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Guess we just have different kinds of luck. :-)
I find in less-instanced games, rather than helping, other players are usually trying to beat me to the boss or glowie in order to get it for themselves. Whereas in CoX, many of my fondest memories are of bumping into folks between missions and deciding to help one another, or of joining their mission in progress to help them past the one last hurdle (or sometimes software bug). I always liked the fact that the requirement to add someone to my team gave me control over whether they could help me -- whereas in an open world, I'd sometimes get unsolicited "help".
Not to mention the disbelief-unsuspension of mobs or glowies that respawn on top of you that comes from open-world content, but that's a bit of a tangent.
Hmmm...I may be wrong here, but going solely off the fact that you mention mostly receiving help, I wonder if the main thing that accounts for our differing experiences is that I was more likely to provide assistance than request it, so I didn't really test that aspect of instanced content from the same point of view.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I would help others as well, both in CoX and other MMO's so don't think it was just one way traffic on the helping front. But in CoX I found that *having* to be teamed up with someone to be able to help them on a mission was annoying (but that is a side effect of having so much content instanced).
But over several years of playing MMO's I probably had *more* people Kill steal from me in CoX than other MMO's. I think what has also helped (especially recently) is that nowadays at least in some of them, there is no such thing as "kill stealing" any more. If someone helps you kill a mob, you both get credit towards your "kill total" (and both get drops)
The re-spawning of mobs *right in front of you*, for me doesn't bother me. Unfortunately it is a necessary evil, although you don't have to have them fade in on you (teleport in effect, dig up from the ground, fly in the from sky that kind of thing can be done instead). You say that its unrealistic... I find the fact that I have to be a *part* of your team to join you "unrealistic" in CoX. (/tangent).
I will also say that I did notice a difference between PvE and RP PvE servers... and in general (even the unofficial RP servers) that the RP PvE servers had a "nicer feel" to them, in that the players were kinder to the general world. Not to say that there were no jerks on them (there are, no matter the server you are on), but that I have met far nicer people on the RP (both official and unofficial) servers than elsewhere (unless of course I knew people from outside the game first of all).
Swings and Roundabouts there.
This. I've lost count of the number of times in the other MMOs I've played where I've approached a spawn guarding a glowie and engaged them, only to have someone else run up to grab the glowie while the mobs are fighting me, and then I have to wait after defeating the spawn, hoping that the glowie refreshes before I have to fight the spawn again. One of the things that has made SWTOR amusing is the fact that the four 'stealth' classes all have a 'get out of combat free' power that drops you into stealth and ends combat; the couple of times that I've been playing the right character and been in just the right spot to fire off that power when someone tries to ooze in and grab the glowie, only to get smacked down by the 'released' spawn when I disappear have made my day. And too many of the open-world missions in other MMOs require you to take down a number of a particular type of mob that spawns only in limited numbers in a restricted area, and when you have a number of players all trying to complete the same mission, you wind up having to either queue up for your turn at a particular spawn, or rush around trying to beat everyone [b]else[/b] to the respawns.
No, I think I prefer the CoH way, where I can be sure, when I enter a mission, that I'm not going to have to stand around for ten minutes waiting for the boss I have to defeat to respawn, and then wait another fifteen for the mission glowie to respawn because someone slipped past me and ninja'd the glowie while I was fighting the boss -- and then have to fight the boss again when [i]he[/i] respawns before the glowie does. If that means, when I get stuck, that I have to exit the mission and advertise for someone to help me, then add them to my team, before they can get in to assist, that's the lesser of a great many evils for me.
I've never had an issue with it from either side, although the auto-level feature that the sidekick/exemplar mechanics became toward the end of the game [i]did[/i] eliminate the ability to bring in a +10 character to steamroll a mission boss when you just wanted the mission to be [b]over[/b]. Which, on the whole, was a good thing, because it made assisting someone else in their mission more interesting.
That was one of the things that made Port Oakes feel more 'real' -- when I started doing routes through the streets of Port Oakes to find the Marconi bosses, I noticed that the Marconi spawns that hung around on the streets would 'replenish' by coming out a door in one of the buildings, and when you spooked a mob into running, they'd run down the street a ways and then duck into a building to get away. It made the zone feel less as if the mobs just popped in out of nowhere to provide zap fodder for the players. To a lesser degree the same thing was true of places like Boomtown, where (after the return of the 5th Column), you would see spawns of mixed 5th Column/Council mobs going at each other until only one side was standing. It made some things more difficult (the Numina TF, where you had to either find 'monoculture' spawns or swoop in and attack quickly before the other side in the fight got credit for the mobs, for example), but it was less artificial than the "little old lady with an unbreakable grip on her purse" spawns.
I think its a swings and roundabouts problem here with the "open world" vs "Instancing everything".
Fighting others for a certain mob... that is part "world design" problem (ie not enough to really go around with all players out there), and player attitude. The Guild Wars 2 method of combating this is that as long as you do *some* damage to the mob you get credit for it. So no need to fight for a certain mob.
Fighting for a "glowy"... solution: Make it respawn quicker (or allow several to interact with it at the same time). Or even make them so that each "glowy" is personal.
My major thing though was that a CoX zone could be *very* empty, especially if everyone is in their own private instance running a mission.
Yes, there are 300 people "in the zone", but 95% of them are in a mission so the zone would only count as 15 people... I am not trying to say that instancing *doesn't* have its place... it does. But I feel that in comparison to CoX/Guild Wars other games felt more "alive".
Oh, and Guild Wars 2 does quite a few of these which means that there is "less fighting" for mobs and glowies (remember that in Guild Wars 2, each zone has a level cap so that you will be down levelled to that cap automatically (no loss of abilities though)). Up levelling doesn't really happen though (there are instances that will up level you, and World Vs World levels you automatically to 80, and some other competitive stuff)
indeed. And come to think of it, it might be why I had difficult time on many occasions to get enough people for a task force that is not the FoTM.
On the forums, people come out the woodwork, "I did that or this TF all the time, And me and my buddies ran it all the time".
But in game it was empty probably because people was busy going mish to mish and while in mission mode didn't see the advertisement for a TF forming because they may have closed the chat box or focused on the team chat while doing missions. And those that did probably simply wasn't interested in doing much at that time because they are RPing, taking a break or doing something else at the moment.
In the past week I got more team invites in each open mish majority games than I got in COX in a year. No exaggeration. Can count on one hand in my entire game play from i4 and up how many time it happened. Then even forming teams whether it's for some dungeon, or in CO case an Alert or taking on Thek. or some other major dude. Never took longer than 15 min to get the team and get started. Maybe because in those games since most missions are out door, more people see it at the times even if CO have lower population than COX had. Thus better chance of the message of forming a team getting to the right people that are interested. But in CO case part of that may be the one server set up.
The troll rave. The first time my character was in Skyway and saw a group of giant glowing trolls running purposefully across the zone...I just *had* to follow and see what was up! It gave a great sense of there being things going on outside of 'run mission, sweep streets'.
So many things were done right with City of Heroes. You could be any hero you really wanted to be, with a little imagination. The game content offered so many situations to choose from, then Architect Entertainment made it even more personal. The hero-side stories made you feel heroic. Many times I just need a break from reality, to just 'go do some good'. Or plumb the depths of comic book evil.
You could get in and out of the game easily for anything but task forces, which meant almost everything. The game encouraged teams, and teams were easy to find. The developers were dedicated to impressing the playerbase. The teams, power variety and power balance meant battles were often new and interesting.
As my first MMO, I did not fully appreciate how incredibly 'right' City of Heroes was until I tried other games. City of Titans has made it better for me already - I stopped looking. I also have more disk space for now.
And I did like me a [url=http://milandare.deviantart.com/art/Airhead-by-Jet-2-172220616]troll rave[/url] too :)
[size=14]"The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths." - Pushkin[/size]
[size=14] "One piece of flair is all I need." - Sister Silicon[/size]
So true. When I first started trying others, I was stunned at the missing things that I had assumed were ubiquitous MMO features (even in recent releases). And annoying game features that made me think, "How could you have decided to do that when there's a perfectly good example out there of how to do it right?"
Spurn all ye kindle.
The thing that I loved the most about CoH was the ability to play alone or with friends when I wanted to. I could go in and just explore and get a random invite to a team. But most of all, the character creation platform was really fun. Sometimes I spent hours creating builds that others said wouldn't work, but turned out awesome in may situations.
Freedom
Teaming and socializing was so easy. The game was really geared for teaming, but at the same time I could take a weak controller and solo for a while.
I still miss the community greatly.
City of Gaymers
050505 thru 120112
The TF's. loved the challenge of going for "masters" badge. And PvP, no droning, please.
The task force of the week at this time everyone could solo the archvillian or archhero and he had to face 8 of us.
The mastermind I built a doctor doomette clone. With on hand I hurt you with my magical science and with the other hand hurt you with my sciency magic.
In the last months i created a street ragamuffin who ran on 4 legs like her animal friends.
Just when coh was getting really awesome they killed it.
[CENTER][URL=http://www.nodiatis.com/personality.htm][IMG]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/18.jpg[/IMG][/URL][/CENTER]
[URL=http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-knhgv6lgbrs/UA_riCKAHNI/AAAAAAAATxE/u-sgh23bZhc/s640/wonder_women_by_penichet-d47up0l.jpg [/IMG][/URL]
I loved the flexibility, as has been noted by several others... The RP possibilities, the creative outlet, all that.
That said, what I loved most about CoH and what separated it from CO and DCUO for me, was that I felt like a superhero when playing. In CO everything felt unfocused. I only played it early on, but while the whole wilderness zone thing was interesting, it lacked the City that CoH had... It didn't feel like you were protecting your home, didn't feel like you could hit the streets and rescue random citizens being mugged if you felt like it. DCUO, even though the action-y twitch style of it's gameplay is superior to the older style of CoH's combat, I just couldn't fully get into it because of the lack of flexibility on the one hand, with power sets feeling very tightly themed and restrictive, and because it sort of failed to feel like you were a superhero. You mostly felt like you were an errand boy, and not even a particularly powerful one.
CoH had its ATs with multiple varied powersets, which were just generic enough that you could flavor them however you liked. In DCUO your role is set by the powerset and the looks of that powerset are set in stone... To a much greater extent than even CoH in the old old days before power customization even. Taking Light Manipulation in DCUO pretty much makes you a GL, and the visuals are too specific to really try and play as anything else.
Same goes for most of their powersets really.
The whole "Inspired By" bit where you pick a DC superhero and get a character who looks like a wannabe sidekick of theirs with appropriate powers and such seems to have been the "intended" play, and customization seems poor. And while you theoretically have the ability to mix and match powersets and weapons, ultimately there's a specific "best" weapon for various roles, and a specific "best" powerset... If you want to be a tank you need X powers with X weapon, and if you use Y weapon instead, you'll be gimped.
Nothing like the freedom accorded by CoH's primary/secondary powerset combinations.
All that said, however... Ultimately for me... When CoH was first released (I was in on the pre-order head start days) I loved it. I loved what Jack Emmert seemed to hate: That the game was not the typical MMORPG (Of its day). You didn't have to put together a perfect team composition and then single pull mobs carefully, fleeing in terror if you got two adds. You were SUPER HEROES. You could assemble a team of willing heroes and simply dive into the fray. You were always outnumbered, and that was a GOOD thing! What kind of a superhero are you if you can't take on ten mooks by yourself, I ask you?
Then they started the nerfs, because "OMG everyone is too powerful! People can take on 100 mobs and live! No one will team up if they're not forced to build trinity teams and struggle with even level mobs!"
Of course, once Jack left, they started fixing all the damage he'd done, reverting things, adding to what the game [i]was[/i] instead of trying to force it to be EverQuest. Instead of trying to nerf and make everyone equally bad, they just put in difficulty sliders, and started buffing. They didn't try to make everything equally good at soloing, they just left it as it was. Everyone could solo, but some where better at it than others, and that was ok! Because the worst solo classes were the most valuable in a group setting, and if you wanted to solo you could just lower the difficulty settings and still go feel like a superhero!
They accepted the fact that groups of 8 could and did take on groups of 30 mobs, and stopped trying to take that away, just started building content with that in mind.
It was still an old-fashioned tab-target MMORPG, but it was a lot more fast and furious than it's contemporaries like EQ, AO, AC, and DAoC.
I liked that there was almost no grind. Instead of trying to keep players by making them grind for a year to get a level 50 character, they just made the game [i]fun[/i]. I had two accounts full of characters, because the game was simply fun. Lots were level 50, and I still played them, because it was just fun to go out and bash supervillains, and roleplay them.
Taking my Super Strength/Shield Brute to Cimmeria and soloing the patrols on the wall was such an amazing thing after all that work getting there. Standing in front of Lord Recluse with my best Tanker in Statesman's Task Force, looking him in the eye, and taking everything he could throw at me, is one of the greatest moments I've had in a game.
So uh, TL;DR: Flexibility, the lack of grind, and the fact that you felt like a powerful superhero at every stage of your progression, from the start to the end.
Especially once they finally caved in and made Fitness inherent, and gave you a "free" travel power from nearly the start.
It was the freedom of the game.
You had a very high level of customization (not having to rely on armor helped).
You could get engaged in all sorts of activities.
The speed of play, style, and they way the sets complimented team play. I could go on, but those are the major reasons for me for anyone who cares.
I want to share a story. I had just found this game today as I started once again grieving the loss of CoH. I lurked around the forums and found this thread. Throughout everything I've read about what people loved about the game was the community, the people. That can't be more right.
