f13.net

A new patch has gone live today (wed June 9th) and the community appears to be up in arms yet again.  The two biggies are that Burn and Provoke were nerfed.  The burn nerf I can understand (and my character is a Fire Tanker) but changing provoke baffles me a bit.

The communities main complaint seems to be that these were both "stealth nerfs".  And apparently one of the devs claimed stealth nerfs would not happen.  You can read all the drama here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=general

I would link to patch notes . . . but they do not exist.


Edit - Found the patch notes, they are here:
http://www.cityofheroes.com/news/updates.html

Statesman has also posted an apology for the stealth nerf here:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=636844&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1

Missing patch messages (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=637370&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1) here.   Also with "future upcoming changes" info.

So far the only change that todays patch has done that effects me is the Super Speed endurance reduction.  (Which surprised me, because it was already 0.4 end/cycle, which was only 0.2 more than Sprint.)

I see that in the near future: "Damage Resistance will be capped at 90%. You will not be able to get your resistance to any type of damage beyond 90%."

That's good, because I know one of our posters commented recently how silly it was that they could stack some tanker towers to take 0% damage.

Same as it ever was.

I have yet to see a patch that was so horrible that it diminished my enjoyment of CoH one iota. But then I play a scrapper mostly, and am no powergamer, so chances are I probably just didn't find the uberest combinations or powers.

As for board whiners, FUCK THEM IN THEIR STUPID ASSES. AGAIN.

I like



Might be good, might be bad for my poor tanker right now, but I imagine it will be a definite boon once I get more melee attacks at 28, 35, and 28.



Ah crap, there goes my "Acc Debuff villian and wail on them while they hit nothing but air" stratagey.

Giddyup.

Ahhh fuck.  I see they have fixed Dr. Cheng, but I wonder if the two bugged story arc mission i have are still screwed.

I have a Devouring Earth and a Fifth Column mission where the contact tells me they had an "Internal error while issuing the task" and I can not procied any farther.

Burn now does pretty much what it stated it would do before and provoke is still nasty as hell it just is not as always on effective.

The changes were necessary and not unexpected in the slightest some will bitch and moan but anybody who thought burn was working as intended was smoking something. Frankly though the fix I would have thought would work better for burn is just make it less spammable. Right now with haste you can plop burns down and overlap them which can blow through mobs FAST.

You really should only be able to have one up a time like other targeted aoes. As for the running portion you can still get a ton of damage from burn if you have a controller in your group just root the mobs then burn baby burn.

Provoke being a level 6 selectable power in the power pool which is better than a primary or secondary power taunt is still probably out of wack powerwise. The current change makes it still great on minions but it hits less on LT's and bosses which is fine as the tank should be concentrating on those anyway with his melee.



Kaid

As an endurance whore Defender, I thank you...

Xilren

No problems here overall with patch.

The provoke nerf has me a bit puzzled.  

But I don’t mind it.  In EQ tanker crowd control was the worst (improved recently).  In shadowbane single target taunts were beautiful – but group control remained a challenge.  With provoke in CoH– I do confess that with a good tank it made combats pretty straight forward.  The nerf may change that now:  folks so hungry to steal aggro from the tank now have renewed capacity to die in an expeditious matter.  This can only add to the entertainment of grouping imo ;)

I played my tanker tonight.

Didn't even notice the nerf till someone pointed it out.

10 second recharge time seems to still be less than the taunt duration with any kind of enhancement.

And it doesn't seem to miss often.

Tbh, all this change will do is force provoke tanks to slot it up rather than it being 100% reliable in unslotted form.

In other news - I *did* notice that O2 boost cc protection lasts a lot longer now.

I think provoke was overpowered and it may be better to have provoke a tanker ability and taunt as the general power pool ability.

It is also possible that today's changes can be mitigated via slotting up provoke to maximum and leaving the situation the same as it was prior to the patch (only with 5 less enchancements slots to choose from in the char builds).

So I am not sure that this is the route to go in order to fix this issue.

Grind

Is it just me, or is this backwards?

Should it not read Decreased Rechage, and END Cost, and Increased Damage?   I mean, is it really going to make the powers more appealing if they cost more to use, and take longer to recycle, for just a damage upgrade?

