Category: Gameplay

CoX – New! Exciting!

Finally did some solo work with Al McGordo last night — Fire/Rad Controller. Got on a sewer mish, which I think is the fastest way to advance beginning toons if it works right — and this one did. Not quite sure how, as there was no strong leader, but I think it was just that the group didn’t “decay” very quickly. We lost one (“gtg”) early on, but kept seven more for an unreasonably long time, and delved deeper than I’ve been in quite some time. 

The Fire/Rad combo is already turning out to be fun. Rad’s debuffs are a hoot, I get a nice area heal, and the Fire gives me a solid Hold (and, now, Hot Feet!). In the end, dinged up Al four levels, to 8. Now on to Kings Row and a temp travel power!

CoX – Making … and losing … money

Okay, I confess, I’m spending a goodly time hanging at Wentworths and doing crafting and all that. I’m not as fanatical about it as some, and sometimes it’s an “I have some free time but don’t want to sign off, so let’s just do something” activity, but I’m still at least mildly hooked. Honestly speaking, it’s the money/influence. Even though everyone swears up and down you don’t need XOs and IOs to make an effective character, I still feel like I’m missing out on something when I don’t actually sell that Deific Weapon for 4 million at auction. And as long as I’m doing that … well, heck, I got this recipe dropped on me and I have almost all the ingredients … and …

Yeah.

The problem is, of course, I’m an altaholic, which means I have plenty of characters to do this with. Even just looking at my main duos with Margie, we have several that we cycle between.

It is a little-known fact that auction stuff gets flushed after, oh, something like 30 days of inactivity.

You see where I’m going.

Yes, with various hiatuses in playing, there have been times when I’ve returned to a character — “45 day ago” — only to discover that all that money I had invested in bidding on stuff has essentially vanished. Basically, if a transaction was accomplished (as they almost always are over time), then that “bought” or “sold” has vanished after the expiry date, taking with it the item or the influence.

*sigh*

Now we know why I’m not a Day Trader in Real Life.

CoX – Poking at bad guys

More Kitsune/Ex-Terra action over the weekend, up around 34, which means Bricks into Founders, zone-wise. We’re picking and choosing our story arcs and generally having a good time. 

As a pair, we’re sort of like a Regen Scrapper … everything golden until it goes into the toilet fast. Ninety-nine percent of the mobs we engage we simply carve through like butter (we’re running on Unyielding at the moment). But there was some death involved over the weekend. Aside from the one case of “gosh, I guess ambushes will come after me if I stand in the train station while on bio break just after I’ve taken a hunt mish,” the rest were all about drawing too much aggro, too quickly. For all my smacky-smack controlling with Illusion, it’s also easy to draw a lot of unwanted attention with the Rad secondary. And a lot of my powers have a long cast time, so it’s easy to watch the health bar drop-drop-drop-gone while waiting to get power X fired so that I can throw a heal.

Biggest regular problem was in the Bricks (Talos) Safeguard mish on the side mission to stop the jail break. Eleventy zillion Tsoo bosses. We both took some temporary dirt naps with those.

Still, fun times.

Margie’s been doing soloing with Old Star, who’s a Fire/Rad Controller, and evidently quite soloable. I rolled a clone of Al McGordo as the same (instead of a Rad/Rad Defender), but didn’t get any play time.

What makes for a successful RP SG?

A few days ago, one of my three faithful readers sent me a note.

I’ve been following your City of Heroes blog for some time, and wanted to pick your brains on the RP SG that I’ve been invited to run on Virtue. The SG in question was once a fairly strong SG with lots of players and a rich RP environment, but attrition in leadership coupled with poor recruiting (and other dramas) has lead to its considerable decline in the last six months. The current status is that the SG is basically dead, but has a ton of prestige and a long history. My goal is to reverse its fortunes in relative short order.

 

The person (who will remain nameless, since it was sent off-list) then proceeded with the brains-picking.

Now, I’m not sure I’m best qualified on the subject. Yes, I’ve done tabletop RP games, and PBeMSs, and, yes, I’ve both played in and run an RP Supergroup in part of an RP Coalition.

