Edit: This is a thread more about the mistakes of CO, so that we can learn from them. If you can think of other mistakes the game made, mention them here so people know what to avoid.
I'd played CO for a long time, I played it for about a year before moving back to city of heroes, but started playing it again after CoX was shut down. The number of mistakes the developers made for it, a few of which will be easy for this game to avoid, but I want to emphasize the ones they made while they were developing new releases. This doesn't focus on the technical side, but the side of the game people see, the games identity, and why it's lost it's identity and why it has stagnated.
On release, CO was praised for it's freeform system, a system that allowed you to make exactly what you wanted. While people used it to become very overpowered, people also made very interesting thematic toons. Pvp wasn't balanced, but pve was a lot of fun, focused heavily on action and high speed. Some powersets lived and died on bugs, unfortunately, but they were otherwise viable. Ranged was more powerful, simply due to it having an advantage, melee wasn't quite powerful enough to make up for it.
While everything was good, the games achilles's heel was it's lack of content. This was to be expected, and many were expecting new content. This, is however, about the amount of content the game would get. The reasons would begin with the end of it's beta, and it's decay would continue over many repeated mistakes.
At the beginning, in the beta, many powers were nerfed immedietly before live, and also shortly after. While this is normal, none of the weaker powers were buffed, powers no one in there right mind used. This severely limited what people felt was powerful and weak, inspite the freedom of the freeform system, the imbalances left prevented many from even bothering to really experiment. Those that did discovered immensely overpowering debuff stacking, but the handling of it was such as to make most resistance debuffing of questionable use. An example would be mini drive, it was initially overpowered, but when nerfed to it's original and intended function, it was also lowered to a very low level of effectiveness.
At the time, this wasn't a major blow, but you also had gear that allowed people to unleash an immense amount of power by reducing the cost of select powers. These items, would be nerfed so harshly, as to be rendered useless, on paper they remained useful, but they didn't even provide the cost discount they were intended to provide.
The first series of buffs would go to melee, however, the amount was such that melee far, far out damaged ranged so much that ranged became useless. It was very easy to get into melee range before, now melee could annihilate entire groups in seconds before a ranged could even take the mobs down to half health, while also inflicting far higher damage on the tankier bosses than ranged could and still do so in the well rounded roles.
We are already seeing the first of a trend of mistakes CO's developers would repeat, in that they did not show any moderation. They often went to one extreme or another. When they nerfed something, often it would be a "sledgehammer" nerf, so much that a stat or an item, or even power, would go from being used all the time, to outright ignored by everyone. If they buffed something, it was also to much so, to an extent that for many, made it such the powers or items buffed in question became "essential".
Another mistake was a cosmetic mistake, pushing an extreme grind of epic proportions for players starting level 30, for travel power devices. These devices took thousands of a not so plentiful drop to get them to the max, and they were obtained in a very, very repetitive way, very similar to games released in the earlier 2000s or even late 1990s.
Then came Vibora Bay, which they initially were pressured by at the time, Atari, into trying to release as a paid expansion, with very little content. As if the above mistake of repeated lack of moderation in nerfs/buffs was not enough to drive people away, charging for vibora bay surely hurt the game further. Cryptic was forced to release it for free, but the damage had been done.
Another problem however would also arise, the mobs were also very weak. Throughout the games history, the mobs did very low damage, often low enough that regeneration in any of it's shapes and forms could simply out-heal them even if the player was not as his keyboard. So the developers would implement difficulties, but they did not scale enough.
After a year of it's release, CO would go free to play, and it's identity would come under threat in a slow, drawn out process. After only a year, the game had to go free to play, but HOW they did it would open up a box that would cause only further damage to the games identity.
The archtypes came.
Unlike city of heroes archtypes, CO's archtypes were very weak, in fact, they were in many ways, intentionally left that way. The sales idea was, by making people by gold for freeform access, people wouldn't play for free simply because the archtypes were often sub-par, sometimes, even weak enough to be almost unplayable in solo play. They were designed around the old healer/tank/damage build, with only a single category called hybrid. While healer was called support, only the mind had any crowd control, the others were still almost streight up healers.
