Pros and Cons of CoH: A Video Review
By
Airhammer,
Posted on: 2010-09-06 13:43 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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Ah memories.
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Originally Posted by rian_frostdrake
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.
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Ambush City, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Ambush - Arc #1043
Strife of the Grave - Arc #3409
Shift - Arc #529411
I have specifically avoided reading the thread so I can come at this unbiased. I'm going to watch your video and that's it, posting as I watch it. Here we go...
*PLAY*
Sweats and t-shirt, personal details about life ("My new apartment"), unprofessional, amateur hour.
Anthropomorphic sword is gimmicky and the back and forth serves no purpose but to appear funny. It isn't. If it's a review, review. Don't make the viewer sit through a meaningless back-and-forth with a cheap set piece.
"Sucks hard," is unprofessional. It cuts into your chops as a reviewer when you're using base, personal type language without specific. Why did it suck hard? Explain. you've lot a ton of credibility and the video hasn't even been going a minute.
...okay, better now. you're talking about the game. It's a mystery why it's taken you almost two minutes to do this.
Ugh. a webcomic plug...seriously? Shameless. This is a review about the game, keep it about the game. Credibility has taken another nosedive as this is starting to look more like a "Look at me!" video than a legitimate review of a product with the purpose of informing the public on its pros and cons. You are off to a pretty rocky start.
"Run around the world too ****** much," is again, needless and unprofessional. I don't know if you're trying to be funny of if it's just unconscious. If the former, it isn't funny. If the latter, work on consciously avoiding swearing needlessly. This, coupled with your "I just fell out of bed" appearance, makes you look and sound like just some random gamer. there are millions of those already. Why should I listen to you? what separates you from the other sweatpant-clad foul-mouthed masses? So far, nothing. Except a dumb plastic sword with googly eyes.
10-20 minutes to run to a contact is a gross exaggeration. It's never taken me that long to reach a contact. If you're going to level a charge at a game, make it accurate. Hyperbole really doesn't have a place in a factual review. Which is a shame because you still have a valid point about traveling between contacts to get missions, but the information you give is off by a wide margin, and your melodramatic delivery. "Nothing! Nothing! Zilch!" etc. Brevity is the soul of wit. Say it and move on.
"Your character blows hard," see above statements regarding unprofessional language. At this point you're sounding like a teenager who has just finished a South Park binge. Now, I like swearing and using colorful language, but that's in casual conversation with people I know. Using that kind of vocabulary in a review of a product aimed at complete strangers is tacky. However, you do bring up what to some might be a valid point about the enhancements.
Ah-ha, major flaw. You compare CoH to WoW. When reviewing something, review it on its own merits and faults. Don't knock points off because it isn't like product X or give it points because it resembles Product Y. At that point it ceases to be a review and becomes a comparison.
Points against the instanced maps and AV fights are good things to point out and you give sound reasoning for your displeasure.
Ugh, you're comparing WoW again. Stop it. It isn't WoW, no game is, except WoW itself.
"Motnonous" or whatever word you're attempting to use instead of "monotony" at 8:27 is another ding against your credibility. Likewise, you've mentioned "bad game design" several times now. While as a reviewer reviewing a game, I'm willing to listen to your opinion on "Is this game fun and entertaining?" because that's a question the average joe can answer. Bringing up game design is a tangent to that main idea, and one that makes me question what background or authority you have to pronounce any form of game design "bad." As you present no credentials or examples of your authority on the subject, you once again lose credibility as a reviewer.
"This offends my 'keep it simple' approach to game design." Why do we care about your game design philosophy? We don't. We care if the game is fun or not. you have gone off topic to talk about yourself and your beliefs regarding game creation. Nobody cares. Anybody watching this video wants to hear your opinions about the game itself, not your approach to game design. Follow your own advice and keep the review simple, and on topic.
Your complaints about the fitness pool powers such as health and stamina are fair and you back them up accordingly. however, recently the developers made an announcement that these powers would be inherent in a coming update, somewhat negating your complaint. This shows you didn't "Fact check" your review, something any professional publication or reviewer/critic does. Granted, this was a very recent announcement, but I see the video was posted a couple days or so after it was made.
Now you are going on about suggestions to fix the game, making this no longer a review, but a "Here's what I think," video. Critics and reviewers (good ones) don't do this. They say if something was good or bad, give evidence for their opinions, and call it a day. They do not give theoretical examples about "How I would have done it." Once again you're making it about you, and nobody really cares about you. not in a mean way, you just aren't a celebrity or other notable personality. I'd say the same thing to somebody working for GameTrailers or PC Gamer. The people working there aren't famous celebrities whose personal opinions get headline space. neither are yours, and therefore have no place in the review.
Annnd I've seen enough. I gave it until over the halfway mark and you just keep repeating the same mistakes.
END VERDICT: Unprofessional, sloppy vanity project with no real meat to it, or worthwhile insights. Facts presented are either false, exaggerated, or otherwise incorrect.
