Originally Posted by Turbo_Ski
![]() Can't even count CoP as part of GR, since it was developed for CoV and got shelved for years because of major exploit bug they couldn't fix.
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Originally Posted by Turbo_Ski
![]() Can't even count CoP as part of GR, since it was developed for CoV and got shelved for years because of major exploit bug they couldn't fix.
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Regarding staffing levels of CoV vs. GR, I suspect that a number of people at Paragon were not working on GR but rather Paragon's next (and currently unannounced) project.
Is there a manual at all in the boxed version of GR? It would be interesting to compare the credits vs. CoH or CoV.
Having betaed GoRo, I also found that I wasn't impressed with what it offered. Although some players like to point that GoRo was an expansion, not a CoV-style release, the issue here is that CoV is the most comparable issue to GoRo in that you have to pay to unlock all of it. As such, looking at GoRo I couldn't see $30 worth of value. The problem is that Paragon Studios aimed too low with GoRo, only releasing new content for lvls 1 - 20 (plus CoP plus tip / morality missions). As such, Praetoria feels like an incomplete world - for both CoH and CoV, the launch was lvls 1 - 40, with Praetoria being half that.
Lvls 1 - 20, of course, are the quickest to get through, so Praetoria feels even smaller. It contains some of the better in-game narratives, certainly, but it will face similar issues to CoV's fixed stories - your character is set on a semi-fixed path (although there is some player freedom to choose the journey) that can see players feel locked-in.
Side switching is nice, but really feels too late (to me). I've got a hero to lvl 50, a villain to lvl 50 and feel I've seen both sides adequately. No, I haven't done every single mission and contact in every area, but I've travelled enough ground to feel that I've seen all I want to see.
Although you might argue (and some have) that my expectations for GoRo should be lower than for CoV because it costs less to buy, it misses the point that Paragon Studios / NCsoft have trumpeted the reinvestment they've made back into CoH/V, that they've got a bigger studio than ever, that things are better than ever, etc. From that perspective, I'd looked to GoRo as a key example of what the future holds for CoH/V. I would have had no problem in paying $50 or more for GoRo if it had offered a fuller Praetorian experience.
I'm also not in the mood to wait for I19, especially since the Incarnate content appears destined to be delivered in parts to the player base so that lvl 50s don't hit that Incarnate 10 point too quickly (which is a wise development strategy, but doesn't thrill me as a paying player). This makes the next question, "when is I19 coming out?" which at this stage of the year will either be November-ish (compete with DCUO, something just before the Xmas event) or next year... and even then what Issue 19 will contain isn't guaranteed. After all, if I have to pay $30 to get access to lvls 1 - 20 within Praetoria, it isn't a long bow to draw that lvls 21 - 40 / 50 are also going to come with a price tag.
Also to add to the OP's points: I've spoken to several long-term CoH/V players and they've all expressed similar opinions about GoRo. Your mileage may vary.
Finally, I've defended Paragon Studio's marketing department in the past but I have to make the comment that the GoRo website was incredibly ordinary. The information is contains (outside of the bios) is very generic and only provides a cursory insight into what the expansion contains.
Take powers: some flavour text and then the names of the powers within the set, but no detail on what those powers do. Two powersets have no videos to show them off. The site itself uses space very badly - huge amounts of space are wasted on the GoRo logo on every page and it is very easy to miss the media sections for powers unless you typically scroll all the way down on a page. The use of videos to promote GoRo was a good step forward, but the actual site itself leaves a lot to be desired.
Just out of curiosity, what was the highest level you got a character to in Praetoria, UnSub?
I'm not even going to give NCSoft execs enough credit to have come to that conclusion, that's how low of my opinion of them after seeing what they've done to their past properties.
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Now that the expansion has been out for a week and having played through a lot of the Praetoria content, I think it is really lacking a 20-30 zone. Don't get me wrong, I have been truly in love with Praetoria every since I made my first character there. Everything about it is awesome, the zones, the missions, the story and the new enemy groups. I can't rate it enough. But 20-30 is quite a lengthy time for a character, and having a 20-30 or even 20-25 zone would have doubled the length of time people spent in Prae and really cemented it nicely in my opinion. Of course, it would have needed as much mission content as Imperial City and Neutropolis put together, but I think it would have been worth it.
