My top 5 CoH annoyances ...

[groobark]

11 minutes ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

Top 5 for me are mostly costume related:

 

5. Not enough asymmetrical options -- greatly eased when they added the asymmetrical boots, gloves, and shoulder options

4. Old auras not getting updated to match newer auras options (some don't have eye options, some don't have individual hand options, etc)

3. Sunglasses and earmuffs are on the same costume slot, making them mutually exclusive

2. No butt cape options outside of widows and trench coats

1. Self-rezzing enemies. I just hate it when they get back up after I've "arrested" them 

I never create a new toon, unless I am absolutely happy with looks. My kids constantly create new characters, just because they love the creator so much. It is actually great.
But ...
There are things that I wish we could change, like there are no ursine heads (I have an idea for a char I cannot make because of that), there is plate armor, but there is no mail, no chain, just ringmail shirts, which are "under" and just the one. I am also with you on the asym thing, but I have played (briefly) on some experimental servers that had literally billions of options for everything (all parts could be selected asym) and 90% of the selections where sh*** because they clipped, had the wrong size, made the char look like a DallE picture ...

[Go0gleplex]

7 minutes ago, TheMoneyMaker said:

Red sucks. I don't want to be a minion or even a boss that ultimately answers to someone else. The allure of being evil should be being able to do my own thing, but the mission arcs seem limited to making you someone else's tool.

I don't mind the contacts so much...some of that is part and parcel with being a small fish in a pool of sharks. But the bank missions are great in terms of giving a feel for causing mass mayhem, terror, and destruction. More of the missions should be like that IMO. What annoys me the most with red side is that once you leave Mercy...you're not given any follow up contacts and have to do newspaper missions for the most part...and then it's limited to just a few before  you out level the zone until you hit Nerva levels. 

 

Having more missions where you attack places like the Paragon PD HQ or Spanky's Boardwalk full of tourists or the docks of IP causing mass mayhem with the various heroes showing up to thwart you along with others would be a nice addition. So many missed opportunities with red side in staying with the blue side contact-mission format that detracts from the overall setting is sad. I know there are program mechanics and structures that limit what the dev's have to work with but I'd think that there is more that can be done within the existing than what has been done. Don't get me wrong. I do enjoy the game as is...but that's the very reason I say anything such as I've made note of. If I didn't care...I'd not bother. 

 

Doc...another reason for the war walls would be that the original dev's were being a bit lazy. The walls mean they didn't need to do a lot of work with the 'distant horizon views' such as you see in Gold side between zones and all that and the city map shows the gaps between the zones that the walls allowed them to make excuse for. The Islands of red side did the same thing...and preserved the actual aesthetic of 'the world' without needing much similar artifice as the walls. I don't really buy the dial up reasoning being the total reason for them...due to WoW being around at the same time and not needing to rely on such between zones. 

[DoctorDitko]

Hmmm. You may be right about the War Walls. As for lazy? Keep in mind this was a tiny development team compared to the WoW army of creators.

 

Nut you are spot-on about Mayhem missions! Once you get "Lord Schnauser" as a contact, you can come back at 50 and run them all, in order if you like! Brilliant fun, and if you get all the explore badges, it satisfies the requirements for one of the stat-boosting accolades, in the most fun way!

 

Here's to more Mayhem!

[Octogoat]

My top five coh annoyances:

 

1. Too many choices

2. Too many buttons

3. Too much freedom

4. Too much customization

5. Too much content

 

Wait... Those aren't annoyances at all

[Scarlet Shocker]

5 hours ago, groobark said:

Before I made this post, I thought long and hard about it, the wording, the content, even the fact if I should post it or not. In fact I have been thinking about this post for over a year.

The primary reason I did not want to post this is because sooner or later these posts always devolve into flame wars, name calling, and ultimately they will be taken down.

 

No amount of chatGPT like answers will change the fact that annoying things, whilst and because they are very subjective, are quite literally annoying to the person being annoyed by them.

