewards hidden behind giant timesink raids for two.

And therein lies one of the principal reasons for this games slow degeneration. Because we continue to focus on the insignificant instead of addressing the issues that would greatly improve this game, we continue our slow spiral back to life support. GR gave us a pretty good boost, but it's time to shift forward and think about this time next year.

As you say, evidently nothing the playerbase says or does makes an impact, even when they depart in massive numbers. Like G.W., our devs are huge fans of 'staying the course', even when the course leads to cancellation. Now, of course I'm not saying that this issue shouldn't be handled immediately, of course it should, nor am I saying that DOOM will befall the game if the farms are killed once again. I am saying that this should not be the top issue on the list. It's fascinating that we have all these people on the forums eagerly decrying their fellow players as 'cheaters' and 'exploiters' and they have their knickers in a bunch over farming, but we can't get them to show in equal numbers for trying to get the game improved or upgraded. WHY? Really. Why.

After rereading all the posts I could find over the last farming escapade, the answer was simple and depressing. There are a thousand and one little logic traps the forum apologists create to support their perspective, but what it comes down to is very simple. Selfish greed. They don't want people having things that they have previously held the market on. Literally. There isn't much more to it than that. They don't want people gaining easily what they have slogged through the awful, awful 'content' and grind for with minimal effort. That, while sad, is understandable. I personally hate the game before 32 and haven't played it in years until recently. My assessment of that experience was.. not positive. I have great respect for people that are able to curb their expectations and accept a lesser effort as 'enough'. I seem to lack that quality myself.

There is, of course, the old "team" argument, where no one wants to see a fifty with no idea what they're doing, but let's face it. This game doesn't HAVE many new players, and gets them so seldom that it is actually a pleasure to me to educate them when they ask for help. I don't personally mind, as I don't team anymore, but I do understand that small point.

Which brings me once again to the main point. That this thread has drawn out far more people than most do, and for nothing more than fingerpointing and namecalling, instead of offering constructive direction for where the entire playerbase would love to see the game go. Because, as you pointed out Arcanaville, no matter what we say, how often or loud we say it, the things that need to improve clearly won't, and the things that don't matter will continue to keep our interest.

I would say "Yes", conditionally 'yes', if they're wise, 'yes', I would venture they have no CLUE what that phrase means anymore, so 'no', I would say exploiting the market system and using it to break the back of every other player that shares the game environment with you should be in there somewhere, punishable by permaban, "not relevant', if there were players not playing by these 'rules' you speak of, I'd imagine the game code would have been corrupted enough to break it by now. If you mean the other subscribers making use of a short lived flaw in the game's programming to get a little ahead and put some things in the game environment back on track as these people that don't play by your 'rules', then I would say it's entirely up to them how they choose to feel.

I personally have grown tired of slogging through the exhausted and pale 'content' and have no interest in leveling a character to fifty through the course of normal play. The game simply isn't that interesting any more and the dearth of content has nailed that coffin long since shut.

I would venture that this game DOES provide an unheard of level 'tinkering' possibilities that make it a fascinating and fun experience, once which has continued to hold my interest for years after the game itself proved stale and tiresome. I don't choose to feel any particular way about the people insisting that I'm "not playing right", or "not doing it by the rules", because I don't particularly care how they feel about it. I'm doing what keeps me interested enough in this game to keep playing it and paying my monthly subs. What they choose to feel is entirely their own concern.

Absolutely. In the short term, it refreshes the market when things get a little out of hand, as well as creating a surplus of items that carry it for up to a year afterwards.

No, no,

not the thread, just my posts. Evidently I am past the point of patience where I can express myself in a non inflammatory manner anymore. When I post it usually lasts about an hour. I'm tired of the forum community not drawing due attention to the issues that require it and instead turning this board into a masturbatory self aggrandizing newbhate fest that drives new players away in droves.

Lisar's statement here amuses me somewhat, enough to post about it, anyway.

"We got told from release not to abuse AE or bad things will happen to us why are we all in shock and awe when weeks later we are doing it and we get our hands smacked?"

Because they have only themselves to blame. This game is constructed on a philosophy of "late blooming sets" and "slowly unraveling plotlines" and "higher level hazard zones" that promise much but demand too much as well, or return nothing, as in the case of the Shadow Shard and other enormous wastes of funding and programmer time.

In my experience, farms are the only thing that has kept me playing this game, mostly because I can't stand how feeble, uninteresting, and painful low level play is. There is no other mechanic than "beat on stuff". No real crafting, no real environment to interact with...nothing. For it's era, that was fun, but any more there needs to be more to it, much more.