Edit to add: I just got one of those powers (Thunder Strike) before the patch, and I must say, if they were looking to make it "More usefull and appealing" as a blaster mele power, they failed utterly.  It now takes almost TWICE as long to recycle (fuck, it takes an obscene amount of time to recycle even with hasten on), and sucks up at least half again as much end as it used to use and I think its area of effect/accuracy dropped as well. My first test with it before I logged off before the patch had me blasting people away from impact left right and center, and now it sometimes has no effect on people standing right next to my target).  Before the patch I was already considering replacing my standard mele punch with it, and now, it is almost useless.  I feel like I wasted that power choice now.

I think Geko's logic goes like:

Blasters in melee = rapidly dead blasters.

Ergo, making a secondary set power do more damage is the most desirable thing, not making it cost less or come back quicker. If you're a blaster you're laying the smack down at range, and if something manages to shift its aggro from the tank and get close to you, you want to put it DOWN. You do not want to whittle away at its life with melee attacks while it takes a fourth of yours in one swing.

--GF

This should be handed out on flyers when new developers are hired, it should be across the bottom of every piece of official internal correspondance, and taped to everyone's monitors.

Theres a good example of this on the boards now.  A poster made a very long, well written report of the effectiveness of his burn tanker at 38 versus level 39 and 40 mobs (bosses, lt's, and minions).  His conclusion?  Only being able to solo two bosses, two lt's and minions simultainiously was not worth the effort and burn tankers were now horriby broken.

Geko's reply is a classic "I must be missing something" type reply though much more polite of course.

This one wins for "First Against the Wall" honors.

Heres the thread I was talking about:

A Fire Tanks Experiments after the Nerf (http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=641214&page=2&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=1&vc=1)

And part of Geko's reply:

Heh, this further confirms that Geko has the PR-Response-Structuring skills of a wheelbarrow full of bricks. Nice guy though.

Holy fuck, I want to cook this motherfucker and eat his liver with a nice glass of chiante.

As a scrapper, I can MAYBE solo 1 boss with a couple of minions, as long as the boss is yellow or lower. If the boss is orange and the minions are yellow, probably not. If the boss is orange and has a yellow lt, probably not.

What the fuck is this whiny pussy bitching about? That he can't solo more than 2 bosses at once? And now the combat is "more stressful" (meaning there's actually some doubt about the combat's outcome) than before? Combat is supposed to be stressful!

God, what a fucking retard.

Haemish. This time you are just plain wrong or maybe not high enough lvl to fully understand the consequences. Basically you are talking out of your ass.

This doesnt nerf fire tankers much. It will just make everyone else die alot more. I will have sooo much fun when the whiny fuckers keep dieing and complaining about tank not holding aggro. They got what they asked for. Fuckers!

The simple fact is if one tank can use a particular power set to solo things no other combination or class can solo, namely bosses, that ain't right no matter how much you cut it.

I have no problems with people soloing. However, taking 2 bosses and assorted minions solo should be a real goddamn hard thing to do, or "stressful" as this assmunch says. If it isn't, something be broke.

Then maybe you can explain it to us in terms that might actually make some sense b/c from the 5 minutes I can stomach looking at the official boards all I can see is somehow dropping damage resist from 100% to 90% now makes the class useless....but somehow 95% would be fine (see Havok's posts, high on drama, low on factsl i got to page 5 before i gave it up for useless).  

You telling me 5% make such a huge difference at level 40 that it's the difference between a class being fine and totally broken?  It smells like bullshit to me considering a freaking training enhancement for damage resistance give you that 5%....

So, anyone have some actual numbers to back this assertion up?

Xilren

Speaking as a levle 28 blaster, all i can say is that I would LOVE to be able to solo a group of two bosses 2 levels higher then me without having a 1% percent survival rate if I didnt run like a scared girl after every third shot or so.

Hell, half the time, it takes real effort to take down a single boss/leutennant combination my level without popping a lot of inspirations and probably having to run like hell at least once to recover hitpoints.

Burn nerf isnt a problem. I freely admit it was too powerful. But provoke kept the TEAM alive. Not the tank...

You other AT's will die alot more now. Thats a fact and as a tanker I will laugh every time you do since I can survive anyway.

The game mechanics changes dramatically at around lvl's 18-20. A provoke tank is really needed then. Controllers are dead weight with the purple invincible patch. So are defenders.

Blasters can solo just fine still using good tactics. 1 example is for elec blasters going after freak tanks that are vuln to elec and got no range whatsoever... Or any AE blaster doing hordes of evens/blue/green mobs. great xp in total if not for each kill.

What's really needed isn't provoke tanking.  What's needed is for them to tweak the Tank's actual Primary power Taunt ability so taking the Provoke power isn't neccessary.

