Account VIP Status, Epic ATs, etc

[Zantorialt]

Hey guys,

 

So I only ever played CoH/CoV a bit around 2008-2010 but never really had the opportunity to play any meaningful amount of time. I've been looking around over the last couple weeks, but it seems that every server up right now has automatic VIP status, most costumes unlocked, instant epic AT etc. I'd really enjoy the opportunity to actually unlock everything the "hard way" so to speak, but I don't really see that being offered anywhere. Is that something that anyone is planning on doing in the future/has already done that I've just missed? Or am I simply SOL?

 

Thanks all,

Zant

[Yomo Kimyata]

I've not done extensive research on this, but I think the Rebirth server (i.e., not Homecoming) is the closest to "old school" CoH right now.

[Zantorialt]

3 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

I've not done extensive research on this, but I think the Rebirth server (i.e., not Homecoming) is the closest to "old school" CoH right now.

I actually checked Rebirth out as well and honestly felt like I got more stuff shoved in my face there than on Homecoming, unless I just wildly misunderstood things. It was honestly pretty surprising considering everything I read beforehand.

[TemporalVileTerror]

There's a pretty intense stance against locking content in the manner you seem to be looking for, although you're not alone in your desire @Zantorialt.  https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/12155-going-forward-can-we-have-more-things-that-mean-something/

Given the deeper understanding of marketing and things like Skinner Boxes which players have these days, and the free nature of these pirate servers, it doesn't seem likely that anything like the VIP system would ever be reintroduced.  As for costume unlocks and the like, we haven't seen an official stance on it, but current trends suggest the Devs have no plans or intentions to lock existing content.  New content . . . that's uncertain.

[ZekeStenzland]

While most things on HC start off unlocked, there are a few things that still require unlocks. The tantrum and ghoul flex emotes require completing a mini event, for example. 
 

Also, the extra costume slot, cape, and aura missions are still around to do, even if the “rewards” are already unlocked. 

[Spinal]

5 hours ago, ZekeStenzland said:

Also, the extra costume slot, cape, and aura missions are still around to do, even if the “rewards” are already unlocked. 

I never understood the reasoning for just handing out capes and auras for free. Earning your cape was an iconic part of the game, and gave a true feeling of accomplishment.

 

I can understand it becoming monotonous on every hero though, so in my opinion it should have been an account wide unlock option.

 

They also hand out way too many free respecs. By the time you hit level 50, you've already been given 5 for free. Nobody does the respec TFs anymore, and they used to be common place.

 

Finally, travel powers unlocked at level 4?? The Hollows lost 90% of it's challenge do to this change. Teams used to have work together to get across the zone to a mission door. Do people even do Frostfire anymore?

 

We needed a CoH Classic server.

[EdgeOfDreams]

52 minutes ago, Spinal said:

I never understood the reasoning for just handing out capes and auras for free. Earning your cape was an iconic part of the game, and gave a true feeling of accomplishment.

 

I can understand it becoming monotonous on every hero though, so in my opinion it should have been an account wide unlock option.

 

They also hand out way too many free respecs. By the time you hit level 50, you've already been given 5 for free. Nobody does the respec TFs anymore, and they used to be common place.

 

Finally, travel powers unlocked at level 4?? The Hollows lost 90% of it's challenge do to this change. Teams used to have work together to get across the zone to a mission door. Do people even do Frostfire anymore?

 

We needed a CoH Classic server.

IIRC travel powers at level 4 was a thing back on Live in one of the last few issues.

 

+1 for account wide unlocks for some things. I'd love to get account-wide unlocks for Accolade powers, for example, even if it took some up-front time to earn.

Edited March 2, 2021 by EdgeOfDreams

[PeregrineFalcon]

1 hour ago, Spinal said:

Do people even do Frostfire anymore?

I used to do it fairly regularly when I first started playing on Homecoming. When I got to the Frostfire mission I'd advertise it in the LFG channel. I'd have a full team within a minute.

 

Back on live my friends and I would do the Atlas Park Safeguard mission, get the jet pack, and then go to The Hollows and do the story arcs there. The Hollows hasn't been scary dangerous since then, and that started when Safeguards went live with Issue 7.

[Doomguide2005]

     While I realize it's not quite the same you could use the wiki's (both the older Paragon Wiki and the newer HCwiki) to learn how things were unlocked and then just not use them until you "unlocked" them.   Check out the thread about "Classic Heroes" for some folks running their characters as close as they can to what it would be be like to level up as if it was issue 0 in 2004.

[Greycat]

4 hours ago, Spinal said:

I never understood the reasoning for just handing out capes and auras for free. Earning your cape was an iconic part of the game, and gave a true feeling of accomplishment.

