Remember when...

[srmalloy]

22 hours ago, Oubliette_Red said:

What they should have done when they added AE was make it rewardless, other than relevant AE badges and author-created souvenirs. Our RP group used it quite a lot to advance our character's own stories. Playing user-created content should have been it's own reward.

But no going back now.

 

If it's completely immersive, I can understand your getting XP, because you're learning how to use your powers better. Tickets, those are AE's reward mechanism. Salvage, recipes, enhancement, and other drops? You're in a virtual-reality environment; nothing you pick up in there exists in the real world. Inf? NWIFH; regardless of what side you're on -- blue, red, or gold -- Inf is supposed to represent your ability to use your reputation as to get people to supply you with stuff, whether it's out of respect for your actions as a hero (blue), fear of what you might do to them (red), or information about them or others to leverage their actions (gold). I don't care how many or how complex the electronic ghosts you've defeated are; crawling into your electronic navel does nothing to increase your reputation in the real world. If you show up in Paragon City, immediately crawl into the AE building, and don't come out until you're level 50, no one in the city is going to have any idea who you are; you'll have zero influence.

Edited July 18, 2020 by srmalloy

[d4verman]

I’ve only recently found Homecoming but I remember the old days….oh, those days back in 2005 or so…I remember

• Seeing so many variations of known characters. You couldn’t go far without seeing a dozen Wolverines, Hulks, Superman, Batman….I once saw Ororo-Storm. I admit that it annoyed me. But it was always funny when they got tined into “blank” slates by admins.
• Finding out for the first time that you can’t Solo the sea monster thing.
• Having to do a mission at level (20?) to get a cape.
• Hating Perez Park. I got lost in the woods there so many times and always at a level where surviving the Circle of Thorns wasn’t easy.
• When some high level characters would sometimes get a bunch of enemies to chase them into a crowd of lower level characters. Hey, that’s how I met the Freakshow for the first time.

[Doomguide2005]

I was about level 5 or 6 in KR, early I4 at Blue Steel when I saw someone being chased by several military geared foes ... Hmm, oh wow! level 52 Malta Gunslinger!  Years later deja vu as one of numerous alts watched a Defender battling in a desperate retreat from a horde of Malta, again from Blue Steel.

 

To be honest I miss the lack of high level mobs engaged in some ambush across low level zones.  And occasionally logging off and back on with a high level to help clean up a neglected ambush.

[Delta]

I remember

* Some of the Martial Arts attacks seemed like it would take forever to animate. (I remember in particular Storm Kick's animation taking a long time to finish)

* The old Positron Task Force and how long it took if your team wasn't built to handle it. 

* The ten minute mission from Tina Macintyre pre-Going Rogue

[Hardship]

6 hours ago, Delta said:

* The old Positron Task Force and how long it took if your team wasn't built to handle it. 

Reminds me of an experience that I had, I was on a PUG doing old Posi. We had several team wipes in a sewer mission with Vahz in Steel. I wasn't the team leader, but after many wipes, I kind of "lectured" everyone about slowing down, pulling only as many Vahz as we could handle and not getting in over our heads. I proceed to explain that we couldn't just run in to every group and start fighting we had to go slower if we wanted to finish. So, after a long 5 minute lecture, I go to type "Ready?" and forgot to hit "Enter" first and the "R" in ready turned on auto-run. So I RAN, Leeroy Jenkins style, in the huge group of Vahz. Everyone is in chat typing, "What's with Hardship?", "How come Hardship did that?", etc...  By the time I got autorun turned off I had aggroed 4 or 5 groups of Vahz. I didn't even try to return the group, I just took my death by typo and started making my way back from the hospital -- with no travel power yet.

 

Surprising though, we did finish the TF and I ended up with a couple of long time server friends out of that session.