The ending arc felt a little rushed to me, as if it was trying to squeeze in before people got too high. That is my only criticism. Plus, I kind of missed having to travel for missions, as strange as it sounds. The occasional mission which sends you back to Nova or IC would have been nice and would have made it feel much more interconnected. It was a shame to have no reason to return more often to Nova. Anyway that is my only minor criticism.
Then again, if Praetoria did content up to 30, a lot of Paragon City would be empty!
The "Endgame" does not refer to "finishing" the game. The idea behind the "Endgame" in MMO's is that people want a way to continue to play the characters they put their (figurative) Blood, Sweat, and Tears (Or, in some peoples cases, phat stacks of paper) into. The "endgame" can consist of high level raids or other activities that can give the player a way to feel like they are making some kind of progress, even when they are no longer gaining levels and have exhausted the "normal" content.
This mindset also comes from games like other mmos, which don't really "begin" until you hit Max Level and start doing raids and other "endgame" content. |
I guess I still don't get it. For me, "endgame" is what I do when a character hits 50: focus on a different character. It just doesn't makes sense to me to continue playing a character that has no powers to gain, no levels to earn and having a good deal of the content you wanted to do... done. Granted, I have gone back to two of my 50s quite a bit: to gather badges, but that means I pull them out for a few weeks after each issue and get the badges I can, and then shuffle off to my other characters. I mean, I do have 20-some characters that I am actively rotating among. What is this "I still want to play my 50, so I demand more things to do with a character that is otherwise done" stuff?
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Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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To be honest, one thing most MMOs miss, I believe, is a feeling of closure. While endless progression has its merit, I still firmly believe that all good things MUST come to an end, because the longer you drag a good thing past its prime, the less good it becomes. I enjoy that, in City of Heroes, I can hit level 50 and feel like I'm DONE. That doesn't mean I'll never play the character again, but it means my character is now complete and I can finally use all that power that I've been accumulating over the character's life span without feeling like I could be adding something more.
In some way, the Incarnate system will ruin this completely, but in another way, that too has an end at some point. |
To be honest, one thing most MMOs miss, I believe, is a feeling of closure. While endless progression has its merit, I still firmly believe that all good things MUST come to an end, because the longer you drag a good thing past its prime, the less good it becomes. I enjoy that, in City of Heroes, I can hit level 50 and feel like I'm DONE. That doesn't mean I'll never play the character again, but it means my character is now complete and I can finally use all that power that I've been accumulating over the character's life span without feeling like I could be adding something more.
In some way, the Incarnate system will ruin this completely, but in another way, that too has an end at some point. |
I love the idea of end-game content. I mean, I really would love having enough new content to keep me interested at max levels. But for people like me that like story and such? It will never really happen.
Unfortunately the only game people seem to think has end-game is WoW. The endgame content consisting of either the military grade organisation of Dungeon runs, orchestrated by archaically minded players who I have heard dictate precise builds required for each class in the raid. (If I wanted to get yelled at by a rude, arrogant, self obsessed person purported to be my superior I would have joined the army)
And the other option? PvP, which is so polarising I'll leave it alone.
I love the idea of end-game content. I mean, I really would love having enough new content to keep me interested at max levels. But for people like me that like story and such? It will never really happen.
Unfortunately the only game people seem to think has end-game is WoW. The endgame content consisting of either the military grade organisation of Dungeon runs, orchestrated by archaically minded players who I have heard dictate precise builds required for each class in the raid. (If I wanted to get yelled at by a rude, arrogant, self obsessed person purported to be my superior I would have joined the army) And the other option? PvP, which is so polarising I'll leave it alone. |
Unfortunately the only game people seem to think has end-game is WoW. The endgame content consisting of either the military grade organisation of Dungeon runs, orchestrated by archaically minded players who I have heard dictate precise builds required for each class in the raid. (If I wanted to get yelled at by a rude, arrogant, self obsessed person purported to be my superior I would have joined the army)
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actually that perspective is a year and half outdated. Wrath had an extremely flexible raid design to make them more widely available to all groups. Only factors people consider for normal mode raid encounters are role composition (such as 2 tanks, 2-3 heals, 5-6 dps for a 10 man run) and if everyone is decently geared enough and keeping a decent balance between melee/physical dps and ranged/magical dps. I regularly PuG a 10 man ICC at least to 6/12 bosses each week without a sweat, something that was almost impossible to do in BC with Kara and Zul'Aman.
