Appreciation of COH
By
DoktorMechaniker,
Posted on: 2010-01-01 23:54 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
travel powers, seriously after playing a few others, where you have to buy a temp travel power or you're just running everywhere or you have to wait until you're a lot higher in level. The CoH travel powers totally rock.
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Knew I forgot to list one - though in the game I mentioned, it's not *as* big a deal. Yes, within zone, hoofing it can take a while (though you can get some nice speed buffs.) But they also have two levels of "everywhere" transport - long distance in zone transportation, and inter-zone via teleport, as well. Of course... they go back to charging each and every time you use it (unless you have someplace bound - also at a fee the first time - or scrolls, which, again, cost.) |
Originally Posted by Zappalina
travel powers, seriously after playing a few others, where you have to buy a temp travel power or you're just running everywhere or you have to wait until you're a lot higher in level. The CoH travel powers totally rock.
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But yeah. There are times hoofing it to a mission or contact I *really* wished I had SJ or something. Though at least your feet arent' nailed to the ground so a particularly large pebble isn't an impassable barrier (much less a six inch rise.) That irritates me no end when I run into it elsewhere.
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That sounds a lot like Lineage II, and if it sounds like Lineage II, you're probably talking about Aion. Suddenly, your "pay for everything" comment makes so much more sense |
Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Knew I forgot to list one - though in the game I mentioned, it's not *as* big a deal. Yes, within zone, hoofing it can take a while (though you can get some nice speed buffs.) But they also have two levels of "everywhere" transport - long distance in zone transportation, and inter-zone via teleport, as well. Of course... they go back to charging each and every time you use it (unless you have someplace bound - also at a fee the first time - or scrolls, which, again, cost.)
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| - Our use of enhancements. Oh dear $deity, you have no idea how much I love this in COH having experienced the "outside world." If you want, say, your Fireball to be stronger - you put in stronger enhancements. And you do it relatively soon. Heck, you can put in IOs. You don't run, hoping your gear can be improved, then pay for Fireball II, III, IV. |
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And here's another thing you didn't mention - difficulty scaling and tailoring. Why is this so underused in current-generation MMOs? In City of Heroes, difficulty scales completely automatically and independently as your team size increases. So you can be playing solo and the difficulty will be about right, then you can hop on a team and the difficulty will STILL be about right. This is such a simple thing we take for granted, but it makes it possible for any number of people to take on any challenge and still have a decent time of it. Most other MMOs give you a static difficulty, which often makes things too hard when you're alone and too easy when you team up with a lot of people. Even if a lot of MMOs try to counteract that by limiting teams to, like, two people max, it's still an issue.
And then there is difficulty tailoring. Game too easy? You can up your difficulty, take on more enemies, take on harder enemies, or both! Game too hard? You can make enemies easier and turn off bosses. Feel like being fancy? Do what I do - drop enemy strength but triple their numbers. You end up close to where you started, but it looks so much cooler! Despite the epidemic of bosses, I am having more fun now with the new difficulty settings than I ever have before, and I think I found my perfect sweet spot. At -1x3 no bosses, I'm in hog heaven. It's a relatively easy game, just the way I like it, it pits me alone against veritable LEGIONS of bad guys, just the way I LOVE it, and they do make up for being -1 by sheer weight of numbers, and it makes the "tough guys" of the game easy enough for me to match wits with an win on MY terms.
Here's something that had me dashing outside to see if flying pigs hadn't made the sky fall - I actually ENJOY fighting Malta! For the past five years, I've done nothing but rant and rave about how much I hate these guys, how much they cheat and how much I think they should be redesigned, so imagine my sheer amazement when I took on them, with a Blaster no less, and I actually enjoyed the fights. Sure, they weren't easy, but they weren't cheap, either, as long as I knew what I was doing. Facing them at -1 meant that their stupid-nasty controls missed a good bit of the time and didn't last as long, it meant they died a little more easily, and it meant my controls lasted ever so slightly longer. Turning off bosses meant that the cheap, cheesy, unfun fights were simply GONE. However, their sheer numbers, with, on average, two lieutenants and a Sapper in every spawn, still made for good hunting. Such an unexpectedly powerful tool, the difficulty settings are. They made my game at least twice as cool
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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.
