Lucky. Wanna trade Cyclops for my “Wolverine trawls a gay bar” costume?
-Tom
No, not really. Wolverine’s never been a favorite of mine, and costume != hero, at least to me. Besides, I already used the token.
That reminds me, though: is there any sort of secure trading interface in this game? I haven’t had occasion to use it yet, but having the option would be nice.
Your loss. Have fun blasting things with your silly eye-beams while I go Cruising in style.
Give me your Cyclops character token and I’ll let you know.
I am, of course, totally kidding. The only non-dopey thing about Cyclops is that he dates Jean Grey. If I wanted to shoot laser beams, I’d buy an Iron Man.
-Tom
Damn, that’s pretty hardcore of you, Tom.
Hey, I just got a character drop! Doctor Octopus just dropped the one character I most want to play: Jean Grey! Except that Jean Grey is the character I’ve been playing all along…
It’s actually not a bad deal, since duplicate character tokens are the only way to upgrade your ultimate power. So now my Dark Phoenix ultimate is level two. All in all, that’s far better for me right now than having another alt sitting in my roster.
-TomHmmm…just realized Nova is a playable character. I just finished reading a long stretch of the last series on Marvel’s digital library subscription. Methinks I may have to check into grabbing this one. I’ve played with my Thing for quite some time now and it’s getting a bit boring…
…and yes, I know what I just wrote.
I got a drop for Daredevil a while back, but I’ve never been a fan of the Stevie Wonder of superheroes.
I finally caved in and tried this last night. Once I got my poor Scarlet witch to a level where she had something useful to cast, I had a decent amount of fun. The pricing on things is absurd, though. What I find particularly annoying is, as near as I can tell, there’s no “Here, you want to buy a lot of stuff? Have a great deal!” I missed the founders offers so I’m stuck paying $35 for a character and new outfit and respec potion or the like.
The game’s not that good. Not when I can go back and just play Ultimate Alliance/Ultimate Alliance 2 again.
The founders packs were okay. Mine gave me Hulk, Cap, Iron Man and Ms. Marvel, as well as 3000 points for 60 bucks. It doesn’t feel super efficient, but rather an average game price for me. 'Course, they gave me Scarlet Witch and Daredevil outright, and I found The Thing (yay?).
I will say that the game gets significantly more funnerer once you hit the mid game. This is not a title that started with its best foot forward.
I haven’t spent a penny of my 3k yet. Reckon I’m gonna wait for Squirrel Girl. You’d have to be nuts to pass up Squirrel Girl!
I got the same pack (Avengers) the weekend the game had its early launch. Although I love all Diablo-type games (I was most blabby here about Titan Quest in 2007), and recently was crazy about the non-MMO The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, I really had paid no attention to Marvel Heroes at all.
A Steam bud recommended it then, and I did get the pack so I could try it. In retrospect, I’ve had the most fun with Gun-y (firearms or energy or both) type characters like Punisher, Cable and the relatively bargain priced (600) Black Widow. I don’t think any of the packs really had the mix of heroes I’ve most enjoyed playing to this point.
Some of my Steam pals are really into the end game, terminals etc., but I most prefer the storyline mission instances, and just general chaos in the zones throughout the storyline. Once that ends, I honestly don’t feel like playing the terminals. I’m working on leveling Black Widow at the moment. I’ll probably try to get all the characters I have left that I haven’t progressed much with (Iron Man, Hulk and Ms. Marvel in the pack; and Scarlet Witch and Daredevil) into the mid 20s and done with the storyline stuff. Don’t know if I’ll stick around much after that, until they add new content (which is promised, at least vaguely).
I’ve been experimenting with streaming/recording vids via Twitch:
(there are of course thousands of better vids on Twitch :-))
As far as what I bought with my 3,000 game bucks in the store, I bought Punisher and Cable after watching other players play as them. I found Cable in particular a real blast to play. And I ate some to get a Punisher stash page. I still think it’s stingy that when you buy a hero in the store, they don’t get one hero-specific stash page, given how expensive most are.
I’m very happy with the Steam version – updates have all downloaded smoothly.
I’ve put in more than 66 hours into the game to this point. Yet I wouldn’t consider myself an Expert because I’m not much into the endgame stuff, even if supposedly that’s where the best loot is, and the best chance to get hero and costume drops. Supposedly the recent patch last week improved the chances on those, but I’ve not experienced that myself.
I have found at other forums people just don’t seem interested in this. Either everyone (i.e., who play one particular hero) having the same costume bothers them, or not having access to all heroes for free bugs them, or it just bothers them it doesn’t play in the Everquest/DaOC/WoW mode of things. That’s actually what I love about it. I love wading into 20-30-40 enemies, and having a good chance of taking them out, rather than fretting about whether I “aggro’d” one more enemy than I can handle. :)
Plus the auto-teaming for instances generally works very well. Co-op in the instances in this is generally a short blast. And then everyone goes their own way usually. That’s fine, though I’ve suggested they consider something more akin to City of Heroes’ Task Forces, where you might have a few group instances interconnected under a storyline that ties them together. Maybe not to that extreme time-commitment-wise (I remember some TFs taking 8-12 hours), but just to have a fun excuse for a team to stay together for a little while. imho, that would maybe build a little bit better community into the game.
I am really trying to enjoy this, but I keep having connection issues and massive lag. Today alone I have been dropped 3 times, once right as I had gotten to a boss.
The game currency conversion is 500 Gs=$4.99, 1000 Gs=$9.99 etc.
