Samuel_Tow

Same here. Especially on the forums, people seem generally nice and helpful. Even when I'm being stubborn on asking for help on a build, which has historically caused people in our own AT forums to tell me I just don't want to listen more often than not. Sure, I had that one troll who picked the whole "Why are you playing an MMO if you don't want to team?" angle after I complained a whole story arc I did solo ended in a mandatory queuing team mission, but mostly, people are friendly.

In the past, I've complained about it, but something struck me in a conversation yesterday. "If I run out of energy... I'll just use my energy builder attack!" I proclaimed without realising how much better this is than what we have here, which is "Do nothing or run away or die because my toggles dropped." Plus, while I love City of Heroes and all its powers and animations, a lot of ours are redundant. Honestly, think about it: How are Flares and Fire Blast different, conceptually speaking? This causes me to have to double- and triple-up on different versions of the same attack, and then often throw in attacks that aren't appropriate for the situation just to fill in the gap so I'm not standing still waiting.

In Champions, you have a constant no-cost energy-building "auto-attack," and then all the "costly" attacks have no recharge whatsoever. What this means is I can pick one melee attack, one close-range AoE, one long-range AoE and call it a day. What I'm saying is you never have to double-up on similar-acting attacks, and if you have an attack that's appropriate to the situation, you're never forced to stop using it, but for reasons of energy. And from what I've seen, it doesn't take long to build energy at all. Your energy builder tends to fill your whole bar in two, maybe three seconds. I'm sure there's some min/maxing optimisation in there somewhere, but if all running out of energy means is my DPS drops, then I can live with it.

Honestly, for as different as the combat system is, I... Don't hate it. Not nearly as much as I used to.

To try and be positive, Champions does a lot of things right in costume design. There is a LOT of variety in body modification, allowing people to make characters with shockingly diverse silhouettes. Last night, I ran into a woman with "arms like pipes" in the Power House, which fit her general design. The day before, I went across a 1-foot-tall chubby creature that looked like Craig MacCracken's Dexter in yellow spandex. Soon before I logged off, I ran into an almost stick-figure thin, tall spindly alien which looked like a grashopper learned how to walk on two legs. Say what you will, but most everyone in City of Heroes has more or less the same body type as his general player model, which is especially punishing to women who can't grow past "photo shoot model." Say what you will about costume selection and art style, but Champions does more to customize your physical build than any game I've ever seen, including The Klub 17 mod for 3D Sex Villa.

All of that said, I do dislike the art style. GREATLY. Pointing to "the face" is a good call. There's really only one face, and for as much as the body can be customized, it's outright criminal that the face can't be. Games like Aion have and Saints Row have demonstrated that the "one face with sliders" system can work quite well and produce drastically unique faces, and I really don't get why Champions' face sliders are so reserved. Or why they're so weird. Both body and face sliders work "at an angle," meaning they change stuff they really shouldn't while not affecting the thing they should be enough, so while the customization is there, it's often in the wrong places and kind of confusing. To be honest, characters with non-human faces look the best because they aren't so obviously "uncanny valley," but human faces are just ugly. And I don't mean the graphics are bad, they're just the faces of ugly people.

When it comes to art style and art design, by far the BEST, most impressive visual designs you'll see will be in the Power House, as done by the players themselves. The game's NPCs are almost criminally ugly and have really bizarre physiques. Defender has short stubby legs, arms that reach down to his knees, hands as big as his head and a hunched-over posture. I mean no offence to Jack Emmert, but Defender looks like he walked out of BoneTown... Why do I keep quoting games like this? Anyway, "the game" is cartoony, caricature and actually quite ugly, but YOU don't have to be. There's more than enough customization in there to prevent at least your character from looking like Lord Bravery.

The UI is weird. It stacks missions in a row under your map, but they overlap with "alert" missions so you can't read anything past mission four in your queue. And considering Champions has a WoW-style missions system where you gather a dozen hunts and go do them all, that's a problem. It took me two full days to realise I can rearrange the UI, because it's not done like you'd think it's done. You can't drag windows around, you have to enter "UI rearrange mode," which turns windows into transparent squares. And some windows extend past their "squares" too. I don't know why this was done. It's more trouble than it should be. And with no ability to save UI settings or chat settings or keybinds that I could find, I foresee a lot of trouble when making new characters.