Because part of the fun of the game is the costume creator, and being able to get your look the way you want it from the get-go (since they give no in-game advantage) was a bigger plus to people than having to wait 'til 20 or 30 (and redoing every costume you wanted them on... especially with some of the bugs in the costume creator.)

 

Plus, frankly, they were probably a hack to get them into the game, since neither existed before issue 2. (And don't forget, some of the VIP/purchased capes *were* available from level 1...so that ship started sailing early.)

 

Last, there is a "COH Classic" server... I forget the name, though, and when I poked my nose in a while back it wasn't very populated.

 

 

[Sir Myshkin]

4 hours ago, Spinal said:

I never understood the reasoning...

For those of us who played the game for a rather significant chunk of time (years) having to unlock Capes and Auras on every toon was a massively monotonous task. I knew plenty of individuals who chose to completely forgo the two options altogether, myself included (although in my case I just frankly don't care for either in most situations). This concern, in conjunction with travel powers, were argued that while it may seem to make sense from a level-scaling perspective, there are plenty of cases and reasoning behind a character having access to certain things out of the gate, and that how some character designs are folded around the very aspect of their travel power like Super Speed (Flash-like characters).

 

The travel power case was a consideration in why the unlock was moved from 14 all the way down to level 4 (among other dev rational) when the game was still Live; that wasn't a Homecoming alteration.

4 hours ago, Spinal said:

Nobody does the respec TFs anymore

They weren't really that "common" on Live in the last couple of years either. With Veteran Rewards many players already carried several freebies, plus you could purchase a Respec Recipe from the Auction House or grab it from a Merit Vendor. The "once every ten" grant here on Homecoming essentially replaced the "Vetspec" we used to get. Personally I've only respeced one character out of my stable since I joined (oh gosh has it really been nearly two years now?!) and that was a massive fine-tuning ordeal.

 

12 hours ago, Zantorialt said:

Is that something that anyone is planning on doing in the future/has already done that I've just missed?

Some aspects of what you're likely remembering changed before the game actually closed down, and some of those factors are just being carried over. A big reason why some of the other, smaller considerations are "unlocked" is because player time is an extreme commodity for many, especially in a game that has been resurrected from the past and so many original players want to get back what they'd lost without the fuss and grind. The beauty of it all is that the content is all still there so there's nothing stopping you from "playing the course" as it were, it's just your own self-control holding you back at this point.

[Coyotedancer]

I, for one, was glad when the cape and aura unlocks went the way of the dodo... I play Oranbegan characters and it annoyed the ever-loving CRAP out of me when my Death Mage or my Thorn Wielder had to wait until they'd already leveled through a big chunk of the game before they could have the glowing eyes they ought to have had from the start. 

 

In a game where character customization is and was such a huge draw, locking something as basic as an eye-glow behind a level 30 mission was just... silly. Walling off capes was absolutely pants-on-head nuts.

 

 

 

Edited March 2, 2021 by Coyotedancer

[Myrmidon]

34 minutes ago, Coyotedancer said:

 

In a game where character customization is and was such a huge draw, locking something as basic as an eye-glow behind a level 30 mission was just... silly. Walling off capes was absolutely pants-on-head nuts.

This. I was very happy that I didn’t have to both wait until 20 and also complete the Imperious Task Force in order to have my main’s primary costume.

[Lunchmoney]

6 hours ago, Spinal said:

Nobody does the respec TFs anymore, and they used to be common place.

I did all three Hero respec TFs last week, with full teams. I've seen others recruiting for them. 

Your statement is demonstrable false, sorry.

[Lunchmoney]

6 hours ago, Spinal said:

Do people even do Frostfire anymore?

Yes.

[Lunchmoney]

6 hours ago, Spinal said:

We needed a CoH Classic server.

The code is out there, as well as wiki guides to help with setting everything up. Why not do it yourself if you think it's needed?

[Ukase]

13 hours ago, Spinal said:

I never understood the reasoning for just handing out capes and auras for free. Earning your cape was an iconic part of the game, and gave a true feeling of accomplishment.

 

I can understand it becoming monotonous on every hero though, so in my opinion it should have been an account wide unlock option.

 

They also hand out way too many free respecs. By the time you hit level 50, you've already been given 5 for free. Nobody does the respec TFs anymore, and they used to be common place.

 

Finally, travel powers unlocked at level 4?? The Hollows lost 90% of it's challenge do to this change. Teams used to have work together to get across the zone to a mission door. Do people even do Frostfire anymore?

 

We needed a CoH Classic server.

The truth is we do NOT need a CoH classic server. We have, what I call, City of Options. There's nothing stopping you from forgoing a cape until you take it upon yourself to complete the cape mission. 
There's nothing stopping you from NOT using various costume pieces until you've done the old-school equivalent of unlocking them. Except you, and perhaps a lack of discipline or knowledge of what was required to do the unlock. 

