CoX, How can it be improved??

[Mitrediabolo]

How can it be improved??

I have been playing CoX for a long time now. Over this time i have heard comments such as "This is to easy", "The devs jump from one extreme to another" etc.(PvP situation comments)

It seems that in CoX, aslong as you have the right  builds you can dominate PvP alot have left because of this and gone to other games which are more competitive.

Personally i would like to see a zone stat system, e.g the type they have in FPS you press tab and kills, deaths, time you have been in the zone comes up. This would be very intresting to see.

I have noticed that the Devs try to hard to make everyone happy and doing so, do stuff like make "Instant healing" a clicky or because on the hero side people complain that CoH PvE  is to easy they bring out CoV issue 1 and make the Recluse Strike force extra hard and limited to 8 people and once every 24 hours you can do it. On the hero side they have "Hamidon" which 200 heroes are able to participate and it respawns every 6 hours, both give a Hamidon Eqivalent enhancement it allows you to improve more then one attribute of a power.

What would you like to see in the game? What would you like to see changed?

[Modern Angel]

Lower the fucking grind.

[Trippy]

What would that accomplish? It's not like there's anything to grind to. It would be better either to make the grind more fun or add a real end game.

[Xerapis]

In my opinion, CoX tend to be improved by either an increase in size, or just by being pleasantly formed.  A slight angle to one side or the other can even be amusing.  Personally, I prefer it if they angle to the left, if they must angle.

WARNING MORTALS!

I AM STUCK ON STAFF DUTY.

THOSE OF YOU HAVE HAD THE ULTIMATE DISPLEASURE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT KNOW WHAT THIS COULD MEAN.

In short, I have to work all night, but have no actual work to do.

I still have access to a computer.

But that computer cannot go to any "real" gaming websites.

Sadly for y'all, I can still access here.

THERE WILL BE WEEPING AND WAILING AND GNASHING OF TEETH!!!!!!

[tar]

I'll second the 'lower the fucking grind' and explain a little about why. When you get a new power it changes the game slightly, that change helps keep the game interesting. Once you hit level 30ish not only does it take longer to gain a new level, it takes more levels to get a new power.

This seriously slows down the rate at which gameplay changes, which means it becomes stale and boring. There isn't enough variety of enemies to compensate for this slowdown. So, my suggestion is to add more 'new shiny' moments - not necessarily new powers, the long postponed skill system or similar would help and/or add a wider variety of things to fight. Not new models, but genuinely new fights, different AI, different powers. Anything to introduce more changes to gameplay.

[Xerapis]

Damn, tar.

That's some serious dedication to staying on-topic.

:P

[tar]

I tend to be pretty single-minded, yeah. One thing at a time :)

[Xerapis]

Ok.

Are you finished talking about that other thing so we can talk about MY needs now?

[Mitrediabolo]

The grind is not really that bad, but it is very repetitive which pisses me off. Once you have one 50 on the hero side then you have probably seen all the content. Aftr i got my first 50 i PLed another 3. In CoV it is not as much of a grind, newspaper missions make it easy to level and certain missions are enjoyable.

[Xerapis]

I just felt no motivation to advance.

I could see all the powers I would gain later, and I watched my character blast away at things.

And I just didn't care enough to keep going.

I think I need the little things.  Like the sound a ring makes when it drops.  Or to see that corpse glowing with the evil possibilities of loot.  Or that little treasure chest that I saw and nobody else did.

Okay, yeah.  I'll admit it.

I ONLY LIKE GRINDING IF COOL SHITS DROPS WHILE I DO IT.  OTHERWISE IT SUCKS MORE THAN ____________________.

[tar]

I never played to grind in CoH/V, there was always something to do for it's own sake but I need a bit of variety and post 30 there just isn't enough. I was a huge altaholic (30+ at last count), mostly due to my need for new powers to play with that just wasn't dealt with in the higher levels. I'm still subscribed but I haven't played for more than an hour a week for several months now. Sub runs out in september and if nothing new has happened by then, that'll be me done with it.

@Xerapis: sure, go for it.

[Mitrediabolo]

I bought WoW a few months ago, i have stopped playing it because i was alte into the game and no one was leveling up and shit its a long game to play on your own.