Haemish, I smell class envy here. This is a PVE game that used to have a varied and good combat system with options for all AT's to shine.
Blasters with good AE powers could do masses of evens. Blasters with heavy nukes could do big game hunts.

Big groups could do high mobs for fun even though xp was capped. Now that is not an option. Getting the picture yet?

This game had/has 1 thing going for it, a varied and good combat system. This got nerfed BAD. now its just a grind where soloing or duoing is the only real way to make any progress.

Fuckers who cry nerf  in a PvE game should crash and burn horribly in any way posible.

So far as I can tell, Geko has yet to have rolled back those changes he did for mobs +3 higher.  He's going to eventually partially roll it back a bit to be more reasonable, it's not in any patch message I've seen.

This would explain why yesterday when I was teamed up with CmdrSlack that my lvl 20 Scrapper could *barely scratch* a lvl 23 minion.   My 60ish base damage was being reduced to about 18ish.

*purged own post*

Edit: You know what, on second thought, this isn't the Vault.  Best not to get too inciteful over this.  I think I'll leave it as "I disagree with what you said" (Secundo's post for reference)

I don't recall which forum it was on, nor who posted it, but I wonder if anyone here has the genesis of that quote archived.  I'd appreciate being able to read it again, and I only wish I'd saved it at the time.

*Edited: Spelling correction
*Edit 2:  Found it. (http://wiki.onlinegamers.org/index.php?I%20disagree%20with%20what%20you%20said)

This whole provoke thing is getting blown way out of proportion. It was a power pool skill. It SHOULD NOT be a must have skill. Period.

Moreover, the skill does work pretty well still. Now if you're talking about +4 mobs, yeah, it's not what it was. You're not supposed to be fighting this stuff without enormous risk. People should die.

The fascination with xp gained puzzles me. I play for fun. I like leveling, but I don't obsess over it. You play, you level sometimes. End of story. Just to say you're level 40? I think EQ has misplaced a player. The whole reason I came to CoH was to get away from leveling treadmills, raiding, and game dev stupidity. Obviously, some would debate the last point, but so far I've been pleased with what the devs are doing. Sure, the narrow mob level confines are a bit annoying, but overall it's acceptable as opposed to the alternatives.

I guess if you don't like the game, you shouldn't play it. I quit EQ because it was going directions I didn't like. I quit DAOC because it got boring. I quit AO because it became EQ. If you played CoH to get to 40 in a week or two and now you can't, guess it's time to move on.

Tanker soloing got nerfed and now the combat system is horribly broken?  Overstate your position a little?

(Spoken with "Soilent Green is People" emphesis:)

"Secundo is the vault!  Secundo is the vault!"

Seriously, throwing around insinuations of class envy and claiming a game is horribly broken because they extremely minorly nerfed a *generic power pool power which you do not even use yourself* is something more appropriately reserved for The Vault Network or perhaps the official CoH forums.  

Spare us the melodrama, would you? (Said Geldonyetich, mighty drama-queen in himself.)

When Geld is telling you to spare the drama, you know you're overdoing it.

You arent seeing it yet are you?  I am fine with getting my burn taker nerfed. Me and my scrapper buddy can still duo anything that is currently killable.

If YOU arent't playing for xp, what do you care if I do? I liked the many varied ways you could solo, duo or team and adjust the mobs you fought accordingly.
Now you are very limited in what you can fight and certain classes quite frankly became useless overnight(controllers, defenders).

I liked the fast xp. It was good for the casual gamer. It was good for me, a powergamer, since I planned to play most of the AT's and power combinations.

It was good because combat is my thing. I like figuring out tactics both solo and for teams. Now its a walk in the park and boring.

And get this, the xp was capped(!). So it was counterproductive to go after really high mobs. But it was fun to have the option.

Fun... imagine that in a game.

Rationalize for the win.  Do you truly believe anything you just said or do you just like the crack? So the game magically becomes unfun with this change?  All of the sudden fun combat becomes unfun when the mobs in a certain level range aren't worth the effort?  Can you draw me a flowchart, you lost me somewhere.

For the folks doing missions in large teams, the game has largely remained the same.  This game isn't built around the powergamer duo power squads. Sorry, it just isn't.

Really, if you're so upset, vote with your wallet. If not, really, shut the cock holster and move on.  We can get this from the genpop boards if we feel like making our retinas beg for mercy.

