Oliin

Yea, I really appreciate the attempt at catching it on 'film' for us but unfortunately that video makes my ears very unhappy.

For me at least it's not so much that it's a negative review as it's really not a very good negative review. If you're going to do a negative review, at least do a comprehensive and fact checked negative review.

The guy had some valid points, some debatable opinions presented as fact, some hyperbole and the couple positive things he had to say were either quickly glossed over or were backhanded compliments. Top that off with a presentation akin to the Angry Video Game Nerd or That Guy With the Glasses but not quite as professional and you'll get people a bit upset. Even then I kind of thought the response was relatively mild from most people.


Incidentally, I'm honestly curious about your dislike of the enhancement system. I remember finding it a welcome relief from the rampant tinking (that's what it was called right? It's been so long ....) in EQ and the loot system in DAoC. I'll admit it can be a bit of a chore to slot new enhancements in the higher levels, but it's not the worst system I've seen.

No, that's about how it was trying to get to The Overthere. Right down to the delevling too.

Oh no. Travel times in CoH are downright speedy compared to every other game I've ever played. I'd get on a horse in DAoC and go off to make a sandwitch, and I distinctly remember getting a group in EQ after much trying ... down in the Overthere when I was in Freeport that was easily 45 minutes of travel for me. I'd be a little leery of saying it took 30 minutes to get anywhere in CoH once I had travel powers, but of course I've never really tested that.

Well no, you have to admit that the travel in the original CoH content's annoying like he says. It may not really take as long to do some of the fedex quests as he claims but they're certainly an annoying speed-bump in the game. Then there's the repetitive nature of our instanced missions which is a certainly true. I don't mind it and I'm guessing neither do you, but it's still something many see as a fault.

Right, but your constant commenting on how WoW does it better could easily be seen as your being a fan of WoW, that's all I'm saying.

And yet wow itself hasn't changed any more or less than CoH has. We've seen a significant shift towards casual players over time here and they added the amazingly flexible difficulty sliders for the more hardcore among us. To top it off the quality and difficulty of the content provided to us by the devs has been significantly improved on over time and they even went and created a whole new low-level game based on that.

Heck, the devs even went and did a complete overhaul of the PvP system a few issues ago. It was something close to an unmitigated disaster for the PvP community but they did it.

Seriously, we've had the same sort of changes over the years that every other MMO I've ever played has had. You can't talk about how one game's getting new zones based upon their evolved design philosophy and then not even try the new zones in CoH because they're just more of the same. That's just lazy reviewing.

If I were to review WoW, I wouldn't go and review their current content, complain about it and then release the review after Cataclysm and entirely neglect to mention the expansion.

But one of your notable complaints was about zone travel and contacts sending you all over the place for '30 minutes' before a mission can start. CoV zones mostly have their story arcs contained to just the one zone or at least have minimal inter-zone travel and even when you do travel most zones are linked by just one ferry instead of the two separate trains. That's the sort of thing you should include in a review. You point out a very clear problem with the CoH content, but acknowledge that it's not there or at least not as bad in CoVs.

Oh, and out of curiosity, did you try fiddling with your difficulty sliders at all. They can provide a significant bump in the challenge provided to you.


I'm not saying you should say it might get better in the future, I'm saying you should acknowledge currently existing and upcoming changes to the game. Something like, "The next issue is supposed to have some sort of end game content attached to it, but I don't know if it would make enough of a difference for me." Something, anything but rants about nonexistant end-game content when that's an announced upcoming feature.

Also for future reference, when you're talking about a game it's best to try and use the nomenclature of that game. You might offer a short explanation of what a 'mission' or an 'archetype' is in relation to other games out there but it will generally come off better if you use that game's terminology.

And I'd also like to mention that not only is it incredibly difficult for just anybody to soft-cap their defense but just about as many tanks are resistance based as are defense based. I agree that the def cap shouldn't be the same across all ATs but the resistance cap isn't so that's something at least.

Generally I think the big issue is your review seems more designed like something one would see from one of those movie reviewers who sit around and make fun of bad movies. That can certainly work, but you can't really structure it like an actual review as that style is mostly done for entertainment purposes instead of an informative one.

That's kind of my point. The only game that I've ever played that (to my knowledge) actually changed its gameplay was Star Wars Galaxies. I think we're all aware how well that turned out.

