Last February, when I decided to cancel my subscription, I thought it really was for good. There was nothing left for me in City of Heroes/Villains. But in checking out issue 14, I'll be honest, I resubscribed largely because of the AE farms where I would have been able to level up some toons that I'd never thought I'd have the time or patience to previously.
Remember my goal of trying to get all Tanker primaries to level 50? I still want to do that and I thought I could with the AE farms. I guess that's not possible now since the
new patch is up and the developers are
threatening to punish people for taking advantage of a poorly thought out system that they built.
And just to be clear, I never intended to level them all from 1 to 50 with AE farms, but rather just to get over the mind numbingly tedious levels of 1 to 25ish. Tankers are late to mature, and it just sucks playing them at the lower levels. And that's the core of the problem, really -to get past that low level hump before I feel compelled to gouge my eyes out.
Given that I no longer really play with my old guildies, its not easy setting up a team of competent players with my limited time to actually get something done. As a result, I end up soloing most of the time. That's how it was the past few times when I decided to cancel my subscriptions, and that's how its going to be now. And if you're wondering, its like freaking pulling teeth if you ever want to give a solo go as a Tanker!
I did try to battle the monotony of the game by introducing this blog and setting goals. It helped for a little bit, and then it just gets boring again. The AE farms made it fun and exciting. I could get where I wanted to be, and fast.
Now I know that some of the holier-than-thou anti-farmers out there are turning their noses up to my little rant because I am 'missing out' on the content. Puh-leeze. I've been around since the first week the game launched and I've run through all the stupid missions, even creating toons specific for soloing missions so I can experience all the content. I've run all of the Task Forces and Trials there is. At one point, I had 3 accounts, full of toons of varying AT and powersets. I have a toon that was a hardcore badge hunter until issue 11, with the introduction of Ouroboros where I realized that I would have to run the missions with power limitations, multiple times! That was my limit.
The developer created content is crap and I honestly don't expect much more from the player created stuff. I have been past the point of caring about content (since I got bored of COV), because you do the same basic thing to get through it anyways. The mechanics of the game and how it as designed is intrinsically flawed. It might have been great 5 years ago, but now? There's really not much to the game play that has the spontaneity and excitement it sorely needs.
AE allowed me to abuse the poorly thought out system that the developers created. They should have saw it coming. But to threaten to ban people for it? That's fine with me. I don't plan on resubscribing after this month is up anyway.