Anyway enough about WoW what i was trying to get at was that i actually liked the game, the bit i liked the most was the exploration, the zones they have look pretty good.

Things like "old ironforge" a hidden place things like this made it intresting. If CoX had this then it would be a better game, features, places in the game which are not shown on the map or told in the manual.

 This included with better looking zones more zones like "eden" and the "hive" would make it better. Not exactly like them, a map with a volcanoe which can be like a trial.

I think it would be more intresting and not as repetitive.

[Signe]

I think Cox would be vastly improved if they had lots of ridges.


Oh wait....

[Xerapis]

So they should be more like Ruffles that way?

[Rodent]

I'd re-sub to CoX if Cryptic got their heads out of their asses and fixed ATi support. A MMOG that hardlocks the system at random intervals is not acceptable, and when it did work performance was nowhere near where it should've been.

They should also stop with Statesmans vision shit and let superheroes/villians be super.

[Glazius]

I'd re-sub to CoX if Cryptic got their heads out of their asses and fixed ATi support. A MMOG that hardlocks the system at random intervals is not acceptable, and when it did work performance was nowhere near where it should've been.

They should also stop with Statesmans vision shit and let superheroes/villians be super.

I play it on an ATI.

The current major ATI problem is related to buggy ATI support for dual-threaded processes. I think you can force the game to run as a single thread to work around that.

Or are you using an older card? I've managed to get it to run fine on an old Radeon Mobility in safe mode.

Er, edited to add: "Statesman's vision shit" is a terrible, terrible misinterpretation. It's not the threat that every hero can only be capable of dealing with three even-level minions. It's a promise that every powerset combination, if properly built, will be able to deal with at least three even-level minions. If it was supposed to be the former there'd be no need for the difficulty++ NPCs (who are on the minimap now.)

--GF

[Glazius]

Things like "old ironforge" a hidden place things like this made it intresting. If CoX had this then it would be a better game, features, places in the game which are not shown on the map or told in the manual.

 This included with better looking zones more zones like "eden" and the "hive" would make it better. Not exactly like them, a map with a volcanoe which can be like a trial.

I think it would be more intresting and not as repetitive.

There _are_ places in the city that aren't shown on the map or detailed in the manual. Somebody hid out in Atlas Park for about half an hour once, challenging people to find him - he was standing in a little park in one corner of the city where nobody ever went, and I only knew about it because I'd run a mission out there as a newbie Kheldian.

There are some interesting culverts under the streets in Skyway City, and Brickstown is built on top of an underground maze of sewer conduits and access ramps. Talos Island does some really interesting things with natural grottos on the northern islands, and have you found the lighted tunnel that cuts through the streets of the main island and heads down to the docks? There's a huge underground mausoleum in Moth Cemetary. Striga is crazy well-built in that you can follow a road from the docks, jumping various checkpoints and whatnot, and wind through the defense tunnel and end up in the secret Council base.

If the devs incentivize heading out there, via badges or whatnot, then the locations will be up on spoiler sites in a matter of days and everybody will go there just long enough to get the badge, then promptly complain there aren't any interesting places in the game that aren't on maps or spoiler sites. It's a vicious cycle.

--GF

[tazelbain]

Scale the exp so that everyone gets full xp in a group.
Auto sidekick everyone in a group -2 levels of the highest hero with.
Put random glowies in missions that removes 2 deaths worth of debt.

[Rodent]

My X800 XT card is getting there, but I wouldn't call it old just yet. I could play CoH just fine performance wise, albeit with random hardlocks to the system but CoV had dreadfull performance and also featured the dreaded lockups ( Theese also happened to a couple of friends who are also using ATi cards ).

I may have misinterpreted Statesmans vision, but all I know is the second he started talking about it my tanker and my scrapper went down the fucking drain. The only good that came out of it was making my Mind Controller somewhat more powerfull solo but that was a poor trade-in for the utter devastation that happened my firetank.

Edit: What I would like for CoX, a stable engine and Issue 3.

[Mitrediabolo]

My ATI RADEON 9200 got fucked with the last patch, ice fixed it now got the 6.5 drivers and disabled geometry buffers which have aloways been a problem with ATI cards. I have to play in safe mode now to play.
I am going to upgrade my comp and get rid of ATI, GeForce seems to be alot better for gaming.