On the other hand, the Consortium of Justice was very intentionally an “RP Lite” group (this should be fun, not work), and, of course, the RP Coalition which I was a leader in managed to blow itself up quite nicely over a series of Unfortunate Dramatic Events. So my quals here are a bit sketchy.

That said, I’m a manager in real life, so I’m either qualified to talk about group management, or else am an expert at sounding like I am. So here’s what was asked and what I wrote, just for the record, and to stir up some conversation. I’ve edited it slightly to untangle some of the email thread.

(Ironically, Doyce was just posting about “guild drama,” whence the amusing graphic below. And I suspect a lot of what I write here applies not just to CoX, but to LotRO, WoW, etc.)

Have you ever run an RP SG? Have you ever been in one? What were the qualities that made it successful?

Though I enjoyed doing RP stuff in CoX, I was (and am) too much of an alt-fiend to get tooooo much into the full-time RP character. My goal was to always speak in character, drop some interesting hints about my character in conversation (and follow up with same when someone chose to pull on the threads), and to have a good time. We were one of the “Light RP” groups in the Coalition.

But in the RP groups and the aspects of the Coalition that worked well, hmmmm …

  1. Strong leadership.
  2. Group events/activities (to allow for RPing). A feeling of *community*
  3. A willingness to have *fun*. It can’t be all drama llamas, as much as some folks will try to make it so.
  4. Utter ruthlessness at booting folks who tear down the fabric of the community. Being nice and hoping they’ll be nice too usually meant that problems got worse, not better. If it were to be done, ’twere best done quickly. And be open about what happened and why, and note that it’s not open for argument.
  5. Utter openness and honesty from the leadership. As much as desires for confidentiality and privacy may seem important, nothing can get a group divided against itself than the sense that the Leaders Are Keeping Secrets. Especially if they’re kvetching about the players behind their backs.
  6. A leadership that sets an example (leads) by being around a lot, and offering to play with other SG members when they get on, esp. new ones. Nothing kills an SG faster than it becoming a clique of leaders who simply invite folks in to build a nice base. A part of that is usually having (at least for the leaders) some lower-level alts to be able to shift to.
  7. [Added] People come and people go. Don’t get desperate about forcing the former and avoiding at all costs the latter. It will lead to bad decisions. If it’s a good group, people will join, and stay, If you are too eager to bring folks in, or too eager to appease them from leaving, you’re making compromises that will come back to haunt you.

In short, I think a strong RP SG operates about the same as a strong SG in general, except that some extra care needs to be taken to foster that fragile suspension of disbelief that makes the RP stuff work.

Hmmmm, what else? Themes are good. Some of the better RP SGs had a strong theme or story behind them, and one that drove their “events.”

I’d add in [I did not in the original of this] an in-person, in-character interview for RP groups. If the person can’t RP an SG interview, they won’t do a good job later on. And it gives the leadership a chance to see if the RP concept will actually work with the SG.

CoX is an interesting game in that it still has a relatively strong user base, based on the fact that it’s a superhero MMO where none existed previously. Do you think that SG declines are occurring in general, or do you think that there is room for another RP SG in the world?

Hard to say. Certainly overall CoX population is down. Virtue is a good server for this simply because it has a large population. I’ve been invited to some SGs, but the populations have never been such that there were ever many people around. And my own interest has, honestly, faded enough that I don’t feel the need or have the time to be dedicated enough to be a good, contributing SG member. Alas.

That said, I think there’s always a place for a good RP SG in any world worth playing in. 🙂

I’ve run many organizations before in many games, so the “business” side is familiar to me. The challenge in this one is to run a heavy RP organization and to revive a dormant brand, as it were.

It might be interesting to advance the “story” around the revival of the “brand” for the characters, new and old. In other words, how is it in Paragon City that the Ultra Corps is suddenly being revitalized, or why is Captain Metallo and his cohorts trying to revive the Ultra Corps to its glory days? In other words, it’s not just a change in management, it’s an adventure! (And if there are some multiple layers to the tale — the one for public consumption, and one that only the “leaders” know but about which hints might be dropped to the troops, or newly initiated leaders are let into the know about (“… Statesman is really a Rikti spy, and we’ve re-formed in order to tackle the Freedom Phalanx when they finally turn on humanity?!”)

