BellaStrega

I also referred to the game going into maintenance mode until NCSoft bought the game, which happened between issues 10 and 11. Apparently, this is something that multiple fans of the game have said without reference to WoW, which is fine. But if you add positive comments about WoW, it suddenly becomes unfair. Good to know.

Issue 7 added Grandville, LRTF, and Recluse's Victory, all of which were necessary along with the level cap increase for villains. Issue 8 added the Faultline makeover, new costumes and veteran rewards. Issue 9 added the invention system, STF, and the new Hamidon encounter. Issue 10 revamped the Rikti Crash Site into the Rikti War Zone, adding a new zone for heroes and villains from level 35 onward. Issue 11 added more inventions, Ouroboros, Flashback (which was really a way to play existing content at max level characters and had been discussed for two or three years at this point). Ouroboros has hinted at The Coming Storm, but so far nothing more as come of that, and added a few new story arcs for the introduction to Ouroboros, which included a reintroduction of the Fifth Column. It also added Dual Blades and Willpower, which were added to every melee AT. Issue 12 added Cimerora, powerset proliferation, and VEATs.

Well, no, many of those features are not direct equivalents. City of Heroes has not added anything on the same scale as WoW expansions since City of Villains (an expansion with zones and content for levels 1-40 at launch and 41-50 in issue 7).

I think CoH has been altered a lot, and in many good ways, but most of the original content, no matter how frustrating or annoying or inconvenient to deal with, is still in place largely as it was at launch. Now, five years after launch, you're still automatically sent to the Hollows for your first mission at level 5 and your contacts in a particular level band will still start sending you to the nearest security chief, ultimately blocking all other missions until you clear that one. Many contacts will send you all over Paragon and many of the older task forces (esp Positron) are padded with numerous filler missions.

But I never said CoH is a bad game. I just agreed that it's showing its age.

Also, just so it's clear, I am aware that Paragon does not have the same resources to put into City of Heroes that Blizzard has to put into WoW.

I mentioned Cimerora and Ouroboros, but Ouroboros is largely not new content so much as making old content accessible, and Cimerora is a fairly small amount of content. We don't have a lot of information about Going Rogue, least of all confirmation on how many zones will be added. I find it doubtful that it's going to remake City of Heroes.

It's possible, but the same computer I had in 2004 was capable of running WoW then and in 2008, when I finally replaced it. Heck, my computer was able to run WoW after ongoing motherboard degradation meant it wouldn't even attempt to run CoH any longer.

No, that was ThatNinja who pointed out that you totally failed to address their comparative profitability while trying to introduce profitability as a reason that CoX should be above criticism.

I really wish you'd stop shifting the goalposts. It's okay to mention profitability to support your points, but not compare it as a counter?

No one is saying that CoH needs to aim for WoW's subscriber numbers.

And what exactly is your point about "greedy profit?" And you realize that common sense is used to justify all kinds of stupidity?

And sometimes, people say stuff in the neg rep that I want to respond to.

People aren't giving reasons why it shouldn't be on the list. Or more specifically, people are basically wounded because someone on the internet criticized CoH, and are using that as an excuse to start throwing around silly claims about how everyone's biased in WoW's favor.

That's not true. I listed multiple changes in CoH as well. Why do you misrepresent my post while attempting to chide me for hyperbole?

I don't mind being neg repped, but I would like the neg rep comments to make sense, you know? Clearly, just acknowledging the negative rep and criticizing it is upsetting to some people (perhaps those who like to take anonymous potshots).

I think people are getting caught up in a lot of irrelevant information. I don't think it would take remaking all existing zones in CoH to bring it up-to-date. Clearly, the WoW devs are undertaking a herculean and expensive task that most dev teams simply couldn't afford to do to their own games. My point is that WoW doesn't belong on that list because a) they really do update their content with new expansions + content updates that add more instances, quests, items, events, etc, and b) because Blizzard really is remaking WoW over. There's no point to calling WoW out for not doing something that they're actually doing.

CoH has added a lot to the game, and I am glad that there's options for 35-40 play that didn't exist for 2-3 years after game launch, that you can go replay any story arc you want via Ouroboros, that you can raid Hamidon or the mothership or do any number of task forces in every level band (at least in CoH, and only partly true in CoV). I am glad that SSKing and power customization are in, and I think AE is a great idea (even if it was misused for evil!). I'm not trying to say that CoH is a bad game, or even really criticizing CoH. What I am saying is that WoW's absence on that list is not some kind of biased pro-Blizzard conspiracy, and that the concerns raised in that list are not exactly wrong, although I think their conclusions (these games will die if you don't do this) are.

