Positivity

[Scarlet Shocker]

I was interviewing a couple of guests on my local radio show last week and they raised a really important point about positivity and the value of good feedback.

 

We're used to being told what's wrong whenever something goes to shit; complaints are easy and cheap and an unhappy person is often very vocal. I know this from personal experience several times over.

 

Many decades ago I worked for a major motorcycle importer in the UK in their customer service team and to deal with customers and dealers you very quickly got the impression that ever single thing we ever did, every product we ever sold, event we staged, everything was a complete bucket of shit from start to finish. Our staff, products, value proposition, sales and marketing & customer service were completely crap and we should all resign and go do something that people might appreciate like become refuse collectors or somesuch. Truly, it was the most demoralising job I'd ever had and I fought to get that job because I was a genuine fan of the product and range. It put me off desperately and in some ways was life changing.

 

This interview reminded me of something - that when something goes well, when something is truly excellent, we often forget the value of telling the powers that be how good it is, how much joy it gives, why we like it, and even just saying a simple thank you. There's also a very important secondary point; when folk complain, often the business responsible for fixing it take a sledgehammer to it because they didn't realise that whilst people hated fault A) they loved positive B) and inevitably bork positive B) in giving fault A) a minor tweak that doesn't fix the problem but makes it less painful. Overall, they give the end user an overall worse experience bit nobody is aware of it until they suddenly realising their fighting a compltely differnet fire. (I'm feeling a bit Rory Sutherland all of a sudden.)

 

We're getting a bit like that here - there's a lot of product negativity (not as bad as some places but nowhere near as good as we could be) so let's turn this around. Enough pre-amble just a simple enough propositional question:

 

What in your opinion makes this game great to play with a completely new team of volunteer, unpaid devs? What works amazingly well, why is this game's management so well respected? What keeps you coming back day after day to punch bad guys in the face? Let's get some positivity out in the open and say it loud!

 

Personally speaking my main joy is that the game is not simply recognisable but enhanced from live. I think our devs have taken a very sensitive line keeping it true to its origins but also adding much new content without erasing or breaking or clean-slating what came before. It's been a fine line and they have done an excellent job of it. That was a big concern of mine when I first learned the game had escaped into the wild and some other rogue servers turned the game into a gross mutation that was barely recognisable but HC devs have stuck true to the original game. Their enhancements, modifications and additions have been very well considered and fit the game well. They deserve a tonne of praise for that, Bravo!

 

Your turn, have at it!

[jprewitt73]

I just like to play the game and I'm happy it's back. I love most of the changes to the game and the expansion of content. If it wasn't there, I'd probably still come back and play anyway. So, I'm positive that I love this game. 

 

[Neiska]

I am split about 50/50 on the changes that I like or dislike. But either way one thing I will give them absolute credit for is the dedication to devote free time to the game that by all rights should be long gone. Younger games are already on life support, so I will thank them for that.

 

Likes - All the cosmetics, new missions, new side content, quality of life improvements. Community involvement. Lore and Story. 

Dislikes - The balance changes, most of which I tend to disagree with. Complete overhaul of some powers to the point they are similar to their originals in name only. Bias in receiving feedback. (There may not be any bias, but it certainly seems that way. One crowd certainly seems to always get what they want and anyone who naysays or disagrees is left by the wayside.) The full-on support/encouragement/rewards/new shiny for team play while leaving people who prefer to solo or mainly play alone very little new content. Even punishing it in some ways such as the heavy-handed AE nerf.

 

Overall, happy the game is alive and well. But I find myself liking the game less the more they change, add, or "fix." All my favorite builds I loved when HC first came back don't even play the same at all anymore.

[Skyhawke]

I. Can. Afford. Set. IOs. 

 

Back on Live, that seemed to be a pipe dream. The Homecoming team really reigned in the obnoxious mess that was the auction house. 

Edited Thursday at 08:49 PM by Skyhawke

[PeregrineFalcon]

I seem to be one of the guys who complains the most every patch, so it's only fair that I also give some positive feedback.

