I Love One Aspect of the Game, But Sometimes, I Hate It.

[RikOz]

Or, "Sometimes an advantage is also a disadvantage."

 

Aside from City of Heroes, my only major MMO experience has been World of Warcraft. I've said before that, from my perspective, one of CoH's biggest advantages over WoW is that the same mission/quest can be different every time you do it.

 

I'm sure this is largely due to CoH's instanced, procedurally-generated mission maps. It means that, unlike WoW's mostly open-world, outdoor quests, the same mission is usually a somewhat different experience every time I do it. In WoW, once I had done a particular quest 2-3 times, I "knew" it. I knew exactly what to do on subsequent alts who performed that quest. I knew exactly what enemies I would be facing, and exactly where they would be. If the quest required collecting items that were sitting around on the ground, I knew exactly where to find them. The only real variable was when I had to collect items dropped by mobs when I killed them - the variable was simply how many I had to kill in order to collect the required number.

 

In CoH, with the exception of a few highly-scripted missions, I can do the same mission on 50 different alts, and have a slightly different experience every time. Different map, different assortment of enemies, clickable items/hostages in different places each time. And that variety is completely freaking awesome.

 

Except when it isn't.

 

Recently, I had two alts who both happened to be doing the same Malta mission arc, and I happened to do one particular mission in the arc, on both characters on the same day, which made the occasional disadvantage very obvious.

 

The first alt pretty much breezed through the mission because, aside from the Titans and Gunslingers, virtually every spawn was made up of Tactical Operatives. Those guys are pretty straightforward, just shooting at you or trying to punch you, and you just do the same back to them.

 

The second alt more or less crawled through the mission, because instead of Tactical Operatives, virtually every spawn was composed of Operation Engineers (the ones who summon those Auto Turrets), and Sappers.

 

Of course, I've run into the same thing at different levels with different enemy groups. Most notably, Circle of Thorns maps that spawn almost nothing but those ToHit-debuffing ghosts, while my next alt in the same mission will have a much easier time of it because it's now filled with the humanoid enemies.

 

How about you? Is there some part of the game [EDIT for clarity: something that is inherent to the game itself, not related to other players] that you normally love, but every now and then it infuriates you?

Edited November 30, 2021 by RikOz

[Aurora_Girl]

PuGs. 😛

[cranebump]

AE scripting

[RikOz]

8 minutes ago, Aurora_Girl said:

PuGs. 😛

I should have been more specific. I meant aspects of the game's mechanics, stuff that is baked into the game itself, not based on other players.

[Coyotedancer]

It's base-building for me... 

[RogerWilco]

I would actually not mind more of the WoW style missions. It would mean that you would see more players and the world would feel more inhabited.

It's also why I don't like all the teleport powers.

 

And you can have the same randomness in an open world mission, although it might be slightly more work for the developers. You just need to randomize mob spawns (which already happens) and item spawns.

 

I think it's actually one of the strong points of WoW, all the missions and stories that are not randomly generated, but crafted with care. GTA5 also springs to mind.

 

It's one of the reasons I really like the Summer Event on Risa in Star Trek Online. It shows what is possible in the Cryptic engine. Most of that event would be easy to implement in CoH.

 

I like doing things like the firefighting missions in Steel Canyon.

Edited November 30, 2021 by RogerWilco

[Techwright]

1 minute ago, RogerWilco said:

I would actually not mind more of the WoW style missions.

 

The moment someone issues me a mission to kill 50 boars, I don't care if they're radioactive, I'm going to punch the contact in the face and turn full on villain.

 

That said, I always had a soft spot for those corners of open world WoW where there'd be silver or even gold-framed opponents and one would have to fight their way through several of them to reach the plunder in the cave behind.  I keep looking at the Freaks town in Crey's Folly thinking it would be perfect for that, and since some Freaks fly, even flight and teleport would not guarantee a quick victory.

