Rodion

There are actually many standard mobs that are easily farmed by particular power sets.

There was one mission (the "Family Farm") that was so heavily abused by Fire/Kins that Family XP was heavily nerfed (by 50%? Don't remember exactly). Freaks were nerfed at least once, and the stunner was added to make them more challenging. Battle Maiden's minions are trivial for Inv tankers. Mu mystics are no challenge for Electric brutes. Even Nemesis are pretty easy for IOed Fire tankers if you know how to fight them (especially leaving the LTs for last). And some of the worst exploits involved using standard mobs in ways the devs didn't foresee (the Rikti and Cimeroran exploits).

The biggest problem with allowing customizing the NPC powers in AE was the waste of dev resources. They spent an inordinate number of hours trying to give us the flexibility we demanded for character creation, and then AE authors would find some exploit and make the devs redo the whole system again to prevent it. They iterated on that at least five or 10 times, each time generating more and more ill will with every level 50 cranked out in two hours.

This is a perfect example of how the devs trying desperately to cater to players' demands worked in everyone's worst interests.

But forcing AE authors to use hard-to-fight NPCs like Carnies for all missions would have been the kiss of death for AE.

Given the game's history of customization it was hard to justify not giving us power customization for AE mobs. Just allowing us to recolor stock NPCs would not have been acceptable because it wouldn't let you create new characters; all you could do is rehash CoH story lines with CoH NPCs.

What the devs should have done up front was set an upper limit on the amount of XP you can get per unit time. (They ultimately did something like that for AE, but the limit was set ridiculously high so you'd never see it unless you were using one of the craziest exploits.)

As long as that limit gave you the same XP per unit time you could get from the standard NPC groups, it doesn't really matter what you're fighting. But this is problematic as well, because of all the whiners who complained about "artificial limits" on leveling speed.

The XP throttle should have been implemented game-wide and active all the time to prevent excessively quick leveling when the inevitable bugs and exploits crop up in the game (such as the Winter Lord in the first winter event). That would have prevented the devs from having to take any action against anyone for getting too much XP from exploits, because the system would just prevent it (except for those exploits that got you around the throttle, of course ).

I just soloed Whiteout yesterday, start to finish, on a Wind/Force/Electrical character that has lots of knockback. I died twice, once when my Nemesis appeared while I was already fighting an AV, and once during the final confrontation where you spend all your time getting tossed around by the villain like a Barbie getting thrown around by a little brother. Getting killed was a blessing in disguise, because once you get out of the room you can attack from the doorway at range and avoid getting knocked around as much.

So, while there might be serious bugs that cause problems, it is possible to complete Whiteout solo at this point. However, I don't recommend that characters less than level 40 try to solo Whiteout and similar arcs, especially if you're new to the game.

In my relatively short experience with CO I have found its problems with knockback to be less serious that CoH's. After playing more than 100 levels on six or seven characters, I've only been unable to attack a character in a wall once. In CoH that problem occurs constantly, at least once every mission or two, especially on cave maps. I could still attack the target in CO with an PBAoE (Hurricane), much like you can in CoH, but in CoH not every power set has access to a PBAoE. That highlights another advantage of CO: you can get any power you want with freeform characters.

In general, CO's knockback is less instrusive than CoH's. You can use Hurricane non-stop in CO without causing massive problems for melee characters, especially since CO has numerous "closing" attacks that jump your character into melee range and do damage. That essentially turns your character into one big ranged weapon and gets you into melee range almost instantaneously.

For me, closing attacks make playing melee characters much more fun than they are in CoH. Other games, such as SWTOR, also have similar attacks. CoH only has "teleport" versions of such powers (Shield Rush and Lightning Rod), which require you to target an area with the mouse. With closing attacks you can attack flying targets easily, and if you're flying already you don't have to maneuver yourself to get in range.

To be fair (at least in the level 1-15 content), the voice acting in SWTOR is fine. It's SO much better than it is in CO: they hired professionals instead of the guy in the next cubicle, they recorded the audio in a studio instead of the next cubicle, and the character's mouths actually conform to the words spoken rather than looking like a parody of lip-synched kung fu movies. All in all, the cut scenes in SWTOR are the best ones among the games I've seen recently, though Secret World's are a close second (though TSW's struck me as being WAY too time-consuming).

But I concur with your concerns about the cost, and have my own concerns about the inconsistency and inflexibility of using voice actors. Adding voice drastically increases the cost and the production time for missions. If the devs want to be consistent, they have to use the same actors to voice our characters' responses, which means that they can have scheduling problems if the actors aren't in-house. If they aren't consistent, then your character can wind up being silent half the time (like the annoying gaps in spoken NPC dialog in CO), or worse, your character sounds like a multi-personality schizoid. And then there's the maintenance problem of having to rerecord dialog when the text of the dialog has to be changed for bug fixes.