 

I'm so glad that City of Heroes is still here. And while I disagree with some of the changes, I think Homecoming has generally done a very good job with the updates.

 

And yes! I love that I can afford special IOs and IO sets now.  😃

[Ghost]

11 minutes ago, PeregrineFalcon said:

I seem to be one of the guys who complains the most every patch, so it's only fair that I also give some positive feedback.

 

I'm so glad that City of Heroes is still here. And while I disagree with some of the changes, I think Homecoming has generally done a very good job with the updates.

 

And yes! I love that I can afford special IOs and IO sets now.  😃

[Snarky]

I have been known to make less than favorable comments.  and I have a few here... but you asked, so i answer:

 

What in your opinion makes this game great to play with a completely new team of volunteer, unpaid devs?

 

These Devs honestly care about the game.  They see value in being here and fight a daily battle to provide a place for us (many ungrateful 🙂 ) geeks and freeks to be.

 

 

What works amazingly well, why is this game's management so well respected?

 

Two questions slammed into one, awkwardly.  But I am not here to criticize.  much.  The team inherited (thats what a redsider would call that, nudge nudge) a strangely powerful game.  It provides a canvas where we can write our own characters and interact mostly on our terms.  The new management is respected for the suaveness in pulling off that inheritance, and their devotion to not screwing it up, maintaining it, and trying to make it better.  

 

What keeps you coming back day after day to punch bad guys in the face?

 

I have made friends here.  I find a place in game to do my thing, and in the forums to be my stream of consciousness self.  A place to relax.  or grind.  Lately I have been gaming with Justice SuperTeamers on Excelsior.  I played WoW after the shutdown.  But there I am running standard undead face 7 with powersets 2YS, and that is not optimal.  Solo or get crap runs.  Enjoy....  Here I can take the crappiest toon or build and join a pug ITF and have a ball.  And then rroll and do it all over, because that played like crap lol.  It is the daily grind.  And I am indeed grateful and thankful.

 

Now... because I can't help myself.  Can we pleae get rid of the intangible in Black Hole?  It is a deal killer, you cant take it on a team, it will get you kicked.  *cough.  Okay better.

 

Thanks!

 

 

[Scarlet Shocker]

3 minutes ago, Snarky said:

What works amazingly well, why is this game's management so well respected?

 

Two questions slammed into one, awkwardly.  But I am not here to criticize.  much. 

 

 

Open questions to be answered in a way you saw fit and, hey it worked and you almost weren't @Snarky about it either. Almost

[Psyonico]

I love that a game that was so important to me in a formative part of my life can still be important.

 

i usually don’t do a ton of beta testing, just enough to get a feel for a new set or something like that.  I gave my negative feedback to Psi armor on tanks when I first tried the set because it felt so lacking.  Once several buffs were given, I gave it a resounding “it feels like a decent set” because it is very much now a middle of the road armor set.  And I’m ok with that.

 

Then I tested regen out on a tank and I gave my full praise in the FF thread because it played the way I always thought regen should play.

 

i am thrilled about Energy Aura getting ported to tanks!  I said several times over the years that “if EA is too OP for tanks then it’s OP for the sets that already get it”.  I haven’t tried out an EA toon on beta, but I feel like the nerf was a lot softer than I was expecting… so again, kudos.

[High_Beam]

It is an absolute release from how I have to be when working.  When it went dark other games did not fill the void.  Its return is absolutely the best thing that could have happened, especially now in these trying times.  SO I am super thankful of those devs that get it done.  Yes I complain about things, or make fun of them, but in the end, it beats whats out there across the board and sure beats a sharp stick in the hinder.

[Intermipants]

 

I love that the game allows me to be creative by providing a vast array of power set combos, costumes, and different ways to play.  It’s a blank canvas that can bring to life some of the things that I imagine. 

 

I love that it satiates my apparent need to create superheroes with stupid names like Disorient Express and Careless Crisper. 

 

I love that it also feeds my analytical side where I can plan for hours about things like getting an extra 0.75 ranged defense without sacrificing recharge. 

 

I love that I can meet people who make me laugh and have fun on PUGs (I more or less play exclusively on PUGs on excelsior).

