RemusShepherd

'Ace, the Bat-Hound' is what he's usually called. Pretty sure it's the same dog.

Nope. I defined it in my last post. Now you're just being intransigent, Trollden Girl.

All of those provide bonuses that you can't get anywhere else. Task Forces give badges that lead to an accolade that used to be highly valued. (I'm not sure whether it is or not anymore). Rikti invasions were the best method for amassing Vanguard credits, which can be used to purchase things available nowhere else, such as expanded storage space. Hamidon is the only source of hami-Os.

Now, all the incarnate content gives incarnate tokens/threads/meritsshards/thingamabobs that lead to incarnate abilities, so they fall into the same category. I don't dislike the incarnate content because it's 'flashy'. I just think it's a grind, and it's designed for middle managers who like herding 24-man teams.

Flashy gimmicks include monthly costume set releases (which give *nothing*, gameplay-wise), new powersets that are functionally equivalent to existing powersets, and new task forces and mission arcs that provide nothing other than another chapter of the CoH backstory. Yes, some of those give alignment merits, but by now A-merits can be gotten in a hundred other ways. They're not new, and they don't elevate flash into substance.

I don't care how often they release costume parts. I don't care much about them at all. I just want more developer attention on improving gameplay.

Yes, I mean that is what I'd like to see. Characters can get a maximum of three (four?) alignment choice missions in GR. Aside from that, I'm not aware of any other 'choice' missions in the game. I'd like to see more. We obviously have the technology to allow players to choose alternatives, why not make it more common?

More importantly, I'd like those choices to matter. The Tip missions don't matter much. Yes, after ten of them you can switch your alignment, after which you can...go do the same missions and TFs you did before. After another ten Tip missions you can switch your alignment again and see 'new to you' content. But there are no repercussions of that switch, no consequences other than which zones you're temporarily locked out of. I like the alignment system, don't get me wrong. But I'd like to see more consequences for a player's actions.

I can't look at it from work, but I'll load it up later at home.

Agreed. I haven't been complaining about the invention system, I think it was a net positive. Although I do hate that we had to go through ED to get it.

All the characters I abandoned on Victory when I switched to Virtue are *still* slotted with 1/5.

More diversity since launch? Sure, I'll go along with that. But we had a peak of diversity sometime after the release of IOs. (Issue 11?) Since then characters have been given various free power slots, and that has decimated diversity in the game. Where we are now is better than at launch but worse off than we were a few years ago.

If you have branching missions and you have to choose which branch to take, no clickable inspiration is going to help you.

We can argue about the semantic meaning of 'gimmick' if you like, but I don't think it would be very productive.

The OP introduced 'gimmick' to describe flashy content, often in staged events, that had nothing to do with the game itself. In CoH, I would say that monthly costume releases and fixed-story signature arcs are good examples of worthless gimmicks.

I have been arguing against that kind of content and for giving the players choices that have consequence. I think if you have an open mind, you'll see that my suggestions give players choices, all of which lead to mutually exclusive consequences. Those aren't gimmicks, they are new forms of gameplay.

Back to the wrestling analogy. If everyone in the WWE decided to wrestle in Santa Claus costumes, that's a gimmick. If the WWE decided that no holds could be applied above the shoulders, that's a change in the game. If the WWE decided that wrestlers could choose to start in a corner, along one side of the ropes, or in the center of the ring, that would be a change in the game that gives the players a choice, and which could lead to consequential effects on the match.

I need a concept before I can build a character. Sometimes it's a role-playing concept, sometimes it's a power concept, and rarely it's just a costume. If I start a character with a role-playing or costume concept, I usually just take the powers that match and play it. Sometime in my 20s I'll pull up Mids and start figuring out how to respec the character into something more efficient.

If I make a power concept, then I start with Mids and plan it out ahead of time.

My power concept characters are limited, though, because I don't like to duplicate powersets. If I've already seen what I can do with Ice blast, why make another character to do the same things with it? Even if it's a different AT, I don't want to reply a powersets if I can help it.

Because I try not to duplicate powersets, I have played most of the powersets in this game at least up to the low-30s. (I've skipped some powersets that I hate, hate, hate. Shield and SR fall into this category; I just can't stand click status defense. Also, my my Beam defender is still in her teens because she's new.) I'm out of powersets to try. Which means no new power concept characters. But that's my choice; I don't expect the devs to release enough powersets to keep someone like me satisfied.

