Originally Posted by King_Moloch
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.
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