I didn't appreciate CoX's innovations until ...

One way in which I'm different from a lot of you is that my MMO gaming history is at serious right angles to most of you: I literally never played any of the "popular" MMORPGs. I didn't go from Everquest to World of Warcraft to here; I went from Anarchy Online to Neocron to Star Wars: Galaxies to here. So there are a lot of things that, I only recently came to understand, are literal standards of the MMO genre, things that almost no other MMO designer can think past or around, things that 90% of all MMO players think are mandatory parts of the MMO genre, that I had literally never been exposed to. Then I went and played Tabula Rasa. And when I started complaining bitterly about it, specifically about features that it shares with another (deceased) MMO called Auto Assault, only then did my friends get it through to me that nobody understood what I was complaining about, because everything I was complaining about was how MMOs just naturally are.

So during this last week of the year, let me take a break from my (honestly, increasingly bitter) arguments about some of the things I hate in this game, especially since issue 11, to thank the City of Heroes/City of Villains development team for a long list of things that they did right that are so, so much more creative and innovative, so much more ground breaking, than I ever gave them credit for.

No Attribute Points: In hindsight, I don't know how I failed to notice they were missing. But I never felt they added anything to the other games; they were one more way to accidentally gimp your character by not making the right choices. Attribute points are a hold-over from the earliest primitive editions of D&D, where every character had more or less the same armor and weapons and where your attribute points were the only customization there were. Where you got the guts to drop them completely from this design, and how you stuck to your guns when NCsoft management almost has to have leaned on you to put them in? I have no idea. But thank you for the courage. You removed some highly unnecessary complexity.

Ubiquitous Instanced Missions: When I started playing City of Heroes after coming here (in part) from Anarchy Online, I complained bitterly about the fact that roughly half of my missions were street sweeping missions. (Nearly all of Anarchy Online's missions are instanced. Or at least they used to be; Eris only knows what that game is like any more.) Only recently has anybody gotten it through my head just how rare instanced missions are in almost every other game, and how expensive they are to develop. Only literally just in the last week have I gotten it through my head that in almost every MMO in the history of the industry, you get maybe 1 instanced mission every other character level, on average over the course of your career, that 99% of the missions you get sent on are street sweeping missions.

Oh, and how did I forget to mention, at first, how amazing it is that your instanced missions adjust automatically to the character level? I took that for granted. Only in the last week did people get it through to me that fixed-difficulty instanced missions are something that the entire rest of the MMO industry takes for granted. The frustration of being given those missions 2 or 3 levels before your average player could complete them, and being told "if you can't complete the instance, go level up 2 more times and come back" is something that, bafflingly to me, the entire MMO industry does to its customers. Everybody, that is to say, but you. That's incredible. Thank you for getting that right.

But back to street sweeping for a second. Back when I started playing City of Heroes, I was complaining about street sweeping at a time when you'd cut the amount of searching all over the map for mobs of the right type and level in half already. Then you came out with City of Villains, where the amount of street sweeping dropped from half of all missions to maybe 5%. When I wrote my long list of broken missions in the level 20-25 range in CoV (and I still think that list is far too long, far longer than any other 5-level range in CoV), those "go street sweep against things 3 to 5 levels above you" missions that I complained about are, apparently, something that every player in every other MMO learns to take for granted will happen to them occasionally. Not knowing that, I didn't give you nearly enough credit for having figured out that you can come up with an equally time-consuming, equally fun, equally social game without that ugly feature. Thank you!

Flight: Right before I started City of Heroes, I remember watching a friend of mine cross the entire length of The Hollows ... with Hover. She was inordinately grateful to have that option at level 6; it was worth the interminable delay to her to not have to fight level 12 Igneous in Grendel's Gulch. And, like everybody else back then, she was designing her character around the assumption that she was going to take Flight or Super Jump at level 14. Nowadays, of course, all of the smarter players have Raptor Packs no later than level 8. In your game, no later than level 14, players who don't want to street sweep their way all the way to the mission door, going from enemy group to enemy group for a mile, against enemy groups that increase in difficulty to far above their level, can simply fly or jump up to the rooftop level and above and fly directly to the mission door. (A trick I used to also use in Anarchy Online starting at, if memory serves, level 20.) When mission doors are hidden in areas where the trees are grown together above them, making us thread ground-level mazes full of mobs, like in Perez Park or Primeva, some players, myself included, complain bitterly.

