Adeon Hawkwood

In general I disagree with the premise of the thread. I love the FEEL of CoH combat but I can take or leave the mechanics themselves. The mechanics aren't awful but at the end of the day it really comes down to watching recharge timers. This sort of mechanic was necessary when CoH first came out due to computer and bandwidth limitations but technology has moved on and I'd like to see MMOs do the same.

Now the bit I do like about CoH combat is the general feel of one hero (or a small group) versus an army. This is something that few other MMOs have and something I feel they should strive to emulate.

First off, I think CoH was a very good game overall but there are a few places that I feel the devs made strategic blunders. However one thing to keep in mind is that hindsight is 20/20 and at the time the decisions were made these probably all seemed like good ideas.

1. City of Villains: This is one of those "seemed like a good idea at the time" items. WoW was going strong and faction rivalry and PvP were one of the reasons so trying to emulate it made a lot of sense. The problem is it didn't really work. PvP never caught on and the lack of interaction killed any real sense of faction rivalry as well as the fact that Villain side never had anywhere near the numbers of Hero side. This really became apparent with the newer Co-op content. The devs had to do mostly co-op content due to resource limits and villain players resented it. Personally I've always felt that if the option to play villains had never existed the game as a whole would have been stronger due to not needing to split development resources.
   
2. Going Rogue: This is another one of those good ideas that didn't take off. Going Rogue had four(?) new zones that today are almost empty. The problem is that while the story content is interesting it doesn't lend itself well to the sort of teaming which has always been CoH's biggest strength. Even pre-Freedom relatively few people used Preatoria for more than a few characters instead opting to create primal characters and side switch them later in part due to increased teaming options. I realize that part of the reason for doing it was to have a new boxed set to sell but it just didn't work.
   
3. Mission Architect: This is one of those things that I think they either shouldn't have done at all or should have done more thoroughly. The idea of user generated content is awesome. The problem is making the system resistant to abuse and even now it's not that great. The initial release was, frankly awful and the various exploit cycles left a bad taste in players' mouths. Combine this with a very poor rating & filter setup and the system as a whole was pretty broken. The worst part is that I think they could have made it work and if it had it would have been very, very cool.
   
4. The Incarnate System: Actually I think the Incarnate system as a whole is reasonably good the problem was that the roll-out and reward structure were flawed. I suspect that the devs feeling their way into it so this is VERY much a situation where hindsight applies and I don't really hold it against them but here are the things I felt when wrong. None of these broke the game on their own but when taken in combination they greatly diminished the appeal of what should have been a major attraction.
   1. To much focus on back-ended rewards. In normal leveling game-play the majority of rewards come from making kills, suddenly the Incarnate system comes along and changes it so that the most rewards come from completing content.
   2. Releasing four slots at once. I would rate this as the worst strategic blunder they made with the Incarnate system. Releasing four slots in a single issue convinced players that they had to grind all four slots now in preparation for the next issue. Doing a more staged release with one or two slots an issue as the content was ready would have eased players into the system better.
   3. Either to much, or not enough content segregation. One fundamental concept of any MMO reward structure is what rewards you get for specific content. IMHO the Incarnate system fell into a horrible pit where rewards were segregated enough to annoy people but not enough to really force content. The post-Alpha slots relied on Incarnate Content (which limited teaming opportunities) but didn't limit the specific Incarnate content which meant people mostly farmed the easy stuff and ignored the rest. The Hybrid slot attempted to fix this and we all know how that went. Combine this with the reward disparity between Trials and any other content and the reward system for Incarnates as a whole was just awful (the lack of a solo path for so long just made it even worse).
   4. The story. Seriously the story for where Incarnate powers came from was really, really annoying. Like most players I pretty much ignored it but it still bugged me. in a game that lets us choose our power such to such a wide degree, why oh why did the devs feel the need to choose it for us here?

