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Grouping?
jakojako
Member Posts: 332
I'm thinking of either picking this game up or resubbing to cox. I honestly would prefer to pick up this game, because I really like the art style and the "be what you want to be" approach, but from the limited amount of time I played in beta, there seemed to be a complete absence of grouping, and the two reasons I play online games are for grouping and pvp (obviously i don't really care about pvp for either of these games, I'll get that fix in l4d).
Are there any incentives to group in this game? Is there anything like cox's group missions or task forces or anything? I hear about lairs, which sound decent, but it seems like there's no more than 5 or 6 of them (and from what I hear they're not even available until around lvl 30), which is kinda lame.
Am I missing something or is there a lack of group content?
Comments
There are about 6-7 group only Lairs. The first 5 player group mission Lair can be completed at about level 25.All the end game UNITY missions scale to your group size.
Desert Crisis has a 2 player group mission. Level 8-14 Canada has more group missions than the Desert (two I think).
It was confirmed on the forums today that they will be adding more group content soon. I would expect this to be 'soon' as in the next month or two, not next week.
At first during beta i felt the same as poster. Then I got a real life friend to join. Additionally, I started up grouping with folks and adding them to my friends list. I was grouping for my entire play sessions once I hit around 10ish
I'm just an aggressive team leader i guess. If i see a noob standing around waiting for a spawn i invite him and try to get a team going this way
The fun factor shoots up x10 when in a group cause its always a riot to see what powers these newbs are picking up
There is a fair amount of optional grouping post level 25. Lairs and scaling instances. It only takes a few days to hit 25 too, so its not a big time investment.
Lairs are hard, fyi. At least when I tried them.
You won't be forced to group however.
Grouping is severely broken. If anyone tells you different they're lieing. Want proof? Just do a search on the champion forums for threads w/ teaming or grouping in the title. There are so many u cant even count.
Main problem is the "requirement" they have for sharing missions creates a barrier where unless you're w/ some1 24/7 chances are you wont be able to have the same quest(s) together. Why the teaming falls into 3 catagories
1.) Randomly invite people in the same area doing obviously the same quest. Then quit when youre done.
2.) Solo (yea i know, not teaming)
3.) Make extra sure to pick the same contacts and do the same missions at exactly the same time as your friends. Don't play the game when they aren't. Make sure they aren't playing the game when you aren't.
None of these is acceptable. Thus, teaming/grouping is broken.
Gameplay Mechanics-wise there are incentives to group. But in the end whether people do it or not will depend on community.
There are support roles and real tangible benefits to crafting group oritented characters.
There are statically tagged group missions in the early levels, ie. 2 man group 3 man group. These do not scale down or up, a good example is Fight Club it has 4 super villains in it.
Later on there are scaled instances like CoH has. Your Nemesis and the UNITY stuff is like that.
But does that mean people WILL group I can't say. I think to some extent we need to see a significant population at level 30+ to even speculate. One of the tricks with this is that unlike CoH you do not start out with scaled stuff right away.
I appreciate the larger in world quesitng stuff in the arly levels as CoH get repetitive in its instances. But I dunno maybe it would have been smart to make the scaled stuff available earlier to foster immediate grouping so that people know it is out there right from the get go even if they do not take advantage of it.
CoH is the best game for grouping IMO. I think CO could be just as good, but in the end it will boil down to community and to some extent things like the early sewer teams etc are what make teaming prevalent later on in CoH.
Let's face it CoH is incredibly solo friendly. No one can claim CO is more solo firendly, its not really possible even its is just as solo firendly. It will be more about what the coummunity thinks works well and is available.
I personally think it will take 2 months or so to see what happens. I think there will be enough former(and present) CoH players around that they will make it understood that it can be a good and easy and fun way to do thing. If there were only WoW players coming here I think it could the exact opposite direction. I think CoH player in there 30s will start to look to group as soon as they see scaled instances and a sort of seed grouping community will develop. But that will take time is pure speculation.