Only recently did I get it hammered into my head that almost every other MMO in the history of the genre considers the street sweeping your way a half a mile to a mile across the map, being forced to fight every spawn between point A and point B, to be the most important content in the game, to be an essential part of the MMO formula. That, I'm finally given to understand, and not the technical obstacles in 3D travel, is why other games are so resistant to flight. And I cannot thank you enough for having the courage to bet that you could continue to raise the development budget to replace all those endless hours of street sweeping with enough instanced missions to keep us playing for the same number of hours. No, really, no amount of thanks I could give you would be enough. Thanks!

Sidekicking and Exemplaring: A friend just pointed me to a blog in which a bunch of current and former MMO programmers are arguing about MMO design theory. And one of their most prominent articles, one they put a permanent sidebar link to, refers to the insoluble problem in all MMOs of what to do if you and a friend want to play together, but your friend has more time per week to play than you do? Pretty soon he's higher level than you; you can't survive his missions, and if he joins you for your missions, neither of you gets any XP. And I read that article, literally just the other day, with a kind of sick fascination. How could all these veterans of the industry not know that this problem got solved three and a half years ago?

And the funny thing is, an exemplar/sidekick system like yours is something that would be even easier to implement in every other MMO in the market. In every other game on the market, most of your combat stats are derived from character attributes that go up more or less linearly per level, and from the stats on equipment of whatever level you're using, which also increase more or less linearly per level. This means that for them, adding the ability to sidekick up to a friend's level, or exemplar down, could be added with not much more than one line of code, not counting the code to track distance between the mentor and sidekick. Because of the freeform power selection, City of Heroes has to memorize what order you picked your powers in, store that information as part of the character data, and adjust your power list on the fly as your level jumps up and down. (I do go back just barely far enough to remember when this didn't happen.) You went to the trouble of doing it, though. That's nothing less than amazing, now that I realize it.

That same game designers' blog insists that "the yellow exclamation point" (the yellow ring, in this game) that tells you that a contact has missions for you is the single greatest technological innovation in the history of MMO design. Garbage. The single greatest innovation in the history of MMO design is the sidekick/exemplar system, and because I didn't realize how revolutionary it still is, even three years after you introduced it, I didn't give you nearly enough credit for it. Thanks!

Cellphones: Because I didn't come to this game from an MMO that used contacts to give out missions (both Anarchy Online and Neocron use terminals that can be found everywhere to communicate with mission givers), I remember complaining bitterly in City of Heroes about how many times I had to run or fly all the way back to the contact before they would trust me with their cellphone number. I remember being extraordinarily grateful when you shortened that substantially in City of Villains, where almost every contact gives you their cellphone number after one mission for them, and most of the rest after two.

Only in the last week has somebody gotten it through to me that other games consider the travel time back to the contact, street sweeping your way the whole way back, to be an essential part of the content, just as I said about the need to walk everywhere, above. Which makes it almost ironic that the game that makes it possible for you to fly back to the contact instead of having to street sweep back to the contact is also the one that invented the in-game cellphone, that the game where it would be the least trouble to go back to the contact is the one that decided that it was still too much trouble. That was both innovative and incredibly generous of you. Thank you!

Extraordinary Forum: I never spent any amount of time on Anarchy Online's forums. Neocron, I remember, had very good forums. But when I blogged about Richard Garriott's bitter determination not to ever have an official forum for Tabula Rasa, only then did people point me to articles about the official forums in every other game, and why almost the entire remainder of the MMO industry wishes they had never turned theirs on. The horrific experiences I remembered from Anarchy Online and SWG, I had considered flukes, evidence of how malevolently awful and criminally stupid their customer service people were. Only now have I gotten it pounded into my head, by people who've played a lot more (and a lot bigger) MMOs than I have, how spoiled I am by the official forums for City of Heroes and City of Villains.