To be fair, Black Widow is very fun to play and goes for just under $6 (600g). My favorite characters so far are Punisher and Cable, each going for about $10-$12.
I totally agree that iconic or edgy characters – Spider-Man, Iron Man etc. – are priced way out of whack, but in my experience the better known or more popular heroes aren’t necessarily the most fun to play in MH. And each hero you play will get a respec potion for completing the storyline mission that gives it as a reward.
They claim to be “reviewing” pricing, but it seems pretty clear that beta testers were complaining about pricing plans months ago. And they supposedly tuned it so heroes and costumes drop more often, but from forum posts that seems to happen mostly in the daily terminal missions (which you usually access around mid 20s levels).
A post today said they will grant a “mystery gift” hero to anyone who mistakenly received a “dupe” hero (a hero they already owned) as the last storyline mission’s reward. That should in an upcoming patch.
I see progress in the game and listening to feedback, but clearly like about any MMO I ever played, it’d have been nice if they were making all these improvements while it was in beta.
Feel free to say hi in the game (I’m “blackjackhero”). :)
Anyone interested in setting up a team to do the first group challenge in the Avengers Tower (Madripoor 1)? I can never find anyone interested in running it in game, and I can’t quite solo it. Last time I tried, I made it to the final boss, but his health regen outstripped my DPS.
I got a second Hero drop! It was…another Scarlet Witch.
I hate everything.
I’m ‘Vantormia’ in game, if I’m online I’ll gladly help out. A QT3 supergroup would probably make it easier for those of us still playing to team up…and to give Tom all our costume and hero tokens.
I found a team to do the first group challenge with tonight, but since I know what a pain that can be, I’ll gladly help anyone else needing to do it. I’m “Karok” in game.
And I also got a second hero drop tonight, a Thing. As Tom said, that was great, since it’s the only way to boost the level 30 ultimate power.
Went back in tonight and got up to the Jersey docks. Still pretty early (I think I’m level 7 or 8), but I’m liking it better than the opening missions. I’ve got a Thing waiting for me to level, but I want to get a little deeper before I go back to the beginning.
Does anyone know if any of the “dynamic” missions have any time limit on them? Soon after I got to the docks, I got a message to stop a shipment of AIM robots (heh, “AIMbots”). Not sure if that task needs to be done ASAP before it auto-fails, or if I can be more leisurely. I’m finding my OCD is triggered by revealing the minimap, so I have to explore every corner of every area.
I’ve been really lucky from a technical standpoint so far. No connection issues, and a pretty solid frame rate even at the highest setting. I hope I didn’t just jinx myself by typing that.
I’ve found that the dynamic events and missions occur so frequently, sometimes restarting as soon as the event finishes so no real need to worry about doing them asap. Some have a timer attached, or a few involve defending some npc’s (it fails if they get overrun) where as others such as ‘defeat Venom’ types go on for a while till a big enough group of players come along to get the job done.
What I’ve found is that if I move out of a given “chapter’s” zone, then the missions I have lingering there drop off the mission tracker. Or maybe it’s highlighting the chapter on the log that has the mission in it. Anyway, I’ve found here and there I had missed stuff because of something like that, rather than a time limit per se. I’d prefer everything stay on the tracker regardless of where I am or what chapter I’m working on.
While the randomizing of the levels is neat, it does feel like every time I log back in or try a different character and return to a zone (now with a different layout and mission entrance locations to some extent), I’ve become one of those folks who “can’t make new memories.” :)
From the complaints and “rage-quit” posts on the forums (somehow, rage-quitting an F2P seems odd to me), many folks refuse to buy any heroes, and just play the freebie and the one drop most folks get (or the Doom quest reward hero) into the 40s, find the endgame lacking, and move on. That is what I often do in more traditional MMOs. Something like this I just enjoy the gameplay mechanic and for now I’m content to keep working heroes through the storyline. I don’t know how long that’ll take me. Hopefully some more storyline stuff will be in the game before I reach that point. If not, I promise no rage-quit posts/drama, I’ll just go where old super heroes go to retire. :)
I was thinking (always dangerous :D) about the pricing, odd as it is. I assume their thinking (however warped) was to price iconic heroes out of orbit to try to balance the mix in MH so there weren’t only Spidey, Thor and Iron Man (or whomever) in the game. I would think they could cut those in half – then Black Widow would be about $3 on the low end, Punisher about $5, and the iconic heroes would be about $10. imho that would still sort of keep the hero choices balanced, but the iconic ones wouldn’t seem outrageously expensive, and I would bet most players wouldn’t blanche to much about $3-$5 for other types.
If they did that, they’d have to analyze the revenue data closely to see whether that evened out.
My other thought was that instead of letting you choose one of five heroes free, just let you play ALL those free heroes. (or, at least maybe 2 of the 5; or 3 of the 5?). The freebies are fun enough, but I don’t think getting to play a couple more of them free would keep folks from buying the others. It might help players get a better gauge on how different types of heroes play, and then be better informed about what other types of heroes they’d want to buy. Though to be fair, the reason I bought Punisher and Cable (rather than playing the rest of my Avengers Pack heroes after Captain A.) was I watched other players seeming to have so much fun with those characters.
So maybe all my ideas are crap. :) But it would seem like they need to shake up the prices and free character system if they want to encourage people to stay.
Yeah, the pricing is just a bit too high for me. If hero prices were half what they are now, I’d probably have dropped $20 unlocking a few characters. Instead, I’ve dropped zero dollars and am just playing freebies, hoping for a sale at some point.