When I do replay a powerset it's usually in service to a role-playing themed character. Those are more difficult to build than they used to be. In the old days almost any concept was good; it was assumed that any superhero in the world would eventually find their way to Paragon City and sign up for a hero license. Now, character concepts have to take into account Praetorian Earth and/or the new newbie trial. Everyone starts out either as a Powers Division trainee or an emergency responder to a crisis in Galaxy Park. Bleah.

I don't do costume concepts very often, but I suppose they're more open than ever. We're getting lots of new costume pieces to design characters around. The devs saw that the costume creator was one of their biggest assets and they've decided to ride that pony until its legs break. My last costume concept characters were from the animal pack. The wolf blaster (Santo Lobo) is in his teens, the panthress necromancer (Panthress) is in her high 20s, and the trap cow in crotchless chaps (Sweet Trouble) got to her 30s before I rerolled her with a beam rifle.

For the wolf and cow, I can look ahead and see what power choices I'll make and they bore me. Attacks, some power pool defenses (the wolf wants toughness; the cow should have Leadership), travel powers (the wolf jumps, the cow has superspeed but I may respec into just using Beast Run, although she'll also get combat jumping because she has so many slots free). The panthress I can't plan out that intuitively because I have less experience with MMs. But I don't see many options for her; leadership is just about mandatory, and none of the other power pools fit either her concept or her powers.

I don't respec as often as you do, however. I like getting a character build and sticking to it. The respec process is painful and irritating -- something else I'd like to see improved, but that's a nitpick on top of everything else.

Absolutely. Glad you asked.

Might as well start with what they're doing and have proven capable of doing. The incarnate trials are neat puzzles, with the regenerating walker in the UG and the tricky fight against Antimatter in Keyes. I just can't enjoy that content because it's all geared for massive teams. If they put out similar missions that were tuned for soloing or for a single team they would be wonderful. Soloing one of my heroes against a villain who can stop time? I'd love that. But make him so powerful that it takes a league to fight him -- which among other things means giving him huge AoE instant death powers -- and it's no fun anymore.

As an example of new content that isn't fun and isn't challenging, I'll point to the signature arcs. Find the glowy, survive the ambushes, hover over the lava and the AI will kill itself off. Terrible.

Want some new ideas?

I still feel that we need new power pools to expand character customization options. It would be great if we could link new power pool access to the completion of a TF, just like the villain Epic powersets are linked to villain plot arcs. Make a TF where the heroes need to stop someone from using some grand device, and have it so a single hero must sacrifice themselves to end the arc. "The backup controls are inside the reactor chamber", says the NPC, "Someone's going to have to go in and switch it off manually." But instead of dying, the hero survives with new access to new power pools. Players would play this over and over (since only one teammate gets their pool access per run), and it would provide character customization that's linked to the backstory (which we only have with the villain epics and the incarnate powers which are linked to the Well of Furies.) Lots of choice, lots of consequence, and all deeply immersive.

Let's revive street hunting. Pick an underused zone -- I'd choose Boomtown -- and make it a faction war. Have council fighting 5th column fighting vahz fighting trolls fighting clockwork. But put in a mechanism such that if players defeat enough mobs of one group, they disappear for a week or so. If enough of the factions disappear, then one faction will 'win' the zone and start making advances on Steel Canyon. This will spawn a faction-themed giant monster and a NPC monitoring the situation who will sell faction-themed temporary powers. If you want to fight the Council's giant mechaman, or if you want to buy a temporary Vahz vomit power, then you have to help the appropriate faction win. Choices, consequences.

How about new tech that can help revive any mission? It's criminal that NPC artificial intelligence has never been worked on. Put in some code to create new minion behaviors. Players know how to use the terrain to their advantage -- every now and then minions should shoot from behind boxes, gaining AoE defense. If a runner gets out of sight of the players, he should spawn an ambush and return with them shouting, "I ran and got help! Here comes the cavalry!" Create traps (visible only to those with +Per powers, including Tactics) that do nothing but raise an alarm and cause every support minion nearby to click on their force field or heal. Code some support minions -- especially incarnate level ones -- to always have their force field and buffs up, instead of waiting for the players' alpha strike. Have organized groups like Longbow and Malta use some tactics, like organized formations and focusing fire on perceived threats. When the Ballista shouts, "Focus fire on <villainname>", all the Longbow
shift to that target and the player's healer better help them out. (In other words, give enemy bosses the power to taunt their minions to attack a target, which may or may not be the players' tank.)