My top hitlist for "CoH Features I'd like to see in another MMO" would be:

1. Appearance divorced from stats. I mean actually divorced, none of that "transmutation" stuff which allows you to change appearance but still limits you to stuff your class can use, I want an actual free-form appearance generator. If I want to have a light combatant wearing heavy armor that should be my choice.

2. Ease of teaming. This one is broad but CoH had some of the easiest teaming I ever encountered. Between the lack of team roles, super sidekicking and the general nature of mission structure forming a team was as simple as finding people who wanted to team.

3. Instanced missions with a focus on combat. This is technically a two-fer but I'm counting it as one. Leveling in CoH is mostly about combat, mission and story rewards are small relative to the rewards from simply killing lots of enemies. Combined with the instanced nature of missions this makes a situation where you spend your time fighting and not worrying about collecting miscellaneous animal body parts. Merits, Incarnates and the new Atlas Park did break this somewhat for CoH which was part of the reason I burned out on playing and frankly in a new MMO I'd like to see them moved more towards a kill-based model.

4. I want to fly (or better yet jump really high). Seriously, having to spend fifteen minutes walking to my mission is not engaging gameplay, it's a time-sink. I don't play video games to walk about, I play them to punch bad guys in the face. The ability to get to my mission quickly in CoH was always a huge draw for me.

Let me dig out my Healing Arrow. Good news, it's a suppository!


EDIT: You know it's an old joke but now that I think about it my TA/A does technically have a healing arrow thanks to the Defender's Bastion set.

Yeah it's a great game, my only real complaint is that it's a bit short. Of course you can always stop right before the last mission and spend your time shooting down UFOs.

I've beaten it on Classic and have been trying to do Ironman but I get so upset when my soldiers die that I just can't do it.

I propose that we rename Earth "Sol 4". That way when Aliens invade they'll waste their time attacking Mars, Jupiter or Saturn (depending on which way they number their worlds and whether they count Pluto as a planet or not).

@Black Zot: It's Welsh (at least the early ones were, I think a few other languages may have slipped in here and there).

For the curious the song is from the film adaptation of the musical "My Fair Lady".

I remember that CoH video as well, it was very well done.

I'm kind of leaning that way myself. I've been playing Guild Wars 2 a bit but honestly my heart just isn't in it. I think that for the near future I'm mostly going to be playing single player games.

Well, they say to always end on a song.

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when,
But I know we'll meet again some sunny day.
Keep smiling through, just like you always do,
Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away.

Here's the thing. Shutting down servers doesn't really save a lot of money. It saves some but the main recurring cost for servers is Bandwidth and that pretty much scales per player regardless of how many servers you have.

The reason to consolidate servers is to concentrate players. Now in some games that does make sense. For example any game with a focus on PvP or an important server-based economy needs a certain concentration of players on each server to work.

City of Heroes isn't such a game. Yes, teams are important but they aren't essential and the market is cross-server. Add in the fact that CoH is heavily instanced and the basic in-game experience is pretty much the same on a low-pop server as a high-pop one. The only real differences are how easy it is to find a team and the general community feel of a server (small-town versus city) which for the most part that is self-regulating. People who want a high-pop server with lots of fast and quick teams moved to Virtue and Freedom and were happy while those who preferred the small-town feel of the other servers went there.

That being said at the end of the day what really matters is not what we as players think but what the devs think. I'm sure that if server merges would have made an appreciable difference then the devs would have done that. But at the end of the day I think it would have cost them more players than it gained.

Back when I was marketing heavily I mostly worked in the low-margin high-volume craft and sell IOs. Basically I looked for IOs where I could buy and craft for less than 5million and sell for 15-20million. Positron's Blast were some of my earlier ones but over time the profit from them dropped a lot and I started maxing into other areas. In general I avoided damage set (to much competition) and focused on the various defensive and healing sets. Aegis was probably my biggest earner pre-Freedom although it dropped afterwards due to increasing competition.

I was never really rich (I think I peaked out at about 24 billion) but that was enough to afford top-end builds on those 50s that I actually played. Last time I took a break I took a lot of that income and plowed it into purples, stockpiling a few of each damage set for future characters.