GKaiser

Hello. I have a web show called The RPG Fanatic where I review computer rpg games. I decided to make CoH my first MMORPG review and while I had played the game before (in Dec 2004), I recently re-visited it, playing from level 1 to 50. After doing this I concluded that CoH has some innovative game design elements I wish other MMORPG developers would incorporate into their designs, but CoH also lacks a lot of content I expect an MMORPG to have today. I dissect the game in the review.

I will be reviewing the Mission Architect system in an upcoming review, and thought some of you might like to see my review for the game overall and add your comments. I might include and/or respond to some of those comments in my next review for the MA system.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waClZLJdIvk

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Torturing animals. Lack of remorse or guilt. Inability to see others as individuals vs objects to be manipulated. Learn what anti-social personality and behavior is... its not simply being non social.

Sorry you dont have any real friends to play with in real life, so are forced to make Cyprtic arrange a play date in make believe land.... Maybe they should just randomly assign us to a group when we log in...

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Your confusing sociopathic and psychotic behavior for anti-social behavior. They are not the same thing bub.

And I'm sorry that there is a few people who are so arragant to think they can convince me that they -arent- anti-social when they are making an assumption about over a thousand people they have never met.

Lets see...some of you cite your 4 or 5 "pickup teams" that were all disasters. Even if each of those groups were maxed with eight people, thats only about 40 people you've ever teamed up with for a time spanning less than an hour.

Take a look at the who list on a typical day for your server. There is A LOT of people playing CoH and your making a judgement about them all based off a limited experience to justify avoiding those other people.

And that is exactly what anti-social behavior is to begin with; making a pre-determined judgement that experiences with others will turn out poorly, therefore making attempts to avoid interacting with others, except the limited few you consider "safe".

Lets see....when we have people who claim they enjoy soloing because other people dont "roleplay" enough -or- all their "pickup" groups suck, then yes they are anti-social people. They are making a prejediced judgement about other people they do not know in order to justify their beliefs on why its best to not play with them.

If that isnt anti-social behavior, then what is?

As for the arguement about wanting to be Punisher and having to fight Darkseid....oh give me a break. If you really fought "The Russian" every single battle, you would get bored. Heck, if every issue of the Punisher was him vs the Russian, the story itself would be tired and you'd lose interest in the Punisher character itself; just like you will with your own character.

Do you really think your going to find the same level of enjoyment soloing your characters a year from now as you currently do? I really doubt it.

The social interactions between players is what keeps players involved with their games. Being apart of a community, even a small one, is what keeps the MMORPG player sticking with their game. This is the real reason why you left EQ; you didnt become apart of that community, and thus were left out.

But thats a choice you made, just as it is a choice your making here to not be apart of this one by making generalized claims that others arent good enough to team up with you.

Partying has been the best way to form bonds between players in these virtual worlds. You unite for a common goal; if you do well, these other players continue to invite you to join their teams. And thus begins friendships which can last years and cross-over to other games you play with those friends.

Nothing stops you from reading a mission description when partied. You start the mission only after reading it. You have a list of clues to go through after every mission. I'm not sure what your trying to get at here.

Everyone in your SG was a stranger to you once. Your deceiving yourself if you really think claiming the only people who you have fun with are going to exist in that SG and your robbing yourself from new and fun experiences you could be having with other people too.

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This is a complete red herring and I'm sick of seeing it. Massively Multiplayer != Group-only game play. I can be chatting with 10 other members of my supergroup while I solo a mission. That's still a "multiplayer" experience. So don't pretend that "multiplayer" = "group-based missions" because it does NOT. They are not synonymous.

And I say this as someone who doesn't actually like soloing. In fact I think the solo game is boring. After 25th level or so, the missions are too easy, they are all copies of earlier missions you've seen before with different enemy names but the same goals. The stories are not enough to hold the game up in the solo experience at all, at least not to me. The only reason I keep subscribing to this game is the FRIENDS that I have in it and the multiplayer experience of being in a good supergroup. However, even though that is my preferred playstyle, I still recognize that you can have a "multiplayer" experience without doing grouped missions.