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Ah, the X-Box live / dungeon finder model. That works somewhat well in games where you have a fixed tank/healer/damage model, except most of the time the damage dealers just end up stuck in long queues because there aren't enough tanks available. WoW's cross-server random instancing has pretty much killed any sense of server community there, and common courtesy too (easy to be rude when you know you'll probably never group with any of these people again).|
Originally Posted by GKaiser
That's not what I meant. I meant a system where you click on a menu indicating you are looking to do missions and are put into a query of other similar level characters who are looking for missions, and automatically grouped together based on the class needs of the party. CoH does not have one. I believe all MMORPGs should.
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I'm going to have to agree with the people who said that you don't really understand how the game works. CoH is designed to not have "class needs" for 99% of the content in the game. A team of eight Defenders (squishy, low-damage support class) is a perfectly viable, and in fact quite awesome steamroller team. Any sort of automatic LFG system would have to be truly random, because it's impossible for the game to build a cookie-cutter team since such a thing doesn't exist.
I didn't read this entire thread(yet), so I may repeat some stuff.
First in a review I think when mentioning quests and raids you should point out those terms are Missions and Tasks Forces in CoH. I feel that is important to educate your viewer.
I'm on board with AV fights being boring, and PvP being broken.
I disagree strongly about your criticisms of the market since it is stupid easy to make Influence in this game. But that is just a matter of opinion, and I do understand how it can be overwhelming to a new player.
You way over simplified tanking, some are about defense(avoiding hits), some are about resistance(hits do less damage).
Scrappers getting to the defense cap(soft cap really) typically are not hurting their DPS. For most sets to get there it takes a large Invention Origin Enhancement investment and if they are putting in the time to soft cap defense, they will be working on other things as well. Go check out the Scrapper forums to learn more.
Fitness pool(Hurdle, Swift, Health, Stamina) are becoming inherent powers soon, so those will no longer be an issue. That just got announced a couple days ago, so it is understandable it is not in your review.
Hasten, Weave, Tough, Acrobatics, and Combat Jumping are by no means required to make a good character. Whoever says that is just flat out wrong. Now if your goal is min/maxing your build, then yes several of those powers will probably be in it. But you can get through most of this games content without ever touch those powers. My most recent Scrapper that can solo AVs doesn't Hasten for example(or acrobatics, but that is another issue I'll get into soon).
Most Tanks and Scrappers really have no use for Acrobatics(in PvE, not sure about PvP) because their sets have Mez and Knockback protection. Fire and Dark armors have no Knockback protection, but that is easily remedied with a couple IOs, saving you power picks.
You mention one possible fix for endurance is making toggles free. While I understand where you are going with this, that wouldn't solve the "problem" you bring up. The fact is toggles don't use much endurance at all compared to attacks.
I agree lack of end game content is a problem. But that is coming the next issue(FINALLY), and that has been known for a while now so it really should have been mentioned in your review. I think it is a valid criticism(my biggest issue with the game today actually), but for completeness and fairness sake you should have informed viewers about the next issue.
PvP is a joke in this game. The Devs tried to fix it back in issue 13, but that was a horrible failure.
As far as fan sites, Paragonwiki.com is a great place to get pretty much all the info you need. While most of the player guides are horribly outdated, posting in the proper section of the CoH forums will get you any info you need.
If you couldn't find teams between 6-8PM Central time then you were going about it the wrong way. Now I don't expect a new player to know what global channels are good and what servers have high and low populations, so that is understandable. But to say the servers are dead is factually incorrect.
Also, a new team forming system is coming to the game, but there isn't any ETA on that yet.
While the badges for Task Forces don't give you anything, you do get Reward Merits and the end of each task force. I'm very puzzled why this wasn't mentioned, as you had to have known this and it is very relevant and important information.
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I think you pretty much nailed it. Almost an exact mirror of my own review of the video earlier in the thread. Your critique though had much more detail.
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Originally Posted by Emperor_Justin
END VERDICT: Unprofessional, sloppy vanity project with no real meat to it, or worthwhile insights. Facts presented are either false, exaggerated, or otherwise incorrect.
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I almost never post, heck this thread alone is what made me finally set up my forum account. With that said I took a look at your review, and I have to admit, the first half of it wasn't bad at all, heck I'd say really good, but the the second half kind of goes down hill, and this is mainly cause, like a few posters have said, it fell kind of dated. I really suck at making post on forums which is why for the most part I never do, so I will try to make this as good as I can as well as keeping personal feeling about the game and the review out cause I feel they don't help and only start flame wars.
Like I said the review wasn't bad, not the first half anyway. You said at the start of your review that it had been a good 2 years or so when you last play, looking at the review as a whole really did feel like it was done the last two years you played. You points on the contact (or quest givers if you like) sending you all over the place in a way holds true today, but mostly on the Hero side. It something people still talk about today in truth, I think I might have seen a post about it a good 2 or 3 days ago. To my point, you don't really get this much in CoV and GR. With that said, almost ever review I ever seen on CoX, no one ever points out the fact that after a good 2 or 3 missions, the contact give you their number, so it really cuts down on the running back in forth a lot.
