Ever had one of those “I don’t know why I bother!” moments?
**Warning in advance: If you don’t play City of Heroes/Villains you won’t understand the rest of this post. **
I’m so irritated, frustrated, and generally thinking “What is the POINT of having a Technical Bug report button in this game?!”. I thought about putting this thread in the Pit, but it’s probably not sufficiently vitriolic.
I’m just going to re-post the information below as it appears in my bug report. Including GM responses. You can draw your own conclusions. No confidential data will appear, I’ll be editing that out - but in all other ways, this is the EXACT correspondence.
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Original Bug Report (filed in the itty-bitty in-game window):
**02/04/2007 09:13 PM **
As an axe tanker, my only attack is axe. However, the knockback sent the villain into a cell during a SafeGuard side mission and now I can’t complete it.
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**Response (Jonathon) 02/04/2007 10:17 PM **
Hello (Bites When Provoked),
Thank you for contacting the PlayNC Support Team.
To help us more quickly assist you regarding this issue, please respond with the following information (otherwise our petitioning system will automatically set your help request to “Closed” status).
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Was this your mission or a teammate’s mission? (If it was a teammate’s mission, please instead have them contact us with the necessary information to clear the mission.)
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If it was your mission, do you still have this mission on this character’s mission list?
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What is the name of the contact that assigned the mission?
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What is the name of the mission?
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Which mission slot (top, middle, or bottom slot) is the mission in?
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Please provide a detailed description of any issue that is preventing you from completing this mission.
The additional information that you submit will help our Quality Assurance Team better investigate the issue you describe and help us work toward a possible resolution.
We apologize for any delay and thank you for your assistance in this matter.
Regards,
Game Master
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**
Customer (Bites When Provoked) 02/05/2007 02:30 AM **
It was my mission (*charactername_1 *on Infinity). I do not have it in the mission list as it was part of a safeguard and I had protected the bank already, so the mission was automatically set to ‘completed’ despite the side-quests that can be undertaken. For this reason, you also won’t find it in my mission slots anymore.
The contact was Det Freitag in King’s Row.
The part of the mission that was bugged was a sidequest to stop villains doing a gaolbreak.
The Mission Title was ‘Protect the Atlas Park Bank’ - or whatever the title for a Safeguard mission is. It was definitely the Atlas Park bank.
The issue, specifically, is with ‘knockback’ powers in these missions. I was playing a Stone/Axe tanker, solo, and while I don’t have any knockback enhancements slotted in it, it still has a heck of a kickback.
When I encountered the Boss mob (a spines scrapper; I don’t recall the name) and fought her, she was flung across the gaol cell area and into a cell. I couldn’t get to her there (even with the AE ‘mud pots’ on) but she still managed to fling spines out at me and the NPC Police.
This is not the first time I’ve encountered the knockback bug in Safeguard missions. I’ve done about 4 of these missions all up, and THREE of them were bugged - but this is the first time it’s occurred from something my character did.
Saturday night I (as charactername_2 on Virtue) did two Peregrine Island safeguard missions (for the PI Bank) and the first side mission we had, one mob from a ‘kill all’ got booted through the door (we’re not sure how it happened). The second time around, it was an Energy blaster who accidentally knocked the mob through a ‘friendly’ door.
On each occasion, the problem meant that we could not successfully complete the side quest.
The problem is a critical one and needs to be fixed at a whole-game level. To have the exact same problem with both Atlas Park and Peregrine Island bank Safe Guard missions shows there’s a significant gameplay issue across the board with this type of mission.
If we could open ‘friendly’ doors, we could get inside and none of these missions (so far) would have been ruined, but because we can’t open the doors - and the mobs can’t get out - we can’t complete them. It’s extremely frustrating.
Thank you for your time.
Kind regards,
(Bites When Provoked).
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**Response (Patrick) 02/05/2007 02:39 AM **
Hello (Bites When Provoked),
Thank you for writing in to PlayNC Support Team concerning a mission that is currently bugged and will not correctly complete. At this time, the mission has been cleared, and you may continue on to the next task from your contact. If you encounter this issue again in a different mission, please feel free to send us a petition including the name of the contact that gave it to you so that we can investigate further. Please let us know if you have any further issues.
Regards,
GM Patrick
Didn’t I just finish SAYING the mission was cleared? Did I not state this in, oh, I don’t know, THE OPENING SENTENCE?!
I fully intend to respond to this message, once I stop being angry. Right now, all I’d be able to come up with is “Thank you for your completely dismissive response. Your lack of effort must surely be an inspiration to imbeciles everywhere, as it goes to prove that no matter how inept a person may be - or how poorly they perform the duties for which they are paid - somewhere, there is a job waiting for them. Have a nice fucking day.”
Which, cathartic though it may be, isn’t going to achieve anything in terms of getting the game to actually play correctly.
Any suggestions, Dopers?
(Other than ‘get over it, it’s just a game’. I’m aware of that, thanks. The game issue is a niggling but persistent annoyance, but it is the ‘Tech Support’ - very much in inverted commas!- that has got me REALLY riled.)
