Quick update...

I had forgotten that it was a bug, but that's a far more specific accident that worked out in their favor. Almost the entire powers system structure was filled with implications the devs didn't really grasp until players took them and went berserk with them. The strength of buffs, the wide variety of buffs available, the ways survival buffs like defense and DR stacked, and the high base HP regenerative powers of player characters all combined to create a system that made us very powerful, and at the same time, that the original devs lliterally didn't understand.

When I started playing CoH, my SG was fighting +10 critters in Talos within a couple of weeks after pre-release. The devs had to put in the "purple patch" and caps on XP gain just to try and limit how powerful we were and how fast that power let us progress. The initial purple patch was much more draconian than what we have today. With the original purple patch, fighting a +1 was more like fighting a +2 is now. Doing so with TOs was completely pointless. They had to give it more spread because of the limitations of the side kick system of the day.

As innovative and awesome as the SK system was, everyone had to have their own mentor, and the levels of all the mentors didn't have to match. Being an SK made you -1 to your mentor. There was, originally, no ability to change mission difficulty setting, so everyone usually wanted to do the missions of the highest level character on the team, so all the level spread was shifted down. You needed players with TOs and DOs to be able to be at least a little useful against +1 or +2 critters, because it was terribly common for an SK to have a mentor who was at least -1 to the current mission holder. So the purple patch was made less intense so we could actually fight more than +0s.

So we have characters who had the raw power to take on +10s with buffs, now restricted to usefully fighting +3 or so foes. But that meant that, with buffs, we were amazingly good at fighting +0 foes - the baseline difficulty the game presented to us. So we usually settled on something higher that didn't get into the worst of the diminishing returns. That was usually perceived to be +2, AKA "Invincible" and later "Relentless" for CoV. (If you had strong AoEs, you were often better on the settings that were, in rough terms, equivalent to (+0/x2) and (+1/x2) today. If you were strong at single-target damage and could take the harder hits, (+2/x1) was usually the best XP/time.)

This has been the root of so many things about the game. The perceptions of baseline (average) speeds at which people leveled, the drive to create mission difficulty settings ... but the biggest thing it led to was the ability to take on huge spawns - one of the most comic-book-like things I think this game delivers outside things like travel powers.

Its one reason I am not sure any game will ever be able to replace CoH for me, because, at its core, I love CoH's gameplay because its balance was broken. Well, "broken" in the sense that it was nothing like what the devs originally aimed for. Despite that they put a bounding box around us with the "purple patch", that brokenness has been a core aspect of the game since release. It's in the game's DNA, as it were, and bleeds into everything the devs have given us since then (good and bad).

And for the most part, I've enjoyed that about it immensely.

I don't know if anyone would be insane enough to implement a system like this on purpose. I'm not sure any more carefully balanced system will ever deliver the raw sense of power this game does. And I certainly don't think it's likely that anyone will accidentally hit the same sweet spots ever again.

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!


Now go and kick werewolves, Statesman!

I haven't seen high-end CO play, and for a variety of reasons, likely never will. But it sounds like its high end offers something that might be comparable to Scrappers, Brutes, or even some things we can't have here, like Ranged/Armored characters. But I don't think that would quite match the high end here on a team, even if you could get lots of mobs together, because the buffs and debuffs are weaker.

I solo a melee characters a lot in CoH, so I certainly can appreciate the notion of a game that lets you build such characters, but I also do things like speed TFs and iTrials, and in those contexts, a lot of the crazy things we pull off in CoH are strongly influenced by buffs and debuffs. Something like the Really Hard Way badge from the Magisterium iTrial is impossible without overwhelming debuffs. (Naturally, I realize it is only set up that way because we have such strong debuff options.) I will miss that big picture of collective overpowered play, assuming of course no one recreates something like it. If they do, I will be very likely to check it out.

(Controls in CoH are a lot of fun too, at least in PvE. They're kinda crazy, though, and clearly a bit hard to balance even in PvE. Another place I have a hard time seeing other people follow.)