Paragon Comes Down Hard On City Of Heroes Cheaters

I have 2 legit level 50's. CoH is a GRINDFEST. I left CoH for almost 2 years because I coulnd't stomach grinding anymore new heroes through the same old crap. I came back during last week's free reactivation, and I couldn't find a damn group unless it was a farm group... PERIOD. It's not that I didn't look (I sat around for about 2 hours), but why the hell would anyone spend 3 hours running the sewers to go from level 4 to 10 when they can spend 15 minutes going from level 4 to 24? They can ban my account, it's no biggie. But I feel it's kinda screwed to punish players who, when they create a baby hero have NO other option for grouping because THEY are too stupid to implement an XP per hour cap. It's not that difficult.

Champions Online will be out in July, so it might be time to start shopping for a set of funeral tights for the City of Heroes' wake.

Lord_Hennessy

@Southrncomfortjm:

Leveling is the boring part?

So the entire premise of an MMO is boring. I guess you find standing around the noob zones with your maxed out character to be more fun than leveling?

DollaBill

@shreddi: The sploit missions give stupid amounts of xp for very little work.

Rikti Comm officers have minion HP's and toughness but grant Lt experience. They have an interruptable portal summon, and a really weak pistol shot for attacks.

Next, choose the Sewer Trial version of Rikti Comm off. which grants double XP. This mob is coded for double xp since the Sewer Trial is like lvls 38-40, but the foes are all lvl 42.

Next, place a barrel next to them that kills 90% of it when they boom.

Gained 2.7 lvls in one 15 minute run last last night, taking my defender from 33.6-36. Did two more runs last night in about 35 minutes to hit 40. Gaining that much xp at those lvls should clearly not be possible, but really they should just fix the game.

ludwigk

@QuantumFluxx: CoH used to have this kind of sploit, but they fixed it years ago by implementing an aggro hard cap of 17, and AoE target limits of 10 or 16. Twinking is still quite possible, but nothing this egregious. Ah, the good old days.

ludwigk

@Fallible.: And that has what to do with the Mission Architect? This is purely about them cracking down on player created levels with the explicit purpose of powerleveling, not powerleveling in general.

It's not the action that is the focus, but rather the method.

dry-roasted-peanuts

@Southrncomfortjm: You only give value to your bed once you slept on the floor.

@vellocet: Max xp per mission doesn't work because Mission Architect is designed to grant the same FULL XP of regular content. A particularly hard mission should have high reward. So this removes a core goal of the system.

Exploded barrel foes should grant NO xp, IMO. It wouldn't be a problem at all from a risk/reward, or xp/hr or anything. If you want xp, kill the mobs, then kill the barrel. If you just want to finish the mission, blow up the barrel, get no xp, and move to next mission. The number of mobs you can destroy from a barrel is mostly dependent on your team size, so your idea wouldn't work, it would just make content unplayable for large groups (more than 1-3 players), which breaks the point of MMO's entirely.

They already have a capped reward for repeated missions systems of a sort - it has to do with reward merits per trial (reward merits are used to purchase high end loot, and to perform random loot rolls). Each additional run of the trial in a 24 hr period reduces your merit reward. But this wouldn't work for the Mission Architect, since there are literally thousands of identical farm missions to pick from.

Not trying to rag on you specifically. There ARE easy solutions to this, but they haven't chosen to implement them yet.

ludwigk

@Dopefish: They had a policy BEFORE the mission architect went live that pertained to mobs with abnormal risk/reward, due to their normal use in PVE. For instance, the healer Cimeroran mob, normally dangerous because he keeps the rest of his team alive, is usually killed first in PVE. But a mission of only healers was cruise control because they were coded with no offensive abilities, and enough spike dmg will kill them super quick. As a result, they removed this mob from the mission creator until a time that they can code a mission creator specific version that doesn't grant xp. Easy enough. So do the same thing with the current mob, right? No, they for some reason waited a week then published a bunch of new policies. Guess it was too much work to 'fix' their game or something.

