New efforts!

[CreVo]

Thing is, you're using another faulty theory. Power levelers don't just power level randoms for free, and if they do its not for very long. No new player has hundreds of inf to spend on getting power leveled, nor do they have enough info on the game to know there is power leveling. Most of what you're saying is out of pure assumption. AE wasn't even the best power leveling in the game, that never stopped being PI missions. Mission Architect was already decently difficult to convince people to skim through and play, adding more restrictions onto it because people are farming in places they can get purples [ not AE ] would be silly. Power leveling is not really a problem in City of Heroes. There are much bigger problems like power sets that are lack luster and useless zones that lack content or are outdated or the very abused and very over priced auction house.

Again though; most of what you describe is only a thing on Virtue / Freedom. Those being the RP and PvP heavy servers.

[Goddangit]

True story: I actually kept notes, especially between September 1 to December 1 in 2012, with the hope that if we were able to save the game, I might either write a book or a documentary about our story, with heavy emphasis on the community aspect of the story.  I still haven't ruled it out completely, but at this point, the story would probably be a lot less exciting.  "And then two years passed..."

I'd like to be played by Steve Buscemi, mainly because I look nothing like him.

/humor off

[Shenku]

On the Powerleveling thing, just my two influence, but I see both sides of the argument, and possibly for different reasons than you'd think for my arguments against it...

I've powerleveled a few times, I'll admit, but I didn't let that become the entire game for myself. In fact, during the last full year or so that I played (before taking an extended hiatus due to limited time, and lack of finances...), I eventually stopped wanting to PL at all because I had become so disgusted with what the AE had become... I think the last straw for me was when I rolled up a brand new character, and hit level 40 inside of an hour and a half with a friend helping me... Seeing how broken the AE made the game kind of turned me off of the whole concept of PLing anymore because quite simply, what's the point if I'm bored out of my mind sitting at the mission door, and am skipping all the content, especially the new content that's changed since I did the 1-50 grind the first time...? Heck, a lot changed between when I went through the first 6 levels on my first scrapper (Hover! Yay! Wait a second... I've seen SNAILS move faster than this!!!) and the 23.5 Issues since then. Those first 6 levels were completely different in Issue 23 compared to Issue 0, and I never had a chance to fully explore just how much of the early levels had changed over the years because leveling became so much easier since the game had launched, that you just sort of rocketed past the first 15-20 levels inside a full day of normal play (i.e. non-PLing), and a lot of the stuff after that became TFs or Story Arcs that everyone had for that/those zone/s.

My biggest complaint with the AE farms though was more of a social issue than anything... Mainly, my SG had slowly drifted into becoming predominately a bunch of farmers, and when I eventually got tired of farming I had no one to team with in the SG, leaving me to go soloing which could quickly become mind-numbingly boring, or I could try and get into a PUG... (Ever spend 30 minutes to an hour forming up for a TF with a random PUG, the team wipes in the first mission, and then almost everyone quits making it impossible to finish...? Yeah... I didn't have good luck with PUGs a lot of the time...) Basically, the problem for me wasn't the "AE Babies" but rather the folks who spent all their time farming and never wanted to do anything else, leaving me to have to look outside my comfort-zone (my SG) for a team...



P.S. TonyV, I think I like many others here would support the heck out of a documentary being made of this whole rollercoaster ride we've been thrown onto, and we'd almost definitely generate at least a little attention outside our usual circles.

[Triage IV]

this to me always stunk of...


waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

I want to buy it for cheap and I want it NOW !!!!!!

I always found a way to get what I wanted cheaper... wait the market out.. normally didnt take very long for the market to reset itself..

Purples were always going to be expensive.. and they should have been..

Things like the salvage.. there was always a way to get it cheaper.. you just had to play the market.. or wait it out.. Never had a proble, building some pretty darn good IO's out builds.. and never had more than 25 billion influence across 38-43 toons that I played over a period of 8 years..

That's the way I feel about those who whine about how others like to play the game for which they pay (or not) monthly fees.  As long as players aren't hurting other players, let them play how they want. 

I actually had more of a hassle getting my branches built for my Incarnate Powers than finding the influence to fund Enhancements.

