Focused Feedback: New Player Experience (NPE) Improvements

[Grouchybeast]

11 hours ago, Wavicle said:

Just needed to chime in one more time re: the Primal EARTH and Praetorian EARTH labels.

 

The design is emphasizing the wrong parts of the name and as a result the buttons are confusing.

 

Instead of appearing to be two different flavors of the same thing, the buttons ought to clarify that they are Two Very Different things.

 

It's also odd that the Praetoria button is larger than the Primal button.  I know it's a forced perspective thing (and possibly a left-over from Going Rogue wanting to promote the new option), but it emphasises the Praetoria button.

[Chris24601]

13 hours ago, Tatterhood said:

Arguably this only draws more attention to the continuity issues, since IP and Faultine have overlapping level ranges. You can easily take a break midway through the Faultline story to do a Yin TF, then go right back to doing missions where she's a kid and it's supposed to be a big surprise when you find out she's a super powerful psychic. At least with the current arrangement you can assume she's a time traveller and for some reason it just isn't mentioned anywhere.

Eh, I think finding out she’s also Sister Psyche’s protégé if you happen to bounce over to IP for a TF would be a nice surprise, but the whole “when you first encounter her she’s surrounded by non-hostile clockwork” (the Psynapse TF is also in the 15-20 range and by then it is known that the Clockwork are psychic constructs not robots) is alreaekinda a big clue.

 

She’s also friends with two other supers when you first meet her and gives you Clockwork pets as a temp power. That’s another big clue.

 

So her also being in IP as the pre-WWD Sister Psyche’s new sidekick (Aurora being both a married woman and member of the Vindicators) isn’t THAT big a spoiler.

 

So, yeah, I’d say have the Penny in IP either use the same model as Faultline and Lady Grey TF… or make some changes to the newer or older Penny Yin* model to make it so that it’s plausible that Faultline/LGTF is just Penny in her off-duty clothes (sorta like Ms. Liberty in Pocket D right now is chillaxing in her off-duty attire) would also resolve some of the temporal weirdness.

 

And that’s the main thing I’m suggesting, really. The new lower level content that arrived with the shift to Freemium was all geared for rushing players past the other content up to the new Incarnate Trial grind and was designed to feel like it was going on in the same timeframe; not the years before that the low level zones initially represented.

 

The result is a sort of asynchronous feel to different parts of the Blueside material as newer NPCs drop plot bombs for older material like it’s common knowledge.

 

I think it could almost entirely be solved with some text passes and, maybe, a few more asset-related tweaks (I bring up Penny mostly because she is the most obviously “not in same time frame” character standing around and it’s largely because her new costume is a Rob Leifield-esque hot mess of over-design that draws your attention because of how awful it is).

 

* if they’d just give costumed Penny long hair (or younger Penny the club hair of her newer model) it’d at least not be quite as obvious at a glance that the costumed one is intended to be years older than her original model. Instead we could just dunk on her tragic teen hero fashion sense as God intended.

Edited February 20 by Chris24601

[Britannic]

Wouldn't it just be better to make a civilian clothed version of adult Penny and stick her in the Faultline zone/mission and the later Lady Grey TF. Her being made older in those shouldn't matter, since her age is seemingly irrelevant to the stories anyway.

[Doomguide2005]

 

On 1/27/2024 at 10:13 PM, gameboy1234 said:

 

7. There's no mission update or dialog at the end of Coyote's mission to tell the player to return to Coyote and speak with him.  All you get is a blank Nav bar.

This

I haven't read the entirety of the thread yet but I had a friend on Live with his first character that spent so much time wandering around Outbreak that he had the badge for defeating Infected prior to entering AP.  He had no clue to return to Coyote and how to get to AP until after he used his phone a friend option.  He was new both to MMO's in general and CoH specifically.  

[Wavicle]

The Escape key ought to be usable to exit screens like Enhancements, Respec, Levelling, Icon, etc, and should be usable to open the Menu, and to activate (but not confirm) Quitting.