MMORPG.com Top 5 MMOs That Need Remakes = CoH bashing

You obviously missed when I said that WoW updates the game with each expansion, but I guess your attention span is too small to read something that isn't written by you. Maybe that's why you missed the point of the article.

There's WoW, and then there's every other MMO in existence. Two totally different ballparks

I guess that wold depend on your definition of major, I suppose. I think the complete change of how teaming works was a rather major change, and that happened less than a month ago. So, my question would stil stand.

So, because Person #1 doesn't make as much money as person #2, they should stop and completely change everything that they are? Why?

Both games are making money. So, CoH doesn't have as many subscribers as the anomaly that is WoW. Big deal. CoH is still making money. If something is actually making a profit, why remake it? Just for the sake of remaking it?

Obviously, I have no busines sense, since I don't see a need to totally remake a perfectly viable source of profit. And the fact that I don't really see a need to make a 1000% profit every quarter.

And CoH doesn't? Issue 16: Power Spectrum changed the fundamentals of teaming with Super SideKicking and the new challenge settings.


Personally, I think we should just agree to disagree here.

Because WoW gets a free ride from the gaming media, for fear on angering those supposed 11 million users...

Business sense? How about common sense. CoH doesn't make anything compared to WoW and saying that a company doesn't need to make a really great profit is just stupid. By updates, I mean enhancing the game to make more on par to this generation. Power customization was a step in the right direction, but WoW also updates the graphics and sound. CoV did this, but that was years ago. The teaming stuff is all fine and dandy, but you're still playing the same content we have since ever. I'm not saying CoH is terrible and WoW is superior, but CoH is outdated while WoW seems to be actively updating their game.

But there wasn't a complete change to how teaming works. There was a streamlining of how sidekicking and exemplaring works that makes things easier, but it was an improvement of an existing system. It was a very nice improvement, and a needed improvement, but it's not a complete change.

You introduced profit into the discussion. If you're not prepared to deal with the disparity in WoW's and CoH's profits, then don't bring it up in the first place.

Nobody said anyone needs to make a 1000% profit every quarter. You suggested that since CoH is profitable at all that everything is fine. Now when people punch holes in your false equivalency (WoW and CoH are both profitable!) you introduce straw men that no one else has introduced or tried to defend.

Look at this, you're trying to compare upgrades to teaming and challenge/difficulty settings to adding entire continents with hundreds of quests, an entirely new tier of endgame content, 1-2 years of continued expansion and support (per expansion) to super sidekicking and the ability to calibrate your difficulty as if you were a team of multiple players. These changes are nice, welcome additions to the game. I am very happy they're here, and I love not having to play sidekick tetris to form a team. I love being able to scale difficulty to my characters' abilities more thoroughly. But this isn't the same as...look, the last update to CoH that was on the same scale as a WoW expansion was City of Villains, four years ago.


Personally, I think we should just agree to disagree here.[/QUOTE]

Read the rest of the thread.

I'm amazed at how many people are complaining about how unfair it is that Blizzard isn't being called upon to remake WoW when Blizzard is already remaking a significant portion of WoW.

Yes, yes, yes!

I'm really, really hoping for a LOT of new artwork/mission tilesets/maps (as well as some sort of randomizer for old(er) content too).

When CoH first came out and my friend was playing with me, we got to about lvl 10 or so before he was like, "this is boring, we're just doing the same missions in the same maps."

And it hasn't really changed much since then :/

There are great maps out there (love the one with the CoT AV burning/breaking down the tech lab one from Tavish Bell in CoV) but just needs to be more and more and have them trickle down into the old(er) content (even newspaper/radio too please).

This is why I disliked WoW too. Just not my thing.

On the other hand, we've got what, 5-10 people that would be responsible for adding new zones and missions? How many man-hours go into making a new continent for WoW?

(I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to put things in perspective)

Oh, I agree entirely.

To the person who neg repped me with:

Is there some kind of "missing the point" chemical in the water? Or is this just the usual sour grapes? Are you people even reading this conversation or are you imagining **** onto what's actually being written and flaming out at that? People, please give at least a token effort toward making sense.

You need to be even with your expectations, however (which is also common sense). You can't say an MMO is only profitable if it does WoW profits, as that is a completely unreal expectation. It's like saying a local bookstore isn't profitable because it doesn't do Barnes and Noble level business, even though it has multiple employees and good level sales for the size of store that it is.

You're also being unfair to the changes being made to COH... the updates do continually change the game, even if they aren't always massive changes like you get with a COV/GR type expansion (or a WoW expansion). But they do change things up quite a bit. I left about I5 or so, and came back between I9 and I10. The game played a LOT different, and it was a much more fun and involving experience. The game has changed a lot since then as well.

Yes, it is still the same game, but it is a different experience. I think a lot of the protest in this thread is that COH isn't given the credit it should, which I would agree with. I remember a MMORPG.com article predicted the top 5 or 10 MMOs a few months back, and "DCU or CO" was on the list, but not COH. That's open to debate, obviously, but it is a pretty big slam on an established game, versus two that weren't out at the time (and really are unknown for how well they will do still). The article was written by an editor over there, so they do seem to have a pretty strong opinion that COH is on the outs, when I don't think that's a sure thing at all.

Does COH need to improve and evolve? You bet it does, and I don't think NCSoft and the dev team can be ignorant of that need, either. We'll see where things go from here and what GR brings. It does need to up the ante... that's for sure. But until it comes out I will still argue that COH has chops and should get some credit for them.

*added*

Kali, ignore the rep stuff. Someone clearly just wanted to take a shot at you in private and didn't do it here. Really not worth noticing that kind of thing.