When I complained about this to people, they told me most of the newer content took itself a little more seriously. I'm not seeing it. The game's "story" is one big joke, and it seems to have been created by someone who HATES comic books and wants to show how ridiculous they are. A mission had me save comic book artists from Foxbat, who wanted them to draw a comic for him. My contact's "mission complete" text said something to the effect of "Thank you! Now fat, filthy, ugly, stupid, anti-social comic nerds won't have to wait an extra minute for their ****** comic book to be printed!" I'm paraphrasing a little (the game said "hygiene-challenge" instead of "filthy," for instance), but... Game? Are you aware who your target audience is?

Honestly, for as much as I've complained about the "comic-bookiness" here, City of Heroes still feels like it was written by people who ostensibly liked comic books, took them as legitimate art and wanted to tell good stories in a similar style. Champions seems to have been written by people who hate and revile comic books and are doing everything the can to mock and satirise not just the genre, but the people who enjoy it. Generic "Prisoners have escaped! Go defeat 15 of them!" are boring, but I can take them. It's standard MMO fare. Missions that make fun of me for playing them, however, just don't belong in a game.

Champions Online isn't the right game to play for the story, simply put. It's cheesy, over-the-top and intentionally bad. The game doesn't take itself seriously and nothing really feels like it has a major impact. There's no better example than the tutorial - Aliens have invaded and are poised to destroy our world, but no-one seems that concerned about it. I spend my time saving people's cats, saving Foxbat from under debris and basically doing "hunt 15" missions. And when it's done? It's like it never happened. Everything's cleaned up and there's no sign of the invasion. In Paragon City, the alien invasion informed THE ENTIRE STORY of the game for years to come, but in Millenium City? Meh, it's no big deal. Or look at the destruction of Galaxy City - a zone was devastated, and now we have to deal with refugees, rampant crime, loss of infrastructure and so forth. It's a big deal.

The truth of the matter is that nothing in Champions Online feels like a big deal, because "status quo is kind." Whatever happens, we find out about it, stop it and everything goes back to how it was. Nothing has consequences, not even make-pretend consequences in-storyline. I guess my problem is that no-one ACTS like there's anything at stake. Sure, Kodiak goes out of his way to explain why a psi-bomb exploding in the West Side is bad... As though that wasn't obvious, but he never acts like he's CONCERNED. For instance, if I were to open my workplace window and jump out of it right now, I'd probably break both of my legs, and possibly my neck, but do you see me worry that might happen? Of course not, because I know I wouldn't do that. And when people act like they care, like Kevin Poe's speech before detonating the bomb, the voice actors and writing end up making it feel like "scaring the little girl" scenery-chewing overacting.

I wouldn't try to take the story seriously if it can't take itself seriously, yet I can't laugh at it because the "humour" is just... Bad.

There is less in terms of volume, decidedly, but a lot of what's there is actually a mashup of MANY concepts. For instance, "martial arts" as a general set includes single blade, dual blades, unarmed and... I forget what else. Each of those sub-sets has two or three attacks that are weapon-specific, but the rest of the powers are pretty much generic to the general concept of the set. You have, for instance, "Lightning Reflexes," which is basically the entirety of Super Reflexes all rolled into one, and it's just a Martial Arts passive. You have a few power combos that take advantage off each other, such as single-blade attacks causing "bleed" and certain toggles spawning effects on every bleed, but you can take most any martial-arts-relevant content and put it together from among these.

Moreover, because you can mix-and-match powers between pretty much any set, this opens up a LOT of opportunities that City of Heroes simply never had, and likely never would have. The two that finally convinced me to give the game a try were Sam Tow himself, who should be using an energy blade and pistols, and just didn't have pistols here. The other is the Steel Rook, who was always intended to be a Power Armour Gatling Gun Guy. They builds don't always come out like what you'd think they would - Sam's using Power Armour Laser Swords, Munitions Pistols and Martial Arts defences - but a lot of what might seem like it can't work really can.

So while Champions might have less specific freedom, there's a lot of opportunity to mix-and-match which... Really is worth a lot.

Same here. City of Heroes became nearly unmanageable for me with Ultra Mode until I bought a GeForce GTX580, and even then I can't really step on the graphics or City of Villains zones will lag for me, and lag bad. Cap Au Diable is still horrid. Champions lags, I agree, and it does drop me into the 40s of framerate more often, but it just seems to be a tad better optimised. It's just that the game's baseline graphics are higher than City of Heroes. CoH CAN work better, but that's if you disable real-time reflections, ambient occlusion, real-time shadows and so forth. Champions is a resource hog, but I wouldn't say it's considerably more so. It's just a resource hog that can't go down as much as City of Heroes can without the game looking like ***.