Additionally, arguments about what other MMOs allow or don't allow are silly. I can name MMOs that make soloing possible from start to finish, also. That doesn't make it right, or wrong. Each MMO has its own design philosophy.

If Cryptic's design philosophy is supposed to be that some missions are soloable and some are not, that's fine. It's their philosophy. But neither they, nor you, nor anyone else, should use "this is an MMO" as an excuse to make a mission be un-soloable. It's not a viable excuse. LOTS of other things can give you a multiplayer experience that have nothing to do with missions, and soloable or non-soloable missions do not make a game an "MMO." In fact I submit that a set of "grouped" players who silently go through a mission together, without saying a word other than, "pull", "wait", "ready" and never chat with each other, are having a much LESS multiplayer experience than the guy who is chattering non-stop over broadcast or the SG channel while he solo tanks things in Talos Island or Dark Astoria or something.


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You see the statement that it's a massively multiplayer game because IT IS a multiplayer game. If you cant handle that, then you shouldnt play them.

Your grabbing at straws with your examples of how you "interact" with people. So now using a private message is the number 1 way you interact with people? Selling an item to some random stranger who might as well be an npc to you? You compare that to forming a team who has to use strategy and timing together, otherwise the whole team will probally get killed? You compare that to forming super groups and taking on TF missions? Heck, you didnt even mention the random broadcasted "event" held by a player in Atlas park.

Your grabbing at straws, just like the guy before you is trying to argue that just because "Spiderman takes on bosses all the time solo" that he should be able to take on all of them as well, while neverminding the fact it is a gameplay design problem for every player to be able to solo without any concern. People tend to flock to do what works most effectively; it is only because there is a clear advantage to teaming that people do it. So no, if you lost experience and had less of a chance to finish a mission with a team than you did solo, there wouldnt be as many people teaming up as there is.

Secondly, your claim of having to street hunt because you used your missions has no bearring on this arguement. You already stated you "had to do some missions with a friend". Well gee golly whiz Batman, you just shot yourself in your own foot. There IS enough missions for everyone to do if you team-up with other people who have missions when you do not, now isnt there?

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As it stands now what potentially stops you is that missions, once given, cannot be given up... and you can only have 3 at a time. If they just gave you say a "solo contact" or something, so you'd know ahead of time, then I'd have no problem with how the missions work. I don't mind that I can't solo an AV. What I mind is being forced to street hunt when none of my friends are on, because all my missions have an AV in them and I can't get new missions because you can't delete the old ones.

You may say, "Well find a random group." If you want to do that go ahead. I do not. I am a roleplayer. I want to group with other roleplayers when I group. Not random strangers who talk in leetspeak or what have you. The chances of finding a roleplayer doing an LFG are so small that it is not worth it.

The main problem is that COH doesn't encourage grouping... it encourages grouping with random people. And a lot of folks who want to group, may not necessarily want to do random pickup gruops. Many members of my SG will group ONLY with other members of the SG due to bad pickup group experiences. And yet, if your SG-mates are not on and you have a bunch of AV missions what choice do you have but a pickup group -- which may be decidedly non-fun for you. So even though you want a group experience, you may not necessarily enjoy a pickup group experience. Shouldn't that me MY choice, not Cryptics?


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Oh, I see the problem now. Your a snobby anti-social player who feels they are better than other "random" players in this game, and you dont want to associate with them. Your an "elite" and they are beneath you, unless they can meet your standards. I've seen your type before.

But the reality is if you never attempt to befriend these strangers you have no bloody idea who they are since you've never heard so much of a word they have ever said. Your probally one of these people who judge based on character name, level and build.

Now lets look at a game that has major unbalancement issues because everyone except 1 build can solo (which would be the Full support priest). This game is called Ragnarok Online. There is no real "quests" in that game other than "bring me x amount of this item and you can make this item" and the quests for job advancement, which is a solo endeavor. Because of this, the majority of people are soloers. The only interaction you might get is when they have their pvp events and when people go to towns to buy items from AFK merchants who setup shop with the vending skill. There is a few people who hang around gates chatting...but thats it. There is no real objectives or direction to pull players together into accomplishing tasks together outside of PvP in guilds.

