Thunder Knight

I thought I'd gotten all the sadness out, but not yet. Farewell to you all. May we meet in other games.

I'm not sure why "an 8-year-old game" should be presented as a negative. It doesn't mean the same thing for a MMO that it does for, say, a console game. CoH has constantly had an active dev team and a constant stream of updates (including, lest you forget, a highly-anticipated one still in beta when the game was killed) during most of its life, and those updates were just getting bigger and more frequent rather than slowing down, as opposed to an 8-year-old console game, which is exactly the same now as it was eight years ago.

For example, the I24 beta wasn't just a content update, it was an update to the technology itself, redoing a lot of the game's backend for improved cutscenes, better demo recordings, and customizing character powers. I24 was a huge technological improvement over I23, let alone I1. The game can do things now that the original developer team and early players could only dream of. That's not "an eight-year-old game". That's a game that's been constantly developed for eight years, which is not the same thing at all.

The whole point of MMOs is the long term play. Older but constantly-updated games are the ones with the amount of content for just such long-term player retention. (That's why, for example, the six-year-old Dofus - which gets regular updates every three months, and in fact has an update in Beta right at this moment - is still breaking subscription records in its home country of France, while its newer, shinier, fancier, and, frankly, better-designed sequel Wakfu appears to be stagnating after less than a year)

NCSoft clearly doesn't understand that it's better to have a small but loyal group who will stick around through thick and thin for nearly a decade than to get a bunch of people who play a shiny new game for a few months, get bored, and wander away.

But NCSoft is apparently looking to grab the latter crowd instead of the former. We need to point out the benefits of "an eight-year-old game" over a newer, shinier, fancier, smaller, emptier game.

So... one person offering a negative idea is now suddenly the entire community?

According to two separate sources, NCSoft is unwilling to sell before November 30th (due to being overcautious about legal entanglements). After that date, it's said they'll be lowering their asking price dramatically.

And Disney is... Disney. One of the largest most well-known companies in the world, with billions of dollars to toss around.

Nobody's pretending this is a sure thing; quite the opposite. This is the longest of longshots.

But it's better than sitting on our thumbs.

Yeah, that sounds like a terrible system. It sounds like my least-favorite part of the otherwise fun Elder Scrolls games. (And comparing it with FPS games - which I hate - doesn't make it sound more enticing)

I'll stick with hitting one key to target the enemy I want to target, rather than swinging wildly and hoping that something is actually there to get hit, thanks.

You'll note that nothing in the original post talked about setting.

Why haven't there been any games that copied WoW's setting while taking the aspects of CoH that made it fun to play?

I'd play a WoW-alike if it had the ability to make my character look exactly the way I want it to (and not buried under ten levels of gear), dozens of possible power combinations for the same class (and I don't mean the difference between one build spec and another, but the difference between Inv/ and SR/ Tankers or Storm/ and Empathy/ Defenders), or if it had Mez powers that let me entirely shut down bosses (like Controllers and Dominators), the ability to have a large crowd of powerful and controllable summons (like Masterminds), and/or the ability to take on huge groups of enemies solo, regardless of the window dressing.

Why haven't any games copied those aspects of CoH (which you can do while still setting it in a Generic Fantasy Realm Of Elves And Orcs), rather than copying WoW's "everyone must look alike", and "Mezzes are useless", and "all members of a classes play the same as all other members of that class", and "One hero can take on one regular enemy, if you want to fight a boss you need a full group" aspects?

... wait, what's the alternative to tab-to-target? Click-to-target? Or some sort of auto-targeting system that doesn't necessarily actually attack the target I want?

I like the slightly slower pace of CoH combat, which still is sometimes too fast for me.

It's "only a game", but in City of Heroes I get to live a fantasy that I don't get to live in any other MMO. Not only being a superhero, but being part of a superhero team where everyone is equally important, regardless of powers.

We joke about Superfriends now, looking at how silly it is and how Superman made everyone else seem useless, but I grew up watching that show. In the show itself, they never considered Batman (powers: has gadgets) or Wonder Woman (powers: has a rope) useless. To them, everyone was important to the team.

And in CoH, having an Inv/SS Tanker on a team doesn't make a MA/SR Scrapper useless, or an Archery/TA Corruptor useless, or anyone else useless. We could create our own unique heroes (or villains) who could then become part of something larger.

It was a game that celebrated individuality and creativity. The quickest way to get shunned in CoH was to blatantly copy an existing character. And that's unique in the MMO world, where conformity is the norm.

So now, I guess it's back to other MMOs where, if you want to join a team, the main priority is making sure your character is wearing EXACTLY the same armor and has EXACTLY the same build as every other character of your class, or "ur doin it rong".

CoH, I will miss you.

I keep thinking I've reached the Acceptance stage, then someone else says good-bye, and I go back to Stage 1 all over again.

