T w e n t y S i d e d

Last week I mentioned how frustrating it was that everybody wanted to fight impossible foes (purples) in City of Heroes. I want to address some of the common responses:

Fighting purples is exciting! The strategy and teamwork is more fun!

Fine, fine. If people said, “I prefer to fight purples because fighting whites is boring”, I wouldn’t mind so much. But they’re always dragging us to our deaths with promises of an XP bounty. I’ve never heard a single player advocate the harder-is-funner position in game.

Why would you want to fight a battle if you know the outcome?

To which I respond: Why would I want to build a sandcastle if someone is just going to come along and kick it over? Not all of us are playing to be “teh hardcorez”. This is particularly true for newbies like me. I just want to move forward and see the rest of the game. The areas, the powers, the new things I can add to my hero (like capes and auras) and new foes. But I can’t get there because I’m always working off XP debt from teaming up with suicidal idiots.

I can understand if you’ve already seen the end, you’ll want to spend time testing yourself and pushing the limits, but I’m still trying to get there. The higher levels in this game are a huge grind as it is, and prolonging that by fighting purples just makes it that much more torturous.

You should join a supergroup!

Most of the people I group with seem to be in supergroups, so I’m not sure how that will help. I’ll end up teamed up with these same people, except now we’ll have matching uniforms. I’ve joined a few supergroups. Some are too small to be helpful. Most are filled with high-level characters and thus not useful to a mid-level player for the purposes of grouping. All of them seem to want to sponge up influence from me without offering much in return. Maybe I’ve just been unlucky, but joining a supergroup didn’t seem to provide what I need, which is easy access to groups of non-lemmings.

It’s all about teamwork! My group fights purples all the time. You see, I have these special enhancements and our group is made up of…

Great, great. I’m glad fighting purples works for you. But none of this really applies to me, fighting in pick-up groups.

I think I’m getting to the end of my time in City Of X. I could go Villain side, but my gripes with the game are all based on player behavior, and changing sides won’t fix that. Plus, I know some people like being a villain, but it just doesn’t appeal to me. I spent my childhood fantasizing about being Spiderman, not the Green Goblin. The powers and archetypes and quests are reportedly better on the evil side of the game, but I just can’t get into it. I enjoy creating villains, but I enjoy creating them as someone I’d like to beat up, not someone I want to play.

I haven’t brought myself to cancel yet, but it’s been a while since I logged in. I still like the idea of the game. I’ll get the itch to jump in and play around a bit, but before I even launch the game I remember what that really means: Ten minutes of standing around doing nothing while I beg for a group, then a bunch of screwing around waiting for the group to fill up and get to a mission, then a bunch of tedious defeats and re-groupings as we brute-force our way through stuff too strong for us. After forty-five minutes of that I’ll be sick of dying and have little progress to show for my efforts.

I’ve worked a couple of characters up to about level 30 now, which is the end game as far as I’m concerned. Those last 20 levels require investments of time and patience I simply do not posses.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.