City of Heroes is the World Wrestling Federation of Superhero MMOs

The reason I used the term gimmick in the way I did was because I was using it the way pro-wrestling (and in reality, television and film) use it. A gimmick isn't just something you find at the end of the iTrials. The gimmick is the trial itself having to rely on a specific ending. No matter what, a trial/task force will always have an ending. But having to go out of your way to devise a new way to complete it, every issue, makes the trial/tf a gimmick.

There are gimmick movies out there that tell the SAME exact story but use a gimmick to draw people in. (ie. Avatar telling the story of Pocahantas, but with space creatures and in 3-D.) Just because it's the same doesn't mean it's bad especially when used in moderation.

Doesn't this describe all content in the game to date? In fact, doesn't that describe how almost all RPG video games work? They force you down a single path while trying to give you the illusion of choice. That's not really a "gimmick" though, is it? It's a limitation inherent to the medium. The best they can do is maybe offer side quests, which I don't think applies to an MMORPG where you can have several story arcs running at once.

Most *good* games give you actual choices that affect gameplay.

In DOOM you might have the choice between a rifle or a shotgun. The rifle will go through your ammo quicker, but the shotgun is useless at range. Choice, consequence.

To take the example of a good RPG, in Planescape Torment you might have the choice to add Ignus or Vhailor to your party. Ignus will give your party awesome AoE attack capabilities, while Vhailor is guaranteed to break your face in as soon as he learns the truth about you. Choice, consequence.

In City of Heroes you have the choice of wearing a standard cape or one with glowy bits on it. Next month they'll give us the choice of new, glowier bits.

Most games give the choice between rock, paper and scissors. Only they all give different names to them. This is called "balance". If anything, that's the real gimmick.

You're saying you actually want things like "Cape of flying +5" and "Power Gloves of smashing +10" in CoH?

I... don't think I'd care to go there, seriously.

You make plenty of choices about personal character development, starting with choosing your AT and power sets.

As for the itrials and and TF's like Apex and Tin Mage, I think they would be far more monotonous if they lacked the 'gimmicks.' I don't want every fight in the game to be nothing more than a simple tank-and-spank affair.

and you're still wrong.

as a slight correction, the STF hasn't even been around for 7 years, more like 4-5.

I disagree. Rock, paper, and scissors are fine choices if they lead to different consequences. It's not right that a rock, a piece of paper and a scissors should all share the same experiences and fate.

Oh, so you prefer the choice between Numina's Convalescence +Stam/+Regen or Miracle +Stam?

We're not talking equipment -- although if we were to focus on equipment, CoH has obviously chosen not to have a very exciting selection of it. We're talking about gameplay, which requires challenge, which comes from choices that have consequences. CoH is providing lots of choices with little consequence. That's not healthy for the long-term future of the game.

You make plenty of choices at every stage of playing CoH. Few of them matter anymore.

AT still matters. A blaster can't tank as well as a tank and a tanker can't blast. Some of those edges have been blurred -- blasters get incarnate shields, now, and a blasting tank *is* possible with vet powers and Epic power pools but it wouldn't be very good.

Powerset hardly matters anymore. Almost all powersets within an AT play identically to each other. Some are clickier, some are more toggle and forget. There are a few exceptions, but not many and the difference between them isn't much. It's even less now that everyone has the exact same incarnate abilities, power pools (which are now mandatory), and special powers that they buy on the Paragon market. Everyone's equally special these days, which means that nobody is.

Lots and lots of choices. A dizzying array of them. No consequences.

That's not a game. It's a newbie-friendly button mashing costume simulator, designed by middle managers for middle managers. That's the new vision.

Nothing wrong with that, really, if it keeps the company running. It'll only drive away people interested in actual gameplay.

As someone else already stated above, CoH already has its own version of "rock, paper, scissors". It may not be in a package you like, or even wish to recognize. Doesn't mean it isn't there.

And it's still a gimmick. It's an artificial way of imposing fairness. That's why every AT has different initial and max levels of HP, defense, and so on.

My point there was that those things are not obvious when you use them. As opposed to some other games where it's painfully obvious that everyone is using the exact same gear because they're all wearing the exact same items. How very dull!

Here's where I disagree with you. There's plenty of choices you can make while playing the game that have repercussions on your character later on; the first ones being what AT you decide to play, and what primary and secondary power sets you choose.

Seriously, I'm not sure what you're expecting out of an MMO. I've let your apples-and-oranges comparisons of different types of games slide so far because I initially made a comparison on the RPG aspects of CoH with single player RPGs, but I think perhaps you've taken it a bit too far.