With my first point said, I have to say there was a big lack of CoV and GR in the review, I mean it's one thing if you don't like it, that is cool, but you can't really do much a full review on the game leaving out stuff like this. It would be like doing a review on WoW and leaving out TBC and WoTLK, yeah it would be a review oh WoW but with only doing the main game that goes from level 1-60 it would be a outdated review, which is what this feels like. While one could say that CoV and GR are more of the same, it's where the Dev really show you what new things they really have come up with over the years, showing you just how much the game has changed.
The part where you started talking about powers and enhancements got me too. Mainly cause while you did touch on IOs or crafted enhancements, that was about all you did, just touch on them. This is another things that I see a lot when someone reviews this game. True normal enhancements get weaker over time, one point people go for all the time, but isn't this something truth almost ever other MMO? In WoW as you level weapons and armor do get weaker over time, heck as you said in your review about how 3 missions later you have weak enhancements, same can be said in WoW, after a good 3 or 5 level which can be done in a good 2 or 3 dungeon run I might add, your gear becomes very weak. This seems like something that is in ever MMO, but seems to be not such a big deal when WoW comes into play.
Now this next part seems to be the very big one that always comes up when people review this game, End Game! Well this one is kind of a hard one, mainly cause we do have an end game in this game, and we kind of don't....for now with I19 and the talk of I20 on the way, this might be what a lot of players may or may not be looking for. I do like the fact you pointed out that we have TF in this game, something I hardly see many reviews do with it comes to CoH, but even then you left out things like the raids we have, there is the new TF which is a 24 man one ( am I getting that right?) CoP. With that said like any other game that has "End Game" stuff, we do seems to almost get a new TF/SF with every new big up date. I would be lying if I said that a lot of our older TF are mainly "tank and spank" well I guess in this game "buff and steamroll", but a lot of the newer stuff isn't so much, heck I have seen a lot of things that you would see in a few other games raid bosses in this game and the other way around, so there is some good stuff out there, just depends on what you feel is good.
I guess it's time to end this with the last thing I'd like to bring up. It seems every time a review is trying to throw City of Heroes into the "Classic MMO" setting, when in truth it's really not, I mean sure, there is a lot of thing you will see in this game, that you will see in any other MMO. but I would like to think that is just more of the basics of MMOs. This game kind of does a lot of things in it's own way far from the classic style, and I bet if you asked that there is a lot of the players here like about that. it's not WoW, or Guild Wars, or even EQ, but at the end of the day it's own thing!
Like I said it wasn't so must a bad review as much as it felt very out dated, had this been made a good 2 or 3 year ago I think you would kind a lot more people agreeing with you and the points you made. Sorry if this was a crazy long wall of text post and a to of misspelled words, I normally never post on forums but this thread got to me. Truth be told I'd love to see you do a full review on the game, but with that said, if at the end of the day you don't really care much for the game, while it might be a lot on the way the game is, it might also be that this just isn't you kind of MMO, which there are many out there and all with their own thing 
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Well I suppose if this is an example of your research skills we know how you have enough time to throw together a poorly edited 20 minute video game review.
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Originally Posted by GKaiser
Do you honestly believe three-four sentence posts (most of them vague about what they dislike about my opinions) are going to instantly change the opinion of someone who spent 97 hours playing the game from 1-50 to review it, and a hell of a lot more researching it?
You call it "defending" my criticisms. I call it elaborating on how I came to my opinions. |
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Thanks!
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Originally Posted by Golden Girl
Welcome to the forums
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I haven't watched the vid, but based on the foaming mouth reactions I'm going to harbor a guess that it was negative in nature.
I recently read a review of a motorcycle I'm interested in by a guy with 10 years racing/street experience and he put in considerable time on the specific bike. Enough where I thought his opinion was worthy. He got trashed by this other guy that had 20 years experience riding and the older guy refused to accept anything he said about the bike. My point is, that no matter how much time you spend someone will probably have spent more and will try to invalidate your opinion based solely on that premise. So that is something to avoid entirely and just let the accuracy of your statements prevail without making an appeal to authority whether inadvertent or otherwise.
I will say this though that I rarely see get bagged on in CoH reviews: The enhancement system (not the IO system) is absolutely terrible. If i20 brought about the removal of that antiquated and poorly constructed system in favor of entirely supporting the IO system I'd be happy with that decision. Sadly, it is the original enhancement system that new players are primarily exposed and indoctrinated with as well.
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For me at least it's not so much that it's a negative review as it's really not a very good negative review. If you're going to do a negative review, at least do a comprehensive and fact checked negative review.|
Originally Posted by Nicetry
I haven't watched the vid, but based on the foaming mouth reactions I'm going to harbor a guess that it was negative in nature.