[Rodent]

Yeah in retrospect I should probably have gone for an Nvidia card, but still Cryptic isn't exactly in a ideal position constantly fuck a large part of gamers based on their choice of graphic cards.

[shiznitz]

The grind has been mentioned and so has my other main gripe. The "purple nerf" really sucked. After that change, a full group of superheroes usually fought a group of villains the same size. That is lame. CoX is best when your enemies outnumber you 5-10x.

[Xerapis]

CoX is also best when you bastiches recognize all the hard work that Signe and I putting into firmly establishing the CoX = cocks line of humor.

The sooner you get the proper acknowledgement out of the way, the less time we will have to spend grinding away at the CoX.

~evil giggle~

[Jimbo]

Purple nerf took the fun out of beating up on tons of villians and villians way higher than you.

ED drove us into crappy builds with less potential, probably needed for pvp, but sure screwed up everyones frame of thinking.

Reducing the grind would be great.  I want to get to level 50 and then try diffrent builds of diffrent characters.  I don't buy into the thinking that if you make the game too easy to get to level cap people will quit.  UO didn't have that problem, nor does WoW, but for some reason CoX wants to keep slowing down leveling time.

Lack of powers after 32.  I do think if they keep making everything less powerful, they ought to go ahead and let us have a power every other level (well maybe not that many, but enough to make it seem not so barren).

Maybe introduce  crafting thing, where you could make duel or triple enhancments, this would be nice since I have some powers that I would like to slot up with more than just damage and accuracy.

Vehicles!  Let me tool around on a bitching motorcyle.   :-D

[Rodent]

Oh yes, another thing they could do to improve CoX, unlimited respecs.

[shiznitz]

Oh yes, another thing they could do to improve CoX, unlimited respecs.

Or just charge $5 for every respec beyond your third. That is a reaosnable price.

[Signe]

I don't want to pay extra to get things my game.  Whether it be respecs (though CoX desperately needs them constantly) or server transfers or anything else.  I think those are all terrible ideas.  I do think a resolution would be a respec a month... especially since they keep changing/nerfing/whatevering stuff.  If it comes down to games charging for things... on regular, not special... servers, I won't pay.  I'll fall behind the majority of the customers, I won't be able to have nice things like them, and I'll quit.  I wonder how many other people would do the same thing.  Personally, I don't think these innovative publisher/devs/whoevers are so much changing the nature of MMOs, I think they're just driving people away.  I suppose time will tell.

[Xerapis]

Well, for me that depends on what extra I get for my buck.

If it's a few bucks for a whole new area to explore...yeah, maybe, if it looks interesting.

A few bucks for a respec...not a chance.

A few bucks for an extra stable slot for my hunters in WOW?  OMGYES!!!!!!!!!!

It all depends.  Different folks are gonna find different value in different things and all that.

[Signe]

I didn't mean I wouldn't pay for expansions that contain content or adventure packs such as the ones that EQ2 offer, just not for things like I mentioned. 

[shiznitz]

I didn't mean I wouldn't pay for expansions that contain content or adventure packs such as the ones that EQ2 offer, just not for things like I mentioned. 

You say that now since they are free now, but if a game launches with these kinds of extra payments players will tolerate them. Of course, the game has to be good in the first place.

[Llava]

What CoX (yes, yes, lol, okay, old joke) suffers from is binary PvP and a lack of continuing variety in PvE.

This goes beyond just standard "missions all look the same" stuff.  They can keep throwing money at that and bring some unique art to a few missions, but overall it's not going to change anything.  That's an expensive and difficult way to go about making missions feel unique, when there are better and cheaper ways to do it.

