Focused Feedback: Travel Updates: Base Teleportation, Long Range Teleporter Accolade, Special TP Powers

[johnnysc]

18 hours ago, Jimmy said:

All base beacons now drop you near the base portal in that zone instead of at a random location on the map

These random locations were sometimes useful.  The Brickstown drop off near the entrance of Crey's Folly is useful during the Manticore task force for the hunt 40 crey mission, as it has lower level crey mobs. The new portal/drop location drops you off in the middle of the zone around level 35 and higher Crey.  

 

There are other mission arcs that make the original location useful. 

 

I don't suppose its possible to have multiple drop locations/beacons per zone?

 

Seems like a lot of work went into this that might have been better spent revamping the mission spawns of the legacy task forces.  

 

 

 

[Faultline]

3 hours ago, CrudeVileTerror said:

Buggy issue found with the Supergroup Portal:

 

While the slash command does work, it seems that one can't pull up the usual menu to select where you want to go unless you're part of a Super Group.

Perhaps this is something which could be addressed regardless of any of the more opinionated suggestions?

Where did you get that message? It's supposed to only show up if you try to use it in a Tutorial map.

[Vanden]

51 minutes ago, ThothMerkaba said:

Last straw for me and I'm off to expand into the other CoX servers.

Alright, but you know those other servers don’t have the base passcodes at all, right?

[Eldrath]

Sorry, but this change to pulling back "enterbasefrompasscode" is just wrong headed. The openness of this system as it exists now makes roleplay easy and encourages folks to explore the myriad plots that other players have built to share with the community. Putting an arbitrary gate on it does NOTHING but restrict that. The whole reason I am here is to roleplay. The game play has never been the draw. The community and the environment is. There are no gameplay gains to be had from making us grind, borrow, or purchase a limited version of the functionality back. If the use of this command is damaging the fabric of the CoX universe, I don't see it. Just leave it alone, it is not broken.

 

-B

[Player2]

4 hours ago, Recovery8 said:

I don't really know if I can add more to the conversation than has been said but these changes feel really really bad for those of us that have a lot of alts. Having to get the accolad on multiple characters is going to be a massive pain and I can understand *why* they don't want us to have the dev command but it's been there for almost two years and has made it incredibly enjoyable to run some of those TFs that require so much zoning that after testing the changes with some friends on Manticore they feel very very rough, adding on travel time that is going to make folks less willing to run these already kind of sparingly run TFs. Not a fan and hope these changes don't make it to live, this feels like a massive misstep. 

No one will have to get the accolade on any of their characters.  IF you want to get it, you will get the benefit of the Long Range teleport power without having to take two other powers in the Teleport pool first.  And the limitation on this is that you can use the long range teleport accolade to only teleport into zones where you've collected the exploration badges.  Some people have been talking about it like they have go through every zone and acquire every exploration accolade and it's a huge inconvenience... and it makes me wonder if they even had 3 powers of the Teleport pool devoted to their build on every one of their characters.  I've got a few hundred alts, with a good portion of them being level 25 or higher, and the amount of teleporters among them has been pretty limited.  I also know everyone's experience and perceptions are different, though, so maybe the teleport pool really is that important to everyone and I've just been overlooking it.  But for myself and all the people who play similar to how I do, the long range teleport change will essentially be a free power to use now on most of our characters, and those that have teleport for some of the other powers in pool will still have one slot freed up that they can devote to something else.

 

As for the enterbasefrompasscode command... I don't think that the devs don't want us to have the command.  They just want to limit it somewhat so that it can't be used as an escape hatch.  The command will still be available, but you now have to use it within a certain distance from a base portal, whether it be a static one in the zone or a temp one that you put down with one of the many powers described in the teleport changes.

[Jacktar]

So from my purely personal viewpoint, “travel” is not and should never be “content”.

However we know that when this particular game was originally released that “content” was a bit thin on the ground and so total gameplay time to finish was shorter that seemed ideal.

So the solution that the then dev’s used was to use “travel” as a sort of quasi “content”.

They built the mission arcs with far flung contacts and thus introduced us to the zone ping pong system.

So from one remote corner of say Grandville we get sent to another farthest away corner of Nerva. (sound familiar?)

