FoxyPrime

Can we do something about the Tina Macintyre mission that involves searching for this Dr. Calvin guy? Massive city layout. Find 5 devices and a guy in a white coat who can resemble one of the random enemies. Needle in a haystack pain in the neck. Just perma mark him for us on the minimap or something because I do not like spending over an hour trying to find one guy tucked away in one of a thousand possible corners on a giant map.

After all the toons I've pushed through early game hell, I've lost many a fight I could have won simply because I missed every other attack or more, with early game enhancements and inspirations doing nothing to help, that I feel safe in saying that it is not simple bad luck streaks. I actually make it a point to use the P2W vendor to turn off inspiration drops like +accuracy because I find them so useless they're just wasting space and I'd rather get defense or a heal. Yes, I've heard people quote the definition of probability at me about RNG all the time for years across all kinds of games and it has changed nothing precisely because it's not addressing the actual problem, it's just deflecting the conversation. That problem in CoX being: early game hell is already slow and tedious and it's become worse when you're forced to restart or back out of content because the RNG arbitrarily won't let you through. It is a waste of the player's time. I think the early game missing should be reduced and early game enhancements to accuracy should be buffed (or eliminated entirely if they're never going to actually help). Say all you want about "realism" or "challenge", but at the end of the day, it's still just arbitrarily wasting our time and for what? A little bit of flavor that's been old news for well over a decade at least? All those goes away at higher levels, so why must early on be such a pain in the neck?

Like a lot of people are saying, new content (or lack thereof) is the real issue, not power leveling. Power leveling wouldn't feel as necessary if there was something fun and engaging to do, but as many have said, we've done all that already. It's not interesting anymore. You think being 50 with nothing to fight is boring? Being forced to level slowly through stuff I've done a hundred times already is boring and tedious, which is even worse. I think the grind should be reduced and new content added (easier said than done, I know), but let's not forget originally this game, like all MMOs, was designed to deliberately waste our time so we would keep paying, but the monetization part is gone and all that's left is an old system that could be experimented with to try improving it so the game is more fun. We're all here because we like the game so the potential is there, but forced grinding is not a good way to keep us here. After all, it's a major reason why someone like me quit every other MMO I ever played and vowed never to play another. City of Heroes manages to be in a unique situation, making it an exception. IMO, power leveling is also grinding, just faster than regular grinding, but still boring and tedious. I don't want to power level. I just want to play the game, tinker with builds, and fight bad guys without an endless abyss of empty bars that fill exceedingly slowly in my way. Also, a sad, but simple truth is that there will always be some portion of the player base that blows through content quickly. It happens. You cannot stop that. It's futile. But it isn't fair to the rest of us to design the game solely based on the needs of the first to finish.

I just defeated Flambeaux and Blast Furnace in a tip mission and neither of them counted towards the Villain Disruptor badge. I know it says safeguard specifically, but the wiki insists it was expanded to include tip mission villains. I think it really should be expanded so fights with these characters outside of safeguards also count, because only doing it through safeguards is extremely tedious.

Honestly, with all the alting we do, I would prefer an overhaul that made the game less grindy, and redo some of the older content that is excessively grindy. The Citadel TF is literally the same Council clearing mission 10 times in the same cave system (sometimes literally the same cave - apparently another regiment of Council moved in as soon as the team walked out). Another one had us going to multiple redundant sub stations doing the same boring chore of clearing everything out. AE farming is done because the grind for xp and inf to get anything accomplished is slow and boring and people want to just get that over with, not helped by the fact that the early game is also annoyingly difficult with high miss rates that can make for a painful experience until you overcome it. I wouldn't farm at all if I didn't have to and would instead be looking for fun and genuinely challenging content (I'm of the opinion that grinding is not a challenge). Could just quickly get alts up and running and try them out, learning to play them well, and not having to be bogged down waiting for an experience bar to slowly rise or my inf amount to climb up enough so I can throw another 20-30mil at 1 out of dozens of enhancements I need off the auction house, all so I can just try the build out. There's only so much time in the world and I would rather spend what time I invest in the game enjoying it feeling like a comic book character in epic battles rather than grinding and farming.