Sunsette

No. Most of us don't identify whether an action is good or evil in a vacuum but with social and emotional context: what was the amount of harm, who is harmed, did we see the harm, was the harm reasonably foreseeable? SBB ensures we don't feel the impact of any harm done and the person harmed isn't especially likable so it's not going to trigger a lot of our gut reactions to be anything but escapism. Now imagine that as part of SBB, the game requires you to strike up a friendly conversation with a nice, charming old person who has the thing you need. And imagine that your character resolves they must break this person's leg, because it's fast and safe and effective. And imagine that you get a description of the person's agony played out. And it ends there. You don't see any happy resolution for this person -- your last involvement is making the clicks necessary for this old grandpa that was fond of you to be bleeding out while you rob them. There would still be people interested -- some people might be more interested than ever, and that's legit! -- but you betcha there'd be a lot of complaints (especially since SBB has cutscenes rather than just pure text). What I find is that the people who are most attracted to the concept of roleplaying villainy -- not necessarily in City of Heroes, but in general -- is that they're most often attracted to the freedom a villain has to set their own agenda, the excitement of forbidden themes, and the ability to get into a distinctly different headspace from their own. City of Villains does not allow a villain to set their own agenda. Forbidden themes, okay, we got that! City of X in general is not written in a way that engenders assuming a different headspace. You have your personality mostly written for you in every mish where that might matter, and I've noticed red-side arcs are really bad about that in particular. Now, you can write someone's personality for them in a game, but you have to do so in a very consistent and interesting way that reveals a unique character. Any such effect CoX has on a player in this fashion is largely the result of players taking the initiative to craft such for themselves. The Graves arc shuffled me between multiple different ideas of villainy, I noticed, to the point where I struggled to come up with a unified personality that encompassed all the responses I had to make. There are degrees of this, always. Even as someone who *never* played Red before this year, I knew that I would want to avoid Westin Phipps. He's that infamous among dedicated Red players I heard about it. But it doesn't have to get that bad for it to start turning people off. I hear a lot positive about Dean MacArthur and I have to ask: what do you do in Dean MacArthur's arc that's actually evil? Plan to rob a bank? You don't even *get* to rob the bank until the very end of the arc and only if you want to! All the evil stuff is optional!

...The order in which it is summoned matters? Wow, I never thought I'd see another Wi Flag. Yeah okay. Seems pretty cottage-rule safe then. I'd love it if these were non-combat only, every time I go away from the game for a long time and come back I'm like "ooh! little robot drone! Why didn't I use this before?" and then little robot friend insta-dies, having drawn the ire of random enemy from 60 feet away after I shot his buddy, and I mentally remove little robot friend from my concept.

Honest question as someone that's barely even tried using these: If they seem to attract aggro extremely well (as my experience does suggest) and they die even better (seems objectively true), then they've never served in the role of a meaningful helper for anyone anyway -- wouldn't it be better if they were non-combat outright? I can only imagine a niche scenario of a defensive AT in a group backlining with one of these and benefitting from them. I kinda feel like we don't need any other weird temp power bandaids for the early experience -- maybe other fixes, sure, but not more temp powers.

