The big feature that’s caused the most excitement in this issue has been power customisation.  The character creator has received a bit of a revamp, and now there’s a separate screen where you can go in and depending on the powerset either recolour the power, or pick a different look or animation for it.   I’ve not played with this a lot, but I have used it to change my fire controller’s powers to a blue flame from the normal one, and its a neat visual effect that further lets you refine your character and add your stamp to them.

The other big change is the new “super” sidekick feature.  Out goes the old system, and now players are automatically level-adjusted appropriately to the team lead.  This isn’t limited by range like the old sidekicking, and seems to be much more flexible, in that there should be no more scrabbling to match low level team members to higher level members.  It should also provide more incentive for high level characters going back to play lower level content with their friends.

Of course, Mission Architect itself has also been subject to some changes.  With the farming and bubble missions attracting so many players desperate to hit level 50 quickly the rest of the content in City of Heroes had been suffering.  I know that during the week I’ve struggled to find a team for general door missions.  The XP changes being introduced should hopefully look to redress that and get people back out of MA and back into the main game.

With City of Heroes now facing competition in the superhero MMO genre in the shape of Champions Online, and next year DCU Online its really nice to see the devs taking time to continually improve the gaming experience and freshen up the game.  Between this and Mission Architect providing user-generated content, there’s definitely a lot of life left in this game.

To be honest, I quite enjoy some of the farming missions.   Some of them are pretty evil, with powerful mobs and a tendancy to spawn ambushes that can really catch you out if you’re not on your toes.  Yes, the missions allow you to leap through levels in a way the game designers didn’t really intend, but with a good team I can still find a good farming mission fun.

Last night though, I ended up on a “Bubble Mission” team though.  I’d heard about Bubble missions from the ingame chat and forums, but I’d never actually seen one, so I must admit my curiousity got the better of me.

The basic structure remains the same as some of the farming missions.  Large groups of powerful, high-level mele mobs that you can pound into the dirt for quick XP gain.   However, unlike normal farming missions, these missions include various NPCs that assist the player team.  These NPCs all contain variations on defender forcefield powers, with the idea being to collect a load of them to run around with your team.   Your team then ends up surrounded by dozens of forcefield bubbles, which maxes out your defense, making you nigh-on unkillable as long as the team sticks with the bubbles.

Its hugely dull.   There’s zero threat to the team and you end up just sitting there cycling your main attack powers until either you fall asleep, quit the team, or you’ve killed everything in sight.

Its pretty much the opposite to the Task Forces.  Both give you a large amount of XP, but with Task Forces there’s a storyline to get your teeth into.  Heck, even in the farming missions, there’s still the risk of planting.  Granted, once you rez, you quickly wipe out any accumulated debt, but there’s still that element of needing a good team, and staying on your toes.

As a tin lid on things the other night, once the team leader had levelled in the mission, he quickly announced he was off and quit the team.  Of course, as the player who had amassed all the bubbles, they all went with him, and we all planted immediately.  The mission now unplayable, everyone quickly quit, and in my case resolved to put a “No Bubble Missions” comment in my team search box.

While I appreciated that a lot of the players would be really into the longer story lines, the idea of having to commit myself to 4 hours of play to complete one always put me off. However, recently, having joined a new Supergroup (The Power Corps), I’ve started joining in their Sunday night runs at Task Forces.

Doing them from within the framework of a Supergroup helps make things easier, at least in terms of the recruitment stage, as Task Forces need a minimum team size to start, and from experience, when putting together a large team, patience is a virtue as it can take the best part of an hour on a bad night.  Not to mention you’re more confident of getting a good team, rather than risking getting a bad Tank or Defender in a pickup group.

What has been nice, is that the Task Forces so far haven’t taken much longer than an hour or two to run.   It helps that we don’t seem to be running them at the maximum difficulty, but they’re very rewarding to run.  Not just in terms of XP gain (although they are), but also just in terms of game experience.   Big groups can always be a lot of fun, with different archetypes performing their own functions in the team, and there’s nothing quite as rewarding as being on a good team.

But they’re also rewarding in terms of the zones.  Some zones in the game seem specifically targetting towards their Task Forces.   This weekend for example, I ran one of the Striga Isle task forces.   Striga Isle is one of the main bases of a villain group known as the Council.  Its a great zone with lots of character.  As you get towards the main Island you find yourself under attack from guard posts and automated turrets.  Groups of Council baddies can be seen exercising on the grounds, and in the middle there’s a classic supervillain cliche, in the form of a volcano.