What world record have they ever set?

And what was the old vision? I don't recall any of my characters ever losing levels or getting deleted or whatever when they got defeated back when I started playing this game. About the only big difference is the amount of debt I used to accrue back then. I got used to that. It wasn't such a big deal then, and of course it's certainly not a big deal now!

So, then... what?

Kurt Angle won a gold medal at the Olympics with a broken neck. Also, because of Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant, they set a world record for attendance at the Pontiac Silverdome.

Over 7 years, and still going strong

For better or worse, Sam, I don't think you'd be able to do that if that's all the game offered. It's the height of speculation on my part, but I doubt the game would still be here if that had been all it offered after all this time.

This is a wholly unsubstantiated claim.

It is nothing more than an opinion, but it is a sincerely held one.

Yes, and people at the time still managed to solo them with everything.

It was either Evil Geko or Zombie Man who soled that entire arc, Hero 1 included, with team-centric AT/powerset characters, on SOs with only small inspirations. I forget what the specifics were, but an entire thread existed in I19 Beta specifically to record those precise results.

Nothing is impossible to solo. Nothing ever was. Some things are simply not fun to solo.

No, I don't see those often for the same reason I never saw them often - because they suck and people don't want to team with them. I'm happy for you if you want to gimp yourself - and that's all it ever was - and face challenge that way, but you're as free to do this now as you were then. By all means, go ahead and make a horrible build that's counter to your AT's strengths and you, too, can have challenge.

Just realise that others who do play to their AT's strengths will be stronger than you, now as before. Granted, now the gulf is greater, but a gulf it always was. I've seen petless Masterminds, and they didn't inspire envy or respect in me. They inspired pity and compassion for the poor soul who wanted to have guns but not Thugs.

That's self-made challenge that you can always make for yourself, as long as your idea of challenge isn't competing with everybody else.

You could always buy them from contacts, you could always buy them from vendors and, failing that, you could always farm for Kora fruit back when that dropped large inspiratiosn. You exaggerate.

As for hoarding and e-mailing, you could always do this even before, you just needed help. Like a second account that you pay an extra $15 for to hold all your stuff. Only now you can have storage for the price of one subscription, yet somehow you read this as more paying to win because it's more convenient?

Wasting three of my power choices on Stamina was easily the worst part of character building. If it's mandatory, give it to me. If it's mandatory that I lose three power picks, simply give me three power picks less. Don't pretend to give me choice and then leave me with only a single option.

And no, adding other powers is not a solution. This was never a choice between picking Stamina or picking a different power. It was a choice between picking Stamina or NOT picking Stamina, where not picking Stamina was the wrong choice. Endurance is this game's greatest equaliser. Everyone needs it for everything, and when it runs out, you run out of options. The only thing you can replace Stamina with and not be wrong is Stamina by another name, at which point that's not a choice at all.

Either the game needed to be redesigned to stop needing endurance so much (fat change), Stamina needed to be taken out of the game entirely (fat chance) or the need for Stamina satiated in another way that's not just making more endurance recovery/reduction powers. The development team chose that last one, by simply eliminating the problem at its source, granting Stamina to everyone and making endurance as a whole not much of a balancing factor in the long run. While this made things easier on the one hand, it also made them a lot less irritating on the other, and it let me have many of the powers I wanted, but could never support the cost of.

First of all, you have a very... Wrong idea of what "powerlevelling" is. Secondly, let's see how long it lasts. That's been in the game for all of a few weeks. How long did it take Matt Miller to start threatening Architect abusers? Finally, how exactly is Death From Below functionally different from gathering a bunch of people and diving into the sewers the old way? Death From Below doesn't have some kind of magical super-experience reward, it's mostly just killing stuff. Yes, it does have those convenient SOs, but that's not even remotely related to power levelling.

Yes, I'm sure you look forward to the old days of dumpster diving and wolf farms and constant bridge requests. I'm sure you pine for the old days of the Winter Lords and the Egg farms and the Portal farms. I'm sure you miss the good old days of Architect exploits. "The game" was never vibrant and exciting because people have been taking the easy road to 50 since before I joined in in May of 2004. You name a period in the game's history and I'm pretty sure I can name at least one way in which the game was broken to provide an easy way to 50 to the masses.

The game is only as "vibrant and exciting" as you want to make it, and this is as true now as it ever was. You merely refuse to do so by your own choice. I, by contrast, found its gameplay to be "vibrant and exciting" for about two weeks to a month, then I dragged my feet until September when my second two-month game card ran out and I left, intending to never look back. Then I was back in December that year, vying to never be slave to gameplay again. Lo and behold, I'm here seven years later, happy as punch while you drag your feet, lamenting how good the game used to be.