What's needed for missions are:
More objectives.  Mayhem missions are awesome largely because of side missions.  Give me optional stuff to do in most of my missions, just as a fun bonus- WITH A REWARD.  Let me find a secret door inside the warehouse that takes me to a hidden cave where the Circle of Thorns hid an artifact.  Let me find an ally locked up in the Council jail cells.  Let me into the basement of the office building where I can plant a few bombs to take out the building's support and hinder my enemies (that is- let me find some cool ways to debuff an archvillain before engaging them if I explore).  Let's say I'm running missions for Indigo- what's to stop her from saying "Alright, you go in through the entrance we discussed and I'll slip in another way, we'll meet up inside"?  She's a hero, shouldn't she and some of the other contacts take up a more active role in the missions they want done?  Harcase is a demon hunter- what does he actually /do/ and why don't we ever see it?  Why doesn't the supposed "hero hunter" Crimson Revenant help me actually hunt some heroes?
More enemy variation.  The best missions have more than 2 groups of enemies inside.  There are about 2 missions that currently have this- one is the Outcast auction, and I can't remember any others.  Is it possible to even throw in a couple enemies from different factions into one group?  Maybe the Freakshow and Warriors have signed a temporary truce to take me out- couldn't I find a group half composed of warrior minions and half of freakshow, instead of one group of freakshow, one group of warriors?  Mixing the groups together causes different power combinations to deal with- meaning more unique gameplay.
Better use and design of enemy groups.  The Tsoo are very rarely used, but they're one of the best designed groups in the game.  The huge amount of variation between their minions, lieutenants, and especially their bosses make them always fun to fight.  More enemies like Sorcerers, who act as support for the other guys, would go a long way towards making all battles more interesting.
MORE CUSTOM BOSSES!  One of my favorite low level contacts is Billy Heck, because you go up against both Pitbull and Bloody Vicious in one mission.  They're not like any of the guys around them, because they were hand crafted.  These missions are memorable.  Hell, you could even award a badge or gladiator for taking them out.
Meaningful decisions in missions.  I don't know how your code works, but the "choices" you've added in missions really... aren't choices.  They're "Do the mission, or don't."  What it ought to be is "Do this mission, or do this mission, and whichever one you pick will affect the outcome of the story".  I know it's a pain to write diverging story lines, but you really gotta or it's not a real choice.  Most contacts make you feel like a pawn or an errand boy, and this is why.  You don't have input- they tell you what to do and you go do it.  But maybe while Hardcase is trying to convince me that I should go stop these demons rampaging in St. Martial, he accidentally mentions some place I could rob.  Then it's my choice whether I let the demons run loose and steal souls left and right or ignore the chance for direct profit to stop them.

For players and powers:
More variation between powersets.  Brutes for instance:  Maybe you've got one set that's great at generating Fury, another that's really endurance efficient, another with really fast attack animations, another that's not great at generating Fury but isn't that reliant on it because it has pretty high base damage anyways?
Or maybe for ranged blast sets, something doesn't have the sheer range of something else, but makes up for it in another way?  Inherent benefits to the powers are intriguing and make for fun synergies.
But with the game as it is, people would hate fundamental changes to their sets, so the best option to implement something like this would be a horizontal customization option.  This goes outside of enhancements (because, face it, you're not wasting a slot on range enhancement when you need those slots for damage, or accuracy, or endurance).  Think up some various stats players can apply to all of their powers, and let them pick a couple.  This changes gameplay much more frequently and to greater effect than tossing in a situational power every 3 levels.  Enhancements don't change gameplay this much because at most you get 3 slots per level, which means either one power will be majorly affected or three powers will be minorly affected.
Lower the grind.  Yes.  People should level up faster.  You already don't expect each character to see all the content, so let's make it so that getting to that content on another character doesn't take months.

PvP:
It's too binary.  Stealth, for instance- either they can see you or they can't.  You've discussed some system whereby you can determine how far away you can see a stealthed character, but that doesn't really display itself in practice.  There should be stealth and perception enhancements, for one (including perception debuff- for powers like Smoke).  And, rule of thumb, if someone is standing right next to someone else, in most cases they should be visible to one another- unless the stealthed person is /really really/ stealthy. If they're over a hundred yards away from one another, and one of them is stealthed, in most cases the stealthed one should not be visible- unless the viewer is /really really/ perceptive.
Crowd Control powers are the same way in PvP.  For the most part, either they work or they don't.  This ends up making debuffs actually more effective in PvP than crowd control- my Ice/Ice Dominator was useful because he could Slow the hell out of anything, not because he could Hold stuff.  Frankly, CC is so broken that I don't know how to fix it.  Half the time it's way too powerful and half the time it's way too weak.  The situation as it is is especially bad for Dominators, because they are completely reliant on crowd control and completely vulnerable to it.  A Scrapper or Tanker can stun a Dominator with a single power, taking him out of the fight, but it requires many, many applications of a Dominator's power to do the same to a Tanker or Scrapper- despite the fact that the Dominator is supposed to be better at CC than a Tanker or Scrapper.  Melee classes with some light CC abilities and CC resist are better able to utilize CC powers than the classes built entirely around those powers.

