Well, clearly, we all need to re-up for a month and see about doing some missions. I think $14.95 or whatever could be spent in worse ways.

Quote from: Werekoala;358000Well, clearly, we all need to re-up for a month and see about doing some missions. I think $14.95 or whatever could be spent in worse ways.

I seem to have it working now. Very strange. It seems to have corrected itself.

Now is the time for the Mad Briar to wend his woeful way through the Rogue Isles; sowing seeds of malcontent, and flowers of chaos. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit indeed. (that reminds me, must try and create a shadow style hero).

Does anyone know anything about these packs you can buy that give more powers/animations?

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;358006Does anyone know anything about these packs you can buy that give more powers/animations?

I have them all so far. In general the value is in the eye of the beholder, they don't offer very useful powers or abilities. The costume changes can be fun. It depends on what you want from them. Most of them offer more costume things, some offer costume change animations, some offer minor powers of limited usefulness or emotes.

Bit of a shame they couldn't include them in the regular updates then as there seems little point paying for them. However I won't be paying for anything until the trial is at least over. I won't commit to subscribing till then. CoH's problem has always been it's depth.

Levelled up a few times now. Got a few powers.

The setting is still awesome, even though my machine struggles a bit. It's still fundamentally playable.

Buuuuuuuuut, the powers are the game's weakest point still. Too many simple, repetitive abilities that don't create a growing synergy as the character levels. There is really nothing of any depth or interest it seems. A few powers are interesting, but the majority of powers within a given set are just shallow permutations of the same thing. For instance I have a couple of abilities to root people in place with vines, both are fundamentally the same. What's the point?

I think the reason games like WoW succeed is because they offer that depth you don't get here. Grouping in CoH is very good (though you can't in the trial account) but even then the shallow abilities persist. In WoW you have more interesting synergistic abilities as well as the means to customise your build with talent points. There's nothing like that here, afaict. You can choose from some secondary powersets, where you get your movement powers from. But even they aren't terribly exciting.

Whether later powers will actually prove more interesting to play remains to be seen; the trial account only lets players reach level 14 as well. These limitations just seem rather silly to me, but there you go.

I never noticed the powers in COH being dull... at least no duller than the powers in WOW, which, depite giving you a smorgasboard of stuff only ends up with a handful of 'optimal' choices.
I can build characters whose look and powers seem a lot more thematic than the cookie cutter stuff I get with WOW.
My main character in COH is a controller and she certainly got some cool powers in the middle and upper levels. The Singularity pet is loads of fun.

My issues with 'depth' in COH is that there is a lot less potential for exploration... not a lot of odd things to find in out of the way places like there are in WOW... and the instances really are redundant except for the Task Force missions. But for me that's balanced by what I feel is a better attitude amongst players and much less concentration on the end game. When I'm in a solid group of players COH is just about always more fun for me.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;357950Just installed the trial version and there's no UI. The only interface element is a tiny window reminding me this is a trial account and i can click on it to log out and go to the store to buy the game. If this is deliberate they can shove their game up their rogue isles.

Sometimes the interface closes itself, although it shouldn't. Hitting N toggles the navigation window.

I think there's more potential to build depth into a character in games like WOW. You have things like talent points which you don't get in CoH; you just get enhancements which don't produce a particularly noticeable effect. For instance my character has two immobilising/dot attacks - they are the first two Plant Control (iirc) attacks. The only difference is that one stops the target from doing anything while the other just stops him from moving. It's the same thing. Not much excitement there. This is exacerbated by the fact that powers recharge and so the end result is you don't have a palette of options to choose from, mob to mob, you just end up doing the same thing. It's ok, don't get me wrong, it's just i can see the game getting boring long before the endgame.

Unfortunately, by far the biggest problem, is that the UK servers are stone dead. As a beginner, all the players who do play may well be sat in the endgame zones. But for me that's no use. There's just no one playing the game: galaxy city, atlas park, port oakes and mercy isle are just empty. Checking the chat options i see there are, on average, 15 players online - and i can't communicate with any of them thanks to the trial account limitations. That's just no good.

Ditched CoH; it's just empty. Not soul in Paragon or the Rogue Isles (UK servers). Can't see Going Rogue going anywhere locally.

Did try Dark Age of Camelot! What a blast from the past! Bizarrely enough it's still got players - more so than CoH! It also looks halfway decent as well (especially on my machine). Despite being an old game it has a ton of content and is still the subject of much love and a free trial by me.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;358941Ditched CoH; it's just empty. Not soul in Paragon or the Rogue Isles (UK servers). Can't see Going Rogue going anywhere locally.

Did try Dark Age of Camelot! What a blast from the past! Bizarrely enough it's still got players - more so than CoH! It also looks halfway decent as well (especially on my machine). Despite being an old game it has a ton of content and is still the subject of much love and a free trial by me.

Sadly I didn't realize you were on the UK servers, or I'd have warned you--the U.S servers hold a solid number of players and is quite active.  My apologies. I'm not sure how much it will pay them to maintain separate servers for U.S/Europe because of that--though I'm sure the few European players their are may be glad for the lesser lag.

It is good you found something to play.

Quote from: Silverlion;358943Sadly I didn't realize you were on the UK servers, or I'd have warned you--the U.S servers hold a solid number of players and is quite active.  My apologies. I'm not sure how much it will pay them to maintain separate servers for U.S/Europe because of that--though I'm sure the few European players their are may be glad for the lesser lag.

It is good you found something to play.

That's ok. It would be too laggy to play on US servers anyway and my machine struggles a bit with the memory requirements CoH has.

DaoC is obscure, confusing and poorly explained. If they want people to pay for it, regardless of its age, they need to do a better job. At least putting a pdf of the instructions would be a start.

I finally ditched my CoH/CoV account, really all my MMO accounts.

I never made it past 35 or so and aside from character creation the game was bogging down into stupidly repetitive territory...

It was sort of weird; Designing a character was lots of fun, but you had so few options at the start that playing those 1-10 levels after the first time were serious chores, while once I hit about 30 or so, I found I either killed everything in sight for no gain, or I got my ass handed to me by hordes I could have easily handled five/ten levels earlier... like the scaling bounced or something...

I think a part of it were the rates that enhancements were rendered invalid/useless.  I leveled so fast and with so little influence accrued that I couldn't really keep up the enhancements, which in turn rendered me weak and 'powerless'.  

Anyway: Months at a time without playing, with 'playing spurts' being 'two hours on a single saturday'... combined with general MMO burnout and time overload killed it for me.  I'm saving a hundred bucks a month more or less.

Which makes me go to myself: Told ya so.  'Cause four years ago I told myself they were too addictive, and the monthly fees made them far too expensive for the pay out... and then I started up WoW...

Oh... the game books I could have purchased. Oh, the free time I could have had.. the heartbreaks I could have avoided (seriously: Two hours pinned in a pvp fight I didn't want in my billion dollar battleship in Eve online. Too expensive to 'cut my losses', to aggrivating not to...)

I am now the Bitter Non MMO-Gamer, the BNM...

I want an mmo. not because i want to sap my life away grinding, but because it's the sort of game i want to causally play. I like that i can go at my own pace and not have to play competitively.

I've been trying a free martial arts mmo by acclaim called 9Dragons (sic). It supports itself (apparently) because you can buy stuff in game. I won't. Unfortunately it's horrendously unstable and the installation includes a program that's supposed to stop people hacking your account called GameGuard which seems to cause all sorts of problems.