And because of that, the game gets boring. Really fast. There is two ways for a player to lose interest in a game:

1) To have done everything in it and attained all their goals within the game.
2) To get "burnout" from playing a game non-stop the exact same way. This is a psychological thing called "boredom". I read a study once about burnout and playing video games; people who play a game religiously are prone to encounter periods where they are "bored" even though they are doing something that a day before was a very fun experience for them. If we arent continually challenged, if we dont continually have new events transpiring in our gameplay, then we lose interest in them.

Thats why people who solo constantly do not have single characters. I think it is safe to say after about 4 weeks, if that long, they will make another character in effort to overcome their boredom.

Either that or they ask for new game features from the developers who they want to help them overcome their boredom.

This boredom can occur in groupers too, but this is only when their role in a group is so redundant they dont have to think about it; they just do it. CoH has a great deal of variety involved in teamed missions however; you dont have 4-5 builds all identical, people tend to have differences about them which others they group with dont always have. Unless of course, your so high and mighty that you cant consider teaming up with people you dont know, because they "dont roleplay" and that automatically means you wouldnt have any fun killing npcs with them, for some reason.

Being able to solo your early levels is neccassary for MMORPGs. A problem, however, develops when people can solo at the higher stages of the game better than they can teaming up. Communities do not build; you have loose interactions between people who might as well be on AIM except you cant trade game items on AIM. Communities are the thing which keeps a player remaining in a game for years, whether any of you want to believe it or not. This is seven years of experience with MMORPGs I am speaking from.

And the one thing CoH lacks the most is a strong community, which I'm hoping CoV will implement changes to encourage more interaction between players beyond trading items, missions and sending pms. I know they have plans for SGs, but right now interaction between various SGs and their ability to cause change in their virtual world is low. CoV should offer plenty of new opportunities to remedy this situation however.

Why dont you stop and think clearly about what Statesman is saying for half a second instead of having a little tantrum on the forums?

City of Heroes is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game. Thats "Massively Multiplayer". You should consider yourself lucky that you can solo at all, considering many MMORPGs do not allow soloing at the higher stages of the games period and have enemies so powerful in such large mobs you must form parties, since you need every classes special abilities to defeat the mobs at those later stages of the game.

Now, the devs here have made great attempts to make sure that the players have enough missions to do so they dont have to do "hunting", which here is called "street sweeping". You dont have to mindlessly kill enemies for hours on end with no clear agenda in this game. They designed the mission system, which is really an evolved quest system, so that you can have other players help you complete your quests and they still get rewards as well (big exp/influence boost at completion and badge awarding). They also made it so the "items" gained here are automatically awarded to party members, so there is no argueing or attempts to "loot".

You think this is done so you can solo your way through the game? I dont get why you'd even want to, the entire point of playing an online game is to play with other people. Your interaction with other people is the foundation of the game structure, whether its something as simple as online checkers or as complex as CoH is, the point is to play it with other players.

Now you have already answered your own question when you asked why they have bosses you struggle to defeat solo in all spawned mobs. You know the answer is that they do not really want to encourage soloing because it reduces other players opportunity to find party members. Think clearly about this; if you designed a game which fundementally is based around the fact the majority who play online games do so because they want to interact with other real live players, you do not want to make it as beneficial to solo as it is to interact with those other players. If you did, then you'd be encouraging people to not interact with other players and you would have a game world which does not provide the player to player interaction which is desired.

This will become even more important when PvP is introduced. Wandering around solo in a PvP enviroment will probally be a very bad idea when you run into a team of people who all can PvP you. Also, I'd rather not see a repeat of Necromancers like in EQ, who could solo hunt and solo PvP against multiple people because of how over-powered they were originally. If you travel in teams in a game like CoH, you'll be a great deal safer from the solo pker I think even if your somewhat lower lv, since you have numbers and I doubt your gonna see teams of people roaming around searching to PvP lower-lvs for the sheer reason people ditch teams when nothing happens in the first 5min as is; do you think they are gonna stick with a team for the 10min it could take to find people weak enough to successfully kill when they could be out lving?

I doubt it.