So, what of the Task Force?  Well, it allows you a tour of the zone, but also involves you in a main storyline linked to the zone.  In this case, you uncover a plot to launch a giant robot against Paragon City, which as it turns out, is being built inside the hollowed-out volcano.  Classic

I’m looking forward to running more such task forces with my Supergroup.  They provide a great chance to get involved in a more detailed storyline, get a feel for the varied zones in the game (the Imperious task force was another favourite.  Love the Roman theme), and encounter some of the Arch Villains that you hear about throughout the game’s mythology.   Granted, there are some which still have reputations for being quite long and difficult, but with an experienced Supergroup, the members should know which Task Forces will be most appropriate.

I’m aware I’m very late into these things. A lot of my CoH experience has been soloing sadly, but I’m very much enjoying this new aspect to the game, and its really opened up content and zones that previously I had little real use for beyond sight-seeing.

Colonel Lightning is a (you guessed it) electricity blaster, with the electricity secondary powerset.  Her character’s defined as the thrillseeker of the group (exemplified by the manic grin I gave her).    Freed of any convoluted multiverse gubbins, I picture her to be a lot like Impulse in that she has no real grasp of the concept of danger.    She’ll blindly barrel into a situation, get in over her head and usually only survive thanks to the timely arrival of other heroes.   Not that she really appreciates this is the case.

Most of the other heroes barely tolerate her prescence in Paragon as she tends to cause them as much work as she does criminal arrests, although some of the older heroes appreciate the enthusiasm she has, and her sheer joy in her powers.  They tend to defend her and  try to teach her to try and think before she acts.

They usually fail though.

Oo.  Its been a heckuva long time since their last major content release (City of Villains), so it’ll be very interesting to see the complete list of changes this will bring.

For now we’ll be able to switch our heroes to villains and vice versa, which sounds interesting, although City of Villains never grabbed me as much as City of Heroes, and the mechanics of switching will be interesting to see.

Of more interest is the brand new gameworld in the Praetorian dimension.  That should be very interesting (and after my torturous backstory to the Reillys, it shouldn’t surprise that I’m keen on this.   I really should just say Lord Reilly’s from that dimension and save myself some pain ).  I wonder if we’ll be able to go there with existing characters, or like CoH/CoV, it’ll largely be a separate set of zones you have to roll a new character to play.

In my main characters’ backstory, I’ve ended up using a (frankly convoluted) multiverse backstory.  I originally had my US character, an energy blaster called Reilly.  I played him up past level 20 (to 24 I think) on the US servers before I started to move on from the game.

Then City of Heroes came out in the UK, and with my friends playing, I got a UK subscription and proceeded to recreate the character on a UK server (Union), although this time I decided to make him an ice blaster as I’d heard good things about the powerset.    When I created this version of the character, his origin deliberately referred to the fact that it was the same character, however through the process of moving to an alternative dimension (ie being recreated on the UK servers), his powers had changed and so he was having to relearn them (a nice in-story way of covering the fact that he was now level 1 again I thought).  This version of Reilly I’ve now played up to level 50 and is my main character that I use to revisit aspects of the gameplay I missed (such as the Vanguard missions in the Rikti War Zone), or go badge-hunting.

When City of Villains went live, I wanted to create an evil version of my main hero.  This is partly from an RP point of view, in that when I’m playing characters in games like this or Oblivion or whatever, I always go for a similar visual look as I find it easier to put myself into their shoes, figure out who they are and play them.   As I’d already used a dimension-hopping angle for my main hero, it made sense to make this a good, old-fashioned, mirror-universe version of Reilly.  

The backstory being that this was a Reilly who had gone over the edge and conquered his world.  Then when Portal tech was discovered decided to remove any “threats” to his world.  My main hero had thought he’d defeated him previously (in the battle which resulted in Reilly being stranded in Union’s Paragon City), however he was only badly wounded and, now sporting robotic limbs and reliant on robot foot-soldiers, he’d followed my main hero to this Paragon City for revenge.  I quite liked the idea of a battle that had spanned the worlds of both Reilly and Lord Reilly (as I’d unoriginally called him), which had resulted in both Reilly getting trapped in a new world, and Lord Reilly being so badly injured that he now not only required the robotic limbs, but that his injuries had also almost completely robbed him of his powers.  This culminated in the little touch of giving Lord Reilly the super-jump power, as I figured this played well as a more limited version of flight (present on Reilly), hinting that Lord Reilly would have also had flight powers before his injuries.

