Sunsette

One thing I would like to add that keeps getting overlooked in conjunction with your costume point: Players need a budget to make mistakes with. "Golly, my sniper attack takes a long time. What if I slot interrupt? ... Oh. It doesn't affect animation speed." "I SIX SLOTTED RECHARGE WHY ISN'T IT GOING ANY FASTER" "I got all this accuracy but I still keep missing against these guys" "I didn't get enough endurance" "What do you mean there's endurance modification and endurance reduction? What's the difference?" etc... etc... etc... Forgiveness to make mistakes is one of the most essential ways to facilitate people learning and experimenting.

And most people will choose to simply not play a game they have to spend extra time to learn to participate at what intuitively feels like a basic level. I experienced this a lot when I was living in Korea with friends who struggled to play the game when I was sleeping or at work due to timezones. I gave them money to help, but there is still a lot of game to learn, and many ultimately decided to stick with games they already played. Not simple games, either. "Easy to learn, hard to master" is the sweet spot for any activity to gain a healthy and active community. "My steam backlog" is a meme these days among gamers -- we have more games than we could ever hope to play. Why play the ones that are not immediately rewarding in some sense?

That is a bad comparison. Most MMOs I have played have genericized equipment or created variable rewards or both such that most pieces of gear are to some degree usable by every class, with very specialized gear only showing up in the max levels, comparable to IOs. As it is, enhancements even if they're all of your origin are very likely to be something you don't need at all unless they are accuracy, endurance, damage, or recharge. This has been explained several times throughout this thread. You do not have to find the argument convincing. The basic answers are: The AH is daunting to use. This is generally true, but CoH has an especially confusing one. The enhancement system is daunting to use. What powers do is rarely explained in a clear and concise way. Newbies even in games that are much more clearly explained will often avoid the auction house unless guided to it by friends or mentoring players; this game is much more hostile as a game to a newbie, and presents immense cognitive load. If you don't find these answers convincing, that's fine. But that's why. The people who are going to understand how to make use of that are not the people we're hoping to facilitate. Complexity is a negative here. I had similar thoughts -- at the end of the day, that'd be a hell of a revamp that I think is asking too much to occur, but would have been a better system to come in from the get-go. I won't hold my breath anymore than you. It would be nice but this risks exploitation with how quickly some ouro arcs can be run. Since rewards can be set per-arc, it is more likely for future arcs to be made more rewarding and less focused on defeat XP than for old arcs to be revamped, I think.

I have not noticed any changes to my drop rates, and I defeated a fair amount in the last day. Keep an eye out just in case, but for the moment, it seems like "Onyxia deep breathes more" territory.

Yeah I was def. sympathetic to them. I love tech and struggle to make characters of other aesthetics and origins. Just wish I enjoyed how Beam Rifle played on blaster, it feels weird with Sent range.

No one here is pushing for the price to come down particularly hard vs acknowledgement of the problem and attempts at a solution. We have commented positively on the drop table solution several times. At this point, unless someone comes in with a new suggestion of note or a significant contribution of math and probabilities,1 the thread seems to have run its course. 1 Not me. I'm a humanities nerd. It's footnotes and charts here.

The endgame isn't *as* boring as much of the leveling content. The most fun I have with any character is typically the first month after 50 where I'm figuring out how to maximize both my playstyle and my build to their most idiosyncratic. Once I've solved the problems presented, it's very likely I will stop playing that character unless I am really, really taken with how it plays in general and those characters get to stay and become part of my permanent roster. There's also psychology around success conditions that only apply for some people to games that people actually play. We are incredibly convoluted thinking machines, and there are a lot of reasons why we do anything we do.

Some people play to be contrary, some people really like the animation options, some people really enjoy the challenge. None of those reasons would ever be sufficient to get me to roll a petless mastermind, but I'll happily team with a petless MM in any content in which carrying a teammate is reasonable (the vast majority of the game)

Can we cut out this sidebar? The last several posts on the intent discussion are basically the same points reiterated but more angrily, and it seems unlikely that a few more clarifying restatements are going to suddenly shift the conversation positively. I frankly don't care what old-dev intent was in the face of an obvious problem twenty years later anyway. Feel free to vent to me in private (or scream at me in PM, I guess, if I'm the other side of the argument here) but let's take it out of the thread.

I think that would be a great idea which would help reinforce a feeling of value from mission arcs over grinding without significantly increasing the profitability of speed running short arcs in Ouro. I think City overvalues grinding in general but it's not an easy thing to fix in a good way.