It also became apparent to me of another flaw when I played the game, buffs and debuffs were sorely lacking. This meant support was limited to healing and at the time crowd control, crowd control which actually was useful. Then came the incapacitate change, brought on by requests by players who could not defend against a power called ego storm. Ego storm had an advantage that let the user lay down a "trap" that could catch players and mobs in it, holding them and restrengthening. At the time, holds did not break so easily. This would change by year two or three, into a system in which crowd control would be rendered useless to all but the most specialized builds, and even then, useless in teams.
Mobs would now break out of holds even easier than before while damaged such that holds just as well have been sleep powers. Once again a sledge-hammer nerf was implemented. In this case, damaging holds like ego storm and heat wave, two very feared and powerful attacks, were made into "incapacitates", in that they'd be interupted the moment the mob affected broke free, as well as making the thresh hold very weak to break out of.
This rendered support largely limited to healing, as there wasn't anywhere near enough of a variety of useful buffs and debuffs for everyones themes.
This was another step in another direction we are probably seeing, the game was turning into a holy trinity. But we still had hybrids, they could still heal themselves fast enough in most things. This would change later with ice and fire, but we can continue looking at other mistakes.
CO was hurting, now, clearly, with these changes, but the holds and crowd control change came with another destructive mistake, the alerts. Quick missions that could keep someone busy, for a short time, they were very repetitive, and with the severe limitations of the archtypes, we are also seeing another trend, towards quick raids and holy trinity gameplay. Archtypes as I said, were limited to trinity play, and the alerts enforced it, teams that failed automatically died, those that did follow it as archtypes would win.
This created a new breed of player, unfortunately, in that now people thought the game was balanced around archtypes, and not around freeforms and hybrids, that the game was originally balanced. Before, people knew you did not need a tank to beat therakiel and the nemesis confrontation, though some were ignorant enough to believe it. But the archtypes reinforced the ignorance, as they were utterly limited to the holy trinity play style. CO's identity, the armor protecting it, recieved it's first cracks, and those cracks would rapidly widen with on alert. A year of neglect would follow on alert, but cryptic north, would only further seal the game.
The new alert, at the request of especially ignorant players, was made such that even freeforms had to conform to the holy trinity. At this point, the game had fully lost it's identity. The rampage overhaul would also introduce a grind designed around a carrot on a stick, in which you were required to do the raids to get the new gear, but you were not even remotely guaranteed any progress. One person could do the fire and ice alert thirty or forty times and get nothing, another could get the token drops within half that many runs.
Other nerfs before it would only further seal the game as a fallen game, a game I think people should learn from, but we should learn from the mistakes it made. While it did some things right, the constant nerfs, copying from other mmorpgs, and forgetting what it was originally made and it's original design with the introduction of the very streight up holy trinity archtypes, the game lost the essence it once had.
Today the game is but a shell of what it was, we can learn from it's mistakes, and I know the devs here are aware of some of them. I wanted to point them out as the game won't be lasting much longer from what I am seeing, a few like me had already called the devs on making it a holy trinity with the fire and ice alert, while a few praise it, many had already moved on. My entire SG even, is moving on, due to simply sheer boredom of one last problem the game had, in that no new content was being made for it and when it did get new content, it was in such small amounts as to only extend the lifespan of the game a couple days, rather than a few months.
Edit: I'll make a special case for vehicles in another thread, as CO had made plenty of mistakes with regards to vehicles, it's more of a "what it didn't do" issue, though the mistake of tying them exclusively to lockboxes was perhaps the biggest mistake with them.
I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.
For me if these things where not in the game I'd play it as much as I did CoH.
1. ugly male faces.
2. Lock boxes.
3. Lack of game support/no new content not in lock boxes
4. While I dont hate the art, aside from male faces, I dont particularly like it either.
I get nausia just thinking about CO's cell shading. In fact, I get nausia when I think about CO, period.
