Wanted! City of Heroes Players!

The Game Room
1381

It’s now the tutorial zone, which is a lot faster and more interesting than Outbreak was.

I’m sad about the change, since I liked being able to play in Galaxy away from the Atlastards, but I can cope.

Issue 18, Going Rogue, was released last August, but it took a little while plus Issue 19 to get everything shaken out, so yeah it was probably around then.

Part of the Incarnate system. They’re endgame trials, most analogous to World of Warcraft raids but more generally accessible.

And they are awesome. But they take some work to get.

Paragon Studios has made a few major missteps, but overall I seriously approve of the direction they’re going in with the latest updates and the new F2P hybrid pricing model. The game really feels revitalized.

The depressing thing is as much as I love the game and been following it, I have a hard time playing it these days. If I’m teamed, I have a lot of fun, but on my own I have a real hard time getting motivated to play.

1382

I must say, as a cheapskate, that the 2 character limit feels MUCH more constraining than any of the free-to-play limits I hit in LotRO.

1383

Did yesterday’s patch bugger up the tab-targeting? It was already a little wonky to begin with, but after the patch it seems to be going out of its way to pick targets on the other side of the room/at the other end of the corridor/way over there, instead of cycling to the next guy in the crowd that’s beating on me. I’m forced to click-target.

So now that Flaminatrix is past level 20, I’m starting run into a lot of timed missions. Out of curiosity, does anybody know if the timer pauses during these sometimes interminable loading screens? Most of the timers so far have given me way more than enough time, but I don’t know if that will always be the case. On a related note, I’d like to shake my fist in indignation at whoever thought it was a good idea to construct the interiors of Arachnos bases almost entirely out of perforated metal. The see-through nature of that stuff means that my video card has to render not only the walls and floor of whatever room/corridor I’m in, but everything on the other side as well, sometimes on through multiple walls, and my card just doesn’t handle that well at all. I ran an AE story yesterday that took place entirely in Arachnos bases. The final mission was timed (short timer, to boot), and between running back after getting killed and the almost constant graphics-lag screen-freezes, I probably lost a good 4-5 minutes.

Bruised Violet, my main villain, is level 11 now and finished the Dr. Graves competition storyline, at least up through winning the Kill Contest. I think somebody else above mentioned how tough Crosscut’s “insidious kill-the-hero” mission was. I’m definitely not a fan of these “try to beat two higher-level-than-you lieutenants, simultaneously” situations.

I’m starting to wonder, though, about the Rogue Isles - is it ever a nice sunny day there? I hardly get to enjoy my villains’ cunningly crafted costumes because it’s always so dark and gloomy. It’s like those islands are located just off the Oregon coast. (I made a number of trips to the Oregon coast in my youth, and I swear there was no such thing as a “sunny day at the beach” on the Oregon coast. Actually, the first time I visited Darkshore in WoW, the first thing that popped into my head was, "Geez, this looks just like the Oregon coast…) I guess in the case of CoH, these islands are actually located off the New England coast, since one of the in-game informational “tips” informed me that Paragon City is located in Rhode Island.

I’ve also noticed that at least one of the studios involved in making this game must be Asian, judging by some really odd word choices I’ve encountered here and there in dialogue and mission text. For example, there are a couple early hero missions where the text says something like, “spreading terror/chaos amongst the city” (“throughout” would have been the more appropriate word, in the context of the sentence), and last night I spotted a villain’s chatter bubble saying something like, “What are you glimpsing at?” Basically, these errors suggest a non-native English speaker who didn’t quite get the subtle difference in meaning between words that mean sort of the same thing. It’s a whole different feel from the slew of spelling/grammar/homonym errors I’ve catalogued in WoW— those are clearly written by Americans — some of whom don’t understand their own native language — and suffer from drastic editing/proofreading fail.

1384

As far as I know, the CoH development team is in the States and much of the flavor text is from Melissa “War Witch” Bianco. “Glimpsing” may have been her attempt at creating some sort of game world slang. There’s tons of it in Praetoria and some select phrases wind up in the “real world” factions as well, especially among lower level gangs-types.

Almost every timed mission gives you more than ample time to get things done with a lunch break in the middle. There’s a few severe exceptions where it almost seems that the intent is for you to fail (three minutes to find a glowy in a five level multi-elevator Crey lab) but failure has no real consequence. The NPC just says “You tried your best but it looks like the data was lost. Let’s try this other place instead…” rather than “You got the data. Hey, this says we need to go to [same other place] and find…”

1385

Going Rogue Resistance quest to find data on Mr. G. 2 minutes, three floors. Not gonna happen :stuck_out_tongue:

One of the first timed missions I got gave me 1 hour to enter a warehouse, arrest all of the Council members inside, and stop their leader from escaping. About five minutes in, after exploring less than half of the first level, the boss apparently escaped and the mission failed. I was like, “BWUH?!” I never even saw the guy. I thought something had glitched because it just went to a loading screen while I was right in the middle of combat, and I didn’t get the “fail” message until after the loading screen. Fortunately, the other timed missions I’ve gotten haven’t been like that - they’ve been mainly 60 to 90 minutes to either defeat everybody in a location and/or collect X number of glowies.

Out of curiosity, is this game supposed to be set in the 1960s-70s? I’m basing that supposition on all the monument placards that describe events that happened in the '30s and '40s, the styles of the cars, and a lot of the female hairstyles.

1386

No, it’s ‘modern day’; that just happens to be kind of vague. There’s so much metahuman/alien influence on the city’s technology that it doesn’t really matter what year it actually is.

The 30s-40s were important mainly because that’s when metahumans began showing up, starting with Statesman and Recluse. After that, the timeline has varied so drastically from our world that it’s not really worth it to try to match dates.