So we agree on the point of agency fundamentally. Much of our disagreement is saying it different ways, highlighting different implementation issues. When I say 'no one wants to be evil', it is in large part in conjunction with my hierarchy of being able to choose kindness or cruelty vs forced kindness vs forced cruelty. Redside doesn't give you a choice in who you are cruel to. Lots of people, in my experience, want to play a bad guy. That's not the same as lots of people wanting to be EEEEEVIL. The number of people who want to play as someone who is a complete raging jerk at all times to everyone they encounter is extremely low. GTA is traditionally an open world single-player game you put maybe a hundred hours into where you assume a single individual's story in a cinematic format. It can present an unusual experience like that for a limited time. Meanwhile, GTA online doesn't focus on people suffering as a result of your actions. Beyond that, though, it's true even for single-player games with no network effects and stories that end. Every cRPG that has allowed players to choose sides has shown an overwhelming preference for players doing good since we started seeing metrics about this stuff with BioWare's Dragon Age and Mass Effect series. It's a tradition that continues to Baldur's Gate 3, a game famous for how much it reflects and encourages the most niche of choices; Larian has even commented with joking disappointment about how much players prefer to do good rather than evil and play "basic" concepts! Anyway, inflicting mayhem like that isn't really achievable in existing structure. One of the big challenges with putting it in this game is that CoH is infamously easy, and that threatens to turn reasonable implementations of real mayhem into godmode "HAHAHAHA EVERYTHING DIES" which will get boring fast. What are you gonna do? Make them run from the police? Making it work represents an incredible amount of effort that I don't think the HC team could reasonably complete because it would have to redo everything about redside as it stands. Even if you wave ALL of that aside, network effects remain a problem for this 20-year-old game. Alliance v. Horde is not nominally a good vs. evil conflict, except a sizable plurality of the game's years have reset it so the hero-coded Alliance are heroes and the villain-coded Horde are genocidal. As far as relevance to CoH though, CoH is both more and less content-locked than WoW in factions. The original zones on both sides of City of X are hard-locked and those zones make up a majority of the content available, but the overwhelming majority of recent content from RWZ onwards was faction-neutral even more than WoW. WoW will often run two parallel quest storylines that merely end in the same place. Up until last year, WoW extremely resisted the concept of cross-faction teaming, so this was unavoidable. And yet, WoW still ended up suffering badly from network effects -- first throughout Classic, where there weren't enough Horde, and then again through Shadowlands where there weren't enough Alliance¹. I think content matters less than social channels when it comes to network effects provided that the content is already cross-accessible (which it is in CoH HC). In WoW, by default, you cannot talk cross-faction in any way except to friends you already have -- and that makes that game feel much harder faction-locked than post-RWZ CoH ever has, especially on HC. You want people to play both sides more? Here's my suggestions for a reasonable implementation: - Remove "Countdown to" Alignment Powers -- I park at Hero as much as I can because I like having a "JUSTICE" power even if I never use it. I lose it for a *week* every time I decide to help out a red-sider. - Improve the Rogue and Vig alignment powers. - Put some hero/neutral contacts in the Rogue Isles and some villain/neutral contacts in Paragon so that people have incentive to be in each others' zones more. - Solo morality mishes in the above. - Visual glow-up of some of the cleaner and more environmental locations to use less dark colorspaces and be 'friendlier' for more visual variety. (Paragon could use a similar diversity pass to make some things dingier but this is not as important). - Prismatic Aether from alignment confirmations. Because what's important to you -- is it that more people have a red-side badge on their player unitframe, or that people who prefer to inhabit the isles see a vibrant, living world full of other players who can do things with them? I'd argue it's the latter, not the former, that matters. ¹ Building on my earlier assertions, a significant, though hardly the only, motivation for making the Horde eeeeeeeeeevil in a lot of later stuff was that many of the devs fondly remembered evil Horde from WC2. They wanted players to enjoy doing awful things and reveling in how evil they were. ... That didn't work out. The Horde playerbase first went through denial about playing the evil side, and then open revolt about the concept.

The big difference between SWTOR and CoV is none of that; the missions are fairly comparable in gameplay between the two sides in SWTOR, and the Republic has better visual design (barely). In SWTOR, you have agency. Quite a lot of Imperial Players love the idea that they're on the 'bad side' but they're actually good guys, and if anything they're *more good*, *more special*, than good guys on the Republic side. And because the writing is so oriented around your specialness and power fantasy in general, this synergizes well with who the game broadly appeals to. So yeah, the biggest central problem is that no one really wants to be evil. Player priorities seem to favor some version of Get to Be Nice or a Jerk to Who I Want > Have to Be Nice to Everyone > Have to be a Jerk to Everyone. The other problem is that binary lockouts between factions are inherently unstable and every game to implement them has seen severe landsliding. I do not think there is actually any feasible solution with HC's current resources to fix the Red population problem; it's a nearly unsolvable mess without redoing the entire game. Not one dev that came up with the "here's two sides, pick one" in a PvE environment had any idea what they were doing in that regard, in every MMO from every studio. It hasn't worked out as planned for literally any of them. Even in WoW, the concept became completely untenable.

A global endurance discount that tapers is a really interesting idea, though I'd be a little concerned about it having the effect of making someone feel like they are getting weaker rather than stronger. My big concern with having enhancements that taper is that I would worry it would add an unfun level of complexity to ward against something that I don't believe would cause imbalance at high levels. I don't think in late-game it's likely to be an issue because you start getting so many ways of rider accuracy/endurance via IOs that are more efficient if you can drop the inf for it. Mostly I think it would just make SO only builds slightly more competitive with IO/HOed builds. I am very open to counterpoints, however. I just want to make the enhancement experience create less analysis overload/"waiting until fun" for a beginning player.