If nothing else, stop making choices for players. Twinshot's arc and the First Ward are terrible about forcing characters to follow the storyline. Instead of having fixed dialogue choices that eventually lead to the one possible mission, have actual branching mission options. You choose to help Twinshot, you go on that mission. You decide that you don't want any part of them, you go on a different mission which sucks you into the storyline a different way. Can you imagine having branched options in a mission arc that eventually lead to multiple endings for that arc? I'd play the crap out of that mission arc, and each time I'd make choices customized for my character and get that character's chosen consequences.

Those are just some ideas. I'd also like to see separating of teams (a villain phases half the team into an alternate mission (really another floor of the same mission)), customized arch-enemies (the competition has this), and missions and enemies that are customized to your powers (If you have fire powers, you get selected to go on the mission 'Track down the villain who froze Perez'. If you have psi powers, you're sent to look for the sons of Ishmael. If you have a weapon (sword, bow, rifle, doesn't matter), you go to a gun or tech show and end up defending it against attacking Council. etc.) I'd like to see Day jobs have real, in-game effects on the story (commuters/storekeepers/auctioneers/doctors can get a tip about villains attacking the metro/store/auction/hospital). I want AI that uses players' tactics against them (Why do so few mobs have taunt? Why so few AoEs? Why have we never seen a mission where the villains have their own emergency medical station, where all the bad guys respawn?) I
want mobs with the power to steal inspirations from players (high level Banished Pantheon content, maybe? They're all about destroying hope, right?) I want power-dampening attacks that disable the last power clicked. I want more use of the 'prison' system in missions, to put defeated characters into deathtraps that they can get out of by solving a puzzle. (Knocking down a door, like with the current prisons, is not a puzzle.)

All right, this has gotten too long...but you did ask. I want new types of gameplay that fit into the classic 1-to-8 player game system. I don't want new costume choices or massive multi-team trials, and I don't want fixed storylines that feel like the devs fan-wanking over their own creations while my character stands by and watches. Or at least not those things exclusively, which is what we're getting.

I just hope that someone in Paragon studios will someday think about maybe budgeting someone to study the impact of possibly assigning an intern to read this thread.

I don't think the average player knows these tactics anymore. They're just dumb button mashers, relying on how easy the game is and how little death matters to brute force their way through everything.

I gave some quick and trivial examples, but let me give two that are more complicated.

On one Manticore TF, I noticed that Paragon Protector fights were taking forever. I peeked at all my teammate's powersets and noticed that we had two */Psi defenders. I watched them and noticed that the one wasn't throwing attacks at all, and the other avoided the PPs. They were scared of drawing aggro. I had to explain to them that when PP went Unstoppable, psi attacks were the only thing that could damage them, and could the defenders please help clean up? Things went much more smoothly after that.

Another, very recent example: I logged on not expecting to do much of anything, but someone whose reputation I respect was running the new UG trial so I signed on. We got to the regenerating war walker and the leader's instructions were 'Attack it! Overwhelm it! If you die, go to the hospital and get back in the fight.' Or in other words, zerg rush. We failed, of course.

I wanted to scream at him. That fight needs three teams -- one of tanks and support to pull the walker to a safe corner, one of ranged support and damage to lay into the thing, and one sweeper team to kill all the additional mobs so the squishies could do their thing without getting killed every five seconds. The sweepers and spikers should both be getting and using the fungus power-ups. A little tactical thought would have won that battle.

Nothing I could have done about it. I didn't know the leader personally, and I'm not a leader -- I have no interest in trying to corral 23 strangers. The incarnate trials require some tactics, but they're a middle manager challenge that I can't take part in.

Do I want the nostalgia of not knowing what to do? Darn tooting that's what I want. I want new content that challenges me. That's what developers of an ongoing game should be providing. I don't pay a subscription fee to play the same old way over and over again, and I'm not paying for the privilege of having them tell me a story. I could care less about their story. I play a role-playing game in order to experience a story of my own. 'New content' doesn't just mean a few new strings of text describing the in-game world. It should mean new gameplay experiences that give the player challenges to overcome.

