City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Pros and Cons of CoH: A Video Review

Airhammer

By Airhammer,
Posted on: 2010-09-06 13:43 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
You're looking at it from an odd perspective.

The number of subscribers by itself is only half the information. The other information is the number of people who have tried the game and been turned off by it. CoH has had pretty strong box sales, but its subscriber base hasn't really increased much.

This indicates its target audience (the people who buy the game) aren't really connecting with the game.
So how long is the average subscriber staying on?

Also, you seem to love numbers. Frankly, these "million user" MMOs (which you have yet to name) get big numbers from one area, primarily - Asia. Where's over half of WoW's playerbase? Where is Aion big? Lineage?

And they all have the exact same sort of grindplay (I refuse to call it "game" play because "game" indicates, to me, something fun and relaxing, which "grind for gold/mats" is not) catering to this very market.

COH does not. COH launched in asia and folded within a year.

Also, as an aside, Blizzard themselves mentioned - what, 60% was it? - of their players never got past level 10. I wouldn't call that a good thing.

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There is a variety of other factors to consider though. Many of those games are fantasy MMORPGs in a market flooded with fantasy MMORPGs.
Auto assault. Tabula Rasa.

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Watch my review again.
Read the criticism of the expectations you set in the first minute and a half. I expect as fair a review from you - from your own presentation, reinforced here on the board - as I would expect of a Democrat's platform from Fox News.

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That's great, but that doesn't mean CoH doesn't have it's own silly time wasting things in it. It does. At least some of the other MMORPG with fetch quests have more tangible rewards, escalating challenge of encounters, and an end-game pvp system that makes a long boring grind worth it in the end because you have this really cool character you can do really cool stuff with.
There's something else you don't get about COH, obviously, something brought up time and time again. This isn't "Get to the end game where the game REALLY begins." This is about the journey there. And that's yet another reason why - unlike you - my forum registration date actually reflects how long I've been playing (with about a week's lag.)

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
See, I can be witty, too.
You should have tried that it the video - it might have livened it up a little bit

Although, it does have a certain car-crash charm to it

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

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Originally Posted by Emberly View Post
*clicks to random part of video*

Yeah, you have no idea what the game is about or how it's changed since you quit in 2004. I can't wait for your Mission Architect review!
Since you, like so many others, have been vague about what you think is wrong...

....is it okay for me to assuming you are trying to say that the amount of bonus an enhancement awards is not relative a character's level and that you actually don't know what you are talking about?

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
It's nice how you've jumped straight into personal insults and haven't actually addressed how my opinions are incorrect using facts. That's really helping change my viewpoints.
What insults? You're asking for feedback and I'm giving it.

Would you take seriously any review that completely neglects the most recent expansion of an MMORPG? If you saw a review for WoW that was made weeks after Cataclysm was released and didn't mention it at all, would you think "Wow, this is a well researched and thought out review"? If I saw a review for a game on a professional site or in a magazine that didn't bother to mention that game's latest content addition, I'd bust out laughing at it.

Did you just not understand set bonuses? You explicitly say in your review that the only reason anyone would want IOs is because they don't go obsolete. This is so wrong it's just ridiculous. It shows either a major misunderstanding of what you're reviewing or just plain laziness that you didn't research or experiment with it.

And that's pretty major stuff, not "nitpicky" stuff. A lot of it just reflects on a lack of getting the hang of things such as your criticisms of the auction system. There's valid criticisms to be made but the fact that you can't just buy whatever you want ready-made for the price you want isn't one of them. Influence is easily made by people who put "research" into their ride up to level 50.

 

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The fact that you have to constantly elaborate upon your video should give you some idea of how poorly your video was constructed.

You can't turn in a term paper and then, when assaulted by evil red pen markings, go to your professor and say "This is what I REALLY meant, I demand you re-evaluate my paper."

CoH is in a stable state of survival because it isn't a typical MMO. Typical MMO fans run around like lunatics to whatever the next game featuring a half-naked elf is. That's why you see such games spike in numbers and then die off as they do.

