GKaiser

I checked on my account. If it's just for totally new accounts, I have no way of verifying that.

I do know this: NO part of my review deals with tutorials or is specific to level 1-20 other than not having 3 bank slots and 3 salvage slots. That is still true, as is most leveling takes place outside that new zone.

Someone said earlier that had I mentioned Going Rogue, it would have consumed 1 minute of time. That's probably true and all I'd have said is that there is an alignment system that lets you become a hero or a villain.

Doesn't change anything I disliked about the game.

[QUOTE=TheJazMan;3183530] Nope. And if you're gonna come up with insults you should at least come up with some decent ones.

Mr. P.S. How clever you must be.

I tried the Troll Rave, Ghost Ship and something involving circle of thorns, I think. Noticed I wasn't getting any xp so I left, because I really don't care about badges.

Samuel I did not power level and I got to 50 in that amount of time. Do not for a minute believe I spent 7 hours every day leveling, because that is impossible given the population level of the game. 7 hours playing (including all the goofing off and jerking around with the AE stuff). I did not plot out my leveling path; I simply did whatever missions people in a party had available.

The average MMORPG player is not going to spend weeks getting to level 20. And given you believe all new players start in the new zone (totally false, I just checked) I'm less likely to believe your whole, "I'm a super knowledgeable veteran player" thing.

What is funny is that it doesn't even matter what was released because, again, it has no bearing whatsoever on my criticisms. Going from 1 to 50 is boring as hell. The endgame content is not on par with endgame content expected in MMORPGs today. The PVP content is extremely lacking. There is weird design elements like the extremely limited inventory space.

It's not in the game and no one knows what the hell they are actually releasing.

18 minute task force that gives merit rewards. Strategy involves destroying some objects and then engaging the archvillain HP pinata. For merit rewards, like every one task force. To get rewards you dont need merit rewards to get and ultimately just give you inventor origins so you can do....well, certainly not PVP much since hardly anyone PVPs, so I guess solo arch villains for money I might spend should anything ever be added to the game that requires as much influence as the cap?

Other events I tried doing did not give xp, so I stopped bothering. Now, that doesn't change I don't really care about some zone event that I basically need to wait around for to trigger and has rewards I'm not terribly interested in to begin with.

Exactly. You didn't spend all that time actually trying to level. You jerked around, yet want to say that is proof of how long it took to go through the new content?

Sorry but that isn't flying with me. The review is accurate.


I am not obligated to include "new characters start in Praetoria" when that has NOTHING to do with my criticism of the game.

And btw? You are full of it with this "must start in Praetoria" nonsense. I just rolled a hero (with the Going Rogue expansion) who started in Atlas Park.

7 hours a day is considered hardcore, and only do-able for me because I had a break that month from semesters. 3 hours a day would be my average. I've cut down considerably on gaming given my college classes are rather time consuming even out of the classroom.

However, less than 7 hours a week is like way beneath casual gamer expectations. Sure, developers like it since it means they dont have to work too hard to maintain those kind of players, but as I pointed out it is hard to maintain an online community who supports both casuals and hardcores if you don't satisfy the hardcores.

Also, WoW is not coming to you. WoW has 10 man and 25 man raids, and PVP events that rely heavily on teamplay dynamics. The difference is WoW gives casuals a reason to interact with the rest of the community. CoH might have a healthy forum community, but inside it's not so lively.

If he is saying it took a week to go from level 1 to 20 in the brand spanking new zone when I got to level 20 within 7 hours of play using the original CoH content that is much more spread out, uh, no his opinion does not reflect the experience of a new player. I do not know how long he played for that week or what the hell he could possibly have been doing, but it doesn't seem to be right to me.

Yep. Go on....

Is it in the game right now? Yes or no?
Do we ACTUALLY HAVE ANY FREAKIN IDEA WHAT THEY WILL RELEASE? Yes or no?

If both answers are 'No', then my question about new endgame content is NO, ISN'T IT?!


It's all 'No', so please stop grabbing at straws.

If I recall correctly, it's one of those random zone events where you don't get xp for killing anyone until you have wasted an hour of your life and actually completed it. And the rewards are random salvage otherwise obtainable from clearing missions with enemies who do give xp, or costume pieces I could care less about.

Am I close?

A week to go from level 1 to 20?