Really, if it were the 60s, how could you tell? How would it matter? So it’s just left as an undefined ‘modern day’.

1387

It’s modern day. You’re not the first to mention the cars. The low-res can be explained by the age of the game but that doesn’t explain the body models.

They look even more ridiculous in ultra-sleek Praetoria. Likewise the silly block cell phones from c. 1995

1388

I key-bound my backspace key to “target nearest enemy”. Sometimes it, too, targets someone way the hell over in Montana, even though there’s someone standing right next to me (a little to the side, not centered) hitting me. It’s annoying, and it was doing this to me long before the latest patches.

The MMO “Rift” also has this targetting problem, while it works as desired in “Star Trek Online”.

I am guessing sloppy coding.

1389

IIRC, the way tab-targeting works is it cycles from left to right across the screen. But since the enemies are constantly moving and you’re constantly moving and the camera is constantly moving, tab-targeting is…less than consistent.

1390

As I understand it, City and Star Trek Online are still using the same engine. I would expect the tab-targeting to work the same way. I keep my “T” key bound to target the nearest enemy (and “Y” to tab through friends, a habit I developed with my empath), and I haven’t had any trouble with it. How is your view set up? It could be that the game doesn’t think the nearby enemy is in your line of sight for some reason.

1391

One of the first things I do when creating a new alt is bind to target_enemy_near, and then I use that to target most of the time - I supplement with tab to swap between enemies in a group, but frequently will go back to closest by hitting, even when dealing with the same group of enemies. You can also bind keys to target teammates, or enemies by rank. I seem to recall that this is now available in the UI, but if not, /bind is fairly easy to learn and incredibly useful.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Bind_load_file_(Slash_Command)

I think the text errors you are spotting are either copy/paste/rewrite problems (“amongst the city” may have started life as “amongst the people of the city” for instance), or slang. I’m a word geek (recovering proofreader and copywriter), and have played since launch, and I have not seen what I would consider evidence of transposition from non-native English speech forms. I certainly see some of that at work; my favorite Indian English thing is “today morning” to refer to what Americans call “this morning”.

1392

Okay, so is this “normal”? The mission contact (Doc Delilah in Faultline) accompanied me as an ally on a mission. We got the the elite boss at the end of the instance, where I was defeated. Ran all the way back and … no Doc Delilah. And I’m all, “Dang, if I can’t beat this with help, I sure can’t do it by myself.”

The “glimpsing” in place of “looking” actually reminded me of the time way back when I was a shoe salesman, and I approached a Mexican man who was perusing the work boots. I asked if I could help him and he replied, “I am seeing only.” I figured out that he meant, “I’m just looking.”

1393

Doc Deliah may have gotten killed by the mobs. They’ll continue fighting for a bit when you’re not there.

You can abandon the mission and retake it if you don’t think you can pull it off alone and can’t get/don’t want outside player help.

Castillo can be a real pain with all the shield drones. Load up on defense and accuracy inspirations and maybe a few heals.

1394

She may have been killed while you were running or sometimes she gets lost on the map in that mission.

1395

Heh. I’ve had a few of those “escort this person back to the exit” missions, and learned early on to stop and look behind me frequently to make sure they’re still following. That was after one mission where I got to the exit and then discovered I needed to run halfway back through the tunnels because the NPC had gotten hung up on something. Found him running in a corner.

1396

It definitely happens. Escort missions are a lot of people’s least favorite type–I almost never take them when running radio/paper missions. (I’ll occasionally make an exception if Clive Loveking or Dr. Stephen Fayte come up, just because I think their dialog is funny.)

On the other hand, they beat the hell out of escort missions in most other games I’ve tried. In other games, the NPC generally doesn’t follow you. Instead, you get to follow a useless idiot into a chain of ambushes. Slowly. Even Fusionette is better than that brain-dead hobbit girl in LotRO.

1397

Almost always there’s more than enough time; the one exception I can recall was only 5 minutes (without warning too, right after another mission) in a level 40+ mission and I understand you were supposed to fail that one. My Ill/Rad controller actually pulled it off though.

Gloom is the order of the day most places there.

That’s definitely Praetorian Resistance talk. They talk funny, something many characters complain about in-game.

I move the menu bar with the map to the right side of the screen and leave the map open; these days hostages/rescuees show up as small green triangles.

1398

Okay, a few new things I noticed after being away from the game for a little more a year that I don’t like:

  1. In missions where the objective (or one of the objectives) is to click on a glowie, a white splotch now tells you exactly where on the map the final glowie is.

  2. In every kill-all mission, you now know exactly where on the map the final mob is and the number of adversaries left to defeat.

  3. In escort missions, the NPC now has its own, slightly smaller version of the player map icon

This is an obvious dumbing-down of the game. My question is why?

Were players complaining about not being able to find a glowie? They make a sound, for goodness’ sake; You know you’re close when you hear it. Were players threatening to quit because they were frustrated with not being able to locate that last mob? Searching for the final mob in a kill-all was part of the fun of the mission.

??

1399

Hunting for the last glowie or mob (especially on the large outdoor maps) wasn’t considered fun by a lot of people. Personally, I never found entertainment in combing a city map for the fifth item hidden behind a dumpster in an alley or half-embedded in a wall.

That’s not “dumbing down” as there’s no challenge in combing every last inch of a map. It’s just a waste of my time to spend fifteen minutes running around. Even on smaller indoor maps, it’s not a challenge, it’s just a slightly less annoying waste of time.

1400

It also makes glitches easier to identify, like when the target has spawned inside a wall or fallen outside the map.