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actually that perspective is a year and half outdated. Wrath had an extremely flexible raid design to make them more widely available to all groups. Only factors people consider for normal mode raid encounters are role composition (such as 2 tanks, 2-3 heals, 5-6 dps for a 10 man run) and if everyone is decently geared enough and keeping a decent balance between melee/physical dps and ranged/magical dps. I regularly PuG a 10 man ICC at least to 6/12 bosses each week without a sweat, something that was almost impossible to do in BC with Kara and Zul'Aman.
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Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Speaking of which, I was remarking to my WoW-playing friend about how smart Blizzard were in terms of business. They have enough players to populate the moon, but instead of resting on their laurels and letting population density build teams by having people run into each other, they still instituted "quick game" team building that sets you up in a raid or instance automatically.
Now, it may be my friend and how he plays, but I get to watch what he's doing literally all the time when he plays, and almost the only time I ever see him team is either in instances or battlegrounds, both of which he joins via auto-team. The rest of the time when he's roaming the lands, he's basically solo doing Lord know what. I gave up on trying to figure out that game's questing system. So what I'm saying is that, end game or no end game, WoW seems to have stopped being about precision-orchestrated encounters with Rick Flair as your team leader and more about a semi-random mash-up of willing volunteers that go with what they have. I wouldn't mind a system like that here, to be honest. |
As long as they allow players the option of opting out of automatic team building I have no objection. I've played in other MMO's that have similar systems and the feature seems to attract a lot of people that join missions and then sit at the entrance waiting to collect the mission completion bonus while other players do all the work.
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Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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yeah, I know what you're talking about.
it's basically the LFG tag that we can apply. instead of manually searching through everyone and cherry picking what you want, you flag yourself for... LRSF and the system groups those interested in the same thing together.
We'll never know the data behind the business decisions that caused Paragon Studios to come out with Praetoria (levels 1-20) before they came out with the much-requested "end game" stuff (50+), but I'll bet it has more to do with someone like me, who's a steady subscriber and plays alts that take around 500 hours to reach 50, than it does with people who take a week or two to get to 50, get bored, and unsubscribe until the next issue.
I'm not saying that your desires aren't important, but a smart business goes where the money is, especially if they have the data to prove it.
--NT
Now, it may be my friend and how he plays, but I get to watch what he's doing literally all the time when he plays, and almost the only time I ever see him team is either in instances or battlegrounds, both of which he joins via auto-team. The rest of the time when he's roaming the lands, he's basically solo doing Lord know what. I gave up on trying to figure out that game's questing system.
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So what I'm saying is that, end game or no end game, WoW seems to have stopped being about precision-orchestrated encounters with Rick Flair as your team leader and more about a semi-random mash-up of willing volunteers that go with what they have. I wouldn't mind a system like that here, to be honest. |
When was the last time you saw people do anything other than instances in this game? Ship Raids and Hammy you say? They have their rare spawns too, but a solo player or non raider will not be likely to be questing around those areas.
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Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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So what I'm saying is that, end game or no end game, WoW seems to have stopped being about precision-orchestrated encounters with Rick Flair as your team leader and more about a semi-random mash-up of willing volunteers that go with what they have. I wouldn't mind a system like that here, to be honest.
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Okay, point, but then that's not saying there's no endgame content available. That's saying that you (figuratively speaking) don't like the endgame content that's available, which is a totally separate issue.
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City of Heroes never made that claim, however, or at least hasn't in the past five years. Sure, there are still the few lost souls who feel that running into populated zones and asking for teams in Local is the way to team, and I'm sure a few still expect to see teams of heroes or villains roaming around the zones killing things, but that has not been even considered for YEARS now.
WoW is different, in that it has a much bigger world, much more people and, interestingly, much more to do in this big world. In fact, watching my friend play for a few years now, it felt like back in the day he spent most of his time in the overworld doing quests and cursing at his Quest Helper, whereas now I barely see him do that. I watched him put off an overworld quest for an entire week, and that's with me nagging him to do it like I'm his mother. |