Falling Stargazer

Incredibly exciting, congrats to all the hard work and consideration by the dev team and to the folk who helped make sure it's seaworthy! I'm maining a Widow presently so the new lick of paint will be a serious breath of fresh air, thank you!

Thanks for the reply @Crystal Dragon, that base list will help me a lot especially. Another question occurs, I've joined the RP and OOC channels inworld but they appear to be more or less abandoned. Are there other chat channels in use in present day for seeking out across the game for people who want to collaborate? It would make things easier being able to just work on solo content but have feelers going somewhere in game.

1) Intro: Hi all! I've been playing on Everlasting for a few weeks and it's been incredible seeing people make use of all the little emotive features of CoH in ways I felt completely on my own enjoying before. I cannot possibly overstate the sheer joy of seeing even a single other human using Walk to move around immersively. 2) The Chase (Cut to It): I'm looking for some intermediate advice on linking up for people with stories. I have extensive background doing rp, primarily in tabletop and forum styles, so getting used to really crunching down my writing to fit CoH and keep momentum has been a fun new challenge. I've spent time lurking in Pocket D, reading profiles, chatting people up in Tells if something in their profiles spark my imagination. I'm curious if anyone could recommend some good additional steps for putting my ideas out there for collaboration. My first instinct is to create a Topic here in the forums advertising the character I'm focusing on, but I don't see much traction in those kinds of threads. To be clear, this is not a frustration thread, I'm no stranger to patiently fishing. Just making sure I'm casting my line into all the ponds available! Looking to learn and get myself plugged into wherever I can! 3) Focus Areas: Some areas I could use help on: Any Super Groups I should Coalition my personal base to for networking making stories? Notable Discords or Reddit groups that gets good chatter and are welcoming to new faces? Is it worth the effort to make some AE maps to use for scenes? Anyone aware of some existing creations or tags to search on for rp-focused backdrop AEs? For full on story conflict, do people generally move to a PVP zone or something? I'm not much of a min-maxer so that could brutalize my creative license if so hah! What are some good entry level hooks people like for playing villains? I say entry level because while I'd love the chance to full on kidnap a mind control victim one day, that's a steep ask for a first scene. Some ideas I can pitch for people to have a low-risk brush with a new enemy would help a lot! I see lots of clubs operating through Superbase codes, any useful hubs where people like to gather? Or codes for places that are useful for scenery people here know of? 4) Basic Character Details: This is more of a "How Do CoH RP Gooder" thread, but in case it's relevant to anyone's advice, here's my current character's bio:

It's immediate, I just checked with stale lowbie I wouldn't mind losing. I was able to immediately get the same name.

This is absolutely the best headspace to enjoy Praetoria's content! I'm glad that things are available for any character in Ouro, but the actual flow of missions is really good about occasionally prompting you with a "Hey, just so you know, just because we only put these two dialog options here on the screen... that doesn't have to be what your character -really thinks-. Glory to Praetoria... unless..?" The game engine can't necessarily express all your ideas into the game world, but the devs were rigorous about highlighting that gaps exist for your benefit first and foremost.

Just to throw in something else... setbacks aren't failures of design. They're part of learning something new. Done the right way, setbacks are good. It's okay to be bad at things the literal first time you play. It's a toy, play with it, play with it BADLY, if it's well-made it won't scuff too much from some kicking, get better at playing with it, talk to people about it; we don't need to over-instrumentalize fun. This player is clearly in "streamer mode" which kneecaps paying attention in favor of keeping up momentum for an audience. In some ways, the format actively encourages failure because panicked blindness is often more entertaining. This is FAR from a reasonable example of play. Honestly, I feel like given the severity of his refusal to engage with it, with explanation text, refusing to go back when he was told about the tutorial, and so on; this video demonstrates way more Ws for CoH's accessibility than Ls. That even engaging in willful ignorance you can still do okay just tapping buttons to auto target mooks. Positive design moments I noticed: The Help Me prompt at character creation. Clearly this is why it's important that prompt exists and jumps out at you. Even without doing the tutorial, he figured out navigating and even activating his fly power within a minute of starting to run around, which is a win in the elegance of the UX. The UI is communicative and not over-stylized or noisy. It wants to help you do things. You can see the design of the Police Drones came up in a meaningful way, taught him that he can retreat to safe areas if he realizes he's in over his head At 27:42 just by poking the buttons on screen, he surfaces nearly every major interface. Nothing broke or yanked him away into some other imposing screen. This is a win for the UX not doing anything too squirrelly that might make a player feel overwhelmed at the game seeming to "ask them to do something". Think of other games where by clicking a button you might wind up in a totally different UI with a skill tree on it or something. CoH doesn't have that kind of hostile interface right out of the gate and that's actually really smart. At 28:58 you see exactly what I mean above, the enhancement screen comes up and he immediately pauses to go "what's this?" and poke around trying to get something out of it. Nothing happens, because again the game is well designed to not seed "starting gear" or something like that which might prompt you to read all of it or accidentally unequip it. There's nothing, so he leaves the screen, so nothing is broken but he knows a certain interface exists. At 31:23 he realizes that he can't see his fly power anymore and intuitively drags the fly icon back onto it. That's a win to the UX responding elegantly! Its skew morphism of buttons and slots readily communicates the way you interact with it. At 33:27 (Comparing against DC Universe Online and Champions Online) "I like this one because of the customization." HAIL TO THE KING, BABY! At 40:22 he removes a costume choice he regretted and because that's free up till level 10, it's no issue! Also it's clearly a good move to have that option available on trainers for just this reason. Some areas of criticism where CoH could improve accessibility: It would be good to flag the EATs with something like "Not recommended for those new to City of Heroes" because they force skipping the tutorial and have odd mechanical quirks. It wouldn't have helped here, because he actively refused to read the class descriptions, but I could see someone who is truly trying also making that mistake. The Help Me popup window should perhaps mention the Help chat channel. In the era of wikis, it's probably faster to ask Google, but plenty of people prefer socializing to learn instead. We're playing an MMO after all. At 29:37 I do actually think it's iffy design sending players to the hospital of a zone. I feel like if they're under the recommended level for the zone a prompt ought to come up asking if they want to go to the Hospital here or return somewhere safe. Cryptic accidentally created the Sellia Crystal Tunnel from Elden Ring decades in advance. He gets lost going to the detective in Steel Canyon while trying to figure out how to get back to a safer zone. I think the fact that the game auto targets detectives in new zones is a little iffy. Maybe it should only do this if you're in the appropriate level band for the zone. And finally just some salt I can't let slide: At 39:03 (In reference to the accuracy system) "Oh so it's like Morrowind then. Oh that's gonna be... that's gonna be annoying." Morrowind slander is a betrayal of all gamerkind. All of his opinions are now completely invalid. 😉 And to be clear, I don't malign the streamer here. Hope he keeps playing, maybe off camera so he can actually process what's going on at his own pace. Welcome to Paragon! Also, good on the member of his audience who hopped in to help. Helping other players we notice struggling is a key component of healthy MMOs. CoH would NOT be the same game if we were only playing with direct acquaintances. MMOs flourished in the era before social media for just that reason.