ludwigk

@ssoltero: I agree with ssoltero. I mentioned in my last post I played one of these but not looking for an exploit. If they punish anyone, it has to be the one who designed the mission using exploits. You click on a mission play it because its rated high not knowing its an expliot untill you figure it out too late?

shreddi

I played one of those missions last night and It was Impossible to solo. about 50 mobs in a group at a time and they kept respawning. Played a few AE missions and just dont see all the fuss about farming. Most everyone I played was very good but then again sort by rating and your pretty safe. You get more points per time in the regular missions because of complete bonus and drops. The farming missions are so so boring let em have the exp points for struggling through it. Im sure I havnt played any of the exploit ones otherwise I wouldng be saying this. Post above Vellocet has a good idea preventing the exploding items from killing more than a few at a time. I personally havnt run across one of the exploding missions.

shreddi

@ZombieFever: This is far from cheating. It was using a custom mob group consisting of a single foe that had extremely high reward vs. difficulty, then placing them guarding destructible objects that damage foe and players alike.

In the normal context of CoH, they have these destructible objects, and these foes, just not together. Now the Mission Architect allows you to make an enemy group consisting of a single foe - perfectly legitimate. It also lets you place an abnormally high number of destructible object - still playing by the rules. Now have custom weakling mob guarding lots of explosive objects. Cheating? Hardly.

Take away reward for the weakling mob. Fix xp granted from destructible objects. So THEIR unbalanced mob + THEIR coding mistake = cheating? No, its an exploit, but please just fix your game before you whine at your paying customers.

Clarification: Normally, when you kill a mob, and a non-team element, such as another foe, or an NPC ally, or a static damage source (lets say a pool of lava) deals damage to it, there is an xp split based on the amount of damage dealt, and a % granted to the actual killer. The barrels should be coded to act the same way - if they deal 80% of the dmg, and deal the deathblow, they should steal almost all the xp. Instead, they are coded as team allies or something, so full xp is granted to the team when they are destroyed for all the dmg they deal.

ludwigk

@RogueA: Actually, you don't even require the exploding barrels. Certain character builds such as the Archery Blaster can take out an entire mob of high-level enemies in two attacks. Couple this with cooldown reduction buffs from allies and you can literally powerhouse your way through these missions without the help of exploding barrels.

@Korgoths: Actually, most people in game have the mentality of "I'll stop when they take it out"

The entire goal of the game is to amass Influence, experience and Prestige for your character and supergroup. Suddenly, the developers put in a highly efficient way of gathering all three.

To most people, it's simply the most rewarding "quest" available, once it's gone, people will simply farm the next best thing they can find (Which isn't hard, you can make missions comprised entirely of Bosses and Arch-Villains, a good group can mow through them with the right team).

@WildKnightblazer: Prisoners were put back in as a MA option a week or two ago, in a slightly modified form.

gkscotty

This type of exploit has existed in Final Fantasy XI for a while now. Using the level sync system you just get a group of summoners together with a paladin to pull every enemy in the zone to a small area, the smn then take turns using their 2 hour ability, astral flow, and boom, 80-150 kills in 2 minutes, worth 200-300xp a pop. The level 13 player who was synced to, instantly becomes level 21/22. The only people to complain about it are the non-summoners, and Square Enix shows now interest in nerfing or disciplining people for doing it.

I think banning for this is too far, if they don't like people exploiting a design flaw, fix the flaw.

I'm sure in City of Villians, hacking is looked up upon, rather than down XD.

sentroshi

As a follow-up to the tip and article, I have to say that not all the players are reacting positively to the news, and there's a 130 page thread that says otherwise. It's long been a dream of most CoX players (probably most MMO players) that a veteran player should be able to skip the 'hump', the first 10-20 levels that are boring retreads of the same thing we've done however many times. The Architect Entertainment farms are an expression of that taken to an extreme, where the 'hump' becomes the entire leveling curve. I had a friend who was on a team with a brute who couldn't kill anything by himself, didn't know what enhancements were (equippable powerups for single skills), and had made a hash out of his power selections. This is the sort of thing noone wants - you shouldn't be able to create a character as a new player and go straight to 50 without understanding the base concepts of the game.