I sound like Boris the Russian, basically. It seems like most of the Slavic-language-speaking peoples basically speak English the same way, which is to say hard and without much of the flow. So, yeah, definitely not appropriate to a suave female bounty-hunter

Though, to be fair, I don't really need either voice acting or voice chat coming out of my character. Even when it's very good, as is the case of Saints Row The Third, it really limits my options. I mean, seriously, why would I want to make another character with the same voice? It would just feel weird, since I now have a face attached to the voice.

PvP isn't something I'm interested in. Not having a big emphasis on it is one of the reasons I stuck with City of Heroes.

Well, City of Heroes doesn't have "mines," and normal loot only drops to one person on a team when the drop table at all decides to drop it, but that doesn't work like this in the Incarnate system. When Incarnate Drops occur - Shards and Threads - each person has his own separate chance to drop one, and an enemy can drop a Shard or a Thread for every person on a team if they're all lucky enough.

I don't think you understand. "People" wouldn't want to have any story they come up with come with full voice overs and cutscenes. Browse the forums for a bit and you'll note a distinct lack of love for voice overs and cutscenes. As far as I'm concerned, voice overs in general are a mistake, and cutscenes are unnecessary. The reason City of Heroes manages to encompass so many concepts is doesn't design content that hinges on specific aspects of the player character. Even in the rare few instances that it does - such as Bane Spider Ruben and the player running the danger of being mind-controlled - the game does its best to explain it away. Ruben, for instance, relies on the logic that if you have enough sentience to speak with him in the first place, you have enough to be affected. It's weak, but it's an honest attempt so it gets a pass.

Voice overs and "personal storylines" are the HD graphics of storytelling. Have you noticed how FPS games have been getting shorter, simpler and showing increasing signs of reusing assets? It's because as graphics become more complex, it takes more and more work and time to make a game, thus it costs more and can do less with a regular development cycle. It's why some AAA games are said to need to sell millions of copies just to break even. I thing the Star Wars MMO needed to sell, like, two million copies to make back the costs or something like that. Same thing with voiceovers - the more you try to incorporate them, the more you limit your storytelling abilities because now stories cost more to make and they have to be very specific. You can't insert player names into voice-overs, after all.

To me, plain text is just fine, even in this day and age of digital excess. It gives developers (and players, as Architect Entertainment showed us) simple, cheap tools for content creation. When I can fill in a few text boxes, drop in some context variable and fiddle with mission creation a tad and manage to churn out content that's decent enough for others to praise me on, then to me, voice acting is nothing more than a boat anchor around a storyteller's neck. It's a cost you pay that ties your hands. When you can only make a few paths and they have to be linear to account for the voice acting, OF COURSE you'll force players into one of those few paths.

But you know what? I'd rather have a game with more freedom than one with voice-acting. Because - and this is a simple truth that not many seem to get - what I create will always be "better" than what a game provides me with, because what I create is mine and I will naturally value it more. It's tailored to my tastes and it has my "scent" on it. It's impossible for a game to give me exactly what I want because developers are not psychic, but if it gives me the tools to MAKE what I want and lets me fit my experience to what I think it should be, then that's better than any amount of production values.

I don't like Guild Wars 2 because it's not to my taste. But here's a shocker - neither is City of Heroes. Only in City of Heroes, I can tweak almost every aspect of my experience and MAKE it to my taste. Don't like the theme? I can make characters of a different theme. Don't like the story? I can make my own. Even if the game is old and ugly and clunky, it's a game that lets me make it what I want. And the simple fact is I don't like the look of any of the Guild Wars races, I don't like any of the base character stories, I don't like the setting and I don't like the theme. And I can't change any of that.

It's probably just personal preference in how we arrange things. I bind anything that isn't an attack to a key and never click anything on the power trays unless it's something I won't need to use in combat. I played a Mercs/Traps/Leadership Mastermind, and I still didn't use more than three trays, but that's because I don't make much use of temporary powers. I HAVE temporary powers, but I keep them on hidden tabs that I flip to only when I need the powers.