When I first started playing, my dad had the Heroes vs. Villains pack, and i had some special VIP things and the sinister and Justice (i believe it was called) costume sets. IT WAS SO FUN! And I started as a claw stalker. I was younger at the time and my character was "Nigt Stalker" and well, it was a cool character. Black and red chaos leather and sinister theme. Good ol' classic claws before the power customizaiton came out. And I met a guy, we were about the same age, and we were quick friend. We roamed about the starting zone of Mercy Island (wasn't that the first villain place? not too sure anymore) and it was about 2am when I finally got off. I got back on the next day, wanting to play with my friend again. He was gone.
I searched, using the yell command, global, broadcasting my message to try to find him. I spent a month trying to find him, wanting to experience that true friendship again... But, alas I came to the conclusion he was a trial player. Throughout my many years of playing the game, I've been friends with many people, many were in the large SG N.E.X.A.N. I believe it was called. A lot of cool people I've met along the way. I remember just sitting in Atlas Park. Under the great Atlas's crotch. Flying around with HunterX's bone wings (my most infamous fire based character I've had for the longest time). But towards about 2 years before it was cancelled. I found another aspect that CoH allowed.
Farther than character customization. Story, and character development. I had a hero, HunterX. I recreated him as a villain. He became such because he was looking for his sister, along the way he murdered many people and was exiled from Paragon City, and when the Breakout occured. He started a new life in the Rogue Isles. This ability to make such complex stories was so amazing to me! And I just hope, that CoT replicates that, or even better.
Improves it.
Everything is a weapon.
I loved the customization like body size, costume parts, power color, power combinations primary/secondary/power pools/patron powers/Incarnate.
CO looked way too corny and DCUO had so little customization I could not like them , CoH was just right.
I also loved combat attributes and how you could see the powers details
What mad COX magical for me was the ability to bring virtually any concept to life. The customization available in costumes (what hooked my wife) was a big part of that as well as the ability to customize weapons and eventually powers. However when you combined that with the backstory of COX, the history, the result was something truly wondrous. A sense of community was also something that has been sorely missed since CoH was shut down. I have never known such a strong, vibrant, caring community as the one I knew in CoH.
You have brought a spark of hope to a darkness that has been complete until now. I salute you!
I am not here to impress you. I am here as a warning of the price of failure.
I've said it before, although apparently not in this thread. The biography / info attached to each character added so much to the game. Personally, I liked that it was relatively small --brevity is an art, and bloat is the enemy of understanding. But to be able to look at any random stranger and immediately get some flavor text about that character -- an origin story, an obsession, hopes and dreams, a song, a poem, a snippet of witty dialogue -- was awesome. It made the characters MUCH more real -- playing other games that lack this feature really brings that home to me. And by creating a place for each and every alt to "sound [his or her or its] barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world," the game subtly encouraged everyone to do so. In all games, characters can be individuals...but in COH, that individuality was immediately accessible.
Captain of Phoenix Rising
I understand there are some stylistic advantages gained by forcing people to write brief character descriptions and I was never an advocate of allowing "huge/unlimited" bio space in CoH regardless.
But with the strict 1,024 character limit imposed by CoH it was literally amazing how many times my first draft of a character description ran to like 1,040 or 1,050 characters long. I probably wasted literally several hours (spread across my years of playing) having to wordsmith descriptions down to fit the tight 1,024 limit.
So again while I see some benefits of forcing people to be succinct in their language I actually wouldn't mind if CoT allowed say 1,200 characters for text descriptions. That small increase would make a world of difference while still making sure you couldn't throw up a "wall of text" no one would want to read.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I am completely with you on this one, Lothic. So many times what I already thought was a pared-down version of a bio nevertheless exceeded the limit by just ...that... much.
Spurn all ye kindle.
I'd buy that. My favorite idea is a two-stage bio -- a smallish description/bio space of a page or less, and a link to a website where much longer text could be hosted for those interested in reading the whole shebang.
Captain of Phoenix Rising
I'd love to be able to have in-game links to third-party offline pages. But that would proably be a nightmare from the point of view of all the naughtiness and absue that would allow.
To be safer MWM could set-up some kind of in-house dedicated "cloud" diskspace that would reside offline (from the game servers) but be maintained/policed directly by their GMs. This way those players who wanted more space could pay for it (via the microtransaction/subscription system) and link to it from their short in-game descriptions. Obviously this could be offered as a future "QoL improvement" that could come to the game in an update after launch.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Or something less complicated, such as having a 'biospace' of, say, 4K of text, with the caveat that only the first 1K of it displays in game when you look at a character's bio, and as part of a wider package of being able to examine characters from outside the game, you would be able to go to MWM's site, pull up the display page for the character, and get the full 4k bio. There were enough third-party sites where interested players could set up pages with more extended background and characterizations for CoH characters that I don't think it would be necessary for MWM to set up their own.
I'm going to have to disagree strongly with the part cited. I do hope I’m not too far off topic here. I had to chime in on it.
You were here since the pre order days and let you're acting as if you were ever forced to struggle with even level mobs. Seriously? The only time I had that issue was well before the major upgrades to controllers (when I was solo’ing my controller)- pre containment and pre Invention Origin (Issue 9).
I just looked it up on the wiki history. Invention Origins got released months before the game was sold to NCSoft which is of course when Jack left.
"OMG everyone is too powerful!" Don't you think that's a bit of an overstatement? There was never anything said about 'holy trinity' that I EVER heard. Not by Jack. Not by anyone. Ever. Once. The game prided itself since the early days on your ability to solo.
Yes, anyone could solo and yes, some would solo better than others. The game release manual stated very clearly which classes could solo the best. It spells out specifically controllers and defenders wouldn't solo as well as the other three classes. That's basically been the case from day one to the day it closed. It is *not* a post Jack development.
I won't argue the game didn't get hit by serious balancing issues under Jack. It seemed pretty obvious they were doing it to set up for Invention Enhancements. I was okay with that; getting that level of power took a little effort instead of "one accuracy, five damage!" in your enhancements as a cold, hard rule. Oh, and no matter what, you “had” to have haste because it was so powerful. (Or so people often seemed to think.)
Yes, you were always outnumbered. The game was all but hard coded around that from the beta tutorial. Fighting a huge group was always meant as a challenge. And yes, thanks to improvements made to the game, you COULD destroy a much larger mob. I'd say that's in large part thanks to access to better enhancements (most of which came *before* Jack left the game) and in a smaller part thanks to inherent abilities (which came in extremely early in the game's history).
"What kind of a superhero are you if you can't take on ten mooks by yourself, I ask you?"
What kind of game should, as a base challenge, focus on it taking TEN NPC's in order to challenge a basic hero? Because if you take that from "I'm solo'ing!" to a team of eight. So that means you have to fight EIGHTY mobs at once before you even get a challenge? Unless you're saying that *should* be the point it challenges you.
That means you need to make the maps even bigger than they were to allow for that many NPC's at once. It sounds like it would mean an unbearably laggy game for how many players?
I guess you were being slightly hyperbolic; I hope so. That sounds like it would turn any team up into Hami in terms of lag.
I do have a question. "They started fixing all the damage he'd done, reverting things, adding to what the game..."
Enhancement Diversification. Never reversed. (The Incarnate system was based on it. I don't count that as 'reversing it' but rather being designed with it in mind.
I don't remember ANY major nerfs being reverted. Not even travel suppression. (I forget if that was pre Jack or post. I wanna say post.)
I’d always seen the two big nefs (global defense reduction and enhancement diversification, and even then I think the phrase nerf is unwarranted) as setting the game up to let you get more powerful in more creative ways. Which major change was reverted rather than being addressed with later developments?
And adding to the game? Invention and Hamidon enhancements were added *under* Jack. "All Archetypes will now be able to reach their Defense cap at sooner." Issue 5. XP Debt protection from resurrection powers and toggles not having to be turned back on after endurance hits zero. Also Issue five. I could keep going - but I think the point is made. Talking about "adding to the game" as if it only happened once the evil Jack left is absolutely unfair and untrue.
"Once Jack left.. they started buffing."
They've been willing to buff since day one. I'd even heard a rumor that LATE in Beta testing, they had adjusted the levels where you don't gain a power- so you'd gain a second enhancement slot instead of just one. Unfortunately I can't find anything on Google about the beta era, so I can't confirm that. (Anyone hear that one?) But the old wiki has plenty of examples of things being buffed even during the 'evil Jack era.'
(And again- I never heard Jack imply at any point anything relating to requiring a holy trinity. If you want to talk about 'mandatory' teams, the closest we got was fire tank herding and, before that, blasters when they were quite broken.)
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
My Martial Arts/Super Reflexes Scrapper, Redlynne, created in Issue 2, would like to have a few ... words ... with you about your "little misunderstanding" of what the word "NERF" means in this context ... having been hit by what amounts to a [i]double and a half whammy[/i] of having an entire SECONDARY POWERSET nerfed into the ground, in addition to having a Secondary Powerset simply [i]filled with Powers[/i] that could only usefully use 1 Enhancement type (Defense only for passives) or 2 Enhancement types (Defense and Endurance Reduction for toggles).
Strike one: 7 Powers nerfed in power level directly.
Strike two: 6 Powers that previously COULD be 6 slotted no longer benefited sufficiently from being 6 slotted.
Strike three: Structural bias of the Super Reflexes Secondary making these changes even more brutally punishing than absolutely necessary.
After the changes, my MA/SR Scrapper went from being Death Defying to being Death Inviting ... due to the fact that she was taking something on the order of 4 to 6 TIMES the amount of incoming damage as previously before the changes. Time To Live dropped like a rock in Jupiter's gravity. This was a Nerf Bat™ with an IRON CORE. It essentially [b]*DESTROYED*[/b] my entire strategy and concept for survival ... as a Scrapper ... and completely ruined the playing experience for me.
I spent the next [i]TWO YEARS[/i] very happily playing World of Warcraft while unsubscribed to City of Heroes ... until Inventions came along and [i]reversed the damage[/i] that Enhancement Dysfunction combined with the Global Defense [b]NERF[/b] needlessly and wantonly inflicted upon my main character, completely ruining my enjoyment of the game. I'd been playing City of Heroes for all of about 6-8 MONTHS when I switched my loyalties to World of Warcraft for the next TWO YEARS.
And yes, to this day, I still DESPISE Statesman (ie. Jack) because of that BUNGLED development.
When you push a change that massive LIVE ... and the response you get to it is so overwhelming [i]that it outright crashes your forum software FOR THREE DAYS[/i] ... and when easily over 90% of the feedback you're getting is flat out NEGATIVE ... and you DON'T LISTEN and *keep the changes* ... let's just say that City of Heroes had been on a somewhat upwards trajectory [i]until that point[/i] and then never recovered afterwards.
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I just talked to your fictional character. It apologized for your condescending and insulting attitude. Drop this "your little misunderstanding" line and take the tone out of your post, please. It's quite offensive to get that tone; let's try to disagree without the little potshots and flamebaiting.
And stop acting as if I said enhancement diversification was perfect. (It was closer to Enhancement dysfunction.)
Here's where we disagree; I never saw regen as being worthless. Most of the people that use the term 'nerf' use it to mean 'any change that reduces me in power.' Yelling in caps you were "NERFED INTO THE GROUND..." there's "your little misunderstanding." No. You. Weren't. That just sounds so hyperactive and sensationalistic.
I don't remember the forum shutting down for three hours much less three days. "Lots of people complaining" doesn't equal "shutting the forums down" anymore than little snarky comments equal a valid argument.
You quit and played World of Warcraft "very happily" for two years. What does that have to do with anything?
Finally if you HATE Jack with such a passion over putting in ED, how do you feel about the fact they didn't simply and immediately remove it after he left the game?
Do you HATE the two head devs who came after and could have reversed it but didn't? If not, why not? Do you feel you were somehow never able to do a proper regen scrapper afterwards?
I had a lower level regen scrapper I didn't have issues with. But that might have had to do more with the lower level.
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
The only statements I recall coming from Jack regarding the ability of characters to do their missions solo was a statement to the effect of "Three minions = 1 hero" that rather quickly went by the wayside, and his declaration that, for him, "fun" was jumping into a fight with the end boss again and again and again, getting defeated each time, until you figured out what the one specific trick was to defeating them and learned how to make that work -- and while [i]that[/i] was visible in the early days of the game, it got ground down with the release of updates as it became obvious to him that, in the era of the Internet, within days of [b]one[/b] person finding the 'trick' to defeating an end boss, [i]everyone[/i] playing the game would know the trick, and that not putting repetetive frustration like that in the game kept the players happy and made the distinction between 'regular' missions and 'epic' missions like the Hamidon raids and task forces clearer.
Particularly when the poster child for 'nerfed into the ground' was Regen, which suffered through a number of major nerfs and then several significant structural changes, at least one of which was confirmed to have been on the basis of the combat capability of a Claws/Regen Scrapper against +7 mobs when the internal test server wasn't reducing the Scrapper's to-hit and damge against higher-level mobs the way the live servers did. And I gave up on my Regen scrapper after the last structural change; I'd created him because the Regen secondary was a 'fire and forget' powerset, and it stopped being fun enough to play after it became more click-dependent; Willpower later replaced it for new characters.
And it's still funny that they never noticed the inherent disconnect between the 'signature' power of that set and its name; 'Instant Healing' was just a big boost to healing rate; you could heal the same damage over and over again until it was all gone, and with the other boosts to healing rate, it meant that a Regen Scrapper would either faceplant early in a fight before they could reduce the incoming damage below their healing rate, or come out of the fight without a visible sign of damage, as they had healed back all the damage they'd taken back to the first hit. It seemed to me that "Instant Healing" should have been a power that made [b]every[/b] application of damage work sort of like Spectral Wounds -- you take all the damage, then after a second or two, an enhanceable fraction of that damage "instantly" heals back. With the heal only being applied against each incoming attack [i]once[/i], it would have the same gross functionality as either Resistance or Defense, and could have been balanced much more cleanly and left as a toggle. But by the time that I came to this realization, the changes had been in for too long for another rebuild to be viable.