And in the long run, I don't think it's really worth it: I find that I just skip through the audio with space bar anyway to speed things up (especially when I've already run the same mission four times with alts).

Spoken dialog a cute idea, and it's fun for a while. But I don't see how it can be sustained cost effectively for 50 levels over hundreds of missions for five different character classes, which all require different variations for their particular circumstances. It's an interesting programming problem, but in the long run it just seems like a maintenance nightmare.

These Task-Force-like arcs all have at least one encounter like this, where you face a supervillain that you can't solo, or are inundated by more mobs than a level 21 character can possibly withstand (typically because you don't have enough defenses, which is especially true for blaster-like characters).

That doesn't mean the game is unbalanced or broken, it means that these encounters are designed to be played by more than one player (or by a well-equipped level 40 character). These arcs should be compared to CoH's TFs that have one or more AVs. CoH AVs have ridiculous amounts of hit points: for example, we don't consider the Synapse TF broken just because we can't solo the AV at the end with level 20 characters.

CoH, however, won't let us start TFs unless we have enough characters to give the typical team a fighting chance to win those encounters. CO often gives you a warning for really tough missions, telling you the minimum recommended team size. I don't think they do that for Whiteout and the other arcs like it, but they really should.

The other advantage of CO is that when you get stuck on a mission like this, you can keep your progress in that arc, and go make 10 levels and try again. I'm not sure, but you may also be able to invite players to that mission to help you out, which you just can't do in CoH. (CO also lets you keep all your powers when you exemp down.)

Mission management in CO has a lot of problems, but it's a lot more flexible that CoH's, and once you know how it works it does have several advantages.

CO has a lot of problems, and I definitely like CoH more. But it's a moot point, because CoH is going away. The real question is whether CO is better than what's left, and so far it's the only one that comes close.

I found that I resented CO not for what it actually was, but because it was different. You really need to judge games based on what they are, and how well they implement the design. At first I really hated CO's blocking mechanic and the energy builder, but mostly because they were different. They do have some advantages that don't become obvious until later.

The real problem is that players of MMOs have no legal rights to the virtual goods they paid real money for. Millions of people are currently paying billions of dollars for costume unlocks, powersets, vehicles and the like, in games like CoH, STO, Champions Online, WoW, yet these companies could pull the plug on these games at any time, completely trashing billions of dollars in virtual investments. That's really what's wrong here.

If you want to make a real difference, start a campaign to get national legislation passed regarding the legal rights of digital citizens, the money we pay for creating and outfitting our virtual characters, and the many hours we put into creating them.

We have laws that protect the Intellectual Property rights of the corporations that produce these games, but we have no laws protecting the rights of the consumers of these games.

The United States now has laws requiring that phone companies let you keep telephone numbers if you switch cellphone providers, so there's already a precedent for tying an abstract digital entity to a real world person. As more and more things move out into "the cloud" more of our lives is winding up on servers controlled by corporations, yet they have no real responsibilities to us.

And it's not just our MMO characters, it's our email accounts, email addresses, file backups, family photo albums, videos, blog and forum posts, and on and on and on.

These companies make HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars off us, and we have no rights with regard to virtual/digital items that we paid real money for. The only "rights" we have are those granted by one-sided EULAs which have never really been tested in court. These EULAs are clearly overstepping legal and ethical bounds, as they claim to own the copyright on every character that we create on their servers even though we're paying them, we never actually sign them and we have no option whatsoever to negotiate the terms.

Whining and making bad press for NCsoft doesn't go very far. Companies will only sit up and take notice if we get the law on our side and even the playing field. It will obviously take a great deal of time and effort, and it will be too late to save CoH, but if you want to take on a mission that would stop companies from doing this in the future, work to pass a law protecting the rights of purchasers of virtual digital entities.

One cause of this is that if you log out during a TF (which includes any kind of AE mission, Ouro mission, etc.) the game considers you still logged in. You appear in the global friends list as apparently logged in but with no actual status.

You can test this by creating a level 1 character, starting an AE arc, logging out and then coming back in a day to see how "old" the character is.

If you read the entirety of the quote you included in your post, you'll note that I mention this. I wrote it the way I did to emphasize the total lack of transparency inherent in the design.

Unlike CoH, you can call in missions even when you're inside the instance. It therefore never have occurred to me to try to use the crime computer until I exited the instance, so I didn't realize there was a hidden exit menu choice (it's not really correct to call it a button) until I expressed my frustration with having to find a door to a friend and he clued me in on the secret.

What were the CO designers thinking? Do they think that clicking a button is somehow more immersion breaking than clicking an icon and selecting a menu item?

I agree with a lot of your complaints. Teaming, rewards and mission handling are much clunkier in CO.

But your point about having to return to contacts isn't true. In many cases you never have to see the contact face-to-face. They just do a terrible job of documenting this.