Oh and when you run most of those arcs solo through oro you never get given a cell phone to call home.

All that travel time just to have the contact say thank you and report back to the other guy in Grandville.

Job done!

Well that was all fine and dandy when we and the game was shiny new and exciting.

Now after how many years it is just old and annoying.

I play most of the time solo and have my own base on each server with all the beacons in place.
I have a macro for each base on all my alts so that as and when I swap servers I hit the game running travel wise.

So I use my base passcode for my exclusive use and get on with playing the game not using the game.

I don’t want to use it to get out of combat I want to use it to get to combat.

It is the best transport system ingame which is exactly why the dev’s had it in the first place

The benifits of now finally having it for my personal use is a huge QOL change from live.

Exploits, I have no idea, just make it unavailable when in combat and leave it at that.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

 

[srmalloy]

13 hours ago, Blackfeather said:

Funnily enough, I don't see the LRT Accolade as the most effective means of transportation given all the other new powers provided in these patches

This. One of the things that made using /enterbasefrompasscode to jump to your base to transit to another zone (in addition to not having to find the tram or base portal in that zone, which the new base portal powers address) was that if you set up your base right, you had a trainer and vendor right there so you could dump excess inventory and train up on your way to the other zone. Teleporting straight to the zone gets you there faster, but doesn't give you the opportunity to take care of housekeeping functions on the way.

[srmalloy]

13 hours ago, Crowe said:

New Accolade: Long Range Teleporter
- Good move. This power sucked. I don't know how many people are going to care enough to get an exploration accolade but good luck to them.

It's just a recordkeeping thing, but all the way back to live when we got access to the Reveal power, I would wait to use Reveal on a zone map until I'd collected all the badges and plaques in the zone. That way, I had a visual indicator when I entered a zone whether or not I'd collected all of them, so I wouldn't spend time rerunning the zone loops (and it's funny how many of them I remembered without having to refer to the maps).

[Recovery8]

The actual changes to teleport pool however have been nice to say such. I just have to agree with what someone else said earlier. Travel time is not content, and this is dev time that could have been spent elsewhere on what feels like a non-issue. 

[unblocked]

Inventing a giant mess of fiddly crap to replace one simple macro was really the best use of your time and effort, nonprofiting volunteer dev team? Y'all must be engineers.

 

Just disable it in combat/inside missions/whatever. Don't remove one of the best feature of the game just because you wasted too much of your time and effort on an unwanted and unneeded replacement. Don't fall prey to sunk cost fallacy. More importantly, do NOT feed us to your sunk cost fallacy.

[iTest]

4 hours ago, Vanden said:

Alright, but you know those other servers don’t have the base passcodes at all, right?

This is false information. Quite a number of the other private CoH servers do have the "enterbasefrompasscode" commandline active.

Don't believe it? Check out my public SG bases on Unity and Thunderspy:
 

Unity: /enterbasefrompasscode TEST-150
Thunderspy: /enterbasefrompasscode OLDSCHOOL-257

Thunderspy, for instance, had a major revamp of the entire game code a couple of months ago, and reverted the SG base system back to Issue 11 (eleven!!). The SG bases thusly look outdated over there. Yet, Thunderspy used common sense, and kept the "enterbasefrompasscode" commandline.

[Blackbird71]

3 minutes ago, unblocked said:

Inventing a giant mess of fiddly crap to replace one simple macro was really the best use of your time and effort, nonprofiting volunteer dev team? Y'all must be engineers.

 

Just disable it in combat/inside missions/whatever. Don't remove one of the best feature of the game just because you wasted too much of your time and effort on an unwanted and unneeded replacement. Don't fall prey to sunk cost fallacy. More importantly, do NOT feed us to your sunk cost fallacy.

Speaking as an engineer, I simultaneously take offense at this comment and agree with the assessment.

Seriously, this is a whole lot of "fiddly" to replace one simple command.  You don't like players having the command, or the way that it works?  Fine.  But there has to be a more elegant solution to this problem than this colossal mess of powers.

[krj12]

Please dont scrap the enterbasefrompasscode  command.   Easy movement from zone to zone is a great thing, and I'd hate to lose it.