I think the bigger problem affecting the game was how those same players constantly harassed others about how ineffective their builds are or how their characters are being played incorrectly.  "A Tank should ALWAYS have Taunt...if not, you'll never be on MY team!", "The Emp should follow the damage dealer!", "A pet-less Mastermind, that's stupid!"

It was an awesome game...don't go messing with it...and change it into something it wasn't.  It had something for everyone's play styles.

[Triage IV]

The power leveling argument is terribly flawed. Just because a player played the content 100 times for each one of his characters doesn't mean he knows how to play properly.  More so than not, people on my team who would do stupid stuff or had bad builds weren't power leveled. I PL'd frequently because I've played enough characters through the content and didn't want to do it for the 100th time just to try a new power set at higher tiers. Its a bad misconception to have, if anything should be "stopped" Its market abuse. Even when i wanted to play content, I'd still PL to 20 for stamina [Pre change of course]. Its pretty childish to force your ideals on people about how they want to go about their MMO experience. A bad player is a bad player, Power leveling or not. Especially when your idea is to screw over people who don't power level -just- to try and force those ideals on people.


Ontop of that, have you ever played during Double XP weekend, or used a XP Booster? Thats basically self-power leveling. Power leveling is more than just a high level running a low level through stuff. Its a pretty slippery slope to complain about people leveling fast.

Well said.

[thunderforce]

The idea that "if what a player does doesn't hurt anyone else, why stop them doing it", is attractive, but it's a bit of a straw man because most behaviours do affect other people. If AE (or whatever) provides a disproportionately effective way to earn influence, that would have meant nothing when everything was bought from vendors, but it certainly does have a negative effect on other players who are competing for the same items on Wentworths.

Likewise, the same argument got used a lot about people who enjoyed playing with the market, but of course that's also a behaviour with a negative effect on other players.

[r00tb0ySlim]

The last year of CoH brought less expensive PvP recipes at the BM largely due to under map farming in Warburg....Great little spots all over the place.  This also happened in Bloody Bay in certain spots.  Over saturated BM.  The under map thing never was completely fixed.  As for the supply & demand over priced common salvage, I played the bid and wait game and saved a ton of $$$ on my car insurance ;D

[thunderforce]

As for the supply & demand over priced common salvage, I played the bid and wait game and saved a ton of $$$ on my car insurance ;D

I ran a personal supergroup as salvage storage with a bit of Perl for inventory-tracking... which worked, but really one might ask if it wouldn't be nice if I hadn't had to.

[Felderburg]

The thought process held by many that the only way to make a sizeable amount of influence  is by AE farming or soloing on 8x is siimply erroneous

One of the ways to actually make a lot of influence is to actually utilize the market to your advantage. Use your advantage... sell your salvage.. sell your rewards.. sell your recipes.. make enhancements and sell them... use your merit rolls.. find the items that yield good influence and are in high demand and sell them...

again.. I never did AE farming for influence.. and neither did most of my SG mates.. and I was able to build out 38-40 toons fully IO'd out with Good results.. Not everyone of them had purples.. in fact most of them didnt.. and Purples were normally the most expensive items in the market..

I also never understood why anyone cared what anyone else did with their toon.. how they got their level.. and how much influence they had..

I have friend who played and completely ignored the market.. and IOs sets completely.. played almost completely with SO or with Generic IO's and enjoyed themselves just as much as the next man..

So to me if they ever got the game back.. leave it alone

For me personally, it's always sort of shocking to hear the amounts of influence some people drop casually, like the 20+ billion mentioned earlier. I don't recall ever breaking a billion - but then, I was more of a casual player, and enjoyed going through the stories rather than farming AE or rushing through Incarnate trials. I played the market, to an extent, but I never put in the time to earn the money... which I guess leads to the point of this reply:

Unlike the friend mentioned above, I did want to play with IOs, and created perfect builds in Mids'. Some of those builds required some fancy things, that I never had the money for. So what about people like me, who didn't want to farm and didn't have the time / desire to play the market, but still wanted to play with fancy IOs? Is a more casual player just out of luck, never ever going to get the nice stuff without a lucky drop? That just seems like a bummer to me. It's one thing in the real world for people to do different levels of work and earn different amounts of money, but in a game that people play for enjoyment, why should the nice stuff be locked out from certain players? Even if CoH had continued, I don't know that I would have ever gotten the nice IO sets I wanted - maybe a few, after a long time - but barring a nice drop, because I didn't want to play the markets, I don't know that I would have ever broken 2 billion influence.

