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The Lore Tab Is STILL MISSING?!?!?!
logandarklighter
Posts: 334 Arc User
To the Developers -
I have been doing my level best to be helpful to former players of City of Heroes who are trying to make sense of the game.
In PARTICULAR I've been having MAJOR difficulty with players who run into that WALL OF FAIL that you've turned the tutorial into. I've gotten it down to some simple answers -
I've had to say that, or versions of that, over and over and over again.
And it's really sad that the level of FAIL in the current version of the tutorial has me basically saying to everyone who gets put off by it -
"Rule #1 of new players trying out Champions. Don't judge the game by the tutorial. There's a much better game hiding behind that wall if you'll just break through it."
Now we've got a different problem, you and I.
THE LORE TAB IS STILL MISSING.
I can't explain this one. I can't get people past it. There's no work-around. There's nothing I can do or say that will make it better.
I can't help you on this. So you've GOT to fix it! I am wondering if you REALLY understand the influx of people you will get on Dec 1st are going to want to UNDERSTAND your world! They're going to WANT TO READ ABOUT IT. They want CONTEXT.
You had a reasonably good system for lore-keeping in the game itself - the Lore tab! Where anything that the player read from the little "glowies" scattered around the game was collected.
And it's GONE.
YOU. WILL. LOSE. PLAYERS. OVER. THIS.
No. Really. Seriously. Don't you DARE walk away. Of all the bugs that this game is suffering, the lore tab being missing is the one that will hurt you the most over the longer period of time. This game is already considered MUCH more shallow than City of Heroes ever was.
To counter that, people defending Champions say -
"Well it's based on the Lore of a game system that's been around for 30 years, so the story is quite deep actually."
"Really? Where do I go in-game to read up on this?"
"Uhm... well... you see... there's a problem with that..."
You have GOT to see how bad that looks!
You've got a little over a month to fix this. C'MON GUYS? HOW HARD COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE? It's freaking TEXT for crying out loud! The data has to still be there! The system still keeps track of what our characters have clicked on doesn't it?
I want Champions to succeed. It's where the majority of people who are still interested in a Superhero MMO are going to go.
These are my friends. And I'd like them not to get disgusted with the game and LEAVE.
I've done everything I can to help people with the costume maker and the tutorial - the biggest places where people are put off of your game by the RIDICULOUS level of FAIL that you've loaded the tutorial with. But there's just nothing I can do for this. There's nothing I can say or do that gets people past this.
I can't help you defend and promote a game that's this badly broken!
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT'S HOLY FIX THE LORE TAB!!!!
I have been doing my level best to be helpful to former players of City of Heroes who are trying to make sense of the game.
In PARTICULAR I've been having MAJOR difficulty with players who run into that WALL OF FAIL that you've turned the tutorial into. I've gotten it down to some simple answers -
Don't make a custom character off the bat.
BLOCK
Don't try and fight the tutorial.
BLOCK
ACCEPT a standardized AT and Costume set and name your character TESTMAN or something. You won't be keeping them.
BLOCK
Run the character completely through the tutorial ONCE.
BLOCK
When you get to Black Talon BLOCK. BLOCK. BLOCK. BLOCK. BLOCK. And for a change of pace. GOD DAMNIT BLOCK. Whittle him down. Beat the tutorial.
Get out in the game, get to level 6 (or 10). And then log out, Delete Testman and NEVER DO THE TUTORIAL AGAIN. No - not even for the Achievement badge.
I've had to say that, or versions of that, over and over and over again.
And it's really sad that the level of FAIL in the current version of the tutorial has me basically saying to everyone who gets put off by it -
"Rule #1 of new players trying out Champions. Don't judge the game by the tutorial. There's a much better game hiding behind that wall if you'll just break through it."
Now we've got a different problem, you and I.
THE LORE TAB IS STILL MISSING.
I can't explain this one. I can't get people past it. There's no work-around. There's nothing I can do or say that will make it better.
I can't help you on this. So you've GOT to fix it! I am wondering if you REALLY understand the influx of people you will get on Dec 1st are going to want to UNDERSTAND your world! They're going to WANT TO READ ABOUT IT. They want CONTEXT.
You had a reasonably good system for lore-keeping in the game itself - the Lore tab! Where anything that the player read from the little "glowies" scattered around the game was collected.
And it's GONE.
YOU. WILL. LOSE. PLAYERS. OVER. THIS.
No. Really. Seriously. Don't you DARE walk away. Of all the bugs that this game is suffering, the lore tab being missing is the one that will hurt you the most over the longer period of time. This game is already considered MUCH more shallow than City of Heroes ever was.
To counter that, people defending Champions say -
"Well it's based on the Lore of a game system that's been around for 30 years, so the story is quite deep actually."
