And this is why City of Heroes will always be unique

Like I've always said, City of Heroes has been quietly innovating MMORPGs since 2004. Too bad about that "quietly" part. For whatever reason the game has always been and continues to be very much under the radar.

However, more and more I've found that MMORPGs sacrifice too much to accommodate those massively multiplayers. I look at what can be done with single player RPGs, and MMORPGs do not compare favorably at all. The MMORPG is very primitive by comparison.

Other people do more to stop your fun than to add to it. That is the single biggest problem with MMORPGs as I see it. People who mostly or exclusively team say it themselves. They team because the game itself isn't fun. Other people are fun, but not the game. With SPRGPs, the game itself is fun.

WARNING: I bold names.

I'm not going to lie, I can see a lot of similarities between the community environment of this game and that of Star Wars Galaxies pre-NGE. (we can talk about games that no longer exist right?)

The game we're playing is fun, engaging, and enables things no other mmo does. Yet it doesn't seem to be pulling in new players at the rate we're thinking it should.

There's this possibility, a shadowed rider on the horizon staring at us, that the higher ups in the company somewhere might attempt a shocking reboot of the game in an attempt to "fix" it. And we all know how horrific that can be. (Please don't delete my class!)

But there is also another thing. I'm sure many of you have played LoL. I won't mention anything about it other than this game suffers from an extreme case of "Tyranny of the Majority" and that's all you need to know. The first group of gamers that started playing the game created an environment that was extremely hostile to new players. The game itself is growing due to regular game updates, constantly adding new and cool stuff, basically the exact same treatment we get from NCSoft and Paragon regarding our game.
But whereas our game isn't gaining new subscribers at an alarming rate, the other game has surpassed WoW in active users and is steadily climbing.

Perhaps there's something WE can do. We've certainly got the assets we'd need to make something happen: a community people would want to join, friendly characters willing to help out in-game, people who really care about the game's success who would want to see it blossom further. We should really form a community effort to boost this game's publicity to really reflect what people can get out of it.

Perhaps... we could create a fan-made series of mission architect missions with a distinct sci/fi bent and a series of characters to match, then showcase it all through a trailer only to bust out the "surprise, this game's already out and free-to-play, and you might even have an old account." Bonus points if we manage to make better storylines than certain other sci/fi properties out there already.

Perhaps we could do a series of packages like that, and turn it into a meme. I'm on spring break, maybe a few other players are too and would be willing to pitch in.

What destroys every other MMO for me, and was more pronounced in the laser swords game, is the open world missions. In CoH, I'm told I'm the only one who can take care of this problem and I never get there and find 10 other super-heroes obviously already dealing with the problem. In other games, even if I can manage to salvage some small feeling of immersion by trying to ignore other players while simultaneously competing with them for goals, that immersion is completely shattered when I have to wait in line for a particular spawn.

The sad thing is, the laser sword game is one that (at least in the areas I got to before I quit playing), could have allowed the player to maintain immersion while having other player characters running around the same mission areas. If they hadn't written those missions, as every other MMO also does, as if it were a single player game. The opening areas for each class worked very well with other players running around them, even if they were apparently doing the same thing you were. They lost that once you left those places.

The only thing in CoH that breaks immersion for me is the way the devs chose to implement the auction house and the AE. Both could have been done using more super-hero appropriate themes.

The other major thing that causes me to get quickly bored with other MMOs is the wide range of powers available in CoH. In other games, there is not a huge difference between various paths and skills a class can take. That may not be true at the highest levels of the game, but, the lack of any noticeable difference has kept me from getting to those levels. In CoH, I can have a number of characters with the same Primary powerset play completely differently from each other if they have different Secondaries. That's not true of all powersets, but it does seem true, at least to me, of the majority of them. That effectively gives CoH 10 or 20 times the number of classes that any other game has.

The work on the expanded universe has been uneven, but one of the nice things about the "Old Republic" era is that it is fairly open-ended leaving room for all kinds of authentically "Star Wars" stories that wouldn't be possible if people stuck to the original trilogy.

I do admit the gameplay doesn't quite match what I expect of Jedi from the movies and the books - but I don't see any way for the game to do that without simply making the laser sword types completely overpowered compared to everyone else. Works in fiction, sucks in a game.

Star Wars launched with a really atrocious /who window and left people to their own devices with bare-bones interface tools.

I took a two year break from City and have come back on and off, and it's always heart-warming to receive blind invites or tells to do things. And it's rarely to do something hard or intense, just fun normal grouping. I really enjoy the community here.