I’ve been in heavy RP organizations before, so I understand the atmosphere, but this will be the first time I’ll be administering it.

It’s different — and it makes it harder in some ways to maintain RP for yourself (you always have to be sort of monitoring things on a meta level). Best advice is:

1. Find others to share the burden with. Burn-out is the biggest threat.
2. Behave as you’d want a leader in your previous groups to behave.

 Thoughts? Anything else I should have mentioned?

CoX – Ping

Well, I was away for three weeks on business and holiday. And then playing catch-up on stuff at home. And then …

Well, I didn’t fire up CoH until this weekend. Margie’s been doing some solo stuff while I was otherwise engaged, but she was happy to have me hop on and join up with me. Wait, that wasn’t quite the way I wanted to phrase that …

Anyway, we pulled up Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra. I was surprised we’d gotten them up to 32, which I sort of see as a magic level for characters (perhaps because Velvet, my first successful character, plateaued at). We’re deep into Croatoa stuff right now, which means lots of nice magic salvage, and now that Kitsune has Fred the Phantasm, she has a nice array of pets, Illusion powers, and Rad debuffs to play with. Usually we start off with her turning the biggest bad guy. Then Ex-Terra hops in, and I either drop Scary Sam (Spectral Terror) or drop my Rad debuffs on the Turned guy, or both. I’m usually in close enough at that point for Fred to get involved, and for my own choking Rad cloud to be playing a role, and between spamming Blinds and keeping the heavies turned, and (as a last resort) calling in the Boy (Phantom Army), we rarely run into too much of a problem — unless one or the other of us takes a wave of damage too quickly.

Fun. Probably boring to read about, but fun. This pair could easily be our next 50.

Hit 42 months Vet Reward, by the bye, so we both now have a Team Teleport power, which just makes life a little bit easier.

CoX – Ding ding ding

Did some solo work with Lady Zebra Friday afternoon, and got her leveled to 31 (despite some rather frustrating “The Case of the Vanishing Mentor (and The Subsequent Mission of Plinking Attacks”). So on to Bricks. Auras, too, save that LZ isn’t really an aura sort of character.

Friday night and Saturday pulled out Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra. Illusion-Rad rocks, though it’s almost an embarrassment of riches in attacks and debuffs. Went through the Midnight Club initiation for the first time, which was mildly frustrating (unless you like puzzles), esp. since it didn’t really lead to anything we can do until 35. Still, got up to 29 by Noon, in time to do some real work for the day.

Huzzah for Double XP weekend, even if the most popular servers (Virtue and Freedom) were red and black (and crash-o-riffic even when only yellow).

CoX – Unappreciated

Was on a large PUG the other evening and we got a police band mission — “Stop Archon Roget and his bodyguards.”

Quoth my character, “Archon Roget — he’s the wordy one, isn’t he?”

Beat. Beat. I’m waiting for the LOLs.

“I dunno – we’ll have to see,” someone finally said.

Man, a line like that would get dice thrown at me at a tabletop game. I know — it has.

CoX – No, really!

Have been playing — not scads, but a decent amount. Over the weekend focused on Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra — got them up to 26 over the course days. I figured they’d be good — as an Ill/Rad Controller and Spine Scrapper — doing the Rikti raids over the weekend, and they were indeed (and, in the meantime, managed to finish off getting the Wedding Band and the Talos safeguard mission, too). Good times.

Next up … hmmm … Margie mentioned there’s some Midnight Club content at our level. I’m interested in giving it a try.