There were two major problems with ED in CoH:
1) They didn't impose the effects of ED at the launch of the game. The main reason most people hated ED was that they had plenty of time to get used to what the game was like BEFORE it happened. Had it been in place from the very beginning no one would have known anything different.
2) After they made the tragic mistake of not implementing ED from Day One they compounded their error by taking several years before they introduced IOs to the game. Basically the only way ED made any sense as a method for power balancing was for it to be paired up to something like IOs which eventually mitigated the "nerfage" imposed by ED. By letting the game exist in a half finished state where ED was in force without IOs we had to suffer in a sort of semi-limbo before it was finally addressed.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
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If you're referring to the same quote I am, I always thought of that as more of a random example of 'challenge = fun.' (He was referring a handheld game, right?) I didn't get the impression from the answer (to a question of what he considered 'fun') that he tried building the game around that idea.
Although given the Statesman and Lord Recluse task forces, maybe that's what they were meant to be?
Fair enough, I suppose. I'd point out though, it was also cited heavily as a set which outperformed the other defense sets early in the life of the forums.
I tend to agree with Lothic that doing it so far into the game made the Enhancement Dysfunction change a much bigger deal than if it would have been done early. Doing it not long after the global defense reduction- where Jack then promised was the last major downgrade to powers - didn't help either.
I just disagree with the premise that any set was made WORTHLESS. I saw no indication of that and every indication even regen could still function quite well when done right. But that's just my opinion and I think I'll leave it there for this thread.
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
I never had any great problem with /SR, but I was playing katana/SR and could parry my way to success. /SR only requiring a few slots in some powers alowed more slots for attacks.
I also stopped playing my regen after the conversion of IH from toggle to click, for the same reason as the previous poster, I liked the fire and forget playstyle. He was still there at the end with 6 slotted passives etc.
The things ED affected most were things like AR/devs, where you could previously use targetting drone to avoid slotting accuracy, so you could slot extra damage.
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Congratulations. You have now lost any and all credibility you might have previously had. The "I'm rubber and you're glue" card never works past the schoolyard playground.
As you wish. I was trying to be polite.
Your colossal and complete misunderstanding then, since you seem to prefer unvarnished honesty.
Kettle, meet pot. Pot, this is kettle. I believe you already know the colors.
Nice little revisionist history industry you've got going there. No, you didn't say it was perfect. What you did say was that you believe the term "nerf" was unwarranted. I disputed that assertion with personal experience that included Voting With Wallet in response.
Considering that neither I, nor you, even mentioned the Regeneration Powerset previous to this obvious attempt at distraction ...
Reducing the effectiveness of a power or ability at the game mechanical level is the textbook definition of a "nerf" in this case. There are differences between whether such reductions are tweaks for balance, warranted or an over-reaction or other type of over-correction on the part of the Developers. Usually the line between a tweak and an over-reaction tends to be around a -20% to -25% or more reduction. Cutting things [i]in half[/i] tends to be sufficient reason and rationale for RageQuit responses.
There's this unfortunate thing called [b]THE TRUTH™[/b] which you seem to be unfortunately resistant to receiving ...
In other words, you either weren't paying attention in 2005 when it happened ... or you've simply forgotten the incident in the intervening 8+ years (neither of which would be all that surprising).
Here's what [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Heroes#Enhancement_Diversification]Wikipedia[/url] mentions (briefly) about the incident:
The forum software limits mentioned involved the City of Heroes boards being taken offline for three days so as to recover the databases because they got buried in negative feedback on the changes (as mentioned). There's no shame in admitting you didn't know this fact. If I had more hours to burn that this discussion is worth, I could dig up CuppaJo's posting on the aftermath of the debacle, but I really can't be bothered.
Oh and here's another contemporaneous account of the [url=http://archive.is/8oGIh]Forum Meltdown[/url] response to Enhancement Dysfunction. You're welcome.
You asserted that neither the Global Defense Nerf nor Enhancement Diversification really ought to be thought of as being a "nerf" since you felt that the term "nerf" was overstating the case.
I disagreed.
I gave my example.
I gave my personal history showing that both of those changes were sufficient to *sour* me on the entirety of the City of Heroes brand for two years ... which was longer than I had played City of Heroes for in the first place.
You claim that the term "nerf" is overstating the case.
I do my "french knight" impersonation in your general directionne in response to your obviously silly revisionist "history" of recollection.
What is difficult to understand? That your understanding of the entire thing is wrong?
Please ...
That's an easy one. I wouldn't even THINK about subscribing to City of Heroes again until Jack had been removed from a position of authority over decisions about game play. That's why for two years ... ie. longer than I'd played City of Heroes for in the first place(!) ... the game was "dead" to me and I wouldn't even consider coming back to it. The only thing that changed my mind was the Invention System [i]partially undoing the damage that ED had wrought[/i] so as to "reclaim" my character(s) at power levels close to what they'd had more than 2 years prior (ie. functional instead of flat out broken and unplayable).
I came back after the "fix" for what they'd "broken" ... deliberately ... got implemented ... TWO YEARS later.
Positron and War Witch? No, no hatred for them. The Invention System (to use a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Leap]Quantum Leap[/url] quote) "put right what once went wrong" so it would be totally unfair to hold my grudge against Statesman against them too. There were several features of ED that were just mind bendingly STUPID ... like the drop off "cliff" formulation used for it ... but with ways to [i]work around[/i] the dead weight problem of ED (with the help of Mids' Hero Planner, that got created in response to the stupidity of ED). ED became an annoying "feature" of the game, rather than something that was (literally) Game Breaking.
Considering the [b]fact[/b] that I not only never played a Regeneration Scrapper ... but also never [b]claimed[/b] I was playing a Regeneration Scrapper ... it is odd that you would inject the subject of the Regeneration Scrapper into our disagreement.
*I* said that my main was a Martial Arts/Super Reflexes Scrapper (more than once).
Reading comprehension for the win ...
Regeneration was (traditionally) the target of repeated nerfs post-launch such that it became something of a joke on the City of Heroes forums. It was pretty "reliable" that every issue Regeneration would get nerfed again somehow ... EVERY time. I forget when the Devs actually *stopped* weakening Regeneration [i]every single issue or patch[/i], because, like I said, I didn't play the Powerset and therefore wasn't all that concerned by or put out by the continual nerfing of Regeneration ... but they did eventually stop nerfing Regeneration every chance they got. Of course, by then, it had been happening so reliably at every opportunity that it had become a [url=http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Regeneration#Powers_History]forum meme[/url] that persisted even after City of Heroes was closed down.
Very very VERY likely that your low levels would be why didn't have much problem. Regeneration was a Powerset that started strong, hit a plateau somewhat early on and then slowly started coming down off its survivability peak relative to the other Powersets as you advanced through the levels. Not because Regeneration got "weaker" itself over time but because other Powersets started coming into their full strength later on than Regeneration did. Super Reflexes, by contrast, was the exact opposite, in that it started out weak and pathetic, didn't really start "coming together" as a protection scheme until the late 30s(!), provided you (totally) skimped on slotting your offensive Powers, and even with Inventions didn't actually reach full potential until attaining Level 50 to get the last three Enhancement slots.
So Regeneration was a Powerset that peaked early, while Super Reflexes was a Powerset that peaked only at the level cap (and even then, could still use help from Incarnate Slotting).
Add in the fact that Enhancement Dysfunction simply didn't have all that much opportunity to kick in until reaching SOs and it would make perfect sense that a low level Regeneration Scrapper wouldn't notice much ([b][i]YET ...[/i][/b]). That would, of course, have changed as you increased in levels though. Regeneration was just a Powerset where you either lived (with full green and blue bars after every fight) or you faceplanted ... with not much wiggle room in between. The biggest danger to Regeneration was taking Alpha Strikes, where you could be defeated by spike damage before your regeneration had a chance to "soak" it up for you, meaning that the Powerset was usually fine in teams diving into the fray SECOND as opposed to being first (so as to let someone else eat the Alpha Strike for you before proceeding into Scrapperlock Beatdown Mode™).
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I’ll go ahead and mostly ignore the insults because quite honestly, I’d just throw your own “you’ve lost all credibility now” back at you after each one, you’d fail to be impressed and we’d get into this cute little back and forth that’d end up being moderated anyway.
You didn’t mean to be insulting? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say “Okay. Sorry.”
I’ll also go ahead and apologize for misreading your post and responding thusly - I was annoyed by the opening comment and misread super reflexes as regeneration. (It was a VERY complained about set, in my defense. As you stated.)
I also seem to be in the wrong about the forums going down. Kudos to you on the fact finding. (Though a big part of that was how badly the message was delivered, which is a point we seem to agree on.)
Jack himself admitted they lost a “few thousand players” over it. I won’t downplay losing up to nearly a quarter of a million dollars a month.. but this was out of 100K players. When you account for the natural rollover of a MMO, that’s still a devastating amount of people, but hardly a major game killer.
I’m curious as to where you come about the 20 to 25 percent number as the breaking point.
To me, making a power completely worthless would be the definition of “a nerf.” “Reducing the effectiveness of a power” seems more like balancing. Overly harsh balancing? A little - but after dealing with ED a while, I’d come to wonder what the big deal was about.
My first level fifty was a Super reflexes scapper. Were your points on the set valid? Yes, absolutely - but it had its problems from day one. Looking at the patch notes, it was bumped up multiple times before the big defense reduction. (At first you couldn’t even attack after using Elude. Talk about a “make the team hate me” power. I never experienced that due to a slower leveling speed.)
There is also this thing called “opinion.” Saying “Well, I quit the game over it” only means.. you quit the game over it. You seem to be implying it’s a FACT that it was ‘nerfed into the ground’ (which is what I was responding to) because you believe really, really hard in it. Yet the power set continued to be quite popular throughout the game’s life, didn’t it?
You’re speaking from your own experiences as a SR scrapper. Mine were obviously different. I shuffled a few slots around after ED.
The set needed help from the beginning. But the ED solution, to me, was never much more than shuffling around slots and using more in the way of endurance reduction. Making use of power pools and stacking more slots into offensive powers and especially health and stamina in the fitness system. That was a huge difference to me. Health keeps you alive. Stamina helps in recovering from well timed use of Elude.
Finally, we get to…
Again, though, I never found Super reflexes unplayable and several other people played it until level fifty even during those two unfortunate years. To me, that refutes “the set was unplayable” logic because people [I]still played it.[/I]
More importantly, your quote illustrates why the hatred on Jack is misplaced, but I’d always gotten the impression the Invention system - or something similar- was expected when the two big ‘nerfs’ as some would call them hit as a way to bring the power level right back up. Yes, waiting two years was a costly mistake. I’m not sure how much of that had to do with the system being revised again and again before being ready to be properly released.
People often blame Jack for the “nerfs” and yet fail to give him any credit for the Invention system.
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Issues
Yet the Invention system hit in Issue 9; NCSoft acquired City of Heroes after Issue 10, and I believe closer to Issue 11. That’s when Jack left to go make Champions Online such a smashing success. (Or maybe he succeeded in smashing it. I’m not really sure at this point.)
The invention system that brought you back came out under Jack. The enhancement diversification and global defense reduction were ‘addressed’ by the system but never simply removed from the game. I was going to say “We would have gotten it under Jack,” but unless I am totally misreading the wiki and remembering wrong, we literally got it under Jack.
Just about a year or two later than was acceptable.
To me, those facts laid out illustrate the two major “nerfs” were embraced by the team, not just by Jack. It’s a little strange to see Jack take the heat for them while getting no credit for the Invention system.
Unless, of course, I’m getting something wrong on history.
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
Considering that THIS is what you took offense to:
The available evidence says that you took offense where none was intended ... especially given the fact that those were the only words in the entire post that addressed YOU, AmbiDreamer, at all, in any way personally. Indeed, it actually takes *work* (on your part) to find such mild wording offensive, so ... yeah ... your bad.
So long as we're clear, apology accepted.
Word of advice. Try not to muck up your efforts at apologizing for mistakes by including backhanded insults. They don't help. The message was delivered just fine ... it was the receiver who had a problem (which yes, we both now agree on, thank you).
At the time, sure, they maybe lost a few thousand players immediately. But the growth trend for City of Heroes [i]reversed at that point[/i] and began its negative downward spiral that the game never recovered from afterwards. Coincidence? I think not. I know that I, and thousands of other Players, told everyone we knew that City of Heroes was not a game to get into after that point, [i]because you couldn't trust the Developers[/i] and the game wasn't stable even a year after launch. That loss of trust and goodwill was a crippling blow to the game's future expansion of its Playerbase. It never *fully* recovered from that.
In effect, the well was poisoned.
It's one of those desires on my part to make incremental changes and evaluate adjustments along the way. Once you get past a 20-25% reduction in the effectiveness of a particular Power or Ability, the Developers are basically saying that the original power level was stupidly broken and they're just flailing to try and find a new balance point for where it "ought to be" relative to where it was. When you get such "large" reductions, you can't help but start questioning the sanity/competency/perspective of the Developers who are in charge of maintaining the game's balance.