Most people are quite understandably upset, however, about the idea of losing beloved characters they've had for some time because they went into a farm or three. I got 3 characters to 50 over the Free Week (Wednesday to Sunday), a warmace/invinc tank I've had forever that was stalled at 45, a thugs/poison mastermind I hadn't played for a while at 30 I was sort of waffling over due to poison's complexity, and a level 11 Widow that I had created when they were first introduced that I wanted to play with a large group of friends as a pack of 8 Arachnos Soldiers/Widows but the group ended up dissolving. I had a ton of fun being back home, enjoying the Mission Architect stuff (I even made an arc, #130542, The Pagoda City Defense Force), got in touch with people I haven't talked to in months, and felt like I was home in Paragon City.

The thing most people are concerned about is 'where does this really cut off at?' This idea's illustrated with my own characters - which one is it really fair to delete or prevent me from using? The tank I've had forever that I got there on my own power, the mastermind I stopped using because poison was becoming boring, or the widow? Is it level based, is it created character time based, is there some fair way that the community and the devs can agree on to determine what characters are safe to save?

And it's not just that, it's the retroactive portion of the threat. Someone else stated it very clearly in the thread: "The town set a bucket of free apples out on the street. A week later, the town set into law that if you take an apple from the bucket, they're going to throw you in jail, and oh, by the way, we've been photographing you for a week, all of you who took 1 apple for now or 10 apples for later, you're going to jail equally." There comes a point where you have to say 'yeah, they did wrong, they shouldn't get away with it' but we're not getting any of that.

Not to mention that people have been saying that this is going to be used for farming since well before it came out, in fact, since the idea was broached, people've been saying it'll be used for farming. This, along with the other farming methods (Peregrine Island demon farming, Rikti Monkey farming, Freakshow and Axis America farming - I've seen 1 fire/kin controller on a 8 person team completely stomp the entire Axis America map, over, and over, and over, and over, and over..) that CoX and Paradon Studios have completed and repeatedly ignored makes this feel....

There's been a lot of bad coming out of this, and I agree that for the most part what they're saying is solid, however, there's really a large grey area of 'what's acceptable, what's not' when it comes to the ban parameters, and a lot of people are seeing the 'retroactive' part as being a serious reason enough to leave the game if it goes through, because really, what's fair and where does it start?

@WildKnightblazer: Exactly my point. Don't know if there is another minion-esque group that can be used in place, but this limits creativity in however a small way and the player base is forced to adapt.

Mix signals much? Every part of the game tells me I need to level, level, level. Then they let you make your own missions and say, "Oh, but you can't use it just to level up!"
The whole game is just about leveling up. Maybe if there were more incentives to just play, you wouldn't get so bent out of shape when people try to speed up the leveling process.

@edb87: Wait for Champions or DC online. The release of both games are imminent and even a slight upgrade should be justifiable over paying $20 for CoH right now.

PsycheE

@ThatShortGuy: Hasn't stopped them from removing the Prisoners as a usable enemy group...

Granted, Prisoners are a bit of a special case, as IIRC they can only use Brawl (a punch) and Throw Rock (exactly what it says on the tin), and so people were using them for low-risk high-reward farming. On the other hand I've seen plenty of people needing Prisoners for some aspect of their story, so it's a shame...

WildKnightblazer

@Stealth_chill: Or they could just limit the number of enemies that can be placed within the blast radius of the barrels.

@ThatShortGuy:

no sorry, i didn't know that missions were user generated. I thought that it was just poor level design by the creator. in which if it was, they could just remove the barrels from that spot. Thats mah bad.