I recently read a review of a motorcycle I'm interested in by a guy with 10 years racing/street experience and he put in considerable time on the specific bike. Enough where I thought his opinion was worthy. He got trashed by this other guy that had 20 years experience riding and the older guy refused to accept anything he said about the bike. My point is, that no matter how much time you spend someone will probably have spent more and will try to invalidate your opinion based solely on that premise. So that is something to avoid entirely and just let the accuracy of your statements prevail without making an appeal to authority whether inadvertent or otherwise. I will say this though that I rarely see get bagged on in CoH reviews: The enhancement system (not the IO system) is absolutely terrible. If i20 brought about the removal of that antiquated and poorly constructed system in favor of entirely supporting the IO system I'd be happy with that decision. Sadly, it is the original enhancement system that new players are primarily exposed and indoctrinated with as well. |
The guy had some valid points, some debatable opinions presented as fact, some hyperbole and the couple positive things he had to say were either quickly glossed over or were backhanded compliments. Top that off with a presentation akin to the Angry Video Game Nerd or That Guy With the Glasses but not quite as professional and you'll get people a bit upset. Even then I kind of thought the response was relatively mild from most people.
Incidentally, I'm honestly curious about your dislike of the enhancement system. I remember finding it a welcome relief from the rampant tinking (that's what it was called right? It's been so long ....) in EQ and the loot system in DAoC. I'll admit it can be a bit of a chore to slot new enhancements in the higher levels, but it's not the worst system I've seen.
MA Arcs: Yarmouth 1509 and 58812
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Well, I made it this far into the thread, and just decided - since this is the second time you bring this up that immediately came to mind - that you simply have no business playing any MMO.|
Originally Posted by GKaiser
<snippage>
However, CoV still has the same problems in terms of the content not really challenging, no end game, little developed pvp, enhancements taking too long to swap, most achievements have no tangible reward, <...> |
You don't like repetitive content. All MMOs are repetitive. "But such-and-such game has you click these powers instead of those powers, so it's a change!" No, it's not - and it's the same the next couple dozen times you run it there, too.
You want "tangible rewards" - uhm, you're playing a computer game. Unless it's an illegal online gambling site, there are no tangible rewards in any of them. The only reward in any of them is the enjoyment you get in playing; if you aren't having fun, then you shouldn't be doing it. It seems like you didn't have fun in this game, and that's fine. But saying that it's because you didn't get a tangible reward is just petty and, quite frankly, pathetic.
While we're on rewards, you mention that you end up "getting rewards just to make the next set of rewards easier to get". Where does it stop in, for example, WoW? Oh, wait - the end game there, that you claim that is missing here, is to grind to get everything in whatever the most recent dungeon is, so that you can grind to get everything in the next expansion. For what purpose? So you can grind to get everything in the expansion after that. Are you seeing a pattern developing here? It's a staple of the genre.
As for throwing out the mission text as irrelevant: do you dismiss story as unimportant in every RPG you review? Because it would seem to indicate a severe lack of understanding in the entire genre. See, in them, you make a character that goes through a story - you know, story, that "flavor text" garbage that can make a game with otherwise completely bland mechanics memorable?
Frankly, while you're welcome to your own opinion, I don't think that putting up a strictly opinion piece is going to cut it as a "professional" review. Your defense of your lack of professionalism here just adds to that impression. If you want to review games as a career, maybe you should do some research beyond coming up with some Trivial Pursuit questions - start with "What about this game makes the people who play it, like it?" If you can't answer that question in your review, then you failed as a reviewer - because you didn't even try to get to the heart of the game.
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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er, watch the vid before proclaiming anyone foaming. more recently the moderator "the ocho" posted up a video review that fairly discussed gr,both the positives and negatives. the points were motly valid and properly backed up with facts as the player knew them, the reviewer was mostly professional, and the back and forth was fairly cordial, this is a garbled, careless train wreck.
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And all quests are missions - or did you not even read what you linked? Specifically, this part here:|
Originally Posted by GKaiser
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 |
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| Usually, in a single-player RPG, a player first receives a quest from a NPC and then, performs its mission and finally, receives a prize after finishing it. During performing the mission, the player interacts with the games world to unravel the quest or understand the plot behind the quest. |
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Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle
it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.
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Originally Posted by Brillig
It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.
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Perhaps, but I bet if he did a review where he just said "cox is great, cox is great" and it had large innacurracies the responses in this thread would be very different. Of course stepping in to the bear's den coated in BBQ sauce just as it wakes up from hibernation is generally only going to lead to one result.|
Originally Posted by Oliin
For me at least it's not so much that it's a negative review as it's really not a very good negative review. If you're going to do a negative review, at least do a comprehensive and fact checked negative review.
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That said, I don't see these colossal inaccuracies that people are proclaiming in his review. I may and do disagree with many of the fixes he proposes to the problems that he identified, but that is not what most people are on him about.
Yes he did not include GR and all of its awesomeness. GR is at most 16.7% of the game*
50 hero levels
50 vill levels
20 GR levels
Yes there are some GR features smattered elsewhere, I'm not discounting those because the percentage I stated doesn't weight the time spent in the level ranges. If it did the number would be much much lower and probably not exceed 7-10% of the entire game that is available. So I guess to be fair he should have done 1.4-2 min on GR in his 20 min review.
