Area and mission access for all

[Oginth]

I have some thoughts on the unpopulated area (red-side and gold-side).

 

What if:

1. Contacts do not have level limit (*yawn*) - not the most unique suggestion

2. Loyalist is considered as Vigilante, and Resistance as Rogue in gameplay mechanic

3. TUNNEL connects to more low-level blue/red/gold area

4. All trams are connected, all water-transports are connected, all air-transported are connected

5. You can phone to report mission completion, but to take mission, you have to go meet him/her/it face-to-face (*gasp*) - so to promote people actually moving around, and you will see more people gathering around mission you are doing

6. Oro does not let you do out-levelled missions you missed (*blasphemy*) - just go talk to the Contacts, there are no level limit!

... ... ...

7. AE does not give inf/exp/drop

[ninja surprise]

16 hours ago, Oginth said:

4. All trams are connected, all water-transports are connected, all air-transported are connected

 

This would make tremendous sense.

16 hours ago, Oginth said:

6. Oro does not let you do out-levelled missions you missed (*blasphemy*) - just go talk to the Contacts, there are no level limit!

 

This is the opposite of the purpose of Ouro. It isn't just a zone to form BAF, it's where you go to time travel. You have to flashback so you become the level of the contact and get the correct-level foes.

[Zeraphia]

36 minutes ago, ninja surprise said:

It isn't just a zone to form BAF

Aww! Way to go you for telling all the juicy secrets!

[AerialAssault]

17 hours ago, Oginth said:

5. You can phone to report mission completion, but to take mission, you have to go meet him/her/it face-to-face (*gasp*) - so to promote people actually moving around, and you will see more people gathering around mission you are doing

I don't know if you've ever been to Nerva Archipelago but uh, I don't know how you could make a dead zone even deader but this would be one way.

 

17 hours ago, Oginth said:

7. AE does not give inf/exp/drop

haha you forgot to put a /sarcasm at the end of your post there haha right?

[Alchemystic]

Heroes have their contacts that live one district over on speed dial, but villains have to plan a trip to a whole other island to scheme with them in person?

 

The sheer injustice.

[FrauleinMental]

On 6/29/2020 at 9:55 PM, Oginth said:

5. You can phone to report mission completion, but to take mission, you have to go meet him/her/it face-to-face (*gasp*) - so to promote people actually moving around, and you will see more people gathering around mission you are doing

What do you hope to gain by this?  People won't stand around ("gathering") outside a mission door unless they have to, so you're inconveniencing other players on the slightly-increased chance you'll stumble upon a random team up.

 

On 6/29/2020 at 9:55 PM, Oginth said:

1. Contacts do not have level limit (*yawn*) - not the most unique suggestion

6. Oro does not let you do out-levelled missions you missed (*blasphemy*) - just go talk to the Contacts, there are no level limit!

As others have said, this was the entire point of Ouroboros.  Also, not every enemy group has mobs at every level range, so some level scaling is necessary.

 

On 6/29/2020 at 9:55 PM, Oginth said:

7. AE does not give inf/exp/drop

I don't do a lot of AE, but I still vote no.  Don't try to force people to play the way you want to play.  (Besides, even before AE there were some missions that were plenty farmable.  I'm looking at you, Council Empire.)

[Coyotedancer]

The rest? Eh... 

 

#5, though? I'd give that one not just an ordinary "no", but a full-on "Oh, HELL NO!"

Too many contacts wait too long when it comes to giving you their call-ins already. That would just make things even *worse* when they insist on sending you back and forth from the far butt-end of Nerva or Crey's Folly. <_<

[Xanatos]

City of Loading Screens

[gameboy1234]

On 6/29/2020 at 6:55 PM, Oginth said:

2. Loyalist is considered as Vigilante, and Resistance as Rogue in gameplay mechanic

3. TUNNEL connects to more low-level blue/red/gold area

4. All trams are connected, all water-transports are connected, all air-transported are connected

I've had the same idea running through my head for a while now.  I think new missions should be added to blue side to go to Praetoria or Rogues Isles and do some missions there.  New missions and new sides would have to be added, but in the meantime just letting people go there and do missions would be fine.

