Nethergoat

Yes, keep on digging that hole!
Don't worry, those bystanders loitering around the rim are cheering you on, not pointing and laughing!
Honest!

Or maybe the universe is punishing you for being so very, very wrong.

Hah!!

It's funny because it's true...

I don't enjoy them all, but I'm all for people doing what they think is fun regardless of my personal opinion.

It's good for a game to provide a wide variety of activities appealing to a wide range of players.

Knock off the crazy talk, Camper!

=P

2 million hasn't been a meaningful sum for me since a few weeks after I9 went live.

my play time > my play money

The fun of a new character and news powers and just the NEW of a game you haven't played before can definitely carry you over banal, wretched content.

But it would be better for everyone if the content reinforced that 'new car smell' instead of relying on it to cover up the stench of garbage.

My position is definitely hardening on the topic- I started off thinking "sure it stinks, but whatever- you can PL past it, you can MA past it, GR is on the horizon...options are there". But now I feel like they NEED to completely re-do the low level hero game in the interest of putting our best foot forward.

MMO development is a cutthroat enterprise, and I think they could markedly improve their odds of retaining new players by devoting some development time to a re-write of the low level hero content.
They could improve it by 1000% just by re-writing the stories & dialog and ditching most of the street sweeps & fedex's. It really wouldn't take much to upgrade it from awful to average.

Gamers know crap when they play it.
I'd prefer people's first encounter with 'real content' be something fun and engaging like Faultline, not a queasy stew of street sweeping, warehouse kill-alls and multi-zone fedex's.

Okay, sure that might seem captivating to some pure naif from the deep rainforest who's never seen a computer before. But it is a huge turn-off for anyone with even a passing familiarity with computer games.

The intrigue of character creation & new powers and fun combat could certainly distract them from the fact that what they're running is roughly as fun as pounding on their thumb with a hammer.

That doesn't mean the content is any good, or that they wouldn't be better served avoiding it entirely and picking it back up when it stops being pure unadulterated crap.

And more power to ya!

I don't always PL up the ladder- right now I have a stalker and a blaster I've been leveling 'the old fashioned way' (which is why the shocking inferiority of the hero content is fresh in my memory).

But I like to play a LOT of alts, and at a certain point the early level slog becomes an irritation I'm happy to bypass.

It's garbage on its own merits. Villain side is fun enough the first few times through- hero side is straight up junk from the second you exit the tutorial.

Poorly written and organized around a terrible design principal ("we don't have an end-game, so let's make advancement as TEDIOUS AS POSSIBLE to keep 'em paying!"), there is literally nothing to recommend it.

As one of those early complainers, no I'm not.


I complained immediately.
Which may have something to do with my original character being ma/sr, but even so.
I remember how excited we were when we got into Perez because it meant we could level without all that ridiculous travel to other zones for no reason.

And they're right.
The low level missions however are garbage, and more likely to chase someone off than encourage them to explore further.

But you keep on defending the bog-awful stuff as long as you want.
It's good for a laugh if nothing else.

You might want to spend more than .5 seconds thinking about your posts, the world would be a much better place for it.

Who's gonna meet more friends, the wallflower who hangs out in the bedroom reading Proust and wondering why nobody wants to join them, or the networker who hangs out by the keg chatting people up?

If you sit around waiting for invites, yeah you might not meet anyone on a small pop server (although I get my share of invite /tells on Triumph, which is small-ish).

Either pull up stakes and head to Freedom or Virtue, or seize the initiative and get your own team together.

I solo more or less full time now, but it's not for lack of people asking me to team.

My favorite is when someone leaves a nasty comment but forgets to change the default +rep and gives me kudos instead.

=D

now THAT'S some clipping! =P

But look on the bright side Sam, he was askin' for it!

I'm sure a historian would approach those novels in exactly the opposite way I did, devouring the process descriptions and skimming past all that tedious plot & character development. =D


I have an interest in medieval Paris, so I ate up the architectural sidebars in Hunchback. But I did skip the technical whaling stuff in Moby Dick- don't hate me, Herman! =P

Yes it is.
It's BORING JUNK however naive and unsophisticated a player is.
We complained about five years back, when we were ALL 'new players'. The exp stunk, the travel was ridiculous, the missions were monotonous and boring, there were way too many fedex missions and street sweeps.

And the devs knew it- compare the low level hero game to the low level villain game. The monotony exists, but only because of a lack of diversity. I would never recommend that a new villain skip the 'official' content- if you haven't played it before, it's relatively fun, engaging and a good introduction to the game world and the mechanics of combat.

The low levels have been improved greatly by all those QOL changes over the years, but the low level hero game is flat-out garbage & a poor introduction to the game that is not at all indicative of the kind of fun available.

I'm not sure how suggesting that people skip boring, annoying content that stunk the day it was released and has only grown worse with time is "turning around" anything.
Generic MA runs or sewer teams are lot more fun than the 'real' thing. Encouraging new players to have fun seems entirely reasonable.

This is my plan for a long-retired AR/Dev I've picked up again.

and GRATZ to the OP on bringing the eeeebil!!@1

Show me a quote where they said they DIDN'T.

Quote:

The DEVs aren't pro-farming.

The devs are definitely pro-staying in business.
And farmers pay their subs like everyone else.


If you sent out a questionaire to every farmer in the game, setting your own spawn density would have been their most requested feature.


Your anti-farm ranting has become so disconnected from reality it's evolved into a species of neurotic performance art.

True- my hover-blaster loves it most of the time but it doesn't really help in office buildings or any map with a low ceiling.

It's one of those powers that doesn't look real fun or sound like it's that good, but once you use it you'll be sold.

One of my first characters was a kat/regen, and I passed on parry/Divine Avalanche because it didn't sound very good. I respec'ed into it in his 40's and couldn't stop kicking myself for skipping it.

I fed mine a couple of slots so I can stack it & can basically put anyone I want on ice for as long as I want.

The only drawback is bosses, but it still works if you can stack it.

Buckshot seems fine to me. I'm not a big numbers guy, but it's great for cleaning up a spawn that has a sliver of health left after Full Auto, and IMHO the more AoE's you have the merrier.

They're fine for soloing if you have the patience, but garbage for teaming.
I'm less into setting up a killing field and more about mowing things down fast, so they weren't a good fit for my playstyle.

I've never had it, but conventional wisdom is that the damage is underwhelming and AoE knockback is always a little problematic on a team.
I'm thinking about picking it up though. My guy is knockback crazy anyway, and I think it would go well with my snipe>full auto>buckshot alpha strike.

I picked mine up again after a LONG break and I'm having a lot of fun too.