My personal preference is for an iterative process of reducing by no more than 10-15% per patch and put Players "on notice" that the Developers will be watching to see how such a reduction "plays out" to determine if further movement is necessary in the overall scheme of things. That way you make a sequence of smaller moves [i]over time[/i] over multiple patches, rather than one BIG move in a single patch, such that if the game balance does not "respond" as expected then it's easier to revert the original change without causing major disruptions, and if you need to continue nerfing further you've gathered data and evidence along the way to support such a decision. Basically a "look before you leap" sort of deal. Naturally, such moves are easier to make when you've got a more frequent patching cycle, such as every two weeks or once a month, than if you're looking at a longer cycle where such balance changes only happen 2 to 4 times a year (if that). That's more a responsiveness and scheduling matter though than anything else.
For some people, such as yourself, that is the definition they use. As I said, there are plenty of situations and conditions where a reduction in a Power's or an Ability's effectiveness is not only wise but also called for by the needs of the overall game balance at large. Doesn't change the fact that such a reduction IS as reduction, and therefore a "nerfing" of that specific power. Likewise, any increase in effectiveness of a Power or an Ability is a "buffing" of that power. In this case, the terms "nerf" and "buff" refer to the direction of movement relative to previous performance, as opposed to the [i]degree of movement[/i] (huge vs small) in a specific direction.
Super Reflexes was horribly broken at game launch, apparently. What do I mean by horribly broken? Try toggle Powers that added +10% Defense unenhanced and passives that added +5% Defense unenhanced ... in a game where the default Accuracy level for NPCs was 75% instead of 50%. Yes, in case you're noticing, that's basically HALF of the values they ended at when the game was shut down. Super Reflexes first got buffed from being 10/5 to being 20/10, which it stayed at ever after until the NPC Accuracy Nerf that happened later on after the Global Defense Nerf which moved Super Reflexes back into being the 14/7 unenhanced values it ended the game with.
Now, 20/10 for unenhanced Defense Powers was FINE ... so long as you could 6 slot them with Defense for +120% Defense with SOs. Putting 6 slots into all three toggles and all three passives gave you 66% Defense vs Melee/Ranged/AoE ... against an Accuracy threshold of 75% ... meaning you were only 4% behind the 70% Defense Softcap, which you could reach with a Pool Power pretty easily. Putting an Endurance Reduction into the toggles meant you needed to get more Defense out of your Pool Powers, but it was still "doable" on a build.
Then ... *[b]POOF![/b]* ... Enhancement Dysfunction hits. You can't 6 slot your Defenses anymore, you can only 3 slot them. So you're still dealing with a 20/10 unenhanced Power combo, but now you can only get to about +60% or maybe +70% or so if you 6 slot for Defense Enhancements. That 66% Defense you used to be getting out of your Secondary? Try dealing with only 48% Defense instead ... against an NPC Accuracy baseline of 75%. Here ... have a Secondary that leaves you 22% short of the Defense Cap instead of only 4% short like before, and try to make up the difference with Pool Powers that offer like +2% Defense each without toggling your Endurance Recovery into oblivion. Yeah ... no. Not happening.
It wasn't until City of Heroes undertook a massive realignment of NPC Base Accuracy, lowering it from 75% to 50%, so as to make up for the unprecedented nerfing that hit Super Reflexes full in the face and make the Defense Softcap (moved from 70% down to 45% where it stayed until the game closed) actually achievable again for the Powerset that was completely oriented around using Defense to survive (and still needing Aid Self and green skittles to accomplish that due to "leaky" Defenses and poor Health Regeneration).
I was a devotee of The Art of [b]NO GET HITSU!![/b] ... and with Enhancement Dysfunction, that Art completely died. As I said, I had to wait for Inventions [i]two years later[/i] to start trying to undo the damage that was done. Even then, after enhancement I could only manage to get to about +30% Defense out of the Super Reflexes Secondary, and needed to resort to use of Pool Powers and Set Bonuses to make up the remaining deficit of +15% Defense vs Melee/Ranged/AoE in order to get [b][i]BACK[/i][/b] to the Defense Softcap that had been taken away from me by the combination of the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Dysfunction.
I'd say that being pushed over 20% Defense off the Softcap by a change in game mechanics amounted to being nerfed into the ground. Instead of taking 1 hit in 20, I'd be taking 5 to 6 hits in 20. That's 5x the incoming damage needing to be soaked by either Regeneration (which as MA/SR I didn't have any of to speak of) or by Healing ... and with no Resistances worth mentioning, the build really wasn't viable even against 3 Minions anymore. Even Regeneration would be hard pressed to survive taking 5x the rate of incoming damage previously delivered!
That's not opinion. That's simple arithmetic and math. It's not even all that hard to figure out. It was just a quirk of the system and how Defense "worked" in the game mechanics ... and then once the basis for how numbers added up changed, the entire Super Reflexes Secondary became broken (and stayed broken for a long time). Again, it wasn't until Inventions that it was possible to get out from under this "trap" that the Developers had (in my opinion) "unwisely" introduced into the system.
For what it's worth, I shouldn't be needing to explain this to you.
As for the popularity of Super Reflexes ... lots of people [i]tried it[/i] but very very few ever "toughed it out" all the way to 50. It really was a One Trick Pony kind of Powerset, although its Set And Forget aspect had a lot of appeal (you just needed to put Practiced Brawler on Autofire). Super Reflexes was, unfortunately, at endgame more of a "Minion Sweeper" Powerset than it was the kind of Powerset you'd want to be using to (pocket) tank an Arch-Villain or a Giant Monster with. The reason for that was that the Accuracy and To-hit Buffs applied to AVs and GMs were such that even if you were at the Defense Softcap, the NPCs would usually have something like a 1 in 8 to a 1 in 10 chance to hit you, just because of how the Accuracy/Defense formulas worked out, which in turn made the likelihood of them scoring a "Double Tap" on you unbearably high ... meaning you couldn't hold onto their attention forever [i]and live[/i]. You could do it for a short time ... but not for a LONG time as required of an Aggro Magnet. Elite Bosses were almost as bad, but at least they had fewer Hit Points and less Regeneration, so you could potentially "make it" against EBs.
And that's before you get into all of the Kryptonite for Super Reflexes that was left lying around here, there and everywhere in the game. Did you know that [i]over 50 Power Debuffed Defenses[/i] ... while scarcely almost a dozen Debuffed Resistances, and only a tiny handful Debuffed Regeneration? Devouring Earth Quartz Emanators gave EVERY Devouring Earth NPC within aura radius +100 To-hit (effectively *negating* your entire Secondary against an NPC *GROUP*). Quite a few Psionic Attacks had no Positional Defense against them, only Typed Defense, meaning Super Reflexes as "naked" against those attacks too (as were a lot of other Powersets, to be fair).
And then there was PvP ... where Super Reflexes was pretty much the only Powerset that could be completely countered (effectively) simply by spamming yellow skittles.
Super Reflexes had its good points and its strengths ... but most of those lay in dealing with Trash Mobs than they did in being able to go toe to toe with Big Bads™.
To be fair, my experiences were obviously [i]quite different[/i] from yours. Some combinations, such as Broadsword/SR and Katana/SR could "compensate" for the nerfs through use of Parry ... but as a MA/SR I didn't get that luxury, since Martial Arts never had any sort of "block" Power given to it. Massive massive difference there.
Believe what you want. I can't stop you.
Oh I can too blame Jack for releasing Enhancement Dysfunction before Inventions were ready! For one thing, the Inventions system building process FAILED multiple times prior to its release in Issue 9. They just couldn't get it "right" internally. Ultimately, it wasn't Jack who "made" the Invention system, it was Positron.
I feel entirely justified in blaming Jack for releasing Enhancement Dysfunction [i]when he did[/i] and not taking it back and undoing it [i]when he could have[/i] prior to having an Invention system ready to go to *Public Testing*. The two pieces "fit together" but doing one without the other was just ... criminal ... to the game's overall balance [i]that had already been established[/i] and was working "fine" as far as the Players were concerned. It was JACK who didn't like how the game played, and he was going to mess it up as much as he needed/wanted until it played the way that *HE* wanted it to play, as opposed to letting it play the way that *WE* wanted it to play.
Small surprise then that there was something of a mass desertion of Players following this episode. Two years later, when Inventions were released, [i]some of us came back[/i] ... but not all of us. Not all of us ...
Actually, by the time Issue 9 had rolled around, Jack had been "kicked upstairs" (I like to think of it as "Failing Upwards") and was no longer the Lead Designer for City of Heroes. I forget when exactly Positron took over as Lead Designer for City of Heroes, but it was certainly before Cryptic sold City of Heroes to NC$oft. Yes, Jack was still "around" when Inventions were released, but we was more on the "business" side of Cryptic (and dealing with Marvel Online overtures and so on) by then as opposed to helming the City of Heroes project that was being held together by the Fighting Fifteen Developers at Cryptic. Needless to say, with only 15 Developers working on the title, there's a reason why it took two years for Inventions to come out, because the team essentially had their hands full just dealing with maintenance issues of the property.
And why were there only 15 Developers at Cryptic working on City of Heroes? Because the game was undergoing something of a Death Spiral as far as subscriptions were concerned.
Why was that Death Spiral happening and what caused it in the first place, especially since City of Villains had just been released? You get three guesses ... and the first two about the Global Defense Nerf and Enhancement Dysfunction don't count and the Player uproar that ensued don't count ...
Jack was still at Cryptic then (and he's still at Cryptic now, today) ... but he wasn't the "show runner" for City of Heroes when Inventions came out. He had been replaced as Lead Designer by Positron before City of Heroes got bought out by NC$oft (which at the time was a good thing!). I forget when exactly Jack "moved on" from running the team for City of Heroes, if it was during Issue 7 or Issue 8, but it definitely had happened by the time Issue 9 hit (I'm pretty sure).
And that was the killer. Remember, City of Heroes had been in release for a little more than 1 year before the debacle happened ... and it wasn't until year 3(!) that the fix arrived. "Too little, too late" comes to mind here, particularly with the idea that the original double whammy nerfs shouldn't have happened WHEN they did, even if they did need to happen *eventually*.
That's something of a Rose Colored Glasses view of things you've got there. The "nerfs" were NERFS ... you can dispense with the "scare quotes" indicating your sense of disbelief. And they weren't so much "embraced" by the team as they got stuck with them when the Cryptic staff working on City of Heroes devolved down into being the Fighting Fifteen who were simply trying to keep the game on life support after the exodus and word of mouth that got around about how Statesman [i]wasn't to be trusted[/i] and was a two faced liar (yaddee yaddee yaddah) who would rather wreck his own game than let other people enjoy playing in it.
The reason why Jack doesn't get "credit" for the Invention system is because he didn't work on the system that actually DID get released in Issue 9. To be fair, he did work on some other Invention systems that failed internally and never saw the light of day ... but the system that DID work wasn't Jack's "fault" because it was managed by Positron. Jack essentially "left" the City of Heroes title after getting run out on a rail by the Playerbase (who never had any use for him ever again) and moved on to working on other titles that Cryptic was developing ... which incidentally didn't come to fruition. It really wasn't until Star Trek Online and Champions Online that Cryptic had its own MMORPG titles in release again after NC$oft bought City of Heroes.
Always a possibility, but we won't talk about it much ... ^_~
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
The other thing about City of Heroes might be the old fashioned 'shards' concept. If there's 300 players in said zone on a more popular server, there's probably at least 100 to 150 on a less populated server. Using that math as an example, there's easily a thousand or more people "in that zone" - just spread over different servers. Which won't be the case in this game.
So those fourteen or fifteen people could easily become a hundred, 150 people active in the zone even if 95 percent of the players are in instances (which seems like a high percent). Assuming we get the same numbers City of Heroes had, which is far from a guarantee.
Personally, I was extremely fond of instanced missions even if I did miss street sweeping being a more viable option later in the game. I hope they can balance the two properly.
I was personally very fond of the world design in the game, especially in relation to vertical travel powers. I could fly around the city for five, ten minutes just for the fun of flying - and I often did on my mind controller. (Though that might have been more ideal if I could have had her do loops and twists in the skies. I wonder if that's viable in a MMO.)
Longtime City of Heroes player, longtime writer. :) Working in Nebraska.
COT: Mission tips writer, studying Cinema 4D animation program
I understand it bugged some folks, but I never had a problem with ED. Even on my SR character (which I did get to 50). I thought it actually made slotting enhs more interesting.
Spurn all ye kindle.
It's not a question of wether or not 'it bugged some folks' or if you had a problem with ED or not, its the fact that it was insanely stupid to push forward such a game breaking design that late into the games life, were people invested a ton of hours into characters that become useless. Whats worse is that it took them about two years, to put in a system to compensate for ED.
For me CoX was my first MMO and since its close, I have not found any game that comes close to the sheer wonder I felt, from my first day to the final close.
I still remember creating my first toon, Rumblestiltskin, stepping out into Atlas park, working out what the icons actually did, moving and looking (it took me many attempts to get the timing right to jump over the walls in the hollows). Teaming up with a husband and wife combo who were also new to the game, helping each other, just having fun.
This continued throughout my time in CoX and despite a break when my interest did wane, I miss it dearly still.
For me the amount of alts, variety of powerset combo's was just awesome. Being from Merry olde England and playing on the US servers I did team up a fair bit but spent a lot of time soloing, which I didn't mind one bit, I am just hoping that I can still solo most toons in CoT as time difference may make it a bit quiet on the servers when I am online.
FeeFye
Some people are like Slinkies, not good for much but it makes ya smile when ya push them down the stairs.....