SUGGESTION: Have every accuracy enhancement of the generic types be like dual Schedule A Hami-Os (or half as strong as that, in the case of DOs). WHY: This simplifies enhancement consideration for every single AT leveling up, by reducing the decisions to potency (damage, mez strength, etc.), frequency (recharge), and reliability (accuracy and endurance). Accuracy in general is not considered to be an exciting factor to balance for in games. Exceptions can be made for attacks that have an unusual amount of inaccuracy to promote a 'casino' playstyle, but over the last 20 years, I've seen the concept of accuracy largely minimized. CoH even echoed this in the amount of accuracy it hands out passively on high level IO sets. It is rare (but non-negligible) that I have to consider slotting an attack for accuracy in a finished build, and when I do, it is largely on some sort of proc-monster attack. Endurance is a transparent limiting mechanic that does provide texture and interest and you have to make combat or build options to deal with the cost of endurance. However, at low levels, you often lack sufficient slots to really make this build choice. The general agreement for the 'correct' way to build a character's attacks up to the 30s is to start with Accuracy, move to Damage, then put in Endurance or Recharge. Combining Accuracy and Endurance makes that first slot even more spoken for as Accuracy, but gives more freedom to consider the rest of the slots from there on out. SIDEBAR: I thought about, and initially considered, proposing the same for generic IOs but 50+5 endurance IOs are powerful enough that they can warrant slots in final builds, and Acc/End IOs are actually uncommon to find in sets, so doing this for a generic IO would represent a wholly unnecessary increase in power for top-end builds. I don't think it would be the end of the world, but I don't think it'd be more beneficial than not; allowing IO builds to even more easily reach extremely high levels of accuracy risks further flattening the texture of high-level encounters which feature individual enemies that have unusually high defenses, either transient or constant.

That's an excellent point. I'm not sure how to feasibly address that since I am mindful of also giving too much information. I'll think about it. Overall, my goal is not to get more people playing Praetoria for the sake of people playing Praetoria; it's to mitigate the effect I've seen in my non-CoH communities where a lot of people bounce off after a week or two of play because they think the game is a snoozefest devoid of interesting content similar to Champions Online. The ideal would be a significant revamp of the 1-20 range for both blue and red sides in that order, but if wishes were horses etc. I might go so far as to go the other direction relative to my other input here, and say it's worth considering removing them from Find Contacts altogether unless you're a Praetorian character. They should certainly be deprioritized; First Ward and Night Ward stories are at a range where Blue and Red actually have plenty of good content that's accessible, interesting, and still not nearly as hard as First Ward or Night Ward can be. Dean MacArthur and Jenni Adair as well as Croatoa all immediately come to mind. The wards, unlike Nova Praetoria, also have plots that actually lose quite a lot if you are not familiar with prior lore (Praetoria in specific in this case). They are classic "mid-expansion" content as opposed to "expansion launch" content. Though not impenetrable or unenjoyable, they should probably be deprioritized in some way. At the very least, throwing both Doorman *and* the pre-Doorman contacts is redundant, and Hellewise I don't think makes any sense as a contact to bring up via Find Contacts at all. If I could snap fingers, I'd actually introduce Hellewise's assistant in Night Ward first and have her brought in via Montague or Ward. I don't have any strong opinions about the repeatables from the Wards, other than that I wish we could somehow make it so that repeatable mish givers in general don't show up until you're running low on non-repeatables.

You have a point about population and it is a good one, but it also really frequently applies to red side, and that's very visible in help. The majority of people who bounce off blue side for its blandness — and it simply factually is, the game's presentation of story on any launch content and mission design is nigh impenetrable and monotonous — will leave before they get to the point of asking for help. I've seen this happen with a large amount of the players in three different discord servers who have been sparked to try the game given recent news. They love the character creator, then DFB is okay, and then... what are they doing, why do they care why they're here? The game's basic mechanics are difficult, I am a teacher, I would never claim otherwise. The majority of that difficulty originates from how badly it explains anything to the player, and it is something I find consistently atrocious throughout the game. Anytime I want to invite a friend to join me in this game, I have to ask myself if they're really going to enjoy it without me walking them through everything every hour I can first (between the impenetrable mechanics and the early content) and the answer is frequently no. That is less of a problem for me with my current schedule than it was five years ago, but I extrapolate that to a broader population and I am daunted. Also, I haven't done twinshot in a hot minute but I just did graves, and it is remarkable how bad a job it does at teaching almost anything in virtually every regard. Late CoH did a lot right, but its new player experience was not one of those things. Anyway, I think the most pertinent thing here is that I would be fine with the proposal to make it a two sentence descriptor that includes both recommended/not and classic/challenging, cinematic. I don't think it would be the best choice, but it would still be a significantly better one than a flat recommendation or non recommendation.

