PC Gamer Review of CoH Freedom: "How free-to-play gaming should be done"

I've easily got a decade on you in terms of lifetime, and I will match my oldity and grumpiness against any of you whippersnappers!

Remember when this game was new? You were young and full of joie de vivre!

Those Canaan days...we used to know...

Actually, I was 32, and I've never had joie de vivre. I'd been working retail for years by then. All of the joie de vivre had been beaten out of me.

*Does some quick calculations...*

When I was the age you were when you first started playing this game, I got my very first 2400 baud modem. The store from where I got it had their own BBS. It wasn't very much, but I was able to find numbers there to other BBSes that had a lot more users, and a lot more fun things to download!

So. If you were 24 in... let's say 1990 (probably more like 1987), that makes you...

*does quick math*

...79 today! Sheesh!

(stupid Ouroboros mucking up everything)

Where have they gone? Where diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

*deep breath*

iiiiiiiiid they go?

My math was off. D'oh!!!

That happened when I was younger than 24.

Six months before I turned 24 is when I acquired my first Internet access at the university I was attending at the time. I had to go into their computer dungeon in the science building and sign up for a shell account on their VAX, which ran VMS.

I used that same 2400 baud modem to dial remotely into their system from home on my Amiga 2000. But I had to dial into another CSU campus that was closer to me in order to avoid getting any local toll charges. It was a simple matter to select the CSUNet from the login prompt, and then I'd be presented with a menu of Cal State University networks I could connect to.

Such an arrangement was incredibly laggy, and I had to use a local chat window on my terminal program in order to properly see what I was typing. But uploading and downloading to my VMS account via Z-Modem worked just fine.

I prefer

Some say they touch the sky
Some say they see the wind
A whisper of spring is near
Can you hear it say
These are Mulberry days

but it is quite a bit more obscure

Playing on MUDs at 2400 baud was funny - you could read everything as it appeared on the screen! The sad part was, due to line noise in the university phone lines, I couldn't connect at faster than 2400 baud even when I got my 14.4 modem or it would go nuts.

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

That pool of phone numbers to data lines at CSULA back in the early 90's were pretty flaky themselves, yeah! Almost every time I dialed into there, I'd end up at 1200 baud. If I wanted 2400 baud, I would have to keep disconnecting and reconnecting until it finally clicked. Total PITA!

A guy I knew at the time found me a VMS port of TinyFugue, which worked very nicely for playing on MU*'s. I set up some function key macros on my terminal program to invoke certain TinyFugue commands.

As a student at DIKU, I was not late to the MU* scene myself.

What do you mean "getting" ?

I was old and grumpy from before this game started. At best its only had a slight mellowing effect

Don't confuse message board presence with receptiveness to ideas.

A nice article but also a very fair article. Which makes it even better that they have placed CoX on top

They decided not to make us pay 15 Astral Merits to unlock the new Incarnate slots, based on our reaction to it.

How many other dev teams would do the same? I'd say it's a safe bet the answer you're looking for there is "none".

That means they DO listen to us, it just doesn't always end up how we'd (as a whole) prefer.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

When working with something that's as easy as (metaphorically) flipping a switch, yeah, I'm sure they're more than happy to take player reaction into account after systems are designed. Happened with the Astral gating, and happened with Build Up in Titan Weapons.

Changing around art assets, or porting a set over to an AT that was overlooked in design though, probably won't happen with any sense of urgency, or in the case of the former, at all.

Hey, I'm trying to reinforce positive behavior here! The devs have shown enough flexibility in the past due to player feedback that it's worthwhile to encourage more. Besides, the last thing we want is the "you'll get nothing and like it" attitude that some MMORPG studios have.

The latter surely? The changes to the CoT revamped art after player feedback recently are the kind of thing we'd like to see more of.

The latter potentially more likely. I believe for Titan Weapons to go to Stalkers, there'd probably need to be a unique AS animation. Synapse seemed to get the idea that not including an AT in a new melee set that has historically gotten access to all of the new melee sets was a bad idea. That was my impression, anyway. That type of port work is mostly numbers, relatively "cheap".

Art assets are expensive to rework in comparison, though. Whereas the CoT change stemmed from the fact that they were an enemy group, I doubt the Gunslinger pieces (what I was alluding to) will change in the same manner simply because they're being sold. It'd be substantial effort (and probably tough to gift new pieces based on a previous purchase, and I doubt they'll flat out remove/replace the current female pieces), and they'd have a helluva time remarketing it. That, and player feedback was essentially ignored for that aspect, aside from, "sorry if this offended anyone, we'll try and make less unique stuff for either gender - that'll teach 'em!" But that's a different conversation.

I don't mean to be negative, but I rarely if ever felt the need to post criticisms before, and I've been doing it an awful lot recently. And I don't really want too. I enjoyed the times where the decisions that were being made were awesome, when long-standing wishlist items were getting checked off. Flashback? Yup! Custom power colors? Yup! Custom weapons? Sure! It was fun, really.

The Gunslinger/Ginslinger costume issue is an ongoing problem all right. The devs certainly didn't pay sufficient attention to criticism during its beta, and the problem's flared up on the general forum now that it's live. The one bright spot, despite Zwillinger's 'table for later' comments, is that directly porting over several pieces from the male set to the female model has been demonstrated to work. And Noble Savage has said that the flexibility of the Paragon Market's piecemeal offerings allow for easier revision and one-offs than the old booster pack model. Hope springs eternal.

Same here - and you're far from alone these days. I've been, ahem, providing so much feedback lately that I jumped at the chance to share this good review for CoH Freedom.

I keep that in mind every time you post.

After you have an entire chunk of the game you play and enjoy cauterized into a smoking stump, I think certain folks are entitled to be bitter.

Don't confuse "Listening" with "doing whatever the forums demand."