I take it you were one of the people it bugged then. I understand that there were people who didn't want to play anymore once ED was implemented, and I'm sorry their experience was diminished in this way. The only reason I'm stating the fact that it didn't bother me is to illustrate that claims of game breaking or making power sets useless are not empirical facts, but merely opinion -- no better or worse than mine. Some people hated it; some didn't care. The ones it bugged the most were (and still are) naturally the vocal ones on the forums. I'm just speaking up for the sake of balance.
If an aspect of game design bothers someone, they are perfectly entitled to describe how it affects their playstyle, even to the point of making them not want to play anymore. (And devs should take those opinions into account.) What they are not entitled to is to claim it as a universal truth.
Spurn all ye kindle.
Tbh what Cinnder states here is pretty much my feeling on ED. I actually quite liked it, it made me rethink toon builds, my playstyle on certain toons (wether solo or teamed) and I cannot honestly think of any character I stopped playing due to ED 'breaking' the powerset.
But everyone is different. Changes in game I didn't mind or really notice may shatter someone else's game experience. I remember reading of one player who implored the dev's not to implement ED or not to apply it to travel powers, as they spent most of their time in game flying. To them, the flight aspect of the game was the most important and having that limited by ED was really upsetting for them.
FeeFye
Some people are like Slinkies, not good for much but it makes ya smile when ya push them down the stairs.....
Actually no, I've much preferred the latter system of IO's etc. I wasn't one of the people it bothered to the point of leaving the game. I was a major alt player in those pre ED days and my highest level alt was a lvl 22 spines/dark scrapper, I didn't have any 'god' toons rendered useless by the system. That didn't stop me from seeing then (and even more so in retrospect after the introduction of IO's) that the way ED was put forward was stupid and designed very very badly.
Everyones entitled to their opinion, yes, but most people who argue that ED was a fine game design at the time tend to just back it with 'well I wasn't effected, or I still played the game just fine' which to me is silly if you look at how many people were effected to the point of leaving the game.
I agree with the previous posts, but to me City has stood apart from every other game through teaming. Teaming in City was easier than any other MMO I have played. Teaming in City was fantastic due to the things mentioned in previous posts like:
** The LFG UI was simply the best I have seen and allowed you to find and search in so many different ways
** Instanced missions, randomized content, etc. made it easy to get a group of people going to just play together - like you'd expect in an MMO
** The malefactor/sidekicking allowed everyone to play with everyone
** The game simplicity allowed newbies to play with vets and feel like they were adding value
** The mission scalability they added towards the end allowed you to adjust the challenge to the team
** TFs and SFs just added to the fun of teaming
There are so many components that made/make teaming successful, which is what I want in an MMO. I hope Titans gets this aspect right.
"it's a long road to wisdom, but it's a short one to being ignored." The Lumineers
The problem lay in the fact that the fundamental mechanics of Regen were different from either Defense or Resistance. Regardless of what your defensive abilities were, if you take damage faster than you heal, you'll faceplant. With Defense, you get attacked, and your defense has a chance of making the attack miss completely; if it fails, you take all the damage. With Resistance, you get hit, and your resistance absorbs a percentage of the damage. What damage you take heals normally. With Regen, you get hit, and you take all the damage, then you heal part of it really quickly. And in the next tick, you heal part of the damage you've taken really quickly. And in the next tick, and the next, and the next... until you're fully healed. All of the 'core' powers in Regen just boosted your healing rate, which meant that you didn't have to [b]win[/b] the fight before you went down; all you had to do was get [i]ahead[/i] of the incoming damage before you went down. So for a /Regen Scrapper, the survivability equation wasn't "Can I beat [b]all[/b] of my opponents fast enough?", but "Can I beat [b]enough[/b] of my opponents fast enough?" As long as you could bring the incoming damage down below your healing rate before you ran out of hit points, you were guaranteed to win the fight.
I ran a large number of simulations looking at the effects of characters with [i]just[/i] Regen, Defense, or Resistance as their defense, and then on the combinations. What I found was that, for a pure Regen character, they would typically hit minimum HP very early in a fight -- between 10% and 25% of the fight's duration -- after which their HP would climb steadily until they were back at full HP at the end of the fight. What was more interesting, though, was that, in combination with Regen, Defense and Resistance were proportionately more effective than they were by themselves -- a Regen-based character given, say, 25% Defense would experience significanly [i]more[/i] than a 25% increase in survivability, and the effect was compounded if the character had both Defense and Resistance.
The problem comes down to the simple fact that both Defense and Resistance are 'single shot' proteciton -- you are attacked, and a percentage of the attacks miss, or a percentage of the damage is absorbed -- while Regen goes after the incoming damage again and again and again -- if it's not needed to heal the damage you just took, your regeneration would go back and heal the damage you took five seconds -- or ten, or thirty, or sixty, if the incoming damage slows down sufficiently. Making IH treat damage like Spectral Wounds, so that each hit would only be 'instantly' healed [b]once[/b], would have addressed the problem for that power, but it would likely have proved necessary to have at least one of the augmented-healing-rate powers get altered so that it separated out an enhanceable fraction of each hit to be healed at an enhanceable rate, with the remaining damage healing at the 'rest' of the character's normal healing rate. This would have reduced the 'repeat offender' nature of the increased healing rate so that it could be balanced against Resistance and Defense -- and, more to the point, so that it wouldn't heterodyne with either or both to become more effective in combination.
It's both heartening and disturbing to see that other MMOs are recognizing at least [i]some[/i] of the utliity of the exemplar/sidekick mechanism that was at the core of what made teaming in CoH so easy, but in most cases missing the mark on [b]how[/b] this happens. SWTOR, for example, has released one, and will be releasing more, "tactical flashpoints" -- group content that is not fixated around the "holy trinity", but which will throw together characters of any level without consideration for role, so you could get level-15 characters teaming with level-55 characters, and the low-level characters will get 'bolstered' to 55. This lets the developers build the content for level-55 characters and still have it accessible to lower-level characters, but the concept still has some bugs.
For example, a group of four level 15-20 characters thrown together won't have the range of abilities that high-level characters would, and would have a tougher time with the content. Also, I discovered the hard way that your consumables don't scale properly -- when a character is bolstered, their stats are bumped to an approximation of what the character's stats should be at their temporary level; however, consumables like medpacs don't scale. A medpac that heals you for 1000-1250 HP is good when you've got 2500HP, but not when you've got 13,000HP, particularly with the "once per fight' limitation.
So I am sure most of the points I am about to make have been said several times, but hey, the devs wanna know right?
You felt powerful/like a superhero right from the start. Once you got those first few levels, you were taking down groups of baddies all on your own and you just felt strong.
Eight man teams were amazing. Having a full 8 man team going into an AV mission, it felt like a mini raid.
No professions/reputations to grind. You could log on for 30 min or 3 hours and felt like you accomplished something.
Awesome giant monsters...in fact moar giant monsters plz
These are just a FEW of the MANY things that made CoH so amazing for me.
For me it was the Community..I made alot of friends that I still talk to today, years later after the end of COH. Plus loved alot of the missions and the story behind them , that was a definite plus
After 3 pages of stuff that i didn't completely look thru i am putting my two pennies in.
Ok so here we go My first hero was a tank class. i picked rock/rock. When i soloed i did damage, what i didn't do was get hurt a whole lot.
This was because one of the rock power set was all defence stuff.
When i grouped i just did what i did when i soloed i hit people they got pissed and i hit them some more.
I never had to take certain gear off and put others on.
I never had to change what powers i had to use when.
I never had to Learn the Dungeon i was on to make sure i was doing it right.
In groups all i had to do was make sure as a tank i was hitting everyone i could aoe when possible and taunt when needed.
Solo the only thing i had to do was well the same stuff. hit people aoe when needed and taunt when someone was going to kill steal.
This brings me to my point, I didn't have to reclass from Dps to Tank to Support. and I Never had to respec once i got to end game cause i never did anything really different.
and the only time i respecced was to change to other power types. energy ice fire what ever.
Yes this lead to the game being simple at times. and a kind of "roll thru" combat system when everything went well. but thats when it went well.
If it wasn't going well in the group. you could lower the difficulty or go solo. You could do most of the missions on your own.
---------
this was the same when i went from being a blaster to a Defender, yes i couldn't kill as fast as a blaster but i could take a hit. because each of the different classes had a passive.
Tanks grabbed threat when attacking.
Blaster did stacking damage
Controllers more damage was done to things being controlled.
Defenders would get energy when the team is hurting.
That saved me on many runs.
---------
All of that, with all the choices for looks and powers made the game good What made it great:
How easy it was to find a group. everything you were doing someone else was doing. And the point of the game wasn't to get thru the 1 story as fast as you could to get to endgame stuff. it was to see and do what the world brought to you. while being able to see a whole other side to the same world. And unlike EVERY mmo out there It was better to team before end game then after. hell they had the choice to not get xp. you could sit at a certain level and do everything you could before moving on.
This game encouraged Alternators And i reveled in that. it made me come up with ideas that were all my own and show off with it.
I believe the anti hero was born from City of heros. And if not City of Heros raised it.
I type before i think
So many people have said the two things that for me, most exemplified CoX over all other MMOs. I've played in several, and most of them are XP pinata parties. Not bad, but lacking the depth of character versatility that only CoX brought to the table. My bots/FF mastermind that was a full fledged hero four days after the option was opened let me continue a story in my own mind that to this day, I can recite. NCSoft may have taken that medium away, but they can NOT stop this community. The parties formed there, where we helped a friend run a story arc, or a new player figure out what story he wanted to tell, were many and pleasant. I look forward to the day CoT gives us that chance once again! :D
Mecha Maestro. Level 50 MM bots/FF. Max Level Incarnate. Gone but not forgotten.
What I like most of all about CoX is it was up. it was playable for all its glory. What i want to see happen in City of Titans is that back. I want my Tanker back. I want my Empathic Healer back. I want ... my game back. I miss you City of Heros. I miss you City of Villains. I shed a tear every time i think about not being able to get on and play with the people i grew to know and love.
I want my game back...*cry*
SO what do we say? let us stand together today and welcome what shall be the best part of our LIVES. lets stand together and make this game everything we loved, and everything we hope it can be.
Together we say CITY OF TITANS forever and For life. CITY OF TITANS, CITY OF TITANS, CITY OF TITANS!
I type before i think
I really enjoyed the camaraderie of my guildies and regular teammates, who made me feel more welcomed than Statesguy and always vocalized their appreciation of the healing power of the Sacred Green Flame. It really warmed my heart to be considered as so much more than just a novelty character. Major kudos to the folks in the 606 Art Forums for helping to lift-up my self-confidence by their VERY generous creation of artwork in which Amerikatt figured prominently (or even peripherally).
I loved flying through the newbie zones and doing fly-by healings, even if the newbs didn't say "Thank-you". After all, I was doing the work of The Great Mother.
Best of all, I loved being silly in Chat and being an actively contributing member of the teams I was on -- helping both in support and front-line combatant roles.
Where else could a simple denizen of Kings Row's back alleyways be so widely accepted as The World's Mightiest Moggie?
[center][color=purple][size=16][b][I][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78N2SP6JFaI]Just a cat from another star![/url][/I][/b][/size][/color][/center]
I hate the Heroes~!
I hate the clear blue sky!
I love Incarnates
I love when bids go high!
I love the Rogue Isles
With all its snakes and skulls~!
BoomDeYada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
BOOMDEYADA!
I love Team Forces!
I love real nerdy things!
I love to fly fast!
I love Stretch Goals And Wings!
I hate NCSoft..
And all their corporate BS~!
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
BOOMDEYADA!
I love Potatoes!
I love Ascendant Too!
I love the Backers!
I love Corrupters (WOO!)
I love the Praetorian Earth!
And Tyrant's epicness!
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
Boomdeyada
[B]Revenge is motivation enough. At least it's honest...[/B]
Roleplayer; Esteemed Villain
[img]http://www.nodiatis.com/pub/5.jpg[/img]
I have to completly agree with this guy and many other i can only barely remember the face and designs of my toons and i miss them cause to me the game was and extension of myself where i transformed into one who stood for justice and fought for all not just myself and together our community achomplished great goals its really sad when you see a game that was just so good that thousands of ppl would always play it I played on infinity server and my main toons name was the Punishing Flame there was also LittleHealerDude and DemonFire666 those are the only ones i can recall if any of my buddies are still out there and remember me hmu on Teamspeak @ launch.playmc3.com I look forward for the beta and cant wait to se the finished project
When I first started playing City of Heroes way back in i5, it was something fresh and new from the staleness of console gaming and Diablo 2. My friend told me about it, and I was like "Hey, this is pretty cool!" Then when I finally got my own account, and my group of friends were playing it, it felt awesome taking on the challenges of the game with just the four of us. Issue after issue brought on new content for us to take on, and whether we succeeded or failed, we had fun doing it.
That's not even to mention that the sky was the limit for back stories, power selection, character looks, pretty much everything that made the game what it was. You weren't limited to "Pick a race, now a class" like other MMOs. With CoH, it was "Be what you want. A lizard guy with cat ears and a rabbit tail? GO RIGHT AHEAD!" That's what I honestly felt what made CoX special to me. The ability to be whatever I wanted and not get ridiculed for my decisions, because with CoX, everyone was a unique little snowflake, even if everyone had a catgirl, and don't deny it, you had one too.
I remember back when there were Costume Contests for the ugliest looking thing you could have, and it was interesting to see what kind of repulsive eye-sores you would see for them. It was an art like making something look good.