 

[srmalloy]

11 hours ago, Moonlighter said:

This whole process with its overlapping cooldowns and the requirement of an additional bar of icons, is a terrible experience for me. So everytime someone says "yes but that area can be accessed this way" and yes but I use this side corner of the game for crafting" and "yes but you just have to pay 1 million influence on every alt to solve that problem lol poor noob influence is easy" it just makes the game worse.

I have to agree; this seems like a baroque and rococo way to address the problem. So enterbasefrompasscode was supposed to be a GM-only command, but it got out and people are using it to speed their travel. Okay, but it's not in and of itself game-breaking. People are using enterbasefrompasscode to skip out on defeat in PvP and 'Master of' runs. This is a problem, because it does break the way the game is supposed to work. Making a change to the use of enterbasefrompasscode so that it is disabled if your character is in combat addresses that; problem solved. But 'you can still use enterbasefrompasscode, but only when you're close enough to a base portal that going to it and clicking on it is just as easy' removes the existing 'usable from anywhere' functionality, so that required creating a P2W power and altering the day job reward to give you a power to drop a temporary base portal anywhere, which you could then use with the code -- but again, you have to be close enough you might as well click on the portal. Yes, a simple, smooth, and elegant solution.

10 hours ago, Vanden said:

The command lets you "bookmark" bases by making macros and binds, and lets you enter SG bases you're not part of or coalitioned with.

You can do that now; the changes just make it more complicated to use, since you either have to be near one of the fixed base portals or use one of the portal-drop powers beforehand.

8 hours ago, Heraclea said:

Cimerora is accessible from level 1 as a result of this?

Nope; that method doesn't work. You can get access to the Midnighter Club at level 1 by going to Night Ward and getting the badge, but you come up hard against the "You must be level 35 to use this crystal" block at the Pillar of Ice and Fire in the back of the Midnighter Club when you try to go to Cimerora. So we're going to see more begging for Ouro portals in AP, and with the new 90-second duration, they'll need to be refreshed more than 3x as often to keep one up for use.

[DoctorDitko]

After minimal testing, it seems the Assemble The Team P2W power still has a 30 minute cooldown. Is this intentional?

If it can't be 10 like the others, could you settle for 15?

[srmalloy]

7 hours ago, Avilister said:

Talos is a really great transport hub now. The base teleporter drops you down literally right behind Luminary, which of course is right next to the tram and a TUNNEL portal. The Oro arrival location is only slightly further away on top of The Hill, of course. Pretty easy access to most locations right there.

And it's got a merit vending machine just across the street east of the tram. Where it loses out, though, is that it doesn't have a vendor in the area. I've picked up the habit of exiting my base to Kings Row, because I can go right up to the corner of the tram platform to the vendor there and open her window, the auction house window, and go through my accumulated recipes to see which ones have decent prices on the AH, dumping the ones no one wants on the vendor for the better price (or keeping the ones that have a really good price to craft and get an even better price), putting salvage on the AH, and then the tram's right there to go to another zone.

 

In fact, this is a good example of the functionality of being able to use the /enterbasefrompasscode command at will -- when I find I've got recipes that would pay better crafted, I can jump to my base, make sure I've got any rare salvage the recipe needs, jump back to KR to use the auction house to buy any salvage I'm missing to craft it, back to my base to craft it, then back to KR to put it up on the AH. With the base portal up on top of the police station, it's inconveniently far away to have to use that, and the base teleporter has way too long a cooldown. With the announced move of the KR base portal, it would depend on where it was moved to -- in the middle of the plaza in front of the tram makes it convenient for this, but just moving it down into the plaza in front of the police station leaves it a distance away, forcing the use of one of the base portal powers and being stuck with their cooldowns.

[Heraclea]

48 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

Nope; that method doesn't work. You can get access to the Midnighter Club at level 1 by going to Night Ward and getting the badge, but you come up hard against the "You must be level 35 to use this crystal" block at the Pillar of Ice and Fire in the back of the Midnighter Club when you try to go to Cimerora. So we're going to see more begging for Ouro portals in AP, and with the new 90-second duration, they'll need to be refreshed more than 3x as often to keep one up for use.

AFAIK it's always been possible to get the Midnighter badge at level 1 by a trip to Night Ward, via Ouro or the AP Tunnel swirly, or IIRC Echo Galaxy.  

