Sureshot_Liberty

You can, but you can't use the mouse wheel to do it, you have to go into the options menu.

I agree. That's why people look at it and see just another fantasy MMO. Because that's what it is. As I said, evolutionary, not revolutionary. The trappings are still there, they just try to make them less annoying.

On the other hand, if you innovate too much, you can sink yourself. Really innovative MMOs don't seem to stick around as long.

It's about fifty bucks in real money for the slot. If you're inclined to only play one character, or just want the one freeform, then it's not a terrible deal. It costs less than the box cost did when the game was new.

You can also unlock them in game, but it's a very low chance. You can also earn store points in game, but it'd take a while to earn enough to unlock a freeform slot.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you have a subscription, another perk is that if you hit 40 when you're subbed, you unlock a free character slot. So, it may be worth it to get all of your slots almost to cap, sub with a time card, and unlock your free slots.

Just in case some people missed it, and in the interest of saving any interested parties some money, I'll point out again that time cards are currently $12.56 for two months on Amazon. I've gotten them for as low as $10/2 months, too.

Sorry to be repetitive. I'm not pimping the game, either. It is what it is, and you'll like it or not. Just wanted to make sure people know there's a cheaper option to get the freeform goodness available.

I know this doesn't help, but to be fair, the free to play model for CO is more generous than the one for CoH. The only major restriction is on the ability to play freeform, and the archetypes are playable, though most aren't nearly as good for solo play as a freeform.

If you do decide to give it another try, then this forum is a good resource for free players: http://champions-online.proboards.com/index.cgi

It may be worth it to research the archetypes offered and if none of the free archetypes suit you, see if any of the paid archetypes are worthwhile. Otherwise, the freeform slot is an option, but I wouldn't drop fifty bucks on it on the off chance you'll warm up to the game.

Content-wise, the best content is in the comic series. They've made those free for everyone.

All that said, it's not really the same experience you get from CoH. It took me a while to warm up to it (especially the character art style), but taken for what it is, it's fun to pop in and out of from time to time. If you go the subscription route, the paid time cards on Amazon are the cheapest option.

Solely on the basis of the "I'm a superhero" rush you get from playing your character, it's OK. It won't match that first time experience in CoH simply because that was the firs time you got that feeling. But it's OK on that account, IMO. (It may take a few levels to get to that feeling, but then so did CoH back at release.)

This is the thing that bugs me about NCSoft's interaction with their player base. (Their treatment of their employees was far worse, but that's another matter.) Most MMOs that go out do so in a predictable manner. Servers get consolidated, and the players know the base is shrinking. The game goes into maintenance mode and no new content is released for a while. The faithful truck on, and enjoy what they have, but they know what's eventually coming. Then, the time comes. There's usually a bit of fanfare and some sort of event staged. This gives the players a sense that their loyalty has been appreciated and maybe helps give a sense of closure.

NCSoft? You just get an abrupt announcement and a huge F-U.

I don't know why they did what they did. Personally, if I was running a company worth billions of dollars, and decided to cut off a service I'd been providing to tens of thousands of loyal customers, I'd handle things a little more generously.

The game isn't so much revolutionary as evolutionary.

Ever try to solo with a tank at launch of CoH? You'd hunker down with a spawn of mobs, and diligently work at whittling down their health. A few minutes later, some blaster would cruise by and nuke the remaining 80% of said mobs' health away, and take the proportional XP away at no risk, because you had the aggro. Pretty annoying.

Ever play any game with a gathering system, like WoW? Racing people to the mining nodes was fun! Wasting time in a dungeon deciding who'd get to tap the rare resource nodes was productive! Not.

Ever join an instance in an MMO and hear a round of ******** and moaning because your class or spec choice is sub-optimal? (Eyes WoW here.) Doesn't happen in GW. Neither does sitting around waiting for a tank or healer, both of which are in short demand because playing either role in a PUG is utterly unrewarding. (Another WoW reference. Also some in DDO and other games. Never seen this kind of garbage in CoH.) GW2 tries to eliminate that as much as possible, but to be successful you'll need to know how to run your character, because there's an expectation of self sufficiency built into the game. (The dungeons tend to be tuned on the hard side.)

Guild Wars 2 tries to take these annoyances out of the equation, and they do a pretty good job of it. You don't have to be ticked off if someone wanders by and helps you with something. You don't have to worry about who gets a gathering node, because everyone can hit the same node. Removing that kind of petty competition is fairly innovative, and worth while.

Another innovation is the downed state. When you lose all your health, you don't just pop to the nearest hospital or grave yard. You get a chance to rally by continuing to attack using an alternate tool bar. What you have available varies by class. My warrior may have the option to throw rocks at an enemy, while my elementalist can shift into mist form and move to a new position. You can chose to attack or to bandage yourself. The biggie, though, is that any other player who comes across you in a downed state can give you first aid. And they DO! This reinforces positive behavior, rather than other game systems that encourage petty competition. (Not that competition is petty, I mean competition over petty stuff.)