First some background, something I regret: The first I heard about City of Heroes was the comic book series. I collected the first several issues, because it was interesting, and I was, well, a comic collector. Somehow, I either never picked up on the fact that the comic was tied into a game, or I knew it was tied to a game but didn't investigate any further because, as a Mac user, I'd been conditioned to believe that any game not from Blizzard was Windows-only or a console game. On top of that, I never did see much in the way of marketing for the game. I've been active on the Internet since 1996, and I've seen tons of ads for video games, but never saw any CoH advertising for some reason. The end result was that, in 2008 I started playing World of Warcraft, because I was a fan of the WarCraft franchise, having played the three RTS games. And also, 2008 was the year I finally got a Mac that was capable of handling MMO graphics. I thought WoW was my only option.
It wasn't until late 2011, when I was growing bored with WoW's terrible Cataclysm expansion, that I mentioned on a message board that I was bored with WoW, but there weren't any other options for a Mac user like myself. And somebody replied, "City of Heroes" has a Mac version." What?! Why did I never hear this before?! Nobody told me! I tracked down the CoH web site and signed myself right up to try it out.
I was hooked immediately. For the next six months, I paid monthly subscriptions to both WoW and CoH. After six months, I realized I was spending the vast majority of my time in CoH, so I cancelled my WoW sub (though I promised my friend in WoW that I'd be back for the next expansion, Mists of Pandaria). So it was somewhat "fortunate" that the release of MoP coincided neatly with the cancellation of CoH, or I may have broken my promise and never gone back to WoW.
So what sucked me in so completely?
Customization. Just ... everything about it. Costumes, power sets, everything. I loved designing characters so much that, despite only getting to play the game for a year, I still had 93 completely unique characters by the time the game shut down. Granted, a lot of those characters remained virtually unplayed, because I designed them just for the sake of the joy I found in designing them.
I really enjoyed creating "themed" super groups. "Groups" in name only, since all of the characters were my own and so could never play "together", but that was beside the point. It was fun to come up with a "team concept" and then fill out that concept with a stable of characters who fit the theme. For example, I came up with a team called "Solar Angels". The leader of the team was a middle-aged female scientist who had developed a process that could imbue suitable candidates with superpowers. She used the process on herself first, and dubbed herself "Mother Sun". She found ten candidates for her process, all female, from various countries, and used the process on each of them, and they took planet-based names: Girl Mercury, Venus Lass, Erdmadchen (from Germany), Ms. Mars (an actual Martian), Fille de Jupiter (France) Saturn Signal, Princesa de Urana (Mexico), Neptune's Niece (Canada), and, representing Pluto, Notta Planet. The tenth candidate became Lunagetic, representing Earth's moon.
http://misterrik.deviantart.com/art/Solar-Angels-290941584
Then there were The Extracurriculars:
http://misterrik.deviantart.com/art/The-Extracurriculars-1-294115972
Job Satisfaction. I always felt like my characters were making a difference, and accomplishing something. I feel that this is related to the mostly-instanced nature of the missions. In WoW, I can finish a quest, and yet, when I return to the place where I performed the necessary tasks, everything is back to the way it was before I started. In CoH, I'd complete my missions within an instance, and it felt that, when I defeated the baddies in question, they stayed defeated (unless it was a major villain who had to survive ... to be dealt with later).
Replay Value. Of my 93 characters, all but 12 of them were heroes. Yet I never got tired of playing through the same low-level missions over and over and over.
The world felt "alive". I loved seeing random civilians and other non-questgivers actually doing something. I still remember how I laughed when I was flying through Steel Canyon one day, and spotted some NPC thug sitting on the ledge at the bottom of a billboard at the top of a building. Dude had climbed all the way up there just to sit and look out over the city. Sure, he was probably breaking the law, but it was cool seeing something like that, as opposed to NPCs just walking around predetermined paths.
Nice summary of some of the best parts of CoX!
Loved the name of the Solar Angel all the way on the right. :-)
Spurn all ye kindle.
I haven't read all the posts in this thread--there are a lot and I'm supposed to be working--but from a quick scan, I didn't see any mention of two of the things which kept me playing for seven years.
Distinct Servers As a longtime PnPer, I loved that there were two "unofficial" RP servers where I could hang my hat.
Unique Names This...so much love/hate when I was playing, but now that I'm in other games with non-unique naming conventions, I really miss it. Like, a lot.
MWM intends to go with a megaserver implementation, so everyone will be logging in to the same place. I believe that they are exploring the use of 'RP instances' to provide RPers their own space, much like they intend to have PvP instances.
On the subject of names, you will have to be disappointed. MWM has said that they intend to go with unique global names and non-unique character names. A fair amount of discussion has taken place [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/unique-names-versus-nameglobal]here[/url].
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Ah. The latter makes some sense given the former, but yeah, those are both dissapointing bits of news.
There was so much to love, 8 years great memories yall.
I liked creating the characters and giving them a "life" of their own.
And letting them live that "life".
go hunt...
RP instances have the potential to work like RP servers, depending on how they implement it, so I wouldn't be too disappointed on that score yet. As for the non-unique names, though, I don't think there is much they can do to "ease the blow" for you about that. :(
Global: @Second Chances
SG: Fusion Force
"And it's not what I wanted
Oh no, it's not what I planned
See it's not where I thought I'd be
It's just where I am"
I think this webpage deserves honorable mention... http://www.mmogames.com/gamearticles/10-things-miss-10th-anniversary-city-heroes/
Hello everyone,
i liked the community, that was a very new experience for me. I started as a wanabe hero in training (even running was difficult for me, my jumping was awful and to learn, how to shriek through enemys with my sonic attack powers instead of walls was a whole other story @.@): But hey, i asked and i got really friendly answers. The people came to help me asap, they explained and showed me the game whole weeks. I made rllifefriends, i met people, who married after they played the games more than 3 years together and formed a family. They were helpful, friendly, somewhat laid back and patient -something i never ever experienced in another game since the shutdown of CoX.
The customization in the game and i mean all aspects: unique names, bios, powers and poweranimations, fashion, character design choices, the mission-& sg-base-architect etc. God, how many hours i spend just to get new clothes for my blaster until i was truly satisfied with her looks or with my base. So much fun!
No weapon and gear-conflicts: I loved the game for the opportunity to learn how your character works. You had to develop your playstyle, you had to think about how your character works best in a team, You even had to learn how to jump or teleport right from one place to another (i hate/loved the hollows - as a newbie, i ran/jumped into thousands of big troll or outcast groups or fell into a deep pit of mud because of a broken street.by accident and crawled my way through the map. It was hard, but it made me stronger) And it was so relaxing, not to argue about dropped gear parts and who had the best and the strongest weapon/armor. It was all about skill and teamplay and that's, what i really really loved. No best gear= best player (ego). There was no "You want to join our team/sg? Than you have to have at least T78792387 because we ran Taskforces. You will be a hindrance otherwise." Something i experienced so much in other games and i hated it.
The opportunity to test out new content on a test server and to give feedback - and the devs listened to some extent or explained things, you didn't understand..
All the fun planned and spontanious events: jumping on or of skyscrappers - who will be the one who jumps higher and faster than the rest? PvP-Duells in the Pocket D, all the holiday events which were fun and creative, club nights where you danced all night and talked to other players in the Pocket D and that was all you did etc.
The city itself. Such wide space for you and your friends/supergroup to explore and to use it your way. Even after 3 years i found things, i never noticed before like funny npcs, an interesting billboard over a door for a mission you did the 30th time with one of your alts, destroyed and build up cityparts etc. Jumping from roof to roof and annoy weak enemies, who killed you as a newbie with one hit xD. I liked it a lot. The city changed through all my playtime, everyday there was something new.
That teamplay really was teamplay: you got more experience the more people were there and played with you through the missions, you had to coordinate people, you had to be flexibel in a team, you had to help your teammates in the best way you could. But it was without stress, without yelling, without rivalry. Here i learned what it means to be part of a team and that it could be fun.
An interesting pvp-system. It was optional and a lot of fun to hunt villians down to steal them their bases (or got them stolen xD).
The possibility to change the level of difficulty for all missions.
What is a hero without love for mankind - Doris Lessing
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom - Bob Dylan
A hero is a man who is afraid to run away - English Proverb
always enjoyed making my pets go on strike in the middle of a mission...more power less pay!
For the most part the awesome community. I think not having to fight for loot and not making particular classes essential for many missions is what helped bring people together, not keep them apart. The ease of using chat channels and the team window to find groups, and masses of content in every aspect of the game.
As someone else said you couldn't gimp yourself, only challenge yourself. Axewrath, my Ice Armour/Axe Tank on Defiant was also a speedster. Ice Armour was a difficult set to work with for years prior to its large buffs, axe's lethal damage was commonly resisted and I hit 50 before you ever got jet or jump packs as temp powers. Terra Volta with superspeed? HELL, but when you get there you felt awesome by overcoming such an obstacle. Unknowingly I made the game very tough on myself with that combo but it was far from gimp (Axewrath had ungodly levels of endurance recovery).
I bought City of Heroes in April 2005, but had to wait until June 2006 until I had access to a computer that was capable of running it (poor post-secondary student, I'm sure you all understand). I stuck mostly to myself, but often found myself complimenting people I passed on their costumes. That's how I ran into a guy going by Cirkuit, and his wife. We became fairly close friends, and as life went on, ended up drifting out of contact. For one reason or another, we both stopped playing City of Heroes for a period of time (for myself, the reasons were financial).
Imagine my surprise when, a mere 2 hours, 45 minutes from shut down, a familiar cape took a seat on the steps of City Hall next to me. I didn't care that I had to bring my computer back from the brink of death to be able to be on-line for shut-down, or that she died only minutes after the last server went dark (she gave her life for my game. I have salvaged as much of her as possible, for that reason). All that really mattered is that the first people to welcome me to Paragon City were the people with whom I said my fare wells.
That, I think, is what made it special. I am far from a social person by nature, and yet I not only made friends in game, I found friends in reality - for Cirkuit made his home a mere three hours drive from where I live. My brothers would occasionally meet up with other players in Toronto; though I did not share in their circle, I recognized the value of the bonds that were forged. I would trust any of those whom I came to call friend to guard my back without hesitation.
I have never before encountered a community as willing to trust as the one that existed in Paragon, and with luck, will exist again.
Fare thee well, Paragon.
It is only when we stand up, with all our failings and sufferings, and try to support others rather than withdraw into ourselves, that we can fully live the life of community.
[color=#ff0000]Business Director[/color]
Much of what you say resonates with me too, Terwyn. I had resisted playing MMOs because I wasn't sure I wanted to play a game with people I didn't know, but CoX was eventually able to change my mind, mostly through the outstanding members of my supergroup -- folks who pulled together despite most of them having never met in real life. We did manage to get together once or twice; I still have fond memories of our group's Taco Bell Summit of 2008, where folks gathered from 3 states and the UK.
I'm always fascinated to hear of introverts finding themselves in jobs that one would normally think of as extroverted.
On a separate note, I've identified one more thing that made me love CoX: the large array of abilities in a power set. As I play other MMOs and single-player RPGs while I wait for CoT, I find myself getting bored because levelling up rarely comes with a reward that inspires me. For 7 years the most exciting thing for me about each character was gaining a level that granted a new power -- not just +10% of some stat, but a new button on my tray that did something I couldn't do before, and this was all the way up to max (or 49, after they made the change). So many other games seem to have just meh rewards for levelling, especially towards the higher levels.
Spurn all ye kindle.
City of Heroes was my first MMO. Christmas of 2004 I got the game and I loved it. I spent hours in the character creation, there was so much to choose from! I soon found the rp community on the Virtue server and learned how to rp and that opened up an entirely new level to the game. My character suddenly was this 3 dimensional entity and I spent hours every day in Paragon City. April 2006 I met my husband when I joined a SG after their party on the Boardwalk.
Paragonian Knights was my family in game and out. I had spinal fusion surgery in September 2006 and my SG was a source of support both in Paragon City and my real one. City of Heroes was not just a game. It was a community. It was family. I still hear the music of Atlas Park sometimes. I miss Paragon City as surely as I miss my hometown sometimes.
Redlynne,
Great comments on super reflexes and Healing. You nailed it! As a scrapper player I would only effectively play both secondary sets with Broadsword parry. I finally dismissed healing as I became tired of frantically clicking heal powers in most fights. And both had that one punch danger from AVs. The invention and incarnate systems allowed me to finally lay the Broadsword to rest. I could finally fight the way I really wanted to because they both systems offered good offense and defense supplements.
P.S. “Thank the Devs” for Oroborus and Stephanie Peebles. Her gift ring was very helpful when my scrapper had to go toe-to-toe with an AV for several rounds. Hmmm, it would be nice to be able to buy something simular at the market…
I joined CoX with the Good vs. Evil pack (i7). This was the first MMO that I bought (I dabbled in UO for a few hours here and there at friends' houses but I was never really captured by it) and as such I was so lost and confused when I started it is actually humorous to me now (ah nostalgia). I was fortunate to have several RL friends that showed me the ropes and helped me figure out what to do.
My first toon was an AR/DEV Blaster. I had no clue at the time what to do with enhancements and so when I was level 17 and struggling to... arrest... a single group without running out of endurance I decided to try a different class. I had witnessed the awesome ferocity of Scrappers so I decided to try one. Looking at the powerset options I noticed that the description for Claws mentioned something about using low amounts of endurance. I then saw Regen and thought "Hey, if I'm not using much endurance and I'm recovering it quickly then I won't ever be huffing and puffing again!"
It took me about 10 weeks to level my toon up to 50 and I learned many things about MMOs along the way. I remember the fun that I had as I raced from mission to mission and always tried to arrive at the door to the next mission before any teammates. I remember how much I hated those Malta Sappers because they would give me flashbacks of my Blaster days.