And the purpose of forums, to an extent, is to collectively think about these frustrations. (I do not want to say vent the frustration)

That escorts are annoying in pretty much every video game that employs them, and for similar reasons, is so commonplace, that even memes about escorts and the annoyances connected with them rarely raise more than a tired yawn.

 

@Scarlet ShockerPlease do not take any of the things that I am writing here as a personal attack on the things you enjoy or like or yourself as a person. Please do not derail the post further than it already is.

 

<snip>

 

I'm taking nothing personally here, don't worry

 

I'm curious how you think responding to you is a derailment of your thread or position.

 

I'm not going to address your wall of text other than to say that if there are things you dislike in the game you can almost always avoid them and do other things.

 

It is a game. It is a leisure activity. If you're not enjoying it, go do something else that you do enjoy. Life is too short to spend it fretting about how some aspects of a volunteer project run by dedicated fans don't meet your expectations.

 

But stuff annoys you and it took a year for you to think about it tells me that you might just be overthinking it a tad.

 

Best to you

[BasiliskXVIII]

On 1/17/2025 at 12:44 AM, groobark said:

5. Kill all missions

They tend to take quite a bit more time and are generally uninteresting. The occasional wandering mob or one that is hiding in a crevice of the reactor room and  this turns from slight annoyance to rage. Sure, sometimes a mission now has a red marker for the last group of mobs. Sometimes!
This may very well be one of the reasons why certain ATOs are not played. My tanker runs x/8 Kill All faster than my average Defender or Controller x/1 (especially on lower level). Being able to stealth a lot of missions with no repercussions exasperates this issue IMO.

I like kill-alls, Since fighting enemies in this game is the majority of the gameplay, kill-alls are the content which give you the most gameplay per mission.  Especially among Task Forces, there's nothing more dire to me than joining a "speed" TF where you go to one place, wait for someone to run through to the objective, and then leave, and then do this again a dozen times. At least with kill-alls, I have a reason to be there. There's definitely a few maps that I would prefer never to see on a kill-all, like the laboratory with three elevators on one floor, but overall, I like them better than the alternative. I will say, though, that I'd really love to see HC add some tools to give us better ways to mitigate the annoyances of things like stuck enemies and lost mobs, but given that any suggestion which could make this problem better tends to be the kind of thing that farmers also want to make farms go smoother, there's no point to suggesting any such thing in the suggestion forums or you'll just be labeled a filthy farmer.

 

[biostem]

Here's my top 5, in no particular order:

 

1. I'm an altaholic, and I've embraced it, but I really wish there was a way to easily save and load all my window positions and layout - I find this to be one of the most frustrating hurdles to overcome with each new alt I create.

 

2. Whether we're the most intimidating edgelord demon from heck or the cutest little creature you can imagine, no enemies react to us one way or the other, and basically fight to the last man;  I'd love a way to establish some sort of "air" about our character - like intimidating, calming, or otherwise, and have NPCs occasionally react to it.  Further, it'd be great if we could somehow opt for a "non-lethal" option - even if it only results in an enemy playing a "I surrender" emote and an obvious teleport-out effect.

 

3. Similar or related to the "stealth kill-all" or other such complaints earlier in this thread, and also possibly related to my 2nd complaint, I'd love an ability to "interrogate" enemies to learn things like their "true" strength in that instanced mission, (i.e. getting clearer objectives and enemy positions marked on the map), as well as things like an express elevator key that allows us to head right to the top floor or such, and eliminate having to clear those additional floors.

 

4. While I appreciate how we can zoom, rotate, and even increase or decrease the light levels in the costume editor, what we cannot do is change the type of lighting we're working under;  Anyone whose made a bunch of costumes will be able to tell you that different instances or even outdoor zones can alter how your character looks, and it'd be really nice if we had some tools to take that into account, within the costume editor.

 

5. The way the chat system handles changing zones/instances mid-conversation is rather annoying - you can be responding to someone's tell, and if you switch zones, it becomes "there is no one to respond to".  Similarly, if you're recruiting for a team and get a lot of responses, it can scroll so fast or trying the quick reply key tags the wrong person;  I'd love it it the chat system could stop scrolling once you click to respond, or otherwise handle tells/DMs a bit better - maybe highlight the person you're responding to in the chat window as well or something.  Also related to this - how about a little icon or color indicator, (customizable by the user), to easily tell if someone you're chatting with is a hero, vigilante, rogue, or villain.