I don't see why teleports have to induce bloat, however, and I REALLY don't see how Masterminds need more space than non-Masterminds. Unless you make lots of macros, but that's just... Ugh! I can't imagine playing this game by clicking on my power tray in combat. Maybe if your mouse aim is perfect, but mine is sloppy, so I'm always misclicking and dragging powers by accident, plus I almost always lose track of where my mouse pointer is, ESPECIALLY on a Mastermind.

Honestly, I "get" temporary powers, but what do you have that you have to use in battle all the time?

Well, let me compromise

I can agree to keeping the busywork of foraging and inventory management if it were the ENTIRETY of what passes for crafting. OK, fine, include foraging as a significantly cheaper alternative to buying the resources you need, but make crafting itself a game.

Do you remember my old "things to DO vs. things to EARN" argument from when Incarnates came out? Same idea here. What I don't like about MMOs is that they all too often supplement "doing" with "having." The entire game concept revolves around getting and having stuff and the "playing" part of the whole thing gets downgraded to "the obstacle between you and loot." MMOs are never as hostile to the player as when they make me resent playing them and turn themselves into a chore - a cost to pay for having loot.

When it comes to MMOs, my question is never what I can get out of a task. No, my question is two-fold: What must I do for the task and what can I do with the reward that I couldn't do without it? Do, do, do - that's what my issue comes down to. I want MMOs to become more about doing than about having, with the having being only a gateway to the doing. Right now, it's the other way around, and that just seems backwards to me.

Back to crafting: It's not that I dislike foraging and inventory management... I do, but it's not JUST about that. The problem is that there's nothing to crafting in most games BEYOND foraging and inventory management. There's not "game" to it. The "game" is in finding the resources. The actual crafting is nothing more than a button press. To me, that's as bad as reducing MMO combat to My Brute, where you plan your build, gather the gear, then let the computer fight it out while you sit back and watch a bar fill in. You know, like in a Civilisation game. To me, that would be dreadfully boring, and it's why I find crafting to be boring - because it doesn't require me to do anything in the actual process of crafting. I just toss my salvage onto an anvil and smash it with a hammer. Sure, stats come into play, but "stats" aren't "doing."

I don't know... MMOs of the past weren't what I'd call "games," in the same sense as I wouldn't call Second Life a game. They were worlds first, with some gameplay elements to them. I keep hoping that, as the genre moves forward, they'd start turning more and more into games, and it just doesn't seem to be happening as fast as I'd like. I guess why I find Guild Wars so disappointing is what was advertised was something completely different and innovative whereas what came out was a by-the-numbers MMO, just a very very good one. There are new ideas in the mix, sure, but they serve prop up an old model, rather than innovating on it.

To me, Guild Wars 2 is a WW2 battleship. It may be the biggest and the most powerful with the heaviest guns... But it's fighting in a changing battlefield where air power and carriers are becoming order of the day. It's trying to create a game to a very old model, and as good as it might make it (and what's there IS very good), it's still an old model. I firmly believe that in order for MMOs as a market to survive, they need to change on a fundamental level and look past the whole "crafting/gear/raids/pvp" framework. Guild Wars 2 strains the limits of its model, but it never really breaks model, which is what I find the most disappointing.

It isn't the colouring, it's the character proportions. I've been dabbling into Champions Online, and while I did what I could to "restore" my own character's proportions to what I feel is reasonable, I keep running into NPCs that break me out of the game. A mob bruiser, for instance, will show up with short, skinny legs compared to his bulging torso and big muscular arms that come down to his knees. It's a style that's a little too reminiscent of the Cow from Mighty Mouse.

Even if we say I'm not supposed to look at NPCs too closely (the ones in City of Heroes still sport graphics circle 2002), it's constantly in my face. Defender, the game's premier hero and camera-hogger, has giant hands, arms that almost reach his knees and a long fat torso to relatively short legs. And he's on camera A LOT, with closeups and all. I can excuse characters like Kodiak and Dr. Silverback... Almost... Because they're supposed to look like inhuman animals, but what the game perceives a basic, normal human looking like just doesn't sit well with me.

I don't really want "realistic" graphics. Far from it. I've always been a fan of stylised graphics, myself. But I just don't like how Champions Online has styled its own. It seems to me like the designs weren't taken seriously and weren't intended to impress. They were taken as a joke and were intended to make people laugh. And me being a humourless git, this is having a catastrophic impact on my ability to enjoy the visuals.