To be fair your review kept on implying that WoW was so much better than CoH so it's easy to see where we'd get the idea.

And I'm kind of curious here, but I've seen people complain that CoH hasn't fundamentally changed its playstyle over the years. Do other games do that? I mean I made a hunter in WoW when it first came out and didn't really have a lot of fun, then I tried it again before that last expansion came out and it was the same exact game I'd played before but with new races that played almost identically to the others. EQ didn't fundamentally change in the couple of years I played that and DAoC stayed the same in spite of all the endgame content it added over the course of my five years there.

It was all the exact same thing. There was just more stuff to do and occasionally some slightly different ways to do it and that's what CoH has picked up.

You also did your credibility a slight disservice when you only played the old-school CoH story-arcs instead of branching out into CoV or the newer areas. The zone design and quest layouts have drastically improved over time and the TFs start to get more complex than just 'hit that one guy a lot until he's defeated'.

Your review also completely ignores the planned inclusion of endgame content in the next and future issues and you didn't even mention the expansion even though it came out several weeks before your review was posted. You didn't have to dwell on it, but just a sentence letting viewers know about the recent and upcoming change and acknowledging that certain aspects of your review might be different than what you experienced because of that.

Oh lord no. I can feel it happ...

COH IZ GUD GAME!! U SUX!!!!1!11!!! LOLOLOLLLOOOL!

Oh good lord I hope not the first one. I'll complain up one side of the forums and down the other if they do that. Well no, I'll probably just grumble to my friends, but I'll want to piss and moan about a level cap increase.

If there's something that bothers me about other game's level cap increases it's the marginalization of previous content due to a level cap increase and even with our merit reward system I'd expect it'd happen to some extent here too.

Thankfully our devs have expressed a disinclination to raise our level cap in the past and I'd be surprised if they moved in that direction in the near future.

Edit: The rest of that stuff could be a lot of fun though.

I don't know. To me the incredibly static faces and mitten-hands are one of the larger contributors to the game's somewhat dated look.

Admittedly I like CoH's graphics a lot better than I do many of its current competitors. Honestly I tend to like its look even more compared to its recent ones than its old ones.

That said, the faces and hands are just starting to look really bad compared to what's out there and especially compared to what's on the horizon. There are a lot of people out there who are suckers for graphics to at least some degree and if CoH doesn't at least try keep up at least marginally that's probably a section of the playerbase that will migrate on.

Sure, if someone's a huge graphics fan they're probably not playing right now. Even as pretty as I think GR is they're likely not here. It doesn't mean that our devs shouldn't at least try and keep the graphics looking somewhat up to par right.

That said, I'd rather have new powerset animation than faces and hands, but I'll cope if they're what we get first.

You know, I'm curious here. Does the fact that I'm generally happy with the game and for the most part pleased with additions to the game make me a fanboy or just the target audience?

I mean, obviously the game has its flaws, and they don't always add the stuff I'd love for them to, but what they do give me tends not to suck and is generally free.

The party pack's still too freaking expensive though.

I'm personally curious about how the ability to only mail one item and some inf per mail message is somehow worse than it was before we got the ability to mail things to globals at all.

I mean if the only one item and inf per message is somehow us paying for the ability to mail stuff. It just doesn't make much sense to me.

Edit: Wow, I somehow missed that new page after I got back from lunch. I thought the number of extra replies that popped up after I refreshed seemed a bit on the anemic side.

I still think your first point held. Even with the powers changes in I13 there were a several things addressing things players had been asking for. Shield and Pain (villain 'empathy'), base pricing tweaks, and patron respecing.

It won't win any 'best issue ever' awards from me or anything, but there were things we'd been wanting in there.

They haven't been able to solidly prove that though have they? I mean yea sure it's what probably happened, but the fun in the story's the ambiguity of the thing.

Oddly enough in my area they've moved the film to the 'bigger' theater. It doesn't really make much sense to me.

Well I think the thing is CoV was a standalone game that just happened to be an expansion to CoH.not have interacted with CoH at all.

I mean you could have purchased CoV, level your character all the way to 40, then eventually 50 after the level cap was raised and never have interacted with CoH in any meaningful fashion. You could PvP in shared zones if you wanted, but that's really pretty minimal interaction really.

Sure, they used a lot of the same systems and art resources as CoH but it was pretty standalone from a gameplay perspective and I think that's how most people are looking at it, which is causing the confusion.