City of Heroes News & Events & Guides

While you can probably play the game just going around and stopping drug deals, robberies, or rituals in progress, you can also go see contacts to get missions. Certain contacts are interested in certain villain groups, so they are likely to give you missions related to those groups. This allows for story arcs to come into play (remember what the 'RP' means?), and can allow you to appreciate the impressive depth of this game. Also, missions are with a fair chunk of experience points. In addition, your contacts will reward you by allowing to buy enhancements, giving you their 'cell phone number' (so you don't have to run all the way back to them when you've finished a mission), or even introduce you to other contacts.

Some missions are too tough for you to take on alone. That's when you need to find teammates. Just look around for characters that are about your level, and complement your archetype (like, all blasters would be bad, but a couple scrappers, a tanker, a defender, and a couple controllers would probably work). Then just invite them to join your CoH Influence team. While you are a member of a team, all experience earned is shared equally. You can even see where your teammates are on the map, if they are in the same zone as you. And you even have a special chat channel that only members of your team can see. If at later levels you want to make the arrangement a bit more permanent, you can even register a super group.

This game does have some server lag and server downtime problems. But I guess that is a mark of how popular it is, since all of the 11 servers seem to be at medium load almost all the time. But still it is annoying to occasionally have a lot of lag, or have the server go down without warning. This doesn't happen very often, but even once is too often in my opinion. I can only hope City of Heroes influence will stop happening as NC Soft gets a handle on things.