If you use SOCRATES, the "crime computer," you can get missions from contacts anywhere, even other other zones. When you open the crime computer window select Search for Emergencies. You'll get a Remote Contacts window. Scroll through this to find the contact you want. Then it's just like you're talking to them directly. When you finish a mission use the same interface to call it in.

I just used it to get a mission from Antoine Harrison, who's in Millennium City, while I was in Canada. I went to MC, did the mission, then called up SOCRATES again to get a reward, which included gear that was added to my inventory.

Some remote contacts don't show up in the list, but most of the regular ones do. In the average case this makes getting and calling in missions simpler than it is in CoH.

One really dumb thing about CO is that there's no Exit button when you complete an instanced mission. You have to find a door to the outside to leave. It's really inconvenient until you figure out the last thing that SOCRATES does is allow you get out of the current map, which is another option that appears when you're on an instanced map.

They paid Cryptic some amount of money for CoH, and they've spent millions of dollars on salaries for the last few years. That's a huge investment, one that's worth a lot of money as a loss on their taxes.

I'm no expert on tax law, but I'm guessing that if they take a total loss on the game they can value it at whatever number they need to reduce their US taxes to zero.

If, on the other hand, they sell it for some paltry amount, that gives it a value, and that could mean they'll have to pay US taxes.

With all that cash rolling in from sales of GW2, they need a huge loss in fiscal 2012 to avoid a massive tax bill.

That one seems to be structured exactly like a CoH trial. The Whiteout mission (the one in Canada with aliens) is structured like a sequence of four or five missions, which you can resume in the middle of, like an arc in CoH.

I really hated CO in all aspects at first. But I got a new computer and graphics card, so it no longer makes me motion sick. I found the face tweaks in the character creator, so my characters look less cartoonish. A lot of other aspects about the design stink (like having to share a mission to get a team mate into it), but they're no worse than WoW or other games.

On the other hand, it does have some things that CoH doesn't: there are many costume options that have been declared "impossible" in CoH, like long skirts and a great deal of control over anatomy.

What I find exasperating is that the characters in STO look great, but Cryptic has chosen to make CO characters look ridiculous even though the games use the same engine (you can even talk via globals to friends playing STO from CO).

I was eventually able to get into the site and found that they had turned off my VIP status and supposedly refunded my last three-month payment in full (it hasn't shown up on my credit card yet, and for some reason they say it will take more than a week to do so). I had originally asked for them to prorate my refund, and repeated that request and reinstate my VIP after they turned it off. I got this reply:

"Due to the closure of the game, we have stopped all VIP status, ability to purchase subscriptions, and ability to purchase from the Paragon Market. We are not able to provide pro-rated refunds, we were only able to provide a full refund for the last subscription charge. Since the refund has been processed on our end, we are not able to reverse it."

It looks like they just want to shut this puppy down ASAP. If they really are turning off everyone's VIP status as they process refunds, it looks like the game will be dead far sooner than the end of November.

The devs had a vested interest in making things take a really long time (throttling the number of hero merits per week, for example) because they were thinking in terms of keeping us on the subscription hook for months at a time.

With a standalone game there's no reason to make things this hard. You would get rewards at a rate that doesn't cheapen the game-playing experience, with no artificial time-wasters for milking more sub time from the players. You could make it relatively easy to get rare stuff (a few hours, not a few weeks) in such a game, so an auction house is unnecessary.

This is really the issue. The development team, including all the overhead, probably ran in the neighborhood of $5 to $10 million a year. It's doubtful they could keep paying subscribers around without adding significant content regularly.

Just look at the whining comments about the slow pace of new power sets and costumes that people posted daily prior to the announcement of the shut down.

Those same techniques are used in PvE as well. Being able to anticipate, see and react to what's going on and massively multitask also make for a skilled PvE player.

I started out playing mostly defenders and controllers, and my first 50 was an Illusion/Empathy controller. I've since come to enjoy playing other powersets much more than Empathy, but if you're good at Empathy it does teach you some very important skills: in particular, watching the status of team mates, including health, end, and if/how they're mezzed, remembering which team mates have been buffed with Recovery Aura, Fortitude and Adrenalin Boost, as well as simultaneously monitoring what the mobs are doing, what they're about to do, what the next mob down the hall is doing. And then there's actually attacking mobs, remembering which mobs you've mezzed, and which bosses need to be mezzed again to get a full hold, etc., etc.

Because of that background I've never understood the point of an "attack chain." If you're paying attention to what's going on around you, there's always something you need to react to that will cause you to do something other than stand there and mash the same buttons in the same sequence over and over again.

In my experience, a skilled player will do much better in PvE than an unskilled player with an identical build, especially for making a team perform well. That's even more important for force multiplier ATs like defenders, corruptors, controllers, and MMs, but also for dominators, tankers and brutes.