My second 50 was another Scrapper. Katana/Regen this time. I noticed that Divine Avalanche had a profound impact on my surivability and I got to thinking that I should try Super Reflexes next and since I wasn't going with Regen this time I wanted to take something familiar that didn't use much endurance -- Claws.
So, I rolled another Scrapper. This time I had an idea for who this toon would be before I created it. I wanted a Scrapper that played wild -- more like a feral cat than a SuperHero. I had a few rules that I followed when playing this toon: #1 Never back down. #2 Attack all out, all the time. #3 Since this was an RP toon, RPing a Pokemon no less, always communicate with only parts of my toon's name (this made communicating with teammates challenging at times, but also enhanced the experience). This toon was like Scrapperlock personified. Thus, Scrapachu was born.
I have never had as much fun playing any character in any other game as I got from playing Scrapachu. It was, in a word, exhilarating. When somehow the team would agro three groups, there seemed to be no hope left and the tank was shouting "RUN!! GO NAO!!" I, bound by my rules, would pop a purple or two and then solo the horde until there was no one left standing... except for me and whoever else on my team that managed to survive.
Then I started to experiment with the Invention system. I had read in the forums that soft-capping positional defenses on a /SR was easy. I'd also heard that it was lackluster. I didn't let the later stop me because I was pretty sure that I had a way to alter my playstyle slightly to maximize the benefits of soft-capped /SR. I figured that I could use Shockwave to knock the whole group down and while they were trying to stand again I would have plenty of time to use Aid Self. In this way, I figured, I had layered defenses and should be able to survive a lot.
I probably would not have believed just how effective this tactic would prove to be without going through this entire process. The real beauty of this approach is that it really did not matter what enemy group I was facing -- my defenses were just as effective. It worked so well I was even able to solo Fire Farms in AE at the +4x8 difficulty (it was difficult, but doable). In fact, Scrapachu only had one weakness; enemies that terrorized. Lucky for me there weren't many of those around.
Eventually I came across a few Claws/Regen builds on the forums that intrigued me. I saw that the possibility existed to soft-cap either Melee or Smashing/Lethal defenses. So I brushed the dust off and started working towards that goal on my first 50. Along the way, I also managed to get to the hitpoint cap and I got enough recharge to keep my heals coming back such that I always had at least two ready to go. It was incredible. +4x8 Freakshow were laughably easy. I could frequently handle entire missions without ever needing to use my heals.
That was what made CoX so great. The entire game was so flexible and allowed for so much customization that no two toons were ever alike. Towards the end of CoX it felt like the devs were actively encouraging players to break the game. Like they wanted us to make toons that were so strong that only the absolute correct set of circumstances could bring us down.
One of my greatest joys with CoX was that my favorite toon at the end was the one that taught me how to play, the one that truly started the love affair.
TL;DR -- What I enjoyed most about CoX was not only the freedom to create any character that I wanted, but also the encouragement to do so. Like the whole game was telling me "Go ahead, Try it. We bet you can make that crazy idea of yours work!"
I've been a diehard superhero comics reader since the 60s and CoX let me be in them.
SEZ
Tatter
Word.
And in a way that noone else got right, even though they came AFTER CoH.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
I started CoH in beta as a katana/regen scrapper named 5 OClock Shadow, and I played him all the way until the end. I had so many alts--each felt like their own character, not just some random space to fill to try a different AT. It was definitely an escape for me and my friends. I absolutely plan to be there once CoT becomes available at any stage. Here are several points why CoX was special for me (with 252 posts, I'm sure these points have been beaten to the ground):
The fluidity of movement, travel powers, etc. I can't stress enough how important mobility is to me in a game. Several games make jumping and running limited, and it feels like you are encumbered, but not in CoX. The way I could turn on a dime or quickly shift up and down while in flight made it so much fun. Funnest part was turn off flight, fall, turn it back on and tumble around. The way I could super jump into a group of thugs, and instantly perform an AOE. Also, ninja run was one of the best features CoX put in--must have ninja run! One thing I would like is a climb feature, that would be even better as far as mobility goes.
The combination of powers/customization (body shape/skin tone/height/aura/colors and so on) paired with the story and personality for every character that I made. Like people have said, this made these characters my own. I truly felt my characters were the best. Not necessarily the strongest/fastest/powerful, but according to my standards of what was fun, bad ass and original--they did feel quite invincible though. My friend and I had characters who were all connected with each other story-wise, and it reflected in their names, customization and the flexibility of the MMO structure. In all aspects, this is something no other game has accomplished.
I really look forward to see what you have in store to make these stories effect the game--both back story and main story. If done right, it's definitely an ingredient to have me as a player for life as I would have been for CoX.
Architect was a dream for me. Though it could have been more flexible in the UI, better customization in the level details and scaled larger, I was happy with it. One of the coolest characters I made was Solstice. I wish I could have actually made him as an alt. He was a tech dual blades/ice brute ninja robot who could duplicate himself 8 times. Obviously duplication wasn't a power, but I could add 8 of him in the same area that gave that illusion. That dude was difficult to beat. Also, being able to have my alts assist me in missions was mind blowing lol. Would have been better if it was my actual alts, and not incarnations.
Alts lived up to the main. Honestly, I never got tired of my main character, but I always would have the urge to fill a role my team was lacking or shoot some shit with electricity. And when it was time to switch to extra fire power or more control, or just a different type of dps, it was easy and fun. I felt I didn't just offer my team stability, but a cool character to get a long with. The alt could be a lesser character, or someone with a hidden power to destroy the entire city, or even the world. Though they weren't the main character, that was the point, they were still fun as hell to play. One of the funnest alts we'd make was the Praetorian versions of our heroes far before Going Rogue came out. If there was a mechanism to connect characters officially in the game through blood or work colleagues or whatever, CoT would be pushing the story telling envelope in my book--as small as that is.
Cityscape and geography. I had the urge to explore every inch of Paragon, RI and the dimensions. Everything was well put together. Sometimes I'd just spend my time exploring--barely accomplishing anything except relieving stress and gaining badges. I mean, how is that possibly fun? lol
The little details; badges, achievements, accolades, tiers of enhancements, merit, unlockable weapons, inspirations, temporary powers, veteran awards. It not only proved to others that you were a seasoned player, but it showed you were involved. I always felt a warm connection to these players with a high number of accomplishments. It felt like we had an unspoken understanding of each other, and always fought seamlessly in groups together. No drama, no bullshit, just sailed smoothly in the fray of battle. I also felt the duty to help people gain them, which was awarding in it's own right.
I always looked forward to the special events.
The things that killed the mood for me was entrance parking. A few of my close friends were real big into this, and discarded RPing/detailed stories they used to do. This in turn caused me and my friend to avoid them. That really took away a sense of community and story writing big time. It was like they caught a virus, and became xp zombies--that isn't fun, it sucks. They pretty much exploit any game they play now though, so it isn't solely a CoX issue.
I haven't read every post in this forum about this, but if there is a decaying experience factor based off of time/distance from group, it could get rid of this issue. After interacting with the group/enemy has idled after a duration of 10 minutes, and a ratio between members interacting with enemies/allies is considered, you'd drop a percent of XP depending on your level per minute until you . After an allotted time of three 10 minute breaks within a mission, you're booted outside the mission or loaded to the city square if you aren't in a mission. This prevents /follow or attacking every so often to exploit the system. If you don't see/interact w/ battle, you don't get xp.
Thanks for existing, guys. Can't wait to play.
5 OClock Shadow
"The Five", "Old Scruff", "Wolfbrand", "Tashomono"
Your shaving days are numbered...
[img]http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/30154944.jpg[/img]
Ego? What ego?
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Haha! No ego, just logic.
5 OClock Shadow
"The Five", "Old Scruff", "Wolfbrand", "Tashomono"
Your shaving days are numbered...
Let's see... thing's that wouldn't feel right if they weren't included... We need high mob-density Sewers, so I can feel nostalgic with this:
The level up self-rez and inspiration surge is a must
Designated resurrection points at a set location on any given map. The "Pain Train" as it were was great for getting lowbies around.
Teleport other power. It wouldn't feel right without the power for other players to function as Taxi's for others.
The extreme emphasis on teaming really helped build up a community. Needing other players to reach maximum strength, adn having many abilities that simply meshed well together made things all the more fun.
Stalkers don't die: They simply... Disappear.
What made it special? Wow. That's a long list. But the first point has been mentioned above: Community.
I liked teaming with friends, doing TF's with my supergroup on a regular basis, and generally hanging out with people. The community aspect was a big part of the game, even as the game got older, and the graphics were somewhat dated, the friends I made in that game were what kept bringing me back. That chat tool they had was perfect, and it's amazing so many other games seem to have problems reproducing something like that, because it did everything it needed to without forcing stuff you wouldn't want.
As much as I liked teaming, there were times I liked solo-ing. Maybe it was part of the character's backstory that they were a solo hero(ine), or maybe I was just feeling antisocial that day. But the ability to solo missions was also much appreciated. There were times, mind you, that I was solo-ing because no one else was on, and it took me about 2 hours for my Dark/Dark defender to solo a door mission by herself, but it still felt like a tremendous accomplishment when I made it out the other end. At no time was there a "holy trinity" of classes you *had to have* to finish a mission, and there was also no built-in assumption that healers and (de)buffers would be utterly useless without someone along to hand out the damage. It might be *harder* for these classes, but they could still solo the missions. And the occasional mission where inevitably I ran up against a force combination, or a boss monster that I couldn't beat with my character, I could always invite someone in to help me out of a tight spot. (Yes, Trapdoor, I'm looking right at you!)
On the other hand, the teaming. CO isn't bad, but nothing beats the team sizes you could have in CoX. Most MMO's assume you'll have 3 people in a team, or maybe you'll go with a whole guild. But they don't seem to get that when your SG is on, maybe you all want to run as a single group, which most of them can't handle. CoX let us have up to 8 people in a single team, with Super Sidekicking to make sure anyone in the SG with a low level alt to join in and run with us as well. We stayed together, we gamed as a group of friends, and had a lot of fun. The other games just don't seem to understand this. And if we were on in large numbers, we could set up a League and do one of the Trials as a supergroup. I'd certainly hope any spiritual successor to CoX remembers this and incorporates it. Large normal team sizes and Super-Sidekicking (whatever you call it in this game,) will ensure plenty of SG team play and alt-building, without anyone being afraid of being left out.
Door missions are important. A lot of MMO's these days keep advertising that their games have done away with door missions to encourage "open world gameplay." What they fail to recognize is this leads to what someone has mentioned above. You get crowds of people endlessly searching the same area, waiting for a particular boss monster to appear so they can gank it before everyone else and continue with their game. It promotes antisocial behavior, and a lot of resentment on behalf of people who come up short or are taken advantage of. Door missions prevent this. Oh, and on the same note, individual rewards. No "group loot, first to click everything gets the toys!" I don't really think it needs explaining why this has been such an awful idea over the years. I've always preferred CoX's method, where the rewards are automatically deposited in the character's loot stash. No fighting over things, no griefing. You just do the mission, and when it's done, you see what you got. Or in the Trials, the specialty rewards are chosen by you from the list, but it's still uniquely yours.
Another thing I hope they keep, based on what I just said, is the idea that what you have on your character isn't saleable or tradeable. Sure you could trade a recipe or resource, but if you build it and put it in your character, it's yours and no one else's. This, I think, is one of the biggest factors which prevented the kind of account abuse places like WoW have had to deal with. What would be the point in CoX in hacking someone's account? Sure you could sell a few recipes, but you don't know in advance what they've got unless they're bragging about it. And even then, you can't be sure they haven't made it and used it in the interim. So there's no advantage. The lack of an exploitable saleable owned item list would help prevent that. CO, I believe also does this by making the critical items character or account-bound, so they cannot be traded or sold to anyone else. Also a good system.
Oh, yes. Almost forgot. The powers list. I loved how in CoX there were so many powers to choose from. Regular powers, pool powers, Incarnate powers, and many more. There were so many ways you could customize your character. CO tries, but because the game is so heavily weighted in favor of damage and damage mitigation, you *always* have to build toward more DPS, and that encourages limited scope. As an example, I recently tried building a Freeform character on CO who was dark-themed, but used elements of other classes. I liked the healing buff stack enhancer, so I took that. Big mistake. Because the darkness powers were damage-based, I got absolutely no benefit from having the heal buffers in my character, even after I took a few Celestial healing powers. That lack of customization is what hurts that game the most. They offer a lot of powers, but if you don't build a character by taking from the same *type* of powers, all you get is wasted effort. In CoX, my primary was that Dark/Dark defender I mentioned, and while her damage powers were light, I could pump up her sniper and primary attack powers, mix in some subscription bonus powers (Blackwand, Nemesis Staff, and Dark Melee were all standard powers in every build once I had them,) and suddenly I could have a character who was designed originally to excel at healing, buffing, and debuffing, and also be capable of holding my own in combat, if I chose to do so. That flexibility was awesome.
The corollary to that is the ability to use powers. Some other MMO's only let you use powers in sequence. Or you might have a power, but (to use CO as an example,) it largely gets ignored because that game also forces a live dodge mechanic. So while you're manically tapping the move buttons on the keyboard, you can't also be intelligently triggering the powers you want when you want them. Some powers don't lend themselves well to active movement in a game like that, so they tend to get ignored. (And don't get me started on their limited enhancement system, which guarantees you have to gimp yourself to get what you want.)