Initially the questing and static 2-3 group stuff will create a WoW group by necessity effect. I think the scaled stuff and the seed CoH community may bring the game up out of that. If that community did not exist I would not be so optomistic as my experience with people from games like WoW is that the sort of grouping community you see in CoH , the free form for fun grouping, does not even occur to them. You see it in CoH even, when level 20s from WoW insist on having a heal, or tell your Storm defender to heal and won't move without a healer instead of just rolling along and adding and subtracting people and having fun.
I would not go with the Beta experience as law. But don't discount it either. We will have to see.
Grouping is severely broken. If anyone tells you different they're lieing. Want proof? Just do a search on the champion forums for threads w/ teaming or grouping in the title. There are so many u cant even count.
Main problem is the "requirement" they have for sharing missions creates a barrier where unless you're w/ some1 24/7 chances are you wont be able to have the same quest(s) together. Why the teaming falls into 3 catagories
1.) Randomly invite people in the same area doing obviously the same quest. Then quit when youre done.
2.) Solo (yea i know, not teaming)
3.) Make extra sure to pick the same contacts and do the same missions at exactly the same time as your friends. Don't play the game when they aren't. Make sure they aren't playing the game when you aren't.
None of these is acceptable. Thus, teaming/grouping is broken.
If you are talking non-instanced questing yeah I can see that, but a lot of scaled instances complete inside the instance when the mission golas are met. I am not sure about their completion mechanics as far as giving xp to the group however they are fairly similar to CoX door missions (in they are door missions). In CoX you usually got completion xp even if it was not your mission.
As long as this exists there should be a decent possibility for good grouping. Is questing good for grouping? I kind of doubt it. This is why the Beta experience which was mostly questing, is perhaps, not a great measure. But i never saw door missions until I auto-leveled to 40 and made my nemesis and took some Unity missions. Nemsiss is level 25 but i didn't get past 17 as I made multiple characters so had to do it at 40.
Er, hold on that is not entirely true sometimes random citizens pop up to you and give a door mission just out of the blue. But that doesn't seem like a reliable way to keep a group together. Although I do think its cool the way you can sort of get unmakred quests by saving a citizen.
Grouping is severely broken. If anyone tells you different they're lieing. Want proof? Just do a search on the champion forums for threads w/ teaming or grouping in the title. There are so many u cant even count.
Main problem is the "requirement" they have for sharing missions creates a barrier where unless you're w/ some1 24/7 chances are you wont be able to have the same quest(s) together. Why the teaming falls into 3 catagories
1.) Randomly invite people in the same area doing obviously the same quest. Then quit when youre done.
2.) Solo (yea i know, not teaming)
3.) Make extra sure to pick the same contacts and do the same missions at exactly the same time as your friends. Don't play the game when they aren't. Make sure they aren't playing the game when you aren't.
None of these is acceptable. Thus, teaming/grouping is broken.
This might have some truth but blown out of proportion. It was a simple matter for me to find some newbs that were along the same Quest lines i was doing. The game is very linear in this manner. You do quests in a straight line til you leave that zone
so it is not that hard to find someone at same point you are.
The best quest series I've grouped for in Canada for example was the series of missions that led to fighting some boss in a lab
As I mentioned in my review. This game is solo friendly almost to a fault. Many players do not group or only do so when they are awaiting a boss to spawn for a quest, etc. However there is group content and bonuses (~15% XP). However grouping in this game is not mandatory for leveling up. The end game may change this ..we have to see
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
city of heroes was the same way though. You could solo all the way to max. You only really grouped for the XP bonuses
Like WoW, once you hit end game that was when grouping became mandatory if you wanted to further evolve your character. So guilds would raid for Hami-Os and so forth. The people that did not dig that would simply reroll and enjoy leveling up a stable of superheroes. Thus it was the norm for most players to have multiple high level alts
The hardcore players though knew to group however because via sidekicking one could get powerleveled up to high levels quickly. Even if this were not your thing, people would still group for the crazy xp bonuses for farming the difficult content
Any villains around remember farming Cuda? That was sweet XP!
Hmm ... very bad news for me indeed