"Really? Where do I go in-game to read up on this?"
"Uhm... well... you see... there's a problem with that..."
You have GOT to see how bad that looks!
You've got a little over a month to fix this. C'MON GUYS? HOW HARD COULD THIS POSSIBLY BE? It's freaking TEXT for crying out loud! The data has to still be there! The system still keeps track of what our characters have clicked on doesn't it?
I want Champions to succeed. It's where the majority of people who are still interested in a Superhero MMO are going to go.
These are my friends. And I'd like them not to get disgusted with the game and LEAVE.
I've done everything I can to help people with the costume maker and the tutorial - the biggest places where people are put off of your game by the RIDICULOUS level of FAIL that you've loaded the tutorial with. But there's just nothing I can do for this. There's nothing I can say or do that gets people past this.
I can't help you defend and promote a game that's this badly broken!
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT'S HOLY FIX THE LORE TAB!!!!
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
Blizzard recently had a similar sort of problem when they chose to take a lot of key events that took place during/before the two most recent WoW expansions - including the deaths of a fair few number of important and long-standing lore figures - and put them into novels with no explanation, commentary, or acknowledgements in the game itself.
Whether the game is big like WoW, or smaller like Champions Online is, the rule still stands:
IF PLAYERS CAN'T LEARN THE LORE OF A LORE-HEAVY GAME WITHIN THE GAME ITSELF, YOU'RE DOING THINGS WRONG.
However, the MAJORITY of the lore that i spent like two years collecting from clickies and what have you from all over the game, is still missing, and requires you go back and click on all those things again.
Too bad that about 1/5th of that stuff is either in instanced missions you can no longer access without the mission or was part of the old canada/desert/Millenium City crises.
Snark never dies.
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
@Quincy-St-Moth's PRIMUS page
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
And playing by myself since Aug 2009
Godtier: Lifetime Subscriber
It would be...
Except isn't EVERY Major patch for this game EXACTLY like that? A Disaster?
*sigh*
The Kitchen Sink patch was far worse...
This is Bathroom Sink, at most...
M-O-O-N, that spells @Rhyatt
Originally Posted by mijjestic: Ultimately, though, MMO players throwing stones at each other in this fashion is basically one nerd pointing and laughing at another nerd whose glasses are thicker.
Laws yes!
Which fits, since according to a lot of folks, CO's already headed for the Toilet.
You are correct. Players can reaquire some of the lore and new players, such as yourself, should have no problems getting most of it. However, the problem is that some of the lore is no longer accessable, due to lore being behind certain missions, that older toons no longer have access to, or due to changes in the game some lore is just plain gone and not accessable to anyone. Somewhere a patch wiped out everyone's lore they had collected over the years. Those of us that took the time to hunt down all the lore before August would like our lore back. I have a feeling it isn't as easy as just giving the lore back to us and may have indeed been wiped clean from every individual toon. I hope not, that sucks.
Same with the char I made in May. Both of them, in fact. And the one from June.
Since three of those are 40s, there's no way I can just re-gather their lore. Just splendid.
Confirmed. I just clicked on the "Evil ATM" in north westside and the lore for that popped up.
Is there ANY REASON to keep a lvl 40 character around instead of just deleting them?
Because all my hard work in hunting down lore on my high level characters is GONE. And I really don't feel like doing this again.
EDIT:
To hell with it. I'm just going to delete every single character on my account and start over on December 1st. I may as well. I'm not going to be able to get the lore back on my characters any other way.
Regarding lore: Is there any place I can go to read up on the lore of the Champions universe? I tried the lore tab, but it is regrettably empty. I also looked far and wide through the website and couldn't find anything. I played this game for a little while in beta and after release, and I seem to remember some pretty good short stories popping up (something about Ironclad fighting in a gladiator arena) but I can't seem to find those either.
Just asking if there's anything at all I can look for, short of finding all of the pen-and-paper sourcebooks. Lore is a pretty big draw for me, and I feel like I would be more invested in the game if I knew some of the story behind all the missions that I'm doing.
And don't invest yourself in this game. There's little point. Cryptic doesn't care about the game or it's lore. That much has become obvious now.
If you really need to find the lore on the universe, you're going to have to go read the books. In fact I'd say buying the books and starting a pen and paper game is more worth your time and energy.
Well I've kind of already invested $14 in a sub, purely because I couldn't stand the character creator otherwise.
Sourcebooks it is, then.
...******nit.
Logan, if the primary reason you have to play the game is to pick up lore, maybe you should take up reading instead. There's quite an elaborate universe underlying Tolkien's Middle-Earth, and the lore of Banks' Culture stories is rather intriguing...
Me, I'm having fun running around playing superhero, saving people and thwarting bad guys. That's pretty much what I expect from a game.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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This is what you people worry about?
