Atomic Dragons of Mars

Thanks for the considered responses. Like I said in my post, I played a lot in my first week, and have 3 mid-20s characters that I leveled on blue and red quests alone. At least one of those got there before I even knew about the P2W vendor's double XP boost, too! I didn't get too far in the Praetorian stuff because, well, yeah. The problem with the Save Syfonite Enterprises mission was that a certain named bad guy wouldn't spawn in and therefore I couldn't beat him and advance the quest. I googled it and found some forum posts from people who said they had the same problem. They blamed it the map: they thought that there were a number of maps this quest could be on and when you started it by clicking the door and entering the map it picked one of those maps randomly. Then you were set for that map, and even logging off and back on wouldn't change that. One of those maps had an issue where it's geometry would possibly preclude this named character from ever spawning, so if you got that map and generated that bug, you were just boned - if I understood their post correctly. That seems pretty theoretical and I have no idea how much of it is true, but the result is the same: a necessary NPC wouldn't spawn and the map was unfinishable. I tried logging in and out and leaving and re-entering the place, and none of it worked, so I just used the auto-complete feature to finish that mission. Of course, then the same thing happened again. And I remembered another spawn bug I encountered! Also in Praetoria, though I'm much fuzzier on this one. You go into the basement of a standard science-y building to talk to a scientist (IIRC) and are ambushed at the end of his conversation tree. You have to survive three to five waves of (very slowly spawning) ambushers to finish the quest. Well, after I finished the dialogue and the first ambusher appeared, I clicked the scientist again, thinking the goal was actually to lead him to safety in a standard escort quest and I would activate his follow mode. Instead, it initiated the same dialogue tree again. After clicking through that a second time, no more waves of ambushers spawned. The quest wouldn't complete, and I spent 5 minutes running around trying to figure out what was going wrong and if I had somehow missed a flag. That one was fixed by abandoning the mission and restarting it or just logging off and logging back in, I forget. Maybe these are weird geometry issues. I don't know. I'm just reporting my feedback. The game sold me on so many cool ideas: the incredible character creator, the weird class combos, flying around big maps, Force jumping across big cities -- all those elements are so free and exciting. I can see they put a lot of effort into the writing for many of the quests, it's just a huge shame that the quests that writing is attached to are too often so dry, confining, and buggy. Much respect to all the devs, new and old, but that combination just leads to me having more fun finding the mission-starting door than actually playing the mission. Again, thanks for the thoughtful responses.

Hey, I'm a new player who never played COX before (except maybe like 30 minutes on my brother's account 15 years ago) and I think this game is fantastic! I have played it for about a week, and really played the HELL out of it, but I've been been very frustrated because of issues I've had with the game. The issues I had are all quality of life issues, which the community helped me with very kindly when they could. The community also seemed very attached to these issues, which is why I guess they haven't been been changed. My experiences with MMOs aren't broad, but I played Lord of the Rings Online, a fairly similar game, for 5 solid years and 4-5 more semi-solid ones, so that's where I'm coming from. These are my frustrations: Quests often suck and break. There are too many quests where the goal is to kill all the dudes or click all the clickables. I'm okay with those in general; they are fine filler. But in this game they often are terrible fun-enders because enemies don't spawn correctly or the clickables look like they are deliberately hidden from the player, which both result in very tedious running back and forth, reloading the maps, and often spending more time hunting down one thing than doing the entire rest of the mission. I don't understand why this happens, when sometimes you CAN see quest goals (monsters or clickables) on the minimap. Making quest goals always visible on the minimap, or made visible by using a power, would go a long way to removing this awful, game-stopping tedium. There is nothing that makes me feel less like a hero than doing a circuit through a bizarrely Escheresque office building, identical to 200 others, for the THIRD time hunting down a mob that hadn't spawned correctly or was hidden away. Speaking of not spawning correctly, the bugs sucked too. The funnest one I encountered made my Power Slide turn on after getting hit with a shot gun, so my character did the falling down animation looking like they were rocketed backward by a purple explosion at their feet. But the bad stuff was the spawning. A quest-required character would not spawn in two missions I had, making them unable to be completed. Thankfully, there's an "auto-complete mission" feature that I used for the first quest, though it was a Praetorian story mission and that felt pretty bad to miss. But then the same thing happened again. The second time it broke it was also in a Praetorian story mission, so the Abandon Quest button was greyed out and unclickable. That character simply couldn't do missions after that. (Thanks so much to the community for trying to help me with this. The missions were Save Syfotine Industries and Hunt Down the Powers Division Murderer.) Well, that character COULD continue to do missions, if I wait three days for the auto-complete's three-day cooldown. But why three days? Why any cooldown for the auto-complete feature at all? And why do my toggles all go off when I get mezzed? Why can't I see quest goals instead of running around in the dark? How much of the in-game information is just wrong, like when Stone Armor powers incorrectly tell me I can't jump when they're toggled on? I wish I had more concrete examples, but the gist of this issue is that I often felt like there were hold-over design decisions or facets of the game from older eras that are kept on for nostalgia's sake, but that are unwelcoming for new players. XP debt is probably minor, now that I reflect on it, but a death penalty like that felt very spiteful to me. These quality of life issues really discourage for me what is otherwise an incredibly cool game. As a new player, I'm not attached to things being this way, so instead these frustrations just made me decide I should spend my time elsewhere. This is an awesome game for the most part. There's just a ton to love here, and I get why you guys all do love it! It's awesome! Like I said, I really played the hell out of this game for the week I was in it. I appreciate that the community helped me overcome a lot of troubles I faced in the game, and I understand when they got low-key hostile when I said there were parts I didn't like or I didn't understand why it wasn't fixed. If I hurt anyone's feelings, I sincerely apologize; that was never my intention. I'm a critical person, and I voice my frustrations -- please don't take my issues with the game as a personal attack. I'm amazed at what you guys have here, and I'm sorry that the donations appear to be closed because I would like to contribute for the experience you guys shared with me. Thanks and good luck with your game!