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The game itself is a lot better mechanically than I remember it, though. With the death of crafting (THANK GOD!) and the introduction of specialisation trees, it seems less needlessly over-complex than before. It's still has a MASSIVE learning curve, though, and the tutorials seem to have been written for someone who's playing an AT and has all his powers chosen for him. Which I'm not, so I'm having to do enough homework to make my head implode.

So Strength raises my melee damage, but that damage buff diminishes towards 70 Strength, so I don't want it as a Super Stat for my melee character because I don't need it too high, but I need Dexterity as my Super Stat because my Super Stat itself adds bonus damage and I need Dexterity for the specialisation tree, and I also need it for the criticals because I'm supposed to be powers that feed off criticals... It's been a NIGHTMARE to figure this game out, and it has ZERO in-game resources to teach me this. All of what I know has come out of the Wiki and other people on the forum (thanks to the community!). If anything will keep me out of Champions, it won't be the art style. I can work with it and I can work against it. No, it'll be me simply being unable to deal with the build system.

You don't need to. Specifically, you can make those solo-friendly by using systems the game already has. Let TFs scale down like Ouro TFs do - AVs to EBs, number of players down to x1, level down to -1. Also, return the old mechanic which existed for a few days that let EBs scale down to bosses when the "no boss" option was selected. It used to be that if you disable bosses AND AVs, Ouro TF avs would drop down to bosses. That solves almost all of the game's "team only" content, and it can already be achieved.

Crafting itself as a concept? No, of course not. Well, perhaps depending on the genre, but for a Fantasy MMO? I can see that. But what I feel is dated annoying crap is the busywork of inventory management and foraging for resources and experimenting for recipes and all that nonsense. I like crafting as a concept, but I don't like the "MineCraft" approach to it that makes crafting itself only a small part of the process, with the bulk of it spent on actually getting the resources to do it.

I prefer crafting systems like those in Kingdom of Amalur or, heaven help me, Darksiders 2, because they're simple and they focus on actually planning out what you'll create more so than getting the salvage to create it. City of Heroes has probably the worst, least exciting intepretation of crafting since Ever Quest, simply because "crafting" is nothing more than a button press. Everything else is resource management and scavenging.

Consider what a real craftsman is praised on - workmanship, skill, quality, attention to detail. Consider what a real craftsman ISN'T praised on - trudging through the woods to mine rocks to smelt into rods so that he can stuff it in a cake oven that spits out a sword. If crafting is supposed to be a major part of the game, the act of crafting itself should be what the mechanic revolves around, not the scavenger hunt for resources. I get that it's common for a sword of Mythril Ore to be ten times as good as a pig iron sword regardless of what inept troll crafted it, but to me, that's not crafting. That's foraging, with crafting only as an afterthought.

Turn it into a game. I'm sure there's some iPhone rhythm game out there around hitting a piece of iron with a hammer in the right places at the right times, and I'm sure someone can put together a list of procedures needed to maked a decent blade that involves heating it, beating it, cooling it, reheating it and so on. I'm not a blacksmith so I don't know the specifics, but I know it involves more than putting a ready-made sword on an anvil and smashing it with a hammer 15 times.

You can make crafting fun, but you have to set out to make CRAFTING fun, rather than focusing on the resource management system for the salvage you need to start crafting in the first place. Consider, for instance, how we have infinite ammo in City of Heroes, even when we fire special high-tech rare toxic bullets. Why can't a crafting profession assume we have access to infinite resources and instead focus on out ABILITY to use them? But then that's hard to design, since you'd need a whole other game around it. You can't just scatter the salvage around the world using the pre-existing loot system, and that's hard.

*edit*
Even MineCraft is more "mine" than "craft." You have a list of recipes for what arrangement of which resources makes what items, and the "game" aspect of it comes down to actually finding the resources. The actual crafting comes down to arranging items on a grid and clicking a button.

Window scaling. Run the game in as high a resolution as you can, then if your computer can't support it, run the game's 3D graphics at a lower resolution. If that's still too big, scale your windows down. I don't have the game in front of me, but I know window scaling has some pretty significant bounds.

I don't disagree with the nuisance that is the event window, though. I wish there were a better way to handle this. Also, I suggest NOT using the new Team Interface. Use the classic one. The new team interface is big, fat, cluttered and designed for huge monitors.

Realistically speaking, the biggest UI chunks you have are power trays and chat. If you can keep chat smaller, even down to a single tab instead of the over/under format and keep any additional power trays elsewhere but stacked on top of your regular trays (I have my extra one in two rows of five on the bottom between my power trays and my chat tab).

