What kind of reaction time do you think City of Heroes should demand?

I like the game as it is now. No changes please.

I'm pretty comfortable with the current reaction speed the game generally demands of me.

Most of the game play is well-paced. There have been improvements in the past. Some things limit folks with less than bleeding edge hardware. I used to _hate_ zoning into missions in Grandville to find my character face down at the feet of Arachnos without even giving my character the chance to exit the mission before defeat. At least mastermind pets zone with the character so the masterminds don't enter completely defenseless. Some ambushes quickly dispatch the unsuspecting (I am looking at you, ya big Malta cheaters).

One of the few annoying things is the onscreen notice that so and so is powering up his super duper orbital energy lance. I would sooner have the notice in the npc chat like when the mastermind pets confirm their actions.

My answer is that this game does it right in that there is a variety.

You can pick powersets that give you different varying effective battle speeds/reaction times, and in some cases, seek out different enemies that do the same. For instance, I find battles against Malta to pace very differently than battles against similar-level Carnies.

I don't think the game should force the same reaction times on all players. I like being able to vary my needed twitch level to some extent with my mood and current degree of caffienation/sleep deprivation.

The hard part, from a design point of view, would seem to go back to the idea of one of your other threads: keeping challenge consistent between slow and fast play. But I think this game does a fair job of that as well.

Maybe somewhere, like on an official wiki, they could label the various enemy groups to indicate the design-intended twitch levels. Something like "these guys require fast reaction times" or "these guys are fairly slow, but hit hard."

Before CoH, I didn't play MMOs. I played online, competitive team FPS games. One of the main things that attracted me to CoH, besides its comic-book superhero theme, was how FPS-ish it felt. I think about 1s or 1.5s is about right for me.

I like it where it is now.
Champions Online demanded a higher reaction time due to the blocking mechanism, and while that was nice for a change, I prefer the way City of Heroes plays.

There is lag compared to single player console games.
I've observed some rather odd adaptation to lag in myself from playing the game a lot. I know how the AI behave roughly, and I'm planning out moves in my head like a decision tree as I play. eg "I'll jump there, fire this attack on him, then that attack on the second minion, but if I miss the first I'll do this instead..." I think that it feels more realtime for me than it actually is because of this predictablity, and the 5% chance to miss no matter what keeps it interesting enough because it forces me to make backup plans as I fight.

There are a couple of cases where the AIs move too fast.

1) Sappers. They seem to be able to fire their guns round corners with zero pause or animation time as soon as you're in field of view. Most enemies dont do this.

2) Master Illusionists. They summon their illusions at the drop of a hat, and nothing short of a Domination hold seems to stop them. On my Gravity Controller I could Lift, Hold and Hold again before they hit the floor on any other enemy but these - they seemed to have the ability to summon duplicates in mid air.

(I know I've picked two favourite bugbear enemies here, but the speed is part of the problem. Im pretty sure this isn't just my skewed perceptions)

well, in general i like very fast twitch games, like guilty gear/street fighter 4 fast. but for coh, it has kind of a legacy being 7 years old, so where it is is good. latency always seem like an issue in online games, and as chase has pointed out, coh often cheats on locations of where you actually are, so too much reliance on actual reflexes would be problematic for the game itself.

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