Pros and Cons of CoH: A Video Review

I am using a game design term. A well documented game design term. Flavor text does not change the meaning of a term. "Mission" is flavor text for the in-game world of CoH. All missions are quests.

http://web.archive.org/web/200508120...11&SessID=4684

You should calm down and stop going off the deep end over trivial nonsense. It makes it harder to take you seriously.

I know!! *high fives rian*

I once had an occupation where I spent all day reading angry flames from customers. My job was to decipher what the actual problem was, if any, based on the feedback. I'm used to this kind of thing.

Like I said, I'm interested in what people have to say and if they might persuade me to change my opinion. I'm willing to tolerate a certain amount of flaming if I gets to the heart of the matter. Even Socrates had people flaming him and yet he interacted with them, and learned a lot by doing so.

Isn't this what the whole thread is about?

You, sir, are no Socrates.

Irony is you.

I find it funny that when people have criticisms about your review (it's style, tone, content, etc.), you gripe about how you're misunderstood or misconstrued.

I think the community so far has spoken and gave your review a thumbs down for a variety of reasons. Please continue to launch personal attacks on your critics. All it does is paint a picture of someone who can give but can't take.

There's a positive that can be gained from this. You can actually try to objectively look at the feedback you've been given (which is valuable) and try to improve with this. Or you can sulk and believe your rather unprofessional presentation style will eventually win us over (pro tip: it won't).

Reviewing / writing is a two way street. If you can't stand the heat in the kitchen, get out.

Its fine, he is like Socrates, we just don't understand.

Actually, one could make a pretty good argument that Socrates was killed for trolling Athens.

I hope you were more competent at reviewing complaints than you are at reviewing games

Hopefully, better than what he's showing us in this thread.

Right, but your constant commenting on how WoW does it better could easily be seen as your being a fan of WoW, that's all I'm saying.

And yet wow itself hasn't changed any more or less than CoH has. We've seen a significant shift towards casual players over time here and they added the amazingly flexible difficulty sliders for the more hardcore among us. To top it off the quality and difficulty of the content provided to us by the devs has been significantly improved on over time and they even went and created a whole new low-level game based on that.

Heck, the devs even went and did a complete overhaul of the PvP system a few issues ago. It was something close to an unmitigated disaster for the PvP community but they did it.

Seriously, we've had the same sort of changes over the years that every other MMO I've ever played has had. You can't talk about how one game's getting new zones based upon their evolved design philosophy and then not even try the new zones in CoH because they're just more of the same. That's just lazy reviewing.

If I were to review WoW, I wouldn't go and review their current content, complain about it and then release the review after Cataclysm and entirely neglect to mention the expansion.

But one of your notable complaints was about zone travel and contacts sending you all over the place for '30 minutes' before a mission can start. CoV zones mostly have their story arcs contained to just the one zone or at least have minimal inter-zone travel and even when you do travel most zones are linked by just one ferry instead of the two separate trains. That's the sort of thing you should include in a review. You point out a very clear problem with the CoH content, but acknowledge that it's not there or at least not as bad in CoVs.

Oh, and out of curiosity, did you try fiddling with your difficulty sliders at all. They can provide a significant bump in the challenge provided to you.


I'm not saying you should say it might get better in the future, I'm saying you should acknowledge currently existing and upcoming changes to the game. Something like, "The next issue is supposed to have some sort of end game content attached to it, but I don't know if it would make enough of a difference for me." Something, anything but rants about nonexistant end-game content when that's an announced upcoming feature.

Also for future reference, when you're talking about a game it's best to try and use the nomenclature of that game. You might offer a short explanation of what a 'mission' or an 'archetype' is in relation to other games out there but it will generally come off better if you use that game's terminology.

And I'd also like to mention that not only is it incredibly difficult for just anybody to soft-cap their defense but just about as many tanks are resistance based as are defense based. I agree that the def cap shouldn't be the same across all ATs but the resistance cap isn't so that's something at least.

Generally I think the big issue is your review seems more designed like something one would see from one of those movie reviewers who sit around and make fun of bad movies. That can certainly work, but you can't really structure it like an actual review as that style is mostly done for entertainment purposes instead of an informative one.

1) Actually ALL my character use level 30 IO enhancements where they can.

Want to know why?

Because level 50 IO enhancements and especially level 40 IO enhancements offer only a tiny 2% additional bonus at most and they tend to be a lot cheaper then the level 50 stuff. Most of them I'll even use level 25 IOs...because once again the difference isn't amazingly major compared to level 50 IOs. Just because their lower level, doesn't stop them being rubbish.

Heck, by level 30 on a brand new character when on the US account side of things, I had 10 million inf by then, that is enough to sort you out for SOs up until level 50 or sort yourself out the basic level 30 IOs.