I'm sorry dude but I can no longer consider your opinion valid. If it took me a week to do that using the old CoH missions, I would never have gotten to level 50 after 2 weeks of re-registering.



Review is 100% valid because Going Rogue didn't change my criticisms.

Okay, let's try this again using an analogy.

I review a toaster called Toastinator 500. I give the toaster a bad review because the ******* thing doesn't even work.

You point out that my review is bad because the newest model of the toaster, Toastinator 500-A has an additional setting just for toasting bagels. I point out that Toastinator 500-A still doesn't even ******* work, but you don't care because I didn't talk about the option for toasting bagels.

Does that make sense to you?

Going Rogue did not address any of my complaints, so it doesn't change my review in any way, shape or form.

As for Stalkers and Scrappers....seriously? "Oh, Stalkers look invisible and can do critical sneak attacks on enemies, and are slightly less defensive!" Give me a break. Almost identical powersets and serves same role in a party. I honestly think Stalkers are slightly cooler, but again, they serve the same party role.

Everyone knowing how to do the puzzle, and getting a whole party of people to do all the steps in the correct order, are two completely different things. It's the difference between throwing a ball at a wall by yourself and playing football with a team. Totally different experience because the mechanics are different.

I know a substantial portion of MMORPG playerbases like to solo. That's fine. However, online games biggest selling point is the multiplayer aspect. I do not play online games to play by myself; I have a vast library of single player videogames for that, all of which offer more challenging solo gameplay than any MMORPG to date can offer. I believe this is true for most gamers.

However, teamwork gameplay has a totally different appeal because it's a team. I can rock hard in a single player game, but I can't share that experience with anyone else. In an MMORPG you can. However, if the challenges aren't appropriate for a team, it becomes boring really fast. The game becomes more of a graphical chat room, where people spam buttons and talk, and you get more xp but you don't feel like you've really accomplished anything.

You've never played World of Warcraft, have you? Even in vanilla WoW, many of the instance and raid bosses were designed as puzzles. It was sometimes a little overboard, but it at least kept things interesting. In recent years some of them have become so complex many guilds need to follow video instructions to learn how to handle the encounters.

Again, this isn't to say WoW is da bomb. I am merely pointing out that you are mistaken that a MMORPG cannot have more challenging enemy encounter design than simply having bosses own pets / have an entourage, and have tons of HP.

In well designed games, the game is not one huge grind. There are breaks where you have something interesting happen, enemies throwing curve balls. Like puzzle bosses.

You're not getting it, are you?


Does the boxed expansion change...

-low level salvage, recipes and enhancements being worth millions of influence on the AH?

-Enhancement system upgrade taking way too much downtime?

-Not enough inventory space for low lv characters.

-Repetitive and boring mission design for levels 1-50.

-Lack of pvp content.

-Lack of endgame content.

-Boring boss design.

-Needing to take several optional powers just to unlock the ones you actually want to use?

Or, you know, anything else I was critical of in my review?

Maybe if I said I was bored levels 1 to 20, or that I wished I could make my Scrapper a villain rather than just roll the nearly identical Stalker class, then Going Rogue would have impacted my review. But I didn't and it didn't.

Nice try.

I would have if I felt the box expansion made any difference. I don't think it does. The new leveling zone is level 1 to 20. That took me one play session to accomplish, and from what I gather in the new zone those levels fly by even faster.

The other content is new power pools for certain archetypes and the option to do alignment quests to make your character go to the other side of the fence-- and other than having the alignment system, the quests aren't structurally any different than any other quest in the game already.

Neither content addresses my criticisms of the game, so it really has no impact on my review. But to appease the vocal majority I'll review Going Rogue content in my next video.

I've become very intolerant of MMORPGs that have poor boss encounter design. I was already fed up with it 14 years ago when I first got into MMORPGs, and now I'm completely unable to not be highly critical of any game that can't offer more of a challenge than games which came out when I was a child. If you really think about it, something as old and simplistic as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has more challenging boss design than most MMORPGs on the market. There is no excuse for modern games made for adults (like CoH is) to not be at least that challenging.

To be perfectly honest, having done all the quests I did level 1 to 50 and several of the Villain quests, I would not be surprised if the majority of CoH quests had been created using a menu based tool not unlike the AE tools offered to players now. There is way too much cookie-cutting and randomization (such as the precise location where objects, escort NPCs and enemies appear, making it difficult to fine tune an encounter) for my taste and it bores the heck out of me. The only thing making the majority of them different is the flavor text in the windows and what NPCs say, and what the clue is.