This post might come off as "waaah, I want stuff" - I want to be clear that I understand that some things need to be rarer and more expensive than others for an economy to work. But it just never sat well with me that I would quite possibly never get certain items, just because I didn't want to play the markets or run mindless farms.










Speaking of mindless farms, a big part of the reason I drifted from CoH before the shutdown announcement was the fact that Incarnate Trials were rushed through messes of combat. The wiki reflects this - there is practically no information on the wiki about the storylines, content, and dialogue from the trials. If CoH never returns, that information is likely lost forever, because they were terrible end-game raid things that people rushed through for loot. Just putting my opinion of them out there, because I'm curious about what others thought.

[BenshowSly]

Speaking of mindless farms, a big part of the reason I drifted from CoH before the shutdown announcement was the fact that Incarnate Trials were rushed through messes of combat. The wiki reflects this - there is practically no information on the wiki about the storylines, content, and dialogue from the trials. If CoH never returns, that information is likely lost forever, because they were terrible end-game raid things that people rushed through for loot. Just putting my opinion of them out there, because I'm curious about what others thought.

I am one of those that reads (and re-reads) the stuff written for missions and TF and such. It was already hard to read TF stuff unless you were leading one (and if you did, you got yelled to hurry up), it was impossible in an incarnate thing. I wish I would have had the chance to know what was all this by reading the stuff but it's impossible to gather what is going on since, like you mention, there are almost 20 angry players ready to bash.

I don't blame them but I still wish I could figure out what was happening there...

[CreVo]

Your SG going full farm mode is very personal though, and not any fault of the AE systems. Farming to get a lot of X thing is just apart of the MMO experience. There isn't a single MMO in which you don't repeatedly do something to get the item or money you desire. Especially when it came to X enemy killed for Y badge. Power leveling can create 'noobs' but so can just being bad at the game. What really hurt CoH [farming wise] was Auction house abuse. Buying all of a single item and re posting it for 4-5x the profit. Thats the thing you'd want to go after, not farming/power leveling. Farming is not fully to blame for market abuse either, it can be done very easily and for very little. The auction being so over priced is what encourages people to farm so they can drop 20+ billion into a character to enjoy CoH their way. Without those kinds of people, half of the Trials wouldn't ever get finished. Theres a reason the Paragon team never went after farming directly, and more after bugs that let people get to 50 in an hour. [If farming was a problem, there wouldn't be mission resetting more than X amount of times per day]

[thunderforce]

Your SG going full farm mode is very personal though, and not any fault of the AE systems. Farming to get a lot of X thing is just apart of the MMO experience. There isn't a single MMO in which you don't repeatedly do something to get the item or money you desire.

Planetside 1 springs to mind. (And City of Heroes pre-Inventions had very, very little of it.)

[Harpospoke]

No news IS good news. We would know if the deal caved.

Great point.

[Tahliah]

Wow, IronWolf, thank you! 

I read through the first few pages of this (very long) thread and was so excited.  I flipped to the last page and find a bunch of COHers complaining about AE, power-levelers, and influence inflation. 

Two years later and people still want to dictate how others play the game we all love?

Surreal.

If we can get our game back, I won't care if EVERYONE is powerleveling on tanks with no taunt, mm's with no pets, and healers with no damage OR heals/buffs--heck, they can just use brawl--... all while jingling billions in influence.  I'd be thrilled beyond words to team with them. 

[Harpospoke]

True story: I actually kept notes, especially between September 1 to December 1 in 2012, with the hope that if we were able to save the game, I might either write a book or a documentary about our story, with heavy emphasis on the community aspect of the story.  I still haven't ruled it out completely, but at this point, the story would probably be a lot less exciting.  "And then two years passed..."

Sounds very cool.   The "two years" thing just makes it all better.