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Originally Posted by rian_frostdrake
er, watch the vid before proclaiming anyone foaming. more recently the moderator "the ocho" posted up a video review that fairly discussed gr,both the positives and negatives. the points were motly valid and properly backed up with facts as the player knew them, the reviewer was mostly professional, and the back and forth was fairly cordial, this is a garbled, careless train wreck.
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I have also watched the "runner" review that Mod8 posted. It was a fairly cordial discussion, but it also led to Castle effectively telling us that runners are a player perception issue followed by several pages of people citing instances and arguing about that mechanic.
If your point is that a red name posting a primarily neutral review leads to a neutral discussion compared to a player posting a largely negative review and actively engaging those that counter him leads to a largely aggressive discussion then I don't think you are going to win any awards for that observation.
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Originally Posted by Oliin
Incidentally, I'm honestly curious about your dislike of the enhancement system. I remember finding it a welcome relief from the rampant tinking (that's what it was called right? It's been so long ....) in EQ and the loot system in DAoC. I'll admit it can be a bit of a chore to slot new enhancements in the higher levels, but it's not the worst system I've seen.
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SO's
- have superfluous and outright outlandish names that are neither intuitive, logical, or fun in any way
- the combining system is clunky, slow, and largely serves no purpose
- system that is gated by specific contacts and zones that serves no purpose other than to sink time. There is no reason for a mutation contact and a magic seller, when it could just be the same person like is seen in GR/Peregrine Island. Additionally there is no reason for them to sell only a narrow level range of enhancements
IO's
- function and intuitive naming system
-logical progression of linear power gain. Whereas old style enhancements are actually plotted on an inverse power slope, that spikes up every 5 levels.
- encourages players to partake in a large game system
Mainly though, there is no reason for both systems to exist because they do the exact same thing (just IO's do it better).
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I think "task" is a nice neutral word - "quest" is fantasy, and "mission" is modern/sci-fi.
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Originally Posted by Siolfir
And all quests are missions - or did you not even read what you linked? Specifically, this part here:
And the fact that you managed to find a more than four-year-old GDC article where the term "quest" is used doesn't change that it's primarily relegated to the fantasy genre, despite the terms being fairly interchangeable as far as meaning. |
@Golden Girl
City of Heroes comics and artwork
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I used terms that I felt most gamers would be familiar with. On that note I referred to influence as "cash", so people would understand what I'm saying.|
Originally Posted by MunkiLord
I didn't read this entire thread(yet), so I may repeat some stuff.
First in a review I think when mentioning quests and raids you should point out those terms are Missions and Tasks Forces in CoH. I feel that is important to educate your viewer. |
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| I'm on board with AV fights being boring, and PvP being broken. |
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| I disagree strongly about your criticisms of the market since it is stupid easy to make Influence in this game. But that is just a matter of opinion, and I do understand how it can be overwhelming to a new player. |
I think this is the problem a lot of people have when they look at my review. They, as someone who has played the game for years, have forgotten the hours they have spent on forum shifting through forum posts trying to find reliable information about the game. They have forgotten the lessons they have learned through trial and error. For me, this stuff is all fresh in my mind and I find it totally unnecessary if the game was better designed, and I wanted to point it out.
It doesn't matter if another game has these problems too. Some of them do. But this isn't a review of them, this is of CoH. Someone has been talking about travel time between NPCs in other games. Yes some of them are crazy in travel time , but in most of them you at least get EXPERIENCE POINTS for finding the damn NPC and the good games reward the experience relative to how bloody hard it was to find that NPC from where the quest began. You generally do not get jack in CoH regardless of how many zones you jumped through. These are the differences that make what happens in these other games a little different than CoH.
While leveling up I met several new players to the game. Players who wondered why their damage didnt increase a lot when they slotted attacks with all red enhancements. They didnt read the elaborate forum posts on Enhancement Diversification. Yes, the tutorial mentions ED. However it doesn't explain it in a way the average gamer can understand the finer details. For that you need to turn to Google.
There are tanks and scrappers I partied with who wondered why they were constantly getting dazed and knocked down. They did not have the optional powers to give the needed defense against those attacks. And why would they? To unlock some those powers you have to pickup several you don't even want. It's not intuitive.
I, on the other hand, had played CoH before. I had read build guides before. I spent a considerable amount of time trying to find decent guides so I could avoid that kind of thing. I took those powers and I don't think I fell down in a fight once, or was knocked back ever. Some call this min/maxing; I call this understanding the game and building a character the way the game mechanics encourage you to do so.
Can you live without those powers? Sure. But as the text in the video said, the powers are only optional if you want your character to suck.
And let me be clear on what "suck" is:
-"Suck" is falling down constantly.
-"Suck" is getting held constantly.
-"Suck" is getting stunned constantly.
-"Suck" is running out of endurance mid-fight and having your toggles fall off, or waiting several minutes for endurance to regenerate.
I could have made a review where I said, "Well, I, as a seasoned MMORPG gamer, was smart enough to spend several hours reading forum posts to know precisely how to build my character and the best story missions to run for blah blah blah" and the review would have been worthless to the average MMORPG gamer, because that isn't how they play.
