Nethergoat

My feelings are neatly summarized in my sig.

You are right to despise Family Guy, it's a pathetic photocopy of better shows populated by non-jokes that we're supposed to laugh at simply because they reference some pop cultural niche we recognize.



Nerva does have an interesting mix of stuff, but like IP it is basically just a huge zone that annoys most people. My archetypal Nerva story is getting that Rob Speakeasy mission and having it be WAAAAAAAAAAAY out in the jungle by the portal mission guy through a cave door.
Must have been the world's most secret speakeasy.

If CoH were more like WoW and those interesting places in Nerva triggered stuff to do, it's be fine. As is, it delivers nothing but sightseeing for its own sake and pointlessly long runs to missions out in the jungle, which may or may not have a thematic reason to be there.

Grandville bothers me less now that my computer doesn't lag out every time I zone in, but as cool as it looks it's pointlessly complicated to navigate. And again, the 'cool' stuff is just window dressing for mission doors.

Nerva wouldn't lose anything if it were half the size it is, and would attract many more players.
Grandville wouldn't lose anything if it were easier to navigate & didn't bring lesser computers to their knees, and would attract many more players.

You missed out on the best thing about it- originally it was bugged and you had it permanently.

=D

Nonsense.
Potentially, sure.
Realistically, very few people are going to dual spec a character, and even fewer will dual spec with super powerful set IOs.

A dual build isn't much different from rolling an alt.
It adds some % to demand, certainly, but nowhere near 'double'.

I can make 150 million overnight- it isn't hard when you know what you're doing.

You're delusional, or you're ignoring the reality of what any reasonably intelligent player can earn on the market.

Either way, you're comically wrong.

The "average" player shouldn't have access to the best loot in the game- it isn't balanced for them, it isn't aimed at them.
How long it would take them to earn it is irrelevant- they aren't its intended audience.

It doesn't specifically encourage it, but it certainly supports the playstyle.
But that's somewhat irrelevant.
You don't need to farm to make huge piles of inf, all you need is the market.

I have two servers full of characters and a bunch more scattered around others. I'm a fairly "serious" player, whatever that means. And I have exactly one dual build in my stable. And it is kitted out with generic IOs.

Just because a possibility exists doesn't mean players will all take advantage of it.

They aren't supposed to be able to.

Where do you get these crack-brained ideas of yours, the Dollar Store?

You just drove your truck full of Wrong down a Wrong Way Street and crashed into a busy Wrong Station, rupturing the tanks and triggering a Wrongferno.

Nice to get some confirmation that my defense idea works.
With well-slotted caltrops, not many things will be getting close to me unless I let the, so concentrating on ranged defense sounds like just the thing.

So far the combo of beanbag & knockback has served me well- I've got burst and shotgun slotted with KB sets, so when they go flying they REALLY go flying.
I have a longstanding dislike for Taser, but it could be they changed it a bit- I don't remember it being ranged at all, for one. Two disorients would certainly be handy- I might give it another chance.


As a dedicated marketeer 540 tickets seems like a pretty steep price- almost 8 random Bronze rolls at my preferred level. I very rarely roll that many recipes without getting something pretty good ('pretty good = I can sell it for 3+ million). With most rare salvage on offer for under a million with a bit of patience (i/e, bid today, pick up tomorrow), I'll just keep buying what I need.

It is interesting that the recpies using this "expensive" salvage are still available for next to nothing. I bet I could pick up a bunch for nothing, craft them and sell them for gigantic profits because people still think Prophecies cost 4 million.

Hmm... =P

Larger spawns without matching drops are pointless.
I don't think they'd waste their valuable time on a feature with no constituency.

As someone who's taken one long and a couple of short vacations to foreign games, I agree.

There are almost always a few features I really like and wish we had here, but much more often I find myself wishing that Game X had this or that feature from CoH.

I haven't got anything against travel as a mechanism, I just get cheesed off by excessive or redundant travel.
Two of my indelible memories of the game are travel related.
One, getting Super Leap as my first ever travel power, and JUMPING all around Atlas plaza like a crazy person. After the seemingly interminable slog to 14th, running all over every square inch of all the lowbie zones, it was like getting out of jail.
Two, taking my first character with Flight for a spin through Steel Canyon.
Breathtaking.

And I really enjoy the hero side zones. Villains, not so much, but there are a couple I like (Sharkhead being my favorite). CoH generally creates a great sense of "place". Being anchored in such a tangibly realized space makes my characters feel more real.

They're going to hammer down the most obviously efficient MA techniques, that's not even a question. They don't like people farming it, they're going to nerf as much stuff as they can without dropping the general reward level below 'real' content.

I think they want to make PI the marquee destination for farmers again and leave MA for everybody else.

Ditto.

in PvE drops are generated by the team and randomly allocated.
So large teams stink for getting drops.

I assume PvP works the same way.

I enjoy a good background as much as anyone- you have to have one, so it might as well be interesting an involving. One branch of my skepticism about CO is their thin, derivative backstory- Champs has great rules, but their 'official' universe was little more than a smudged, blurry photocopy of silver age Marvel.

