Terenos

The chat macros are a really good idea for teams. Do you have those up all the time, or is there a way you can call the windows when you need them?

My own UI is probably slightly more crowded, partially because the UI scale is at 120% because my old eyes couldn't read things at any smaller. I use a lot of extra buttons for keybinds, including "qer" for my basic attack chain, "gfv" for slower or aoe attacks, "xv" for build-up style abilities (or self-heals), and then "c" is always to toggle sprint on/off. I try my best to keep these general setups the same across characters so I can jump back into an alt with at least a rough idea of what the various buttons will do when I press them. I swapped the positions of the target and navigation bar because I hated how pulling down a map during a mission would obscure my entire field of vision, and I found it more helpful to be able to glance up and see my target details at center of vision. The health/etc. bar is pulled down to the right because I want to be able to see it without moving my eyes too much. The combat attributes window will vary on what's displayed (for some reason "Gravity" is stuck on a bunch of my brute characters after I came back instead of fury which I usually tracked on a lot of them). My UI choices have often been described as "cluttered" in other games, but it works for me.

Had a weird bug where the open world mission "Stop the Legacy Chain Reinforcements" from Lt. Harris decided to throw a navigation point to one of the doors in Mercy that leads back down to Darwin's Landing rather than just around the corner from the previous objective. Two screenshots below, the first one showing the distance and direction it had me going for the bug, the second one being the door it took me to (although I'd already used the door I was being directed to when I thought to take the second one it set itself to the correct spot afterwards, even after going back into the door).

I'm a life-long Red Side player, it's where I started and it's where I default to with new characters (Just to add unnecessarily - I dislike Blue Side, it's boring and zone travel is confusing) I hated the change to allow Civilians to be targeted and attacked in Mayhem Missions. The main reason? Now when I'm trying to target things, they get in the way; they take up target slots for AoEs. They're just annoying as all get out and it feels like the change was made for no other reason than people wanted a mechanic way to feel more villainous or edgy in the least interesting way possible. I would be in full support of just reverting that change and making them NPCs in the mission again who just kind of bump you a little bit as they run away. I don't want a badge for avoiding killing them, because it's just as boring and pointless not hitting them as it is hitting them. They're just annoying, and not in any way that makes me feel more or less like a villain.

One of Ashley McKnight's greetings has a "PlayerName" set wrong.

Both of the doors for the mayhem missions in Port Oakes are way out on the edges of the zone map, often requiring you to go through some of the more dangerous areas of those zones to get through. The second one is minor, but the first one (especially at sub level-10 where players may not have travel powers beyond those on the P2W vendor) feels excruciating - especially because you then have to make the trip back to whoever your broker is. This would be a good QoL change, as there doesn't seem to be anything particularly special about those doors (except the submarine, which has the villain choose-your-own Mayhem contact next to it, which I expect he's there more because that's near where one of the doors is than because he needs to be out there) beyond being "a ship" and "a submarine."

To be honest, the AT descriptors need a more complete editing pass to bring them all in line with a single voice. Some of them talk about the AT mostly in the third person, some of them talk about them in the second person, and some switch back and forth indiscriminately. My edits were mostly just to address a low-hanging fruit problem.

There are a couple of places in the archetype descriptions where it still genders the AT. Here are the ones I was able to catch, along with fixes: Blaster The Blaster is an offensive juggernaut. This hero can deal a ton of damage from a distance. But the Blaster must be careful, because he's they're somewhat fragile compared to other heroes. The Blaster can't stand toe to toe with most opponents at melee for long. His A Blaster's best defense is a great offense! Defender The Defender tends to help his their allies, and attack his (no pronoun needed here) foes, from a distance. The Defender excels at powers that assist friends, but can also hinder his their enemies. The Defender is able to attack at quite a range, however, the Defender is not built for hand to hand. He They might be able to dodge a few attacks, but the Defender won't last for long. Dominator As a Dominator, you control a devastating combination of control and assault powers. A Dominator can freeze foes in place, render them unconscious, or cause them to flee in terror. Dominators can also smite their foes with a selection of single-target melee and ranged attacks, with devastating effectiveness. Additionally, each time a Dominator attacks, he comes they come closer to unleashing his their true sadistic power of Domination. With so much emphasis on diverse offensive powers, Dominators lack in defenses and work best with teammates who can provide protection.