[cranebump]

35 minutes ago, Hardship said:

Reminds me of an experience that I had, I was on a PUG doing old Posi. We had several team wipes in a sewer mission with Vahz in Steel. I wasn't the team leader, but after many wipes, I kind of "lectured" everyone about slowing down, pulling only as many Vahz as we could handle and not getting in over our heads. I proceed to explain that we couldn't just run in to every group and start fighting we had to go slower if we wanted to finish. So, after a long 5 minute lecture, I go to type "Ready?" and forgot to hit "Enter" first and the "R" in ready turned on auto-run. So I RAN, Leeroy Jenkins style, in the huge group of Vahz. Everyone is in chat typing, "What's with Hardship?", "How come Hardship did that?", etc...  By the time I got autorun turned off I had aggroed 4 or 5 groups of Vahz. I didn't even try to return the group, I just took my death by typo and started making my way back from the hospital -- with no travel power yet.

 

Surprising though, we did finish the TF and I ended up with a couple of long time server friends out of that session.

D'oh!

[Doomguide2005]

10 hours ago, Hardship said:

Reminds me of an experience that I had, I was on a PUG doing old Posi. We had several team wipes in a sewer mission with Vahz in Steel. I wasn't the team leader, but after many wipes, I kind of "lectured" everyone about slowing down, pulling only as many Vahz as we could handle and not getting in over our heads. I proceed to explain that we couldn't just run in to every group and start fighting we had to go slower if we wanted to finish. So, after a long 5 minute lecture, I go to type "Ready?" and forgot to hit "Enter" first and the "R" in ready turned on auto-run. So I RAN, Leeroy Jenkins style, in the huge group of Vahz. Everyone is in chat typing, "What's with Hardship?", "How come Hardship did that?", etc...  By the time I got autorun turned off I had aggroed 4 or 5 groups of Vahz. I didn't even try to return the group, I just took my death by typo and started making my way back from the hospital -- with no travel power yet.

 

Surprising though, we did finish the TF and I ended up with a couple of long time server friends out of that session.

Oh my!  I remapped my R key in part because of autorun.  Being clever I put it far across the keyboard to 'p'.   Not long afterwards while fighting Trolls in a Hollows mission I typed, "Maybe we should pull ... "  These days it's mapped to "]". 

[Nemu]

I member when mobs stacked and you could one shot them, and yourself, with energy transfer.

 

I member when you joined a low level TF beyond your level range you prayed to god you don't disconnect (ahem old skool posi).

 

I member when fire/dev blasters were a thing and smoke grenade was OP, and there was a guide that told you to blast mobs on the street and then leave them because there will be street sweeping teams that will clean up the mess you made and you'd still get xp.

 

I member when I learned jousting from pvpers. That completely changed the way I played this game.

 

I member the nictus crystals that used to spawn in missions when a Kheldian was on the team. They were hard by yester-year's standards but a pushover now with IOs. Bring those back please!

[MTeague]

12 hours ago, Hardship said:

Reminds me of an experience that I had, I was on a PUG doing old Posi. We had several team wipes in a sewer mission with Vahz in Steel. I wasn't the team leader, but after many wipes, I kind of "lectured" everyone about slowing down, pulling only as many Vahz as we could handle and not getting in over our heads. I proceed to explain that we couldn't just run in to every group and start fighting we had to go slower if we wanted to finish. So, after a long 5 minute lecture, I go to type "Ready?" and forgot to hit "Enter" first and the "R" in ready turned on auto-run. So I RAN, Leeroy Jenkins style, in the huge group of Vahz. Everyone is in chat typing, "What's with Hardship?", "How come Hardship did that?", etc...  By the time I got autorun turned off I had aggroed 4 or 5 groups of Vahz. I didn't even try to return the group, I just took my death by typo and started making my way back from the hospital -- with no travel power yet.

 

Surprising though, we did finish the TF and I ended up with a couple of long time server friends out of that session.

I would have tried to be all "I meant to do that." and said "SEE??  That's how fast we die if we pull too much at once!"