But I don't view the CoH canon as so inspiring and all encompassing that meddling with it is sacrilege. The success of alterations is dependent, as always, on the quality of the author. A good author will usually succeed in drawing me in to the story and suspending my disbelief- this is as true of 'canon' stories as it is private mythologies.

I will say canon stories have a leg up because we all know the characters and the history- authors are able to use more shorthand, which given the restricted size of MA arcs is a not inconsiderable advantage.


I also prefer 'generic' enemies in MA, but not because they're any more involving than the custom ones- it's because they're balanced for 'normal' characters. I've bailed on many an otherwise interesting arc because the author (inadvertently?) populated it with tremendously powerful custom enemies.

I think you're overacting.
My criticisms in this thread have been mild and oblique. What you see as "accusations" I see as observation.

Alas, when you engage the public sphere other people rarely restrict their discussion to your pre-approved topics.
I make no claim on understanding how other players feel. I'm not psychic. But there's plenty of empirical evidence that many, many players have wholeheartedly embraced MA. To the extent that its has engendered its own opposition, who complain that they can't find teams for anything except MA.

People play the game they want to play and find their own fun- nothing I say or do can impact that in the slightest, and I've never pretended otherwise. You endow my opinions with more power than they actually have.

In any case, I haven't been trying to insult you and antagonize you here Sam. If that's the way it came across, I apologize.

I haven't called you any names, I've just described your POV as I see it.
If I'm wrong, correct my misconceptions.

I don't think I'm wrong, which I guess is why you're so defensive about it.

I admit being wildly opinionated in general and fairly intolerant on certain specific subjects. In this instance I'm more confused than anything else.
I've always found your logic regarding what you enjoy and how you go about enjoying it rather tortured & baroque- this sub-thread brought home to me just how internalized & insulated from the wider community your dialog with the game is. It seems tremendously cramped and joyless, but you must be getting something out of it or you'd be doing something else.

Wow, that's a thin reed to hang a subscription off.

I mean I absolutely love the character creator- it's consistently been my favorite part of the game for the last 5 years. I often make characters I know I'll never play- I log on just to mess with the character creator at least a few times a week.

But if I didn't enjoy the rest of the game there's no way I'd stick around. Creating characters absent a world you'd like at least some of them to explore seems like a hollow undertaking.


More familiar, sure.
Easier? No freaking way.

I understand that you derive enjoyment from the tedium of running around the city for no good reason, but it isn't "easier" than spending a few seconds scanning MA for something that looks interesting then running it. Not by any rational measure.

Why do you play content that doesn't excite you?
I'm bemused by this. I play games to have fun.
I mean we all invent our own fun up to a point, but if I had as dire a view of the vast majority of the game's content as you I'd be gone yesterday.

Yes.
You have ideological requirements to 'enjoy' something- you want contacts that send you around zones, you want things that are 'interesting', as defined by an inflexible bible of requirements.
MA doesn't pass so you don't like it, regardless of the relative merits of individual story arcs.



Again, Purity Test.
It doesn't fit your preconcived notions so you reflexivly write it off.

And clearly the overwhelming majority of players WILL play it. I'm not sure why you bring that point up. Put something new in the game, everyone tries it out. If they like it, they keep playing. Most players have founds somethign to enjoy in MA, which is completely predictable since a wide variety of creators is going to generate a wide variety of interesting content.

Clearly nobody has talent rarified enough to qualify as "interesting" in the Bible of Sam.

I can be very nitpicky, critical and negative, but compared to you I'm Pollyanna.

I'm not sure how you survive on the weak stream of sour enjoyment you wring from the boiled carcass of the game.

I'm curious what keeps you hanging around since you rate the majority of the game's content as "not good".
Is running the 30-odd percent of missions you do enjoy over and over again really that mesmerizing?
Obviously none of us would be here if we didn't have a fairly high tolerance for repetition, but your position strikes me as extreme.

MA fails your 'purity test' so you tar all its content with the same brush.
You're a content ideologue, insisting it meet some arbitrary personal criteria rather than judging on its merits.

Be my guest, I was responding to the OP not whatever sub-thread you've been cultivating.

giving farmers the ability to set their own mission populations is going to draw most/all of them away from MA and back to their "real" purple-generating farm missions.

and it will also enable part-time farmers like me who dislike asking for fillers to generate far more drops. I can't wait to run my fire/rad through his zombie farm mission with the population slider maxed out. Spawned for one, spawned for eight....they all burn the same, but I'll be generating many, many more drop opportunities per run.

Anyone not constrained by the mental straightjacket you insist on wearing can make anything they want using this game engine.

The writing was equal to or better than 95% of all the 'real' content I've played, the maps were interesting and well chosen and the enemies were 'real' with some fun, different bosses to add spice.


This confirms my impression that your dislike for MA is an arbitrary personal quirk with no relation to the quality of its better storylines. It'll be interesting to see your reaction to whatever dev content we get in the future, since it will also be created with MA.

Indeed!

I'm saving up for a buying spree.