State of the Gameplay

A few notes about this and that in my online gaming life:

  1. Health check: left elbow (and compensating for it) make it painful for me to use the standard QWE movement keys and power numbers for any great length of time — meaning that Margie and I don’t play more than an hour or two tops at any given sitting. Which should be helping our sleep, but not our gaming. It’s annoying.
  2. CoX: We’ve spent most of our time playing a Fire/Fire scrapper (fun, but a bit squishy) and a Mind/Mind blaster. The latter is a delicate trick — I’m still trying to get a good set of attacks and tactics to use with her. At 15 or so, of course, things are limited, and I also foresee a lot of secondary pool setups for her. But at the moment, balancing a bit of attack, a bit of knockback, a sleep and an immobilize is proving challenging. 
    I’m seriously looking at shifting to a couple of other alts for a bit. We did do a bit of play with a new scrapper duo, a couple of Jaegermonsters, but I didn’t feel any buzz.
  3. LotRO: Haven’t touched it in a couple. Not feeling any great desire to. Not sure what’s going on there with me.

CoX: Speedy auras

Noticed a Forum entry (now no longer up) complaining about the Hasten effect (and, peripherally) the Superspeed effect. Hasten wreathes your hands (up to the elbows in a burning yellow glow. Superspeed gives you a bright flashy area all around your feet — and, of course, as a trail when you run.

The Superspeed effect can be a little irksome — but Hasten is one of those that’s bugged me practically since I started the game. If it would have any good I would have added the following:

 

I’ll toss in my vote to significantly tone down the Hasten effect (hey, if you want flaming hands, take an Energy power, a Fire power, or an Aura). Superspeed is a bit annoying, too, but while it makes no sense that your feet/running would be glowing at only 90mph, it’s at least a canonical sign of, well, superspeed.

The problems/differences are:

1. Superspeed is a toggle. If I want to appear without Superspeed’s aura, I turn it off. If I want to appear without Hasten obscuring my hands and arms, I have to wait a minute or two (and be sure I turn off the auto-fire).

2. Superspeed is a power. Hasten is a character mechanic enhancement, like Focus and Build-Up, only with less justification for the effect. People take it, mostly, not because they think glowing hands fit their concept, but because their build will be helped by faster recovery. So obtrusive an effect for an enhancement used by people of all Origins and ATs and Builds makes little sense.

(Of course, I find the dust kickup from Sprint and the trailing dustfall from Combat Jump to be mildly annoying, esp. when flying or standing still, so I may be oversensitive.)

(I’ll also note that it makes more sense for Hasten to be a whole-body thing, since the recharge effect works on kicks, mental powers, pretty much everything, not just swiftness of hands.)

I am not a Dev, nor do I want to be one on TV, but it seems to me that this effect could be toned down quite a bit without a lot of development effort. Ironically, its ubitiquity means it much less likely that’s going to happen, since it would affect the appearance of so many players.

That said, if we could get a toned-down “Custom Hasten” similar to the “Custom Sprints,” I would be very happy.

 

The impression given from the replies form BAB and his forum supporters was (a) it’s not broke, so it ain’t gonna be fixed; (b) if it ever does get fixed, it will be with powers customization; so (c) it’s not likely to get fixed any time soon.

Which may all be true, but it’s still an annoyingly bad choice of effect for most characters, and I wish it was different.

 

 

CoX: Happy Gaming

No distinctive details, just ended up on a faboo PUG last night with Lady Zebra — one of those times which justifies and makes up for all the crappy PUGs one gets on. There was glorious battle against impossible odds, there was witty dialog and role-playing, there was a balanced team that worked together and a leader who got things done … it was all very nice, and dinged LZ up twice, to 26, and I stayed up way too late.

Good times.

CoX – Observations from the weekend

  1. Did a lot of solo play in CoX, mostly with lower-level characters I hadn’t run during the Rikti invasion period (since jogging around Paragon is sooooo passé). Didn’t play much with Margie because she was [REDACTED DUE TO NDA].
  2. There is very little in the game that matches throwing a Tesla Cage on a Tesla Knight. It made me giggle. Repeatedly. Ask Margie.
  3. Which is worse about the character “Anoying Little Demon” — that he was spamming the Broadcast channel asking for Influence, or that he misspelled the word “Annoying” in his name?

CoX – Rikti madness!

Have had a lot of fun the past week or so with the renewed Rikti invasion stuff — it’s a good periodic “event” for the CoX world.