But people seem to be unable to separate "WoW's not on that list" and "WoW's not on that list because they're already doing the stuff that the list writer is suggesting these other games do, and because by any measure, WoW's not in danger of waning popularity" from "OMG everyone's engaged in WoW favoritism. No one can ever say anything mean about WoW evar!" which is just partisan whining.

And MMO players can be ridiculously, implausibly, partisan.

To the person who neg repped me with:

Is there some kind of "missing the point" chemical in the water? Or is this just the usual sour grapes? Are you people even reading this conversation or are you imagining **** onto what's actually being written and flaming out at that? People, please give at least a token effort toward making sense.

Well, 1-20 can be anywhere from 1-5 zones, so...yeah.

Brilliant!

Yeah, that too.

I was under the impression that there would be zones for levels 1-20 in Praetoria, where you could start hero or villain ATs, and then a level 50 zone?

Which part? Because the guest author news is not new. The specific story arcs are.

Also: It helps publicity to give news outlets the chance to say stuff before the publisher does - the outlets are happier with this, as it gives people a reason to read their articles. If you could read about this stuff on the CoH homepage, why go to Kotaku at all?

I don't know if you have that particular double-standard, but I think it would've been funny to imply it.

But, really, just because people have double-standards doesn't mean they're okay.

To the anonymous eejit who said "whining about negative rep is petty":

I suggest you learn the difference between "whining" and "responding." Oh, and look up "petty" while you're at it. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

If you still need an explanation: Someone says something risible in a neg rep, doesn't sign it. If I want to respond to it (and in this case I did, because the neg rep was epically stupid and clearly was knee-jerking), I can only reply to the thread (and probably the comment) where I got the negative rep. I can't PM the person, nor can I reply to a post in this thread.

If you don't want someone to parade your anonymous stupidity around in public, don't apply it in the first place.

Read the rest of the thread.

I'm amazed at how many people are complaining about how unfair it is that Blizzard isn't being called upon to remake WoW when Blizzard is already remaking a significant portion of WoW.

But there wasn't a complete change to how teaming works. There was a streamlining of how sidekicking and exemplaring works that makes things easier, but it was an improvement of an existing system. It was a very nice improvement, and a needed improvement, but it's not a complete change.

You introduced profit into the discussion. If you're not prepared to deal with the disparity in WoW's and CoH's profits, then don't bring it up in the first place.

Nobody said anyone needs to make a 1000% profit every quarter. You suggested that since CoH is profitable at all that everything is fine. Now when people punch holes in your false equivalency (WoW and CoH are both profitable!) you introduce straw men that no one else has introduced or tried to defend.

Look at this, you're trying to compare upgrades to teaming and challenge/difficulty settings to adding entire continents with hundreds of quests, an entirely new tier of endgame content, 1-2 years of continued expansion and support (per expansion) to super sidekicking and the ability to calibrate your difficulty as if you were a team of multiple players. These changes are nice, welcome additions to the game. I am very happy they're here, and I love not having to play sidekick tetris to form a team. I love being able to scale difficulty to my characters' abilities more thoroughly. But this isn't the same as...look, the last update to CoH that was on the same scale as a WoW expansion was City of Villains, four years ago.


Personally, I think we should just agree to disagree here.[/QUOTE]

He's getting your point. You introduced profit, btw, by pointing out that WoW and CoH are both profitable. When someone addresses your comment by saying that WoW's making an order of magnitude more profit than City of Heroes, when you respond as you do above, that's called "shifting the goalposts." He was responding to what you said in that case, not what the article says.

You're clearly not getting anyone else's. You're trying to shift the parameters of the discussion until WoW is exactly like City of Heroes, and that's a conversation that simply cannot be about the real world.

This is what's happening in the real world:

* City of Heroes went into maintenance mode after CoV's launch, and stayed there until NCSoft purchased it and hired the CoH dev team to make Paragon Studios. In the time since, CoH has had several content updates - nothing really major - two new VEATs, a few new powersets, powerset proliferation, Rikti War Zone, Cimerora, and Ouroboros. Additionally, CoH got the mission architect and powerset customization. None of this has changed the game - it's still fundamentally the same game it was four years ago. This isn't a bad thing - CoH is a good game, and a lot of the problems over the long term have been ironed out and mitigated. It's not perfect, but it is at least polished.

* City of Villains added paper (heroside radio) and mayhem (heroside safeguard) missions.