 

Also, I often do play a Rogue, and I pretty much hate the split Red/Blue side we have now.  There's all sorts of ways this doesn't work.  Including kicking you from TFs or other teams just because you used a base portal or Ouroboros.  That system should go away too, it encourages everyone to just congregate on one side (blue) and not bother with the others.

 

Connecting all the trams and other travel affordances is a great idea, keeps people from getting stuck (or lost, or confused) if they're sent there on a mission.  You can always get back!  And of course makes it possible to go there until contacts and missions are added.

 

[Chance Jackson]

1 hour ago, gameboy1234 said:

Also, I often do play a Rogue, and I pretty much hate the split Red/Blue side we have now.  There's all sorts of ways this doesn't work.  Including kicking you from TFs or other teams just because you used a base portal or Ouroboros. 

I thought that only happened on live

[MTeague]

On 6/30/2020 at 2:55 PM, ninja surprise said:

This would make tremendous sense.

This is the opposite of the purpose of Ouro. It isn't just a zone to form BAF, it's where you go to time travel. You have to flashback so you become the level of the contact and get the correct-level foes.

Now if you could talk to the mission contact at any level, but upon accepting the mission, you became auto-exemplared, just like you do in Ouroborus, with the same dialogue box to select additional challenge options (can't take away opportunitty to get the badges after all....), I'd be willing to think about it.  I suspect needing to GO places would still annoy many players... but I do miss the days of seeing everyone travel about the world on a regular basis.

Edited July 5, 2020 by MTeague

[gameboy1234]

55 minutes ago, Chance Jackson said:

I thought that only happened on live

I have definitely been kicked off teams as a Rogue because of both Ouroboros and base portals.  I think only on blue side TFs but I wasn't making notes or anything either.  They may have fixed it since last summer 2019 but that's what happened.

 

[Coyotedancer]

2 hours ago, Chance Jackson said:

I thought that only happened on live

Nope.

 

Ouro arcs are flaky as all hell, too. Getting tired of having the Rogue version of Kai either randomly kicked off of Hero-side teams, or just not being allowed an invitation to join them in the first place by the game, is exactly why I ended up making a second, blue-side native version of the character. It was easier than side-switching every single time I wanted to run her with her hero friends. Which was the only sure way we found to avoid the alignment issues that would result in her being kicked half-way through an arc.. <_<

 

 

Edited July 5, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[gameboy1234]

Also: we need to just a little update to the lore, that Rogues Isles was always closer to Paragon City.  They're probably both in Florida.  Or maybe the Mediterranean?  I dunno.

[MTeague]

4 hours ago, gameboy1234 said:

Also: we need to just a little update to the lore, that Rogues Isles was always closer to Paragon City.  They're probably both in Florida.  Or maybe the Mediterranean?  I dunno.

I actually kinda would like to know more about the rest of Primal Earth. 

What's going on in say....  Belize?  Or London? Or Cape Town?  Or Kiev?

 

How come all the heroes and villains have to duke it out over one city and one island chain?

Some kind of spiritual magnetic attraction that compels them to seek each other out?

Do we have to say "There can be only one!" at odd intervals?

[ImpousVileTerror]

Other locations are name-dropped here and there.  Mostly, though, I think it was a conscious decision for two core reasons:

A)  Gives players the opportunity for personal authorship of ideas related to other geographic and political elements on an international plane.

B)  There is simply no maintaining a WHOLE WORLD worth of on-going lore for a game with a development team the size of the ones at Cryptic, ncsoft NorCal (*), or Paragon Studios.

 

* Is my memory serving me correctly here?  That was the name of the studio during the interim time between Cryptic and Paragon Studios, right?