Most of the innovation of the past few years has been in technology that increases Paragon studio's ability to tell their stories. Alert flashing, cutscene improvements, phasing, signature arcs (*their* signature characters, note), and a pigeonholed alignment system. There have been almost no innovations in character creation or simple gameplay. Some new costume creature UIs, and some questionable changes like inherent stamina, that's it.

Going back again to the OP, it's as if we're getting gimmicks, not substance. Some players are okay with that. Others will only retain interest as long as they are given content with substance.

Yes, and I've been saying that since inherent stamina was announced. Giving us more slots with no more options results in fewer choices. We need more options.

Fair enough. Here are some simple strategies against different enemy groups, if we were fighting the old way:

Hellions, Skuls -- Focus fire on the bosses or they will wreck you. Minions and Lts are ignorable, but if you're solo and defense based take out the ones with def-reducing attacks.
Clockwork -- Manage the teslas first of all; either get their aggro on the tank or kill them quick. Save AoEs for after bosses' deaths to sweep away gears. Teammates with recovery boosting powers are valuable here.
Circle of Thorns -- For most levels, the Lts are the dangerous ones. Air and earth mages can screw up a team's squishies, while the Lt ghosts do massive damage and accuracy drains. Focus fire on those Lts. An exception is the Ruin Mage, especially at low level. Wait until he drops an earthquake then pull him to a spot away from it and kill him.
The Council -- Focus fire on bosses. Secondary targets are the riflemen, who have massive slows and def-reducing attacks.
Freakshow -- Anything with 'shock' in its name has sleep and/or stuns; focus fire on them. Squishies should not fight bosses in close range. If possible fight from the air, as Freakshow have few ranged attacks although some of them fly.
Sky Raiders -- First target are the engineers, who create shield drones. Bosses can be extremely dangerous and durable, and most of them explode on death. Be ready to heal meleers right after a boss goes down, and squishies should fight at range.
Nemesis -- Lts use vengeance on death, so kill minions and bosses first and avoid using AoE damage. Warhulks and jaegers will explode on death.
Devouring Earth -- Park the bosses near a tank and ignore them. Focus on the Lts, who spawn eminators, and the fungoids who toss sleeps.

This is not secret knowledge. None of you reading this are idiots -- you know all of the above tactics already. But I don't see players doing any of that. What I see is everyone fighting the 'new' way:

Hellions, Skuls -- Pop a purple. Zerg.
Clockwork -- Pop a purple. Zerg.
Circle of Thorns -- Pop a purple. Zerg.
The Council -- Pop a purple. Zerg.
Freakshow -- Pop a purple. Zerg.
Sky Raiders -- Pop a purple. Zerg.
Nemesis -- Pop a purple. Zerg.
Devouring Earth -- Pop a purple. Zerg.

Maybe it's because I've lost my SG and I mostly team with PUGs these days. Maybe I'm just playing with idiots. But there sure seems to be a lot more idiots than there used to be, and the game is encouraging them to act that way.

Some people just look up builds, yes. But for some people like myself, building a character can be an exercise in creativity, and it takes strategy and thought to make a character build that's unique and functional. Or at least it used to.

I'll give you an example. My controller 'Fernguard' is a Plant/TA. I designed her as a scraptroller, focusing mostly on holds and melee attacks, and with high defenses.

In order to pack the Fitness pool, Flying pool (for flight and Air superiority), and Fighting pool into her build, I had to make sacrifices. I didn't take spirit tree and a few of her secondary arrow debuffs. But in return I had a character that did good damage in melee (thanks to containment), had maxed slash/lethal resistance, and a fair amount of defense.

Then the travel powers were given with no prerequisite, and stamina became inherent.

Suddenly I had four additional power choices. I kept air superiority because it fit my concept. But I was forced to take the powers I had skipped from my primary and secondary. (My only other option was to take another power pool that I couldn't slot, which seemed worse than useless.)

What did all the other controllers who already had their primary and secondary powers take with their four extra powers? Air superiority and the fighting pool.

So now Fernguard has a build that's almost identical to every other controller with her powerset, and pretty similar to every other controller no matter what set they are. And I still call her a scraptroller, because...why? Nostalgia?