And here's the thing that really amazes me about this. I've played City of Heroes long enough now to have seen several lead moderators and several official community representatives disappear, to have to leave for personal reasons or to be poached away by other game companies. And every time it's happened, the entire player base held its breath, waiting for the inevitable decline into the same kind of horrific madness I remember from the SWG forums. But what happened instead, each and every time, is that the total unknown we got introduced to as a new forum moderator or as a new official representative to the community turned out to be at least as good as the old one, sometimes even better!

I've run enough online discussion groups and online communities in my life to know what a deft touch it takes. But online forums for these games bear a special burden: sometimes the official company rep to the forums has to tell people "no," and sometimes tell them "no" when they're good and thoroughly (and even sometimes not unreasonably) angry. There are ways to do this. At the very least, it takes someone who can get it across to people that they are being listened to, someone with the skill to actually hear, understand, and paraphrase back the complainers' arguments. Not many people involved in running MMO forums seem to realize just how important that one step is, that an awful lot of the anger comes not from people not getting what they want, but from people feeling like they're being held in contempt, that they're beneath the company's notice. There's also an entirely different tightrope to walk sometimes, and watching the moderators here do it taught me really how it's done. There's a gift, a skill, to telling people that the door isn't closed on their suggestion forever, to convincing them that the games' developers really are watching the game to see if the change the users are demanding is needed, that if actual evidence convinces the developers (somewhere down the road months from now) that the players were right that then the complaining players will get their way. Actually, that part is easy. The hard part is doing so without creating in the complainers the expectation that it's inevitable that they'll win.

I don't know where NCsoft is finding these people, or how they're taking ordinary moderators and community reps and training them to be this good. But only recently has anybody gotten it through to me just how rare and unusual this talent is, to what extent NCsoft has a near monopoly on it. And it's important to both the quality of the game and the quality of the relationship between us customers and you the company, it's the source of an awful lot of the goodwill between us. So again, thank you for making it look so easy that I never appreciated just how unusual and amazing you were being.

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Don't get me wrong. There are still things that I don't like about City of Villains, mostly balance issues and a few obnoxious missions. There are a awful lot more things I don't like about City of Heroes, mostly areas where some of the innovations I mentioned above haven't been back-incorporated into the design. I still think the sound quality in both games sucks badgers. I still think some enemy groups are way overused, and some storylines and villain groups are way underused. But now that I realize just how far the entire rest of the industry lags behind City of Heroes and especially behind City of Villains in overall level of innovation and customer service, I realize just how well and thoroughly spoiled I am. Thank you!

Times like this I wish we could still offer starts to posters.

Best I'm afraid I can do is to 5-star this thread.

Yep, good post. And, as somebody who has in fact played a few of the more mainstream MMOs (EQ1 and 2, DAoC), you're absolutely right: the basic formula for MMOs is to create as much tedium as possible to keep people playing, while making sure that carrot is always in plain view to convince them to stay despite the tedium. This is why I came back to CoX after heading to EQ2 for a while. I rarely if ever feel like I'm being forced to do unfun things in order to pursue that darn carrot

Admit it, you were visited by three ghosts the other night, weren't you?

Yes, travel powers, sidekicking, and instanced missions are all trés wunderbar.

Nice post. I quite agree with everything, (sidekicking, the great conveniences, the well-maintained forum community) except I'm in the weird minority that actually likes street sweeping. Especially solo.

So thank you for keeping the -choice- in the game (eg. Borea's missions) and for spending so much hard work decorating the recent zones (Striga onwards, all of CoV) with enemies that give you an immersive sense of the world and react so satisfyingly to being broken up. Even if most people zoom past them anyway to instanced missions.

Here's the thing that blows my mind that other game designers don't "get" about the combination of travel powers and instanced missions, that pretty nearly only City of Heroes and Anarchy Online got right. Some times I only have half an hour or an hour to play, maybe less. What I want to do at those times is travel directly to an instanced mission, get the instanced mission done, fly back to a safe place to log out, and log out.