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| You way over simplified tanking, some are about defense(avoiding hits), some are about resistance(hits do less damage). |
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=115184
The end conclusion would have been the same. The Defense attribute is about dodging not reducing damage. Most Defenders do not spam heals, but have buffs to reduce the chance to get hit in the first place and improve regeneration. This I felt was a pro of the game, though it had the negative drawback of making the game unchallenging when taken to the extreme at the later levels.
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| Scrappers getting to the defense cap(soft cap really) typically are not hurting their DPS. For most sets to get there it takes a large Invention Origin Enhancement investment and if they are putting in the time to soft cap defense, they will be working on other things as well. Go check out the Scrapper forums to learn more. |
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| Fitness pool(Hurdle, Swift, Health, Stamina) are becoming inherent powers soon, so those will no longer be an issue. That just got announced a couple days ago, so it is understandable it is not in your review. |
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| Hasten, Weave, Tough, Acrobatics, and Combat Jumping are by no means required to make a good character. Whoever says that is just flat out wrong. Now if your goal is min/maxing your build, then yes several of those powers will probably be in it. But you can get through most of this games content without ever touch those powers. My most recent Scrapper that can solo AVs doesn't Hasten for example(or acrobatics, but that is another issue I'll get into soon). |
Why do players do it if there isn't a significant advantage to doing so?
Because the people who number crunch are stupider than the people who don't ? I don't think so.
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| Most Tanks and Scrappers really have no use for Acrobatics(in PvE, not sure about PvP) because their sets have Mez and Knockback protection. Fire and Dark armors have no Knockback protection, but that is easily remedied with a couple IOs, saving you power picks. |
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| You mention one possible fix for endurance is making toggles free. While I understand where you are going with this, that wouldn't solve the "problem" you bring up. The fact is toggles don't use much endurance at all compared to attacks. |
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| I agree lack of end game content is a problem. But that is coming the next issue(FINALLY), and that has been known for a while now so it really should have been mentioned in your review. I think it is a valid criticism(my biggest issue with the game today actually), but for completeness and fairness sake you should have informed viewers about the next issue. |
I reviewed the game as it was in July. It is now September. It took me awhile to have enough free time to edit the video. I haven't logged into Going Rogue but based on the videos I've seen and the forum posts, it seems no endgame content was released. I don't consider being able to switch factions to be endgame content since the missions seem pretty much exactly the same design-wise, except now you have a choice in what mission you'll do to get good or bad brownie points.
Show me a boss in CoH who requires critical thinking to defeat? A boss that whose encounter is a puzzle and not a clickfest? Is there any mission in the game that can't be bulldozed through with AoE spam?
Lord Recluse and his towers is all that comes to mind, but even that can be soloed
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...21&postcount=7
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| The PvP is a joke in this game. The Devs tried to fix it back in issue 13, but that was a horrible failure. |
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| As far as fan sites, Paragonwiki.com is a great place to get pretty much all the info you need. While most of the player guides are horribly outdated, posting in the proper section of the CoH forums will get you any info you need. |
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| If you couldn't find teams between 6-8PM Central time then you were going about it the wrong way. Now I don't expect a new player to know what global channels are good and what servers have high and low populations, so that is understandable. But to say the servers are dead is factually incorrect. |
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| Also, a new team forming system is coming to the game, but there isn't any ETA on that yet. |
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| While the badges for Task Forces don't give you anything, you do get Reward Merits and the end of each task force. I'm very puzzled why this wasn't mentioned, as you had to have known this and it is very relevant and important information. |
Some people have said that my criticism of how long it takes to upgrade enhancements is silly because other games have items to equip. The difference is those items are generally gained by killing enemies. In CoH you generally do not get the enhancements you actually want through random drops and the limited space to store items forces you to toss stuff away. Trying to farm salvage before you've unlocked a sizable number of salvage slots carries the same problem. Yet, some of the stuff you toss to make space might be needed when a good recipe drops. The system makes equipping feel more like rolling dice than any other gear system in an MMORPG I can think of. In better designed games, if a boss drops good loot for you, you can equip it right away without needing to find 2 other ingredients and the recipe, then go to a special place that only appears in certain towns to actually make it.
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Honestly, there are a couple fairly widely accepted issues with CoH. PvP's kind of broken, fed-ex missions aren't terribly fun (all the go talk to XXX missions), and the game could use more missions maps. That our AVs are pretty much walking bags of HPs instead of a puzzle will get you debates on if it's a negative or not though I'd imagine.|
Originally Posted by GKaiser
I'm glad you agree. You seem to be one of the few who can look at this a little more objectively.
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Thankfully the devs seem to be intent on moving away from a lot of those things. Though I don't think we'll be quick to see lots of new mission maps sadly. There's been less and less inter-zone travel in missions as they've developed more content, and they've recently started giving us more interesting fights. The Khan TF and Barracuda SF both have 'tricks' to beat Reichsman though not terribly complex ones, and Protean from the Issue 17 story arcs has an attack with a 'tell' (big message telling you to move) that will massively drain your endurance and heal him and Vanessa DeVore in Praetoria disappearing and reappearing with a group of mirror doubles to fight. It's not perfect, but it's a start and indicates to me that our devs are trying to give us more dynamic boss fights.