I think people are getting caught up in a lot of irrelevant information. I don't think it would take remaking all existing zones in CoH to bring it up-to-date. Clearly, the WoW devs are undertaking a herculean and expensive task that most dev teams simply couldn't afford to do to their own games. My point is that WoW doesn't belong on that list because a) they really do update their content with new expansions + content updates that add more instances, quests, items, events, etc, and b) because Blizzard really is remaking WoW over. There's no point to calling WoW out for not doing something that they're actually doing.

CoH has added a lot to the game, and I am glad that there's options for 35-40 play that didn't exist for 2-3 years after game launch, that you can go replay any story arc you want via Ouroboros, that you can raid Hamidon or the mothership or do any number of task forces in every level band (at least in CoH, and only partly true in CoV). I am glad that SSKing and power customization are in, and I think AE is a great idea (even if it was misused for evil!). I'm not trying to say that CoH is a bad game, or even really criticizing CoH. What I am saying is that WoW's absence on that list is not some kind of biased pro-Blizzard conspiracy, and that the concerns raised in that list are not exactly wrong, although I think their conclusions (these games will die if you don't do this) are.

But people seem to be unable to separate "WoW's not on that list" and "WoW's not on that list because they're already doing the stuff that the list writer is suggesting these other games do, and because by any measure, WoW's not in danger of waning popularity" from "OMG everyone's engaged in WoW favoritism. No one can ever say anything mean about WoW evar!" which is just partisan whining.

And MMO players can be ridiculously, implausibly, partisan.

I don't mind being neg repped, but I would like the neg rep comments to make sense, you know? Clearly, just acknowledging the negative rep and criticizing it is upsetting to some people (perhaps those who like to take anonymous potshots).

Most of the argument isn't that WoW should be on the list. It's that CoX shouldn't, and the reason given for its place is so flimsy that it can applied to WoW equally. Are there areas CoX can improve on? Certainly. And there's a boxed expansion on the way that will likely answer the complaints. Claiming that it desperately needs to be redone, or just scrapped and replaced with a sequel is utterly foolish.

I believe you, but to be fair, you did catalog every change in WoW's boxes and then dismiss two to three years of CoX development as "Well, they added a little bit". Hyperbole on both sides isn't helping at all.

I don't get much rep, but when I do get it, it's usually positive. I did just get negative rep the other day for making a JOKE. It was obviously a joke, and in my server's forums, where people know me. So how I was negative repped for it, I really do not know. It doesn't make sense, as does most overly negative criticism (if you're honestly disagreeing, it usually doesn't involve the amount of negative feeling used by someone giving someone else negative rep).

People aren't giving reasons why it shouldn't be on the list. Or more specifically, people are basically wounded because someone on the internet criticized CoH, and are using that as an excuse to start throwing around silly claims about how everyone's biased in WoW's favor.

That's not true. I listed multiple changes in CoH as well. Why do you misrepresent my post while attempting to chide me for hyperbole?

And sometimes, people say stuff in the neg rep that I want to respond to.

And nobody else realized this?

Well, you did fail to mention Going Rogue, which will be adding multiple zones to the game, in addition to other things. Also, Ouroboros, was introduced in 2007, if I'm not mistaken. Cimerora was added after that. All of that was after CoV.

Since we're discussing upgrades, does WoW's minimum requirements change from expansion to expansion?

About the profits. I did not even attempt to compare profitability, nor did I attempt to contrast profitability. I just pointed out that both are profitable. You were the one that tried to compare the two.

The amount of profit or subscribers is really irrelevant to my main question.


I did not mention Power Customization. Thank you for the effort though.

The amount of profit that one company makes over another is totally irrelevant to determine whether either company needs to remake a product. both companies are profitable.

There is common sense, then there is greed. Where's the line between common sense profit and greedy profit?

Also, using WoW subscriber numbers as a baseline is totally absurd. Something to aim for, maybe. But the baseline to which all MMOs should function? Not even close.



Ok, agreeing to disagree.

Just to be realistic for a moment, I suspect it's somewhere far, far above the amount of money even an MMO with a few million subscribers pulls down. I mean, look at the recent goings-on in the financial and insurance sectors.

He's not too far off the mark, though, whether you intended it or not.

In your compare/contrast, you completely skipped over Issues 1-5, reduced City of Villains to a footnote, misrepresented the period between I7 to about I12 (calling it "maintenance mode"), entirely ignored Inventions (which sure as heck changed the game), and glossed over Flashback, Mission Architect, SSK, the new Difficulty Slider, and Power Customization.

Whereas when listing all of WoW's features by expansion, you went into about twice as much detail, and listed things that are near if not direct equivalents of the very same CoX features you said were "nothing major".

I mentioned Cimerora and Ouroboros, but Ouroboros is largely not new content so much as making old content accessible, and Cimerora is a fairly small amount of content. We don't have a lot of information about Going Rogue, least of all confirmation on how many zones will be added. I find it doubtful that it's going to remake City of Heroes.

It's possible, but the same computer I had in 2004 was capable of running WoW then and in 2008, when I finally replaced it. Heck, my computer was able to run WoW after ongoing motherboard degradation meant it wouldn't even attempt to run CoH any longer.

No, that was ThatNinja who pointed out that you totally failed to address their comparative profitability while trying to introduce profitability as a reason that CoX should be above criticism.

I really wish you'd stop shifting the goalposts. It's okay to mention profitability to support your points, but not compare it as a counter?

No one is saying that CoH needs to aim for WoW's subscriber numbers.

And what exactly is your point about "greedy profit?" And you realize that common sense is used to justify all kinds of stupidity?