The Daily Grind: Are you going to check out the I14 open beta?

I was thinking about it. I keep hearing good things about customization and character creation for this game. However, when I reviewed the classes nothing jumped out at me as appealing to play. And I don't really have time to do justice to another game so why bother. Instead I logged into EVE and spent 10M ISK on skill books I needed to outfit a ship for faction warfare. O-U-C-H!

I was a dedicated player for 3.5 years. I13 and I14 were the first 2 issues that had little appeal for me.

I think CoH will have to come out with some (dev created) incredible content, w/ some extremely unique rewards to stay relivant in 2009.

While the idea of the MA is fantastic, the rewards are minimal, and aside from badges, there's not much that differs it from the tens of thousands of other cookie cutter quests in the game.

So no, I won't. My wife, bro-in-law, and 3 RL friends have all cancelled our accounts in the last 3 weeks.

Ryzom had a mission creator years ago and no one cared about it then, why would anyone care about it in CoH now? What a shame.

Other MMOs have had mission creators -- Hero's Journey was another, and there have been others. I think Horizons even had something toward the end? Maybe not.

Just because previous attempts haven't been hugely successful doesn't mean this new one won't. I've tried it out, and it's easy to use, as much or as little customized as you like, and it gives you that old DM feel, and that can never be a bad thing.

The thing about content creation systems, like this, is that you don't see the good stuff right off. There will be a hundred thousand missions soon after this goes live, and ninety thousand of them will be crap. Soon, most people will get bored of it and go back to their regular gameplay.

And then there will be the crazy geniuses who come up with something earth-shaking, who make it all worthwhile.

Come back in two or three months, then check out the best player missions. They will be something you have never seen before.

It's all the rage these days. Crowd sourcing. Somewhere out there is a crazy genius who wants to build you something amazing for free. All you have to do is give them the tools.

One word : BANZAIIIIIII !

Yes, I'm going to check it out. Looks like a lot of fun.

I probably won't bother with the Beta. Heck, i14 looks almost to be a wash for me, and I'm a bit of a Badger. Unfortunately all the big announced MA badges (and unfortunately no non-MA badges have been revealed) in i14 just come off to me as about as easy to get as the Bug Hunter badge (for those of you who don't know what that is, it's something you can only get if you're the first person to find and report a major exploit in game that the Devs don't know about, and even then they have to feel like you've earned that badge). Add in that I all the rest of the stuff or lack there of feels like it's PvP only (new PvP tournaments, very good rewareds that only drop from PvP kills, etc.), and.... Bleh.

Probably the only good thing I've even heard about this is there's now a /CHANCE/ of getting some of the harder to get rewards (like Luck of the Gambler +Recharge) via normal drops, but the chances of even getting a drop from that pool is on par with an ultra-rare drop. Worse, since the drop pool for these drops is being merged with one of the other drop pools, they're not even going to drop that often.

Oh well, at least there's still a lot of content on Villains I haven't done yet. That is if I can ever find any teams over there....

I've messed around with the beta for Issue 14, the Mission Editor is incredible and offers endless options. Almost anything you could think of can be done. This is definitely a tool RPers will have a lot of fun using to create content catered to their characters and friends/guilds characters.

My only concern about issue 14 is that they might have spent to many man hours on the editor and not offer anything else. This is a game that only got 1 major update last year and that update was watered down because they pushed the Mission Editor back til this update. With Champions close to releasing and DCUO on the horizon, CoH is a game that is going to need to stay fresh if they want to weather the storm and not get buried.

I've tried the I14 beta and it's fantastic. Really brings a new dimension to the game.

IMO, by far, the most important aspect is the critter customisation. The sheer variety this provides is incredible - entire enemy groups can be built up from the ground by designers, using nearly any powerset in the game. Even if you've been playing for five years, when you step into any arc that uses custom critters you're in for a surprise, as your enemies will be ones you have never seen before.

Although it's a bit too easy to make your custom critters VERY difficult. Good for those who love a challenge though.

I was one of the I14 "haters", in that I didn't think the issue would bring much to the table for me.

After playing with the editor last night, I'm kinda kicking myself for not at least coming up with some good story ideas beforehand. Even my 15-minute tossed together level with custom boss fight was pretty sweet.

The badges and rewards are a nice touch, since they can't add real loot to a custom system, I still feel like I'm getting goodies for playing my own mission.

I'll definitely give my next go at the creator more thought, and yeah. I think this is a worthwhile feature for the game.

No, played for 3.5 years, got bored, no end-game content, devs don't care about the PvP community, then they revamped PvP... it sucked, PvP zones went dead, and so I won't ever go back until they put PvP back.

The beta is currently fragile, but the possibilities are amazing. The game is suddenly a challenge, for the first time in a long time, and I had to switch NPC chat back on, because the a lot of the stories are now new, very well plotted, clever, funny and interesting!
No heading back to the wiki to see what happened later.

I have been playing around with the MA stuff in the open beta now and I love it.
The mission editor is very easy to use, which I do think is important to make this kind of feature a success.
And they have enough features in there to allow the results to not be too simplistic.

The main point in playing the beta now is of course if one has any interest in creating new story arcs. For those interested in playing only this may not be the time just yet.