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| There are tanks and scrappers I partied with who wondered why they were constantly getting dazed and knocked down. They did not have the optional powers to give the needed defense against those attacks. And why would they? To unlock some those powers you have to pickup several you don't even want. It's not intuitive. |
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| Can you live without those powers? Sure. But as the text in the video said, the powers are only optional if you want your character to suck. |
The fighting pool's another debatable one. You can take it if you want to min/max your character out, but you can make a very playable character without it. Saying you'll suck without it is a bit of a stretch and on some AT's it's really not something I'd suggest someone take unless they were going for a specific play style (blapper for instance, and even then I'm not sure it'd be worth it).
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| You admit that, in order to min/max, you need those powers. The problem with your reasoning is that players don't min/max if they don't have to. |
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| I reviewed the game as it was in July. It is now September. It took me awhile to have enough free time to edit the video. |
MA Arcs: Yarmouth 1509 and 58812
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I would have if I felt the box expansion made any difference. I don't think it does. The new leveling zone is level 1 to 20. That took me one play session to accomplish, and from what I gather in the new zone those levels fly by even faster. |
Originally Posted by Oliin
Could you have thrown in a line about how you reviewed it a while back and that CoH has had a box expansion since then somewhere? You could have easily said that it didn't add anything to change any of your views on the game and the like. It's a simple add and acknowledging that you reviewed the game in a slightly different form than it is currently might have added to your review.
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The other content is new power pools for certain archetypes and the option to do alignment quests to make your character go to the other side of the fence-- and other than having the alignment system, the quests aren't structurally any different than any other quest in the game already.
Neither content addresses my criticisms of the game, so it really has no impact on my review. But to appease the vocal majority I'll review Going Rogue content in my next video.
I've become very intolerant of MMORPGs that have poor boss encounter design. I was already fed up with it 14 years ago when I first got into MMORPGs, and now I'm completely unable to not be highly critical of any game that can't offer more of a challenge than games which came out when I was a child. If you really think about it, something as old and simplistic as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has more challenging boss design than most MMORPGs on the market. There is no excuse for modern games made for adults (like CoH is) to not be at least that challenging.
To be perfectly honest, having done all the quests I did level 1 to 50 and several of the Villain quests, I would not be surprised if the majority of CoH quests had been created using a menu based tool not unlike the AE tools offered to players now. There is way too much cookie-cutting and randomization (such as the precise location where objects, escort NPCs and enemies appear, making it difficult to fine tune an encounter) for my taste and it bores the heck out of me. The only thing making the majority of them different is the flavor text in the windows and what NPCs say, and what the clue is.
As much as it might be "unrealistic", I much prefer finely tuned encounters where you might have to run the dungeons several times to get what you want, but enemies at least throw some curve balls at you and can't just be steamplowed through, and the party has to use some of their higher brain functions to survive the battle.
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well, yeah, its a single player game, of course it will, no latency to deal with, link only has a specific set of powers that the player has no control over, its not surprising. offline games simply a re too different from mmos to have really engaging boss fights, whether they are big bags of hitpoints or coordinated efforts with specific roles for players, neither will be as engaging as an offline game because they simply cannot. if youa re looking for that in an mmo, you will be forever disappointed. if i want crazy twitch fights, ill pop in a ninja gaiden game.
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Originally Posted by GKaiser
I've become very intolerant of MMORPGs that have poor boss encounter design. I was already fed up with it 14 years ago when I first got into MMORPGs, and now I'm completely unable to not be highly critical of any game that can't offer more of a challenge than games which came out when I was a child. If you really think about it, something as old and simplistic as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has more challenging boss design than most MMORPGs on the market. There is no excuse for modern games made for adults (like CoH is) to not be at least that challenging. |
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Originally Posted by GKaiser
To be perfectly honest, having done all the quests I did level 1 to 50 and several of the Villain quests, I would not be surprised if the majority of CoH quests had been created using a menu based tool not unlike the AE tools offered to players now. There is way too much cookie-cutting and randomization (such as the precise location where objects, escort NPCs and enemies appear, making it difficult to fine tune an encounter) for my taste and it bores the heck out of me. The only thing making the majority of them different is the flavor text in the windows and what NPCs say, and what the clue is. |
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Originally Posted by GKaiser
As much as it might be "unrealistic", I much prefer finely tuned encounters where you might have to run the dungeons several times to get what you want, but enemies at least throw some curve balls at you and can't just be steamplowed through, and the party has to use some of their higher brain functions to survive the battle.
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This comment right here displays one of your many flaws: you didn't even bother with the boxed expansion. |
Originally Posted by GKaiser
I would have if I felt the box expansion made any difference. I don't think it does. The new leveling zone is level 1 to 20. That took me one play session to accomplish, and from what I gather in the new zone those levels fly by even faster.