By giving us more power slots but no new power options (such as new power pools), the devs removed consequential choice from character building. All characters were driven toward the same standardized power selections. There are no other options. And thus creativity was no longer necessary or desirable in character design. Go look up a build on the forums; it's as good as anything else.

Nobody finds this sad, other than me? Nobody misses -- or even remembers -- when we used to apply intelligence and logic to figuring out the puzzles of this game system?

Maybe everyone like me has already left?

It's endemic, Arcanaville. On a team it's impossible to find people who will work with me to develop a strategy. The mindset in the game is zerg rush first and last and always.

Let's take the old Positron TF. Often teams would get stuck in the CoP missions, with no knockback protection to keep the Ruin Mages from wrecking them and swarmed by accuracy-draining ghosts. Without some strategy -- careful pulling, focusing damage on called targets -- these missions could be impossible to get through. With a little planning and with everyone working together they were tedious but not that hard.

Now...well, accuracy at low level has been buffed, characters no longer have to work toward stamina so they're more likely to have KB protection in their teens, they get powers at +5 their level anyway when exemped down, and they have inspiration dispensers to fill them with break frees and insights. Oh, and the TF was rewritten to eliminate the problem encounters entirely. There's no reason not to zerg in, pop as many inspirations as you can, and if you die you buy more at the hospital and zerg again. (The new, reduced death penalty comes into this also; zerging is the popular strategy because nobody cares if they die.) That's the extent of strategy left in this game. Teams don't listen when you suggest using strategy, because braindead button-mashing works.

When soloing there's more occasion for strategy. But characters are more powerful, so there's less reason to use it. And the new content seems to actively discourage inventive strategies -- if you're constantly besieged by ambushes that can see invisible and track you anywhere, what else can you do but stand your ground and eat lucks like candy?

Could I play only the old missions, intentionally gimp my characters, and use tactics to win missions? Sure I could. But then I'm playing 2004 content that I've already seen dozens of times already. That's not something worth sticking around for.

Yeah, I know. We're a lot alike. I tell everyone that I could have been Arcanaville.

In the first month after release, I did a study of defense powers and released them in a spreadsheet here on the forums. I think I got mine out before yours. But I didn't go any further -- I just wanted enough information about the powers to plan interesting builds. You have a zeal for exploring the game mechanics, and I admire that about you.

I admit that the devs *are* designing tasks that require large team strategies. That's the new focus, on large team raids that require mass coordination. Middle manager gaming, designed by middle managers. I'm not a leader. I can't play that metagame.

I disagree. In my opinion the game has changed in a way that tactical thinking is no longer necessary nor rewarded.

How many ranged attacks does your blapper have? How many powers did they *not* pick from their primary? Unless you have multiple travel powers and the entire leadership and fighting pools, you probably have most of your primary powers. And if you do have the leadership and fighting pools, how are you differentiated from all the other characters who take those pools because there's no other attractive option? I'd like to see your build sometime.

Your scrappiers got scrappier, your tankers got tankier...and you don't understand how all powersets are basically similar? I bet your squishy ATs got more defense and recharge, because that's what IO sets mostly offer. They're all the same as any other characters of their AT.

To give a challenge you must give players choices that have consequences. If all scrappers can become equally scrappy, all tankers can become equally tanky, and all squishies can become equally non-squishy...where are the consequences? What good is the choice?

And that's before we get to the bland, AT-obsoleting commonality of incarnate powers.

I just feel that I'm on autopilot when I plan character builds these days. Eight powers from column A, eight powers from column B, a travel power, combat jumping and then choose an epic pool. Powerset? Doesn't matter. Yawn.

The game has become easier. It has more story content, but less substantial gameplay. Flashy gimmicks like monthly costume releases will not bring back the players who want a game that engages their mind.

And yet some games allow this. Fallout, which is not so very far from Doom, allows you to skip a lot of combats with high charisma and smart dialogue choices. In some RPGs you can design a character to be a complete pacifist, and finish the game with non-combat interactions.

We don't need anything that extreme in CoH. But some kind of gameplay other than button-mashing would be nice.

I said level 20 in 4 hours. I know it doesn't scale much beyond that. The DFB is officially sanctioned powerleveling past the early levels.