Edited Sunday at 12:14 AM by biostem

[Uncle Shags]

1 hour ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

I'm curious how you think responding to you is a derailment of your thread or position.

You came into their thread, strawmaned them, promoted a false dichotomy (you're either an unquestioning sycophant or an ungrateful hater), accused them of not enjoying the game, gave ridiculous unsolicited advice, and said they were overthinking because they were hesitant to post because of the EXACT thing you are currently doing to them.  And the complaint about wall of text coming from you is...rich...

 

Not all of us need blind loyalty to enjoy this game. It's possible to be critical and appreciative at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that's way better than fanboi platitudes. 

[Scarlet Shocker]

23 minutes ago, Uncle Shags said:

You came into their thread, strawmaned them, promoted a false dichotomy (you're either an unquestioning sycophant or an ungrateful hater), accused them of not enjoying the game, gave ridiculous unsolicited advice, and said they were overthinking because they were hesitant to post because of the EXACT thing you are currently doing to them.  And the complaint about wall of text coming from you is...rich...

 

Not all of us need blind loyalty to enjoy this game. It's possible to be critical and appreciative at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that's way better than fanboi platitudes. 

 

I'm impressed. You've found me out exactly

 

I am undone!

[Sovera]

I'm currently testing Thunderspy and their scaling contents is a blessing. Even doing Ouroboros arcs does not exemplar us down. So outside of actually doing TFs all content scales up. This in turns means most/all builds and sets can roam the levels without being sad because we lost our AoE or travel power.

 

 

While this is not a 'hey, what's your five pet peeves?' thread I feel like joining in.

 

1 - Lack of new melee sets. I don't care about buffing/debuffing/MM sets so all the new things have passed me by. What keeps my heart beating is the occasional armor or melee set revision as they almost always come out polished and shiny.

2 - STILL having the fear code in so mobs run at % HP. Good lord, it's 2025 and soloers are still divided in first and second class citizens. Any thing without an agro aura should expect to take twice as long to go through a mission, no hyperbole. Lets please have mobs NOT run, and agro auras simply mean they will prefer to hit the agro auro owner instead of a nearby squishy.

3 - Exemplaring still not being robust. Losing power is fine. Losing powers is not. But it's too baked into the game so I don't expect changes or the cottage cheese will curdle.

4 - The kill all with mobs hiding in the walls has been mentioned but deserves being repeated. Citadel in particular has had more than once some mobs who walk into the geometry and I go around and around and around trying to find them. A grace period where if we are in a kill and have been inside for more than 10 minutes should make all mobs visible.

 

 

No five. I couldn't find another peeve I cared enough. Game and server is in a good spot. Now if we were talking of TS I would have more grievances as its owner likes things hardcore. Their regular gameplay is more exacting than my self-imposed ironman challenges here, and then they actually HAVE iron man challenge coded in 😄 But it's his server and he makes the rules so it's fine even if in my opinion it makes things a slog.

[tidge]

34 minutes ago, Sovera said:

2 - STILL having the fear code in so mobs run at % HP. Good lord, it's 2025 and soloers are still divided in first and second class citizens. Any thing without an agro aura should expect to take twice as long to go through a mission, no hyperbole. Lets please have mobs NOT run, and agro auras simply mean they will prefer to hit the agro auro owner instead of a nearby squishy.

 

I've been thinking about this one a lot recently. Mostly because I've been playing a Scrapper recently, a little bit because of another thread I don't feel like mentioning. There were plenty of times when I'd watch a solo runner, on the ground, go more than 250 feet away before slowly coming back. Fliers did the same, just much faster. This is not a problem on my ranged attackers or control types.

 

I couldn't think of a a good solution to propose. This behavior was seen as some important part of critter AI, implementing it *did* eliminate trivial gaining of XP. I looked a little at the potential implications of scaling up some damage sets, but that was misguided I think.