Even though I'm relatively new to the game, I see what he is saying. It's the difference between a challenge and stupidly impossible. The current setup, which even the devs have admitted went too far, means that any more over 4 levels to you is basically a study in frustration to fight. You will miss 80% of the time. IMO, misses are the worst idea in these kinds of games, nothing is as frustrating as seeing a string of 5-10 misses. Much better to at least allow more minimum damage hits than a ton of misses.

Another thing that seems to have been majorly broken by the change was group friendlyness. As it currently stands, instead of inviting anyone in a 5 level range, and having fun with a large group (which was never the most efficient way to level, just the most fun for a lot of people) now if you go outside 2 levels the lower level members of your group either have to be sidekicked or are feeling useless because they can't hit the mobs.



See above for why this is not true



Ah, love it or leave it, even when the devs have admitted what he's bitching about went too far.

As to the taunt nerf, it seems again the devs double nerfed the problem. First they extended the timer so burns couldn't be stacked up, the only reason the burn tankers were doing the damage they were, then they also nerfed provoke, which was what allowed burn tankers to keep the mobs centered on the burn area. Don't you think it would have been more reasonable to nerf the damage done by burn, put it on test, then see if they needed an additional nerf to a skill used by many other than burn tankers?

The problem with the tanker line taunt is it's single target. And frankly, targetting with the mouse in CoH is pretty miserably done. If a debuffer or sloppy nuker draws agro from multiple mobs, an ae targetted taunt can allow the tanker to have a chance of saving them. If you have to try to click each one individually, good luck getting them all off before the low hp AT is killed. Most tankers, amazingly enough, feel bad when someone dies when they can't taunt mobs off them, so it is frustrating when a useful tool is taken away from them because one class needed toning down in their ability to solo by abusing that skill.

Note that other than soloing burn tankers, none of these changes effect the powerleveling small teams you are accusing him of being on. Small teams don't fight large groups of mobs, it's inefficient. If you're melee, 3-5 even or slightly higher mobs are the best experience, any higher you hit the already existing experience cap and experience is dropped on the floor. If you are blasters, large groups of blues and even greens yeild far better experience per hour with minimal downtime. 2-3 blasters with ae attacks can chew through experience unbelievably fast with little risk this way, because the mobs have less hitpoints and the nukes do full damage.

I guess it's like the difference between vegas and a lottery ticket. In Vegas the house has slightly better odds, in the lottery, it's just a tax on people who can't do math.

I'm not sure the "for sure" hits and minimum damage would really change anything. EQOA and AO (to a lesser degree) work this way. Fighting high reds is usually a death sentence to the mageling types. Tanks can't really do any damage to them, so it's a slow losing battle. Sure you hit, but for practically nothing.

In AO you HAD to have mobs hitting for mins or you weren't around long. Even then, min damage could come in like an avalanche and you simply couldn't keep up with it. Things were a bit different at 150+, but you still had to keep damage as low as possible. Even then, enforcer mobs with their huge ATK were very difficult to deal with just because their mins were so high (and you usually couldn't keep them at min anyway).

This is just a design call, in my opinion. Either model has the same balancing issues. Whether you miss or whether you hit for mins only. Half a dozen of one, six of another.

As for groups, I find smaller groups of 3-5 just more fun than large groups. Large groups have a certain chaotic charm in missions, but are unwieldy and keeping large pickup groups together is like herding cats. The fascination large groups have with +4 level mobs is another strike against them. Best xp is by volume of mobs killed, not high level individual mobs.

I think we'll see more tuning in the days to come. It's a work in progress. I'm still having fun. I don't make one trick pony toons, and I don't play just one toon in exclusion to all else. I haven't found the changes so far to negatively effect my gameplay. Even if they did for one toon, I have plenty of others. Actually, the wet ice nerf did knock my ice/axe tanker out of play, but I may even come back to her someday. I just don't agonize over this stuff.

My point was it's a perception thing, and leads to player frustration. In AO, I don't recall feeling near as frustrated with a string of low numbers on hits on mobs as I was in EQ on a string of outright misses. If it's a case of easier balancing over enjoyment, it's a lose IMO.



Another place where balance has been picked over fun IMO. One of the cooler things EQ did in the last few years was admit that ya, if you hunted harder mobs, you should get better rewards, and change experience to reflect it. You already have a harder time hitting them, and they have more hitpoints and hit you harder, so why should your net return on your time be even lower. Making artificial caps on experience gained which encourages grinding on low level mobs is not, IMO, good game design.