Course, I'm still having fun.  I still like the game a lot.  But it could be better.

[Glazius]

What's needed for missions are:
More objectives.

God yes. It's fun to protect something or to cart around an NPC helper. Randomized mayhem-style side objectives sound fun too. My favorite part of the generally squee-worthy "break back into the Zig" was seeing Jenkins as a Huntsman, though I have no idea how the spaz made it up in the ranks.

More enemy variation.  The best missions have more than 2 groups of enemies inside.  There are about 2 missions that currently have this- one is the Outcast auction, and I can't remember any others.  Is it possible to even throw in a couple enemies from different factions into one group?

You're off by a couple orders of magnitude. The Tsoo enter into negotiations with Outcasts, Trolls, Warriors, and Family at various points. Warriors hold contests of strength with the Tsoo and Freaks. The CoT, Tsoo, and Warriors all throw down with the Banished Pantheon under various pretenses. Nemesis negotiates with the CoT to fight the Rikti, then turns around and plays Hero Of Justice when the CoT are trying to blow Brickstown out from under them. Sky Raiders break into a business that's actually a Council front. Crey try to obtain a sample of the Devouring Earth's mind-control spores. The Freaks put pressure on councilman Carmen St. Iago and the Family try and take care of their own. And the beat goes on.

Every mission map, however, has a "primary enemy". Any enemy groups that are _not_ that enemy, even if they're mixed, have to be specially placed. Or so I gather.

Better use and design of enemy groups.

People gravitate toward the "easier" enemy groups and away from the "harder" ones. Plenty of enemies in the later game act as support - Nemesis 'surgeons' and lieutenants, Rikti guardians, Crey across the spectrum. But people tend to prefer the more monolithic enemies.

MORE CUSTOM BOSSES!

God yes. Billie Heck also gives you 3K Kelvin, a custom Hellion elite, and then there's "Duke" Mordragor, the Herald of Bat'Zul (though he doesn't look it), and Professor Echo.

Meaningful decisions in missions.

Some ideas to implement this. First is at a mission level - how you act in the mission determines what comes next. This is a bad idea for obvious HAY GUYS I'LL CLICK THE GLOWY THING reasons. Second is having the contact give you "choices". This will need some good writing to not be Communist Choice caliber, but doable. Third, only on the CoH side, the five or so contacts of the same origin at every tier can all open up and you can tackle various segments of a story arc from different angles. Again, writing-intensive.

More variation between powersets.

I like the idea of going beyond enhancements to do some "custom tailoring" at various levels.

Lower the grind.

This one could actually run into some problems. How are people going to, for example, get the hang of Warriors and Tsoo so they know how to deal with them grouped together, if all you have time to do are like two Tsoo missions, two Warrior missions, and one teamup before you outlevel everybody involved?

A properly built "custom tailor" system would make the dead stretches seem a lot less dead.

PvP is too binary.  Stealth, for instance- either they can see you or they can't.

And when an attack connects it either kills you or it doesn't. Way too binary! :-(

Crowd Control powers are the same way in PvP.

Balancing PvP 1-on-1 is a hopeless cause. There are some control powers with secondary effects - most of Earth Control does -def, Grav Control does -speed, Ice Control does a slight slow - but all Controller powers need that effect a) to be present and b) to be enhanced in PvP. Dominators actually seem to have a slight chance of applying an effect regardless of any status protection. Is that good or bad?

--GF

[Trippy]

Part of the reason why CoX has so much trouble with ATI cards is that the ATI OpenGL driver sucks big time. ATI has been promising a rewrite for a long time now but AFAIK they haven't done it yet. I used to play CoH when it was first released on a 9600 Pro so I had to suffer through that. Of course now, thanks to I7 changes, the game will freeze on me even with my NVIDIA card (I'm one of the many Kinetics players who suffers from the sound loop freeze bug) which never happened before pre-I7 on either my NVIDIA or ATI cards.