(Said in the voice of "Uncle" from Jackie Chan Adventures...) Oh! One more thing... Don't tie movement powers like flight and superspeed and so on to the end bar, okay? I've seen what Valiant Online is doing, and while it isn't bad, what really turned me off the latest dev post was when they showed the flight power draining the end bar while it was active. This turns an awesome movement power into another strategic decision, which takes away the "super" feel from the game. If I build Major Uber, with the traditional rack 'o muscles, lantern jaw, and steely expression, I don't want him to launch off a skyscraper, fly about four blocks... then plummet to his death because his end bar ran out. Do what CoX did and make movement powers so end-low in cost that if you're not running too many other toggles simultaneously, it doesn't decrement endurance.
I'm sure there's more. But that's what occurs to me right off, anyway. :)
Couldn't agree more with everything you said, Dragonflight. Oh, and nicely written also.
Spurn all ye kindle.
i cant deny that it was the customizable abilities that the game had. i had 32 characters all so uniquely different. one thing i loved the most was our base. sooooo much time invested in the base. 4 days alone on placing more than 800 block down a hallway to create a maze (which many of my friends ragequit out of lol). each wing of the base themed uniquely, one was just overgrown forest type with water and everything. (Three Eyes of Cerberus if anyone wants to find the youtube walkthrough).
there are many more things i loved about cox but i had to pick the one thing that consumed most of my gameplay - base and character customization
<---- Alt-aholic lol meow
First, I miss being able to fly up to a purple spawn completely unseen; engage my parking brake...er...hover; mez or debuff the living poop out of them; and then proceed to destroy them with complete impunity while tossing off spells in local chat. No other game allows me to do that!
Second, the RP was something epic. Contributing factors probably included a non-twitch interface (thus allowing real-time spell "vocalizations" in combat without losing effectiveness); MASSIVE customization of appearance and powers; macro building; and of course a great community for this sort of thing. No other game has that combination.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
For me it was simply how close the game felt to the comics, which I noticed right at the beginning,of my playtime as I looked down from the rooftop to the unsuspecting criminals below.
Yeah, it was the same with me, there was a time that I can say in all honesty I went."Man...I feel just like a hero, I wish I could draw so I can portray what I feel.''
--Formerly Jorortis--
Note: Jorortis is still a character of mine and is still going to be in the super group, not Demirus, at least not yet...
City of Heroes....even though I didn't play it much but when I returned to the game in 2012 after a hiatus since 2005 (before CoV came out and the update to merge COV into the game), i still loved the game. I made a Mutant Electric Blaster/Electric Manipulator Hero named Bolt Templar. Bolt had long white hair, electric green glowing eyes, a silver plate over his right eye, black long sleeve tight top with electric green "Electricity" design with banded black wraps on his hands. He also wore a large black studded belt and black baggy pants that had a large electric green lightning bolt down the side of his pants and black spiked shoulder armor with electric green outline and spike tips (boots were included with the pants naturally in the character creation...I would imagine the boots to be black banded boots with lightning bolt on the sides to match the pants.....boots were more seen in his 2nd outfit when he takes on a more "soul reaver/Raziel" like appearance). My main character and his storyline is what made City of Heroes special to me. Even though Bolt Templar lives on in his DCUO incarnation (with Batman as his mentor to fit his stoic/dark persona even though Heroes being mentored by Superman are technically mutants of the DCUO world), but his original incarnation still lives on in me and in CoH/CoV. Like all heroes, a hero has a arch-villian (Batman to the Joker and Superman to Lex Luthor), Bolt's own arch-villian even reincarnated in DCUO who I called him "Nuova Templar" who, like him, is a mutant blaster but with the element of Fire (the storyline i made up has it that at one point Nuova and Bolt were allies until the Arachnos Invasion and Lord Recluse turned him). I would give u a picture of Bolt Templar and his outfits but unfortunately, I never got a chance to take screenshots of him before CoH's shutdown. I always began in Galaxy City (Pre-CoV and CoX Freedom era). Hopefully when City of Titans comes up to running, Bolt's true and original incarnation may return.
There were three main aspects of CoX that appealed to me that I can't find anywhere else - at least not all three of them.
1. Playing the game, running the missions - it made you feel, well, Heroic. With so many games, the emphasis is on gaining loot - most of which becomes completely irrelevant by the time you get half way to end game. I hate sweeping up loot. It seems unheroic to me to say, "I would capture that bad guy, but I need to pick up this loot on the ground first." Loot is important, of course, but I loved how it dropped straight into inventory in CoX so I could deal with it later. The total garbage loot (like "Training" enhancements) even stopped dropping altogether when you got past the place your toon would use it. The emphasis on loot makes a little bit of sense if your playing an adventurer, but not a super hero.
2. The social system. Even when I had no particular reason to log in, I did just to chat with the other members of the channels. Also, being able to chat with a channelmate while he was playing on another server or the opposing faction is something missing from most other games. CoX's social system was in a class by itself.
3. Random Number Generators. There's no such thing as random in a computer - just less predictable. Ever notice how certain events or drops tend to repeat themselves? It's not a foible of luck, it's a function of computer-generated "random" numbers, which rely on repeatable algorithms to come up with less predictable, but not random, numbers. Heavy reliance on RNG means most folks are not going to get the loot they want. In CoX, nothing depended on the RNG. Yes, drops came off the RNG table, but you could also earn any recipe or item in the game or find someone else who got it but didn't want it in the auction house. You might have to farm a specific mission to earn enough to buy it, but you were not stuck in a cycle of farming for the same 3% chance it will drop not knowing how long, if ever it will take to get it.
Also, I liked the heavy reliance on instanced missions. I've never found a happy medium for open missions. Either the zone runs dry during heavy traffic or the respawns are so frequent, you can't escape combat to get a breather to sweep up the cursed loot the mobs are dropping.
City of Villains added some much needed spice, and the "weaker" "Tanks" that were Brutes, meant that people didn't mind starting teams, however, Masterminds was the perfect pet class (at least for me). I made a Hunter on WoW and always felt like the class should've been more versatile (pet wise), MM's made that happen for me. Even Dominators added a raw unmatched power that didn't make you feel weak, CoV was very much about being bold and staking a claim. Which said a lot to me since I thought it was going to suck big time...I was glad to be proven wrong...
Goddamnit ....here comes the feels again.
"A true hero, is the sum of his accomplishments, no man won the hearts of the people by assuming he's better than them, he is a citadel for the people, a vessel to which hope and strength is carried on." - Marcus Falcon
I started playing CoX back about 6 months from it's start. Previous to that my brother was playing on the same account which I ended up taking over till the end of CoX. The first character I made was an Illusion/Kinetics Controller. She was my main and first 50 of course.
I started out going solo for a long time and it took me a really long time to make it to 50 just because I kept getting in over my head a lot but even in defeat I never lost the fun in trying to do more than I probably should have tried to do. Anyway for the first couple of months playing completely solo declining a lot of team invites politely and going about my business trying to save Paragon City on my own. It was a lot of fun just on my own then the first winter event came along and I realized, " Oh crap I'm not able to take one of these Winter Lords down by myself " , so I hopped on a team to start taking down those ice tossing menaces. I discovered then that that I really enjoyed being on a team just as much as I did running solo maybe even a little more. I ran a lot more with PUGs and ran some of the lower level TF's like Positon's and Synapse's and had a real blast doing that.
So I noticed that most of the teams I was on really lacked some serious healing and not because there was no healer it was that most of the healers decided that attacking was their best option to keep the fights shorter but I noticed that they were mostly around to Rez people and not heal the team. I figured, Hmm I could do a better job healing and keeping a team alive than some of these guys, so I decided to make an empathy/dark defender and try my hand at playing a strict healer. Well I was quite surprised how quickly a team would ask me to join them in what ever tasks were going on. One of my fondest memories of this was at level 9 ish running with a random PUG and doing some of Frostfire's arc with a bunch of scrappers and a tank we entered the map and everyone took off running in different directions! I said in chat, " Shouldn't we stick together so we lessen the chance of getting wiped out? " , of course no response because everyone else had jumped into different mobs and were taking a beating. I managed to keep the entire team alive running back and forth between each member of the team healing them. the only one that died was me but fortunately for me I had wakies in reserve for such occasions. It was an intense run too because not one person on the team really communicated and did their own thing while I focused on just keeping everyone alive. In the several missions that we ran I think I only attacked once or twice at the most beyond that it was just saving the lives of my team mates. After all that as I was about to log off the tank was the only one that said anything to me after those couple of hours of running with them, " Thanks a lot, I doubt we would have done this well if you hadn't been around. You're probably the best healer I've seen around in a while. " , that was quite the complement considering not one person talked the entire time and we managed to survive with very few real defeats. Through out it all there were maybe 6 KO's and I'm pretty sure 4 of them were me trying to get to another teammate to heal them. That to me was just as fun as trying to take down all those Hellions.
After getting a lot higher in level I decided to change it up again and made a blaster though everyone's most hated of blasters the Energy/energy blaster. Hell for me I kinda hated it too after a while. On the second night of playing and getting high enough to run around Steel Canyon I got a random invite from a higher level character just running some of his missions in Steel. when I saw his level my first comment " Umm I'm really low level to be running with you are you sure you want me to come with you on thesse I may not be very effective with my powers. " of course he said " Ah no worries I'll Sidekick ya and you should be alright. " . This was my first time ever running with someone much higher than me and getting sidekicked so it was a new learning experience to me. Through out the couple of hours we chatted and played got to know him a little and then he asked " Are you in any Super Groups?". Me still being the newb I was said no I wasn't even totally sure what they were like or what was the point of joining one. So after the usual explanations that you get for joining I said yes and joined the League of Legends which turned into pretty much the only SG I wanted to work with people in it were great to work with and fun to talk with and I even managed to become friends with most of them as the game went on. Through out the entire run of CoX there were 3 leaders of the SG me being the last after being voted in by the entire SG. I took over and really started to do more for the group than probably expected of me I'm sure. But it was all for My friends. :) I still chat with a lot of them online and I've even met with a whole bunch of them even though it was quite the challenge to get out to see most of them considering they were literally from all over the US and Canada. Through a few trips I've managed to meet up with at least 10 of the members of the SG and hopefully I'll get the chance to go out and see more of them in the future.
As you all can see one of the things that I enjoyed most about CoX was the community that was one of the best things about it. The way us heroes tended to help others with the little things. I remember there were a lot of times that I would just run around on a one of my 50's helping beginners learn the ropes and just randomly helping teams running through Perez Park healing or Fulcrum Shifting them so they can get through easier. Or the times I'd run around on my tank helping teams with agro because they were getting overwhelmed. Or just giving someone a little Influence to make them be able to pick up their first DO's or SO's. I even enjoyed seeing that same people later on doing the same thing I did for another new player.
Another thing that I really thought was great about CoX was the variety of characters that you could make was unbelievable and, so far as I know now, unbeatable. The fact that I had favorite powers that I like to use more than others , I made a lot of controllers, defenders, coruptors and tanks, it meant that I was able to fill the role that I wanted to or was needed in any teams I joined. Sometimes I would build a character to completely support a team other times I'd make something that could farm to make Prestige or Influence or to get IO's for builds ( and to make things for my SG mates to use ). The character options were absolutely amazing and I want that back in this game without a doubt.
Teaming in CoH was so easy to do it was terrific. No game I've played since was even close to how good it was. You could search for people by level or archtype and message them to see if they'd like to join a team. It was awesome that you could build a team the way you wanted without a major hassle. And the interface got even better as you could eventually say you were looking for certain things like a TF or no team or whatever. These are the little things that made the game a lot nicer to play.
When bases came in I was ecstatic just because of having a little dimension that we as a SG could use to store things to help our members, teleporters to speed up getting the team together etc. It was so useful for us and we did a good job of getting things in to make it easier for everyone to make enhancements to get their builds together and I for one would make IO's and store them in the base for my SG members to take at their will. I know not every SG did things like that but that's one thing that I felt would be nice for me to do it.
I could go on about more of the things that I really liked about CoX that I would like to see in CoT but there have been quite a few things in this thread that already state things that I like, even the stuff I mentioned already has been in the thread. I just thought it'd be nice to be able to talk about some of the memories I had of the game along with maybe put out there the few things I'd really like to see back.
Now back to my lurking ;-)
Thanks for sharing. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but I think a key thing for me that oft gets overlooked is:
That was a huge part of the fun for me in CoX, and I hope CoT encourages the same kind of "foolish" taking-on of ridiculous odds. It's the main reason I don't want to see increased penalty for defeat (as discussed in a separate thread).
Spurn all ye kindle.
:O That was you!? ;D
Ironically I never suffer from this problem in other games which have repair costs involved. I think I was possibly more careful due to the XP debt than anything else; particularly in the early life of the game where too much debt could end up with you running out of content to do at your level...
Which then forced you to team up to be able to progress to the next contact... or street sweep.
Actually, this makes me think about "ridiculous odds". I am assuming that you mean that you are referring to taking on more than you normally should be able to do (which if you normally survive are *not* ridiculous odds in my book). If it is normally a 50/50 chance of you surviving or less, then I would call them more ridiculous odds. My favourite is taking on mobs that are designed for 3+ players, and doing it solo...
On a blaster styled character.
With no form of healing.
And winning.
Hell, I cannot pull it off all the time.. or even 50% of the time... maybe just 15% of the time. That is ridiculous odds in my favour (or being the last one alive killing a boss mob in a dungeon... done that a couple of times)
Side note: I play squishy characters in most games, so I am very used to examining the floor. City of Heroes annoyed me with how some powers could accidentally tag an extra group (Fire cages could do this if you were just slightly off and went for the wrong mob).
Game play, COX was the best group play game I ever experienced. All the classes really had impact and I never felt like there was either a useless or overpowering class.
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