What appalls me, after playing this game, is looking over my mission list and realizing that just to get to where the (fill in the blank) mobs spawn, I'm in for half an hour of street sweeping each way, then 20 minutes to a half an hour of waiting for the right mobs to spawn and/or looking for them. That's something that City of Villains, in particular, almost never asks me to do, and after level 6 or so never forces me to do.

this almost completely mirrors my experiences with other MMOs, and is the reason why, even though i only have 5-10 hours per week to play cox now, i'll continue to subscribe until it goes under.

This is my First and Only MMO. I am SO glad I didn't start with one of those - might have left and never come back! Thanks for summarizing this. I hope some magazine picks it up and publishes it somewhere.

These topics that you mentioned are one of the main things that make me play this game... CoX doesn't feel like it's trying to drain your life away like other MMOs.

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Yes, travel powers, sidekicking, and instanced missions are all trés wunderbar.

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Absolutely. It's a pleasure to get a travel ability at level 14 instead of level 40 (only to find you can't afford to "learn" how to use it...) in other craptacular MMO's that shall remain nameless...

I had a similar epiphany when I played 9Dragons a while back. I got into the game and managed to get sucked right into a massive grind and waste of time for increasingly distant rewards. These games seem to be built to lure, offering lots of content, friendly missions and easy enemies in the beginning, but that's where all the really cool stuff actually ends, and the rest of the game is just a grind for the next level. In that game, I actually gained one quest per level, so all I had left to do was find a nice patch of enemies and grind for the next level. Bleh!

Some of the first things I noticed was the interface. We all complain about CoH's interface, but every other MMO I've played has had it a lot worse. For the life of me, could never figure out how to send personal messages to people. The line commands did not work, and forget about clicking on someone's name and chatting like you do in CoH. There were no tabs and channels to talk into, either. It's just a series of commands. An exclamation point - ! - in front of your text sends it to team, for example. There is no such thing as Broadcast, and forget about help. You need help, you run to a populated village and start asking.

Sidekicking is, as you said, a MAJOR benefit. In after the second day I had to sit around and do nothing while my friend caught up, I outright left the game. If I can't play with my friends and the game isn't fun enough on it's own, then it's not worth it. Why aren't more games doing this? If it's true that a community keeps an MMO alive, doesn't it stand to reason that allowing the people from that community to play together more would only help with that? I'm a person who solos most of the time and even I was bugged I couldn't team up with the people I wanted to.

And then there's the presence of reverse progress. I went at length with a few erudite posters on the 9Dragons boards about why it was OK for your weapons to have a change of breaking (as in, gone from your inventory completely) when you were trying to enhance them, and why it was OK for you to lose experience every time you died, and why it was OK to lose Karma points (gained for grinding a LOT and used for a few powerful items) when you died, and why it was OK to lose blood points (used to make the enhancing ingredients for weapons) when you died and so forth. While they did agree it was basically an intentional time sink, I did meet with a few people who felt anything any more forgiving was just not fun. And I don't get that.

I'm not sure about you guys, but I love our debt system. Sure, it may slow you down as much as loss of experience can, theoretically, with it at least you can never get stuck re-earning the same span of progress over and over and over again. Sure, you're improving slower, but you ARE improving. You never go back, only forward. I've never had a moment in this game when I've though "Well, gee, with that death now the last two hours I spent grinding are gone down the drain. I wish I'd gone to see a movie, instead." The only time I've regretted time spent in the game has been failing TFs I'm exemplared to, and even that only when the team wasn't fun. Other than that, everything I do in this game has some value to me, and even if it doesn't necessarily progress me, it never brings me back.

And that's another thing - unlike all other MMOs, this game has a consequence for failure that, while significant, is not something to really be concerned about. In other games I've seen people outright freak out when they die, costing themselves sometimes days of hard work, to say nothing of hours of travel time. Here, you fall, you take your debt, get back up and you're back and running where you left off within minutes. And that's before you even consider the wide, WIDE availability of powers that can wake you up on the spot without missing a beat. A Lineage II player would die and tear his hair out. A City of Heroes player would die, pop Rise of the Phoenix and keep on laying the smackdown.

And, I don't know about WoW, but most MMOs I've seen don't actually HAVE a team search function. You form teams basically by running into people grinding the same monsters you are and blind-inviting them because they move out of Local range before you can type a proposal. I'm starting to see where this culture of just inviting random people as soon as you get the chance to comes from.