CoH is stable because it ISN'T offering something every MMO is going to give you. If you want CoH, you go to CoH. If you want WoW you go... Pretty much everywhere. I'll agree that the demand for more fantasy RPG's is big, and the allure of such a demand is a mighty temptress for new development, but if you truly want to SURVIVE, and do WELL at surviving, you need to fill a niche nothing else in the ecosystem is filling.

 

Posted

1. yes..and they were games that followed your ideas, pvp emphasis, loot grinding for successive tiers of power, and then they collapsed to fractions of their populations. why we are saying that a 6+year old game would be ill served by following a drastic design change to follow a number of games that have pancaked.

2.i'm saying that calling a player a subscriber is different than comparing them to a paying
customer. i'm a "subscriber" to about 5 games that likely still count me, i havent played them in months, in fact i barely got past the lower 25% of levels in most of them. alo, server costs are scaleable. I will let chase or someone more familiar with the costs go into detail, but they really go in a curve, particularly when there really isnt a significant release of content that would require a large maintained development house. hell, horizons is still around with only 10k players, they manage it with a smaller development house.

 

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I can't comment on the review, because I couldn't get past the first few minutes. It might have only been the first few seconds.

It felt like two hours.

Some random guy, no personality, no style, slumped on a couch mumbling to an animated talking sword.

I couldn't take it, sorry.

 

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Originally Posted by Jophiel View Post
What insults? You're asking for feedback and I'm giving it.
Would you take seriously any review that completely neglects the most recent expansion of an MMORPG? If you saw a review for WoW that was made weeks after Cataclysm was released and didn't mention it at all, would you think "Wow, this is a well researched and thought out review"? If I saw a review for a game on a professional site or in a magazine that didn't bother to mention that game's latest content addition, I'd bust out laughing at it.
Because Going Rogue has new content that is uniquely different than existing content, right? I mean, oh boy, a new zone just for people who are level 1-20! A couple more hours worth of flavor texts structurally identical to every other quest in the game! What fun! New powersets, so I can do the same quests but with slightly different animations but fundamentally identical playstyle to existing powersets!

Oh boy! I can make my hero into a villain! That's totally different than just making a villain character!

Don't get me wrong, that stuff is okay, but it feels underwhelming for an expansion. I might have a different viewpoint if endgame content was in it.


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Did you just not understand set bonuses? You explicitly say in your review that the only reason anyone would want IOs is because they don't go obsolete. This is so wrong it's just ridiculous. It shows either a major misunderstanding of what you're reviewing or just plain laziness that you didn't research or experiment with it.
If you watch the review again you will see I was specifically talking about low level IOs and their usefulness. I think you will agree that no amount of set bonuses changes that you need to keep enhancements as close to your character's level as possible in order for the bonuses to keep up with the stats of the NPCs you encounter.

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And that's pretty major stuff, not "nitpicky" stuff. A lot of it just reflects on a lack of getting the hang of things such as your criticisms of the auction system. There's valid criticisms to be made but the fact that you can't just buy whatever you want ready-made for the price you want isn't one of them. Influence is easily made by people who put "research" into their ride up to level 50.
My criticism of the inventor origin system isn't just that you can't buy them. As I explained in my review, the lack of inventory and bank space makes it hard to build those origins yourself, especially when by the time you might have gotten those materials you've probably outleveled those inventor origins, at which point a single origins give more bang for their buck.

I mean, level 10 inventor origins or level 30 single origins? This isn't hard to understand, is it?

A lot of your criticism seems to be based on not paying full attention to what I'm actually saying.

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Originally Posted by Warkupo View Post
The fact that you have to constantly elaborate upon your video should give you some idea of how poorly your video was constructed.
This is a good point I will consider in the future. I do think many people simply aren't hearing what I'm actually saying because they are angry someone would dare criticize their favorite game in the whole wide world.

 

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I stopped watching before the real review even began. Are you a comedy team or are you a reviewer? Very few people can do both well, so choose your approach. A talking sword, needless vulgarities and looking at your bland apartment were immediate turn offs... it took you a minute fifteen to even start reviewing. No thanks. Yeah, I could have skipped ahead but closing the browser is so much easier.