As much as it might be "unrealistic", I much prefer finely tuned encounters where you might have to run the dungeons several times to get what you want, but enemies at least throw some curve balls at you and can't just be steamplowed through, and the party has to use some of their higher brain functions to survive the battle.

I used terms that I felt most gamers would be familiar with. On that note I referred to influence as "cash", so people would understand what I'm saying.

I'm glad you agree. You seem to be one of the few who can look at this a little more objectively.

I want to point out that in the video I discussed how the market impacted new players. And I strongly believe the market does not accommodate new players very well.

I think this is the problem a lot of people have when they look at my review. They, as someone who has played the game for years, have forgotten the hours they have spent on forum shifting through forum posts trying to find reliable information about the game. They have forgotten the lessons they have learned through trial and error. For me, this stuff is all fresh in my mind and I find it totally unnecessary if the game was better designed, and I wanted to point it out.

It doesn't matter if another game has these problems too. Some of them do. But this isn't a review of them, this is of CoH. Someone has been talking about travel time between NPCs in other games. Yes some of them are crazy in travel time , but in most of them you at least get EXPERIENCE POINTS for finding the damn NPC and the good games reward the experience relative to how bloody hard it was to find that NPC from where the quest began. You generally do not get jack in CoH regardless of how many zones you jumped through. These are the differences that make what happens in these other games a little different than CoH.

While leveling up I met several new players to the game. Players who wondered why their damage didnt increase a lot when they slotted attacks with all red enhancements. They didnt read the elaborate forum posts on Enhancement Diversification. Yes, the tutorial mentions ED. However it doesn't explain it in a way the average gamer can understand the finer details. For that you need to turn to Google.

There are tanks and scrappers I partied with who wondered why they were constantly getting dazed and knocked down. They did not have the optional powers to give the needed defense against those attacks. And why would they? To unlock some those powers you have to pickup several you don't even want. It's not intuitive.

I, on the other hand, had played CoH before. I had read build guides before. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to find decent guides so I could avoid that kind of thing. I took those powers and I don't think I fell down in a fight once, or was knocked back ever. Some call this min/maxing; I call this understanding the game and building a character the way the game mechanics encourage you to do so.

Can you live without those powers? Sure. But as the text in the video said, the powers are only optional if you want your character to suck.

And let me be clear on what "suck" is:

-"Suck" is falling down constantly.
-"Suck" is getting held constantly.
-"Suck" is getting stunned constantly.
-"Suck" is running out of endurance mid-fight and having your toggles fall off, or waiting several minutes for endurance to regenerate.

I could have made a review where I said, "Well, I, as a seasoned MMORPG gamer, was smart enough to spend several hours reading forum posts to know precisely how to build my character and the best story missions to run for blah blah blah" and the review would have been worthless to the average MMORPG gamer, because that isn't how they play.

I did not oversimplify tanking. Sure, I didn't dissect the system. It would look like this if I did.
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=115184

The end conclusion would have been the same. The Defense attribute is about dodging not reducing damage. Most Defenders do not spam heals, but have buffs to reduce the chance to get hit in the first place and improve regeneration. This I felt was a pro of the game, though it had the negative drawback of making the game unchallenging when taken to the extreme at the later levels.

They don't do as much DPS as they are capable of when they soft cap. And as I said in the review, the point becomes mute because they hardly get hit anyway. I consider that to be a problem in regards to making content challenging and requiring teamwork. A lot of people solo farm AVs and don't party, at least that I saw in the server lists when looking for parties.

That's great. It's not how I would handle it, but that would be better than the current design.

You admit that, in order to min/max, you need those powers. The problem with your reasoning is that players don't min/max if they don't have to. I mean, who really wants to take Kick or Boxing? Who wants to pickup Acrobatics and Combat Jumping if they don't want to take Super Jump?

Why do players do it if there isn't a significant advantage to doing so?

Because the people who number crunch are stupider than the people who don't ? I don't think so.

They don't have enough protection from their powersets; that is why they have to take the optional powers.

I think if the constant endurance drain from the toggles wasn't adding to the drain from powers, it would make a big difference. But the main reason I proposed that is because it was a solution I could think of. I don't like criticizing something without offering a possible solution to fix the perceived problem.