 

Which raises another issue, actually.  A trip to Echo: Galaxy City was and AFAIK still is needed to get the reading badge for the Atlas Medallion, and there were many exploration badges that are accessible nowhere else.  This makes Echo: Galaxy even more inconvenient to access, which seems another pointless nuisance.   

 

____________

 

EDIT: This may be a bug.  On my test base, Mercy Island and the other redside zones are showing up as available to heroes.  Tried to go there on a hero; got kicked out as expected.  When I was, I was kicked into Atlas Park, but nowhere near the base portal.  Rather, I was sent to a place a few yards from the current AP portal destination, but at the bottom of the hill rather than the top. 

 

Edited October 25, 2020 by Heraclea
found what may be a new bug

[srmalloy]

1 minute ago, Heraclea said:

AFAIK it's always been possible to get the Midnighter badge at level 1 by a trip to Night Ward, via Ouro or the AP Tunnel swirly, or IIRC Echo Galaxy.  

 

Which raises another issue, actually.  A trip to Echo: Galaxy City was and AFAIK still is needed to get the reading badge for the Atlas Medallion, and there were many exploration badges that are accessible nowhere else.  This makes Echo: Galaxy even more inconvenient to access, which seems another pointless nuisance.   

The issue wasn't getting the Midnighter badge; it was getting the Midnighter badge so you could enter the Midnighter Club, travel to Cimerora, get one of the two exploration badges, which would give you the 'exposure to time travel' that would award you the Ouroboros Portal power. The 'travel to Cimerora' part is level-locked, which means that although you would be able to get and use the Ouro portal at level 1, you have no way to do it on your own, and have to have someone drop an Ouro portal for you so you can go there and get the exploration badge there to get your own portal.

 

Your second point, though, is well-taken; one of the things I normally do with my new characters, once they get their travel power, is to make sure they have the badges in AP, then go to Echo: Galaxy City, get the badges and plaques there, then to Echo: Atlas Park for its badges (giving me a total of 15 merits for the three exploration accolades), then to Ouro for its badge and the Ouro Portal, and back to Atlas. Removing the Echo: Galaxy City beacon means joining all the new characters begging for an Ouro Portal drop before doing this, adding a layer of inconvenience for no visible benefit.

 

Similarly, removing the beacon for Echo: Dark Astoria alters the process for getting there to join a group for defeating Adamastor; you could jump to your base and then to Echo:DA from anywhere at any time. Now, you have to go to Ouro to get to Echo:DA -- the cooldown on the Ouro portal is reduced, but it's there, and the emptiness of my base is much easier to navigate than arriving in Ouroboros and finding a couple of dozen people all standing right next to the exit portal keeping me from moving until I can squeeze my way out to get around to the back where the portal to the Echo zones are.

 

And I just had a thought that I haven't tested, so I'll toss it out here: If the Ouro Portal stays around even if you've zoned out, does it persist if you log out, too? If it does, then that gives you a way to pass Ouro Portals to yourself, albeit requiring some setup work -- move your lowbie to a 'safe' location (i.e., City Hall, Icon, or the hospital in AP), log out, switch to a character with an Ouro Portal, go to where you logged out your lowbie, drop your Ouro Portal, immediately log out and switch to your lowbie, then use the Ouro portal you dropped on your alt. That would at least alleviate some of the clustering in AP for portals.

[Moiread]

21 hours ago, Xanatos said:

SUGGESTED TWEAKS TO POWERS

 

Base Transporter 

Reduce recharge from 10mins to 30s. (To match Base Teleporter).

 

Pocket D VIP Teleporter

Reduce recharge from 10mins to 30s. (To match Base Teleporter).

 

Supergroup Portal

Reduce recharge from 30mins to 90s. (To match Ouroboros).

 

Base Teleporter

Remove charge function. (Have it work just like a regular power without charges.)
 

Rapid Response Portal

Remove charge function. (Have it work just like a regular power without charges.)

Increase recharge from 30s to 90s. (To match Ouroboros)

 

The above balancing will keep everything uniform and easy to keep track of, remove the weird "limited charge" restriction, and will have the added benefit of making the P2W powers optional, and only required for those who don't have the dayjob portals unlocked.