2) In every MMO I've played...I've had to replace my entire gear every 5 levels, so your point with SOs goes out the window.

3) SOs and IOs are not gear, you can't compare them to your Rok'delar bow (given to you by the hunter epic quest started in Molten Core in the chest drop from Major Domo!) or your Tier gear in MMOs.

You want to know why? SOs are your bog standard shop bought white items, they're easy to get hold of, I have yet to see any game where I can go raid in stuff bought from a shop! The game is balanced around said vendor bought items, not around IOs.

IOs let you do some downright crazy things and unlike tier gear in Fantasy MMOs (which will only offer more tohit, more crit etc.) IOs allow builds to massively varied.

My Invuln/SS tanker has one build which has 40% resistance to Psionic damage, purely through IOs, the other build has her softcapped to every type of damage by Psi with one enemy standing next to her. Name another game where my build could be that amazingly varied and each build still be viable for end gaming stuff?

In WoW, there is no variation in high end raiding specs, when I left for Hunters you either had to go survival or gtfo, during Burning Crusade, you had to go Beast Mastery or gtfo. While which build is the best changes, the fact that one build is the best does not change.

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On to the next thing, you mentioned that the game is not really challenging.

You do know that we have difficulty adjuster NPCs in the game, go talk to them, if you feel the game is too easy solo, bump up the missions so that you're the equivilent of eight heroes, that you want bosses while you solo and at +4 difficulty level...while you're say...hmmm level 20?

Or do that with a team orientated AT, like say a controller who Isn't a fire/kin.

Would that be challenging enough for you?

The fact is that City of Heroes can be played a lot of different ways, you can RP (which you seem to dislike...), you can min/max like a motherlover, or you can come home from a hard day at work and just kick the crap out of the badguys on your scrapper.

You don't have to be raid focused in order to play the endgame, you don't have to even be specced that well to be able to do it.

Oh and PvP...yes it sucks...infact a lot of people think it shouldn't have ever been implemented in this game, that is the one thing you did get right.

Edit: Also you claim to want 'feedback' and 'to see things from a different perspective' yet you continually shout out how 'you are right and they are wrong!', I've yet to see you actually take some of the good points from peoples posts and actually have a discussion.

See my Guides and Tutorials

Well no, you have to admit that the travel in the original CoH content's annoying like he says. It may not really take as long to do some of the fedex quests as he claims but they're certainly an annoying speed-bump in the game. Then there's the repetitive nature of our instanced missions which is a certainly true. I don't mind it and I'm guessing neither do you, but it's still something many see as a fault.

Challenge issued! I honestly wouldn't mind seeing that Memphis

Also Mr Videoposter....you're the type of player CoH isn't aimed at, unlike your typical fantasy MMO where levelling is a PITA purely to get to the good stuff at level cap and you only roll alts because your guild needs a 'healer'.

CoH is the complete opposite of this. Perhaps you should have pointed it out in your review that CoH isn't aimed at the atypical fantasy playing MMO player and frankly I think I speak for a good 95% of the current people playing CoH when I say...

...GOOD!

I hated the fact that I hated the fact it was raid or gtfo in WoW, atleast in CoH levelling alts isn't like pulling teeth.

Which is why there have been so many cries that the basic non-CoV, non-Praetoria content needs a dire revamp, I will agree that the fedex's and hunts of the legacy content are something that needs to be delt with and quickly. Honestly though, travel time in other MMOs is a hell of a lot worse, in WoW at low levels it could take me 5-10 minutes of running (sometimes even longer) just to get to the area the mobs I needed to kill were in. Or 8 minutes of flight pathing from say Ironforge where I do my AH using to get to the Eastern plaguelands.

So CoH travel is definitely not worse than what he keeps praising in WoW.

The instance maps do need a sprucing I agree on that as well.

Oh no. Travel times in CoH are downright speedy compared to every other game I've ever played. I'd get on a horse in DAoC and go off to make a sandwitch, and I distinctly remember getting a group in EQ after much trying ... down in the Overthere when I was in Freeport that was easily 45 minutes of travel for me. I'd be a little leery of saying it took 30 minutes to get anywhere in CoH once I had travel powers, but of course I've never really tested that.

Same here, the shot composition, sound, and enthusiasm just made me not care. The editing needs some serious work to get some energy up and keep the viewers interest.
I started watching, noticed the 20 minute timer and said "oh F--- that"

even better, ffXI's boat, only came every half hour, took over 10 mins to go to port, and you could be attacked either by some fisher pulling up a monster or a pirate , both of which were stupidly above your level, get killed, and be sent back to the stone you were bound to..and lets not even get into deleveling from said death. also, star wars galaxies and their space shuttles. think they were 10 min timers, compared to coh's click and go trams, its a difficult connection to make.

No, that's about how it was trying to get to The Overthere. Right down to the delevling too.