What's interesting is that this is the ONLY MMO I get this impression from. It's not fun at levels below 32. At all. In fact, I haven't (until this last week, ironically) played a character at those levels as a general rule. It's frustrating, not engaging, boring, and work. I play this game to entertain myself. Not to have a third job.

Back years and years ago when this game was new and the MMO industry was much younger, we were much more forgiving of a game's shortcomings. This has gotten to be true less and less as we have watched technology just steamroll right past this game and a few others that were very popular in their time.

Farming offers me a way to circumnavigate the laughably bad "plot" and ignore the grind grind grind of newspaper/radio missions, which are a poor substitute for real content. Since this game's developers and programmers refuse to offer ANYTHING in the way of real content, I don't see the issue with me finding a way to make the game enjoyable enough to keep paying for my accounts and keep generating revenue for it to continue to fail me. And the vocal few screaming about how "the marketz are being rooned!", I can say only that the tools exist for them to redress this issue in the same manner everyone else does. Get your commons with tickets, it takes ten minutes to have hundreds of them. Otherwise, welcome to the other side of the fence, where people are going to belittle and harass you for not playing the game their way. I've been dealing with it for years as I waited for real content to be added and it never was. Here and there I got an hours worth of task force every year or two, and a zone no one ever uses or two, but other than that, pretty much nil since launch. And GR, an expansion I paid for that offers really... nothing of interest or value aside from a vague promise of "more to come" that I've been choking on for years. More to come.. when? And will it be something other than the same tired rehashed and then rehashed again Freedom Phalanx characters that I've grown to hate with unmatched intensity? If the hamfisted Incarnate storyline is any indication, it's not something I'm overly eager about in any case.

What's ironic is that with DC Online marketing to a lower IQ bracket, the NCSoft folks should be taking a very, very close look at the niche of people that won't under any circumstance be looking into that diseased abortion. Right now, the base community of CoH seems to be RPers, people that love the costume creator too much to leave, and a small hard core group of PvPers that against all odds (and common sense, it seems) have found the dedication to make this game work for them. Instead of puking out ridiculously poor "content" (as with the Alpha Strike 'plotline') they would be wise to consider updating the graphcs in a meaningful fashion instead of a hopelessly overcomplex retooling utra mode that didn't really improve much. I mean really, its been seven years and I STILL DON'T HAVE FINGERS. I have fleshy meat mittens. Not that difficult to figure out.

So, instead of wasting time and effort pointing out the excesses of the playerbase and this latest farming craze , which would pass on it's own most likely, soon enough, resources need to instead be allocated to figuring out what needs to be focused on, the players that have stayed for years and years, despite this game's many, many flaws. The BASE BUILDERS. THE ROLEPLAYERS. I'm not talking about the creepy catgirl ERP nonsense,the actual roleplayers that are and have always been the backbone of this game's community, behind the vast majority of community events and interaction.

Instead of complaining about the farmers, fix the reasons it is vitally necessary for them to farm. Fix the prestige gulf. The cost of base building is absolutely, unforgivably stupid. It needs to be addressed, and would take very little real time or effort to do so, and yet for years it has remained in limbo.

This, like many other things in this game, is what drives people to farm for prestige, farm for influence (since the developers thought putting a cap on how much could be charged for an item was a no-go as was suggested when the market was born), farm for tickets for salvage since the low level game is a nightmare to play for many of us. Address these issues before chopping out the means of resolving them.

Or don't and limp along slowly dying off as more and more people get fed up and move on to better games. Oh, of course, I forgot, this game has MILLIONS of subscribers, and more joining every day, it's population is HUGE and still growing!

Closing, I suppose this had turned into one of those pissed off rants that annoy when I read them from other people, but reading this entire thread has just irritate me to no end. This game has much, much bigger problems we've continued to pretend not to notice than the players trying to make the game something interesting enough to stay logged into.

/end sarcastic overview and analysis


<---The above is written after reading this entire thread and getting tired of the CoH Forum Apologists trying to pin the imbalances and their usage on the players instead of the development team, who very likely instigated this whole thing to begin with in order generate enough interest and higher level characters to actually USE the alpha strike expansion.

qft

The above statement ends this argument satisfactorily. As a blaster player with quite a variety under my belt, I was skeptical about corruptors for good long while. Now it is unlikely I will waste my time with a blaster again. My Fire/Dark and AR/KIN corruptors are unstoppable juggernauts that steamroll just about anything I put them up against. Blasters, (for which I was a long advocate and later apologist) do not compare and cannot compete.