 

I agree 100% with this. There is no reason for recharge to be so long. Cast time should be enough to prevent the abuses that the GM command was being used for. 

[Jimmy]

1 hour ago, srmalloy said:

Nope; that method doesn't work. You can get access to the Midnighter Club at level 1 by going to Night Ward and getting the badge, but you come up hard against the "You must be level 35 to use this crystal" block at the Pillar of Ice and Fire in the back of the Midnighter Club when you try to go to Cimerora.

Cimerora is now accessible at level 1.

Additionally, you can drop an Ouro portal for yourself, log out, then access it on another character as the portal now remains after you leave.

[Lines]

10 minutes ago, srmalloy said:

And I just had a thought that I haven't tested, so I'll toss it out here: If the Ouro Portal stays around even if you've zoned out, does it persist if you log out, too? If it does, then that gives you a way to pass Ouro Portals to yourself, albeit requiring some setup work -- move your lowbie to a 'safe' location (i.e., City Hall, Icon, or the hospital in AP), log out, switch to a character with an Ouro Portal, go to where you logged out your lowbie, drop your Ouro Portal, immediately log out and switch to your lowbie, then use the Ouro portal you dropped on your alt. That would at least alleviate some of the clustering in AP for portals.

 

Just tried this. It works.

[Blackbird71]

15 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

Additionally, you can drop an Ouro portal for yourself, log out, then access it on another character as the portal now remains after you leave.

That this is a considered a reasonable rationalization for anything is a concerning sign of the logic being used to justify these changes.  Whether your own or not, this still requires another character to open the portal for another to use in order to gain access.

If the goal is for everyone to have access to Ouro at level 1, than you may as well grant the portal to all characters on creation, or make it a freebie in the P2W vendor.  Not that I think that's the right way to go, but the way it's been proposed is just adding trivial yet tedious (i.e., worthless) hoops to avoid this reality.

Edited October 25, 2020 by Blackbird71

[Jimmy]

The goal isn't to give everyone access to Ouro at level 1, but the level restriction was meaningless, so we removed it.

 

You're meant to gain access to Ouro by being naturally exposed to time travel or by being initiated by another member (via a dropped portal).

 

However, if you really want to gain access to Ouro at level 1 without another player or another character, this is still possible through Cimerora.

 

 

[Replacement]

6 hours ago, Eldrath said:

Sorry, but this change to pulling back "enterbasefrompasscode" is just wrong headed. The openness of this system as it exists now makes roleplay easy and encourages folks to explore the myriad plots that other players have built to share with the community. Putting an arbitrary gate on it does NOTHING but restrict that. The whole reason I am here is to roleplay. The game play has never been the draw. The community and the environment is. There are no gameplay gains to be had from making us grind, borrow, or purchase a limited version of the functionality back. If the use of this command is damaging the fabric of the CoX universe, I don't see it. Just leave it alone, it is not broken.

 

-B

This betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the passcode changes.

 

Roleplayers can roleplay themselves as traveling through the city to a base portal.  And when they're within 45' of a portal, they will have the exact same functionality.

 

There are several gameplay and community gains to be had from this change, and no impact to the intrepid RPer who doesn't mind walking over to the portals that have been there for 16 years.

[srmalloy]

3 minutes ago, Jimmy said:

You're meant to gain access to Ouro by being naturally exposed to time travel or by being initiated by another member (via a dropped portal).

 

If you really want to gain access to Ouro at level 1 without another player or another character, this is still possible through Cimerora.

So "TUNNEL to Night Ward, get the Midnighter badge, enter the Midnighter Club, go to Cimerora, get one of its badges, get an Ouro portal" is an acceptable way to get an Ouro portal at level 1, but the Echo: Galaxy City beacon has to be removed to isolate it (along with echo:DA) as only accessible from Ouroborus to prevent low-level characters from going there and either getting the badges/plaques there or just going straight to Ouro to get an Ouro Portal. I don't really see the need to put up a barrier like that (or for why Echo:GC and Echo:DA had beacons, but Echo:Faultline and Echo:RCS didn't, but that's a separate discussion); funneling people through a single arbitrary hoop while taking away an option that had previously existed seems a little pointless.