Rule number one of older City of Heroes missions:

[dvandom]

If a mission is given in Steel Canyon and requires travel to Skyway City or vice versa, whichever train station is closer to the contact will let you out at the wrong end of the target city. ALWAYS.

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

At one point, the designers spent a lot of time proceeding under the parallel assumptions that:

1) Requiring travel on foot across large and potentially hazardous areas was important for teaching players to manage aggro; and

2) Adversity builds character, if you'll pardon the pun.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, hence "older missions". :) They'd clearly become disabused of those assumptions by the time CoV launched, since the entire Paths of Power arc redside stays in Cap Au Diable. Doing it Blueside led to my first ever trip to Bricktown! (Which is a pretty quick and safe badge-hunt if you have flight.) The cape mission redside is more fight, less flight as well...one warehouse mission to get your ticket punched, then the statue-busting mission. As opposed to another grand tour of Paragon City blueside.

[zqadams.livejournal.com]

They've pretty much admitted, IIRC, that there were some pretty serious design errors in the early content--they expected people to spend a lot more time street sweeping on the way to missions, and less time actually IN missions. The mere existence of Raptor and Zero-G packs is an admission of failure in that regard, as is the more compact nature of the Rogue Isles (a smaller number of large zones, with districts therein being the dividing line between group spawn sizes.

Has Issue 15 gone live yet? I haven't had time to play of late.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

There are a number of lessons learned - and a couple that seem oddly to have been unlearned (I'm looking at you, supergroup registrar located in a place no one would ever pass casually whilst transacting other business) - in the design of City of Villains. In some cases, I think they might've taken things a bit too far in trying to "fix" perceived flaws in City of Heroes, and they went overboard on the art design (I realize the Rogue Isles are a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but does it all have to be dingy-skied and dirty?), but they were clearly trying.

I miss the Random Mission Generator that was inadvertently part of CoV during beta test. You'd go to one of those wooden-doored caves, click to enter, and find yourself in... a warehouse?! It was unintentional and quickly fixed, but it did rather give the Isles the feeling of being nothing but wall-to-wall James Bond villain lairs. :)

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Oh, I've occasionally had weird mission spawns. Like the radio mission to stop a bank robbery where the door was located...in the Architect Entertainment glowy pillar. Or the Safeguard mission where I had to go to a warehouse at the south end of Faultline (i.e. deep in Arachnos territory) to get to a Skyway City bank.