My New Player's Feedback

[Atomic Dragons of Mars]

Hey, I'm a new player who never played COX before (except maybe like 30 minutes on my brother's account 15 years ago) and I think this game is fantastic! I have played it for about a week, and really played the HELL out of it, but I've been been very frustrated because of issues I've had with the game. The issues I had are all quality of life issues, which the community helped me with very kindly when they could. The community also seemed very attached to these issues, which is why I guess they haven't been been changed. My experiences with MMOs aren't broad, but I played Lord of the Rings Online, a fairly similar game, for 5 solid years and 4-5 more semi-solid ones, so that's where I'm coming from.

 

These are my frustrations:

 

Quests often suck and break. There are too many quests where the goal is to kill all the dudes or click all the clickables. I'm okay with those in general; they are fine filler. But in this game they often are terrible fun-enders because enemies don't spawn correctly or the clickables look like they are deliberately hidden from the player, which both result in very tedious running back and forth, reloading the maps, and often spending more time hunting down one thing than doing the entire rest of the mission. I don't understand why this happens, when sometimes you CAN see quest goals (monsters or clickables) on the minimap. Making quest goals always visible on the minimap, or made visible by using a power, would go a long way to removing this awful, game-stopping tedium. There is nothing that makes me feel less like a hero than doing a circuit through a bizarrely Escheresque office building, identical to 200 others, for the THIRD time hunting down a mob that hadn't spawned correctly or was hidden away.

 

Speaking of not spawning correctly, the bugs sucked too. The funnest one I encountered made my Power Slide turn on after getting hit with a shot gun, so my character did the falling down animation looking like they were rocketed backward by a purple explosion at their feet. But the bad stuff was the spawning. A quest-required character would not spawn in two missions I had, making them unable to be completed. Thankfully, there's an "auto-complete mission" feature that I used for the first quest, though it was a Praetorian story mission and that felt pretty bad to miss. But then the same thing happened again. The second time it broke it was also in a Praetorian story mission, so the Abandon Quest button was greyed out and unclickable. That character simply couldn't do missions after that. (Thanks so much to the community for trying to help me with this. The missions were Save Syfotine Industries and Hunt Down the Powers Division Murderer.)

 

Well, that character COULD continue to do missions, if I wait three days for the auto-complete's three-day cooldown. But why three days? Why any cooldown for the auto-complete feature at all? And why do my toggles all go off when I get mezzed? Why can't I see quest goals instead of running around in the dark? How much of the in-game information is just wrong, like when Stone Armor powers incorrectly tell me I can't jump when they're toggled on? I wish I had more concrete examples, but the gist of this issue is that I often felt like there were hold-over design decisions or facets of the game from older eras that are kept on for nostalgia's sake, but that are unwelcoming for new players. XP debt is probably minor, now that I reflect on it, but a death penalty like that felt very spiteful to me. These quality of life issues really discourage for me what is otherwise an incredibly cool game.

 

As a new player, I'm not attached to things being this way, so instead these frustrations just made me decide I should spend my time elsewhere. This is an awesome game for the most part. There's just a ton to love here, and I get why you guys all do love it! It's awesome! Like I said, I really played the hell out of this game for the week I was in it. I appreciate that the community helped me overcome a lot of troubles I faced in the game, and I understand when they got low-key hostile when I said there were parts I didn't like or I didn't understand why it wasn't fixed. If I hurt anyone's feelings, I sincerely apologize; that was never my intention. I'm a critical person, and I voice my frustrations -- please don't take my issues with the game as a personal attack. I'm amazed at what you guys have here, and I'm sorry that the donations appear to be closed because I would like to contribute for the experience you guys shared with me.

 

Thanks and good luck with your game!

[Judasace]

Honestly. I've played probably thousand of missions, done every story arc in the game a dozen times, and not had the issues you're describing. Hell, I played when the clickies didn't hum, and they were always there, just damn hard to find.