As for Frostfire, I took it upon myself to promote and lead an old-school style, no 2xp blue side crawl for my sg. We go in, once a week for 90 minutes, collaboratively completing various arcs. We did Frostfire two weeks ago. Half the team doesn't even slot anything until level 22, so things were pretty sloppy and embarrassing, to be honest. Didn't seem to take away from anyone's fun, though. 

In some ways, what you're after is a lot like badging in CoH. Some folks seem to not do anything unless there's a badge behind it, and others have no issue reaching level 50 with less than 50 badges. Any badges they got was either by accident, or game-given as a result of leveling and reaching certain benchmarks without a thought to badges. Some only pursue stat boosting accolades. Nobody puts a gun to anyone's head saying they have to - but they get to do so, if they want. Same thing with capes, auras and other things that used to be gated/locked. 

[srmalloy]

9 hours ago, Sir Myshkin said:

Personally I've only respeced one character out of my stable since I joined (oh gosh has it really been nearly two years now?!) and that was a massive fine-tuning ordeal.

Back before SOs were made available all the way to the start, I would burn a respec at 22 -- use TOs up until 12, then slot 15 common IOs, and at 22 respec to pull them all out to go into base storage for other new characters, replacing them with 25 IOs, which would be used until replaced piecemeal with sets (unslotters pulling them out to go into storage), and the last of the common IOs replaced with 50s. But my time on Live gave me a better sense of how to make a build that's at least acceptable, so I rarely need to burn a respec to fix a character.

[tidge]

Add my voice to the chorus of players who appreciates having capes/wings and auras available to character costumes at level 1. I have some characters for which I don't need/want those, a few who have added them as the 'progressed', and a few that would have really weird looking costume choices without them.

 

I will admit that having a character with wings that can't take a Flight power from a power pool immediately feels a little odd, but those concept characters almost always make such a power pool pick very early... certainly much earlier than level 20. Similarly it feels very odd to NOT be able to have glowing eyes (for example) until level 30, when the character may have a "glowing eye" attack power before level 10.

[macskull]

3 hours ago, Ukase said:

The truth is we do NOT need a CoH classic server. We have, what I call, City of Options. There's nothing stopping you from forgoing a cape until you take it upon yourself to complete the cape mission. 
There's nothing stopping you from NOT using various costume pieces until you've done the old-school equivalent of unlocking them. Except you, and perhaps a lack of discipline or knowledge of what was required to do the unlock. 

One of the counter arguments I’ve seen to this is “seeing other people running around with XYZ thing at level 1 cheapens *my* experience.” Granted, this isn’t a *good* argument, but it is where some of these people are coming from. “I had to do this the hard way so you should too” is a pretty crappy argument.

[Doomguide2005]

21 minutes ago, macskull said:

One of the counter arguments I’ve seen to this is “seeing other people running around with XYZ thing at level 1 cheapens *my* experience.” Granted, this isn’t a *good* argument, but it is where some of these people are coming from. “I had to do this the hard way so you should too” is a pretty crappy argument.

I can understand that ... when the "thing" is new(ish).  I recall earning the ability to create a new class of cleric in the RPGA.  Only way you could get the ability was successfully completing a mission.  I got to use the new character for maybe a half dozen adventures and then they opened it up to everyone.  And I felt a bit cheated.  But most of the changes talked about in the thread above have been around for many game issues, years of game time.  They aren't remotely new changes.  For an awful lot of people the current set up is the status quo.

[TemporalVileTerror]

There's also the "appropriate time and appropriate place" argument to be made in this particular situation.

City of Heroes has long dominated the role of "-the- MMO where your character is YOURS," and I've failed to see any other MMO approach the level of personal ownership which this game offers to players.  

It achieves this in no small part thanks to the character appearance customization.  While literally unique characters aren't quite achievable here, and we're faced with the same dilemma which music arguably has ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcjV60RnRw ) due to a finite number of combinations, ultimately the precedent has been set that providing players with a multitude of tools for personalization results in a great deal of creative freedom.  Ergo:  The greatest opportunity for practically unique creations.

My personal view is that "This is a good thing.  This is a GREAT thing.  This is -THE- thing for City of Heroes!"  (Which is why I tend to be so vocal about unlocking additional costume pieces, such as NPC pieces.)

 

But not everyone agrees with this point of view, of course.  There's the argument that something might be "more unique" if you have to unlock it somehow. 

However, these things aren't finite resources that only a limited number of players have access to.  They're not actually unique.  Gating them just places an arbitrary and artificial barrier in the way of access.