It makes no difference what you chose to do then, because the same things you chose to do, you can choose to do now. You chastise the game for being easy, but when I cite how it used to be EASIER, you swerve by saying you didn't do that. Well, if you managed to find challenge in a game infested with farmers and powerlevellers, you can find challenge now. You're simply not looking hard enough.

I have one better. I remember facing Nosferatu, circa I7, on my own and kicking his ***. I'll take that experience over wasting an hour of my life beating my head against a brick wall. As Yahtzee once said, I suppose succeeding in breaking down the wall with my head would have given me a great sense of achievement, which is just as well as I'd have lost all my other senses by then. What you describe strikes me as a HORRIBLE experience that I would have abandoned at the 15 minute mark, as that's about the amount of patience I have for fake difficulty.

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of the pre-GR Diabolique, who was both famous and infamous for her propensity to turn on Personal Forcefield and take off into the sunsent. I've fought Black Swan both before and after the AV-to-EB change, as well as before and after Going Rogue, and at no point has she run. I've fought Diabolique under the same circumstances, and she has run every time, multiple times.

And every time it pisses me off to no end because running enemies are one of my biggest irritants in this game. Chasing after a fleeing Agent Crimson is not my idea of fun, nor is stopping 30 Fir Bolg. It's actually the polar opposite of fun, come to think of it. It's painful and nauseating and it makes me hate both the game and the people who make it. I drop both of these missions like a hot potato every time they show up in my queue in the vague hope that someone in QA might notice.

Yes, I too remember the "thrill" of running... Ever so slowly... Back from the hospital, seeing half my team drop, making the mission impossible to finish, urging the remaining few people in a valiant attempt to salvage that mess, team-wiping again about five more times because we don't have enough people and all going our separate ways bitter and defeated. I don't miss that.

Nor have I, but until you mentioned it, I was lucky enough to not remember having to "use tactics," as was one-size-fits-all solution to everything that arrogant ponces used to toss at every player who complained about power balance. I remember how bored out of my skull I was while the Blaster would slooooowly drag all the enemies around the corner, one by one, so that we can take fifteen minutes to take down one spawn. I remember dying a lot, too. I remember not having a hell of a lot of fun.

A while ago, I sat down and reflected on the game, how it once was and all the things that had changed. I realised one thing: The Launch game really, really sucked for power balance and the kind of player power I really wanted - that is, the ability to solo my own missions without dying all the time - was only achievable through min-maxing. Well, now it's available to the masses, and whether or not it is an achievement no longer interests me. I care to get it, not HOW I get it. So, no, I don't miss having to pull, which is about the sum total that "use Tic Tacs" always seemed to come down to.

And I'm saying that they never did that. I don't know what greater depth you ever saw in City of Heroes (that isn't there now), but I always saw City of Heroes for the click-and-kill fighter that it is, not much different from Diablo 2 or Dungeon Siege (which is essentially Diablo 2 anyway). You pick your powers, then click on things to die. The only difference is you don't have an auto-attack, and must instead rely on recharge-bound skills, instead.

City of Heroes is not and has never been a complex system worthy of gaming it. It was never designed to be one. This isn't D&D or Champions (the PNP system). This is a game which revolves solely around delivering enough damage and surviving enough damage, and there isn't all that much planning necessary to achieve this. There never was. Especially since "Bring a Defender or two" has always solved any problems a team might have. Back in I3, I ran a Bastion TF with 6 Scrappers and a Bubble Defender, and we walked over absolutely everything in our path. That's before I started running numbers, and this was done with a pick-up TF group and it was still dead easy.

This was never a complicated, deep, engaging game. It was a studio's first project, and it shows. It started off rife with bad programming, shoddy design, poor balance and limited interactivity, and Cryptic then NCNC then Paragon Studios have spent much of their time just fixing the inexperience of the original team. Hell, I'm sure Geko was under tremendous pressure to crank out a huge amount of powersets in a short amount of time, which is why he made so many of them so broken (Elude didn't let you attack, Moment of Glory didn't let you heal up, Rooted literally rooted you, Blasters had crappy ranged AND melee damage AND Controller hit points, etc.), and that's just one thing.

People flocked to City of Heroes partly for the comic books, but also partly because it WAS broken in a way that made us overpowered. Tired of having to fight single critters with a full team and fearing for their lives, people flocked to this game where you could take 20 goons out on your own. And you didn't start out fighting rats. Well, and because the game had no loot and raiding, but that's besides the point.