I don't get mad, I restructure the laws of quantum physics and resolve the situation with temporal engineering.
Umm... I though most players, when the formulas change the playstyle, dont actually leave the game (some do though), most stay and try to be the 1st to MASTER it before anyone else does. ;)
Isnt that how you fight Depreciatation!? ;D
Yeah I agree with you there on the lock boxes. A huge number of mistakes really hurt them, I actually liked how DCUO handled boxes, just cosmetic things and nothing more. CO's forcing vehicles to be part of lock boxes was one of the things that really hurt how vehicles could have been implemented, course half of CO's playerbase was utterly unsupportive of vehicles outright, let alone due to boxes.
I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.
Not always, actually only competitive players do that, CO's playerbase was very, very casual, so they weren't willing to adapt anyways. Even elitists though don't try to adapt at times, some of them, what tv tropes call god moders, will often outright quit. Course those kinds of players are real bad to begin with and not constructive. CO's playerbase was mostly either casual or god moders.
CO lost it's identity with on alert as over time, players began to think of either keeping the game to easy, or making it a holy trinity, but not making it challenging without making it a holy trinity, in fact many of them have this delusion that the holy trinity is the one and only way to encourage team play in mmorpgs, which isn't true.
I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.
Some lessons to be learned from Champions Online:
1) Keep your production notes - If the dev team cannot follow the development path three years from now you're screwed. Also each new build that is released should not need to re-address bugs that you've already fixed or features you've already released
2) Keep systems sovereign - Make sure that your frameworks database has rules in place for what mechanics are allowed and are not allowed and keep them consistent when releasing new content. Examples: If a 50ft ranged crowd control attack is mobile then they should all be mobile. If the combat system is built with a maximum number of stats in mind then do not go and make gear that exceeds that baseline. Introducing changes to entire systems without acknowledging the effect on the rest of the ecosystem is naive and bad for the future of the game.
3) Keep builds regulated - Make players make choices in their build mutually exclusive. Jack of All trades builds are hard to build content around. If a character concept is built on dodge then have that character understand that they will not ALSO get invulnerability. This way you can focus on making dodge work like dodge and invulnerability work like invulnerability. Sure there may be some MINOR tweaks in a gear/training system to how a build works but overall I want to avoid god-modding.
4) Communicate Truthfully - Soon™ is not communication. If you're going to tell players information then make sure it is a clear communication. If you're doing a good job of keeping your documentation then patch notes should actually include the changes that are in each patch. If you're working on something that's not ready to be communicated then keep it under wraps, but when there's something to excite and motivate the player-base then keep them up to date on the progress.
5) Execution DOES Matter - Releasing a half done patch that's full of bugs is just not acceptable. If you're going to promise to review "each framework by the end of 2016" then actually keep your word (instead of stopping short because.. telepathy). If your endgame release model is to release a new map every 2 years then try to keep to that schedule OR explain to the player base why that schedule turned out to be unreasonable. Don't start releasing smaller and smaller buggier and buggier patches with no explanation as to why your dedication to the product is waning.
6) Player Generated Content is awesome - Champions will never get a Foundry or mission builder system but it's a great (repeat GREAT) way to increase the amount of story content without much budget from your staff development team. PvP is also user generated content, no two battles are the same and people enjoy that about PvP, so keep it fun and engaging.
7) Individualization Matters - Because of Champions' freeform system you'd find that almost no two builds mechanics were alike, however every one's build ended up functioning alike. There are great creative ways to keep build individuality without something as game breaking as freeform power choice, but the bottom line; people want to have characters that are unique. Having costume options is a great way to start but also choosing how powers LOOK and FEEL is important. I, personally, do not think you need to give ANY build choices beyond "what role/path do you want" with a choice of 3-5 completely pre made builds for play styles within that role. If you give players the ability to customize the aesthetics of those builds. People will disagree with me and that's a good debate to have but my opinion remains that aesthetic choices are what people want in the end.