[RogerWilco]

21 minutes ago, Techwright said:

The moment someone issues me a mission to kill 50 boars, I don't care if they're radioactive, I'm going to punch the contact in the face and turn full on villain.

 

That said, I always had a soft spot for those corners of open world WoW where there'd be silver or even gold-framed opponents and one would have to fight their way through several of them to reach the plunder in the cave behind.  I keep looking at the Freaks town in Crey's Folly thinking it would be perfect for that, and since some Freaks fly, even flight and teleport would not guarantee a quick victory.

 

I remember some Basilisk brains that were needed, but none of the beast seemed to have one.

 

That is not the kind of missions I mean, even though effectively CoH has a lot of missions like that as well, if you have to kill all enemies in the instance.

I would love to see more open world missions, and more missions that didn't require killing things.

Like the door knock stuff at Halloween, and the presents now with Xmas.

I would love it if streetsweeping meant something. I always attack those purse snatchers.

If some of the police/newspaper missions were not an instance.

Let's have a bank robbery where the Villains go to Hero maps (no direct PvP, but you can support the police or something).

Maybe something where the Heroes need to go to the Rogue Isles.

One of the first Hero missions from Matthiew Habashy, where you need to go to the Helion Cave is not an instance. More missions could work like that. He has more missions in Atlas Park itself, as does Sondra Costel.

 

Some ideas from STO:

Just build a sand castle on the beach!

Surfboard race between players.

Tag local wildlife for the scientists studying it.

Find certain flowers/gems/stones/radiation leaks/etc. I loved the gathering professions in WoW. Maybe these could reward salvage?

 

Edited December 1, 2021 by RogerWilco

[Aurora_Girl]

2 hours ago, RikOz said:

I should have been more specific. I meant aspects of the game's mechanics, stuff that is baked into the game itself, not based on other players.

 

The ability to group with people you don't know. 

[Oubliette_Red]

19 hours ago, Coyotedancer said:

It's base-building for me... 

 

Iknowright!?!

 

In any other MMO I've played (and even solo-player), whenever they provide any kind of housing, it always falls short compared to CoH's base building.

 

[KC4800]

Another way it gets different: Flashing back to lower content and forgetting to ease up on the difficulty.

Sometimes it's successful, sometimes its infuriatingly difficult. But that's on me.

 

 

[Zhym]

23 hours ago, Aurora_Girl said:

PuGs. 😛

You're stepping on @Snarky's turf, there!

 

For me, it's the costume builder.  It's so fun to play dress-up with my characters and play with concepts...until I discover that the costume piece I want doesn't quite exist, or that what I want can't take a pattern, or that what I really want is three colors on a part and can only have two, or that I can't find what I want in the increasingly arcane menu structure and really long lists.  It's fun...but it's also cumbersome. 

[Spaghetti Betty]

The Invention system.

[Oubliette_Red]

Super Sidekicking.

 

I love it in CoH and hate that no other game has it.

 

Edited December 1, 2021 by Oubliette_Red

[Luminara]

I adore the freedom of movement provided by Combat Jumping.  Decide to go left mid-jump?  No problem!  Changed your mind and want to go back the way you came from?  Instant redirection!  Scaling a tall building and need to bump forward and backward to hit the sills?  Easy peasy dirty sleazy!

 

I despise the finicky, spastic way I flop around when trying to stick a landing on a street light with Combat Jumping toggled on.  I swear, anyone who has the misfortune to witness me doing that has to believe I'm having a seizure.

[TopherSG]

I thought I remembered reading, back in the day, that mission maps *aren't* actually procedurally generated, Any given mission might be on a number of randomly selected maps, but those maps are preconstructed. It just *looks* procedurally generated because they're made from such a limited selection of modules.

Am I misremembering?

[Clave Dark 5]

I think that applies to a fair number of missions, but I'm also pretty sure some are baked right into the story and it's always the same map for them.

[krj12]

Somone in WoW had a real thing for ... crap.   Don't know how many missions I had where the objective was to pick up piles.

I'll take CoH over that any day.