I ran the game at 1280x1024, which isn't a huge screen, for almost my entire time here - probably 6 out of 8 years - and I managed to arrange my UI to work pretty much fine. It was big-ish, yes, but not that big. So unless your laptop is running at 1024x768, you should be able to do relatively fine. And I never scaled my windows, either.

Because a sinlge-player version of the game does not exist. Because I don't play this game for the teaming or the guilds or the PvP. I play it for the ability to create my own custom characters with amazing powers in a contemporary setting and experience creative and well-written stories. If you can, point me to a game that does this without being an MMO?

Also, because MMOs receive constant content upgrades, whereas a single-player game rarely receives so much as a patch to fix obvious bugs.

Also, "massively multiplayer" describes a persistent world with many people logged into it concurrently. It describes a design framework, not a gameplay framework. HAVING many people online at a time does not imply that I need INTERACT with many people at a time. Smart MMOs don't require this. Smart MMOs let me duck into an instance when I want to do something by myself. Guild Wars tries to make me "social" by putting the bulk of its content outdoors where I'm expected to cooperate with other people.

I've gone at length about how being a face in the crowd ruins my sense of achievement. It's why I don't run iTrials. I want what Guild Wars offers as "my personal story" as content for my entire playtime. It doesn't have to be as high-qiality as that particular story, but I want A story that takes part in an instance. Then, if I feel like teaming with other people, I'll invite them myself.

I'm not displaying anti-social behaviour. I'm displaying private behaviour. As you can see by both my post count and my posting history, I don't dislike people, I don't dislike interacting with people and I have nothing against the community. However, I want those interactions to happen on MY terms - when I want them, if I want them. When a game is structured so that it doesn't "mingle" me with other people, ONLY THEN do I have any desire to go out and look for people on my own. When the game does what it can to make me social, I simply delegate my social energy to the game and go with the flow, seeing other people as a burden.

It's a mistake in modern game design to try and delegate as much of what would normally be social interaction to the game's systems. The more the game tries to be social for me, the less I care to do anything on my own. I'm the most social in games not built to encourage that, because those are the games which require me to be involved the most personally. Trying to "foster community" by just jamming everyone in the same overworld doesn't put people together to make friends. It sticks other people in my way. It doesn't help endear me to others. It makes me irritated that I keep tripping over them.

You don't encourage socialisation by literally putting people in proximity of each other. You encourage socialisation by providing tools for those times when people want to SEEK OUT social interaction. You make people look for it, you don't shove it in their faces.

What? How is the City of Heroes UI "massive?" You can scale it, you can resize it and you can move it around. And how is chat anything but perfect? I LOVE the over/under split chat window because it allows me to monitor my system messages AND my chat at the same time without having one scroll the other off-screen. I have yet to see another game do this. Sure, some games let me define my own tabs (and I don't know that Guild Wars does), but even then, I can only have one tab visible at a time. Not only does City of Heroes default to two separate tabs visible at any one time (which you can merge into one if you so wanted), but it allows me to spawn additional chat tabs if I want to see up to six tabs at a time.

And I'm not sure what you're playing that requires four trays to see all of your powers, but I've never needed more than three. But that's the beauty of the UI - if you WANT four, you can have them. Hell, you can have up 11, if I remember correctly.

I like a UI which allows me to scale, resize, customize elements and move them around at will. There's no reason to dislike a customizable UI because it's as good as you make it. The only thing there is to dislike is your own job of customizing it.

To me, what Guild Wars does is it put filters on cigarettes then yells from the mountaintops how this makes smoking so much less damaging to your health, blissfully unaware that NOT SMOKING is both less damaging and easier to do. All of the problems you list are tumours on the MMO genre that exist for no reason other than because they have always existed and that's what an MMO is "supposed" to have. Developers feel they have to include the outdated, irritating mechanics and then struggle to make it so they're not as painful.

Yes, mining in Guild Wars annoys me less than mining in Tera, but "mining" itself annoys me irredeemably. The most you can do is make it annoy me slightly less, but you'll never make me LIKE it.