The only thing that really causes me to agonize over nerfs and game design philosophy that says any time a few power gamers max out their characters faster than the designers intended, the automatic reaction should be to slow it down is that I find when the grind is made tedious, I don't want to spend the time making more than one or two characters. In a game like CoH where so many different combos look interesting, this annoys me. The conventional wisdom among devs seems to be that if it's too easy for people to level, too many people will quit. I'd like to see someone risk making leveling easy enough and character variation wide enough to prove that wrong.

CoH especially, unless they pull of some kind of a miracle with new content and new tricks to hook people, to me seems to have a shelf life limited by design due to it's lack of anything to do once you have leveled a character, assuming you don't burn out on the combat before that. By slowing down experience even more, it just makes it less likely most people will want to grind out another one. At least CoH avoided the DaoC pitfall of making the gameplay such that a character pretty well played the same at 20 as 40 by just making the upgrades repeats of the lower level powers with higher numbers, but not enough to make me want to grind all the levels to get there.

Also, by narrowing the range of things you can fight to one to two levels, they've even made gameplay more bland and repetitive than it had to be.

Other than that, I bought CoH knowing it probably wouldn't keep me interested more than the free month or two, just from discussion here and other places. The only issue I have is that the huge, fun fights I heard raved about here seem to be a thing of the past just as I got the game because hardly anyone is making large groups now.

The narrow level range is a bit annoying, but I simply don't see how they could expand it with the relativly low cap on maximum levels that there is. Personally, I don't have any problem with people maxing toons as long as they don't piss and moan and the devs attemp to cater to this lot when they get bored. I guess I don't bore easily.

I got plenty frustrated with AO. As an MA all I ever hit for were mins for a long period of time. Sometime after 13.8 (I think) they finally fixed this after a fashion and things got more interesting. I don't like huge miss strings, but I remember EQOA where my SK would hit for continuous single numbers and low teens on mid-red to high-red mobs. Not much better.  

I think mob difficulty and rewards are a dev call. This is what we have. Again, the low level cap seems to dictate that rewards are going to be relativly low with a narrow range. They don't want to see people hitting 40 quickly for some reason, so there it is. I don't much care one way or the other, but I'm fine with things as they are. More tuning is good, too. I'm easy, what can I say?

All MMRPGs have limited shelf life. I can only take so much of either dev stupidity or the community idiocy one tends to find in these games. I've quit EQ three times. Mostly because of the huge balancing issues that seem to crop up after large expansions (Velious, Luclin, now GoD). I quit AO most because of the emphasis on the (stupid) PvP game and what it did to classes in the PvE game. Same with DAOC, though I did spend time on Gaheris, but quit out of outright boredom there. EQOA I quit because the community was made up of mostly complete oxygen thieves. I liked the game, but you couldn't find a decent, reasonably intelligent group to save your life.

I generally go into these game with people I already know from other games, so I have a ready made group. Experience with games like EQ and EQOA leave me very disinclined to pickup group. So I like the small group action. So far CoH meets my requirements for a good time. I still like large group fights, they're usually fun, though as a tanker or scrapper I generally watch the controllers and blasters lockdown and obliterate mobs about as fast as I can engage them. Still, it's the whole mass mayhem thing that's amusing.

Ahh, lastly, the fast leveling high cap model was tried in Diablo 2. I guess you can say it worked rather well there (we'll leave the community out of this). Even there, though, it slowed radically post-80 or so. More levels are the answer to keep an illusion (or even a reality, if the devs can pull it off) of advancement? In D2, most builds were done by the late 60s and anything subsequent was gilding the lilly. Or do we need a rolling cap like FFXI? I think that's actually what the devs in CoH are leaning towards. Only time will tell.

They already had an experience cap on max experience per kill as your level +3. Lowering that would have had the same effect on slowing levels without affecting gameplay.



I hadn't thought about D2 mostly because it wasn't a subscription based game. It seems as soon as monthly subscriptions are at stake, slowing leveling becomes a fetish with the developers and the idea that someone who maxed out one character might start a completely different character and continue paying their subscription if the level grind were less tedious is completely inconcievable.

However, you are right, D2 shows people will continue to play, to the point that I've seen one fellow claim to have had 3 different paladin builds alone up to the low 70's. Really, even if they capped the level at 40 for quite a while, adding new content from 1-40 instead of the planned 40-50 of the next content patch, that would only broaden the appeal of making other interesting builds of characters as eventually they'd become like current EQ, which has too much content for one character to see at level appropriate times. EQ had that from the beginning, at least in the 20-40 range, where you could level in multiple zones if you could find people to group somplace other than the unrest/cazic/guk treadmill to 50.