[Llava]

More enemy variation.  The best missions have more than 2 groups of enemies inside.  There are about 2 missions that currently have this- one is the Outcast auction, and I can't remember any others.  Is it possible to even throw in a couple enemies from different factions into one group?

You're off by a couple orders of magnitude. The Tsoo enter into negotiations with Outcasts, Trolls, Warriors, and Family at various points. Warriors hold contests of strength with the Tsoo and Freaks. The CoT, Tsoo, and Warriors all throw down with the Banished Pantheon under various pretenses. Nemesis negotiates with the CoT to fight the Rikti, then turns around and plays Hero Of Justice when the CoT are trying to blow Brickstown out from under them. Sky Raiders break into a business that's actually a Council front. Crey try to obtain a sample of the Devouring Earth's mind-control spores. The Freaks put pressure on councilman Carmen St. Iago and the Family try and take care of their own. And the beat goes on.

Every mission map, however, has a "primary enemy". Any enemy groups that are _not_ that enemy, even if they're mixed, have to be specially placed. Or so I gather.

Reread what I wrote.

More than two.   Not two or more.  The Outcast auction has Tsoo, CoT, Outcasts, and Hellions.  I'm sure the system right now requires that groups not belonging to the primary enemy faction be hand placed, which is why a lot of missions lately will see only 1, maybe 2, of the other enemy group in the whole mission.  That needs to be reworked.  Either more hand-placement needs to go on, or they need to figure out how to tell the system "Make this mission 25% this, 50% this, and 25% this."

You're being a smartass about the binary comment:  DAoC stealth isn't binary because there are different levels of how effective the stealth is.  Not so in CoH.  They claim it's so, but on both ends of the spectrum I haven't seen anything to indicate as much.  Either you're visible at full range or you're totally invisible.  So if they had a system like that in place, it needs to be reworked to be meaningful.  I think Perception and Stealth enhancements would go a long way towards doing this.

Easier VS Harder:  That's why the "hard" groups need to either be worth it, or all groups need to be equally hard.  Easier is the former, which they've already done.  But I'd really like to see a group decide "Hm, let's do the Tsoo mission.  It's harder, but really good exp."

Rikti Guardians are a good example of support.  The Surgeons aren't so much- one heal every so often that heals about as much as one decent attack isn't really worth a lot.  Nothing compares to Sorcerers or Pantheon Shamans, though, in pure levels of "omg, kill them first ALWAYS".  They make fights interesting.  The Council's almost a shame, because there's so much effort in there to make them a varied group, but very little of it actually shows in the gameplay.  Varied bosses are a great idea- Longbow Wardens and Tsoo Bosses are my favorite to fight, because it's always something different.  Freakshow bosses... it's either smashing damage or lethal damage, otherwise no difference.  I go up against Tsoo, I could be dealing with a kinetic, a stormer, a spines scrapper, a fire blaster....... same with Wardens- sonic, storm, empath, super strength, martial arts, the list goes on.  Much more fun.

Hell, with Freakshow bosses the smashing/lethal difference doesn't even matter, because there's what, 1 power in the game that gives protection to one but not the other? (Increase Density)  I don't even have to use a different shield.

People complain about the grind, but that's only because they're not having fun.  So they think the grind needs to be shorter.  Thing is, they still won't have fun- it'll just take less time for them to do the things they DO enjoy.  So they get all pissy when the game gets harder because they think the grind is longer, and they want it to be shorter, but really if the game gets harder it requires more thought which means more active involvement which means more  fun, which means the grind won't suck.

It should still be shorter than what it is, but that won't solve any problems.  Asking for the game to be easier is the same as asking for it to take less thought, which means you get bored faster and stop having fun sooner.  That's why herding groups sucked- they felt awesome at first, but got boring really quick and diverted player attention away from gameplay and onto the experience bar.





Also, it'd be cool if NPC text would recognize if you have a "The" in front of your name.  If my name is The Marked Man, I want people to go "Oh no, it's The Marked Man!"  Not "Oh no, it's Marked Man!"

And I want a pwny.

[Llava]

I just remembered the other mission with more than 2 villain groups in it:

The Nemesis recruitment drive.