This backstory also bled into aspects of Reilly’s costume design, with his second costume slot now sporting a set of armour with a tattered cape (although this was before those textures were available, so the cape is actually the VIP one styled to try and look as if its ripped at the bottom).    My thinking being that during this big multiversal battle, Reilly had found himself overmatched.   He ended up adopting this suit of armour, given to him by another, dying, hero to give him an edge.  The tattered cape being from the remains of his own original costume that he’d added to the armour to make it his own.

However, this all got really muddied when the server transfer came online.  Now, more than just playing a new version of my original character, I could now actually bring my US character across and play him once again.  Obviously I jumped at the chance, but this did mean the backstory I had now didn’t quite work.

It meant that I now had two copies of what was essentially the same character (in terms of backstory, not powers).    On importing my US character, he got renamed to Reilly V1 and the UK Reilly lost his backstory. So now, the UK Reilly is defined by being the version of the character native to the Union Paragon City, who shortly after gaining his powers, found himself targetted by Lord Reilly.

Essentially the initial backstory of Reilly V1 and Lord Reilly remains intact, up until the fallout of their battle which left Lord Reilly injured.  Now Lord Reilly is the one who ended up retreating to the Union Paragon City in order to escape and recuperate.  Once there, he gained his robotic limbs and recuperated, and now targets Union’s Reilly as he views him as the main threat to his plans to appropriate Portal technology and re-establish connection to his home universe (and thus his forces).  

Meanwhile Reilly V1 realised that Lord Reilly escaped and followed him to this universe.   So their roles end up somewhat switched, with Reilly V1 now chasing Lord Reilly, rather than vice versa, and Lord Reilly, rather than Reilly V1 being the one who’s trapped.

The reasoning for Union Reilly’s suit of armour stays pretty much the same though, in that he adopted it at somepoint during a large battle against Lord Reilly.     

Lord Reilly invariably ends up gaining portal technology from time to time, however with Reilly V1 now permanently staying in Union to keep an eye on him, they tend to keep him locked up in Union’s universe as V1 has determined its the universe most capable of keeping him contained (for some reason).

Its a bit of a shame that what started as a neat explanation for my US character being recreated on UK servers with different powers has ended up so muddied.  In DC terms Reilly is Earth-1 Superman, Reilly V1 is Earth-2 Superman and Lord Reilly is Ultraman, however the actual backstory I had in place has ended up pretty twisted now, to the point where you can pretty much see why DC had the Crisis back in 1986

And actually, given the character’s namesake from Marvel Comics, I guess its pretty appropriate

Firstly there’s been a followup post on the forums from the devs.  The follow-up makes it clearer I think, that when they’re talking about punishing people, they’re really targetting the people who have:

• Deliberately created missions that use exploits in the game, rather than those that played them.
• Those that heavily abused the exploitative MA missions (probably your people that got characters from 1-50 in no time, and then did it several times.  The really heavy abusers).  

There’s also a lot more focus on the fact that its the exploits they’re angry with.  They may not be pleased about the farming (I don’t know), but its the specific exploiting and “cheating” that they’re more interested in.

This to me seems much more balanced than the original post, and seems like an understandable move from the developers. 

Secondly, there’s also a patch gone live that looks to address some of the exploits that have been used.  I think specifically the issue with the out-of-proportion XP for Rikti Comms Officers has been addressed, although there’s a few more things in there as well, including restructuring the Architect badges.

Finally  I’ve also noticed a lot of players are now being more considerate regarding the broadcast channel.   While there’s still some “looking for farm team” messages going on, quite a few players are now opting to hang out in the MA and just use the local channel, which to me makes a lot more sense. 

Unfortunately, as I’ve said, the whole thing has still made me a bit wary towards pickup groups and the MA.  I’m still seeing broadcast messages about farming teams and the like, but for now I think I’d rather play more interesting missions.  To this end I’ll probably end up soloing some missions from my Supergroup and that are recommended online.   Either that, or I’ll use it just to create missions for fun.

Its just a pity that this maybe wasn’t as well handled as it could’ve been, and resulted in a lot of heated discussion on the forums.   Although I was admit, I found some of the conversations regarding farming vs exploiting quite interesting, with some interesting pro-farming points raised.