8) Monetize your development - Giving away development for free is bad for the longevity of the game. If a player comes to the game at year 7 and wants access to ALL the content built in 7 years then have them buy it. Sure it may be cheaper later on due to the diminishing returns model but frankly that is the strength of your financial product. You build it once and sell it to infinite quantities. If you stop selling it then you may do something STUPID like REMOVING content from players and selling it back to them.. how Cryptic thought they'd get away with it I may never know.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
good points.
Although I dont think aesthetics will fool anyone into thinking it's different. Fire whether colored green, blue purple or red is still fire and still the same power as the other guy with fire. But I do like that concept though. I think freeform is good idea but wasn't implemented in the best way in CO, and don't think their implementation should sully the entire idea. Hell there are games with ATs that did bad implementation of ATs, well CO, but that doesnt mean AT is a bad idea completely. I think CO really messed up in the balancing thing. many powers are good, but many have been rendered near perceived uselessness due to nerfs. But then again COX had some powers that were near useless depending on playing style. While some loved to team and played support, they found many of their powers useless if they tried to play during slow times because many were affect team mate only type powers. I figure one way to avoid that is to make powers be able to affect team mate and the player themselves. Kind of like how CO does with most heals and other buffs. I think CO greatest issue is their extreme nature when they "tweak" stuff. They either sledgehammer nerf or sledgehammer nerf and seem to ignore the other issues. With each nerf the ignored by dev issues become more and more forefront. AT first the controls were ok in CO. They nerfed it. Now, while I find some use, they really are forgettable. They are useless against any mob that is Super Villain and above, and although the player is supposed to be Super hero, they are still suseptable to control powers. And although one can build a jack of all trades, they cannot become all powerful. They can be decent at say both dodge and invul but cant focus either especially since the last dodge nerf. Say they grab LR, a dodge based. For every thing they put towards invul, which they must start at the basic and cant use a defense passive for the invul boost, they lose out on points that could have went to the dodge stats. COX had plenty of jack of all trade builds especially since the intro of IOs and purples. People with blasters claiming or actually tanking, but yet still dealing out blaster damage. Dominators with permanent status protection and maxed out resistance for the AT. Even IOed out scrappers that put the best SO tankers to shame in sheer damage and resistance and defense ability. And COX didnt even have Freeform to do that. Thus that stuff cant be attributed to the presence of Freeform.
I think Freeform can work if powers are all well done and not have a group that is good and a group that are too weak. While by nature of having variety some will be percieved as stronger and some as weak, the gap shouldn't be too large. Unfortunately I'm not sure how easy that is in a MMO world where damage is king, aka where the entire point in every mission is to deplete the enemy HP to win. So more than likely high damage stuff will always be king balanced against the ability to withstand damage or rather deplete the enemy HP before they deplete yours. The problems with Freeform is no different than any problem with badly balanced ATs or even if properly balanced, players tend to gravitate to the few perceived powerful ones and ignore the rest AT or Freeform.
I think you pretty much nailed it, CO was a very shallow game, and for a long time damage was king, for a while. And with the nerfs towards crowd control, you ended up with a "disguised holy trinity", you cannot even make a very good well rounded character in CO anymore in comparison to CoX even with the freeform system, due to the imbalances of CO caused by the tendency to go extreme either way with balance changes.
Two gun mojo is actually a perfect example, they buffed the damage by a massive 60%, when it's base damage was just as much as the lowest damage ticks of AR and PBR, I'd have thought a 30% buff would have been enough to keep it in line with those two. A lack of any notes or standards or spreadsheets really is to blame for this overkill buff....
...as is the sledgehammer nerf for the dodge stat, which they did buff back up a little, but it was still to low to be useful for anyone without legion gear. The lack of any idea on how much survivability a defensive passive is supposed to give resulted in a nerf to LR as well, so at the most without anything else an LR user would only dodge 50% of the time, meaning they had far less survivability than invulns/defiant/regen users. PFF was also ignored, the latest content released, even the most vocal advocate for buffing PFF and fixing it had given up when he saw that healing was the be-all-end-all of the new alert. It's a lack of moderation in regards to the content, thats only encouraged by bad forum goers in CO's forums.