[Greycat]

There is (was?) hero activity elsewhere - it's part of Hero Corps backstory, for starters, and I'm fairly sure other groups are mentioned as well.  Even just ignoring player decisions about where they're based or from. 🙂

 

And yeah, I'd love to have just a *taste* of being elsewhere without having to go to another plane. If we can have giant towers in Praetoria to fight on, why not... the Eiffel Tower? Big Ben? We know Gadzul Oil (and the dropped Blood of the Black Stream) were active in Egypt, why don't we end up there for a few missions? Or head elsewhere in Africa to cripple the Banished Pantheon on their old battleground? There are "mystic" sites around the world, and magic plays a not insignificant role in the COH world. How about having to investigate a mesoamerican pyramid? (which... I built up and did elsewhere.) We've gone to Cimerora, why not check out the ruins?

 

Just *maps* would be useful (and nice in AE, as well.)

 

(And yes, it was NC Norcal.)

[gameboy1234]

31 minutes ago, MTeague said:

I actually kinda would like to know more about the rest of Primal Earth. 

What's going on in say....  Belize?  Or London? Or Cape Town?  Or Kiev?

 

How come all the heroes and villains have to duke it out over one city and one island chain?

I like the cohesiveness of CoH better than say Champions Online, which feels like a lot of random locations just smushed together randomly.  But yes now that we've got that cohesive locale, that home base, I wouldn't mind seeing what's going on in Paris or New York or Venice or Tokyo or other places.

[srmalloy]

7 hours ago, ImpousVileTerror said:

B)  There is simply no maintaining a WHOLE WORLD worth of on-going lore for a game with a development team the size of the ones at Cryptic, ncsoft NorCal (*), or Paragon Studios.

This was something I took advantage of when I was creating characters, starting back on live; over time, I created a number of characters with origins in the Soviet Union/Russia. I'd have to go through the various character backgrounds to collate everything, but I assembled a number of references that got re-used, like the state-run hero team Народная Армия (People's Army), various scientific research institutions cribbed from real ones, and various individual heroes and villains, so that I didn't have to create the entire background from scratch each time, and the commonality between them created a common environment that the characters came from.

[Llewellyn Blackwell]

9 hours ago, gameboy1234 said:

I like the cohesiveness of CoH better than say Champions Online, which feels like a lot of random locations just smushed together randomly.  But yes now that we've got that cohesive locale, that home base, I wouldn't mind seeing what's going on in Paris or New York or Venice or Tokyo or other places.

Its hard to say for certain but one could surmise many major cities suffered far worse fates then Paragon during the first Rikti invasion, and Paragon suffered pretty badly even with the bulk of the worlds most powerful at the ready to defend it. Hell the Midnight Squad who had been investigating the strange lights in the sky trying to discern origin and nature still got completely blindsided by the assault and had primal Earths version of the midnight Mansion wiped from the world. In fact we can from that surmise most of the worlds mystical orders suffered a very similar fate, as that first rikti invasion was globe spanning, and they basically nuked any major source of magical energy, which they had the means to easily detect and locate.

 

And ponder this, the Dawn Patrol was founded by british heroes, Hero 1 was basically this game worlds captain britan and maybe Statesmans closest peer in power, and they were here in Paragon not in London or the UK in general when the attack came. In fact considering how often I heard from the couple devs I chatted with back in the day, that primal and praetorian earth had more in common than not in a lot of ways, while our Earth isnt consumed by Hami, it likely is pretty wrecked world wide and more often than not would just need to reuse assest from Boomtown adn the Warzone for most other city locals. Even the bit of info we have on Crey's widespread control of the global corporate and economic structures, whats more likely that the Countess controls a world wide network comparable to our worlds own massive global corporate empires, or due to the rikti assault, so much was left in ruin world wide, that it created the opportunity to further expand Creys control hand in hand with the great PR their PP units gave them due to their being the reason Paragon didnt fall before the heroes could mount a proper counter offensive.

 

I tend to imagine the majority of primal earth is more akin to something like the world we see in the tv series Falling Skies, with the big df being its a world with super powered beings who have consolidated their forces to protect the remaining bulk of humanity. That is why people flock to Paragon and the Rogue Isles, because the mortals need to live in the cities of the gods to be safe from those not so benevolent powers that be on the planet.