Overall, these are the selling points of the game. These, and the incredible graphics and decent music. Aside from these things, the game is still a fantasy MMO. You still kill X number of critters (even though X is a variable more often than not), carry crap from point A to point B, click on stuff, etc. That's all there. It's just packaged to be a lot more sociable. In beta, it was a very friendly environment.

Does it work out perfectly? I don't know. It's going to depend heavily on the player base and what kind of culture arises from it. The biggest hitch I see in their plan for a kinder, gentler MMO is that hardly anyone bothers to chat much. If you heal someone back up from a downed state, they may type a quick "TY" before moving on. If anything, the game may be too solo friendly in general.

My overall impression is that it's a solid, very polished, state of the art MMO. But it's still an MMO. I don't think any MMO will ever match CoH for the sheer thrill of a first time play experience. CoH was the first MMO I stuck with past the kill ten rats stage. (Where the rats were capable of beating your heavily armored a** into the dirt, btw.) You may not have felt *that* super out of the gate, but at least if you went down it was to some Hellion with a shotgun and not an over-sized rodent. Gain a few levels and .... Perez Park! Where I met my SG. Had a lot of fun times leveling with those guys.

It's not strictly a matter of server resources. It's more along the lines of having issues with configurations, etc. on servers added right before launch. Capacity shouldn't be an issue once those problems are fixed.

Yeah, I never understood the need to rush to the cap on a game that has just been released. You'll just run out of end game content sooner. Then again, I've always been an altaholic, smell the roses, kind of player in any MMO.

Minor quibble. Villains didn't launch in the face of Chuck Norris. They didn't even launch in the face of Mr. T, who was the first celebrity endorsement ad. (Mr. T was 2007, with the first wave Verne Troyer and William Shatner. Chuck Norris was 2011, in the pre-LK wave of celeb ads.)

That's not to say that WoW wasn't a huge juggernaut that had way more mainstream exposure than any MMO before or since. It was just a slightly smaller juggernaut in 2005.

Now, Villains did launch in the face of Chuck Norris Facts taking over and displacing the original Vin Diesel facts in late 2005. From WoW launch until later in 2005, Barrens chat was filled with Vin Diesel fact jokes. The Norris jokes were a spin off of the same site that started them, but rapidly took prominence. Maybe because of Conan O'Brien. (Or maybe because they seem to fit Norris better anyway. Diesel has always come off as a bit more modest and doesn't push the macho image in real life as much.)

Back on topic: I do think the original post makes a great point about all of the support that NCSoft has given CoH over the years, but something has changed. NCSoft is not a monolithic entity. People change. Apparently, the current crop of people are the sort who will lay off an entire company with no notice. Right at back to school time. Just a few months before the holiday season. Not to mention the destruction of the community the prior NCSoft helped foster. The act goes against their own company motto, which I'm going to assume was written by the first set of guys.

If they reverse their decision, or at least are open to some alternate solution such as sale to another company, then that may mitigate the damage to their reputation (for me, anyway) somewhat. I personally won't trust them enough to invest in any of their older games. When DDO went free to play, I supported them with a lot of cash shop purchases, because they were proving themselves to be trustworthy, and seemed intent on keeping the game running and improving it. NCSoft seemed to be on the same track for the last year or so, and I was excited about all the changes. But this 360 has done a serious amount of harm to their relationship with the fans.

In short, I'm not enraged by their decision, but I will be cautious in dealing with NCSoft going forward.

You must be a leveling fool if you've already seen the endgame. Is the leveling curve really that fast? (They had it turned up a notch or three in the last beta weekends, so it's hard to conceive of hitting level cap that fast.)

If you haven't been able to team for story quests, it's a bug. You should be able to. The functionality was there in the beta weekends and worked fine then.

Right. That server only has about 7 characters on it, anyway. Some of those, I'd logged into recently, but others haven't been logged in in a long while. Those are the locked ones. (I returned with a VIP account a little before this update, so these "locked" characters were ones that had been archived but that I hadn't gotten around to logging in yet.)

The problem isn't so much that I can't access the characters, but that on this particular server, it's tossing up the message that some slots have been locked because I've gone free to play. It may just be a display issue, or an issue with generating the wrong error message for the situation.

I just figured I'd post and let the devs know. I've /bugged it in game too. I don't really care about those characters anyway, and had only logged in to delete them to free up names for other people, as they were just characters that I'd used to test some powersets on way way back.

This isn't the "testing forum" it's the "Player Help > Player Guides" forum. If your guide doesn't address an issue, then I think it's fair to point it out. The poster's stated intent was to let people know that they don't need to skip over Illusion b/c your test doesn't reflect real world performance.

I know that you mentioned that you were only testing for this specific case, but I don't think it hurts for someone to reiterate that, given that a lot of people don't read too closely, and many will just skip down to your results tables, which could lead to an uninformed decision.

This isn't the Controller board. You might have thought to include that information in your original post here, too.