I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.
"Can" freeform work. sure. "Will" freeform work.. I doubt it.
Instead I look at the core desire of what people want. If you want to build a Sniper character with close ranged attacks then Pick the Sniper Ranged Framework with a secondary melee DPS framework. Pick the damage of your choice (up to 2 or three types) and you have the build you want, offensively. Defenses (again being role dependent) are chosen through the leveling process too. Find the animations you want (Guns Animation and Nun-Chucks animation lets say) and the FX you want (I want to shoot beams and have my nun chucks made of energy". Done. You have the individuality you want but we don't have to think of every over appropriation that's possible to ruin actual combat system balance.
You want to be a invulnerable tank who has some great buffs. Choose the invulnerable tank primary framework with the buffing guardian framework. Pick the damage of your choice (up to 2 or three types) and you have the build you want, offensively. Defenses (again being role dependent) are chosen through the leveling process too. Find the animations you want (Street Fighting animation and Screaming animation lets say) and the FX you want (I want to punch with flame hands and have my buffs made of White Magic looking spells". Done. You have the individuality you want but we don't have to think of every over appropriation that's possible to ruin actual combat system balance.
I hear there will be some "third set" to choose from for players to further define their abilities. I dunno what this could look like until they give us more info. But the idea that "Burning only works this way" is something the devs aim to avoid. So you don't have to worry about your particular type of character not being created.. only that the animations and FX may not yet be in the game. If I want to do "plant biotoxin" damage, I can. If I want to do "plant slashing" damage, I can. The only real difficulty would be in "hybrid damage" .. lets say to me "sonic" damage is a mix of 50% physical and 50% energy damage.. there may need to be special mechanics needed for that but even then it's not too game breaking.
Do there need to be 12 different invulnerable tank trees to reach the desired result? I say no.. but if there's a play style not fairly represented then they should release a framework for that play style. I see no reason why the devs can't adequately continue to create and define the builds for us without us having choice that is admittedly hard to regulate.
Build mechanics and build individuality are not directly linked. I don't mind if the player to my left or right chooses the same mechanics as I do (I hope my training (gear) gives me an edge when applicable) and I hope that when my character shoots/throws/blasts it doesn't look like the person next to me. But honestly there is enough differentiation in "dice rolls" and "defense types" and plain "player intuition" that make things dynamic. Frankly I don't watch the combat logs closely enough to see what the person to my left or right are doing unless it's a "raid" or advanced difficulty.
Freeform was a great experiment, but the results were not conclusive enough to declare the variables that would make it "work". So I'd rather not spend the 3 years of theory craft it'd take to "get right" and just use something that "works". Sometimes you spend more time planning on how to dig a hole than you would have spent just putting your shovel to the dirt.
Crowd Control Enthusiast
I agree with you there on the freeform system, it just, the lack of standards made sure it was doomed to fail for CO. Honestly I recall the devs were going for an archtype like system, I am glad for it. I didn't focus so much on the freeforms in my post as I don't really blame the freeform system for CO's failure, but more a tendency to listen to the wrong people and ignore anyone with any sound ideas, as well as a tendency to sledge-hammer nerf and a bad habit of putting more nails into CO's coffin, which kept it from getting new content. It was a huge variety of mistakes that crippled the game, as well as the lost of it's identity, that killed it.
I realized something today(5/8/2014) that many MMORPG players, are not like us who enjoyed CoX. They enjoy repetitiveness and predictability, rather then unpredictability. We on the other hand enjoy unpredictability and variety.
Indeed.
You know alot of that I just accepted as is. The freeform system was inevitably going to have alot of inconsistencies and balance problems.
There are 5 things that killed the game for me:
1. Mutually exclusive abilities. Munitions is a good example. I pick submachine gun, congrats I now have a close ranged AOE power. I will literally be gimping myself if I take shotgun, grenade, or strafe becuase the range and arc of cone powers is good enough to function as an AOE power. Getting two powers that accomplish the same thing when I can get another power to make me stronger is always a bad choice.