Mostly played various solos and duos in the high 10s and low 20s — folks with the mobility to get from invasion zone to invasion zone, the power mix to be of use, but low enough to get some appreciable XP impact. Old Saucy Jack, Lady Zebra, Miss Crackle … we even pulled out Fazenda and Araware (hi, Storm Knights!) for a couple of nights, which was fun.

Did some invasions where things went swimmingly — which usually means huge crowds, lag time out the wazoo, lots of bad guys, but enough healers and buffers to make it all a foregone conclusion. Alternately, some of the zones where there weren’t a lot of people worked well, too — the invasion groups are smaller, but with a good PUG (or multiple PUGs) you can usually do okay.

Of course, I’ve also seen invasions go horribly wrong. There’s a sort of death spiral with the things — if enough of the team goes down, then not only do you lose the healing and buffing, but the already-established rate of bad guys coming in have fewer targets — including you — to zero in on. When you start seeing a lot of orange death names, that’s a problem. Of course, nobody’s losing XP — just opportunity loss as you jet back from the hospital (some zones are better for that than others). But as folks rush back in piecemeal, they tend to be dispatched the same way. Regroup and work in from the edges …

It can seem like it would be monotonous, but the mass craziness of the Rikti invasions can be addictive — at least for a while. Wouldn’t want to do it all the time

Thoughts on zones (just from the hero side — didn’t run any villain groups, though we ought to have done one with our MM duo):

  • Atlas/Galaxy – Too many low-levels makes this risky, as there’s rarely enough good “support” powers in the area. Plus the bombing zones tend to be a ways away from the core in Atlas.
  • Skyway – Easy to get to. Difficult to move around in for bombs, though the big park around Nimble Mynx is a good area to fight in.
  • Steel – Easy to get to. Good gather point (Positron), good post-battle stores and Wentworths, but the battle is usually a long ways from the hospital. (Hmmm — wonder if we could talk folks into gathering at the big park by the hospital sometime.)
  • Talos – Easy to get to, good gather point with nearby bombing runs, usually big crowds, close hospital, and plenty of selling opportunities. The battles here seem to last forever — not sure if that’s population dependent or not.
  • Founders – A very large zone, which disperses folks searching for bombs. No solid consensus on places for folks to gather to battle (university? Williams Square? the train station?)
  • PI – Good gather point, but leave quickly post-battle before the local bad guys respawn, unless you’re at a good level.

And that’s enough of that. The event ended last night, but I’m sure it will be back eventually. Good times.

CoX: Advertising

Ads are coming to the CoX universe.

NCSoft’s deal with Double Fusion would replace the fake billboards that dot the scenery of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles with genuine, revenue-generating advertisements. The ads should go live some time this summer, but Clayton stresses that it’s up to the player whether or not the ads are visible.
 

“I want to make it very clear that we are not ‘forcing’ in-game ads upon our players. Thus, the word ‘optional’ is of key importance. None of our players have to change their game experience in any way if that’s what they prefer. All that you need to do is opt-out via the Options menu in the game,” he wrote in a post on the City of Heroes web site.

 

Seems fine to me. And CoX (vs WOW or LoTRO or other fantasy/sf games) is perfect for such a thing. Thoiugh I’m not sure who’s going to want to advertise over in the Rogue Isles.

So why would anyone want to show the ads (stay opted in)? Because NCSoft will only get revenue when they are opted in, and the proceeds to go CoX development. Again, nothing wrong with that.

I have no problem with this. 

LotR: Likes and Dislikes

Because of my recent playing of CoX, and chit-chat with Margie, I found this set of lists slowly growing, so I thought I’d toss them out there. Your mileate will almost cetainly vary.

Comparison caveats:

  • I’ve played a lot less LotRO than CoX. I’ve only gotten up to the mid-20s with my highest on the former, vs. running two toons to 50 on the latter. So my full experience with LotRO is a bit limited in comparison, and CoX is the “baseline” against which I judge.
  • I am a huge LotR/Tolkien fan — not quite as fanatical as I was back in high school or college, but still madly in love with the Rings Trilogy.
  • I play LotRO mostly duoing with Margie.

Things I like about LotRO (particularly in comparison to CoX).