[Techwright]

On 7/18/2020 at 2:11 PM, d4verman said:

I’ve only recently found Homecoming but I remember the old days….oh, those days back in 2005 or so…I remember

• Hating Perez Park. I got lost in the woods there so many times and always at a level where surviving the Circle of Thorns wasn’t easy.

That, Croatoa, and Eden.  I can't tell you how many times I'd wished day jobs included "lumberjack" and would come with a temp power of chainsaw.  

 

Hmm, come to think of it, that'd work pretty good on the Vahz and Banished Pantheon, too.

On 7/19/2020 at 9:12 PM, Nemu said:

I member the nictus crystals that used to spawn in missions when a Kheldian was on the team. They were hard by yester-year's standards but a pushover now with IOs. Bring those back please!

One can always run the Imperious Task Force if one has the urge for nictus crystals.  (But yes, I liked those as surprises as well.)

 

___

Remembering when there were few, if any, limitations on Tsoo sorcerers, and your team would stumble into a nest of them in a filled, large room.    I remember early on, it took a mildly experienced team 3 hours to clear a large room there were so many sorcs healing each other.

[MoonSheep]

On 7/14/2020 at 4:21 PM, Apparition said:

Dinging level 47 and being nearly immediately inundated with tells along the lines of, “Hey, would you mind going to PI and bridge for us?”

I think back in the day lvl 42 was the ultimate SK for a lvl 53 farming map!

[UltraAlt]

On 7/14/2020 at 11:27 AM, Apparition said:

AE was the worst thing that Paragon Studios added to the game.  A lot of people warned them during the Issue 14 beta of exactly what would happen if it went live.  They didn’t listen.

I know.

I was one of them.

 

It could have been one of the best things.

Easiest fix. No XP gain. No Influence gain.

Then only the people that wanted to enjoy creating stories and playing stories would have had a use for it.

 

Isn't that really what it was made for?

The DEV post that I posted in my original post indicates to me that the answer is "yes".

 

Alternate leveling path? Possibly.

Definitely not created to power level past all content or generate huge influence rewards.

 

... but this is probably a discussion for another thread at this point.

 

So do  you "remember when ...", it was just before the CoV beta server was shut down?

[UltraAlt]

On 7/14/2020 at 5:48 PM, Mister Mass said:

My recollection was that a very vocal group of people on Test insisted that, despite being a wonderful (& almost unprecedented in MMOs) tool to allow for player-created content, almost nobody would use the AE unless the rewards were commensurate with the rest of the game.  The devs, after their hard work in creating this amazing new thing, understandably bowed to this pressure, despite warnings about how the AE would be used, in order to introduce the playerbase to their new baby, not wanting it to be orphaned at birth.

I can almost guarantee that those players (insisting it needed to have rewards) were all players that had already figured out how to exploit and an build missions already to do just that ... and, at least some of them, were gold farmers knowing full well how much these exploits would give them rewards that they could turn into real world money.

-

Plenty of players would have used it without the xp and influence rewards. It would not have been orphaned, and the game would have been better off for it.

 

But I "remember when" I found this on the City of Heroes forums ... (it isn't mine, but I saved it because...well, it should be obvious that it how so many felt)

 

It was about a year after I had stopped subscribing because of all the AE PL/farming/abuse that was going on had ruined my gaming experience.

I still would log into the forum from time to time to see how the game was going and hoped that there would be changes that would bring me back to the game.

 

I'll try to be quiet about my feelings on the issue. This picture kind of sums it up for me even if it wasn't created for that reason.

 

I've very glad that Homecoming is here and I am able to enjoy the game the way that I enjoyed it before I stopped subscribing.

Thank you, Homecoming team.

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by UltraAlt

[DoctorDitko]

On 7/19/2020 at 9:12 PM, Nemu said:

I member the nictus crystals that used to spawn in missions when a Kheldian was on the team. They were hard by yester-year's standards but a pushover now with IOs. Bring those back please!