 

One could imagine that in the wake of the rikti attack factions managed to rise up and seize power, my imagination leads me down the path of the council and 5th column being very strong forces in the old historically hard defended regions by them in WW2. So in my minds eye I see that part of the world over run with shadow cysts, war wolves, fascists warlords and a whole lot of ruins of what once was.

 

I know I know I sure paint a pretty grim picture of the world outside the shining war walls. What can I say, as I dont see a whole lot of evidence to suggest that the wider world has  done better in the post rikti invasion era than the city of heroes.

[MTeague]

1 hour ago, Bentley Berkeley said:

I know I know I sure paint a pretty grim picture of the world outside the shining war walls. What can I say, as I dont see a whole lot of evidence to suggest that the wider world has  done better in the post rikti invasion era than the city of heroes.

I don't think it can be all that bad.

 

The citizens of both Paragon and the Isles aren't dead from starvation, so crops and livestock are still grown somewhere.

InFront Steakhouse, Up N Away Burger, El Super Mexicano, and all the rest get sufficent supplies to make restaraunts possible and affordable. 

I doubt it's all supposed to be brought in by Portal Corp. 

 

There are several hero contacts that are with the FBI, CIA, FAA, the US Military, etc, so some degree of the USA still exists enough to have such agencies and national identity.

You do occasional tip missions to help rescue foreign dignitaries and ambassadors and there's concerns about international incidents, so there's some functioning governments abroad.

 

It just always struck me as odd that Nemesis and the Council and Malta and CoT are so focused on succeeding in Paragon City instead of going for vastly lower hanging fruit across the globe.

[Apparition]

23 hours ago, Chance Jackson said:

I thought that only happened on live

All of my non-gold side toons are Rogues, and I have done plenty of Task Forces and Trials, and even lead many Task Forces and Trials since April of last year and have never, ever, been booted from a team.

[ImpousVileTerror]

My personal read on that is some of them have largely succeeded.  There are probably whole countries out there which are functionally Council-run despot nations, like the Etoiles are for Arachnos.

We know that Nemesis is an emotional old windbag, so he takes personal pride in anything related to Paragon City, probably blinding him to much wiser courses of action in other nations . . . yet he also makes a point of invading alternate realities?  He's just an indecisive mollusc.

Malta doesn't need a whole country; they just need a few key figures in the governments of those countries to be plants or otherwise in Malta's pocket.

And the Circle of Thorns laid claim to the area which we now call Paragon City thousands of years prior to colonization.  They're pretty irked about all these people moving in to their land.  But not as irked as they are over their own past deals brokered with demonic forces.  They're prioritizing accordingly.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HfLSvH5L78

[Eclipse.]

53 minutes ago, Apparition said:

All of my non-gold side toons are Rogues, and I have done plenty of Task Forces and Trials, and even lead many Task Forces and Trials since April of last year and have never, ever, been booted from a team.

It happens, but I'm not sure _WHY_ it happens.

I think it only happens if  a few conditions are met:
1.) The leader is a pure hero, not a vigilante.
2.) the Task force hasn't been started yet.
3.) The person getting booted on Base load is Rogue.

But not 100% sure. I had it happen to me a couple times when doing things with a buddy, but I've never had an issue with it outside of that.

Ouro arcs are a lot more of a pain with "not trusting someone on your team", and co-op content is sometimes just a bit annoying being able to invite some people before they're in zone, and others not so much depending on team comp.

Edited July 6, 2020 by Eclipse.

[MTeague]

I was teaming with someone just yesterday who got auto-booted from a team three times just last night, 6/6/2020.

It was not a TF.  It was just a regular mission team.  World Wide Red arc, I think.  Not flashbacks. Just at-level-content.

I was not team leader, so I can't give a yay/nay on Eclipse's speculations about team leader being pure hero vs not.

 

It did seem to happen right when someone ported to Ouro or to Base though, each of the 3 times.