Stealth_chill

@vellocet: Just take out the exploding barrels. At least then people have to actually KILL the enemies, which still is quicker than normal leveling, but it's not the run in, hit all the barrels, run out mission that it is now.

@b-radicate: Oh, man. I never did pick up the second one after hearing basically that. I'm surprised that at least the awesome combat system didn't get re-used after that.

If they made a third Mark of Kri and it was any good, I would probably buy a PS3 because of it.

As far as CoH goes, I think it would be pretty funny if villains were allowed to get away with sneaky powerleveling but heroes weren't.

I really don't think this should be considered cheating. If there were a rule that says "you can't gain more than x experience in one hour," then I would take my words back.

Now is it cheap? Yes. But that's always the best way to play.

meshnaster

There are easy ways to fix that. Off the top of my head... a maximum XP per mission and diminishing returns for playing it again and again (like 1/2 xp the second time and 0 third). Put criteria that deactivates the mission if you can kill more than 5 enemies or something with an exploding barrel.

That's just off the top of my head... I'm sure they can come up with hundreds of other ways to solve this instead of the ban stick.

vellocet

@edb87: Well, if you can stand the grind, CoH isn't that bad. Costuming is fun, as is combining different powersets and enhancements. I'd strongly recommend going into it with at least one other person though. Makes the grind a lot more bearable.

[ZTF]214A, 2A, 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D, 214B, 214D

@edb87: It's a bit heavy for any laptop. My M1530's fan goes into over-drive anytime I even think about loading it up. Most desktops can run it though, and I mean most, it might be worth downloading the trial just to check.

@edb87: My thing is though my laptop is a hunk of junk and I can't afford to upgrade or get a new rig. I can actually run CoH.

@ThatShortGuy: I quit before I even got to the Patron powers. I rejoined this month to try the Architect, and my friend took me through a few meow farms to get to 42, and finally get a patron. I was planning on using it to get to 50, so that I could finally experience the VEATs, but I dont have another 2 months to play just to get those last 8 levels. Fuck that.

@D-K, Came for the punch, stayed for the band-aid: It's a good thought, but there should certainly be limits to how far that ideology is taken.

In this case though, too bad for paragon. I'm surprised the game has been around this long if the development team lacks the foresight to predict this feature being exploited like this. Limits should have been put in place to avoid this before it was made available to the players.

@DarkSonic999: I've never heard of CoH taking any action against any cheater, ever (AFK Lichen farming, Rikti Monkey prestige, Egg farms, 29+29+29+29+29+29+29+29 reward merits in Otown, etc.)

I find it odd that they left the farms in the game for a month, gave expired accounts a free weekend, then came down hard with threats of deletion. They do need to bump their login numbers once per fiscal quarter though, so maybe it's not odd at all.

@RogueA: This. It's the main reason I left City of Heroes. Grinding became the only way to advance past lvl40 without rounding up numerous people to try and wade your way through some rough content.

Yeah, I know, M-M-O and all that, but bottle-necking players into only two circumstances at the time didn't really help, either.

I'd have to say that it's pretty lame of the developers to punish players for exploiting the game that designed that way. If they don't want players to exploit their design, then the developers need to fix the problem in the game, not punish players who decide to exploit an obvious flaw. Exploits are pretty far from cheating if you ask me. Cheating would be more along the lines of altering the game outside of game play then using your changes in-game for your benefit.

Sorry Paragon, but this was your fault, not the players. Don't punish the players, fix your bad design.

(Oh, ya, and just as a disclaimer, I've never played this game.)

ssoltero

What's Evil is making progression in games so slow of a grind you get bored before you experience half the content.

@Stealth_chill: You run the risk of inhibiting creativity when you start removing items like that. Someone could be able to utilize barrels or any other item to create an entertaining setting or puzzle, so to take that away forces them to go another route or potentially even takes away that idea altogether.

It's a fine line, I know, but I think it would work better if the kids shooting spitballs were punished as opposed to the paper being taken away from everyone.

