Street Sweeping fun

[Peacemoon]

Missions, Task Forces, more missions. 
 

Do people do much street sweeping still?

 

Back when I was a noob, I would regularly have fun spending time in the cool zones, Independence Port (especially the big bridges), Terra Volta, Crey’s Folly, Skyway City, Faultline etc.

 

The actual CITY of City of Heroes is amazingly fun to fight in. You have all the buildings and geometry to fight in and around. The elevated gangways to battle on. Rooftop hopping and knocking enemies off high rises never gets old.
Nothing beats defeating a Family mafia guy by knocking him off the top of independence port’s bridges!
Plus if you take the time to explore the avenues, the zones are amazingly detailed and lovingly crafted. 

And it feels very heroic to swoop in and help the civilians being kidnapped or sacrificed!

 

I’d love to see street sweeping become more fashionable and rewarding again, and as usual, I have an idea!

Every week we have weekly TFs to do that give great merit rewards.

What if every week there was a large street sweeping mission for a particular zone, that rotated around the city every week. Something like ‘defeat 300 enemies in independent port’ and reward a a ton of influence and/or merits for completion. 
There could be one for a ‘normal zone’, and a harder one for a ‘hazard zone’.

What do you think? 😀

 

 

[gamingglen]

I've already made suggestions about street sweeping. The main one was newspaper/radio-like repeatable missions but from a police officer contact in each zone.  It could even be from the same ones that you contact about newspaper/radio missions. Or, it could be a wanted poster on the bulletin board inside the police station, but I wouldn't want to go into the police station each time and also would require map editing which may be more effort than it's worth (so strike this last suggestion, but I'll keep it mentioned just in case someone thinks it has merit.. the poster board could be outside the station.. even the tram station).

 

I would keep the count down to about 10-20, depending on if the target is just bosses or any of a particular group. Or, each level is worth more, for example minion=1, lieutenant=2, boss=3. 

 

A 300-count mission would be quite a chore. Even going for the 100 Outcast boss badge I hunt for in Steel I can only handle in smaller chucks before it seems like work. Unless your aim is for team/league play but I doubt teams would bother with that.  It could be an optional mission no one ever has to take, but I'd lower to to about 100.  These aren't epic level missions.

 

One thing about street sweeping is that you can choose the terrain to some extent. There's no maze-like offices, blue/purple caves, or Oranbega hallways to navigate, or have to search every nook and cranny of said maps. And you get the grateful praise of saved civilians, at least on blueside (redside has deadinside civilians 😄 ).

Edited May 5, 2021 by gamingglen

[Hexquisite]

I'm in. I've recently rekindled my own fondness for street sweeping. It's been fun some nights to just run around, explore, feel like a hero just out on patrol, rather than simply running from one mission to the next. Also good for grabbing that last bit of exp to set off the ding that you weren't quite able to get in that last mission.

 

Plus... anyone else feel bad when you run/fly/jump right past a mugging? No? I'm the only one?

[Techwright]

The devs just added a feature tied into street sweeping.  I believe it was meant to encourage some street sweeping. If you do street sweeping, eventually the game will start dropping tips that will point you to the locations of the exploration badges hidden around the zone.  These tips are stored in the same location as alignment tips.

[MTeague]

I tend not to do street sweeping as actual team event, because well, inertia of teams doing what they been doing all along.

But if I'm zipping across a zone, I'll clobber some enemies for the sake of doing it. 

 

5 hours ago, Hexquisite said:

Plus... anyone else feel bad when you run/fly/jump right past a mugging? No? I'm the only one?

Because yea, I'm I'm on a hero, and a bunch of Family are shaking down for poor soul in Independance Port, hey, ain't it our job to stop that?

 

Redside, it's easier to justify the "you're so not worth my time." and cruise on past enemies.

But sometimes your villain can just feel like saying, "Hiya Mr. Blue Ink Man!  Now you're gonna die!!!!!!"

 

And particularly with the Tour Guide Tips, it's a nice way to grab a bunch of Exploration Badgers I always meant go get, but never quite got around to getting 

[Nightmare Shaman]

Street sweeping was all people did in the early years of the game.  And, there was good reason: it was the best way to get xp.  A couple of issues in, the dev's changed the amount of xp you get from missions essentially making missions more xp profitable than street sweeping.  So, it went away forever.  

Some of my street sweeping nostalgia:

 

1) Running through the sewers with another person as the CoH beta server shut down back in 2004.

2) Sewers teams.

3) Perez Park street sweeping.  (The go to lowbie strategy originally.)

4) Being on that same bridge in IP with a female inv tank tanking like a boss for the entire team.  (Back when you absolutely needed a tank.)

5) And of course, Boomtown.  Another one of those essential places.

 

It just went away.  Missions are just so much more convenient, interesting, and fruitful now.  Especially with the convenience of radio mission.  