I did not and do not dispute that Praetoria is much harder and too difficult to be the assumed default. However, I think a meaningful fraction of players can look at those descriptions I provided -- classic versus challenging/more cinematic -- and decide for themselves that's a challenge they want to take on, or don't. The blandness of early blue-side content is a barrier to retention, and I'm sure it's one the HC team is aware of -- this slight wording change would help mitigate that somewhat until a more complete improvement can be implemented someday. As it stands right now, someone who tries the recommended start and goes "this is boring" has little incentive to go "wait, what if I like this other thing". If we actually lay out a brief description of the pro/con of each, however, they might find something they like instead. I am not advocating for walls of text -- I am advocating for an equally long (one-sentence) description to replace the proposed that tells people what they are getting into.

As I already mentioned, I do not agree with this evaluation. Going Rogue was used as a launching point for the game's second expansion and it explains itself far better than primal earth does over the same level range. The Phalanx and their mirrors are pastiches of common concepts. The general cultural concepts serve well enough to explain the important things with the better presentation of Praetoria. Statesman, Manticore, Positron, etc. are not particularly novel variations on their clear and publicly well-known inspirations, while other characters like Calvin Scott, Marauder, and Marchand are sold effectively even if you have no idea about their original versions. One sentence apiece that briefly sums up the differing advantages of the two starting zones rather than calling one recommended and the other not is a much more accurate representation. It's not ideal in that you do want to present players with a unified starting experience and the starting experience possibly offers too many decisions to players already, but you already have three options in Primal Earth and the best of them (Breakout) suffers from the villain disadvantage to begin with. I think being upfront about what Praetoria is good about is more likely to meaningfully retain players.

I think flat-out discouraging players from going to Praetoria is the wrong idea. Praetoria is well-designed for new players in that it is significantly more comprehensible and engaging than the rest of the game at comparable levels. Lest we forget, it was actually a launch area for what I would say was live CoH's best period of the game. I brought several new people in with me to Praetoria. As noted earlier in this topic, it has the best existing tutorial. It has modern-adjacent game design sense. The mish areas are not nearly as long on average, the win conditions are varied. You can play the goodest of good guys or pretty bad guys with sympathetic perspectives It has beautiful visual variety across its aboveground zones, and the underground zones are still much more appealing than their counterparts in Paragon and the Isles. Moral choices are a perennially popular feature. The story isn't CoH at its best but it's CoH at one of its better ends, and it *is* CoH at its best in presentation of that story. A modern gamer is more likely to understand what is happening in Praetoria than to understand what's happening in Primal, which significantly outweighs the presence of easter eggs. I ignored most of CoH lore before Praetoria myself and only started caring about Primal's plot outside of the Rikti after wanting to know more about the Praetorians I met. It's easy to traverse and rewards a variety of travel powers. Concealment, Leaping, Flying, and Speed are all very reasonable, which is highly relevant when you can get all these powers from a very low level. What is the usual reason cited for why Praetoria is bad for new players? It's that Praetoria is hard. You need to understand a lot of concepts for both the general genre and the specific, like target prioritization, using the environment, etc. Ambushes are either bugged or poorly thought out (I don't know which) with no spacing, turning into tower defense waves. I like it as a veteran, but that would be terrible for a new player. The game's mechanics are overly vague and poorly explained. I would also argue that Praetoria's experience bands need to be reconsidered to avoid the overleveling problem that causes people to clip a lot of arcs, though that's partially come up in the topic already so I won't rehash that. It remains a point against it. I'm not saying that these are small problems -- even if I had brought this up at the very beginning of the open beta period, it would be far too late to do anything about them in a beta cycle. But I do think that "NOT RECOMMENDED FOR NEW PLAYERS", or "RECOMMENDED FOR NEW PLAYERS" are the wrong approaches. People are generally going to expect the "recommended" experience to be the most polished and engaging one. I have met very few players under the age of 30 who speak positively of blue-side (and most people want to be heroes), and red-side is spoken of in more measured tones still. Also, origin powers being much more useful for the first 10 levels will go a long way to mitigating the lack of offensive options many ATs have for dealing with the zone early on. Therefore, I would go with language more like "THIS IS THE CLASSIC CITY OF HEROES EXPERIENCE." and "THIS IS A CHALLENGING, MORE CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE."