 

The only bug that regularly still happens is NPCs getting stuck in the geometry.  Yes, sometimes it's a single mob on a "kill all" and it sucks if you don't have any non-targeted AOE's to kill them with. Amy still sometimes does this on the KHTF, and for some reason Sirocco gets stuck in the caves during the DA Incarnate Arc, even my Phantasm got stuck in the ground in the Hydra dimension the other day. Unfortunately I think this is an engine issue and really can't be fixed.

 

But NPCs not spawning, glowies not being there...haven't had it happen, especially not in stuff added later, such as Praetoria, again with dozens of playthroughs. For glowies, turn up the sound effects, as for the rest, you can avoid a lot of the really bad missions by sticking with contacts that were added later in the game. If they look like they were made with the character creator, they're generally ok. If they look like melted wax dressed in shabby clothes, they generally should be avoided. You'll have to do Maria Jenkins and Tina McIntyre's arcs late game, bu they got redone later in the game's life and aren't as onerous as they were before.

[Glacier Peak]

Cool feedback! A lot of what you described disliking are relics of a different era, when the goal of the game was to keep players paying a monthly subscription. I'm all in favor of showing clicky objectives in missions. 

[GraspingVileTerror]

Thank you for taking the time to give your feedback, @Atomic Dragons of Mars, and for exploring City of Heroes.  Your criticisms and concerns are valuable, and while not everyone likes to hear "dissension," please know that your words here are appreciated.

 

It sounds like you're been playing the Going Rogue / Praetorian content.  This has a tendency to be better in some ways and worse in others, compared to legacy content.  I would like to encourage you to also explore traditional Blueside (Heroes, Paragon City) and Redside (Villains, Etoile "Rogue" Isles).  However, be warned that the majority of the gameplay is largely combat focused in both of those places; much moreso than the content in Praetoria.  Conventional "wisdom" says it can't or shouldn't be changed, so it's a bit of an upward struggle to convince many of the older fans of the possibility, feasibility, and value in creating more diverse content.

But with feedback such as yours, and encouraging more new players to try the game out and give their thoughts, we should be able to build up momentum to eventually branch out and explore more avenues for fun and enjoyment here.

 

Good luck, and I hope you continue to find enjoyment in this game.  And thank you for the offer to make a donation.  The window is usually open on the last Saturday of each month.  The next day will likely be June 26th.  The donation window is typically only open for about an hour, and it starts at a relatively random time, to try and give players in different time zones different opportunities to contribute.

[Atomic Dragons of Mars]

Thanks for the considered responses. Like I said in my post, I played a lot in my first week, and have 3 mid-20s characters that I leveled on blue and red quests alone. At least one of those got there before I even knew about the P2W vendor's double XP boost, too! I didn't get too far in the Praetorian stuff because, well, yeah.

 

The problem with the Save Syfonite Enterprises mission was that a certain named bad guy wouldn't spawn in and therefore I couldn't beat him and advance the quest. I googled it and found some forum posts from people who said they had the same problem. They blamed it the map: they thought that there were a number of maps this quest could be on and when you started it by clicking the door and entering the map it picked one of those maps randomly. Then you were set for that map, and even logging off and back on wouldn't change that. One of those maps had an issue where it's geometry would possibly preclude this named character from ever spawning, so if you got that map and generated that bug, you were just boned - if I understood their post correctly.

 

That seems pretty theoretical and I have no idea how much of it is true, but the result is the same: a necessary NPC wouldn't spawn and the map was unfinishable. I tried logging in and out and leaving and re-entering the place, and none of it worked, so I just used the auto-complete feature to finish that mission.

 

Of course, then the same thing happened again.