I think this is the basic difference between you and I, Samuel, and it illustrates how this game has changed. It used to be that you *could* win a mission with strategy. Brute force worked, but there were alternate ways to win. I preferred to find the alternate paths.

But the missions no longer reward alternate strategies. Even the old missions are no longer challenging enough to bother figuring out strategies for, because stamina-inherent veteran-power equipped characters are overpowered compared to the old content.

The game used to support both of our playstyles -- my thinking, and your button-mashing. It no longer supports mine. That's the root of the problem.

I think it's a very interesting fact that the person who is very happy with the game is the one raving about how simple and brainless it is.

We were talking about MMOs. Many of the innovations CoH brought to the MMO world were lifted from single-player RPGs. They were still revolutionary for MMO games.

But there was the ability. Giving players the ability to escape the FOTM rut allowed both you and I to be happy. The devs have now driven the game toward the rut, hoping to bring in twitch-happy hordes of new players, but they're losing their thoughtful iconoclastic explorers.

I'm trying to figure out how you can support that statement. I've had tons of aerial combat, with sky raiders in IP and goldbrickers in Cap, not to mention the dogfights I've had with Circle ghosts in Oro missions. Superspeed is less useful with suppression but the good old punch-by still works as a pulling tool. I have several characters designed to fight only while Hovering, and at least one with enough endrdx slotted in Superspeed that I leave it on during combat.

Some MMOs don't even give characters the ability to jump. CoH pioneered high-mobility combat in MMOs.

Well, you got the game you wanted. In the process, they took the game I liked away.

To get back to the original point of this thread, some players are looking for more substance than button-mashing. They will not be distracted for long by gimmick gifts like new costumes.

That's a perfect example. I liked the pull-apart strategy, and I always tried to convince my teams to do it. These days nobody bothers -- most characters in the ITF are incarnates and they're so powerful that there's no need for subtlety in that fight anymore.

I'll give you another example. The first Signature mission arc, where you save Synapse? The entire arc -- all three (?) missions -- can be solved by hovering over the lava. You never have to fight at all, just throw an attack as a taunt and start floating. That's an alternate strategy for the new content. But it's cheap, it's exploiting the bad AI, and it is probably not a tactic that the devs put in intentionally. It's an accident. I want well-crafted content that requires strategy to solve.

It's not the same. My new characters have inherent stamina and are forced to take every power in their ATs; they're not unique or innovative, and they're significantly more powerful than my old characters were at the same level.

Besides, I've played all that old stuff. I'm not going to keep playing the same content over and over, even if the character options remain as open-ended as they used to be. All the new content is for people like you, the button-mashers. Or the middle-managers. There isn't any new content for me.

That's the problem. You may not agree with me, but if you have any empathy at all then surely you can see the problem.

Not that it really matters. Paragon studios is gambling that the loss of players like me will be balanced out by an influx of players like you. For their sake I hope they're right.

Scrankers, blappers, scraptrollers and the rest are only underpowered because the game system is geared to discourage them. I maintain that a healthy game should encourage alternate playstyles. What you are describing is part of the disease, not a sign of health.

And you're wrong. Kora fruit were not always available. Nor were super-inspirations, Wentworth's, item email, base stockpiles, or the Paragon market. You misremember.

You're provably, factually wrong here. DFB sidekicks, allowing all levels to gain appreciable experience from level 1-6 content. The old way couldn't get you past level 8 or so.


I never did any of those. I pine for the days when teams needed to use strategy to win a mission. I miss the good old days when players actually needed skill to play high level content.

It is possible to have those old challenges without the abuses you rage against. In fact, I'm not sure how they're related. You just didn't like the old days. I agree that there were problems, but there were also game experiences that were worth preserving.

It's not fake difficulty. It's a puzzle, and we felt rewarded when we solved it.

(For those unfamiliar with Nosferatu, he has a PBAoE heal that leeches off of melee characters next to him. Blasters can solo him pretty easily. For scrappers it's harder. For a team of scrappers and tanks, which I had, it's one hell of a challenge, especially because we had never heard of him before and didn't know how his heal worked.)

There are no puzzles anymore, save in 24-man incarnate trials, where you fail if too many of the random strangers you've teamed with are idiots. It's a middle manager minigame, designed by middle managers.

I loved all of those missions, but obviously we have different expectations for gameplay. You refuse to play any ranged ATs, as far as I can tell. I think your standards are a little farther from the norm than mine.