 

I think the "fairest" idea that crossed my mind was this: What if enemy critters that went into "escape mode" got a movement debuff/penalty, so that there was a slightly better chance for melee types to get them before they high-tail it? I don't know if that is a very elegant solution, and it would spoil some of the game I think.

[lemming]

5 hours ago, biostem said:

I'm an altaholic, and I've embraced it, but I really wish there was a way to easily save and load all my window positions and layout - I find this to be one of the most frustrating hurdles to overcome with each new alt I create.

Not perfect, but you can save your window stuff to files using wdwsavefile and wdwloadfile

(I use it more for my two different screens and laptop, but you could save a file configured for a character)

 

chatsavefile & chatloadfile, plus uiscale help with other aspects.

 

 

[groobark]

6 hours ago, biostem said:

2. Whether we're the most intimidating edgelord demon from heck or the cutest little creature you can imagine, no enemies react to us one way or the other, and basically fight to the last man;  I'd love a way to establish some sort of "air" about our character - like intimidating, calming, or otherwise, and have NPCs occasionally react to it.  Further, it'd be great if we could somehow opt for a "non-lethal" option - even if it only results in an enemy playing a "I surrender" emote and an obvious teleport-out effect.

The character creator in Biomutant is a bit like that, your appearance adjusts based on your traits, making you more cute or more brick like as you adjust strength and such. This would theoretically allow the world to react to you based on how you look. ... Which it doesn't and also I realize that this is the opposite way of what you described.
In Mask of the Rose there are hidden modifiers on clothing that influences the way the world reacts to you. Unfortunately, to highlight this particular gimmick, they have made it actual gates to overcome, meaning the game forces the secondary effects of an outfit on you as something you have to manage, rather than leaving the choice of how you want to look to the player.
A few gamebooks on the choice of games platform have tried to build in responses to the players looks, but in all cases this has been "Oh look at your $size, my but you have beautiful $eyecolor eyes.", which is kind of worse ...
This touches on things I have been thinking about for a couple of years now: How can you introduce something that is meaningful for the player, without sidelining it in the game (i.e. it does have some more than meaningless impact) while also ensuring that it doesn't affect game balance in such a way that it can be used to abuse game mechanics or make it mandatory.
Unfortunately I do not have an answer (yet). But thank you for reminding me of this problem.

[groobark]

5 hours ago, Sovera said:

No five. I couldn't find another peeve I cared enough. Game and server is in a good spot. Now if we were talking of TS I would have more grievances as its owner likes things hardcore. Their regular gameplay is more exacting than my self-imposed ironman challenges here, and then they actually HAVE iron man challenge coded in 😄 But it's his server and he makes the rules so it's fine even if in my opinion it makes things a slog.

This is another interesting riddle. Scarlet mentioned travel in the early days, and it is true that, in line with other MMOs in the same era, this unquestionably made the game more "interesting": "remember, if you die on the way to the mission or in the mission itself, you loose everything, have to re-buy and re-equip all your stuff and then do it all again".
There is nothing like the feeling of having spent half an hour dodging dark red mobs on the way to the mission, managed to survive the hard fights in the mission with a hair of health left and, scraping the consumables barrel, made it to the objective.
But ... it impedes a lot of other things that are fun in an MMO, like the ability to easily team up and face greater challenges together or mowing mobs down in a blind exhilarating rush through missions. In AO, if one or two people accidentally die in a mission, everyone has to wait at least half an hour for them to make it back, and if someone dies on the way, then you can basically forget about it completely.
With CoH's approach, for all arcs to require around 60-90 minutes, it is in a very good spot compared with most of the other MMOs.
I actually believe that they timed the completion of arcs when they made the content originally, especially on blue side it is almost uncanny how most arcs finish around the same time mark for the same character. Arcs that have a lot of stealthable missions, tend to have quite a bit of running (bring x to Azuria) or hunting rare mobs (Carnies in Peregrine) or one or two kill all missions to pad the completion time of the arc.
Super long arcs (0.40 The New Recruits, which was the original Posi) are rare or have subsequently been split in regular content.