I'm not new to MMORPGs. I'm not foolish enough to say, "Don't worry guys, SOMETHING COOL IS COMING IN THE NEW EXPANSION!" when I have nothing to go by but marketing hype.

I reviewed the game as it was in July. It is now September. It took me awhile to have enough free time to edit the video. I haven't logged into Going Rogue but based on the videos I've seen and the forum posts, it seems no endgame content was released. I don't consider being able to switch factions to be endgame content since the missions seem pretty much exactly the same design-wise, except now you have a choice in what mission you'll do to get good or bad brownie points.

Show me a boss in CoH who requires critical thinking to defeat? A boss that whose encounter is a puzzle and not a clickfest? Is there any mission in the game that can't be bulldozed through with AoE spam?

Lord Recluse and his towers is all that comes to mind, but even that can be soloed
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...21&postcount=7

I'm glad you agree. As I mentioned in my video and some of the replies to my video prove, a lot of people don't see the value of PVP, but I explained in my video why I feel PVP is important to have.

I mentioned this earlier, but that Wiki is missing a lot of info I was looking for. I know it exists, but if it doesn't have the info I'm looking for it doesn't really help.

This is really silly. Yes, I know how to use a global channel to search for parties. I know how to respond to others random global chat spam for parties. But spamming the global chat is not a magic solution to the problem of the game having a low population and the majority of players have several lv 50s and would rather solo farm or socialize / farm with their guildmates. Leveling people tend to form parties with others who are leveling. Sure, now that a brand new expansion came out, lots of people are more active. I doubt that will last.

Again, if it's not in the game I'm not going to pretend that it is.

Because near as I could tell, you can't buy anything you can't already get from just killing enemies and getting random drops. Like I said in the review, you don't get anything you can't get from normal missions.

Some people have said that my criticism of how long it takes to upgrade enhancements is silly because other games have items to equip. The difference is those items are generally gained by killing enemies. In CoH you generally do not get the enhancements you actually want through random drops and the limited space to store items forces you to toss stuff away. Trying to farm salvage before you've unlocked a sizable number of salvage slots carries the same problem. Yet, some of the stuff you toss to make space might be needed when a good recipe drops. The system makes equipping feel more like rolling dice than any other gear system in an MMORPG I can think of. In better designed games, if a boss drops good loot for you, you can equip it right away without needing to find 2 other ingredients and the recipe, then go to a special place that only appears in certain towns to actually make it.

I once had an occupation where I spent all day reading angry flames from customers. My job was to decipher what the actual problem was, if any, based on the feedback. I'm used to this kind of thing.

Like I said, I'm interested in what people have to say and if they might persuade me to change my opinion. I'm willing to tolerate a certain amount of flaming if I gets to the heart of the matter. Even Socrates had people flaming him and yet he interacted with them, and learned a lot by doing so.

I am using a game design term. A well documented game design term. Flavor text does not change the meaning of a term. "Mission" is flavor text for the in-game world of CoH. All missions are quests.

http://web.archive.org/web/200508120...11&SessID=4684

You should calm down and stop going off the deep end over trivial nonsense. It makes it harder to take you seriously.

I do think WoW is better designed than CoH. WoW still has a lot of design elements I highly dislike and is why I'm not playing it anymore.

The popular games tend to do dramatic changes to their design structure every couple years. Most of it pertains to the end-game, but sometimes it's thinks like CoH's Enhancement Diversification where the rules of the game substantially change.

Using WoW as an example (only because I think most people are familiar with it), WoW has changed substantially over the years, to the point its target audience isn't even the same audience it as when it first launched. This can be seen in the raid and pvp design; sure, leveling was much easier than say EQ and the penalties for death were much less severe, but it was still very much for a hardcore gamer audience. It's become much more casual friendly in recent years, with optional hard modes for the hardcore players. The newest expansion is completely re-designing the original game content to follow the new design philosophy.


I did play CoV a'bit more, and the quest lines did seem a'bit more polished in that I didn't spend nearly as much time running around all over the world. However, CoV still has the same problems in terms of the content not really challenging, no end game, little developed pvp, enhancements taking too long to swap, most achievements have no tangible reward, auction house monopolized by long term players, etc.

Forcing myself to play a hero from 1 to 50, I had no desire to roll a villain from 1 to 50. The game isn't working for me and I listed the reasons why.

I don't think I should say, "Well it might get better in the future" because I honestly don't know that it will. I will only comment on the parts of the game I can actually play with.