Yeeeeaaaah, we're from different planets. I saw City of Heroes as a game where one supplemented attack powers with crowd management, team synergy, and savvy target selection, all with an interesting character design minigame. Almost all of that is superfluous, now. You've got your clickfest.

I think it was. For MMOs of its era, it was very advanced. Other MMOs had yet to standardize status effects and had clumsy aggro management. CoH also had a unique team buff role that broke away from the classic typical tanker-spiker-healer triad. The character creation and enhancement system was unusual and much more complex than the 'class and equipment' systems. Not to mention the spatial freedom this game gave the players, with the ability to fight in three dimensions and at great speed. All of those were CoH gameplay innovations. This game used to be revolutionary.

I agree that the world has passed it by. I wish the devs had tried to keep up. But they've been obsessed with making revolutions in content presentation (the AE is still revolutionary, and they're doing amazing things with storytelling in raids) at the cost of letting game play stagnate.

I pretty much disagree with everything you wrote about how the gameplay in CoH used to suck and still sucks and always will. It didn't. It doesn't have to in the future. But yes, it does right now.

It is nothing more than an opinion, but it is a sincerely held one.

You make plenty of choices at every stage of playing CoH. Few of them matter anymore.

AT still matters. A blaster can't tank as well as a tank and a tanker can't blast. Some of those edges have been blurred -- blasters get incarnate shields, now, and a blasting tank *is* possible with vet powers and Epic power pools but it wouldn't be very good.

Powerset hardly matters anymore. Almost all powersets within an AT play identically to each other. Some are clickier, some are more toggle and forget. There are a few exceptions, but not many and the difference between them isn't much. It's even less now that everyone has the exact same incarnate abilities, power pools (which are now mandatory), and special powers that they buy on the Paragon market. Everyone's equally special these days, which means that nobody is.

Lots and lots of choices. A dizzying array of them. No consequences.

That's not a game. It's a newbie-friendly button mashing costume simulator, designed by middle managers for middle managers. That's the new vision.

Nothing wrong with that, really, if it keeps the company running. It'll only drive away people interested in actual gameplay.

I disagree. Rock, paper, and scissors are fine choices if they lead to different consequences. It's not right that a rock, a piece of paper and a scissors should all share the same experiences and fate.

Oh, so you prefer the choice between Numina's Convalescence +Stam/+Regen or Miracle +Stam?

We're not talking equipment -- although if we were to focus on equipment, CoH has obviously chosen not to have a very exciting selection of it. We're talking about gameplay, which requires challenge, which comes from choices that have consequences. CoH is providing lots of choices with little consequence. That's not healthy for the long-term future of the game.

Most *good* games give you actual choices that affect gameplay.

In DOOM you might have the choice between a rifle or a shotgun. The rifle will go through your ammo quicker, but the shotgun is useless at range. Choice, consequence.

To take the example of a good RPG, in Planescape Torment you might have the choice to add Ignus or Vhailor to your party. Ignus will give your party awesome AoE attack capabilities, while Vhailor is guaranteed to break your face in as soon as he learns the truth about you. Choice, consequence.

In City of Heroes you have the choice of wearing a standard cape or one with glowy bits on it. Next month they'll give us the choice of new, glowier bits.

The competitors were feckless morons. I tried one of them, and the gameplay sucked worse than a toothless mule.

But just because some competitors failed, it doesn't mean that a successful one couldn't arise. It should be noted that CoH has been emulating features from the failed competition, as if they were somehow good ideas that should be stolen. The more Paragon dumbs down CoH, the more opportunities they give to any potential competitors.

For some ATs, a single boss was a challenging encounter. Some were impossible to solo -- Herakles, Nosferatu, Black Swan pop immediately to mind.

This is the change that I'm marking as the beginning of the problem.

Trapdoor doesn't impress me. I've soloed him with every one of my characters save one (who happened to be in a team at the time). Later in that arc, soling Hero-1 impresses me. I have several characters who were unable to take him. I expect now they would do it handily, with super-inspirations, an inspiration dispenser button, a free self-rez, more power choices due to inherent stamina and travel powers, etc.

I'm with you, Samuel! But very few of us felt that way.