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Sidekicking, the first effort, and the impoved version now. Within a small margin, it does not matter what level your friend is YOU CAN PLAY TOGETHER! not so in the other MMO.
it always helps to see what else is out there. some of it you may like, but other stuff will make you appreciate stuff here. This year really makes me happy with ssk, pugging is so bleeding convenient. the other mmo i play is co, and they have ssk too, but i try other stuff at times, and it makes me appreciate things.
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Oh, and related - very hard habit to break from COH.|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
And here's another thing you didn't mention - difficulty scaling and tailoring.
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Here, I can take a level 1 and fight off 3-5 minions, sometimes more.
There... One's a fight, two's a rough fight, three is pretty much guaranteed death solo. So when I see "oh, two walking around there, no problem..." um... yeah. That's cost me a few times. (And that's not even getting into their bosses!)
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Oi lordy! I've taken to playing at -1x3 as early as... Well, about level 4 or so, so for the bulk of my career, I'm taking on spawns comprised of five to eight enemies, sometimes even more. I swear I've seen spawns of at least 10 minions, all -1. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a cheat, but HOT DANG if it doesn't feel cool to wade in like you own the place and wipe out the lot of 'em |
Originally Posted by Memphis_Bill
Oh, and related - very hard habit to break from COH.
Here, I can take a level 1 and fight off 3-5 minions, sometimes more. There... One's a fight, two's a rough fight, three is pretty much guaranteed death solo. So when I see "oh, two walking around there, no problem..." um... yeah. That's cost me a few times. (And that's not even getting into their bosses!) |
And unlike other games, the higher I go in level, the more things I can take on by myself.
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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.
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I do rather wonder if I would have enjoyed WoW more if I hadn't played COH first. As it is, I was frustrated with finding teams to play with (and it was actually hard to coordinate playtime with the people I knew that were playing WoW as well), I hated that I could only fight 1-2 people at a time, and that travel was so SLOW. There are more things, obviously (I won't touch WoW now because of all the raiding and gear requirements at high levels), but those were huge for me. |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
Oi lordy! I've taken to playing at -1x3 as early as... Well, about level 4 or so, so for the bulk of my career, I'm taking on spawns comprised of five to eight enemies, sometimes even more. I swear I've seen spawns of at least 10 minions, all -1. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a cheat, but HOT DANG if it doesn't feel cool to wade in like you own the place and wipe out the lot of 'em
And unlike other games, the higher I go in level, the more things I can take on by myself. |
I was offered a free couple of weeks for my deactivated accounts two years ago for WoW and CoH. In playing both, I haven't left CoH, and haven't touched Wow since then. I was offered it again a few weeks ago for WoW, and wasn't even interested. I really like this game and hope it keeps succeeding, as I haven't found too many games like this that I like to keep playing and playing and playing.
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Yes - a proper surperhero feeling |
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
And unlike other games, the higher I go in level, the more things I can take on by myself.
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@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
The Sidekick system. My nephews got stuck playing WOW (poor young souls...) and I can't ever play with them because of the whole level mix thing.
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This is what 3700 heroes in a single zone looks like.
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I love this game too. It is so cool in so many ways that there is no place for me to start when it comes to how cool it is.
Unless I start talking about the player base. I'm not talking about the people that come here to play a game. I'm talking about the community of super powered beings that really make the City and Isle a cool place to hang out and a great place to team.
Sure there are some of those people running around that are obnoxious or just trying to cause trouble in general - those tend to be people trying to beat the game. I feel sorry for those people because they can't understand what makes the game really cool.
However, that can not thwart the over-all friendly, helpful feeling I get from other players playing characters in this game because they love the genre. And maybe it is the genre that brings out the kind of players that are naturally friendly and helpful.
In any case, I'm glad for the great game, but what has kept me here is all the great players in the game that take time to be friendly and helpful with other players.