The other content is new power pools for certain archetypes and the option to do alignment quests to make your character go to the other side of the fence-- and other than having the alignment system, the quests aren't structurally any different than any other quest in the game already. Neither content addresses my criticisms of the game, so it really has no impact on my review. But to appease the vocal majority I'll review Going Rogue content in my next video. I've become very intolerant of MMORPGs that have poor boss encounter design. I was already fed up with it 14 years ago when I first got into MMORPGs, and now I'm completely unable to not be highly critical of any game that can't offer more of a challenge than games which came out when I was a child. If you really think about it, something as old and simplistic as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has more challenging boss design than most MMORPGs on the market. There is no excuse for modern games made for adults (like CoH is) to not be at least that challenging. |
Like I said before, there are some valid points we made to your post. You still haven't acknowledged them because if you had then you would not make this type of comment. You may think there is nothing new to GR but you don't know for sure; you didn't try it or acknowledge it's presence.
I really hope you learn from some of this because your review and many replies are very flawed. I do agree with a a lot of your comments about weak parts to CoH but when writing a review, you really have missed the mark. You don't know your topic well enough to present a critical review. Sorry. No two ways about it.
Anyway, the servers are quite busy even at 1am PST on a Monday night of the long weekend. I guess we'll see how many stick after Sept 17. For me, this MMO is one of the better ones and your review is very inaccurate. If you keep doing this type of thing, your credibility will be shot (it already is with me - I wouldn't trust your review on any other game I am not familiar with). Anyway, you may want to take down that youtube post and try again.
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You're not getting it, are you?|
Originally Posted by TheJazMan
This comment right here displays one of your many flaws: you didn't even bother with the boxed expansion.
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Does the boxed expansion change...
-low level salvage, recipes and enhancements being worth millions of influence on the AH?
-Enhancement system upgrade taking way too much downtime?
-Not enough inventory space for low lv characters.
-Repetitive and boring mission design for levels 1-50.
-Lack of pvp content.
-Lack of endgame content.
-Boring boss design.
-Needing to take several optional powers just to unlock the ones you actually want to use?
Or, you know, anything else I was critical of in my review?
Maybe if I said I was bored levels 1 to 20, or that I wished I could make my Scrapper a villain rather than just roll the nearly identical Stalker class, then Going Rogue would have impacted my review. But I didn't and it didn't.
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| Anyway, you may want to take down that youtube post and try again. |
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You've never played World of Warcraft, have you? Even in vanilla WoW, many of the instance and raid bosses were designed as puzzles. It was sometimes a little overboard, but it at least kept things interesting. In recent years some of them have become so complex many guilds need to follow video instructions to learn how to handle the encounters. |
Originally Posted by rian_frostdrake
well, yeah, its a single player game, of course it will, no latency to deal with, link only has a specific set of powers that the player has no control over, its not surprising. offline games simply a re too different from mmos to have really engaging boss fights, whether they are big bags of hitpoints or coordinated efforts with specific roles for players, neither will be as engaging as an offline game because they simply cannot. if youa re looking for that in an mmo, you will be forever disappointed. if i want crazy twitch fights, ill pop in a ninja gaiden game.
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Again, this isn't to say WoW is da bomb. I am merely pointing out that you are mistaken that a MMORPG cannot have more challenging enemy encounter design than simply having bosses own pets / have an entourage, and have tons of HP.
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| same deal in any mmo, kill 10 rats, get 10 rat tails, go to location here or there, click some resource node, and drop this named rat. regardless of exp or any silly reward, those are the nature of the beast, all the rest is, as you say, flavor text. funny thing about flavor text, a lot of us call taht story, setting and progression, and view wether we have the blue word of stupidly high damage or the purple sword of slightly higher damage as a somewhat pedestrian part of gameplay, indistinguishable from one mmo to the next. as such, "flavor text" is yet another thing that you seem overly contemptuous of, when in reality it is one of the few distinguishers between several of the games out there that otherwise follow a fairly standard template. |
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do the puzzles change each time? or is it a puzzle once and then a repitious act to template. we have a "puzzle" boss in reichsman, but once you figure out the puzzle, the variety vanishes. That is the point, a puzzle works one time, then you figure it out and it becomes grind. anything is grind if you dont enjoy it, and nothing is grind if you do. grind is an entirely subjective term, meaningless unless adequately defined as to why it is not fun. define curve balls, how often do they happen?? are the constantly happening or just in a few showcase events. i did play wow on a trial, i mentioned that in an earlier post, i killed 10 specific enemies, i got 10 low drop items, i was entirely unimpressed. it was the same old as i had already done, but with next to no customization and, at the time, a garbage teaming mechanic.
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Originally Posted by GKaiser
You've never played World of Warcraft, have you? Even in vanilla WoW, many of the instance and raid bosses were designed as puzzles. It was sometimes a little overboard, but it at least kept things interesting.
In well designed games, the game is not one huge grind. There are breaks where you have something interesting happen, enemies throwing curve balls. Like puzzle bosses. |
yeesh, glad i never played that then, i rage quit the boat game so hard it left a crater