There IS no innovative gameplay and unique gaming experiences. There never were such things, that's what I'm saying. At least, there never were any which no longer exist. City of Heroes brought a lot of innovations to MMOs, but none of them are gameplay-related. They are, for the most part, convenience innovations. Sidekicking is one big one, but all that meant was you could play with more people, but the actual playing was still the same simplistic button-mashing system. Every time they tried to innovate, they produced a flop like simu-click objectives, running bosses or Dr. Graves. Every time they tried to experiment with powersets, they produced another Trick Arrow.

The core game is still here, pretty much unchanged since 2004. It's not much more complex, it's not much less difficult, it's not all that different. Scrappers are still awesome, Blasters are still sad, Defenders still insist they're not Healers and so on, only now we have more ATs to be condescending towards, but the game remains the same. What worked before still works now, just maybe better. What didn't work before hasn't gotten any better, it just sucks a little less.

What you're looking for, you can still achieve. Up your difficulty, mix up your builds, take chances, that sort of thing. I say the game is easy, but even I face hard fights a lot of the time. That's for the simple fact that I don't care to min-max, thus I'm operating more or less at pre-I9 levels of performance.

Sure, if you WANT to min/max AND have a difficult game, then I will have to politely ask you to please find another game. Because any game where I have to try hard and STILL have a hard time is a game I do not want to play. I get having a hard time if I'm lazy, I get putting in a lot of work to make the game easy, but to bust my *** and still be fighting for my life? No. Every other MMO on the Market does this, and there's a reason I'm not playing any of them.

I'm really not sure how you come to that conclusion when City of Heroes is still the only MMO which offers a decent super hero experience for those who aren't necessarily comic book fans, it's still the only MMO on the market that's relatively easy all the way through and it's still one of the VERY few MMOs where you can solo relatively well. Compound that with the fact that it's one of the few who technically have an open world but are still largely instance-based AND has 7 years worth of costume creator and that's a very tough act to beat.

It is precisely because City of Heroes is "MMO-lite" that I'm here. I recall back in 2004 and 2005 how many people we had who admitted that City of Heroes was not only their first MMO, but their first computer game ever, as well. If you're looking for an MMO classic, you came to the wrong place, because City of Heroes is not a classic MMO, nor should it be. If I wanted WoW in tights, I can always play Champions Online. As I'm posting here on the VIP-only forums, that's probably not the case.

I've tried other MMOs. In fact, just last night a friend of mine asked me to try Vindictus. You know what my first experience with it was? Mailbox, crafting, auction house, gear degradation, mining, materials, armour dyes, loot enhancement that has a chance to break your weapon. Essentially, "MMO stuff," none of which is interesting to me.

The stats and skulls and the gear and the trading and the dying isn't why I'm here. The reason I'm here is because when I was younger, I sat down and wrote the story of a character whom I gave the ****** name of "Samuel Tow," whom I really, really liked. So when I heard about a game where I could probably make Sam and play him for real, I jumped at the chance. Sam was always overpowered the way I wrote him, and he's only gotten worse with time. Being overpowered in the game is exactly up his alley. And it is in Sam's image that my entire cadre of probably 60 characters at this point spawned, and ideally, I want them all to be as awesome as him. All the numbers and the loot and the "challenge" do is get in the way.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

No, what I want is Inventions (and while we're at it, Raids) out of the game permanently. Since we're stuck with them, we may as well make the best of them by... Pretending they don't exist.

Um... Not in the slightest. One of the most entertaining games I've ever played was MegaMan X4 for the PC, specifically with Zero. That game gives you just about zero choice, because you always build the same character by the end (unless you miss something valuable), and yet it's still a tremendous amount of fun because it looks amazing at least by arcade emulator standards, and because it's just fun to play. That game gives you no choices and provides you with no consequences. The worst that can happen is you have to replay a stage, with none of the stages being particularly hard or long once you know what you're doing (and have read a guide showing you all the hidden items).

If you're talking about the mythical "replay value," then I personally prefer to be able to replicate exactly the same experience over and over again because that's the experience I like. Alternate paths have no real meaning beyond that, because if I didn't pick them, then I didn't want to pick them.

For example, I don't need Tankers and Defenders and Controllers and Dominators and Corruptors to enjoy the game, because I'm never going to play any of these classes. They offer no replay value to me, because I simply don't like them. And no, I'm never going to be convinced otherwise.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Thanks!