This applied double to single target attacks. As munitions I'm going to have assault rifle out, alot. It's the single target goto of choice for DPS (though not burst). So really I need assault rifle, SMG, Rocket launcher/sniper rifle, GG. Now I choose alot of supportive/energy stuff or I have to be really really really careful not to overlap. Not fun. This is where COH cooldowns have a large advantage. When one power is on cooldown you can use another so both can be useful.
Also, maintains. If it's good enough to use and good enough to maintain it's prolly good enough to take over at it's given job. Yay, stuff, things. Meaning you run into the above problem.
2. Terrible team mechanics. Team mechanics really were just trash.
3. Energy builders. Really really really not fun honestly. Even building for energy you had to constantly go back to your dink dink dink dink dink that was not only weak as heck but an automated auto-attack you got to watch. So you even took me being involved in any way out of it. Even worse some sets flowed well with the energy builders, some did not. Why would I take out my pistols again? Is my assault rifle out of ammo or something? No, doesn't seem so. Just WTF?
4. PVP needed some basic tiering: Yes build were going to be broken, it's understood. Freeform would be impossible or close to it to balance. This destroyed Zombie apocolypse and arena PVP, which were actually very fun without super broken people being try hards. A basic tiering system would have filtered the broken builds upwards to face off against each other and let those of us that were not trying to break the game as hard as possible just enjoy a fun match.
5. Travel powers WWWWAAAYYYY too slow at first. They learned from City of Heros, or so I thought, because they gave me a travel power at level 1. But it was a lie. You traveled just as slowly as you did in City of Heros relative to the world. It was a trick, a lie, a sham. They made the exact same mistake twice.
Next time just give people usable travel powers early. I understand you want them to scale and get faster with levels. But you need a starting point that doesn't make people want to stab themselves repeatedly just trying to get to a new area with enemies that never seem to stop attacking you, suppressing you, and making it worse.
This is just what killed it for me personally. YMMV.
CO was too cartoonish, the building energy was horrid, I think the picking any power you want idea was just too much
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Spurn all ye kindle.
In my opinion, here the mistakes :
1-The map's builder : Everyone wanted to build their own map , asked all players to play and they forgot the game's content.
2- The Xp's system : Leveling too fast isn't good because many players leave the quest once they give nothing.... I mean in the old system , you need to finish all quests to follow the game's history .
3- Making the game more easy like : Authorizing to play Warshade or Peacebringer when you hit the lvl 20 is a mistake for me , because they are th ultimate reward.
All of the points on this thread are excellent (though Dark's seem to be about CoH instead of CO :P) and I really hope the Dev's take a good long look at them.
One, however, is of absolutely critical importance and I want to comment on it:
Good income is so key to the survival, development, maturation, and continuation of City of Titans that it simply cannot be overstated.
HOWEVER, many players are legitimately tight on money and feeling the pinch, which can lead to a case of "the man" syndrome where charging for things is invariably interpreted as "soulless corporate money grubbing".
Sometimes it is--for example, CO IS horrible--but there is plenty of complaining, as can be clearly observed on any forums, about absolutely anything that isn't given away scott free, even very reasonable and fair monetization.
As someone who has always been on a very fixed budget--and at times just flat out struggling--and who is a business owner of a labor-of-love business as well as a lifelong consumer like everyone else, I have emphasize--they HAVE to make good money for the game to survive and thrive both short-term and long-term.
So, +++1, well-monetized development is key for the devs to do and for us to understand and support.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Reading this gives me some insight on goals of character building vs balance, considering I never played CO.
So the hybrid system, pretty much a freeform system, had balancing issues but was handled badly by heavyhanded nerfs along with implementing ATs poorly with emphasis on trinity gameplay without proper trinity tools?