The Nemesis enemies in the Shadow Shard use the speech lines and emote animations for the soldiers posted there; the soldiers are silent.

One of the strongest arguments given for why Sentinels occupy a reasonable design space is that, even if a Blaster can ultimately approximate a sent at high levels, the game exists outside of high levels. It stands to reason that that works in reverse as well -- one of the strongest interest in assault sets on other ATs is that it allows for long-range attacks and meaningful melee attacks which match your theme on a character from a low level. It is correct to point out that an assault set would ultimately be entering a crowded design space, but that's not really any less true of a pure ranged set.

You probably won't get a firm answer of "why" unless the SCORE fan team that put them together before the HC dev takeover were to speak on the subject But I would guess it was probably because it would have been a huge undertaking to create a lot of new Assault sets while there were a ton of existing blast sets. ... and no, 60 foot range with no snipe very much puts them at medium range. Appreciation of distance is basically a function that moves as a square. pi r² and all that. Every other ranged combatant has a primary kill area of 6400 pi feet, Sents have one of 3600 pi feet, that's a big difference in COH's wide open spaces.

Well Allow me to be the second. It's quite comprehensive and great work. Thank you.

Types of fun I usually optimize for in MMOs: Ludonarrative harmony. How well do my actions and aesthetics line up with my character at a gameplay level. Just world fantasy. I enjoy imagining a setting where the world is markedly less unjust than our own and I can contribute to that. Rewards for smart build planning. Dynamic gameplay that encourages full utilization of the game and your abilities. Pleasing aesthetics Content engagement levels. I enjoy having both relatively brainless content you can cheese while half thinking about work and highly involved challenging content for shorter bursts. If the other five points have been met, going brain off can be a fun time kill.

Thank you very much for your contribution! I should have a review of my own going up in the next few weeks but your opinions seem dead-on or well-supported to me!

The accept text for the Exploration Tip mission tied to the Hive Mind badge says, Oppose buzz of the Hive Mind. It should instead say Oppose the buzz of the Hive Mind.

Croatoa tips, Jack's Wrath tip. Second line of the poem: Make for yourself, a circumstance most die! It should probably be Make for yourself, a circumstance most dire!

Faultline Exploration Tip mish for Escape Artist If one underestimates Arachnos and their reach, they will regret it. not high priority but the grammar here is overly vague, by using "their" and "they" consecutively to refer to two different nouns. Suggested fixes: If you underestimate Arachnos and their reach, you will regret it. or If one underestimates Arachnos (and their reach), they will regret it.

Faultline Exploration Tips, the initial page of the contact window it currently reads "They serve the purpose of both attracting donations for the costly construction project, but also spreading awareness of the area's state of affairs." Instead it should read, "They serve the purpose of not only attracting donations for the costly construction project, but also spreading awareness of the area's state of affairs." or "They serve the purpose of both attracting donations for the costly construction project, and also spreading awareness of the area's state of affairs."

I'm with you on ITF, though I think Apex and TIn Mage have the best overall task force design I've seen; short and sweet, not a lot of filler fights, you need to think a reasonable amount unless people are way overgeared (though at this point overgearing is a bit too common). Market Crash is also nicely done if a bit too easy.

Honestly, I apologize for starting up with my "yeah not a big red side fan". It was off-topic, I knew it was off-topic, I was talking just to talk but I was part of kind of an avalanche of negativity. I genuinely think having a regular planning thing is a great idea for increased interest and community-building and I wish the best to it. The only thing I think is genuinely not a good idea would be the suggestion in the middle about altering task forces but no one really ran with that. Taking pictures and all that, find a jazzy name, I'll try to make a logo as my way of apology (though I'm kinda amateurish) if someone wants?

Last post because I'm done: I'm saying Energy Blast in its present form is not fun. It is brainless, random, frustrating, underperforming, and counterintuitive. A global KB to KD switch isn't my preferred solution because it actually doesn't fix any of that except the underperformance/frustration and it removes the visceral joy of launching fools to be pitied halfway across the neighborhood. But at least it would only have three of those negative characteristics instead of five. I'm not interested in arguing about it with someone who doesn't play the set and doesn't love those sparkles, Kirby dots, and watching Fake Nemeses ragdoll as much as I do.