When City of Heroes launched, it had no gear, no crafting, no inventory management and no loot. And I LOVED the game for it. It was a simple, light MMO which didn't waste my time with busywork ******** and simply let me build a character directly and, most importantly, go play the game. MMOs of old were designed to be "virtual worlds" in the image of D&D campaigns more so than games - an environment for people to log into and live in, rather than a game for people to play through. I'm pretty sure that's not all MMOs can be, and it's high time we started seeing MMOs that aren't trying to be Ever Quest, but with less annoying crap.

You could if you went out of your way to time-travel to that content. In however many years it's been since Ouroboros was introduced, the first time I ever used it was a month ago when it became apparent the Incarnate system would revolve around repeating the same arc. Furthermore, missions and TFs take place indoors so their results (or lack thereof) aren't immediately evident. I can't go back to Dr. Vahzilok's lair on an unrelated "quest" and see him still there, with a conga line of player waiting their turn to kill him. Guild Wars 2's "heart" quests never end. They may have ended for me, but every time I run by the location, there are still people queuing up to do them again.

It probably doesn't help that "Heart" quests in that game are some of the most boring, menial busywork I've seen since delivering pies. I don't want to feed bear cubs or wash cows or watch paint dry. I want a story with some meaning. I don't want work, I want an adventure. And no "go into cave to kick over lanterns and wipe away graffiti" is neither an adventure nor a story. It's busywork. People complain that City of Heroes missions are all the same, and they are, but the game manages to put a decent story behind all of them, a story I care to see through the end, because I want to know how it ends. Because I care about the plot. There is no plot in "Turn into a lion and hunt prey to see their ways."

It's busywork that never ends. I don't care how good the "system" may be, when what the system is being used for bores me to tears. I went as far as I could in that game, chasing heart and hoping I'd reach one that was actually interesting on a narrative level, and gave up after about six of the same.

To be fair, 7 out of 10 "character creation" steps involve you picking what that video says. I'm not saying it's not railroading, since it is. "I got drunk in a bar and did _____ in my stupor" isn't exactly open to interpretation. But to me, the most restrictive aspect of Guild Wars 2 is the races. Having those hard-coded as pretty much the fundamental decision you make about your character does not sit well with me.

The one I was offered - and that was the ONLY Xbox controller in the whole store - was ~$150. Fat chance I'll buy that. The one I did end up buying was ~$15, but I have yet to hook it up.

I'm not worried about kill-stealing, I'm worried about having a sense of accomplishment. There's no sense of accomplishment in a task that loops itself if I don't leave the area quickly enough which visibly has more to do about it by the time I'm finished with it. Say I need to break up a poacher camp and free all the cubs they've taken. I CAN'T. I can kill some of the poachers, but they just keep spawning on top of me too fast to even get all of them off-screen. I can free some of the cubs, but the cages reset faster than I can release them. I can never "complete" these quests. I can just do enough to tick the numbers on my time sheet and move on.

This is a problem I have with Champions Online, as well. An NPC tells me that civilians are trapped in the streets with the aliens so defence forces can't use their heaviest weapons. I'm tasked with saving three people. I save three people and go to head back. Before turning the corner to speak with my contact, I turn around and see around five or six people more trapped by aliens. I speak with him, and he says defence forces "can't see any more civilians." I guess they aren't looking very hard and those poor sods I left behind will be carpet-bombed.

I don't like overwold activities, because they can never be "completed" on account of all those other people that the activities have to be available for. It's Aaron Thiery chastising me for not stopping to punch every purse-puller when there are an infinite number of those and they will always respawn as soon as my back is turned. It's why I don't give a toss about fighting street crime - because it never gives any indication that I'm accomplishing anything. And at least City of Heroes events are infrequent. A fire starts, I put it out, and the zone is fire-free for another half hour. In Guild Wars 2, I stop the rampaging minotaurs, am congratulated for it and then I run into another set of rampaging minotaurs for a repeat of the even before I can turn around to leave.

And the fact that if I go to do a "quest" but I'm not quick enough on my reading and question, then other people will complete it for me. I didn't care for door-sitting in City of Heroes, and I don't care for going to a quest that's already half-way done, only to see it finished before I'm done reading the contact dialogue and figuring out what to do. I don't like playing to other people's schedules, I don't like depending on other people and I don't like objectives from my quests being completed with no input from me. I logged into the game to play, not have it played for me.

And there we go again. Thank you, Dr. Armchair, for psychoanalysing me. I assure you, the last time people did this to me, it was very productive and helpful. But let me share with you a simple, basic fact:

City of Heroes played just fine with that mentality of mine and it never bothered me until Incarnates came out and forced teaming was forced down my throat. If City of Heroes can do it, other MMOs can do it.