Speaking my mind, I dislike freeform systems. Imagination isn't all about being able to make any monstrosity under the sun to your hearts content. If can also be utilizing limited tools in unique ways, kind of like how triple-A gaming had gotten so bloated because devs want to use as many bells and whistles to make their productions look pretty and do all the stuff other games tote as their special features resulting in a bloated mess with buggy, cruddy meshing mechanics, weak gameplay and/or story, most likely bloated budget. You can still be very creative within limits too, often times requiring more imagination and creativity than you would otherwise.
That being said, it's not a horrible thing to go with a trinity system. Obviously there is a section of players that do enjoy that type of team dynamic, it's just a shame that CO just didn't embrace it from the start (or never at all). Just like there are other subsets of mmos, there could be the same for superhero mmos. For CoT, whatever route they take, I need to stick with it from the start and for heavens sake, don't reduce your combat to arms races where dps is the only focus like GW2.
Oh lord, Leo you just reminded me of my awful experiences in GW2.
Please do not make the same mistake as GW2 holy trinity wise. GW2's dungeons/team mission equivalents were some of the most irritating experiences I have experienced. People would always proclaim that GW2 was great for removing the trinity and giving everyone abilities to survive....which probably did sound great on paper but in execution it was god awful, players would spend more time getting put in the injured state then actually running around and attacking mobs. The dungeons ramped the difficulty up to ridiculous degrees compared to the open world telegraph wise...and it also didn't help that the telegraphs were really hard to see (Wildstar did the telegraph system WAY better). The actual mobs and bosses? Usually just the same mobs you saw in the zone the dungeon was in....just with more hitpoints and damage. The bosses on top of that were usually either very boring or astronomically frustrating (I remember that Level 70 or 80 Asura instance....Crucible of Pain I think it was. Had one of the most frustrating bosses I have ever encountered).
Those dungeons were god awful and they was pretty much the only end-game for PvE players. I could't stand WvW and the PvP in most games got on my nerves. Some classes were very restrained build wise. A necromancer at thatt point in the games life pretty much only had one build and any other possible alternative required the boring as hell staff to be effective.
That's just my two cents. I played Champions Online a long while ago when it launched up until Vibora Bay. I don't remember it too well but I did find it very irritating how I tried multiple times to make good builds with a mash of powers that I liked but no matter what I did I just could't make it....effective at all. DCUO was....okay. I was much to my surprise a good melee player in that game.....most of that game's issues was barely any content.
One thing I always loved above CoX was that you could make a lot of builds that could be effective and fun.
Formerly known as Bleddyn
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WCqnt88Umk]Do you want to be a hero?[/url]
[url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/nyktoss-character-cove] My characters [/url]
Well things have changed in PvE for Gw2. Yeah the telegraphs are hard to see at first but once you do a certain encounter enough, you don't need to see them, you just know when to expect them. The problem to me is that the way their builds work, you tend to be using the same weapons, skills and traits very often. One you get good at using the skills you need, there's no other diversity to the game so you're left just hunting the next shiny skin. The other type of builds you can make are good to great in PvP but are comparatively handicapping yourself in PvE and pve is simple an arms races to scrounge as much damage as possibly and trade in some invulnerability, blocks or other buffs if you need them. The only support is damage buff stacking, reflect and timed interrupts all of which anyone can do by swapping in a utility skill or two.
It's not a bad set up except it really limits encounters. They all seem to end up being the same: Dodge when special move comes, cheese the AI or its moves and dps down. Practically all of that can be done with the same build in nearly the same way. Guess what? It gets boring. And you'd think you could just swap some weapons in to battle monotony, but many are so niche use (often something for PvP or WvW) they are borderline abysmal so it's more like torture than a fun distraction. They got no room for build diversity, little room for encounter diversity, limited tactics diversity... it's nice for what it is but boring all the same.
To an *extent* this is why I like Wildstars system which almost *forces* you to change up your build according to the encounter.
Sure, there are "general purpose" builds that you can play with, and they are perfectly suitable to most (if not all) dungeon/raid/PvE encounters.
But sometimes, just sometimes, there are times where you DON'T want to use an ability due to how it can make it harder later on.