Which brings me to the value I place in the community of this game in general. Sure, I'm not a big person on communities and, despite spending way too much here, I don't particularly need a community to be part of. But the people who make up our community are, individually, a lot more communicative and responsive than the people I've seen just about anywhere else, plus their spelling and grammar are worthy of much praise. People in game are open to talking in a coherent manner, will respond to communication and are generally helpful and nice. It's not a 100% guarantee, of course, but this is the only game I know where I can pick up a random stranger and we could have a nice chat while we go about our business. All other games I've played feature people who mostly play together because the game requires more than one person, not specifically because they like the company of other people.

Plus, this is the only game where I can cut people with swords, shoot them with guns, burn them with flames, blast them with radiation, send armies after them, where I can jump, run, fly, teleport, where I can look any way I like and where the story really intrigues me, all in the same game. Yeah, the boys at Cryptic and NCsoft really did something right here

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I think Brad finally gets how I feel after having played EQ and DAoC, especially re: world-based spawns, grinds, and travel. Besides some of the lvl 45+ street missions (kill 50 Malta AND 50 Carnies in PI?!? ), i wholeheartedly agree with the OP.

To the OP: I'd be interested in reading that MMO developer blog if you'd post or send me the URL.

I would like to add my thanks as well. One aspect you left out, though, is the continuing release of "Issues", all of which are free, since the start of CoH. All of these Issues have advanced the story line of Paragon City for all of us, as well as giving new content. In WoW, for instance, the upgrades they release cost to play.

Another benefit of CoH/CoV is the minimal "Raiding". Yes, there has always been Hamidon, but there has never been a requirement to do it, and those that don't aren't gimped for lack of equipment.

Finally, I'd point out how simple it is to get a group together in CoH. Almost any time of day, at almost any level, you can get some Heroes together and do some radio missions. Yes, we all have PUG horror stories, but those aren't the norm, that's why we tell them. I've played Tabula Rasa. While they have some good tech (like being able to move while shooting), their group-seeking leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, in TR, grouping only really helps you when you are doing an instance that's above your level (and there are only about 3 Instances per level), or if something is in short supply: "Kill a certain Boss that only spawns once every 30 minutes. Oh yeah, everyone else will be trying to kill him too, and you only get credit if you fire the killing blow, unless you are on a team. Good luck, soldier." In CoH, XP seems to just roll in on even half-decent teams, and finding teams is a breeze.

Are there things I'd change? Sure! I think a bunch of Heroes standing around in an Auction House is just dumb; we should be able to access WWs by laptop, just like you do eBay now. They should make a simple way to transfer Influence between characters on the same account. And don't get me started about the lack of jetpacks as a costume option!

But the evolution of CoH really is amazing. You can change servers. You can rename your character. It doesn't take an act of Congress to Respec your powers. Game changes and the reasons for them are explained and usually put on Test for player feedback before they hit the Live servers. There are a bazillion costume choices, so running across someone that looks like you is almost impossible. CoH/CoV is the best MMO out there, period.

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Sidekicking and Exemplaring: A friend just pointed me to a blog in which a bunch of current and former MMO programmers are arguing about MMO design theory. And one of their most prominent articles, one they put a permanent sidebar link to, refers to the insoluble problem in all MMOs of what to do if you and a friend want to play together, but your friend has more time per week to play than you do? Pretty soon he's higher level than you; you can't survive his missions, and if he joins you for your missions, neither of you gets any XP. And I read that article, literally just the other day, with a kind of sick fascination. How could all these veterans of the industry not know that this problem got solved three and a half years ago?

And the funny thing is, an exemplar/sidekick system like yours is something that would be even easier to implement in every other MMO in the market. In every other game on the market, most of your combat stats are derived from character attributes that go up more or less linearly per level, and from the stats on equipment of whatever level you're using, which also increase more or less linearly per level. This means that for them, adding the ability to sidekick up to a friend's level, or exemplar down, could be added with not much more than one line of code, not counting the code to track distance between the mentor and sidekick. Because of the freeform power selection, City of Heroes has to memorize what order you picked your powers in, store that information as part of the character data, and adjust your power list on the fly as your level jumps up and down. (I do go back just barely far enough to remember when this didn't happen.) You went to the trouble of doing it, though. That's nothing less than amazing, now that I realize it.