I remember when just having a Kheldian on your team, however briefly, "tainted" the whole team until they all logged off. Those Crystals and Void hunters would keep showing up forever unless everyone logged off.

Good times!

 

[Apparition]

6 minutes ago, DoctorDitko said:

I remember when just having a Kheldian on your team, however briefly, "tainted" the whole team until they all logged off. Those Crystals and Void hunters would keep showing up forever unless everyone logged off.

Good times!

 

If by “good times” you mean that people would actually quit teams if a Kheldian joined, then yes.

[DoctorDitko]

It reminded me of old-school AD&D where one joker would secretly be psionic, and everyone had to deal with squid-faced guys in dressing gowns all night long.

(No, I'm not dating myself. That's illegal in my state.)

[Coyotedancer]

3 hours ago, Apparition said:

If by “good times” you mean that people would actually quit teams if a Kheldian joined, then yes.

 

Or they wouldn't let you join in the first place, especially with a Peacebringer... Which happened more often than anyone likes to admit these days. <_<

 

 

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by Coyotedancer

[Skyhawke]

I remember playing this on dial up.  

 

 

[Heraclea]

One thing I just thought of.  I remember when a character's first ITF was a significant milestone, because that meant that you cold finally access the Roman armor pieces.  Most of my characters couldn't really finish their costumes without them.  You had to prepare for this by running Montague Castellano (sp)'s arc, which I would typically do as soon as it opened at 10; then you had to go to Cim and get it done, which I tried to do as close to 35 as possible.

 

The Roman chest details remain mainstays of my costume designs.  But it isn't the milestone it used to be.

[Jaguaratron]

On 7/14/2020 at 9:42 AM, Heraclea said:

When Invincibility rooted you?   If you were an Invulnerability tank you took teleport?

and "teletanking" was considered an exploit as other mez protections were mutually exclusive to their defences...

[Arnabas]

On 7/15/2020 at 3:28 PM, Greycat said:

Ha.

 

Ha ha.

 

Ha ha ha.

 

There would be no farming. Oh, that's cute. As my empaths who were flooded with tells on hitting the early 40s in the early days would tell you, there would *definitely* be farming. The only thing that would change would be people complaining about "all these stupid lowbies in PI begging for battlemaiden/council/other mission farms" instead. And level-locking AE to 50+ would have killed it. My SGs used it for storytelling. Not everyone was 50, and it was used on the way up for relevant plot points.

 

 

Well, fair enough. I suppose people would still farm it, just not for XP, since they would already be level 50. 

Personally I (and several people I know) would have been perfectly happy just using it for new content as opposed to leveling up.

[Chuckers]

Devouring Earth eminators (pets) used to spawn as Lieutenants.

[Chuckers]

I remember when the tank would dumpster dive with an impossible number of mobs and I would run in, use my blaster's Nova and all would be dead. It would make me laugh every time!

[Chuckers]

I miss the Taxibots hanging out in The Hollows to help us not have to take the death train back to the entrance.

[Doomguide2005]

On 7/21/2020 at 3:08 PM, Coyotedancer said:

 

Or they wouldn't let you join in the first place, especially with a Peacebringer... Which happened more often than anyone likes to admit these days. <_<

 

 

 

The first Khelds I saw were a pair, I think, husband wife duo.  They joined our team when we were down to 3 of us after the other 5 quit off.  We'd been doing well in the Hollows, then ran into Pumicites and repeatedly kept getting aggro of the entire mob with predictable team wipes.  I have rarely seen then or since some one manage to repeatedly and reliably pull single pumicites till we cleared the mission as the one playing the Peacebringer.  

 

I can also remember dropping my much exempted Emp/Dark when a bug was causing the Cysts to spawn much higher level mobs than was supposed to occur.  These had popped up at level 24 iirc vs our Frostfire team.