Example: There is a raid boss that goes around the room, and drops 4 "eggs" at intervals as you drag him around the room. If you hit the egg/walk over it/drag the boss over it it will explode and leaves a damage pool on the ground that will persist for the rest of the encounter.
What does this mean? You have to be careful with your targeting of attacks (the tab target lock system is *possibly* an advantage here), so maybe not using that "AOE of Enemy death" would be a good idea. Swap it for something else. Also AMP's/Runesets that add "damage spreads" effects to your abilities are not recommended here.[1]
Encounter 2: A boss that when you interrupt him does raid wide damage per interrupt attack that you land on him. Solution? Use interrupt attacks that remove 2 "interrupt armour" at a time. Reduces strain on your healers, even if it means that your DPS gets reduced a small amount for the whole fight.
Hell, right now I have 4 or 5 builds that I flick between in most raids depending on the situation that I need to resolve. Do I need more AOE damage? Do I need more Single Target? Do I need more interrupts? All of this is a balancing act. And some classes have this problem more than others
Whilst some of these could be "solved" with a larger ability bar for Wildstar, other builds that I use are definitely more in the "changing of enhancement slotting" level of CoX changes...
If anything, most of the encounters in Wildstar are nicely varied in my opinion... combining both mob and environmental encounters to make something that is not necessarily always the same way twice (even if you do have the same builds).
But I think that is something that might not always be apparent to those who have not really played it.
[1] We started off like this, but now we have "over geared" it with experience and "better gear" so we just defeat him before it becomes a problem. This is similar to the difference in tactics between a normal CoX build, and an IO build.
Respectfully (I mean that, not sarcasm) partially disagree.
I haven't played Wildstar, but The Secret World was like this, and I really didn't enjoy it. It sounds like a great idea--letting you change your build on the fly to be adaptable--but when content *forces* you to actually have to do this, you can't just get in a groove with your build if that's what you like to do.
I personally build very much based on theme and story, and I like changing tactics and playstyle based on content, not my actual build. I enjoy learning how to take the build that I know well and utilize it in different situations--which was how CoH was. Even after you could switch builds in CoH, the content didn't *make* you.
So, I'd like the OPTION to change up builds, sure, but I wouldn't want content that forces you to use the mechanic. The CoH Devs went out of their way in general to make sure you DIDN'T need a particular build or team for certain content, which was a defining charachterisic of the game, and, happily, a charachterisic that the CoT Devs have said that they aspire to.
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Excellent analysis of what happened to CO. Spot on target in fact, and I thank you for posting it!
Capt Odee, saving the city one click at a time.
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For me, CO's freeform system killed my desire to make a lot of alts.
It seemed all my toons (I have less than 10 compared to the 50+ I had during my time in CoH) ended up with the same basic set of tools. Not the same powers, per se, but the same mechanics.
edit - now that I think about it, because CO uses the non-unique-name at unique-global naming system, I didn't feel any pressure to "reserve" a cool name that I thought of. Since CoT will be using that sytem, I wonder how it will affect my alt-a-holism.
"I don't think you understand the gravity of your situation."
For me it all came down to the following:
1) The freeform power system - on tabletop it works great, and in theory it could work well in an electronic game, but in CO I found everyone playing essentially the same tank-mage build. It really worked against teaming IMHO, and all my characters felt the same. I'd much rather a CoH-style Arctype system, one that has "classes" but does away with the "holy trinity". Thankfully CoT seems to be going the "soft AT" route.
2) The atmosphere - the graphics and music grated on my nerves after a while. Too cartoony. Too "biif" "pow" "slammo". Many of the animations looked horrible - probably because there was no anchoring.
3) Lack of content - I really don't think I need to elaborate - I mean the last time I played it there were several significant "level/xp gaps".
4) The nickel and diming. I'm not against having to pay for [I]certain[/I] things in MMOs, but the lock boxes/gambling ticked me off.
EDIT: oh - and yeah the Energy Building was a pain as well.
It won't affect mine in the least, except now, whether I build from powers to name or name to powers, I will be assured that I can get the character I [I]want[/I].