The only answer I found to this is: play two different games that focus on these two aspects. I may actually give TS a go ...

[Andreah]

I like kill-alls too, in principle. What annoys me is when they turn into "can't-kill-alls".

[BasiliskXVIII]

I suppose I may as well pitch in my top 5:

 

1. The intersecting problem between wanting to experience the story and wanting to play in a team. Only the team leader gets the context from any of the task forces, You can read the mission information while you're in the mission, but by the time you've read a paragraph of what's happening, someone's stealthed through the mission and completed it. The game frequently feels like it's not entirely sure whether it wants you to solo or team.

 

2. Contacts. Can we just make them so that they get added to your contacts roster if you talk to them? It seems like my characters are always getting their contact chains dying out in the late teens/ early 20s, leaving me with Laura Lockheart, Graham Easton, Montague, etc, but none of the older contacts that'll give the badge missions or older story arcs.

 

3. Stupid long rez animations. When I've died and have gone to the hospital, that "resurrection" animation feels like it lasts about three years. Worse are Freakshow and Circle Demons who leave you twiddling your thumbs as they go through their rez cycle where you can't target them until they're fully rezzed and then spent a few seconds to compose themselves. Also, as far as animations go, why is it that doors don't work until the third or fourth time you click them?

 

4. How it seems like the focus for HC-made content at non-50 levels appears to be aimed exclusively at 50s who are exemplaring down with all their incarnate stuff and set bonuses or teams who aren't running those missions. Came back, made a villain, and started playing through the arcs, got to Doc Buzzsaw. Ran through the first (original) arc with minimal difficulty on my Beam/Poison corr. Then I get to the Lab of Doctor Vahz arcs, and I'm like "Oh, I don't remember this". It was a bloody meat grinder. Throwing myself at the game again and again and again cause I couldn't find anyone who'd care to help and, as it happens, a Beam Rifle/Poison corruptor on SOs isn't phenomenally survivable out of the box. Getting slammed with bosses in spite of my difficulty setting because the game can't figure out how to downscale enemies that spawn in, while also being forced to deal with the Kraken at the same time? Every mission was like a new excuse to rage quit.

 

5. Constant junk clearing. Only a tiny, tiny fraction of recipes are actually used for anything.  You can slot lower level recipes while levelling up for some bonuses, but generally you zip through the 10-30 levels fast enough that it's not worth the effort, and certainly not the rare salvage to bother with them, meaning that you're frequently having to just ditch all the junk you keep accumulating.

[Skyhawke]

1. Enemy pets/summons that give no xp but don't go away when the summoner does. If the summoner's gone, their minions should go as well or if they persist and stretch a fight out, gimme something. 

 

2. Certain enemy attacks/holds will detoggle something and it's oh so easy to not notice and get smacked by something with no defense against it. I've had characters get hit with something and only later did I realize one of their defense toggles turned off. 

 

3. Every. ##$%ing Freakshow rezzing in a mission/TF. Here and there, sure. When it's all the time (and it does happen) things draaaaaaaag. It's already been proven you're not winning, stay down. 

 

4. Not being villainous enough Redside. There's a handful of story arcs/missions that will make you raise and eyebrow in how twisted they can be, but most Redside content is being an anti-hero at best and total loser at worst.

 

5. Everyone Goldside has super reflexes and an invisible targeting drone. Yeah, I know it's meant to be more challenging, but sometimes it dips into absurdity. 

[Lunar Ronin]

1. Galaxy City was destroyed.  Before I started playing two decades ago, I read that City of Heroes had two starting zones: Atlas Park and Galaxy City.  I also read that Atlas Park was much more crowded with people than Galaxy City.  So even with my very first character twenty years ago, I started in Galaxy City both because crowds suck and Galaxy City sounds a lot cooler than Atlas Park.  Now, I never start a character blue side if I can help it as that means starting in Atlas Park.
2. Being able to outlevel contacts.  No, the Ouroboros Flashback system isn't a fix, it's a hack.
3. The Procs Per Minute system.  It's obviously broken and greatly imbalances the game.
4. Blue side is boring and monotonous.  "Face roll on your keyboard" boring.  There's no challenge playing blue side whatsoever (at least not until you get to content made in Issue 8 and later), and it has too many zones compared to red and gold sides.
5. Mastermind minion and lieutenant henchmen are still below the PC's level outside of Incarnate content.