Its not been one of the shining moments in the CoH community.  But it’ll probably quickly become a footnote and laughed at.  I remember when Enhancement Diversification was coming out and there was all kinds of flames flying all over the place on the forums, but once it was in place, the players accepted it and moved on.  Its still significant enough that it gets talked about from time to time, but no one’s really angry about it anymore.   After all, it is just a game

So, intrigued to see what he’d said, I checked out the official forums this morning, and basically it amounts to the crackdown I’d been waiting on, but they’re not pulling their punches either.

In a post here Positron takes a stand against the abuse of the Mission Architect and announces the various punishments that are being looked at (NOT decided) including:

• Removal of benefits from characters who have abused the system (I’m assuming this would effectively amount to rolling them back to their state pre-I14 launch).
• Complete removal of characters if its felt warranted.
• Changes to the Architect badges (this one is definitely happening).
• Suspensions or bans from the entire MA system for using exploits when creating a mission.
• Banned missions will still use up one of three available publishing slots. Meaning if you get 3 missions banned due to them using exploits, you can’t publish any more content again.

Now, I should underline the fact that none of this is decided.  Positron’s clear that these are options that are just being considered.

I mentioned previously that it was only a matter of time before the devs would come down on this stuff like a tonne of bricks.  The amount of XP that could be made in these missions was excessive.   There’s now proof floating around of a character that was levelled from 1-50 in a matter of hours thanks to this.

However, the harshness of some of these punishments strikes me as a little uncalled for.   There’s a vagueness associated with them, as they’re obviously still deciding what to do, but I think there has to be a moderated response here.   I’m suspecting a few examples to be made, but my take based on these proposals would be:

Put a version of Positron’s post in game as a message of the day.   Consider it fair warning to all players that there’s going to be a zero-tolerance policy from now on.

In an ideal world I’d argue to just take things from that point forward.  Any characters (even excessively-PL’d ones) are left alone, and for any existing farming/exploit missions, delete them (as they’re currently doing), and maybe an email to the player warning them that if it happens again they’ll lose a publishing slot in line with the suggestions.

The danger with the kind of heavy-handed action being speculated on (even though it may never come to pass), is that it’ll just cause a backlash in the playerbase.   The idea of losing any character, or even a few levels is going to be hard for any players to take, and a lot of the playerbase have been doing farming missions since I14 was launched.

I think its more realistic that we’ll see examples made of the extreme cases (such as the level 50s that got there in a couple of hours or days), and for the rest they’ll be left alone.    A lot of the players won’t read the forums or anything like that, so there’s a good chance that they won’t know about Positron’s post, or what constitutes farming vs an exploit (apparently Rikti Comms Officers constitute some form of exploit, although I’m not clear on how yet, and I only read about it this morning, which kind’ve proves my point).

I’m also not keen on the way Positron’s post says this is all based around feedback received during the Anniversary event.  Now, I don’t for a second believe this is actually the case.  It’ll be based on the dev’s intentions, the forums and various other sources.  However I think just saying that its from the Anniversary event is a bit of a misstep in what is undoubtedly going to be a controversial post.    That event would have only been attended by the minority of the player base.   Heck, I was interested in attending, but I only got the in-game notice that it was happening when I saw a global “See you in Pocket D” message.   “Cool” I thought, but then found out it was Pocket D on the Test Server.   Since I didn’t have a test server installation setup, I skipped it.  Does this mean that the people who already had it setup get to dictate the game experience I should be having?   As I say, its almost certainly not the case, but those sentences lept out at me as a problem in what he was saying.

At the end of the day, we all knew it wouldn’t last.   I am surprised that the system went live with such clear capabilities to make farming/exploit missions that would result in this backlash, however now that the devs want to crack down on it, I say fine.  But the tone of the post strikes me as overly heavy-handed.    At the end of the day, its just a game, and is deleting someone’s characters or rolling them back worth the loss of their subscription?

My hope is that its just meant to scare everyone away from abusing the MA until they plug the holes, and in my case its certainly worked.   Any pickup groups I join that are running MA missions of any kind I’ll quit.  I’ll only run MA missions if I’m testing my own, or I’m in a group with people I know aren’t going to start running farming/exploit missions.

And that’s the shame of this situation.  The MA is an excellent system and allows players to produce some great content.    But now I’m worried to touch it lest my characters are smited.

As I mentioned on Twitter the other day, there was a big anti-farming protest on Union over the weekend, that I was lucky enough to catch.  This kicked off because of the high volume of farming teams being created in Atlas Park, and the resulting constant “looking for farm team” messages in the Broadcast channel in that zone, combined with a general belief that its not playing the game properly.