Some people associate "worth" with things that are "achieved."  But really . . . if someone can "achieve" it by toggling a binary flag in the code more easily than spending ten minutes hitting the same buttons over and over completing an in-game task, why even bother if not for personal reasons?  And if those personal reasons aren't good enough to do those tasks and personally "lock" the content on your own terms, can those reasons possibly hold muster for -other- players to be restricted by them?

 

But, again, these are just my views on it.

Other people see it differently.

There are plenty of other games out there where locking content is the norm.  Goodgawd, just take a look at the games industry these days.  Destiny 2 is an absolute NIGHTMARE when it comes to personalizing your character(s).  Warframe wasn't much better the last time I played it.  (That new Marvel game is a special brand of hell in this regard, not that the characters you play as there were ever remotely going to be considered "your own.")  And generally, I think people who play City of Heroes for the sake of character customization aren't too thrilled with the customization options in those games.

But . . . those games aren't "for us" really, are they?  I don't like to make assumptions, but it doesn't strike me as likely that the people playing those games are doing so with the express desire to make personal creations out of their player-avatars.

 

Which circles us back around to what I opened this post with:  Appropriate time and appropriate place.

I'm not one of the Devs, and I have no verifiable sources as to their views on this subject, but the present conditions in the game set certain expectations.  With improvements such as Auras and Path Auras no longer being mutually exclusive, and asymmetrical costume pieces, I think we've received a fairly clear message that the Devs presently appreciate the sentiment that this game benefits from having more costume customization rather than less.

 

I very much think now is not the time and I frankly doubt if Homecoming will -ever- be the place for arbitrarily locking players away from expressing their creative freedom.

I also acknowledge that the Devs (now, or in the future) may see it differently.  The present evidence doesn't suggest that, though.

[ZekeStenzland]

On 3/1/2021 at 4:41 PM, Spinal said:

I never understood the reasoning for just handing out capes and auras for free. Earning your cape was an iconic part of the game, and gave a true feeling of accomplishment.

 

Because there are a lot of in-game reasons for having access to costume parts. I had a character that wore a cape because it was the only thing left of his (super powered) brother. Kind of sucked that I had to wait until L20 before he could wear the cape that was part of his origin.

 

Is the only way to acquire a Roman cingulum really to time travel back millennia and do a favor for long dead Romans? Doubt it. 

 

Do villains care at all that Vanguard hasn’t authorized their usage of an official Vanguard(tm) chest plate? What are they going to do about it? They got bigger fish to fry. 
 

Do people even do Frostfire any more? Yep. Ran it yesterday in Oro for the badges. “Yeah, simple” cracks me up every time. 

[Ukase]

11 hours ago, macskull said:

One of the counter arguments I’ve seen to this is “seeing other people running around with XYZ thing at level 1 cheapens *my* experience.” Granted, this isn’t a *good* argument, but it is where some of these people are coming from. “I had to do this the hard way so you should too” is a pretty crappy argument.

There's a Monty Python one-liner that goes, "I've really suffered for my music. Now it's your turn."  And then he began to play his guitar. 

I honestly think that when some of us struggle through something like all the crafting badges or the dreaded ouroboros no-enhancement, no travel power badges that we genuinely want others to suffer through it as well. I can understand why someone wants everyone to do things that certain way. Misery loves company, right? 

The problem, if you can even call it that, is not everyone enjoys the same things in the same way. That's really what it comes down to. And since there's no advertising beyond word of mouth, and there are other private/publicly available free servers also running, it's really not in anyone's best interest to begin to do something that would alienate a fair portion of the player base, as it's already rather slim compared to what we'd like to see. 

[Riverdusk]

On 3/1/2021 at 4:41 PM, Spinal said:

They also hand out way too many free respecs. By the time you hit level 50, you've already been given 5 for free. Nobody does the respec TFs anymore, and they used to be common place.

 

Finally, travel powers unlocked at level 4?? The Hollows lost 90% of it's challenge do to this change. Teams used to have work together to get across the zone to a mission door. Do people even do Frostfire anymore?

 

We needed a CoH Classic server.

I don't see them too often, but still see respec trials advertised (many more when they are the TF of the week of course).

 

To truly get the travel power thing back you'd need to also remove the cheap easy travel powers from the P2W vendor.  Allowing travel powers at level 4 I think is a minor part of it.  Lot of people don't bother taking any travel power ever anymore because of the cheap temp ones.  Even without either of those for Hollows it is super easy to do the bank safeguard mission at level 5 and you get a temp fly pack from that too.  I do still see Hollows teams advertised for as well.

 

Honestly, the biggest one that I was disappointed with is that they just entirely got rid of SG prestige.  I enjoyed collecting that and working to build up my base.  I would have much preferred if they'd have just massively cut prestige and upkeep costs, but still kept prestige around so that people had to at least work a "tiny" bit to build a SG base.