[Harpospoke]

Who cares if people Power Level.. People power leveling never bothers me.. People with a gajillion influence never bothered me.. If thats how they enjoy playing.. then let them enjoy it the way they want.. if you want to take the slowest possible route to level 50 and play every single mission and examine every story arc to the greatest detail.. then have fun doing it..

Power Leveling didnt kill CoH.. NC Soft killed it..

Some of the claims about PLing never made sense to me.  There were those who assumed every "bad player" was a new player who had PLed past all the content and never learned to play their characters.

That didn't make sense to me for several reasons.

1-The game was at least 5 years old at that point...I highly doubt there were that many new players showing up.

2-The game was't really that hard.  I admit I'm using my own standard here.   I wasn't an awesome player, but I was competent and people seemed to like having me on their teams.   After playing for a few years, I could roll a new character, PL up past 20 or where ever...and figure out how to use all the powers in 15 minutes.  Most of the powers were easily understood just by reading the descriptions after you've played the game a while.

3-Some people just aren't skilled at these kinds of games no matter how long they play.  I again use myself as an example.  After a year or two, I moved from Champion to Freedom.  The first character I rolled was a Tanker.  I was curious about the AT and wanted to try it.   Since I was new to the server there were no shortcuts for that character...I have to level her to 50 the hard way.   She got the most "experience" possible.   ....And I never became a great Tanker.   Average maybe?   Seemed like I was always in a mild panic on teams trying to keep everyone alive.   Exhilarating for sure...but I was never as good at it as I was with Controlling.   I had to wonder if some people assumed I PL'ed my Tanker and "never learned to play it".    8)   Conversely, I could PL a Controller to 50 and kick butt right away as if I had been playing it for years with no problem.

And yeah...I played on Freedom.  That was where everything was the "worst", right?   Well...I never ran into all these problems I would read about on the forums.   Supposedly, PLers would race to 50 and then loudly complain there was nothing to do.   When did that happen?   Never heard one person say that.   Supposedly, PLers made PuG's a nightmare.   I was a dedicated PuG player and rarely had any problems.  PuG's were how I teamed.  I ran my own SG in which I was the only member.   Getting a team was not hard at all.   Just do the search thing, send tells explaining what I wanted to do ("All Controller Mish team looking for members....fun times...interested?").   I guess if I was good at anything it was running PuG's...so I could be biased about that one.   It was also easy to get a team when I wasn't looking...I had to run in hidden when I wanted to be alone or I would get tells constantly inviting me to teams.   

I realize a lot of people were running farms, but I only interacted with them when I wanted to.  Otherwise they weren't a part of my experience.   Once they changed the difficulty thing where you could run a farm by yourself, I never did it with anyone else again.   But I will say this...the farmers I did get to know were hardly ignorant about the game.  Those guys/girls were seriously knowledgeable!    I was fairly competent about how to build a character thanks to MIDS and reading the guides on the forums...but holy smokes I was an amateur compared to those guys!   They could do things I could never attempt.   Pretty impressive.   They weren't "bored" either...they loved the min/max game.

I'll admit I got a little whiny about the market in the beginning.  Especially when someone would claim they were doing the community a service by buying something cheap and relisting it for a higher price.   ;D    But I figured out that simple patience gets you around that stuff.    And if someone drove up the price of Nevermelting Ice....I would just help flood the market with them and get the benefit while driving the price back down.   ;)    I also would do things like use tokens to craft the Recharge Luck of the Gambler and sell them.   Pretty easy money and I helped supply.

Like others said...there were so many different ways to play the game.  If I started wanting to stop what others were doing, what would happen if others made me stop what I wanted to do?

[skippy7721]

Some of my toons were power leveled, some of them went through the story arcs all the way to 50+, I really didn't have a preference as long as I was having fun...I really think we all should play the game in a way that makes us happy whatever that may be.

Case Closed.

IronWolf thanks for the info so far, I am excited just having something to look forward to for once even if things don't pan out in a way we like. Hope is a good thing.

[Reaper]

Wow, IronWolf, thank you! 

I read through the first few pages of this (very long) thread and was so excited.  I flipped to the last page and find a bunch of COHers complaining about AE, power-levelers, and influence inflation. 

Two years later and people still want to dictate how others play the game we all love?

Surreal.