I generally didn't comment on your topics or have any interaction with you whatsoever, but I'm going to miss your level-headed posts from someone who actually knew what she was talking about.

I'll just echo: good job. You'll be missed.

I wanted the Vanity Pet myself. It should have followed you by moving whenever you weren't looking at it, you know, like Watson.

Really, it's hard to name just ONE thing (a lot of what I love is how everything fits together), but a few would be:

Class/powerset is a big one. I love that, for example, a "Brute" could mean a hulking super strong and invulnerable guy, or an agile swashbuckler with a pair of rapiers, or staff-wielding stone figure, or dozens of other combinations of offensive and defensive powersets (and that's before pool powers and Epic/Patron powers get factored into the mix). In most MMOs I've tried, once you pick a class, that's it; all the powers you'll ever have are pretty much pre-selected for you at that point. CoH has enough variety that even playing the same class can be a completely different experience.

I also love the emphasis on survivability. What other game gives you the potential to be 75% resistant to damage with little work (let alone the 90% that some classes can achieve with a little work), or the "active defense" ability to completely shut down single enemies or even entire groups for long periods of time? (To compare: in a certain other superhero game, an "Invulnerability" character has about as much durability as a CoH Blaster with Tough and an Epic/Patron resistance toggle unless you devote your entire build to it)

And, yeah, I love Flight, as well as the other travel power options. Completely unrestricted, not requiring a special mount or quest to unlock, or any of the other drawbacks that plague travel powers in other games (when they have them at all). Flight is my favorite travel power in CoH (with Super Leap being a close second).

Honorable mention: Masterminds. A huge army of controllable (and namable!) summons, and possibly a few more uncontrollable pets or pet-like entities depending on your exact powersets (Gang War, Soul Extraction, Dark Servent, Tornado, Lightning Storm, many of the Traps, etc).

Psionic Melee has also appeared in the live client, in the same situation as Bio Armor and Sorcery (that is, unbuyable).

It would have been interesting, if the numbers weren't changed before release, because it had a 40-foot ranged confuse attack and a 100% Mag 3 hold in its Tier 8 attack.

Yes, exactly!

I realize I'm taking a risk here by making an analogy (which will then be misunderstood, possibly deliberately), but:

It's not like losing your car, going "Oh well, I liked that car", and then just getting another car.

It's like losing your car and being told that (for some reason - just go with it) there's no more cars anymore that you can replace it with, but you can still get a bicycle, a skateboard, or a giant mack truck that doesn't fit inside your garage.

Sure, they're all transportation that will get you where you want to go, and you may even learn to like them, but they're not the same as the car you lost, and you probably will even have to learn how to use them from scratch.

There are still other games available, but they're not the same. At best, they're vaguely similar, but they just aren't as much fun as CoH.

I've been playing video games since my Telstar Ranger in the 1970s (yes, I'm old), and I've been playing MMOs since I was first introduced to Dofus in 2005 (and from there I've also tried a bunch of others, including Wakfu, Kingdom of Loathing, a bit of Champions Online, and, of course, World of Warcraft - heck, I've even gotten a Toontown Online character as far as you can get in F2P), and only CoH has had that Perfect Storm of game features that has kept me continually wanting to play, and make the game my home.

Without it, I'll probably go back to drifting from game to game, never "settling down" again.

And that's what makes me sad.

From where I sit, it looks like the boycot is just a tool, a means to an end (with that end now being NCSoft selling the IP to someone who will reopen the game), not an end in itself. (This is how I felt about the petition - it wasn't itself going to get the game back, but it was going to be used as ammo by people who could get the game back)

It's focused on showing NCSoft that working with the SaveCoH movement (which, I would remind folks, also includes a New York Times best-selling author who has weekly chats with Bryan Clayton) is better for them in the long run than ignoring SaveCoH.

With that said, I do think that a few may have lost their way, and are now thinking that the boycot is an end in itself (or, at least, are enjoying watching NCSoft's stocks plunge).

(Though, on the other side of the coin, GW2's financial woes started long before the "Boycot NCSoft" movement did, or even before the announcement about CoH's closing was made. It was underselling right out of the gate - they expected 6 million sales, they got 2 million. That's a expectation-to-reality failure on the same scale as the notorious E.T. game for the Atari 2600)

Part of what made the community WAS the game, though. The community that developed in CoH, a cooperative game with a relatively casual difficulty level, is not going to be the same community that develops in, say, more antagonistic games where you compete with your teammates for loot drops and compete with other players in PvP.

One cannot simply "transfer" the cooperative and laid-back atmosphere of CoH to another game where the main focus is beating other players up and taking their stuff.

P.S., by the way, folks, I'm still waiting for an answer. Again: my question a few pages back was not rhetorical. Either tell me what game has the same features I loved in CoH ("but better", or so the claims go), or stop insisting that it's easy to just go and find another game.