The biggest "whiners" are usually the ones that used the exploit so of course they will try to say it was the fault of the developer or say things like " If it doesn't hurt anyone why should the dev's care. Well it is their game so they can make the rules and if you don't like it then you can go pound sand.

Korgoths

So you're saying that anyone who plays my 'fireworks' mission is gonna get banned? Makes sense.

OK, so I don't have a 'fireworks' mission. I don't even have the game. But my point being that there is going to be a gray line here and some people are going to get banned who never intended to 'cheat' the system.

Cloral

@Fallible.: I'm not quite as Doomsday (har) about it, but something like this is bound to happen when you're dealing with player-created content. No system is perfect upon its initial implementation, so tweaking like this is necessary.

Do I think the devs should have caught something like this beforehand? Yes. Point is stuff will fall through the cracks.

Any changes made are likely going to elicit a knee-jerk reaction from the player base, especially when it comes with a warning from the developers responsible for the *feature*. See any class changes in WoW for reference.

The hilarious thing is all the DOOOM crying on the boards over them actually enforcing their since-day-one policy against exploit based farming. They've nerfed missions over and over that were being misused to grant unbalanced reward vs. little risk -- this is no different.

If anybody thinks Champions Online won't do the same thing, they're off their rocker. Every MMO, every one, everywhere, all the time makes changes to established things in order to fine tune balance. It's how the genre works.

@RogueA: Yeah. I don't like cheaters, but I mind them a lot less when they're just making the grind easier for themselves. If there are people PAYING others to go through a part of the game for them because it's that boring and tedious, I dunno... it's exploiting, but if the game was better designed, they wouldn't feel as big a need to.

Paragon mad people don't like perpetual repetition? :x

@edb87: £8. Being honest, I suspect it will still be better than Champions, better than DC Universe Online, though? Hard to say, I personally hope not.

It's my go-to MMO, the character creation is probably the best of any MMO I have ever played.

Only took a week and a half. I can't believe Paragon didn't anticipate this exploit earlier. It seems so obvious.

Dopefish

@edb87: Wait for Champions. I've played both, and Champions Online is better by far.

[ZTF]214A, 2A, 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D, 214B, 214D

I'm a bit late to the CoH thing. Is it worth getting? How much is it per month to play?

If the grind wasn't so goddamn ridiculous, this would have never become a problem.

@dry-roasted-peanuts: Because farming prestige in Ground Zero, or Recluse has never, ever, been a problem? Power levelling has been a round since the game hit, banning it now -- and not even effectively -- isn't going to earn the game any brownie points this late in the day.

Too bad pre-Architect, farming the missions like these in Peregrine was the only way to get from 42-50 without going insane.

[ZTF]214A, 2A, 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D, 214B, 214D

@ZombieFever: It wont be any soon, but you can be sure each time they will be punished even harder so many cheaters will think more before doing these things.

Wait, instead of taking the time to find everyone using this and banning every single person. Why not just take out the exploding barrels? Wouldn't that take way less time and money?

Seems really stupid to me.....

Stealth_chill

People should neither be rewarded nor punished. Virtual Reality is a medium where a fine balance between rules and freedom must be zig zag. Players exploiting certain features of a game should never be punished for. It is pushing limits and thinking outside the box, that is the cornerstone of gaming imo.

Unless people disadvantage other players DIRECTLY there is no need to intervene. No world is perfect, how can something created be perfect when the creater itself is not. Live and let level.

D-K, Came for the punch, stayed for the band-aid

@Stealth_chill: You can make your own mission in COH. They are cracking down on player/authors who design levels with the explicit purpose of experience farming.

dry-roasted-peanuts

@dry-roasted-peanuts: I loved the first game in that series but the sequel was completely lackluster. Never even finished it. Got bored after I realized all the levels were rehashes of the first game.

That series had so much potential after the first one... sigh. You just made me sad.

Leveling is the boring part... let us skip it and we might enjoy ourselves more!