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To be fair, Everquest II does have Exemplaring. Multiple higher level players can exemplar down to one low character's level and the low level character will earn bonus experience for each mentor. The mentors also earn experience, but at a reduced rate.

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You forget one thing with street sweeping (that Stealth sort of touched on.)

No "must get loot from spawns." No spawn camping or spawn competition.

Playing TR in beta, or that WoW trial? "Kill some of these things, and bring back their intestines so I can make soup!"

Yeah, well ten of the other people - who don't, by the way, want to team - in the area are doing the same thing. Then there are people who are just running by killing them for a little more XP, or crafting material or just for the heck of it, and because *they* got the kill, YOU now have to kill 150 of them to get those 10 randomly selected drop items.

Here? "Kill 30 Crey" means "Kill 30 Crey." Not "And collect rare item piece blah blah blah that only drops in one in five, IF you get the kill shot." If you're supposed to get a location, you don't wait for the Scroll of Ancient Dude's Kneecaps to drop. When you kill the 30th one (or whatever,) you get the info.

And, as mentioned - you don't have to street sweep there and back again.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Samuel Tow: Yes, absolutely freaking yes, the Team Find button in this game is amazingly useful. I don't care how many people complain about blind invites; in other games, the only "invite" window is a broadcast chat message in the LFG channel. Well, at least in most of them you can apparently find and click-invite people on your Friends list, yeah - but see above regarding sidekicking, absence thereof in other games. The search window is something I took for granted after playing this game, and shouldn't have. Credit where credit is due. Yet another innovation that's pretty nearly unique to City of Heroes/City of Villains, one I wasn't giving them enough credit for because I didn't realize how few games had caught up to them in this regard yet.

Jessex: http://www.zenofdesign.com/

I'm sorry to see you had to experience Tabula Rasa first hand before you realized how it was one of the most over-hyped games of the past 2 years. (and thats saying alot). What it promised in bucklets it delivered in drips and when you play and then look back at interviews with Richard Garriott you can see that the clues were there all along. The founder of the MMO has totally lost touch with where the genre is today, in the interviews he talks about turn based combat and standing toe-to-toe with enemies while numbers are crunched. He claims that dynamically changing battle fields, customisable weapons, real-time 3D combat with stat modifiers and use of cover are revolutionary. So unless I've been reading the wrong websites and magazines and playing obscure MMOs for the past 5 years I could have sworn that all of those things have become commonplace, maybe not all in the same game but certainly done somewhat.

Dynamically controlled territory. Planetside.
Real-Time combat which uses terrain: Every MMO since SWG, except WoW.
Customisable weapons: Every MMO since Anarchy Online.

But CoH has all of these, ok so the dynamically controleld terrain is limited to PvP environments so it's yet to move to PvE but it is there. It's not something TR invented like Mr G would claim. To be fair, Cryptic broke the MMO genre mold a loooooong time ago and we're only now seeing new developers pick up the peices. The Team Seek function, renewable respecs, dropping stat attributes in favour of customised powers/weapons which are clear, exemplaring/sidekicking so you don't have to always find someone near your level, missions which are available as soon as you log on without needing to run across half the game world to a contact.

There is so much that CoX has done for the genre but saddly its gone unawares by many people due to a lack of advertising, it's too late now to capitalize on the success of the game as it's looking too aged these days compared to new MMOs. However I still feel that more exposure is needed.

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You forget one thing with street sweeping (that Stealth sort of touched on.)

No "must get loot from spawns." No spawn camping or spawn competition.

Playing TR in beta, or that WoW trial? "Kill some of these things, and bring back their intestines so I can make soup!"

Yeah, well ten of the other people - who don't, by the way, want to team - in the area are doing the same thing. Then there are people who are just running by killing them for a little more XP, or crafting material or just for the heck of it, and because *they* got the kill, YOU now have to kill 150 of them to get those 10 randomly selected drop items.