Over 200,000 thousand players have come and gone from the game since January, nobody ever said "Hey guys, I found awesome lore, you should totally check this out, its AMAZING"
Not even once.
I heard they are trying to remove the taint of goofiness that is spread like cheese over the game. Maybe it starts with getting rid of the lame back stories, dopey characters, and lore.
It's scattered throughout the game. Keep an eye out for items when you're running around, including instances, that you can click on. They provide bits and pieces of the backstory of the game and each time you get one it's added t the collection of what you can access from the lore tab on your character.
Calm down... Yes, it really sucks that the people that were collecting it on their various toons lost all the info in their lore tabs but, it's not like it's the end of the world. I know there's info you're all missing now and some of it can't be gotten back but, maybe this would be a good motivation for people to do stuff like update the wiki. If someone had done that before, it wouldn't be as big a deal anyways since you'd still all be able to access that lore easily.
Honestly, just like a lot of the other new people on CO, I'm from CoH and I've been talking with friends on that game. None of them has asked, "Is the lore on that game good?" Not a single one. Some have asked how hard it would be to adapt characters they play on CoH to CO's lore which I tell them is super easy considering that CoH's setting was basically cribbed almost entirely from the Champion's P'n'P and almost every orginization in CoH has a counterpart in CO but, none could give a s**t about how engrossing the signature characters or stuff like that are. The ones that RP will make up their own stories and the others just wanna blast stuff.
Actually, yeah, the lore is very important to me. I spent time tracking them all down and would appreciate getting it back. It would be the same as taking away a device someone farmed months for, it just stinks. Granted, this isn't a deal breaker and having me run to GW2, but it still stinks and if I can get it back, that would be nice.
And I do not believe that most people think the lore is full of lame back stories and dopey characters. I believe most people rather enjoy it. That is why a lot of us have stuck around since Beta, we enjoy the comic book feel of it all.
You can read and find most of the lore here:
http://www.champions-online-wiki.com/wiki/Lore_Perks
And extended lore perhaps here:
http://www.herogames.com/home.htm
It is not JUST the lore.
It's just that this is the last straw.
I've been boosting this game as the best place for former COH people to go to and at the same time I've been having to DEFEND this game and make excuses for it's broken nature for quite some time now. And I am tired of defending a broken game and I've decided I'm not going to do it anymore.
The lore tab is just an example of the degree to which Champions has been abandoned by Cryptic. Actually no - abandoned by PW.
It really hit home for me between the time I made my original post in this thread and last night after I read from the thread here.
So yeah. THIS.
The lore tab isn't even the big thing. It's a SYMPTOM. And between the above and the obvious lack of care this game has received over the years...
I can't recommend it as a home anymore to City of Heroes players.
I hate to say this. But DCUO might just be the better offering in the long run.
Let me repeat - I HATE THAT. Because DCUO will NOT let you create your own original character the way you want it or let you recreate a character spot on as it was in City of Heroes or even from this game.
But it is a superhero game. And it will be around for much longer than Champions. And they are improving it steadily. And they're treating their subscribers MUCH better there.
This whole thing pisses me off because I WANT to love Champions. I see SO MUCH GOD DAMN POTENTIAL in this game that... It makes me sad and enraged at the same time to realize that that potential will NEVER be realized.
This at the same time my heart is breaking over losing City of Heroes.
I'm sorry to seem to be all of a sudden turning so negative when before I was a supporter. But this has really hit me hard at the WORST possible time.
As a counter point I find a lot of the lore to be lacking as they have barely added anything at all from the Champions sourcebooks. Barely scratched the surface. If we were guaranteed to get a major piece of lore with every new patch I might take it more seriously.
But we aren't. So I don't.
This game neeeeeeds a lot of things before I can recommend it to anyone who played COH.
I'm crossing my fingers that next year, after NWO launches, they will ramp up development here.
If there had never been a COH there would never have been a CO. :cool:
Watch & learn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-qesAt92Jw
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
Yeah. Seriously. Lore. As in, the reason behind everything you see and do in the entire gameworld. The motivation behind every mission. The setting. The world. Lore.
How does this not make sense to you?
...Now it's my turn: Seriously? The world is fictional nonsense. Nothing but colorful pixels dancing around for your amusement. I'm not sure why you think giving those pixels a story is some sort of grievous insult.
What do you mean, "you people!?"
Is this what passes for omniscience these days?
You mean, in all the thousands of fans of the tabletop game, not one of them looked at Champions Online and said, "You know what? I really liked the story to that game. I think I and all my friends should give it a try."
They could sure as hell start by kicking you out.
Yeah! And you know what? The character creator is stupid. Just give everybody featureless avatars! And missions? Screw 'em - let's make the game about standing still for as long as possible. And you know that gigantic skyscrapers in the middle of Millennium City? **** those. Gimme some cardboard boxes.