[Nutation]

On 1/18/2025 at 10:15 AM, TheMoneyMaker said:

Red sucks. I don't want to be a minion or even a boss that ultimately answers to someone else. The allure of being evil should be being able to do my own thing, but the mission arcs seem limited to making you someone else's tool.

There are counter-examples, though I generally agree with you.

 

1. The Mayhem missions are simply offered as opportunities, not work for hire. I find the missions themselves to be great anarchical fun.

 

2. Dean MacArthur's and Leonard's connected clone arcs. You are running your own operation and have a chance to feel very powerful (see "Army of Me" badge).

 

3. Brother Hammond's arc. The whole thing is presented as your idea.

 

4. The final arc of every patron in Grandville.

 

[Nutation]

duplicate

Edited 10 hours ago by Nutation
duplicate

[srmalloy]

On 1/18/2025 at 6:16 PM, Sovera said:

I'm currently testing Thunderspy and their scaling contents is a blessing. Even doing Ouroboros arcs does not exemplar us down. So outside of actually doing TFs all content scales up. This in turns means most/all builds and sets can roam the levels without being sad because we lost our AoE or travel power.

The issue I have with automatically-scaling content is that it eliminates a practice seen in comics -- you're unable to defeat a particular opponent, you go off and get better, then come back again and defeat them this time. If all content scaled to your level, if you were unable to defeat, say, Requiem at the end of an arc, the only option you have is to rope in some other heros to help you. And if the content that you're hung up on is tagged as a solo mission, well, then, you're SoL -- your only option is to autocomplete it.

[srmalloy]

On 1/18/2025 at 10:08 AM, groobark said:

We all know what 5th Column/Council is supposed to allude to, but again, why are they fighting?

Unfortunately, there are aspects of the game lore that swept through play and disappeared, never to be seen again. For those of us who played through it back on Live, we can remember the falling out at the top levels of the 5th Column that broke it into the 5th Column and the Council, with scattered mass battles between the two in various zones, with the Council seemingly triumphing over the 5th Column and replacing them all over Paragon City, and it was only much later that we found out that the 5th Column had gone deep to lick their wounds and rebuild, eventually pushing their way back into the city, where the animosity between the groups continues to be seen in zones like Steel Canyon.

 

In my opinion, it would be worthwhile to create content that showcases the animosity separating the two groups, with a story arc that feeds you clues about the original breakup of the 5th Column, with an Ouroboros-only arc that puts you back in the middle of that breakup -- being on the edge of the street fights between the 5th Column and the Council, investigating a 5th Council base and having a Council team invade to attack everything inside, infiltrating a Council base shortly after their victory and seeing the new Council banners but crates and other decorations still showing the old 5th Column markings because the Council didn't want to go to the expense of repainting everything when they could just use it up.

Edited 9 hours ago by srmalloy

[Sovera]

2 hours ago, srmalloy said:

The issue I have with automatically-scaling content is that it eliminates a practice seen in comics -- you're unable to defeat a particular opponent, you go off and get better, then come back again and defeat them this time. If all content scaled to your level, if you were unable to defeat, say, Requiem at the end of an arc, the only option you have is to rope in some other heros to help you. And if the content that you're hung up on is tagged as a solo mission, well, then, you're SoL -- your only option is to autocomplete it.

 

No. They only scale to your level. Not to your power. Requiem will be exactly the same power as before (low level enemies have slower attacks and do less damage in order to not overwhelm lowbies. Being higher level does not change how they were coded), where the player will have leveled, will have more powers, more slots, purchased IOs, purchased Envenomed Daggers if it came down to that.

Not to mention that scaling contacts is not the same as scaling missions. If you did the mission and got stuck at level 20 with a level 20 Requiem, if you go and level 5 times and return the mission will still be level 20 with a level 20 Requiem. This is how the game is coded.