You have probably spent more time playing with the auction house than I have, or had better luck with salvage than I was on whatever server / time I was playing. I was able to sell items on the AH, but I definitely did not make 1 million from selling stuff I was already in my 40s, and that was from Archvillain drops and rare recipes. At level 50 a lot of the pre-30 mats didnt even sell and I had to basically throw them away so I could put up mats I could sell.

If we are to consider enhancements are "gear" like in most RPG games, I believe the acquisition of gear upgrades shouldn't be terribly painful. A big problem with just making some low level IOs is the bonuses don't increase to match the character's level, which is needed for how enemies are balanced. Because of the limited salvage space, it's more of a pain to make IOs than it should be given how replacable they are.

Ex. Having lv 20 IOs for your Defense enhancements isn't gonna help you a lot against level 30+ enemies, and you're gonna get hit more than you should be for that level.

So while the bonus from an IOs cannot be outleveled, you need to replace them anyway because the bonus they give is too small against higher level opponents.

That's not what I meant. I meant a system where you click on a menu indicating you are looking to do missions and are put into a query of other similar level characters who are looking for missions, and automatically grouped together based on the class needs of the party. CoH does not have one. I believe all MMORPGs should.

I did mention the exemplar / sidekick system as why I think having a PUG system would really benefit the gameplay, because you don't actually need to find people of the same level as you. Maybe I should have specifically mentioned I like that feature, though I think it does have the drawback of making the game harder to balance encounters to be challenging. I'll talk about it more when I do the AE review.

I already talked about why "Free to play" doesn't matter. Players playing the game costs bandwidth. Like it or not those games are more commercially successful than CoH is. But this isn't about them, it's about CoH.

There are lots of reviews for CoH out there which go for the "middle of the road" approach, regardless of how the reviewer feels about it. Most are written by people who, because the game is time consuming to play, did not play from levels 1 to 50. As someone who actually did, I think my opinion is more informative than those who spend most of the review talking about how awesome it is make cool looking characters, and more time talking about what the actual gameplay is like.

I also rolled a new character, so the experience is more similar to that of someone who may be coming into the game not knowing anything about it.

I was not power leveled to 50, as the footage attests to. You should really stop making assumptions.

An authority on why I have very little interest in playing it further? Yes it does. Like I said in the review, if I wasn't reviewing it I would have stopped at level 35 because that is when I became very bored. I had to force myself to keep going. Are you trying to suggest I don't understand why I don't like something?

And as for my claim of a million + subscribers in other games....uh, there's no backpedaling, those are facts.

Some people don't agree with my conclusion. I knew that before I even made the review. It'd be more helpful if you explain why you like the content I don't like, rather than try to dismiss my reasons for disliking that very same gameplay by trying to claim I'm ignorant and stupid and so forth. Because trying to prove I don't know what I'm talking about isn't gonna fly, because I do. The only difference is you like the stuff I don't like.

Not really. I actually play the game when I review it, not just jerk around in it for a few hours like most reviewers.

Because Going Rogue has new content that is uniquely different than existing content, right? I mean, oh boy, a new zone just for people who are level 1-20! A couple more hours worth of flavor texts structurally identical to every other quest in the game! What fun! New powersets, so I can do the same quests but with slightly different animations but fundamentally identical playstyle to existing powersets!

Oh boy! I can make my hero into a villain! That's totally different than just making a villain character!

Don't get me wrong, that stuff is okay, but it feels underwhelming for an expansion. I might have a different viewpoint if endgame content was in it.


If you watch the review again you will see I was specifically talking about low level IOs and their usefulness. I think you will agree that no amount of set bonuses changes that you need to keep enhancements as close to your character's level as possible in order for the bonuses to keep up with the stats of the NPCs you encounter.

My criticism of the inventor origin system isn't just that you can't buy them. As I explained in my review, the lack of inventory and bank space makes it hard to build those origins yourself, especially when by the time you might have gotten those materials you've probably outleveled those inventor origins, at which point a single origins give more bang for their buck.

I mean, level 10 inventor origins or level 30 single origins? This isn't hard to understand, is it?

A lot of your criticism seems to be based on not paying full attention to what I'm actually saying.

This is a good point I will consider in the future. I do think many people simply aren't hearing what I'm actually saying because they are angry someone would dare criticize their favorite game in the whole wide world.