* World of Warcraft launched The Burning Crusade, which added multiple new zones, reinvented the endgame with heroic instances as well as new raids, and added two new races. Further, after TBC was launched, Blizzard released content updates to add the Black Temple and Sunwell Plateau. Blizzard also added daily quests to reduce the need for grinding to make gold to pay for raiding and other expenses. Blizzard also added flying mounts in TBC, which was a direct change from classic WoW, in which the only flight was between fixed flight points. TBC also added Outlands, which was a decent sized continent, with zone intended to take characters from 60-70. Blizzard also revamped one of their older zones, Dustwallow Marsh, to add new quest hubs (Alliance, Horde, and Neutral) to give players in their 30s-40s another option for questing,

* Last year, Blizzard launched Wrath of the Lich King, which added phasing to outdoor zones (the ability to have different players on different parts of a story arc to see the zone differently - one player might see a fort under siege, while another might see that same fort safely behind the battlefront). Blizzard also reinvented the endgame again, this time recalibrating their expectations to reduce the amount of consumables raiders needed, which also reduced the overall cost of raiding. They further made entry-level raiding more accessible, by doing away with key quest chains and simply allowing players to access the starting raid instances, and only requiring one player with a key in raids against Malygos, the only keyed raid. They've also added the concept of hard mode fights, in which you engage the boss in a particular way or take a particular action that makes the boss harder, but gives better loot. Blizzard again added a significant number of zones with full, complete quest chains to get characters from 70-80. Since Wrath was launched, Blizzard's had two major content updates and revamped a level 60 instance for level 80 (Onyxia's Lair) players.

* In Cataclysm, Blizzard is going to redesign the two classic continents - Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor - to make use of the new options and technology implemented in the first two expansions. One change will make it possible for players to use flying mounts in the old world - something that was simply not technically possible. Currently, Anyplace in Azeroth you can't typically see is pretty much unfinished and untextured, and the flight paths are designed to keep you away from those locations. Also, despite the way the zones appear on a map, that's not exactly how they're constructed. Apparently, it's easier to describe them as stacked on top of one another. They're doing away with all of that, and presenting a finished, fully refurbished old world, which will also have content designed for level 78-85, add two more races with starting zones for them, and incorporating phasing through the old world, enabling a greater amount of flexibility in designing zones (when you fight off the bandits, they won't necessarily be there anymore).

So to answer your question, not putting WoW on that list doesn't say whether or not it needs a remake. The devs themselves have said that WoW needs a makeover, and they're working on it right now. Why should any site call WoW out for showing its age when Blizzard's said "Yeah, WoW's showing its age. We're doing this and this and this to fix that problem." Do you understand now?

What point are you trying to make? Yes, WoW is doing well. Yes, the WoW devs decided (correctly) that with all the improvements made in TBC and WotLK that the old world - the 1-60 zones - were showing their age. They chose to deal with this by redesgning the two continents and building areas that had been neglected from the start.

Because you should read this before whining at length about WoW not being called out for updating their game. The last major update to City of Heroes was in 2005. The last major update to World of Warcraft was 11 months ago. Further, the stuff that the writer said those games need to do (whether or not you or I or anyone else here agree that those games need to do these things), is stuff that Blizzard is already doing. Do you understand this, finally? Or are you biased?

A disconnect from what? That WoW wasn't like a superhero game?

Those weren't cave moles. I'm not sure what quest you're talking about, but I'm positive there's no cave moles anywhere in WoW. Most of the mobs you fight are a bit more consequential than that.

Incidentally, druids are a bit weak at low level, moreso than some other classes, at least until they start getting their other forms. Once you get cat, you find yourself significantly more powerful. Most classes actually have some kind of pivotal ability that makes life a lot easier - hunters get pets, warlocks get pets, etc. They usually get this stuff at level 10, 20 at the latest.

Well, no doubt! You were apparently expecting a superhero game and got a fairly traditionally designed fantasy game. This doesn't make WoW slow, but it means it's not appealing to you.

Also, much of what you did experience has either been streamlined or will be - like spells either will be changed to level up with you, or they'll be changed to do so in the near future.. Also, IME, more experienced players have an easier time handling multiple mobs than new players. Many people I know found their first characters to be the hardest.

Also also, whenever I play a kinetic, or an FF, or any buff-oriented powerset in CoH, I wish to god we had 30-minute buffs. 1-4 minutes is busywork and a nuisance. Given the choice between a spell that lasts 30 minutes and an FF bubble that lasts for four minutes, give me the spell any day.

How about this:

Why should WoW be on the "they need a remake list" (which WoW does kinda need) when they're already remaking their game for real?

Slow leveling, slow combat. I guess you could say it has slow travel, but they've mitigated that a lot recently with the shift downward in level requirements to train riding. It's also pretty easy to get around if you get a hearth set in Shattrath or Dalaran (easy to do at any level, esp if you have warlock or mage guildies or friends), or if you are a mage.