Running a level 14 Widow "Yastenna" through story content over on Everlasting. Feel free to reach out so long as you're okay with someone who isn't in much of a hurry. My feelings on CoV just get increasingly mixed as I've gone through. From an interaction and layout perspective, the zone design is such a breath of fresh air from Paragon's samey grid streets and concrete pillar buildings. Each zone has a huge degree of hostile arrangement that rewards travel powers and makes navigating to destinations much more interesting. Super jump and the weaker freebie travel powers like ninja run have always been a favorite of mine, and CoV's zones reward my love of platforming mightily. But then that same zone design has most of its individuality smothered out of it with the three layers of brown grime applied uniformly across every corner and then the Arachnos iconography smeared atop even that. It's like the fatigue I get of colossal hero statues in Paragon made worse by them all being of the same guy. It's mixed bags all the way down like that thusfar. So in one sense I'm really glad to have a chance to come back to this now that my media literacy is much higher than back when it was Live. I'm much more interested in picking apart what's working and what isn't and why. I'll have to do a proper writeup sometime analyzing my experiences, because even some of its weaker elements often stem from the devs clearly committing to unconventional artistic choices and a dedication to make something completely fresh for their players.

(Note, I'm just a rando who's dealt with these kinds of problems in my work.) This is often a difficult thing to conceptualize for people who've never had to deal with load balancing problems in software. A somewhat-helpful analogy is a conveyor belt. Want the conveyor belt to go faster? Okay the most obvious thing is to buff up the motor. But we hit a point where the friction of the wheel turning starts to damage the belt and it rips. The motor exceeded the assumptions made by its designers about how much force the belt material would experience at a rate its elasticity can tolerate. A code limitation might sound like it should be as equally-mutable as a display bug you notice in the game, but the assumptions in base-level elements like hosting have roots in everything else. Devs create code that sits on top of the hosting protocols, expecting those quirks to work in their specific way. So changing hosting logic means breaking a hundred other elements all throughout the system. In the end, everyone gets to play more and get their beauty sleep if we just have several pretty-good conveyor belts and use some incentives to help manage them wisely.

Yeah, Kings Row really shows a high bar for these kinds of sprinkled details! Someone out there had fun looking at infrastructure and thinking "what would be the worst possible piece of this to fail suddenly?" and then putting a Clockwork there, no matter how out of the way it was.

+1 to Zephyr, the biggest barrier I use to keep my brain in check is whether I can snag an interesting name for the concept. I'm committed to only using legit names (no added characters/numbers to force it through). If I have a REALLY strong drive but can't get the name, I go in and create them as a character for AE or just save it as a costume for later. My altitis is currently [manageable] but that's probably because I'm focused on experiencing the story content progression with my main hero. Once he's at 50 and through however much of the Incarnate system as keeps my interest, it will probably get dire for a while. Especially once I have enough Prismatic Aether that I can incorporate the costume holograms into my concepts. I'm so doomed. (Totally off topic, but I recommend trying out a Stalker if you have friends to levelup with! I run one with two buds and it's an interesting change of pace getting to be the forward scout in missions. As well as getting to pick one enemy to be deleted before a fight starts.)

One of my absolute favorite aspects of CoH was how much effort they put into little living touches. The fact that mobs are often -doing something- worth you starting a fight with them has actively poisoned other rpgs whose mobs just idle around in little circles waiting to offer their lives to the exp gods. Thugs are trying to hammer open garage doors. Cultists performing rituals on captured innocents. The Clockwork are in a tier of their own, just prying up materials in places no player would ever actually be looking for fights. So I've been trying to capture especially interesting quirks when I see them. Tell me your favorites too! Clockwork being awful gremlins: A Circle Mage's reach exceeded his grasp: Hellion chilling way off the beaten path in the Atlas Park warehouse district: The Lost clown car spawn in Faultline has several variations they put in! In some of them the PPD Officer is confused how all of them even fit into the car. In another version one of the Lost is trying to argue their way out of having run a red light. This last one is probably my current favorite in the game. It's a Crey exhibition where they spawn as neutral (yellow) alignment and are talking up the Protector unit. But when the encounter triggers, the Protector clutches their head and lashes out for what Crey has done to them. It's a solid little micro story! More to come if people are interested!