Sad.

The leveling system is a ridiculous grind anyway, so when you give the players the option to create their own missions of course this was going to happen. It was a good thing.

I feel this is where the thread slowly begins to unravel for the player created content in CoH.

There is nothing more satisfying than seeing cheaters getting punished. I can't stand those fuckers. Really, I can't.
Bots killed Silk Road Online. I'll never forgive them. NEVER. EVER!!!

BarbeQueQ

BRING THE HAMMER DOWN OH MIGHTY PARAGON GODS

Seems like everyone is cracking down on cheaters these days. Hopefully soon cheating will be a thing of the past...........

ZombieFever

@Mit: Well done Rao. Now, whack the dummies!

dry-roasted-peanuts

So they are mad at players who are taking advantage of the dumb level design in which there are exploding barrels by alot of enemies......

makes sense.

Stealth_chill

That big dude reminded me of the guy from Mark of Kri. Good game ;_;

[/offtopic]

They certainly should not be rewarded for finding ways around normal progression. Play the game right, like everyone else.

When did they stop coming down hard on cheaters?

City of Heroes has had the best customer support i've ever experienced in any MMO to date

DarkSonic999

WAAAAAA

WAAAAAAAAA

CRY SOME MORE!!!

Seriously, this makes me glad I'm not playing it right now. They make good things, then BITCH when people enjoy them. What did they THINK was going to happen when they let players make their own missions?

@Lord_Hennessy: sad thing is, Champions Online is WORSE than City of Heroes. Also, it tastes like Jack Emmert's penis. again.

@PratzStrike: I wouldn't know what that tastes like. Would you describe it for those of us who have never tasted Jack Emmert's penis?

Also...
I'm willing to bet that Cryptic won't put in a feature, and then RETROACTIVELY ban people for using it. :P

Only NCsoft is blind enough to think they could give players the ability to create farms with no XP per hour cap, and then bitch at their players for using it to get TONS of XP. It's very simple the level cap is 50 and the game is a grueling grind-fest until you hit level 35... of COURSE people will farm XP...
Now to say they are going to BAN people who used it in this manner is RETARDED. When you consider I am on Infinity, and I tried to get a regular mission group for over 2 hours before I realized I would just have to do farm missions to play at all. That means NOBODY was playing regular missions. WTF are they going to do? Ban EVERYONE on Infinity?

Lord_Hennessy

As someone who has played this game on and off since 2005 I have something to say.

First, I'd like to point out that I have been away from this game for 5-6 months & only tried it over the weekend. The reason I had stopped playing was because the game had become a GRINDFEST.

This game originally felt like an arcade side scroller, only w/ 8 players on your team & in 3D.

Everything changed when they introduced IOs (Invention Origin enhancements). With this came crafting, salvage, & rarity (as well as auctioning). Oh, and it completely unbalanced one of the most balanced games around.

They introduced it because they were afriad the game was getting stale and it was all they could come up with. Maybe they thought since WoW has an auction house that it would increase the player base. OR, (& this is the MORE likely reason) because they figured people would stay subscribed longer ($$$) because of the monotonous slow "grind" to reach the end of their envisioned character.

Originally everyone was very well balanced, gaining just enough money to stay current w/ buying SO (Single Origin enhancements) from NPC vendors. People could enjoy the game with their friends while still being able to 'FEEL' like a Super Hero.

All it did though was make people HAVE to farm to even be able to enhance their character enough to feel "Super" anymore. Which is the opposite of what a Super Hero game should be about. What they did is took a fun game and turn it into a job. There's a game for people who like that, it's called EVE Online. NCSoft needs to do more data mining and see what people actually enjoy doing.