[Peacemoon]

13 minutes ago, Nightmare Shaman said:

Street sweeping was all people did in the early years of the game.  And, there was good reason: it was the best way to get xp.  A couple of issues in, the dev's changed the amount of xp you get from missions essentially making missions more xp profitable than street sweeping.  So, it went away forever.  

Some of my street sweeping nostalgia:

 

1) Running through the sewers with another person as the CoH beta server shut down back in 2004.

2) Sewers teams.

3) Perez Park street sweeping.  (The go to lowbie strategy originally.)

4) Being on that same bridge in IP with a female inv tank tanking like a boss for the entire team.  (Back when you absolutely needed a tank.)

5) And of course, Boomtown.  Another one of those essential places.

 

It just went away.  Missions are just so much more convenient, interesting, and fruitful now.  Especially with the convenience of radio mission.  

I remember those Nightmare Shaman. I remember join Perez Park groups and getting levels 6-12. Progressing around the zone as we all levelled up.

Also I remember Boomtown doing a similar thing. It was in Boomtown that I first got to try Dimension Shift. My group loved me!

[Sovera]

Problem with street sweeping is the same as running arcs outside of Ouro: we outlevel things.

 

Running arcs without Ouro has me sent against enemies +4 or grey mobs. Street sweeping I did a few times to get a level or two but sadly we start, even level mobs, defeat, defeat, level up, defeat, level up, grey or green mobs. Keep  looking... grey mobs, grey mobs... Move to another zone. Purple mobs.

 

😛

[srmalloy]

20 minutes ago, Sovera said:

Problem with street sweeping is the same as running arcs outside of Ouro: we outlevel things.

The thing of it is, street sweeping was a way of life back on live, because running around at 1x XP, you would inevitably find yourself, at some point in your career, find that you'd run out all of your current contacts, and the ones they forwarded to you just tell you "come back when you're level X", so you needed to join a team to run someone else's missions or grind task forces. The police radio missions helped some, but there were some points where it just wasn't enough. As more content was added, the problem eased, but it never went away completely, but Homecoming put all of that in the past, so that you may only see people street sweeping if they want to get the last fraction of a bar to ding, so they can train right away, instead of dinging 10% of the way into a mission.

[Sovera]

1 minute ago, srmalloy said:

The thing of it is, street sweeping was a way of life back on live, because running around at 1x XP, you would inevitably find yourself, at some point in your career, find that you'd run out all of your current contacts, and the ones they forwarded to you just tell you "come back when you're level X", so you needed to join a team to run someone else's missions or grind task forces. The police radio missions helped some, but there were some points where it just wasn't enough. As more content was added, the problem eased, but it never went away completely, but Homecoming put all of that in the past, so that you may only see people street sweeping if they want to get the last fraction of a bar to ding, so they can train right away, instead of dinging 10% of the way into a mission.

 

I started in Issue 7 and I don't recall street sweeping being anything but done for funsies. I don't even understand what you mean by 'radio missions helped but weren't enough'. Why weren't they enough? Back then they were the bread of leveling. I seldom touched TFs (no merits rewards) and leveled pretty much on radio missions. They gave XP from killing mobs and then another chunk from completion, and we could team up which greatly sped leveling since without IOs even tough characters like Brutes and Tankers needed the buffs and heals and there were no armored Blaster as there are now.

 

I'm not saying people did not do it though.

[srmalloy]

19 minutes ago, Sovera said:

I started in Issue 7 and I don't recall street sweeping being anything but done for funsies. I don't even understand what you mean by 'radio missions helped but weren't enough'. Why weren't they enough?

I started about a week after CoH went live, and I don't know if it was craziness with the RNG or not enough random missions in the list (it always seemed to me -- and more so after AE was released -- that it should be possible to create a virtually endless series of 'cabbage patch' radio missions to eliminate it), but after the ninth or tenth time you've recovered the Liquid Computer, it wears on you. It's like taking relics to Azuria to be filed under 'will call' for the Banished Pantheon or the Circle of Thorns.

[Sovera]

1 minute ago, srmalloy said:

I started about a week after CoH went live, and I don't know if it was craziness with the RNG or not enough random missions in the list (it always seemed to me -- and more so after AE was released -- that it should be possible to create a virtually endless series of 'cabbage patch' radio missions to eliminate it), but after the ninth or tenth time you've recovered the Liquid Computer, it wears on you. It's like taking relics to Azuria to be filed under 'will call' for the Banished Pantheon or the Circle of Thorns.

 

I can't argue with you there 😄 Even back when I was substantially younger and thrived on grinding it eventually felt heavy to rinse and repeat the same bland radio missions.

[Xenosone]

Yeah.  The tiny group i run with likes to hit perez and boomtown. Even terravolta on occasion. Brickstown is fun. Theres a parking garage thats like a hazard zone.