  1. The scenery. The exteriors are just incredibly gorgeous, imaginatively but effectively evocative of Tolkien’s books, but further fleshed out. The interiors aren’t shabby, either. The world and environment have been lovingly crafted, and is the real star of the game.
  2. The epic, heroic story line. Part of that is the books, but the game has done a lot to incorporate that without getting players too on-stage for the books’ tale. When LotRO is being heroic, it’s great. 
  3. Mission variety. Margie disagrees (or, rather, seems to think it’s a wash), but I feel like CoX has a much more limited number of sets (interior/exterior) and mission types than LotRO. Maybe it’s the ability to take multiple missions at the same time, or the lush scenery that they take place in.
  4. More shops. You can sell stuff practically anywhere to anyone, rather than spending a lot of time jumping around town to get to the one Nat Store when you’re in Indepndence Port.
  5. I love time-not-logged-in credit on experience for characters. 
  6. I think I prefer the “Defeated, a Bit Worse for the Wear” mechanic of LotRO to the “Back to the Hospital, gaining experience more slowly” mechanic of CoX. 
  7. The PUG/LFF/general chat environment seems a bit more positive than CoX.
  8. The crafting ingredients, so to speak — the stuff you pick up to do things — tend to be more controllable and makes more sense than the crafting system grafted onto CoX. Heck, the whole Inspiration bit always seemed a bit lame (“Wait, are these actually little pills, or concepts, or karma points, or what?”). And the who-remembers-their-names origin-specific DO/SO stuff is either underplayed (no actual game effect) or too complicated (trying to pick things out from the stores) for CoX’s own good.
  9. The general mechanisms around buying/selling/crafting — recipes and loot and auction houses and crafting halls and sellers — and the interfaces to them are, by and large, quite a bit easier to use in LotRO than in CoX. While I feel like it’s still a huge time sink in LotRO, it’s a lot easier to figure out what something is worth, and a tad easier to figure out if you should sell it or auction it, in LotRO.   And while I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time running around in Bree between Craft and Auction Houses, it’s trivial compared to even the most convenient of setups in CoX (i.e., Steel Canyon, where the University (crafting), Wentworths (auction), two stores and a variety of contacts, plus the Vault, are all within a relatively easy distance (except you need a travel power to make it such), and I still end up spending several orders of inordinate time making it work. 
  10. I like that you can take a large number of missions in LotRO, and that world tends to send you to clusters of missions — rather than the Steel/Skyway or Talos/IP shuffle, for example.
  11. I like that you can see what level you are at all times.
  12. I like that there’s no kill-stealing in LotRO.
  13. It may be because of the preponderance of outside zones, but the distribution of bad guys (plus their “wandering”) feels more organic and natural than, say, CoX’s standard spawn points within each interior map and standard spawn groups for each type of foe. Plus it’s believable that there’s hostile wildlife all over the place, except for pockets of habitation (towns, camps, lairs, etc.) — while it’s not believable that the whole of Paragon City is actually overrun by street thugs and crime gangs.
  14. I love that auction results are mailed to you, rather than having to revisit the auction house.
  15. I love that you can send stuff (money, items, raw materials) to your other alts.

Things I dislike about LotRO (particularly in comparison to CoX).