 

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Originally Posted by Jophiel View Post
I don't know why you'd need feedback when you're already correct about everything
I think he was expecting this thread to go a very different way than it did

 

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Watched the whole review, seemed pretty whiney and uninformed to me.

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
a new zone
Zones - the new vista zoning tech allows for them to have zones seamlessly linked together, rather than using war walls - although you might have been too busy researching to discover that

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just for people who are level 1-20! A couple more hours worth of flavor texts structurally identical to every other quest in the game! What fun! New powersets, so I can do the same quests but with slightly different animations but fundamentally identical playstyle to existing powersets!

Oh boy! I can make my hero into a villain! That's totally different than just making a villain character!
If you're not internested in the lore or the stories, then this really isn't the game for you

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If you watch the review again
I'm not certain I could stand that - once was enough

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the inventor origin system
I'm assuming that each time you've written that it's simply been a typo, as your extensive research would have shown you that it's correct name is "Invention Origin", not "inventor orign"

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A lot of your criticism seems to be based on not paying full attention to what I'm actually saying.
Well, it's not that easy to do

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

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Originally Posted by Judas_Ace View Post
I can't comment on the review, because I couldn't get past the first few minutes. It might have only been the first few seconds.

It felt like two hours.

Some random guy, no personality, no style, slumped on a couch mumbling to an animated talking sword.

I couldn't take it, sorry.
There was probably some exciting PvP endgame at the end of the video though - you just neded to sit through the boring grind to get there

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

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Originally Posted by Silverado View Post
Watched the whole review, seemed pretty whiney and uninformed to me.
From a WoW player? How totally unexpected

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

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Originally Posted by BasilAcid View Post
I stopped watching before the real review even began. Are you a comedy team or are you a reviewer? Very few people can do both well
Well, if even one of the two approaches had worked, he'd at least have had a %50 success rate rather than 0%

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

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Originally Posted by Golden Girl View Post
Well, if even one of the two approaches had worked, he'd at least have had a %50 success rate rather than 0%
Agreed. Here's someone who does comedy and a decent review.

http://www.youtube.com/user/wowfony#p/u/1/i_OISYwjoRs

Take notes, GKaiser. This is your competition, among other people.

 

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Golden Girl, you are an awesome debater. Clearly, your ability to nitpick over semantics in a game where the majority of the players use acronyms but ignore the spirit of the argument makes you better at this than I am.

Also, your ability to make wild and incorrect assumptions such as that I'm a WoW fanboy makes you a winner.

 

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Originally Posted by BasilAcid View Post
Agreed. Here's someone who does comedy and a decent review.

http://www.youtube.com/user/wowfony#p/u/1/i_OISYwjoRs

Take notes, GKaiser. This is your competition, among other people.
Not really. I actually play the game when I review it, not just jerk around in it for a few hours like most reviewers.

 

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Well, GK, I really hope you're not actually trying to defend the style of your review or it's lack of objectivity.

This review seems like its of the game from 2005. Like I said before, you have some legit criticisms but you are way too bias and too whiny to take seriously.

This game has it's flaws and some of them are never really addressed but it is still well received by many professional gaming web sites.

CoH isn't for everyone and it seems like it really isn't for you. You half-arsed a review and it shows. You want to be taken seriously? No chance. Know what you're doing first and then research your task a bit. Your replies go outside the scope of your own argument far too many times as well (best example: where you try and back pedal your claim of MMOs having millions of subs but then note mostly free to play ones AND without any evidence to substantiate any of your claims - not too smooth).

Anyway, good try and hopefully this has been a bit of a learning lesson for you. If you want to be taken seriously for any type of reviews, you have a long way to go.

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
Not really. I actually play the game when I review it, not just jerk around in it for a few hours.
Yes 97 hours in a game that has existed for 6 years makes you an authority on the game.