 

And I remembered another spawn bug I encountered! Also in Praetoria, though I'm much fuzzier on this one. You go into the basement of a standard science-y building to talk to a scientist (IIRC) and are ambushed at the end of his conversation tree. You have to survive three to five waves of (very slowly spawning) ambushers to finish the quest. Well, after I finished the dialogue and the first ambusher appeared, I clicked the scientist again, thinking the goal was actually to lead him to safety in a standard escort quest and I would activate his follow mode. Instead, it initiated the same dialogue tree again. After clicking through that a second time, no more waves of ambushers spawned. The quest wouldn't complete, and I spent 5 minutes running around trying to figure out what was going wrong and if I had somehow missed a flag. That one was fixed by abandoning the mission and restarting it or just logging off and logging back in, I forget.

 

Maybe these are weird geometry issues. I don't know. I'm just reporting my feedback.

 

The game sold me on so many cool ideas: the incredible character creator, the weird class combos, flying around big maps, Force jumping across big cities -- all those elements are so free and exciting. I can see they put a lot of effort into the writing for many of the quests, it's just a huge shame that the quests that writing is attached to are too often so dry, confining, and buggy. Much respect to all the devs, new and old, but that combination just leads to me having more fun finding the mission-starting door than actually playing the mission.

 

Again, thanks for the thoughtful responses.

[Tahliah]

15 hours ago, Atomic Dragons of Mars said:

And I remembered another spawn bug I encountered! Also in Praetoria, though I'm much fuzzier on this one. You go into the basement of a standard science-y building to talk to a scientist (IIRC) and are ambushed at the end of his conversation tree. You have to survive three to five waves of (very slowly spawning) ambushers to finish the quest. Well, after I finished the dialogue and the first ambusher appeared, I clicked the scientist again, thinking the goal was actually to lead him to safety in a standard escort quest and I would activate his follow mode. Instead, it initiated the same dialogue tree again. After clicking through that a second time, no more waves of ambushers spawned. The quest wouldn't complete, and I spent 5 minutes running around trying to figure out what was going wrong and if I had somehow missed a flag. That one was fixed by abandoning the mission and restarting it or just logging off and logging back in, I forget.

Although you seem rather frustrated with parts of the game, I'm so glad you took the time to share your thoughts with us! 

 

On this one point, you don't need to actually click "follow" on a  hostage (or an NPC of any kind) that you are leading out or that is "helping" you with the mish.  Instead, just stand near them and they'll latch onto you.  This can get complicated on older content if you are running on a stealth proc or have a stealth or invis power activated because they can't "see" you, and so you'll leave your hostage or NPC "helper" behind.  Turn off whatever is making you not register for them (stealth, invis), and try again.  Newer content has addressed this issue, and your hostage or whomever you are rescuing can still follow through stealth and invis powers.

 

That said, sometimes you WANT to leave your NPC "helper" behind because they are completely crazy and will run or fly into mobs with a death wish.  This can be bad if the mish needs them to live to complete, etc.  Typically, I will leave some NPC "helpers" behind unless the mish requires I keep them with me.  For example, I tend to ditch Fushionetta whenever I can, she's a PITA, there are others who are more trouble than help, but you'll get that as you go along.   

 

Glad you are here with us!  Don't be shy about asking for help in the Help section of chat, too, people are always happy to help, even to literally join your team and get you through a mish that seems bugged (but likely isn't). 

[Gobbledygook]

First, welcome!

Second, awesome name!

Third, with the issue regarding missions and not being able to complete them, I know you said you have auto completed some, and even logged out and back in. But did you know that if you have more than one mission, you can "abandon" your active mission by selecting another mission?

Just reselect the buggy one and try again. This may not work on all, but on mishes that you can't complete because someone didn't spawn, it should help.

 

As far as toggles dropping when held or mezzed, that should only happen if it's a toggle that affects an enemy in some way.

 

With Stone Armor the in game info says that some powers will prevent you from jumping, because that was the case, until the most recent update, which came out in the last month or so. 

Our current Devs are all volunteers, so sometimes things such as in-game info isn't updated right away.

 

Hope this info helps.