As a practice, this action they have taken is even worse than how Sony was deleting LBP levels for fear of copyright. Because nobody is infringing on copyrights by making missions they WANT to play. And the farming system actually increased the availablity of items, reducing their cost. Which has been driven UP DRAMTICALLY by the annoying gold (influence) farmers (who didnt even exist on CoH until after they introduced IOs). It has gotten so bad that they have had to add a Spam Button to the in game email. (not that it even works)

I had no reason to level, as the characters that I play are already maxed. However, the "Meow Farm" levels WERE FUN in that it actually made you FEEL like you had Super Powers.

In a game where you're supposed to be a Super Hero they make you grind out against minions, lieutenants & bosses. That would be like Superman having to work hard to defeat muggers, armed robbers & bodybuilders on PCP. To defeat a Super Villain you need a whole team of "Super Heroes"; which just doesnt seem right.

Instead of removing what ever remaining fun from the game was left in the name of "As Intended" they should spend more time readusting WHY people HAD to make the farms.

It all comes back to the IO system. If they added it because they thought it would improve the game OR, (& this is the MORE likely reason) because they figured people would stay subscribed longer ($$$) because of the monotonous slow "grind" to reach the end of their envisioned character.

However it's backfiring. New players will start on Champions Online; as it will be more up to date both graphically, balance-wise & w/ play-mechanics. Old players, will be sick of doing the same old thing for the past 5 years; and being given a tool but told that they can only use it w/ restrictions or risk being banned is tantamount to taunting them.

I'm glad I read this story. At least now I know NOT to reactivate my account. Which i WAS going to do because i thought i might actually enjoy the game again. Guess not.

string_theory

@string_theory: Champions suffers from many of the same flaws, and from what I can tell from the beta, most of the game just rips off CoH anyway. Plus, there's no semblance of balance, since any character can have any power set, no archetypes.

@Cloral: I think the way they're approaching it is if someone creates and exploitive mission and another player runs it again and again ... maybe then. Just once, not likely.

I actually was shown a screenshot of a level 50 character with their in-game age being reported as 1 hour. ONE HOUR. This is not just about some people getting 25% more xp then a traditional mission, this is truly about something completely broken.

@Twoflower: Exactly. And in this case they got the system up and monitored things for a while before having to step in. I'd much rather they made balance adjustments with some real observations in hand than just guessing.

@edb87: It's $15 a month and you get City of Heroes and Villains both. The game has a good active population and free trials are available. I know a couple people got into the Champions beta and their response is just "yuck." Just keep in mind that the point of City is to adventure your way to 50, the journey is the point of the game. There are still things to do at 50, but it's not a game where 80% of the content is focused on those max level characters. Because you get 12 slots per server you can literally have dozens of characters and play all the archetypes and most of the power combinations.

@[ZTF]214A, 2A, 5A, 5B, 5C, 5D, 214B, 214D: Your mind is weak if it would snap under such conditions.

There are 6 contacts with story arcs from 40-44; 6 with arcs from 45-50; 3 with arcs available all from 40-50; the Imperious Task force which can be done from 35-50; the Lady Grey Task Force which can be done 45-50 (also Statesman's Task Force but generally people just want 50s for that) and there are some TFs in the Shadow Shard (but admittedly some of those can be a hassle). That doesn't even include the randomly dispensed police band missions or the filler missions in Cimmerora.

@Southrncomfortjm: Leveling is the point of that game! There's almost nothing to do once you hit 50. It doesn't play like WOW, at all.

@RogueA: "[Champions]Rips off CoH" like Gears of War 2 ripped off Gear of War? Because basically that's what Champions is City of Heroes 2, with an actual back-story and lore that wasn't thrown together in 6 months, but rather crafted over YEARS of pen and paper RPG. And most people I've seen talk about the game are saying CoH is screwed because Champions is VASTLY superior in every aspect. It's about a 70/30 thing with the 30 disliking the game.

Lord_Hennessy

I think certain things that change the game so drastically cant be allowed.

But finding a little work around if you ask me should be rewarded.

I would put a little message on thanking the player for playing the game or put a note in their inventory, or an achievement for finding a glitch. Big deal why get rid of a little thing.

V12themonster