 

I love that the game I started playing before my kids were born I now play with them. 

 

Thanks Scarlet Shocker for a brilliant post - too often I take the things I love for granted, it’s great to have an opportunity to say thanks to the devs for bringing this game back and looking after it and the community so well. 

[Octogoat]

City of heroes was the first MMO I ever played back on live @Andreah introduced me to it when I was wee and had a problem with constraints on creativity and social biases on several Neverwinter nights servers. From my mmo journey mostly coh I grew a thicker skin, matured, and thrived creatively without having to confirm to rigid social order. I could just be me and be silly or serious and no one would judge 

 

When coh shut down it effected me greatly with how I played games. I played mmos but I didn't commit to people or characters. Now coh is back again and better in some ways and I find myself reaching out to other players again.

 

Homecoming has been a healing experience.

Edited Friday at 11:18 AM by Octogoat

[MonteCarla]

What an awesome idea for a thread, Scarlet! 🙂
 

CoH is a masterpiece of game design. Teaming is easy and meaningful, and you're rewarded for getting over that social energy hump.
The support powersets are the best I've ever come across, each noticeably impacting the entire team in different ways.

And the other powersets are balanced but each with their own quirks and wonkiness that means I'm still exploring them after 90+ level 50s.

And the invention system is equally balanced but wonky, with all sorts of strange patterns in it to explore.

 

Homecoming have really added to this:

- LFG channel as part of the default setup for every player. Putting task forces together is a joy here.

- The economy is wonderful. The steady feed of low end salvage, converters and binning recipes and enhancements of different levels all make it function smoothly with a smaller population than Live had. The best way to riches is not Market PVP where you're undercutting other players and flipping items, but converter roulette where you're making the items other players want, essentially working for your money

- Double XP. The grind is gone. I can now level an alt in around 24 hours of playtime. This and the economy make the game a great sandbox for making new characters the X-Men approach to superheroes. The Superman way still works too thanks to the Incarnate system.

- New costume items. The costume creator is still world class. I'm happy that we no longer have items gated behind badges or task force completion.

- Sentinels. A great character class of new players to flesh out some common concepts without advanced build-fu and millions of inf, and also a viable alternative for the old hands to play around with.

- Powerset proliferation. No more of that "villains can't have Empathy, it's too nice. Here's a Pain-based set" nonsense! ( always a pet peeve of mine 🙂 )

- AT proliferation. So glad I can make a Hero Dominator without having to mess around villain-side or gold-side first.

- Null the Gull. Talk to a seagull instead of doing 11 missions in case you want to do a quick strike force on the other side of the tracks. (and track your Portal Jockey progress)

 

Yeah. I am stoked that this game survived, and thrived, and got better. And made gaming history as the first game to get official sanction for private servers after it was shuttered. 

It also had the best community, and still does.

Edited Friday at 12:29 PM by MonteCarla

[MTeague]

City of Heroes has always been an incredibly alt-friendly game. 

 

The two other MMO's I played were EverQuest 1999-2005, and World of Warcraft  2008-2015. For both games, I needed to spend... truly ridiculous amounts of time levelling my "main" characters. Getting them geared up, and making constant trade off with other members of my respective Guilds to struggle towards shared goals. I always itched to see how other classes played, but between work, family, and efforts on my main characters, it was difficult to get any Alt to any respectable level, much less have a raid-worthy alt. When I finally did manage to get a few raidworthy alts, I was burning myself out badly, costing myself far too much sleep for far too long. I'd begun to develop health issues from lack of sleep.

 

In 2016, I swore all Guilds, forever. 

 

But between those two treadmills, from 2005 to early 2008, I had played City of Heroes, City of Villains. CoH was FUN. Extremely casual friendly. I could play alts to my hearts content. There was no endless treadmill of raidset after raidset to "gear" your characters.  Guilds / Supergroups were entirely unnecessary. I could spend as much or as little time in game in a week as I wished, without having to feel like I was letting anyone down. I could alt around and still get a good night's sleep, every night, without straining real life obligations. A part of me always regretted leaving CoH for Warcraft, especially given how burnt out I was by the end of 2015. I was always idly interested in going back to CoH, but it had been shut down in between. 