At the moment I see CoH as very shallow, without enough variety to sustain interest through trying multiple builds, and I think it's sad because there are such a large variety of builds that look interesting. Half the people I meet seem to be leveling characters to 10 or 15 then rerolling and trying something else just to see how it plays. However, you only get part of the picture because of the way the powers are spread out.

Actually, to a large extent, the game _is_ built around smaller groups rather than larger, and the Dread Purple Patch severely decreased the utility of larger groups.

Go into a mission with enough people and the level of the mobs (based around the group leader's level) shoots up by 1. With a full group it's up by 2.  So a group with a 2-level variance (not overcomable by sidekicking) would find its power significantly dropped for the people 2 levels behind. If the mission is 'frontloaded', meaning the mobs at the entrance are 1 level higher than normal, they'll be _5_ levels higher than the now-useless people 2 levels behind. Even a 1-level spread gets rendered largely useless by a frontloaded mission.

Street hunting with larger groups works kinda the same way. I think these are the issues Geko's proposed rollback is designed to address.

I _would_ like to tell the people complaining that because of a four-level disparity they can't hunt with their friends that, if they're not willing to hunt blues and greens with their friends that friendship isn't worth very much. (Of course, the problem there is that, given the 'group dynamics and XP' post, hunting blues and greens might make your friends worse off than they would be without you. Or not. Comprehension is not my friend tonight.)

I think the whole purple thing was addressing what might be a deep-seated refusal of the game engine to work the way the designers wanted it. There was supposed to be an XP cap of +3 levels for a mob. In a group this turned out to mean that you couldn't get XP (post-split) more than a mob of +3 levels. Which meant that large groups of people knocking down select higher-con mobs without much damage variety were advancing at breakneck paces.

I have to wonder if that was a means to force people down a particular playstyle. You could _play_ City of Heroes as a huge, repetitive grind against the same mobs to 40, but that turns it into, well, a huge, repetitive grind against the same mobs.

I forget who said it. Maybe it was someone here, maybe not. But the gist was - if it's possible to pursue a certain goal in a game via a calculated mathematical method, then people will use that method, however joyless and frustrating it may be, because it's 'the best way' to get where they're going.

City of Heroes is like a puzzle game. There's only one thing to do, but the fun is supposed to be in the doing, not necessarily in level prograssion.

I can't see inside the devs' heads, of course. But part of me wonders if the purple patch was an attempt to save the playerbase from itself.

--GF

I think they've called front loading a bug, but I could be wrong. Anyhow, with the changes they've made, they should address the situation above.  

I don't really agree with the changes they've made, but the pissing and moaning is bordering on hysteria.  Hopefully, some rational, sane information like the above is delivered to the devs. But likely all they're seeing are the people complaining because they can only kill 2 purple bosses and a red lt without draining their endurance.

I have to agree that the narrowed level range is really hurting CoH's longevity in the long run.    Geko said he was going to adjust it back a bit, but I don't think he's gotten around to it yet.   Meanwhile, we've gone through a weekend in which no doubt many customers have been hemoraged because of his sloth or technical inability to partially return the level range difference as he was planning.

Really though, our problems predate this.   I think a lot of us hit a dead end at about level 14-22nd in City of Heroes.   It's a fun game for a good while, sure...  however once you hit the 14th-22nd point you hit the bloody treadmill wall.    This wall is perhaps best defined as point in which we realize that things within the game have stopped being meaningful enough to do anything more than grind.  

We've all had our share of pushing the bloody treadmill wall, so at about that point we throw in the towel and once again return to our wait for a MMORPG that feels less like a treadmill and more like an enjoyable endeavor althroughout.   (We got quite a bit further in FFXI, level wise, and I believe this is because the excellently balanced and involving gameplay and a varied, even enthralling, environment.)

So it makes sense that those few us who remain in City of Heroes are mostly those who enjoy playing the Super Hero enough to overlook the treadmill entirely, or else are still hanging on to beliefs that the developers will fix the problem down the line by introducing new features, content, and rebalancings.    

All this sounds like a better theory for why our CoH SG has suffered a drastic downturn in population than my other theory.   That theory being it's summer and many people are enjoying the weather.

One of the things that hurts City of Heroes (big time) is the fact there's nothing to do but level. No matter how fun it is, there are absolutely ZERO diversions. While I applaud their ability to release a fun, stable, and content rich game - they really should have waited until they had social things (like headquarters) in before release. By not having things to do OTHER than leveling, people are burning the 'fun' very quickly. Oh well.