  1. The teeny-tiny freaking radar/map. It’s smaller than it should be by an order of magnitude. The amount of time one has to spend popping back and forth to the “big map” is proof of that. I don’t expect an entire CoX zone map, but something bigger would be very nice.
  2. Too many missions that, well, aren’t heroic. “Can you go run back and tell Fred that I have the money I owe him?” Dammit, Jim, I’m an immortal elf huntress from Lothlorien, not an errand boy!
  3. Too many suicidal NPCs, esp. of the type where you go and rescue them and they wander around, blundering into every bad guy in the immediate area. Granted, CoX had a few of these with the more recent issues (waves at Fusionette), but not to this frustrating extent. Too many cases where I just throw up my hands and say, “Screw it — let the orcs have him.” On the other hand, CoX has a lot more static NPCs (never-ending purse tug-o-war, police perma-cringing from gang members), and more mute NPCs (the perma-cringing cops are more vocally thankful for help than the AI cops you help against the AI villains in the newer zones).
  4. Running around. Yes, the game compensates for it some (clustered missions, compressed distances, horses/stables), but CoX travel powers just simply rock. (I’m not sure how LotRO could get around this given the setting, though.)
  5. Limited character options. I’ve only gotten into the mid-twenties with one set, and into the teens with another couple of toons, but I feel I’ve now “done” half the archetypes and most of the races. One elf hunter is a lot like another, it seems (heck, two hunters are pretty close, once you’re in the same territory). Yes, there can be subtle differences depending on traits, professions. etc., but those differences are trivial compared to what you can do in CoX with its plethora (and growing) of primary and secondary powers, a larger set of archetypes (if you consider CoV), and much more interesting cosmetic effects (character design). 
  6. Limited storyline options. Within the caveats of the limited experience above, it feels in LotRO that “journey” for any given character is going to have much less variation than CoX, limiting replayability.
  7. More logistical busy-work. I loathe encumbrance rules in any game. And between profession “hunting” and looting and selling and auctioning and crafting, it seems fairly easy to spend at least a third of your time or more doing stuff other than thwomping orcs. And, as far as I can tell, it’s really pretty much necessary to do so in LotRO (vs. CoX, where the crafting stuff was grafted on relatively recently, and theoritically is still fully optional).
  8. Squishy characters. LotRO characters may be heroic, but they are easily overcome by numbers (or, rather, more easily than CoX characters).
  9. What level am I? I know what level it says — but did I level since I last visited a trainer?  I know there must be an easy way to determine whether you’ve gone and leveled, but I haven’t found it.
  10. I think I prefer the instanced mission arrangement of CoX to the common zones of LotRO, where other heroes might be running past picking up your treasure, making you wait for re-spawns (or letting you slip past without opposition), etc. It’s a bit of a toss-up, though.
  11. Tell me again why I’m collecting Neeker-Breeker Wing Slime? And why someone will pay for it? And why I care
  12. I miss @names. I like being able to globally hook up with a friend (esp. when it’s my wife).
  13. I don’t like looting bodies. It’s realistic (using the term lightly), but it’s an annoyance. Even with auto-loot turned on. (This was one of the greatest reliefs when I played CoX this past weekend.). 
  14. I dislike that if I want to give something to someone, I have to open up (and wait for) a trading window. I really like the CoX drag-and-drop (optional) interface.
  15. Facing is a wash. It’s, um, realistic. It can also be a pain in the neck.
  16. Having to trudge back to the mission contact is a pain. I don’t know how to mitigate that, given the setting — though a number of missions could be handled, for example, by just mailing a postcard back to the mission sender. And, yes, some missions don’t require returning.
  17. I dislike that there’s no incentive (aside from being a nice guy) to help someone who’s in over their heads. That’s the flip side to the no-kill-stealing mechanism. (Perhaps a “the encounter owner / first damager gets full credit, while other damagers get a lesser credit” rule might be the best.)

None of this means I plan to not play LotRO, or that one game is the clear winner over the other. And, as I noted above, a lot of the above is my own play style and preferences. But, then, it’s my blog, and I’ll whine if I want to.

CoX: Gameplay for a whole day!

Basically spent the day playing CoX, which is something that hasn’t happened in … well … months. And it felt good. Not something I want to devote every Saturday to, but a lot of fun. Especially given the company (bats eyelashes at Margie).

More Kitsune/Ex-Terra fun, getting them from 14 to 19.  We’re also actively pondering what we’re going to do when I12 hits. I’m seriously thinking the Psionic Blaster (at least until it gets nerfed), but a Fire/Fire scrapper sounds like it could be fun. Margie has a yen for a Plant Controller, too. Whatever we do, I look forward to seeing how the Hollows operates.

CoX: Gameplay!

I actually played CoH last night! 

Yeah, it’s pretty pathetic that that’s news.

Actually had a very fun time. Kitsune-chan (my Illusion/Rad Controller Fox Onii) and X-Terra (Margie’s Spine Scrapper), both around 14 (Travel! Yay!), and we just kicked butts and chewed gum — save that there is no emote for chewing gum.

Just plain fun.

Yay!