There's a lot I appreciate about this game, but one of the most subtle is the invention system. There's no such thing as a cookie-cutter build in CoH because it doesn't exist; IOs provide a huge amount of space for customization without compromising performance. It's a bit telling that even builds for the same powersets with the same build goals and budget can be significantly different. Even better, in this game you can't just throw money at a build and make it get better; you need to know what you're doing, or you'll end up with bad value for money at best and an inferior build at worst. I'm not sure if the devs grasp what a success they've accomplished. This ought to be the Holy Grail of game design everywhere.
Killing things:
0th3r G4m3s: For XP and Mad Lewt. Grinding.
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Level pacts may keep me here forever.
Love that feature.
Vet rewards. I love the idea of the devs rewarding us for playing longer instead of the usual "Here's a couple of crappy items you'll outlevel in 2 hours" that I normally see in MMOs.
Character Customization.
All the wonderful, creative and thoughtful people I've met.
and of course,
Freem!
So I'm a two MMO gamer right now. Not mentioning the other (though I have in the past, and I have played one or two others,) as I don't really want to make this a "comparison" of them. There's a good bit about the other game I like - but at the same time, it has REALLY made me appreciate some things in COH.
Such as:
- Our lack of gear. No, enhancements are not "gear." Yeah, they wear out (IOs excluded,) but at most they could be considered "gear lite."
- Our use of enhancements. Oh dear $deity, you have no idea how much I love this in COH having experienced the "outside world." If you want, say, your Fireball to be stronger - you put in stronger enhancements. And you do it relatively soon. Heck, you can put in IOs. You don't run, hoping your gear can be improved, then pay for Fireball II, III, IV.
- Not having to pay for Every. Little. Thing. Or more precisely, to get better at things. Now, I'm not referring to drops and such here. I'm talking about - I suppose "ranks" would be a good way of putting it. "You've gathered X amount of stuff, great! Now pay me 500,000 gold so you can do it for another few levels. Oh, by the way, you need to get to a higher rank (by paying me) before you can do your mission."
If this were in COH? Imagine paying, say, 150k inf to open up travel powers. And 150k to be able to start using DOs. Since you're higher level, another... say, 2,000,000 inf to start on SOs. And that after you've paid to put a third, fourth, fifth and sixth slot in a power. You'd also be paying for pools, paying for access to powers after tier3 and 6 - in both the primary and secondary...
And this leads to:
- No real grind in COH. Yes, you can choose to. Yes, we *used* to (sort of) have a grind when content petered out at 38, years ago - earlier, perhaps, if you died a lot (higher debt cap, etc.) But part of the reason RMTers seem to have such a foothold everywhere else is that last point I mentioned - pay for *everything.* Here? It's just not a big deal. *Everything* has a chance of dropping, there's no "You need X amount of INF to level up, and for a costume, and... and... and...." There, I can really, really understand taking the risk of an RMTer hijacking your account and/or you getting banned when you're looking at a few million (insert monetary unit here) to... well, *be able to do anything.*
- No XP loss, no real penalty for dying. I've said before (and I think someone has it in their sig, actually) that the only thing lighter than debt, especially with all the reduction, patrol XP, etc. we can get, would be to have to wait for an NPC to come by and laugh at you before you could rez.
Really, though, I think a lot of this is specifically the Eastern MMO design vs the Western MMO design. We have subscriptions, while many Eastern MMOs have people playing at cafes, paying hourly and the like - and to try to keep them in, you want them working this stuff off. You don't need that with a monthly (or greater) sub - you've got the money, even if the person only logs in an hour a month.
Now, yes, there are things I think COH can take from the other MMOs as well, and I've mentioned them at times in the past. Other things... just wouldn't translate over very well. (For instance, I like the whole crafting bit - even if it gets expensive, especially the chance to "crit" and get higher quality items, which themselves can be used for even higher quality items... with a chance to fail. I kind of like that element of chance, even if it makes things expensive at times.)
But overall - heading "out there" has just reinforced for me how *good* we have it here, even with some of COH's own lumps.