If we can get our game back, I won't care if EVERYONE is powerleveling on tanks with no taunt, mm's with no pets, and healers with no damage OR heals/buffs--heck, they can just use brawl--... all while jingling billions in influence.  I'd be thrilled beyond words to team with them.

Yeah, I am having a hard time following this logic as well.  Everyone should play how THEY want to play.  There have always been people who could manipulate the game better than others, but really, the same advantages/disadvantages were equally accessible to everyone.

If/When we get the game back, I will team with most anyone.  If, for some reason, I don't like someone's play style or attitude, I'll make a note of it and move on.  I'll just be thrilled to have the game back!

I just don't understand the complaints.  I always thought the game had a pretty decent balance of everything for everyone.  Never had trouble getting my toons what they needed.  But hey, maybe that was just me.

[LaughingAlex]

Thing is, you're using another faulty theory. Power levelers don't just power level randoms for free, and if they do its not for very long. No new player has hundreds of inf to spend on getting power leveled, nor do they have enough info on the game to know there is power leveling. Most of what you're saying is out of pure assumption. AE wasn't even the best power leveling in the game, that never stopped being PI missions. Mission Architect was already decently difficult to convince people to skim through and play, adding more restrictions onto it because people are farming in places they can get purples [ not AE ] would be silly. Power leveling is not really a problem in City of Heroes. There are much bigger problems like power sets that are lack luster and useless zones that lack content or are outdated or the very abused and very over priced auction house.

Again though; most of what you describe is only a thing on Virtue / Freedom. Those being the RP and PvP heavy servers.

I agree with the zone and power set issue, but even then I felt a lot of power sets were balanced.  This game isn't like CO where you litterally have to take TGM or arc lightning if you want to be a top damage build cause everything else didn't come close. 

What i'm talking about is some friend introducing someone new to the game power leveling others and then those players also never fight anything but council/freaks.  Seriously have you remembered many radio pugs that ever willingly fought the tsoo in the twenties or even circle of thorns at that level range?  They'd often go out of their way to avoid that, even leaving and re-entering the zone to ensure council/freaks showed up.  It got very boring for me to play in such teams(which were extremely common, so unless I soloed I didn't get to really fight tsoo enough, and some such teams avoided the only bank mission that had you fighting tsoo).

Thing was I ENJOYED fighting the harder mobs, but the need for a team to level up faster often ended up with cases where, due to at my time unwillingness to form teams myself, ended up with a lot of unnecessary repetition(something I won't repeat if the game comes back, I do plan to form my own teams).

Seriously guys I am getting a feeling your just painting a bad view of me here I'm just saying people should be encouraged to fight other mobs besides just council/freaks, cause it gets boring at times and you miss alot of the fun CoX had to offer.  AE power leveling is no different, your missing mobs with real threatening abilities that could be a lot of fun to fight against when you learn how to do so with your power sets.  Just about ANY mob that is pure damage, in reality, is an easy mob to fight in CoX.  While those that teleport around, launch aoe stuns at groups, debuff people to oblivion ect are harder for a reason.  Yet they can be countered with powers, and sometimes a few inspirations if your struggling, but you can counter them and people MISS THAT ENTIRELY BECAUSE THEY NEVER FIGHT THEM ENOUGH OR TRY TO LEARN HOW TO DEAL WITH THEM.

Heck it's feeling like some of you guys are blowing what I said WAY out of proportion and I'm wondering why.  I mean people missed chunks of things the game had to offer or when they did encounter it they "These are to hard, council and freaks are better!".  Even if they had the powers to counter em to boot :/.

[Harpospoke]

Thing was I ENJOYED fighting the harder mobs, but the need for a team to level up faster often ended up with cases where, due to at my time unwillingness to form teams myself, ended up with a lot of unnecessary repetition(something I won't repeat if the game comes back, I do plan to form my own teams).

That probably is the best plan.

It probably seems hard to do until you get used to it.   You would be surprised at the response if you are upfront about what you want.   Asking, "Hi...I'm forming a team that isn't in a big hurry and will fight some of the harder foes like Carnival of Shadows and Malta....interested?" will get you the team you are looking for.   Lots of like-minded people out there just waiting to be asked probably.   :)