I do think there's something to the idea that it feels more rewarding when straight XP is received, though I got the impression from the dev commentary that it was not reasonably feasible for whatever reason to have the XP reward scale even though Patrol XP does. I might be inferring erroneously. (Inference drawn from below quote; if it was easy to scale, I don't see why that would be a problem.)

I do think the calls for improving drop tables are reasonable. I'm not sure it would be sufficient, but I think it'd be a strong step forward that can be re-examined. I'm not married to the particular idea of a price reduction as the solution to the problem -- but I think it's pretty well-established throughout this thread, if fragmented and in multiple places, that there is a problem. Original developer intent seems pretty irrelevant 20 years later with an adjusted XP table. I don't care to play originalism even in law, let alone in a gameplay experience.

It triggers automatically on receiving your first Merit Reward. But it strikes me very much as one of those things that's necessary but not sufficient; lessons learned without context are quickly forgotten, and as Lockely explained very well, there are many questions about how Merit Rewards work.

Out of curiosity, were you or any of your friends either Rog or Vig? I've noticed missions that are mirrored on both sides have been having a lot of complaints like this in the last few weeks and most times that I inquire, it happens to a Rog or Vig.

This is absolutely correct, but I crack up at how incomprehensible a system this is. "Here's two different kinds of conditional level increases!" I'm half convinced the incarnate system is the result of a prayer to a mad but mostly benevolent elder god

I agree with this, it's unhealthy for the game. I think Dark Astoria did a good job tightening the band of expectations in power without making people feel weaker, and I'm impressed how deftly that needle was threaded. I usually build my L50 characters to be able to handle +4×8 in a reasonable timeframe solo because I enjoy building to that degree and it helps me deal with other kinds of content when crap hits the fan... it's unlikely I'll keep a character that can't build to that performance while maintaining concept and feeling fun to me, so I delete or retire a lot of characters. But even so I rarely actually play at that level solo. It's immersion breaking, it's monotonous, and money and exp are easy enough for me to get. Though I understand the human impulse here. Keeping up with Joneses is a reaction we would all do well to shed ourselves of but it's one easier said than done for many of us. I don't think there's an easy fix and mostly lament the decisions of the live devs in creating such wild differences in performance solo that span a 40 level [(–1 to +4)×(1 to 8)] difference. You can't remove those options now and you can't possibly buff every powerset and AT to match that functionality.

I've run into and could communicate with a few Korean players on Everlasting. The game's support of Hangeul is... interesting, it doesn't copy or paste correctly and my keyboard went a little wild when I tried to switch my input language to Korean mid-game but it prints just fine. I ended up having to write in Hangeul outside of the game and paste into the client to communicate with them.

And just to pre-empt: No one's asking to remove the things about City of Heroes that make it City of Heroes. It wouldn't be feasible, it wouldn't be smart. This game's charm derives heavily from a lot of its quirks compared to the rest of the market. But I do not think "cannot afford the standard equipment unless you learn several secondary systems well enough to get a windfall or someone sends you money" is one of those driving quirks.

yes, there are already rainbow trails. rainbow hair would be nice. doubtful it's possible, but nice.

FTR, invention origin enhancements are across the board FAR cheaper than they were in live. The attuned and salvage market changes have only been positive in the overwhelming majority of ways. But I still fail to see what meaningful negatives would occur from a significant cost reduction in SOs, while the benefits are apparent.

The alternate animations are the ones called Bright Aim Charge and Dark Aim Charge, iirc, available on standard blast sets. Can be previewed with a new character. I would post a photo but multitask atm.

This might be a good time to point out that the MMO genre suddenly stalled out and stopped growing very suddenly and instead its userbase began graying dramatically, with the most popular holdouts being the games that have done quite a lot on a continuing basis to facilitate new player entry. Or... they just stop playing.

You are not alone; this matches the reality of a lot of players I've met in this game who don't frequent the forums or talk in general/endgame chats regularly. Except that most of them end up quitting if they aren't helped by someone the way you help your friends well before the four year point. I cannot stress these enough: a lot of players don't like interacting with auction houses, finding the auction house is hard as a low-info player, and CoH's consignment house is extra confusing, the inventory system is confusing, the salvage system is confusing. Using the price of SOs as a way to onramp new people onto the consignment house is remarkably backwards, imo. And we haven't even gotten into how confusing and poorly explained enhancements are.

That's unfortunate. Sorry you had to deal with it. I've mostly dealt with it in non-badge runs where someone wants to get a little spicy, and that's not how I roll but it's not too difficult to deal with either.

I'm glad it's not just me that feels this way. I didn't test out these changes on the beta server because I liked the sound of them and welcomed the idea of shaking up stale groups, but the execution has felt somewhat misaimed. Though as always, I acknowledge this is a tricky thing to execute.