[arcane]

I only really street sweep in Dark Astoria since I generally don’t play below level 50 unless it’s for a Yin, Morty, Moonfire, or perhaps the very occasional other TF. Would do it more if there were more options for 50’s. (And that really needs to mean level 54 enemies to be relevant. Possessed scientists aren’t worth anything.)

Edited May 6, 2021 by arcane

[arcane]

18 hours ago, Sovera said:

 

I started in Issue 7 and I don't recall street sweeping being anything but done for funsies. I don't even understand what you mean by 'radio missions helped but weren't enough'. Why weren't they enough? Back then they were the bread of leveling. I seldom touched TFs (no merits rewards) and leveled pretty much on radio missions. They gave XP from killing mobs and then another chunk from completion, and we could team up which greatly sped leveling since without IOs even tough characters like Brutes and Tankers needed the buffs and heals and there were no armored Blaster as there are now.

 

I'm not saying people did not do it though.

Well... if you started in i7 for one thing, you may have missed that radios were new. You used to actually be able to run out of missions for reals if you played before CoV.

[Arbegla]

I've been locking my characters at the level ranges, (4, 9, 14, 19, 24, etc) and running through all the missions in my contact list. Its been a lot of fun, and I've really enjoyed street sweeping. Its actually been really interesting, because I'm playing H side with a Mastermind, and never done that kinda street sweeping before. V side the zones are very tight, so the battles don't get as epic.

[Knock!]

19 hours ago, Sovera said:

 

I started in Issue 7 and I don't recall street sweeping being anything but done for funsies. I don't even understand what you mean by 'radio missions helped but weren't enough'. Why weren't they enough? Back then they were the bread of leveling. I seldom touched TFs (no merits rewards) and leveled pretty much on radio missions. They gave XP from killing mobs and then another chunk from completion, and we could team up which greatly sped leveling since without IOs even tough characters like Brutes and Tankers needed the buffs and heals and there were no armored Blaster as there are now.

 

I'm not saying people did not do it though.

 

At launch, there were no difficulty settings for missions, so if you wanted to fight foes who were much higher level, you needed to find a high-level team leader (and that leader really wanted to be on a higher-level team himself), or you could street sweep and fight purples where you found them. 

 

And before the purple patch, a decent group could easily fight +5s, even +6s and +7s (although it was slow), and you had a chance with +8s. I'm not sure it really was faster than quickly killing +3s and +4s, but most of the people I teamed with wanted to fight +8s if they could.

 

Independence Port was really popular for street sweeping because it had a broad range of baddies in the 20s (when levelling really started to slow down) and it was HUGE, meaning you could find large areas without other teams, for a little while at least. The western edge of IP is a ghost town now, but back then if you went far enough, you'd soon find another team of 8 street sweeping toward you.

 

It's funny that the massive size of zones like IP and Boomtown is a pain now, because that was what we liked about them back at the start: more room to spread out.

 

[Col. Kernel]

Around level 8 or, IIRC, it's fun to take a team into Perez Park and just go round the street - not even into the park proper.

[RikOz]

I occasionally find it fun, when I'm on a high-level toon in Atlas Park, to take out an entire crowd of Hellions with one AoE. Though I do tend to look around first to make sure I'm not about to kill-steal from a lowbie.

[siolfir]

17 hours ago, arcane said:

Well... if you started in i7 for one thing, you may have missed that radios were new. You used to actually be able to run out of missions for reals if you played before CoV.

Radios were new to heroes in issue 8 (as opposed to paper missions being part of CoV from its inception because that's how contacts were unlocked after Mercy Island), so someone who played a hero in i7 still would've had to wait for them.

[Spaghetti Betty]

I like street sweeping when I need a breath of fresh air from running door to door. Some of my favorite zones to sweep are Croatoa, Crey's, and RWZ. Sharkhead gets an honorable mention for having a good variety of terrain and enemy types.

 

In fact, now that there are exploration badge tips, I'm taking a fresh toon through the City just street sweeping until I get all the badges in an area. It presents an interesting challenge if you're somewhere like The Hollows, since you could be level 8 and get the tip drop for the badge all the way on top of the mountain.

 

As for making it more tantalizing for group play again, I like the idea of having one big outdoor mission everyone in the zone works on. Maybe doing so could also spawn some more challenging outdoor threats. Defeat X amount of Hellions in Perez Park and they summon a giant, powerful demon in their desperation. Defeat enough Council/5th in Steel Canyon and they decide to roll out tanks. One can dream.

Edited May 8, 2021 by Spaghetti Betty
changed 1 word

[Biff Pow]

The Tour Guide tips were a great idea. I used to avoid the "defeat X of an enemy group" missions from contacts, but now they're more fun with that extra reward.

[Glacier Peak]

The Sewers and the Abandoned Sewers are where it's at. There's even a hospital down there so you never even need to see the light of day 😄