 

I was delighted when my annual "city of heroes 20xx" google search finally came back with a hit in June 2019. I still refuse to join anything expect a personal supergroup, that is just "Never Again" territory. But I enjoy pickup teams and TF's, and I enjoy being able to dabble into a little bit of everything, while still keeping balance in Real Life and getting a good night's sleep. CoH does so much that is "right" from my admittedly biased point of view. There is no "loot drama", no "OMG I should have won that piece of gear!" that can plague other MMO's. You don't have to make it a full time job all by itself.  This is what online games should be like. 

[Maelwys]

The availability of high-end IOs and the general state of the game economy are great, IMO.
Likewise the new Powersets (over and above what were available end-of-live and even from SCORE) are great too.

I still run a private server based on the Ourodev i24 code with very minimal tweaks; because it was the easiest way for me to completely replicate my old characters from Live there and satisfy the nostalgia kick.

But I play on Homecoming because it's fun.

Sure, I see lots of imbalance across powersets and ATs and plenty of bugs that scream "easy fix" to me... and so I would often take a different direction or focus if it was me in charge of things. However it's important to remember that this is someone else's playground that we've been invited into. And it's a very decent and well maintained playground.

 

[skoryy]

I used to be a happy level one tech support guy, and then the company decided they wanted us to handle overnight customer support as well.  A few months of that and I went looking for a promotion.

 

As for what keeps bringing me back, CoH like GW2 is where I can log in and feel like "what do I want to do today" as opposed to "what do I have to do today." On top of that is how much creativity we can pour into character creation with all the costume parts and powers.  Sure, sometimes I groan, but sometimes I'm sending tells saying "great bio and/or costume".  CoH may be the last great creative outlet in MMOs.

[twozerofoxtrot]

The fact that Homecoming has attunement for all IO sets is incredible.

 

No matter what tweaks happen to the game, your high level characters can be Viltrumites on mid and low level TFs because of the set bonuses they have access too.

 

It's way better than live ever was.

[arcane]

20 hours ago, Neiska said:

Dislikes - The balance changes, most of which I tend to disagree with. Complete overhaul of some powers to the point they are similar to their originals in name only. Bias in receiving feedback. (There may not be any bias, but it certainly seems that way. One crowd certainly seems to always get what they want and anyone who naysays or disagrees is left by the wayside.)

Is it possible that one crowd is simply more cognizant of how the game has always been balanced historically and thus just has realistic expectations?

 

Like I don’t think a side is being favored just because Seeds of Confusion is getting nerfed. The sides aren’t “nerf nothing” vs “nerf everything”. They’re more like “nerf nothing” vs “reality”.

Edited Friday at 05:30 PM by arcane

[Seed22]

23 hours ago, Scarlet Shocker said:

I was interviewing a couple of guests on my local radio show last week and they raised a really important point about positivity and the value of good feedback.

 

We're used to being told what's wrong whenever something goes to shit; complaints are easy and cheap and an unhappy person is often very vocal. I know this from personal experience several times over.

 

Many decades ago I worked for a major motorcycle importer in the UK in their customer service team and to deal with customers and dealers you very quickly got the impression that ever single thing we ever did, every product we ever sold, event we staged, everything was a complete bucket of shit from start to finish. Our staff, products, value proposition, sales and marketing & customer service were completely crap and we should all resign and go do something that people might appreciate like become refuse collectors or somesuch. Truly, it was the most demoralising job I'd ever had and I fought to get that job because I was a genuine fan of the product and range. It put me off desperately and in some ways was life changing.

 

This interview reminded me of something - that when something goes well, when something is truly excellent, we often forget the value of telling the powers that be how good it is, how much joy it gives, why we like it, and even just saying a simple thank you. There's also a very important secondary point; when folk complain, often the business responsible for fixing it take a sledgehammer to it because they didn't realise that whilst people hated fault A) they loved positive B) and inevitably bork positive B) in giving fault A) a minor tweak that doesn't fix the problem but makes it less painful. Overall, they give the end user an overall worse experience bit nobody is aware of it until they suddenly realising their fighting a compltely differnet fire. (I'm feeling a bit Rory Sutherland all of a sudden.)