As for grabbing a pre-made character template, that's fine for those who didn't want to be creative with their characters. But some of us did enjoy it, and we can't do it anymore. See any Scrankers, Blappers, Scraptrollers, Meleefenders, or Petless Masterminds lately? Probably not, because with inherent stamina and travel powers character builds are almost forced to take every power in their AT. Character gameplay customization has disappeared.

You can buy them from your contacts, you can buy them from the nurse. You can go to the Paragon store and buy them with your purse. You can farm super-inspirations with incarnates in a raid, you can mail them to your buddies, you can hoard them in your base.

(Damn, I can't quite rhyme 'raid' and 'base'. I wanted to go all Dr. Seuss on you to explain this very simple truth. Inspirations are everywhere these days and more powerful than ever.)

Pretty much everyone was wrong, and I said so at the time. I also said that the only way to make this right was to provide customization power pools so that you could fill out your characters with options other than combat jumping. They haven't given us those.

Death from Below. Level 20 in four hours. Official content.

That's a sad, sad statement. I'm sorry you feel that way. *I* thought it was vibrant and exciting.

See, I never did any of that. I've never farmed, I never had an OP tanker (my level 50 tankers are Dark and Ice), my main blaster was single-target focused, and I've never had perma-Phantom Army.

What I remember is being in a full team and facing Nosferatu for the first time, and we spent an hour trying to figure out how to take him down. I remember jumping from building to building in an instanced King's Row trying to chase down Black Swan before she could disappear and ambush me again. I remember street sweeping in Boomtown with my old SG, and the spawns were so close together that we'd start way too many fights at once and all of us would freak out. I remember the thrill of running back from the hospital after a teamwipe and strategizing with my friends about how we were going to win. I haven't had to plan out an attack strategy in *years*. I used to *love* it.

So...we've had different experiences. I'm not going to dis anyone for that. I wanted to be creative in building my characters and I wanted a gameplay challenge, and I understand that not everyone wanted that. Paragon studios decided that they could make more money catering to you than to me. Fair enough.

But the original point of this thread was that gimmicks do not substitute for substance. I was looking for substantial gameplay. The devs aren't giving that anymore, they're just delivering content, as if...well, as if they were manufacturing a comic book. They want to tell a story and they want players to take a measured amount of time to flip the pages. But they don't want to gamble that anyone will be unable to reach the end of the story.

If there really were more people like you in the game than those like me, then CoH will do well. There's nothing wrong, in theory, with a button-mashing costume simulator.

But if the true allure of City of Heroes was in the innovative gameplay and unique gaming experiences, then people like me are going to disappear. And no gimmick will bring them back.

They won't. They'll just stick them in. If any player complains, the devs' response will be 'Go turn the difficulty down.'

By giving us multiple 'I win' buttons, the devs have abdicated their responsibility to make balanced, challenging content. They're no longer making a game. They're just telling stories now.

That's an example of a 'gimmick', by the way. As the OP illustrated, gimmicks will draw some people in, but they also give the competition an opportunity to kill you by offering superior gameplay.

DOOM requires skill. You have to be able to shoot straight while running, and there's always the problem of conserving ammo.

CoH no longer requires skill. If you can't tweak the difficulty down enough to succeed at something, you can always buy added powers with real money. The only skill left in CoH is in forming and commanding large teams. It's turned into a game for middle managers, designed by middle managers.

I remember when things were different and there was actual skill involved...but, ah, memories are sweet. I do wish that some of the original game's challenge had survived.

I'mma gonna let you finish your lecture about wrestling history, Commander, but I just wanted to say that Bob Backlund was the greatest technical wrestler of all time. ALL TIME!

Sadly, he eventually succumbed to the plague of 'fixed' gimmick fights in the WWF. Even though he could out-wrestle anyone (*), even though he was the best there was at what he did, he couldn't stand up against McMahon's money-grubbing showmanship tactics.

Which just goes to prove that actual competition only works when you and your industry are honest. Another lesson that Paragon studios needs to remember.

(* -- Well, he could beat anyone that was not named Andre the Giant in a fair fight. And in a Backlund vs. Andre match I still would have bet on Backlund. Andre mostly did gimmick matches.)

If the bullet broke up in the deer, it would have hit the kid as a spray, something like a mini-shotgun spread. The doctor might just be counting the number of entry wounds.