The amount of XP that can be made from some of these farming missions is without a doubt obscene. Even my high-level character could gain 2 levels in just one run of a mission. People are managing to get from 1-50 in a matter of days by playing them.

However, the argument is, should they be stopped? If people want to farm their way through the game, missing out on story arcs, interesting zones and villains etc, then why not let them? They’re not hurting anyone are they?

For me, I’m not against a bit of farming now and again. I’d never use it as my main gameplaying though as its just dull and repetitive. It is however, a nice way of killing some of the grind which, as a casual player, could really bog things down.  However for the players who use it as their main style of play, I just wonder what the point is.   You get to 50 before you’ve blinked.  You won’t have gotten a feel for the tactics of your powers, learned the history of Paragon City or encountered the many diverse villain groups that litter the game.   Instead they’ve probably run through the same 2-3 missions countless times.  The same zone, the same villains.  Its just dull.   Unless your tanks miscalculate a pull there’s no sense of strategy or achievement.  They pull over a couple of groups, and everyone else just nukes the heck out of them.  There’s much less demand for a varied and proper team with the benefits that different classes can bring.

I do get tired of all the fuss over it though.  Take that protest.  While I appreciate the sentiment, what harm are the farmers really causing?  If people want to play like that, then let them. They’re off in the architect, in their own instanced missions, so they’re not griefing anyone. They’re missing out on most of the content, but that’s their choice. And it leaves the rest of the game area clear for people playing the main missions, RPing or whatever.   As a long term player of the game, I know that farming has always been around (the Synapse Taskforce used to be a favourite before the devs tweaked its first missions), or alternatively havock would be caused by one group pulling all the mobs in a particular zone to create one giant group for them to nuke.   If you happened to be hunting in that zone, you’d wonder where all the bad guys had gone, or if you were just wandering through at the wrong time, you’d get caught in the pull and annihilated (something the devs tried to fix by reducing the effectiveness of taunt).  Now all other players have to do is avoid the AE building in Atlas Park.

I’ll agree that the constant “looking for farm” spam on broadcast is annoying though. However so is the constant “Stop spamming broadcast with farming requests” spam. Hopefully the farming requests can get filtered into their own channel or something, or they’ll calm down in a few weeks once the fuss over the Architect’s farming missions has died down, or all the power levellers have gotten bored and left now they’ve got 30 level 50 characters.

The next move from the devs should be interesting. Do they stomp on the XP from architect missions as its spoiling the game experience, or do they leave it be, and just be happy that a load of subscribers have come back?  Especially with Champions Online due out soon, the competition in the Superhero -based MMO arena is about to take off.  

For myself, I hope its left alone.   While I may partake in the odd bit of farming in order to give certain characters who have stalled a boost, I’ll also happily hang around the AE buildings in other zones to build up my own missions.  My first as I’ve mentioned before is already published, and I’ve got some ideas for my second.  The power levellers and the like are always going to be around, so at least this keeps them contained and out of everyone else’s way.  Not to mention netting their subscription fees which is never a bad thing

I’m incredibly impressed.

The development team have managed to put together something that is both easy to use, and very powerful.  With no real tutorial I quickly went in and built up a story arc, consisting of three missions which included a custom-designed group of villains (of all ranks up to Elite Boss), all with their own look and powers.  One of the missions involves finding certain objects in the map and defeating a boss, whereas another involves you rescuing a rookie hero (also custom designed for the story with his own powers) who will then follow and help you for the rest of the map.

Of course, you don’t have to go with your own characters, and dropping in any of the pre-existing characters and groups is also a snap.   Levels let you choose from any of the existing map layouts, from any of the designs used in the game.

As well as the usual rewards of XP, influence and prestige, when running missions created in the architect you also amass “tickets”, which can also be exchanged for goodies, including the ability to unlock additional maps, costume parts etc for building your own missions (for example, full capes aren’t available from the outset for your custom characters, but can be bought with architect tickets and accessible from then on).  Don’t be worried though.  From the outset, there’s more than enough flexibility in the options available to build unique characters and missions.   Its just that these add even more.

Of course, as expected, there’s a good few missions where people have just picked an open map and chucked in loads of high-level minions to be farmed for rapid XP.   They’re not particularly original or well thought out maps, but they do what they set out to.  Hopefully though once there’s a good few of these caught on, we’ll see less of them overall, and the truely creative maps will start to shine through, with people building up interesting story arcs, filled with crazy characters.