"An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of BS." -General George Patton

-Lord Azazel

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
Golden Girl, you are an awesome debater.
Well, it takes two to debate - and your review and following reactions shows to you be quite a master debater.

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Clearly, your ability to nitpick over semantics in a game where the majority of the players use acronyms but ignore the spirit of the argument makes you better at this than I am.
Better at research, that's for sure

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Also, your ability to make wild and incorrect assumptions such as that I'm a WoW fanboy makes you a winner.
Tell me something I didn't know

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
Not really. I actually play the game when I review it, not just jerk around in it for a few hours like most reviewers.
Which is weird, because they come accross as more well-informed than you do

@Golden Girl

City of Heroes comics and artwork

 

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Originally Posted by GKaiser View Post
Because Going Rogue has new content that is uniquely different than existing content, right?
So you're saying you would take a review seriously that fails to mention the game's latest content?

Well, apparently you and I approach reviews in very different ways. Because you just have a whole lot of rationales for why you didn't have to mention it and I think not mentioning it is just really poor reviewing.

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If you watch the review again you will see I was specifically talking about low level IOs and their usefulness. I think you will agree that no amount of set bonuses changes that you need to keep enhancements as close to your character's level as possible in order for the bonuses to keep up with the stats of the NPCs you encounter.
No, I wouldn't agree with that at all. In fact, sets in the low 30's range are often the most valuable because people want to keep their set bonuses when they do lower level team content. Yep indeed, even though those won't be the highest possible numbers when they're doing lvl 50 content, they'd still rather have the lvl 30 enhancements.

Like I said, it's just laziness or lack of understanding. Keep handwaving away why it's okay but it really shines through.

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As I explained in my review, the lack of inventory and bank space makes it hard to build those origins yourself, especially when by the time you might have gotten those materials you've probably outleveled those inventor origins, at which point a single origins give more bang for their buck.
I think you're under a couple mistaken impressions. One is that you "deserve" the best stuff at every single level and that if you have to make due with a collection of DOs and SOs instead of all SOs or have some lvl 20 IOs in among your lvl 30 IOs, there's a problem with the game. The second is that you don't know how to manage your inventory space. You keep harping on the lack of inventory so you can't make things. What exactly are you doing with the stuff you have? The whole idea is that you collect stuff as you go along and the stuff that you can make things with, you make things with and the stuff you can't you sell. Salvage for standard IOs is common. If you need the auction house to make lvl 25 Accuracy IOs, you're doing something wrong.

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I mean, level 10 inventor origins or level 30 single origins? This isn't hard to understand, is it?
What game are you playing where you're not getting enhancement drops along the way or salvage to make IOs or influence to patch in the holes? Why would it be between a lvl 10 IO and a lvl 30 SO?

Again, I think much of your "issues" with enhancements, the invention system, inventory and the auction house stem from a feeling that you deserve to have the best stuff each level rather than working towards it. It's like saying there's real problems with your stock fantasy MMORPG because I don't get raid level gear at leach level and have to actually slum with this Sword +2 for a couple levels.

 

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Just reading the comments and the semi-evasive responses from the OP tells me all I want to know.

City of Heroes was my first MMO, & my favorite computer game.

R.I.P.
Chyll - Bydand - Violynce - Enyrgos - Rylle - Nephryte - Solyd - Fettyr - Hyposhock - Styrling - Beryllos - Rosyc
Horryd - Myriam - Dysquiet - Ghyr
Vanysh - Eldrytch
Inflyct - Mysron - Orphyn - Dysmay - Reapyr - - Wyldeman - Hydeous

 

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Originally Posted by Jophiel View Post
So you're saying you would take a review seriously that fails to mention the game's latest content?

Well, apparently you and I approach reviews in very different ways. Because you just have a whole lot of rationales for why you didn't have to mention it and I think not mentioning it is just really poor reviewing.

.
Burning Crusade was just Vanilla WoW with more zones and dungeons and 10 more levels!!!
Same for Woltk Vs BC

"An army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality stuff is a bunch of BS." -General George Patton

-Lord Azazel