:rolleyes:
Thanks for the constructive responses, everybody who responded constructively. Appreciate it.
I'm going to be deleting my entire stable of characters and starting completely over again.
Reasons:
There is absolutely no way to re-acquire some of the Lore without going through specific missions. And it just can't be done on a level 40 solo. (And good luck finding someone specifically doing that one mission you need, even if they're part of your supergroup.)
I thought about the crafting that my two level 40s can do. And it's not much. I have lvl 400 skill. But I never did get around to getting the old legacy material anyway. And crafting is pretty much a dead issue anyway. Why should I bother crafting anything at all when I can just get it on the market?
I have an entire Supergroup coming over from City of Heroes. I may as well start over and level up with them. It won't take long anyway. And it'll let me re-acquire the lore that was taken away from me.
I'll still have the same costume saves and re-make the same characters in many cases. It's not as if I'm losing anything important. I have no legacy powers or anything.
There's no real reason to even keep a level 40 around anyway in this game. There's nothing to do anyway. I may as well stick around my friends level and play the game with them as they level up.
I'll keep a single level 40 as my "Bank" until I re-create all my other toons, then re-distribute all the gear and in-game currency out and delete him too for re-creation.
Is there anything at all wrong with this plan that I haven't considered? Anything I'm missing that I'll want to keep a current level 40 (with zero Lore) around for?
May I highly recommend to you that you do this for some of your characters but not all? Please? It seems to be an impulsive decision you might regret.
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
*shrug* Like I said - I'm not deleting everything. I'll certainly be keeping at least one as a bank until I can redistribute stuff around. It'll probably take some time anyway. I didn't just rush off and do it already. It's a plan I'll be implementing piecemeal over the course of the month as I have some spare time.
Some of these characters have been idle for many months anyway. I can think of at least two that I was thinking of deleting before this whole mess anyway. (I was amused by the costume concepts but the characters themselves lost my interest over time.)
It'll probably allow me to re-discover some things I'm out of date on anyway. Certain aspects of leveling up with some of the power sets that have seen some revamps since I started.
In a way I'm kinda looking forward to it.
"#2 Explorable content."
Actually tell you what, PM me if I'm in-game and I'll level with ya! I got some characters in need of leveling up, and it's hard to be motivated to do it without a team (I'm just highly teamwork oriented as an individual I guess).
Consolidate the currencies! (Please!)
Does your Champion have a theme song? (share it!)
Got a funny in-game screenshot? (share it!)
Please fix the Overdrive energy unlock! (Should help promote thematic build diversity!)
Your toons. If you really want to then have at it but, I'd recommend deleting one or two at a time and leveling those back up instead of getting rid of a bunch all at once. You might get sick of it before you get around to leveling up that many of them.
Not a bad mod to the plan. Primarily I could start by deleting the ones I mentioned that were just lying fallow (moving their resources over to the others beforehand of course).
Then I could delete and recreate the ones that are direct CoH ports since those are the primary ones I'll want to play and level with my SG starting Dec 1st.
Then see if I want to delete the mid and high level ones immediately or wait a bit. Who knows - maybe they'll fix the lore stuff before I have to. And in the meantime I'll be having some low-level fun.
Yeah - that's one thing that's definitely a plus! My old level 40s started right after launch and did what was then the low-level content. The newer stuff at the lower levels? They haven't done.
Plus - one of the things that's been a little frustrating this last year was trying to figure out how to respec those older toons to the new system. It may be easier to figure out what gear and builds works best by re-playing them from the ground up!
Definitely I'll consider it! ^_^
So, y'all were terribly worried about collecting incorrect information about the adventures your heroes didn't actually have?
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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So still not acceptable for me and I'm still on track for my plan to delete and recreate.
It's being upset about having NO information in the tabs AT ALL. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Ixnay. All tabs wiped clean with nothing on them. No way to look up event info. No way to reference what info each character might have encountered for RP purposes. Some of my characters might've taken the Desert route. Others might've gone through Canada.
But there's no evidence of anything that they did AT ALL? So - did I defeat Poe or not? Did I run Telios lab? Dr. Destroyers Factory? If I did - what background info does my character know?
Impossible to say now. So I'm deleting and starting over. If CO is going to force a continuity retcon on me, than I'm going to just take it all the way and retcon back to the beginning.
Champions has little to no incentive to play a character at level 40 anyway. Once the content is done, it's DONE and that's all.
People keep saying "it's the journey, not the destination". Well it's as if I never left on the journey in the first place.
The Lore tabs are my characters "memory" and they all have amnesia now.
So if the only way to regain the "memory" is to replay the whole thing again, I guess that's what I'll have to do.
I'll hardly be alone after all.