NightshadeLegree

Cry some more, fatty.

I bought the game, twice since I sometimes ran two accounts. I had two years worth of sub time over those accounts, much of it during the I13-15 period when the game really was dead on its feet. I've bought costume packs, and Going Rogue, and when CoH went F2P I paid up to unlock MMs and some character slots. My conscience is clear, and I and any other so-called 'freeloaders', have as much right to mourn what's happened to this game as you do.

Ah, so that's why I reinstalled CO. I knew there had to be some reason...

He's not right. The way the genre works these days, no MMO that relied on retaining all of its players all of the time would survive past the first 6 months. People come and go - especially in games with F2P models, and that is, or should be, taken into account by the companies that run these games.

@FFM, you're pissed off and looking for someone to blame, but insinuating that those players who took breaks from the game are partly to blame for this is wrong headed and downright low, and stinks of the kind of "thou shalt have no other game but me" fundamentalism that is one of the worst things about MMO communities.

To quote TvTropes, "Even Evil Has Standards."

City has always struck me as being a 'Bronze Age' comic book universe - i.e. the 70s/80s runs which, whilst more grounded in reality than the zaniness of the Silver Age, was still ultimately a world where death was a big deal. Villains didn't kill often, and Heroes didn't kill AT ALL. I always liked that the game was ambiguous about what happened to your 'defeated' enemies - leaving it for the player to decide if you just beat up a bunch of Longbow or if you killed everyone in the base.

(Given your ... ah... unusually limited experience of redside you might not be able to identify with this, but prior to Going Rogue the number of arcs where even a villain would explicitly kill someone during a mission could be counted on the fingers of one hand.)

Contacts like Westin Phipps gained their notoriety because they were the exception rather than the rule. Now we seem to be sliding more into a 90s Dark Age mentality, with lots of 'grim and gritty' violence, and...well, it just doesn't do it for me. Some of my villains would kill anyone who got in their way, sure, but others would much rather gloat over their unconscious bodies in a megalomaniacal manner then stroll off to get back to their own evil plans, regardless of that meaning they'll probably have to fight them all over again at a later date.

Like I said, Praetoria works, because everyone in that reality plays by the same rather brutal rules and the setting justifies it, but ultimately Paragon and the Rogue Isles are rather silly settings, like good superhero comic book settings should be. Fighting the good guys is just part of the 'game', and quite a few of my villains would regard killing a helpless foe as at best unsporting and at worst as the act of a mere common criminal and hence beneath them.

Apparently not

Ms. Liberty's always been my favourite heroside signature character for exactly this reason. You just know she's got no problem at all with her personal army chasing down villains with their infamously unheroic flamethrowers.

lolrp amirite?

So you and a bunch of other people were snarky to an RPer... um, gratz?

It's not rage. I used up all my rage in the post-I20 announcement forum wars. As I said in the first part of my post, the pro-solo/small team argument is a lost cause, for now, so long as the new shiny remains new and shiny.

So call it a /mehquit. There's nothing in this issue that interests me, and seeing every new art asset, map, enemy group, mechanic and power being poured into TFs and Raids really does take the shine of the existing game that I do normally enjoy. The likelihood is that I21, at least, will be more of the same, because they need to get more trials out there before everyone starts complaining that they have nothing to do with their 50+ characters. The devs can barely support CoV in addition to CoH (hence the increasingly boring emphasis on co-op content that has spilled over into the Trials) so how do they expect to feed the need for Incarnate content in addition to that?

Put it a different way. Someone in the beta forums (I forget who) summarised the current direction of the game as "We're sorry you don't like large team content, because we really want you to like large team content." For the first time I'm really wondering what the game will look like in a year's time, and whether or not it's still going to be a game I want to spend time on.

And if I21 won't be 'all team/trial all the time' then why is that all we're hearing about? Answer: becaue they really really want us to like large team content. Add in I22 (not an unreasonable possibility) and you're looking at 2012 before they've got this established, never mind whatever comes next.

It's not about me wanting the powers but not wanting to grind for them. I have 2 50s, both naturals. Neither of them really want to be throwing giant AoEs of godly death around, or have a Praetorian ghost/spirit/whateverthehellitis following them around. It's more about a shift in the culture of the game, which I think we're already seeing, with all the forum trash talk about people not wanting to 'work' for their rewards. Nah, not for me. If I wanted to run the same stuff over and over again for epic loot I'd be playing the 800lb gorilla, not City of Heroes.