I think this is the difference in our opinions that probably won't be reconciled. I don't see making the early game slightly easier as providing a crutch. I see it as making sure we're not breaking people's legs right out the gate. I've enjoyed discussing this with you, but I think we're just going in circles now.

Okay, this is disputing the frame of my argument, not the point of it: not everyone has a "me" they can feel comfortable with reaching out to to ask questions. Let's take another analogy to try to get to the heart of the matter. There is a room that is really cool, but to get into the room, you have to walk through a door. The top of the door frame is a little too short and the first time people come in to the room they will often hit their head on it on the way in. It's not a serious hit, no one is injured, but wow is it annoying to clip your head when you enter the room for the first time. Now, if I'm there at the entrance or if they call me, I can warn them about how they might hit their head on the door if they don't duck a little bit. There's also a whole bunch of reviews online advising that, if you want to enter the really cool room, you should duck when you get to the door. But the really cool room isn't private, so there's people who end up going in without seeing any of those warnings or who don't have a friend who can warn them that the door is like that. And then they hit their head on that door frame - not because they don't understand how doors work, or because there's something wrong with them. It's just because this particular door is a little too short and a little too unlike other doors they've seen recently, and it's a little annoying, but that's okay because the room is really cool. Except this is just one door that leads into the room. There are a bunch of other doors with varying height problems that aren't quite like other doors they've seen. And they have to pass through all of them to get fully into the really cool room. Some people will get frustrated and look up the reviews online, and see where they have to duck and make it to the really cool room a little flustered but wiser. Some people will soldier on, hit all the doors, and eventually get to the cool room and ask others, "hey, did you hit those doors on the way in, too?" and get the answers they need. Other people will hit some section of those doors and decide the really cool room can't be worth all this hassle and leave without ever getting to see what makes the really cool room really cool. When we hear enough people complain about hitting their head on one of the doors to the really cool room, our response shouldn't be, "well why didn't you look this information up." It should be "why aren't we making the door easier to get through?" Good news! This is one of the changes being made with the next issue (which I'm very happy about). I think it's a big step in the right direction, but I honestly feel like some of the options we've discussed here would also go a long way to helping out new players just beyond this change without significantly impacting the game for vets.

We don't need to teach them how the enhancement system works, the game is surprisingly good at that through multiple tutorials. The assumption is not that new players are incapable of learning how to slot little orbs, it's that the cost of the system is too high for new players to utilize without having to look up outside guides on making infamy or efficient slotting techniques or just feeling like they're doing something wrong. We even added this neat little button that would automatically upgrade all your slotted enhancements for you instead of making them go to a vendor each time (it's just too bad that without outside knowledge or inf it's generally too expensive to use)! For players approaching the game with fresh eyes, it can be a frustration point that builds on top of the already frustrating task of dealing with 20-year old game and UI design - it doesn't need to be that way and any solution that makes getting and using enhancements more smooth can go a long way to getting those players to the point where they're comfortable enough to ask questions in chat or deep dive in the forums for build advice (and then run across other information - like making inf and the most efficient way to do enhancements, etc.). I'm passionate about this less because I'm passionate about enhancements as a system, and more because I see it as one system of many that can make it a hard sell to get otherwise awesome people to stick around and enjoy CoH. I'm also not really talking hypothetically here about player bounce when faced with so many old or revamped systems - when Homecoming announced the deal with NCSoft, I got a lot of friends asking me for advice about how to do this or how to do that or how to deal with some form of outdated UI decision. I ended up linking them to a lot of great threads here and writing up my own little guide that I could send them via Discord on stuff to do at the start to improve play experience. Many of them ended up shelving the game, though, because there was too much arcane knowledge required to make the early levels enjoyable - finding and keeping up on "gear" (their words, not mine) was just one of many bounce points.