 

We're getting a bit like that here - there's a lot of product negativity (not as bad as some places but nowhere near as good as we could be) so let's turn this around. Enough pre-amble just a simple enough propositional question:

 

What in your opinion makes this game great to play with a completely new team of volunteer, unpaid devs? What works amazingly well, why is this game's management so well respected? What keeps you coming back day after day to punch bad guys in the face? Let's get some positivity out in the open and say it loud!

 

Personally speaking my main joy is that the game is not simply recognisable but enhanced from live. I think our devs have taken a very sensitive line keeping it true to its origins but also adding much new content without erasing or breaking or clean-slating what came before. It's been a fine line and they have done an excellent job of it. That was a big concern of mine when I first learned the game had escaped into the wild and some other rogue servers turned the game into a gross mutation that was barely recognisable but HC devs have stuck true to the original game. Their enhancements, modifications and additions have been very well considered and fit the game well. They deserve a tonne of praise for that, Bravo!

 

Your turn, have at it!

The thing I like about CoH HC is that I don't have to play it.

 

Now that the raging at that sentence has simmered down 😛 let me seriously elaborate. 

 

I don't NEED to play it. In today's day and age of MMO, the goal is to keep subs at all cost. So we end up with chores in a video game, which lmao hell no. These days, as far as gaming is concerned,  im almost solely on Xbox talking with friends and playing titles I missed alongside most new releases. Naturally this means months or probably going forward, years of not playing the additions to CoH. Yet, you'd never know because there isnt some limited time event(outside of seasonal stuff which Idrc anyway and/or already have) or Weekly you need to keep track of.

 

This next one is going to appear cheeky of facetious to folks here but it's not. Thanks to the changes to powers, I have been taking advantage of gamepass and really expanding my skills in my favorite hobby; gaming! I have played more soulslikes and metroidvanias and turn based games than I ever played back in 2019-2023, all thanks to my personal disagreement with powers changes. 

 

Hell, I'd miss the game of a generation today(E33) if it weren't for the powers changes in these pages. Seriously, these changes have forced me to learn how to handle(even if it may not always appear as such on the forums/discord) things outside of my control in a much better manner, and how to find alternatives. 

 

It also keeps me excited for future pages, because it's a gamble of what new set may come and will it be enough to draw me back enough to add CoH into my entertainment schedule. 

Edited Friday at 08:07 PM by Seed22

[Neiska]

3 hours ago, arcane said:

Is it possible that one crowd is simply more cognizant of how the game has always been balanced historically and thus just has realistic expectations?

 

Like I don’t think a side is being favored just because Seeds of Confusion is getting nerfed. The sides aren’t “nerf nothing” vs “nerf everything”. They’re more like “nerf nothing” vs “reality”.

 

No, it's more one group of things consistently getting nerfed while the other is either outright ignored or even encouraged and rewarded.

Edited Friday at 08:49 PM by Neiska
Removed personal examples.

[Skyhawke]

For a thread about positivity:

 

 

[Snarky]

37 minutes ago, Skyhawke said:

For a thread about positivity:

 

 

Be positive…

[Scarlet Shocker]

11 hours ago, skoryy said:

I used to be a happy level one tech support guy, and then the company decided they wanted us to handle overnight customer support as well.  A few months of that and I went looking for a promotion.

 

As for what keeps bringing me back, CoH like GW2 is where I can log in and feel like "what do I want to do today" as opposed to "what do I have to do today." On top of that is how much creativity we can pour into character creation with all the costume parts and powers.  Sure, sometimes I groan, but sometimes I'm sending tells saying "great bio and/or costume".  CoH may be the last great creative outlet in MMOs.

 

Dailies have their place but I do love that we're not immediately faced with FOMO if we log in or not. We can log in and take time to just stand around and admire the scenery without feeling we need to do a thing. That's probably one reason why the RP community has been so strong here