Here? "Kill 30 Crey" means "Kill 30 Crey." Not "And collect rare item piece blah blah blah that only drops in one in five, IF you get the kill shot." If you're supposed to get a location, you don't wait for the Scroll of Ancient Dude's Kneecaps to drop. When you kill the 30th one (or whatever,) you get the info.

And, as mentioned - you don't have to street sweep there and back again.

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I played Ever Quest. Camping is something I don't miss at all. REALLY don't miss at all. I don't miss the lines, the waiting, the chance what you want won't drop at all, the ninja looters...NONE of it. Ick. Occasionally in CoH/CoV you hear a little complaining about kill stealing in the newbie zones, but, back in EQ Kill Stealing was bad news, because it happened at all levels and cost you the chance of the loot off the critter or Named...the Named that might only spawn once in a blue moon if the sun rose in the West(Stupid flying horse in South Karana, I am talking about YOU!). Plus, there were at that time no instances at all. If someone was following you to harrass, the only option you really had was to log out.

I'll agree that sidekicking and exemping are marvelous. The chat system here is also wonderful. Having a team seek tool is splendid.

And I may never again be able to play a game that doesn't let me fly.

I adore how flexible the teams are. I very much like that you don't need the standard MMO formula of tanker+healer+DPS but instead can build a realistic team of 8 blasters or whatever and still succeed. I like that you can bend the ATs that we *do* have into things like scrapfenders or blappers or blaptrollers, to name a few of my favorites. I like the flexibility. I like being able to get teams easily.

I love being *able* to solo on any of my characters. Even my most "team support" character can street sweep some while looking for a team. In other games you often end up not being able to do that depending on what character class you choose.

I like being able to log on for a half hour or an hour and being able to get something done. I like not having to do "corpse runs" to get all my stuff back.

I don't miss keys. We actually *have* a mechanism somewhat like keys, in that you have to unlock certain contacts. There are certain zones you can't get to before certain levels. However, there is nothing so far like the zones in EQ that you had to grind and camp and quest for the key to a zone...and certain guilds had requirements that you have the keys already before you even applied to join. Then there were the keys that you had to Raid to get. Certain guilds discovered that they could block other guilds from successfully getting those keys, and did so for months at a time....I don't miss that. At. All. There was an attitude of competition, of trying to stay on top, that I just haven't run into here.

I like CoH so very much more.

I gave a 2 week trial of WOW and remember one quest I was given to find something that I had to fight and I couldn't find it no matter how long I searched. Wasn't really all that impressed with WOW, but really love COX!

One thing that I think deserves a mention every time sidekicking/exemplaring is brought up is global chat. Nowhere else have I seen a system that let me stay so well in touch with my friends online. Hell, it beats IM programmes sometimes. This is indispensable and goes hand-in-hand with being able to play with said friends regardless of your levels. The people I've met and stayed in touch in this game, they're still here with even three years after the fact. Even if we don't team a lot, even if we don't actually physically see each other's characters for months (blasted faction divide!), we still keep in touch and chat, either person to person or in the greater channel we've established (several times over, thanks to global dying twice).

I remember playing Lineage 2, and if my friend was sitting right here on the chair besides mine, communication would have been a real pain. I remember 9Dragons and its team menu tucked away to the side and so tiny I'd always forget I was even ON a team at all. And it's not like anyone cared. They invited everyone and whoever stayed helped and whoever didn't would eventually leave.

Global is a jewel in the crown in this game and, in my opinion, the way to go in the future. If MMOs are built on their social aspect, then allowing people communicate easily and always keep in touch HAS to be a very positive thing indeed. With a global friends list, you can always find your friends regardless of what character they're playing, even if it's some random newbie they threw together 5 minutes ago and are still running through Outbreak. You can always find them and you can always team with them, barring server and faction divides. Far beyond chatting with people's characters, you're communicating with the actual people, and if there's one thing that fosters a friendly environment, that's a personable medium of communication.