I posted this exact suggestion two weeks ago, and got the exact same pan of arguments that we've been having in this thread. Somewhere there's something about helping new players with a minor change to the enhancement system that really sets people off. I feel like there's a feeling around here that all new players should have to suffer through the start of the game with a frustrating system just because we vets did. Suggestions to fix the system have been put in this thread multiple times: Lower the cost of early (1-20) DO enhancements; make enhancement drops more universal. But the rebuttals keep coming back to how easy it is to make inf, or that making these changes somehow destroys a low level economy that doesn't exist in any meaningful way. Selling enhancements to a vendor are not a major enough source of inf to afford enhancements until you start hitting higher levels (30+) where leveling slows down and enhancements start lasting longer and longer in comparison to the amount of inf you're taking in from a lot of sources. No one in this thread is disputing that it's possible to make inf and afford enhancements at any level if you know all the tricks. Those of us who are advocating for changes to the system are disputing that you should be required to learn those tricks to afford early enhancements just because that's the way it's always been. Research and min-maxing and learning optimal paths for alts should be something a player gets interested in once they're invested in the game and have joined the community, not as some sort of hurdle or litmus test requirement to do so.

I think we're coming at this from different perspectives. Yes, what you're describing is the most efficient way for a new character to do enhancements and manage infamy. But none of this is knowledge that new players come into the game with. I say this as someone who knows the little tricks to gaining infamy at early levels, who knows what the best to things are to buy with merits, and the easiest ways to kit out a character - looking at a screen like this just feels terrible (19 blaster), so many empty slots! And with just the infamy I've earned from doing missions and arresting baddies, it's not enough to fill those slots up. It feels like I'm wasting potential here. Now, do I need enhancements in these? I and you, as veteran players, know the answer is no - this character will be able to do missions just fine, and if I miss here and there it's not the end of the world. But if I'm a new player and I've been told that enhancements are a thing I should use by the tutorials, it's incredibly frustrating to realize that between drops and trying to buy them, and then dealing with the fact that I'm leveling past some of them that I can't keep up. (Yes, I'm aware I don't actually need to upgrade the stuff in the screenshot to 22, but it's hard to kit out a build with low enough level DOs at 19, and this screenshot was more to demonstrate the cost of upgrading) The requests to improve availability of low level DOs through price is not an efficiency thing. As vets, we know it's not the most efficient use of resources and no one here is arguing that the way to do enhancements you're describing is not objectively correct (it totally is). But the game experience of people who start and are willing to read the forums, or willing to ask questions in the in-game chat (because the community is always very helpful when this question comes up in-game) are going to be very different to people who download the game, maybe play with a friend just as new as them, and then see they can't fill all those slots and start seeing their accuracy go down as they level up and their stamina running out mid-fight faster and faster as they get more abilities and then never think to even ask the question of is there a more efficient way to do this. Enhancements requiring the level of institutional knowledge you're describing is not something that new players should be expected to deal with during the early levels of the game. They shouldn't have to know the most efficient way to spend merits, how and what to post on the AH to get a good inf/merit threshold, and what the break points are for where IOs overtake SOs. I get that we all learned this eventually, and that there are resources outside the game that are really helpful to new players. But they're outside the game. and the advice we give on this as vets is not something that's apparent during the normal course of play. Obtaining and maintaining enhancements as they currently are, in the early (sub-22) levels of the game, is a frustrating experience without help that has to come from outside the game - they shouldn't have to be.

I don't disagree with you. Those five enhancements are great, and new players should absolutely be directed to them and using them. I just also think that early on players should be able to interact with more than just those five enhancements without as much friction (looking up a guide outside the game to learn about using merits to make inf on the market, or about relative levels of IOs to purchased enhancements). I know it's unpopular to bring it up, and I'm completely in favor of having gotten rid of them, but TOs were a good opportunity for new players (and I mean new players, not new characters) to interact with the enhancement system. Sometimes things need to exist that aren't the most efficient to make adoption easier in a game.

Sorry, I should be more clear. I'm not saying they literally don't know that Red Side exists. "Realizing Red Side exists" is a rhetorical device here. I'm saying that there's way more teaming opportunities being advertised there, so the default choice (or awareness) feels like it should be to always remain a hero because it's easier to see rewards and teams there. Getting people to step foot on Red Side for the first time is often the hardest part - once they're there, they may take the time to do a story arc, and then maybe their next alt is a Villain to experience some of the stories there. Then, if people are also running the SFs there, that also means there's teams there to break up soloing - as it stands, SFs just don't get organized nearly enough to create those opportunities.