Well, to be fair, getting into console gaming NOW isn't as cheap as most people think. Until a few months ago, all I had was an old tube TV set because I barely watch TV. That doesn't work for current-generation gaming consoles. I have a better, 1920x1080 TV set now, but its sound sucks *** because, apparently, I'm expected to have a sound system and the speakers on it are garbage. I DO have a sound system - a Logitech 5.1 doulby surround system... That only works on my PC, not on my TV. So if I want to enjoy my console games, I'd need a sound system that's at least as expensive. Then I'd need to find a place to put it, and right now the TV set is so big it fills up the entirety of the niche I can spare for it. Doing anything more would mean buying a new bookcase, which basically guts my entire living room.

And that doesn't include buying the console itself, which is expensive, buying all the peripherals, and then buying games which are, on average, more expensive than what I pay for PC games as I buy most of mine over Steam discount sales.

And then I'd still have to use a game pad which I don't like. People touted that "Well, you can just hook up a keyboard and mouse to your Xbox." OK, let's imagine for a moment that Xbox games can actually play with a keyboard and mouse - I have no place to put them. For my PC, I have a rather large desk, which faces away from the TV. In front of my TV, I have a bed that's incredibly awkward to sit on. It has a wood board in the front which hurts my legs and its back is on a wall with blinders on it that I can't rest my back on without damaging them. And my TV set is VERY far away from the bed because I tend to not watch it too often and mostly watch it lying down prone. Using a keyboard and mouse hooked up to the TV is not an options.

Which just sucks all the more since a lot of the current generations better games are console-exclusive, and even the ones that aren't are ported badly. Darksiders 2 has that HORRIBLE snapping camera that wants to always turn in the direction I'm moving and pan up and down with terrain tilt. And that's a GOOD port since it at least lets me remap my keys.

*edit*
Which is especially funny since all it would take to un-suck comabt in The Secret World would be to let me bind my autoattack to my left mouse button.

Did I mention I would buy a single-player version City of Heroes if one existed?

Paradoxically, Tribes: Ascend strikes me as a little TOO skill-based, involving the kind of skill I just don't have - very fast twitch reflexes. It's why, despite being some of my favourites, I stopped playing Unreal engine online shooters. Jetpacks and fast-moving enemies make the game very dynamic, but they also make it very hard. I remember struggling to keep up in Section 8: Prejudice because of those confounded jet packs.

I mention World of Tanks because while it's skill-based, it really doesn't come down to good aim or good reactions, so much as good judgement and thinking ahead. For as fast as you can get killed by an unseen foe, World of Tanks is actually a very slow, plodding game. A heavy Tank might require several minutes just to climb a hill. A cannon can take upwards of 30 seconds to reload. Health lost can never be repaired. It makes for a game where the smart and experienced survive and the rash and stupid rush ahead to be shot to ****. But when a cannon can take a full 10 seconds to aim after traversing your hull or even just moving a little, it's not a game of reflexes.

For as much as I like games of skill, I'm actually terrible at the fast ones. I just can't think fast enough. It's the slow, methodical ones where I can actually catch myself thinking in real time that really hit that butter zone.

I saw one of those in Technomarket. I started asking the sales person about the thing, what systems it works with and we got right up until he told me how much it costs. After that, I was no longer interested. I did end up buying a much cheaper no-brand gamepad that only works for PCs, but I have yet to use it as I really don't like gamepads. They're one of the primary reasons I don't own a video game console.

Planes, no. Warships, definitely. Well, if it comes out right.

And World of Tanks IS a grind, and a massive one. To a large extent, you can "buy" away the grind, and I've been doing a little bit of that. I refuse to play the game without a VIP subscription to it, which boosts credit and experience gains, but I have found some small comfort in finding a strong tank I like and doing well with it. It burns out fast, but it's good in longer stretches if you pace yourself, or go back to playing lower-tier tanks of another nationality. Turns out French tanks are pretty badass.

There are not penalties for death in City of Heroes, either, just an experience bonus for staying alive. That doesn't make enemies heal up to full. Not in instances, anyway.

Which, really, is my biggest problem with Champions and why I once said it felt like WoW in tights - it feels like almost all overworld quests, and I hate that. Why is City of Heroes the only MMO out there that makes any real use if instances beyond "special events?"