I think global chat is the single-best feature in our game as pertains to our ability to interact with the rest of the player base, along with a reliable and simple interface to make use of it. We all take it for granted, but finding out you're missing it is a rather jarring experience.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Barring two minor annoyances (having to set up your chat windows again with every new character, and Rikti Invasion notices being sent to the System channel where they are extremely easy to miss) I think the chat system in this game is nearly flawless. Once they finally get rid of intermittent bugs that cause the loss of channels or reset the default channel on zoning, it will truly be peerless.

[ QUOTE ]
Flight: Right before I started City of Heroes, I remember watching a friend of mine cross the entire length of The Hollows ... with Hover. She was inordinately grateful to have that option at level 6; it was worth the interminable delay to her to not have to fight level 12 Igneous in Grendel's Gulch. And, like everybody else back then, she was designing her character around the assumption that she was going to take Flight or Super Jump at level 14. Nowadays, of course, all of the smarter players have Raptor Packs no later than level 8. In your game, no later than level 14, players who don't want to street sweep their way all the way to the mission door, going from enemy group to enemy group for a mile, against enemy groups that increase in difficulty to far above their level, can simply fly or jump up to the rooftop level and above and fly directly to the mission door. (A trick I used to also use in Anarchy Online starting at, if memory serves, level 20.) When mission doors are hidden in areas where the trees are grown together above them, making us thread ground-level mazes full of mobs, like in Perez Park or Primeva, some players, myself included, complain bitterly.

Only recently did I get it hammered into my head that almost every other MMO in the history of the genre considers the street sweeping your way a half a mile to a mile across the map, being forced to fight every spawn between point A and point B, to be the most important content in the game, to be an essential part of the MMO formula. That, I'm finally given to understand, and not the technical obstacles in 3D travel, is why other games are so resistant to flight. And I cannot thank you enough for having the courage to bet that you could continue to raise the development budget to replace all those endless hours of street sweeping with enough instanced missions to keep us playing for the same number of hours. No, really, no amount of thanks I could give you would be enough. Thanks!

[/ QUOTE ]

Even better is when you take into account that if you want faster movement speeds in most other MMO's, you either need to:

Use a power to let you sprint for a limited amount of time, and sucks up all your endurance/spirit/mana/ect in fifteen seconds flat,

or

Wait till level 40 and spend an ungodly amount of money to buy a mount in order to move faster. (Or be one of the few classes that can quest for one).

And even *better* is that unlike those other games, CoH/V doesen't make you traipse all over the [censored] wilderness just to find a connecting flight path the be able to travel to it. Want to quick travel to another zone here? Hit the tram/ferry and be able to go to any zone it's connected to!

Also, and most importantly... NO [censored] GIANT RATS. I swear to [insert diety here] that if I have to spend five more minutes grinding wolves/snakes/stupid STUPID rat creatures! just to get their heads which may or may not drop, I'm gonna jab something sharp into my brainpan.

(Quick Response)

Very nice, well thought out post.

This forum has a few articulate posters who have managed to avoid the "short, choppy sentence" syndrome that permeates today's intarweb, as well as a quite a few one-line-only people. I could go on for hours about the evil of censorship and the small mindedness of some people, but that wouldn't serve any purpose; these forums have a veneer of respectability and courteousness, if you scratch at that veneer, the truly awful nature of -many- posters will waft out like a bad smell.

Yet, if I want to know something about CoH, this is the forum to check. The Player Guides section is gold -- people put in hours of effort to break down and explain stuff in the game, and it's mostly searchable. Thats the best part about the forum. The worst parts are the stupid quote pyramids, and endless one-liners from the forum-hermits, those sad people who spend more time in the forum looking for 'new posts' or adding their $0.00000000002 worth, RATHER than actually playing the game.

Now compared to OTHER forums dealing with MMO's, this forum is probably at the apex of the 'good pile'. The other forums are full of hate, idiocy, illiteracy, and 'one line only' garbage. What might be a veneer of respectability in here, at least makes people put in -some- token effort to be unoffensive, and even slightly informative and on topic; stuff which completely goes by the wayside over on World of Warcraft and Eve Online official forums.

But thats me preaching about my ideals and my misgivings -- your post was excellent, informative, and you admitted not understanding things. Not many people can do the hubris thing; they think it is a sign of weakness, something to absolutely avoid "I got something wrong".

See you around.

Ex